In the Fog | Page 8

was one of
complete ease. But his mouth had fallen open, and his eyes were set
with an expression of utter horror. At the first glance I saw that he was
quite dead.
"For a flash of time I was too startled to act, but in the same flash I was
convinced that the man had met his death from no accident, that he had
not died through any ordinary failure of the laws of nature. The
expression on his face was much too terrible to be misinterpreted. It
spoke as eloquently as words. It told me that before the end had come
he had watched his death approach and threaten him.
"I was so sure he had been murdered that I instinctively looked on the
floor for the weapon, and, at the same moment, out of concern for my
own safety, quickly behind me; but the silence of the house continued
unbroken.

"I have seen a great number of dead men; I was on the Asiatic Station
during the Japanese-Chinese war. I was in Port Arthur after the
massacre. So a dead man, for the single reason that he is dead, does not
repel me, and, though I knew that there was no hope that this man was
alive, still for decency's sake, I felt his pulse, and while I kept my ears
alert for any sound from the floors above me, I pulled open his shirt
and placed my hand upon his heart. My fingers instantly touched upon
the opening of a wound, and as I withdrew them I found them wet with
^ blood. He was in evening dress, and in the wide bosom of his shirt I
found a narrow slit, so narrow that in the dim light it was scarcely
discernable. The wound was no wider than the smallest blade of a
pocket-knife, but when I stripped the shirt away from the chest and left
it bare, I found that the weapon, narrow as it was, had been long
enough to reach his heart. There is no need to tell you how I felt as I
stood by the body of this boy, for he was hardly older than a boy, or of
the thoughts that came into my head. I was bitterly sorry for this
stranger, bitterly indignant at his murderer, and, at the same time,
selfishly concerned for my own safety and for the notoriety which I
saw was sure to follow. My instinct was to leave the body where it lay,
and to hide myself in the fog, but I also felt that since a succession of
accidents had made me the only witness to a crime, my duty was to
make myself a good witness and to assist to establish the facts of this
murder.
"That it might possibly be a suicide, and not a murder, did not disturb
me for a moment. The fact that the weapon had disappeared, and the
expression on the boy's face were enough to convince, at least me, that
he had had no hand in his own death. I judged it, therefore, of the first
importance to discover who was in the house, or, if they had escaped
from it, who had been in the house before I entered it. I had seen one
man leave it; but all I could tell of him was that he was a young man,
that he was in evening dress, and that he had fled in such haste that he
had not stopped to close the door behind him.
"The Russian servant I had found apparently asleep, and, unless he
acted a part with supreme skill, he was a stupid and ignorant boor, and
as innocent of the murder as myself. There was still the Russian

princess whom he had expected to find, or had pretended to expect to
find, in the same room with the murdered man. I judged that she must
now be either upstairs with the servant, or that she had, without his
knowledge, already fled from the house. When I recalled his apparently
genuine surprise at not finding her in the drawing-room, this latter
supposition seemed the more probable. Nevertheless, I decided that it
was my duty to make a search, and after a second hurried look for the
weapon among the cushions of the divan, and upon the floor, I
cautiously crossed the hall and entered the dining-room.
"The single candle was still flickering in the draught, and showed only
the white cloth. The rest of the room was draped in shadows. I picked
up the candle, and, lifting it high above my head, moved around the
corner of the table. Either my nerves were on such a stretch that no
shock could strain them further, or my mind was inoculated to horrors,
for I