“We don’t want to disturb Mr. Orbit, if there’s been a mistake made, but a man who says he’s a servant here has met with a bit of an accident,” McCarty explained. “He’s kind of stout with a round, red face and a little bald spot on his head. Forty-five or nearer fifty years old, he might be. Can you tell us his name?”
He had edged closer to the side of the wide entrance door, so that, in continuing to face him, the Chinaman had been compelled to turn until the low light played across his countenance but it remained gravely inscrutable as he listened. And although there was a perceptible pause, when he did reply, the words followed each other without hesitation.
“It is Hughes, the valet. You desire to talk with Mr. Orbit? He is engaged but I will see if he can receive you. This way, sirs.”
He closed the door after them and led the way into the house. As he walked the long queue which depended from his head almost to his knees swayed with each step.
“A Chink!” Dennis whispered. “What is he, the laundress here?”
Once again his remark went unheeded for McCarty was staring about him. He had seen many wealthy homes in the past, but never had he entered an apartment of such unostentatious magnificence as this hall of Mr. Henry Orbit’s house. He could not know that he walked among almost priceless treasures, that the dim panels on the walls were Catalan tapestries of the fifteenth century, that the frescoed ceiling had known the brush of Raphael himself, and that upon the great carved chair, secretly removed from the Duomo long ago, had once rested the exhausted but dauntless frame of Savonarola. The ex-roundsman could only feel with some sixth sense, that he was in the presence of beauty and he trod as lightly as his clumping boots would permit on the ancient, deep-piled rug beneath his feet.
The Chinese butler conducted them to a spacious room at the left of the hall, bowed them to chairs and withdrew, closing the door behind him. From the room opposite the swelling notes of the organ rose, filling their ears with a thunder of harmony which made the impressionable Dennis catch his breath and instinctively bow his head.
“Come out of it, Denny! We’re not in church!” McCarty admonished, and then turned to the inspector. “You see, sir, that fellow who died down there by the wharves was wearing his own cheap shoes but the expensive hand-me-down clothes of another man not his own build, and who would that have been but his employer? He’d shaved too often and very close like a man who was constantly in service, a butler or a valet, and if he borrowed, without leave, cigars too good for the likes of his taste he might have borrowed a hat, without leave as well. It struck me the keys was his own, though, along with the little metal tag and that’s why I thought maybe we’d save time by stopping here first.”
“You were right, again!” Inspector Druet exclaimed heartily. “I was in such a hurry that I took too much for granted. We’ll see what Mr. Orbit can tell us about this man of his.”
But Mr. Orbit did not immediately appear, and as the last notes of the organ throbbed into silence, Dennis found his voice.