The birthday dinner at Hartfield House was, until eleven o'clock, a very pretty success. There was champagne, there were presents, and there was Effie Strange at the centre of the table, bright as a lamp and quite unembarrassed by the cheerful public discussion of her debts, which the Colonel had promised, before the fish, to settle in the morning as a birthday matter. Between that fish and the toast itself, Xerxes remarked — lightly, as a man remarks upon the weather — that the east wing was to be shut up, the Turkish bath torn out within the month, and the tiles sold, to make room for a billiard room. Then the glasses went up, and nobody said anything further about it.
He was found at 11:20.
He lay along the marble bench of the cooling room in his own Turkish bath, in a plain linen robe, a towel folded neatly beneath his head, as a man lies who has arranged himself comfortably and then declined to get up again. The steam had gone off. The room had cooled. Not a couch was pushed askew, not a slipper out of line; nothing whatever in the room was disarranged, which is a thing one notices chiefly by its absence of interest.
Dr Tobias Quill, who is also the city's coroner and thus obliged to attend to matters twice over, examined him upon the bench. He found, at length and only because he looked for it, a single fine puncture at the base of the neck, no larger than a pin's entry. There was no other mark upon him. There was no blood upon the tiles. There was no sign of any struggle, and it may be said with confidence that Xerxes Hartfield, who had never in his life submitted quietly to anything, submitted quietly to this.
He wore no jewel. That was the first thing anyone said aloud. In the little vestibule where the robes and slippers hang, the velvet slip-case that ordinarily holds the Maharaja's Sapphire, Aziz's love-token, lay open and empty upon the shelf beside his folded evening clothes — the case gaping like a mouth that has finished a sentence. Xerxes had never sold the stone, though he had been offered a price for it three times, and wore it at his throat at all hours, bath or bed.
Within the hour, the constable turned the Sapphire up in the toe of one of Xerxes's own slippers, under the bench, where it had been dropped like a coin into a poor-box.
Beside the empty case on that same shelf stood a small glass of Dr Quill's sleeping draught, compounded by him at 8:00 and set out against Xerxes's usual hour. It had not been touched. The measure stood full to the line. Xerxes slept badly and took his draught late, near midnight, and bathed before it; the household knew the hour of the bath as well as they knew the dinner bell.
Mabel, the cheetah, lay across the vestibule threshold from ten o'clock, and was fed there by Aziz at 10:30. She did not stir. It is held in that house — held firmly, and with some pride — that she does not tolerate strangers passing her without a word from someone she knows. The east wing has one door. Whoever went in went past Mabel.
The vestibule floor was wet in a single track, from the hot room to the bench and no further; the corridor carpet outside bore no damp at all. In the vestibule cupboard, among the shaving things, lay a fine surgical needle of the sort kept in any household medicine case, and in three cabinets in this one. It had been rinsed and put back.
The company, meanwhile, had been disposed about the house with a tidiness that would have gratified a butler. The Colonel, Nan and Dr Quill sat at cards in the drawing room from 9:30 until the cry went up at 11:20, and not one of the three rose from the table. Lady Lavinia Loveless was in Effie's dressing room the whole of that time, reading the cards for the birthday, while the Reverend Simeon Gaunt, her half-brother, stood upon the terrace with Wat from 10:00, disputing the tithe upon cargo with the persistence of a man who has the scripture and the Captain who has the ledger; Gaunt did not leave him until the cry. Zane Swain passed the night at Cruikshank Manor, abed and vouched for by the entire household there, and did not come to Hartfield House at all that evening.
In the dressing room, Fifi pinned and repinned Effie's hair from 9:45 until 11:15, with Lavinia and Effie both having her in sight and in hand throughout. Fifi is rarely at Hartfield House; Effie's summons that afternoon was the first cause she had had to come in four months. She has thrown herself at Xerxes for two years and been refused, kindly, each time, which is the most disobliging manner of refusal there is. Effie herself was in that dressing room from 9:45 and in the drawing room from 11:15, when the cry went up. She has admired the Sapphire loudly and often, and has twice asked what such a stone would fetch.
Aziz, Moroccan, exiled, nine years resident, keeper of the cheetah and of Xerxes's hours, fed Mabel at the threshold at 10:30 and carried the empty dish down to the kitchen, where the cook and two maids had him until 11:10. He put the Sapphire into Xerxes's hand himself, years ago. It is worth more than everything else he owns together.
Wat runs cargo for Xerxes and knows what is in every crate; he has money out of half this house and keeps a ledger of what people would rather not have said. He did not leave the terrace.
There remains Cousin R, a guest of unplaceable origin and no surname, a fortnight in the house, who collects other people's secrets and has never been known to ask anything for them. He left the dining room at 10:15, saying he wanted the light in the east corridor. No one saw him again until 11:20, when he was among the first at the vestibule door.
His portfolio was in the smoking room. He had sketched, over the fortnight, three other rooms of the house and abandoned all three; only the east wing had held him. There were eleven studies of it — the tiles, the light falling through the ceiling stars, the marble bench — every one numbered and dated, which he had not troubled to do elsewhere. He has been asked, and has refused, four commissions this year; he accepts no payment and takes no subject he has not chosen himself. The last study bore that same day's date. It showed the cooling-room bench occupied by a reclining figure in a robe.
The cooling room, then, gone cold, the ceiling stars dark; the magnificent nabob laid along his own marble bench with a towel folded neat beneath his head; and in the vestibule an empty velvet case and a full glass, and the cheetah asleep across the door.