THE
EMERALD
CATHERINE THE GREAT

By Hilaire Belloc

With Illustrations by
G. K. Chesterton

1926

Publishers

New York and London

Harper & Brothers

Mr. Collop describes the Finesse Diplomatique
of Bogotar.

TO MAURICE BARING

MY DEAR MAURICE:

This is the fourth book I have dedicated to you, and you will see why if you read it—which no one need do.

First, emeralds are green; and, on principle, like the Green Overcoat, it owes to you of the Green Elephant, a dedication. Next, there is Catherine the Great. She plays no long part, but she founded the fortunes of them all; and we are in communion in the matter of that large and generous but regal soul; we agree that it is a pity she died before we were born. Also, you who know all about Russia, and I who know nothing, have, in the matter of Russia, this Monarch of all the Russias for a link.

Lastly, you have often urged me to write a detective story, because (you assured me) they have gigantic sales. I promised you I would, on condition there was nothing to find out.

Here it is.

KING'S LAND,

Whitsun, 1926.

CONTENTS

[CHAPTER ONE]
[CHAPTER TWO]
[CHAPTER THREE]
[CHAPTER FOUR]
[CHAPTER FIVE]
[CHAPTER SIX]
[CHAPTER SEVEN]
[CHAPTER EIGHT]
[CHAPTER NINE]
[CHAPTER TEN]
[CHAPTER ELEVEN]
[CHAPTER TWELVE]
[CHAPTER THIRTEEN]
[CHAPTER FOURTEEN]
[CHAPTER FIFTEEN]
[CHAPTER SIXTEEN]
[TALE-PIECE]

THE EMERALD OF
CATHERINE THE GREAT

[CHAPTER ONE]

William Bones was a stalwart man, some thirty-five years of age, the master of a Brig which sailed from the port of Boston in Lincolnshire and was half his own property. He was a native of that town, his father having been therein a pork butcher in a fair way of business, his mother the daughter of a small farmer in the Wring Land. He traded with the Baltic when George the Third was King—indeed, when George the Third was still young and long before George the Third first went mad.

Among other ports, he had found profit more than once in visiting that of the River Neva, and was acquainted with the Russian trade. The great city of St. Petersburg, still new but already splendid, became familiar to him; and he himself, in his humble visits to the local factors, became a familiar figure to the Secret Police of that capital. Even his most domestic and private actions during his dealings in this port were registered; and, it must be added, his strong English frame and handsome English face admired, but also duly noted and their description passed on to the proper authorities.

On his third voyage to Russia he was honoured by the invitation of a merchant somewhat wealthier than the common of his acquaintance and at that table met some official of the Court, of what exact situation his ignorance of Russian and of French forbade him to inquire. Before returning to his native Lincolnshire, his happy spouse and his young family, he enjoyed the singular privilege of a further unexpected invitation from this same Court official whom he had thus chanced to meet, and so found himself at supper in one of the smaller and more discreet rooms of the Palace, upon its mezzanine floor, in a choice company of both sexes.

It is characteristic of the Empress herself—a great woman!—that a large humanity and a laudable curiosity combined rendered her indifferent to the conventions of rank. No sooner had she heard of the British merchant captain's cheerful and manly habit than she desired a more exact description, upon her receiving which he was permitted an entrance to the Presence.

He enjoyed, partly by means of an elderly female who interpreted for him until he had improved his few words of German—the Empress's mother tongue and most familiar idiom—no little conversation with the august sovereign, who, when he arrived at this stage, deigned to keep him by her alone for some while. The interview was repeated upon more than one occasion and her Imperial Majesty was so good, upon his reluctant leave-taking some two or three weeks after his first arrival, as to press him with an invitation to return.

Next season, the moment the Baltic ice was melted, he did so, disposing of a mixed cargo; and, while leisurely awaiting his return charge, was almost daily conveyed to the Palace from his humble lodging. For four successive seasons running this strange adventure persisted.

Meanwhile his Boston neighbours could not but remark that his home in the British haven of which he was a native and mariner, showed a considerable advance in prosperity. His wife was better dressed, his growing family could boast an increasing and superior acquaintance among children of a rank with whom they would not earlier have mixed. It was even whispered that Bill Bones had made formidable investments in the City of London, which he certainly had visited more than half a dozen times during his last winter stay in England; and though his friends very charitably agreed that the profits of the Baltic trade might be large, and that Bill Bones might have had exceptional opportunities, they none the less talked among themselves upon the various possible sources of a fortune which that trade could hardly account for.

With the fifth season there came an end to what had certainly been a remarkable series. Whatever advantages communion with a throne might have had for William Bones, the future would no doubt show; but the fifth season was the end. There had been farewells, and yet no loss of the high regard in which, for some extraordinary reason, he had been held by the Semiramis of the North. He had acquired a certain assurance of bearing which marked his new fortunes, and indeed, in this final scene of his presence upon the quays of St. Petersburg, he seemed by his gait to be some one of consequence. And no wonder, for he had left the Palace for the last time bearing secreted in the bosom of his ample coat a jewel worthy to be a memorial of the greatest passages in any life.

It was an emerald, exceptionally large—the largest, he had been assured, in the world—square in shape, of the purest water and set in a delicate little gold mounting after a fashion which recalled the ornaments of the French Court.

It speaks well for Captain Bones that on his return to Boston he handed this jewel to his wife, who thenceforward had it fixed with a pin, to serve the office of a brooch, and wore it upon great occasions; notably at a dance given by the mayor of the town, to which she brought her eldest daughter, though barely of an age for such ceremonials.

The next year William Bones let his house in Boston and abruptly transported himself and his family to the metropolis. His neighbours were interested to discover that before abandoning them he had purchased not a little property in the town and had even appointed a substantial agent to deal with his rentals. He was clearly an advancing man and their respect for him grew profound when they learnt what figure he now cut in a world above their own. In London he was found entertaining largely and standing upon an equal footing with merchants of repute, though not perhaps as yet of the first fortune. Meanwhile he had preferred the name of Bone, in the singular, to that of his earlier life, conceiving it to be more consonant with his present position and his residence in Cornhill and his interests in the banking world.

His only son George, when of an age for such occupations, which was some five years after the family had come up to London, was taken in as a partner by Mr. Worsle the India merchant, partly, no doubt, as a testimony of friendship to his father, but partly also because William Bone, who would now indifferently sign himself Bone or Bohun—the original form of the name—had put at the young fellow's disposal a very considerable capital.

William Bohun himself died somewhat prematurely in the eighth year after his transmigration, and his wife, who, though much desiring to cut a proper figure in her new world, had never properly succeeded in doing so, followed him within three months to the grave. Her younger daughters had received an excellent education; her eldest, born in her father's earlier days, had perhaps less refinement of accent and deportment—but on the other hand, her solid worth and quite exceptional dowry had procured her alliance with the heir to Sir Philip Goole, a landed gentleman in the West of England possessed of a fine town house in Cavendish Square, but indifferent to politics.

George de Bohun—he had at first rejected but later began to use the prefix "de" which a friend in the Heralds' College had suggested to him—prospered, I am glad to say, exceedingly, as the son of such a worthy father should, and acquired the playful nickname of "The Nabob," which spread from the city to the more exalted circles into which he was welcomed, west of Temple Bar. It is a sufficient indication of the respect in which he was held when I say that he was elected to Brooks's Club, and there, by his generous behaviour at the card table, failed not to become a favourite with the most exalted of his contemporaries in Whig circles.

It may or may not interest the reader to know that upon his father's death it was discovered that the Emerald of Catherine the Great had been made an heirloom and was devised by an explanatory letter—since the law could not enforce such a succession—for the eldest son, or, failing sons, the eldest daughter of the reigning de Bohun on arriving at his twenty-first, or her eighteenth birthday, his or her parents or trustees being its successive custodians until that date. Failing such a personage, the jewel was to be passed to any cadet branch, the eldest in succession. If the great line of de Bohun should fail—which Heaven forfend!—the sacred object was to be buried with the last of that illustrious lineage.

The legal complications to which such a disposition would give rise need not concern us, for in fact they never arose. George de Bohun had but one son, Richard, born in the same year that saw the death of General Bonaparte, the famous Corsican adventurer. To this son in his old age he conveyed the jewel with the instructions concerning it, but he had previously got rid of its unfashionable Louis XVI mounting and had it set again, now as a pendant, after the fashion prevalent in the first years of Queen Victoria.

Mr. George de Bohun had acquired—perhaps from his father—an unusual reverence for the gem which he believed, with a mystical devotion curious in a business man, to be in some way the tutelary genius of his House. He would frequently tell young Richard, his heir, during the boyhood of that philanthropist, the story of how Catherine the Great herself had given it to his own father, the grandfather of the lad, when that powerful genius was engaged upon a secret diplomatic mission to the Russian Court. Hence had the emerald come to be known by the title of "The Emerald of Catherine the Great" in the private circle of the de Bohuns—pronounced "Deboons." That it should be preserved in the family, certainly never sold and—please God!—never lost, was a religion with George, which grew more fanatical as he approached the tomb. He came, perhaps from an idea inherited from his father, to regard it as a necessary condition of their prosperity, and he imbued his son Richard with I know not what vague fears of disaster should its possession be abandoned or should the stone itself be mislaid.

