Tracks in the Snow

Being the History of a Crime

Edited from the MS. of the Rev. Robert Driver, B.D.

by Godfrey R. Benson

Longmans, Green, and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London
New York and Bombay
1906



dedication: "Ad Dorotheam"



Chapter I

On the morning of the 29th of January, 1896, Eustace Peters was found
murdered in his bed at his house, Grenvile Combe, in the parish of
Long Wilton, of which I was then rector.

Much mystery attached to the circumstances of his death. It was into
my hands that chance threw the clue to this mystery, and it is for me,
if for any one, to relate the facts.

To the main fact of all, the death of my own friend on the eve, as I
sometimes fancy, of a fuller blossoming of his powers, my writing
cannot give the tragic import due to it, for it touched my own life
too nearly. I had come—I speak of myself, for they tell me a narrator
must not thrust himself quite into the background—I had come to Long
Wilton, three years before, from a college tutorship at Oxford, to
occupy the rectory till, as happened not long after, the son of the
patron became qualified to hold it. Country-bred, fond of country
people and of country pastimes, I had not imagined, when I came,
either the difficulties of a country parson’s task or the false air of
sordidness which those difficulties would at first wear to me; still
less was I prepared for the loneliness which at first befell me in a
place where, though many of my neighbours were wise men and good men,
none ever showed intellectual interests or talked with any readiness
of high things. The comradeship of Peters, who settled there a few
months after me, did more than to put an end to my loneliness; by
shrewd, casual remarks, which were always blunt and unexpected but
never seemed intrusive or even bore the semblance of advice, he had,
without dreaming of it—for he cared very little about the things of
the Church—shown me the core of most of my parish difficulties and
therewith the way to deal with them. So it was that with my growing
affection for the man there was mingled an excessive feeling of mental
dependence upon him. So it was that upon that January morning a great
blank entered into my life. Matters full of interest, in my pursuits
of the weeks and months that went before, are gone from my memory like
dreams. My whole sojourn at Long Wilton, important as it was to me, is
a thing dimly remembered, like a page of some other man’s biography.
Even as I call to mind that actual morning I cannot think of the
immediate horror, only of the blank that succeeded and remains. I
believe that no one, upon whom any like loss has come suddenly, will
wonder if I take up my tale in a dry-eyed fashion. I can use no other
art in telling it but that of letting the facts become known as
strictly as may be in the order in which they became known to me.

Eustace Peters, then, was a retired official of the Consular Service,
and a man of varied culture and experience—too much varied, I may say.
He had been at Oxford shortly before my time. I gathered from the
school prizes on his library shelves that he went there with
considerable promise; but he left without taking his degree or
accomplishing anything definite except rowing in his college Eight (a
distinction of which I knew not from his lips but from his rather
curious wardrobe). He had learnt, I should say, unusually little from
Oxford, except its distinctive shyness, and had, characteristically,
begun the studies of his later years in surroundings less conducive to
study. He left Oxford upon getting some appointment in the East.
Whether this first appointment was in a business house or in the
Consular Service, where exactly it had been and what were the later
stages of his career, I cannot tell, for he talked very little of
himself. Evidently, however, his Eastern life had been full of
interest for him, and he had found unusual enjoyment in mingling with
and observing the strange types of European character which he met
among his fellow-exiles, if I may so call them. He had ultimately left
the Consular Service through illness or some disappointment, or both.
About that time an aunt of his died and left him the house, Grenvile
Combe, at Long Wilton, in which a good deal of his boyhood had been
spent. He came there, as I have said, soon after my own arrival, and
stayed on, not, as it seemed to me, from any settled plan. There he
passed much of his time in long country rambles (he had been, I
believe, a keen sportsman, and had now become a keen naturalist), much
of it in various studies, chiefly philosophic or psychological. He was
writing a book on certain questions of psychology, or, perhaps I
should say, preparing to write it, for the book did not seem to me to
progress. My wife and I were convinced that he had a love story, but
we gathered no hint of what it may have been. He was forty-three when
he died.

This is, I think, all that I need now set down as to the personality
of the murdered man. But I cannot forbear to add that, while his
interrupted career and his somewhat desultory pursuits appeared
inadequate to the reputation which he had somehow gained for ability,
he certainly gave me the impression of preserving an uncompromisingly
high standard, a keenly if fitfully penetrating mind and a latent
capacity for decisive action. As I write these words it occurs to me
that he would be living now if this impression of mine had not been
shared by a much cleverer man than I.

On the 28th my wife was away from home, and I had supper at Grenvile
Combe, going there about seven o’clock. There were three other guests
at supper, James Callaghan, C.I.E., William Vane-Cartwright, and one
Melchior Thalberg. Callaghan was an old school-fellow of Peters, and
the two, though for years they must have seen each other seldom,
appeared to have always kept up some sort of friendship. I knew
Callaghan well by this time, for he had been staying three weeks at
Grenvile Combe, and he was easy to know, or rather easy to get on
with. I should say that I liked the man, but that I am seldom sure
whether I like an Irishman, and that my wife, a far shrewder judge
than I, could not bear him. He was a great, big-chested Irishman, of
the fair-haired, fresh-coloured type, with light blue eyes. A
weather-worn and battered countenance (contrasting with the youthful
erectness and agility of his figure), close-cut whiskers and a heavy
greyish moustache, a great scar across one cheek-bone and a massive
jaw, gave him at first a formidable appearance. The next moment this
might seem to be belied by something mobile about his mouth and the
softness of his full voice; but still he bore the aspect of a man
prone to physical violence. He was plausible; very friendly (was it,
one asked, a peculiarly loyal sort of friendliness or just the
reverse); a copious talker by fits and starts, with a great wealth of
picturesque observation—or invention. Like most of my Irish
acquaintance he kept one in doubt whether he would take an
exceptionally high or an exceptionally low view of any matter; unlike,
as I think, most Irishmen, he was the possessor of real imaginative
power. He had (as I gathered from his abundant anecdotes) been at one
time in the Army and later in the Indian Civil Service. In that
service he seemed to have been concerned with the suppression of
crime, and to have been lately upon the North-West Frontier. He was,
as I then thought, at home on leave, but, as I have since learned, he
had retired. Some notable exploit or escapade of his had procured him
the decoration which he wore on every suitable and many unsuitable
occasions, but it had also convinced superior authorities that he must
on the first opportunity be shelved.

Vane-Cartwright, with nothing so distinctive in his appearance, was
obviously a more remarkable man. Something indescribable about him
would, I think, if I had heard nothing of him, have made me pick him
out as a man of much quiet power. He was in the City, a merchant
(whatever that large term may mean) who had formerly had something to
do with the far East, and now had considerable dealings with Italy. He
had acquired, I knew, quickly but with no whisper of dishonour, very
great wealth; and he was about, as I gathered from some remark of
Peters, to marry a very charming young lady, Miss Denison, who was
then absent on the Riviera. He had about a fortnight before come down
to the new hotel in our village for golf, and had then accidentally
met Peters who was walking with me. I understood that he had been a
little junior to Peters at Oxford, and had since been acquainted with
him somewhere in the East. Peters had asked him to dinner at his
house, where Callaghan was already staying. I had heard Peters tell
him that if he came to those parts again he must stay with him. I had
not noted the answer, but was not surprised afterwards to find that
Vane-Cartwright, who had returned to London the day after I first met
him, had since come back rather suddenly, and this time to stay with
Peters. He now struck me as a cultured man, very different from Peters
in all else but resembling him in the curious range and variety of his
knowledge, reserved and as a rule silent but incisive when he did
speak.

Thalberg, though not the most interesting of the company, contributed,
as a matter of fact, the most to my enjoyment on that occasion. I
tried hard some days later to recall my impressions of that evening,
of which every petty incident should by rights have been engraven on
my memory, but the recollection, which, so to speak, put all the rest
out, was that of songs by Schubert and Schumann which Thalberg sang. I
drew him out afterwards on the subject of music, on which he had much
to tell me, while Vane-Cartwright and our host were, I think, talking
together, and Callaghan appeared to be dozing. Thalberg was of course
a German by family, but he talked English as if he had been in England
from childhood. He belonged to that race of fair, square-bearded and
square-foreheaded German business men, who look so much alike to us,
only he was smaller and looked more insignificant than most of them,
his eyes were rather near together, and he did not wear the spectacles
of his nation. He told me that he was staying at the hotel, for golf
he seemed to imply. He too was something in the City, and I remember
having for some reason puzzled myself as to how Vane-Cartwright
regarded him.

I must at this point add some account of the other persons who were in
or about Peters’ house. There were two female servants in the house;
an elderly cook and housekeeper, Mrs. Travers, who was sharp-visaged
and sharp-tongued, but who made Peters very comfortable, and a
housemaid, Edith Summers, a plain, strong and rather lumpish country
girl, who was both younger and more intelligent than she looked. It
subsequently appeared that these two were in the house the whole
evening and night, and, for all that can be known, asleep all night in
the servants’ quarters, which formed an annex to the house connected
with it by a short covered way. In a cottage near the gate into the
lane lived a far more notable person, Reuben Trethewy, the gardener
and doer of odd jobs, a short, sturdy, grizzled man, of severe
countenance, not over clean. Peters was much attached to him for his
multifarious knowledge and skill. He had been a seaman at some time,
had been, it seemed, all sorts of things in all sorts of places, and
was emphatically a handy man. He was as his name implies a Cornishman,
and had come quite recently to our neighbourhood, to which in the
course of a roving existence he was attracted by the neighbourhood of
his uncle, Silas Trethewy, a farmer who lived some three miles off. He
was now a man of Methodistical professions, and most days, to do him
justice, of Methodistical practice; but I, who was perhaps prejudiced
against him by his hostility to the Church, believed him to be subject
to bitter and sullen moods, knew that he was given to outbursts of
drinking, and heard from his neighbours that drink took him in a
curious way, affecting neither his gait, nor his head, nor his voice,
nor his wits, but giving him a touch of fierceness which made men glad
to keep out of his way. With him lived his wife and daughter. The wife
was, I thought, a decent woman, who kept her house straight and who
came to church; but I had then no decided impression about her, though
she had for some time taught in my Sunday school, and had once or
twice favoured me with a long letter giving her views about it. The
daughter was a slight, childish-looking girl, whom I knew well,
because she was about to become a pupil teacher, and who was a most
unlikely person to play a part in a story of this kind.

Our party that evening broke up when, about ten o’clock, I rose to go;
and Thalberg, whose best way to the hotel lay through the village,
accompanied me as far as the Rectory, which was a quarter of a mile
off and was the nearest house in the village. We walked together
talking of German poetry and what not, and I cannot forget the
disagreeable sense which came upon me in the course of our talk, that
a layer of stupidity or of hard materialism, or both, underlay the
upper crust of culture which I had seemed to find in the man when we
had spoken of music. However, we parted good friends at the Rectory
gate, and I was just going in when I recollected some question about
the character of a candidate for Confirmation, on which I had meant to
have spoken to Peters that night. I returned to his house and found
him still in his library. The two guests who were staying in the house
had already gone to bed. I got the information and advice which I had
wanted—it was about a wild but rather attractive young fellow who had
once looked after a horse which Peters had kept, but who was now a
groom in the largest private stables in the neighbourhood. As I was
leaving, Peters took up some books, saying that he was going to read
in bed. He stood with me for a moment at the front door looking at the
frosty starlight. It was a clear but bitterly cold night. I well
remember telling him as we stood there that he must expect to be
disturbed by unusual noises that night, as a great jollification was
taking place at the inn up the road, and my parishioners, who realised
the prelate’s aspiration for a free rather than a sober England, would
return past his house in various stages of riotous exhilaration. He
said that he had more sympathy with them than he ought to have, and
that in any case they should not disturb him. Very likely, he added,
he would soon be asleep past rousing.

And so, about a quarter to eleven, I parted from him, little dreaming
that no friendly eyes would ever meet his again.



Chapter II

I was up early on the 29th. Snow lay thick on the ground but had
ceased falling, and it was freezing hard, when, while waiting for
breakfast, I walked out as far as my gate on the village street to see
what the weather was like. Suddenly Peters’ housemaid came running
down to the village on her way, as it proved, to the police-station.
Before passing she paused, and breathlessly told me the news. I walked
quickly to Peters’ house. Several neighbours were already gathering
about the gate of the drive but did not enter. I rang the bell, was
admitted by the housekeeper and walked straight up to Peters’ bedroom.
Callaghan and Vane-Cartwright were there already, the former
half-dressed, unshaved and haggard-looking, the latter a neat figure
in bedroom slippers and a dressing-gown. We had only exchanged a few
words when the police-sergeant entered, followed a minute or two later
by a tall and pleasant-faced young constable, who brought with him the
village doctor, an ambitious, up-to-date youth who had lately come to
those parts.

I have some little difficulty in saying what I then observed; for
indeed, though I looked intently enough on the dead face and figure,
and noticed much about them that is not to my present purpose, I took
in for myself very little that bore on that problem of detection which
has since interested me so much. I cannot now distinguish the things
which I really saw upon hearing the others mention them from the
things which I imagine myself seeing because I knew they were
mentioned then or later. In fact I saw chiefly with the eyes of the
Sergeant, who set about his inquiries with a quiet promptitude that
surprised me in one whom I knew only as a burly, steady,
slow-speaking, heavy member of the force.

There was little to note about the barely furnished room which showed
no traces of disorder. On the top of some drawers on the left of the
bed-head lay a curious, old-fashioned gold watch with the watchkey by
it, a pocket-knife, a pencil, a ring of keys and a purse, the last
containing a good deal of money. On a small table on the other side of
the bed stood a candlestick, the candle burnt to the socket; by it lay
two closed books. Under the table near the bed lay, as if it had
fallen from the dead man’s hand or off his bed, a book with several
leaves crumpled and torn, as if, in his first alarm, or as he died,
Peters had caught them in a spasmodic clutch. I looked to see what it
was, merely from the natural wish to know what had occupied my
friend’s mind in his last hour. It was Borrow’s _Bible in Spain_. When
I saw the title an indistinct recollection came to me of some very
recent mention of the book by some one, and with it came a faint sense
that it was important I should make this recollection clear. But
either I was too much stunned as yet to follow out the thought, or I
put it aside as a foolish trick of my brain, and the recollection,
whatever it was, is gone. The position of the body and the arrangement
of the pillows gave no sign of any struggle having taken place. They
looked as if when he was murdered he had been sitting up in bed to
read. He could hardly have fallen asleep so, for his head would have
found but an uncomfortable rest on the iron bedstead. But I repeat, I
did not observe this myself, and I cannot be sure that anybody noted
it accurately at the time.

The surgeon stepped quickly to the body, slightly raised the left arm,
drew aside the already open jacket of the sleeping suit, and silently
indicated the cause of death. This was a knife, a curious, long,
narrow, sharp knife for surgical use, which the murderer had left
there, driven home between two of his victim’s ribs. I say “the
murderer,” for the surgeon’s first words were, “Not suicide”. I had no
suspicion of suicide, but thought that he pronounced this judgment
rather hastily, and that the Sergeant was right when he asked him to
examine the posture of the body more closely. He did so, still, as I
thought, perfunctorily, and gave certain reasons which did not impress
either my judgment or my memory. I was more convinced by his remark
that he had studied in Berlin and was familiar with the appearances of
suicide. I may say at once that it appeared afterwards, at the
inquest, that there was reason to think that Peters had not had such a
knife, for he never locked up drawers or cupboards, and his servants
knew all his few possessions well. It appeared, too, that the owner of
the knife had taken precautions against being traced, by carefully
obliterating the maker’s name and other marks on it with a file.

In the midst of our observations in the room a vexatious interruption
happened. I have forgotten to say that the servants had been sent out
of the room by the police-sergeant, and that, almost immediately
after, the constable who brought the doctor had been sent down to
examine the outside of the house. For some reason he was slow in
setting about this; it is possible that he stopped to talk to the
servants, but in any case, he went out through the kitchen, and
explored first the back of the house, where he thought he knew of an
easy way of making an entrance. Meanwhile the neighbours, who had
collected about the gate, had been drawn by their curiosity into the
garden, and by the time the constable had got round to the front of
the house several were wandering about the drive and the lawn which
lay between it and the road. They had no more harmful intention than
that of gazing and gaping at the windows, but it led to the very
serious consequence that a number of tracks had now been made in the
snow which might very possibly frustrate a search for the traces of
the criminal. This the Sergeant now noticed from the window.

