Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Page 12

  What could this thing portend?

  I had already convinced myself that if Sir Henry were the subject of a hallucination, I also shared it. As this was impossible, I felt certain that the apparition had a material foundation. Who was the person who glided night after night into Lady Studley's room, who knew the trick of the secret spring in the wall, who entered the old wardrobe, and performed this ghastly, this appalling trick on Sir Henry Studley? I resolved that I would say nothing to Sir Henry of my fresh discovery until after I had spent another night in the haunted room.

  Accordingly, I slipped the key of the wardrobe once more into my pocket and went downstairs.

  I had my way again that night. Once more I found myself the sole occupant of the haunted room. I put out the light, sat on the edge of the bed, and waited the issue of events. At first there was silence and complete darkness, but soon after one o'clock I heard the very slight but unmistakable tick-tick, which told me that the apparition was about to appear. The ticking noise resembled the quaint sound made by the death spider. There was no other noise of any sort, but a quickening of my pulses, a sensation which I could not call fear, but which was exciting to the point of pain, braced me up for an unusual and horrible sight. The light appeared in the dim recess of the wardrobe. It grew clear and steady, and quickly resolved itself into one intensely bright circle. Out of this circle the eye looked at me. The eye was unnaturally large – it was clear, almost transparent, its expression was full of menace and warning. Into the circle of light presently a shadowy and ethereal hand intruded itself. The fingers beckoned me to approach, while the eye looked fixedly at me. I sat motionless on the side of the bed. I am stoical by nature and my nerves are well seasoned, but I am not ashamed to say that I should be very sorry to be often subjected to that menace and that invitation. The look in that eye, the beckoning power in those long, shadowy fingers would soon work havoc even in the stoutest nerves. My heart beat uncomfortably fast, and I had to say over and over to myself, 'This is nothing more than a ghastly trick'. I had also to remind myself that I in my turn had prepared a trap for the apparition. The time while the eye looked and the hand beckoned might in reality have been counted by seconds; to me it seemed like eternity. I felt the cold dew on my forehead before the rapidly waning light assured me that the apparition was about to vanish. Making an effort I now left the bed and approached the wardrobe. I listened intently. For a moment there was perfect silence. Then a fumbling noise was distinctly audible. It was followed by a muffled cry, a crash, and a heavy fall. I struck a light instantly, and taking the key of the wardrobe from my pocket, opened it. Never shall I forget the sight that met my gaze.

  There, huddled up on the floor, lay the prostrate and unconscious form of Lady Studley. A black cloak in which she had wrapped herself partly covered her face, but I knew her by her long, fair hair. I pulled back the cloak, and saw that the unhappy girl had broken a blood-vessel, and even as I lifted her up I knew that she was in a dying condition.

  I carried her at once into her own room and laid her on the bed. I then returned and shut the wardrobe door, and slipped the key into my pocket. My next deed was to summon Sir Henry.

  'What is it?' he asked, springing upright in bed.

  'Come at once,' I said, 'your wife is very ill.'

  'Dying?' he asked, in an agonized whisper.

  I nodded my head. I could not speak.

  My one effort now was to keep the knowledge of the ghastly discovery I had made from the unhappy husband.

  He followed me to his wife's room. He forgot even to question me about the apparition, so horrified was he at the sight which met his view.

  I administered restoratives to the dying woman, and did what I could to check the haemorrhage. After a time Lady Studley opened her dim eyes.

  'Oh, Henry!' she said, stretching out a feeble hand to him, 'come with me, come with me. I am afraid to go alone.'

  'My poor Lucilla,' he said. He smoothed her cold forehead, and tried to comfort her by every means in his power.

  After a time he left the room. When he did so she beckoned me to approach. 'I have failed,' she said, in the most thrilling voice of horror I have ever listened to. 'I must go alone. He will not come with me.'

  'What do you mean?' I asked.

  She could scarcely speak, but at intervals the following words dropped slowly from her lips: –

  'I was the apparition. I did not want my husband to live after me. Perhaps I was a little insane. I cannot quite say. When I was told by Sir Joseph Dunbar that there was no hope of my life, a most appalling and frightful jealousy took possession of me. I pictured my husband with another wife. Stoop down.'

  Her voice was very faint. I could scarcely hear her muttered words. Her eyes were glazing fast, death was claiming her, and yet hatred against some unknown person thrilled in her feeble voice.

  'Before my husband married me, he loved another woman,' she continued. 'That woman is now a widow. I felt certain that immediately after my death he would seek her out and marry her. I could not bear the thought – it possessed me day and night. That, and the terror of dying alone, worked such a havoc within me that I believe I was scarcely responsible for my own actions. A mad desire took possession of me to take my husband with me, and so to keep him from her, and also to have his company when I passed the barriers of life. I told you that my brother was a doctor. In his medical-student days the sort of trick I have been playing on Sir Henry was enacted by some of his fellow-students for his benefit, and almost scared him into fever. One day my brother described the trick to me, and I asked him to show me how it was done. I used a small electric lamp and a very strong reflector.'

