It was a wholesale poisoning. Veronica, Matilde, and Gregorio
were all seized nearly at the same time.
Several of the servants left the house within half an hour after it was
known that their masters were all poisoned. Within a fortnight, Bosio
Macomer had killed himself and there had been two poisonings. Matilde's
maid and a housemaid, the cook, and the butler went quietly to their
several rooms, took the most valuable of their own possessions, and
slipped out. They felt that the house was doomed, with every one in it.
But some one had gone for the doctor, and he arrived in a short time.
Matilde, to whom all the proper antidotes had been given on the previous
day, might have taken them at once, but in the first place, weak and
still suffering the consequence of the first dangerous experiment, she
was almost unconscious with pain, and secondly, if she had taken an
antidote herself, it would have seemed strange that she should not
administer it to Veronica, or at least send some one to the young girl
to do so. Gregorio lay howling with pain in his room. But Matilde had
warned him that it would come, after they had left Veronica's room
together, and he knew that everything depended on his not hinting at the
truth.
The doctor came to Matilde first. Far away, at the other end of the
house, Elettra was with Veronica. She had known what they had done for
the countess on the preceding evening, and while the servants were
screaming and running hither and thither through the apartments, like
scared sheep, the woman had quietly got oil and warm water, and was
giving both to her mistress.
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