CHAPTER .3

It was that same Friday night, and about 9.55 by the clock. The men had just come in from the dining-room. They had been warned that the housekeeper, Mrs. Bankes (fear nothing—you will never meet her again) had commandeered the drawing-room. They were not allowed to go back there, for even now the belated serfs were spreading, under Mrs. Bankes' eye, large dingy cloths over the chairs and tables against the early sweep of the morrow.

The Home Secretary had no choice but to shepherd them into the somewhat forlorn, hardly used West Room. A good fire had been ordered. He trusted humbly in God that the parrot Attaboy, securely covered in its black cage cloth, could utter no unseemly Attaboy cry. If it did—well, if it did, Tommy must laugh. After all, it was his fault if he had pulled a horse.

The men crawled in. McTaggart, being by far the meanest, was compelled—in an agony—to go first. Next the Professor slid; after him with sullen assurance Tom Galton. And the great statesman filed in last, as host and chief, and shut the door with all the discretion of the Front Bench and fourteen years of Westminster.

Marjorie was standing on the polar-bear skin rug by the fire, near that fierce grinning head, those ironical teeth, holding the emerald—the brooch—in her open hand; showing it to Victoria, who peered at it cynically enough. She had already heard the story of it—for the third time in two weeks, and for the three hundred and fifty-first in her life—she knew it to be false, and she dreaded to hear again the myth of the diplomat, the old Bohunian lie. But a good heart thumped behind that bony breast and Victoria Mosel spared the child.

With this coming in of a new audience, Marjorie summoned them at once, and they crowded round in obedience to that summons; and once more to the listening earth she told—in her innocence!—the largesse of Catherine the Great to her ancestor the diplomat, in whom she firmly believed.

Lord Galton looked at the jewel with a sort of animosity, as much as to say, "Put on no suspicious airs with me!" McTaggart tittered at it with a nervous smile, as though he liked it well enough, but was rather frightened of it; the Professor glared it down with an expert's pose. The three men stood thus, bunched round their young hostess, touching shoulders, while Marjorie continued her story of the de Bohun mission to the great Empress, adding sundry other details which in her judgment gave a heightened historical value to the gem.

Then the gods struck.

What she did, or how she did it, she never remembered. She felt a sharp shoot in her finger: she should have known it was due to the ill-calculated length of the pin. She said to herself—but in her heart she did not believe it—that some one had jogged her elbow. Anyhow, the Emerald of Catherine the Great jerked out suddenly and fell from her palm, making no noise. It must have fallen upon the bearskin at her feet, where a standard electric light upon a little table near at hand happened to cast a shadow. She gave a startled cry, and at once the three men were on their knees—yes, even the old Professor—groping in the fur.

They were longer at their groping than one might have thought. The object was small, but not so small as all that. It was flat, heavy, metallic: it could not have rolled. It must be within a few inches, or a foot at the most, of the place on which its proprietress had stood.

Unfortunately she moved, and in that movement no one could remember, to half a foot or so, exactly where it should have lain. While the three men still groped, and the impatient Marjorie tapped with her foot in the suspense of it, the unfortunate McTaggart cried excitedly, "I've got it!"

Lord Galton at once jumped up, relieved; the Professor also extended upwards—less smartly; but when they had risen McTaggart was still on his knees. Then with his face peering into the fur of the bearskin, he added, "No! It's a splinter of coal,"—and he threw that fragment into the fire and continued to rummage.

The Professor and Lord Galton looked at each other. They hesitated whether to go down again; they thought it better to leave it to McTaggart. Poor McTaggart thus remained in the abject attitude to which he had now been subjected for two minutes or more, becoming increasingly convinced that something terrible had happened.... He could not conceive why he should not put his hand upon the thing.... But it was not there.... At last, flushed, more disordered than ever, he pressed the fingers of his left hand upon the floor and stood upright. He was a little blown.

"I can't find it!" he said.

"You must find it!" said Marjorie sharply. Then, remembering herself, she looked at the two who were her equals and cousins and she said:

"One of you must find it! It can't be lost! Nonsense.... Look here, stand back!" She pushed her poor old aunt, who was peering about in a futile fashion. She enlarged the circle, and then said again:

"Now then, you must find it! Look here, I'll find it." They went down again reluctantly, and she herself sank suddenly to her knees and helped the group.