  'How did you find out the secret door of the wardrobe?' I asked.

  'Quite by chance. I was putting some dresses into the wardrobe one day and accidentally touched the secret panel. I saw at once that here was my opportunity.'

  'You must have been alarmed at your success,' I said, after a pause. 'And now I have one more question to ask: Why did you summon me to the Grange?'

  She made a faint, impatient movement.

  'I wanted to be certain that my husband was really very ill,' she said. 'I wanted you to talk to him – I guessed he would confide in you; I thought it most probable that you would tell him that he was a victim of brain hallucinations. This would frighten him and would suit my purpose exactly. I also sent for you as a blind. I felt sure that under these circumstances neither you nor my husband could possibly suspect me.'

  She was silent again, panting from exhaustion.

  'I have failed,' she said, after a long pause. 'You have discovered the truth. It never occurred to me for a moment that you would go into the room. He will recover now.'

  She paused; a fresh attack of haemorrhage came on. Her breath came quickly. Her end was very near. Her dim eyes could scarcely see.

  Groping feebly with her hand she took mine.

  'Dr Halifax – promise.'

  'What?' I asked.

  'I have failed, but let me keep his love, what little love he has for me, before he marries that other woman. Promise that you will never tell him.'

  'Rest easy,' I answered, 'I will never tell him.'

  Sir Henry entered the room.

  I made way for him to kneel by his wife's side.

  As the grey morning broke Lady Studley died.

  Before my departure from the Grange I avoided Sir Henry as much as possible. Once he spoke of the apparition and asked if I had seen it. 'Yes,' I replied.

  Before I could say anything further, he continued:

  'I know now why it came; it was to warn me of my unhappy wife's death.' He said no more. I could not enlighten him, and he is unlikely now ever to learn the truth.

  The following day I left Studley Grange. I took with me, without asking leave of any-one, a certain long black cloak, a small electric lamp, and a magnifying glass of considerable power.

  It may be of interest to explain how Lady Studley in her unhealthy co
ndition of mind and body performed the extraordinary trick by which she hoped to undermine her husband's health, and ultimately cause his death.

  I experimented with the materials which I carried away with me, and succeeded, so my friends told me, in producing a most ghastly effect.

  I did it in this way. I attached the mirror of a laryngoscope to my forehead in such a manner as to enable it to throw a strong reflection into one of my eyes. In the centre of the bright side of the laryngoscope a small electric lamp was fitted. This was connected with a battery which I carried in my hand. The battery was similar to those used by the ballet girls in Drury Lane Theatre, and could be brought into force by a touch and extinguished by the removal of the pressure. The eye which was thus brilliantly illumined looked through a lens of some power. All the rest of the face and figure was completely covered by the black cloak. Thus the brightest possible light was thrown on the magnified eye, while there was corresponding increased gloom around.

  When last I heard of Studley Grange it was let for a term of years and Sir Henry had gone abroad. I have not heard that he has married again, but he probably will, sooner or later.

  Father Brown

  Created by G. K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936)

  ARGUABLY THE MOST widely gifted of the writers featured in this book, Chesterton published dozens of books in his lifetime on subjects ranging from theology to literary criticism. He was also famous as a prolific journalist, able to turn his gift for wit and paradox on a wide array of literary, social, political and religious issues. He wrote a number of novels, including The Napoleon of Notting Hill, a fantasy set in a future London, but his best known works of fiction are the Father Brown stories in which an unassuming Roman Catholic priest solves apparently insoluble mysteries through logic and his knowledge of the human heart. Chesterton himself became a Roman Catholic in 1922. 'The Hammer of God' is one of the most memorable of the Father Brown stories. At one point in the narrative, the murderer, confronted by the simple priest's apparent ability to read his mind, asks, 'Are you a devil?' 'I am a man,' Father Brown replies, 'and therefore have all devils in my heart.' His knowledge of the devils inside him and inside others is what enables Father Brown to perform the apparently impossible feats of deduction which enliven Chesterton's stories.

  The Hammer of God

  THE LITTLE VILLAGE of Bohun Beacon was perched on a hill so steep that the tall spire of its church seemed only like the peak of a small mountain. At the foot of the church stood a smithy, generally red with fires and always littered with hammers and scraps of iron; opposite to this, over a rude cross of cobbled paths, was 'The Blue Boar', the only inn of the place. It was upon this crossway, in the lifting of a leaden and silver daybreak, that two brothers met in the street and spoke; though one was beginning the day and the other finishing it. The Rev. and Hon. Wilfred Bohun was very devout, and was making his way to some austere exercises of prayer or contemplation at dawn. Colonel the Hon. Norman Bohun, his elder brother, was by no means devout, and was sitting in evening dress on the bench outside 'The Blue Boar', drinking what the philosophic observer was free to regard either as his last glass on Tuesday or his first on Wednesday. The colonel was not particular.

