It was that same Friday night, and about 9.55 by the clock. The men had just come in from the dining-room. They had been warned that the housekeeper, Mrs. Bankes (fear nothing—you will never meet her again) had commandeered the drawing-room. They were not allowed to go back there, for even now the belated serfs were spreading, under Mrs. Bankes' eye, large dingy cloths over the chairs and tables against the early sweep of the morrow.
The Home Secretary had no choice but to shepherd them into the somewhat forlorn, hardly used West Room. A good fire had been ordered. He trusted humbly in God that the parrot Attaboy, securely covered in its black cage cloth, could utter no unseemly Attaboy cry. If it did—well, if it did, Tommy must laugh. After all, it was his fault if he had pulled a horse.
The men crawled in. McTaggart, being by far the meanest, was compelled—in an agony—to go first. Next the Professor slid; after him with sullen assurance Tom Galton. And the great statesman filed in last, as host and chief, and shut the door with all the discretion of the Front Bench and fourteen years of Westminster.
Marjorie was standing on the polar-bear skin rug by the fire, near that fierce grinning head, those ironical teeth, holding the emerald—the brooch—in her open hand; showing it to Victoria, who peered at it cynically enough. She had already heard the story of it—for the third time in two weeks, and for the three hundred and fifty-first in her life—she knew it to be false, and she dreaded to hear again the myth of the diplomat, the old Bohunian lie. But a good heart thumped behind that bony breast and Victoria Mosel spared the child.
With this coming in of a new audience, Marjorie summoned them at once, and they crowded round in obedience to that summons; and once more to the listening earth she told—in her innocence!—the largesse of Catherine the Great to her ancestor the diplomat, in whom she firmly believed.
Lord Galton looked at the jewel with a sort of animosity, as much as to say, "Put on no suspicious airs with me!" McTaggart tittered at it with a nervous smile, as though he liked it well enough, but was rather frightened of it; the Professor glared it down with an expert's pose. The three men stood thus, bunched round their young hostess, touching shoulders, while Marjorie continued her story of the de Bohun mission to the great Empress, adding sundry other details which in her judgment gave a heightened historical value to the gem.
Then the gods struck.
What she did, or how she did it, she never remembered. She felt a sharp shoot in her finger: she should have known it was due to the ill-calculated length of the pin. She said to herself—but in her heart she did not believe it—that some one had jogged her elbow. Anyhow, the Emerald of Catherine the Great jerked out suddenly and fell from her palm, making no noise. It must have fallen upon the bearskin at her feet, where a standard electric light upon a little table near at hand happened to cast a shadow. She gave a startled cry, and at once the three men were on their knees—yes, even the old Professor—groping in the fur.
They were longer at their groping than one might have thought. The object was small, but not so small as all that. It was flat, heavy, metallic: it could not have rolled. It must be within a few inches, or a foot at the most, of the place on which its proprietress had stood.
Unfortunately she moved, and in that movement no one could remember, to half a foot or so, exactly where it should have lain. While the three men still groped, and the impatient Marjorie tapped with her foot in the suspense of it, the unfortunate McTaggart cried excitedly, "I've got it!"