As for the actual carriage-drive I was fortunately able to remember
(and it was the only useful thing that I did observe for myself) that
when I had arrived there had been no footmarks between the gate and
the front door except the unmistakable print of the goloshes worn by
the housemaid on her way to call the police. But the tracks on the
lawns and elsewhere about the house might cause confusion.

Upon seeing what was happening the Sergeant asked Vane-Cartwright,
Callaghan and myself to await him in Peters’ study, while he went out
to drive away the intruders, to make the constable keep others out and
to pursue his own investigations. While we waited Vane-Cartwright, who
had spoken little but seemed to watch all proceedings very
attentively, made the sensible suggestion that we should look for
Peters’ will, as we ought to know who were his executors. We consulted
the housekeeper, who pointed out the drawer in which the few papers of
importance were kept, and there we soon found a will in a sealed
envelope. The first few lines, which were all that we read, showed me
that, as I had expected, I was Peters’ executor along with an old
friend of his whom I had never met but who, I believed, as was the
fact, now lived in America.

The Sergeant now rejoined us; he had discovered nothing outside, and,
though the tracks of the intruders made it difficult to be certain, he
believed that there was nothing to discover; he thought that the
murderer had approached the house before the snow began to fall, and
he found no sign that he had entered the house in the manner of a
housebreaker. He had, I must say, taken a very short time about his
search. He wished now that the servants should be summoned, as of
course it was necessary to make inquiries about the movements of all
persons connected with the house. But he was here delayed by Callaghan
who had matters of importance to relate.

He and Vane-Cartwright had been disturbed during the night in a
notable manner. They had actually had an alarm of murder, and
curiously enough a false and even ludicrous alarm. About 11.30 o’clock
they had been roused by loud shouting outside the house, amid which
Callaghan declared that he had distinguished a cry of murder. He had
come tumbling out of his room, calling Vane-Cartwright, who slept in
the next room, and who immediately joined him in the passage. Without
waiting to call Peters, whose room was some distance from theirs and
from the staircase by which they descended (for there were two
staircases in the main part of the house), they went to the front door
and opened it. The flash of a bull’s-eye lantern in the road, the
policeman’s voice quietly telling some revellers to go home and the
immediate cessation of the noise, showed them that they had been
roused by nothing more serious than the drunken uproar which I had
predicted to Peters would disturb him. The two men had returned to
their rooms after locking the front door again; they had noticed that
the library door was open and the lights out in that room; they had
noticed also as they went upstairs (this time by the other staircase)
light shining through the chink under Peters’ bedroom door; and they
had heard him knock out the ashes of a pipe against the mantelpiece.
The pipe now lay on the mantelpiece; and, of course, that particular
noise is unmistakable. They concluded that, though he was awake and
probably reading, he had not thought the noise outside worth noticing.
Callaghan added that he himself had lain awake some time, and that for
half an hour afterwards there had been occasionally sounds of talking
or shouting in the lane, once even a renewal of something like the
first uproar.

The report subsequently received from the constable who had been on
duty along the road that night confirmed the above, and a little
reflexion made it appear that the disturbance outside had nothing to
do with the murder. In fact the only thing connected with this
incident which much impressed me at the time was Callaghan’s manner in
relating it. He had up to now been very silent, he now began to talk
with furious eagerness. He readily saw and indeed suggested that the
disturbance which he related was of little consequence. But having to
tell of it he did so with a vividness which was characteristic of him,
so that one saw the scene as he described it, saw indeed more than
there was to see, for he spoke of the ground already white and the
snow falling in thick flakes, when he was pulled up by the Sergeant
who said that the snow had not begun to fall till three o’clock that
morning. Callaghan began angrily persisting, and the Sergeant appealed
to Vane-Cartwright, who up till now had said little, merely confirming
Callaghan’s narrative at various points with a single syllable or with
a nod of his head, but who now said that Callaghan was wrong about the
snow. He added the benevolent explanation that Callaghan, who was
really much excited, had combined the impressions of their false alarm
over night with those of their all too real alarm in the morning.



Chapter III

Hereupon Callaghan, who had a more important matter to relate, changed
the subject abruptly by saying, “Sergeant, have your eye on that man
Trethewy”. He told us that, ten days before, Trethewy had quarrelled
with his master. Peters, he said, had met Trethewy in the drive, at a
point which he indicated, and, noticing a smell of spirits, had firmly
but quietly taken him to task, telling him that his occasional
drinking was becoming a serious matter. Callaghan had come up at the
moment and had heard Trethewy, who was by his account dangerous with
drink at the time, answer with surly insolence, making some malicious
counter-insinuation against his master’s own habits, exploding for a
moment into wild anger, in which he seemed about to strike his master,
but to refrain upon catching sight of Callaghan’s powerful frame
beside him, then subsiding again into surliness and finally
withdrawing to his own cottage with muttered curses and a savage
threat. This was the substance of Callaghan’s statement. But there was
a great deal in it besides substance; the whole of the conversation,
from the moment at which Callaghan came up, was professedly repeated
word for word with a slight but dramatic touch of mimicry, and the
tone and temper of master and man were vividly rendered. I can never
myself remember the words of any conversation, and for that reason I
am unable now to set out Callaghan’s narrative, and was unable at the
time to put faith in its accuracy. Here and there a phrase was
presumably truly given because it was given in Trethewy’s own dialect,
but once at least the unhappy Trethewy was made responsible for a
remark which he surely never made, for it was pure Irish, and indeed I
think it was the very threat of picturesque vengeance which I had
myself heard Callaghan address to a big boy in the street who was on
the point of thrashing a little boy. One detail of the description was
a manifest mistake. Callaghan indicated (truly, I have some reason to
think) the spot in the drive where such altercation as did happen took
place, but he added that Peters stood watching Trethewy with his hand
upon a young tree. Now Peters had planted that tree with Trethewy
several days later, just before the frost set in; and other details in
the story seemed equally incredible. “Ever since then,” concluded
Callaghan, “I have seen murder in that fellow’s eye. Mind you, I have
had to do with murderers in India. Three times have I marked that look
in a man’s eye, and each time the event has proved me right, though in
one case it was long after. I tell you this man Trethewy——” But here
Vane-Cartwright stopped him. He had already disconcerted Callaghan a
little by pointing out the Hibernicisms that adorned the alleged
remarks of Trethewy; and now he quelled him with the just, but, as I
thought, unseasonably expressed, sarcasm, that if he had seen murder
portended in Trethewy’s glance it would have been a kind attention to
have given his host warning of the impending doom. He went on to
insist warmly on the totally different impression he had himself
gathered from Trethewy’s demeanour to his master. He was not apt to
say more than was needed, but this time he ran on, setting forth his
own favourable view of Trethewy, till he in turn was stopped by the
Sergeant who said, “Really, sir, I do not think I ought to listen now
to what any gentleman thinks of a man’s manner of speaking, not if it
is nothing more than that”.

The Sergeant then sent for Trethewy. I had wondered that we had not
seen him before, the explanation was that he had been away at night,
had returned home very late, and so had come late to the house in the
morning and was still doing the pumping when the Sergeant sent for
him. However, he seemed at last to have slept off the effect of
whatever his nocturnal potion had been, and he gave a clear account of
his movements without hesitation and with a curiously impressive
gravity. He had suddenly made up his mind at dusk on the previous
evening to go to his uncle’s house, where there was a gathering of
friends and kinsfolk, which he had at first intended to avoid. They
had made a night of it. He had started home, as several, whom he
named, could testify, at four o’clock in the morning (the church clock
near his uncle’s was then striking), and the violence of the snowstorm
was abating. He had come across the moor by a track of which he knew
the bearings well. This track struck into the grass lane which passed
near the back of the house at the other side of the pasture, and which
curved round into the road joining it close by Trethewy’s cottage. As
he came along the lane a man on horseback leading a second horse had
overtaken him and exchanged greetings with him. He had seen the man
before, but could not tell his name or dwelling or where he was going.
The snow had done falling when he reached his cottage. Once home, he
had turned in and slept sound till he was roused soon after eight by
his wife with the news of the murder. He had seen nothing, heard
nothing, guessed nothing which could throw light on the dreadful deed
of the night. Trethewy was dismissed with a request from the Sergeant
to keep in his house, where he could instantly be found if information
was wanted from him. This he did.

The two servants were now summoned, and the Sergeant had a number of
questions to ask them. The housekeeper in particular had a good deal
to say about her master’s ways, the household arrangements and so
forth, and seemed to find satisfaction in saying it at length. So a
lot of trivial details came forth, which I, who was by this time
becoming exhausted, had little patience to follow. Was the candle
which was found burnt out a new candle the evening before, or a
candle-end, or what? The question was asked of the housekeeper, but
the housemaid answered with promptitude that it was a full new candle
which she had herself put there last evening, shortly before the
master went to bed. We learnt also that Peters was very irregular
about going to bed; sometimes he would take a fit of sitting up,
working or reading, night after night, and sometimes he would go to
bed early, but always he had a book with him and lay awake for a while
(often for hours and hours, as he had confessed to her) reading it
after he went to bed. Sometimes it would be a story book, but more
often one of those dull books of his; and much more on the same
subject would have been forthcoming if the housekeeper had not at last
been stopped, without, as I thought, having told us anything of
importance.

At last I went home, to find the churchwarden irate at my lateness for
an appointed interview about the accounts of the dole charities, and
to have a forgotten but much-needed breakfast pressed upon me. I would
rather have been alone, but Callaghan gave me his company as far as my
house, and expounded his view about Trethewy all the way. He left me
at my door to go in search of Thalberg, whom up to that moment we had
all forgotten.

In about three-quarters of an hour Callaghan burst in on me. Where he
had breakfasted, if at all, I neglected to ascertain, but he had
contrived to get shaved at the village barber’s, and he now looked
fresh and seemed keen. He was this time in a state of great
indignation against Thalberg. He had been unable to see him, but had
ascertained that he was still at the hotel, and that he had heard the
news of Peters’ murder, but had seemed little interested in it, and
had rejected the landlady’s suggestion that he might like to go up to
the house to learn the last news of his unhappy friend. It appeared
that Thalberg had shut himself up in his room ever since, but had
ordered a fly to drive him to the afternoon train at the station five
miles off. The landlady and Callaghan seemed to have agreed that there
was something peculiarly heartless in his omission to call at Peters’
or to make any inquiries.

Callaghan soon left me, returning, as I thought, to Grenvile Combe,
while I endeavoured to settle myself to prepare my sermon for the next
day, Sunday, with a mind hardly indeed awake as yet to the horror of
the morning or to the loss I had sustained, much less able in any
connected way to think over the meaning of our observations, but
mechanically asking over and over again whether it was reasonable that
my now confirmed aversion from Thalberg was somehow associated in my
mind with the object of our investigations.

I say “our” investigations; as a matter of fact I had no intention
whatever at that time of busying myself with investigation at all. In
the first place I was quite aware that I had no aptitude for such
work, and in the second, and far more important place, I, who hold it
most undesirable that a clergyman should be a magistrate, could not
but feel it still less fitting that he should be a detective in his
own parish. But I could not escape altogether. About 2.45 I received a
visit from the Sergeant, a much-embarrassed man now, for he brought
with him the Superintendent, who had driven over in hot haste to take
charge of the inquiry. The Sergeant had zealously endeavoured to rise
to the occasion, and to my unpractised judgment seemed to have shown
much sense. Perhaps his zeal did not endear him the more to the keen,
and as I guessed, ambitious gentleman who now took over the inquiry,
but any way he had been guilty of real negligence in allowing the snow
round the house to be trampled over by trespassers, and at this the
Superintendent, who had rapidly gathered nearly all that the Sergeant
had to tell, seemed greatly exasperated; moreover, the Superintendent
had noticed, if the reader has not, that the public-house had been
open very late the previous night. His present errand was to ask me to
come to the house, not because I was the deceased man’s legal personal
representative, but because he foresaw possible explorations in which
my topographical knowledge of my large and scattered parish might be
of use.

We returned to Grenvile Combe, and the Superintendent went straight to
the death-chamber where he remained some minutes with the Sergeant and
me, taking note with much minuteness and astonishing rapidity of all
the details which I have already mentioned. Suddenly he opened the
door and called up the housemaid; she arrived at length, the
housekeeper, who fetched her, being refused admittance. “Why,” said
the Superintendent pointing to the window, “is that window latch
unfastened and the other fastened?” The housemaid said shyly but quite
decidedly that she did not know, but this she did know, that both had
been fastened by her last night, that one of the few matters in which
her master showed any fussiness was insisting that a window should be
latched whenever it was shut, and that he never neglected this
himself. Why had the Sergeant not noticed this in the morning? Poor
Sergeant Speke, already crestfallen, had no answer; at least he made
none. Our stay in the room was short. The Superintendent, I believe,
returned there that evening and spent an hour or two in searching
microscopically for traces of the criminal; but now he was in haste to
search the garden. “I shall begin,” he said, “at the point under that
window. It is past three already. Come on, there is not a minute of
daylight to be lost.” At the point under the unlatched window he made
a startling discovery, startling in that it had not been made before.



Chapter IV

I am now driven to attempt the task, which I had hoped to escape, of a
topographical description. To begin with what is of least importance
for the present. The village of Long Wilton lies in the valley of a
little stream, and two roads run Northwards from the village along the
opposite sides of the valley. The road along the Western side leads up
a steep hill to the church, built at some distance from the village
for the benefit of the former owners of the manor house. Just beyond
the church lies a house which was the manor house, but has now lost
its identity in improvements and extensions and become a new and not
very beautiful hotel. This hotel owes its origin to the South-Western
Counties Development Company, Limited, which discovered in its
neighbourhood promising golf links, whose promise may be fulfilled
when the extension of the railway is completed. I ought to but do not
thank the Company for a liberal contribution made for the reseating of
the church in the days of my predecessor. The hotel spoils the view
from Grenvile Combe, across the valley. Its upper windows command a
prospect of the whole of Peters’ grounds. This, however, does not
concern us yet.

The road on the other side of the valley leads to some outlying
hamlets which form part of the parish. On the right hand of it, as you
go Northwards, the ground rises steeply towards a wide tract of
moorland. About a quarter of a mile out of the village a grass lane
diverges from the road and leads in a North-Westerly direction.
Grenvile Combe is a little property of some ten acres lying between
the grass lane and the road, and bordered on the North by a fir
plantation which extends from the road to the lane. The cottage, or
lodge, which was then Trethewy’s, stands close to the Southern corner
of the grounds, where the grass lane turns off; and the gate of the
drive is close by. The stables, which Peters had not used of late,
stand on a detached piece of the property across the road. The house
itself is near the fir plantation. The back of it looks out upon a
steeply rising pasture field which lies along the grass lane. The
front looks (across the drive, a strip of lawn and the road) to the
stream and to the church and that ugly hotel on the little hill
beyond. Peters’ study was in the front of the house at the North-East
corner of the main block of the building, in other words, it was on
your left as you entered at the front door; and his bedroom was just
above it. A path leads from the drive under the North wall of the
house to the kitchen entrance, and on the left of this path, as one
goes towards the kitchen, stands an out-building in which is the pump.
A shrubbery of berberis and box and laurel, starting near the house,
just across the path, skirts round the blind end of the drive, and
straggling along under the low brick wall, which separates the drive
and front lawn from the fir plantation, ends at a fine old yew tree
which stands just by the road. All along the front of the house there
is a narrow “half area,” intended to give so much light and air, as
servants were once held to deserve, to the now disused dungeons where
the dinners of former owners had been cooked.

In that area right below the unlatched window we saw a ladder lying, a
short light ladder, but just long enough for an active man to have
reached the window by it. Now the snow had come with a North-East
wind, and any one who may have wrestled with my essay in topography
will readily understand that just here was a narrow tract where very
little snow had fallen and the frozen ground was mostly bare. There
was accordingly no clear indication that the ladder had ever actually
been reared towards the window, but it might have been. The path to
the kitchen door was clear enough too, and a man might have picked his
way just thereabouts and left not a footprint behind. Casting about
like a hound, the Superintendent had found some footprints near,
before his companions had begun seeking; footprints pointing both
ways. He immediately returned to the house and got some bundles of
chips for kindling, with which to mark the place of the footprints he
discovered. Callaghan had joined us, and he and I and the Sergeant
followed the Superintendent, keeping, as he bade us, carefully a
little behind him. In a moment it was plain that some man had climbed
the wall out of the fir plantation, not far from the yew tree, that he
had crept along the edge of the lawn, planting his feet most of the
way under the edge of the berberis shrub, but now and then, for no
obvious cause, but perhaps in guilty haste, deviating on to the lawn
where his tracks now showed in the snow. He had made his stealthy way,
not quite stealthy enough for him, round the end of the drive; no
doubt he had found the ladder somewhere up that side path, no doubt he
had opened the latch in the well-known way, entered through the
window, done the deed, slipped out and left his ladder where we found
it; and there were his footprints, returning by the way he came to the
same point in the wall.

