The Colonel had opened his cellar to lay down a new pipe of port, and Dr Quill's standing invitation was at last made flesh: a small company gathered at Cruikshank Manor on a wet October night to decant, to judge, and to set aside the vintage. Twelve glasses were poured from the decanter at 10:00, and the decanter was drunk out by all present with no ill effect whatever. Gaunt said a grace over it. Everyone declared it sound.
Cousin R took his glass away from the table at a quarter past ten, as was his habit, and did not come back.
He was found at 12:15 in the cold pantry off the cellar stair, seated upright upon a cellar stool, his glass set neatly at his elbow, quite dead. He had been dead perhaps an hour. He had been dying for rather longer. Dr Tobias Quill, physician and coroner, examined him where he sat and named laudanum in the port — a great deal of it, enough that a man would feel it come upon him slowly, grow heavy, and want very much to lie down. Quill observed, without emphasis, that a man taken so is savable for the better part of an hour, given a stomach pump and a determined hand.
There was no disorder in the pantry. Nothing was posed, nothing arranged, nothing composed. A cellar stool, a glass, a man sitting up in his coat as though waiting for the kettle.
The laudanum bottle from the Colonel's medicine press stood open on the pantry shelf, nine-tenths gone. The press is not locked and stands in the back passage between the dining room and the cellar stair; the whole household knows it, and every soul in the house had passed it that evening. Mrs Gow says the bottle was full at noon. Cousin R took laudanum himself for a bad shoulder, in small measures, and everyone knew it; his own vial was in his room, untouched, and half full.
Upon the pantry floor, half under the stool, lay a knotted cord of black wool with a small brass ring worked into it: the Reverend Simeon Gaunt's knee-cord, which he wears wound at the wrist and which he had been observed telling through his fingers all that evening.
The cold pantry has a stone floor and shares a wall with the servants' passage. Mrs Gow, in the still-room from 11:00, heard through that wall a man's voice going on and on in a low steady rhythm — not conversation — from about 11:10 until near midnight. She took it for the wireless of the mind and thought no more of it. Zane, fetching ice in the pantry passage at 11:05, heard the same low voice through the same wall and reported it to Mrs Gow at once. It should be said that a man in the cold pantry who wished to be heard could be heard: the still-room, the servants' hall and the passage all share its wall, and there were people in all three from eleven o'clock. The bell-pull in the cold pantry is in good order and hangs within reach of the stool. It was not rung.
In Cousin R's coat pocket was a folded card in his own small hand, headed "For the cellar evening," and listing under it four names with a mark against each — a note of who might be worth watching — and a fifth line reading only "the parson is the only one who understands it". His other pocket held a pocket-book of pressed things: a moth, a small bird's foot, and three photographic cards of the recently dead, arranged and lit with great care, each annotated in his hand with the hour of composition.
He had come and gone at Cruikshank Manor for eleven years, the unplaceable guest who orbits the Colonel and has no surname anyone has ever established. He collected things people would rather he did not, and had never once asked anybody for money. Within the past month he had remarked to Nan that she was the only person in the house who was never in a room, and had asked Xerxes, pleasantly, how many people in the world knew what was in his upstairs closet. Neither answered him; both said afterwards that he had not seemed to want anything. Lady Lavinia Loveless would not sit at a table with him if she could help it, holding that the spirits will not come while he is looking. Effie says he was the only person in Cairnholm who was never surprised by her, and found it restful and infuriating by turns.
Three days before, at the Colonel's table, Cousin R had described at length, and with evident pleasure, the arrangement of a drowned man he had helped lay out at the harbour: the fall of the hands, the angle of the head, the improvement he had made to both. Gaunt set down his fork and did not take it up again. On the morning of the cellar evening, Gaunt walked to the harbour mortuary and asked the keeper what alterations had been made to the drowned man before burial. The keeper told him: the hands, the head, and a moth laid on the breast. Gaunt thanked him and went away without a word more. He has held it thirty years that the body is not ours to improve, that the dying are owed prayer and nothing else is owed them, and that a man who makes an ornament of death has put himself outside mercy. He has preached it at the harbour and been thought severe. He keeps no laudanum and disapproves of it.
Gaunt was at the Manor by the Colonel's letter, invited to say a grace over the new pipe and to take the Colonel's subscription for the poor of the harbour; he is unbribable and feels no guilt about anything. He was at table for the grace and the first glass, left the dining room at 10:20, saying the noise of judgment over wine wearied him, and was next seen by anybody at 12:05, coming up the cellar stair. He gives his own account of the interval: he was at his prayers, alone.
The remainder of the company account for themselves with tiresome completeness. Nan was in the dining room from 10:00 to 11:00, filling glasses and saying nothing; from 11:00 she sat with Mrs Gow in the still-room over the linen count and did not leave it until the alarm, Mrs Gow vouching for the whole hour. Xerxes was at table until 10:40, then in the Colonel's study over the venture papers until 11:55, the Colonel and the study fire vouching for him; he sleeps badly and had taken his usual draught at nine. Wat, whose boat had brought the pipe up from the harbour and who stayed to be paid for it, was at table for the first glass and belowstairs from 10:25 in the servants' hall, being counted his money and drinking the Colonel's beer with the boot-boy; Mrs Gow came and went through that hall all evening and puts him there without a break until 12:10. Lavinia was at table until 10:30, then in the Colonel's late wife's morning room with the Colonel from 10:35 to 11:50, being paid her month's fee and talking of his wife. Effie was at table until 10:15, then in the long gallery playing at billiards against herself; Zane brought her soda and a second lamp at 10:50 and again at 11:30, and Fifi passed her twice on the gallery landing between. Zane himself was on duty in the dining room and gallery all evening under Mrs Gow's eye.
Aziz remained at Hartfield House with a chill and did not travel. Fifi was on the gallery and stairs all evening under Mrs Gow's eye, and the Colonel was in company continuously from 10:00 until the alarm — first at table, then with Lavinia, then with Xerxes in the study. Quill was at table until 10:45, and thereafter asleep in the library armchair with the decanter at his elbow, where Fifi found him at 11:40 and again at 12:10, and where he still was when the alarm was raised.
The cold pantry has since been swept, and is cold. The stool has been put back against the wall. On the shelf stands the laudanum bottle with its stopper out; and in the dining room above, eleven glasses are washed, and the twelfth stands still where it was set down, at the elbow of nobody.