“She talked chiefly about her mistress,” said Jane, in answer to a question from the coroner, “to whom she was most devoted. She told me that she loved her so, she would readily die for her. Of course, I thought that silly like, and just mad, foreign talk, but Roonah was very angry when I laughed at her, and then she undid her dress in front, and showed me some papers which were sown in the lining of her dress. ‘All these papers my little missee’s fortune,’ she said to me. ‘Roonah guard these with her life. Someone must kill Roonah before taking them from her!’
“This was about six weeks ago,” continued Jane, whilst a strange feeling of awe seemed to descend upon all those present whilst the girl spoke. “Lately she became much more silent, and, on my once referring to the papers, she turned on me savage like and told me to hold my tongue.”
Asked if she had mentioned the incident of the papers to anyone, Jane replied in the negative.
“Except to Miss Henriette, of course,” she added, after a slight moment of hesitation.
Throughout all these preliminary examinations Lady d’Alboukirk, sitting between her cousin Captain Jack and her niece Henriette, had remained quite silent in an erect attitude expressive of haughty indifference. Henriette, on the other hand, looked distinctly bored. Once or twice she had yawned audibly, which caused quite a feeling of anger against her among the spectators. Such callousness in the midst of so mysterious a tragedy, and when her own sister was obviously in such deep sorrow, impressed everyone very unfavourably. It was well known that the young lady had had a fencing lesson just before the inquest in the room immediately below that where Roonah lay dead, and that within an hour of the discovery of the tragedy she was calmly playing golf.
Then Miss Joan Duplessis was called.
When the young girl stepped forward there was that awed hush in the room which usually falls upon an attentive audience when the curtain is about to rise on the crucial act of a dramatic play. But she was calm and self-possessed, and wonderfully pathetic-looking in her deep black and with the obvious lines of sorrow which the sad death of a faithful friend had traced on her young face.
In answer to the coroner, she gave her name as Joan Clarissa Duplessis, and briefly stated that until the day of her servant’s death she had been a resident at Fordwych Castle, but that since then she had left that temporary home, and had taken up her abode at the d’Alboukirk Arms, a quiet little hostelry on the outskirts of the town.
There was a distinct feeling of astonishment on the part of those who were not aware of this fact, and then the coroner said kindly:
“You were born, I think, in Pondicherry, in India, and are the younger daughter of Captain and Mrs. Duplessis, who was own sister to her ladyship?”