The Castlecourt Diamond Mystery

WE HAD been in London two years when a series of extraordinary events took place which involved us, through no fault of our own, in the most unpleasant predicament that ever overtook two honest, respectable Americans in a foreign country.

I had been sent over to start the English branch of the Colonial Box, Tub, and Cordage Company, one of the biggest concerns of the Middle West, and it wasn’t two months before I realized that the venture was going to catch on, and I was going to be at the head of a booming business. I’d brought my wife and little girl along with me. We’d been married five years—met in Necropolis City, and lived there and afterward in Chicago, where I got my first big promotion. She was Daisy K. Fairweather, of Buncumville, Indiana, and had been the belle of the place. She’d also attracted considerable attention in St. Louis and Kansas City, where she’d visited round a good deal. There was nothing green about Daisy K. Fairweather—never had been.

Daisy and I didn’t know many people when we first came over, but that little woman wasn’t here six months before she’d sized up the situation, and made up her mind just how and where she was going to butt in. The first thing she did was to conform to those particular ones among the local customs that seemed to her the most high-toned. In Chicago we’d always dined at half-past six, and given the hired girls every Thursday off. In London we dined the first year at half-past seven, and the second at half-past eight. We had four servants and a butler called Perkins, who ran everything in sight—myself included. I always dressed for dinner after Perkins came, and tried to look as if it was my lifelong custom. I’d have sunk out of sight in a sea of shame rather than have had Perkins think I had not been brought up to it.

Daisy caught on to everything, and then passed the word on to me. She was always springing innovations on me, and I did the best I could to keep my end up. She stopped talking the way she used to in Necropolis City, and made Elaine—that’s our little girl—quit calling me “Popper” and call me “Daddy.” She called her front hair her “fringe” and her shirt-waist her “bloos,” and she made me careful of what I said before the servants. “Servants talk so!” she’d say, just as if she’d heard them. In Necropolis City, or even Chicago, we never bothered about the “help” talking. They said what they wanted and we said what we wanted, and that was all there was to it. But I supposed it was all right. Whatever Daisy K. Fairweather Kennedy says goes with me.

By the second season Daisy’d broken quite a way into society, and knew a bishop and two lords. We were asked out a good deal, and we’d some worthy little dinners at our own shack—15 Farley Street, near Walworth Crescent, a thirty-five foot, four-story, high-stooped edifice that we paid the same rent for you’d pay for a seven-room flat in Chicago. Daisy by this time was in with all kinds of push. She was what she called a “success.” Nights when we didn’t go out she’d sit with me and say:

“Well, I don’t really see how I’ll ever be able to live in Chicago again, and Necropolis City would certainly kill me.”

This same season Lady Sara Gyves dined with us twice (it was a great step, Daisy said, and I took it for granted she knew), and once at a reception Daisy stood right up close to the Marchioness of Castlecourt, the greatest beauty in London, and watched her drink a cup of tea. Daisy didn’t meet her that time, but she said to me:

“Next season I’ll know her, and the season after that, if we’re careful, I’ll dine with her. Then, Cassius P. Kennedy, we will have arrived!”

I said “Sure!” That’s what I mostly say to her, because she’s mostly right. You don’t often find that little woman making breaks.

It was in our third season in London, the time the middle of May, when the things occurred of which I have made mention at the beginning of my statement. It was this way:

We’d been going out a good deal, pretty nearly every night, and we were glad to have, for once, a quiet evening at home. Of course, that doesn’t mean the same as it does in Necropolis City or even Chicago. We dine, just the same, at half-past eight, and both of us dress for dinner. We have to, Daisy says, no matter how we feel, because of the servants. The servants in London are good servants all right, but the way you have to avoid shocking their sensitive feelings sometimes makes a free-born American rebellious. I like to think I’m an object of interest to my fellow creatures, but it’s a good deal of a bother to have it on your mind that you mustn’t destroy the illusions of the butler or upset the ideals of the cook.

