_THE
EMERALD
CATHERINE THE GREAT_

_By Hilaire Belloc_

_With Illustrations by
G. K. Chesterton_

1926

Publishers

New York and London

Harper & Brothers

[Illustration: _Mr. Collop describes the Finesse Diplomatique
of Bogotar._]

TO MAURICE BARING

MY DEAR MAURICE:

This is the fourth book I have dedicated to you, and you will see why if
you read it--which no one need do.

First, emeralds are green; and, on principle, like the Green Overcoat,
it owes to you of the Green Elephant, a dedication. Next, there is
Catherine the Great. She plays no long part, but she founded the
fortunes of them all; and we are in communion in the matter of that
large and generous but regal soul; we agree that it is a pity she died
before we were born. Also, you who know all about Russia, and I who know
nothing, have, in the matter of Russia, this Monarch of all the Russias
for a link.

Lastly, you have often urged me to write a detective story, because (you
assured me) they have gigantic sales. I promised you I would, on
condition there was nothing to find out.

Here it is.

KING'S LAND,

_Whitsun_, 1926.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TALE-PIECE

THE EMERALD OF
CATHERINE THE GREAT

CHAPTER ONE

William Bones was a stalwart man, some thirty-five years of age, the
master of a Brig which sailed from the port of Boston in Lincolnshire
and was half his own property. He was a native of that town, his father
having been therein a pork butcher in a fair way of business, his mother
the daughter of a small farmer in the Wring Land. He traded with the
Baltic when George the Third was King--indeed, when George the Third was
still young and long before George the Third first went mad.

Among other ports, he had found profit more than once in visiting that
of the River Neva, and was acquainted with the Russian trade. The great
city of St. Petersburg, still new but already splendid, became familiar
to him; and he himself, in his humble visits to the local factors,
became a familiar figure to the Secret Police of that capital. Even his
most domestic and private actions during his dealings in this port were
registered; and, it must be added, his strong English frame and handsome
English face admired, but also duly noted and their description passed
on to the proper authorities.

On his third voyage to Russia he was honoured by the invitation of a
merchant somewhat wealthier than the common of his acquaintance and at
that table met some official of the Court, of what exact situation his
ignorance of Russian and of French forbade him to inquire. Before
returning to his native Lincolnshire, his happy spouse and his young
family, he enjoyed the singular privilege of a further unexpected
invitation from this same Court official whom he had thus chanced to
meet, and so found himself at supper in one of the smaller and more
discreet rooms of the Palace, upon its mezzanine floor, in a choice
company of both sexes.

It is characteristic of the Empress herself--a great woman!--that a
large humanity and a laudable curiosity combined rendered her
indifferent to the conventions of rank. No sooner had she heard of the
British merchant captain's cheerful and manly habit than she desired a
more exact description, upon her receiving which he was permitted an
entrance to the Presence.

He enjoyed, partly by means of an elderly female who interpreted for him
until he had improved his few words of German--the Empress's mother
tongue and most familiar idiom--no little conversation with the august
sovereign, who, when he arrived at this stage, deigned to keep him by
her alone for some while. The interview was repeated upon more than one
occasion and her Imperial Majesty was so good, upon his reluctant
leave-taking some two or three weeks after his first arrival, as to
press him with an invitation to return.

Next season, the moment the Baltic ice was melted, he did so, disposing
of a mixed cargo; and, while leisurely awaiting his return charge, was
almost daily conveyed to the Palace from his humble lodging. For four
successive seasons running this strange adventure persisted.

Meanwhile his Boston neighbours could not but remark that his home in
the British haven of which he was a native and mariner, showed a
considerable advance in prosperity. His wife was better dressed, his
growing family could boast an increasing and superior acquaintance among
children of a rank with whom they would not earlier have mixed. It was
even whispered that Bill Bones had made formidable investments in the
City of London, which he certainly had visited more than half a dozen
times during his last winter stay in England; and though his friends
very charitably agreed that the profits of the Baltic trade might be
large, and that Bill Bones might have had exceptional opportunities,
they none the less talked among themselves upon the various possible
sources of a fortune which that trade could hardly account for.

With the fifth season there came an end to what had certainly been a
remarkable series. Whatever advantages communion with a throne might
have had for William Bones, the future would no doubt show; but the
fifth season was the end. There had been farewells, and yet no loss of
the high regard in which, for some extraordinary reason, he had been
held by the Semiramis of the North. He had acquired a certain assurance
of bearing which marked his new fortunes, and indeed, in this final
scene of his presence upon the quays of St. Petersburg, he seemed by his
gait to be some one of consequence. And no wonder, for he had left the
Palace for the last time bearing secreted in the bosom of his ample coat
a jewel worthy to be a memorial of the greatest passages in any life.

It was an emerald, exceptionally large--the largest, he had been
assured, in the world--square in shape, of the purest water and set in a
delicate little gold mounting after a fashion which recalled the
ornaments of the French Court.

It speaks well for Captain Bones that on his return to Boston he handed
this jewel to his wife, who thenceforward had it fixed with a pin, to
serve the office of a brooch, and wore it upon great occasions; notably
at a dance given by the mayor of the town, to which she brought her
eldest daughter, though barely of an age for such ceremonials.

The next year William Bones let his house in Boston and abruptly
transported himself and his family to the metropolis. His neighbours
were interested to discover that before abandoning them he had purchased
not a little property in the town and had even appointed a substantial
agent to deal with his rentals. He was clearly an advancing man and
their respect for him grew profound when they learnt what figure he now
cut in a world above their own. In London he was found entertaining
largely and standing upon an equal footing with merchants of repute,
though not perhaps as yet of the first fortune. Meanwhile he had
preferred the name of Bone, in the singular, to that of his earlier
life, conceiving it to be more consonant with his present position and
his residence in Cornhill and his interests in the banking world.

His only son George, when of an age for such occupations, which was some
five years after the family had come up to London, was taken in as a
partner by Mr. Worsle the India merchant, partly, no doubt, as a
testimony of friendship to his father, but partly also because William
Bone, who would now indifferently sign himself Bone or Bohun--the
original form of the name--had put at the young fellow's disposal a very
considerable capital.

William Bohun himself died somewhat prematurely in the eighth year after
his transmigration, and his wife, who, though much desiring to cut a
proper figure in her new world, had never properly succeeded in doing
so, followed him within three months to the grave. Her younger daughters
had received an excellent education; her eldest, born in her father's
earlier days, had perhaps less refinement of accent and deportment--but
on the other hand, her solid worth and quite exceptional dowry had
procured her alliance with the heir to Sir Philip Goole, a landed
gentleman in the West of England possessed of a fine town house in
Cavendish Square, but indifferent to politics.

George de Bohun--he had at first rejected but later began to use the
prefix "de" which a friend in the Heralds' College had suggested to
him--prospered, I am glad to say, exceedingly, as the son of such a
worthy father should, and acquired the playful nickname of "The Nabob,"
which spread from the city to the more exalted circles into which he was
welcomed, west of Temple Bar. It is a sufficient indication of the
respect in which he was held when I say that he was elected to Brooks's
Club, and there, by his generous behaviour at the card table, failed not
to become a favourite with the most exalted of his contemporaries in
Whig circles.

It may or may not interest the reader to know that upon his father's
death it was discovered that the Emerald of Catherine the Great had been
made an heirloom and was devised by an explanatory letter--since the law
could not enforce such a succession--for the eldest son, or, failing
sons, the eldest daughter of the reigning de Bohun on arriving at his
twenty-first, or her eighteenth birthday, his or her parents or trustees
being its successive custodians until that date. Failing such a
personage, the jewel was to be passed to any cadet branch, the eldest in
succession. If the great line of de Bohun should fail--which Heaven
forfend!--the sacred object was to be buried with the last of that
illustrious lineage.

The legal complications to which such a disposition would give rise need
not concern us, for in fact they never arose. George de Bohun had but
one son, Richard, born in the same year that saw the death of General
Bonaparte, the famous Corsican adventurer. To this son in his old age he
conveyed the jewel with the instructions concerning it, but he had
previously got rid of its unfashionable Louis XVI mounting and had it
set again, now as a pendant, after the fashion prevalent in the first
years of Queen Victoria.

Mr. George de Bohun had acquired--perhaps from his father--an unusual
reverence for the gem which he believed, with a mystical devotion
curious in a business man, to be in some way the tutelary genius of his
House. He would frequently tell young Richard, his heir, during the
boyhood of that philanthropist, the story of how Catherine the Great
herself had given it to his own father, the grandfather of the lad, when
that powerful genius was engaged upon a secret diplomatic mission to the
Russian Court. Hence had the emerald come to be known by the title of
"The Emerald of Catherine the Great" in the private circle of the de
Bohuns--pronounced "Deboons." That it should be preserved in the family,
certainly never sold and--please God!--never lost, was a religion with
George, which grew more fanatical as he approached the tomb. He came,
perhaps from an idea inherited from his father, to regard it as a
necessary condition of their prosperity, and he imbued his son Richard
with I know not what vague fears of disaster should its possession be
abandoned or should the stone itself be mislaid.

This second in the great line, George de Bohun--pronounced Deboon--the
son of its founder, though born as long ago as 1780, lived to see the
inauguration of the Hyde Park Exhibition by Queen Victoria in 1851, and,
having refused a peerage, closed his eyes in the fine country house
known as Paulings.

This mansion was--and is--situated in Herts, at no more than twenty-five
miles from Westminster. The successful Russian merchant purchased it
upon advantageous terms from the bankrupt and disreputable Parrall
family, whose last and seventeenth representative not only proved
incapable of preserving the patrimony of his ancestors, but had joined
the Romish Church and perished miserably at Boulogne.

Richard de Bohun was of course the "Dirty Dick" of mid-Victorian
politics, and an intimate friend of Lord Palmerston. There is little to
record of him except that after doing good and lucrative work in two
administrations he also refused a peerage; in which he was wise, for
though the family fortunes had not diminished, the general increase of
wealth around him made his position less conspicuous than that of his
father had been in the City of London. Indeed, the family was now no
longer connected with trade.

He died--as he had been born--at Paulings, a country house of such
absorbing interest that I shall later be compelled to describe it in
accurate if tedious terms.

The now reigning de Bohun, called Humphrey--after an illustrious
ancestor, the Humphrey de Bohun who fought at Bannockburn under Edward
II and undoubtedly held land, through his wife, in the neighbourhood of
Boston--the son of this statesman, is the Mr. de Bohun--pronounced
Deboon--of our own day: the highly respected Home Secretary who has
already passed with such distinction through what he himself will call
the _Cursus honorum_, having been Parliamentary Secretary to Harry Gates
during all of the great Paramooka Scandal--when he was the Baby of the
House--then successively rejected by Middleham West after the Seychelles
Scandal--when Gates went to the Lords--elected after a second attempt by
Middleham East, Under-Secretary during the period of the Second General
Strike and at last, after the usual vicissitudes of public life,
occupying the exalted position which he still adorns.

His figure is familiar to the public, I fear, rather by early
photographs than by recent portraits. He is a man tall and carefully
clothed, with a rather weary expression, set on a long face, with
insufficient grey hair neatly brushed. He is of a courteous demeanour.
He is much attached to his country life at Paulings, so happily
convenient to London, and sheltered from the large growth of suburban
villas about it by a dense fringe of more or less ancient trees. He is a
widower, possessed of three motor cars, but with only a flat in town. He
has refused a baronetcy, for he has (alas!) no son, but one daughter,
now just entering her nineteenth year. The name of the charming child is
Marjorie, and it was but recently, upon her eighteenth birthday, the
15th of January, that her father somewhat solemnly presented her with
the famous heirloom.

He had used no little ceremonial, speaking a little pompously of her
dead mother--a Ginningham--of the immemorial traditions of their house,
and with curious insistence upon the supposed influence of the jewel
upon their fortunes. He smiled somewhat lugubriously as he touched that
point, but Marjorie, though not extravagantly intelligent, had brains
enough to believe in omens, mascots, talismans, and was proud, as a girl
should be at her age, to enter upon the possession of the Sacred Gem of
the de Bohuns.

Her father had discarded, for so great an occasion, the Victorian gold
setting which, he was assured by Mr. Marolovitch and other experts, was
in deplorable taste. The jewel was now set once more--by Mr.
Marolovitch--as a brooch, since a woman was to wear it. The new setting
was in platinum, designed in the finest taste of Berlin, with writhing
curves and dead square divisions of the most entrancing variety. Large
as the Emerald was, and its new Prussian setting adequately broad, yet
the whole lay easily on the palm.

