“Look!” whispered my friend in a low voice. “This way.” And he switched on the lights at the further end of the great high apartment.
I stepped forward at his side, until I distinguished, huddled up in the further corner, a human figure in dark grey trousers and black frock-coat. It seemed as though he had been propped in the corner, and his grey head had fallen sideways before death.
I went further forward, holding my breath.
The victim was apparently nearly sixty, with hair and moustache turning white, rather stoutly built, and broad-shouldered. His position was distorted and unnatural, as though he had twisted himself in the final agonies of death. The thin waxen hands were clenched tightly, and the linen collar was burst from the neck, while the Professor’s dark blue fancy vest bore a stain where the assassin’s knife had struck him unerringly in the heart.
Of his features I, a stranger, could distinguish but little, so swollen, livid, and scarred were they that I was instantly horrified by their sight. The disfigurement had been so terrible that there remained hardly any semblance to a human face.
“Well,” exclaimed Kirk at last, “you have seen it! Now what is your opinion?”
We were standing alone in the great laboratory, for Antonio and his brother had remained downstairs at my companion’s suggestion.
I looked round that great silent workshop of one of the most distinguished chemists of the age, and then I gazed upon the mortal remains of the man upon whom so many honours had been showered. Warped, drawn, crouching, with one arm uplifted almost as though to ward off a blow, the body remained a weird and ghastly object.
“Has it been moved?” I inquired when I recovered speech.
“No; it is just as we found it—just as the unknown assassin left it,” he said. “The disfigurement, as far as I can judge, has been caused by some chemical agency—some acid or other substance placed upon the face, with fiendish cruelty, immediately before death.”