The Hound of the Baskervilles Part 32 (2/2)
”It was ame to watch Stapleton It was evident, however, that I could not do this if I ith you, since he would be keenly on his guard I deceived everybody, therefore, yourself included, and I came down secretly when I was supposed to be in London My hardshi+ps were not so great as you i details ation of a case I stayed for the most part at Coombe Tracey, and only used the hut upon the moor when it was necessary to be near the scene of action Cartwright had couise as a country boy he was of great assistance to me I was dependent upon hi Stapleton, Cartwright was frequently watching you, so that I was able to keep s
”I have already told you that your reports reachedforwarded instantly froreat service to me, and especially that one incidentally truthful piece of biography of Stapleton's I was able to establish the identity of the man and the woman and knew at last exactly how I stood The case had been considerably coh the incident of the escaped convict and the relations between him and the Barryh I had already come to the same conclusions from my own observations
”By the time that you discovered e of the whole business, but I had not a case which could go to a jury Even Stapleton's atteht which ended in the death of the unfortunate convict did not help us ainst our man There seemed to be no alternative but to catch him red-handed, and to do so we had to use Sir Henry, alone and apparently unprotected, as a bait We did so, and at the cost of a severe shock to our client we succeeded in co Stapleton to his destruction That Sir Henry should have been exposed to this is, I e the terrible and paralyzing spectacle which the beast presented, nor could we predict the fog which enabled him to burst upon us at such short notice We succeeded in our object at a cost which both the specialist and Dr Morti journey may enable our friend to recover not only fros
His love for the lady was deep and sincere, and to him the saddest part of all this black business was that he should have been deceived by her
”It only rehout
There can be no doubt that Stapleton exercised an influence over her which may have been love or may have been fear, or very possibly both, since they are by no means incompatible emotions It was, at least, absolutely effective At his coh he found the limits of his power over her when he endeavoured to make her the direct accessory to murder She was ready to warn Sir Henry so far as she could without iain she tried to do so Stapleton himself seems to have been capable of jealousy, and when he saw the baronet paying court to the lady, even though it was part of his own plan, still he could not help interrupting with a passionate outburst which revealed the fiery soul which his self-containedthe intimacy he made it certain that Sir Henry would frequently coet the opportunity which he desired On the day of the crisis, however, his wife turned suddenly against hi of the death of the convict, and she knew that the hound was being kept in the outhouse on the evening that Sir Henry was co to dinner She taxed her husband with his intended crime, and a furious scene followed in which he showed her for the first time that she had a rival in his love Her fidelity turned in an instant to bitter hatred, and he saw that she would betray hiht have no chance of warning Sir Henry, and he hoped, no doubt, that when the whole countryside put down the baronet's death to the curse of his family, as they certainly would do, he could win his wife back to accept an accomplished fact and to keep silent upon what she knew In this I fancy that in any case he made a miscalculation, and that, if we had not been there, his doom would none the less have been sealed A wohtly And now, ive you a more detailed account of this curious case I do not know that anything essential has been left unexplained”
”He could not hope to frighten Sir Henry to death as he had done the old uncle with his bogie hound”
”The beast was savage and half-starved If its appearance did not frighten its victim to death, at least it would paralyze the resistance which ht be offered”
”No doubt There only remains one difficulty If Stapleton came into the succession, how could he explain the fact that he, the heir, had been living unannounced under another name so close to the property? How could he clai suspicion and inquiry?”
”It is a formidable difficulty, and I fear that you ask too much when you expect me to solve it The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer Mrs Stapleton has heard her husband discuss the problem on several occasions There were three possible courses He ht claim the property from South America, establish his identity before the British authorities there and so obtain the fortune without ever couise during the short tiht furnish an acco hi a claim upon some proportion of his income We cannot doubt from e know of him that he would have found some way out of the difficulty And now, my dear Watson, we have had so, I think, we hts into uenots' Have you heard the De Reszkes? Might I trouble you then to be ready in half an hour, and we can stop at Marcini's for a little dinner on the way?”