The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes

the man himself.'

As he spoke, there had arisen from below an excited pealing of the door-bell, and, before Mrs. Hudson could announce him, our visitor had burst into the room. He was a tall, thin, high-shouldered man in rustic clerical dress with a benevolent, scholarly face framed in anti­quated side-whiskers of the sort once known as Dun­dreary weepers.

'My dear sirs,' he cried, peering at us myopically from behind oval spectacles, 'pray accept my assurance that it is only the pressure of events that prompts my invasion of your privacy.'

'Come, come,' said Sherlock Holmes good-humoured­ly, waving him to the basket-chair before the empty fireplace. 'I am a consulting detective, and therefore my privacy is of no more consequence than that of a doctor.'

The clergyman had hardly seated himself when he blurted out the extraordinary words with which I have begun this narrative.

'Death by the visitation of God,' repeated Sherlock Holmes. Though his voice was subdued, yet it seemed to me that there was a roll and thrill in the words. 'Then surely, my dear sir, the matter lies rather within your province than within mine?'

'I ask your pardon,' said the vicar, hastily. 'My words were perhaps over-emphatic and even irreverent. But you will understand that this horrible event, this—' his voice sank almost to a whisper as he leaned forward in his chair. 'Mr. Holmes, it is villainy: cold-blooded, deliberate villainy!'

'Believe me, sir, I am all attention.'

'Mr. John Trelawney—Squire Trelawney, we called him—was the richest landowner for miles about. Four nights ago, when only three months short of his seventieth birthday, he died in his bed.'

'Hum! That is not so uncommon.'

'No, sir. But hear me!' cried the vicar, raising a long forefinger curiously smudged on the very tip. 'John Trelawney was a hale and hearty man, suffering from no organic disease, and good for at least a dozen more years in this mundane sphere. Dr. Paul Griffin, our local medi­cal practitioner and incidentally my nephew, flatly refused to issue a death-certificate. There was a most dreadful business called a post-mortem.'

Holmes, who had not yet doffed his mouse-coloured dressing-gown, had been leaning back languidly in his arm-chair. Now he half opened his eyes.

'A post-mortem!' said he. 'Performed by your nephew?'

Mr. Appley hesitated. 'No, Mr. Holmes. It was per­formed by Sir Leopold Harper, our foremost living au­ thority on medical jurisprudence. I may tell you, here and now, that poor Trelawney did not die a natural death. Not only the police but Scotland Yard have been called in.'

'Ah!'

'On the other hand,' continued Mr. Appley agitated­ly, 'Trelawney was not murdered, and he could not possibly have been murdered. The greatest medical skill has been used to pronounce that he could not have died from any cause whatsoever.'

For a moment there was a silence in our sitting-room, where the blinds had been half drawn against the summer sun.

'My dear Watson,' said Holmes cordially, 'will you be good enough to fetch me a clay pipe from the rack over the sofa? Thank you. I find, Mr. Appley, that a clay is most conducive to meditation. Come, where is the coal­ scuttle? May I venture to offer you a cigar?'

'Cras ingens iterabimus aequor,' said the vicar, run­ning his curiously mottled fingers over his side-whiskers. 'At the moment, thank you, no. I cannot smoke. I dare not smoke! It would choke me. I am aware that I must tell you the facts in precise detail. But it is difficult. You may have remarked that I am considered somewhat absent- minded?'

'Indeed.'

'Yes, sir. In youth, before my call to the Church, I once desired to study medicine. But my late father forbade it, due to this absent-mindedness. Were I to become a doctor, said my father, I should instantly chloroform the patient and remove his gall-stones when he had merely come to enquire about a slight cough.'

'Well, well,' said Holmes, with a touch of impatience. 'But you were disturbed in your mind this morning,' he continued, regarding our client with his keen glance. 'That, no doubt, was why you consulted several books in your study before catching the train to London this morn­ing?'

'Yes, sir. They were medical works.'

'Do you not find it inconvenient to have the book­shelves in your study built so high?'

'Dear me, no. Can any room be too high or too large for one's books?'

Abruptly the vicar paused. His long face, framed in the Dundreary weepers, grew even longer as his mouth fell open.

'Now I am positive, I am quite positive,' said he, 'that I mentioned neither my books nor the height of the shelves in my study! How could you have known these things?'

'Tut, a trifle! How do I know, for instance, that you are either a bachelor or a widower, and that you have a most slovenly housekeeper?'

'Really, Holmes,' cried I, 'there is another besides Mr. Appley who would like to know how you deduced it!'

'The dust, Watson! The dust!'

'What dust?'

'Kindly observe the index finger of Mr. Appley's right hand. You will note, on its tip, smudges of that dark- grey dust which accumulates on the top of books. The smudges, somewhat faded, were made no later than this morning. Since Mr. Appley is a tall man with long arms, surely it is obvious that he plucked down books from a high shelf. When to this accumulation of dust we add an unbrushed top hat, it requires small shrewdness to determine that he has no wife, but an appalling house­keeper.'

'Remarkable!' said I.

'Meretricious,' said he. 'And I apologize to our guest for interrupting his narrative.'

'This death was incomprehensible beyond all measure! But you have not yet heard the worst,' continued our visitor. 'I must tell you that Trelawney has one surviving relative: a niece, aged twenty-one. Her name is Miss Dolores Dale, the daughter of the late Mrs. Copley Dale, of Glastonbury. For several years the young lady has kept house for Trelawney in his great whitewashed home, called Goodman's Rest. It has always been understood that Dolores, who is engaged to be married to a fine young man named Jeffrey Ainsworth, would inherit her uncle's fortune. When I tell you that a sweeter, or kinder spirit never existed, that her hair is darker than Homer's wine- dark sea and that upon occasion she can be all flash and fire suggestive of Southern blood—'

'Yes, yes,' said Holmes, closing his eyes. 'But you stated that I had not heard the worst?'

'True. Here are the facts. Shortly before his death, Trelawney changed his will. Disinheriting his niece, whom the stern-minded old man considered to be too frivolous, he left his entire fortune to my nephew, Dr. Paul Griffin. Sir, it was the scandal of the country-side! Two weeks later, Trelawney was dead in his bed and my unhappy nephew is now under suspicion of murder.'

'Pray be particular in your details,' said Holmes.

'In the first place,' continued the vicar, 'I should describe the late Squire Trelawney as a man of stern and implacable habit. I seem always to see him, tall and big-boned, with his great head and his grizzled silver beard, against the brown of a ploughed field or a line of heavy green trees.

'Each evening, in his bedroom, he would read a chapter of the Bible. Afterwards he would wind up his watch, which had almost run down at that hour. Then he would retire to bed at ten o'clock precisely, and rise at five each morning.'

'One moment!' interposed Holmes. 'Did these habits of his ever vary?'

'Well, should he become absorbed in the Bible, he might read until very late. But this happened so seldom, Mr. Holmes, that I think you may disregard it.'

'Thank you; that is quite clear.'

'In the second place, I am sorry to say that he was never on the best of terms with his niece. He was stern to a point of brutality. On one occasion, two years ago, he thrashed poor Dolores with a razor-strop, and confined her to her room on bread and water, because she had gone to Bristol to witness a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera, Patience. I can still see her, with the tears running down her warm-blooded cheeks. You