The Execution of Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free PDF Page B

brow is low, the lower part of the face sensual. The upper lip, like that of most of the group, is abnormally thick. As your lip will be, Mr. Holmes, for it is congestion caused by the process of hanging—or rather of strangling. You will observe that some, like Cour voisier, have died with their eyes open and some with them shut. Those whose necks are broken by the drop have their eyes closed, those who drop short and choke to death have them open, as yours will be, Mr. Holmes.’
    Holmes said nothing, but he noticed for the first time a weighing machine in one corner of the room.
    ‘You will oblige us,’ said Milverton, ‘by standing upon the scales. Your weight is of importance to the master-at-arms, so that the end may be as we wish it to be. Many people, Mr. Holmes, have looked forward to this spectacle and it would never do for your final appearance to be too brief. You must expect us to have some sport with you after you have put us to so much trouble. A short drop and a long dance for you, I fear, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.’
    Holmes stood upon the metal plate of the machine but still said nothing. The grizzled brute, whom they called the master-at-arms, fiddled with the bronze disks of the weights—first he added one, then replaced it with a smaller one—until the metal arm of the balance oscillated slightly and was still. Milverton pretended to busy himself with some papers but as soon as the weighing was over he looked up.
    ‘Good-bye, Mr. Holmes. We shall not meet again until the morning of the great occasion. It is the custom, is it not, to allow a man three clear Sundays before his execution? That we cannot do. However, it will be a week or more before some of our friends are here, so you may make whatever peace you can in that time with whatever gods you think may spare you their attention. There will come a point, however, when you will wake each morning not knowing whether this is—or is not—to be your last. A morning when you are merely allowed one more day to live will make you think yourself the luckiest man alive. Fancy that, Mr. Holmes! At such times, as your despair becomes unendurable, you will consider us as your dearest benefactors for allowing you one more brief day! You have no idea how well we shall get on!’
    Holmes fixed the man with his sharp but steady gaze. Milverton held his eyes for a moment, then smirked and looked down at his papers.
    The way back to the condemned cells was not by the route they had come. It led down an ill-lit corridor and over a covered bridge. There was a glimpse of four galleries of cells under a glass roof, all deserted and silent. Holmes and his escorts passed through an iron gate and along a small passage, paved with slate, beside an exercising ground that he calculated must border on Newgate Street. There was not an inch of that short journey that was not catalogued in his mind. I daresay he could have told you the number of paving slabs they had crossed, how many were chipped, and where the cracks were.
    He noticed, a little beyond the bridge and the glass roof, a side opening with several sets of clothes or uniforms hanging upon wall-hooks. Next to it was a recess with a sink, three razors and brushes, a hand-mirror face-down upon a stone surface. At such moments, I had often observed, he became an invincible brain without a heart or the tremor of a ner ve or a pang of affection. Perhaps it was as well for him that this should be so. As they came out under a covered arch he saw for the first time what lay beyond his opaque cell windows. It was a yard beyond reach of the sun with the cell block on one side. Its walls rose sleek as marble to what Wilde, the prisoner-poet, had called ‘that little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky.’
    Abandon hope. … The builders had chosen an apt text for the condemned block. Even a man who could free himself from the chain at his ankle, render himself invisible to the guard in his cell, open the prison locks on