He went on to Demaine House, and found there nothing but a man making a very careful inventory of all the pictures, all the furniture and all the glass. He came back to his room, and at last the mystery was solved.
All good things come to an end, as do all delays and all vexations, and life itself. By a method less expeditious than some of those which modern civilisation has put at our disposal, the full truth was revealed to him.
George Mulross Demaine was at that moment (it was six o’clock) upon that afternoon of Wednesday, the 3rd of June, ... drinking brandy and soda in great quantities and refusing tea, at the Liverpool Street Hotel. A courteous message from the Manager thereof was the source of the information, and Edward—Edward who never failed—had been the first to receive it.
The message had gone up and down London a good deal before it had got to the House of Commons; at Demaine House the Manager had been told to try Mary Smith’s number, and at Mary Smith’s the half-wit having almost had her head blown off by Edward’s repeated violence, very sensibly suggested that the Manager should telephone direct to the House of Commons and give a body peace.
An instant demand (said Edward) that Demaine should himself come to the instrument, had been followed by a very long pause, after which he was told that the gentleman had gone off in a four-wheeler with a lame horse, and had left the bill unpaid.
There was nothing to do but to wait.
Half-past six struck, and the quarter. Their fears were renewed when, just upon seven, a figure strangely but neatly clothed was shown into the room, by a servant who displayed such an exact proportion between censure and respect as would have puzzled the most wearisome of modern dramatists to depict.[4]
It was Demaine!
His clothes were indeed extraordinary. You could not say they fitted, and you could not say they did not fit. The trousers and the coat and the waistcoat were made of one cloth, a quiet yellow. The lines of the shoulders, the arms, the legs, the very stomach, were right lines: they were lines proceeding from point to point; they were lines taking the shortest route from point to point. They were straight: they were plumb straight. The creases upon the trousers were not those adumbrations of creases which the most vulgar of the smart permit to hint at the newness of their raiment: they were solid ridges resembling the roofs of new barns or the keels of racing ships. The lapels of the coat did not sit well upon it; rather they were glued to it. The waistcoat did not fit, it stuck. And above this strange accoutrement shone, with more fitness than Edward and Dolly could have imagined, the simple face of George Mulross Demaine.
His hair—oh horror!—was oiled; one might have sworn that his face was oiled as well.