His Last Bow, Arthur Conan Doyle [love books to read TXT] 📗

he cried, laying his hand on the breast of the

foremost. “Take it back this instant!”

 

“What the devil do you mean? Once again I ask you, where is your

warrant?” shouted the furious Peters, his big red face glaring

over the farther end of the coffin.

 

“The warrant is on its way. The coffin shall remain in the house

until it comes.”

 

The authority in Holmes’s voice had its effect upon the bearers.

Peters had suddenly vanished into the house, and they obeyed

these new orders. “Quick, Watson, quick! Here is a screw-driver!” he shouted as the coffin was replaced upon the table.

“Here’s one for you, my man! A sovreign if the lid comes off in

a minute! Ask no questions—work away! That’s good! Another!

And another! Now pull all together! It’s giving! It’s giving!

Ah, that does it at last.”

 

With a united effort we tore off the coffin-lid. As we did so

there came from the inside a stupefying and overpowering smell of

chloroform. A body lay within, its head all wreathed in cotton-wool, which had been soaked in the narcotic. Holmes plucked it

off and disclosed the statuesque face of a handsome and spiritual

woman of middle age. In an instant he had passed his arm round

the figure and raised her to a sitting position.

 

“Is she gone, Watson? Is there a spark left? Surely we are not

too late!”

 

For half an hour it seemed that we were. What with actual

suffocation, and what with the poisonous fumes of the chloroform,

the Lady Frances seemed to have passed the last point of recall.

And then, at last, with artificial respiration, with injected

ether, and with every device that science could suggest, some

flutter of life, some quiver of the eyelids, some dimming of a

mirror, spoke of the slowly returning life. A cab had driven up,

and Holmes, parting the blind, looked out at it. “Here is

Lestrade with his warrant,” said he. “He will find that his

birds have flown. And here,” he added as a heavy step hurried

along the passage, “is someone who has a better right to nurse

this lady than we have. Good morning, Mr. Green; I think that

the sooner we can move the Lady Frances the better. Meanwhile,

the funeral may proceed, and the poor old woman who still lies in

that coffin may go to her last resting-place alone.”

 

“Should you care to add the case to your annals, my dear Watson,”

said Holmes that evening, “it can only be as an example of that

temporary eclipse to which even the best-balanced mind may be

exposed. Such slips are common to all mortals, and the greatest

is he who can recognize and repair them. To this modified credit

I may, perhaps, make some claim. My night was haunted by the

thought that somewhere a clue, a strange sentence, a curious

observation, had come under my notice and had been too easily

dismissed. Then, suddenly, in the gray of the morning, the words

came back to me. It was the remark of the undertaker’s wife, as

reported by Philip Green. She had said, ‘It should be there

before now. It took longer, being out of the ordinary.’ It was

the coffin of which she spoke. It had been out of the ordinary.

That could only mean that it had been made to some special

measurement. But why? Why? Then in an instant I remembered the

deep sides, and the little wasted figure at the bottom. Why so

large a coffin for so small a body? To leave room for another

body. Both would be buried under the one certificate. It had all

been so clear, if only my own sight had not been dimmed. At

eight the Lady Frances would be buried. Our one chance was to

stop the coffin before it left the house.

 

“It was a desperate chance that we might find her alive, but it

WAS a chance, as the result showed. These people had never, to

my knowledge, done a murder. They might shrink from actual

violence at the last. The could bury her with no sign of how she

met her end, and even if she were exhumed there was a chance for

them. I hoped that such considerations might prevail with them.

You can reconstruct the scene well enough. You saw the horrible

den upstairs, where the poor lady had been kept so long. They

rushed in and overpowered her with their chloroform, carried her

down, poured more into the coffin to insure against her waking,

and then screwed down the lid. A clever device, Watson. It is

new to me in the annals of crime. If our ex-missionary friends

escape the clutches of Lestrade, I shall expect to hear of some

brilliant incidents in their future career.”

 

The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot

 

In recording from time to time some of the curious experiences

and interesting recollections which I associate with my long and

intimate friendship with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have continually

been faced by difficulties caused by his own aversion to

publicity. To his sombre and cynical spirit all popular applause

was always abhorrent, and nothing amused him more at the end of a

successful case than to hand over the actual exposure to some

orthodox official, and to listen with a mocking smile to the

general chorus of misplaced congratulation. It was indeed this

attitude upon the part of my friend and certainly not any lack of

interesting material which has caused me of late years to lay

very few of my records before the public. My participation in

some if his adventures was always a privilege which entailed

discretion and reticence upon me.

 

It was, then, with considerable surprise that I received a

telegram from Homes last Tuesday—he has never been known to

write where a telegram would serve—in the following terms:

 

Why not tell them of the Cornish horror—strangest case I have

handled.

