This story is written by the great English writer Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of many adventure, science fiction, historical literary works.
Variegated Ribbon first found its reader in February 1892. And today this story is rightfully considered one of the best that tells about the "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson."
This article summarizes Conan Doyle's Variegated Ribbon.
Tie
So, the story is preceded by a few phrases from its author - Dr. Watson. He notifies the reader that this incident in the practice of Holmes belongs to the category of “bizarre” and even “fantastic,” and the reader would have known about it a long time ago had it not been for the word given by the great detective to the heroine of history. Only after her death Watson was able to tell about the true causes of the mysterious death of Dr. Grimsby Roylotte.
Who is Grimsby Roylott
Events, as necessary to explain in a brief summary of Doyle's Variegated Ribbon, begin to develop one early April morning. A certain Helen Stoner turned to Sherlock Holmes for help. It was a young woman, the stepdaughter of Roylotte. And with what background she began the story of her misadventures.
The family to which her stepfather belonged was once one of the richest in England. But the last descendants squandered the state of their ancestors. All that remains of former wealth is a small land plot and an old house, long mortgaged, re-mortgaged. The last heir was able, having collected the necessary funds, to obtain a doctor’s diploma and even begin his own practice in India. However, the rabies seizures that occurred in many men, representatives of the Roilott family, once led him to prison bunks - falling into a rage, he beat his butler to death. After serving, the doctor returned to his homeland already disappointed and gloomy subject.
Helen further reported that she and her twin sister Julia were two-year-old girls when their mother, a very wealthy lady, became Roylotte's wife. However, soon after returning to England, she died in a railway accident. And her husband, having never resumed medical practice, settled down with his step-daughters in the Stok-Moronsk family estate.
Among his neighbors, he was known as a quick-tempered man who easily started quarrels with others. The large and very strong Roylotte shied away and feared. Because of the frenzied disposition in his house there was always a shortage of servants, and the girls had to do housework themselves.
In addition, the estate was home to exotic animals brought by a doctor from India - a cheetah and a baboon. Which, of course, did not add charm to these places.
Julia's death
Helen further reported that her sister Julia died two years ago. She was barely thirty. By that time, she was going to marry one retired major, but did not live two weeks before her wedding. She died as a result of a terrible event ...
On the eve of her last night, before going to bed, Julia asked her sister if she could hear a whistle at night:
Recently, at about three in the morning, I can clearly hear a quiet, distinct whistle. I sleep very sensitively, and a whistle wakes me up. I can’t understand where he comes from - maybe from the next room, maybe from the lawn.
The night then, as Helen told us, was terrible - with a strong wind and rain. And suddenly a no less terrible cry rang out. Jumping out into the corridor, the girl, in the light of the lamp, saw her sister in the doorway of the next room, whitened with horror, writhed in pain.
Oh my god Helen! She screamed. - The tape! Motley ribbon!
The stepfather, who had run up to the cries, tried to save the unfortunate by pouring a little cognac into her. They also sent for a village doctor, but all in vain - Julia soon died, and so without regaining consciousness.
The work of the investigator yielded nothing - the causes of the death of the sister were not found. The doors of her room were locked from the inside by a reliable lock, and the windows had shutters. They studied the floor, walls and fireplace, but to no avail. And no signs of violence or poisoning on the body of the deceased.
Helen suggested that Julia died of a severe nervous shock, but what caused him?
The words about the motley ribbon may have somehow related to the gypsies, who spread their camp nearby, but this was unreliable.
Further events
Two more years have passed. Finally, Helen found her chosen one. The stepfather did not mind marriage.
Shortly before the girl’s visit to the detective, she said, alterations began in the house, which forced her to temporarily move to the room of her late sister. And so, lying at night in her place, Helene had the opportunity to hear the very quiet whistle that Julia had told about before death.
Frightened, barely waiting for the morning, she quietly slipped out of the house and went to London, on Baker Street.
