‘I suppose the fact that I had become anxious about the situation opened my ears a little and gossip which would have previously quite passed me by began now to catch my attention, and contribute to the ugly picture which was forming in my mind. It must have been something of the sort, for I assure you that I did not go out of my way to discover things, or to interfere in what was not my business; but, little by little, further intelligence relating to Trent came my way: that he had been engaged to be married once before, whilst in India, and that the engagement had been broken off by his fiancée when certain facts about his conduct had come to light; that he had come very close to being charged with murder over the death of another man during a tiger-hunt; that he was not quite so wealthy as he liked people to believe; and that shortly before his whirlwind courtship of Miss Ballantyne he had spoken to acquaintances of how great he believed her own wealth to be.
‘I imagine you can see now the picture that formed in my mind: of a ruthless, reckless man, who had pursued Miss Ballantyne chiefly on account of the wealth he imagined she possessed. But I have, as I remarked, been intimate with Miss Ballantyne for many years, and I know that she is not nearly so wealthy as is popularly supposed. Her antecedents were very humble ones. Her father was a railway employee, at a place called Laisterdyke, near Bradford in Yorkshire, and when he died, some years ago, her mother was left in very difficult circumstances. Throughout her professional life, Miss Ballantyne has been sending money regularly to her mother and to her two younger sisters. She has also, although she does not wish this to be generally known, contributed a great deal of money to various charitable and philanthropic causes. Thus, although she has earned considerable sums of money in recent years, she has given much of it away and has amassed very little for herself. How disappointing it must have been for the grasping Captain Trent to discover this after they were married!
‘Recently, I engaged a private detective to report to me on Trent’s activities. It may not seem a very honourable thing, to spy upon another man’s private life; but the conduct upon which I was spying was itself not honourable. The very first report I received informed me that Trent had dined privately, on several occasions, with Lydia Summers. At once I recalled how keen Trent had been to recommend Miss Summers to Mr Hardy when the latter was first beginning work on The Lavender Girl, and how he had laid great stress upon her father’s wealth, and how useful it might therefore be to have Sir Cecil Summers connected with the theatre company. Again, that villain was thinking of wealth and, I was convinced, of how he might acquire it. It was then that I began to seriously fear for Miss Ballantyne’s safety. When a man is as reckless and unprincipled as Trent, there is no knowing what he might do.
‘The part played by Miss Summers in all this, incidentally, is, in the main, I believe, an innocent one. She is a somewhat dull-witted girl, and her chief points of attraction definitely lie in her purse – or in that of her father, at least. Whether it struck her as at all unusual or improper to dine alone in an obscure restaurant with another woman’s husband, I cannot say. No doubt Trent convinced her that it was the most natural thing in the world. He talks well to women. But she is not essentially dishonourable. Had she guessed the fiendish scheme that was in his mind, I strongly suspect that she would have declined to have anything more to do with him.
‘This scheme, I am convinced, was first to rid himself of his wife, and then to woo and wed Miss Summers. And had it not been for your timely intervention, gentlemen, the despicable villain might well have succeeded!’
‘It cannot have been very pleasant for Miss Ballantyne to learn that her husband has been plotting to murder her,’ remarked Holmes. ‘It is scarcely a morale-boosting discovery, two days before opening night. What will happen to The Lavender Girl now, Count Laszlo? Will it be postponed?’
Our visitor shook his head. ‘Isabel Ballantyne is very brave,’ said he, ‘and if anyone can survive such a blow, she can. She is staying with friends now, who will, I know, treat her with a kindness she has never received from her husband. Besides, terrible though the revelation is, I suspect that in her heart Isabel has known for some time that something was seriously amiss. I believe that intuitively she suspected that Trent was behind the recent events at the Albion, but could not bring herself to acknowledge that suspicion. Now, her chief consideration is not to let her friends down. She insists that The Lavender Girl will open as advertised, on Saturday evening. Miss Summers, I might add, has withdrawn from the production. She could scarcely do otherwise. Her name will inevitably figure in any future court case involving Trent, either criminal or civil. Her role in the play has been taken by a delightful girl from the chorus, who has a sweet voice and will, I believe, do very well. Hardy is already reconciled to the likelihood of managing without Sir Cecil Summers’s bounty, but as he has not yet seen a penny of that fabled wealth, that will be no loss. In any case, I have informed him that I shall in future take a more active part in the business, especially upon the financial side. I look forward to a prosperous future for the company.’
‘How came you to appear in the room beneath the stage when you did?’ asked Holmes.
