“Then the investigation began. Nothing
could be discovered. No door, window or piece
of furniture had been forced. The two watch dogs
had not been aroused from their sleep.
“Here, in a few words, is the testimony of the
servant:
“For a month his master had seemed excited.
He had received many letters, which he would immediately
burn.
“Often, in a fit of passion which approached
madness, he had taken a switch and struck wildly at
this dried hand riveted to the wall, and which had
disappeared, no one knows how, at the very hour of
the crime.
“He would go to bed very late and carefully
lock himself in. He always kept weapons within
reach. Often at night he would talk loudly, as
though he were quarrelling with some one.
“That night, somehow, he had made no noise,
and it was only on going to open the windows that
the servant had found Sir John murdered. He suspected
no one.
“I communicated what I knew of the dead man
to the judges and public officials. Throughout
the whole island a minute investigation was carried
on. Nothing could be found out.
“One night, about three months after the crime,
I had a terrible nightmare. I seemed to see the
horrible hand running over my curtains and walls like
an immense scorpion or spider. Three times I awoke,
three times I went to sleep again; three times I saw
the hideous object galloping round my room and moving
its fingers like legs.
“The following day the hand was brought me,
found in the cemetery, on the grave of Sir John Rowell,
who had been buried there because we had been unable
to find his family. The first finger was missing.
“Ladies, there is my story. I know nothing
more.”
The women, deeply stirred, were pale and trembling.
One of them exclaimed:
“But that is neither a climax nor an explanation!
We will be unable to sleep unless you give us your
opinion of what had occurred.”
The judge smiled severely:
“Oh! Ladies, I shall certainly spoil your
terrible dreams. I simply believe that the legitimate
owner of the hand was not dead, that he came to get
it with his remaining one. But I don’t know
how. It was a kind of vendetta.”
One of the women murmured:
“No, it can’t be that.”
And the judge, still smiling, said:
“Didn’t I tell you that my explanation
would not satisfy you?”
The walls of the cell were bare and white washed.
A narrow grated window, placed so high that one could
not reach it, lighted this sinister little room.
The mad inmate, seated on a straw chair, looked at
us with a fixed, vacant and haunted expression.
He was very thin, with hollow cheeks and hair almost
white, which one guessed might have turned gray in
a few months. His clothes appeared to be too
large for his shrunken limbs, his sunken chest and
empty paunch. One felt that this man’s mind
was destroyed, eaten by his thoughts, by one thought,
just as a fruit is eaten by a worm. His craze,
his idea was there in his brain, insistent, harassing,
destructive. It wasted his frame little by little.
It—the invisible, impalpable, intangible,
immaterial idea—was mining his health,
drinking his blood, snuffing out his life.
