Colonel Cecil Cruikshank had promised his India slides for a fortnight, and on a wet Tuesday evening in the autumn of 1884 the long drawing-room at Cruikshank Manor was shuttered against the weather, the chairs ranked in rows, and the magic lantern set hissing upon its stand at the back of the room. The lamps went down at nine. The company understood that twenty minutes of reliable darkness lay between the first slide and the last, and settled into it with the patience of persons who have seen elephants before.
At 9:20 the last slide went dark and Zane brought up the lamps. The Colonel was not in his chair at the front. He was found at the foot of the main stair, below the gallery landing, quite tidy, his neck broken. Dr Tobias Quill, who had sat three chairs from the lantern and had therefore missed nothing that the chimney-glow illuminated, gave the fall as the cause and the time as within the darkness. There was no mark upon the Colonel but the fall. Nothing had been taken from him: pocket-book, watch and ring were all upon him still.
It must be said that the gallery landing had been asking for this for a fortnight. The rail was under repair; the joiner's trestle stood against the gap where the balusters should have been, and a length of dust-sheet was tacked over it, which is a courtesy to the eye and no obstacle whatever to a gentleman going forward. Everyone in the house knew the rail was out. It had been discussed at table. In the dark of the passage, however, the gap was invisible, and the dust-sheet no more than a paler patch of nothing.
The lantern was lit at 9:00 and burned without interruption until 9:20. The company sat in the dark for those twenty minutes. Zane worked the slides from the back of the room, and named afterwards every person he could account for in the glow of the lantern chimney, which is the sort of testimony one may take or leave, though he gave it steadily.
On the floor beside the Colonel there lay a folded note in Nan's hand, four words: "He is upstairs now." It had been slipped to the Colonel during the lecture. Nan said at once, and without being asked twice, that she had written it, and that it referred to Captain Wat Frew, whom she had seen go up.
Captain Wat Frew was in fact not upstairs at 9:00, nor at any time during the lecture. He had gone out to the yard for his pipe at ten minutes to nine, and Mrs Sib Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, had him under her eye at the scullery door until the lamps came up.
The Colonel's chair was empty from about 9:05. Cousin R, who sat directly behind him, said the Colonel rose without a word and went out by the door nearest the stair. He carried his stick and a lit candle-stub in a chamber-stick; the chamber-stick was found on the third step from the top, still upright, the candle out. He had gone up in the dark, quietly, on his own feet.
Nan sat in the second row throughout, at Lady Lavinia Loveless's left hand, and never left her chair. Lavinia said so; Dr Quill said so.
Certain matters of the household attach themselves to the evening whether one invites them or not.
Nan Pringle is the Colonel's niece by his late wife's Pringle line, and his dependent. She keeps his correspondence, his appointment book and his household accounts, and has lived at Cruikshank Manor eleven years without wages. Her allowance is thirty shillings a quarter, counted into her hand at the breakfast table before the assembled household, which is a tidy way of doing a thing that might be done less publicly.
The Colonel's will, as it has stood these nine years, divides the residue between Effie Strange and Nan. On the Monday the Colonel had his solicitor, Mr Baird, out from Cairnholm for two hours in the study, and told the company at dinner that he had settled on a new instrument and would sign it at eleven o'clock on Wednesday. Nan had written Mr Baird into the appointment book herself, twice.
At that same dinner the Colonel observed, cheerfully, that a woman who cannot keep a civil tongue in a house that feeds her may find the house smaller than she thought. He was looking at Nan when he said it. Effie Strange laughed; nobody else did.
The Colonel had lately spoken of settling Nan by marriage upon Xerxes Hartfield, and had put it to Xerxes twice; Aziz was in the room the second time, in his fez, courteous, and unamused.
For a week the Colonel had complained that somebody was going up to the gallery at night and at the linen presses. He was warm on the subject. He said he would catch the party himself and not trouble the police, and repeated it in the hearing of anyone who would stand still for it.
Fifi and Zane had a bad half-hour of it on the Saturday, when the Colonel found a hat of his father's in the boot-room and asked which of them had been at his things. Nothing came of it. No notice was given, and their characters stand — Fifi, who has a hat-brim of secrets and a horror of a poor reference, being particularly anxious that they should.
And Nan alone was told, that afternoon, that Captain Frew would come to the lecture and take his pipe in the yard as he always does. She keeps the Colonel's engagements; she passed the word to the kitchen herself.
As to the room: Xerxes Hartfield and Dr Quill sat the lecture through and both give the room as it was. Lady Lavinia Loveless came for the slides, there being no sitting on a Tuesday. Effie Strange sent word she was kept in town at the Assembly Rooms until midnight and did not come. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt passed the whole evening at St Mungo's vestry with his sexton, and neither was at the Manor at any hour of it. Aziz sat at the end of the front row beside Xerxes for the whole of the lecture, as Xerxes and Cousin R both place him. Fifi was belowstairs from a quarter to nine, laying the supper trays with Mrs Gow, who had her in sight the whole while. Wat had his pipe. Cousin R, who is a guest of no fixed relation and collects what people let fall, sat behind the Colonel's chair the whole twenty minutes, and Dr Quill and Lavinia both place him there.
It should be recorded, for the comfort of those who like their instruments tidy, that under the Colonel's will as it stood, and under any instrument not yet signed, the estate falls as the old paper directs.
The lamps up, then; the lantern still ticking as it cooled; and on the floor by the Colonel a folded slip of paper with four words on it in a small, clerkly hand.