If it be not blasphemy to suggest any inefficiency in our Teutonic
cousins, I should suggest that the pin was a thought too long and
capable, on careless handling, of biting the hand that fed it. But for
any such trifling defect the grey colour of the new and more expensive
mounting, resembling that of a leaded grate, and the awful severity of
its odd rectangles and unexpected heavings of its re-entrant curves,
made ample atonement. Such was the aspect of the Emerald of Catherine
the Great in the winter when it entered upon its liveliest activities.

CHAPTER TWO

About a fortnight had passed since Mr. de Bohun had given his daughter
Marjorie the family mascot. It was Friday, the 30th of January, 1930:
the weather unpleasantly cold, overcast, with a threat of snow, and the
dark already set in.

After the heavy strain of an English working week, especially in
Parliament, complete relaxation is necessary from Friday after lunch to
the Monday's return to town by the afternoon. Nor was any mansion more
fitted to recuperate the exhausted energies of statesman or politician
than Paulings.

It had been built in the classical manner some twenty years before the
decline of the Parrall fortunes, which got their worst blow after the
year 1745. It was classical and highly symmetric; its fine great doors
had been designed to stand slightly above the level of the drive and
looked upon a shallow sweep of stone stairway. Upon either side of them,
windows in the Palladian fashion, with a pediment above each, announced
the wealth within; a hanging wreath of flowers and fruit in stone went
the length of the great wall, and against the sky was a balustrade.

That was all very well for the eighteenth century; but the nineteenth
and the new wealth of the de Bohuns put on useful excrescences. There
was a bulb to the east, and yet another bulb at the end of that, where
new stables, now a garage, were added to new offices, and on the west
there had been built, a little after the Crimean War, something like
half as much again of house room, in a manner pleasingly different from
all the rest. Here a new and more convenient door gave into a large
hall, not without suits of armour purchased at considerable expense, and
giving by various doors into the larger, older, and grander rooms of the
house, into a panelled dining-room, a large drawing-room, too often
changing in style, and on the extreme west a room very rarely used save
for the reception of whatever was not wanted about the living parts of
the house, or--in theory at least--for the complete seclusion of its
master, when--in theory--his heavy responsibilities demanded heavy
concentration.

This room we must know, for it was here that blind Fate, an all-seeing
Providence, or--more probably--a lively and mischievous sprite had laid
the scene of the loss of the Emerald.

The room was not large; it was in good proportions, for it dated from a
time when we were still civilized. It was strangely apparelled. There
was a large, rather shabby desk, at which the Home Secretary was
supposed to write and where he did at least leave accumulated a few old
letters and kept them down with a paper-weight of Chinese crystal,
carefully chiselled into the form of a little god who smiled.

There were five deep chairs of the sort called lounge, upholstered in a
leather almost black. There were as many more comfortable common chairs.
There was a really good fireplace brought over from one of the old
houses in Dublin, of marble with a Bacchic frieze. There was in front of
that really good fireplace a rug made of the skin of a polar bear,
singularly fierce in its open red mouth of ferocious grin, its gleaming
teeth and staring eyes--the room was so deserted that no one had knocked
that head to pieces with his feet. It seemed almost new, fresh from the
Arctic.

There were six windows looking to the west, south, and north, and coming
down close to the floor with deep sills forming seats after the fashion
of our fathers. For the room projected out into the park upon three
sides and the western one faced a long grass path between an avenue of
trees. There were one or two tables which did nothing, after the fashion
of most tables--outside dining-rooms, and even there they do no work
which I can recommend. There was above the mantelpiece one of those
looking-glasses of the First French Empire, round, lens-like, and
diminishing the picture of all the room. It had a round, broad, gilded
rim and upon its summit an eagle of the sort that flew from the Pyramids
to Cadiz, from Cadiz to Paris, from Paris to Moscow, and from Moscow
back again.

The floor was of the sort called, I believe, in the trade, antique
Austrian parquet. That is, it consisted of some half dozen slabs of
cheap pine firmly bolted together, on the top of it a veneer of
herring-bone Baltic oak, chemically treated to simulate the age and
dignity of Schönbrunn. The thing was designed for rapid laying down and
lifting and fitted together simply upon joists with what are--again
technically--called invisible screws, but at the corners of the room the
contraption was held by certain clamps which wanted a hell of a lot of
hammering down when it was fixed. On the surface of this dignified
flooring lay, carelessly chucked about, a few Oriental rugs from
Brighton and one charming little Chinese mat from London, damnably out
of place and swearing with the rest of the room like a cat run up a tree
from a dog.

What else was there in the room? Ah, yes, there was a parrot cage, and
if you are wise, unfortunate reader, you will pay particular attention
to that parrot cage, for later on it has a speaking part.

It hung by a chain from the ceiling against the west window looking out
on the long avenue, and within it lived--not melancholy, for he was too
stupid, but in a mixture of stolid age, indifference, and
nothingness--the parrot Attaboy. Nor must I omit either the appearance
of the parrot Attaboy, but only later can I tell you how the parrot
Attaboy came by his name.

Of his lineage I know nothing, nor even of his age. He might well have
been one hundred. Certainly there was nothing young about his eyes or
gestures, and I have always heard that parrots, like family servants and
others whom the gods hate, live to a great age.

Aunt Amelia had made a pompous present of him three years before to her
beloved niece Marjorie after her beloved Marjorie had reached her
fifteenth birthday; she bestowed not only the parrot but the cage, and
simultaneously a kiss upon her niece's forehead. At first the recipient
of the fowl did not appreciate the gift. But love will grow. The
thing--by which I mean the cage and the parrot and all--was hung by a
hook--at Aunt Amelia's expense--to the roof of this room simply because
it was so little used.

It happened precisely at the opening of the flat racing season, three
years before the opening of the story which you now have the ecstatic
pleasure of reading, that young Lord Galton, Marjorie's cousin--recently
acceded to the title by the sudden and unexpected death of his father
from I know not what forms of excess--had pulled a horse.

He was one of our modern youths, loving the risks of life and living
dangerously. Therefore had he pulled a horse and the horse he had
pulled--his very own--he had named Attaboy.

It was never brought home to him, as the phrase goes; that is, everybody
knew that it was true. Attaboy was famous at Paulings--a sort of family
crime to be proud of--a word used as often as any other for the moment
at Paulings; and the poor old parrot--we have no initiative in
age--picked it up and refused to learn anything else.

In a way it was awkward. Tommy Galton would come to his uncle's house
from time to time, and when he came it was rather important to keep him
out of the West Room during daylight. For the parrot had a way of
croaking quite suddenly, in the strong colonial accent of his tribe,
"Attaboy!" at the most unexpected moments. However, the parrot Attaboy
possessed a cover of black felt carefully put over his cage at night,
and whenever it found itself in darkness it was habitually silent after
the honourable fashion of parrots--and, after all, the room was not
commonly used. There was little risk of Lord Galton's being in it save
after the black cover was over the detestable bird.

Of Attaboy the parrot--Attaboy the horse had already gone to
stud--Marjorie grew fond. For one thing, she was not unattracted by her
cousin Tom, and Attaboy made a sort of bond between them. For another,
she was at the age when women can be fond of anything, even Tommy
Galton, let alone a parrot.

So much for Attaboy and the deserted room.

It has been remarked--without payment--by more than one philosopher that
the great events of this world arrive through the action of agents who
did not intend them. And this you will find to be true of Attaboy, of
the Polar Bear, and the deserted West Room.

I think it only fair to add, since I am writing a detective story, that
when Aunt Amelia visited her brother the Home Secretary, which was, all
totted up, for something like a third of the year, she was given the
principal guest room, known in the family as Bannockburn, which lay
immediately above.

So much for Paulings and its now famous, then deserted, West Room; its
Parrot, its Polar Bear.

I return to that winter week-end, that cold January Friday and the few
gathered in the great drawing-room of Paulings round its tea table.

It was not a party: it was a family meeting of a very few people.

[Illustration: _Dear Aunt, so good, so kind, and a little deaf._]

Old Lady Bolter, a much elder sister of the Home Secretary, known among
the Great as "Aunt Amelia," we have seen was half a permanency. She had
already given them three weeks of herself a month before; and she had
now settled down to another bout. They suffered her in this fashion
often enough; but as for her, she knitted. I have read in one of those
books which are published anonymously upon the people of that world,
that she had been famous in King Edward's day for her wit. Maybe. She
would hardly be famous for it now. However, she was not nearly so blind
nor so deaf as she pretended to be. She had met most people up to the
Great War and resembled a sheep.

Victoria Mosel was there, Marjorie's friend of another generation, still
sinuously moving round and round from house to house forever. There were
two men, close relatives, cousins: an elder and a younger.

The first was the hippo-phile, the expert in things of the Turf whom you
have just heard of, young Lord Galton, the son of the Home Secretary's
first cousin, Cecily, who had brought to Algernon, first--and very
nearly last--Lord Galton, a sufficient dowry, drawn from the then ample
funds of the de Bohuns, for her father had been the younger brother of
the Home Secretary. But this first--and very nearly last--Lord Galton
indeed was dead, and so was Lady Galton his wife, and the young man, now
his own father, found his inheritance less than he might have desired.
The Galtons, wisely taking their title from their name, had not done
well since they had left Liverpool; they had left that town too early.
So here he was, a tall, dark young man, a little too solid and certain
of himself, and--unhappily--attached to racing, a pastime for which his
fortune might have been sufficient fifty years ago, but was not at all
sufficient to-day.

It was not every house in England in which Lord Galton would have been
welcomed; but family counts, and he was here, with his rather sullen
face, strong chin and fixed mouth, and sub-challenging eyes. They were
sub-challenging because of Attaboy the horse. He had not suffered as he
might have done; he went a good deal less to one or two of his better
clubs than he had done before the rumour spread, but he was still a
constant member of the Posts and gambled there assiduously and with some
success. Yet was he always embarrassed, and his embarrassment did not
help his reputation.

He sat at the tea table that afternoon, fighting the boredom of Aunt
Amelia with what was toleration if it was not courtesy, and looking at
Marjorie without admiration but perhaps with intention. Now and then he
cast a furtive sharp look, when he thought it was safe, at Victoria
Mosel. She always knew too much, and as she stood there in front of the
fire, with a sham vacant look on her shrewd face, and the eternal
cigarette hanging from her lip, he wished her farther.

[Illustration: _Mr. B. Leader, Reader in Crystallogy to the
University, reading in Crystallogy to the
University._]

The second guest at that table, next to the Home Secretary himself, was
yet another cousin, but a whole first cousin this time--the only son of
the youngest uncle of all, who had married very young and very
imprudently. Wherefore was the said cousin, William by name, unable to
go into the City, and, compelled to become a Don, had become by
profession a professor. For a first cousin he was rather absurdly older
than the head of the family. The Home Secretary, who had himself married
late, was not more than fifty-five; but the Don, William de Bohun,
Fellow of Burford and holding the Chair of Crystallography, was quite
ten years older--perhaps a little more. He had a simple pride in the
excellence of his birth, a distracted manner due to his immense
learning--not indeed in the general field of the Humanities or the Arts,
but upon the particular point of dodekahedral crystals--and even of
octohedrals he had a smattering. Such was his fame that he had been
mentioned more than once in the proceedings of learned societies abroad
and had been elected Corresponding Member to the Crystallographic
Society of Berne.

Unmarried, with a small private income, the poor nest egg of his
improvident father, amply endowed, with no pupils to speak of, and the
dodekahedral hobby, he would have been as happy as it is possible for an
atheist approaching death to be, had it not been for the existence of
that infamous charlatan, Bertram Leader, not even a Fellow of St.
Filbert's, and mere Reader to the University in Amorphic Crystallogy.

I need not insist on the gulf that separates crystallography, a true
science, from crystallogy, its base mercantile application. To the one,
as was but right, a chair was attached; a chair founded by Z. Leizler
the philanthropist, before his flight, and now occupied by the aged
figure of the de Bohun. The other was thought hardly worth a Readership
at £600 a year, and only under secret threats had that wealthy college,
St. Filbert's, been persuaded by certain City men whom B. Leader in his
turn had threatened, to cough up. It took its revenge by admitting B.
Leader to its high table, and refusing to elect him a Fellow.

