The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (38 page)

The local inspector glanced significantly at Gregson and tapped his forehead. "Catholic?

Well, now that you mention it, I believe they were in the old times. But what on earth—!"

"Merely that I would recommend you to your own guide-book. Good night."

On the following morning, after dropping my friend and myself at the castle gate, the two

police-officers drove off to pursue their enquiries further afield. Holmes watched their

departure with a twinkle in his eye.

"I fear that I have done you injustice over the years, Watson," he commented somewhat

enigmatically, as we turned away.

The elderly manservant opened the door to us and, as we followed him into the great

hall, it was painfully obvious that the honest fellow was still deeply afflicted by his master's

death.

"There is naught for you here," he cried shrilly. "My God, will you never leave us in peace?"

I have remarked previously on Holmes's gift for putting others at their ease, and by degrees

the old man recovered his composure. "I take it that this is the Agincourt window," observed

Holmes, staring up at a small but exquisitely coloured stained-glass casement through which

the winter sunlight threw a pattern of brilliant colours on the ancient stone floor.

"It is, sir. Only two in all England."

"Doubtless you have served the family for many years," continued my friend gently.

"Served 'em? Aye, me and mine for nigh two centuries. Ours is the dust that lies upon their

funeral palls.

"I fancy they have an interesting history."

"They have that, sir."

"I seem to have heard that this ill-omened guillotine was specially built for some ancestor

of your late master?"

"Aye, the Marquis de Rennes. Built by his own tenants, the varmints, hated him, they did,

simply because he kept up old customs."

"Indeed. What custom?"

"Something about women, sir. The book in the library don't explain exactly."

"Le droit du seigneur,
perhaps."

"Well, I don't speak heathern, but I believe them was the very words."

"H'm. I should like to see this library."

The old man's eyes slid to the door at the end of the hall. "See the library?" he grumbled.

"What do you want there? Nothing but old books, and her ladyship don't like —Oh, very well."

He led the way ungraciously into a long, low room lined to the ceiling with volumes and

ending in a magnificent Gothic fireplace. Holmes, after strolling about listlessly, paused to light

a cheroot.

"Well, Watson, I think that we'll be getting back," said he. "Thank you, Stephen. It is a

fine room, though I am surprised to see Indian rugs."

"Indian!" protested the old man indignantly. They're antique Persian."

"Surely Indian."

"Persian, I tell you! Them marks are inscriptions, as a gentleman like you should know.

Can't see without your spy-glass? Well, use it then. Now, drat it, if he hasn't spilled his

matches!"

As we rose to our feet after gathering up the scattered vestas, I was puzzled to account for

the sudden flush of excitement in Holmes's sallow cheeks.

"I was mistaken," said he. "They are Persian. Come, Watson, it is high time that we set out

for the village and our train back to town."

A few minutes later, we had left the castle. But to my surprise, on emerging from the outer

bailey, Holmes led the way swiftly along a lane leading to the stables.

"You intend to enquire about the missing horse," I suggested.

"The horse? My dear fellow, I have no doubt that it is safely concealed in one of the home

farms, while Gregson rushes all over the county. This is what I am looking for."

He entered the first loose box and returned with his arms full of straw. "Another bundle

for you, Watson, and it should be enough for our purpose."

"But what is our purpose?"

"Principally to reach the front door without being observed," he chuckled, as he shouldered

his burden.

Having retraced our footsteps, Holmes laid his finger on his lips and, cautiously opening the

great door, slipped into a near-by closet, full of capes and sticks, where he proceeded to throw

both our bundles on the floor.

"It should be safe enough," he whispered, "for it is stone-built. Ah! These two mackintoshes

will assist admirably. I have no doubt," he added, as he struck a match and dropped it into

the pile, "that I shall have other occasions to use this modest stratagem."

As the flames spread through the straw and reached the mackintoshes, thick black wreaths

of smoke poured from the cloak-room door into the hall of Arnsworth Castle, accompanied

by a hissing and crackling from the burning rubber.

"Good heavens, Holmes," I gasped, the tears rolling down my face. "We shall be

suffocated!"

His fingers closed on my arm.

"Wait," he muttered, and even as he spoke, there came a sudden rush of feet and a yell of

horror.

"Fire!"

In that despairing wail, I recognized Stephen's voice.

"Fire!" he shrieked again, and we caught the clatter of his footsteps as he fled across the

hall.

"Now!" whispered Holmes and, in an instant he was out of the cloak-room and running

headlong for the library. The door was half open but, as we burst in, the man drumming with

hysterical hands on the great fireplace did not even turn his head.

"Fire! The house is on fire!" he shrieked. "Oh, my poor master! My lord! My lord!"

Holmes's hand fell upon his shoulder. "A bucket of water in the cloak-room will meet the

case," he said quietly. "It would be as well, however, if you would ask his lordship to join us."

The old man sprang at him, his eyes blazing and his fingers crooked like the talons of a

vulture.

"A trick" he screamed. "I've betrayed him through your cursed tricks!"

"Take him, Watson," said Holmes, holding him at arms' length. "There, there. You're a

faithful fellow."

"Faithful unto death," whispered a feeble voice.

I started back involuntarily. The edge of the ancient fireplace had swung open and in the dark

aperture thus disclosed there stood a tall, thin man, so powdered with dust that for the moment

I seemed to be staring not at a human being but at a spectre. He was about fifty years of age,

gaunt and high-nosed, with a pair of sombre eyes that waxed and waned feverishly on a face

that was the colour of grey paper.

