Death and the Magician by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

Legerdemayne now helpith me right nought.

Farewell my craft and all such sapience,

For Deth hath more maistries than I have wrought.

Lines addressed to Death by John Rekyll,

Court Magician to King Henry V. From

“The Dance of Death’ painted in the

north cloister of Old St Paul’s Church,

London, in the reign of Henry VI

Chapter Six

THE UNKNOWN MESSAGE

He was taken to his hotel in great pain; the shock had brought on his kidney trouble. He was very ill, but he was determined to travel home immediately. He cabled Dash to delay the funeral, and then he travelled to Bremen to catch the first available boat. He arrived in New York on 29 July, and went straight to the house and into the room where his mother lay. He knelt beside her body and placed his ear to her heart, as he had so often done since childhood. But there was nothing for him to hear, no sturdy beat to reassure him. The following day she was buried beside her husband in the family plot Houdini had purchased. When she had said goodbye to him on the pier, he had asked what present he should bring her back from Europe. She had asked for a pair of warm woollen slippers. He had bought these in Bremen on his return journey, and he placed them beside her in the coffin.

Dash and his sister, Gladys, gave him all the details of their mother’s last hours. A fortnight previously she had been stricken with paralysis. The following night, as they sat by her bedside, she kept trying to give them some message for Houdini. She tried desperately to tell them, but she could not get the words out and eventually she closed her eyes, exhausted. She died at fifteen minutes past midnight.

Houdini believed that the message had to do with a family crisis which had arisen shortly before his departure for Europe; a terrible blow which his mother had tried to save him from knowing until he returned, and she herself had resolved the matter in her own mind. Sadie, the wife of his brother, Nat, had left her husband to marry another brother, Leopold. The rest of the family regarded this as a dreadful sin. Houdini loved Leopold, but he could not bring himself to forgive him. He had told his mother that in this matter he would be guided by her, but now she had died before she could tell him what to do.

Had his mother been asking him to forgive his brother? He questioned Dash and Gladys over and over again, but they could only repeat what they had already told him; that his mother had been too weak, too paralysed to speak distinctly. The only word they were able to work out had been his own name. What had she tried to say? He asked himself the question over and over again, but no answer came. He could never know whether the message contained the word, FORGIVE, the one word she would want to send, the one word he would want to hear.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.