This second in the great line, George de Bohun—pronounced Deboon—the son of its founder, though born as long ago as 1780, lived to see the inauguration of the Hyde Park Exhibition by Queen Victoria in 1851, and, having refused a peerage, closed his eyes in the fine country house known as Paulings.

This mansion was—and is—situated in Herts, at no more than twenty-five miles from Westminster. The successful Russian merchant purchased it upon advantageous terms from the bankrupt and disreputable Parrall family, whose last and seventeenth representative not only proved incapable of preserving the patrimony of his ancestors, but had joined the Romish Church and perished miserably at Boulogne.

Richard de Bohun was of course the "Dirty Dick" of mid-Victorian politics, and an intimate friend of Lord Palmerston. There is little to record of him except that after doing good and lucrative work in two administrations he also refused a peerage; in which he was wise, for though the family fortunes had not diminished, the general increase of wealth around him made his position less conspicuous than that of his father had been in the City of London. Indeed, the family was now no longer connected with trade.

He died—as he had been born—at Paulings, a country house of such absorbing interest that I shall later be compelled to describe it in accurate if tedious terms.

The now reigning de Bohun, called Humphrey—after an illustrious ancestor, the Humphrey de Bohun who fought at Bannockburn under Edward II and undoubtedly held land, through his wife, in the neighbourhood of Boston—the son of this statesman, is the Mr. de Bohun—pronounced Deboon—of our own day: the highly respected Home Secretary who has already passed with such distinction through what he himself will call the Cursus honorum, having been Parliamentary Secretary to Harry Gates during all of the great Paramooka Scandal—when he was the Baby of the House—then successively rejected by Middleham West after the Seychelles Scandal—when Gates went to the Lords—elected after a second attempt by Middleham East, Under-Secretary during the period of the Second General Strike and at last, after the usual vicissitudes of public life, occupying the exalted position which he still adorns.

His figure is familiar to the public, I fear, rather by early photographs than by recent portraits. He is a man tall and carefully clothed, with a rather weary expression, set on a long face, with insufficient grey hair neatly brushed. He is of a courteous demeanour. He is much attached to his country life at Paulings, so happily convenient to London, and sheltered from the large growth of suburban villas about it by a dense fringe of more or less ancient trees. He is a widower, possessed of three motor cars, but with only a flat in town. He has refused a baronetcy, for he has (alas!) no son, but one daughter, now just entering her nineteenth year. The name of the charming child is Marjorie, and it was but recently, upon her eighteenth birthday, the 15th of January, that her father somewhat solemnly presented her with the famous heirloom.

He had used no little ceremonial, speaking a little pompously of her dead mother—a Ginningham—of the immemorial traditions of their house, and with curious insistence upon the supposed influence of the jewel upon their fortunes. He smiled somewhat lugubriously as he touched that point, but Marjorie, though not extravagantly intelligent, had brains enough to believe in omens, mascots, talismans, and was proud, as a girl should be at her age, to enter upon the possession of the Sacred Gem of the de Bohuns.

Her father had discarded, for so great an occasion, the Victorian gold setting which, he was assured by Mr. Marolovitch and other experts, was in deplorable taste. The jewel was now set once more—by Mr. Marolovitch—as a brooch, since a woman was to wear it. The new setting was in platinum, designed in the finest taste of Berlin, with writhing curves and dead square divisions of the most entrancing variety. Large as the Emerald was, and its new Prussian setting adequately broad, yet the whole lay easily on the palm.

If it be not blasphemy to suggest any inefficiency in our Teutonic cousins, I should suggest that the pin was a thought too long and capable, on careless handling, of biting the hand that fed it. But for any such trifling defect the grey colour of the new and more expensive mounting, resembling that of a leaded grate, and the awful severity of its odd rectangles and unexpected heavings of its re-entrant curves, made ample atonement. Such was the aspect of the Emerald of Catherine the Great in the winter when it entered upon its liveliest activities.

[CHAPTER TWO]

About a fortnight had passed since Mr. de Bohun had given his daughter Marjorie the family mascot. It was Friday, the 30th of January, 1930: the weather unpleasantly cold, overcast, with a threat of snow, and the dark already set in.

After the heavy strain of an English working week, especially in Parliament, complete relaxation is necessary from Friday after lunch to the Monday's return to town by the afternoon. Nor was any mansion more fitted to recuperate the exhausted energies of statesman or politician than Paulings.

It had been built in the classical manner some twenty years before the decline of the Parrall fortunes, which got their worst blow after the year 1745. It was classical and highly symmetric; its fine great doors had been designed to stand slightly above the level of the drive and looked upon a shallow sweep of stone stairway. Upon either side of them, windows in the Palladian fashion, with a pediment above each, announced the wealth within; a hanging wreath of flowers and fruit in stone went the length of the great wall, and against the sky was a balustrade.

That was all very well for the eighteenth century; but the nineteenth and the new wealth of the de Bohuns put on useful excrescences. There was a bulb to the east, and yet another bulb at the end of that, where new stables, now a garage, were added to new offices, and on the west there had been built, a little after the Crimean War, something like half as much again of house room, in a manner pleasingly different from all the rest. Here a new and more convenient door gave into a large hall, not without suits of armour purchased at considerable expense, and giving by various doors into the larger, older, and grander rooms of the house, into a panelled dining-room, a large drawing-room, too often changing in style, and on the extreme west a room very rarely used save for the reception of whatever was not wanted about the living parts of the house, or—in theory at least—for the complete seclusion of its master, when—in theory—his heavy responsibilities demanded heavy concentration.

This room we must know, for it was here that blind Fate, an all-seeing Providence, or—more probably—a lively and mischievous sprite had laid the scene of the loss of the Emerald.

The room was not large; it was in good proportions, for it dated from a time when we were still civilized. It was strangely apparelled. There was a large, rather shabby desk, at which the Home Secretary was supposed to write and where he did at least leave accumulated a few old letters and kept them down with a paper-weight of Chinese crystal, carefully chiselled into the form of a little god who smiled.

There were five deep chairs of the sort called lounge, upholstered in a leather almost black. There were as many more comfortable common chairs. There was a really good fireplace brought over from one of the old houses in Dublin, of marble with a Bacchic frieze. There was in front of that really good fireplace a rug made of the skin of a polar bear, singularly fierce in its open red mouth of ferocious grin, its gleaming teeth and staring eyes—the room was so deserted that no one had knocked that head to pieces with his feet. It seemed almost new, fresh from the Arctic.

There were six windows looking to the west, south, and north, and coming down close to the floor with deep sills forming seats after the fashion of our fathers. For the room projected out into the park upon three sides and the western one faced a long grass path between an avenue of trees. There were one or two tables which did nothing, after the fashion of most tables—outside dining-rooms, and even there they do no work which I can recommend. There was above the mantelpiece one of those looking-glasses of the First French Empire, round, lens-like, and diminishing the picture of all the room. It had a round, broad, gilded rim and upon its summit an eagle of the sort that flew from the Pyramids to Cadiz, from Cadiz to Paris, from Paris to Moscow, and from Moscow back again.

The floor was of the sort called, I believe, in the trade, antique Austrian parquet. That is, it consisted of some half dozen slabs of cheap pine firmly bolted together, on the top of it a veneer of herring-bone Baltic oak, chemically treated to simulate the age and dignity of Schönbrunn. The thing was designed for rapid laying down and lifting and fitted together simply upon joists with what are—again technically—called invisible screws, but at the corners of the room the contraption was held by certain clamps which wanted a hell of a lot of hammering down when it was fixed. On the surface of this dignified flooring lay, carelessly chucked about, a few Oriental rugs from Brighton and one charming little Chinese mat from London, damnably out of place and swearing with the rest of the room like a cat run up a tree from a dog.

What else was there in the room? Ah, yes, there was a parrot cage, and if you are wise, unfortunate reader, you will pay particular attention to that parrot cage, for later on it has a speaking part.

It hung by a chain from the ceiling against the west window looking out on the long avenue, and within it lived—not melancholy, for he was too stupid, but in a mixture of stolid age, indifference, and nothingness—the parrot Attaboy. Nor must I omit either the appearance of the parrot Attaboy, but only later can I tell you how the parrot Attaboy came by his name.

Of his lineage I know nothing, nor even of his age. He might well have been one hundred. Certainly there was nothing young about his eyes or gestures, and I have always heard that parrots, like family servants and others whom the gods hate, live to a great age.