"I fear that the dust is bothering you, Lord Cope," said Holmes very gently. "Would

you not be better seated?"

The man tottered forward to drop heavily into an arm chair. "You are the police, of course,"

he gasped.

"No. I am a private investigator, but acting in the interests of justice."

A bitter smile parted Lord Cope's lips.

"Too late," said he.

"You are ill?"

"I am dying." Opening his fingers, he disclosed a small empty phial. "There is only a short

time left to me."

"Is there nothing to be done, Watson?"

I laid my fingers upon the sick man's wrist. His face was already livid and the pulse low and

feeble.

"Nothing, Holmes."

Lord Cope straightened himself painfully. "Perhaps you will indulge a last curiosity by

telling me how you discovered the truth," said he. "You must be a man of some perception."

"I confess that at first there were difficulties," admitted Holmes, "though these discovered

themselves later in the light of events. Obviously the whole key to the problem lay in a

conjunction of two remarkable circumstances— the use of a guillotine and the disappearance

of the murdered man's head.

"Who, I asked myself, would use so clumsy and rare an instrument, except one to whom it

possessed some strong symbolic significance and, if this were the case, then it was logical to

suppose that the clue to that significance must lie in its past history."

The nobleman nodded.

"His own people built it for Rennes," he muttered, "in return for the infamy that their

womenfolk had suffered at his hands. But pray proceed, and quickly."

"So much for the first circumstance," continued Holmes, ticking off the points on his fingers.

"The second threw a flood of light over the whole problem. This is not New Guinea. Why, then,

should a murderer take his victim's head? The obvious answer was that he wished to conceal the

dead man's true identity. By the way," he demanded sternly, "what have you done with

Captain Lothian's head?"

"Stephen and I buried it at midnight in the family vault," came the feeble reply. "And that

with all reverence."

"The rest was simple," went on Holmes. "As the body was easily identifiable as yours by the

clothes and other personal belongings which were listed by the local inspector, it followed

naturally that there could have been no point in concealing the head unless the murderer had

also changed clothes with the dead man. That the change had been effected before death was

shown by the blood-stains. The victim had been incapacitated in advance, probably

drugged, for it was plain from certain facts already explained to my friend Watson that

there had been no struggle and that he had been carried to the museum from another part of

the castle. Assuming my reasoning to be correct, then the murdered man could not be Lord

Jocelyn. But was there not another missing, his lordship's cousin and alleged murderer, Captain

Jasper Lothian?"

"How could you give Dawlish a description of the wanted man?" I interposed.

"By looking at the body of the victim, Watson. The two men must have borne a general

resemblance to each other or the deception would not have been feasible from the start. An ash

tray in the museum contained a cigarette stub, Turkish, comparatively fresh and smoked from a

holder. None but an addict would have smoked under the terrible circumstances that must have

accompanied that insignificant stump. The foot-marks in the snow showed that someone had

come from the main building carrying a burden and had returned without that burden. I

think I have covered the principal points."

For a while, we sat in silence broken only by the moan of a rising wind at the windows

and the short, sharp panting of the dying man's breath.

"I owe you no explanation," he said at last, "for it is to my Maker, who alone knows the

innermost recesses of the human heart, that I must answer for my deed. Nevertheless, though

my story is one of shame and guilt, I shall tell you enough to enlist perhaps your forbearance in

granting me my final request.

"You must know, then, that following the scandal which brought his Army career to its

close, my cousin Jasper Lothian has lived at Arnsworth. Though penniless and already

notorious for his evil living, I welcomed him as a kinsman, affording him not only financial

support but, what was perhaps more valuable, the social aegis of my position in the county.

"As I look back now on the years that passed, I blame myself for my own lack of

principle in my failure to put an end to his extravagance, his drinking and gaming and certain

less honourable pursuits with which rumour already linked his name. I had thought him wild

and injudicious. I was yet to learn that he was a creature so vile and utterly bereft of honour

that he would tarnish the name of his own house.

"I had married a woman considerably younger than myself, a woman as remarkable for her

beauty as for her romantic yet singular temperament which she had inherited from her Spanish

forebears. It was the old story, and when at long last I awoke to the dreadful truth it was also to

the knowledge that only one thing remained for me in life—vengeance. Vengeance against

this man who had disgraced my name and abused the honour of my house.

"On the night in question, Lothian and I sat late over our wine in this very room. I had

contrived to drug his port and before the effects of the narcotic could deaden his senses I told

him of my discovery and that death alone could wipe out the score. He sneered back at me that

in killing him I would merely put myself on the scaffold and expose my wife's shame to the

world. When I explained my plan, the sneer was gone from his face and the terror of death

was freezing in his black heart. The rest you know. As the drug deprived him of his senses,

I changed clothes with him, bound his hands with a sash torn from the door-curtain and carried

him across the courtyard to the museum, to the virgin guillotine which had been built for

another's infamy.

"When it was over, I summoned Stephen and told him the truth. The old man never

hesitated in his loyalty to his wretched master. Together we buried the head in the family

vault and then, seizing a mare from the stable, he rode it across the moor to convey an

impression of flight and finally left it concealed in a lonely farm owned by his sister. All that

remained was for me to disappear.

"Arnsworth, like many mansions belonging to families that had been Catholic in the olden

times, possessed a priest's hole. There I have lain concealed, emerging only at night into the

library to lay my final instructions upon my faithful servant."

"Thereby confirming my suspicion as to your proximity," interposed Holmes, "by leaving no

fewer than five smears of Turkish tobacco ash upon the rugs. But what was your ultimate