He it was who, waging secret war upon university caste, dug his
revengeful fangs into the Professor's naked soul. He it was who spotted
with relentless eye all the misprints in the Professor's papers, and
denounced them as enormities of ignorance in the _British
Crystallographic Review_, with which is combined the _Crystal
Gazetteer_ and _Bulletin_. He it was who exploded de Bohun's ancient
German doctrines with the recent research of horrid Dagoes, and exposed
it to derision whenever he lectured to a class of more than a dozen; for
his department being mixed up with commerce, there was money in it, and
a few undergraduates on the scent of the same; not so the Professor's
department. Now two, now one student, sought the well of learning, and
sometimes none.

On the other hand, Professor de Bohun could--and did--nourish a burning
happiness in his heart to remember that the infamous B. Leader was of no
lineage and had no private income at all. Nay, worse; an accent--almost
a twang.

But alas! for the alloyed happiness of risen man, in whom the highest
have something in them of the ape, (Poggles _General View_, Vol. II, Ch.
XXII, p. 222). B. Leader himself nourished a secret burning joy in his
heart; for he had found out--what the great thought was peculiar to
their own circle--the dreadful story of William de Bohun and the
Mullingar Diamond.

Because he loved crystals--not because he loved wealth: because the
Mullingar Diamond was the largest of its yellow kind in the world, and
had a flaw which was confidently reported to be due--incredible!--to a
bubble, William de Bohun had, eight years before, while stopping at the
Abbey as an honoured guest, pinched the Mullingar Diamond--not for a
permanency, but to make a close examination of the incredible bubble. He
had returned it, but already his action had got known, and some people
were cold to him. The less instructed among the great whispered that he
had been a famous thief in youth; the more instructed believed that his
profound science had produced a momentary lapse. The Family knew, but
had long forgiven him; indeed, there was nothing to forgive--they said.

Let it be added that Professor de Bohun had acquired, from so much
concentrated study upon dodekahedral crystals--with fatiguing excursions
among the octohedrals--a pleasing habit of repeating a word, never less
than three times, and sometimes six or eight.

In dress the old gentleman was careless, and, though perpetually
washing, never apparently clean. However, he did shave--save for the
whiskers which were the badge of his attainments in the learned world.

There was expected a third man, as young as, or younger than, Lord
Galton, and of a very different and meaner kind, a certain Hamish
McTaggart, who had become suddenly famous within the narrow circle of
the people in the know, because the Prime Minister, upon reading an
article of his upon Protection had said--in the full hearing of the very
narrow circle--"This is the only man on Protection whom I really
understand." The article had appeared by the order of McTaggart's master
in _The Howl_, whence it may be rightly assumed that McTaggart knew no
more of economics than would a warthog of Botticelli. Hence the lucid
style which the Prime Minister had saluted with such discovering joy.

His argument had been very simple. If you prevent things coming in to
the sacred Island, Albion, the Albionese will have to make these things
for themselves, and that means more employment, doesn't it? The truth
had struck the Prime Minister with far more effect thus set down in
clean print, than when he had heard it, as he had heard it a thousand
times, from the proprietor of _The Howl_, whom he had himself so rightly
ennobled.

Therefore was Hamish McTaggart now glowing with a vivid, though, alas!
restricted fame.

He himself was getting heartily tired of it. It had halved his
income--that is, it had brought it down below five hundred pounds a
year. No one would print him except upon the subject of Protection, and
he had to write in the way that was really understood. And he was
allowed to write only in those papers peculiar to the little inner
circle with the little inner circulation corresponding--and there's no
money in that! When he wanted to write about tigers, and get his
expenses paid free to the East and a lump sum--a job he would have got
for the asking two years before, when he wrote by the thousand words, to
order, just after leaving the University--he was asked what on earth he
knew about it? Tigers! And was bundled back to Protection.

Therefore was his future black; but in the little circle he was a sort
of lion. Victoria Mosel was always talking of him; Marjorie was eager to
see him once and then to discard his company for ever; Lady Bolter, full
of the intellectual Victorian time, wanted to be able to say that she
had been in the same room with a man of whom the Prime Minister himself
had said that he was the only man whose writing he really understood.
The Home Secretary had met him once or twice in other people's houses;
Marjorie herself and her aunt were the only two for whom he was still
quite a stranger.

"What train is he coming by?" said Tommy Galton, sunk into a deep chair.

The Home Secretary looked at his watch, then at the clock, noted they
did not correspond, frowned, and said he'd be here any time.

[Illustration: _Victoria Mosel lays odds on Mr. McTaggart's
saying "Dee-Boe-Hunn."_]

"I'll give you evens," said Victoria Mosel, "that he calls you Dee Boe
Hunn."

"Done!" said Tommy Galton, putting up a finger.

"Bradburys?" said Vic, sucking a pencil. "Gimme a bit o' paper."

Tommy Galton wrote on his cuff. "That'll do," he said.

"I often wish," bleated Aunt Amelia, "that you young people could have
met John Bright. I was only in the schoolroom, of course, but my dear
father had no scruples in----"

She was not allowed to go on.

"We can't all sit here kicking our heels till he's kind enough to
parade," said Marjorie, with girlish simplicity.

"No one wants you to," said Vic, delicately tearing off the last
cigarette like a plaster, and sticking in another one. "I'm clamped
down. Me for Hamish!"

The Professor suddenly gave tongue. His exceedingly pale old eyes were
wide open, and his foolish mouth almost as wide.

"Oh, I think it'll be exceedingly interesting--exceedingly interesting,"
he quavered. "Exceedingly interesting to meet one of the new generation
of ... shall we say, ah! journalists? Yes, journalists.... Journalists."

"Yes, Bill," replied young Galton. "We'll say journalists." Marjorie
yawned and stretched.

"Well, I'm not going to wait any longer," she said, when the buzz of a
motor was heard on the gravel outside, the approach of middle-class
feet, the door solemnly thrown open as for a dancing bear, and the
unfortunate McTaggart appeared, his name preceding him.

The Home Secretary, who had preserved some of the traditions, unfolded
himself painfully from his chair and stood up, greeting McTaggart with
the wan smile of the public man.

"Good evening, Mr. de Bohun." And behold! he pronounced it Deboon. With
the business-like rapidity that became her so well, Victoria Mosel
handed a crushed ball of three one-pound notes undemonstratively to Tom
Galton, who stretched forward to take it and elaborately crossed out the
note on his cuff.

Young McTaggart stood there a moment, not daring to sit down, suffering
great torture. Nor did any of the company relieve it, though Aunt
Amelia, to do her justice, did tell him how glad they all were to see
him, much as a spokesman for the Divinities might welcome any clod.

The poor devil was out of place. He did not know why he had come; he had
come because he was pressed, because he had nothing else to do, because
he was lonely, because he had heard of Paulings and wanted to see it,
because he thought such a visit to such a house might improve his
prospects; and now that he was here, he wished it had never been built.

He was never at his ease with his social superiors. His father and
grandfather had been mere soldiers; his great-grandfather one of
Nelson's captains; _his_ father again a very small laird in
Ayrshire--but one had to go back as far as that to get to gentility. He
dressed awkwardly, and he knew it. He never seemed to know quite where
to put the hands and feet at the extremities of his uncouth frame. He
also had a rather irritating trick of never looking anybody in the face.
It was nervousness, and came of writing too much. He was, I regret to
say, terrified of women, but especially of Ladies; and he had already
spent the first hours of his exile in wondering why on earth he had
allowed himself to be over-persuaded and had come.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

So much for the tea table and those that sat round it. The Home
Secretary, damnably full of courtesy but rather silent, sat helpless;
Victoria Mosel still stood by the fire surveying them all--and
particularly McTaggart--not unsaturnine for the others, but with a
singular touch of kindness in her slits of eyes for the embarrassed boy.
Then she recovered the firm pressure of her lips, emphasised by the
drooping cigarette, and the others looked on inanely or surlily,
according as God had made them.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

If you think I am going to describe to you in any detail how they passed
their time between tea and dinner, you are mistaken. Some books are
written like that, and there is an art of making them readable. I have
it not.

To action, therefore--to the Emerald!

CHAPTER THREE

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!

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

    Far in the Eastern Wing where, mured in stone
    Arrived at by a passage cold that ran
    Along the North o' the House, and barred with iron
    As to its windows: also by a door
    Which leads from the considerable room
    Wherein are great receptions held at Paulings
    [An Antrum gaunt, abandoned, having only
    Upon its walls the Oils of dead de Bohuns
    (Pronounced Deboons) and sundry dusty sofas:
    The Room grandiloquently named the Ballroom],
    There stand the Servants' Quarters. It is there,
    That, ruled by their dread Queen, the Housekeeper,
    And by her Coadjutor King, the Butler,
    The serfs Boonesque repose. The Cook, the Chauffeur,
    The Kitchen Maids, the Footmen, and the Boy:
    And Lord! how many others! These that night--
    That winter night of doom--held high discourse,
    Upon the EMERALD. Samuel had heard
    (While bearing in the tray of drinks, himself
    Arrayed in livery) how its disappearance
    Had flummoxed all the Toffs. "You bet your breeches!"
    Said he, to either sex, indifferent
    And indiscriminate. "You bet your breeches!
    Whoever's pinched it's got to cough it up!
    The Boss, he ain't Home Secretary, not
    For nothing!" and with that his tongue was still.
    Then spake young Gwendoline, the Tweeny Maid,
    "I pity Him or 'Er as 'as it!" Words
    Which, when she had them spoken, froze their souls--
    Nor none more starkly than the Second Housemaid's,
    Unless it were the Boy's--and so to Bed.

CHAPTER FOUR

The majestic poise of the Nordic blood is nowhere seen in greater
perfection than in that crown of our civilization, a modest English
Country House. Here is there no class consciousness, here is there no
class war. Each is in his or her own place, and there is peace through
order.

To consider only the servile portion of the establishment: the Butler
has his own dignity, and the various other males--upon whose titles I am
a little shaky--have theirs. So the Females of the species: the Cook
cooks; the Kitchen Attendants attend the kitchen; the Nurse nurses. So
with the external squad: the Groom grooms; the Gardener and all his
Assistants garden. With regularity and zeal the Footmen footle. The mere
Maids go maidenly about their tasks. Below these specialised
functionaries, for which Our Race is famous, comes one who may be
regarded indifferently as the foundation of the fabric or the last rung
of the ladder, and who is known as the Boy. On him the petty,
unorganised, lesser work devolves, for which his Superiors are indeed
responsible, but the mere brute labour of which is his alone.

[Illustration: _The Boy Ethelbert in Captivity._]

Thus it is the Boy who blacks the boots, fills all the coal scuttles and
carries them about, lays the fires and lights them, polishes the knives,
the silver plate--the silver itself, when there is any--and the antique
pewter; washes up the dishes of the supper below stairs, cleans the door
knobs and bell handles; pulls up the blinds; pulls back the curtains of
the ground floor. Notably it is he also who conveys to the Upper
Servants--who then shall have risen from slumber--the numbers of the
bells that have sounded. It is he who opens the windows when they should
be shut, and shuts them when they should be open--so far at least as the
early hours are concerned, for when the Great are about this function is
performed by a young man in uniform. It is the Boy who lays out the
morning post, sets the newspapers in order--therein discovering the
odds--lets out the little dog--or dogs--and after some few other
trifling tasks accomplished, brushes and carefully folds the clothes of
the male guests and lays them out where stronger and older men shall
carry them up, each parcel to its room, and for that service receive an
ultimate reward. It is the Boy who carries up the boots themselves--for
these are defiling to the fingers!--and it is the Boy--mark you: this is
essential to the tale, you must not miss it--_it is the Boy who picks up
the rugs and shakes them_, room after room, a ritual preparatory to the
settling of great clouds of dust, which, shortly after, not the Boy but
a Maid brings down to the rugs again with feathery instruments and
devastating cloths.

Hence it was that the Boy--Ethelbert by his full baptismal name, but in
the daily, Bert--before yet the wintry dawn was more than grey on that
Saturday in January, whistling gaily at his task, was holding the polar
bear up by its _forepaws_ and shaking it, as in duty bound.

His heart was gay, for he was redeemed.

Not so long since, this same Ethelbert had (alas!) in company with
youths of his own age and a little more, not yet free from the trammels
of elementary education, purloined from a shop certain fruits: two
bananas.

