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Page 90
"Good! Now regard the other side."
"A coat of arms--a golden bull on a red ground--why, father,
that was what puzzled you at Florence!"
"Surely it was. The thing stuck in my memory, yet I could not
remember where I had seen it before."
Signor Mannetti prepared for his effect, then made it.
"The arms of the Borgia! The arms of the Spanish Pope,
Alexander VI. of unholy memory. So all is told, and we will soon
go to bed. Having marked them this morning, you will see how
readily I was led into the heart of the secret. It only needed
some such certain sign. And everything that had happened was
consonant with this explanation. The first to suffer puzzled me;
but I solved that problem, too. You shall hear how each woman and
each man was slain. Look at this mattress upholstered in satin--
there lies the unsleeping thing that brings sleep so quickly
to others! I guessed it this morning; I proved it to-night. At
seventeen minutes past eight Prince was dead; but not until I awoke,
near two o'clock, did I dare approach him. For how did he die?
The moment the heat of his ancient body penetrated the mattress
under him, it released its awful venom. He stretched himself,
curled up again, and, as the exhalation rose, with scarcely a
tremor he passed from sleep into death. Needless to tell you
that I kept far from him, for I guessed that not until the poor
fellow was cold would the demon in the mattress sink down and
disappear, as the effret into his bottle. Then mattress and dog
were alike harmless, as they are now. I gave him only five hours,
for he was a small, thin beast, and the heat soon left his body."
"But, signor--"
"I shall anticipate all your objections if you will listen a little
longer, dear Mrs. May. Let us sit again, and question me after
I have spoken, if any doubts remain unanswered. Another liqueur,
Masters."
He sipped, and preserved silence for a few moments, while none
spoke. Then from his armchair he traversed the story of the Grey
Room, and proved amazingly familiar with the smallest detail of it.
Indeed, when at last he had finished, none could find any questions
to ask. "There are two very interesting preliminary facts to note,
my friends," began the signor. He beamed upon them, and enjoyed
his own exposition with unconcealed gusto. "The first is that a
room, already suffering from sinister traditions, and held to be
haunted, should have been precisely that into which this infernal
engine of destruction was introduced. Yet what more natural? You
have the furniture, and, for the time being, do not know what to
do with it. The house is already full of beautiful things, and
these surplus treasures you store here, to be safe and out of the
way, in a room which is not put to its proper use. You are not
collectors or experts. Sir Walter's father did not share his
father's enthusiasm, neither did Sir Walter care for old furniture.
So the pieces take their place in this room, and are, more or less,
forgotten.
"That is the first interesting fact, and the second seems to me to
be this: that those who perished here in living memory all died at
different places in the room, and so died that their deaths could
not be immediately and undeviatingly traced to the bed. Hardcastle,
for example, as you have related his conversation, did not associate
the death of poor Captain May with that of the lady of the hospital
eleven years before; and Sir Walter himself saw no reason to connect
the still earlier death of his aged aunt, which took place when he
was a boy, with the disaster that followed.
"Let us now examine for a moment the amazing fact that none of the
stigmata of death was found in those who perished here.
"Death has three modes--the pale horseman strikes us down by
asphyxia, by coma, and by syncope. In asphyxia he stabs the lungs;
in coma his lance is aimed at the brain; in syncope, at the heart.
"When a man dies by asphyxia, it means that the action of the
muscles by which he breathes is stopped, or the work of his lungs
prevented by injury, or the free passage of air arrested, as in
drowning, or strangulation. It may also mean that embolism has
taken place, and the pulmonary artery is blocked, withholding
blood from the lungs. But it was not thus that any died in this
chamber.
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