Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Page 9

  'Yes. Poor Captain! Did he yelp or groan?'

  'Why, he gave one loud, long, hideous yelp, just as if he had been a common cur. I might just as well have let him alone; it only set that other brute opening his window and spying out on me, and saying in his cracked old voice: "Master, what are you doing out here at this time of night?"'

  Again he sank back in his chair, muttering incoherently with halfclosed eyes.

  Loveday let him alone for a minute or so; then she had another question to ask.

  'And that other brute – did he yelp or groan when you dealt him his blow?'

  'What, old Sandy – the brute? He fell back – Ah, I remember, you said you would like to see the hammer that stopped his babbling old tongue – now, didn't you?'

  He rose a little unsteadily from his chair, and seemed to drag his long limbs with an effort across the room to a cabinet at the farther end. Opening a drawer in this cabinet, he produced, from amidst some specimens of strata and fossils, a large-sized geological hammer.

  He brandished it for a moment over his head, then paused with his finger on his lip.

  'Hush!' he said, 'we shall have the fools creeping in to peep at us if we don't take care.' And to Loveday's horror he suddenly made for the door, turned the key in the lock, withdrew it and put it into his pocket.

  She looked at the clock; the hands pointed to half-past seven. Had Griffiths received her note at the proper time, and were the men now in the grounds? She could only pray that they were.

  'The light is too strong for my eyes,' she said, and rising from her chair, she lifted the green-shaded lamp and placed it on a table that stood at the window.

  'No, no, that won't do,' said Mr Craven; 'that would show everyone outside what we're doing in here.' He crossed to the window as he spoke and removed the lamp thence to the mantelpiece.

  Loveday could only hope that in the few seconds it had remained in the window it had caught the eye of the outside watchers.

  The old man beckoned to Loveday to come near and examine his deadly weapon. 'Give it a good swing round,' he said, suiting the action to the word, 'and down it comes with a splendid crash.' He brought the hammer round within an inch of Loveday's forehead.

  She started back.

  'Ha, ha,' he laughed harshly and unnaturally, with the light of madness dancing in his eyes now; 'did I frighten you? I wonder what sort of sound you would make if I were to give you a little tap just there.' Here he lightly touched her forehead with the hammer. 'Elemental, of course, it would be, and – .'

  Loveday steadied her nerves with difficulty. Locked in with this lunatic, her only chance lay in gaining time for the detectives to reach the house and enter through the window.

  'Wait a minute,' she said, striving to divert his attention; 'you have not yet told me what sort of an elemental sound old Sandy made when he fell. If you'll give me pen and ink, I'll write down a full account of it all, and you can incorporate it afterwards in your treatise.'

  For a moment a look of real pleasure flitted across the old man's face, then it faded. 'The brute fell dead without a sound,' he answered; 'it was all for nothing, that night's work; yet not altogether for nothing. No, I don't mind owning I would do it all over again to get the wild thrill of joy at my heart that I had when I looked down into that old man's dead face and felt myself free at last! Free at last!' His voice rang out excitedly – once more he brought his hammer round with an ugly swing.

  'For a moment I was a young man again; I leaped into his room – the moon was shining full in through the window – I thought of my old college days, and the fun we used to have at Pembroke – topsy turvey I turned everything – .' He broke off abruptly, and drew a step nearer to Loveday. 'The pity of it all was,' he said, suddenly dropping from his high, excited tone to a low, pathetic one, 'that he fell without a sound of any sort.' Here he drew another step nearer. 'I wonder – ' he said, then broke off again, and came close to Loveday's side. 'It has only this moment occurred to me,' he said, now with his lips close to Loveday's ear, 'that a woman, in her death agony, would be much more likely to give utterance to an elemental sound than a man.'

  He raised his hammer, and Loveday fled to the window, and was lifted from the outside by three strong pairs of arms.

  ******

  'I thought I was conducting my very last case – I never had such a narrow escape before!' said Loveday, as she stood talking with Mr Griffiths on the Grenfell platform, awaiting the train to carry her back to London. 'It seems strange that no one before suspected the old gentleman's sanity – I suppose, however, people were so used to his eccentricities that they did not notice how they had deepened into positive lunacy. His cunning evidently stood him in good stead at the inquest.'

  'It is possible,' said Griffiths thoughtfully, 'that he did not absolutely cross the very slender line that divides eccentricity from madness until after the murder. The excitement consequent upon the discovery of the crime may just have pushed him over the border. Now, Miss Brooke, we have exactly ten minutes before your train comes in. I should feel greatly obliged to you if you would explain one or two things that have a professional interest for me.'

  'With pleasure,' said Loveday. 'Put your questions in categorical order and I will answer them.'

  'Well, then, in the first place, what suggested to your mind the old man's guilt?'

  'The relations that subsisted between him and Sandy seemed to me to savour too much of fear on the one side and power on the other. Also the income paid to Sandy during Mr Craven's absence in Natal bore, to my mind, an unpleasant resemblance to hush-money.'

