She opened her eyes again.
"Is he safe?" she asked.
"Has he escaped?"
"He cannot escape us, madam."
"No, no, I did not mean my husband.
Sir Henry? Is he safe?"
"Yes."
"And the hound?"
"It is dead."
She gave a long sigh of satisfaction.
"Thank God!
Thank God!
Oh, this villain!
See how he has treated me!"
She shot her arms out from her sleeves, and we saw with horror that they were all mottled with bruises.
"But this is nothing – nothing!
It is my mind and soul that he has tortured and defiled.
I could endure it all, ill-usage, solitude, a life of deception, everything, as long as I could still cling to the hope that I had his love, but now I know that in this also I have been his dupe and his tool."
She broke into passionate sobbing as she spoke.
"You bear him no good will, madam," said Holmes.
"Tell us then where we shall find him.
If you have ever aided him in evil, help us now and so atone."
"There is but one place where he can have fled," she answered.
"There is an old tin mine on an island in the heart of the mire.
It was there that he kept his hound and there also he had made preparations so that he might have a refuge. That is where he would fly."
The fog-bank lay like white wool against the window. Holmes held the lamp towards it.
"See," said he.
"No one could find his way into the Grimpen Mire to-night."
She laughed and clapped her hands.
Her eyes and teeth gleamed with fierce merriment
"He may find his way in, but never out," she cried.
"How can he see the guiding wands to-night?
We planted them together, he and I, to mark the pathway through the mire.
Oh, if I could only have plucked them out to-day.
Then indeed you would have had him at your mercy!"
It was evident to us that all pursuit was in vain until the fog had lifted.
Meanwhile we left Lestrade in possession of the house while Holmes and I went back with the baronet to Baskerville Hall.
The story of the Stapletons could no longer be withheld from him, but he took the blow bravely when he learned the truth about the woman whom he had loved.
But the shock of the night's adventures had shattered his nerves, and before morning he lay delirious in a high fever under the care of Dr. Mortimer.
The two of them were destined to travel together round the world before Sir Henry had become once more the hale, hearty man that he had been before he became master of that ill-omened estate.
And now I come rapidly to the conclusion of this singular narrative, in which I have tried to make the reader share those dark fears and vague surmises which clouded our lives so long and ended in so tragic a manner.
On the morning after the death of the hound the fog had lifted and we were guided by Mrs. Stapleton to the point where they had found a pathway through the bog.
It helped us to realize the horror of this woman's life when we saw the eagerness and joy with which she laid us on her husband's track.
We left her standing upon the thin peninsula of firm, peaty soil which tapered out into the widespread bog.
From the end of it a small wand planted here and there showed where the path zigzagged from tuft to tuft of rushes among those green-scummed pits and foul quagmires which barred the way to the stranger.
Rank reeds and lush, slimy water-plants sent an odour of decay and a heavy miasmatic vapour onto our faces, while a false step plunged us more than once thigh-deep into the dark, quivering mire, which shook for yards in soft undulations around our feet.
Its tenacious grip plucked at our heels as we walked, and when we sank into it it was as if some malignant hand was tugging us down into those obscene depths, so grim and purposeful was the clutch in which it held us.
Once only we saw a trace that someone had passed that perilous way before us.
From amid a tuft of cotton grass which bore it up out of the slime some dark thing was projecting.
Holmes sank to his waist as he stepped from the path to seize it, and had we not been there to drag him out he could never have set his foot upon firm land again.