Free The rivals of Sherlock Holmes : early detective stories by Unknown Author Page A

his doubt, on his assurance that they were quite safe. Munday had repeated what she asked him to, but he had no answer to console her. He had no answer to console himself. He was staggered by the weight of his own and his wife’s fears. He worried about himself; poor health was his egotism: he saw himself collapsing, falling forward dead in the darkest room of the black house. That star of pain which had twinkled on and off now burned ceaselessly like a hot knuckle of decay in the pulp of his heart. His sleep was a kind of stumbling at night, going down in a restless doze and then scrambling to consciousness. Usually he lay awake, rigid in his bed, listening to the slow clock and the ping of the electric fire, his eyes wide open, wanting to wake his wife and talk to her. He envied her slumbering there, her body purring with snores, but he could not divulge his worry and he knew that to tell her his fears would be to have her awake beside him, fretting through the night.
    One night, early in December, he slid out of bed to go downstairs for some aspirin. He made no sound. At the bedroom door he heard:
    “Where are you going?” Her voice was sharp; its alert panic implored him. It was not the monotone of a person just awakened—it had the resigned clarity of his own when he said he’d be right back. He said nothing more; he imagined that their exchange had been overheard, and when he returned to the bed and Emma embraced him, pulling her nightgown to her waist and fingering his inner thigh, he drew away, whispered “No,” and immediately looked around half-expecting to see a witness, staring in a blue and gray dress.
    In the daytime he was tense with fatigue, and though he did not sleep much in his bed he dozed in his chair, nodded over his food, and sometimes out walking he felt he could not go one step further: he wanted to drop to his knees and fall down in the sunlight on a grassy knoll and sleep and sleep. His mind spun, stampeding his thoughts, and his arms and eyes were heavy and wouldn’t work. So the preparation of his lecture took as long as if he was doing a paper for a learned society. He hated every moment of it, making notes, putting his colored slides and tapes in order and labeling the tools and weapons he planned to pass around to the audience.
    After lunch, on the day he was due to give his lecture at the church hall, Emma said, “Let’s get some fresh air.”
    It was cold and windy and very bright, typical of the weather in its new phase. There were slivers of ice in the stone birdbath that lay in the shadow of the house. They climbed the bank in the back garden and stood in the humming gorse and broom at the edge of the high meadow. Beneath them was the vast green Vale of Marshwood, sunlit and so deep they could take in most of it at a glance, the several village clusters—each marked by smoking chimneys and a square church steeple topped by a glinting gold weathercock—the dark measured hedgerows, the nibbling sheep like rugs of spring snow on the hillsides, the scattered herds of cows, and here and there small wooded areas, islands anchored in the rolling seas of the meadows. Wide gloomy patches of cloud shadow, the shape and speed of devil-fish, glided across the floor of the valley, rippling over trees, swept up the slope, and passed over the Mundays, blocking the sun and putting a chill on them. They continued to look, not humbled by the size, but triumphant; at their vantage point on its very edge, where it began to roll down, they had an easy mastery of it, like people before a contour map on a table. Each house and bam and church was toy-sized and the whole was marred only by the file of tall gray pylons and their spans of underslung wires across the southern end of the valley. At the sea was a ridge of hills, gold and green downs which opened where the low late-autumn sun dazzled on the water. That was as far as they could see. Closer, just under them, blue smoke swirled over a terrace of