As we were waiting for dinner to be announced we heard a cab rattle up and stop, as it seemed, at our door. We looked at each other with inquiring eyes, and then heard the cab go off—on the full jump, I should say, by the noise it made—and a minute later the bell rang sharp and quick. Perkins opened the door, and Daisy and I heard a lady’s voice, very sweet and sort of drawling, say something in the vestibule. I peeped through the curtains, and there were a man and a woman—a distinguished-looking pair—taking off their coats and primping themselves up at the hall mirror. I’d never seen either of them before, as far as I could remember, but I could tell by their general make-up that they were the real thing—the kind Daisy was always cultivating and asking to dinner.

I stepped back, and said to her, in a whisper:

“Somebody’s come to dinner, and you’ve forgotten all about it.”

She shook her head, and whispered back:

“I haven’t asked any one to dinner; I’m sure I haven’t.”

“Well, they’re here, whether we’ve asked them or not,” I hissed, “and you can’t turn ’em out. They expect to be fed.”

“Who are they?”

“Search me! Friends of yours I’ve never seen.”

“For pity’s sake, don’t look surprised! Try and pretend it’s all right.”

We lined up by the fireplace, and got our smiles all ready. The portière was drawn, and Perkins announced:

“Major and Mrs. Thatcher.”

They sailed smilingly into the room, the woman ahead, rustling in a long, sparkly, black dress. To my certain knowledge, I’d never seen either of them before. The woman was very pretty; not pretty in the sense that Daisy is, with beautiful features and a perfect complexion, but slim, and pale, and aristocratic-looking. She had black hair with a little wreath of red flowers in it, and the whitest neck I ever saw. She evidently thought she was all right as far as herself and the house and the dinner were concerned, for she was perfectly serene, and easy as an old shoe. The man behind her was a big, handsome, dense chap—just home from India, they said, and he looked it. He’d that dull way those dead swell army fellows sometimes have; it goes with a long mustache and an eye-glass.

I looked out of the tail of my eye at Daisy, and I knew by her face she couldn’t remember either of them. But they were the genuine article, and she wasn’t going to be feazed by any situation that could boil up out of the society pool. She was just as easy as they were. She’d a smile on her face like a child, and she said the little, mild, milky things women say just as milkily and mildly as tho she was greeting her lifelong friends.

Well, it went along as smoothly as a summer sea. They located themselves as Major and Mrs. Thatcher, and told a lot about their life and their movements—all of which I could see Daisy greedily gathering in. I didn’t know whether she remembered them or not, but I didn’t think she did, she was so careful about alluding to places where she had met them. They seemed to know her all right—Mrs. Thatcher, especially. She’d allude to smart houses where Daisy had been asked, and tony people that were getting to be friends of Daisy’s. She seemed to be right in the best circles herself. I wouldn’t like to say how many times she mentioned the names of earls and lords; one of them, Baron—some name like Fiddlesticks—she said was her cousin.

She didn’t stay long after dinner. I don’t think I sat ten minutes with the major—and it was a dull ten minutes, and no mistake. There was nothing light and airy about him. He asked me about Chicago (which he pronounced “Chick-ago”), and said he had heard there was good sport in the Rocky Mountains, and thought of going there to hunt the Great Auk. I didn’t know what the Great Auk was, and I asked him. He looked blankly at me, and said he believed a “large form of bird,” which surprised me, as I had an idea it was a preadamite beast, like a behemoth.

I was glad to have the major go, not only because he was so dull, but because I was so dying to find out from Daisy if she’d placed them and who they were. They were hardly on the steps and the front door shut on them before I was back in the parlor.

“Who are they, for heavens’ sake?” I burst out.

She shook her head, laughing a little, and looking utterly bewildered.

“My dear boy,” she said, “I haven’t the least idea. It’s the most extraordinary thing I ever knew.”

“Isn’t there anything about them you remember? Didn’t they say something that gave you a clew?”

“Not a word, and yet they seem to know me so well. The queerest thing of all was that, when you were in the dining-room with the man, the woman, in the most confidential tone, began to ask me about some one called Amelia. It was too dreadful! I hadn’t the faintest notion what she meant.”