Aunt Amelia had made a pompous present of him three years before to her beloved niece Marjorie after her beloved Marjorie had reached her fifteenth birthday; she bestowed not only the parrot but the cage, and simultaneously a kiss upon her niece's forehead. At first the recipient of the fowl did not appreciate the gift. But love will grow. The thing—by which I mean the cage and the parrot and all—was hung by a hook—at Aunt Amelia's expense—to the roof of this room simply because it was so little used.

It happened precisely at the opening of the flat racing season, three years before the opening of the story which you now have the ecstatic pleasure of reading, that young Lord Galton, Marjorie's cousin—recently acceded to the title by the sudden and unexpected death of his father from I know not what forms of excess—had pulled a horse.

He was one of our modern youths, loving the risks of life and living dangerously. Therefore had he pulled a horse and the horse he had pulled—his very own—he had named Attaboy.

It was never brought home to him, as the phrase goes; that is, everybody knew that it was true. Attaboy was famous at Paulings—a sort of family crime to be proud of—a word used as often as any other for the moment at Paulings; and the poor old parrot—we have no initiative in age—picked it up and refused to learn anything else.

In a way it was awkward. Tommy Galton would come to his uncle's house from time to time, and when he came it was rather important to keep him out of the West Room during daylight. For the parrot had a way of croaking quite suddenly, in the strong colonial accent of his tribe, "Attaboy!" at the most unexpected moments. However, the parrot Attaboy possessed a cover of black felt carefully put over his cage at night, and whenever it found itself in darkness it was habitually silent after the honourable fashion of parrots—and, after all, the room was not commonly used. There was little risk of Lord Galton's being in it save after the black cover was over the detestable bird.

Of Attaboy the parrot—Attaboy the horse had already gone to stud—Marjorie grew fond. For one thing, she was not unattracted by her cousin Tom, and Attaboy made a sort of bond between them. For another, she was at the age when women can be fond of anything, even Tommy Galton, let alone a parrot.

So much for Attaboy and the deserted room.

It has been remarked—without payment—by more than one philosopher that the great events of this world arrive through the action of agents who did not intend them. And this you will find to be true of Attaboy, of the Polar Bear, and the deserted West Room.

I think it only fair to add, since I am writing a detective story, that when Aunt Amelia visited her brother the Home Secretary, which was, all totted up, for something like a third of the year, she was given the principal guest room, known in the family as Bannockburn, which lay immediately above.

So much for Paulings and its now famous, then deserted, West Room; its Parrot, its Polar Bear.

I return to that winter week-end, that cold January Friday and the few gathered in the great drawing-room of Paulings round its tea table.

It was not a party: it was a family meeting of a very few people.

Dear Aunt, so good, so kind, and a little deaf.

Old Lady Bolter, a much elder sister of the Home Secretary, known among the Great as "Aunt Amelia," we have seen was half a permanency. She had already given them three weeks of herself a month before; and she had now settled down to another bout. They suffered her in this fashion often enough; but as for her, she knitted. I have read in one of those books which are published anonymously upon the people of that world, that she had been famous in King Edward's day for her wit. Maybe. She would hardly be famous for it now. However, she was not nearly so blind nor so deaf as she pretended to be. She had met most people up to the Great War and resembled a sheep.

Victoria Mosel was there, Marjorie's friend of another generation, still sinuously moving round and round from house to house forever. There were two men, close relatives, cousins: an elder and a younger.

The first was the hippo-phile, the expert in things of the Turf whom you have just heard of, young Lord Galton, the son of the Home Secretary's first cousin, Cecily, who had brought to Algernon, first—and very nearly last—Lord Galton, a sufficient dowry, drawn from the then ample funds of the de Bohuns, for her father had been the younger brother of the Home Secretary. But this first—and very nearly last—Lord Galton indeed was dead, and so was Lady Galton his wife, and the young man, now his own father, found his inheritance less than he might have desired. The Galtons, wisely taking their title from their name, had not done well since they had left Liverpool; they had left that town too early. So here he was, a tall, dark young man, a little too solid and certain of himself, and—unhappily—attached to racing, a pastime for which his fortune might have been sufficient fifty years ago, but was not at all sufficient to-day.

It was not every house in England in which Lord Galton would have been welcomed; but family counts, and he was here, with his rather sullen face, strong chin and fixed mouth, and sub-challenging eyes. They were sub-challenging because of Attaboy the horse. He had not suffered as he might have done; he went a good deal less to one or two of his better clubs than he had done before the rumour spread, but he was still a constant member of the Posts and gambled there assiduously and with some success. Yet was he always embarrassed, and his embarrassment did not help his reputation.

He sat at the tea table that afternoon, fighting the boredom of Aunt Amelia with what was toleration if it was not courtesy, and looking at Marjorie without admiration but perhaps with intention. Now and then he cast a furtive sharp look, when he thought it was safe, at Victoria Mosel. She always knew too much, and as she stood there in front of the fire, with a sham vacant look on her shrewd face, and the eternal cigarette hanging from her lip, he wished her farther.

Mr. B. Leader, Reader in Crystallogy to the
University, reading in Crystallogy to the
University.

The second guest at that table, next to the Home Secretary himself, was yet another cousin, but a whole first cousin this time—the only son of the youngest uncle of all, who had married very young and very imprudently. Wherefore was the said cousin, William by name, unable to go into the City, and, compelled to become a Don, had become by profession a professor. For a first cousin he was rather absurdly older than the head of the family. The Home Secretary, who had himself married late, was not more than fifty-five; but the Don, William de Bohun, Fellow of Burford and holding the Chair of Crystallography, was quite ten years older—perhaps a little more. He had a simple pride in the excellence of his birth, a distracted manner due to his immense learning—not indeed in the general field of the Humanities or the Arts, but upon the particular point of dodekahedral crystals—and even of octohedrals he had a smattering. Such was his fame that he had been mentioned more than once in the proceedings of learned societies abroad and had been elected Corresponding Member to the Crystallographic Society of Berne.

Unmarried, with a small private income, the poor nest egg of his improvident father, amply endowed, with no pupils to speak of, and the dodekahedral hobby, he would have been as happy as it is possible for an atheist approaching death to be, had it not been for the existence of that infamous charlatan, Bertram Leader, not even a Fellow of St. Filbert's, and mere Reader to the University in Amorphic Crystallogy.

I need not insist on the gulf that separates crystallography, a true science, from crystallogy, its base mercantile application. To the one, as was but right, a chair was attached; a chair founded by Z. Leizler the philanthropist, before his flight, and now occupied by the aged figure of the de Bohun. The other was thought hardly worth a Readership at £600 a year, and only under secret threats had that wealthy college, St. Filbert's, been persuaded by certain City men whom B. Leader in his turn had threatened, to cough up. It took its revenge by admitting B. Leader to its high table, and refusing to elect him a Fellow.

He it was who, waging secret war upon university caste, dug his revengeful fangs into the Professor's naked soul. He it was who spotted with relentless eye all the misprints in the Professor's papers, and denounced them as enormities of ignorance in the British Crystallographic Review, with which is combined the Crystal Gazetteer and Bulletin. He it was who exploded de Bohun's ancient German doctrines with the recent research of horrid Dagoes, and exposed it to derision whenever he lectured to a class of more than a dozen; for his department being mixed up with commerce, there was money in it, and a few undergraduates on the scent of the same; not so the Professor's department. Now two, now one student, sought the well of learning, and sometimes none.

On the other hand, Professor de Bohun could—and did—nourish a burning happiness in his heart to remember that the infamous B. Leader was of no lineage and had no private income at all. Nay, worse; an accent—almost a twang.

But alas! for the alloyed happiness of risen man, in whom the highest have something in them of the ape, (Poggles General View, Vol. II, Ch. XXII, p. 222). B. Leader himself nourished a secret burning joy in his heart; for he had found out—what the great thought was peculiar to their own circle—the dreadful story of William de Bohun and the Mullingar Diamond.

Because he loved crystals—not because he loved wealth: because the Mullingar Diamond was the largest of its yellow kind in the world, and had a flaw which was confidently reported to be due—incredible!—to a bubble, William de Bohun had, eight years before, while stopping at the Abbey as an honoured guest, pinched the Mullingar Diamond—not for a permanency, but to make a close examination of the incredible bubble. He had returned it, but already his action had got known, and some people were cold to him. The less instructed among the great whispered that he had been a famous thief in youth; the more instructed believed that his profound science had produced a momentary lapse. The Family knew, but had long forgiven him; indeed, there was nothing to forgive—they said.

Let it be added that Professor de Bohun had acquired, from so much concentrated study upon dodekahedral crystals—with fatiguing excursions among the octohedrals—a pleasing habit of repeating a word, never less than three times, and sometimes six or eight.

In dress the old gentleman was careless, and, though perpetually washing, never apparently clean. However, he did shave—save for the whiskers which were the badge of his attainments in the learned world.

