To make sure you recognized the place when you got there and knew what to do, she said. Who did all the guiding and the sending and so on? she said. The same, the same chap who appeared in my book to tell Allington what he wanted done. Why couldn’t he have fixed the monster himself? she said. There are limitations to his power. There can’t be many, she said, if he can make the same object be in two places at the same time.
Yes, you see, she’d thought of that too. It’s supposed to be a physical impossibility, isn’t it? Anyway, I said probably the way he’d chosen had been more fun. More fun, Jane repeated. She looked very thoughtful.
As you’ll have seen, there was one loose end, of a sort. Who or what was it that had taken on my shape to enter that bedroom, talk to Jane with my voice, and share her bed for at any rate a few minutes? She and I didn’t discuss it for several days. Then one morning she asked me the question more or less as I’ve just put it.
Interesting point, I said; I don’t know. It’s more interesting than you think, she said; because when… whoever it was got into bed with me, he didn’t just go to sleep.
I suppose I just looked at her. That’s right, she said; I thought I’d better go and see John before I told you. (That’s John Allison, our GP.)
It was negative, then, I said. Yes, Jane said.
Well, that’s it. A relief, of course. But in one way, rather disappointing.
THE DARKWATER HALL MYSTERY
On consulting my notes, their paper grown yellow and their ink brown with the passage of almost forty years, I find it to have been in the closing days of July, 1885, that my friend Sherlock Holmes fell victim, more completely perhaps than at any other time, to the innate melancholy of his temperament. The circumstances were not propitious. London was stiflingly hot, without a drop of rain to lay the dust which, at intervals, a damp wind swept up Baker Street. The exertions caused Holmes by the affair of the Wallace-Bardwell portfolio, and the subsequent entrapment of the elusive Count Varga, had taken their toll of him. His grey eyes, always sharp and piercing, acquired a positively hectic brightness, and the thinness of his hawk-like nose seemed accentuated. He smoked incessantly, getting through an ounce or more of heavy shag tobacco in a single day.
As his depression became blacker, he would sit in his purple dressing-gown with his fiddle across his knee and draw from it strange harmonies, sometimes sonorous, sometimes puzzling, more often harsh and disagreeable. Strange too, and quite as disagreeable, were the odours given off by his chemical experiments; I did not inquire their purpose. When he brought out his hair-trigger pistol and proceeded to add elaborate serifs to the patriotic VR done in bullet-pocks in the wall opposite his armchair, my impatience and my concern together dictated action. Nothing short of a complete rest, in conditions of comfort and ease such as I could not possibly provide, would restore my friend to health. I moved swiftly; telegrams were exchanged; within little more than twelve hours Sherlock Holmes was on his way to Hurlstone in Sussex, the seat of that Reginald Musgrave whose family treasures he had so brilliantly rediscovered some five years earlier. Thus it was that events conspired to embroil me in what I must describe as a truly singular adventure.
It came about in the following fashion. That same afternoon, I had just returned from visiting a patient when the housekeeper announced the arrival of a Lady Fairfax. The name at once stirred something in my memory, but I had had no time to apprehend it before my visitor had crossed the threshold of the sitting-room. There entered a blonde young woman of the most unusual beauty and distinction of feature. I was at once aware in her of a discomposure obviously not at all derived from the sweltering weather, to which indeed her bearing proclaimed utter indifference. I encouraged this lovely but troubled creature to be seated and to divulge her purpose.
‘It was Mr Sherlock Holmes whom I came to see, but I understand he has gone away and is not expected back for a fortnight,’ she began.
‘That is so.’
‘Can he not be recalled?’
I shook my head. ‘Quite out of the question.’
‘But I come on a matter of the utmost urgency. A life is in danger.’
‘Lady Fairfax,’ said I, ‘Holmes has been overworking and must have rest and a change of air. I speak not only as his friend but as his physician. I fear I cannot be influenced by any other consideration.’
The lady sighed and lowered her gaze into her lap. ‘May I at least acquaint you with the main facts of the matter?’
‘Do so by all means, if you feel it will be of service to you.’
‘Very well. My husband is Sir Harry Fairfax, the sixth baronet, of Darkwater Hall in Wiltshire. In his capacity as a magistrate, he had brought before him last year a man known locally as Black Ralph. The charge was poaching. There was no doubt of his guilt; he had erred before in this way and in others, and my husband’s sentence of twelve months in gaol was lenient to a degree. Now, Black Ralph is at liberty again, and word has reached our servants that he means to revenge himself on my husband — to kill him.’
‘Kill him?’ I ejaculated.
‘Nothing less, Dr Watson,’ said Lady Fairfax, clasping and unclasping her white-gloved hands as she spoke. ‘My husband scouts these threats, calling Black Ralph a harmless rascal with a taste for rhetoric. But the fellow is no mere drunken reprobate such as one finds in every village; I have seen him and studied him, and I tell you he is malignant, and in all likelihood mentally deranged as well.’
I was at a loss. My visitor was by now extremely agitated, her vivid lips atremble and her fine blue eyes flashing fire. ‘He sounds most menacing,’ said I, ‘and I understand your desire for assistance. I chance to know a certain Inspector Lestrade at Scotland Yard who would be happy to lend you all the aid he could.’
‘Thank you, but my husband refuses to go to the police and has forbidden me to do so.’
‘I see.’
‘There must, however, be other consulting detectives in London whom I might approach. Perhaps you know of some of them?’
‘Well,’ said I after a short space, ‘it’s true that in the last year or so a number of — what shall I call them? — rivals of Sherlock Holmes have sprung up. But they’re very slight and unsatisfactory fellows. I could not in honesty recommend a single one.’
There was a silence. The lady sighed once more and at last turned to me. ‘Dr Watson, will you help me?’
I had half expected this preposterous suggestion, but was none the better armed against it when it came. ‘I? I am quite unfit. I’m a simple medical man, Lady Fairfax, not a detective.’
‘But you have worked with Mr Holmes on his previous cases. You are his close friend and associate. You must have learned a great deal from him.’
‘I think I can say I know his methods, but there are aspects of his activities of which I am altogether ignorant.’
‘That would not prevent you from talking to my husband, from making him see the peril he faces. Nor from approaching Black Ralph, warning him, offering him money. Dr Watson, I know you think me overwrought, fanciful, perhaps even deluded. Is it not the case, that you think so?’
This was uncommonly and uncomfortably shrewd, not only as an observation, but also as a turn of tactics. I made some motion intended to be evasive.
‘Thank you for being so honest,’ was the smiling response. ‘Now I may be all you suppose, but I lay no obligation upon you, and would two or three comfortable days out of London in this weather be so great a burden?’
Sherlock Holmes once observed that the fair sex was my department. I never fully took his meaning, but if it was to the effect that I enjoyed any ascendancy in that sphere, he misreckoned. Otherwise I should scarcely have found myself, the evening after the interview just described, alighting at a remote railway halt some miles from Westbury.