It rained at Cairnholm that Sunday, as it does, and the household of Cruikshank Manor came home from morning service at St Mungo's damp about the hems and perfectly composed. Colonel Cecil Cruikshank kept a Sunday table and filled it on the usual principle: his poor relation, his business partner, his physician, his medium, and the inevitable Cousin R. The dining room is the most observed room in the house — a long table, two fireplaces, and a service passage at either end — and on that evening it did its duty admirably. Nearly everybody was seen by nearly everybody else for nearly the whole of it.
The Colonel had been in voice since morning. At church, within hearing of six people, he had observed that a man of Xerxes's fortune wanted a wife and a settled house, and that certain household arrangements at Hartfield House would want tidying before Michaelmas. He said it as he said most things, which was loudly, and then he went in and sang.
At table he improved upon the theme. Between the soup and the fish he announced that he had that afternoon written to Hartfield House proposing a match between Xerxes and Nan, and that he expected the thing settled by Michaelmas; he added that he had already spoken to his solicitor about settlements. Nan said nothing. Xerxes said it was a handsome notion and ate his fish. Nan Pringle lives at the Manor upon an allowance the Colonel was accustomed to name aloud at table, and she had learned that afternoon that she was to be married to a gentleman who had never once courted her; she took this, as she took the allowance, in silence, and shortly afterwards was handed the fish to carve, Fifi having been called away.
Aziz, who had come with Xerxes, rose from the table when the match was announced and did not return to it. He left at 8:42. He has lived under Xerxes's roof for nine years; at Hartfield House he keeps his own rooms adjoining Xerxes's, and at the Manor he is seated at the far end of the table, below Cousin R. Three weeks ago the Colonel had refused him a seat in the Manor pew and had him sent round to the servants' bench, and Xerxes made no objection at the time.
At 8:40 the Colonel left the table, announcing to the company that he would take his port in the gun room and that nobody was to follow him. Zane carried in the decanter at 8:42 and came straight out again, being a young man who has never in his life gone where he was not sent; he was back in the dining room by 8:44 and served and cleared continuously, in view of the whole table, until 9:20. The gun room has one door, off the long corridor.
At 8:45 Mrs Sib Gow, the housekeeper, met Aziz in that corridor. He told her he had come to find a cloth for a spilled glass. Mrs Gow keeps the linen and had given out no cloth.
At 8:50 Lavinia rose once, to fetch her shawl from the hall, and was back in under a minute, Zane holding the door for her. At 9:05 the Colonel's bell rang from the gun room, once, and stopped. Mrs Gow answered it at 9:10, found the corridor empty and the gun-room door shut, and did not go in; the Colonel had said that he was not to be followed, and Mrs Gow is not a woman who improvises. At 9:12 Aziz rejoined the company in the drawing room, in his shirtsleeves.
At 9:20 the Colonel was found in the gun room, seated upright in his own armchair, quite dead. He had been strangled — throttled by hands. There was no cord, no weapon, no blood, and nothing in the room disturbed but a fallen footstool.
Two of his Sunday pistols lay loaded on the gun-room table, within reach of his right hand, which was the arrangement of forty years' soldiering; the company had long since stopped remarking on them. Neither had been touched. The decanter was half drunk and the glass set down neatly beside it, as a man sets down a glass he intends to take up again.
Dr Tobias Quill, who is also the coroner, put the death between 8:40 and 9:20 and would not be moved from it. He noted that the Colonel was a thick-necked man of sixty, and that the hands that did it were strong and unhurried. He noted also that the collar and stock were torn at the fastening; that caught in the stock was a short dark thread of wool; and that on the back of the Colonel's right hand there were four short scratches.
Aziz's coat, a dark wool, was found folded over a chair-back in the morning room. He dined in his shirtsleeves for the remainder of the evening and explained this by the heat of the fires. The left cuff of his shirt was torn at the seam.
The rest of the table may be accounted for with very little trouble, Mrs Gow keeping the belowstairs book and having never been known to misremember a time. Nan was in her chair from 8:40 to 9:15, where Cousin R, Lavinia and Quill all place her, carving. Xerxes was in the dining room until 9:15, disputing freight rates with Quill, who vouches for him, and went thereafter to the terrace for air, where Zane saw him; he and the Colonel hold the Bengal shipping venture jointly, at some eight hundred a year each, and neither has ever offered to buy the other out. Fifi, housemaid and twin to Zane, was called down to the kitchen at 8:35 to deal with a burst flour sack and kept there by Mrs Gow, in her sight, until 9:18 — a pity for the theorists, the Colonel having twice threatened the twins with dismissal without reference for insolence, most recently last month. Cousin R, that guest of no fixed origin who has orbited the Colonel for three seasons collecting what people say when they are tired, and who has lately been much interested in the Colonel's late wife, sat the whole evening in the chair facing the door, and was remarked upon by everyone because he did not once put down his wine. Lavinia, whom the Colonel paid four guineas a week to sit with that same late wife, and whom he had assured on Friday that the sittings would continue, left her place only for the shawl. Quill himself was visible to all from the soup to 9:20, notwithstanding that the Colonel had shouted at him across that soup about a bill.
Captain Wat Frew had been put out of the house at 8:20 in a temper, having dunned the Colonel that afternoon for sixty pounds on account of a cargo of 1871 which the Colonel underwrote and would rather forget; he was seen at the Dog and Gun on the harbour road from 8:35 until past eleven by the landlord and a dozen others. Effie Strange, the heir-presumptive, with debts she does not discuss and an apothecary's bill she does, had asked the Colonel for forty pounds on Friday and been refused; she was at the Assembly Rooms in Cairnholm from eight until midnight, the stewards' book carrying her signature at 8:10. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt passed the whole of Sunday at St Mungo's and the parish houses keeping the vigil of the fast, in company of his churchwardens from six in the evening until two in the morning, and has not entered Cruikshank Manor since Lady Cruikshank's funeral.
Of the Colonel's affairs it need only be said that his will stands unsigned in a new draft at his solicitor's, where it has stood for five weeks, no appointment having been made to sign it.
So he remains in the memory of the house: the Colonel upright in his armchair, the untouched pistols within reach of his right hand, the port set down neatly beside them; and in the morning room a folded dark coat over a chair-back, its owner in his shirtsleeves, saying nothing at all.