The White Room

Walls and roof and flooring and furniture and hangings were absolutely white. There was not a spot or speck of color in the place. The walls were of white enamel studded with silver fleur-de-lis; the floor of polished marble strewn with white skins of long-haired animals. The curtains, drawn aside from the window, were of milky velvet. The furniture was of white polished wood cushioned with pearly silks. Everywhere the room was like snow, and the milky globes of the lamps shed an argent radiance over the whole. It looked cold and cheerless but eminently beautiful. An artistic room, but not one that had a homely look about it. The white glow, the dazzling expanse, colorless and severe, made the man shiver, rough though he was. "It's like a cold winter's day," Mulligan's said. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation. On moving cautiously into the room, he saw a piano of polished white wood in a recess, concealed by a white velvet curtain from the door. Before the piano lay a white bearskin; on this, face downward; the body of a woman. She was dressed in black, the one spot of color in that pale room. But there was another color...a vivid red, staining the skin. Mulligan touched the body, it was cold and limp. "Dead," Mulligan said. From under the left shoulder-blade trickled a thin stream of blood, and his voice, strong as it was, used as he had been to scenes of terror, faltered in the dead silence of that death-chamber. "Dead! Murdered!" Not a sound. Even the wind had died away. Only the strong man looking down at that still corpse, only the blackness of her dress; the redness of her life-blood soaking into the white bearskin, and all around the wan desolation of that white, mysterious room, Arctic and silent.