The Hound of the Baskervilles
It is true that I have had only the one glance at him, and yet
there are some things to which I am ready to swear. He is no one
whom I have seen down here, and I have now met all the
neighbours. The figure was far taller than that of Stapleton, far
thinner than that of Frankland. Barrymore it might possibly have
been, but we had left him behind us, and I am certain that he
could not have followed us. A stranger then is still dogging us,
just as a stranger dogged us in London. We have never shaken him
off. If I could lay my hands upon that man, then at last we might
find ourselves at the end of all our difficulties. To this one
purpose I must now devote all my energies.
My first impulse was to tell Sir Henry all my plans. My second
and wisest one is to play my own game and speak as little as
possible to anyone. He is silent and distrait. His nerves have
been strangely shaken by that sound upon the moor. I will say
nothing to add to his anxieties, but I will take my own steps to
attain my own end.
We had a small scene this morning after breakfast. Barrymore
asked leave to speak with Sir Henry, and they were closeted in
his study some little time. Sitting in the billiard-room I more
than once heard the sound of voices raised, and I had a pretty
good idea what the point was which was under discussion. After a
time the baronet opened his door and called for me. “Barrymore
considers that he has a grievance,” he said. “He thinks that it
was unfair on our part to hunt his brother-in-law down when he,
of his own free will, had told us the secret.”
The butler was standing very pale but very collected before us.
“I may have spoken too warmly, sir,” said he, “and if I have, I
am sure that I beg your pardon. At the same time, I was very much
surprised when I heard you two gentlemen come back this morning
and learned that you had been chasing Selden. The poor fellow has
enough to fight against without my putting more upon his track.”
“If you had told us of your own free will it would have been a
different thing,” said the baronet, “you only told us, or rather
your wife only told us, when it was forced from you and you could
not help yourself.”
“I didn’t think you would have taken advantage of it, Sir
Henry—indeed I didn’t.”
“The man is a public danger. There are lonely houses scattered
over the moor, and he is a fellow who would stick at nothing. You
only want to get a glimpse of his face to see that. Look at Mr.
Stapleton’s house, for example, with no one but himself to defend
it. There’s no safety for anyone until he is under lock and key.”
“He’ll break into no house, sir. I give you my solemn word upon
that. But he will never trouble anyone in this country again. I
assure you, Sir Henry, that in a very few days the necessary
arrangements will have been made and he will be on his way to
South America. For God’s sake, sir, I beg of you not to let the
police know that he is still on the moor. They have given up the
chase there, and he can lie quiet until the ship is ready for
him. You can’t tell on him without getting my wife and me into
trouble. I beg you, sir, to say nothing to the police.”
“What do you say, Watson?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “If he were safely out of the country it
would relieve the tax-payer of a burden.”
“But how about the chance of his holding someone up before he
goes?”
“He would not do anything so mad, sir. We have provided him with
all that he can want. To commit a crime would be to show where he
was hiding.”
“That is true,” said Sir Henry. “Well, Barrymore—”
“God bless you, sir, and thank you from my heart! It would have
killed my poor wife had he been taken again.”
“I guess we are aiding and abetting a felony, Watson? But, after
what we have heard I don’t feel as if I could give the man up, so
there is an end of it. All right, Barrymore, you can go.”
With a few broken words of gratitude the man turned, but he
hesitated and then came back.
“You’ve been so kind to us, sir, that I should like to do the
best I can for you in return. I know something, Sir Henry, and
perhaps I should have said it before, but it was long after the
inquest that I found it out. I’ve never breathed a word about it
yet to mortal man. It’s about poor Sir Charles’s death.”
The baronet and I were both upon our feet. “Do you know how he
died?”
“No, sir, I don’t know that.”
“What then?”
“I know why he was at the gate at that hour. It was to meet a
woman.”
“To meet a woman! He?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the woman’s name?”
“I can’t give you the name, sir, but I can give you the initials.
Her initials were L. L.”
“How do you know this, Barrymore?”
“Well, Sir Henry, your uncle had a letter that morning. He had
usually a great many letters, for he was a public man and well
known for his kind heart, so that everyone who was in trouble was
glad to turn to him. But that morning, as it chanced, there was
only this one letter, so I took the more notice of it. It was
from Coombe Tracey, and it was addressed in a woman’s hand.”
“Well?”
