"'Do you know what befell him?'
"'I heard that he was beaten by some Apaches in the Montmartre
district and crippled for life.'
"'Quite true, Mr. Holmes. By a curious coincidence he had been
inquiring into my affairs only a week before. Don't do it, Mr.
Holmes; it's not a lucky thing to do. Several have found that out. My
last word to you is, go your own way and let me go mine. Good-bye!'
"So there you are, Watson. You are up to date now."
"The fellow seems dangerous."
"Mighty dangerous. I disregard the blusterer, but this is the sort of
man who says rather less than he means."
"Must you interfere? Does it really matter if he marries the girl?"
"Considering that he undoubtedly murdered his last wife, I should say
it mattered very much. Besides, the client! Well, well, we need not
discuss that. When you have finished your coffee you had best come
home with me, for the blithe Shinwell will be there with his report."
We found him sure enough, a huge, coarse, red-faced, scorbutic man,
with a pair of vivid black eyes which were the only external sign of
the very cunning mind within. It seems that he had dived down into
what was peculiarly his kingdom, and beside him on the settee was a
brand which he had brought up in the shape of a slim, flame-like
young woman with a pale, intense face, youthful, and yet so worn with
sin and sorrow that one read the terrible years which had left their
leprous mark upon her.
"This is Miss Kitty Winter," said Shinwell Johnson, waving his fat
hand as an introduction. "What she don't know--well, there, she'll
speak for herself. Put my hand right on her, Mr. Holmes, within an
hour of your message."
"I'm easy to find," said the young woman. "Hell, London, gets me
every time. Same address for Porky Shinwell. We're old mates, Porky,
you and I. But, by cripes! there is another who ought to be down in a
lower hell than we if there was any justice in the world! That is the
man you are after, Mr. Holmes."
Holmes smiled. "I gather we have your good wishes, Miss Winter."
"If I can help to put him where he belongs, I'm yours to the rattle,"
said our visitor with fierce energy. There was an intensity of hatred
in her white, set face and her blazing eyes such as woman seldom and
man never can attain. "You needn't go into my past, Mr. Holmes.
That's neither here nor there. But what I am Adelbert Gruner made me.
If I could pull him down!" She clutched frantically with her hands
into the air. "Oh, if I could only pull him into the pit where he has
pushed so many!"
"You know how the matter stands?"
"Porky Shinwell has been telling me. He's after some other poor fool
and wants to marry her this time. You want to stop it. Well, you
surely know enough about this devil to prevent any decent girl in her
senses wanting to be in the same parish with him."
"She is not in her senses. She is madly in love. She has been told
all about him. She cares nothing."
"Told about the murder?"
"Yes."
"My Lord, she must have a nerve!"
"She puts them all down as slanders."
"Couldn't you lay proofs before her silly eyes?"
"Well, can you help us do so?"
"Ain't I a proof myself? If I stood before her and told her how he
used me--"
"Would you do this?"
"Would I? Would I not!"
"Well, it might be worth trying. But he has told her most of his sins
and had pardon from her, and I understand she will not reopen the
question."
"I'll lay he didn't tell her all," said Miss Winter. "I caught a
glimpse of one or two murders besides the one that made such a fuss.
He would speak of someone in his velvet way and then look at me with
a steady eye and say: 'He died within a month.' It wasn't hot air,
either. But I took little notice--you see, I loved him myself at that
time. Whatever he did went with me, same as with this poor fool!
There was just one thing that shook me. Yes, by cripes! if it had not
been for his poisonous, lying tongue that explains and soothes, I'd
have left him that very night. It's a book he has--a brown leather
book with a lock, and his arms in gold on the outside. I think he was
a bit drunk that night, or he would not have shown it to me."
"What was it, then?"
"I tell you, Mr. Holmes, this man collects women, and takes a pride
in his collection, as some men collect moths or butterflies. He had
it all in that book. Snapshot photographs, names, details, everything
about them. It was a beastly book--a book no man, even if he had come
from the gutter, could have put together. But it was Adelbert
Gruner's book all the same. 'Souls I have ruined.' He could have put
that on the outside if he had been so minded. However, that's neither
here nor there, for the book would not serve you, and, if it would,
you can't get it."
"Where is it?"
"How can I tell you where it is now? It's more than a year since I
left him. I know where he kept it then. He's a precise, tidy cat of a
man in many of his ways, so maybe it is still in the pigeon-hole of
the old bureau in the inner study. Do you know his house?"
"I've been in the study," said Holmes.
"Have you, though? You haven't been slow on the job if you only
started this morning. Maybe dear Adelbert has met his match this
time. The outer study is the one with the Chinese crockery in it--big
glass cupboard between the windows. Then behind his desk is the door
that leads to the inner study--a small room where he keeps papers and
things."
"Is he not afraid of burglars?"
"Adelbert is no coward. His worst enemy couldn't say that of him. He
can look after himself. There's a burglar alarm at night. Besides,
what is there for a burglar--unless they got away with all this fancy
crockery?"
"No good," said Shinwell Johnson with the decided voice of the
expert. "No fence wants stuff of that sort that you can neither melt
nor sell."
