“Be careful—put it back—put it down, man,” he almost shouted at me, and banging the door shut as soon as he had seen me restore the weird little bottle safely to its old position, he dragged me to the sink and made me rinse my hands in some strong disinfectant.
I should have been amused, had he not been so obviously alarmed, and I protested that I might have been handling a bomb that had the fuse alight by all the fuss he made about it.
“A bomb’s a plaything for a baby in a pram compared with that dear little bottle,” he laughed, and went on to explain that Hanson was by way of being a bit of a specialist in the study of poisons, and that the little flagon I had handled so carelessly contained a very deadly and almost unknown poison, that he, The Tundish, had been fortunate in securing for his collection from central China.
The tiny bottle apparently contained enough to finish off the whole of Merchester, and as yet they had not succeeded in finding any antidote to its action. A colorless fluid with a distinctive taste and smell, it was immediately narcotic, but it engendered a sleep from which no one ever woke. The body of the victim looked exactly as though it had passed out of a peaceful slumber into death, except for the eyes; and they, in addition to the usual contraction of the pupils due to a narcotic, were horribly suffused with blood. It seems that had any of the poison got on to my fingers from the side of the bottle and had I then allowed them to touch my lips, so deadly was the stuff that he might have been unable to save my life.
All this he told me as I disinfected my hands at the sink, and by the time he had finished I began to think that I had had a lucky escape and I was no longer inclined to laugh at his considerate alarm. My hands properly rinsed and dried, we went back into the drawing-room to finish our pipes before going to bed; The Tundish told some interesting tales about his life in China, where he had gone out to live with an uncle when he was twenty-four and had only returned a few years ago. Then our conversation turned to tennis and the tournament, and I was telling him of the interest Miss Palfreeman had aroused as she joined us in the tent at lunch-time, when he interrupted me.
“You know it’s a most extraordinary coincidence—” he began, with something akin to excitement in his usual level voice, and then instead of telling me what the curious coincidence was, his statement dwindled into indecision and he sat thoughtfully watching the blue smoke spirals that curled to the ceiling from his pipe.
“Well?” I asked after a pause, turning to look at him in surprise.
But there he sat staring vacantly at nothing, his face an expressionless mask, his eyes introspective and dead. They regained their normal twinkle as I watched, and he continued, “Oh, nothing really—nothing at all—only something that something you said reminded me of. Now I’m sure it’s time that you went off to bed.”
We said good night at the bottom of the stairs, and with my foot on the bottom step I asked him what on earth had made him say that Miss Hunter in particular looked as though she needed rest. I can not think what made me ask the question, and it had no sooner crossed my lips than I realized how indiscreet it was. He looked at me quizzically. “Should a doctor tell!—eh?”
I apologized profusely.