‘As I have described, I had suspected for some time that Trent was planning something, but had no idea what form his evil plans might take. Yesterday afternoon, however, a curious thing happened. It was raining very heavily when I arrived at the theatre, so I sat in my carriage for a few moments, waiting for it to let up. I was thinking about Isabel and her husband, when, to my very great surprise, Captain Trent himself appeared from round the side of the theatre. I leaned back in my seat so that he would not see me, and reflected on the matter. What, I wondered, had he been doing round there? I instructed my coachman to turn into the little street by the side of the theatre. There was only one place there from which Trent could possibly have come, the locked side-door of the old Palace Theatre. But what possible business could he have in there? And then it was as if the scales fell from my eyes! Trent had discovered the old tunnel between the two theatres which I remembered having read about two or three years ago. It was he that was responsible for all the nasty little tricks which had been played upon the company recently and on each occasion he had used the tunnel to make good his escape! I saw it all now and feared that some serious harm might be intended for Miss Ballantyne. I therefore resolved that I would keep guard in the basement corridor today, during the dress-rehearsal. It seems, however, that I would, nevertheless, have been too late. Somehow, that devil slipped by me and I heard nothing until the sounds of your struggle came to my ears. How fortunate it was for Miss Ballantyne that you were more alert than I and cleverer than that serpent, Trent, to foil his devilish plot!’
‘And how fortunate it was for Miss Ballantyne,’ I interjected, ‘that the wooden bar which held the trap-door had jammed and did not slide free!’
Holmes chuckled. ‘I am always ready to acknowledge the part played by chance in the affairs of men,’ said he; ‘but in this case, with regard to the trap-door, at least, I must insist that chance had very little to do with it. The wooden bar did not slide free because I had called in at the theatre in the morning, borrowed a hammer from one of the stage-hands and banged two large nails into the back edge of it, where they could not be seen by anyone looking up from the floor.’
‘What!’ I cried. ‘You might have told me, Holmes! I had no idea that you had been there earlier in the day!’
‘My dear fellow! You can hardly suppose that I would leave my client at risk of plummeting to her death. I had been pondering overnight how best to secure the trap-door without making it apparent to Trent that I had done so. In the end I decided that the simplest method was the best. I really could not leave it as we had found it, Watson. The risk was simply too great. Consider, for instance, the number of brewers’ drays in London on an average day! Any one of them might have run us down on our way to the theatre and thus prevented our reaching there in time to save Miss Ballantyne!’
‘And even though
we were there in good time,’ I remarked, ‘Trent still succeeded in holding us all at bay until he had pulled on the rope.’
Again my friend chuckled. ‘I had a pistol of my own in my pocket,’ said he. ‘When Inspector Jones’s slip gave away our position, I could have whipped it out and had Trent at my mercy at once. But I wished him to think himself secure and thus proceed with his plan, so that his guilt could be proved beyond doubt before three reliable witnesses! I am sorry that I had to keep you in the dark about the trap-door, old man! But I was concerned that if you knew that I had secured it, you might inadvertently reveal the fact to Jones; and if Jones knew about it, he might inadvertently reveal it to Trent. I am sure that under the circumstances you will forgive my reticence on the point!’
‘I am more than familiar with your tendency to reticence,’ said I, laughing. ‘Frankly, I doubt that my granting or withholding forgiveness will make the slightest difference to it! But if you would value my forgiveness, I hereby grant it!’
‘For what you have done,’ said Count Laszlo in a serious tone, ‘I can never repay you and any gesture I might make would be but a trifle. Nevertheless, I should be greatly honoured if you would be my guests on Saturday evening. I have a private box for the opening of The Lavender Girl, and am entertaining the entire company afterwards in my rooms at the Langham Hotel.’
‘I am honoured by your invitation,’ replied Holmes, ‘but regret that I shall be otherwise engaged on Saturday evening.’
My face must have betrayed the disappointment I felt at this response; for after a glance in my direction, and a moment’s pause, my friend’s features broke into a smile and he chuckled.
‘But, perhaps, on this occasion, I could cancel my other engagements!’ said he with a merry laugh. ‘After all, both Dr Watson and I have certainly made a contribution, however indirect, to the eventual success of The Lavender Girl; so it is perhaps no more than fitting if we are in attendance when she is at last presented to the world!’
The Adventure of the Old School Friend
It has been justly observed of medicine that it can never be wholly a science, but must also be at least partly an art. For unlike the other scientific subjects, its field of study is not that of inanimate substances and forces, but living and breathing human beings, who are not always amenable to being treated in a purely scientific manner, and who are, generally speaking, less interested in hearing one’s opinion of what is wrong with them than in achieving full health once more. This fact serves not only to distinguish medicine from the other sciences, but also to mark a division in the ranks of medical practitioners themselves. All medical men serve the same deity, but an individual’s temperament will determine the character of his service.
There are medicos of my acquaintance, for instance, to whom the presence of other human beings seems nothing but an irksome distraction, except when it is a downright nuisance, especially if the human beings in question should actually have the effrontery to be ill. Such men find their most useful employment in medical research. For others, the study of one particular aspect of the complex that is a man becomes so absorbing that it is only as specialists that they can achieve professional satisfaction. But for many – and among these I would number myself – the chief interest lies not in any one illness or condition to which a person may fall victim, but in that person as a whole, whatever may ail him. For such medical men, who derive their satisfaction from diagnosing and treating the quite unpredictable variety of complaints with which their patients present them, there is nothing so good as general practice.
