At a sound from behind me, I turned my head. My heart rose momentarily at sight of a dim figure walking uphill toward me, its feet crunching with a reassuring, solid hesitancy upon the gravel of the path. but it was only Martin Armstrong, who had left the group gathered just outside the house and followed me in my futile pursuit. Quickly overtaking me on his younger legs, the American had run some distance farther down into the garden, past the point where I had lost the path. but presently he, too, had lost sight of what he pursued and had decided to abandon the chase.
He came up to me now, out of breath but with an obscure triumph in his voice. “They’re gone, Watson. They were too fast for me in the darkness. What did you see?”
Vaguely I was now aware that I had somehow torn my sleeve and trouser leg, and that I was seriously out of breath. “No more than a dim figure,” I gasped. “but Holmes went with it. It carried him away.”
Armstrong’s vague outline beside me nodded. “That’s very much what it looked like to me. They went in this direction–but there must have been more than one man, wouldn’t you say? To abduct Sherlock Holmes in such a fashion?”
I murmured something.
During this brief exchange both of us had been trudging steadily uphill, and within a minute or so of our departure we were back on the terrace, where confusion and excitement reigned. Armstrong and I rejoined an uncertain number of dim figures that were still moving about in almost complete bewilderment, though now in relative quiet. Realizing that under the circumstances very little could be accomplished without more light, I re-entered the library through the broken window and went immediately to switch on the electric chandelier.
Inside the house, the impact of servants’ fists could now be heard through both of the library’s locked doors, as well as their muffled voices demanding to be answered, pleading for reassurance against the overwhelming evidence that something had gone terribly wrong.
Again, as in my earlier attempt, my progress toward the electric switch was impeded by disarranged furniture, and by collisions with one or more other people who were still moving about at cross-purposes in the darkened room.
When at last my fingers closed on the switch, and the lights in the library chandelier came on again, the sudden glare revealed Louisa’s mother, sitting near the library table in one of the few chairs which remained upright, the flowers on her gay dress now sadly crushed and torn. With the impact of the dazzling light, Mrs. Altamont screamed. Her outcry was promptly repeated, became a dirge of renewed loss that went on and on. It was echoed by a fresh scream from out on the terrace, in the voice of young Sarah Kirkaldy.
Meanwhile both the father and the fiancé of Louisa Altamont had followed me back into the house. The older man and the younger alike were joyfully stunned–but the two of them were not, as I was soon to discover, rejoicing for exactly the same reason.
It was Altamont who spoke to me first. “She came back... I touched her, Dr. Watson. Twice I touched her hand, her arm.” Extending his own trembling fingers, Louisa’s father went on to tell me, in a halting, altered voice, of how he had held his daughter’s hand, and had been able to see her at very close range in the darkness. They had exchanged some words of mutual recognition. “She came back!” he repeated, softly marveling.
We now drew back the draperies from all the windows, so that the electric light fell out strongly through the glass upon the terrace just outside. Asking a pale-faced Rebecca Altamont to see that my medical bag was brought down to me at once, I went out on the terrace again. My chief concern was for Abraham Kirkaldy. He was still lying almost exactly where I had seen him fall, although his sister, adding her lamentations to the noise, had lifted the young man’s gory head into her lap.
Both of the elder Altamonts, as well as Martin Armstrong, had suffered minor injuries from broken glass and collisions in the dark, but none requiring my immediate attention. Hurrying to the side of the fallen youth, I bent over him and made an examination with the aid of the glaring electric chandelier inside. Immediately it was obvious that young Kirkaldy had suffered a severely torn scalp, and almost certainly serious injury to the skull beneath. The wound had the appearance of having been made by a hard blow with some sharp and heavy weapon. As usual with a serious laceration of the scalp, there was considerable bleeding. but at the moment the victim still breathed.
While I was examining the young man, someone else, I believe it was Armstrong, at last went to unbolt and open the room’s interior doors, admitting the servants who had been pounding on them and demanding to know whether their master and mistress were all right.
Altamont now had a joyous answer for the clamoring servants, who now poured into the library bearing lights and a variety of improvised weapons. “She came to us! To her old parents–and I had doubted, but I shall never doubt again!” He went to try to comfort his wife, who, rather than rejoicing in Louisa’s return, was bemoaning her renewed loss. Neither had really taken any notice as yet of the new tragedy on the terrace–or of the kidnapping which had seemingly just occurred.
Looking around in the confusion, the fact struck me again, with even more ominous force than before, that Sherlock Holmes was still nowhere to be seen.
One of the servants had now brought my bag. Having done my best to stanch the bleeding of young Kirkaldy’s scalp wound–there was nothing else I could do for him at the moment–I quickly descended once more into the garden a few yards west of the terrace, and shouted Holmes’s name repeatedly. but there was no reply. It seemed to me that he had been made to vanish into a darkness whose ominous silence swallowed violence and death alike.
Now I had a few moments in which to look about the library. Perhaps Louisa had dropped something, left some actual trace of her presence in the house? but in the general disarrangement and confusion I could discover nothing.
It upset me at the time, but perhaps it is not really to be wondered at that in the circumstances, confronted by marvels and by violent injury, no one else seemed much concerned about the fact that Holmes was missing. I believe it was generally assumed that he had gone in pursuit of some intruder, despite my denials that that had been the case. Even though I was sure that my old friend had been in distress when I last saw him, I was still able to hope that he would soon return.
Despite my attempts to give myself such reassurances my worry grew.
Meanwhile, the various minor injuries suffered in the outbreak of violence kept me busy for a time in my professional capacity. At intervals I went outside again and looked and listened, but neither my borrowed electric torch nor my ears gave me the slightest encouragement regarding the success of any renewed search.
The screams uttered by Louisa’s mother had by this time declined into low exhausted moans. Obviously the woman remained for the moment inconsolable. In a low voice she had begun lamenting, over and over, the fact that her beloved Louisa had been here, within reach, and then had been somehow driven away again.
Mrs. Altamont, evidently in some forlorn hope of tempting her lost daughter back, asked that the electric lights be once more turned off. Of course the request had to be refused, and I invoked my medical authority firmly enough that the servants obeyed me. Meanwhile young Rebecca Altamont was trying, in a broken voice, to comfort her mother, even while struggling to suppress her own sobs.
Louisa’s father, obviously shaken to the depths of his being by the experience through which he had just passed, sympathized with his wife’s grief, but the main focus of his attention remained elsewhere. The man kept wandering in and out of the house, from the terrace to the library and back again, looking about him hopefully at every step, as if he thought his daughter might appear again. At length he came inside, let himself down in one of the chairs turned sideways from the table, and sat there staring into space, his mouth open, his expression vacant, as if unaware that his hand was still bleeding from a piece of broken glass. A servant who came to help him was ordered absently away, so that the blood continued to drip, unnoticed by the victim, upon the carpet.