Chapter SEVEN

Marjorie had insisted upon seeing her father alone, and she had worked it easily enough.

The Professor in his relief from the accursed emerald had fallen into a sprightly mood. He had compelled young Galton to take a _second_ walk, and therein had bored the turfist to agonies; which only shows that God is just, and that we are punished in that by which we sinned; in Galton's case, the avenue. During that walk the crystallographist volubly explained his exciting experiences in the past as an amateur detective. His large prattling mouth discoursed of marvellous sleuth-deeds in the past. But he did not go too far. He said nothing of emeralds. He kept the tit-bit, the great revelation, for his host--and he knew at what time to deliver it.

As for McTaggart, there was no difficulty in getting rid of _him_. All he desired was to be alone. He wandered off all solitary. Victoria Mosel, left with no one but Aunt Amelia, fled; and Aunt Amelia, once in her chair, was safe to remain there for the rest of the afternoon. Therefore was Marjorie safe to tell her father what should be done.

Her temper was at breaking point; she was in that mood when women will blame whatever is nearest at hand and most defenseless; and what more admirable butt than a widowed parent?

"Papa," she said, "there's only one thing to be done. You must get a detective! At once!"

"My dear child! My dear child!" said the shocked politician, all the traditions of the de Bohuns rising in his blood, "a detective at Paulings!"

"Oh, stuff and nonsense!" said the dutiful daughter. "I'm sick of all that. Considering the kind of people you _do_ have in Paulings--gaol birds like Tommy, and that damned old fool Cousin Bill, who steals diamonds ..."

"Hush! My dear, hush!" begged the appalled and terrified Home Secretary. He had noticed an open door, and hurriedly shut it. "Besides which, apart from being overheard, really, one must not say such things!"

"Say what?" retorted Marjorie sharply. "Oh, papa, for Heaven's sake don't talk any more nonsense, but do get that detective!"

"I can hardly telephone on such a thing as that," hesitated the poor man weakly. "Everything I say over the telephone is known at the exchange. And we know what happened that time when they were paid by _The Howl_. As for letting one of the servants do it ..."

"Oh! Good heavens, papa!" said Marjorie. "Isn't there a car? Go up in the car! Tell Morden all about it."

"Morden can hold his tongue," mused de Bohun thoughtfully.

"Of course he can!" snapped Marjorie.

"But ..." hesitated her father, again, "I don't see how ... what with the guests ... and I wouldn't have them suspect for worlds...."

And as he said this he saw out of the corner of his eye his two cousins coming back towards the house, close at hand; the elder one was gesticulating in fine fury in his new-found happiness, and the other paced sombrely fierce at the end of his torture. Before they could open the front door ...

"Oh, damn!" said Marjorie--and she nearly added "you." "I'll telephone to you from my room. I'll give you an excuse to say the Home Office is calling." And she flew upstairs.

She was safely at her telephone before the two cousins had passed the front door. She gave them time to get into her father's presence, or for her to guess, at any rate, that one of them would be in the library. Then, with the promptitude of the young and the modern, she did the trick. The basement had put her through, and the bell on the big desk rang smartly. Galton and the Professor, sitting there in the room with the Home Secretary, looked up as quickly as did their host. He was on the receiver with a nervous rapidity; and the conversation was of a simple sort which I almost blush to recall.

"Now, papa, just tell them you've got to go to town because there is a hurried summons in London. Tell them you'll be back in a couple of hours."

"Who's on?" said Lord Galton.

"Yes! Yes!" said de Bohun. "All right! Yes! The Home Office? Ah! Yes? Tell me the details," knitting his brows a little; then turning to his two cousins, "It seems they want me at Whitehall."

_The Telephone_: "Hurry up, papa; it's all got to be fitted in pretty damn close, you know; they've got to get the man, and he's got to be got here by this afternoon, and got somehow!"

_The Home Secretary_: "Ah? Yes!" Frowning, "Oh! that's serious--well! You want me at once? All right! It's Saturday afternoon you know! Is Morden there? Tell him I'll be up within the hour." Then he turned to his guests. "Yes, they want me at once, it seems. Most urgent. But they say it won't take long." He spoke into the receiver in his turn: "Do you think I can get back here by five or a little after in the car? ... Yes," turning round and nodding at his guests thoughtfully, "they say I can get back by five--or a little after, in the car. What a business it is! I have often wondered," he added sententiously as he hung up the receiver on its hook and rang the bell to order the car--"I have often wondered what makes men take office. It's a tradition," he sighed, "Some one must serve the State! But it's a weary business." All this for the benefit of his two cousins, as though they had been a public meeting. "I'll get back at once; my man can do it in forty minutes from here if he takes the cut by Muffler's Lane, and there's not much traffic after the first two hours of a Saturday afternoon."

The car was round promptly enough. It was stopped within five miles for the great man to telephone back--from a local box--to Paulings for something he had forgotten to leave word of. But he did not telephone to Paulings. He telephoned to the Home Office, of which he was the chief. To such abasement do modern contrivances drive us. He called up the invaluable Morden and discovered to his enormous relief that the invaluable Morden, though it was a Saturday and already a quarter to four, was working away.

Within twenty minutes more the great statesman was in his official palace of Whitehall. Morden was there all right, as the telephone had told him. Morden was there! Oh invaluable Morden! have you not earned those directorships and that sinecure in the Engrossing Department? By God! you have.

