When I look at the three massive manuscript volumes whichcontain our work for the year 1894, I confess that it is verydifficult for me, out of such a wealth of material, to select thecases which are most interesting in themselves, and at the sametime most conducive to a display of those peculiar powers forwhich my friend was famous. As I turn over the pages, I see mynotes upon the repulsive story of the red leech and the terribledeath of Crosby, the banker. Here also I find an account of theAddleton tragedy, and the singular contents of the ancient Britishbarrow. The famous Smith-Mortimer succession case comes alsowithin this period, and so does the tracking and arrest of Huret,the Boulevard assassin—an exploit which won for Holmes anautograph letter of thanks from the French President and theOrder of the Legion of Honour. Each of these would furnish anarrative, but on the whole I am of opinion that none of themunites so many singular points of interest as the episode of YoxleyOld Place, which includes not only the lamentable death of youngWilloughby Smith, but also those subsequent developments whichthrew so curious a light upon the causes of the crime.
It was a wild, tempestuous night, towards the close ofNovember. Holmes and I sat together in silence all the evening,he engaged with a powerful lens deciphering the remains of theoriginal inscription upon a palimpsest, I deep in a recent treatiseupon surgery. Outside the wind howled down Baker Street, whilethe rain beat fiercely against the windows. It was strange there, inthe very depths of the town, with ten miles of man’s handiwork onevery side of us, to feel the iron grip of Nature, and to be consciousthat to the huge elemental forces all London was no more than themolehills that dot the fields. I walked to the window, and lookedout on the deserted street. The occasional lamps gleamed on theexpanse of muddy road and shining pavement. A single cab wassplashing its way from the Oxford Street end.
“Well, Watson, it’s as well we have not to turn out to-night,”
said Holmes, laying aside his lens and rolling up the palimpsest.
“I’ve done enough for one sitting. It is trying work for the eyes. Sofar as I can make out, it is nothing more exciting than an Abbey’saccounts dating from the second half of the fifteenth century.
Halloa! halloa! halloa! What’s this?”
Amid the droning of the wind there had come the stamping of ahorse’s hoofs, and the long grind of a wheel as it rasped against thecurb. The cab which I had seen had pulled up at our door.
“What can he want?” I ejaculated, as a man stepped out of it.
“Want? He wants us. And we, my poor Watson, want overcoatsand cravats and goloshes, and every aid that man ever inventedto fight the weather. Wait a bit, though! There’s the cab off again!
There’s hope yet. He’d have kept it if he had wanted us to come.
Run down, my dear fellow, and open the door, for all virtuous folkhave been long in bed.”
When the light of the hall lamp fell upon our midnight visitor,I had no difficulty in recognizing him. It was young StanleyHopkins, a promising detective, in whose career Holmes hadseveral times shown a very practical interest.
“Is he in?” he asked, eagerly.
“Come up, my dear sir,” said Holmes’s voice from above. “I hopeyou have no designs upon us such a night as this.”
The detective mounted the stairs, and our lamp gleamed uponhis shining waterproof. I helped him out of it, while Holmesknocked a blaze out of the logs in the grate.
“Now, my dear Hopkins, draw up and warm your toes,” said he.
“Here’s a cigar, and the doctor has a prescription containing hotwater and a lemon, which is good medicine on a night like this. Itmust be something important which has brought you out in such agale.”
“It is indeed, Mr. Holmes. I’ve had a bustling afternoon, Ipromise you. Did you see anything of the Yoxley case in the latesteditions?”
“I’ve seen nothing later than the fifteenth century to-day.”
“Well, it was only a paragraph, and all wrong at that, so you havenot missed anything. I haven’t let the grass grow under my feet.
It’s down in Kent, seven miles from Chatham and three from therailway line. I was wired for at 3:15, reached Yoxley Old Place at 5,conducted my investigation, was back at Charing Cross by the lasttrain, and straight to you by cab.”
“Which means, I suppose, that you are not quite clear aboutyour case?”
“It means that I can make neither head nor tail of it. So far asI can see, it is just as tangled a business as ever I handled, and yetat first it seemed so simple that one couldn’t go wrong. There’s nomotive, Mr. Holmes. That’s what bothers me—I can’t put my handon a motive. Here’s a man dead—there’s no denying that—but, sofar as I can see, no reason on earth why anyone should wish himharm.”
Holmes lit his cigar and leaned back in his chair.
“Let us hear about it,” said he.
“I’ve got my facts pretty clear,” said Stanley Hopkins. “All Iwant now is to know what they all mean. The story, so far as Ican make it out, is like this. Some years ago this country house,Yoxley Old Place, was taken by an elderly man, who gave the nameof Professor Coram. He was an invalid, keeping his bed half thetime, and the other half hobbling round the house with a stick orbeing pushed about the grounds by the gardener in a Bath chair.
