She made a sweeping bow to all the company. The coroner afterwards learned that she was a Duchess, and was glad to have caught her eyes.
'I have summoned a jury,' the coroner said blandly. Sir Rupert winced. The idea of having a coroner's jury in his home seemed a sort of degradation to him. But so, too, did the idea of a dynamite explosion. Even his genuine grief for poor Soame Rivers left room enough in his breast for a very considerable stowage of vexation that the whole confounded thing should have happened in his house. Grief is seldom so arbitrary as to exclude vexation. The giant comes attended by his dwarf.
'Well, we shall have a look at everything,' the coroner said cheerily. 'I suppose we need not think of the possibility of a mere accident?'
And now Ericson found himself involuntarily, and voluntarily too, working out that marvellous, never-to-be-explained problem about the revival of a vanished memory. It is like the effort to bring back to life a three-parts drowned creature. Or it is like the effort to get some servant far down beneath you who has gone to sleep to rouse up and obey your call and attend to his duty. You ring and ring and no answer comes, until at last, when you have all but given up hope, the summons tells upon the sleeper's ear and he wakes up and gives you his answer.
So it was with Ericson. Just as he thought the quest was hopeless, just as he thought the last opportunity was slipping by, his sluggish servant, Memory, woke up with a start, and fulfilled its duty.
And Ericson quietly put himself forward and said:
'I beg your pardon, Sir Rupert and Mr. Coroner, but I have to say something in this matter. I have to charge these two men, who say they are American citizens, with being escaped or released convicts from the State prison of the capital of Gloria, in South America. I charge them with being guilty of the plot for assassination and for dynamite in this house. I say that their names are José Cano and Manoel Silva. I say it was I who commuted the death sentence of these men to perpetual imprisonment, and I say that in my firm conviction they have been let loose to do these crimes.'
Sir Rupert seemed thunderstruck.
'My dear Ericson,' he pleaded. 'These gentleman are my guests.'
'I never remembered their names until this moment,' Ericson said. 'But they are the men—and they are the murderers.'