_The Story of the Bald-Headed Man_
We followed the Indian down the sordid and common passage,
ill-lighted and worse furnished, until he came to a door upon the
right, which he threw open. A blaze of yellow light streamed out
upon us, and in the centre of the glare there stood a small man with
a very high head, a bristle of red hair all round the fringe of it,
and a bald, shining scalp, which shot out from among it like a
mountain-peak from fir-trees. He rubbed his hands together as he
stood, and his features were in a perpetual jerk, now smiling, now
scowling, but never for an instant in repose. Nature had given him a
pendulous lip, and a too visible line of yellow and irregular teeth,
which he strove feebly to conceal by constantly passing his hand over
the lower part of his face. In spite of his obtrusive baldness, he
gave the impression of youth. In point of fact, he had just turned
his thirtieth year.
"Your servant, Miss Morstan," he kept repeating in a thin, high
voice. "Your servant, gentlemen. Pray step into my little sanctum.
A small place, miss, but furnished to my own liking. An oasis of art
in the howling desert of South London."
We were all astonished by the appearance of the apartment into which
he invited us. In that sorry house it looked as out of place as a
diamond of the first water in a setting of brass. The richest and
glossiest of curtains and draperies draped the walls, looped back
here and there to expose some richly mounted painting or Oriental
vase. The carpet was of amber and black, so soft and so thick that
the foot sank pleasantly into it, as into a bed of moss. Two great
tiger-skins thrown athwart it increased the suggestion of Eastern
luxury, as did a huge hookah which stood upon a mat in the corner. A
lamp in the fashion of a silver dove was hung from an almost
invisible golden wire in the centre of the room. As it burned it
filled the air with a subtle and aromatic odor.
"Mr. Thaddeus Sholto," said the little man, still jerking and
smiling. "That is my name. You are Miss Morstan, of course. And
these gentlemen--"
"This is Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and this Doctor Watson."
"A doctor, eh?" cried he, much excited. "Have you your stethoscope?
Might I ask you--would you have the kindness? I have grave doubts as
to my mitral valve, if you would be so very good. The aortic I may
rely upon, but I should value your opinion upon the mitral."
I listened to his heart as requested, but was unable to find anything
amiss, save indeed that he was in an ecstasy of fear, for he shivered
from head to foot. "It appears to be normal," I said. "You have no
cause for uneasiness."
"You will excuse my anxiety, Miss Morstan," he remarked, airily. "I
am a great sufferer, and I have long had suspicions as to that valve.
I am delighted to hear that they are unwarranted. Had your father,
Miss Morstan, refrained from throwing a strain upon his heart, he
might have been alive now."
I could have struck the man across the face, so hot was I at this
callous and offhand reference to so delicate a matter. Miss Morstan
sat down, and her face grew white to the lips. "I knew in my heart
that he was dead," said she.
"I can give you every information," said he, "and what is more, I can
do you justice; and I will, too, whatever brother Bartholomew may
say. I am so glad to have your friends here, not only as an escort
to you, but also as witnesses to what I am about to do and say. The
three of us can show a bold front to brother Bartholomew. But let us
have no outsiders--no police or officials. We can settle everything
satisfactorily among ourselves, without any interference. Nothing
would annoy brother Bartholomew more than any publicity." He sat
down upon a low settee and blinked at us inquiringly with his weak,
watery blue eyes.
"For my part," said Holmes, "whatever you may choose to say will go
no further."
I nodded to show my agreement.
"That is well! That is well!" said he. "May I offer you a glass of
Chianti, Miss Morstan? or of Tokay? I keep no other wines. Shall I
open a flask? No? Well, then, I trust that you have no objection to
tobacco-smoke, to the mild, balsamic odor of the Eastern tobacco. I
am a little nervous, and I find my hookah an invaluable sedative."
He applied a taper to the great bowl, and the smoke bubbled merrily
through the rose-water. We sat all three in a semicircle, with our
heads advanced, and our chins upon our hands, while the strange,
jerky little fellow, with his high, shining head, puffed uneasily in
the centre.