Here we paused for a moment. Not a word was said as to the inferences
that we all drew from those few footprints, but the Superintendent
sharply asked the Sergeant, “Why was that trail not found and followed
to an end this morning?” Poor Sergeant Speke looked for an instant
like a detected criminal, but he pulled himself together and made
sturdy answer: “I think, sir, it was not there this morning”. “Think!”
said the Superintendent, and in a very few minutes from the discovery
of the first footprint, he and all of us were over the wall and in the
fir plantation. And there we paused again, for the fir boughs also had
kept out the snow, and the carpet of fir needles showed no distinct
traces of feet. Eventually—it seemed a long time but it was a short
time—we found where the fugitive had emerged from the fir plantation
over some iron hurdles into Peters’ field and along a little sort of
gulley that there ran from the plantation half-way along the field.
“Not the best place to break cover, but their wits are not always
about them,” said the Superintendent, and he pointed to a wedge-shaped
snowless tract which, caused by some extra shelter from the wind,
extended from the wall, tapering towards a clump of gorse bushes. Then
he sped on the trail, making the rest of us spread out to make sure
that there were no other tracks across the field. Southwards, right
along the field, the trail led till he, and we rejoining him,
scrambled out of the field, where our quarry must have scrambled, into
the green lane about two hundred yards from Trethewy’s cottage. Thus
far, but no farther; along the now well-trodden snow of the lane it
was idle to look for the print of any particular foot. “I am thinking
of the hours of lost daylight,” said the Superintendent, now
depressed. “Was this a likely way for a man making for the moors,
Rector?” “You need not look that far,” said Callaghan; “those
footprints were the man Trethewy’s. Down at the cottage yonder,” he
added for the Superintendent’s benefit. “They are the track of
hobnailed boots, sir,” said the Superintendent, “that’s all that they
are.” “Do you see that pattern?” said Callaghan; and there was
something odd about the pattern of the nails in the last footprint
just beneath our eyes. “You never saw it in any footprint before, but
I did, and it is the pattern I saw in Trethewy’s footmark not a
fortnight ago when last there was snow.” He was strung up again now,
and he had strangely quick eyes when he was strung up. “That is the
man’s footprint,” he said, “and there are the man’s boots.” Some way
along the ditch, under brambles and among old kettles and sardine tins
and worn-out boots (for plentiful rubbish had been dumped just here),
lay quite a good pair of boots, old boots truly, but not boots that I
should have thrown away, whatever a poorer man might do. The
Superintendent had them instantly. “Odd they are so full of snow,”
said Callaghan; “he did not lace them or they were much too big for
him. But what possessed him to throw them away, anyhow?” “Oh,” said
the Superintendent, “they mostly have plenty of half-clever ideas. It
takes a stupid one to escape me, sir,” he interposed to me with a sort
of chuckle, for he had lost no more time in appropriating the
discovery than he had done in picking up the boots. “The clever idea
this time,” he added, “was just this—the lane is trampled enough now,
but in the morning, when fewer feet had been along it, you might have
picked out the print of a particular boot by careful looking. But a
fellow in his socks could shuffle along among the few footmarks and
make no trace that you could swear to; only he would not go far like
that by daylight when the people he passed would notice his feet. Of
course it was madness not to hide the boots better, but I expect he
had taken a good deal of liquor to screw himself up to his work. Is
that Mr. Trethewy’s house, sir?” for we were by this time close to it.

I had been keen enough, as any man would have been, from the moment we
saw the ladder till now, but I hope it will be easily understood why I
did not accompany the hunters to Trethewy’s cottage. I went back to
the house to find Vane-Cartwright, who had stayed there, as it seemed,
reading gloomily and intently all the afternoon, and to arrange for
the prompt removal of him and Callaghan from that now cheerless house
to the Rectory. The housekeeper, oddly enough, was quite ready to
stay, and she kept the housemaid with her.

Callaghan, who soon came back, said that Trethewy had come to the door
of his house when they knocked. “Mr. Trethewy,” said the
Superintendent, “do you know these boots?” He answered composedly
enough, “They look like my boots, but I do not know where you found
them”. Here Mrs. Trethewy came forward and said in a very unconvincing
tone (so Callaghan insisted), “Why, that is the pair I have looked for
high and low these three days. Do not you remember, Reuben, how angry
you were they were lost?”

We left the house for the Rectory soon (my man was to come with a
barrow for the luggage), but before we left, one further piece of
evidence had accidentally come to my knowledge. I learnt from
something which the housekeeper was saying to the maid that the ladder
was one which was always kept in the pump-house, that the pump-house
was always kept locked, and that Trethewy kept the key.



Chapter V

On Wednesday, the 2nd of February, Candlemas Day, I read the burial
service over my friend’s body. I will not dwell upon what that service
was to me, but like many funerals of my friends it is associated in my
mind with the singing of birds. The inquest had taken place on the
Monday and Tuesday, and while it clearly established the fact that the
death had been caused by murder, not suicide, nothing was laid before
the jury which would have justified a verdict against any particular
person. I believe that some doubt had arisen as to the identification
of the boots. The village shoemaker, whose expert opinion was asked,
had said that though he never arranged hobnails in that way himself,
he had seen the same arrangement in boots that had been brought to him
to be repaired, by some man who was not Trethewy. Later on, however,
it was ascertained, I fancy through Callaghan’s ingenuity, that
Trethewy, who liked dabbling in various handicrafts, had cobbled and
nailed some boots for a friend, that this friend was the man whose
hobnails had been noticed by the shoemaker, and that he had been safe
out of the way at the time of the murder. Moreover—perhaps I forgot
it, perhaps I assumed that they would find it out for themselves and
preferred that they should—anyhow I had not mentioned to the police
that I heard Trethewy alone had had access to the ladder (they found
it out later).

Callaghan and Vane-Cartwright stayed with me for the funeral. A large
crowd of merely impertinent people, as I confess I regarded them,
collected from the neighbourhood and even from far away for the
occasion. Two only of Peters’ family were there, or could have been
there. He had two nephews in the Army, but they were then in India.
The rest of his near belongings were an old gentleman (a cousin of his
father’s, whom I had heard Peters himself describe as a relative whom
he had only met at burials, but whom he regarded as an essential part
of the funeral ceremony) and a maiden aunt, his mother’s sister. Both
of them came; both insisted on staying at the hotel, instead of at the
Rectory, for the night before, but they had luncheon and tea at the
Rectory after the funeral, and departed by the evening train. The old
gentleman was, I believe, a retired stipendiary magistrate.
Vane-Cartwright very obligingly devoted himself to entertaining him
and took him for a walk after luncheon, while Callaghan roamed about,
observing the people who had come for the funeral, expecting, as he
told me, that there might be something to discover by watching them. I
was thus left alone for a while with Peters’ aunt, who, by the way,
appeared to have known Vane-Cartwright as a boy.

Having with some difficulty overcome her formidable reserve and
shyness, I learnt from her much that I had not known about my friend,
her nephew, how really remarkable had been the promise of his early
days, though he had idled a little at Oxford; and how he had left
Oxford prematurely and taken up an appointment abroad, because he felt
that his parents could not well afford to keep him at the university
until he could earn his living in a profession at home. Of his later
life too, including his latest projects of study, she had much to tell
me, for she had followed him and his pursuits with an affectionate
interest. This contrasted strangely both with her evident indifference
on her own account to books and such matters as delighted him, and
with the strange calmness with which she seemed to regard his death
and the manner of his death. I was becoming greatly attracted by this
quiet, lonely old lady, when the return of the cousin and
Vane-Cartwright and of Callaghan at the same time put an end to our
conversation. Probably it was only that she did not feel equal to the
company of such a number of gentlemen, but I half-fancied that some
one of the number—I could not guess which, but I suspected it was the
old cousin—was antipathetic to her.

I went to London myself that night, returning next afternoon. I had to
go and see my wife and children. They had gone soon after Christmas to
stay with my wife’s father, and she had taken the children for a night
to London on their way home. She was compelled to stop there because
my daughter, who was delicate, caught a bad chill. It was now so cold
for travelling that I urged her to remain in London yet a little
longer.

I am not sure why I am being so precise in recording our movements at
that time. Perhaps it is merely from an impulse to try and live over
again a period of my life which was one of great and of increasing,
not diminishing, agitation. But having begun, I will proceed.

I returned to my rectory the day after the funeral hoping to be free
from any share in a kind of investigation which consorted ill with the
ordinary tenour of my work. But of course I could not remove myself
from the atmosphere of the crime. To begin with, I had an important
interview with Trethewy (which I will relate later) the day after my
return. But, besides, rumours of this clue or that, which had been
discovered, came to me in the common talk of my parish, for every
supposed step towards the discovery of the criminal seemed to be
matter of general knowledge. So the crime went with me in my parish
rounds, and in the privacy of my house I was still less able to escape
from it, for Callaghan was with me, and Callaghan’s mind was on fire
with the subject.

I discovered very soon that Callaghan, whom I had asked to stay for
the funeral, was bent upon staying in the village as long as he could.
He conceived that, with the knowledge he possessed and his experience
in India, he might, if on the spot, be able to contribute to the ends
of justice; and he seemed to find a morbid satisfaction, most unlike
my own feeling, in being near to the scene of crime and the scene of
detection. Moreover, he exhibited an esteem and love for Peters and a
desolate grief at his loss which, though I had not known that the two
men were quite such friends, I was almost forced to think unaffected.
So I readily invited him to stay at the Rectory, and he stayed there
some ten days altogether, when he declared that he would put himself
upon me no more and would move to the hotel. At the last moment he
changed his mind, and said he had taken a fancy to stay at Peters’
house if he might. I was persuaded to acquiesce in this, and there he
stayed, with occasional absences in London, till nearly a month later,
shortly after the time when, as I shall tell, Trethewy was committed
for trial at the Assizes.

Vane-Cartwright, who remained quiet and reserved, thanked me very much
the night after the murder for having him at the Rectory, saying, with
a feeling that I had not quite expected, that either to hurry away on
that day of agitation or to stay a night longer in Peters’ house,
would have been a trial for him. He added that he purposed returning
to London immediately after the funeral, and after an important City
meeting, for which he must stay in England, he was going out to meet
his young lady on the Riviera. I suppose that without intending I
betrayed before the funeral the fact that I was a little worried by my
impending duties as executor, duties which strangely enough I had
never had to perform before, and in which I was now a little
embarrassed by the absence from England of my fellow-executor and the
principal legatees, and by the prospect of having to carry out a
charitable bequest which left me a large discretion and might possibly
involve litigation. Vane-Cartwright very unobtrusively put me in the
way of doing whatever was immediately incumbent on me. I suppose I
appeared as grateful as I felt; anyhow, it ended with a delicate
suggestion from Vane-Cartwright that he would be very glad to stay at
the hotel for a day or two and make himself useful to me in any way
that he could. Of course I pressed him to stay at the Rectory, and, in
spite of an apparent preference for staying at the hotel, he after a
while agreed. I was expecting that I might soon be leaving home for
some time, as it might be necessary to take my little daughter for a
month abroad in a warmer climate, and after that I knew I should be
very busy with Confirmation classes and other matters, so that I was
anxious to make immediate progress, if I could, with winding up
Peters’ estate, and was very glad that Vane-Cartwright would stay, as
he did stay, at the Rectory. On the Saturday however (a week after the
murder) he received a telegram which compelled him to leave that
afternoon. I had by this time begun to like him, which I confess I did
not at first; men of his stamp, who have long relied on themselves
alone and been justified in their reliance, often do not show their
attractive qualities till the emergency occurs in which we find them
useful.

Trethewy was arrested the day that Vane-Cartwright left. I wondered
why he was not arrested earlier (for there did not seem to be any real
room for doubt that he had made those footmarks), but I have never
ascertained, and can only guess that the police felt sure of securing
him if he attempted to escape, and hoped that, if left alone, he might
betray himself by such an attempt or otherwise. He never did. He sat
in his cottage, as I gathered, constantly reading the Bible, but once
or twice a day pacing thoughtfully and alone up and down the drive. He
did the few necessary jobs for the house with punctuality, but he
never lingered in it, never visited the field or the lane, and hardly
spoke to any one, except on the day before his arrest, when, to my
astonishment (for he was known to be hostile to the Church), he sent
for me, and we had the memorable interview to which I have already
referred.

During the days before his arrest, as well as after, all sorts of
enquiry, of which I knew little, were going on. Thalberg’s movements
after the murder were traced. Some attempt was made, I believe, to
find the man who, according to Trethewy, had passed him with two
horses in the lane. But there seems to have been some bungling about
this, and the man, about whom there was no real mystery (he was a farm
servant who had started off early to take a horse, which his master
had sold, to its new owner), was not then found. Two important
discoveries were made about Trethewy. After his arrest his cottage was
searched, and he was found to be the possessor of inconceivably
miscellaneous articles. Among them were several weapons which he might
naturally have picked up on his travels, but among them (which was
more to the point) was a small case of surgical instruments. Two
instruments were missing from that case, and the instrument used by
the murderer might, though not very neatly, have fitted into one of
the vacant places. The case was found, as Callaghan, who contrived to
be present, told me, at the back of a shelf in a cupboard filled with
all sorts of lumber and litter that had lain there who can say how
long. Callaghan, however, professed to have observed, from marks on
the dust of the shelf, that the contents of the cupboard had been
recently disturbed, in order, he had no doubt, to hide the instrument
case at the back of everything.

The other new discovery had occurred two days before. Trethewy’s uncle
and the guests who had been at his party on that ill-omened night were
of course sought and questioned. They all corroborated Trethewy’s own
account of his movements, but they added something more. Trethewy it
seemed had been normal and cheerful enough as the evening began, but,
as the night and the drinking went on, fell first into melancholy,
then into sullenness, lastly and a little before he went home into
voluble ferocity. He recurred to the topic, to which his uncle said he
had more than once alluded on previous days when he had met him, of
his quarrel with Peters, against whom he had conceived an irrational
resentment, and he actually, though those who heard him did not take
him seriously at the time, uttered threats against his life.



Chapter VI

I was told of this behaviour of Trethewy’s by Sergeant Speke the day
after the arrest. But it was no surprise to me, for I had come myself
to communicate to the police something to the same effect. On mature
reflexion I had thought it my duty to report the matter of the
interview which I had had with Trethewy some days before. Trethewy
had, unsolicited, made a confession to me—not a confession of crime,
but a confession of criminal intent.

Unchecked by a warning that I could promise no secrecy as to what he
should say, and a reminder of, what he knew full well, that he was in
a position of grave danger, he declared to me that he had harboured
the thought of killing his master, and, though he had never actually
laid hands on him, was as guilty as though he had done so. Starting
with this declaration he plunged into a long and uninterrupted
discourse of which I should find it impossible, even if I wished it,
to give an at all adequate report.

As for the matter of his statement: if one were to accept it as true,
it was the tale, common enough two centuries ago, but so rarely told
now that modern ears find it very hard to take it in, the tale of the
ordinary struggle between good and evil in a man, taking an acute and
violent form, so that the man feels day by day the alternate mastery
of a religious exaltation, which he believes to be wholly good, and of
base passions, which, when they come upon him, seem to be an evil
spirit driving him as the steam drives an engine. From the manner of
the statement, it was very hard to gather how much of it was sincere,
impossible to gather whether or not something worse lay concealed
behind that which was so strangely confessed. Self-abasement and
self-righteousness, the genuine stuff of Puritan enthusiasm, the
adulterated stuff of morbid religiousness, sheer cant, manly
straightforwardness, pleasure in the opportunity of preaching and that
to the parson,—all these things seemed blended together in Trethewy’s
talk.

