“A shop girl, I should say, but she had a foreign look about her: a lot of dark hair, and big dark eyes to match, and she was neatly dressed, trim and tidy. You know the sort of way these French girls get themselves up, but all in black or some dark colour. Very quiet and respectable-looking girl. The only thing I thought looked a bit flashy about her was that she wore a heap of common jewellery, bracelets and brooches all over, cheap and nasty; and I could see a string of great beads round her neck under her blouse, imitation pearls as big as marbles. I was astonished, I must say, at her going in for that sort of thing, for in other ways she seemed a very nice, quiet girl. Looked terribly ill, too, poor thing.”
“I wonder who she was,” said Gimblet. “Do you say she wore her necklace under her blouse?”
“Yes, I could see it through the muslin or whatever it was she had on. Some transparent stuff.”
“That was rather curious. Girls of that class, who are fond of decking themselves out with such cheap ornaments, don’t generally hide their finery. It’s generally quite on the surface, I think.”
“I should think it was unusual,” agreed Sir Gregory. “She must have dressed in a hurry, and done it by mistake; don’t you think so?”
Gimblet did not answer. He had been wandering about the room, in an aimless fashion, and now he paused beside a table and offered Sir Gregory the contents of a glass jar that stood upon it.
“Have some barley sugar?” he suggested. And, as Sir Gregory indignantly refused: “One must have a pet vice, and after all, this is my only one,” said he, putting a large piece into his mouth. But Sir Gregory only shook his head mournfully and refused to smile.
“I suppose,” he said after a moment, with a shamefaced look, “that there can’t be anything in Chark’s idea, can there?” His tone was that of one who pleads to have a disturbing and discreditable doubt utterly removed. Gimblet remembered the warmth of the baronet’s protestations to Sidney, and suppressed a smile.
“I think we may hope for a solution less shocking than Mr. Chark’s,” he said hopefully. “As for whether his suspicions can have anything in them or not, I can only say that they are nothing much more than the wildest of surmises. They amount to this. Mr. Sidney has lost money in a way disapproved of by Mrs. Vanderstein, and, on appealing to her for assistance, was met not only by reproaches but by threats that he would be cut off from his inheritance. On the other hand, Mrs. Vanderstein is not very much older than her nephew, so that his expectations of enjoying that inheritance could never be other than extremely remote, since the lady enjoys the best of health. Mr. Chark does not hesitate to hint that Sidney may have taken his aunt’s life, in order that he may at once inherit the money of which he is certainly in urgent need. And if he could contemplate such a deed at all there may be said to be this further inducement, that in the event of Mrs. Vanderstein remaining alive she would most likely marry again; when, if she had children, she would probably—since she has full power over it—leave most if not all her fortune to them, whatever her late husband’s hopes may have been regarding the disposal of it.
“Chark takes these circumstances and finds in them a motive; he then takes Mrs. Vanderstein’s disappearance and proceeds to infer from that, that young Sidney has made away with her. His motive may exist, though it is a question whether such a motive is strong enough to induce so terrible a crime in a young man of Sidney’s class and upbringing, who is in normal health, and we will presume, for the sake of argument, sane. But Chark has not, as far as I know, a shadow of evidence on which to assert that the lady has been injured in any way; and I think any such conjecture is ridiculous without more to support it; while to suggest it publicly, as he has done, is quite scandalous. It is still perfectly possible that Mrs. Vanderstein or Miss Turner received some urgent message while at the opera, which caused them to leave before the end of the performance. It may have been an appeal for help from some friend in trouble, or something involving a certain secrecy of procedure. There are thousands of possible situations that might arise, to the conduct of which privacy would be essential. Wait, Sir Gregory, at least to see if we get an answer to our advertisements, before allowing your imagination to follow headlong in the wake of Mr. Chark’s speculations.”