  'Poor wretched being! And I hear that, after all, the woman he married in his wild young days died soon afterwards of drink. I have no doubt, however, that Sandy sedulously kept up the fiction of her existence, even after his master's second marriage. Now for another question: how was it you knew that Miss Craven had taken her brother's place in the sick-room?'

  'On the evening of my arrival I discovered a rather long lock of fair hair in the unswept fireplace of my room, which, as it happened, was usually occupied by Miss Craven. It at once occurred to me that the young lady had been cutting off her hair and that there must be some powerful motive to induce such a sacrifice. The suspicious circumstances attending her brother's illness soon supplied me with such a motive.'

  'Ah! that typhoid fever business was very cleverly done. Not a servant in the house, I verily believe, but who thought Master Harry was upstairs, ill in bed, and Miss Craven away at her friends' in Newcastle. The young fellow must have got a clear start off within an hour of the murder. His sister, sent away the next day to Newcastle, dismissed her maid there, I hear, on the plea of no accommodation at her friends' house – sent the girl to her own home for a holiday and herself returned to Troyte's Hill in the middle of the night, having walked the five miles from Grenfell. No doubt her mother admitted her through one of those easily-opened front windows, cut her hair and put her to bed to personate her brother without delay. With Miss Craven's strong likeness to Master Harry, and in a darkened room, it is easy to understand that the eyes of a doctor, personally unacquainted with the family, might easily be deceived. Now, Miss Brooke, you must admit that with all this elaborate chicanery and double dealing going on, it was only natural that my suspicions should set in strongly in that quarter.'

  'I read it all in another light, you see,' said Loveday. 'It seemed to me that the mother, knowing her son's evil proclivities, believed in his guilt, in spite, possibly, of his assertion of innocence. The son, most likely, on his way back to the house after pledging the family plate, had met old Mr Craven with the hammer in his hand. Seeing, no doubt, how impossible it would be for him to clear himself without incriminating his father, he preferred flight to Natal to giving evidence at the inquest.'

  'Now about his alias?' said Mr Griffiths briskly, for the train was at that moment steaming into the station. 'How did you know that Harold Cousins was identical with Harry Craven, and had sailed in
the Bonnie Dundee?'

  'Oh, that was easy enough,' said Loveday, as she stepped into the train; 'a newspaper sent down to Mr Craven by his wife, was folded so as to direct his attention to the shipping list. In it I saw that the Bonnie Dundee had sailed two days previously for Natal. Now it was only natural to connect Natal with Mrs Craven, who had passed the greater part of her life there; and it was easy to understand her wish to get her scapegrace son among her early friends. The alias under which he sailed came readily enough to light. I found it scribbled all over one of Mr Craven's writing pads in his study; evidently it had been drummed into his ears by his wife as his son's alias, and the old gentleman had taken this method of fixing it in his memory. We'll hope that the young fellow, under his new name, will make a new reputation for himself – at any rate, he'll have a better chance of doing so with the ocean between him and his evil companions. Now it's good-bye, I think.'

  'No,' said Mr Griffiths; 'it's au revoir, for you'll have to come back again for the assizes, and give the evidence that will shut old Mr Craven in an asylum for the rest of his life.'

  Dr Halifax

  Created by L.T. Meade (1854 – 1914) and Clifford Halifax (1860 – 1921)

  L. T. MEADE WAS the pseudonym of Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith, an almost impossibly productive writer of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras who made her first appearance in print in the 1870s and went on to publish close to 300 books. At one stage in her career she was writing ten novels a year. In her lifetime she was best-known as the author of stories for girls, often with a school setting, but she also wrote many crime stories, sometimes in collaboration with other writers. With Robert Eustace, for example, she created a remarkable femme fatale and supervillain in Madame Sara who appeared in a series of stories in The Strand Magazine in 1902-3, later collected in a volume entitled The Sorceress of the Strand. 'Stories from the Diary of a Doctor' also appeared in The Strand but they were written eight years earlier and accredited to Meade and Clifford Halifax, the pseudonym of a writer and doctor named Edgar Beaumont. The central character is a medical man who finds himself involved in cases where medicine and crime come together. The stories are archetypally late Victorian in their values and are often melodramatic and stilted but many of them are also vividly memorable. 'The Horror of Studley Grange', with its central character driven to the brink of madness by what seem to be supernatural apparitions, is one of the best.

  The Horror of Studley Grange

  I WAS IN my consulting-room one morning, and had just said goodbye to the last of my patients, when my servant came in and told me that a lady had called who pressed very earnestly for an interview with me.

  'I told her that you were just going out, sir,' said the man, 'and she saw the carriage at the door; but she begged to see you, if only for two minutes. This is her card.'

  I read the words, 'Lady Studley'.

  'Show her in,' I said, hastily, and the next moment a tall, slightlymade, fair-haired girl entered the room.

  She looked very young, scarcely more than twenty, and I could hardly believe that she was, what her card indicated, a married woman.