"Quite so," said Holmes. "Well, now, Miss Winter, if you would call
here to-morrow evening at five, I would consider in the meanwhile
whether your suggestion of seeing this lady personally may not be
arranged. I am exceedingly obliged to you for your cooperation. I
need not say that my clients will consider liberally--"
"None of that, Mr. Holmes," cried the young woman. "I am not out for
money. Let me see this man in the mud, and I've got all I've worked
for--in the mud with my foot on his cursed face. That's my price. I'm
with you to-morrow or any other day so long as you are on his track.
Porky here can tell you always where to find me."
I did not see Holmes again until the following evening when we dined
once more at our Strand restaurant. He shrugged his shoulders when I
asked him what luck he had had in his interview. Then he told the
story, which I would repeat in this way. His hard, dry statement
needs some little editing to soften it into the terms of real life.
"There was no difficulty at all about the appointment," said Holmes,
"for the girl glories in showing abject filial obedience in all
secondary things in an attempt to atone for her flagrant breach of it
in her engagement. The General 'phoned that all was ready, and the
fiery Miss W. turned up according to schedule, so that at half-past
five a cab deposited us outside 104 Berkeley Square, where the old
soldier resides--one of those awful gray London castles which would
make a church seem frivolous. A footman showed us into a great
yellow-curtained drawing-room, and there was the lady awaiting us,
demure, pale, self-contained, as inflexible and remote as a snow
image on a mountain.
"I don't quite know how to make her clear to you, Watson. Perhaps you
may meet her before we are through, and you can use your own gift of
words. She is beautiful, but with the ethereal other-world beauty of
some fanatic whose thoughts are set on high. I have seen such faces
in the pictures of the old masters of the Middle Ages. How a beastman
could have laid his vile paws upon such a being of the beyond I
cannot imagine. You may have noticed how extremes call to each other,
the spiritual to the animal, the cave-man to the angel. You never saw
a worse case than this.
"She knew what we had come for, of course--that villain had lost no
time in poisoning her mind against us. Miss Winter's advent rather
amazed her, I think, but she waved us into our respective chairs like
a reverend abbess receiving two rather leprous mendicants. If your
head is inclined to swell, my dear Watson, take a course of Miss
Violet de Merville.
"'Well, sir,' said she in a voice like the wind from an iceberg,
'your name is familiar to me. You have called, as I understand, to
malign my fianc? Baron Gruner. It is only by my father's request
that I see you at all, and I warn you in advance that anything you
can say could not possibly have the slightest effect upon my mind.'
"I was sorry for her, Watson. I thought of her for the moment as I
would have thought of a daughter of my own. I am not often eloquent.
I use my head, not my heart. But I really did plead with her with all
the warmth of words that I could find in my nature. I pictured to her
the awful position of the woman who only wakes to a man's character
after she is his wife--a woman who has to submit to be caressed by
bloody hands and lecherous lips. I spared her nothing--the shame, the
fear, the agony, the hopelessness of it all. All my hot words could
not bring one tinge of colour to those ivory cheeks or one gleam of
emotion to those abstracted eyes. I thought of what the rascal had
said about a post-hypnotic influence. One could really believe that
she was living above the earth in some ecstatic dream. Yet there was
nothing indefinite in her replies.
"'I have listened to you with patience, Mr. Holmes,' said she. 'The
effect upon my mind is exactly as predicted. I am aware that
Adelbert, that my fianc? has had a stormy life in which he has
incurred bitter hatreds and most unjust aspersions. You are only the
last of a series who have brought their slanders before me. Possibly
you mean well, though I learn that you are a paid agent who would
have been equally willing to act for the Baron as against him. But in
any case I wish you to understand once for all that I love him and
that he loves me, and that the opinion of all the world is no more to
me than the twitter of those birds outside the window. If his noble
nature has ever for an instant fallen, it may be that I have been
specially sent to raise it to its true and lofty level. I am not
clear'--here she turned eyes upon my companion--'who this young lady
may be.'
"I was about to answer when the girl broke in like a whirlwind. If
ever you saw flame and ice face to face, it was those two women.
"'I'll tell you who I am,' she cried, springing out of her chair, her
mouth all twisted with passion--'I am his last mistress. I am one of
a hundred that he has tempted and used and ruined and thrown into the
refuse heap, as he will you also. Your refuse heap is more likely to
be a grave, and maybe that's the best. I tell you, you foolish woman,
if you marry this man he'll be the death of you. It may be a broken
heart or it may be a broken neck, but he'll have you one way or the
other. It's not out of love for you I'm speaking. I don't care a
tinker's curse whether you live or die. It's out of hate for him and
to spite him and to get back on him for what he did to me. But it's
all the same, and you needn't look at me like that, my fine lady, for
you may be lower than I am before you are through with it.'
"'I should prefer not to discuss such matters,' said Miss de Merville
coldly. 'Let me say once for all that I am aware of three passages in
my fianc?s life in which he became entangled with designing women,
and that I am assured of his hearty repentance for any evil that he
may have done.'
"'Three passages!' screamed my companion. 'You fool! You unutterable
fool!'
"'Mr. Holmes, I beg that you will bring this interview to an end,'
said the icy voice. 'I have obeyed my father's wish in seeing you,
but I am not compelled to listen to the ravings of this person.'
"With an oath Miss Winter darted forward, and if I had not caught her
wrist she would have clutched this maddening woman by the hair. I
dragged her towards the door and was lucky to get her back into the
cab without a public scene, for she was beside herself with rage. In