On the most favourable view the story came to this. A few years
before, Trethewy, after a careless life, had become suddenly impressed
by deep religious feelings, no less than by precise and inflexible
religious views. His conversion, he trusted, had not left his conduct
unaffected, but though for a time he walked, as he said, happy in this
new light, it had been the beginning, not the end, of his inward
warfare. His natural ill-temper, that worst sort of ill-temper which
is both sulky and passionate, began to come upon him again in
prolonged fits of intense wrath, intensified, I suppose, by reaction
from the pitch at which he often strove to live. Besides this, he gave
way at times to a keen pleasure in alcohol. He was tempted by what he
called a “carnal” pride in the strength of his head for liquor; and I
have sometimes observed that drink works its worst havoc upon the very
men who may appear to be the least affected by it, bringing about a
slow perversion of the deeper motives of action, while for a long time
it leaves the judgment unclouded upon those more trivial and obvious
matters in which aberration is readily detected. Thus at the time of
that altercation with Peters of which Callaghan had been a witness,
Trethewy was already brooding perversely over some trumpery or
altogether fancied grievance. He was deeply under the influence of
drink at that moment, and did not know it, but knew he had had enough
to make most men drunk. His very worldly pride had therefore been the
more offended at the imputation which Peters threw on him. His
spiritual pride was offended too by a rebuke from one, whom, though
originally fond of him, he had come to regard as a worldling, steeped
in mere profane philosophy. He had been enraged to the point of
desiring Peters’ death, and the threat which Callaghan reported had
been actually uttered. He had meant, it may be, nearly nothing by his
threat when he uttered it; but, when once this almost insane notion,
of killing for such a trifle a man whom normally he liked, had taken
shape in words, it recurred to him every time that he was put out, or
that a third glass of spirits went to his lips. Perhaps it recurred to
him with all the more terrible power because in better moments his
conscience was horribly alarmed at his having given in, by so much as
one thought, to this suggestion of the Devil. On the morning before
Peters’ death he had a fresh altercation with him on the occasion of
some trifling oversight in the garden to which Peters had called his
attention, and I was surprised after what Vane-Cartwright had said to
be told that Vane-Cartwright was present on this occasion and had
heard the insolent language in which he seems to have addressed
Peters. All day and night after that the evil dream had been upon him,
and he walked home from his uncle’s that night plotting murder. He
awoke in the morning calmer, but his wrath still smouldered, till his
wife brought him the news that Peters was murdered, when it gave place
in a moment to poignant grief for Peters. He could not stir from the
cottage; he sat, he tried to pray, he thought, and he saw himself as
he was—perhaps not quite as he was, for he saw himself as a man guilty
of blood.

He would gladly, I think, have talked with me of his soul, but, with
the suspicion which I had in my mind, I did not see how I could say
much to him. So, having heard him out, I got away with some pitifully
perfunctory remarks. How was I to take this confession? Was the mental
history which the man gave of himself a cunning invention for
accounting for the known quarrel and the known threats? Was the story
true with this grave correction that Trethewy had carried out his
intent? Was it the simple truth all through? Did it even go beyond the
truth in this, that the man’s thoughts had never been so black as he
made them out? For days these questions occurred frequently to my
mind, but my real opinion upon them was fixed almost as soon as I got
away from Trethewy. Contrary to my principles I disliked him, I felt
strangely little sympathy for his spiritual struggles; but I did not
doubt that they were real, and I did not doubt that he was innocent of
the crime.

Before Trethewy was brought before the magistrates, a letter arrived
which excited my imagination unaccountably, or rather two letters
arrived. The day before Vane-Cartwright had left, a letter had arrived
for Peters, bearing the postmark of Bagdad. Vane-Cartwright carelessly
opened it. He had, I think, at my request, on the day when I was away
in London, opened some letters which arrived for Peters’ executors. So
he had a good excuse for opening this. “Well, that is very
uninforming,” he said, passing the letter over to me, with an apology
for his mistake, and laughing more than was usual with him.
Uninforming it certainly was. “Dear Eustace,” it ran, “I am sorry I
can tell you nothing about it.—Yours, C. B.” Just a week later, after
Vane-Cartwright had left, came another letter from the same place, in
the same hand, and almost, but not quite, as brief: “Dear Eustace,
This time I will not delay my answer. Longhurst sailed in the
_Eleanor_ and she did not go down. To the best of my belief she still
sails the seas. I never liked C.—Yours ever, Charles Bryanston.”



Chapter VII

After several remands, the proceedings against Trethewy before the
magistrates came to a close about the end of February. There was
nothing much to note about these proceedings, which ended, as I
suppose they must have ended, in his being committed for trial. The
reader knows by this time pretty nearly the whole case against him.
That Peters had been murdered was certain. The accused had had several
altercations with the murdered man. In one of them he had expressed a
wish to kill him, and he had repeated this wish to others upon the
fatal night. Footprints had been found which, as the reader knows,
seemed at first sight plainly indicative of his guilt. Then there was
the ladder. It was undoubtedly kept, before the murder, locked up in a
place of which only Trethewy had the key. That any one could have had
access to it between the murder and the discovery of the ladder was a
view supported only by the uncorroborated statement of the accused
that he had left the key of the pump-house that morning, when summoned
to speak to the police, and had forgotten to go back for it until the
next day. Lastly, the finding of the instrument case, though not very
important, at any rate disposed of any improbability that Trethewy
would have had such an instrument as the knife that was used.

I daresay this would have been enough to hang a man if this was all;
and against this there was nothing to be set, except the immovable
persistency of Trethewy and his wife from the first in the tale which
they told.

Nothing, that is, till after he had been committed for trial. But the
very evening after his committal, a slight but almost conclusive
circumstance was brought to light, and entirely altered the aspect of
the case. That evening I received a visit from Peters’ housemaid,
Edith Summers. She had, she said, something on her mind. She had told
a falsehood to the police-sergeant on the morning after the murder.
She had interrupted the housekeeper to say that the candle by Peters’
bed had been a long candle the night before; she had said this because
she had been very severely scolded by the housekeeper for forgetting
to put fresh candles in the candlestick; and so she had said what was
false, not meaning any harm, but thinking for the moment (as she now
tried to explain) that it was true, and that she had done what she had
intended. She had confessed to the housekeeper since, but the
housekeeper had only said she was an impudent girl to have put in her
word then, and had better not put it in again. She had gone to the
court expecting to be a witness on some small point and determined to
make the matter clear then; but she had not been called. She had
spoken to a policeman, and had been told to speak to one of the
lawyers. She had tried to get the attention of Trethewy’s lawyer, but
he had been too busy to listen to her.

I am ashamed to say that listening to her rather long explanation, I
entirely failed to see the significance of what she told me. I said
something quite well intentioned about the evil of saying what was not
true, and then told the girl kindly, that I did not think there was
any harm done. But she had thought about it and was in earnest, and
she made me see it in a moment. There were, she explained, other
candles in the room, but they were new candles, and they were not
lighted that night. From this and what we already knew the conclusion
was almost inevitable. Peters was murdered before two inches of
ordinary candle, which was burning at 11.30 P.M. on the 28th of
January, burnt down.


Stupid as it may seem, I had for some time been convinced of
Trethewy’s innocence, and yet had never really drawn the necessary
inference from it. Of course with the two premisses in my mind—Peters
was murdered, Trethewy did not murder him—I had been aware, in a
sense, of the conclusion, but it had taken no hold of my attention.
Now, however, I had evidence of Trethewy’s innocence, which was no
longer a private intuition of my own, but was something of which every
one must appreciate the force. Perhaps it was from this, perhaps it
was from the sentimental effect of having the time of the crime fixed
within such narrow limits; anyhow the thought, “Some one other than
Trethewy murdered Peters,” came upon me with a sudden horror which
could hardly have been greater if I had only that moment become aware
of the original fact of the murder.

I instantly went over in my mind the list of those few who were so
placed as to lie within the reach of suspicion. Trethewy could no
longer be suspected. Thalberg surely could not. I dismissed the two
women servants from my mind immediately. There remained two men—three
men—three men, of whom I was one. I knew how easily I could clear
myself, for the door had been locked behind me before that candle was
lit. But I was the last man known to have seen Peters, and my confused
current of thought included me as a man to be suspected. I asked
myself of each in turn, is he the guilty man? and in each case I
answered no. As I look back now, it seems to me, that the answer “no”
did not come to my mind with the same whole-hearted conviction in each
case. But I did not in the few moments for which I then reflected, I
did not till long after do more than go round in this circle: One of
us three men murdered Peters. Was it—— each of us in turn? No. Could
it after all be one of the servants? No! Was there not then in the
vast region of possibility some way of accounting for Peters’ death
without the guilt of any of us. The plainest reasons bade me answer
yes, and yet again I answered no. And so back round the circle.

But the girl was with me and I could not keep her waiting for ever. I
arrested my mental circle where it began, at the thought: it seems
Peters was murdered while two inches of ordinary candle, lighted
before 11.30 P.M. on the 28th of January, burnt out. I started up to
take the girl at once to see the police, but on a sudden idea I
desisted. I wrote a note to the housekeeper, asking that the girl
should again come to see me at eight in the evening, and I sent a
message to the police-sergeant, asking him to come at the same time.
Of course I had often interviewed him on parish matters, and having
got him settled into the arm-chair in my study, in which I could
usually put him at his ease, I fired upon him the question, “Sergeant,
were those tracks, which we found, really there when you came to Mr.
Peters’ house in the morning?” Now Sergeant Speke was a very honest
man, but he was (most properly, I am sure) a creature of discipline,
and his answer threw, for me, a flood of light on the problem how it
is that the very best of the police are so ready to back up one
another. He answered immediately and with conviction: “Well, you see,
sir, it is not for me to judge”. The answer was on the face of it
preposterous. He alone had searched the front of the house that
morning, and it was for him alone, of all men, to say whether the
tracks were there. He obviously did not see this at all, and I was
wise enough to let go an opportunity for moralising to him. I beguiled
him, with a glass of wine and other devices of the tempter, into
feeling himself off duty for the while, and talking with me as
fellow-mortal to fellow-mortal. I very soon discovered, first, that
Sergeant Speke had searched carefully enough around the house that
morning to have seen the tracks if they had been there, and, secondly,
that the man, Speke, as distinct from the Sergeant, knew perfectly
well that they were not there.

Not till then did I summon the girl Edith from the servants’ hall
where she was waiting. I made her tell her tale. I saw the Sergeant
take a due note of it for transmission to those, to me mysterious,
headquarters where I supposed all such matters were digested. I got
the assurance that Sergeant Speke was really man enough to see that
his own evidence, as to the non-existence of the tracks that morning,
would be noted and digested too. I dismissed the Sergeant and Edith,
and went slowly to bed. Did I suspect this person? No! Did I suspect
that person? N—no. At last I determined that I would not let my
suspicions fasten on any one man, while it might be just as reasonable
that his suspicions should fasten on me. But my mind remained full of
horror and of the image of a candle-end spluttering out, while the
man, who had lighted it to read by, lay dead in those bloody sheets.
Very, very glad I was that my wife was at last coming home next day.

I suppose it was from the association of two female names that my
dreams, when at last I slept, were of nothing more horrible than the
ship _Eleanor_, which, as the reader remembers, probably still sailed
the seas.



Chapter VIII

With some doubt as to whether it was what I ought to do, but with no
doubt that it was what I wanted to do, I sought out Callaghan next
morning for a final talk with him before he left; for he was at last
to tear himself away from the scene which he haunted. I tried on him,
I do not know why, the effects of Edith’s disclosure without telling
him what I now knew about the tracks. I could see that he accepted the
truth of the girl’s statement, and had grasped, much more quickly than
I had, what it imported. It was therefore wearisome to me, and, in my
then state of mind, most jarring, that for some time he persisted in
playing with the idea that Trethewy might still be guilty. He
supported it, as he went on, with more and more far-fetched arguments,
so that my patience was nearly at an end, when, to my amazement, I
found my friend off at full speed again upon a fresh track, that of
Thalberg. I listened, and this time seriously, to several things which
he told me about Thalberg, which were new to me and threw an
unpleasant light upon him. Then I interposed. Thalberg had left the
house with me, and it had been made all but certain that he went
straight to his hotel and never left it until many hours after the
murder had been discovered. In any case it was not he who had made
those tracks, for he had certainly kept in his hotel from early
morning on the 29th till he left. And I then told Callaghan my reason
for believing that those tracks were made in the middle of the day on
the 29th. “My dear friend,” he exclaimed, this time with all the
appearance of earnestness, “I no more really believe than you do that
Thalberg actually did the deed. He is not man enough. But I have a
method, I have a method. I am used to these things. I am off to Town
now; I shall be there some time; you know my address. I mean,” he
added grandiloquently, “to work through all the outside circumstances
and possibilities of the case, and narrow down gradually to the real
heart of the problem; it is my method.”

Well, there may have been some method in his madness, for there was
certainly some madness in his method. I took leave of him (after he
had called, that afternoon, to renew acquaintance with my wife) little
foreseeing what his two next steps would be. He stopped on his way to
London at the county town, where he went to the county police office
to communicate some information or theory about Thalberg. He went on
to London, as he had said he would, but, instead of remaining there as
he had said, he suddenly departed next day for the Continent, leaving
no address behind.

We have now arrived at the first week in March, the several events (if
I may include under the name of events the slow emergence of certain
thoughts in my own mind) which prepared the way for the eventual
solution of our mystery, occurred at intervals, and in an order of
which my memory is not quite distinct, during that and the remaining
nine months of the year.

The resolution at which I had arrived, not to occupy my mind with
suspicions, or to regard the detection of crime as part of my
business, was not a tenable resolution, and it was entirely dissipated
by my wife in a talk which we had on the first evening after her
arrival. I was aware that she would not be able to share with me in
the determination not to harbour suspicions of any particular person,
but I had thought she would be averse to my taking positive steps
towards the detection of the crime. She, however, was indignant at the
idea that I could let things be. “Several innocent men will be under a
cloud all their lives,” she said, “unless the guilty man is found.
There is Trethewy, I suppose they will let him out some day; but who
is going to employ him? Not that uncle of his; and we cannot. Who do
you suppose is going to see this through if you do not?” She was
powerfully seconded in this by a neighbour of ours, now an old man,
who had had much experience as a justice. “Mr. Driver,” he said, “you
may think this is the business of the police, but remember who the
police are. They do their ordinary work excellently, but their
ordinary work is to deal with ordinary crime. This was not an ordinary
crime, and it was done by no ordinary man. If it is ever discovered,
it will be by a man whose education gives him a wider horizon than
that of professional dealers with criminals.”

I do not know how far the reader may have been inclined to suspect
Callaghan (that depends, I suppose, on whether the reader has been
able to form any idea of his character, and I myself had not, so far,
formed any coherent idea of his character; there seemed little
coherence in it), but the police certainly had begun to suspect him.

On a superficial view of the matter there was every reason to do so.
Short of bolting on the night of the murder, before it was discovered,
he had done all that, theoretically, a guilty man should have done. He
had lost no time whatever in attempting to put suspicion on one
innocent man. He had striven to intermeddle officiously in the
investigations conducted by the police. There was more than one
apparent lie in the information he had given. He had haunted the scene
of the crime as though it fascinated him. When the first innocent man
was cleared, he had at once suggested another man, who was almost
certainly innocent also, and he had then, after giving false accounts
of his intentions, quitted the country without leaving his address.
Then he was certainly in the house when the crime was committed. His
movements on the following day were nearly accounted for, but not so
fully that he could not have made those false tracks. After all it was
a circumstance of deep suspicion that he had been so quick to
recognise the peculiar print of Trethewy’s boot.

Alas, even to the test _cui bono_, “that stock question of Cassius,
‘whom did it profit?’” Callaghan responded ill. I knew, and somewhat
later in reply to an enquiry by the police, it was my duty to say,
that Callaghan was in a certain sense a gainer by Peters’ death. He
had been a most imprudent investor (not, I believe, a speculator), and
had in his embarrassment borrowed £2,000 from Peters. Peters, while
living, would not have been at all hard on him if he had been honestly
unable to pay, but was just the man to have made Callaghan’s life a
burden to him if he thought he was not doing his best to keep above
water. Peters’ will cancelled the debt, and it was not impossible that
Callaghan knew it. But this last point illustrates the real weakness
of the argument against him. Nobody could know Callaghan a little and
think that either this interest in the will or any other point in this
hypothetical story of his crime, however much it might be like human
nature, was in the least like him.

Here, for want of a good description of him, are a few traits of his
sojourn in my parish. He was, it is true, with difficulty dragged out
of a furious brawl with a gentleman from the North of Ireland who, he
said, had blasphemed against the Pope. The man had not so blasphemed,
and Callaghan himself was not a Roman Catholic. On the other hand, he
had habitually since his arrival lain in wait for the school children
to give them goodies and so forth. He assaulted and thrashed two most
formidable ruffians who were maltreating a horse, and then plastered
their really horrible bruises with so much blarney that they forgave,
not merely him, but the horse. He had brought for Peters, with
infinite pride, a contraband cargo of his native potheen, a terrible
fluid; and after Peters’ death he would sit up alone in that desolate
house, drinking, not the potheen, which, in intended charity, he
suggested that I should bestow on the poor in the workhouse, but Mrs.
Travers’ barley water, and writing a rather good and entirely bright
and innocent fairy story.

