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Page 92
"In the case of Captain May the conditions are altogether different.
Let me speak with all tenderness and spare you pain. Be sure that
he suffered no more than the others. The bed is now no longer
made; the mattress is bare. That matters not to him. Clad in his
pyjamas, with a railway rug to cover him and his dressing-gown
for a pillow, he flings himself down, and from his powerful and
sanguine frame warmth is instantly communicated to the mattress
that supports him. Probably but a few minutes were sufficient to
liberate the poison. He is not asleep, but on the edge of sleep
when he becomes suddenly conscious of physical sensations beyond
his experience. He had breathed death, but yet he is not dead.
His brain works, and can send a message to his limbs, which are
still able to obey. But his hour has come. He leaps from the bed
in no suffering, but conscious, perhaps of an oppression, or an
unfamiliar odor--we cannot say what. We only know that he feels
intense surprise, not pain for in that dying moment his emotions
are fixed for ever by the muscles of his face. He needs air and
seeks it. He hurries to the recess, kneels on the cushion, and
throws open the window. Or the window may have been already
open--we cannot tell. To reach it is his last conscious act, and
in another moment he is dead. The bed is not suspected. Why
should it be? Who could prove that he had even laid down upon it?
Indeed it was believed and reported at the inquest that he had not
done so. Yet that is what unquestionably happened. Otherwise his
candle would have burned to the socket. He had blown it out and
settled to rest, be sure.
"We have now to deal with the detective, and here again there was
nothing to associate his death with the bed of the Borgia. Yet
you will see without my aid how easily he came by his death. Peter
Hardcastle desires to be alone, that he may study the Grey Room
and everything in it. He is left as he wishes, walks here and
there, sketches a ground plan of the room and exhausts its more
obvious peculiarities. Would that he had known the meaning of the
golden bull! Presently he strikes a train of thought and sits down
to develop it. Or he may not have finished with the room and have
taken a seat from which he could survey everything around him. He
sits at the foot of the bed--there on the right side. He makes
his notes, then his last thoughts enter his mind--abstract
reflection on the subject of his trade. For a moment he forgets
the matter immediately in hand and writes his ideas in his book.
He has been sitting on the bed now for some while--how long we
know not, but long enough to create the heightened temperature
which is all the watchful fiend within the mattress requires to
summon him. Then ascends the spirit of death, and Hardcastle,
surprised as Captain May was surprised, leaps to his feet. He
takes two or three steps forward; his book and pen fall from his
hand and he drops upon his face--a dead man. He is, of course,
still warm when Mr. Lennox finds him; but the bed he leaped from
is cold again and harmless--its work done.
"There remains the priest, the Rev. Septimus May. He neither lay
on the bed, nor sat upon it. But what did he do? He clearly
knelt beside it a long time, engaged in prayer. Nothing more
natural than that he should stretch his arms over the mattress;
bury his face in his hands, and so remain in commune with the
Almighty, uttering petition after petition for the being he
conceived as existing in the Grey Room, without power to escape
from it. Thus leaning upon the bed with his arms stretched upon
it and his head perhaps sunk between them, he presently creates
that heightened temperature sufficient to arouse the destroyer.
It enters into him--how, we know not yet--and he sinks unconscious
to the floor, while the bed is quickly cold again.
"As to the four detectives--Inspector Frith and his men--pure
chance saved the life of at least one of them, and by so doing,
chance also prevented them from discovering that the bed in their
midst was the seat of all the trouble. Had one among them taken
up his watch upon it, he would certainly have died in the presence
of his collaborators; but the men sat on chairs in the corners of
the room, and the chairs were harmless. Whether their gas masks
would indeed have saved them remains, of course, to be proved. I
doubt it.
"Such, my friends, were the masterpieces of the Borgia, for whom
the profoundest chemists worked willingly enough and by doing so
doubtless made their fortunes. Their poisons were so designed to
act that, by their very operation, the secrets of them were
concealed, and all clues obliterated. Chemistry knows nothing of
the supernatural, yet can, as in this case, achieve results that
may well appear to be black magic.
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