Sherlock Holmes -Sign of Four Chapter 4

Chapter 4 - The Story of the Bald-Headed Man

We followed the Indian down a sordid and common passage, ill-lit 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 writhed 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 tapestries 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 odour.

"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 Dr. 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 Bart- holomew 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 balsamic odour 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 unaesthetic 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 cannot 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 Barth- olomew. 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 cannot 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 con-
siderable sum of money, a large collection of valuable curiosi- ties, 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
tonight, was one of them. He was once lightweight champion of En- gland. 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
towards 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 assis- tance; 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 bring- ing 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; "l heard you quarrel, and I heard
the blow. But my lips are sealed. All are asleep in the house. Let us put him away
to- gether." 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 l 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 towards 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 round us. The window of my father's room was
found open in the morning, his cup- boards 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 thought- fully 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 deadly 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 low 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 splendour 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 godt 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.
Yester- day, however, I learned that an event of extreme importance has occurred.
The treasure has been discovered. I instantly commu- nicated 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 topcoat with astrakhan
collar and cuffs. This he but- toned 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 programme 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 intermi- nable 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
large 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. Thad- deus Sholto as he
handed her out.

Index TOC Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Adventures

All Family Resources provides a collection of Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle between 1887 and 1925.
(Absent are those in the Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927), which is still covered by copyright until January 1, 2003.)