“There were other people in the hall, especially at my end of it. A perfect
throng was coming from the billiard-room, where the dancing had been, and it
might easily be that he could both enter and leave that secluded spot without
attracting attention. He had shown too early and much too unmistakably his lack
of interest in the general company for his every movement to be watched as at
his first arrival. But this is simple conjecture; what I have to say next is
evidence. The stiletto—have you studied it, sir? I have, from the
pictures. It is very quaint; and among the devices on the handle is one that
especially attracted my attention. See! This is what I mean.” And I handed him
a drawing which I had made with some care in expectation of this very
interview.
He surveyed it with some astonishment.
“I understand,” I pursued in trembling tones, for I was much affected by my own
daring, “that no one has so far succeeded in tracing this weapon to its owner.
Why didn’t your experts study heraldry and the devices of great houses? They
would have found that this one is not unknown in England. I can tell you on
whose blazon it can often be seen, and so could—Mr. Grey.”
X.
I ASTONISH THE INSPECTOR
I was not the only one to tremble now. This man of infinite experience and
daily contact with crime had turned as pale as ever I myself had done in face
of a threatening calamity.
“I shall see about this,” he muttered, crumpling the paper in his hand. “But
this is a very terrible business you are plunging me into. I sincerely hope
that you are not heedlessly misleading me.”
“I am correct in my facts, if that is what you mean,” said I. “The stiletto is
an English heirloom, and bears on its blade, among other devices, that of Mr.
Grey’s family on the female side. But that is not all I want to say. If the
blow was struck to obtain the diamond, the shock of not finding it on his
victim must have been terrible. Now Mr. Grey’s heart, if my whole theory is not
utterly false, was set upon obtaining this stone. Your eye was not on him as
mine was when you made your appearance in the hall with the recovered jewel. He
showed astonishment, eagerness, and a determination which finally led him
forward, as you know, with the request to take the diamond in his hand. Why did
he want to take it in his hand? And why, having taken it, did he drop
it—a diamond supposed to be worth an ordinary man’s fortune? Because he
was startled by a cry he chose to consider the traditional one of his family
proclaiming death? Is it likely, sir? Is it conceivable even that any such cry
as we heard could, in this day and generation, ring through such an assemblage,
unless it came with ventriloquial power from his own lips? You observed that he
turned his back; that his face was hidden from us. Discreet and reticent as we
have all been, and careful in our criticisms of so bizarre an event, there
still must be many to question the reality of such superstitious fears, and
some to ask if such a sound could be without human agency, and a very guilty
agency, too. Inspector, I am but a child in your estimation, and I feel my
position in this matter much more keenly than you do, but I would not be true
to the man whom I have unwittingly helped to place in his present unenviable
position if I did not tell you that, in my judgment, this cry was a spurious
one, employed by the gentleman himself as an excuse for dropping the stone.”
“And why should he wish to drop the stone?”
“Because of the fraud he meditated. Because it offered him an opportunity for
substituting a false stone for the real. Did you not notice a change in the
aspect of this jewel dating from this very moment? Did it shine with as much
brilliancy in your hand when you received it back as when you passed it over?”
“Nonsense! I do not know; it is all too absurd for argument.” Yet he did stop
to argue, saying in the next breath: “You forget that the stone has a setting.
Would you claim that this gentleman of family, place and political distinction
had planned this hideous crime with sufficient premeditation to have provided
himself with the exact counterpart of a brooch which it is highly improbable he
ever saw? You would make him out a Cagliostro or something worse. Miss Van
Arsdale, I fear your theory will topple over of its own weight.”
He was very patient with me; he did not show me the door.
“Yet such a substitution took place, and took place that evening,” I insisted.
“The bit of paste shown us at the inquest was never the gem Mrs. Fairbrother
wore on entering the alcove. Besides, where all is sensation, why cavil at one
more improbability? Mr. Grey may have come over to America for no other reason.
He is known as a collector, and when a man has a passion for
diamond-getting—”
“He is known as a collector?”
“In his own country.”
“I was not told that.”
“Nor I. But I found it out.”
“How, my dear child, how?”
“By a cablegram or so.”
“You—cabled—his name—to England?”
“No, Inspector; uncle has a code, and I made use of it to ask a friend in
London for a list of the most noted diamond fanciers in the country. Mr. Grey’s
name was third on the list.”
He gave me a look in which admiration was strangely blended with doubt and
apprehension.
“You are making a brave struggle,” said he, “but it is a hopeless one.”
“I have one more confidence to repose in you. The nurse who has charge of Miss
Grey was in my class in the hospital. We love each other, and to her I dared
appeal on one point. Inspector—” here my voice unconsciously fell as he
impetuously drew nearer—“a note was sent from that sick chamber on the
night of the ball,—a note surreptitiously written by Miss Grey, while the
nurse was in an adjoining room. The messenger was Mr. Grey’s valet, and its
destination the house in which her father was enjoying his position as chief
guest. She says that it was meant for him, but I have dared to think that the
valet would tell a different story. My friend did not see what her patient
wrote, but she acknowledged that if her patient wrote more than two words the
result must have been an unintelligible scrawl, since she was too weak to hold
a pencil firmly, and so nearly blind that she would have had to feel her way
over the paper.”
The inspector started, and, rising hastily, went to his desk, from which he
presently brought the scrap of paper which had already figured in the inquest
as the mysterious communication taken from Mrs. Fairbrother’s hand by the
coroner. Pressing it out flat, he took another look at it, then glanced up in
visible discomposure.
“It has always looked to us as if written in the dark, by an agitated hand;
but—”