Geraldine Bonner

“ 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. ”

“ Everybody knows that when I married Lord Castlecourt I was poor. What everybody does not know is that I was a natural spend-thrift. Extravagance was in my blood, as drinking or the love of cards is in the blood of some men. I had never had any money at all. I used to wear the same gloves for years, and always made my own frocks—not badly, either. I’ve made gowns that Lady Bundy said— But that has nothing to do with it ”

“ Farley Street, Knightsbridge, London. I BELIEVE it is not necessary for me to state how a chamois-skin bag containing one hundred and sixty-two diamonds came into my hands on the evening of May 14th. That it did come into my possession was enough for me. I never before thought that the possession of diamonds could make a woman so perfectly miserable. When I was a young girl in Necropolis City I used to think to own a diamond—even one small one—would be just about the acme of human joy. ”

“ With a woman of Lady Castlecourt’s lax and unbusinesslike methods, unusual conditions could be readily exacted. She is of the class of persons that, under a pressing need for money, would agree to any conditions and immediately forget them. That she did agree to a speedy reimbursement I am positive; that once again she found herself confronted by an angry and threatening creditor; and that, in desperation and with the assistance of Sara Dwight, she stole the diamonds, intending probably to pawn them, is the conclusion to which my experience and investigations have led me. ”

“ I paid off all my debts, both in Paris and London; I even paid a year’s interest on the diamonds. For a short time I breathed again, and was gay and light-hearted. My husband would never know that I had not paid my bills for five years and had been threatened with a lawsuit. It was delightful to get rid of this fear, and I was quite my old self. I suppose I ought to have felt more [204] guilty; but when one is relieved of a great weight, one’s conscience is not so sensitive as it gets when there is really nothing to be sensitive about. ”

“ I tried to tidy the bureau and pick up the bottles as well as I could, and every time I looked at the door into the sitting-room I saw that policeman’s head peering round the door-post at me.
That was an awful night. I did not know it till afterward, but both Chawlmers and I were under what they call “surveillance.” I did not know either that Lord Castlecourt had told the policeman he believed us to be innocent; that we were of excellent character, and nothing but positive proof would make him think either of us guilty. ”

“ I think my nerves had been shaken by that spectral pursuit in the fog. Anyway, I wasn’t willing to risk a second edition of it.
We sat over dinner a little more than an hour. It was not yet ten when Mrs. Kennedy and I rose, and with a reminder to Tom that we were to “go to the opera,” I trailed off in advance of my hostess across the hall into the drawing-room. Here we sat down by a little gilt table, and disposed ourselves to endure that dreary period when women have to put up with one another’s society for ten minutes. It was my opportunity of getting rid of the diamonds, and I knew it. ”

“ Besides the marquis and his lady, there were a maid and a valet to be considered. The former was a dense, honest woman named Sophy Jeffers, close on to forty, and of the unredeemed ugliness of the normal lady’s maid. Such being the case, it was but natural to find that she was in love with Chawlmers, the valet, who was twenty-seven and good-looking. Jeffers was too truthful to tamper with her own age, but she did not feel it necessary to keep up the same rigid standard when it came to Chawlmers. It was less of [54] a lie to make him ten years older than herself ten years younger. ”

“ But Necropolis City is a good way behind me now, and I have found that the [158] owning of a handful of them can be about the most wearing form of misery.
I suppose there are fearless, upright people in the world who would have taken those diamonds straight back to the police station and braved public opinion. It would have been better to have had your word doubted, to be tried for a thief, put in jail, and probably complicated the diplomatic relations between England and the United States, than to conceal in your domicile one hundred and sixty-two precious stones that didn’t belong to you. ”

“ The major was a burglar beyond a doubt, but he looked and talked just like a gentleman; besides, he’d dined with us. That makes a great difference. When a man has broken bread at your table as a respectable fellow [176] creature, it’s hard to get your mind round to regarding him severely as a criminal. I felt that the only thing to do was to graciously ignore it all, as you do when some one spills the claret on your best table-cloth. At the same time, there were the diamonds! I could not let the chance escape.
“Oh, Major Thatcher!” ”

“ There might be many men in Scotland Yard who knew me, and that, as they say in Chicago, “is all the good it would do them.” They couldn’t arrest me for sitting peacefully at a theater looking at a play. As for connecting me with Sara Dwight, I would give any one a hundred pounds who, when I was dressed and had my war-paint on, would find in me a single suggestion of the late housemaid at Burridge’s. ”

“ They were more afraid of being found out than we were. The cold sweat would break out on Mr. Kennedy’s brow when the conversation edged up toward the subject of previous meetings, and Mrs. Kennedy would begin to talk feverishly about other things. She was the kind of woman who hates to be unequal to any social emergency; and I am bound to confess, considering how unprepared she was, she held her own this time with tact and spirit. She had the copious flow of small talk so many Americans [84] seem to have at command, and it rippled fluently and untiringly on from the soup to the savory. ”

“ 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 would not go to Paris with him. Nor will I go to London next season. Both places are too full of horrible memories. Perhaps some day I shall feel about [222] them as I did before the diamonds were taken, but now I do not want to leave the country at all. Besides, we can economize here, and the four thousand pounds necessary to get back the stones was a good deal for Herbert to have to pay out just now. And then it is so sweet and peaceful in the country. Nothing troubles one. Oh, how delightful a thing it is to have an easy conscience! One does not know how good it is till one has lost it. ”

