The Poisoned Chocolates Case · Chapter 2 (2/2)

Thoroughly alarmed now, believing indeed that Bendix was dying under his eyes, he raised a shout for the porter and a doctor. There were two or three other men at the further end of the big room (in which a shout had probably never been heard before in the whole course of its history) and these hurried up at once. Sir Eustace sent one off to tell the porter to get hold of the nearest doctor without a second’s delay, and enlisted the others to try to make the convulsed body a little more comfortable. There was no doubt among them that Bendix had taken poison. They spoke to him, asking how he felt and what they could do for him, but he either would not or could not answer. As a matter of fact, he was completely unconscious.

Before the doctor had arrived, a telephone message was received from an agitated butler asking if Mr. Bendix was there, and if so would he come home at once as Mrs. Bendix had been taken seriously ill.

At the house in Eaton Square matters had been taking much the same course with Mrs. Bendix as with her husband, though a little more rapidly. She remained for half-an-hour or so in the drawing-room after the latter’s departure, during which time she must have eaten about three more of the chocolates. She then went up to her bedroom and rang for her maid, to whom she said that she felt very ill and was going to lie down for a time. Like her husband, she ascribed her condition to a violent attack of indigestion.

The maid mixed her a draught from a bottle of indigestion-powder, which consisted mainly of bicarbonate of soda and bismuth, and brought her a hot-water bottle, leaving her lying on the bed. Her description of her mistress’s appearance tallied exactly with the porter’s and taximan’s description of Bendix, but unlike them she did not seem to have been alarmed by it. She admitted later to the opinion that Mrs. Bendix, though anything but a greedy woman, must have overeaten herself at lunch.

At a quarter past three there was a violent ring from the bell in Mrs. Bendix’s room.

The girl hurried upstairs and found her mistress apparently in a cataleptic fit, unconscious and rigid. Thoroughly frightened now, she wasted some precious minutes in ineffectual attempts to bring her round, and then hurried downstairs to telephone for the doctor. The practitioner who regularly attended the house was not at home, and it was some time before the butler, who had found the half-hysterical girl at the telephone and taken matters into his own hands, could get into communication with another. By the time the latter did get there, nearly half-an-hour after Mrs. Bendix’s bell had rung, she was past help. Coma had set in, and in spite of everything the doctor could do she died in less than ten minutes after his arrival.

She was, in fact, already dead when the butler telephoned to the Rainbow Club.