“Yes, Mr. Cleek. I have no very great faith in Hindus at any time, so you may be sure I took that precaution the instant the man placed the case in my hands. The necklace was there. I even went further. Before leaving my place of business I submitted the stones to chemical test to be sure that no substitution had been made. They were absolutely genuine; so that there can be no shadow of doubt that it was the Ladder of Light itself I carried home with me. On arriving at my residence I stationed the two Hindu guards at the front gate, entered the house, and was upon the point of going immediately to my study to subject the stones to yet another chemical test—to make sure that no trickery had been practised upon me by the Hindus on the journey—when I was unexpectedly pounced upon in the main hallway by my son, Henry, who was in a greatly excited state and attempted to renew the subject of our unpleasant interview of the day before.”
Here Sir Mawson’s voice grew curiously thick and unsteady. He paused a moment as if ashamed to go on, then stiffened himself and continued.
“Mr. Cleek,” he said, agitatedly, “it is necessary that I should tell you, at this point, something with regard to those who make up the members of my household.”
“You needn’t. I have already heard. Lady Leake is, I believe, your second wife, and you have two sons.”
“No—three,” he corrected. “Henry, my eldest, who is twenty-four and is the only survivor of the children of my first and most unhappy marriage; Curzon, who is just entering his twenty-first year, and Bevis, who has not yet turned seven, and is, of course, still in the nursery. I may as well admit to you, Mr. Cleek, that my first marriage was a failure; that it was none of my own choosing, but was consummated in deference to the will and wishes of my parents. We were utterly unsuited to each other, my first wife and I, and it is, no doubt, only natural that the son she left me when death delivered us both from an irksome bondage should reflect in himself some of those points of difference which made our union a mistake.
“Don’t misunderstand me, however. He is very dear to me—dear, too, to his stepmother, who loves him as her own, and the one strong feature in his character is the love he gives her in return. Then, too, he is my first born, my heir, and no man fails to love that first child that ever called him father.”
“No man could fail to love this particular one at all events, Mr. Cleek,” put in her ladyship. “Wild, reckless, extravagant—yes! But at heart, the dearest boy!”
“Just so!” interposed Cleek. “But let us get on, please. So this ‘dearest boy’ had an unpleasant interview with you the day before yesterday, did he, Sir Mawson? What was it about?”
“The usual thing—money. He is extravagant to the point of insanity. I’ve paid his debts until my patience is quite worn out, hoping against hope that he will reform. At that interview, however, he asked for a thing I would not listen to—£200 to settle a gambling debt at his club: to take up an I. O. U. that would get him blacklisted as a defaulter if it were not met. ‘Then get blacklisted!’ I said to him, ‘if there’s no other way to cut you off from the worthless lot you associate yourself with. You’ll not get one farthing from me to settle any such disgraceful thing as a gambling debt, rest assured of that!’ Then I walked out of the room and left him, and that was the last I saw of him until he pounced upon me in the hall yesterday when I was going to my study with the case containing the Ranee’s necklace.
“That was the subject he wanted to renew. He’d been to town, he said, and had had a talk with the man to whom he had given the I. O. U., ‘and dad, if you’ll only do it just this once—just this one last once!’ he was saying when I interrupted him. ‘I’ve no time to listen now, and no inclination. I’ve important business to attend to,’ I said, then waved him aside and went into the study and locked the door while I attended to the matter of applying the acid test to the diamonds for the second time.