This is emphatically not evidence, but it made me sure of Callaghan’s
innocence. Looking at what I suppose was evidence, I had wondered
whether I was not soft in this, and I brought the matter to the test
of my wife’s judgment. I knew that, at least at her earlier meetings
with Callaghan, she had disliked him, and, out of the facts which she
knew already, I made what I flattered myself was a very telling case
against him. It did not disconcert me that the lady, who, when told of
his flight, had trusted he would remain out of England till she went
abroad, said without much interest, “What stuff,” and then suddenly
kindling, exclaimed, “What, Robert, are you turning against that poor
man?” When I asked for the reasons why she scouted the idea of his
guilt, she seemed to consider the request quite frivolous; but at last
I extracted from her a sentence which expressed what I think was at
the root of my own thought. “Mr. Callaghan,” she said, “is violent
enough to commit a murder and cunning enough to conceal anything, but
I cannot imagine his violence and his cunning ever working together.”

Of course we both thought of him as sane, though he was just one of
those people to whose doings one constantly applies the epithet “mad”.



Chapter IX

The enquiry upon which I had now stirred myself to enter, could not be
an easy one, but it should have seemed for the present to be narrowed
down to a question about a single man. Perhaps it was from repugnance
against consciously going about to hang a man who had sheltered under
my roof, that I did not even then definitely put to myself the
question of that man’s guilt. By some half-conscious sequence of
thought I was led to begin my search far afield. It started with the
two letters which had come for Peters from Mr. Charles Bryanston, or
rather first with the later letter.

I had some time before written briefly and formally to Mr. Bryanston
to acquaint him with the fact of Peters’ murder, but had, for a while
since, thought no more of him. Now I began to do what one very seldom
does, steadily and methodically think. I mooned up and down with a
pipe in my garden or in the lanes. I sat, with those letters in my
hand, alone before the fire. I sat at my writing-table with paper
before me, and made incoherent jottings with a pencil. I should be
afraid to say how often and how long I did all these seemingly idle
things. Till at last, in the time between tea and dinner, with the
children playing in the room, I arrived at actually spelling the
matter out.

“This time I will not delay my answer.” “This time——” Then at other
times he did delay his answer. That might have some significance when
I turned to the earlier letter. “This time I will not delay my
answer.” It was an answer to a question in a letter just received from
Peters, an answer probably by return of post. Why not delay it this
time as usual? Why, of course, because the question was one which both
to Peters and to Bryanston seemed important, perhaps momentous. Simple
enough so far. “Longhurst did sail in the _Eleanor_, and she did not
go down.” It was clear enough that some one had thought that Longhurst
had sailed in a ship that did go down. Peters had thought otherwise,
and Peters was right. What of that? There is nothing momentous in
that. Stop, though. It is not necessarily that. Some one need not have
thought it—he may have said it to Peters, and Peters may have thought
it was a lie. And what did it matter, and why did some one say it?
Well, of course, Longhurst would be dead if the ship had gone down;
and Longhurst was not really dead, and some one was interested in
saying that he was. Perhaps Longhurst was the next heir to some
property, and search ought to have been made for him; and my mind
wandered over all the stories I had ever read of lost heirs, in fact
or in fiction. Or perhaps—— Who said Longhurst and his ship went down?
“C.” said it, whoever “C.” might be.

Then I took up the earlier letter. I knew from the other letter that
this had been sent late. There was nothing further to be gained from
the words of it, but a flood of suspicion broke upon me as I held it
in my hand. Had “C.” another initial to his surname, a double name?
Did I know this “C.”? Had I not seen this very letter in the hands of
“C.”? Had I not thought it rather odd that he, a man so decidedly “all
there,” had opened and read it before it was given to me? Had I not
rather wondered at the pains he had kindly taken to help me with
several letters before? Did he not laugh rather strangely as he read
it, though I never heard him laugh at anything amusing? Did he not go
away just after the letter came, though he had not been intending to
go so soon? Was it conceivable that he knew that Peters had asked that
question, and thought the first letter (“very uninforming,” as he
called it) was the answer to that question, and an answer which made
him safe? After that one laugh I thought he became suddenly downcast.
Had he really read in that letter that he need not have feared Peters,
and that he had—yes, murdered him for nothing? Had the accident that
Peters had written, perhaps long before, some unimportant question to
Bryanston, and the accident that Bryanston had delayed his answer
betrayed this man into leaving me alone with my letters a week too
soon; and would this trifling mistake lead him to—to the gallows? and
I remembered with a start the grim end which I was preparing. Yes, all
this was conceivable. There is an old maxim that you should beware of
going back upon your first instinctive impressions of liking or
dislike when you happen to have them. There are qualifications to it;
the repulsions that start from ugliness or strangeness or difference
of opinion may not be safe guides. But broadly the maxim is true. It
was true in this instance. No, I too had never liked “C.”

It is strange that I should have received Mr. Bryanston’s answer the
very next morning, a long, full, warm-hearted letter on the death of
the friend to whose letters in life—and what letters Peters wrote!—he
made such scrappy replies. In a P.S. at the end, as if the writer had
hesitated whether to write it, were the words: “It is curious and may
be news to you that Mr. Peters, at the time he was murdered, was
unravelling the mystery of another murder, committed, as he suspected,
many years ago”.

So then, as I had half-guessed, Longhurst was dead. It was not that he
was alive and Cartwright pretended he was dead, he was dead, and
Cartwright had a motive for falsely pretending he was drowned.



Chapter X

“Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner,” is, I do not doubt, a saying
which has its truth. Nevertheless, I have generally noticed, when I
have read much about murders or other great crimes, or about the
social or political misdeeds which are not called crimes, that every
piece of additional knowledge about the manner in which the thing was
done, the inducements that led to it, the conduct that followed it,
has, for me at least, set the capital act of wrong in a more hideous
light. It is not, I think, that the picturesque circumstances, like
the guttering candle whose image got on my nerves that night, affect
me profoundly. It is, I believe, that, while many men, most if you
like, are middling, the distinctly bad are really much worse and the
distinctly good are really much better than the world of middling
people is at all ready to allow. When I looked at the whole
circumstances of the crime, as I now conceived them, a great hatred of
Vane-Cartwright possessed my soul. There was a passage in my
subsequent course with regard to him, when a reason personal to myself
had just been added to the cause of my hate, upon which I look back
sometimes with self-disgust, but I cannot think that the desire, which
first prompted me to fasten myself upon Vane-Cartwright and try to
drag him down, was an impure desire, or that it consorted ill with the
inner meaning of those precepts which it was my profession to teach.

Whether it was right or wrong, the strength of the feeling which then
animated me showed itself in my resolve to think calmly and to act
circumspectly. I was conscious that the structure of my theory was
held together by no firm rivets of verifiable fact, but by something
which must be called feeling. I did not distrust my theory on that
account; but I did distrust myself, and I determined, in what lay
before me, to take as few impulsive steps and to draw as few impulsive
conclusions as I could.

Reflecting, next morning, on what could be done immediately to bring
my hypothesis to the test of fact, I looked in the _Postal Guide_ for
such information as it gave about the mails to and from Bagdad. I also
verified my impression as to the date of that occasion when
Vane-Cartwright, staying at the hotel, had spent the evening with
Peters. From what I found it seemed to me that a letter to Bagdad,
posted that night, might have been expected to bring an answer back by
the date on which the first letter from Bryanston came to my hands, or
even a few days earlier, but that the delays of steamers might easily
bring it about that an answer should not arrive till a week later,
that is, when the second letter from Bryanston came to me. So far then
there was nothing to make my conclusion impossible. I may add here
that the enquiries which I made, as soon as I saw how to do it,
confirmed what I gathered from the _Postal Guide_, and showed that on
this occasion such a delay of the mails had actually happened.

But, assuming this about the mails, what a frail edifice my theory
still remained! Upon most careful reconsideration, I saw, as the
reader may see, that it fitted in easily with all the known facts. It
was just as well founded as many things which are taught as
established truths of science or history. But as for expecting the law
to hang Vane-Cartwright upon this, I myself, fantastically no doubt,
refrained a little later from black-balling him at a distinguished
club, of which, oddly enough, I had in my ambitious youth become a
member. In large part the case, so to call it, against him rested on
my observations of his demeanour in my house, and especially of his
conduct in regard to my business as executor and my letters. This was
precise and cogent enough for me, the observer at first hand; but it
was too much matter of general impression to be of use to any one but
me. Then the attribution of that early murder to Vane-Cartwright
seemed to me absolutely requisite to make his murder of Peters
conceivable. But it was the work of my imagination. In the region of
palpable facts, one thing alone was evidence against Vane-Cartwright
and not against any other man. It will be remembered that, when
Callaghan first denounced Trethewy, Vane-Cartwright said that
Trethewy’s behaviour in his presence to Peters had been friendly and
respectful. He knew, I now told myself, a better way than expressing
suspicion of Trethewy, and while by his stealthy act he fabricated
evidence against him, he contrived by his words to cast on Callaghan
alone the risk of thereafter appearing as an innocent man’s traducer.
But his cunning had made a slip. It was gratuitous in doing so to have
uttered a refutable lie as to Trethewy’s conduct in his presence. He
was not the man to have seen the imprudence of this. It would have
been to him inconceivable that Trethewy should confess the full extent
of his wrong conduct to me. And so, not from any want of coolness, he
had provided me with the one scrap of ordinary evidence necessary to
give firmness to that belief of mine which might otherwise have seemed
a mere bubble.



Chapter XI

By the time that my wife, who had been again obliged to be in London
while I was spelling out this story, had returned, I had long come to
the conclusion that my theory had enough in it to be worth submitting
to her criticism. But she forestalled me with news of her own, and
news which concerned Vane-Cartwright. The young lady, Miss Denison,
whom he was to have married had suddenly broken off the engagement
within two days of his joining her upon the Riviera. The girl could
give no good reason for her conduct, and her own people loudly
condemned it; they had been against the engagement, for the difference
of age was too great; they were still more against the flighty breach
of it; but she was obdurate. She and her people returned home for
Easter, and my wife, who had already known her a little, now met her
several times at the house of a common friend in London. The foolish
or unhappy young lady had given my wife her confidence. Far from
having any suspicion about the murder, she had never even heard, when
she made her decision, that there had been a murder at all; for she
and her mother did not read news of that order, and Vane-Cartwright,
though he had said that he had been through a dreadful experience, of
which he was anxious to tell her, had not yet said what it was. There
had evidently been a quite unaccountable quarrel in which the
high-tempered girl had, in all things external, begun, continued and
ended in the wrong; and she did not now defend herself. Somehow, she
said, he was changed. No, not in his manner to her; she had not
doubted his attachment to her. Only she had thought she had loved him
before, and she knew now that she did not. Something, which she had
seen in him before but not disliked, now jarred upon her feelings in a
new way. She had been very, very foolish, very, very wrong; she could
explain nothing; she was very unhappy, very angry with herself; but
this she knew, and this alone she knew, that it would be wrong for her
to become William Vane-Cartwright’s wife.

So much my wife told me. Then, with that precipitancy in travelling to
remote conclusions which sometimes seems so perilous in able women,
she said, as quietly as if it were the most obvious comment, “Robert,
it was Vane-Cartwright that did the murder”. Now she had never even
spoken to him.

Accordingly, she received my theory of the murder almost with
enthusiasm. None the less, she immediately put her finger upon the
weakest part of it. “I wonder, all the same,” she exclaimed, “why he
murdered Eustace?” “Why,” I said, “he saw in a moment that Eustace
knew he was lying and suspected him of the murder.” “That would not
have been enough,” she said; “he must be a very cool-headed man from
the way he behaved after the murder, and he would never have run the
risk he ran by a second murder, if there had not been much more than
suspicion of the first.” “Then,” I suggested, “perhaps Eustace already
knew it, and the lie he told only provoked Eustace into showing it.”
“If,” she replied, “Eustace knew it, he would never have had him
within his doors.” “Well,” I said wearily, because I could not
immediately see how to answer, “perhaps he did not murder Eustace.”
Then she turned on me with a woman’s promptitude and a woman’s
injustice: “You can always argue me down,” she said, “but he did
murder Eustace Peters, and you have got to find out all about it and
bring him to justice. I am sure you have the ability to do it. You may
have to wait, but, if you wait patiently and keep your eyes open, all
sorts of things will turn up to help you. I shall be very angry with
you,” she added, in a tone not at all suggestive of anger, “if you do
not do it.”

I felt, like my wife, that it was a matter of waiting for what would
turn up. In the neighbourhood of the murder there was probably very
little to turn up. The police, I felt no doubt, had made all manner of
enquiries; and as for anything that I was likely to pick up, I
supposed I had already heard all, and more than all that any person in
the neighbourhood knew about the matter. I may anticipate a little and
say that in the whole of the four months, which, as it proved, were
all that remained to me as Rector of Long Wilton, no fresh information
was given to me by my neighbours there. It soon occurred to me that
the murder of Longhurst, far away and long ago, might be easier to
trace than the recent, but perhaps more carefully veiled, crime
committed to cover it. Peters, I reasoned, must have been in
possession of proofs of it, and probably, as I searched his voluminous
papers, something would appear to indicate the nature of those proofs.
I began, as in any case I should have done, a careful reading of his
papers. It took up no small part of my spare time, for I found that he
had prepared little enough for immediate publication, but fuller and
more valuable materials for his projected book of psychology than I
should at all have expected from his manner of proceeding. But, of
what now interested me more than my friend’s philosophy, I found
nothing in all this mass of letters and notes and journals; nothing,
that is, which threw direct light on this mystery, for indeed his
psychological notes and my discussions with a friend of his, an Oxford
philosophy tutor, to whom I eventually committed them, did, I think,
influence me not a little in one important part of my enquiry later.

In pushing enquiries further afield there was need for some caution.
An indiscretion might have brought what I was doing unnecessarily soon
to the notice of the suspected man, and the great ability with which I
credited him might suggest some effective scheme for baffling my
search. But of course I wrote early to Mr. Bryanston to ask if he
would tell me to whom he alluded as “C.,” whether Longhurst was the
man whom Peters suspected had been murdered, and whether I inferred
rightly that “C.” was involved in this suspicion.

It was my duty to put all that I knew at the disposal of the police,
and the opportunity for doing so soon presented itself in the visit,
which, as I have said, was paid to me to enquire about Callaghan. My
visitor was an important official, since dead, whom I need not more
clearly indicate. He had been a military man, and he struck me as, in
some ways, admirably qualified for his post. He was, I believe,
excellent in the discipline he maintained among his subordinates and
in all the dispositions he made for meeting the common public
requirements. I am told also that he had wonderful familiarity with
the ways of ordinary law-breakers, but he did not appear to me to have
much elasticity of mind. After answering fully his question about
Callaghan, I thought it right to give my own impression of his
innocence. My visitor answered me with a somewhat mysterious reference
to those who really guided the conduct of the affair. He could not
himself, he said, go behind their views. Then with an evident sympathy
for my concern about Callaghan, he told me in confidence and still
more mysteriously that the opinion of an eminent specialist had been
taken.

I then ventured to press the question of Trethewy’s release, and
learnt that it was being carefully considered, but he could not be set
free immediately. Then I told my visitor of the statement of
Vane-Cartwright when Callaghan first spoke of Trethewy, and how
Trethewy’s confession proved this to have been a deliberate falsehood.
I showed him and gave him copies of the letters of Bryanston to Peters
and to me. I informed him, and at my request he noted, that
Vane-Cartwright had opened the first letter. I stated what I had
myself observed of Vane-Cartwright’s conduct, and indicated frankly
the conclusion which I was disposed to draw. It did not seem to me
that I produced any impression. My visitor listened, if I may say so,
with the air of a man who completely takes in the fact and sees that
it should be put in some pigeon-hole, but is without either
apprehension or wonder as to its real bearing. I gathered, on the
whole, that the official mind was chiefly taken up with the theory
that Callaghan was guilty; but that there was also thought to be an
off-chance that something might yet turn up to repair the seemingly
shattered case against Trethewy. I gathered too, and, I hope, gave due
weight to the fact, that there was some likely way, of which I had
before heard nothing, by which an unknown person might have entered
and escaped from the house that night. One thing more I learnt;
nothing suspicious had been discovered about Thalberg’s movements, but
it appeared, and this seemed to be considered as in his favour, that
he had a great deal to do with Vane-Cartwright.