 

I have no idea what backward sweep of memory had brought the

matter fresh to his mind, or what freak had caused him to desire

that I should recount it; but I hasten, before another cancelling

telegram may arrive, to hunt out the notes which give me the

exact details of the case and to lay the narrative before my

readers.

 

It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes’s iron

constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of

constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps,

by occasional indiscretions of his own. In March of that year

Dr. Moore Agar, of Harley Street, whose dramatic introduction to

Holmes I may some day recount, gave positive injunctions that the

famous private agent lay aside all his cases and surrender

himself to complete rest if he wished to avert an absolute

breakdown. The state of his health was not a matter in which he

himself took the faintest interest, for his mental detachment was

absolute, but he was induced at last, on the threat of being

permanently disqualified from work, to give himself a complete

change of scene and air. Thus it was that in the early spring of

that year we found ourselves together in a small cottage near

Poldhu Bay, at the further extremity of the Cornish peninsula.

 

It was a singular spot, and one peculiarly well suited to the

grim humour of my patient. From the windows of our little

whitewashed house, which stood high upon a grassy headland, we

looked down upon the whole sinister semicircle of Mounts Bay,

that old death trap of sailing vessels, with its fringe of black

cliffs and surge-swept reefs on which innumerable seamen have met

their end. With a northerly breeze it lies placid and sheltered,

inviting the storm-tossed craft to tack into it for rest and

protection.

 

Then come the sudden swirl round of the wind, the blistering gale

from the south-west, the dragging anchor, the lee shore, and the

last battle in the creaming breakers. The wise mariner stands

far out from that evil place.

 

On the land side our surroundings were as sombre as on the sea.

It was a country of rolling moors, lonely and dun-colored, with

an occasional church tower to mark the site of some old-world

village. In every direction upon these moors there were traces

of some vanished race which had passed utterly away, and left as

it sole record strange monuments of stone, irregular mounds which

contained the burned ashes of the dead, and curious earthworks

which hinted at prehistoric strife. The glamour and mystery of

the place, with its sinister atmosphere of forgotten nations,

appealed to the imagination of my friend, and he spent much of

his time in long walks and solitary meditations upon the moor.

The ancient Cornish language had also arrested his attention, and

he had, I remember, conceived the idea that it was akin to the

Chaldean, and had been largely derived from the Phoenician

traders in tin. He had received a consignment of books upon

philology and was settling down to develop this thesis when

suddenly, to my sorrow and to his unfeigned delight, we found

ourselves, even in that land of dreams, plunged into a problem at

our very doors which was more intense, more engrossing, and

infinitely more mysterious than any of those which had driven us

from London. Our simple life and peaceful, healthy routine were

violently interrupted, and we were precipitated into the midst of

a series of events which caused the utmost excitement not only in

Cornwall but throughout the whole west of England. Many of my

readers may retain some recollection of what was called at the

time “The Cornish Horror,” though a most imperfect account of the

matter reached the London press. Now, after thirteen years, I

will give the true details of this inconceivable affair to the

public.

 

I have said that scattered towers marked the villages which

dotted this part of Cornwall. The nearest of these was the

hamlet of Tredannick Wollas, where the cottages of a couple of

hundred inhabitants clustered round an ancient, moss-grown

church. The vicar of the parish, Mr. Roundhay, was something of

an archaeologist, and as such Holmes had made his acquaintance.

He was a middle-aged man, portly and affable, with a considerable

fund of local lore. At his invitation we had taken tea at the

vicarage and had come to know, also, Mr. Mortimer Tregennis, an

independent gentleman, who increased the clergyman’s scanty

resources by taking rooms in his large, straggling house. The

vicar, being a bachelor, was glad to come to such an arrangement,

though he had little in common with his lodger, who was a thin,

dark, spectacled man, with a stoop which gave the impression of

actual, physical deformity. I remember that during our short

visit we found the vicar garrulous, but his lodger strangely

reticent, a sad-faced, introspective man, sitting with averted

eyes, brooding apparently upon his own affairs.

 

These were the two men who entered abruptly into our little

sitting-room on Tuesday, March the 16th, shortly after our

breakfast hour, as we were smoking together, preparatory to our

daily excursion upon the moors.

 

“Mr. Holmes,” said the vicar in an agitated voice, “the most

extraordinary and tragic affair has occurred during the night.

It is the most unheard-of business. We can only regard it as a

special Providence that you should chance to be here at the time,

for in all England you are the one man we need.”

 

I glared at the intrusive vicar with no very friendly eyes; but

Holmes took his pipe from his lips and sat up in his chair like

an old hound who hears the view-halloa. He waved his hand to the

sofa, and our palpitating visitor with his agitated companion sat

side