“Secret!” he snorted. “How are you going to hoodwink the coroner?”
“Then you think poor Beryl is really dead?” her cousin gasped.
“She is dead,” the old fellow answered gruffly.
“But can you do nothing?” I urged in desperation.
“If she’s dead, that’s impossible,” he declared.
“No,” I said. “I refuse to believe that she is actually beyond your aid. To us she may appear dead, but her state may be only a cataleptic one.”
He shook his great shaggy head dubiously, but made no response. This man, one of the greatest chemists of the age, who had been recognised as private docent of pathological anatomy and bacteriology at the University of Naples, and was renowned throughout the world for his excursions into the queer byways of medicine, was a man of few words.
His grunts were full of expression, and his fleshy face with the dull eyes was absolutely sphinx-like. The story he had heard regarding Beryl’s sudden seizure did not convince him. His expressive grunt told me so. He had ripped up the tight sleeves of her dress, and was examining the inside of the arms at the elbows, but what he saw did not satisfy him.
I told him of the mirror-test, of the artificial respiration which I had tried, and he listened to me in silence. With his finger he opened the left eye and looked long and earnestly into the pupil. Then after a long suspense he suddenly spoke.
“Ach! we have been meestake; she is not dead.”