"When they came in I saw that Roger was glad you had been with me and were staying to dinner. Maybe he thought you might make things go easier, for it looked to be a rather difficult dinner, just Antony, he and I. And Antony looked so glum and silent, like a tired red boy, so that I wondered if Roger had cleared things up with him too. But the dinner wasn't difficult, not difficult enough, was it?" ...
To tell the plain truth I found myself thoroughly enjoying it—a pleasant contrast to my last dinner there, when I had so resented the brothers' coldness. And, anyway, I'm afraid I was too busy recovering from my rather jumpy few hours with Iris, who communicated a mood as you or I would a piece of news, to notice much besides the fact that though Antony was more silent than usual, we three men had at a step got back to our old easy friendship.
It was close on ten o'clock when Howard came in to tell his master that he was wanted on the telephone,—which was in the adjoining room, the library, opened to the one we were in through a folding door. Roger looked a little surprised, I thought, but got up quickly; and at a glance from him, a sort of lifted-eyebrow glance, Antony followed, leaving the door slightly ajar behind them.
From where we sat at the table we could only hear but not see Roger at the telephone, which was on the writing table just within the library door. But it seemed to be a very short call, for we only heard him say the few bare words: "Yes—right you are! Of course, yes.... Thanks very much, Carter"; and then click down the receiver. Then an unforgettable voice, strangled with laughter and venom:
"I told you days ago to burn those concession papers, and you swore you already had—and now Carter tells me that the police have just been to the office, as we knew they must, and found every blessed one of 'em in the top drawer of my desk—which was unlocked. O Antony! O you poor husk of a man, you graveyard of a broker—what a lot of pleasure you've had from me, haven't you? And all I can think of as a nice little epitaph for you is Dolor ira—but what could be fairer than that, Antony?" ...
A wild rush took me to the door, even as the house shrieked with Roger's "grief and anger." I stood dazed as I burst it wide—to see through the smoke a huge figure facing me from the corner by the window, swaying idiotically to and fro with the eyes of a thrashed child—and at the table beside me Roger, his head fallen sideways against the over-turned telephone and the smoke from the thing in his hand hanging dreadfully about him. I didn't look at the weight I suddenly felt against my shoulder, I just put out my arm to hold Iris, for I was staring at Antony. He had not seemed to see us until this moment—and now his eyes were trying to tell Iris something, they were livid with what he was trying to tell her—his eyes were accusing her!
"He didn't, I tell you," he shouted at her. "He didn't break his promise. He wanted to kill me, you see, but—he...."
His tongue fumbled with his lips for words—which never came, for with a wild backward wave of his arm as though to wipe three figures for ever from his mind, he swung round and strode heavily out through the open window. And whether or not Sir Antony, under a less conspicuous name, died in some obscure corner of the war that befell a few months later I have never heard for quite certain, and now never will. But Iris and I have sometimes preferred to think that he has met the only death that could at all have satisfied the tortured vanity of the helpless braggart.
THE END