The Deed might have appeared upon his record at Scotland Yard and dogged
him through life, for he was already eight years of age and knew full
well the wickedness of his act. He had been spared by the noble
elasticity of the English Common Law. His sobbing widowed mother had
seen, indeed, the shadow of the police across her threshold,
and Ethelbert had stood in the Felons' Dock before the dud
parliamentary lawyer who had got the local stipendiary job. But our
Magistracy--especially that of the Stipendiary Sort--is famous
throughout the whole world for its merciful wisdom. Young Bert had
escaped imprisonment, as having been led away by his senior Charlie
Gasket, who was nearly ten.

He had, I say, been saved; but the memory of the peril had burnt into
his soul. And now, though he was nearly fifteen years of age, the
incident still stood out the sharpest of his memories. It was known to
his lord the Butler--perhaps to his Master--but to no others. He had
been taken into the Great House in spite of it all, because his father
had worked upon the estate. Therefore, I say, did Ethelbert feel himself
redeemed. But he trembled still at the apparatus of National Justice.

[Illustration: _The Boy Ethelbert untouched by
Civilisation._]

In the innocence of youth he whistled gently to himself. His other work
was done; this performed, he had but now to settle the last rug, the
Polar Bear, and then to rouse his superiors in the hierarchy below
stairs, to lay their breakfast out and to attend thereon as minister. So
shook he perfunctorily the Arctic Ursine Fleece, the Hyperborean
Candour, when he heard something fall sharply at his feet. He even
caught a flash of it as it fell. He saw it issuing from that ear of
Thule which would hear no more; he saw it sliding down the whiteness of
the hair and gleaming dully in the candlelight upon the polished wood of
the flooring.

There was no mistake. It was _IT_. It was that pledge of respect and
esteem which the ever-memorable Catherine, Empress of All the Russias,
had bestowed three lives ago upon the stalwart Bones. It was the
heirloom of that noble House of de Bohun which Ethelbert served. It was
the Stone on which he had heard all the domestics of the house inflamed
in the last hours of the previous evening.

There is an instinct planted in man by Mr. Darwin, which impels him to
pick up a thing, anything dropped. That instinct Ethelbert obeyed. The
act was half unconscious, immediate; he had slipped the Emerald into his
pocket and was already off with a candle in one hand and the other in a
side pocket, fondling the stone. He was off down the long stone corridor
which led along the north of the house towards the offices; and as he
went his mind was full of some vague intention to hand over the
treasure-trove to those in authority--in good time.

But even as he thus went up by the dim candlelight in the cold dawn,
along that prison-like perspective of iron-barred windows and whitewash,
with stone flags ringing to his feet, a vision of judgment arose within
him. His teeth chattered at the memory of the police.

Ethelbert, that product of no more than an elementary education, had
received some general outline of the world from cinemas and from police
reports, which that same education enabled him to read in the more
widely circulated Sunday papers.

He could not have told you that society was organized to the advantage
of circles to which he did not belong, and to the disadvantage of his
own; but he did know that this piece of green glass in its
leaden-coloured setting of hideous lines would sell for a sum that would
free him from servitude for ever. He also knew that to be found
possessed of it would involve a far worse servitude; a servitude not to
the Gentry but to the Force, and lasting, one way or another, the whole
of his life. He knew that such servitude was torture. The people of his
world knew all those things. Therefore did not the emerald represent to
Ethelbert immediate wealth so much as a vision of confinement alone in
a small mechanical cell; upon release, a life-long chain binding him as
an informer and spy over whom further imprisonment should hang at will;
a crushing and overwhelming tyranny; and perhaps at last a secret and
abominable death. Of all these things had young Bert's mind been full
from very early years, for all these things still haunt the distorted
fancy of the poor.

He saw himself presenting with trembling hand this Thing of Power, this
Emerald, to his Emperor the Butler; he imagined a first awful and
immediate trial at the hands of that Justiciar, and later an
overwhelming sentence from the Master himself. He heard the key turning
in the door of his room; he saw himself a gibbering prisoner therein; he
heard the voices of the Inspector and his accompanying Sergeant; he felt
the gyves upon his wrist.

All this in the few seconds between the West Room of Paulings and the
offices built out of the extreme east.

So was Ethelbert's mind made up. For his good angel, failing to
penetrate the first thick skin of stupidity and to suggest the simple
delivery of the gem to his superiors, at any rate got through the second
skin and suggested a second best.

He had the brushing of the clothes. He would put it into the pocket of
some one of the guests, and then he could breathe freely.

Which guest should it be? No one was yet astir; he was free to choose.
There was a minute or two before the clock would strike the half hour
and bid him summon the earliest riser--after himself--the kitchen-maid.
Her name, Kathleen Parkinson, I take the liberty of giving you, although
she will appear no more in these pages.

There lay the three little piles of clothes, to be carefully brushed and
folded up by himself, within the next half hour, and among them how
could a youth of romantic genius hesitate? Did not every novelette,
every Sunday paper, every cinema, point with unerring finger to the
lord? Are not lords and jewels made one for the other, like love and
laughter, or politics and stocks and shares? The lord could not but be
the recipient of the emerald, and when he should have received it, who
fitter than he to deal with such trifles? Bert could see him in his
mind's eye, and hear him in his mind's ear, strolling up to the Master
of the House and saying, in that airy accent which had always so
astonished him in the wealthy:

"Oh, I say, Humph, I found the bloody thing this morning and picked it
up--what?"

Now into which pocket of Lord Galton's quiet blue suit should it go?
Into the right-hand trousers pocket; for therein, as Bert knew by
fruitful search, his lordship carried loose change. From the waistcoat
it might fall out. In the coat pockets it might lurk for long without
being found; in Lord Galton's right-hand trousers pocket, therefore, did
the emerald go, to the full depth thereof. The garment was folded again
very neatly. And all was well.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

In the fulness of time, the sun being already risen--yes, for an hour or
more--one of those older young domestics of whom I have spoken bore up a
parcel of clothes and a can of hot water to Lord Galton's door. All the
ritual of these palaces was gone through. The socks were turned inside
out, the shirt laid out like a corpse in its shroud, the pile of brushed
and folded clothes set upon a chair, the fire lit--as though the room
were not already stifling with a hot-air machine; the window opened
wider, as though the piercing air had not already started a draught
which had fought with the hot air all night long. The under-upper
servant glided away, and Lord Galton got out of bed and shaved and
washed and dressed; considering in his mind what all others woke to
consider in that same house on that same morning, but especially the
Fated Three: the Emerald.

He looked at his watch; it was a quarter past nine. He stood gazing out
of the window at the frosty mist on the damp gaunt trees of the park,
and tried to estimate how he really stood in the minds of those about
him.

Who would believe that he knew nothing of the stone? Which of them had
heard--several of them, he knew--which of them _believed_ that story
about Attaboy? Certainly his host, almost certainly Vic--she knew
everything. He was not quite certain that she had not meant to rag him
about it in something she had said during the day before. She would not
misunderstand, but she knew about it.

Did that damned greasy fellow the journalist know? He doubted it; they
never did know the things that counted. And as for the Don, he might as
well have suspected the first imbecile in the County Asylum.

Marjorie did not know; he was pretty sure of that by her way to him. But
still ... it was known enough; it was known to two.... After all, what
was pulling a horse, and what had it to do with pinching emeralds,
anyhow? ... Yet ... yet ... he could not leave Paulings till it was
cleared up.... If the damned thing turned up in town in some receiver's
shop they might connect it with him.... He was glad he hadn't brought a
man.... No, he must stay till it was cleared up. It was a damned
nuisance. They were getting up a party on Sunday night at the Posts.
There was to be a rich young fool from Ireland whom they would all play
with. Those occasions were not so common nowadays. But he must sacrifice
it. He must stay on.

He made his decision; he slowly picked up the small change off his
dressing table and shuffled it into his trousers pocket. Then he
mechanically followed it with his hand, and found something that was not
a coin....

At first he had the grotesque idea that he was handling a pebble, though
how it could have got there he could not conceive. Then a matchbox, for
it was smooth and cold.... When he pulled it out and saw what it was,
his whole mind went through a violent shock of revulsion.

He was so sickened, strong as he was, that he had to sit down and
recover himself. And as he so sat, he fixed the dreadful thing with his
eye, holding it there between the fingers of his right hand, unmoving.

Now indeed was a resolution to be taken!

At first his mind would not work. A man possessed of a thing, no matter
what he does with it, carries his communications about with him, leaves
traces about of his possession. If he threw it out of the window, it
would be found within the radius of such a throw. There was nowhere in
the room where he would dare to hide it. If he dropped it as he went
downstairs, a servant might pass and find it within a minute, connecting
him with what was so found.

Give it back himself he dared not. That would mean, "Poor Tommy! He gave
way, but he did the honest thing in the end." He would be branded for
life. Attaboy was enough, without that.

At first the easiest course lured him; to say nothing; to keep it upon
his person until everything had blown over; then to take it up with him
to town.... Then? ... He could not help remembering how Alfred had told
him about his uncle and the cutting establishment in Amsterdam. It was
all mixed up with the committee for inquiring into the Meldon
business when there was that trouble in Parliament a few years
before.... It seemed that one could have a stone cut and get it back
unrecognisable.... Then he thrust the thought out of his mind and
shuddered a little at the danger.

[Illustration: _Lord Galton discovers the Emerald._]

But if he kept it, where should he put it? Where could he put it so as
to be certain during the night--to be _absolutely_ certain--that no one
could find it with him or near him? What if he should fall faint or ill?
What if ... No, there was only one thing to be done. He must pass it on.
No matter what tale he told--even if he told the truth--to appear with
it in his possession and to make an explanation was to damn himself
finally, and that just at the moment his half-damnation on the turf was
beginning to be forgotten.... He must pass it on.... He must pass it on.

There was one obvious repository; an aged fool of that profession whose
incompetence is stamped upon them; a native dupe. It should go into the
pocket of his distinguished cousin, the Professor; it should pass into
the unwitting possession of the expert on dodekahedral crystals. His
mind thus decided, he was half at peace.

Lord Galton went down to breakfast. He found his host already at the
table. The others came in gradually, and no one talked of the stone; nor
upon anything else to speak of--for of the stone everyone was thinking.

It was, naturally, the learned cousin, the Professor, who first put in
the word that should not have been spoken. He did it somewhere about the
jam, and when the Home Secretary was already feeling the need for a
pipe. Perhaps food had strengthened him. He piped up in his quavering
voice:

"Ah! Any news about the emerald, Humphrey? Any news this morning about
the emerald? About the emerald? ... the emerald? ... the emerald?"

There is a natural sequence in fools, as in all others of God's
creatures. Aunt Amelia came in a good second.

"Oh, yes, Humphrey," she bleated, in that woolly-mutton voice which
fitted her as does sodden mist a marshy formless hill. "Is there any
news about the emerald?"

"There is hardly likely to be, Amelia," said her brother, as tartly as
he could be got to say anything, for long years of suave politician's
make-believe had untartled his tongue.

"I thought," said Aunt Amelia in self-defense, "that some servant might
have found it and told you."

"Well, they have not," said her brother, shortly; and there was silence.

The journalist opened his mouth--which he should not have done--and
began rather too loudly, and in too high a pitch:

"What I think, you know ..." and then stopped suddenly--which put him in
no better case.

What Victoria Mosel would have said nobody knew, for she took her
breakfast in bed--always. But Marjorie had come down in the midst of
this, and spoke sharply. She had slept little and her temper was on
edge.

"Oh, that's enough about the emerald!" she said. "What's the good of
talking of it _now_?" Then she gave one sweeping look around, like a
searchlight trying to spot a boat, and betook herself to the jam.

The one who said nothing was the young racing man with the emerald in
his trousers pocket. He was not sure of it--he touched its pin point two
or three times furtively to make certain the gem had not dropped out;
and then he began, by way of clearing the air, to talk to the learned
Professor about indifferent things.

But these indifferent things had a purport in them. For first he talked
of the University, then of that degraded College, St. Filbert's, and so
worked things round to the infamous B. Leader, and that fairly started
his companion off--as Lord Galton had intended he should be started.

The old Don was still at it when they got up from the breakfast table.
He was shepherded--though he did not know that he was being
shepherded--by the younger man, out into the hall, helped into his rusty
overcoat, led out through the glass doors into the park, and there did
Lord Galton patiently listen to his academic victim for something over a
quarter of an hour, as they walked side by side up the swept gravel to
the very far end of the avenue, and then turned back again towards the
house.