There was expected a third man, as young as, or younger than, Lord Galton, and of a very different and meaner kind, a certain Hamish McTaggart, who had become suddenly famous within the narrow circle of the people in the know, because the Prime Minister, upon reading an article of his upon Protection had said—in the full hearing of the very narrow circle—"This is the only man on Protection whom I really understand." The article had appeared by the order of McTaggart's master in The Howl, whence it may be rightly assumed that McTaggart knew no more of economics than would a warthog of Botticelli. Hence the lucid style which the Prime Minister had saluted with such discovering joy.

His argument had been very simple. If you prevent things coming in to the sacred Island, Albion, the Albionese will have to make these things for themselves, and that means more employment, doesn't it? The truth had struck the Prime Minister with far more effect thus set down in clean print, than when he had heard it, as he had heard it a thousand times, from the proprietor of The Howl, whom he had himself so rightly ennobled.

Therefore was Hamish McTaggart now glowing with a vivid, though, alas! restricted fame.

He himself was getting heartily tired of it. It had halved his income—that is, it had brought it down below five hundred pounds a year. No one would print him except upon the subject of Protection, and he had to write in the way that was really understood. And he was allowed to write only in those papers peculiar to the little inner circle with the little inner circulation corresponding—and there's no money in that! When he wanted to write about tigers, and get his expenses paid free to the East and a lump sum—a job he would have got for the asking two years before, when he wrote by the thousand words, to order, just after leaving the University—he was asked what on earth he knew about it? Tigers! And was bundled back to Protection.

Therefore was his future black; but in the little circle he was a sort of lion. Victoria Mosel was always talking of him; Marjorie was eager to see him once and then to discard his company for ever; Lady Bolter, full of the intellectual Victorian time, wanted to be able to say that she had been in the same room with a man of whom the Prime Minister himself had said that he was the only man whose writing he really understood. The Home Secretary had met him once or twice in other people's houses; Marjorie herself and her aunt were the only two for whom he was still quite a stranger.

"What train is he coming by?" said Tommy Galton, sunk into a deep chair.

The Home Secretary looked at his watch, then at the clock, noted they did not correspond, frowned, and said he'd be here any time.

Victoria Mosel lays odds on Mr. McTaggart's
saying "Dee-Boe-Hunn."

"I'll give you evens," said Victoria Mosel, "that he calls you Dee Boe Hunn."

"Done!" said Tommy Galton, putting up a finger.

"Bradburys?" said Vic, sucking a pencil. "Gimme a bit o' paper."

Tommy Galton wrote on his cuff. "That'll do," he said.

"I often wish," bleated Aunt Amelia, "that you young people could have met John Bright. I was only in the schoolroom, of course, but my dear father had no scruples in——"

She was not allowed to go on.

"We can't all sit here kicking our heels till he's kind enough to parade," said Marjorie, with girlish simplicity.

"No one wants you to," said Vic, delicately tearing off the last cigarette like a plaster, and sticking in another one. "I'm clamped down. Me for Hamish!"

The Professor suddenly gave tongue. His exceedingly pale old eyes were wide open, and his foolish mouth almost as wide.

"Oh, I think it'll be exceedingly interesting—exceedingly interesting," he quavered. "Exceedingly interesting to meet one of the new generation of ... shall we say, ah! journalists? Yes, journalists.... Journalists."

"Yes, Bill," replied young Galton. "We'll say journalists." Marjorie yawned and stretched.

"Well, I'm not going to wait any longer," she said, when the buzz of a motor was heard on the gravel outside, the approach of middle-class feet, the door solemnly thrown open as for a dancing bear, and the unfortunate McTaggart appeared, his name preceding him.

The Home Secretary, who had preserved some of the traditions, unfolded himself painfully from his chair and stood up, greeting McTaggart with the wan smile of the public man.

"Good evening, Mr. de Bohun." And behold! he pronounced it Deboon. With the business-like rapidity that became her so well, Victoria Mosel handed a crushed ball of three one-pound notes undemonstratively to Tom Galton, who stretched forward to take it and elaborately crossed out the note on his cuff.

Young McTaggart stood there a moment, not daring to sit down, suffering great torture. Nor did any of the company relieve it, though Aunt Amelia, to do her justice, did tell him how glad they all were to see him, much as a spokesman for the Divinities might welcome any clod.

The poor devil was out of place. He did not know why he had come; he had come because he was pressed, because he had nothing else to do, because he was lonely, because he had heard of Paulings and wanted to see it, because he thought such a visit to such a house might improve his prospects; and now that he was here, he wished it had never been built.

He was never at his ease with his social superiors. His father and grandfather had been mere soldiers; his great-grandfather one of Nelson's captains; his father again a very small laird in Ayrshire—but one had to go back as far as that to get to gentility. He dressed awkwardly, and he knew it. He never seemed to know quite where to put the hands and feet at the extremities of his uncouth frame. He also had a rather irritating trick of never looking anybody in the face. It was nervousness, and came of writing too much. He was, I regret to say, terrified of women, but especially of Ladies; and he had already spent the first hours of his exile in wondering why on earth he had allowed himself to be over-persuaded and had come.

* * * * * * *

So much for the tea table and those that sat round it. The Home Secretary, damnably full of courtesy but rather silent, sat helpless; Victoria Mosel still stood by the fire surveying them all—and particularly McTaggart—not unsaturnine for the others, but with a singular touch of kindness in her slits of eyes for the embarrassed boy. Then she recovered the firm pressure of her lips, emphasised by the drooping cigarette, and the others looked on inanely or surlily, according as God had made them.

* * * * * * *

If you think I am going to describe to you in any detail how they passed their time between tea and dinner, you are mistaken. Some books are written like that, and there is an art of making them readable. I have it not.

To action, therefore—to the Emerald!

[CHAPTER THREE]

It was that same Friday night, and about 9.55 by the clock. The men had just come in from the dining-room. They had been warned that the housekeeper, Mrs. Bankes (fear nothing—you will never meet her again) had commandeered the drawing-room. They were not allowed to go back there, for even now the belated serfs were spreading, under Mrs. Bankes' eye, large dingy cloths over the chairs and tables against the early sweep of the morrow.

The Home Secretary had no choice but to shepherd them into the somewhat forlorn, hardly used West Room. A good fire had been ordered. He trusted humbly in God that the parrot Attaboy, securely covered in its black cage cloth, could utter no unseemly Attaboy cry. If it did—well, if it did, Tommy must laugh. After all, it was his fault if he had pulled a horse.

The men crawled in. McTaggart, being by far the meanest, was compelled—in an agony—to go first. Next the Professor slid; after him with sullen assurance Tom Galton. And the great statesman filed in last, as host and chief, and shut the door with all the discretion of the Front Bench and fourteen years of Westminster.

Marjorie was standing on the polar-bear skin rug by the fire, near that fierce grinning head, those ironical teeth, holding the emerald—the brooch—in her open hand; showing it to Victoria, who peered at it cynically enough. She had already heard the story of it—for the third time in two weeks, and for the three hundred and fifty-first in her life—she knew it to be false, and she dreaded to hear again the myth of the diplomat, the old Bohunian lie. But a good heart thumped behind that bony breast and Victoria Mosel spared the child.

With this coming in of a new audience, Marjorie summoned them at once, and they crowded round in obedience to that summons; and once more to the listening earth she told—in her innocence!—the largesse of Catherine the Great to her ancestor the diplomat, in whom she firmly believed.

Lord Galton looked at the jewel with a sort of animosity, as much as to say, "Put on no suspicious airs with me!" McTaggart tittered at it with a nervous smile, as though he liked it well enough, but was rather frightened of it; the Professor glared it down with an expert's pose. The three men stood thus, bunched round their young hostess, touching shoulders, while Marjorie continued her story of the de Bohun mission to the great Empress, adding sundry other details which in her judgment gave a heightened historical value to the gem.

Then the gods struck.

What she did, or how she did it, she never remembered. She felt a sharp shoot in her finger: she should have known it was due to the ill-calculated length of the pin. She said to herself—but in her heart she did not believe it—that some one had jogged her elbow. Anyhow, the Emerald of Catherine the Great jerked out suddenly and fell from her palm, making no noise. It must have fallen upon the bearskin at her feet, where a standard electric light upon a little table near at hand happened to cast a shadow. She gave a startled cry, and at once the three men were on their knees—yes, even the old Professor—groping in the fur.

They were longer at their groping than one might have thought. The object was small, but not so small as all that. It was flat, heavy, metallic: it could not have rolled. It must be within a few inches, or a foot at the most, of the place on which its proprietress had stood.

Unfortunately she moved, and in that movement no one could remember, to half a foot or so, exactly where it should have lain. While the three men still groped, and the impatient Marjorie tapped with her foot in the suspense of it, the unfortunate McTaggart cried excitedly, "I've got it!"

Lord Galton at once jumped up, relieved; the Professor also extended upwards—less smartly; but when they had risen McTaggart was still on his knees. Then with his face peering into the fur of the bearskin, he added, "No! It's a splinter of coal,"—and he threw that fragment into the fire and continued to rummage.

