Summary. It was Cousin R, and not for silence but for possession — he had found in Gaunt his finest specimen, and took him before the pulpit could spend him. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The room told against every easy reading from the start. Nothing overturned, nothing struck, the decanter full and untouched — this was not a man surprised or a room fought through, but a man arranged, and arrangement wants a particular sort of hand. That the hymn-book was found closed, the cushions squared, the hands folded and the hat set upon the knee, spoke less of murder than of composition — a thing done afterward, with care, by someone who could not leave the work half-finished. The tray from the cabinet, carried in and laid out on the mantel with its lens and tweezers and pins and blank card, said the same in a louder voice. Nothing in that ante-room wanted labelling. Something in that chair did.

The four with grievance enough to kill him all fall on plain fact rather than character, which is as it should be. The Colonel was in Xerxes's study from ten until half past eleven, continuously with Xerxes or Wat, at the far end of the house from the only door the ante-room owns; and he is besides a noisy man, and this was quiet work. Lavinia never left the alcove from a quarter to ten, under eight pairs of eyes, and had in any case more to lose than gain — his death froze her own money rather than freeing it. Nan was in the gallery the whole evening, placed at every quarter-hour by one guest or another, and she is a woman who works through other people, not with her own two hands in a shut room. Effie was in a cab to the Shore and back, driver and manservant both plain about the times, and the door she'd have needed was in a gallery she never entered that hour.

Cousin R alone slips the evening's accounting — gone from the gallery from a quarter past ten, back after eleven with his tea, and for the interval nobody vouches. He had, twice that autumn, drawn Gaunt out on the subject of penance, hidden against displayed, and each conversation left both men grave amid a table talking of the weather; two men, it turned out, who took suffering with equal seriousness, though from opposite sides of a coat button. Gaunt's discipline — the marked linen, the knotted cord wound in oilcloth, kept these years under a buttoned collar and shown to no one, not even his own doctor — was exactly the article Cousin R prizes above all others in this world: a thing complete, unbribed, and unseen, of the kind he arranges and labels and never once sells. The Sunday announcement threatened to make it common property, preached from a pulpit at Advent for any fool in a pew to gawp at. R had said himself, coming out of that sermon, that it would be a pity to make it public. He did not mean to argue the point. He meant to prevent it, and to keep the thing for himself in the only manner his nature allows — taken whole, and set out properly, alone in a quiet room.

So he went in at a quarter past ten, pressed a folded cushion-cover over mouth and nose while Gaunt sat waiting on his half-sister, and had done it without upsetting so much as a hymn-book. Then, being what he is, he could not simply leave a specimen slumped and undignified; he set the man upright, folded the hands, squared the cushions, and fetched his instruments to lay beside the work as he lays them beside every other thing he has ever cared to keep. He was back at the fire with his tea a little after eleven, and the body was found twenty minutes later, sitting exactly as he had left it — which is to say, correctly.

I had near put the tray down to chance, one more curiosity among many that evening — until I recalled that the card upon it was blank. A man arranging a stranger's death to look like grief would have written something on the card, or nothing on the mantel at all. Only its true author would leave the label waiting, because in his own room the object always comes first and the naming after — and Gaunt, taken so, had not yet been given his name. That blank card is R's signature, plainer than any hand could write it. He is charged accordingly; the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and the file may close.

When all's said and counted, the deed it was done,
and Cousin R the answer, when answer was none.
Poor Gaunt lies quiet, a candle, a knife,
the tidiest exit from Cairnholm and life.
The lesson is here, should we trouble to learn —
but the cards, being cards, will be dealt a fresh turn.