Long before they thus faced about, the learned cousin's mind was a
thousand miles away from reality. The harangue which poured forth
against the infamous B. Leader needed but little sympathetic jogging--a
word here and there--from his companion. His soul was not in his body.
You might have stuck a pin into him, and he would not have felt it; and
Lord Galton, who knew men nearly as well as he knew horses--at least on
the side of their weaknesses--felt secure that the moment had come. And
as he leaned forward, sympathetically close to the left side of his
companion, he gently dropped into the loose, wrinkled side pocket of the
rusty overcoat that perilous gem, and felt as though he had cast off a
garment of lead.

The expert in dodekahedral crystals still poured out unceasingly and
shrilly his grievance, with many a "Would you believe it?" and "If you
please!" and "Then he actually wrote to the Society at Berne," and so
on; and Lord Galton, almost grateful in the new lightness of his heart,
applauded heartily and loudly marvelled that the Society at Berne did
not drum Leader out of their ranks with every mark of infamy.

"So," he thought, as they came into the house again--the quavering voice
of the Crystallographer still more emphatic within four
walls--"salvation comes with a little intelligence, a little decision,
and a little opportunity."

He helped the old fool out of his overcoat; hung it up for him on a peg,
and saw its owner go shambling off to his books.

Lord Galton was pleased with himself; he saw his way fairly straight
before him, but he would do nothing hastily ... which might flurry the
head of the house.... It would be a wise and a small risk, to bide his
time. He would bide it till the noon post had come in, until his host
had looked at his letters. Then only would he take the next step in his
programme. He sauntered out again into the Park, where he would feel the
strain of waiting less, with a walk to occupy him. He looked back over
his shoulder when he had got round towards the lodge, and saw for one
moment through the window of the library his aged relative pottering
among the shelves. He was safe till lunch. And Lord Galton, though all
alone, smiled.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

The young man walked briskly for a couple of miles, thinking clearly and
concisely. He came back to Paulings through the mill gate, up by the
stables, walking strongly and well. He knew exactly what he had to do.

He met one of the servants, and asked where Mr. de Bohun might be, and
was told he was in the garage; sought him there, and found him giving
orders about a repair, and trying--unsuccessfully--to understand whether
the proud chauffeur were lying or no.

He went straight up to his cousin, who turned round at hearing his step,
and said in a very low voice, and quickly:

"Let me see you in your study alone for a moment. It is urgent!"

And the Home Secretary, glancing up hurriedly with a half-frightened
look, said, "Yes? Certainly! Come."

CHAPTER FIVE

Lord Galton stood by the Home Secretary in his study, looked round
suddenly, and said, "May I lock the door?" locked it without leave and
then came back and began talking.

The young fellow talked as impressively as ever he had talked when he
was giving instructions to a jockey, or rather, to the go-between who
took the risk. He knew how to talk, as do most men who are successful in
giving instructions to jockeys. His sentences came, weighty, short,
decisive, and each had its effect. Men said he would have done well in
the House of Commons, but the men who have said that do not know the
House of Commons. Yes, he would have done well in the House of Commons:
not by oratory, but by what I may call the Attaboy side of his
character. He began:

"Humphrey, I'm going to tell you about the emerald. I think I know where
it is."

The Home Secretary looked up, startled; but he did not interrupt.

"I want to begin by saying that I know I am myself under suspicion."

"Oh, my dear Tommy," began his unfortunate host. But the younger man put
up a hand like a slab of stone.

"No," he said. "There's no time to be wasted, and we must have things
absolutely clear. One of us three must have got that brooch. No doubt we
are all under suspicion--but I know why I am under suspicion. People say
I pulled a horse." Again the Home Secretary would have interrupted, but
the heavy hand made an impatient gesture, and again he checked himself.
"Marjorie mayn't believe it, and of course that old fool of a Cousin
Bill hasn't heard of it; and as for that journalist fellow McTibbert, or
whatever his name is, he may or may not have; I don't care. But anyhow,
you know it. _You've_ heard all about it!"

"But, my dear Tommy," broke in the Home Secretary, lying eagerly and
almost with affection, "I don't believe it. Believe me, I don't believe
it. Do you suppose," he added with beautiful tact, "that if I believed
it I'd have you here at Paulings?"

Lord Galton just showed at the muscles of the mouth what a fool he
thought the man. He went on undisturbed.

"It's nothing to do with the value of the lie--they haven't turned me
out of the Posts, for that matter; nor warned me off. But the point is,
the story has gone the rounds. A man that would cheat would steal. Also
you know I'm on the rocks, and therefore I'm under suspicion. Now we're
all three under suspicion, as I say. That old ass, Cousin Bill, got
mixed up with the Mullingar Diamond years ago--too much of a fool to
pinch it for selling; wanted to look at it through one of his
contraptions. Anyhow, he can't keep his hands off crystals. And an
emerald's a crystal."

"Is it?" asked the Head of the Family with great interest.

"I think so--I don't know," said Galton impatiently. "Anyhow, it's a
jewel, a precious stone--what?"

"Oh, yes! It's a jewel, yes, a precious stone. Oh, yes," admitted
Humphrey de Bohun.

"Well then, so's a diamond. A man who'll take diamonds'll take
emeralds--what? ... Then there's that journalist fellow--he's under
suspicion because he's a journalist; they're all on their uppers, and
you told me yourself about the one who stole the spoons when you were at
the Board of Works."

A faint smile appeared for a moment on the face of his host. It was his
favourite funny story--all about a journalist who once stole some
government spoons. He had told it on every occasion. He told it to
journalists. But then he was never really featured by the Press.

"Now of those three," went on Lord Galton, rather more slowly, and
separating his words, "the man who has got it is our miserable old
family goat, Cousin Bill...."

The Home Secretary started.

[Illustration: _Lord Galton explains to the Home Secretary his
theory--or rather, certitude--upon the
whereabouts of the Great Emerald._]

"Yes, I know what you'll say ... he got the fright of his life over the
Mullingar Diamond. You'd say he'd never dream of doing it in the house
of the head of the family." (A dignified look passed over the features
of the Chieftain of the de Bohuns.) "Then he's such a clumsy old ass
that you can't imagine him doing it so quickly. After all, it took him
half an hour to fish the Mullingar Diamond out of an open drawer, and
even then he left things topsy-turvy. You'll say all that, and if I were
just guessing I'd half agree with you. But I'm not guessing. And I tell
you _he's got it_. I don't pretend to do any of this private detective
work, and I've never read one of their rotten mystery stories in my
life. That's how I've kept my common sense clear--men who are blown upon
need their wits about them. I know Bill's got it for a very simple
reason--_I've seen it in his hand with my own eyes_. Some one told the
old goat that the place to hide anything was where it would be most
obvious and simple. He's got it in the left-hand pocket of that damned
smelly overcoat he wears; but he's such a nervous old balmy that he
can't help fingering it the whole time; and when he thinks no one's
looking he pulls it half out and looks at it furtively out of the corner
of his eye. Dons are always as mad as hatters. He did it three separate
times while we were out walking just now. He couldn't help himself. He's
too much shut up inside his own addled head to notice other people. And
I'll tell you something else, which is also common sense. He won't take
it out of that pocket till he's left the house. An overcoat's the only
thing they don't brush or fold up, in this house; you're old-fashioned,
with these things on pegs and not on marble tables. He knows that. It'll
hang there on the peg till he goes away. That's the whole point of
leaving it in such a place.... _And it's there now_. You look for it
there, and you'll find it."

The Home Secretary put on his expression of gravity in the third
degree--the expression with which he would meet a deputation for saving
an innocent man from the gallows and gratify them with a majestic
refusal.

"What you say, Tommy," he began, slowly, "is very serious. Very serious
indeed. In my judgment ..."

"Oh, look here," said Lord Galton impatiently, "cut out all that! He's
not in the hall. He went off to the library, and when he gets there he
strikes root. There'll be no one about--they're laying the table. Come
with me, and I'll prove it."

"I hesitate ..." began the Home Secretary. His powerful young relative,
by way of reply, hooked him by the arm, unlocked the door, and marched
him straight out into the hall. The ghost of what might well have been
an ancestor--for we all have such things--must have mourned, if, as such
things do, it had taken up its kennel in a suit of armour standing by
the side of the fireplace in the hall: it would have mourned to see the
head of the de Bohuns stand by while the deed was done.

Lord Galton went smartly up to the bunch of coats, plunged his hand into
the left-hand pocket of that one wretched old garment, and turned it
sharply inside out, so that the damning evidence should fall before his
cousin's eyes. There fell out no small amount of gathered dirt, some
paper torn into minute fragments, and a stub of pencil; also a rather
repulsive handkerchief--nothing more. Nothing rang upon the hall floor.
There was no Emerald.

Lord Galton for once did a weak thing--or a superstitious one. As though
not trusting his senses, he picked the repulsive handkerchief up and
shook it. But there was no emerald. Indeed, one could see and hear by
the way it had fallen that there was no emerald within its large but
unattractive folds. He knew that well enough before he touched the
rag--but it was a forlorn hope.

It was the older man who hastily picked up these evidences, not of the
Professor's dishonour, but his own, and rapidly put them back where they
belonged; darting a glance over his left shoulder and sighing with
relief to find that there was still no one about, not the sound of a
distant footfall, not the glide of a serf. His companion's face was
darker and flushed.

"I could have sworn ..." he opened. Then he added, murmuring, "He must
have taken it away."

"I wish we hadn't ..." began the Home Secretary, and then switched off
to, "You're quite sure you saw it with your own eyes, Tommy?"

"Absolutely certain," said the young man, with a fearless steady gaze,
and proud to be telling one truth at least.

The Home Secretary held his chin in his hand, stood silent for a good
quarter of a minute, and then said something characteristic of his
profession as a statesman. He said, "Humm!"

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

What had happened?

Dear--or, if that is too familiar a term--charming reader, this is not
one of the detective stories of commerce. You shall know all about it
beforehand, as you have already known all about it, step by step. You
shall be subjected to no torture of suspense. We will leave that to the
people of our story. They were born for it.

What had happened was simple enough. The Professor had gone off to the
library. He wanted to make certain of the Society at Berne in the
_Almanac de Gotha_. With men such as he, an obsession having cropped up
has a horrid fascination for the mind and holds it. He was worrying
about the exact title: whether it was Crystallographique, or
Crystallographische, or de Crystallographic. He was determined to get it
right.

He kept on talking to himself, as was his learned habit, repeating with
a hideous smile the words, "Crystals ... ah! yes ... crystals....
Crystals, eh? Crystals ... yes.... Crystallograph ... something, eh? Now
then, it'll be among the books of reference, eh? Crystals.... Oh, what a
dirty trick that was of Leader to play!" His left hand was fumbling in
the left-hand pocket, where he always kept those indispensable
instruments of research, his large tortoise-shell spectacles. His hand
groped. He muttered the word "Berne" three times in less and less
confident tones. Then the message so tardily conveyed reached his
erudite brain. "Oh! ... I've lost my spectacles!"

He never got used to the shock of losing his spectacles, though he
suffered from it a dozen times a day. Each time he lost them it was all
up with him; each time he went through a crisis. Here he was in the
depths of the country and without eyes! There was a touch of agony in
his muttering now, as came louder the words, "My spectacles, oh, ah! my
spectacles ... now where could I ..." He bent his powerful will to the
control of his, if possible, less powerful memory; he traced events back
one after the other for a good three minutes, and then he remembered
that he had gone out in his overcoat and had left it hanging in the
hall.

[Illustration: _The Professor gave an odd little scream like a shot
rabbit._]

He shambled out and groped in the recesses of the left-hand pocket, and
there, side by side with his familiar handkerchief, the faithful
companion of many days, was the feel of the rough spectacle case; it was
all right, but also, what annoyed him a little, a pebble. It was natural
that pebbles should get into one's pockets when one was out walking in
the country; at least, he thought it was. He thought it went with those
terrible animals called cows, and all that sort of thing. But he pulled
it out mechanically, felt the prick of a pin and then gave an odd little
scream, like a shot rabbit. Next (excuse him!) he rapped out a frightful
oath. "My God!" cried the aged blasphemer. No less. But the violence of
his emotion must have shaken his standards.

