The Hound of the Baskervilles
waiting for us upon the platform.
“No, we have no news of any kind,” said Dr. Mortimer in answer to
my friend’s questions. “I can swear to one thing, and that is
that we have not been shadowed during the last two days. We have
never gone out without keeping a sharp watch, and no one could
have escaped our notice.”
“You have always kept together, I presume?”
“Except yesterday afternoon. I usually give up one day to pure
amusement when I come to town, so I spent it at the Museum of the
College of Surgeons.”
“And I went to look at the folk in the park,” said Baskerville.
“But we had no trouble of any kind.”
“It was imprudent, all the same,” said Holmes, shaking his head
and looking very grave. “I beg, Sir Henry, that you will not go
about alone. Some great misfortune will befall you if you do. Did
you get your other boot?”
“No, sir, it is gone forever.”
“Indeed. That is very interesting. Well, good-bye,” he added as
the train began to glide down the platform. “Bear in mind, Sir
Henry, one of the phrases in that queer old legend which Dr.
Mortimer has read to us, and avoid the moor in those hours of
darkness when the powers of evil are exalted.”
I looked back at the platform when we had left it far behind and
saw the tall, austere figure of Holmes standing motionless and
gazing after us.
The journey was a swift and pleasant one, and I spent it in
making the more intimate acquaintance of my two companions and in
playing with Dr. Mortimer’s spaniel. In a very few hours the
brown earth had become ruddy, the brick had changed to granite,
and red cows grazed in well-hedged fields where the lush grasses
and more luxuriant vegetation spoke of a richer, if a damper,
climate. Young Baskerville stared eagerly out of the window and
cried aloud with delight as he recognized the familiar features
of the Devon scenery.
“I’ve been over a good part of the world since I left it, Dr.
Watson,” said he; “but I have never seen a place to compare with
it.”
“I never saw a Devonshire man who did not swear by his county,” I
remarked.
“It depends upon the breed of men quite as much as on the
county,” said Dr. Mortimer. “A glance at our friend here reveals
the rounded head of the Celt, which carries inside it the Celtic
enthusiasm and power of attachment. Poor Sir Charles’s head was
of a very rare type, half Gaelic, half Ivernian in its
characteristics. But you were very young when you last saw
Baskerville Hall, were you not?”
“I was a boy in my teens at the time of my father’s death and had
never seen the Hall, for he lived in a little cottage on the
South Coast. Thence I went straight to a friend in America. I
tell you it is all as new to me as it is to Dr. Watson, and I’m
as keen as possible to see the moor.”
“Are you? Then your wish is easily granted, for there is your
first sight of the moor,” said Dr. Mortimer, pointing out of the
carriage window.
Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood
there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a
strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some
fantastic landscape in a dream. Baskerville sat for a long time,
his eyes fixed upon it, and I read upon his eager face how much
it meant to him, this first sight of that strange spot where the
men of his blood had held sway so long and left their mark so
deep. There he sat, with his tweed suit and his American accent,
in the corner of a prosaic railway-carriage, and yet as I looked
at his dark and expressive face I felt more than ever how true a
descendant he was of that long line of high-blooded, fiery, and
masterful men. There were pride, valour, and strength in his
thick brows, his sensitive nostrils, and his large hazel eyes. If
on that forbidding moor a difficult and dangerous quest should
lie before us, this was at least a comrade for whom one might
venture to take a risk with the certainty that he would bravely
share it.
The train pulled up at a small wayside station and we all
descended. Outside, beyond the low, white fence, a wagonette with
a pair of cobs was waiting. Our coming was evidently a great
event, for station-master and porters clustered round us to carry
out our luggage. It was a sweet, simple country spot, but I was
surprised to observe that by the gate there stood two soldierly
men in dark uniforms who leaned upon their short rifles and
glanced keenly at us as we passed. The coachman, a hard-faced,
gnarled little fellow, saluted Sir Henry Baskerville, and in a
few minutes we were flying swiftly down the broad, white road.
Rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of us, and old
gabled houses peeped out from amid the thick green foliage, but
behind the peaceful and sunlit countryside there rose ever, dark
against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor,
broken by the jagged and sinister hills.
The wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upward
through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on
either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart’s-tongue
ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light
of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a
narrow granite bridge and skirted a noisy stream which gushed
swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the grey boulders. Both
road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak
and fir. At every turn Baskerville gave an exclamation of
delight, looking eagerly about him and asking countless
questions. To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of
melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the
mark of the waning year. Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and
fluttered down upon us as we passed. The rattle of our wheels
died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation—sad
gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the
carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.
“Halloa!” cried Dr. Mortimer, “what is this?”
A steep curve of heath-clad land, an outlying spur of the moor,
lay in front of us. On the summit, hard and clear like an
equestrian statue upon its pedestal, was a mounted soldier, dark
and stern, his rifle poised ready over his forearm. He was
watching the road along which we travelled.
“What is this, Perkins?” asked Dr. Mortimer.
Our driver half turned in his seat. “There’s a convict escaped
from Princetown, sir. He’s been out three days now, and the
warders watch every road and every station, but they’ve had no
sight of him yet. The farmers about here don’t like it, sir, and
that’s a fact.”
“Well, I understand that they get five pounds if they can give
information.”
“Yes, sir, but the chance of five pounds is but a poor thing
compared to the chance of having your throat cut. You see, it
isn’t like any ordinary convict. This is a man that would stick
at nothing.”
“Who is he, then?”
“It is Selden, the Notting Hill murderer.”
I remembered the case well, for it was one in which Holmes had
taken an interest on account of the peculiar ferocity of the
crime and the wanton brutality which had marked all the actions
of the assassin. The commutation of his death sentence had been
due to some doubts as to his complete sanity, so atrocious was
his conduct. Our wagonette had topped a rise and in front of us
rose the huge expanse of the moor, mottled with gnarled and
craggy cairns and tors. A cold wind swept down from it and set us
shivering. Somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was lurking
this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his
heart full of malignancy against the whole race which had cast
him out. It needed but this to complete the grim suggestiveness
of the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling sky.
Even Baskerville fell silent and pulled his overcoat more closely
around him.
We had left the fertile country behind and beneath us. We looked
back on it now, the slanting rays of a low sun turning the
streams to threads of gold and glowing on the red earth new
turned by the plough and the broad tangle of the woodlands. The
road in front of us grew bleaker and wilder over huge russet and
olive slopes, sprinkled with giant boulders. Now and then we
passed a moorland cottage, walled and roofed with stone, with no
creeper to break its harsh outline. Suddenly we looked down into
a cuplike depression, patched with stunted oaks and firs which
had been twisted and bent by the fury of years of storm. Two
high, narrow towers rose over the trees. The driver pointed with
his whip.
“Baskerville Hall,” said he.
Its master had risen and was staring with flushed cheeks and
shining eyes. A few minutes later we had reached the lodge-gates,
a maze of fantastic tracery in wrought iron, with weather-bitten
pillars on either side, blotched with lichens, and surmounted by
the boars’ heads of the Baskervilles. The lodge was a ruin of
black granite and bared ribs of rafters, but facing it was a new
building, half constructed, the first fruit of Sir Charles’s
South African gold.
Through the gateway we passed into the avenue, where the wheels
were again hushed amid the leaves, and the old trees shot their
branches in a sombre tunnel over our heads. Baskerville shuddered
as he looked up the long, dark drive to where the house glimmered
like a ghost at the farther end.
“Was it here?” he asked in a low voice.
“No, no, the yew alley is on the other side.”
The young heir glanced round with a gloomy face.
“It’s no wonder my uncle felt as if trouble were coming on him in
such a place as this,” said he. “It’s enough to scare any man.
I’ll have a row of electric lamps up here inside of six months,
and you won’t know it again, with a thousand candle-power Swan
and Edison right here in front of the hall door.”
The avenue opened into a broad expanse of turf, and the house lay
before us. In the fading light I could see that the centre was a
heavy block of building from which a porch projected. The whole
front was draped in ivy, with a patch clipped bare here and there
where a window or a coat of arms broke through the dark veil.
From this central block rose the twin towers, ancient,
crenelated, and pierced with many loopholes. To right and left of
the turrets were more modern wings of black granite. A dull light
shone through heavy mullioned windows, and from the high chimneys
which rose from the steep, high-angled roof there sprang a single
black column of smoke.
“Welcome, Sir Henry! Welcome to Baskerville Hall!”
A tall man had stepped from the shadow of the porch to open the
door of the wagonette. The figure of a woman was silhouetted
against the yellow light of the hall. She came out and helped the