Our visitor’s face had turned ashen gray as he listened to the words of his accuser. Now he sat for some time in thought with his face sunk in his hands. Then with a sudden impulsive gesture he plucked a photograph from his breast-pocket and threw it on the rustic table before us.
‘That is why I have done it,’ said he.
It showed the bust and face of a very beautiful woman. Holmes stooped over it.
‘Brenda Tregennis,’ said he.
‘Yes, Brenda Tregennis,’ repeated our visitor. ‘For years I have loved her. For years she has loved me. There is the secret of that Cornish seclusion which people have marvelled at. It has brought me close to the one thing on earth that was dear to me. I could not marry her, for I have a wife who has left me for years and yet whom, by the deplorable laws of England, I could not divorce. For years Brenda waited. For years I waited. And this is what we have waited for.’ A terrible sob shook his great frame, and he clutched his throat under his brindled beard. Then with an effort he mastered himself and spoke on:
‘The vicar knew. He was in our confidence. He would tell you that she was an angel upon earth. That was why he telegraphed to me and I returned. What was my baggage or Africa to me when I learned that such a fate had come upon my darling? There you have the missing clue to my action, Mr Holmes.’
‘Proceed,’ said my friend.
Dr Sterndale drew from his pocket a paper packet and laid it upon the table. On the outside was written ‘Radix pedis diaboli’ with a red poison label beneath it. He pushed it towards me. ‘I understand that you are a doctor, sir. Have you ever heard of this preparation?’
‘Devil’s-foot root! No, I have never heard of it.’
‘It is no reflection upon your professional knowledge,’ said he, ‘for I believe that, save for one sample in a laboratory at Buda, there is no other specimen in Europe. It has not yet found its way either into the pharmacopoeia or into the literature of toxicology. The root is shaped like a foot, half human, half goatlike; hence the fanciful name given by a botanical missionary. It is used as an ordeal poison by the medicine-men in certain districts of West Africa and is kept as a secret among them. This particular specimen I obtained under very extraordinary circumstances in the Ubangi country.’ He opened the paper as he spoke and disclosed a heap of reddish-brown, snuff-like powder.
‘Well, sir?’ asked Holmes sternly.
‘I am about to tell you, Mr Holmes, all that actually occurred, for you already know so much that it is clearly to my interest that you should know all. I have already explained the relationship in which I stood to the Tregennis family. For the sake of the sister I was friendly with the brothers. There was a family quarrel about money which estranged this man Mortimer, but it was supposed to be made up, and I afterwards met him as I did the others. He was a sly, subtle, scheming man, and several things arose which gave me a suspicion of him, but I had no cause for any positive quarrel.
‘One day, only a couple of weeks ago, he came down to my cottage and I showed him some of my African curiosities. Among other things I exhibited this powder, and I told him of its strange properties, how it stimulates those brain centres which control the emotion of fear, and how either madness or death is the fate of the unhappy native who is subjected to the ordeal by the priest of his tribe. I told him also how powerless European science would be to detect it. How he took it I cannot say, for I never left the room, but there is no doubt that it was then, while I was opening cabinets and stooping to boxes, that he managed to abstract some of the devil’s-foot root. I well remember how he plied me with questions as to the amount and the time that was needed for its effect, but I little dreamed that he could have a personal reason for asking.
‘I thought no more of the matter until the vicar’s telegram reached me at Plymouth. This villain had thought that I would be at sea before the news could reach me, and that I should be lost for years in Africa. But I returned at once. Of course, I could not listen to the details without feeling assured that my poison had been used. I came round to see you on the chance that some other explanation had suggested itself to you. But there could be none. I was convinced that Mortimer Tregennis was the murderer; that for the sake of money, and with the idea, perhaps, that if the other members of his family were all insane he would be the sole guardian of their joint property, he had used the devil’s-foot powder upon them, driven two of them out of their senses, and killed his sister Brenda, the one human being whom I have ever loved or who has ever loved me. There was his crime; what was to be his punishment?
‘Should I appeal to the law? Where were my proofs? I knew that the facts were true, but could I help to make a jury of countrymen believe so fantastic a story? I might or I might not. But I could not afford to fail. My soul cried out for revenge. I have said to you once before, Mr Holmes, that I have spent much of my life outside the law, and that I have come at last to be a law to myself. So it was now. I determined that the fate which he had given to others should be shared by himself. Either that or I would do justice upon him with my own hand. In all England there can be no man who sets less value upon his own life than I do at the present moment.
‘Now I have told you all. You have yourself supplied the rest. I did, as you say, after a restless night, set off early from my cottage. I foresaw the difficulty of arousing him, so I gathered some gravel from the pile which you have mentioned, and I used it to throw up to his window. He came down and admitted me through the window of the sitting-room. I laid his offence before him. I told him that I had come both as judge and executioner. The wretch sank into a chair, paralyzed at the sight of my revolver. I lit the lamp, put the powder above it, and stood outside the window, ready to carry out my threat to shoot him should he try to leave the room. In five minutes he died. My God! how he died! But my heart was flint, for he endured nothing which my innocent darling had not felt before him. There is my story, Mr Holmes. Perhaps, if you loved a woman, you would have done as much yourself. At any rate, I am in your hands. You can take what steps you like. As I have already said, there is no man living who can fear death less than I do.’