He stood there, with the emerald in the palm of his right hand, staring
at it, distraught. And once more in his bewilderment he fell to
repeating the name of his Creator--upon whose existence indeed, he had
more than once learnedly discoursed, concluding upon the whole against
it.

It is said that under the strain of very severe emotion men do things
unnatural, out of themselves. And behold! Professor William de Bohun
behaved for the next half hour like a whole group of characters, any one
of whom you would have said he could not have thrown himself into for
the world. Terror inspired him, and the tragic sense of impending doom.

It must be got rid of!

He had a mad impulse to swallow it. Luckily he restrained it in time: it
was too big, its metal fastenings too angular for health; and then,
there was the pin.

After he had given up the swallowing baulk, another, far more feasible,
arose and formed itself more clearly. There appeared before his mind's
eye a young, round naïve face, fresh to the world, an awkward figure,
the whole standing out against the background of known poverty. It was
the figure of McTaggart, the journalist.

A wicked glint illumined the Professor's eye.

   "Oh! Baleful, hellish light, thus to suffuse
    The inactive optic, wontedly so dulled,
    But now with evil purpose all inflamed!"

as Milton has it in the matter of the fish-god, Dagon.

He made no excuses for himself. He recked nothing of the young man's
ruin. He plunged heartily and heavily into sin. As his colleague the
Professor of Pastoral Theology had once finely quoted in his Luther
Commemoration Lecture, "_Si peccas pecca fortiter_."

It is generally held by the more liberal school among theologians that
man acting of his own free will is not mastered by an external evil
impulse, but may well submit to it.

So it was with Cousin William on this never-to-be-forgotten occasion of
his chief downfall.

A Minor Devil happened at that moment to be wandering rather emptily
through Paulings, seeking what he might devour. He was hungry, poor
spirit; he had eaten nothing since he had left his own place at midnight
and he had got lost in the fog all morning. He had almost caught a small
housemaid, but she had slipped away through the efforts of her patron
saint, sweet Millicent, and left him perfectly ravenous. It was almost
noon and devils are not built for fasting. Judge then his joy at coming,
by pure chance, upon this evil old man. He almost jumped out of his
black fiendish skin for joy to perceive the flashing violet light which
surrounds, in the eyes of supernatural beings, the head of a wicked man.
He spotted it first from a corner of the hall where he had just come out
of a corridor. He rubbed his hands together and even flapped his clawed
wings in his excitement. He flew up to the Professor and began pouring
all sorts of excellent suggestions into his ear--his left ear.

Young McTaggart could play billiards ... the Professor had heard them
say that ... young McTaggart was probably proud of his billiards ... he
could be got to go round the table exhibiting his billiards. He would
take off his coat before exhibiting his billiards. And when the coat was
once off, and its owner's eye was concentrated on the billiard table ...
oh, then!...

The Devil, who can see through walls, gently shepherded his pupil into
the little room next the library where the overflow of books was kept.
That door, with horrid smile, the old conspirator opened; and there,
indeed, he found the youth, looking miserably enough out of the window
with his hands in his trousers pockets. He had slunk into that
inhospitable fireless den in order to be free for a while from the
terrors of high society.

"Ah, Mr. McTaggart, Mr. McTaggart, Mr. McTaggart!" carolled the
scientist--and as he said it he opened his arms wide in a most genial
gesture. "I've been looking for you everywhere!" There slyly wagging a
knotted forefinger, "And I wonder if you can guess why? Eh? Why? Guess
why!" Which words said, and smiling still broader, he repeated them once
more three times, as was his wont, and then added: "I wonder whether you
can guess why, Mr. McTaggart, whether you can guess why ... whether you
can guess why?"

The Devil was now so happy that he could hardly refrain from manifesting
himself, which would have been fatal. He whisked all round the room,
jeering at McTaggart.

Poor young Mr. McTaggart! He had been all night and all that morning a
most unhappy man. He exaggerated in his own mind the suspicions under
which he lay. He was too innocent to believe that he shared it with such
exalted beings as the lord and the Professor, of whom--though he had
never heard his name--he was assured the fame to be European, and who,
anyhow, was connected by blood with a cabinet minister.

The lad imagined himself watched by a thousand eyes. He dared not take
his leave, and yet he was in hell during those hours he passed at
Paulings. He would have been unhappy anyhow, for it was not his world;
but to be within all that set and at the same time a marked
criminal--for that is what he felt himself to be--was almost
intolerable. How he had sprung up when the learned Ancient approached
him, with those seeming kindly eyes! Ah! had McTaggart enjoyed a few
more years of human experience he would have seen in those eyes such a
mixture of cunning and evil joy as might have put him on his guard. But
no; he thought that in his loneliness he had found a friend. Who
knew?--perhaps a supporter.

The Professor's plan was simple, but McTaggart was simpler still.

[Illustration: _Sudden interest in the game of Billiards upon the
part of the Professor of Crystallography
to the University._]

"Mr. McTaggart," said the Ancient, with horrible geniality, "I hear that
you are astonishing at billiards.... Billiards, billiards, yes,
billiards.... Billiards. The Home Secretary was telling me, Humphrey, I
mean, my cousin, my cousin Humphrey ... the Home Secretary, yes ... the
Home Secretary was telling me that you were astonishing at billiards.
Now you know"--and here he went so far as to make a step sideways and
seize the young man by the arm--"it is the one thing I can watch for
hours ... billiards ... good billiards.... I have gone into the
mechanics of the thing"--he was lying freely, and gambling, rightly, on
the idea that his companion could not distinguish between
Crystallography and any other science--"and it fascinates me ...
fascinates me ... oh! fascinates me. I wonder whether--" and in a
fashion which would have been crude to any other man, but to the lonely
McTaggart was heavenly kindness, he urged with linked arm and long
sidling crablike step towards the billiard-room.

It was in the Professor's conception of things that when one is
deceiving a fellow being one must talk the whole time. He is not the
only one to suffer from that delusion.

He talked all the way to the billiard-room; he talked while McTaggart
was pulling off the cloth; he talked while McTaggart was putting on the
lights to see clearly on that dim January day; he talked while McTaggart
was chalking his cue and thoughtfully placing the three balls in
position.

The torrent of rapid words--all dealing with excellency at billiards,
all squeaky--was interrupted only at one moment. It was the moment when
McTaggart did what he had been expected to do--the moment when he took
off his coat and threw it on the leather cushions by the side of his
newly-made and slightly eccentric friend.

The sight of that coat so thrown immediately by his side, and subject to
his hand, almost choked the senile conspirator with joy. But he
recovered himself, and still poured out a torrent of repeated words as
the young fellow walked slowly round the table, getting absorbed in a
continuous break. The Professor interrupted that verbal spate only now
and then to gaze with a murderous keenness at a projected stroke and to
mutter "Marvellous!" two or three times; but all the while his heart was
failing him. It was not the only mean thing he had done in his life by a
long chalk. He had spent the whole of his life doing nothing but mean
things; but it was the first actively and perhaps dangerously wrong
thing the old booby had ever dared to do: for he did not count the
Mullingar Diamond--that was in the cause of Science, and in the cause of
Science you can do anything.

But the Devil chose his moment for him; it was a moment of silence when
young McTaggart was waiting long and breathlessly to be certain of a
stroke that would bring his break over the hundred. His back was turned
to the Professor; he was intent upon his play.

The old bony hand, with the gesture of one that takes rather than gives,
put the emerald into a side pocket of the coat, where lay he knew not
what--but in point of fact, a tobacco pouch, a pipe, a pencil, and a
piece of chocolate--of all things in the world!--no longer clean. Nor
had the Emerald ever been in such society before, from the day when it
had started life in the splendid court of Moscovy to these last evil
days of ours.

McTaggart had brought off his shot: his break was 102, and the spot and
the red lay perfect for a cannon and red in the pocket.

But you exaggerate the diplomatic value of the Professor if you think
that he had the wit to continue his stream of gabble after the deed was
done.

It was lucky for him that he was dealing with the candour of youth, or
that abrupt retreat of his from the scene of his crime would have
brought suspicion. For, his deed accomplished, he simply got up with a
jerk, dropped all attention to the play, looked at his watch, muttered
the time of day with an exclamation, and sidled out of the room, leaving
his companion marooned ... and with him, full of success, went the
Lesser Devil.

McTaggart could do without him; he went on playing for another ten
minutes or so, till the break ended, and had reached the pretty figure
of 151. Then he in turn looked at his watch in his waistcoat pocket,
found it would be time for luncheon in a few minutes, put up his cue,
and sadly resumed his coat.

Had he been of those who smoke all day he would have pulled out his
pipe, and ten to one would have found the thing lurking there next his
tobacco; but he thought of the meal coming on, and much more did he
think with dread that it would be breaking some mysterious etiquette of
country houses if he were to smoke a pipe. He would not dare to do it
till he saw some one of his betters at the same work. For the same
reason, after he had heard them going towards the dining-room and had
joined them, he was too nervous to put his hands in his pockets in a
gesture of repose. He kept them dangling in his extreme anxiety to
commit no solecism. He moved nervously about amid the sullen silence of
the rest and wondered a little why the burst of geniality upon the part
of the man of gems should have dried up so suddenly. For not a word more
did the Professor speak to him; and all through luncheon McTaggart sat
there in the same terror and the same misfortune of soul, never daring
to speak some artificial word during the rare moments when anyone broke
the silence.

They had not yet risen from table; he was still wondering what one did
at the end of luncheon in the houses of the great--at what point one got
up, whether immediately after one's host or simultaneously with one's
host; whether the women went out first, as he knew they did at dinner;
whether it was his duty to open the door for them--when Lord Galton
pulled out his pipe, filled it deliberately enough, and lit it. After
the easy manners of our happy times he slowly and with deliberation blew
a cloud of smoke across the board which wreathed itself, not
ungracefully, about the venerable head of Aunt Amelia. So natural an
action was followed by his host, who in turn thoughtfully pulled out his
own pipe and lit it, as he rose to fetch himself wine: he mixed tobacco
and wine, did Humphrey de Bohun.

"Then," thought McTaggart to himself, in an agony of desire for tobacco,
"it seems this kind of thing _can_ be done,"--and he felt for his pipe,
and pulled out his pouch.

[Illustration: _Mr. McTaggart discovers the Emerald._]

Now there happened to be in the room at that moment an Angel. He had
come to Paulings express to counteract the Devil who had been putting in
such strong work on the Professor, and the Angel saved the quill driver,
whom, for his poverty, he loved. For that innocent, finding something
that felt like his slab of chocolate in among his tobacco, and knowing
himself to be well capable of having put it there, was just about to
pull it out, and was already speculating on what sort of flavour
chocolate gave to Bondman--or Bondman to chocolate--when the Angel
seized his wrist and pinned it. He did not know the Angel was doing
this--we never know our luck--he could not have told you what happened,
except that he hesitated, and being of the opposite sex, was not lost.
But for the Angel, he would have pulled out the thing before them all,
and said, "Hallo, what's this?" and there would have been an end of
McTaggart. Instead of which the Angel, with angelic swiftness, put a
thought into his head.

"Don't pull out that lump of chocolate! It will make you look a fool.
The great don't eat chocolate, except out of large expensive wooden
boxes with Japanese pictures outside; elaborate boxes. The rich do not
carry half-broken slabs of chocolate in their pockets--still less in
their tobacco pouches!"

Therefore was it that McTaggart did not take out the lump, whatever it
was; he grasped a fingerful of tobacco and peered down with one eye into
the recesses of the pouch. When he saw what was there, his heart stopped
beating! For a moment he felt faint and giddy.... But the angel firmly
put the pouch back again, leaving the tobacco in his fingers, and with
shaking hand he filled his pipe, and with shaking hand he lit it!

What the devil?

How on earth ...?

The unfortunate boy actually examined his own mind to see whether he
could possibly have done such a thing, and then forgotten it--have done
it inadvertently. Then he thought it had fallen into his coat when
Marjorie had let it drop. Then he remembered that he had not been
wearing that coat, that he had been in evening dress. Then he thought
that the universe was made in some way that he did not understand. He
looked at his coat, and fingered it. It was all right. His mind would
not work properly again until he had satisfied himself beyond a doubt
not once, but many times. He allowed--through terror--too long a time to
pass lest he should seem in haste; strolled, looking as careless as he
could, towards the library, looked round to make sure that no one had
noticed him, leaped upstairs to his room, locked the door, took out his
pouch and that which was within. He gazed at it for something like half
a minute, putting it down on his dressing-table in the strong light to
make sure.

