The coachman stepped forward, braced himself for the shove he directed against the wooden barrier, and the door swept splintering inward. Roger advanced first and a grim confusion touched him with cold horror. Taou Yuen was half seated and half lying across a table beside the bed; he couldn't see her face, but her body was utterly lax. Nettie Vollar, too, was in a dreadful waxen similitude of death, with lead colored lips and fixed sightless eyes. A slight extraordinary sound rose behind him, and whirling, Brevard discovered that it was Edward Dunsack giggling. He was silent immediately under the other's scrutiny, and an expression of stubborn and malicious caution pinched his wasted sardonic countenance.
Brevard turned to the greater necessity of the women, and moved Taou Yuen so that he could see her features. It was evident that she was not, as he had first thought, dead; her breathing was slow and deep and harsh, her pulse deliberate and full; she was warm, too, but her face was suffused by an unnatural blueness and the pupils of her inert eyes were barely discernible. He shook her with an unceremonious vigor, but there was no answering energy; she fell across his arm in a sheer weight of satin-covered body. He moved back in a momentary uncontrollable repulsion when Kate Vollar threw herself past him onto the bed. "Nettie!" she cried, "Nettie! Nettie!" Brevard was chilled by the possibility of an unutterable tragedy, when with a faint suffusion of color the girl gave a gasping sigh. Her voice stirred in a terror shaken whisper:
"Uncle Edward, don't! Why—don't. Oh!" She pressed her face with a long shudder into the pillow. "Whatever was it—?" her mother began wildly. Brevard caught her shoulder. "Not now," he directed; "you'll come downstairs with me. We must have help at once and your daughter quiet."
However he was in a quandary—he couldn't trust the woman here, he would have to go immediately for assistance, and yet it was impossible to leave Nettie Vollar and Gerrit's wife alone. "You will have to wait in the room," he decided, turning to Quarles.
Edward Dunsack was wavering against a wall; Brevard went swiftly up to him. "We'll need you," he said shortly. Dunsack maintained his silence and air of stubborn cunning; but, when the other man clasped his incredibly thin arm, he went willingly followed by Kate Vollar below. There he sat obediently, his judicious detachment broken by a repetition of the thin shocking snigger.
"You must be responsible for your brother," Roger Brevard told the quivering woman. "I'll be back immediately. Now that you know Nettie's safe you must control yourself. No one should go up—keep everybody out—till you hear from me or the doctor or Captain Ammidon."
What an inexplicable accident or crime, he thought, hurriedly approaching the countinghouse of Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone, the first and nearest of the places to which he must go. He could remember no mark of what had overcome Taou Yuen. How was Dunsack, who was now clearly demented, implicated? What racking thing had Nettie Vollar seen?
In the subsequent exclamatory rush, even on the following morning when Roger Brevard learned that—poisoned by opium undoubtedly taken by herself—Gerrit Ammidon's wife had died without regaining consciousness, the greater part of the tragedy became little clearer. No statement could be had from Edward Dunsack other than a meaningless array of precautionary phrases; and returning in a sliding gait toward Hardy Street he was put under a temporary restraint.
Nettie Vollar, Brevard heard, had relapsed from her injury into a second critical collapse. Yet, he told himself, entering the room that was his home in Mrs. Cane's large square house on Chestnut Street, that the Manchu still absorbed his speculations.
It was a pleasant room and a pleasant house with a dignified portico; and his tall windows, back on the right of the second floor, opened on the length of the Napiers' garden. Brevard sat looking out over a dim leafiness of evening and tried to discipline his thoughts into order and coherence. Any dignity of death had been soiled by the ugly mystery of the aspects surrounding the end of Taou Yuen.