"Morden," said the Home Secretary.

"Aye, aye," answered Mr. Morden wittily.

"You know Scotland Yard?"

Morden did not turn a hair. Did he know Scotland Yard? Did he? He, Morden of the Home Office! The man who laid the traps for the scapegoats ... the man who worked the parks.

So young--not forty--he had already seen pass before him a long troop of politicians, and he was ready to take any folly from them, short of physical violence. So when he was asked whether he, the junior brain of the Home Office, knew the place and institution called Scotland Yard, he said that he did; and he said it as naturally as though he had been asked for some information on Thibet.

"Now who do you think," said the Home Secretary musingly, as he rose from his chair and paced up and down the enormous room, his brows tortured with deep thought--"who do you think there would be--connected with Scotland Yard, mind you!--who would undertake a private inquiry, and be rigidly secret?"

"They are all rigidly secret," said Morden simply.

The Home Secretary wagged his long head with a weary simulation of cunning, and a would-be sly smile illuminated--or at least undimmed--his eye.

"That's all right for the _public_, Morden," he said. "But you'll see what I mean in a moment. Could they find some one even _more_ rigidly secret than the rest? Eh?"

"_I_ could," said Morden. "I can tell you his name. A man called Brailton, close over sixty, but very good indeed. He was the man we used when there was that trouble about the death in Lady Matcham's house just before her administration went out of office."

"Oh, was he?" cried the Home Secretary eagerly. "Was he?" Then with great satisfaction in his voice: "In that case he is all right. It was certainly astonishing, the way that was kept back....You see, Morden, it's something of the same case here. _The trouble is in my own house_ ... _Paulings_."

For once Morden was genuinely taken aback. He was silent. "I see," he at last murmured gravely. "_Your_ house--and the safe side?--Of course!"

"It's in my own house--and the safe side? Good God, yes!" The Home Secretary spoke firmly. Then after a pause he added, "When they find out who has done it ..."

"Done what?" said Morden.

"Never mind," answered his courteous chief. "You're bound to know all about it in good time. Well, as I was saying, when they know who's done it, it might turn out to be some one of whom not a soul in the Press must know that he has done it. I mean, if he _has_ done it, nobody must know that it was he who did it, outside the few who know that he _has_. Have I made myself quite, quite clear?" he asked anxiously.

"Perfectly," said Morden.

"Now this man Brailton. When could he get down to Paulings?"

"He could come at an hour's notice," said Morden. "He got back from Yorkshire last night, and he's got nothing on for the moment."

"Ring him up," said the Home Secretary.

It was at six removes, and took just over ten minutes. The man in the outer room rang up the department, which told the section, which sent for the controller, who gave the order to the third floor, which got hold of the group, and the group had the good fortune to find Brailton at the end of a wire. Brailton would take whatever train he was told, and was waiting.

The Home Secretary meditated.

"I am going down by car now," he said. He looked at his watch. "It takes well under the hour by train--it's not seventeen miles. I shall be home by half past five, and I'll tell Marjorie. The best train is the six-thirty from St. Pancras. It gets down in forty minutes. I'll have him met and brought straight to Paulings. He'd be in time for dinner.... By the way," he added suddenly, as a thought struck him, "he'll be all right, will he? Go down?"

"Perfectly," said Morden eagerly. "Perfectly."

"No one'll suspect anything?" persisted his chief anxiously.

"Oh, no, no, no!" assured Morden airily. "I know the man like an uncle. Quiet, silver, rather too refined, silent, tall. Dresses--if anything--a little too carefully. At Lady Matcham's he passed for a Don working in Egypt who hadn't come to London for months. And in this last Yorkshire case he passed as a _Times_ correspondent just back in England from the east after some years. All you have to do is to make up good reasons for people not having seen him before. He passes perfectly."

"The accent?" said the Home Secretary, knitting his brows again. "Is--well--you know what I mean?"

"Oh, perfectly. It's beautiful; it's remarkably smooth--yet not conspicuous," said Morden. Then, "You knew old Dickie Hafton?" he added suddenly.

"Of course I knew old Dickie Hafton!" answered the indignant Home Secretary. "He was my mother-in-law's first cousin--went to the Lords in 1895 and to the Lord in 1910. Fond o' women." And there rose before his mental eye the image of that aged peer, thin, aquiline, too proud, too careful of his dress, a man of exquisite voice a trifle thin in tone, but how precise! with the old, not uncharming habit of a few French words here and there. A public figure to the last, famous for his activities in the evangelical world.

"Well," answered Morden, "old Brailton's the startling image of Dickie Hafton. You'll like him. He goes down."

"All right," said the Home Secretary, hugely satisfied. "That's settled! I'm off; I leave it to you to make arrangements. The six-thirty."

But to make his chief quite at ease, Morden whispered something in his ear.

"Really?" said the Home Secretary, as he struggled into his coat--and he said it very loudly, so that everyone could hear it in the next room, to Morden's horror. "Not old Dickie's _son_? There wouldn't be time for it!"

Morden nodded mysteriously, and whispered again: "Yes, there is! He was only eighteen.... It was the housemaid at his grandmother's." And the Home Secretary went out bemused and marvelling at the strange revelations of this pur world.