Sara Dwight had the greatest admiration for Lady Castlecourt. She’d manage to be standing about in doorways and on the stairs when my lady passed down to go to dinner and to the opera. Then she’d come back and tell me how beautiful my lady was, and how she envied me being her maid. While she was talking she’d help me tidy up the room, and sometimes—because she admired my lady so—I’d let her look at the new clothes from Paris as they hung in the wardrobe. Sara would gape with admiration over them. She spoke a little about my lady’s jewels, but not much. I’d have suspected that.
It was in the fifth week after we came to town—to be exact, on the afternoon of the fourth day of May—that the diamonds were stolen. As I’d been so badgered and questioned and tormented about it, I’ve got it all as clear in my head as a photograph—just how it was and just what time everything happened.
That evening my lady was going to dinner at the Duke of Duxbury’s. It was to be a great dinner—a prince and a prime minister, and I don’t know what all besides. My lady was to wear a new gown from Paris and the diamonds. She told me when she went out what she would want and when she would be back. That was at four, and I was not to expect her in till after six.
Some time before that I got her things ready, the gown laid out, and the diamonds on the dressing-table. They were kept in a leather case of their own, and then put in a despatch-box that shut with a patent lock. When we traveled I always carried this box—that is, when my lady used it. A good deal of the time it was at the bankers’. Lord Castlecourt was very choice about the diamonds. Some of them had been in his family for generations. The way they were set now—in a necklace with pendants, the larger stones surrounded by smaller ones—had been a new setting made for his mother. My lady wanted them changed, and I remember that Lord Castlecourt was vexed with her, and she couldn’t pet and coax him back into a good humor for some days.
One of the last things that I did that afternoon while arranging the dressing-table was to open the despatch-box and take the leather case out. Tho it was May, and the evenings were very long, I turned on the electric lights, and, unclasping the case, looked at the necklace.
I was standing this way when Chawlmers comes to the side door of the room (the whole suite was connected with doors), and asks me if I could remember the number of the bootmakers where my lady bought her riding-boots. Some friend of Chawlmers wanted to know the address. I couldn’t at first remember it, and I was standing this way, trying to recollect, when I heard the clock strike six. I told Chawlmers I’d get it for him. I was certain it was in my lady’s desk, and I put the case down on the bureau, and Chawlmers and I together went into the sitting-room (the door open between us and my lady’s room) and looked for it. We found it in a minute, and Chawlmers was writing it down in his pocket-book when I thought I heard (so light and soft you could hardly say you’d heard anything) a rustle like a woman’s skirt in the next room. For a second I thought it was my lady, and I jumped, for I’d no business at her desk, and I knew she’d be vexed and scold me.
Chawlmers didn’t hear a thing, and looked at me astonished. Then I ran to the door and peeped in. There was no one there, and I thought, of course, I’d been mistaken.
We didn’t leave the room directly, but stood by the desk talking for a bit. When I told this to the detectives, one of the papers said it showed “how deceptive even the best servants were.” As if a valet and a lady’s maid couldn’t stop for a moment of talk! Poor things! we work hard enough most of the time, I’m sure. And that we weren’t long standing there idle can be seen from the fact that I heard half-past six strike. I was for urging Chawlmers to go then—as Lady Castlecourt might be in at any moment—but he hung about, following me into my lady’s room, helping me draw the curtains and turn on all the lights, for my lady can’t bear to dress by daylight.
It was nearly seven o’clock when we heard the sound of her skirts in the passage. Chawlmers slipped off into his master’s rooms, shutting the door quietly behind him. My lady was looking very beautiful. She had on a blue hat trimmed with blue and gray hydrangeas, and underneath it her hair was like spun gold, and her eyes looked soft and dark. It never seemed to tire her to be always on the go. But I’d thought lately she’d been going too much, for sometimes she was pale, and once or twice I thought she was out of spirits—the way she’d been in the country last summer.
She seemed so to-night, not talking as much as usual. There were some letters for her on the corner of the dressing-table, and I could see her face in the glass as she read them. One made her smile, and then she sat thinking and biting her lip, which was as red as a cherry. She seemed to me to be preoccupied. When I was making the side “ondulations” of her hair—which everybody knows is a most critical operation—she jerked her head, and said suddenly she wondered how the children were. I never before knew my lady to think about the children when her hair was being attended to.