After my visitor had taken courteous leave of me, it dawned upon me
what was meant by his dark sayings about Callaghan. I had wondered how
the opinions of an eminent specialist in police matters could be so
cogent in a case about which he knew nothing at first hand. Suddenly
it occurred to me that the eminent specialist really was a physician
well versed in the symptoms of insanity. The police then were not
being guided by those superficial and so to speak conventional notes
of guilt, of which I had thought, to the exclusion to all those sides
of character which I had noted. On the contrary they had a view of
their own on which these two conflicting sets of phenomena might be
reconciled, a view which explained why Callaghan was to me so
inexplicable. The man was not sane.

I could not conceal from myself that there was at least something
plausible in this view. There is a sort of marked eccentricity and, as
it were, irresponsibility of conduct of which I had always thought as
something not merely different from incipient madness but very far
removed from it. Yet I had once before been terribly mistaken in
thinking thus about a friend, and I might, I reflected, be mistaken
now. The natural effect upon me was, or should have been, a keener
sense of the unsubstantial nature of the story which I had built up
about Vane-Cartwright. But I believed it still.



Chapter XII

In the course of the summer my wife and I paid our annual visit
together to London, and I had a few days in Oxford before the end of
the summer term.

I heard a good deal about Vane-Cartwright in London, for he had become
a man of some mark in society, and moved in a little set, which was
known among its members by a rather precious name, now forgotten
though celebrated in the gossip of that time, and which included a
statesman or two of either party and several men of eminence in
letters, law or learning. By a strange coincidence of the sort which
is always happening, I met at an evening party a friend who mentioned
Longhurst, and I had just heard from him something of no moment about
this man whose fate so deeply exercised me, when I saw Vane-Cartwright
himself standing in another part of the throng. I took the opportunity
of watching him, unobserved myself, as I supposed. I have hitherto
forborne to describe his appearance, because such descriptions in
books seldom convey a picture to me. But I must say that seen now in a
room where there were several distinguished people, he made no less
impression on me than before. He was, I should say, five foot eleven
in height, thin and with a slight stoop, but with the wiry look which
sometimes belongs to men who were unathletic and perhaps delicate when
young, but whose physical strength has developed in after years. Hair
which had turned rather grey, while the soft texture and uniformly
dark hue of his skin still retained a certain beauty of youth,
probably accounted for a good deal of his distinction of appearance,
for he was not handsome, though his forehead, if narrow, was high, and
his eyes which were small were striking—of a dark greenish-grey
colour, I think. The expression of the mouth and of the clear-cut and
firm-set jaw was a good deal hidden by a long though rather thin
moustache, still black. I had time while he stood there to notice
again one trick, which I already knew; he was, I supposed, bent upon
being agreeable, so he was talking with animation, and when, in so
talking, he smiled and showed his white teeth, his eyelashes almost
completely veiled his eyes. To me, naturally, it gave him a hateful
expression, yet I could see a certain fascination about it. Then he
moved farther off—very quietly, but I could see as he made his way
through the crowd that in reality every motion was extraordinarily
quick.

Some ten minutes after, I was about to go, when he suddenly came from
behind and addressed me, asking me to choose a day for dinner or
luncheon at his club. I declined, and freed myself as courteously and
as quickly as I could, and thought, for the moment, that there had
been nothing marked in the way in which, obeying irresistible impulse,
I had shaken off the man whom I suspected on such slight grounds but
so rootedly.

A few days afterwards a great robbery was attempted at
Vane-Cartwright’s house. The robbers were after a well-chosen and
valuable collection of gold ornaments of early periods or from strange
countries, which he had begun to make. It was reported in the papers
that the theft had been with great presence of mind interrupted and
prevented by the owner of the ill-guarded treasures. But the robbers
themselves got away. The matter was much talked of, and conflicting
tales were told about it, but it seems that Vane-Cartwright, hearing
some unusual noise, had come downstairs and surprised the two men who
had entered the house before they had succeeded in removing any of
their spoil. As he came down he had rung up the police by the District
Messenger Company’s apparatus which was in the house. Coming quietly
upon them, and standing in the dark while they were in full light, he
had first ordered them to hold up their hands, and had then made each
of them singly turn out his pockets and restore the smaller stolen
articles which they had already secreted in them. He then, it was
said, kept them standing there to await the police. But, by some ruse,
they distracted his attention for a moment, and then, suddenly putting
out their light, made a rush past him and escaped. Such at any rate
appears to have been the information which he gave to the police who
arrived soon after. The police actually arrested two men, already
known to them as suspicious characters, who had been observed lurking
near the house together and afterwards slinking away separately, and
they were at first confident that they had secured the authors of the
attempted robbery. But Vane-Cartwright not only could not identify the
arrested men as the two housebreakers, whom he had of course seen
well; he insisted firmly that they were not the men whom he had seen;
nor were the right men ever caught. The matter caused some surprise,
and the police were freely blamed for their bungling. I have my own
reason for doubting whether they were justly blamed.

It is a mere fancy on my part that this incident and my meeting with
Vane-Cartwright a few days before may have had a connexion with each
other and with certain subsequent events in this history. I fear that
my experience in that year and the next has made me ready to see
fanciful connexions; and the reader, when he knows of those subsequent
events, will see what I suspect took place upon the discovery of the
theft, but will very likely think my suspicion extravagant. However
that may be, Vane-Cartwright’s plucky adventure and the celebrity
which it helped to give to his artistic collections, caused me to hear
all the more of him during my stay in London.

Curiously, however, it was at Oxford, where he had not distinguished
himself, that the fame of Vane-Cartwright was most dinned into my
ears. The University is apt to be much interested in the comparatively
few of her sons whose road to distinction is through commerce; and,
moreover, he had lately given to the University Museum a valuable
collection of East Indian weapons, fabrics, musical instruments and
what not, which he had got together with much judgment. Thus it
happened that I heard there one or two things about him which were of
interest to me. A friend of mine, an old tutor, the Bursar of the
college at which Vane-Cartwright had been, described him as he was in
his undergraduate days. He had, in his opinion, been badly brought up,
had never gone to school, but been trained at home by parents who were
good people with peculiar views, highly scientific and possibly highly
moral views. He had not fallen into either of the two common classes
of undergraduates which my old friend understood and approved—the
sportsmanlike and boyishly fashionable class, or the studious class
who studied on the ordinary lines; still less into the smaller, but
still not small, class which combines the merits of the two. He had
attainments of his own, which the old tutor did not value
sufficiently, for he was proficient in several modern languages and
modern literatures; moreover, the necessary mathematics, Greek and
Latin grammar, formal logic, etc., which he had to get up, gave him
not the slightest trouble. Altogether he had plenty of cleverness of
his own sort, but it was a sort which the Bursar thought unwholesome.
He was quite well conducted, and ought to have been a gentleman,
coming of the family of which he came, but somehow he was not quite a
gentleman. Thus it was a great surprise to the possibly conventional
instructor of his youth that he had done so well in the world.

Then I heard of him from another man, justly esteemed in financial
circles, who was on a visit to his son at Oxford, and whom I met in a
common-room after dinner. Somebody had hazarded the remark that
Vane-Cartwright must have been either a very hard worker or a very
lucky speculator. “No,” said this gentleman, who was a colleague of
his on the Board of one of the only two companies of which he was a
director, “I should not say that a man like that worked hard as you
would understand work at Oxford, or at least as a few of you would.
His hard work was done when he was young. Most of his business is what
one of his clerks could run, and probably does run, for many weeks
together, on lines which he has planned very carefully and revises
whenever occasion requires. Nor is he what most people would call a
speculator. I fancy he very seldom takes any uncommon sort of risk,
but he always does it at the right moment. He has succeeded because he
is very quick in making his calculations and very bold in taking
action on them. He does not seem to be constantly watching things, but
when a special emergency or a special opportunity occurs he seems to
grasp it instantly, and I believe he troubles himself very little, too
little perhaps, about any affair of his when it is once well in
train.”

Lastly, I heard a story, the narrator of which could give me few
precise details, of the pains which Vane-Cartwright had taken to
search out the few relations of an old partner of his in the East who
had died before their affairs turned out so successfully, and of the
generosity with which he had set up these people in life though they
had very little claim on him. Here at least was something which took
its place in the story which I was weaving; the rest of what I had
heard was little to the purpose, though it served to give life and
colour to my idea of the man’s character.

Now, however, I was really to discover something definite. When we
returned to our home at Long Wilton, only a little before we finally
left it, I completed my examination of Peters’ papers. His various
diaries and notebooks, notes of travel and notes of study, jottings
and completed passages for his psychological book, I found to be of
fascinating interest, and I lingered over them long, but there was not
a hint among them all of Longhurst, the _Eleanor_ or any kindred
topic. One of the journals, I noticed, had had some leaves cut out.
The last place of my search was a small wooden trunk which I had
brought home from his house (now sold). On the top of it lay a sheet
of paper with, written in his mother’s hand, “Some little things which
I have put aside for Eustace. His wife or his children may care to see
them hereafter.” It may have been from a false sense of pathos, but my
eyes filled with tears, and I was indisposed to rifle callously these
relics so lovingly put aside with natural hopes which now could never
be fulfilled. I was about to make a bonfire of the box and all its
contents, reverently but with speed, when my wife arrested me in
amazement at my folly. “Why,” she said, “cannot you see? His letters
to his mother will be in it.” “His letters from the East,” she added,
as I still did not comprehend. And they were in it.



Chapter XIII

I here set down in order of their date several extracts from Peters’
letters to his mother written from Saigon in the years 1878 to 1880.

_First Extract:_ “I have a new acquaintance, one Willie Cartwright, a
young fellow who was at Oxford just after me. I spend a good deal of
time with him because of talking Oxford shop and because he is fond of
books; at least he was brought up among them, and reads the books he
thinks he ought to read. I have not got very much in common with him,
for he is a narrow-shouldered, bilious-looking, unathletic fellow,
with no instinct of sport in him; but he is a welcome addition to my
circle, because he is refined—in a negative way at least—and most of
my friends’ conversation here is—well, not refined, and it becomes a
bore.”

_Second Extract:_ “How curious that you should have known some of
young Cartwright’s people, for it is W. V. Cartwright. I thought they
must have lost their money since I heard of him at Oxford. Yes, I will
try to ‘take care of him’ a little, as you say, but really, though he
is quiet and not sociable among men, he is by no means a timid youth,
and he has quite got the name of a shrewd business man already.”

_Third Extract:_ “I am rather sorry about Willie Cartwright. He seems
to have got into the hands of a fellow named Longhurst, who has lately
turned up here, no one knows why. He, Longhurst, is a rough customer
whom no one seems to know anything about, except that he has been in
Australia. He has been a mining engineer, and seems to know also a lot
about tropical forestry. He has wonderful yarns of the discoveries he
has made in the Philippines, the Dutch Indies and all over the shop. I
should not believe his yarns, but he seems to have made a little money
somehow. Well, Cartwright now talks of becoming a partner with him in
some wild-cat venture, and I am afraid he will get let in. He says
himself he thinks Longhurst will try to do him. He had much better
stick to his humdrum business here, which will give him a living at
any rate, and perhaps enable him to retire comfortably when he is,
say, forty-five, young enough to enjoy life, though one does age soon
in this climate.”

_Fourth Extract:_ “Cartwright and Longhurst have actually gone off
together. Parker, whom Cartwright was with, is very sick about
it. . . . By the way, I ought to confess I was quite wrong about
Longhurst. I have seen a good deal of him since, and found him a very
kind fellow, with an extraordinary simplicity about him in spite of
all his varied experiences. I generally assume that when a man is
spoken of as a rough diamond, the roughness is a too obvious fact, and
the diamond a polite hypothesis, but I was wrong in Longhurst’s case.
Also I think you may reassure C.’s aunt about the chances of his being
swindled. In strict confidence I think the chances are the other way.
MacAndrew, the lawyer here, told me a story he had no business to tell
about the agreement between . . .” (Part of letter lost.)

This was all. Peters before long was moved to Java; and the letters to
his mother ceased soon after, for she died.

Not long afterwards I got Bryanston’s answer to my letter of enquiry
to him. He told me little but things of which by this time I was sure.
“C.” was Cartwright (William V. Cartwright, he called him), and was,
he conjectured, the man whom Peters connected with Longhurst’s death.
He would be glad to tell me at any time anything that he could, but he
was off now for a sea voyage which the state of his health made
necessary (a long absence immediately before accounted for some delay
in his answering me), and at present he could think of nothing to tell
me but what I should see in Peters’ letter to him, of which he was
keeping the original and now enclosed a copy.

The important part of the letter enclosed was as follows: “I have a
question to ask you which perhaps you will answer this time by return
of post. Never mind my previous question about the old Assyrians. You
will remember the time in 1882 when you were at Nagasaki, and you will
remember Longhurst’s being there and his sailing. After his
disappearance it got about naturally that he sailed in that unhappy
ship the _William the Silent_, which went down in a cyclone. Now I
have a distinct recollection that when I met you, some months after
that, you told me that you had seen Longhurst with Cartwright at
Nagasaki, that you saw them off, and that they both sailed together in
the same ship. I have forgotten the name of the ship you mentioned,
but it was a ship with some female name, and it belonged to your
people. Will you please tell me at once if my recollection is right.
As for my reason for asking, I expect I told you fully my reasons for
believing that Longhurst died by some foul play. I may have told you
the suspicion which I had as to who did it. It was a suspicion for
which I was sorry afterwards, for I saw reason to think it quite
unfounded. But I have just seen a man, whom I need not name, who must
have known when and how Longhurst sailed from Nagasaki; and he
astonished me by saying that he sailed in the _William the Silent_.
Now one of three things: either I have got muddled in my recollection
as to what you said, or, which I can hardly believe, I was mistaken in
my identification of the body which I exhumed from the tomb which the
chiefs showed me, or I was right in both points, and then a conclusion
seems to follow which I shrink very much from drawing. There is one
other matter of fact which I suspect and which I can easily verify,
which would absolutely fix the guilt on the man I allude to, but I
want to make quite sure from you that my memory is right as to
Longhurst’s sailing. A suspicion of my man’s guilt came to me as I
have said, long ago, but after making some enquiries I dismissed it
summarily, for I have, or ought to have, a sort of hereditary
friendship with him.”

So then my hypothesis had been further put to the test of facts, and
again some of the points which I had guessed had proved to be true. It
was no longer only a fanciful imagination of my own, but a suspicion
which any sane man with the facts before him must feel, and feel very
strongly. There was more than enough evidence for any sensible
historian, for a lawyer there was still none at all.

In September the time came that we were to leave Long Wilton for good.
We then moved to a country parish, which, though deep in the country,
is yet very near to London (and I thenceforward often came to town).
Naturally leaving one parish and getting into another, not to speak of
the change of house, filled my whole time with work to be finished now
or never, and with arrangements which must instantly be set on foot
for future work.

Before the close of the year 1896 (I think it was late in October,
anyway it was some time after I had settled into my new parish), a
further record of the sort for which I have been looking came to
light. It was my business as executor to sell certain securities which
had belonged to Peters, and for a long time there was a difficulty in
finding with whom those securities were lodged. Eventually, however,
they were found in the hands of the firm who had been his agents while
he was absent in the East, and in sending them to me, the firm sent
also a packet which they told me had been deposited with them for safe
keeping in the year 1884, on the occasion of a brief visit home which
Peters had made. The packet was a large envelope on which was written
“Notes on the affair of L.” On opening it I found first two maps drawn
by Peters. The one was a rough copy of a map of the island Sulu, in
the Philippines. The other a map on larger scale, very carefully
drawn, apparently from Peters’ own survey, of a small portion of the
island. It was inscribed “Chart showing the spot where the tomb of a
dead white man was shown me by the two chiefs”. Next I found a number
of sheets taken out of Peters’ journal, kept in the year 1882 in the
months of July and August. From this it appeared that Peters had at
that time accompanied one Dr. Kuyper, who seemed to have been a
naturalist, upon a cruise in the Philippines, and that they had come
to a village upon the coast of the island, where the Filipinos
informed them that a month or so before, a European, they thought an
Englishman, had come down from somewhere inland, with several Malay
and Chinese servants, and had requested assistance in burying the body
of his companion. The dead man, he stated, had been killed by a fall
from some rocks. The Filipino chiefs had told Peters that the
servants, who had not been present when the fall took place, were much
excited, and seemed suspicious about it, but that the manner and the
answers of the European traveller had allayed their own suspicion.
Something, however, seems to have aroused suspicion in Peters and
Kuyper, for they disinterred the body. Peters’ journal proceeded to
record certain facts about the body, the clothing, etc. (in particular
the fact that a finger was missing on one hand), which had led Peters
to identify the body as that of his former acquaintance, Longhurst. He
recorded also that they had found two bullets from a revolver in the
back of the head, and he made a note as to the size and pattern of
revolver which these bullets would fit. Full enquiries were made by
Peters and Kuyper as to the movements of the surviving traveller, who
was presumably the murderer, and he appeared to have sailed, the day
after his arrival, in a Chinese junk, which took him up at a point
which was indicated on the chart. Peters had recorded also the
description which the Filipinos gave of this visitor, and it was plain
to me that there were points in the description which tallied with the
appearance of Vane-Cartwright. It seemed, though the journal after
this point was fragmentary, that Peters and Kuyper proceeded
immediately afterwards to Manilla, very likely to communicate their
discovery to the officers of justice. There was nothing more in the
journal itself which it is worth while to repeat here.