“What did you say? I’ll lay ten to one you were equal to it.”

“I realized it was desperate, and, after going through the dinner so creditably, I wasn’t going to break down over the coffee. She said: ‘How about poor Amelia?’ I knew by that ‘poor’ and by the expression of her face it was something unusual and queer. I thought a minute, and then looked as solemn as I could, and answered: ‘Really, the subject is a very painful one to me. I’d rather not talk about it.’”

We both roared. It was so like Daisy to be ready that way!

“And then—this is the strangest part of all—she put her hand in the front of her dress and drew out some little thing of chamois leather, and told me to give it to Amelia from her. I tried to stop her, but it was too late. She put it here in the crystal bowl.”

Daisy went to the bowl, and took out a little limp sack of chamois leather.

“It feels like pebbles,” she said, pinching it.

And then she opened it and shook the “pebbles” into her hand. I bent down to look at them, my head close to hers. The palm of her hand was covered with small, sparkling crystals of different sizes and very bright. We looked at them, and then at one another. They were diamonds!

For a moment we didn’t either of us say anything. Daisy had been laughing, and her laugh died away into a sort of scared giggle. Her hand began to shake a little, and it made the diamonds send out gleams in all directions.

“What—what—does it mean?” she said, in a low sort of gasp.

I just looked at them and shook my head. But I felt a cold sinking in that part of my organism where my courage is usually screwed to the sticking-place.

“Are they real, do you think?” she said again, and she took the evening paper and poured them out on it.

Spread out that way, they looked most awfully numerous and rich. There must have been more than a hundred of them of different sizes, and shaking around on the surface of the paper made them shine and sparkle like stars.

“It’s a fortune, Cassius,” she said, almost in a whisper; “it’s a fortune in diamonds. Why did she leave them?”

“Didn’t she say they were for Amelia?” I said, in a hollow tone.

“Yes; but who is Amelia? How will we ever find her? What shall we do? It’s too awful!”

We stood opposite one another with the paper between us, and tried to think. In the lamplight the diamonds winked at us with what seemed human malice. I turned round and picked up the bag they had come from, looked vaguely into it, and shook it. A last stone fell out on the paper, quite a large one, and added itself to the pile.

“Why did she leave them here?” Daisy moaned. “What did she bother us for? Why didn’t she take them to Amelia herself?”

“Because she was afraid,” I said, in the undertone of melodrama. “They’re stolen, Daisy.”

I had voiced the fear in both our hearts. We sat down opposite one another on either side of the table, with the newspaper full of diamonds between us. I don’t know whether I was as pale as Daisy, but I felt quite as bad as she looked. And sitting thus, each staring into the other’s scared face, we ran over the events of the evening.

We couldn’t make much of it; it was too uncanny. But from the first we both decided we’d felt something to be wrong. Why or how they’d come? who they were? what they wanted?—we couldn’t answer a single question. We were in a maze. The only thing that seemed certain was that they had one hundred and fifty diamonds of varying sizes that they had wanted, for some reason, to get rid of, and they’d got rid of them to us. And so we talked and talked till, by slow degrees, we got to the point where suddenly, with a simultaneous start, we looked at one another, and breathed out:

“The Castlecourt diamonds!”

We had read it all in the papers, and we had talked it over, and here we were with a pile of gems in a newspaper that might be the very stones.

“And next year I’d hoped to know Lady Castlecourt. I’d been sure I would!” Daisy wailed. “And now—”

“But you haven’t stolen the diamonds, dearest,” I said, soothingly. “You needn’t get in a fever about that.”

“But, good heavens, I might just as well! Do you suppose there’s any one in the world fool enough to believe the story of what happened here to-night? People say it’s hard to believe everything in the Bible! Why, Jonah and the whale is a simple every-day affair compared to it!”

It did look bad; the more we talked of it the worse it looked. We didn’t sleep all night, and when the dawn was coming through the blinds we were still talking, trying to decide what to do. At breakfast we sat like two graven images, not eating a thing, and all that day in the office I found it impossible to concentrate my mind, but sat thinking of what on earth we’d do with those darned diamonds.

