The Nameless Shame by Edgar Saltus

"It is most unusual! " said the Duchess of Kincardine. "Most! " she added. Then, rallying, she exclaimed: "What is the world coming to?"

There had been a stupid discussion that had arisen, how, the Lord only knows, apropos of the tea things, perhaps, on the subject of poached eggs. I had ventured to state that it was sinful to poach them in water, that no one with any sense of self-respect would touch an egg that had not been cooked in milk and mushrooms.

"Why not in champagne and pineapples? " Agatha, the duchess' daughter, had suggested. "Yes, why not?"

But here solemnities were interrupted. Yorke -- the Honorable Eric -- a beautifully preserved young man of forty, glided in.

"Ferrol is dead," he soothingly announced. "Howdy do? He was found on the floor. Good afternoon. Thanks, very much. No sugar."

"Dead! " cried a fat, rancid-faced woman, known as Lady Massingbird. "How shocking! And his engagement to Miss Rivers off only yesterday! But what was it? A fit?"

"No," Yorke replied, in the same soothing way. "No. It appears that somebody strangled him."

It was at this juncture that the Duchess of Kincardine made her notable exclamation.

The duchess, it is hardly more than worth while to relate, was née, as you may remember, not merely retroussé, but Genevieve Bridgewater, of Washington Square. The story of her marriage to a Scotch bankrupt is common property. It is also ancient history. So ancient that long since she found time to develop the Kincardine burr, and therewith a perfection of dowdiness which even in London was considered successful. Yet these laurels must have been insufficient. Whether because of her nose, or the immaculate atmosphere of lower Fifth Avenue, in which she had been brought up, or both, or something else, natural ambition, perhaps, she had also succeeded in being talked about. But that, too, is ancient history.

I had known her when she was a little thing in short skirts, and I remember still the spindle legs which she then exhibited. That rather intimate reminiscence constituted my passport to her very dingy house in Hill Street, where, of a June afternoon, she was inquiring what the world was coming to.

In London, anything that has not occurred every day since the memory of man runs not to the contrary is always unusual, unless it happens to be most so. The remark of the duchess was, therefore, in accordance with precedent. But in this instance it was justified.

The death of Ferrol -- Lord Henry Grafton Ferrol -- was, when you got at the facts, not merely unusual and most unusual, but altogether extraordinary. It was the curious circumstance that his engagement should have been broken one day and he should have been killed the next which astounded the duchess and, for that matter, the rest of us who were with her. But that circumstance, however astounding, was tame beside the surprises which followed.

With Ferrol I had had a slight acquaintance, one which had begun in Hill Street and had continued -- of all places in the world -- in the British Museum. Incidentally, I was also acquainted with Miss Rivers. Like the duchess, she, too, was a New Yorker, a millionairess to boot, and a tip top sample of what our commerce in beauty can exhibit. Joined to her looks and her dollars she had an air of dauntlessness which, to me, was very fetching, but which, in London, I had heard catalogued as "so American," a phrase which, being interpreted, means, I believe, very vulgar.

Of the breaking of her engagement to Lord Ferrol I was aware, but not of the reason. On that subject no one in Hill Street could, I found, enlighten me. It was known merely that the day previous the girl had gone to Paris. But with conjectures I was presently supplied.

Into the room there had erupted a compatriot, Lady Silverstairs, a delightful little woman, who knew pretty much all that was going and a good deal that was not. She, too, had heard of Ferrol's death and also of the broken engagement. Concerning the latter, Lady Massingbird was at the moment holding forth.

"It must be, don't you think? " she indulgently put it, "that either she found out something awful about him or else that he found out something still more awful about her?"

"May not the discoveries have been mutual? " Lady Silverstairs suggested.

"Yes," said the duchess; "but, then, you see even that does not explain how he got strangled."

The word seemed to stir my delightful compatriot voluptuously. "Strangled? " she repeated. "I thought it was a rupture of a -- of a thingumagig."

"Oh, no," Yorke consolingly corrected. "Howdy do? No. Ferrol's man ran out and saw Simpson in a hansom. Simpson, you know, is the chap who looks after -- what? Yes, physician in ordinary. Well, from what I heard this afternoon at the Bachelors', Simpson said that it was due to compression of the carotid artery."