"Dinner is served," intoned this sober personage, with a curate-like solemnity all his own.
I had no wish to gape at the man, but that first glimpse of mine was a sharp one, for I knew that it was Wilkins himself that I was confronting. As I beheld him there in all the glory of his magisterial assurance I felt an involuntary and ridiculous sinking in the diaphragm. I asked myself in the name of all the Lares and Penates of Manhattan, why I had suddenly gone off on a wild-goose chase to bag an inoffensive butler about whom I had had a midnight nightmare?
Then I looked at the man more closely. He wore the conventional dress livery of twilled worsted, with an extremely high-winged collar and an extremely small lawn tie. He seemed a remarkably solid figure of a man, and his height was not insignificant. Any impression of fragility, of sedentary bloodlessness, which might have been given out by his quite pallid face, was sharply contradicted by the muscular heaviness of his limbs. His hair, a Kyrle-Bellewish gray over the temples, was cut short. The well-powdered and close-shaven face was bluish white along the jowls, like a priest's. The poise of the figure, whether natural or simulated, was one marked for servitude.
Yet I had to admit to myself, as we filed out and down to the dining-room, that the man was not without his pretended sense of dignity. He seemed neither arrogant nor obsequious. He hovered midway between the Scylla of hauteur and the Charybdis of considerate patience. About the immobile and mask-like face hung that veil of impersonality which marked him as a butler—as a butler to the finger-tips. When not actually in movement he was as aloofly detached as a totem-pole. He stood as unobtrusive as a newel-post, as impassive as some shielding piece of furniture, beside which youth might whisper its weightiest secret or conspiracy weave its darkest web.
I had to confess, as I watched his deft movements about that china-strewn oblong of damask which seemed his fit and rightful domain, that he was in no way wanting in the part—the only thing that puzzled me was the futility of that part. There was authority, too, in his merest finger-movement and eye-shift, as from time to time he signaled to the footman who helped him in his duties. There was grave solicitude on his face as he awaited the minutest semaphoric nod of the woman in the blue silk dinner gown. And this was the man, with his stolid air of exactitude, with his quick-handed movements and his alert and yet unparticipating eyes, whom I had come into that quiet household to proclaim a thief!
I watched his hands every course as I sat there talking against time—and Heaven knows what I talked of! But about those hands there was nothing to discover. In the first thing of importance I had met with disappointment. For the cuffs that projected from the edges of the livery sleeves covered each large-boned wrist. In the actual deportment of the man there was nothing on which to base a decent suspicion. And in the meanwhile the dinner progressed, as all such dinners do, smoothly and quietly, and, to outward appearances, harmoniously and happily.
But as it progressed I grew more and more perplexed. There was another nauseating moment or two when the thought flashed over me that the whole thing was indeed a mistake, that what I had seemed to hear in my restless moments of the night before was only a dream projected into a period of wakefulness. Equipped with nothing more than an echo from this dream, I had started off on this mad chase, to run down a man who had proved and was proving himself the acme of decorous respectability.
But if this thought was a sickening one, it was also a sickly one. Like all sickly things, too, it tended to die young. It went down before the crowding actualities of other circumstances which I could not overlook. Coincidence, repeated often enough, became more than fortuity. The thing was more than a nightmare. I had heard what I had heard. There was still some method by which I could verify or contradict my suspicion. My problem was to find a plan. And the gravity of my dilemma, I suppose, was in some way reflected in my face.
"Well, what are you going to do about it?" asked Van Tuyl, with his heavy matter-of-factness, at a moment when the room happened to be empty.
"Don't you see it's a mistake?" added his wife, with a self-assuring glance about the rose-shaded table and then a wider glance about the room itself.