There was no doubt at all. Either he was mad, or that was the emerald.
He remembered some odiously vivid dreams that he had had as a child
during the air raids--but he was certain this was no dream. He was
McTaggart all right, a miserable young journalist against whom fate had
woven some hellish plot; and there was the Emerald.

Next he tortured himself as to what he should do; obviously he must keep
it upon him; he dared not secrete it anywhere. If one secretes things
one can be traced. Conscience for one moment bade him go and tell his
host, and risk all; but unfortunately the Angel had been called away at
that very moment to tackle the Devil again, who had settled in the
Vicarage; and in lack of such heavenly aid McTaggart fell, as any one of
us would have fallen. He put the emerald into the inner pocket of his
coat, pinned three pins round it carefully to make certain that it
should not escape; and then went down with leaden heart to mix with his
fellow beings and to trust to time.

CHAPTER SIX

The boy Ethelbert was suffering; not from contrition--which, I need
hardly tell one of your learning, is the pure sorrow for sin--but from
attrition--which, I need hardly tell one of your learning, is the sorrow
for sin only in so far as one considers its unpleasant consequences to
oneself.

The boy Ethelbert clearly appreciated that in attempting to save himself
from one danger he had run himself into another far greater. He had put
a valuable jewel into a nobleman's pocket and that might be, in legal
terms, for all he knew, embezzlement, malversation or even a compound
and chronic felony of _malice prepense_; perhaps a misdemeanour--with
which word he was familiar through the fate of an uncle of his called
John.

He was in great agony, was the boy Ethelbert; in agony of that sort
which youth cannot endure until it has relieved itself by communion. But
how should he speak? His duty was to his natural lord, the Butler. The
glorious, the remote Mr. Whaley: God of the Underworld. Should he
confess to the Butler? It would be madness. Yet he must speak: he must
unburden his mind.

The innocent child was not long in finding a plan. He would go to his
true superior and, naming no names, mentioning no-one-like, he would
give a nod as good as a wink to a blind horse, and them as understood
could follow if they chose, and if they asked no questions they wouldn't
be told no lies. And mum's the word. Such, in rapid succession, were the
Napoleonic thoughts of Ethelbert.

It was shortly after luncheon that he sought the room in which the
dignified O.C. of the household of Paulings was wont to repose from his
labours: and never more thoroughly than after luncheon.

Midday sleep is unknown to the young, at least after they are very, very
young. Those of young Ethelbert's age have no use for it and cannot
understand what a boon it may be to others. Foolishly, therefore, did
young Ethelbert knock at the door of the holy of holies, thereby
suddenly awakening the sacred being within, who jerked into a startled
gasp. He pulled a handkerchief from his face, thought for a moment that
the house was on fire, expected to see an angry master perhaps; was on
his feet with labouring breath, purple, expectant; when there entered
the Boy.

A fine and hearty curse greeted the youth and almost blasted him from
the room, but what he had to say was of such moment that he just stood
his ground.

"Oh, sir!" he said, "I thought I'd come and tell you..."

"Come and tell me what? You young devil!" roared Mr. Whaley with a lack
of dignity which I should have thought impossible had I not myself once
spied upon him in his more relaxed moments, when he thought that none
could observe. "I've a mind to have you larroped! Damned if I don't
larrop you myself!" He made a vicious dash at the Boy, who was only
spurred by such terror to the arresting cry of.

"Ho, sir! The Hemerald....!"

"The Emerald ..." gulped Mr. Whaley in a very changed tone. And then,
almost meekly: "Well, what about the Emerald, young Bert? What about
it?" The fierceness had gone out of him altogether; he sat down. "Anyone
been saying who took it?" For conscience that makes cowards of us all
makes us most cowardly when we are innocent--especially in a trade with
perquisites.

Ethelbert recovered some little of his composure, and there came into
his eyes a look of simple cunning.

"There's some," he said, nodding mysteriously, "what might speak if they
chose."

"Oh! Is there?" said Mr. Whaley. "Well then, speak, you little rat!"

"I didn't say it was me as knew," answered Ethelbert a little
plaintively. "But don't you think, sir, that when the clothes are
brushed and all, him as brushes finds out what's in the pockets--yes"
(mysteriously) "even in them of the 'ighest?"

"'Oo'd be fool enough to leave such a thing in their pocket?" said Mr.
Whaley contemptuously. "And 'oo do you mean by the 'ighest?"

Ethelbert nodded with a superior air.

"Ah!" he answered doggedly, "all I said was, 'there's some could speak
if they chose.' And there's things that may be left in the pockets even
of the 'ighest."

"Look 'ere, young Bert," said Mr. Whaley, rising again ponderously, and
with a new threat in his face: "I'm not going to have any of _that_."
Then shaking a considerable sausage of a forefinger at the lad, he
added, "When you say 'the 'ighest' that's enough! Don't let me 'ear you
speak again: leastways not on jewels and such like. There's only one
name that it can mean you're driving at"--and there rose up within his
mind the majesty of the master, Humphrey de Bohun.

"I'm driving at no one," said the Boy, struck suddenly again with
terror. He had not dreamed that the upper servants felt so strongly upon
the immunity of lords such as he in whose pocket the gem, to Ethelbert's
certain knowledge, reposed--for he had put it there.

"You've been a-brushing the clothes, young lad, have yer? Yes, of course
you have; that's your place; and setting 'em out as they should be set.
And you say you found something in the pocket of the 'ighest, did you?"

"I never ..." began Ethelbert, almost on the point of howling.

"You shut your dangerous young mouth," shouted Mr. Whaley. "It's talking
like that against your betters as 'as put many and many a lad in
prison."

"Oh, sir!" said the unfortunate Bert.

"Now look here, my Boy," went on Mr. Whaley, in his heaviest manner,
slowly transforming himself into the distant Superior and pronouncing
divine moral judgment and guidance, as it were, for the very young. "You
listen to me, and listen solemn. This may be a turning point in your
life, it may. Talk like this among the lower servants, let alone a
little bastard not yet sixteen, 'as been the ruin of some--aye, of many.
So I tell ye. The gaols are full of 'em. Now, you mark what I say, young
Ethelbert"--it was the first time he had ever used the entire name, but
the occasion demanded it--"one word from your lips, and you're ruined.
It's well you come to one like me, that might be your father like, and
that has a care for your future, my lad. Remember that! One word from
your lips, and you're ruined. It's not for you to be piecing this and
that together. Gentlemen 'ave got ways o' their own, and, anyhow, I'm
slow to believe you. There may be a game about all this, and, anyhow,
not a word from your lips. Mark, my lad!" he went on, his voice booming,
"ye're lost if ye speak. Have you taken that?" he ended, almost shouting
again.

"Oh, yes, sir!" said the miserable Ethelbert, trembling. "Oh, sir, I
meant no harm...."

"Well, then, you go and _do_ no harm," concluded Mr. Whaley, and waved
the infant away.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Mr. Whaley rose to his full height and girth and stretched. He looked in
a little square looking-glass, one of his necessaries of life, thought
his tie doubtful, carefully and gingerly put on a new one, worthy of the
occasion. His boots--he glanced down at them--yes, his boots would do.
His trousers were just what they should be. The fringe of hair round the
majestic dome of his head never needed attention less than now.

It was a solemn moment in history. He, George Whaley, a man of weight
and years, possessed, moreover, now of a sufficient competence, but not
undesirous of making it larger still, was in possession of the dread
secret. The head of the de Bohuns, one of His Majesty's principal
Secretaries of State, had fallen, fallen, fallen! Humphrey de Bohun had
pinched his own daughter's emerald. The Emerald of Catherine the Great.
The fortune of the de Bohuns lay concealed by his master's hand,
awaiting the receiver's gold. Oh, horror! In what embarrassment the
unfortunate man had committed the fatal act Mr. Whaley knew not: could
so good a man have been blackmailed by scoundrels? Why should he need
money--and money at such risk? Alas! who can plumb the depths of the
human heart? thought George Whaley--indeed, he almost spoke the words
aloud, so apposite did they seem, and so often had he read them in his
book of devotions. Yet was it so! And ever, in the least expected
places, thought George Whaley again, lies the solution of a mystery. He
shot his cuffs, drew himself up, coughed a little, and rehearsed the
scene.

"I beg your pardon, sir, may I have the honour of a moment's
confidential word with you?" And then another discreet cough.

Then how to put it? He thought long and deeply. He must put it with
sympathy--almost as a friend. He must not forget that he was talking to
a superior. It would need very skilful handling; but what are butlers
for if they cannot skilfully handle? It is the very core of buttling!

He had handled other situations in his other situations, had Mr. Whaley:
none quite so delicate as this, but still, some of 'em pretty delicate.
Yes; he must talk to Humphrey as a friend. Respectfully, but as a
friend: and above all firmly. It was clear that such a service would
merit some reward.

God knows, there would be no tone of menace! Oh, no! Whatever honorarium
might accrue to George Whaley as a reward for such revelation should be
the gift of a grateful heart alone: and, said Mr. George Whaley to his
own conscience, why not? He would be doing his master a very great
service. Indeed, he would be doing a double service--nay, a treble one.
For he would be rescuing the Home Secretary of England from his lower
self; that was a moral service. He would be preventing him from
inevitable discovery; that was a material service. He would be serving
him faithfully as an honest domestic should; and that was a service of
loyalty.

Was it to be wondered at (the whole scene rose vividly before his eyes
as it was to be--as it certainly would be), was it to be wondered at
that the grateful man should, on an impulse, seize the honest servitor's
hand, grasp it warmly, and then, with a catch in his voice, cry aloud,
"Whaley, you have served me well!" The rest would follow. Not less, he
took it, than five hundred pounds.

Should he go further? Should he offer his services for taking back the
gem discreetly and seeing that it should be laid, through means he could
command, upon the dressing-table of the culprit's daughter--no one
should know whence?

Time must show; the opportunity would develop; the details of the drama
would be filled in. But the main lines were clear. George Whaley would
save the head of the family of de Bohun; he would save the soul--and,
incidentally, the more earthly reputation--of the head of the family of
de Bohun. He would receive the little spontaneous, heartfelt reward due
to so honest a liegeman of the de Bohuns. Ah! Chivalry was not dead....

But nothing must be done on impulse. He glanced at his watch. It was
only just past three. He must watch the poor tortured soul until there
had developed in it, as inevitably there would through the effect of
time, a false security--a false security brought by suspicions and
counter-suspicions among the guests, who could never dream the real
truth. Upon such a mood the revelation would fall with tenfold effect.

Then, and then only--he would watch his moment--would George Whaley
unburden himself of the curse of the de Bohuns and turn that curse into
a blessing; moral to his master, and to himself material.

Such was the plan of George Whaley. Once more he recited, but in an
undertone, a whisper, the words of which could not be heard by another,
the very phrases he was to use, the gestures proper to the great moment
when it should come. So discreetly did he rehearse that young Ethelbert
without, his ear glued to the keyhole, heard nothing but a murmur of
monologue within, and feared in one wild moment that the awful
revelation about Lord Galton had driven the butler mad.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Marjorie had insisted upon seeing her father alone, and she had worked
it easily enough.

The Professor in his relief from the accursed emerald had fallen into a
sprightly mood. He had compelled young Galton to take a _second_ walk,
and therein had bored the turfist to agonies; which only shows that God
is just, and that we are punished in that by which we sinned; in
Galton's case, the avenue. During that walk the crystallographist
volubly explained his exciting experiences in the past as an amateur
detective. His large prattling mouth discoursed of marvellous
sleuth-deeds in the past. But he did not go too far. He said nothing of
emeralds. He kept the tit-bit, the great revelation, for his host--and
he knew at what time to deliver it.

As for McTaggart, there was no difficulty in getting rid of _him_. All
he desired was to be alone. He wandered off all solitary. Victoria
Mosel, left with no one but Aunt Amelia, fled; and Aunt Amelia, once in
her chair, was safe to remain there for the rest of the afternoon.
Therefore was Marjorie safe to tell her father what should be done.

Her temper was at breaking point; she was in that mood when women will
blame whatever is nearest at hand and most defenseless; and what more
admirable butt than a widowed parent?

"Papa," she said, "there's only one thing to be done. You must get a
detective! At once!"

