"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 withunconcealed 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.
"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 sually 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 andconverted it to fact.As to why the bed has these properties, that is for science to find out presently.
