Colonel Cecil Cruikshank had, that wet Tuesday evening in the autumn of 1884, done the handsomest thing a man of his position can do: he had opened his cellar. A pipe of port had come up from the harbour that day, and Dr Quill's standing invitation to the laying-down — issued so often that it had begun to seem a species of furniture — was at last made flesh. The vintage was to be decanted in the cellar passage, carried up, and judged in the dining room; and the household drifted agreeably between the two, as households will when there is something to drink and nothing yet to think about.
At 8:30 Mrs Sib Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, trimmed the stair-head lamp and set it high, the cellar being opened. A little after 9:00 the Colonel was found at the foot of the cellar stair, lying face-down across the bottom three steps, struck once from behind. The iron decanting stand lay beside him. There was no other injury upon him whatsoever, which the company agreed was at least tidy.
He lay squarely between the stair-foot and the arch into the cellar passage, and lay so completely that a man coming down the stair could not have continued into the cellar without stepping over him. Xerxes had been in that passage at the time, at the racks, chalking bins since 8:50; he heard the fall and nothing else, being behind the arch, and saw nothing at all.
The decanting stand's cradle was still warm from the lamp and bore no cloth-print. The cellar cloths hung folded and dry upon their hook. Whoever lifted the thing lifted it bare-handed and set it down again at once, which is not the way one handles iron that has been standing near a flame.
The vintage itself had come to no harm. A decanter stood upon the cellar sill, three-quarters full and undisturbed, its stopper laid beside it. Nothing had been taken from the racks; the cellar key was found in the Colonel's own waistcoat; and it was observed, without much satisfaction, that nothing in the cellar was worth stealing that had not been left exactly where it was.
At 9:04 Aziz was found on the cellar stair-head, standing. His sleeve was dusted with cellar whitewash from the elbow to the cuff. He said he had come to fetch Xerxes up to the judging, and said it in the manner of a man who has come to fetch somebody up to the judging. He wore, as he always does, a fez, and about his neck on a plain cord a small enamelled locket. The locket was a gift from Xerxes; it is worth more than a year of Aziz's keep; it is never taken off, and has never been offered for sale. His exile is his own; his purse is Xerxes's. That afternoon he had remarked, in Mrs Sib Gow's hearing, that a house may take a man's money and his name and leave him his own, but that it must not take the man.
The stair-head lamp, when it was looked at, had been turned down to a thread.
In the dining room the four judging glasses sat poured and untouched. Quill, Lavinia, Cousin R and Nan had been sitting to them from a quarter to nine and vouched for one another in a body, none of them having tasted so much as a mouthful, the ceremony requiring the Colonel's presence and the Colonel being detained.
Upstairs, on the Colonel's writing table, uncovered by an ink-pot, lay a marriage settlement drawn in his own hand that afternoon, providing for a match between Nan Pringle and Xerxes Hartfield, with the venture's partnership articles pinned to it. He had read it aloud after dinner to the whole company, in the highest good humour, and had for a month been pressing the match upon anyone within earshot: that a partner of standing wanted a wife, and that his own poor relation would do handsomely. At table that evening he had gone further, and said that the thing would be signed before Martinmas, and that any private arrangement of Xerxes's would have to be put by. Aziz had stood at the Colonel's elbow throughout the reading, and had left the room at about 8:40, before it was finished.
The Colonel had, that week, no quarrel with any man in the house but upon that one subject, which he had aired at dinner.
The rest of the establishment was disposed as follows. Captain Wat Frew, who supplies the cellar and takes his cut in confidences, had brought the pipe up from the harbour himself and stayed to be paid; he held two of the Colonel's buried shames, was paid quarterly for holding them, had been paid in full that afternoon, and had that day received a further order for two pipes for the spring. He was in the stable yard from 8:35, receipting the carter and drinking with him, and the carter and Mrs Sib Gow both place him there until 9:10. Lavinia — Lady Lavinia Loveless upon the bills, retained by the Colonel to reach his late wife — had had her retainer renewed for a further year on the first of the month and doubled that week, the Colonel observing that his wife's voice was worth any money; she sat at the judging glasses from a quarter to nine. Effie, the bright young thing and heir-presumptive, had come out from town at his invitation to taste the vintage and hear the settlement read; she was in the morning room from 8:45, where Fifi and Zane Swain were laying out the second tray, and both servants place her there without a break until the body was found. Fifi and Zane themselves are vouched for by Mrs Sib Gow and by Effie. Cousin R sat with the glasses. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt passed the whole evening at the mission house in Cairnholm at his Tuesday penitential office, the register signed and the sexton attending, and was nowhere near the Manor.
There remained the small matter of the will, which was unsigned. The Colonel's man of business was to come out from Cairnholm on the Thursday to take the signature; Effie, being heir-presumptive under the old will and uncertain of the new, stood to lose by his dying this week, and had the grace to say so before anyone asked.
The four judging glasses stand in a row in the empty dining room, poured and untasted, the port gone dull. Upstairs the settlement lies open under its ink-pot. On the cellar stair-head a lamp burns down to a thread.