  The colour rushed into her cheeks as she held out her hand to me. I motioned her to a chair, and then asked her what I could do for her.

  'Oh, you can help me,' she said, clasping her hands and speaking in a slightly theatrical manner. 'My husband, Sir Henry Studley, is very unwell, and I want you to come to see him – can you? – will you?'

  'With pleasure,' I replied. 'Where do you live?'

  'At Studley Grange, in Wiltshire. Don't you know our place?'

  'I daresay I ought to know it,' I replied, 'although at the present moment I can't recall the name. You want me to come to see your husband. I presume you wish me to have a consultation with his medical attendant?'

  'No, no, not at all. The fact is, Sir Henry has not got a medical attendant. He dislikes doctors, and won't see one. I want you to come and stay with us for a week or so. I have heard of you through mutual friends – the Onslows. I know you can effect remarkable cures, and you have a great deal of tact. But you can't possibly do anything for my husband unless you are willing to stay in the house and to notice his symptoms.'

  Lady Studley spoke with great emphasis and earnestness. Her long, slender hands were clasped tightly together. She had drawn off her gloves and was bending forward in her chair. Her big, childish, and somewhat restless blue eyes were fixed imploringly on my face.

  'I love my husband,' she said, tears suddenly filling them – 'and it is dreadful, dreadful, to see him suffer as he does. He will die unless someone comes to his aid. Oh, I know I am asking an immense thing, when I beg of you to leave all your patients and come to the country. But we can pay. Money is no object whatever to us. We can, we will, gladly pay you for your services.'

  'I must think the matter over,' I said. 'You flatter me by wishing for me, and by believing that I can render you assistance, but I cannot take a step of this kind in a hurry. I will write to you by to-night's post if you will give me your address. In the meantime, kindly tell me some of the symptoms of Sir Henry's malady.'

  'I fear it is a malady of the mind,' she answered immediately, 'but it is of so vivid and so startling a character, that unless relief is soon obtained, the body must give way under the strain. You see that I am very young, Dr Halifax. Perhaps I look younger than I am – my age is twenty-two. My husband is twenty years my senior. He would, however, be considered by most people still a young man. He is a great scholar, and has always had more or less the habits of a recluse. He is fond of living in his library, and likes nothing better than to be surrounded by books of all sorts. Every modern book worth reading is forwarded to him by its publisher. He is a very interesting man and a brilliant conversationalist. Perhaps I ought to put all this in the past tense, for now he scarcely ever speaks – he reads next to nothing – it is difficult to persuade him to eat – he will not leave the house – he used to have a rather ruddy complexion – he is now deadly pale and terribly emaciated. He sighs in the most heartrending manner, and seems to be in a state of extreme nervous tension. In short, he is very ill, and yet he seems to have no bodily disease. His eyes have a terribly startled expression in them – his hand trembles so that he can scarcely raise a cup of tea to his lips. In short, he looks like a man who has seen a ghost.'

  'When did these symptoms begin to appear?' I asked.

  'It is mid-winter now,' said Lady Studley. 'The queer symptoms began to show themselves in my husband in October. They have been growing worse and worse. In short, I can stand them no longer,' she continued, giving way to a short, hysterical sob. 'I felt I must come to someone – I have heard of you. Do, do come and save us. Do come and find out what is the matter with my wretched husband.'

  'I will write to you to-night,' I said, in as kind a voice as I could muster, for the pretty, anxious wife interested me already. 'It may not be possible for me to stay at Studley Grange for a week, but in any case I can promise to come and see the patient. One visit will probably be sufficient – what your husband wants is, no doubt, complete change.'

  'Oh, yes, yes,' she replied, standing up now. 'I have said so scores of times, but Sir Henry won't stir from Studley – nothing will induce him to go away. He won't even leave his own special bedroom, although I expect he has dreadful nights.' Two hectic spots burnt in her cheeks as she spoke. I looked at her attentively.

  'You will forgive me for speaking,' I said, 'but you do not look at all well yourself. I should like to prescribe for you as well as your husband.'

  'Thank you,' she answered, 'I am not very strong. I never have been, but that is nothing – I mean that my health is not a thing of consequence at present. Well, I must not take up any more of your time. I shall expect to get a letter from you to-morrow morning. Please address it to Lady Studley, Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria.'

  She touched my hand with fingers that burnt like a living coal and left the room.

  I thought her very ill, and w
as sure that if I could see my way to spending a week at Studley Grange, I should have two patients instead of one. It is always difficult for a busy doctor to leave home, but after carefully thinking matters over, I resolved to comply with Lady Studley's request.

  Accordingly, two days later saw me on my way to Wiltshire, and to Studley Grange. A brougham with two smart horses was waiting at the station. To my surprise I saw that Lady Studley had come herself to fetch me.

  'I don't know how to thank you,' she said, giving me a feverish clasp of her hand. 'Your visit fills me with hope – I believe that you will discover what is really wrong. Home!' she said, giving a quick, imperious direction to the footman who appeared at the window of the carriage.