No one was smiling any longer. Dorothy could not withdraw her eyes from the piece of tapestry. So the adventure did not come to an end with the astonishing meeting of the Marquis' heirs, nor with the reading of his fantastic will. It went as far as the hollow stairway in the old tower, to which no one had ever penetrated, to the very threshold of the inviolable retreat in which the Marquis had drunk the draft which brings sleep.... Or which kills. What was there behind the tapestry? A bed, of course ... some garments which kept perhaps the shape of the body they had covered ... and besides, a handful of ashes.
She turned her head to her companions as if to say to them:
"Shall I go first?"
They stood motionless—undecided, ill at ease.
Then she took a step forward—then two. The tapestry was within reach. With a hesitating hand she took hold of the edge of it, while the young men drew nearer.
They turned the light of their lamps into the alcove.
At the back of it was a bed. On that bed lay a man.
This vision was, in spite of everything, so unexpected, that for a few seconds Dorothy's legs almost failed her, and she let the tapestry fall. It was Archibald Webster who, deeply perturbed, raised it quickly, and walked briskly to this sleeping man, as if he were about to shake him and awake him forthwith. The others tumbled into the alcove after him. Archibald stopped short at the bed, with his arm raised, and dared not make another movement.
One might have judged the man on the bed to be sixty years old.