The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley [194]
I decided that it was my duty now at least to deliver an oblique warning to the Count Palatine’s faithful manservant, even though I still did not wish to disclose that I knew through Holmes whom he served. I succeeded, I hope, in giving him some general advice about the dangers of burglars in the neighbourhood, advice which I hoped would alert him without betraying what Holmes and I alone knew. I was relieved, too, when my patient, having declared his intention of visiting a Continental spa now that he felt so much better, asked if his servant could collect from me a supply of a nerve tonic I had prescribed sufficient to last him for a number of weeks. I gladly arranged for the man to come to me next day for the purpose, thinking that I could in this way get the latest tidings before the Count Palatine – if indeed this were the Count Palatine – left our shores.
My anxieties over the lurking seaman I had noticed by the house gate proved fully justified when the manservant called on me the day afterwards. He reported that he had encountered this very fellow in the garden at dusk the night before, and that he had given him a thorough beating before chasing him from the premises. I decided it would be as well to visit Holmes and report on the favourable turn to the situation. It ought, I believed, to assuage any fears he might have. Instead therefore of returning home to lunch I called in at my club, which lies between my house and Baker Street, to take some refreshment there.
It was while I was hastily consuming a boiled fowl and half a bottle of Montrachet that the place next to me at the table was taken by an old acquaintance, Maltravers Bressingham, the big-game hunter. I enquired whether he had been in Africa.
“Why, no, my dear fellow,” he replied. “I have been shooting nearer home. In Illyria, in fact. There is excellent sport to be had in the wild boar forests there, you know.”
“Indeed?” I answered. “And were you not disturbed by the state of the country? I understand the situation there is somewhat turbulent.”
“Turbulent?” Bressingham said, in tones of considerable surprise. “My dear fellow, I assure you that there are positively no signs of unrest at all. I spent a week in the capital, you know, and society there is as calm and as full of enjoyment as one could wish.”
“Is it indeed?” I said. “I believed otherwise, but it must be that I have been misinformed.”
Sadly puzzled, I left the club and took a hansom for Baker Street. I found Holmes in bed. I was more dismayed at this than I can easily say. A fortnight before, when I had first called on him after a period of some weeks, he had been lying on the sitting room sofa certainly and in a condition I did not at all like to see. But his state now seemed a good deal more grave. Was that indomitable spirit at last to succumb totally to the sapping weakness which lay for ever ready to emerge when there was nothing to engage the powers of his unique mind? Was the world to be deprived of his services because it held nothing that seemed to him a worthy challenge?
“Holmes, my dear fellow,” I said. “What symptoms affect you? Confide in me, pray, as a medical man.”
In response I got at first no more than a deep groan. But I persisted, and at length Holmes answered, with a touch of asperity in his voice which I was not wholly displeased to hear.
“Nothing is wrong, Watson. Nothing. This is the merest passing indisposition. I do not require your professional services.”
“Very well, my dear fellow. Then let me tell you of events down in Hertfordshire. I trust they will bring you not a little comfort.”
But even as I spoke those words, my heart failed me. Certainly I had what had seemed glad tidings from Hertfordshire. But my news was of the foiling of an apparent attempt on the Count