A large diamond brooch, a string of fine pearls, and a bag of wonderful
polished emeralds.
"Mort, the man couldn't help it. Why, here's a fortune for a prince;
and yet he remained here for more. Well, he's gone; poor beggar."
They burrowed into the suit-cases and trunks. A dark green bottle came
to light, Forbes took out the cork and carelessly sniffed. A great
black wave of dizziness swept over him, and he would have fallen but
for Crawford. The bottle fell. Crawford put Forbes out into the hall
and ran back for the bottle, sensing a slight dizziness himself. He
recognized the odor. It was Persian. He and Mason had run across it
unpleasantly, once upon a time, in Teheran. He was not familiar with
the chemistry of the concoction. He corked the bottle tightly. Forbes
came in groggily.
"Well! Did you ever see such an ass, Crawford? To open a strange
bottle like that and sniff at it!"
"Here's an atomizer. They must have used that. Never touched their
victims."
"It evaporates quickly, though. But the effect on a sleeping person
would be long. Now, who the deuce is this chap Webb? A confederate?"
"Still dizzy, eh? No; Thomas is a dupe. Don't you get it? He's Lord
Monckton. Come on; we'll go down and straighten out the kinks."
So they went down-stairs. And Forbes tells me that when Thomas
acknowledged his identity, Kitty did not fall on his neck. Instead,
she walked up to him, burning with fury: so pretty that Forbes almost
fell in love with her, then and there.
"So! You pretended to be poor, and entered my home to make play behind
our backs! Despicable! We took you in without question, generously,
kindly, and treated you as one of us; and all the while you were
laughing in your sleeve!"
"Kitty!" remonstrated Killigrew, who felt twenty years gone from his
shoulders.
"Let me be! I wish him to know exactly what I think of his conduct."
She whirled upon the luckless erstwhile haberdasher's clerk; but he
held out his hand for silence. He was angry, too.
"Miss Killigrew, I entered your employ honestly. I was poor. I am
poor. I have had to work for my bread every day of my life. For seven
years I was a clerk in a haberdasher's shop in London. And one day the
solicitors came and notified me that I had fallen into the title, two
hundred and twenty pounds, and those sapphires. The estate was so
small and so heavily mortgaged that I knew I could not live on it. The
rents merely paid the interest. I was no better off than before. The
cash was all that was saved out of an annuity." From his inner
waistcoat pocket he produced a document and dropped it on the desk.
"There is the solicitor's statement, relative to the whole transaction.
And now I'll tell you the rest of it. I've been a fool. I was always
more or less alone. I met this man Cavenaugh, or whatever he calls
himself, in a concert-hall about a year ago. We became friendly. He
came to me and bought his collars and ties and suspenders."