  The Bohuns were one of the very few aristocratic families really dating from the Middle Ages, and their pennon had actually seen Palestine. But it is a great mistake to suppose that such houses stand high in chivalric tradition. Few except the poor preserve traditions. Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions. The Bohuns had been Mohocks under Queen Anne and Mashers under Queen Victoria. But like more than one of the really ancient houses, they had rotted in the last two centuries into mere drunkards and dandy degenerates, till there had even come a whisper of insanity. Certainly there was something hardly human about the colonel's wolfish pursuit of pleasure, and his chronic resolution not to go home till morning had a touch of the hideous clarity of insomnia. He was a tall, fine animal, elderly, but with hair still startlingly yellow. He would have looked merely blonde and leonine, but his blue eyes were sunk so deep in his face that they looked black. They were a little too close together. He had very long yellow moustaches; on each side of them a fold or furrow from nostril to jaw, so that a sneer seemed cut into his face. Over his evening clothes he wore a curious pale yellow coat that looked more like a very light dressing gown than an overcoat, and on the back of his head was stuck an extraordinary broad-brimmed hat of a bright green colour, evidently some oriental curiosity caught up at random. He was proud of appearing in such incongruous attires – proud of the fact that he always made them look congruous.

  His brother the curate had also the yellow hair and the elegance, but he was buttoned up to the chin in black, and his face was clean-shaven, cultivated, and a little nervous. He seemed to live for nothing but his religion; but there were some who said (notably the blacksmith, who was a Presbyterian) that it was a love of Gothic architecture rather than of God, and that his haunting of the church like a ghost was only another and purer turn of the almost morbid thirst for beauty which sent his brother raging after women and wine. This charge was doubtful, while the man's practical piety was indubitable. Indeed, the charge was mostly an ignorant misunderstanding of the love of solitude and secret prayer, and was founded on his being often found kneeling, not before the altar, but in peculiar places, in the crypts or gallery, or even in the belfry. He was at the moment about to enter the church through the yard of the smithy, but stopped and frowned a little as he saw his brother's cavernous eyes staring in the same direction. On the hypothesis that the colonel was interested in the church he did not waste any speculations. There only remained the blacksmith's shop, and though the blacksmith was a Puritan and none of his people, Wilfred Bohun had heard some scandals about a beautiful and rather celebrated wife. He flung a suspicious look across the shed, and the colonel stood up laughing to speak to him.

  'Good morning, Wilfred,' he said. 'Like a good landlord I am watching sleeplessly over my people. I am going to call on the blacksmith.'

  Wilfred looked at the ground, and said: 'The blacksmith is out. He is over at Greenford.'

  'I know,' answered the other with silent laughter; 'that is why I am calling on him.'

  'Norman,' said the cleric, with his eye on a pebble in the road, 'are you ever afraid of thunderbolts?'

  'What do you mean?' asked the colonel. 'Is your hobby meteorology?'

  'I mean,' said Wilfred, without looking up, 'do you ever think that God might strike you in the street?'

  'I beg your pardon,' said the colonel; 'I see your hobby is folklore.'

  'I know your hobby is blasphemy,' retorted the religious man, stung in the one live place of his nature. 'But if you do not fear God, you have good reason to fear man.'

  The elder raised his eyebrows politely. 'Fear man?' he said.

  'Barnes the blacksmith is the biggest and strongest man for forty miles round,' said the clergyman sternly. 'I know you are no coward or weakling, but he could throw you over the wall.'

  This struck home, being true, and the lowering line by mouth and nostril darkened and deepened. For a moment he stood with the heavy sneer on his face. But in an instant Colonel Bohun had recovered his own cruel good humour and laughed, showing two dog-like front teeth under his yellow moustache. 'In that case, my dear Wilfred,' he said quite carelessly, 'it was wise for the last of the Bohuns to come out partially in armour.'

  And he took off the queer round hat covered with green, showing that it was lined within with steel. Wilfred recognised it indeed as a light Japanese or Chinese helmet torn down from a trophy that hung in the old family hall.

  'It was the first hat to hand,' explained his brother airily; 'always the nearest hat – and the nearest woman.'

  'The blacksmith is away at Greenford,' said Wilfred quietly; 'the time of his return is unsettled.'

  And with that he turned and went into the church with bowed head, crossing himself like one who wishes to be quit of an unclean spirit. He was a
nxious to forget such grossness in the cool twilight of his tall Gothic cloisters; but on that morning it was fated that his still round of religious exercises should be everywhere arrested by small shocks. As he entered the church, hitherto always empty at that hour, a kneeling figure rose hastily to its feet and came towards the full daylight of the doorway. When the curate saw it he stood still with surprise. For the early worshipper was none other than the village idiot, a nephew of the blacksmith, one who neither would nor could care for the church or for anything else. He was always called 'Mad Joe' and seemed to have no other name; he was a dark, strong, slouching lad, with a heavy white face, dark straight hair, and a mouth always open. As he passed the priest, his moon-calf countenance gave no hint of what he had been doing or thinking of. He had never been known to pray before. What sort of prayers was he saying now? Extraordinary prayers surely.