The choice of general practice – the specialisation in generality, as it has been termed – has the added advantage, also, that in following it, one comes into contact to a quite singular degree with the multifarious panorama of life; for one’s patients have a habit of adulterating their descriptions of what ails them with large measures of personal history and local anecdote. The years I had shared chambers with Sherlock Holmes had sharpened my taste for all that was outré and out of the common, and I enjoyed hearing the unusual experiences of my patients. Only when it was apparent that some unusually garrulous patient regarded his physician as a captive audience for as long as he chose to hold forth have I been tempted on occasion to regret my choice of medical career.
When I took over the Paddington practice of old Dr Farquhar, shortly after my marriage, I was at once involved in a more strenuous round of work than I had known since my days in the Army Medical Department. No longer in his prime, Farquhar had had neither the energy nor the inclination to put any great amount of effort into the practice, with the inevitable result that a decline had set in, and many of his patients had transferred to the rival practice of the young and vigorous Dr Jackson. The temptation to effect such a change must indeed have been a great one, for the temptation most difficult to resist is that which calls for the least expenditure of effort; and in this respect the circumstances could scarcely have been more agreeable, the premises of the two doctors standing side by side in the same street. Still, the physical proximity of our consulting-rooms could just as well work to my advantage as to that of my rival, I reasoned, and I was confident that by dint of hard work I could more than recoup the losses that my predecessor had suffered.
Thus it was that I found myself busily making acquaintance with all manner of folk, and if I had hoped to learn something of the eccentricities of the human race as I learnt something of their bodily infirmities, I was not disappointed. For although it was not a large practice that I had inherited from Dr Farquhar, it was certainly a varied one. Scarcely a day passed but I encountered some surprising novelty of human behaviour or experience.
One frail old lady, whose delicate and refined appearance had led me to suppose that she had never in her life travelled beyond the bounds of London, surprised me greatly one day, when she began to speak of the twenty-five years she had spent in the jungles of Borneo. Another of my patients, an unexceptional-looking, middle-aged man, a railway employee at Paddington station, turned out to have the most profound and erudite knowledge of Anglo-Saxon coins and medallions, upon which subject he had written numerous monographs. There was also, I regret to recall, Mr Septimus Witherington. He was a softly spoken, learned-looking man and I had mentally marked him down as something of a scholar. Unfortunately, scholar though he may have been, he was also a monomaniac.
Upon my expressing enthusiasm for English literature, in response to some casual remark of his, he at once launched into the most rambling and long-winded disquisition that it has ever been my misfortune to hear, the chief theme of which was that the works generally ascribed to William Shakespeare were in fact written by someone else altogether. I had no especial objection to this thesis; indeed, the detective-work which was involved in it appealed to my inquisitive nature; but his mode of argument was quite intolerable; for, like all true fanatics, he was unable to present his views except in the most violently abusive of terms.
In vain I attempted to interrupt him; in vain I shuffled the papers upon my desk and rearranged my medical instruments; in vain I consulted my watch ostentatiously, stood up from my desk and wound the clock upon the mantelpiece. Nothing, it seemed, could stem his flow. At length I was obliged to be a little brusque with him, whereupon he at once took great offence, informed me that I was as big a fool as I looked, and stamped out of the room in high dudgeon. Of Mr Witherington and his theories I have since heard no more, but I cannot say in all honesty that this state of affairs has ever caused me any great regret.
Not all my patients turned out so eccentric as this, however – perhaps fortunately, from the point of view of their physician’s good humour – and I was privileged to be the recipient of many interesting – and some most surprising – anecdotes. Perhaps most memorable of all is the story I now propose to relate, which concerns the curious adventure of Mr Alfred Herbert and the oriental idol. This was remarkable not only for its surprising turns of events and unforeseen outcome, but also because chance dec
reed that I was myself to play an active part in the matter – and because, also, it provided an opportunity for me to observe once more the singular talents of my remarkable friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes.
_______
It was a bright, sunny period in August, the very type of the perfect English summer, with blue skies from dawn to dusk and a gentle breeze to moderate the heat. The weather being so good, there were few calls upon my professional services and I was taking the opportunity to catch up on my reading of the medical journals when Mr Herbert was shown into my consulting-room, early one evening. He was a short and stockily-built man of about my own age, with a large, round, clean-shaven face and slightly protruding eyes. His ailment was mild but chronic bronchitis, which, surprisingly, had not improved at all during the fine weather. I applied my stethoscope to his chest and listened for a moment to the tell-tale rattle from within.
The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes Page 17