The Professor and Lord Galton looked at each other. They hesitated whether to go down again; they thought it better to leave it to McTaggart. Poor McTaggart thus remained in the abject attitude to which he had now been subjected for two minutes or more, becoming increasingly convinced that something terrible had happened.... He could not conceive why he should not put his hand upon the thing.... But it was not there.... At last, flushed, more disordered than ever, he pressed the fingers of his left hand upon the floor and stood upright. He was a little blown.

"I can't find it!" he said.

"You must find it!" said Marjorie sharply. Then, remembering herself, she looked at the two who were her equals and cousins and she said:

"One of you must find it! It can't be lost! Nonsense.... Look here, stand back!" She pushed her poor old aunt, who was peering about in a futile fashion. She enlarged the circle, and then said again:

"Now then, you must find it! Look here, I'll find it." They went down again reluctantly, and she herself sank suddenly to her knees and helped the group.

But they looked in vain. They separated the hair of the rug carefully, they lifted it up pettily, edge by edge, and looked beneath. They pressed upon it with their palms to see whether they could not find a lump. Then they took the poor beast up and shook him savagely. But he yielded no emerald. It was gone.

When at last they all rose again—appalled, for the moment silent—Marjorie was as white as the skin upon which she trod.

"It can't be lost," she said again, bitterly. "I say, it can't be lost."

But lost it was.

"Father," she said angrily. "Do come and look!"

The Home Secretary reluctantly hoisted himself from his chair with a secret groan, shuffled up to the place, and looked down at the rug in a refined manner.

"Look for it, father! Do look for it! Come, it can't be lost!"

Painfully but obediently the Home Secretary went down on his knees in his turn and groped about, with far less chance than any other man would have had, of laying his hand upon the stone. He drew blank, as the others had, and rose with more difficulty, McTaggart helping him; he shuffled back, and sank again into his chair.

"Well, well, well!" he said. "Well! Well!"

There were tears in Marjorie's eyes—which was a weakness in one so born and in such a place, but she could hardly keep them back. They were tears as much of anger as of anything else. Upon Victoria Mosel's face—somewhat apart, and smiling awfully at the bunch of them—there was a look you could not see through. But upon the face of each of the three men who had been first down upon their knees—not upon the face of the Home Secretary—was now drawn an indefinable veil, as of instinctive protection against a censorious world.

It had dawned upon each of them, in varying degrees of rapidity, that he was possibly suspect.

It had flashed first upon the lordlet. He lived and breathed in an air of challenge. It would not have surprised him if he had seen some day on a glaring sky sign flaming up large over Piccadilly Circus and winking in and out to compel the eye: "Attaboy? Who pulled Attaboy? Tommy Galton!"

The Professor got the message to his brain about a quarter of a minute later. He very nearly spoke—but he caught the words in time. The Mullingar Diamond oppressed him: all the world pointed a finger at him, and the air was full of demoniac whispers: "Mullingar! Mullingar!"

And as for the miserable McTaggart, he was already such a worm in his own eyes among these exalted folk that he thought his poverty might alone have him arrested that very night. It struck him with a pang that, in his innocence, he had remained there on his knees long after the others had risen. Then a new shaft stabbed him. Ingenuous, he had dug his own grave! They would interpret that cry, "I've found it!" as the sudden shock of a real discovery: for him there sounded dully all around, "Ar-r-rest that mon!"—and he was nearly sick.

So there they stood—three men, none of whom had any idea what had happened, and each well convinced that he was the suspect who must fight it out sooner or later: each at the same time firmly believing that one of the other two was the culprit. In Marjorie's pure mind there spread a growing certitude that they were all of them guilty, all of them, and that each of them had the emerald in his pocket—yet were there not three emeralds but one emerald. At least, that was how it felt. But within the soul of the Home Secretary—if I might so call it—there was a strong sense of botheration and of wishing the beastly thing had never happened.

Under the keen inward light of Victoria Mosel's intelligence, standing apart, a fascinating problem was being discussed. She was delighted. It would occupy her for days. It was just what she liked.

In all that circle of heads, showing in different degrees—Victoria's least of all—the mood of the mind through some transfiguration of the face, each silent for the moment, only one head stood frankly stamped with a fierce joy. It was the head of the polar bear.

If he could have spoken he might—or he might not—have told them. It might have amused him more to keep them in suspense. His great red grinning open mouth and shining teeth were full of joy. His fierce glass eyes glared upon them mischievously. It was almost worth while being shot and skinned for such a revenge as this! He knew where the emerald was.... It was in his right ear.

They had taken him and shaken him with great indignity, but they had foolishly taken him up by the hind legs. One should never take a polar bear up in that way, especially when it is a bear who has been a prince in his own country of keen wind, low shining sun, and little dancing seas against the ice. They had shaken him, but they had shaken—oh, shame!—upside down, and the more they had shaken him, the more firmly had they wedged the emerald in his right ear, where it so snugly lay.

He could have told them, and I have hastened to tell you. Then where, you ask me, does the detective fun come in?

You shall see!

* * * * * * *

Far in the Eastern Wing where, mured in stone
Arrived at by a passage cold that ran
Along the North o' the House, and barred with iron
As to its windows: also by a door
Which leads from the considerable room
Wherein are great receptions held at Paulings
[An Antrum gaunt, abandoned, having only
Upon its walls the Oils of dead de Bohuns
(Pronounced Deboons) and sundry dusty sofas:
The Room grandiloquently named the Ballroom],
There stand the Servants' Quarters. It is there,
That, ruled by their dread Queen, the Housekeeper,
And by her Coadjutor King, the Butler,
The serfs Boonesque repose. The Cook, the Chauffeur,
The Kitchen Maids, the Footmen, and the Boy:
And Lord! how many others! These that night—
That winter night of doom—held high discourse,
Upon the EMERALD. Samuel had heard
(While bearing in the tray of drinks, himself
Arrayed in livery) how its disappearance
Had flummoxed all the Toffs. "You bet your breeches!"
Said he, to either sex, indifferent
And indiscriminate. "You bet your breeches!
Whoever's pinched it's got to cough it up!
The Boss, he ain't Home Secretary, not
For nothing!" and with that his tongue was still.
Then spake young Gwendoline, the Tweeny Maid,
"I pity Him or 'Er as 'as it!" Words
Which, when she had them spoken, froze their souls—
Nor none more starkly than the Second Housemaid's,
Unless it were the Boy's—and so to Bed.

[CHAPTER FOUR]

The majestic poise of the Nordic blood is nowhere seen in greater perfection than in that crown of our civilization, a modest English Country House. Here is there no class consciousness, here is there no class war. Each is in his or her own place, and there is peace through order.

To consider only the servile portion of the establishment: the Butler has his own dignity, and the various other males—upon whose titles I am a little shaky—have theirs. So the Females of the species: the Cook cooks; the Kitchen Attendants attend the kitchen; the Nurse nurses. So with the external squad: the Groom grooms; the Gardener and all his Assistants garden. With regularity and zeal the Footmen footle. The mere Maids go maidenly about their tasks. Below these specialised functionaries, for which Our Race is famous, comes one who may be regarded indifferently as the foundation of the fabric or the last rung of the ladder, and who is known as the Boy. On him the petty, unorganised, lesser work devolves, for which his Superiors are indeed responsible, but the mere brute labour of which is his alone.

The Boy Ethelbert in Captivity.

Thus it is the Boy who blacks the boots, fills all the coal scuttles and carries them about, lays the fires and lights them, polishes the knives, the silver plate—the silver itself, when there is any—and the antique pewter; washes up the dishes of the supper below stairs, cleans the door knobs and bell handles; pulls up the blinds; pulls back the curtains of the ground floor. Notably it is he also who conveys to the Upper Servants—who then shall have risen from slumber—the numbers of the bells that have sounded. It is he who opens the windows when they should be shut, and shuts them when they should be open—so far at least as the early hours are concerned, for when the Great are about this function is performed by a young man in uniform. It is the Boy who lays out the morning post, sets the newspapers in order—therein discovering the odds—lets out the little dog—or dogs—and after some few other trifling tasks accomplished, brushes and carefully folds the clothes of the male guests and lays them out where stronger and older men shall carry them up, each parcel to its room, and for that service receive an ultimate reward. It is the Boy who carries up the boots themselves—for these are defiling to the fingers!—and it is the Boy—mark you: this is essential to the tale, you must not miss it—it is the Boy who picks up the rugs and shakes them, room after room, a ritual preparatory to the settling of great clouds of dust, which, shortly after, not the Boy but a Maid brings down to the rugs again with feathery instruments and devastating cloths.

Hence it was that the Boy—Ethelbert by his full baptismal name, but in the daily, Bert—before yet the wintry dawn was more than grey on that Saturday in January, whistling gaily at his task, was holding the polar bear up by its forepaws and shaking it, as in duty bound.

His heart was gay, for he was redeemed.

