be more comfortable if he carried this chair into the priest's hole and closed the sliding panel after you.'
We had to bend our heads to catch Lord Jocelyn's response.
'Then a higher tribunal will judge my crime,' he whispered faintly, 'and the tomb shall devour my secret. Farewell, and may a dying man's blessing rest upon you.'
Our journey back to London was both chilly and depressing. With nightfall, the snow had recommenced and Holmes was in his least communicative mood, staring out of the window at the scattered lights of villages and farm-houses that periodically flitted past in the darkness.
'The old year is nodding to its fall,' he remarked suddenly, 'and in the hearts of all these kindly, simple folk awaiting the midnight chimes dwells the perennial anticipation that what is to come will be better than what has been. Hope, however ingenuous and disproven by past experience, remains the one supreme panacea for all the knocks and bruises which life metes out to us.' He leaned back and began to stuff his pipe with shag.
'Should you eventually write an account of this curious affair in Derbyshire,' he went on, 'I would suggest that a suitable title would be 'the Red Widow'.'
'Knowing your unreasonable aversion to women, Holmes, I am surprised that you noticed the colour of her hair.'
'I refer, Watson, to the popular sobriquet for a guillotine in the days of the French Revolution,' he said severely.
The hour was late when, at last, we reached our old lodgings in Baker Street where Holmes, after poking up the fire, lost not a moment in donning his mouse-coloured dressing-gown.
'It is approaching midnight,' I observed, 'and as I would wish to be with my wife when this year of 1887 draws to its close, I must be on my way. Let me wish you a happy New Year, my dear fellow.'
'I heartily reciprocate your good wishes, Watson,' he replied. 'Pray bear my greetings to your wife and my apologies for your temporary absence.'
I had reached the deserted street and, pausing for a moment to raise my collar against the swirl of the snow-flakes, I was about to set out on my walk when my attention was arrested by the strains of a violin. Involuntarily, I raised my eyes to the window of our old sitting-room and there, sharply outlined against the lamplit blind, was the shadow of Sherlock Holmes. I could see that keen, hawk-like profile which I knew so well, the slight stoop of his shoulders as he bent over his fiddle, the rise and fall of the bow-tip. But surely this was no dreamy Italian air, no complicated improvisation of his own creation, that drifted down to me through the stillness of that bleak winter's night.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to min'?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And days o' auld lang syne.
A snow-flake must have drifted into my eyes for, as I turned away, the gas-lamps glimmering down the desolate expanse of Baker Street seemed strangely blurred.
My task is done. My note-books have been replaced in the black tin deed-box where they have been kept in recent years and, for the last time, I have dipped my pen in the ink-well.
Through the window that overlooks the modest lawn of our farm-house, I can see Sherlock Holmes strolling among his beehives. His hair is quite white, but his long, thin form is as wiry and energetic as ever, and there is a touch of healthy colour in his cheeks, placed there by Mother Nature and her clover-laden breezes that carry the scent of the sea amid these gentle Sussex Downs.
Our lives are drawing towards eventide and old faces and old scenes are gone forever. And yet, as I lean back in my chair and close my eyes, for a while the past rises up to obscure the present and I see before me the yellow fogs of Baker Street and I hear once more the voice of the best and wisest man whom I have ever known.
'Come, Watson, the game's afoot!'
----:----
In the case of the Darlington Substitution Scandal it was of use to me, and also in the Arnsworth Castle business.
FROM 'A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA'
