My beloved gave vent to a shriek of horror—and what more natural? She now realized, for the first time, that she had been the victim of a clever and amazing plot.
“I recollect,” she said, “that just at the moment of my sudden seizure I seemed to become fascinated by the gorgeous Spanish shawl which Gabrielle Engledue had around her shoulders. It was a most beautifully embroidered silk shawl with long, heavy fringe, and flowers worked in red, green and gold upon a silk fabric. I had been admiring it all the time I sat at the table, but the colours seemed so dazzling as to bewilder me, to muddle my senses—red, green and gold.”
How often had those words of hers puzzled me! Now I knew the truth! That magnificent Spanish shawl had stood out in her recollection as the last object she had seen before the deadly orosin had done its work.
Then I told her my own story.
“I was inveigled by a specious story into that house soon after you had sipped your coffee—perhaps even before,” I said. “The library was filled with a curious, overpowering perfume of pot-pourri which overcame me, and then De Gex gave me a liqueur glass of brandy into which there had been introduced that most baneful of all drugs orosin! It took immediate effect upon me, and a few moments later I was shown you lying upon the bed, as though you were dead! Indeed, I believed you to be dead, and in the muddled state of my brain I actually gave a certificate with which that fiend De Gex had already provided himself. I declared that you had died of heart disease, a malady for which I had for some months treated you!”
“But I knew nothing more until I was found on the road in Hampshire,” she said.
“And I knew nothing more until I found myself in a hospital over at St. Malo,” I went on. “The drug orosin in small doses destroys the memory; in large doses it produces an effect of death, and in still larger ones—like that administered to your friend the Anglo-Spanish girl Miss Engledue—causes instant death, with no symptoms that the post-mortem can distinguish other than the natural cause of sudden heart failure.”
“Was I given the drug deliberately?” asked Gabrielle, looking at me with her wonderful wide-open eyes—eyes so different from those dulled fixed ones which I had seen in the Duomo in old Florence, when she had raised herself from praying in her half-demented state while the sinister Italian doctor stood behind her.
“Yes,” I said. “De Gex passed his coffee cup to you, smiling and without compunction, well knowing the effect it must have upon you, at the same time his intention being to kill your friend Miss Engledue by administering a stronger dose. This must have been accomplished by the infection of some wound or slight abrasion of the skin so that the drug should be introduced directly into the system and not by the mouth. Such a method would cause almost instant death.”
“But did Gabrielle Engledue die?” she asked excitedly.