"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 wouldhave 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.
"And if we, of this day, fail to find them out, it is easy to guess that in their own times, much that they caused to be done was set down to the operations of Heaven alone.
"Science will be deeply interested in your Borgia mattress, Sir Walter.Science, I doubt not, will carefully unpick it and make a series of very remarkable experiments; yet I make bold to believe that science may be baffled by the cunning and forgotten knowledge of men long dust.We shall see as to that."He rose and bade Masters call Stephano.Then, with a few words, they parted, and each shook the old man's hand and expressed a deep and genuine gratitude before they did so.
"A little remains to add," said Signor Mannetti."You shall hear what it is to-morrow.For the moment, 'Good-night!' It has been a crowning joy to my long life that I was able to do this service to new and valued friends."In the servants' hall next morning Masters related what he had heard."And if you ask me," he concluded, "I draw back what I thought abouthim being younger than he pretends.He's older - old as the hills - older than that horror in the Grey Boom.He's a demon; and he's killed the old dog; and I believe he's a Borge himself if the truth was known."
