“Yes,” said Jennings, “there was some scandal, I know, but it was after my time here.”
“Something about an old mandarin out Johore Bahru way, was it not?” asked Burton. “The last thing I heard about Adderley was that he had disappeared.”
“Nobody would have cared much if he had,” declared Jennings. “I know of several who would have been jolly glad. There was a lot of the brute about Adderley, apart from the fact that he had more money than was good for him. His culture was a veneer. It was his check-book that spoke all the time.”
“Everybody would have forgiven Adderley his vulgarity,” said Dr. Matheson, quietly, “if the man's heart had been in the right place.”
“Surely an instance of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,” someone murmured.
Burton gazed rather hard at the last speaker.
“So far as I am aware,” he said, “the poor devil is dead, so go easy.”
“Are you sure he is dead?” asked Dr. Matheson, glancing at Burton in that quizzical, amused way of his.
“No, I am not sure; I am merely speaking from hearsay. And now I come to think of it, the information was rather vague. But I gathered that he had vanished, at any rate, and remembering certain earlier episodes in his career, I was led to suppose that this vanishing meant———”
He shrugged his shoulders significantly.