Not so long since, this same Ethelbert had (alas!) in company with youths of his own age and a little more, not yet free from the trammels of elementary education, purloined from a shop certain fruits: two bananas.

The Deed might have appeared upon his record at Scotland Yard and dogged him through life, for he was already eight years of age and knew full well the wickedness of his act. He had been spared by the noble elasticity of the English Common Law. His sobbing widowed mother had seen, indeed, the shadow of the police across her threshold, and Ethelbert had stood in the Felons' Dock before the dud parliamentary lawyer who had got the local stipendiary job. But our Magistracy—especially that of the Stipendiary Sort—is famous throughout the whole world for its merciful wisdom. Young Bert had escaped imprisonment, as having been led away by his senior Charlie Gasket, who was nearly ten.

He had, I say, been saved; but the memory of the peril had burnt into his soul. And now, though he was nearly fifteen years of age, the incident still stood out the sharpest of his memories. It was known to his lord the Butler—perhaps to his Master—but to no others. He had been taken into the Great House in spite of it all, because his father had worked upon the estate. Therefore, I say, did Ethelbert feel himself redeemed. But he trembled still at the apparatus of National Justice.

The Boy Ethelbert untouched by
Civilisation.

In the innocence of youth he whistled gently to himself. His other work was done; this performed, he had but now to settle the last rug, the Polar Bear, and then to rouse his superiors in the hierarchy below stairs, to lay their breakfast out and to attend thereon as minister. So shook he perfunctorily the Arctic Ursine Fleece, the Hyperborean Candour, when he heard something fall sharply at his feet. He even caught a flash of it as it fell. He saw it issuing from that ear of Thule which would hear no more; he saw it sliding down the whiteness of the hair and gleaming dully in the candlelight upon the polished wood of the flooring.

There was no mistake. It was IT. It was that pledge of respect and esteem which the ever-memorable Catherine, Empress of All the Russias, had bestowed three lives ago upon the stalwart Bones. It was the heirloom of that noble House of de Bohun which Ethelbert served. It was the Stone on which he had heard all the domestics of the house inflamed in the last hours of the previous evening.

There is an instinct planted in man by Mr. Darwin, which impels him to pick up a thing, anything dropped. That instinct Ethelbert obeyed. The act was half unconscious, immediate; he had slipped the Emerald into his pocket and was already off with a candle in one hand and the other in a side pocket, fondling the stone. He was off down the long stone corridor which led along the north of the house towards the offices; and as he went his mind was full of some vague intention to hand over the treasure-trove to those in authority—in good time.

But even as he thus went up by the dim candlelight in the cold dawn, along that prison-like perspective of iron-barred windows and whitewash, with stone flags ringing to his feet, a vision of judgment arose within him. His teeth chattered at the memory of the police.

Ethelbert, that product of no more than an elementary education, had received some general outline of the world from cinemas and from police reports, which that same education enabled him to read in the more widely circulated Sunday papers.

He could not have told you that society was organized to the advantage of circles to which he did not belong, and to the disadvantage of his own; but he did know that this piece of green glass in its leaden-coloured setting of hideous lines would sell for a sum that would free him from servitude for ever. He also knew that to be found possessed of it would involve a far worse servitude; a servitude not to the Gentry but to the Force, and lasting, one way or another, the whole of his life. He knew that such servitude was torture. The people of his world knew all those things. Therefore did not the emerald represent to Ethelbert immediate wealth so much as a vision of confinement alone in a small mechanical cell; upon release, a life-long chain binding him as an informer and spy over whom further imprisonment should hang at will; a crushing and overwhelming tyranny; and perhaps at last a secret and abominable death. Of all these things had young Bert's mind been full from very early years, for all these things still haunt the distorted fancy of the poor.

He saw himself presenting with trembling hand this Thing of Power, this Emerald, to his Emperor the Butler; he imagined a first awful and immediate trial at the hands of that Justiciar, and later an overwhelming sentence from the Master himself. He heard the key turning in the door of his room; he saw himself a gibbering prisoner therein; he heard the voices of the Inspector and his accompanying Sergeant; he felt the gyves upon his wrist.

All this in the few seconds between the West Room of Paulings and the offices built out of the extreme east.

So was Ethelbert's mind made up. For his good angel, failing to penetrate the first thick skin of stupidity and to suggest the simple delivery of the gem to his superiors, at any rate got through the second skin and suggested a second best.

He had the brushing of the clothes. He would put it into the pocket of some one of the guests, and then he could breathe freely.

Which guest should it be? No one was yet astir; he was free to choose. There was a minute or two before the clock would strike the half hour and bid him summon the earliest riser—after himself—the kitchen-maid. Her name, Kathleen Parkinson, I take the liberty of giving you, although she will appear no more in these pages.

There lay the three little piles of clothes, to be carefully brushed and folded up by himself, within the next half hour, and among them how could a youth of romantic genius hesitate? Did not every novelette, every Sunday paper, every cinema, point with unerring finger to the lord? Are not lords and jewels made one for the other, like love and laughter, or politics and stocks and shares? The lord could not but be the recipient of the emerald, and when he should have received it, who fitter than he to deal with such trifles? Bert could see him in his mind's eye, and hear him in his mind's ear, strolling up to the Master of the House and saying, in that airy accent which had always so astonished him in the wealthy:

"Oh, I say, Humph, I found the bloody thing this morning and picked it up—what?"

Now into which pocket of Lord Galton's quiet blue suit should it go? Into the right-hand trousers pocket; for therein, as Bert knew by fruitful search, his lordship carried loose change. From the waistcoat it might fall out. In the coat pockets it might lurk for long without being found; in Lord Galton's right-hand trousers pocket, therefore, did the emerald go, to the full depth thereof. The garment was folded again very neatly. And all was well.

* * * * * * *

In the fulness of time, the sun being already risen—yes, for an hour or more—one of those older young domestics of whom I have spoken bore up a parcel of clothes and a can of hot water to Lord Galton's door. All the ritual of these palaces was gone through. The socks were turned inside out, the shirt laid out like a corpse in its shroud, the pile of brushed and folded clothes set upon a chair, the fire lit—as though the room were not already stifling with a hot-air machine; the window opened wider, as though the piercing air had not already started a draught which had fought with the hot air all night long. The under-upper servant glided away, and Lord Galton got out of bed and shaved and washed and dressed; considering in his mind what all others woke to consider in that same house on that same morning, but especially the Fated Three: the Emerald.

He looked at his watch; it was a quarter past nine. He stood gazing out of the window at the frosty mist on the damp gaunt trees of the park, and tried to estimate how he really stood in the minds of those about him.

Who would believe that he knew nothing of the stone? Which of them had heard—several of them, he knew—which of them believed that story about Attaboy? Certainly his host, almost certainly Vic—she knew everything. He was not quite certain that she had not meant to rag him about it in something she had said during the day before. She would not misunderstand, but she knew about it.

Did that damned greasy fellow the journalist know? He doubted it; they never did know the things that counted. And as for the Don, he might as well have suspected the first imbecile in the County Asylum.

Marjorie did not know; he was pretty sure of that by her way to him. But still ... it was known enough; it was known to two.... After all, what was pulling a horse, and what had it to do with pinching emeralds, anyhow? ... Yet ... yet ... he could not leave Paulings till it was cleared up.... If the damned thing turned up in town in some receiver's shop they might connect it with him.... He was glad he hadn't brought a man.... No, he must stay till it was cleared up. It was a damned nuisance. They were getting up a party on Sunday night at the Posts. There was to be a rich young fool from Ireland whom they would all play with. Those occasions were not so common nowadays. But he must sacrifice it. He must stay on.

He made his decision; he slowly picked up the small change off his dressing table and shuffled it into his trousers pocket. Then he mechanically followed it with his hand, and found something that was not a coin....

At first he had the grotesque idea that he was handling a pebble, though how it could have got there he could not conceive. Then a matchbox, for it was smooth and cold.... When he pulled it out and saw what it was, his whole mind went through a violent shock of revulsion.

He was so sickened, strong as he was, that he had to sit down and recover himself. And as he so sat, he fixed the dreadful thing with his eye, holding it there between the fingers of his right hand, unmoving.

Now indeed was a resolution to be taken!

At first his mind would not work. A man possessed of a thing, no matter what he does with it, carries his communications about with him, leaves traces about of his possession. If he threw it out of the window, it would be found within the radius of such a throw. There was nowhere in the room where he would dare to hide it. If he dropped it as he went downstairs, a servant might pass and find it within a minute, connecting him with what was so found.

Give it back himself he dared not. That would mean, "Poor Tommy! He gave way, but he did the honest thing in the end." He would be branded for life. Attaboy was enough, without that.

