Pegram ran out of the room, but Lady Molly sat quite still.
“I have succeeded in clearing the innocent,” she said quietly; “but the guilty has meted out to herself her own punishment.”
“Then it was she?” I murmured, horror-struck.
“Yes. I suspected it from the first,” replied Lady Molly calmly. “It was this conversion of Roonah to Roman Catholicism and her consequent change of manner which gave me the first clue.”
“But why—why?” I muttered.
“A simple reason, Mary,” she rejoined, tapping the packet of papers with her delicate hand; and, breaking open the string that held the letters, she laid them out upon the table. “The whole thing was a fraud from beginning to end. The woman’s marriage certificate was all right, of course, but I mistrusted the genuineness of the other papers from the moment that I heard that Roonah would not part with them and would not allow Mr. McKinley to have charge of them. I am sure that the idea at first was merely one of blackmail. The papers were only to be the means of extorting money from the old lady, and there was no thought of taking them into court.
“Roonah’s part was, of course, the important thing in the whole case, since she was here prepared to swear to the actual date of the first Madame Duplessis’s death. The initiative, of course, may have come either from Joan or from Captain Duplessis himself, out of hatred for the family who would have nothing to do with him and his favourite younger daughter. That, of course, we shall never know. At first Roonah was a Parsee, with a dog-like devotion to the girl whom she had nursed as a baby, and who no doubt had drilled her well into the part she was to play. But presently she became a Roman Catholic—an ardent convert, remember, with all a Roman Catholic’s fear of hell-fire. I went to the convent this morning. I heard the priest’s sermon there, and I realised what an influence his eloquence must have had over poor, ignorant, superstitious Roonah. She was still ready to die for her young mistress, but she was no longer prepared to swear to a lie for her sake. After Mass I called at Fordwych Castle. I explained my position to old Lady d’Alboukirk, who took me into the room where Roonah had slept and died. There I found two things,” continued Lady Molly, as she opened the elegant reticule which still hung upon her arm, and placed a big key and a prayer-book before me.
“The key I found in a drawer of an old cupboard in the dressing-room where Roonah slept, with all sorts of odds and ends belonging to the unfortunate woman, and going to the door which led into what
“ ‘I sent Pegram to her room with orders to break open the locks of her hand-bag and dressing-case’ ”