“A gentleman to see you,” Mrs. Hudson told Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes took the card proffered on a silver tray. He held it up for me to read: “John Vincent Harden, Esq.”
“A gentleman, indeed,” said Holmes, fingering the nondescript white card as Mrs. Hudson withdrew. “A wealthy American, Watson. Proud, but not haughty, I should judge.”
“This is too much, Holmes!” I protested. “Surely even you could scarcely draw such profound inferences from a mere piece of pasteboard.”
“Once again you disappoint me, Watson. I assure you my little profile of Mr. John Vincent Harden is written here in black and white, if only you know how to read it: The paper. The engraving. The ink. The whole tone of this tiny document – powerful, but understated. It is much in the American style. And here is our visitor to prove out our modest inferences.”
Holmes unfolded his long, lean body and rose to meet the prospective client’s outstretched hand. John Vincent Harden was a short but powerfully built man wearing an expensive white linen suit, torn and stained from some recent altercation, and carrying a walking stick. He affected a large, graying mustache in the fashion of the American General Burnside. I put his age in the middle 50s, but when he gripped my hand it was with the strength of one decades younger.
“Mr. Holmes, I’ll come straight to the point,” said he, in the forthright manner of one who could do naught else. “I hear tell you’re the best.”
“Indeed? Friend Watson here has spread the news of my poor powers farther than I had suspected if I am so famous in – Tennessee, perhaps?”
“Kentucky, sir.”
“Indeed? I should have thought a trifle farther south. That explains, then, why you fought on the victorious Northern side in the American Civil War. Perhaps the late unpleasantness had something to do with your uncertain fortunes, for it is obvious that you were born into great wealth, lost it, but regained substantial means through your own labours.”
John Vincent Harden tightened his grip on the walking stick. “You’re good, all right. Damned good. Unless somebody told you about me.”
“I assure you I never heard your name until your card announced you five minutes ago, Mr. Harden. That card and you yourself told me all that I know of you. The ‘GAR’ emblem on the watch fob in your waistcoat pocket stands for ‘Grand Army of the Republic,’ does it not? Your military bearing would have ended any doubt I may have entertained. The gold watch which you consulted upon entering this room is old, but clearly valuable. An heirloom, then, of a wealthy family. Yet your hands are scarred, calloused. You have done manual labor, though not recently. And those efforts have paid off handsomely, for your dress – though tattered by whatever misadventure has brought you into these chambers – tells me you are wealthy once more.”
“I’m rich enough, all right, but let’s get down to cases. I’m here because I’m damned scared.”
The frank admission of fright, coming from this man of such obvious moral and physical strength, sent a chill through the warm sitting room. I believe that even Sherlock Holmes, the least fanciful of men, must have felt it. He leaned forward.
“Pray tell your story from the beginning, leaving out nothing. As you have seen, I am one who can make much of little things.”
“Well, sir, as for my early life, you seem to know a good deal already. I grew up on my family’s tobacco plantation, Whitecrest, thirty miles southwest of Lexington. We owned a hundred and twenty-five slaves. When the War Between the States broke out back in ’61, the Commonwealth of Kentucky was badly split. Both Jeff Davis and Abe Lincoln were born in our state, you understand. Officially, Kentucky stayed with Lincoln and the Union, and that’s where I saw my duty. I joined the army, fought at Gettysburg, rose to the rank of Colonel. But back at home, a lot of friends – even family – were joining the Rebs. Whitecrest was fair game for Rebel looters and marauders. When I returned from the war, there wasn’t much left of it. The house was a shambles. The slaves were gone. My mother was dead. My father didn’t recognize me. My brother – he was younger than I – had run off to join Morgan’s Raiders and never made it back.
“Mr. Holmes, that was thirty years ago, but not a day has gone by since that I haven’t remembered the vow I made to myself then: The Rebs couldn’t beat Grant and they weren’t going to beat me. I would start over. I would plant tobacco with my own two hands if I had to. And I would make my own fortune. There were hard years, sir. Many of them. The harder they got, the harder I got. Yes, I am a hard man, but a fair man. And a successful one, for I fulfilled that vow.”
Holmes stirred from his lounging position and lit his clay pipe. “And yet your life has not been without sadness.”
The tobacco millionaire stared at the floor, his clear blue eyes seeing far away as he replied in a dull voice: “I married a wonderful woman, sir. Norma brought grace and culture to Whitecrest. Even taught a hard man like me to appreciate your Mr. Shakespeare. She was carried away by consumption in ’81. Ophelia, our daughter, is the joy of my life – the reason I want to keep living.”
For all the forced gruffness with which he said these last words, our visitor’s voice was at the point of breaking and there was a wildness in his eyes. I handed him a glass of brandy and a cigar, medicines for melancholy, as Holmes pressed on. “It is only in England that you have become preoccupied with such thoughts, I perceive.”
“That’s true enough, sir,” John Vincent Harden conceded, setting down his walking stick to take a firm grip on the cigar in one hand and the brandy in the other. “All has gone well for me in my own element these recent years. I have reared Ophelia to a fine young woman of eighteen. She is to be married this fall to a young man of great promise. Her mother would be proud.”
“You approve of the match, then?”
“In every degree, sir. Stephen – Mr. Stephen Winter – comes from a fine old Lexington family. And yet I felt that before she entered the married state Ophelia ought to see the world in an extended stay abroad. We arrived in London nine weeks ago. For the first two months, we enjoyed the sites of your great city immensely. Then, six days go, I became the object of what I can only regard as a persecution, fanciful though the notion may seem. Ophelia and I returned to our hotel, the Langham, that afternoon after seeing Mr. Irving in Hamlet – my Norma’s favorite play – at the Adelphi Theatre.”
“Something was missing?” I conjectured.
John Vincent Harden almost chuckled. “I suppose you could say our room was missing, in a manner of speaking. It had been rented out to someone else! The room clerk, a man named Weber whom I’d never seen before, solemnly assured me that not three hours previously I had paid our bill and departed with my luggage and my daughter. Ophelia and I had to spend two days in a little cubbyhole before a proper room was available to us. Meanwhile, we had to replace all the clothing in our luggage. Damned nuisance. I almost quit England right then, but Ophelia wouldn’t have it.
“The clerk and the hotel manager acted as if I were a madman. I might have thought them right if Ophelia hadn’t assured me I had indeed been with her the entire day. Someone else checked us out of that hotel, Mr. Holmes. Someone who looked and sounded just like me.”
The American sat back and drank deeply from his brandy.
Holmes smoked in silence.
“But this is fantastic!” I cried. “It recalls nothing so much as Poe’s unearthly story of the two William Wilsons.”
“Tut-tut, Watson. Let us not be fanciful. Surely there are parallels enough in the commonplace books” – Holmes indicated their place on our shelves – “without turning to the supernatural for a solution to this mystery. The affair of the missing tobacco shop at Vienna in ’87 suggests itself immediately. There was also that dangerous little business at Montpellier two years ago in which I was of some assistance to M. Luttmer of the Sureté. And certainly you, Watson, remember the rather comic incident of diminutive love rivals of the Brandenburg Circus.”