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Updated: June 21, 2025
"What is the room yonder used for?" asked Godfrey, pointing to the connecting door. "It's a sort of store-room just now, sir," said Parks. "Mr. Vantine is just back from Europe, and we've been unpacking in there some of the things he bought while abroad." "I guess that's all," said Goldberger, after a moment. "Send in Mr. Vantine, please." Parks went out, and Vantine came in a moment later.
Now go ahead; and remember there's no hurry." "Well, sir," began Rogers slowly, as though carefully considering his words, "Mr. Vantine came out from dinner about half-past seven maybe a little later than that and told me to light all the lights in here and in the next room. You see there are gas and electrics both, sir, and I lighted them all.
I put it rather brutally, no doubt, but I was anxious to end the interview. Mr. Morgan's face grew very red. "He did!" he ejaculated. "Ha well, I have heard he was rather crazy." "He was as sane as any man I ever knew," I retorted drily. And then I remembered the doubts which had assailed me that last day, when Vantine was fingering the Boule cabinet. But I kept those doubts to myself.
There's a little difficulty I want you to untangle for me." I followed him upstairs to his study, where a table laid for two had been placed near a low window. "I had lunch served up here," Vantine explained, as we sat down, "because this is the only really pleasant room left in the house. If I didn't own that plot of ground next door, this place would be impossible.
Since they were not taken, it follows, doesn't it, that he was killed before he had a chance at the drawer? Perhaps he never saw the cabinet. He must have been killed out there in the ante-room, a few minutes after Parks left." "And how about Vantine?" Godfrey asked. "I don't know," I said, helplessly.
Great nobles, whether possessed of vast wealth and estates, or altogether landless, were summoned to take their rightful positions at the Court, where Vantine the wine-grower, and Jost the Jew, no more obtained admittance; men of science, letters and learning, were sought out and honoured in various ways, their wives and daughters receiving special marks of the Royal attention and favour; and round the icy and statuesque beauty of the Queen soon gathered a brilliant bevy of the real world of women, not the half-world of the 'femme galante' which having long held sway over the Crown Prince while Heir-Apparent to the Throne, judged itself almost as a necessary, and even becoming, appendage to his larger responsibility and state as King.
It stood there blazing with arrogant beauty, a thing apart. Who had helped Vantine place it there, I wondered? Neither Rogers nor Parks had mentioned doing so. I turned back to the outer room. Rogers was sitting crouched forward in his chair, his hands over his eyes, and I could feel him jerk with nervousness as I touched him on the shoulder. "Oh, is it you, Mr. Lester?" he gasped.
"It has occurred to me, madame, that you may have seen him that he may even be known to you." "What was his name?" "The card he sent in to Mr. Vantine bore the name of Théophile d'Aurelle." She shook her head. "I have never before heard that name, Mr. Lester."
She, also, wanted to open the secret drawer, in order to secure its contents that seems fairly certain from her connection with the first caller." "You still think it was her photograph he carried in his watch?" "I am sure of it. But how did it happen that it was Vantine who was killed?
There is a certain mystery surrounding this cabinet which we have not been able to solve. I suppose you have read of the mysterious deaths of Mr. Vantine and of an unknown Frenchman, both in the same room at the Vantine house, and both apparently from the same cause?" He nodded. "Do you mean that this cabinet is connected with them in any way?" he asked quickly.
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