“ The very candor and childishness with [152] which she showed her varying states of mind would have disarmed most people, but were to me almost conclusive proofs of her guilt. She is a woman whose shallow irresponsibility of mind is even more unusual than her remarkable beauty. No one but an old and seasoned criminal, or a creature of extraordinary simplicity, could have behaved with so much audacity in such a situation.
Having arrived at these conclusions, I am not reduced to a passive attitude. I will wait and watch until such time as the diamonds are either pawned or sold. ”

“ Lord Castlecourt didn’t like going to the hotel at all. Chawlmers used to tell me how he’d talk sometimes. Chawlmers has been with my lord ten years, and was born on the estate of Castlecourt Marsh Manor. But my lord generally did what my lady wanted, and she was not at all partial to the country. She’d say to me—she was always full of her jokes:
“Yes, it’s an excellent place, the country—an excellent place to get away from, Jeffers. And the farther [11] away you get the more excellent it seems.”
My lady had been born in Ireland, and lived there till she was a woman grown. ”

“ A dirty, messy city, and full of men ready to ogle an honest, Christian woman, as if she was what half the women look like that go prancing along the streets. My lady spent a good deal of her time at the dressmakers, and she and I were forever going up to top stories in little, silly lifts that go up of themselves. ”

“ There was not a sound but our own horse’s hoof-beats, and far off, like a noise muffled by cotton wool, the echo of our pursuer’s. Through the opaque, motionless atmosphere I saw that the vista into which I stared was deserted. There was not a human figure or a vehicle in sight. ”

“ I didn’t know how extravagant I was [191] till I married and Lord Castlecourt gave me six hundred pounds a year to dress on. It was a fortune to me. I’d never thought one woman could have so much. The first two years of our married life I did not run over it, because we lived most of the time in the country, and I was unused to it, and spent it slowly and carefully. I was still unaccustomed to it when, after my second boy was born, Herbert brought me to town for my first season since our marriage. ”

“ Dwight as an accomplice I am not qualified to state. In my opinion, fear of detection made her seek the aid of a confederate. Sara’s flight, with its obviously suspicious surroundings, has an air of prearrangement suggestive of having been carefully planned to divert suspicion from the real criminal. Sophy Jeffers assured me that Lady Castlecourt had never, to her knowledge, conversed at any length with the housemaid. But Jeffers is a very simple-minded person, whom it would be an easy matter to deceive. That Sara Dwight was her ladyship’s accomplice I am positive ”

“ Society made much of her; she became one of its most brilliant ornaments. Her husband’s infatuation was well known. During the first years of their marriage he could refuse her nothing, and he stinted himself—for, tho well off, Lord Castlecourt is by no means a millionaire peer—in order to satisfy her whims. The lady very quickly developed great extravagances. She became known as one of the most expensively dressed women in London. ”

“ Some time before that I got her things ready, the gown laid out, and the diamonds on the dressing-table. They were kept in a leather case of their own, and then put in a despatch-box that shut with a patent lock. When we traveled I always carried this box—that is, when my lady used it. A good deal of the time it was at the bankers’. Lord Castlecourt was very choice about the diamonds. Some of them had been in his family for generations. The way they were set now—in a necklace with pendants, the larger stones surrounded by smaller ones—had been a new setting made for his mother. ”

“ We stopped at the Bristol, and stayed one month. My lady went out a great deal, and between-whiles was, as usual, at what they [16] call there “couturières’,” at the jewelers’, or the shops on the Rue de la Paix. She also bought from Bolkonsky, the furrier, a very smart jacket of Russian sable that I’ll be bound cost a pretty penny. When we went back to London for the season her beauty and her costumes were the talk of the town. Old Lady Bundy’s maid told me that Lady Bundy went about saying: “And but for me, she’d be the mother of the red-headed larrykins of an Irish squireen!” ”

“ The theft reminded us both of the affair of the Comtesse de Chateaugay’s rubies, when this particular thief, who speaks French as well as she does English, was supposed to have been the moving spirit in one of the most daring jewel robberies of our time.
Brison, confident that Sara Dwight and Laura the Lady were one and the same, concentrated his powers in an effort to find her. He was successful to the extent of locating a woman closely resembling Laura the Lady living quietly in a furnished [132] flat in Knightsbridge with a man who passed as her husband. ”

“ Tom didn’t say much. He doesn’t in moments like this. He’s got the nerve all right, but not the brain. There’s no inventive ability in Tom, he’s not built for crises. Handsome [67] Harry now and then dropped some remark through the trap, which was like a trickle of icy water down one’s spine. I began to realize that my lips were dry, and that the insides of my gloves were damp. I knew that whatever was to be done had to come from me. I’d got them into this, and, as they say in Chicago, “it was up to me” to get them out. ”

“ 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.
[115] “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! ”

“ When I told this to the detectives, one of the papers said it showed “how deceptive even the best servants were.” As if a valet and a lady’s maid couldn’t stop for a moment of talk! Poor things! we work hard enough most of the time, I’m sure. And that we weren’t long standing there idle can be seen from the fact that I heard half-past six strike. I was for urging Chawlmers to go then—as Lady Castlecourt might be in at any moment—but he hung about, following me into my lady’s room, helping me draw the [26] curtains and turn on all the lights, for my lady can’t bear to dress by daylight. ”

“ Brison, the Scotland Yard detective, had us up in the sitting-room asking us questions till I was fair muddled, and didn’t know truth from lies. Lord Castlecourt and my lady were both present, and Mr. Brison was forever politely asking my lady questions till she got quite angry with him, and said she wasn’t at all sure the diamonds were stolen; they might have been mislaid, and would turn up somewhere. Mr. Brison was surprised, and asked my lady if she had any idea where they were liable to turn up ”