Summary. It was the Reverend Gaunt who killed Cousin R, and he killed him twice over — once with the laudanum in his port, and once more with the hour of prayer he spent kneeling at his side instead of raising the house. He did it because R had made an ornament of the dead — arranging bodies as compositions, keeping his pressed specimens and his photographic cards of the departed, each dated to the hour of its composing — and Gaunt held that a man who so used death had put himself outside the mercy owed to the dying. So he gave him the prayer, and withheld everything else. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The method wants little unravelling once the medicine is found. The Colonel's laudanum press stands unlocked in the back passage, known to the whole house, and R took his glass away from the table at a quarter past ten as was his settled habit. Gaunt left the dining room five minutes later, by that same passage, and was seen by nobody again until he came up the cellar stair at five past midnight. In between, the bottle emptied itself into R's glass, and R sat down upon a cellar stool and did not get up. Dr Quill will tell you, without much feeling, that a man so dosed is savable the better part of an hour, given a stomach pump and somebody willing to shout for one. There was a bell-pull within reach of the stool, in good working order, and it was not rung. There was, instead, a voice — a man's, low and steady, going on and on through the pantry wall from ten past eleven to near midnight, heard separately by Mrs Gow in the still-room and by Zane in the passage, and taken by both for nothing more than a man at his prayers. It was a man at his prayers. Gaunt's knee-cord was found on the pantry floor, and he did not trouble to retrieve it, being a man who does not conceal what he does not consider a sin.

The rest of the house accounts for itself with a completeness that would be suspicious in a novel and is merely tiresome in a police report. Nan was on the far side of that same wall from eleven o'clock, over the linen count with Mrs Gow, who vouches the hour entire. Xerxes was with the Colonel in the study from twenty to eleven until five to twelve, and in any case the dose went into a glass R carried off before Xerxes ever left the table. Wat was being paid his boat-money in the servants' hall from half past ten, on the hearing side of the wall throughout, not the speaking side. Lavinia was with the Colonel in his late wife's morning room until ten to twelve, and the voice through the wall was, in any case, a man's. Effie was seen twice upon the gallery landing in the very half-hour the voice began, by a footman with a lamp who has no reason to lie for her. Zane heard the voice himself at five past eleven, from the passage, and reported it at once to Mrs Gow — which puts him outside the pantry at the moment the thing began, not within it. Only Gaunt is unaccounted for across that hour, and only Gaunt's account of it — prayer, uninterrupted — matches to the minute what two others heard through a wall he did not know was thin.

The house had persuaded itself of a tidier story, and I do not blame it. R kept a card in his pocket with four names marked upon it, people he had lately unsettled with a remark or a question, and it was easy enough to suppose some secret-holder had stopped his mouth before he could put a price on it. But R never asked anybody for money in his life, and the same card carries a fifth line, in his own hand, naming the one man in the house he had not thought worth watching: the parson, because the parson alone took death as seriously as he did, only in the opposite key. That is not the note of a man expecting a blackmailer. It is the note of a man who had, without knowing it, found his judge.

The doctrine behind it is thirty years old and needs no dressing up. Gaunt has preached at the harbour that the body is not ours to improve, that the dying are owed prayer and nothing besides, and that a man who ornaments the dead has forfeited the ordinary claim on mercy. Three nights before, R had described over the Colonel's table how he had helped lay out a drowned man at the mortuary and had improved the fall of his hands and the angle of his head, and had laid a moth upon his breast for the composing of it. Gaunt put down his fork and said nothing more that evening. On the morning of the cellar dinner he walked to the mortuary and asked the keeper what alterations had lately been made to the drowned man's body, and the keeper told him: the hands, the head, the moth. That is the whole of it. A man confirmed in his sin that morning, and judged and sentenced by nightfall, with a full hour allowed him afterward in which any cry would have saved him, and none came, because none was meant to.

It is the third this twelvemonth, by my count, that I have had occasion to write up from that house, and I do not expect it to be the last. I have charged the Reverend Simeon Gaunt with the wilful poisoning of Cousin R, and with a mercy withheld that any honest court will call by its plain name. He does not deny the laudanum, and does not consider the praying a fault. The file is closed.

When all's said and counted, the deed it was done,
and Gaunt the answer, when answer was none.
Poor Cousin R lies quiet, a candle, a knife,
the tidiest exit from Cairnholm and life.
The lesson is here, should we trouble to learn —
but the cards, being cards, will be dealt a fresh turn.