The Cas of Sherlock Holmes | Page 7

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
fiance, 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 fiance, 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 fiance's life in which he became entangled with designing women, and
that I am assured of his hearty