Holmes sat for some little time in silence.
‘What were your plans?’ he asked at last.
‘I had intended to bury myself in central Africa. My work there is but half finished.’
‘Go and do the other half,’ said Holmes. ‘I, at least, am not prepared to prevent you.’
Dr Sterndale raised his giant figure, bowed gravely, and walked from the arbour. Holmes lit his pipe and handed me his pouch.
‘Some fumes which are not poisonous would be a welcome change,’ said he. ‘I think you must agree, Watson, that it is not a case in which we are called upon to interfere. Our investigation has been independent, and our action shall be so also. You would not denounce the man?’
‘Certainly not,’ I answered.
‘I have never loved, Watson, but if I did and if the woman I loved had met such an end, I might act even as our lawless lion-hunter has done. Who knows? Well, Watson, I will not offend your intelligence by explaining what is obvious. The gravel upon the window-sill was, of course, the starting-point of my research. It was unlike anything in the vicarage garden. Only when my attention had been drawn to Dr Sterndale and his cottage did I find its counterpart. The lamp shining in broad daylight and the remains of powder upon the shield were successive links in a fairly obvious chain. And now, my dear Watson, I think we may dismiss the matter from our mind and go back with a clear conscience to the study of those Chaldean roots which are surely to be traced in the Cornish branch of the great Celtic speech.’
A Schoolmaster Abroad
E. W. Hornung
Ernest William Hornung (1866–1921), known as ‘Willie’ to friends and family, was Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, and an accomplished author in his own right. Doyle described him as ‘a Dr Johnson without the learning, but with a finer wit. No one coul
d say a neater thing, and his writings, good as they are, never adequately represented the powers of the man, nor the quickness of his brain.’ Today, Hornung is remembered as the creator of A. J. Raffles, the amateur cracksman, whose equivalent of Dr Watson is Harold ‘Bunny’ Manders, who had fagged for him when they were at public school.
The enduring popularity of the Raffles stories is deserved, but has obscured Hornung’s other work. His detective characters included Stingaree the Bushranger (Hornung lived in Australia at one time) and Dr John Dollar, who ventures to Switzerland in this story. Dollar sees himself as a crime doctor, someone whose mission is to prevent crime by treating prospective criminals by ‘saving ’em from themselves while they’re still worth saving’. This is a notion which, in different forms, continues to provoke interest. It is a pity that, after producing a single book about Dollar’s cases, Hornung’s literary career faltered due to a combination of bereavement and poor health. His work is still worth seeking out.
***
I
It is a small world that flocks to Switzerland for the Christmas holidays. It is also a world largely composed of that particular class which really did provide Dr Dollar with the majority of his cases. He was therefore not surprised, on the night of his arrival at the great Excelsior Hotel, in Winterwald, to feel a diffident touch on the shoulder, and to look round upon the sunburnt blushes of a quite recent patient.
George Edenborough had taken Winterwald on his wedding trip, and nothing would suit him and his nut-brown bride but for the doctor to join them at their table. It was a slightly embarrassing invitation, but there was good reason for not persisting in a first refusal. And the bride carried the situation with a breezy vitality, while her groom chose a wine worthy of the occasion, and the newcomer explained that he had arrived by the afternoon train, but had not come straight to the hotel.
‘Then you won’t have heard of our great excitement,’ said Mrs Edenborough, ‘and I’m afraid you won’t like it when you do.’
‘If you mean the strychnine affair,’ returned Dollar, with a certain deliberation, ‘I heard one version before I had been in the place an hour. I can’t say that I did like it. But I should be interested to know what you both think about it all.’
Edenborough returned the wine-list to the waiter with sepulchral injunctions.
‘Are you telling him about our medical scandal?’ he inquired briskly of the bride. ‘My dear doctor, it’ll make your professional hair stand on end! Here’s the local practitioner been prescribing strychnine pills warranted to kill in twenty minutes!’
‘So I hear,’ said the crime doctor, drily.
‘The poor brute has been frightfully overworked,’ continued Edenborough, in deference to a more phlegmatic front than he had expected of the British faculty. ‘They say he was up two whole nights last week; he seems to be the only doctor in the place, and the hotels are full of fellows doing their level best to lay themselves out. We’ve had two concussions of the brain and one complicated fracture this very week. Still, to go and give your patient a hundred times more strychnine than you intended—’
And he stopped himself, as though the subject, which he had taken up with a purely nervous zest, was rather near home after all.
‘But what about his patient?’ adroitly inquired the doctor. ‘If half that one hears is true, he wouldn’t have been much loss.’
‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ said Lucy Edenborough, with the air of a Roman matron turning down her thumbs.
‘He’s a fellow who was at my private school, just barely twenty-one, and making an absolute fool of himself,’ explained Edenborough, touching his wine-glass. ‘It’s an awful pity. He used to be such a nice little chap, Jack Laverick.’
