Denis Smith - The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes

‘You must admit, Watson,’ continued my friend, seating himself by the window and gazing down into the street below, as he proceeded to fill his pipe, ‘that the balance of probability has swung against your snug, rosy-cheeked City man, and in favour of my perturbed and ague-cheeked tea-planter.’

‘No doubt you are correct,’ I conceded. ‘You almost make me regret that ever I opened my mouth! But, come,’ I continued, laughing, ‘you have constructed so much of the unknown Mr Pringle; surely you can round out the picture a little now. What age, for instance, would you put upon the fellow and how would you say he is dressed today?’

‘He is, I should say, about forty years of age and wearing a tweed suit.’

‘Well I never!’ I cried in astonishment. ‘How in the name of Heaven can you tell that?’

‘Quite simply because I see the fellow standing on the front doorstep at this moment,’ replied Holmes drily.

The man who was shown in a few moments later accorded in every respect with the inferences my friend had drawn. A tall, handsome, well-built man, he had, nevertheless, an air of weakness and debility about him, as one worn down by a chronic disease. His face was unnaturally lined and leathery for one his age, his cheeks were sunken and of a sickly, yellowish hue and his hair was quite grey. But his grip as he shook my hand was firm and strong, and there was a spark in his blue eyes which showed that the disease had not broken his spirit, at any rate.

‘Are you quite recovered?’ asked Holmes in a kindly voice; ‘or is there perhaps something we can offer you? I observed that you had been dosing yourself with quinine and I know how horribly that can affect the stomach.’

Pringle shook his head. ‘It is not the nausea so much with me,’ he replied, ‘as the infernal ringing in the ears that the stuff gives me. But I’ve walked about a bit, and looked in a few shop-windows to take my mind from it, and I’ll be all right now. Don’t ever consider yourselves unlucky,’ he added with a flash of his eyes, ‘until you’ve had what I’ve got. No man ever had a more implacable enemy than malaria, I can tell you: no matter how many battles it may lose against you, it will never give up the war. But I did not come here to discuss pathology with you, gentlemen, and in any case I have learnt recently that there are things which can strike you harder than any disease. I wish your advice, Mr Holmes.’

‘I shall be only too pleased to give it, if you will acquaint me with the facts.’

‘Well, we’ll call them facts for the moment, but what you will make of them, I don’t know. A few snatches of conversation here, a trivial incident there – even as I think of these things now, they strike me as amounting to nothing.’

‘You had best let me be the judge of that,’ said Holmes. ‘Pray proceed with your account.’

‘I have lived most of my life in Ceylon,’ began our visitor after a moment. ‘My father had been a successful coffee-planter there, but he lost everything when the crash came – when, in a single season, those infernal spots of mould destroyed both the island’s plantations and its prosperity – and, sadly, neither he nor my mother lived to see the success which was later achieved so rapidly with tea. I was fortunate, for I managed to get in on the new business early on and after a couple of successful seasons, with a planter by the name of Widdowson, I decided to strike out on my own. I went in with two other fellows of like mind, Bob Jarvis and Donald Hudson, and by working all the hours in the day, and sometimes, it seemed, more than that, we soon made our plantation one of the finest on the island.

‘It was just then, when I was successful – and proud of that success, I don’t mind admitting – and more wealthy than I could ever have imagined, that this cursed swamp-fever struck me down. It took poor Jarvis clean away in under a week, so, in a way, I suppose I must count myself fortunate; but I cannot pretend to feel it. For weeks my life was despaired of, until eventually the doctor gave it as his opinion that my only hope lay in quitting the island altogether until the fever was beaten. With great reluctance, then, I returned to England, leaving Hudson in charge of the plantation.

‘That was three years ago and things have since gone very well for me in most ways. The attacks of malaria had become so infrequent, until a couple of months ago, that I fondly believed myself fully cured and I have managed to set up a company to sell our own tea – a long-standing ambition of ours – which has been at least moderately successful. I have also during my stay here met and married Laetitia Wadham, the most delightful woman in all the world. We met at Willoughby Hall, near Gloucester, where she was acting as companion to Lady Craxton, and soon discovered that we had much in common. Her father had been for a time a district magistrate in Ceylon and she had thus spent some years there as a child. It was at Gloucester that we were married, a small, quiet affair, for she was almost as without kin as I was myself. She had no brothers or sisters, and her mother and father were both dead. After a brief holiday at Lyme Regis, we took a fine modern villa, known as Low Meadow, which lies beside the Thames between Staines and Laleham. It has splendid gardens, about sixty yards in length, which sweep down from the house almost to the river itself, from which they are separated by a narrow belt of trees. It is a place where flowers bloom and birds sing, and there is all a man could wish for to complete his domestic bliss. Once more my life seemed upon an even keel; once more it seemed that nothing could come to blight my happiness.’

Our visitor paused and, taking a handkerchief from his pocket, mopped his brow, which glistened with beads of perspiration.

‘Once more,’ he continued after a moment, his voice lower and softer than before, ‘once more I have been struck low. And if I had thought malaria to be unseen, insidious, intangible, how much more so is the present evil! Thank you, Dr Watson, a glass of water would be most welcome.

‘About seven weeks ago I was, quite suddenly and without warning, laid low with the fever. It came quite out of the blue, for I had not had an attack for nearly a year; but it was as if the disease had been storing its energies for one almighty battle, for I had never been so knocked up by it since I left Colombo and I felt quite at death’s door. There I lay, prostrate in my bed, while outside, the sun warmed the garden, and birds sang gaily and a beautiful English spring day took its course. How much worse did it make me feel, to know that just beyond my bedroom window was such peace and tranquillity! It was then that an odd thing happened, from which I now believe I can date the beginning of the trouble which has beset me.

‘It was, I believe, early in the afternoon. I had been lying for some time in a fevered sweat, slipping in and out of delirious dreams and barely ever fully conscious. From time to time the warm breeze through my window set the curtains fluttering and I was, I recall, observing this gentle movement when I gradually became aware of voices, speaking softly, in the garden below. I could not tell if they had at that moment begun, or if they had been speaking for some time whilst I had been asleep, but as I listened it seemed to me that one of the voices was that of my wife. Who her companion might be, I did not know, nor, in truth, did I much care. That low, hushed whisper might have been a friend or a stranger, a man or a woman, for all I could tell; for the chief part of my mind was concentrated upon the fiery struggle within my own body and I had little energy left over to eavesdrop upon the conversation of others. By and by, however, I heard a chinking sound, as of a spoon’s being stirred in a jug of lemonade, and a few snatches of the low conversation came to my ears.