"When I first determined to make this communication to you," said he,
"I might have given you my address, but I feared that you might
disregard my request and bring unpleasant people with you. I took
the liberty, therefore, of making an appointment in such a way that
my man Williams might be able to see you first. I have complete
confidence in his discretion, and he had orders, if he were
dissatisfied, to proceed no further in the matter. You will excuse
these precautions, but I am a man of somewhat retiring, and, I might
even say, refined tastes, and there is nothing more unesthetic than a
policeman. I have a natural shrinking from all forms of rough
materialism. I seldom come in contact with the rough crowd. I live,
as you see, with some little atmosphere of elegance around me. I may
call myself a patron of the arts. It is my weakness. The landscape
is a genuine Corot, and, though a connoisseur might perhaps throw a
doubt upon that Salvator Rosa, there can not be the least question
about the Bouguereau. I am partial to the modern French school."
"You will excuse me, Mr. Sholto," said Miss Morstan, "but I am here
at your request to learn something which you desire to tell me. It
is very late, and I should desire the interview to be as short as
possible."
"At the best it must take some time," he answered; "for we shall
certainly have to go to Norwood and see brother Bartholomew. We
shall all go and try if we can get the better of brother Bartholomew.
He is very angry with me for taking the course which has seemed right
to me. I had quite high words with him last night. You can not
imagine what a terrible fellow he is when he is angry."
"If we are to go to Norwood it would perhaps be as well to start at
once," I ventured to remark.
He laughed until his ears were quite red. "That would hardly do," he
cried. "I don't know what he would say if I brought you in that
sudden way. No; I must prepare you by showing you how we all stand
to each other. In the first place, I must tell you that there are
several points in the story of which I am myself ignorant. I can
only lay the facts before you as far as I know them myself.
"My father was, as you may have guessed, Major John Sholto, once of
the Indian army. He retired some eleven years ago, and came to live
at Pondicherry Lodge in Upper Norwood. He had prospered in India,
and brought back with him a considerable sum of money, a large
collection of valuable curiosities, and a staff of native servants.
With these advantages he bought himself a house, and lived in great
luxury. My twin-brother Bartholomew and I were the only children.
"I very well remember the sensation which was caused by the
disappearance of Captain Morstan. We read the details in the papers,
and, knowing that he had been a friend of our father's, we discussed
the case freely in his presence. He used to join in our speculations
as to what could have happened. Never for an instant did we suspect
that he had the whole secret hidden in his own breast--that of all
men he alone knew the fate of Arthur Morstan.
"We did know, however, that some mystery--some positive
danger--overhung our father. He was very fearful of going out alone,
and he always employed two prize-fighters to act as porters at
Pondicherry Lodge. Williams, who drove you to-night, was one of
them. He was once a light-weight champion of England. Our father
would never tell us what it was he feared, but he had a most marked
aversion to men with wooden legs. On one occasion he actually fired
his revolver at a wooden-legged man, who proved to be a harmless
tradesman canvassing for orders. We had to pay a large sum to hush
the matter up. My brother and I used to think this a mere whim of my
father's, but events have since led us to change our opinion.
"Early in 1882 my father received a letter from India which was a
great shock to him. He nearly fainted at the breakfast-table when he
opened it, and from that day he sickened to his death. What was in
the letter we could never discover, but I could see as he held it
that it was short and written in a scrawling hand. He had suffered
for years from an enlarged spleen, but he now became rapidly worse,
and toward the end of April we were informed that he was beyond all
hope, and that he wished to make a last communication to us.
"When we entered his room he was propped up with pillows and
breathing heavily. He besought us to lock the door and to come upon
either side of the bed. Then, grasping our hands, he made a
remarkable statement to us, in a voice which was broken as much by
emotion as by pain. I shall try and give it to you in his own very
words.
"'I have only one thing,' he said, 'which weighs upon my mind at this
supreme moment. It is my treatment of poor Morstan's orphan. The
cursed greed which has been my besetting sin through life has
withheld from her the treasure, half at least of which should have
been hers. And yet I have made no use of it myself--so blind and
foolish a thing is avarice. The mere feeling of possession has been
so dear to me that I could not bear to share it with another. See
that chaplet tipped with pearls beside the quinine-bottle. Even that
I could not bear to part with, although I had got it out with the
design of sending it to her. You, my sons, will give her a fair
share of the Agra treasure. But send her nothing--not even the
chaplet--until I am gone. After all, men have been as bad as this
and have recovered.