Next I found a considerable number of notes, which were in large part
unintelligible to me and perhaps to any one except the man who made
them. There were many abbreviations in them, and very often they were
illegible. They included descriptions of a number of people with
outlandish names, and particulars as to where and how it was supposed
they were to be found. Unfortunately, it was just in these particulars
that the abbreviations and illegibility made the difficulties of the
reader most serious. There were also recorded the movements, or a
great part of the movements, of a personage called “X.” in the months
June to September in the year 1882.

Further, on a separate sheet of paper, I found an indication of the
reason why Peters had desisted from his pursuit of that person X. whom
I thought myself able to identify. This sheet of paper was headed
“Description given me of the convict Arkell executed at Singapore in
November, 1882”. The description corresponded very well with that
given in the journal of the presumable murderer of Longhurst, and so
far as it went it seemed to show that the convict Arkell might well
have been confused with the successful and respected financier,
William Vane-Cartwright. At the foot of the paper was a note, with the
dates queried, as to the time when Arkell had been, as he seems to
have been, on the island of Sulu.

There was also among these papers one which began, “These, so far as I
can recollect them, are the facts told me by MacAndrew in regard to
the agreements made in 1880 between X. and L.” MacAndrew’s story had
apparently related to changes made in the draft of the agreement, at
the instance of X., which MacAndrew evidently thought that L. had not
understood. The note seemed to have been finished in haste and to have
left out some important facts, which Peters no doubt carried in his
memory. A lawyer, among my friends, tells me that without these facts
it is impossible to be certain what exactly was the trick which “X.”
played upon “L.,” and that it is even possible to suppose that there
was no dishonesty at all in his proceedings.



Chapter XIV

Towards the end of November, 1896, I again saw Callaghan. I had some
time before ascertained that he had returned to London, and I daresay
it may appear to the reader strange that I should not immediately upon
his return have sought him out and again compared notes with him. But
(not to mention that I had no reason, so far, to set great store upon
Callaghan’s observations and theories) it must be remembered that I
had received a very grave warning as to his possible character. It is
a serious matter for a father of a family to enter into intimate
relations with a gentleman who, according to an eminent specialist, is
a homicidal lunatic. So I made first a few enquiries from
acquaintances of his in regard to his character and recent
proceedings. For a while I intended to put off seeing him till a time,
which I was now unhappily compelled to foresee, when my wife and
children would be safe out of the country. But in the end my enquiries
and my wife’s absolute conviction satisfied me that the idea of his
lunacy was really, as I had at first supposed, quite unfounded and
foolish.

Anyway, I at last invited Callaghan to stay for a couple of days in
our new home. He accepted, but for one night only. He arrived in the
afternoon full of his Parisian adventures and to a less extent of his
detective researches. With these, or with an adorned version of them,
he entertained me for an hour or so before dinner. It seems that his
sudden departure for Paris was not altogether motiveless. He had, on
his arrival in London, heard by some accident of a gentleman in Paris
who was a correspondent and intimate of Thalberg. He had immediately
conceived the notion of scraping acquaintance with this gentleman and
using him as a means of information about Thalberg, and he was further
drawn towards Paris by a fancy that he would like to study French
methods of criminal investigation, into which, through the good
offices of some friends of his, he thought he could get some insight.
In the latter respect he was gratified. Now it seems that he had
already begun before Peters’ death to cherish the ambition of getting
high employment in the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland
Yard. So it came to pass that his studies in the science of criminal
investigation generally, occupied more of his attention from that time
till our present meeting than the particular investigation which had
at first fascinated him. Moreover, before he had been long in Paris he
discovered, to his huge amusement, that he was himself the subject of
suspicion and of close observation, and without regard to how this
might affect his cherished ambition of an appointment at Scotland
Yard, he entered upon, and continued during three whole months, an
elaborate scheme of mystification for the French officials who were
observing him, and, through them, for that very Department in which he
wished to fill a high place. Nevertheless, he had pursued ingenious
enquiries in regard to the (as I still thought him) unfortunate
Thalberg, for which purpose he paid several flying visits to London
and elsewhere. The result of these enquiries he related to me,
mingling it up with the tale of his other adventures in such a manner
that it was hard for me to grasp what its importance might be. I was
able to see that Callaghan had employed quite extraordinary ingenuity
and pains in picking up the facts about Thalberg which he told me, but
that very ingenuity struck me as ludicrously disproportionate to the
importance of the facts which he had found, or was ever likely to find
along this road. Thalberg was a solicitor in the City who had been in
a small way of business, till the firm of which he was now the sole
surviving partner began, a good many years before, to be employed by
Vane-Cartwright. Vane-Cartwright got this firm appointed solicitors to
a company which was formed to take over his original venture in the
East, and he still continued to employ Thalberg from time to time upon
private business of his own. Thalberg’s family were interested in
Eastern commerce, and he had correspondence with many persons in
various parts of the far East. Years before he had transacted for
Vane-Cartwright a good deal of correspondence of a nature so secret as
to be unknown to his clerks, and in the course of this very year he
had again returned to an employment of the like kind for some one or
other. It appeared that it might have been upon an errand connected
with this secret correspondence that he had come down to Long Wilton.
Callaghan was much excited about a discovery which he had made that
Thalberg had in January of this year been in correspondence with a
personage in Madrid, telegraphing to him in a cipher employed by the
Spanish Consulate in London, of which he was able to make use through
an official in that Consulate, who had since been discharged for
misconduct and was now in Paris. There was more of this nature as to
the mysterious proceedings of Thalberg, but I cannot well remember how
much Callaghan told me on that occasion, and I must observe that I
have set down what he then told me as I understand it now. I was not
able to understand it completely at the time owing to the fact that
throughout his talk that afternoon Callaghan did not once allude to
Vane-Cartwright by his name.

I wondered then, and I wonder now, how far up to this time Callaghan
suspected Vane-Cartwright. I believe that he did not like to avow to
himself the full suspicion that he felt, and that this was why he
hesitated to name him to me. I am sure that in his heart he disliked
him very much; he had always seemed to do so. But I think that, to my
Irish friend, Vane-Cartwright appeared the embodiment of those
characteristics of the Englishman which an Irishman knows he dislikes,
but thinks that he ought to respect. So I should guess that, as long
as he could, he had dutifully forced himself to believe in
Vane-Cartwright as a very estimable person full of English rectitude.
In any case, for all the pains he took to follow up his suspicion that
Thalberg was somehow connected with the crime, I know that he had not
fully seen the conclusion to which this was leading him.

When I went up to dress for dinner, I reminded my wife of certain
passages in Peters’ manuscripts on psychology which we had read
together with very great interest. Among these was a curious paper on
“Imagination, Truth-telling and Lying,” in which, beginning with the
paradox that the correct perception of fact depended far more on moral
qualities, and truthfulness in ordinary speech far more on
intellectual qualities than was generally supposed, he proceeded to
describe with great wealth of illustration some of the types under
which races and individual men fall, in respect of their power of
getting hold of truth and of giving it out. Scattered through these
pages were a number of remarks which came to my mind in this talk with
Callaghan. With most of them I will not trouble the reader, but in one
passage in particular Peters had pointed out the mistake of thinking
that a man who commits glaring inaccuracies is necessarily on that
account not worth listening to. Ludicrous inaccuracies, even glaring
falsehoods as they may seem, spring often, he insisted, from the
peculiar abundance and vivacity of the impressions which a man
receives from what passes before his eyes. A person with this gift may
frequently in his memory put something that he has truly noticed into
a wrong connexion, or combine two scattered fragments of observation,
true in themselves, into a single totally erroneous recollection of
fact. But a man who gets things wrong in this way, is, said Peters,
often more full of information than a more sober observer, because he
has noticed far more, and after all, a very large part of what he has
noticed is sure to be accurately retained. In another passage, which I
am afraid I may mar by summarising it, Peters described how, with all
men in some degree, but with some men in a wonderful degree,
intellectual faculties are the servants of emotional interests, so
that not only the power of inference, but even memory itself will do
work at the bidding of pain or pleasure, liking or dislike, which it
will not do upon a merely rational demand. Reminding my wife of this,
I said I wished I knew by what test I could tell the true from the
false in Callaghan’s reminiscences, and by what spell I could turn the
flow of those reminiscences into the channel in which they would be
useful.

As we went down to dinner she whispered to me that, if Callaghan was
the sort of man that I seemed to think, she would try to turn his
thoughts in the useful direction; only I must let him alone for a
little while. In the course of dinner, she told our guest what she had
told me long before about Vane-Cartwright’s engagement, and how it had
been broken off, and just what the young lady had said to her. Only of
course she did not go on to tell him the rash inference which she had
drawn as to Vane-Cartwright’s guilt. I could see that Callaghan heard
her with strange emotion, but my wife speedily turned the conversation
on to more commonplace topics, upon which, during the remainder of
dinner, he responded to her brightly enough, but by no means with his
usual appearance of interest.

After dinner Callaghan and I retired to my study to smoke pipes. He
sat for a long while silent, and I thought that he had gone to sleep,
or should have thought so but for the contraction of his brows.
Suddenly he sat upright in his chair. “Faith!” he exclaimed with great
energy, and with the air of a man to whom a really thrilling thought
has just occurred, “I know what became of those eyeglasses of mine.”
“What eyeglasses?” I asked, disappointed and annoyed at the triviality
of what came forth as the issue of his cogitation. “Why,” he said, “I
once took for a short time to wearing eyeglasses. I was looking at the
stars with a man one night and I found I could not count seven
Pleiades. So I went to an oculist who said he would pass me for the
Navy, but as I was paying him a fee I might take a prescription for a
pair of double eyeglasses which I never could keep steady on my nose.”
“Well?” I said sulkily. “Well,” he answered, “it is only that I lost
them while I was staying with Peters. Of course they went into that
big despatch-box, which Vane-Cartwright always kept in his room. My
dear Mr. Driver,” he said in a more serious tone, “do you really
suppose that Vane-Cartwright had not possessed himself of something
handy for throwing suspicion upon you, if you had turned out to be the
convenient man? I might easily have been the convenient man, and in
that case, the morning after the murder, my eyeglasses would have been
found smashed and lying on the floor of Peters’ bedroom, as if he had
knocked them off in struggling with me. Only (fortunately for you and
me, Mr. Driver), Trethewy was chosen as the suitable man, and
accidents that we know of prevented the plot against Trethewy working
as well as perhaps the plot against you or me might have worked.
Well,” he continued with a smile, “I have a good deal more to tell you
about Mr. Thalberg, but that will keep for a bit, and we shall
understand it better later. I suspect there is something different
that you wanted to ask me about now.”

I asked him for anything that he remembered of that evening when
Vane-Cartwright had first visited Peters at Long Wilton, while
Callaghan was already staying in the house. He recounted to me and to
my wife, whom we called in, the conversation and events of that
evening in great detail. An indescribable change seemed to have come
over him for a time; not only was the matter which he had to relate
weighty, but the man himself gave me an impression of force and
character which I had not previously suspected. I repeat only so much
of his narrative as was of special interest for my purpose. “After a
bit,” said Callaghan, “Peters and Vane-Cartwright got away on to the
subject of their experiences in some Cannibal Islands, or French
possessions, or I do not know where. I was not much interested, and I
dozed a bit, till suddenly I was aroused and saw that there was
something up. I do not know what Vane-Cartwright had said, but
suddenly Peters said, ‘Sailed in what?’ three times as quick and three
times as loud as his usual way of speaking. That was what woke me up.
‘In the’—I don’t remember the name, I did not quite catch it, for
Vane-Cartwright was speaking very quietly, though I could see that his
face was set hard and that his eyes were bright, and I began to think
he did not look such a dull fellow as I thought him at first. Peters
said nothing but ‘Oh,’ and this time very quietly. Then he got up and
strode slowly about the room with his hands clenched. He did not seem
to notice Vane-Cartwright much, and Vane-Cartwright went on talking,
in as indifferent a way as he could, about cyclones and things, the
usual sort of travellers’ talk, only without the lies that I should
have thrown in; but he was watching Peters all the time like a cat.
After a while Peters sat down again and seemed quite composed, and
talked again in quite a friendly way, but it seemed to be an effort.
Then he went and wrote a letter at the other end of the room, two
letters rather; one I noticed was addressed to Bombay, or Beirut, or
somewhere beginning with a B. Both the letters had twopenny-halfpenny
stamps on them. Soon it was bedtime; but Peters was for taking his
letters down to the post that they might go early in the morning, and
Vane-Cartwright was very anxious to take the letters for him, as it
would be very little out of his way to go down to the post. Peters
thanked him in that very polite way which he had with him when he did
feel really obstinate. I was not going with them, for I thought I was
in the way, but, just as he was leaving, Peters turned back and asked
me rather pressingly to come too. I suppose he would have felt lonely
in that man’s company, for certainly he did not want to talk to me. I
do not think he said more than two words to me after we parted from
Vane-Cartwright, who, by the way, kept with us all the way to the post
office, which was not on his way home; but, just as we were getting
back, Peters said to me suddenly, ‘Let me see, did I ask him to stay
with me next time he came here?’ ‘I do not know,’ said I. ‘Well,
good-night,’ said he.”

At this point I broke in upon Callaghan’s story with loud regrets that
Peters had written those letters with the murderer in the room, “For
you know what those letters were about,” I added, remembering that he
did not. “I know,” said he, “but he could not help it; he was an
Englishman. You English always show your hand. Not because you are
frank and outspoken, for you are anything but that, but because you
are so proud. You know,” he went on, “that I have a devout belief in
the English qualities that all we Irish hear so much about; but when I
had an Englishman for my dearest friend, I could not help noticing the
national defects, could I? I could not have acted as Peters did. I
rather hope that when I had got scent of the fellow’s dirty
secret—whatever it was, for I have not a notion about that—I would
have exploded at once and had it out with him. I daresay I should not,
but, if I had not, at least I should have taken the trouble to
dissemble properly.” “If he had done either,” I said, “he would be
alive to-day, and Vane-Cartwright would not be a murderer, or at
least——” “I understand you,” said he.

He continued his story, and related with great detail what was done
and said day by day during Vane-Cartwright’s calamitous sojourn in
Peters’ house when he returned to stay there. He described the
relations of the two men as being exactly the reverse of what they had
been when he had formerly seen them together. Then Peters had been
genial and friendly, Vane-Cartwright stiff and unforthcoming. Now it
was very much the other way. Several times, it appeared, the
conversation had got upon the subject of Peters’ Eastern travels. Each
time the conversation had been led thither by Vane-Cartwright in a way
of which I was afterwards to have experience. Peters was in a manner
compelled to enter into it and compelled to yield information which
Callaghan at the moment had thought utterly trivial, but which he now
saw clearly Vane-Cartwright was anxious to possess. The information
which was extracted seems to have related to all the places that
Peters had visited in the East, and all the people whom he had ever
met, and Callaghan remembered, or fancied, that several times, while
he was being thus drawn out, Peters showed curious irritation. It
appeared most strikingly from Callaghan’s recital that Vane-Cartwright
had throughout shown the coolest readiness to talk about the scene of
his crime, if he had committed one, and to take Peters’ recollection
back to the old days of his association with Longhurst.

