“You are a fool,” I said—­” and worse, if you stir.”

At this moment, I know not by what sense, as if I had eyes at the back of my head, I was aware of some one moving behind me, yet I dared not look aside.  Suddenly two mighty folds of darkness seemed to envelop me like arms.  A powerful scent ascended my nostrils.  There was a ringing in my ears, a beating at my heart.  Darkness came on, deeper and deeper, like huge waves.  I seemed growing to gigantic stature.  The waves rolled on faster and faster.  The ringing became a roaring.  The beating became a throbbing.  Lights flashed across the darkness.  Forms moved before me.  On came the waves hurrying like a tide, and I sank deeper and deeper into this mighty sea of darkness.  Then all was silent.  Consciousness was still.

. . . . . .

How long I remained unconscious, I cannot tell.  But it must have been some considerable time.  When consciousness once more began to dawn within me, I found myself lying on a bed surrounded by a group of eager, watching faces, and became aware of a confused murmur of whispering going on around me.  “Er Lebt” (he lives) were the words which greeted my opening eyes—­words which I recognized as coming from my landlord.

I had had a very narrow escape.  Another moment and I should not have lived to tell the tale.  The dagger that had already immolated two of Bourgonef’s objects of vengeance would have been in my breast.  As it was, at the very moment when the terrible Ivan had thrown his arms around me and was stifling me with chloroform, one of the servants of the hotel, alarmed or attracted by curiosity at the sound of high words within the room, had ventured to open the door to see what was going on.  The alarm had been given, and Bourgonef had been arrested and handed over to the police.  Ivan, however, had disappeared; nor were the police ever able to find him.  This mattered comparatively little.  Ivan without his master was no more redoubtable than any other noxious animal.  As an accomplice, as an instrument to execute the will of a man like Bourgonef, he was a danger to society.  The directing intelligence withdrawn, he sank to the level of the brute.  I was not uneasy, therefore, at his having escaped.  Sufficient for me that the real criminal, the mind that had conceived and directed those fearful murders, was at last in the hands of justice.  I felt that my task had been fully accomplished when Bourgonef’s head fell on the scaffold.

The Closed Cabinet

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