“Well, sir, I thought no more of the matter, and never would have
done had it not been for my wife. Only a few weeks ago she was
cleaning out Sir Charles’s study—it had never been touched since
his death—and she found the ashes of a burned letter in the back
of the grate. The greater part of it was charred to pieces, but
one little slip, the end of a page, hung together, and the
writing could still be read, though it was grey on a black
ground. It seemed to us to be a postscript at the end of the
letter and it said: ‘Please, please, as you are a gentleman, burn
this letter, and be at the gate by ten o clock. Beneath it were
signed the initials L. L.”
“Have you got that slip?”
“No, sir, it crumbled all to bits after we moved it.”
“Had Sir Charles received any other letters in the same writing?”
“Well, sir, I took no particular notice of his letters. I should
not have noticed this one, only it happened to come alone.”
“And you have no idea who L. L. is?”
“No, sir. No more than you have. But I expect if we could lay our
hands upon that lady we should know more about Sir Charles’s
death.”
“I cannot understand, Barrymore, how you came to conceal this
important information.”
“Well, sir, it was immediately after that our own trouble came to
us. And then again, sir, we were both of us very fond of Sir
Charles, as we well might be considering all that he has done for
us. To rake this up couldn’t help our poor master, and it’s well
to go carefully when there’s a lady in the case. Even the best of
us—”
“You thought it might injure his reputation?”
“Well, sir, I thought no good could come of it. But now you have
been kind to us, and I feel as if it would be treating you
unfairly not to tell you all that I know about the matter.”
“Very good, Barrymore; you can go.” When the butler had left us
Sir Henry turned to me. “Well, Watson, what do you think of this
new light?”
“It seems to leave the darkness rather blacker than before.”
“So I think. But if we can only trace L. L. it should clear up
the whole business. We have gained that much. We know that there
is someone who has the facts if we can only find her. What do you
think we should do?”
“Let Holmes know all about it at once. It will give him the clue
for which he has been seeking. I am much mistaken if it does not
bring him down.”
I went at once to my room and drew up my report of the morning’s
conversation for Holmes. It was evident to me that he had been
very busy of late, for the notes which I had from Baker Street
were few and short, with no comments upon the information which I
had supplied and hardly any reference to my mission. No doubt his
blackmailing case is absorbing all his faculties. And yet this
new factor must surely arrest his attention and renew his
interest. I wish that he were here.
_October_ 17_th_.—All day today the rain poured down, rustling on
the ivy and dripping from the eaves. I thought of the convict out
upon the bleak, cold, shelterless moor. Poor devil! Whatever his
crimes, he has suffered something to atone for them. And then I
thought of that other one—the face in the cab, the figure against
the moon. Was he also out in that deluge—the unseen watcher, the
man of darkness? In the evening I put on my waterproof and I
walked far upon the sodden moor, full of dark imaginings, the
rain beating upon my face and the wind whistling about my ears.
God help those who wander into the great mire now, for even the
firm uplands are becoming a morass. I found the black tor upon
which I had seen the solitary watcher, and from its craggy summit
I looked out myself across the melancholy downs. Rain squalls
drifted across their russet face, and the heavy, slate-coloured
clouds hung low over the landscape, trailing in grey wreaths down
the sides of the fantastic hills. In the distant hollow on the
left, half hidden by the mist, the two thin towers of Baskerville
Hall rose above the trees. They were the only signs of human life
which I could see, save only those prehistoric huts which lay
thickly upon the slopes of the hills. Nowhere was there any trace
of that lonely man whom I had seen on the same spot two nights
before.
As I walked back I was overtaken by Dr. Mortimer driving in his
dog-cart over a rough moorland track which led from the outlying
farmhouse of Foulmire. He has been very attentive to us, and
hardly a day has passed that he has not called at the Hall to see
how we were getting on. He insisted upon my climbing into his
dog-cart, and he gave me a lift homeward. I found him much
troubled over the disappearance of his little spaniel. It had
wandered on to the moor and had never come back. I gave him such
consolation as I might, but I thought of the pony on the Grimpen
Mire, and I do not fancy that he will see his little dog again.
“By the way, Mortimer,” said I as we jolted along the rough road,
“I suppose there are few people living within driving distance of
this whom you do not know?”
“Hardly any, I think.”
“Can you, then, tell me the name of any woman whose initials are
L. L.?”
He thought for a few minutes.
“No,” said he. “There are a few gipsies and labouring folk for
whom I can’t answer, but among the farmers or gentry there is no
one whose initials are those. Wait a bit though,” he added after
a pause. “There is Laura Lyons—her initials are L. L.—but she
lives in Coombe Tracey.”
“Who is she?” I asked.
“She is Frankland’s daughter.”
“What! Old Frankland the crank?”
“Exactly. She married an artist named Lyons, who came sketching