Page:Phillpotts - The Grey Room (Macmillan, 1921).djvu/264

Rh is already full of beautiful things, and these surplus treasures you store here, to be safe and out of the way, in a room which is not put to its proper use. You are not collectors or experts. Sir Walter's father did not share his father's enthusiasm, neither did Sir Walter care for old furniture. So the pieces take their place in this room, and are, more or less, forgotten.

"That is the first interesting fact, and the second seems to me to be this: that those who perished here in living memory all died at different places in the room, and so died that their deaths could not be immediately and undeviatingly traced to the bed. Hardcastle, for example, as you have related his conversation, did not associate the death of poor Captain May with that of the lady of the hospital eleven years before; and Sir Walter himself saw no reason to connect the still earlier death of his aged aunt, which took place when he was a boy, with the disaster that followed.

"Let us now examine for a moment the amazing fact that none of the stigmata of death was found in those who perished here.

"Death has three modes—the pale horseman strikes us down by asphyxia, by coma, and by syncope. In asphyxia he stabs the lungs; in coma his lance is aimed at the brain; in syncope, at the heart.

"When a man dies by asphyxia, it means that the action of the muscles by which he breathes is stopped, or the work of his lungs prevented by injury, or the free passage of air arrested, as in