‘He was nice enough when he was out here a year ago,’ the bride admitted, ‘and he’s still a sportsman. He won half the toboggan races last season, and took it all delightfully; he’s quite another person now, and gives himself absurd airs on top of everything else. Still, I shall expect Mr Laverick either to sweep the board or break his neck. He evidently wasn’t born to be poisoned.’
‘Did he come to grief last year, Mrs Edenborough?’
‘He only nearly had one of his ears cut off, in a spill on the ice-run. So they said; but he was tobogganing again the next day.’
‘Dr Alt looked after him all right then, I hear,’ added Edenborough, as the champagne arrived. ‘But I only wish you could take the fellow in hand! He really used to be a decent chap, but it would take even you all your time to make him one again, Dr Dollar.’
The crime doctor smiled as he raised his glass and returned compliments across the bubbles. It was the smile of a man with bigger fish to fry. Yet it was he who came back to the subject of young Laverick, asking if he had not a tutor or somebody to look after him, and what the man meant by not doing his job.
In an instant both the Edenboroughs had turned upon their friend. Poor Mr Scarth was not to blame! Poor Mr Scarth, it appeared, had been a master at the preparatory school at which Jack Laverick and George Edenborough had been boys. He was a splendid fellow, and very popular in the hotel, but there was nothing but sympathy with him in the matter under discussion. His charge was of age, and in a position to send him off at any moment, as indeed he was always threatening in his cups. But there again there was a special difficulty: one cup was more than enough for Jack Laverick, whose weak head for wine was the only excuse for him.
‘Yet there was nothing of the kind last year,’ said Mrs Edenborough, in a reversionary voice; ‘at least, one never heard of it. And that makes it all the harder on poor Mr Scarth.’
Dollar declared that he was burning to meet the unfortunate gentleman; the couple exchanged glances, and he was told to wait till after the concert, at which he had better sit with them. Was there a concert? His face lengthened at the prospect, and the bride’s eyes sparkled at his expense. She would not hear of his shirking it, but went so far as to cut dinner short in order to obtain good seats. She was one of those young women who have both a will and a way with them, and Dollar soon found himself securely penned in the gallery of an ambitious ball-room with a stage at the other end.
The concert came up to his most sardonic expectations, and he resigned himself to a boredom only intensified by the behaviour of some crude humorists in the rows behind. Indifferent song followed indifferent song, and each earned a more vociferous encore from those gay young gods. A not unknown novelist told dialect stories of purely territorial interest; a lady recited with astounding spirit; another fiddled, no less courageously; but the back rows of the gallery were quite out of hand when a black-avised gentleman took the stage, and had not opened his mouth before those back rows were rows of Satans reproving sin and clapping with unsophisticated gusto.
‘Who’s this?’ asked Dollar, instantly aware of the change behind him; but even Lucy Edenborough would only answer, ‘Hush, doctor!’ as she bent forward with shining eyes. And certainly a hairpin could not have dropped unheard before the dark performer relieved the tension by plunging into a scene from Pickwick.
It was the scene of Mr Jingle’s monologue on the Rochester coach—and the immortal nonsense was inimitably given. Yet nobody could have been less like the emaciated prototype than this tall tanned man, with the short black moustache, and the flashing teeth that bit off every word with ineffable snap and point.
‘Mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother’s head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—’ and his own grim one only added to the fun and swelled the roar.
He waited darkly for them to stop, the wilful absence of any amusement on his side enormously increasing that of the audience. But when it came to the episode of Donna Christina and the stomach-pump, with the culminating discovery of Don Bolaro Fizzgig in the main pipe of the public fountain, the guffaws of half the house eventually drew from th
e other half the supreme compliment of exasperated demands for silence. Mrs George Edenborough was one of the loudest offenders. George himself had to wipe his eyes. And the crime doctor had forgotten that there was such a thing as crime.
‘That chap’s a genius!’ he exclaimed, when a double encore had been satisfied by further and smaller doses of Mr Jingle, artfully held in reserve. ‘But who is he, Mrs Edenborough?’
‘Poor Mr Scarth!’ crowed the bride, brimming over with triumphant fun.
But the doctor’s mirth was at an end.
‘That the fellow who can’t manage a bit of a boy, when he can hold an audience like this in the hollow of his hand?’
And at first he looked as though he could not believe it, and then all at once as though he could. But by this time the Edenboroughs were urging Scarth’s poverty in earnest, and Dollar could only say that he wanted to meet him more than ever.
The wish was not to be gratified without a further sidelight and a fresh surprise. As George and the doctor were repairing to the billiard-room, before the conclusion of the lengthy programme, they found a group of backs upon the threshold, and a ribald uproar in full swing within. One voice was in the ascendant, and it was sadly indistinct; but it was also the voice of the vanquished, belching querulous futilities. The cold steel thrusts of an autocratic Jingle cut it shorter and shorter. It ceased altogether, and the men in the doorway made way for Mr Scarth, as he hurried a dishevelled youth off the scene in the most approved constabulary manner.
Resorting to Murder Page 4