It proved that the butler the evening before had assumed the rôles of despot and inquisitor in the world below stairs, and had then been my serious rival for honours in composition. Blenkinson read loudly in a high, thin voice, a woeful torture to the ear, his eyes behind the pince-nez bulging whenever he licked his thumb to turn the page. The screed he unfolded to the gaping company began with a preamble and concluded with a peroration, and must have been a couple of thousand words long. It was a vindication of the servants’ hall against base suspicion in the matter of the late demise of Sean Cosgrove.
The evidence was in a sort of interlocking system. From the time Crofts had dismissed his court of inquiry after luncheon, until the hideous laugh that emanated from we don’t know where, the whole baker’s dozen of servants were accounted for and quite removed, I should say, from the province of investigation.
The boy Toby had been outside the kitchen entry peeling potatoes and onions all afternoon, on promise, vain, as it proved, of being let off at night for semi-bucolic revelry in New Aidenn. With him for half the time were Jael and Em, the maids, who according to the condensed economy of the house always joined in the “parin’s and dishin’s.” When released from knives and vegetable-baskets, they resorted to the room of their companion Harmony, whom they awoke from snores, and the trio proceeded to improve the afternoon with gossip. Rosa and Ruth Clay could testify to the earlier snoring of Harmony; under the eye of Blenkinson they had then prepared tea, had early wheeled the tea-table, minus tea and hot water, into the Hall, and had gone to the stables for a bit of genteel chat with Morgan. From then until the catastrophe they vouched for him, as well as for the other stablemen, who were moving about, momently in and out of sight, over one hundred feet from the place of Cosgrove’s death. The jealous eye of Ardelia Lacy, too, herself seen in and seeing from Alberta Pendleton’s window, corroborated the Clays; she had come down and was sipping tea in the kitchen at the moment of the attack upon Cosgrove. Soames polishing silver until he answered my ring, and old Finlay pottering about in the flower-beds, were amply vindicated. Even Hughes the keeper was accounted for in Blenkinson’s compendium, for there was plenty of evidence that he had been in his room mending a refractory gun for three solid hours.
That gives a faint idea of the method of Blenkinson’s “document”; it does not begin to do justice to the detail and close-meshed cogency of it. The servants, severally and individually, are out of the investigation. For my part, I never for a moment considered the implication of any of them could be other than mad.
Blenkinson, however, had done more. He had unearthed one or two bits of evidence that may be valuable. Of these I shall relate one, leaving the other until the problem occurred of checking Cosgrove’s whereabouts after he followed Miss Lebetwood from the Hall of the Moth.
Very early indeed yesterday morning Jael, polishing the kettle, sat at the window by the door leading from the kitchen along the passage to the servants’ rooms. In her carefreeness she was singing a measure, when her eye caught movement in the kitchen-garden near the chicken yard. A strange man, “shaped like a lump,” was prowling there. She opened the window, shouted warning to the stables; the invader uttered a short heathenish exclamation and ran away toward the head of the Vale. The men later found his footmarks in a carrot-bed.
Strange to say, there had been no inclination on the part of the servants to assign the attributes of Parson Lolly to this interloper. Perhaps the fact that he left footprints robs him of the distinction. Instantly, however, I recognized in him the gorilla-man I had encountered in the twilight when entering the Vale for the first time. Probably Jael saw him seeking breakfast.
Blenkinson concluded with a peroration the essence of eloquence, pleased with himself as an old stager applauded on his return at sixty in the part of Romeo. For our lively buzz showed that the butler had stimulated us out of our moroseness, made us forget ourselves, even in that rainy, melancholy morning.
“Priceless,” I heard Belvoir chuckle, and our harassed host unbent so far as to smile, whereas Lib Dale forgot the solemnity of the occasion in open chortling. Lord Ludlow muttered something about “probably a stickit minister.” As for the servants, they seemed to be in a stupor of admiration.
Whatever Salt may have thought of Blenkinson’s taking evidence behind his back he kept it to himself. Reaching over, he grasped the document about to disappear into the coat-tail pocket once more, and placed it in his own inner pocket instead.