The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

by Arthur Conan Doyle

The body was stiff and rigid, the eyes projecting, and the limbs contorted. There was agony in every line of it.

“Well, you’ve done it!” he cried at last. “I had read of you, but I never believed it. It’s wonderful!” I was forced to shake my head. To accept such praise was to lower one’s own standards.

I deprecate, however, in the strongest way the attempts which have been made lately to get at and to destroy these papers. The source of these outrages is known, and if they are repeated I have Mr. Holmes’s authority for saying that the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant will be given to the public. There is at least one reader who will understand.

It was a close, musty, ill-ventilated place, as might be expected, since its inmate seldom left it. From keeping beasts in a cage, the woman seemed, by some retribution of fate, to have become herself a beast in a cage.

We sat in silence for some time after the unhappy woman had told her story. Then Holmes stretched out his long arm and patted her hand with such a show of sympathy as I had seldom known him to exhibit. “Poor girl!” he said. “Poor girl! The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.

“Well, well, it is of little consequence now. The case is closed.” “Yes,” said the woman, “the case is closed.” We had risen to go, but there was something in the woman’s voice which arrested Holmes’s attention. He turned swiftly upon her. “Your life is not your own,” he said. “Keep your hands off it.” “What use is it to anyone?” “How can you tell? The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world.”

Two days later, when I called upon my friend, he pointed with some pride to a small blue bottle upon his mantelpiece. I picked it up. There was a red poison label. A pleasant almondy odour rose when I opened it. “Prussic acid?” said I. “Exactly. It came by post. ‘I send you my temptation. I will follow your advice.’ That was the message. I think, Watson, we can guess the name of the brave woman who sent it.”

He looked impatiently at his watch. “I had a new client calling, but he is overdue. By the way, Watson, you know something of racing?” “I ought to. I pay for it with about half my wound pension.” “Then I’ll make you my ‘Handy Guide to the Turf.’ What about Sir Robert Norberton? Does the name recall anything?” “Well, I should say so. He lives at Shoscombe Old Place, and I know it well, for my summer quarters were down there once. Norberton nearly came within your province once.” “How was that?” “It was when he horsewhipped Sam Brewer, the well-known Curzon Street money-lender, on Newmarket Heath. He nearly killed the man.” “Ah, he sounds interesting! Does he often indulge in that way?”

“Well, he has the name of being a dangerous man. He is about the most daredevil rider in England—second in the Grand National a few years back. He is one of those men who have overshot their true generation. He should have been a buck in the days of the Regency—a boxer, an athlete, a plunger on the turf, a lover of fair ladies, and, by all account, so far down Queer Street that he may never find his way back again.”

The door had opened and the page had shown in a tall, clean-shaven man with the firm, austere expression which is only seen upon those who have to control horses or boys.

“First of all, Mr. Holmes, I think that my employer, Sir Robert, has gone mad.” Holmes raised his eyebrows. “This is Baker Street, not Harley Street,” said he. “But why do you say so?”

“No, sir, and there is something more that I can’t fit in. Why should Sir Robert want to dig up a dead body?” Holmes sat up abruptly.

They seem to be of a curiously mixed character. But that should surely help us. It is only the colourless, uneventful case which is hopeless.

this strange incident in a career which has now outlived its shadows and promises to end in an honoured old age.