“Good night, old chap,” said Cleek. “Hello, Nurse, got a sore finger, have you, eh? How did that happen? It looks painful.”
“It is, sir, though I can’t for the life of me think whatever could have made a thing so bad from just scratching one’s finger, unless it could have happened that there was something poisonous on the wretched magpie’s claws. One never can be sure where those nasty things go nor what they dip into.”
“The magpie?” repeated Cleek. “What do you mean by that, Nurse? Have you had an unpleasant experience with a magpie, then?”
“Yes, sir, that big one of Mr. Essington’s: the nasty creature that’s always flying about. It was a fortnight ago, sir. Mistress’ pet dog had got into the nursery and laid hold of Sambo—which is his lordship’s rag doll, sir, as he never will go to sleep without—tore it well nigh to pieces did the dog; and knowing how his lordship would cry and mourn if he saw it like that, I fetched in my work-basket and started to mend it. I’d just got it pulled into something like shape and was about to sew it up when I was called out of the room for a few minutes, and when I came back there was that wretched Magpie that had been missing for several days right inside my work-basket trying to steal my reels of cotton, sir. It had come in through the open window—like it so often does, nasty thing. I loathe magpies and I believe that that one knows it. Anyway, when I caught up a towel and began to flick at it to get it out of the room, it turned on me and scratched or pecked my finger, and it’s been bad ever since. Cook says she thinks I must have touched it against something poisonous after the skin was broken. Maybe I did, sir, but I can’t think what.”
Cleek made no comment; merely turned on his heel and walked out of the room.
The second curious thing occurred between nine o’clock and half-past, when the gentlemen of the party were lingering at the table over post-prandial liqueurs and cigars, and the ladies had adjourned to the drawing-room. A recollection of having carelessly left his kit-bag unlocked drew Cleek to invent an excuse for leaving the room for a minute or two and sent him speeding up the stairs. The gas in the upper halls had been lowered while the members of the household were below; the passages were dim and shadowy, and the thick carpet on halls and stairs gave forth never a murmur of sound from under his feet nor from under the feet of yet another person who had gone like he, but by a different staircase, to the floors above.
It was, therefore, only by the merest chance that he looked down one of the passages in passing and saw a swift-moving figure—a woman’s—cross it at the lower end and pass hastily into the nursery of the sleeping boy. And—whether her purpose was a good or an evil one—it was something of a shock to realize that the woman who was doing this was the Honourable Mrs. Carruthers.
He locked the kit-bag, and went back to the dining-room just as the little gathering was breaking up, and Mr. Claude Essington, who always fed his magpies and his other pets himself, was bewailing the fact that he had “forgotten the beauties until this minute” and was smoothing out an old newspaper in which to wrap the scraps of cheese and meat he had sent the butler to the kitchen to procure.
The Honourable Felix looked up at Cleek with a question in his eye.
“No,” he contrived to whisper in reply. “It was not anything poisonous—merely candle wax. The bird had flown in through the store-room window, and the housekeeper caught it carrying away candles one by one.”