Xerxes Hartfield had asked a small company to Hartfield House on a mild spring evening to watch Mabel, his tame cheetah, exercised on the south lawn before dinner. The house stood full of lamplight; the garden held its breath; and the guests, having been assured that Mabel was gentleness itself, arranged themselves in a careful ring at a distance of some yards, which is the polite form of courage.
At eight o'clock Mabel was led out upon her chain. Xerxes presented her as another man presents a daughter, and a dozen spectators kept him in view throughout, so that no one afterward troubled to ask where he had been. Among the ring stood Dr Tobias Quill, an anxious man who dreads a judging eye and who had come in his professional capacity; several guests placed him among the spectators for the whole of the display. Captain Wat Frew was at the stable end of the yew walk, seeing to a delivery cart, the groom working at his elbow the entire while. Aziz remained within doors, feeding Mabel's kennel-mate, and was seen by the kitchen staff at intervals so frequent as to be tiresome. The Colonel, Nan, Cousin R and Effie were at cards at Cruikshank Manor, vouched for by that household, and heard of the evening's business only at breakfast.
The Reverend Simeon Gaunt drifted away from the spectators before the display had ended. He had never cared for animals kept beyond their proper latitude.
He was found in the yew walk that runs from the south lawn toward the stables, fallen forward on the gravel, struck once from behind on the back of the head. Beside him lay a loose granite coping-stone from the low garden wall. There was no blood beyond the single wound, and nothing about him disarranged: his coat lay flat, his hands were empty, and his hat — for he had been wearing one — was nowhere upon him. Quill, summoned at once from the ring of spectators, examined the body as coroner and set the death between eight and half past eight, which is to say during the cheetah's exercise and just after it.
A man's hat lay in the yew walk a little beyond the body. It was not a clergyman's hat. It belonged to the evening livery of a footman; and the footman Zane's evening livery and hat were noted absent from the servants' hall peg where they usually hung.
Zane Swain is an infrequent visitor at Hartfield House, come this evening to help wait upon the cheetah party — a rule-abider, careful of appearances, the sort of young man who straightens a fork that has been laid a quarter-inch out of true. His twin sister Fifi vouches for him without hesitation: that Zane was with her at the front of the house, carrying trays and lighting lamps, from before eight until the alarm was raised. Zane and Fifi were born Swann, and are near-indistinguishable in livery from behind or at any distance greater than a handshake — a resemblance the household finds diverting and the twins themselves have never had cause to correct.
There was, however, this. A spectator on the south lawn glimpsed a footman answering to Zane's build near the yew walk; and a moment later — the two sightings barely apart — saw "Zane" pass a tray at the front steps. The spectator reported both without embarrassment, having no notion that she had said anything remarkable.
Gaunt had spent the afternoon closeted with his half-sister Lavinia, and the two had parted coldly. A maid, passing with linen and pausing rather longer than linen required, heard raised voices through the door and the word "disgrace." Gaunt was Lavinia's half-brother and the trustee of her affairs, and being unbribable and severe, he had lately taken to reading his sister's household closely and spoke of "setting a wrong to rights." What he had learned that afternoon, none of the guests could say. The servants said nothing at all, which is a different silence and a better-kept one; for it was among the servants, and not among the guests, that it was known Lavinia had for some months been in the habit of receiving a footman privately, and that the footman came from elsewhere, and came often, and was not asked his business at the door. Lavinia herself had been about the grounds the whole evening, as had Aziz and Wat, all three residing at or working about Hartfield House.
So the account stood. Two footmen, or one footman twice; one hat where no hat should be, and one peg where a hat should have been; and a clergyman who had gone quietly down a gravel walk with something in his possession that he had not yet said aloud.
The coping-stone was afterward set back in its gap in the wall, where it fitted exactly. Mabel padded the length of the lawn on her chain. And a single hat lay in the yew walk, where two brisk footmen had, it seemed, been in two places at once.