"My dear child! My dear child!" said the shocked politician, all the
traditions of the de Bohuns rising in his blood, "a detective at
Paulings!"

"Oh, stuff and nonsense!" said the dutiful daughter. "I'm sick of all
that. Considering the kind of people you _do_ have in Paulings--gaol
birds like Tommy, and that damned old fool Cousin Bill, who steals
diamonds ..."

"Hush! My dear, hush!" begged the appalled and terrified Home Secretary.
He had noticed an open door, and hurriedly shut it. "Besides which,
apart from being overheard, really, one must not say such things!"

"Say what?" retorted Marjorie sharply. "Oh, papa, for Heaven's sake
don't talk any more nonsense, but do get that detective!"

"I can hardly telephone on such a thing as that," hesitated the poor man
weakly. "Everything I say over the telephone is known at the exchange.
And we know what happened that time when they were paid by _The Howl_.
As for letting one of the servants do it ..."

"Oh! Good heavens, papa!" said Marjorie. "Isn't there a car? Go up in
the car! Tell Morden all about it."

"Morden can hold his tongue," mused de Bohun thoughtfully.

"Of course he can!" snapped Marjorie.

"But ..." hesitated her father, again, "I don't see how ... what with
the guests ... and I wouldn't have them suspect for worlds...."

And as he said this he saw out of the corner of his eye his two cousins
coming back towards the house, close at hand; the elder one was
gesticulating in fine fury in his new-found happiness, and the other
paced sombrely fierce at the end of his torture. Before they could open
the front door ...

"Oh, damn!" said Marjorie--and she nearly added "you." "I'll telephone
to you from my room. I'll give you an excuse to say the Home Office is
calling." And she flew upstairs.

She was safely at her telephone before the two cousins had passed the
front door. She gave them time to get into her father's presence, or for
her to guess, at any rate, that one of them would be in the library.
Then, with the promptitude of the young and the modern, she did the
trick. The basement had put her through, and the bell on the big desk
rang smartly. Galton and the Professor, sitting there in the room with
the Home Secretary, looked up as quickly as did their host. He was on
the receiver with a nervous rapidity; and the conversation was of a
simple sort which I almost blush to recall.

"Now, papa, just tell them you've got to go to town because there is a
hurried summons in London. Tell them you'll be back in a couple of
hours."

"Who's on?" said Lord Galton.

"Yes! Yes!" said de Bohun. "All right! Yes! The Home Office? Ah! Yes?
Tell me the details," knitting his brows a little; then turning to his
two cousins, "It seems they want me at Whitehall."

_The Telephone_: "Hurry up, papa; it's all got to be fitted in pretty
damn close, you know; they've got to get the man, and he's got to be got
here by this afternoon, and got somehow!"

_The Home Secretary_: "Ah? Yes!" Frowning, "Oh! that's serious--well!
You want me at once? All right! It's Saturday afternoon you know! Is
Morden there? Tell him I'll be up within the hour." Then he turned to
his guests. "Yes, they want me at once, it seems. Most urgent. But they
say it won't take long." He spoke into the receiver in his turn: "Do you
think I can get back here by five or a little after in the car? ...
Yes," turning round and nodding at his guests thoughtfully, "they say I
can get back by five--or a little after, in the car. What a business it
is! I have often wondered," he added sententiously as he hung up the
receiver on its hook and rang the bell to order the car--"I have often
wondered what makes men take office. It's a tradition," he sighed, "Some
one must serve the State! But it's a weary business." All this for the
benefit of his two cousins, as though they had been a public meeting.
"I'll get back at once; my man can do it in forty minutes from here if
he takes the cut by Muffler's Lane, and there's not much traffic after
the first two hours of a Saturday afternoon."

The car was round promptly enough. It was stopped within five miles for
the great man to telephone back--from a local box--to Paulings for
something he had forgotten to leave word of. But he did not telephone to
Paulings. He telephoned to the Home Office, of which he was the chief.
To such abasement do modern contrivances drive us. He called up the
invaluable Morden and discovered to his enormous relief that the
invaluable Morden, though it was a Saturday and already a quarter to
four, was working away.

Within twenty minutes more the great statesman was in his official
palace of Whitehall. Morden was there all right, as the telephone had
told him. Morden was there! Oh invaluable Morden! have you not earned
those directorships and that sinecure in the Engrossing Department? By
God! you have.

"Morden," said the Home Secretary.

"Aye, aye," answered Mr. Morden wittily.

"You know Scotland Yard?"

Morden did not turn a hair. Did he know Scotland Yard? Did he? He,
Morden of the Home Office! The man who laid the traps for the
scapegoats ... the man who worked the parks.

So young--not forty--he had already seen pass before him a long troop of
politicians, and he was ready to take any folly from them, short of
physical violence. So when he was asked whether he, the junior brain of
the Home Office, knew the place and institution called Scotland Yard, he
said that he did; and he said it as naturally as though he had been
asked for some information on Thibet.

"Now who do you think," said the Home Secretary musingly, as he rose
from his chair and paced up and down the enormous room, his brows
tortured with deep thought--"who do you think there would be--connected
with Scotland Yard, mind you!--who would undertake a private inquiry,
and be rigidly secret?"

"They are all rigidly secret," said Morden simply.

The Home Secretary wagged his long head with a weary simulation of
cunning, and a would-be sly smile illuminated--or at least undimmed--his
eye.

"That's all right for the _public_, Morden," he said. "But you'll see
what I mean in a moment. Could they find some one even _more_ rigidly
secret than the rest? Eh?"

"_I_ could," said Morden. "I can tell you his name. A man called
Brailton, close over sixty, but very good indeed. He was the man we used
when there was that trouble about the death in Lady Matcham's house just
before her administration went out of office."

"Oh, was he?" cried the Home Secretary eagerly. "Was he?" Then with
great satisfaction in his voice: "In that case he is all right. It was
certainly astonishing, the way that was kept back....You see, Morden,
it's something of the same case here. _The trouble is in my own
house_ ... _Paulings_."

For once Morden was genuinely taken aback. He was silent. "I see," he at
last murmured gravely. "_Your_ house--and the safe side?--Of course!"

"It's in my own house--and the safe side? Good God, yes!" The Home
Secretary spoke firmly. Then after a pause he added, "When they find out
who has done it ..."

"Done what?" said Morden.

"Never mind," answered his courteous chief. "You're bound to know all
about it in good time. Well, as I was saying, when they know who's done
it, it might turn out to be some one of whom not a soul in the Press
must know that he has done it. I mean, if he _has_ done it, nobody must
know that it was he who did it, outside the few who know that he _has_.
Have I made myself quite, quite clear?" he asked anxiously.

"Perfectly," said Morden.

"Now this man Brailton. When could he get down to Paulings?"

"He could come at an hour's notice," said Morden. "He got back from
Yorkshire last night, and he's got nothing on for the moment."

"Ring him up," said the Home Secretary.

It was at six removes, and took just over ten minutes. The man in the
outer room rang up the department, which told the section, which sent
for the controller, who gave the order to the third floor, which got
hold of the group, and the group had the good fortune to find Brailton
at the end of a wire. Brailton would take whatever train he was told,
and was waiting.

The Home Secretary meditated.

"I am going down by car now," he said. He looked at his watch. "It takes
well under the hour by train--it's not seventeen miles. I shall be home
by half past five, and I'll tell Marjorie. The best train is the
six-thirty from St. Pancras. It gets down in forty minutes. I'll have
him met and brought straight to Paulings. He'd be in time for dinner....
By the way," he added suddenly, as a thought struck him, "he'll be all
right, will he? Go down?"

"Perfectly," said Morden eagerly. "Perfectly."

"No one'll suspect anything?" persisted his chief anxiously.

"Oh, no, no, no!" assured Morden airily. "I know the man like an uncle.
Quiet, silver, rather too refined, silent, tall. Dresses--if
anything--a little too carefully. At Lady Matcham's he passed for a Don
working in Egypt who hadn't come to London for months. And in this last
Yorkshire case he passed as a _Times_ correspondent just back in England
from the east after some years. All you have to do is to make up good
reasons for people not having seen him before. He passes perfectly."

"The accent?" said the Home Secretary, knitting his brows again.
"Is--well--you know what I mean?"

"Oh, perfectly. It's beautiful; it's remarkably smooth--yet not
conspicuous," said Morden. Then, "You knew old Dickie Hafton?" he added
suddenly.

"Of course I knew old Dickie Hafton!" answered the indignant Home
Secretary. "He was my mother-in-law's first cousin--went to the Lords in
1895 and to the Lord in 1910. Fond o' women." And there rose before his
mental eye the image of that aged peer, thin, aquiline, too proud, too
careful of his dress, a man of exquisite voice a trifle thin in tone,
but how precise! with the old, not uncharming habit of a few French
words here and there. A public figure to the last, famous for his
activities in the evangelical world.

"Well," answered Morden, "old Brailton's the startling image of Dickie
Hafton. You'll like him. He goes down."

"All right," said the Home Secretary, hugely satisfied. "That's settled!
I'm off; I leave it to you to make arrangements. The six-thirty."

But to make his chief quite at ease, Morden whispered something in his
ear.

"Really?" said the Home Secretary, as he struggled into his coat--and he
said it very loudly, so that everyone could hear it in the next room, to
Morden's horror. "Not old Dickie's _son_? There wouldn't be time for
it!"

Morden nodded mysteriously, and whispered again: "Yes, there is! He was
only eighteen.... It was the housemaid at his grandmother's." And the
Home Secretary went out bemused and marvelling at the strange
revelations of this pur world.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Many of our most important modern inventions have been forestalled by
the Chinese, for whom we should have the greater regard in that they are
not Christians. Gunpowder, False Money, the art of Printing, Diplomacy,
Propaganda, Prison Fortunes, Taximeters and the Strike--all these are of
the extreme Orient. But what have I to do with all these? It is of the
Mariner's Compass that I sing--which also was first spotted by the
Chink.

Now of the various forms of Mariner's Compass there is one with which
some few of my readers may be acquainted. It is used in certain
scientific experiments which have nothing to do with pointing to the
North, but with the measurement of delicate electrical hints. The needle
swings on a jewelled pivot, very nicely balanced, encased in a small
round box about an inch across, covered in with glass so that no dust
can affect the very sensitive affair; and at the side there is a little
stud on a spring which you press with your finger when you want to fix
and register the pointing of the needle. So long as you press the stud
the needle stands firm. When you release the stud the needle trembles
again.

All very interesting. But what of it?

Wait a moment. Retain this clearly in your mind, and I will proceed to
the second point.

It has been remarked by the less stupid of psychologists--and that is
not saying much--that cunning and intelligence are not often combined.
Conversely, as Dr. Nancy Neerly shrewdly remarked, when her assistant at
the Hospital for Nervous Diseases, gonophed her microscope, extreme
incompetence is often accompanied by cunning. Nothing is more cunning
than your half-wit.

Getting that principle firmly into your head, you will appreciate that
when Professor de Bohun slunk out in the evening after his cousin's
departure for town, into the neighbouring suburban villas of Bakeham
(which, for one thing, fringed the Park--the de Bohuns had long ago
screened it by a dense row of quickly-growing timber--and for another,
provided the Home Secretary with a considerable part of his insufficient
income) his action was not unconnected with that upon which his mind had
been exercised for now nearly twenty-four hours.

He sought a policeman, and said with a sudden squeak which made that
high official jump:

"Oh! Can you tell me if anyone round here sells scientific instruments?
Optical instruments? Electrical instruments? ... Instruments?"

"Wot?" said the policeman.

"Let us say ... ah, for instance," went on the squeaky voice,
"clinometers.... Shall we say Clinometers? Clinometers? ... Yes!
Clinometers!"

"Pass along!" said the policeman. "Pass along!" And there was that in
his eye of a man who hesitates between a verdict of lunacy and arrest
for leg-pull.

"But, Constable ..." pleaded the unfortunate cadet of an ancient house.

"Pass on! Pass on!" boomed the tyrant, and as there was a difference of
at least three octaves between the two men's voices, the unfortunate
Professor obeyed the double bass, crossed the street at the risk of his
life, and wandered inanely past the shop windows.

But there is a Providence for such as he, as also for drunkards and
babes; and there, right before him, was an ancient bow window of
bottle-glass panes; the name of the shop in old Georgian script; the
information that it had been founded in 1805; and, behind the glass, two
telescopes, a microscope, a clock, several watches, and a sextant of