Once—twice—I repeated the attempt, but in vain. At length, however, my love, in frantic haste to learn the truth, threw her weight against the door at the same instant as mine, and with our combined efforts we succeeded in breaking the cheap lock from its fastenings, and the door giving way, we went head foremost into the long, old-fashioned drawing-room, furnished in faded green rep of a style long since out of date.
The one blind being up gave sufficient light, and next instant our eyes fell upon a scene which filled us both with horror, and caused cries of dismay to break involuntarily from our lips.
Selby was seated in a collapsed position in an arm-chair, his head hanging listlessly upon his breast; while the hunchback, with hands outstretched and tightly clenched, lay face downwards upon the carpet behind the table.
I bent and touched their faces, one after the other. They were cold as marble.
Both men had evidently been dead some hours.
“But my father—my poor father?” wailed Judith. “Where is he? He must be in this house! Let us search.” And she started off frantically from room to room, I following her in breathless amazement at this tragic discovery.
Yet although we searched the garrets and even the cellars, we failed to discover him. He was evidently not there.
Again we ascended the stairs to that room of horror, where the two men lay white and dead, a ghastly sight indeed; and as we re-entered she suddenly complained of an acute pain in her left arm and a curious sensation in the head.
Singularly enough I experienced the very same symptoms in my left arm—very similar, indeed, to those I had felt after examining The Closed Book.
“Ah?” she shrieked, “I know. I ran my hands along the rail on the stairs and felt a scratch. Look at my hand! Look—I—I’m poisoned!”