At first the easiest course lured him; to say nothing; to keep it upon his person until everything had blown over; then to take it up with him to town.... Then? ... He could not help remembering how Alfred had told him about his uncle and the cutting establishment in Amsterdam. It was all mixed up with the committee for inquiring into the Meldon business when there was that trouble in Parliament a few years before.... It seemed that one could have a stone cut and get it back unrecognisable.... Then he thrust the thought out of his mind and shuddered a little at the danger.

Lord Galton discovers the Emerald.

But if he kept it, where should he put it? Where could he put it so as to be certain during the night—to be absolutely certain—that no one could find it with him or near him? What if he should fall faint or ill? What if ... No, there was only one thing to be done. He must pass it on. No matter what tale he told—even if he told the truth—to appear with it in his possession and to make an explanation was to damn himself finally, and that just at the moment his half-damnation on the turf was beginning to be forgotten.... He must pass it on.... He must pass it on.

There was one obvious repository; an aged fool of that profession whose incompetence is stamped upon them; a native dupe. It should go into the pocket of his distinguished cousin, the Professor; it should pass into the unwitting possession of the expert on dodekahedral crystals. His mind thus decided, he was half at peace.

Lord Galton went down to breakfast. He found his host already at the table. The others came in gradually, and no one talked of the stone; nor upon anything else to speak of—for of the stone everyone was thinking.

It was, naturally, the learned cousin, the Professor, who first put in the word that should not have been spoken. He did it somewhere about the jam, and when the Home Secretary was already feeling the need for a pipe. Perhaps food had strengthened him. He piped up in his quavering voice:

"Ah! Any news about the emerald, Humphrey? Any news this morning about the emerald? About the emerald? ... the emerald? ... the emerald?"

There is a natural sequence in fools, as in all others of God's creatures. Aunt Amelia came in a good second.

"Oh, yes, Humphrey," she bleated, in that woolly-mutton voice which fitted her as does sodden mist a marshy formless hill. "Is there any news about the emerald?"

"There is hardly likely to be, Amelia," said her brother, as tartly as he could be got to say anything, for long years of suave politician's make-believe had untartled his tongue.

"I thought," said Aunt Amelia in self-defense, "that some servant might have found it and told you."

"Well, they have not," said her brother, shortly; and there was silence.

The journalist opened his mouth—which he should not have done—and began rather too loudly, and in too high a pitch:

"What I think, you know ..." and then stopped suddenly—which put him in no better case.

What Victoria Mosel would have said nobody knew, for she took her breakfast in bed—always. But Marjorie had come down in the midst of this, and spoke sharply. She had slept little and her temper was on edge.

"Oh, that's enough about the emerald!" she said. "What's the good of talking of it now?" Then she gave one sweeping look around, like a searchlight trying to spot a boat, and betook herself to the jam.

The one who said nothing was the young racing man with the emerald in his trousers pocket. He was not sure of it—he touched its pin point two or three times furtively to make certain the gem had not dropped out; and then he began, by way of clearing the air, to talk to the learned Professor about indifferent things.

But these indifferent things had a purport in them. For first he talked of the University, then of that degraded College, St. Filbert's, and so worked things round to the infamous B. Leader, and that fairly started his companion off—as Lord Galton had intended he should be started.

The old Don was still at it when they got up from the breakfast table. He was shepherded—though he did not know that he was being shepherded—by the younger man, out into the hall, helped into his rusty overcoat, led out through the glass doors into the park, and there did Lord Galton patiently listen to his academic victim for something over a quarter of an hour, as they walked side by side up the swept gravel to the very far end of the avenue, and then turned back again towards the house.

Long before they thus faced about, the learned cousin's mind was a thousand miles away from reality. The harangue which poured forth against the infamous B. Leader needed but little sympathetic jogging—a word here and there—from his companion. His soul was not in his body. You might have stuck a pin into him, and he would not have felt it; and Lord Galton, who knew men nearly as well as he knew horses—at least on the side of their weaknesses—felt secure that the moment had come. And as he leaned forward, sympathetically close to the left side of his companion, he gently dropped into the loose, wrinkled side pocket of the rusty overcoat that perilous gem, and felt as though he had cast off a garment of lead.

The expert in dodekahedral crystals still poured out unceasingly and shrilly his grievance, with many a "Would you believe it?" and "If you please!" and "Then he actually wrote to the Society at Berne," and so on; and Lord Galton, almost grateful in the new lightness of his heart, applauded heartily and loudly marvelled that the Society at Berne did not drum Leader out of their ranks with every mark of infamy.

"So," he thought, as they came into the house again—the quavering voice of the Crystallographer still more emphatic within four walls—"salvation comes with a little intelligence, a little decision, and a little opportunity."

He helped the old fool out of his overcoat; hung it up for him on a peg, and saw its owner go shambling off to his books.

Lord Galton was pleased with himself; he saw his way fairly straight before him, but he would do nothing hastily ... which might flurry the head of the house.... It would be a wise and a small risk, to bide his time. He would bide it till the noon post had come in, until his host had looked at his letters. Then only would he take the next step in his programme. He sauntered out again into the Park, where he would feel the strain of waiting less, with a walk to occupy him. He looked back over his shoulder when he had got round towards the lodge, and saw for one moment through the window of the library his aged relative pottering among the shelves. He was safe till lunch. And Lord Galton, though all alone, smiled.

* * * * * * *

The young man walked briskly for a couple of miles, thinking clearly and concisely. He came back to Paulings through the mill gate, up by the stables, walking strongly and well. He knew exactly what he had to do.

He met one of the servants, and asked where Mr. de Bohun might be, and was told he was in the garage; sought him there, and found him giving orders about a repair, and trying—unsuccessfully—to understand whether the proud chauffeur were lying or no.

He went straight up to his cousin, who turned round at hearing his step, and said in a very low voice, and quickly:

"Let me see you in your study alone for a moment. It is urgent!"

And the Home Secretary, glancing up hurriedly with a half-frightened look, said, "Yes? Certainly! Come."

[CHAPTER FIVE]

Lord Galton stood by the Home Secretary in his study, looked round suddenly, and said, "May I lock the door?" locked it without leave and then came back and began talking.

The young fellow talked as impressively as ever he had talked when he was giving instructions to a jockey, or rather, to the go-between who took the risk. He knew how to talk, as do most men who are successful in giving instructions to jockeys. His sentences came, weighty, short, decisive, and each had its effect. Men said he would have done well in the House of Commons, but the men who have said that do not know the House of Commons. Yes, he would have done well in the House of Commons: not by oratory, but by what I may call the Attaboy side of his character. He began:

"Humphrey, I'm going to tell you about the emerald. I think I know where it is."

The Home Secretary looked up, startled; but he did not interrupt.

"I want to begin by saying that I know I am myself under suspicion."

"Oh, my dear Tommy," began his unfortunate host. But the younger man put up a hand like a slab of stone.

"No," he said. "There's no time to be wasted, and we must have things absolutely clear. One of us three must have got that brooch. No doubt we are all under suspicion—but I know why I am under suspicion. People say I pulled a horse." Again the Home Secretary would have interrupted, but the heavy hand made an impatient gesture, and again he checked himself. "Marjorie mayn't believe it, and of course that old fool of a Cousin Bill hasn't heard of it; and as for that journalist fellow McTibbert, or whatever his name is, he may or may not have; I don't care. But anyhow, you know it. You've heard all about it!"

"But, my dear Tommy," broke in the Home Secretary, lying eagerly and almost with affection, "I don't believe it. Believe me, I don't believe it. Do you suppose," he added with beautiful tact, "that if I believed it I'd have you here at Paulings?"

Lord Galton just showed at the muscles of the mouth what a fool he thought the man. He went on undisturbed.

"It's nothing to do with the value of the lie—they haven't turned me out of the Posts, for that matter; nor warned me off. But the point is, the story has gone the rounds. A man that would cheat would steal. Also you know I'm on the rocks, and therefore I'm under suspicion. Now we're all three under suspicion, as I say. That old ass, Cousin Bill, got mixed up with the Mullingar Diamond years ago—too much of a fool to pinch it for selling; wanted to look at it through one of his contraptions. Anyhow, he can't keep his hands off crystals. And an emerald's a crystal."

"Is it?" asked the Head of the Family with great interest.

"I think so—I don't know," said Galton impatiently. "Anyhow, it's a jewel, a precious stone—what?"

"Oh, yes! It's a jewel, yes, a precious stone. Oh, yes," admitted Humphrey de Bohun.

"Well then, so's a diamond. A man who'll take diamonds'll take emeralds—what? ... Then there's that journalist fellow—he's under suspicion because he's a journalist; they're all on their uppers, and you told me yourself about the one who stole the spoons when you were at the Board of Works."

A faint smile appeared for a moment on the face of his host. It was his favourite funny story—all about a journalist who once stole some government spoons. He had told it on every occasion. He told it to journalists. But then he was never really featured by the Press.

"Now of those three," went on Lord Galton, rather more slowly, and separating his words, "the man who has got it is our miserable old family goat, Cousin Bill...."

The Home Secretary started.