"'I will tell you how Morstan died,' he continued. 'He had suffered
for years from a weak heart, but he concealed it from every one. I
alone knew it. When in India, he and I, through a remarkable chain
of circumstances, came into possession of a considerable treasure. I
brought it over to England, and on the night of Morstan's arrival he
came straight over here to claim his share. He walked over from the
station, and was admitted by my faithful old Lal Chowdar, who is now
dead. Morstan and I had a difference of opinion as to the division
of the treasure, and we came to heated words. Morstan had sprung out
of his chair in a paroxysm of anger, when he suddenly pressed his
hand to his side, his face turned a dusky hue, and he fell backward,
cutting his head against the corner of the treasure-chest. When I
stooped over him I found, to my horror, that he was dead.
"'For a long time I sat half-distracted, wondering what I should do.
My first impulse was, of course, to call for assistance; but I could
not but recognize that there was every chance that I would be accused
of his murder. His death at the moment of a quarrel, and the gash in
his head, would be black against me. Again, an official inquiry
could not be made without bringing out some facts about the treasure
which I was particularly anxious to keep secret. He had told me that
no soul upon earth knew where he had gone. There seemed to be no
necessity why any soul ever should know.
"'I was still pondering over the matter, when, looking up, I saw my
servant, Lal Chowdar, in the doorway. He stole in, and bolted the
door behind him. "Do not fear, sahib," he said. "No one need know
that you have killed him. Let us hide him away, and who is the
wiser?" "I did not kill him," said I. Lal Chowdar shook his head,
and smiled. "I heard it all, sahib," said he. "I heard you quarrel,
and I heard the blow. But my lips are sealed. All are asleep in the
house. Let us put him away together." That was enough to decide me.
If my own servant could not believe my innocence, how could I hope to
make it good before twelve foolish tradesmen in a jury-box? Lal
Chowdar and I disposed of the body that night, and within a few days
the London papers were full of the mysterious disappearance of
Captain Morstan. You will see from what I say that I can hardly be
blamed in the matter. My fault lies in the fact that we concealed,
not only the body, but also the treasure, and that I have clung to
Morstan's share as well as to my own. I wish you, therefore, to make
restitution. Put your ears down to my mouth. The treasure is hidden
in--' At this instant a horrible change came over his expression;
his eyes stared wildly, his jaw dropped, and he yelled, in a voice
which I can never forget, 'Keep him out! For Christ's sake, keep him
out!' We both stared round at the window behind us upon which his
gaze was fixed. A face was looking in at us out of the darkness. We
could see the whitening of the nose where it was pressed against the
glass. It was a bearded, hairy face, with wild, cruel eyes and an
expression of concentrated malevolence. My brother and I rushed
toward the window, but the man was gone. When we returned to my
father, his head had dropped and his pulse had ceased to beat.
"We searched the garden that night, but found no sign of the
intruder, save that just under the window a single footmark was
visible in the flower-bed. But for that one trace, we might have
thought that our imaginations had conjured up that wild, fierce face.
We soon, however, had another and a more striking proof that there
were secret agencies at work all around us. The window of my
father's room was found open in the morning, his cupboards and boxes
had been rifled, and upon his chest was fixed a torn piece of paper
with the words, 'The sign of the four' scrawled across it. What the
phrase meant, or who our secret visitor may have been, we never knew.
As far as we can judge, none of my father's property had been
actually stolen, though everything had been turned out. My brother
and I naturally associated this peculiar incident with the fear which
haunted my father during his life; but it is still a complete mystery
to us."
The little man stopped to relight his hookah, and puffed thoughtfully
for a few moments. We had all sat absorbed, listening to his
extraordinary narrative. At the short account of her father's death
Miss Morstan had turned deathly white, and for a moment I feared that
she was about to faint. She rallied, however, on drinking a glass of
water which I quietly poured out for her from a Venetian carafe upon
the side table. Sherlock Holmes leaned back in his chair with an
abstracted expression and the lids drawn over his glittering eyes.
As I glanced at him I could not but think how on that very day he had
complained bitterly of the commonplaceness of life. Here, at least,
was a problem which would tax his sagacity to the utmost. Mr.
Thaddeus Sholto looked from one to the other of us with an obvious
pride at the effect which his story had produced, and then continued
between the puffs of his overgrown pipe:
"My brother and I;" said he, "were, as you may imagine, much excited
as to the treasure which my father had spoken of. For weeks and for
months we dug and delved in every part of the garden, without
discovering its whereabouts. It was maddening to think that the
hiding-place was on his very lips at the moment that he died. We
could judge the splendor of the missing riches by the chaplet which
he had taken out. Over this chaplet my brother Bartholomew and I had
some little discussion. The pearls were evidently of great value,
and he was averse to part with them, for, between friends, my brother
was himself a little inclined to my father's fault. He thought, too,
that if we parted with the chaplet it might give rise to gossip, and
finally bring us into trouble. It was all that I could do to
persuade him to let me find out Miss Morstan's address and send her a
detached pearl at fixed intervals, so that, at least, she might never
feel destitute."
