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Page 91
"Coma occurs through an apoplexy, or concussion; by the use of
certain narcotic or mineral poisons; and in various other ways,
all of which are ruled out for us.
"There remains syncope. A heart ceases to beat from haemorrhage,
or starvation, from exhaustion, or the depressing influence of
certain drugs. They who died here died from syncope; but why?
No autopsy can tell us why. They passed with only their Maker
to sustain them, and none leaves behind an explanation of what
overtook him, or her. Yet we know full well, even in the case of
Peter Hardcastle, concerning whom the police felt doubt, that he
was quite dead before Mr. Lennox discovered him and picked him up.
We know that the phenomena of rigor mortis had already set in
before his body reached London.
"Nothing, however, is new under the sun. Many journals related
the fact that these people had passed away without a cause, as
though it were an event without a parallel. It is not. Your Dr.
Templeman, in 1893, describes two examples of sudden death with
absolute absence of any pathological condition in any part of the
bodies to account for it. He describes the case of a man of
forty-three, and calls it 'emotional inhibition of the heart.'
The heart was arrested in diastole, instead of systole, as is
usually the case; the mode of death was syncope; the cause of death,
undiscoverable.
"A layman may be permitted, I suppose, to describe 'emotional
inhibition of the heart' as 'shock'; but we know, in our cases,
that if a shock, it was not a painful one--perhaps not even an
unpleasant one. Since all other emotions can be pleasant or
unpleasant, why must we assume that the supreme emotion of death
may not be pleasant also, did we know how to make it so? Perhaps
the Borgia, among their secrets, had discovered this. At least
the familiar signs of death were wholly absent from the
countenances of the dead. The jaws were not set; the familiar,
expressions were not changed, as usually happens from rigidity of
facial muscles; their faces were not sallow; their temples were
not sunk; their brows were not contracted.
"We will now take the victims, one by one, and show how death
happened to each of them, yet left no sign that it had happened.
Frankly, the first case alone presented any difficulties to me.
For a time I despaired of proving how the bed had destroyed Sir
Walter's ancestor, because she had not entered it. But the
difficulty becomes clear to one possessing our present knowledge,
for once prove the properties of the bed, and the rest follows.
You will say that they were not proved, only guessed. That was
true, until Prince died. His death crowned my edifice of theory
and converted it to fact. As to why the bed has these properties,
that is for science to find out presently.
"To return, then, to the old lady, the ancient woman of your race,
who came unexpectedly to the Christmas re-union and was put to
sleep in the Grey Room at her own wish. She was found dead next
morning on the floor. She had not entered the bed. The exact
facts have long disappeared from human knowledge, and it is only
possible to re-construct them by inference and the support of
those straightforward events that followed. I conceive, then,
that though the old lady did not create the warmth that liberated
the evil spirit of the bed and so destroyed her, that warmth was
nevertheless artificially created. What must have happened, think
you? The bed is made up in haste and the fire lighted. But the
fire is a long way from the bed, and would have no effect to create
the necessary temperature. There is, however, a hot-water bottle
in the bed, or a hot brick wrapped in flannel. The old lady is
about to enter her bed. She has extinguished her candle, but the
flame of the fire gives light. She has prayed; she throws off her
dressing-gown and flings back the covering of the bed, to fall an
instant victim to the miasma. She drops backward and is found
dead next morning, by which time the bottle and bed are also cold.
"Taken alone, I grant this explanation may fail to win your
sympathy; but consider the cumulative evidence in store. The old
lady may, of course, have died a natural death. She may not have
turned down the bed. There is nobody living to tell us. All that
Sir Walter can recollect is that she was found on the floor of the
room dead. Exactly where, he does not remember. But for my own
part I have no doubt whatever that her death took place in that way.
"We are on safer ground with the other tragic happenings, though,
save in the case of Nurse Forrester, there is nothing on the
surface of events to connect their deaths with the accursed bed.
You will see, however, that it is very easy to do so. In the lady's
case all is clear enough. She goes to bed tired and she sleeps
peacefully into death without waking. She is probably asleep
within ten minutes, before her own warmth has penetrated through
sheet and blanket to the mattress beneath and so destroyed her.
Suppose that she is dead in half an hour. She retired to rest at
ten o'clock; she is called at seven; the room is presently broken
into and she is then not only dead, but cold. The demon has gone
to sleep again under its lifeless burden. Now had she been stout
and well covered, there had hardly been time for her to grow cold,
and those who came to her assistance might even have perished, too.
But she is a little, thin thing, and the heat has gone out of her.
This assured the safety of those who came to the bedside. One can
make no laws as to the time necessary for a dead body to grow as
cold as its surroundings. The bodies of the old and the young
cool more quickly than those of adult persons. If the conditions
are favorable a body may cool in six to eight hours. Prince took
but five, poor little bag of bones.
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