Lord Galton explains to the Home Secretary his
theory—or rather, certitude—upon the
whereabouts of the Great Emerald.

"Yes, I know what you'll say ... he got the fright of his life over the Mullingar Diamond. You'd say he'd never dream of doing it in the house of the head of the family." (A dignified look passed over the features of the Chieftain of the de Bohuns.) "Then he's such a clumsy old ass that you can't imagine him doing it so quickly. After all, it took him half an hour to fish the Mullingar Diamond out of an open drawer, and even then he left things topsy-turvy. You'll say all that, and if I were just guessing I'd half agree with you. But I'm not guessing. And I tell you he's got it. I don't pretend to do any of this private detective work, and I've never read one of their rotten mystery stories in my life. That's how I've kept my common sense clear—men who are blown upon need their wits about them. I know Bill's got it for a very simple reason—I've seen it in his hand with my own eyes. Some one told the old goat that the place to hide anything was where it would be most obvious and simple. He's got it in the left-hand pocket of that damned smelly overcoat he wears; but he's such a nervous old balmy that he can't help fingering it the whole time; and when he thinks no one's looking he pulls it half out and looks at it furtively out of the corner of his eye. Dons are always as mad as hatters. He did it three separate times while we were out walking just now. He couldn't help himself. He's too much shut up inside his own addled head to notice other people. And I'll tell you something else, which is also common sense. He won't take it out of that pocket till he's left the house. An overcoat's the only thing they don't brush or fold up, in this house; you're old-fashioned, with these things on pegs and not on marble tables. He knows that. It'll hang there on the peg till he goes away. That's the whole point of leaving it in such a place.... And it's there now. You look for it there, and you'll find it."

The Home Secretary put on his expression of gravity in the third degree—the expression with which he would meet a deputation for saving an innocent man from the gallows and gratify them with a majestic refusal.

"What you say, Tommy," he began, slowly, "is very serious. Very serious indeed. In my judgment ..."

"Oh, look here," said Lord Galton impatiently, "cut out all that! He's not in the hall. He went off to the library, and when he gets there he strikes root. There'll be no one about—they're laying the table. Come with me, and I'll prove it."

"I hesitate ..." began the Home Secretary. His powerful young relative, by way of reply, hooked him by the arm, unlocked the door, and marched him straight out into the hall. The ghost of what might well have been an ancestor—for we all have such things—must have mourned, if, as such things do, it had taken up its kennel in a suit of armour standing by the side of the fireplace in the hall: it would have mourned to see the head of the de Bohuns stand by while the deed was done.

Lord Galton went smartly up to the bunch of coats, plunged his hand into the left-hand pocket of that one wretched old garment, and turned it sharply inside out, so that the damning evidence should fall before his cousin's eyes. There fell out no small amount of gathered dirt, some paper torn into minute fragments, and a stub of pencil; also a rather repulsive handkerchief—nothing more. Nothing rang upon the hall floor. There was no Emerald.

Lord Galton for once did a weak thing—or a superstitious one. As though not trusting his senses, he picked the repulsive handkerchief up and shook it. But there was no emerald. Indeed, one could see and hear by the way it had fallen that there was no emerald within its large but unattractive folds. He knew that well enough before he touched the rag—but it was a forlorn hope.

It was the older man who hastily picked up these evidences, not of the Professor's dishonour, but his own, and rapidly put them back where they belonged; darting a glance over his left shoulder and sighing with relief to find that there was still no one about, not the sound of a distant footfall, not the glide of a serf. His companion's face was darker and flushed.

"I could have sworn ..." he opened. Then he added, murmuring, "He must have taken it away."

"I wish we hadn't ..." began the Home Secretary, and then switched off to, "You're quite sure you saw it with your own eyes, Tommy?"

"Absolutely certain," said the young man, with a fearless steady gaze, and proud to be telling one truth at least.

The Home Secretary held his chin in his hand, stood silent for a good quarter of a minute, and then said something characteristic of his profession as a statesman. He said, "Humm!"

* * * * * * *

What had happened?

Dear—or, if that is too familiar a term—charming reader, this is not one of the detective stories of commerce. You shall know all about it beforehand, as you have already known all about it, step by step. You shall be subjected to no torture of suspense. We will leave that to the people of our story. They were born for it.

What had happened was simple enough. The Professor had gone off to the library. He wanted to make certain of the Society at Berne in the Almanac de Gotha. With men such as he, an obsession having cropped up has a horrid fascination for the mind and holds it. He was worrying about the exact title: whether it was Crystallographique, or Crystallographische, or de Crystallographic. He was determined to get it right.

He kept on talking to himself, as was his learned habit, repeating with a hideous smile the words, "Crystals ... ah! yes ... crystals.... Crystals, eh? Crystals ... yes.... Crystallograph ... something, eh? Now then, it'll be among the books of reference, eh? Crystals.... Oh, what a dirty trick that was of Leader to play!" His left hand was fumbling in the left-hand pocket, where he always kept those indispensable instruments of research, his large tortoise-shell spectacles. His hand groped. He muttered the word "Berne" three times in less and less confident tones. Then the message so tardily conveyed reached his erudite brain. "Oh! ... I've lost my spectacles!"

He never got used to the shock of losing his spectacles, though he suffered from it a dozen times a day. Each time he lost them it was all up with him; each time he went through a crisis. Here he was in the depths of the country and without eyes! There was a touch of agony in his muttering now, as came louder the words, "My spectacles, oh, ah! my spectacles ... now where could I ..." He bent his powerful will to the control of his, if possible, less powerful memory; he traced events back one after the other for a good three minutes, and then he remembered that he had gone out in his overcoat and had left it hanging in the hall.

The Professor gave an odd little scream like a shot
rabbit.

He shambled out and groped in the recesses of the left-hand pocket, and there, side by side with his familiar handkerchief, the faithful companion of many days, was the feel of the rough spectacle case; it was all right, but also, what annoyed him a little, a pebble. It was natural that pebbles should get into one's pockets when one was out walking in the country; at least, he thought it was. He thought it went with those terrible animals called cows, and all that sort of thing. But he pulled it out mechanically, felt the prick of a pin and then gave an odd little scream, like a shot rabbit. Next (excuse him!) he rapped out a frightful oath. "My God!" cried the aged blasphemer. No less. But the violence of his emotion must have shaken his standards.

He stood there, with the emerald in the palm of his right hand, staring at it, distraught. And once more in his bewilderment he fell to repeating the name of his Creator—upon whose existence indeed, he had more than once learnedly discoursed, concluding upon the whole against it.

It is said that under the strain of very severe emotion men do things unnatural, out of themselves. And behold! Professor William de Bohun behaved for the next half hour like a whole group of characters, any one of whom you would have said he could not have thrown himself into for the world. Terror inspired him, and the tragic sense of impending doom.

It must be got rid of!

He had a mad impulse to swallow it. Luckily he restrained it in time: it was too big, its metal fastenings too angular for health; and then, there was the pin.

After he had given up the swallowing baulk, another, far more feasible, arose and formed itself more clearly. There appeared before his mind's eye a young, round naïve face, fresh to the world, an awkward figure, the whole standing out against the background of known poverty. It was the figure of McTaggart, the journalist.

A wicked glint illumined the Professor's eye.

"Oh! Baleful, hellish light, thus to suffuse
The inactive optic, wontedly so dulled,
But now with evil purpose all inflamed!"

as Milton has it in the matter of the fish-god, Dagon.

He made no excuses for himself. He recked nothing of the young man's ruin. He plunged heartily and heavily into sin. As his colleague the Professor of Pastoral Theology had once finely quoted in his Luther Commemoration Lecture, "Si peccas pecca fortiter."

It is generally held by the more liberal school among theologians that man acting of his own free will is not mastered by an external evil impulse, but may well submit to it.

So it was with Cousin William on this never-to-be-forgotten occasion of his chief downfall.

A Minor Devil happened at that moment to be wandering rather emptily through Paulings, seeking what he might devour. He was hungry, poor spirit; he had eaten nothing since he had left his own place at midnight and he had got lost in the fog all morning. He had almost caught a small housemaid, but she had slipped away through the efforts of her patron saint, sweet Millicent, and left him perfectly ravenous. It was almost noon and devils are not built for fasting. Judge then his joy at coming, by pure chance, upon this evil old man. He almost jumped out of his black fiendish skin for joy to perceive the flashing violet light which surrounds, in the eyes of supernatural beings, the head of a wicked man. He spotted it first from a corner of the hall where he had just come out of a corridor. He rubbed his hands together and even flapped his clawed wings in his excitement. He flew up to the Professor and began pouring all sorts of excellent suggestions into his ear—his left ear.

Young McTaggart could play billiards ... the Professor had heard them say that ... young McTaggart was probably proud of his billiards ... he could be got to go round the table exhibiting his billiards. He would take off his coat before exhibiting his billiards. And when the coat was once off, and its owner's eye was concentrated on the billiard table ... oh, then!...