Colonel Cecil Cruikshank had been a fortnight at the coast, taking the airs on medical advice and his own inclination, and returned on a wet October evening to find his house improved behind his back. The furniture stood a hand's breadth off its accustomed marks. The portraits, which had hung agreeably crooked since the Crimea, had been levelled. The conservatory had been tidied to within an inch of its life. A small homecoming dinner was got up for him, and he ate it while explaining, at length and to Nan Pringle in particular, what a levelled portrait does to a room.
Nan bore it. She had run the house in his absence and given the orders that had done the mischief, and she took her scolding in the drawing-room from half past nine onward with the composure of a woman who had expected it since Tuesday.
The party was not large. Xerxes Hartfield had called in the afternoon on business touching the Colonel's venture and had stayed to dinner; he left the Manor at nine o'clock and was driven home to Hartfield House. Aziz had not come with him, being kept at Hartfield House by a delivery. Captain Wat Frew was at sea with the tide. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt was at the manse across the town at his own devotions, and had not been to the Manor in a month. Dr Tobias Quill sat over the port until ten o'clock, as he did most weeks, and then went through to the drawing-room. Lady Lavinia Loveless, who attends the Manor weekly on the Colonel's account, had been kept to dinner for the occasion and did not leave the drawing-room from dinner until eleven o'clock. And Cousin R was there, as Cousin R always is — the guest nobody can place and nobody has ever thought to ask about, who has orbited the Colonel for years, keeps a flower-press in his rooms, and cannot pass a crooked thing without setting it straight.
Effie Strange came down late, bright and rattling, and drank very little. She was called the moth of Cairnholm from the season she came out — the bright thing that flew at every lamp in the county — and she said it herself that night, cheerfully, over the fish. She had lately done Xerxes a small service over a shipping paper, and he had thanked her for it before the company at nine o'clock, and they parted on excellent terms. She had no quarrel with the twins and had never had; that summer, when a broken decanter was laid at Zane Swain's door, it was Effie who spoke for him to the Colonel, and the matter was dropped. She owed money in three directions and had twice that week written to the Colonel asking him to settle it. He had not answered. His will stands as it stood.
At half past nine she left the table, saying she wanted air and a quiet quarter of an hour, and went through to the conservatory.
Mrs Sib Gow, the housekeeper, kept the passage from the hall to the conservatory in view from the pantry door between half past nine and eleven o'clock, and could say who went through it. She saw Effie go through at half past nine. She saw Cousin R go through at a quarter to ten. She saw no one else until Fifi found the body. Zane was in the servants' hall and at the dining-room door across that whole span, vouched for by Mrs Gow throughout, having never yet been caught out of his place; Fifi was belowstairs with her likewise, until she was sent through at eleven o'clock to ask whether Effie wanted anything.
Cousin R came back into the drawing-room at ten o'clock and took up a hand of cards with Lavinia. He remarked that Effie had asked to be left alone with the rain, and that he had not disturbed her.
At eleven o'clock Fifi found her in the small blue sitting-room off the conservatory, lying along the chaise as though she had merely stopped listening. She had been smothered. Not a cushion was out of place. Her glass stood upright and half full on the table beside her. The door had been left ajar.
The room had been rearranged along with the rest of the house. The chaise had been moved under the window and the lamp shifted to the far table, with the consequence that a person lying on the chaise lay in shadow and could not be seen from the doorway at all. During the fortnight the Colonel was away, Cousin R had remained at the Manor and had been seen most days in the conservatory, moving that furniture a little at a time, until it sat as he wanted it.
On the sill above her lay a single moth, very lately dead, its wings set open and even. The window was shut, and had been shut all evening, the catch stiff with paint. The gardener swore that no moth had been in the blue sitting-room that fortnight, the window having been painted shut since August.
Quill, examining her, gave it that the thing had been done between half past nine and half past ten, and that she had not struggled to speak of.
The Colonel was in the dining-room and then the drawing-room from dinner until eleven o'clock, in company throughout, holding forth on his portraits. He received the news with the air of a man handed a further inconvenience.
It is worth setting down, since half the household has seen it and nobody has remarked on it in years, that Cousin R presses flowers. He also presses moths: pale things laid open between the pages of the pressed blooms, each one set true, each one dated in a small hand.
The blue sitting-room is tidied now and lamplit, the chaise back under the window; and on the sill a moth with its wings set open and even, as though someone had taken a moment over it.