“Should you care to add the case to your annals, my dearWatson,” said Holmes that evening, “it can only be as an exampleof that temporary eclipse to which even the best-balanced mindmay be exposed. Such slips are common to all mortals, and thegreatest is he who can recognize and repair them. To this modifiedcredit I may, perhaps, make some claim. My night was haunted bythe thought that somewhere a clue, a strange sentence, a curiousobservation, had come under my notice and had been too easilydismissed. Then, suddenly, in the gray of the morning, the wordscame back to me. It was the remark of the undertaker’s wife, asreported by Philip Green. She had said, ‘It should be there beforenow. It took longer, being out of the ordinary.’ It was the coffin ofwhich she spoke. It had been out of the ordinary. That could onlymean that it had been made to some special measurement. Butwhy? Why? Then in an instant I remembered the deep sides, andthe little wasted figure at the bottom. Why so large a coffin forso small a body? To leave room for another body. Both would beburied under the one certificate. It had all been so clear, if only myown sight had not been dimmed. At eight the Lady Frances wouldbe buried. Our one chance was to stop the coffin before it left thehouse.
“It was a desperate chance that we might find her alive, but itwas a chance, as the result showed. These people had never, tomy knowledge, done a murder. They might shrink from actualviolence at the last. The could bury her with no sign of how shemet her end, and even if she were exhumed there was a chance forthem. I hoped that such considerations might prevail with them.
You can reconstruct the scene well enough. You saw the horribleden upstairs, where the poor lady had been kept so long. Theyrushed in and overpowered her with their chloroform, carried herdown, poured more into the coffin to insure against her waking,and then screwed down the lid. A clever device, Watson. It is newto me in the annals of crime. If our ex-missionary friends escapethe clutches of Lestrade, I shall expect to hear of some brilliantincidents in their future career.”
The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot
In recording from time to time some of the curious experiencesand interesting recollections which I associate with my longand intimate friendship with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I havecontinually been faced by difficulties caused by his own aversionto publicity. To his sombre and cynical spirit all popular applausewas always abhorrent, and nothing amused him more at the endof a successful case than to hand over the actual exposure tosome orthodox official, and to listen with a mocking smile to thegeneral chorus of misplaced congratulation. It was indeed thisattitude upon the part of my friend and certainly not any lack ofinteresting material which has caused me of late years to lay veryfew of my records before the public. My participation in some ifhis adventures was always a privilege which entailed discretion andreticence upon me.
It was, then, with considerable surprise that I received atelegram from Homes last Tuesday—he has never been known towrite where a telegram would serve—in the following terms:
Why not tell them of the Cornish horror—strangest case I havehandled.
I have no idea what backward sweep of memory had broughtthe matter fresh to his mind, or what freak had caused him todesire that I should recount it; but I hasten, before anothercancelling telegram may arrive, to hunt out the notes which giveme the exact details of the case and to lay the narrative before myreaders.
It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes’s ironconstitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face ofconstant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps,by occasional indiscretions of his own. In March of that year Dr.
Moore Agar, of Harley Street, whose dramatic introduction toHolmes I may some day recount, gave positive injunctions that thefamous private agent lay aside all his cases and surrender himselfto complete rest if he wished to avert an absolute breakdown.
The state of his health was not a matter in which he himself tookthe faintest interest, for his mental detachment was absolute,but he was induced at last, on the threat of being permanentlydisqualified from work, to give himself a complete change ofscene and air. Thus it was that in the early spring of that year wefound ourselves together in a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, at thefurther extremity of the Cornish peninsula.
It was a singular spot, and one peculiarly well suited to thegrim humour of my patient. From the windows of our littlewhitewashed house, which stood high upon a grassy headland,we looked down upon the whole sinister semicircle of MountsBay, that old death trap of sailing vessels, with its fringe ofblack cliffs and surge-swept reefs on which innumerable seamenhave met their end. With a northerly breeze it lies placid andsheltered, inviting the storm-tossed craft to tack into it for rest andprotection.
Then come the sudden swirl round of the wind, the blisteringgale from the south-west, the dragging anchor, the lee shore, andthe last battle in the creaming breakers. The wise mariner standsfar out from that evil place.
On the land side our surroundings were as sombre as on the sea.