"It was a kindly thought," said our companion, earnestly. "It was
extremely good of you."
The little man waved his hand deprecatingly. "We were your
trustees," he said. "That was the view which I took of it, though
brother Bartholomew could not altogether see it in that light. We
had plenty of money ourselves. I desired no more. Besides, it would
have been such bad taste to have treated a young lady in so scurvy a
fashion. '_Le mauvais gout mene au crime_.' The French have a very
neat way of putting these things. Our difference of opinion on this
subject went so far that I thought it best to set up rooms for
myself; so I left Pondicherry Lodge, taking the old khitmutgar and
Williams with me. Yesterday, however, I learned that an event of
extreme importance had occurred. The treasure has been discovered.
I instantly communicated with Miss Morstan, and it only remains for
us to drive out to Norwood and demand our share. I explained my
views last night to brother Bartholomew; so we shall be expected, if
not welcome, visitors."
Mr. Thaddeus Sholto ceased, and sat twitching on his luxurious
settee. We all remained silent, with our thoughts upon the new
development which the mysterious business had taken. Holmes was the
first to spring to his feet.
"You have done well, sir, from first to last," said he. "It is
possible that we may be able to make you some small return by
throwing some light upon that which is still dark to you. But, as
Miss Morstan remarked just now, it is late, and we had best put the
matter through without delay."
Our new acquaintance very deliberately coiled up the tube of his
hookah, and produced from behind a curtain a very long befrogged
top-coat with astrakhan collar and cuffs. This he buttoned tightly
up, in spite of the extreme closeness of the night, and finished his
attire by putting on a rabbit-skin cap with hanging lappets which
covered the ears, so that no part of him was visible save his mobile
and peaky face. "My health is somewhat fragile," he remarked, as he
led the way down the passage. "I am compelled to be a
valetudinarian."
Our cab was awaiting us outside, and our program was evidently
prearranged, for the driver started off at once at a rapid pace.
Thaddeus Sholto talked incessantly, in a voice which rose high above
the rattle of the wheels.
"Bartholomew is a clever fellow," said he. "How do you think he
found out where the treasure was? He had come to the conclusion that
it was somewhere indoors; so he worked out all the cubic space of the
house, and made measurements everywhere, so that not one inch should
be unaccounted for. Among other things, he found that the height of
the building was seventy-four feet, but on adding together the
heights of all the separate rooms, and making every allowance for the
space between, which he ascertained by borings, he could not bring
the total to more than seventy feet. There were four feet
unaccounted for. These could only be at the top of the building. He
knocked a hole, therefore, in the lath and plaster ceiling of the
highest room, and there, sure enough, he came upon another little
garret above it, which had been sealed up and was known to no one.
In the centre stood the treasure-chest, resting upon two rafters. He
lowered it through the hole, and there it lies. He computes the
value of the jewels at not less than half a million sterling."
At the mention of this gigantic sum we all stared at one another
open-eyed. Miss Morstan, could we secure her rights, would change
from a needy governess to the richest heiress in England. Surely it
was the place of a loyal friend to rejoice at such news; yet I am
ashamed to say that selfishness took me by the soul, and that my
heart turned as heavy as lead within me. I stammered out some few
halting words of congratulation, and then sat downcast, with my head
drooped, deaf to the babble of our new acquaintance. He was clearly
a confirmed hypochondriac, and I was dreamily conscious that he was
pouring forth interminable trains of symptoms, and imploring
information as to the composition and action of innumerable quack
nostrums, some of which he bore about in a leather case in his
pocket. I trust that he may not remember any of the answers which I
gave him that night. Holmes declares that he overheard me caution
him against the great danger of taking more than two drops of castor
oil, while I recommended strychnine in larger doses as a sedative.
However that may be, I was certainly relieved when our cab pulled up
with a jerk and the coachman sprang down to open the door.
"This, Miss Morstan, is Pondicherry Lodge," said Mr. Thaddeus Sholto,
as he handed her out.