The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
A look of surprise passed over his face, and at the first quiver
of his eyebrows my heart turned to lead in my breast.
“You did not write this?” I said, pulling the letter from my
pocket. “There is no sick Englishwoman in the hotel?”
“Certainly not!” he cried. “But it has the hotel mark upon it!
Ha, it must have been written by that tall Englishman who came in
after you had gone. He said—”
But I waited for none of the landlord’s explanations. In a tingle
of fear I was already running down the village street, and making
for the path which I had so lately descended. It had taken me an
hour to come down. For all my efforts two more had passed before
I found myself at the fall of Reichenbach once more. There was
Holmes’s Alpine-stock still leaning against the rock by which I
had left him. But there was no sign of him, and it was in vain
that I shouted. My only answer was my own voice reverberating in
a rolling echo from the cliffs around me.
It was the sight of that Alpine-stock which turned me cold and
sick. He had not gone to Rosenlaui, then. He had remained on that
three-foot path, with sheer wall on one side and sheer drop on
the other, until his enemy had overtaken him. The young Swiss had
gone too. He had probably been in the pay of Moriarty, and had
left the two men together. And then what had happened? Who was to
tell us what had happened then?
I stood for a minute or two to collect myself, for I was dazed
with the horror of the thing. Then I began to think of Holmes’s
own methods and to try to practise them in reading this tragedy.
It was, alas, only too easy to do. During our conversation we had
not gone to the end of the path, and the Alpine-stock marked the
place where we had stood. The blackish soil is kept forever soft
by the incessant drift of spray, and a bird would leave its tread
upon it. Two lines of footmarks were clearly marked along the
farther end of the path, both leading away from me. There were
none returning. A few yards from the end the soil was all
ploughed up into a patch of mud, and the branches and ferns which
fringed the chasm were torn and bedraggled. I lay upon my face
and peered over with the spray spouting up all around me. It had
darkened since I left, and now I could only see here and there
the glistening of moisture upon the black walls, and far away
down at the end of the shaft the gleam of the broken water. I
shouted; but only the same half-human cry of the fall was borne
back to my ears.
But it was destined that I should after all have a last word of
greeting from my friend and comrade. I have said that his
Alpine-stock had been left leaning against a rock which jutted on
to the path. From the top of this boulder the gleam of something
bright caught my eye, and, raising my hand, I found that it came
from the silver cigarette-case which he used to carry. As I took
it up a small square of paper upon which it had lain fluttered
down on to the ground. Unfolding it, I found that it consisted of
three pages torn from his note-book and addressed to me. It was
characteristic of the man that the direction was a precise, and
the writing as firm and clear, as though it had been written in
his study.
“My dear Watson,” he said, “I write these few lines through the
courtesy of Mr. Moriarty, who awaits my convenience for the final
discussion of those questions which lie between us. He has been
giving me a sketch of the methods by which he avoided the English
police and kept himself informed of our movements. They certainly
confirm the very high opinion which I had formed of his
abilities. I am pleased to think that I shall be able to free
society from any further effects of his presence, though I fear
that it is at a cost which will give pain to my friends, and
especially, my dear Watson, to you. I have already explained to
you, however, that my career had in any case reached its crisis,
and that no possible conclusion to it could be more congenial to
me than this. Indeed, if I may make a full confession to you, I
was quite convinced that the letter from Meiringen was a hoax,
and I allowed you to depart on that errand under the persuasion
that some development of this sort would follow. Tell Inspector
Patterson that the papers which he needs to convict the gang are
in pigeonhole M., done up in a blue envelope and inscribed
‘Moriarty.’ I made every disposition of my property before
leaving England, and handed it to my brother Mycroft. Pray give
my greetings to Mrs. Watson, and believe me to be, my dear
fellow,
“Very sincerely yours,
“Sherlock Holmes.”
A few words may suffice to tell the little that remains. An
examination by experts leaves little doubt that a personal
contest between the two men ended, as it could hardly fail to end
in such a situation, in their reeling over, locked in each
other’s arms. Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely
hopeless, and there, deep down in that dreadful caldron of
swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most
dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their
generation. The Swiss youth was never found again, and there can
be no doubt that he was one of the numerous agents whom Moriarty
kept in his employ. As to the gang, it will be within the memory
of the public how completely the evidence which Holmes had
accumulated exposed their organization, and how heavily the hand
of the dead man weighed upon them. Of their terrible chief few
details came out during the proceedings, and if I have now been
compelled to make a clear statement of his career it is due to
those injudicious champions who have endeavoured to clear his
memory by attacks upon him whom I shall ever regard as the best
and the wisest man whom I have ever known.