Murder by Reflection Read Free

someone else’s decorations should not go empty away. Too good historical scholars to say that Miss Ibis could documentarily be proved to be even the most oblique—even batonsinistered—descendant of some medieval gangster, who preferred rather to shoot his way into wealth than to earn it, they were right loath to discourage such zeal for gentility. For another handsome sum they gave Miss Ibis a handsome “coat” all of her own. She was right. She need not brazen her name out, she could emblazon it. She now had a proprietary right in the bird. It was her Crest. It was to appear “all proper” and “gorged with a ducal coronet”—which sounds as though the bird was heavily dressed and had swallowed that head-bauble with all its metal strawberry leaves, but means in herald-argot that the bird was to appear in its natural coloring with the crown not down its throat but round its neck. The motto, too, gave their invention an easy opening. Ibis pictorially was without doubt a bird—“of the wading species”—and linguistically the same word was a good Latin mono-verbal description of a go-getter.
    So equipped, the bird-crested lady returned to the town of her adoption. Her friends asked the questions. She did not have to open the subject. Miss Kesson was naturally the first. She was quite an antiquarian and claimed to have traced half a dozen local families through old Bibles back from their present cultured prosperity to the extreme poverty of small artisans who had left their living in England to follow their conscience into the wild.
    â€œWhat a lovely design!” she remarked. “Where, dear Irene, did you find such a treasure?” She was examining her teaspoon, which on the splay of its eighteenth-century handle now carried, “an Ibis regardant, all proper, ducally gorged, on a field vert.” Of course you knew that the field was “vert” by the small dots and scratches which marked the little mound on which the costly bird was mounted. On a waving scroll underneath, you read the newly honored name “Ibis.”
    â€œWhen I was last in Britain the College of Heralds found that I had the right to carry coat-armor.” The sentence had been carefully prepared against the question. But now that it was launched it sounded heavy.
    Mrs. Maligni—of Italian extraction—looked up. “What is that?” Then, looking at her own spoon, “Oh, you have a decoration, an honor!”
    â€œWell, it’s not quite that.” Miss Ibis was able to make elucidation and further assertion sound like disavowal. “It really has nothing to do with anything I’ve done personally. I called at the College of Heralds to make some inquiries”—she hoped it sounded accidental—“about family trees and they became interested in mine.”
    â€œDoesn’t the motto tell us something?” said Miss Branch, whose forte was decipherment.
    â€œWell, yes,” allowed Miss Ibis. “The Heralds felt that it was quite a happy name because, as they said, it ‘told’ both as an emblem and a motto.”
    â€œOh, I see,” broke in Miss Branch. “How cute. Latin, of course, and so hopeful!”
    â€œYes,” said their hostess with demure assurance. “They said they felt that cultured American families looked forward as well as back. A motto meaning ‘You will go’ is, I think, a charming message of good will from the Old World to the New.”
    Then all the silver was inspected. It had always been good; Miss Ibis had collected with cost and taste. Though the true collector might have been hurt to see a jejune crest cut into a fine old piece, Miss Ibis’ taste was not so impractical as all that. Mrs. Maligni was even more interested than Miss Kesson. Miss Kesson, after making quite a good amateur effort to describe the crest in herald’s language, went on to ask about the