But they looked in vain. They separated the hair of the rug carefully, they lifted it up pettily, edge by edge, and looked beneath. They pressed upon it with their palms to see whether they could not find a lump. Then they took the poor beast up and shook him savagely. But he yielded no emerald. It was gone.

When at last they all rose again—appalled, for the moment silent—Marjorie was as white as the skin upon which she trod.

"It can't be lost," she said again, bitterly. "I say, it can't be lost."

But lost it was.

"Father," she said angrily. "Do come and look!"

The Home Secretary reluctantly hoisted himself from his chair with a secret groan, shuffled up to the place, and looked down at the rug in a refined manner.

"Look for it, father! Do look for it! Come, it can't be lost!"

Painfully but obediently the Home Secretary went down on his knees in his turn and groped about, with far less chance than any other man would have had, of laying his hand upon the stone. He drew blank, as the others had, and rose with more difficulty, McTaggart helping him; he shuffled back, and sank again into his chair.

"Well, well, well!" he said. "Well! Well!"

There were tears in Marjorie's eyes—which was a weakness in one so born and in such a place, but she could hardly keep them back. They were tears as much of anger as of anything else. Upon Victoria Mosel's face—somewhat apart, and smiling awfully at the bunch of them—there was a look you could not see through. But upon the face of each of the three men who had been first down upon their knees—not upon the face of the Home Secretary—was now drawn an indefinable veil, as of instinctive protection against a censorious world.

It had dawned upon each of them, in varying degrees of rapidity, that he was possibly suspect.

It had flashed first upon the lordlet. He lived and breathed in an air of challenge. It would not have surprised him if he had seen some day on a glaring sky sign flaming up large over Piccadilly Circus and winking in and out to compel the eye: "Attaboy? Who pulled Attaboy? Tommy Galton!"

The Professor got the message to his brain about a quarter of a minute later. He very nearly spoke—but he caught the words in time. The Mullingar Diamond oppressed him: all the world pointed a finger at him, and the air was full of demoniac whispers: "Mullingar! Mullingar!"

And as for the miserable McTaggart, he was already such a worm in his own eyes among these exalted folk that he thought his poverty might alone have him arrested that very night. It struck him with a pang that, in his innocence, he had remained there on his knees long after the others had risen. Then a new shaft stabbed him. Ingenuous, he had dug his own grave! They would interpret that cry, "I've found it!" as the sudden shock of a real discovery: for him there sounded dully all around, "Ar-r-rest that mon!"—and he was nearly sick.

So there they stood—three men, none of whom had any idea what had happened, and each well convinced that he was the suspect who must fight it out sooner or later: each at the same time firmly believing that one of the other two was the culprit. In Marjorie's pure mind there spread a growing certitude that they were all of them guilty, all of them, and that each of them had the emerald in his pocket—yet were there not three emeralds but one emerald. At least, that was how it felt. But within the soul of the Home Secretary—if I might so call it—there was a strong sense of botheration and of wishing the beastly thing had never happened.

Under the keen inward light of Victoria Mosel's intelligence, standing apart, a fascinating problem was being discussed. She was delighted. It would occupy her for days. It was just what she liked.

In all that circle of heads, showing in different degrees—Victoria's least of all—the mood of the mind through some transfiguration of the face, each silent for the moment, only one head stood frankly stamped with a fierce joy. It was the head of the polar bear.

If he could have spoken he might—or he might not—have told them. It might have amused him more to keep them in suspense. His great red grinning open mouth and shining teeth were full of joy. His fierce glass eyes glared upon them mischievously. It was almost worth while being shot and skinned for such a revenge as this! He knew where the emerald was.... It was in his right ear.

They had taken him and shaken him with great indignity, but they had foolishly taken him up by the hind legs. One should never take a polar bear up in that way, especially when it is a bear who has been a prince in his own country of keen wind, low shining sun, and little dancing seas against the ice. They had shaken him, but they had shaken—oh, shame!—upside down, and the more they had shaken him, the more firmly had they wedged the emerald in his right ear, where it so snugly lay.

He could have told them, and I have hastened to tell you. Then where, you ask me, does the detective fun come in?

You shall see!