After the visit, Helen Holmes was visited by another guest. It was Dr. Grimsby Roylotte. He tracked down the stepdaughter and now appeared to the detective with the intention of finding out what the conversation was about.
When this bruiser left, bending the fireplace poker, Holmes was able to do his current business. First of all, we mention in a brief summary of the motley ribbon, he found out everything about the inheritance of the two daughters and the Roylotte's stepfather. Of course, the doctor would have greatly lost in annual income if the stepdaughters got married and began to live separately. Since the papers in which the money of the deceased wife were invested fell in price, he would in no case be satisfied with part of the inheritance. He wanted to get everything.
In Stoke Moron
Having reached the estate on the picturesque roads of Surrey, Holmes, accompanied by Watson, examined the rooms and hid in the bedroom of the deceased sister, intending to find out the cause of the disaster and the source of the mysterious whistle. Miss Stoner had to spend the night in the old room, still not renovated.
Holmes drew attention to some strange details: a fan above the bed, which is screwed to the floor, a fake cord hung from it to call servants. Is it a coincidence that it was here that Julia died?
At night, the friends smelled hot oil and metal, and after that Holmes jumped up and began to whip the cord with his cane. Apparently, the doctor’s eyesight was weaker than that of Holmes, because he could not understand why he did this.
After a few moments, as Dr. Watson writes in his story,
the silence of the night was cut by such a terrible cry, which I had never heard in my life. This hoarse cry, in which misery, fear and rage mixed, grew louder and louder. They said later that not only in the village, but even in the remote house of the priest, this cry woke all the sleeping.
This scream came from Roylotte's room. When they entered there, the dead owner of the estate was sitting on a chair, and a yellow snake with a brown speckled around his head. It was a swamp viper, one of the most dangerous poisonous creatures, death from a bite of which overtook the victim almost instantly.
Holmes threw a noose around the head of the snake and threw it into a fireproof closet, after which the police took up this sad adventure. As a result, the investigation concluded that this was an accident - the doctor died from careless handling of a poisonous snake.
Holmes's explanations
As usual in the works of the detective genre, at the end the detective explains how he came to his conclusions. Sherlock Holmes did this in The Motley Tape - in a brief summary we will talk about it.
Sherlock Holmes’s attention during a visit to the estate was attracted by a vent over the bed of the deceased Julia and a false cord for a bell that ran from the fan to the victim’s pillow. Then it turned out that the bed was screwed to the floor, and when the detective saw a saucer with milk on a fireproof cabinet, he immediately thought of a poisonous snake. Indeed, after all, Dr. Roylott, this lover of exotic animals, who had lived in India for many years, could not have known that snake venom is unlikely to be discovered when examining a bitten body. And two tiny dark spots on the victim’s skin - the traces of the teeth of the viper - are unlikely to be given due attention.
This creature, which in the wild creeps out to hunt only in the dark, Roilott released from his fireproof cabinet deep after midnight:
He passed the snake through the fan ... and he knew for sure that she would crawl along the cord and go down to bed. Sooner or later, the girl was supposed to be a victim of a terrible plan, a snake would sting her, if not now, then in a week.
With a whistle, the doctor called her back, having taught her to return to him and drink milk. The snake should not have been found next to the body of the victim, otherwise Roylotte’s criminal plan would have been uncovered.
(Note in parentheses: Conan Doyle most likely did not know that snakes do not hear. These reptiles have a certain analogue of their inner ear, but without a tympanic membrane. However, the jawbone with which the organ is connected perceives vibration. That is why the creators of the Russian film adaptation of the story (1979, directed by Igor Masennikov), "forced" the main villain to not only whistle, but also to tap on the wall.)
When Holmes, having heard the hiss of a snake descending along the cord, began to beat it with a cane, she, angry, returned and stung her "master". These were the circumstances of the death of Dr. Grimsby Roylotte, and it is unlikely that the great detective Sherlock Holmes can be considered guilty of this death.
So ends the summary of the story "Variegated Ribbon".