His wife had been dead a year when I met Drayton Deane in the
smoking-room of a small club of which we both were members, but
where for months--perhaps because I rarely entered it--I hadn't
seen him. The room was empty and the occasion propitious. I
deliberately offered him, to have done with the matter for ever,
that advantage for which I felt he had long been looking.
"As an older acquaintance of your late wife's than even you were,"
I began, "you must let me say to you something I have on my mind.
I shall be glad to make any terms with you that you see fit to name
for the information she must have had from George Corvick--the
information you know, that had come to him, poor chap, in one of
the happiest hours of his life, straight from Hugh Vereker."
He looked at me like a dim phrenological bust. "The information--
?"
"Vereker's secret, my dear man--the general intention of his books:
the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the
figure in the carpet."
He began to flush--the numbers on his bumps to come out.
"Vereker's books had a general intention?"
I stared in my turn. "You don't mean to say you don't know it?" I
thought for a moment he was playing with me. "Mrs. Deane knew it;
she had it, as I say, straight from Corvick, who had, after
infinite search and to Vereker's own delight, found the very mouth
of the cave.
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