“Nonsense,” said Thorndyke. “If you had broken in you would have found a dead man. As it was you found a live man and obtained an important statement. You acted quite properly.”
“How do you suppose he managed it?” asked Badger.
Thorndyke held out his hand.
“Let us look at his cigarette case,” said he.
Badger extracted the little silver case from the dead man’s pocket and opened it. There were five cigarettes in it, two of which were plain, while the other three were gold-tipped. Thorndyke took out one of each kind and gently pinched their ends. The gold-tipped one he returned; the plain one he tore through, about a quarter of an inch from the end; when two little black tabloids dropped out on to the table. Badger eagerly picked one up and was about to smell it when Thorndyke grasped his wrist. “Be careful,” said he; and when he had cautiously sniffed at the tabloid—held at a safe distance from his nose—he added: “Yes, potassium cyanide. I thought so when his lips turned that queer color. It was in that last cigarette; you can see that he has bitten the end off.”
For some time we stood silently looking down at the still form stretched on the floor. Presently Badger looked up.
“As you pass the porter’s lodge on your way out,” said he, “you might just drop in and tell him to send a constable to me.”
“Very well,” said Thorndyke. “And by the way, Badger, you had better tip that sherry back into the decanter and put it under lock and key, or else pour it out of the window.”
“Gad, yes!” exclaimed the inspector. “I’m glad you mentioned it. We might have had an inquest on a constable as well as a lawyer. Good night, gentlemen, if you are off.”
We went out and left him with his prisoner—passive enough, indeed, according to his ambiguously worded promise. As we passed through the gateway Thorndyke gave the inspector’s message, curtly and without comment, to the gaping porter, and then we issued forth into Chancery Lane.
We were all silent and very grave, and I thought that Thorndyke seemed somewhat moved. Perhaps Mr. Jellicoe’s last intent look—which I suspect he knew to be the look of a dying man—lingered in his memory as it did in mine. Halfway down Chancery Lane he spoke for the first time; and then it was only to ejaculate, “Poor devil!”
Jervis took him up. “He was a consummate villain, Thorndyke.”
“Hardly that,” was the reply. “I should rather say that he was non-moral. He acted without malice and without scruple or remorse. His conduct exhibited a passionateless expediency which was dreadful because utterly unhuman. But he was a strong man—a courageous, self-contained man, and I had been better pleased if it could have been ordained that some other hand than mine should let the axe fall.”
Thorndyke’s compunction may appear strange and inconsistent, but yet his feeling was also my own. Great as was the misery and suffering that this inscrutable man had brought into the lives of those I loved, I forgave him; and in his downfall forgot the callous relentlessness with which he had pursued his evil purpose. For it was he who had brought Ruth into my life; who had opened for me the Paradise of Love into which I had just entered. And so my thoughts turned away from the still shape that lay on the floor of the stately old room in Lincoln’s Inn, away to the sunny vista of the future, where I should walk hand in hand with Ruth until my time, too, should come; until I, too, like the grim lawyer, should hear the solemn evening bell bidding me put out into the darkness of the silent sea.
Colophon
The Eye of Osiris
was published in 1911 by
R. Austin Freeman.
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