I’d suggested, the first thing, to go and give them up at the nearest police station. But Daisy wouldn’t hear of that. She said that no one would believe a word of our story—it was too impossible. And when I came to think of it I must say I agreed with her. I saw myself telling that story in a court of justice, and I realized that a look of conscious guilt would be painted on my face the whole time. I’d have felt, whether it was true or not, that nobody really ought to believe it, and as an honest, self-respecting citizen I ought not to expect them to. Here we were, strangers that nobody knew a thing about, anyway! Daisy said they’d take us for accomplices; and when I said to her we’d be a pretty rank pair of accomplices to give up the swag without a struggle, she said they’d think we got scared, and decided to do what she calls “turn State’s evidence.”

She thought the best thing to do was to keep the stones till we could think up a more plausible story. We tried to do that, and the night after our meeting with Major and Mrs. Thatcher we stayed awake till three, thinking up “plausible stories.” We got a great collection of them, but it seemed impossible to get a good one without implicating somebody. I invented a corker, but it cast a dark suspicion on Daisy; and she had an even better one, but it would have undoubtedly resulted in the arrest of Perkins and the housemaid, and possibly myself.

It was a horrible situation. Even if we could possibly have escaped suspicion ourselves, it would have ruined us socially and financially. Would the Colonial Box, Tub, and Cordage Company have retained as the head of its London branch a man who had got himself mixed up with a sensational diamond robbery? Not on your life! That concern demands a high standard and unspotted record in all its employees. I’d have got the sack at the end of the month.

And Daisy! How would the bishop and two lords have felt about it? Had no more use for that little woman, you can bet your bottom dollar! Even Lady Sara Gyves, who, they say, will go anywhere to get a dinner, would have given her the Ice-house Laugh. I know them. And I saw my Daisy sitting at home all alone on her reception day, and taking dinner with me every night. No, sir! That wouldn’t happen if Cassius P. Kennedy had to take those diamonds to the Thames and throw them off London Bridge in a weighted bag.

So there we were! It was a dreadful predicament. Every morning we read the papers with our hearts thumping like hammers. Every ring at the bell made us jump, and we had a deadly fear that each time the portière was lifted and a caller appeared we’d see the buttons and helmet of a policeman with a warrant of arrest concealed upon his person. I began to have awful dreams and Daisy didn’t sleep at all, and got pale and peaked. We thought up more “plausible stories,” but they seemed to get less probable every time, and all our spare moments together, which used to be so happy and care free, were now dark and harassed as the meetings of conspirators.

Even concealing the miserable things was a wearing anxiety. First we decided to divide them, Daisy to wear her half in the chamois bag hung around her neck, while I concealed mine in a money-belt worn under my clothes. We had about decided on that and I’d bought the belt, when we got the idea that if we were killed in an accident they’d be found on us, and then our memoirs would go down to posterity blackened with shame. So we just put them back in the bag and locked them up in Daisy’s jewel-case, round which we hovered as they say a murderer does round the hiding-place of his victim.

I never knew before how burglars felt; but if it was anything like the way Daisy and I did, I wonder anybody ever takes to that perilous trade. We were the most unhappy creatures in London, feeling ourselves a pair of thieves, and our unpolluted, innocent home no better than a “fence.” There was less in the papers about the Castlecourt diamonds robbery, but that did not give us any peace; for, in the first place, we didn’t know for certain that we had the Castlecourt diamonds, and, in the second, when we now and then did see dark allusions to the sleuths being “on a new and more promising scent,” we modestly supposed that we might be the quarry to which it led. Daisy began to talk of “going to prison” as a termination of her career that might not be so far distant, and to the thought of which she was growing reconciled.

This about covers the ground of my immediate connection with the stolen diamonds. Their subsequent disposition is a matter in which my wife is more concerned than I am. She also will be able to tell her part of the story with more literary frills than I can muster up. I’m no writing man, and all I’ve tried to do is to state my part of the affair honestly and clearly.