But now I must explain that through all that Callaghan told me, ran
the same strain of odd and fantastic inaccuracy to which I have more
than once alluded. Several times, for example, he said that I was
present at conversations at which I certainly was not present. He
repeated to me remarks of my own, which, if I ever said anything like
them, were made on a totally different occasion from that of which he
spoke. One of those remarks had really been made within three hours of
the time when he repeated it to me, and could not have been made
previously. This is perhaps the best example that I can give of what
caused me a most exasperating sense of disappointment. Disappointment
because, where I could not check him, Callaghan seemed to be supplying
me, in the greatest fulness and in the most credible manner, with just
the information that I desired; but where I could check him, though he
was now and then curiously accurate in his recollection of
circumstances well known to me, which I had not thought he could have
observed, it still more often happened that he was under some
grotesque mistake.

Worst of all, he gave me new details about the fatal night, which, if
they could have been trusted, would have had greater weight than any
other piece of evidence that had yet come to me, but they were just of
the sort in which he was likely to be mistaken. Speaking of the moment
at which he was called out from his room by the disturbance in the
street, he declared that knocking immediately at Vane-Cartwright’s
door he heard, as Vane-Cartwright answered from the far corner of the
room, a click which he was certain came from the lock of the
despatch-box which he had mentioned. He conjectured that among various
articles which were there for a dark purpose, the knife which was the
instrument of Peters’ death lay in that box, and that he had
interrupted Vane-Cartwright in the act of taking it forth. This of
course was mere conjecture, but what followed seemed at first evidence
enough to have hanged the criminal. He had opened Vane-Cartwright’s
door, and he now described to me almost every object that was in the
room as he entered it. Amongst others there lay upon the chest of
drawers George Borrow’s _Bible in Spain_ in a binding which he
described. Curiously enough he did not know the significance of this;
he had, as he told me, been so much overwhelmed with grief when the
murder was discovered that he had hardly begun to see or think
distinctly till after we had all left the room of death; but as the
reader may remember, this was the very book (and it was bound in the
same way) which was found in that room dropped from the dead man’s
hand with torn and crumpled leaves. Who but Vane-Cartwright could have
brought it there?

It was one of Peters’ oddities, well known to me (and perhaps
Vane-Cartwright had learnt it long ago at Saigon), that he would have
welcomed at any strange hour the incursion of a friend to talk about
anything. No doubt, I thought, Vane-Cartwright entered his room on the
pretext of showing him a passage which bore on something he had said.
Probably between the leaves of the _Bible in Spain_ he carried
something that looked like a paper-knife. Anyway here was proof that
after the hour at which any of us saw Peters alive, after
Vane-Cartwright, by his own account, had last seen him, that man
entered Peters’ room. “But,” I exclaimed, as all this ran through my
mind, “you spoke just now of the day when I was riding at Long Wilton,
whereas I was on a horse to-day for the first time for four years. Ten
times at least I have known you put things out of time or out of place
just like that, by way of giving colour to your story. How do I know
that you have not done so now, that you did not really see that book
in Vane-Cartwright’s room any one of the other times that you went
there, that it had not been back in Peters’ library and been brought
up again by Peters himself?”

To my surprise Callaghan answered most humbly. He was quite aware, he
said, of this evil trick of his mind; he had had it from a boy, and
his parents ought to have flogged it out of him. As to the particular
point on which I challenged him, he could not himself be quite sure.

During the remainder of his stay with me I gave him an outline of what
I had so far discovered, and we compared notes upon it, but he was not
long with me, as he had an important engagement next evening, and our
conference was not so full as it should have been. So it easily
happened that neither of us gained the enlightenment which he might
have gained if our talk had been fuller. But I must confess that I
fell into the fault which he called English. My disclosure was more
incomplete than it need have been; I had not quite got over my
instinctive wish to keep him at arm’s length, and my pride rebelled a
little at the discovery that this erratic Irishman was not a man whom
I could afford to patronise.



Chapter XV

The chapter which I am about to write may well prove dreary. It will
be nothing but a record of two deaths and of much discouragement. Here
was I with my theory (for it had been no more) grown into a fairly
connected history which so appealed at many points to a rational
judgment as to leave little room for doubt of its truth. And yet, as I
could not but see, there was very little in it at present which could
form even a part of the evidence necessary to convict Vane-Cartwright
in a Court of Law. I determined all the same to get advice upon the
matter from a lawyer, who was my friend, thinking that it was now time
to put my materials in the hands of the authorities charged with the
detection of crime, and that, with this to start upon, and with the
skill and resources which they possessed, they could hardly fail
before long to discover the evidence needed for a prosecution. But my
lawyer friend, though he quite agreed with me in my conviction that
Vane-Cartwright was guilty of two murders, doubted whether the facts
which I had got together would move the authorities to take up the
matter actively. Still he undertook, with my approval, to talk about
the subject with some one in the Public Prosecutor’s office or in the
Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, I do not know
which. Nothing resulted from this, and the failure needs little
explanation. Some want of touch between town and country police, some
want of eagerness on the part of a skilled official who had lately
incurred blame and disappointment through the ludicrous failure of a
keen pursuit upon a somewhat similar trail, these might account for it
all. But besides, Callaghan had been beforehand with us, and on this
occasion had managed to raise a spirit of incredulity about it all.
Perhaps too even hardened experts recoiled instinctively from
associating with guilt one of the few great men of finance who were at
once well known to the outside public and respected in the City
itself.

For me then there was nothing but to wait for the further things which
I somehow felt certain would turn up. As for Callaghan it happened
just about this time that he became keenly enamoured of an invention,
made by an engineer friend of his, through which he persuaded himself
that he could make his own and his friend’s fortune. Henceforward for
some time the affair of Peters seems to have passed from his mind, and
he was prevented from meeting me at the few times at which I should
have been able to see him.

In the course of December I had a letter from my old parish from a
friend who was kind enough to keep me posted in the gossip of the
place. He said that the police were now busy over a new clue as to the
murder. It may be remembered that according to Trethewy he had, as he
returned home on the night of the murder, been passed in the lane by a
man riding a horse and leading another. Well, report said now that a
man in a neighbouring parish, who had been greatly excited about the
murder at the time, had been having dreams about it night after night,
which impressed him with the notion that he was to discover the truth.
Rooting about for all the recollections of that time which he could
find among his neighbours, he heard that in the early morning after
the murder a man with two horses had been seen between Peters’ house
and the village, that another man, a stranger to the village, had come
up from the direction of Peters’ house and had mounted the second
horse, and that the two had ridden off together. Report added that the
man whom Trethewy had seen had now been traced by the police, and that
his answers as to the man who had joined him and ridden off with him
were unsatisfactory and suspicious; and it added one more telling
detail. The police (as I may have mentioned) had before I left Long
Wilton noticed one window at the back of the house as in some respects
the readiest way by which the house could have been wrongfully
entered. It belonged to a housemaid’s closet, of which the door did
not shut properly. It was very easy to climb up to it; but then the
window itself was very small, and it was a question whether a man of
ordinary stature could possibly have squeezed himself through it; now
the strange man of this rumour was described as being ridiculously
small and thin. There were many more picturesque details related, but
the whole story professed only to consist of unsifted rumour. I
believed little of it, but I naturally did accept the statement (quite
mistaken) that the police were busy in the matter. With my fixed idea
about Vane-Cartwright, I felt sure that they were upon a false scent.
But I thought it very likely that this would for the present absorb
their attention, and, between this and the great pressure of work in a
new parish and of certain family anxieties, I made no further effort
at this time to secure attention to the discovery which I believed I
had made.

Twice in the few days just before Christmas my hopes of making further
discoveries were vainly aroused. I made a call of civility in my new
parish upon a notable Nonconformist parishioner, and, in my rapid
survey of his sitting-room before he came to me, I noticed several
indications that he had been in Australia, and I saw on the
mantelpiece a framed photograph. It was rather a hazy and faded
photograph which gave me no clear impression of its subject, but under
it was written, “Walter Longhurst, Melbourne, 3rd April, 1875”. Could
that be my Longhurst, and was this one of those relations of his,
whom, as I had heard, Vane-Cartwright had treated with suspicious
generosity? Might he not, in that case, be the possessor of
information more valuable than he knew? He now came in. He was a truly
venerable man, who in spite of great age was still active as a
lay-preacher of one of the Methodist Churches, and I was attracted by
the archaic but evidently sincere piety of his greeting when he
entered the room. But unfortunately, when by adjusting his gold
spectacles he had discovered of what profession I was, a cloud of
suspicion seemed to arise in his mind, and he was more anxious to
testify, in all charity but with all plain dealing, concerning
priestly pretensions and concerning that educational policy which was
then beginning to gather strength, than to enter into any such
conversation as I desired. I made out, nevertheless, that this Walter
Longhurst was probably my Longhurst, and my expectation rose
unreasonably. My new friend (if he will let me call him so) was no
relation of his, but had known him at a time when both were in
Australia. Longhurst was from his point of view outside the fold
besides being a rough kind of man, or, as he put it, a “careless
liver”; but he evidently flattered himself that he had exercised a
good influence over Longhurst, and the latter had given money, which
he could then ill afford, though he made a good deal of money later,
to help religious work with which my lay-preaching friend was
connected. Later on, when my informant had returned to England and was
for some time incapacitated by an accident which happened on the
voyage, Longhurst, to his surprise, had from time to time sent him
presents of money. They came in the form of banknotes, sent by a
mysterious agent in London, who gave no address to which they could be
returned, but who wrote stating Longhurst’s desire that he should use
them for himself, or, if he absolutely would not, should at least use
them in his work. All this the old man’s gratitude obliged him to
relate, but, when I pressed him for information about Longhurst’s
relations or friends, either he knew nothing or his ill-defined
suspicion of me returned and shut his mouth. I did, however, ascertain
that some years before (after Longhurst’s death) a rich gentleman,
whose name the old man had forgotten, though I thought I could supply
it, had heard of him in some way as one of Longhurst’s beneficiaries,
and pressed upon him a pension which he had refused, as he would, if
he could, have refused Longhurst’s bounty.

Two days later, on Christmas Eve, I was urgently summoned to visit
Peters’ aunt, Miss Waterston, whom I had seen at his funeral. I had
called upon her in the summer at her flat in London, but a lady who
was staying with her remained in the room all the time, in spite, as I
thought, of several hints that she might go, and Miss Waterston, when
I left, said how glad she would be to see me again, and, she hoped,
talk with me more fully. I took little note of this at the time, but I
made up my mind to take my wife to see the old lady when I could, and
continued thinking of it and putting it off till I got this summons,
which told me that Miss Waterston was very ill and had something which
she much wished to tell me. When I arrived at her flat she was dead.
The lady who had been looking after her told me that she had several
times shown anxiety that I should come soon, but had at last remarked
that if I did not come in time she would accept it as a sign that what
she had meant to tell me was best untold. She had two weeks before,
when she was not yet ill, remarked that she would like to see me soon.
Various straws of things that were told me about her suggested that
she had lately become concerned afresh about her nephew’s death. She
had been intimate with the Cartwright family, and had to the end seen
something of a rather neglected widowed cousin of William
Vane-Cartwright’s. Of course I have no ground for thinking that she
had any grave disclosure to make to me.

Christmas, that year, came sadly to me. We must in any case have been
full of memories of the last Christmas, at which Peters had joined our
party and added much to the children’s and our own delight. This
Christmas he was dead; the hope, not perhaps consonant with Christmas
thoughts, of avenging him had arisen in my mind and was dying, and I
came home from the deathbed of the last remaining person of his kin
who had loved him better than we did, and who in the little I had seen
of her had reflected to me some indefinable trace of the same noble
qualities as I discovered in him.

I attended her funeral. So did the old cousin who had come with her to
Peters’ funeral. He recognised me and greeted me courteously,
remarking what a charming person that Mr. Vane-Cartwright was whom he
had met at my house. He looked to me older; his grey hair was turning
auburn; he was as unattractive to me as the rest of the appanage of
funerals, but I was grateful to him for being one of the very few who
came to honour the remains of the old woman, almost a stranger to me,
whom I yet so truly respected.

By the time the anniversary of Peters’ death came round I was again
alone; it had been necessary after Christmas that my daughter should
go South, and my wife had taken her. I was busy and therefore happy
enough, and I did not often but I did sometimes ask myself, would
nothing more ever turn up? Yes, before long something did turn up;
something not to help me on but to show me that, in thinking ever to
unravel the dark history of Longhurst’s fate, I had started upon a
hopeless task. Early in February a letter came to me re-directed to
Peters from the dead letter office at Siena, where it had long lain
entombed. It was a letter written by Peters to a certain Reverend
James Verschoyle, D.D., addressing him as a person Peters well knew
and had seen quite lately. It bore the date of Vane-Cartwright’s first
evening at Grenvile Combe. It reminded him of a conversation which he
had had with Peters, at their last meeting, about a very mysterious
event in the Philippines, and of the great surprise which Peters had
expressed at what Verschoyle then told him. “To tell the truth,” said
Peters, “it should have revived a suspicion which I had long ago
entertained against a man who was once my friend. Or rather, it should
have done more than that, it should have convinced me of his guilt and
given me the means of proving it. How I came to put it from my mind I
hardly know. I think that my recollection of what you told me is
precise, but I should be greatly obliged if you would refer to your
journals of the months May to October, 1882, and perhaps you will
oblige me by copying out for me all that has any bearing on this
matter. I am sorry to trouble you, but I am convinced that the ends of
justice may be served by your doing this for me, and I suspect that if
they are to be served, I must act as quickly as I may.”

I lost no time in tracing the Rev. James Verschoyle, D.D., who had
about a year before been at Siena. He had, after a sojourn in Germany,
come back to England. He had, I found, been a missionary in the East.
I managed to trace him to his latest address, only to find that he had
died in the previous August. I had an interview with some of his
family, and found them most obligingly willing to search for the
journals in question. It was strange that the journals for the years
1881 to 1883 could nowhere be found. I was convinced that they had
contained those crucial facts to which Peters had referred in his
letter to Bryanston.

Evidently there had been information in Dr. Verschoyle’s possession
which in Peters’ hands could have led to the conviction of
Vane-Cartwright. Evidently Peters had once seen that information, but
had disregarded it, more or less wilfully, in his determination to
think his old acquaintance innocent, and to put the guilt on Arkell
who had been hanged at Singapore. Evidently the full significance of
Verschoyle’s facts came to his mind when Vane-Cartwright, that evening
at Grenvile Combe, had revived his first suspicion, and he wrote at
once to recover the precise details. But of what nature that
information was, and how Vane-Cartwright, seeing Verschoyle’s name on
an envelope, could have grasped the full extent of the danger to
himself, I could not guess then, and I cannot guess now.



Chapter XVI

So then the mystery of Longhurst’s fate was not for me to unravel.
Peters had held the clue of it, and had died because he held it;
Verschoyle perhaps had the clue and was dead too, probably from some
other cause; neither had recorded his secret, or the record could not
be found. As for the manner of Peters’ death, what further place was
there to look to for some fresh discovery? I already had heard all
that any of my old parishioners, any grown man or woman among them,
knew, and it was less than I knew, and I had searched the
neighbourhood for news, quietly, but I hoped no less effectively; the
police, I was now ready to believe, had searched as zealously and more
wisely. And so Vane-Cartwright was to go unhanged, and why not, after
all? he was not a homicidal maniac but a wise criminal, rather more
unlikely than most men to commit any further crime. Even his gains,
however ill-gotten, were not likely to be more harmfully spent than
those of many a better man. And no innocent man suffered under
suspicion. Trethewy had been found a good place by some unlooked-for
benefactor, where no memory of the crime would pursue him. Callaghan’s
numerous enough friends understood him far too well to suspect him,
and as for his numerous acquaintances who were not friends, if they
did suspect him, the good man would be rather amused than otherwise.
Let Vane-Cartwright live and adorn society which is adorned by men and
women worse than he, to whom circumstances have never brought the
opportunity of dramatic wrong-doing.

Thus I tried to think, as I left England for a few weeks in the late
spring of 1897 to join my wife and our daughter, who was now much
stronger, in Italy; but, whatever I tried to think, I had always with
me that consciousness of a purpose frustrated or let go, which is
perhaps the hardest thing to bear well and the most enervating thing
to bear ill.

Some ten days later I was in Florence with my wife. The next day we
were to go to Rome, leaving our daughter at the villa of a friend in
Fiesole. I remember at our early breakfast telling my wife the facts
or reports which I had been picking up about that strangely powerful
secret organisation, the Mafia. I repeated to her what I had just
heard, that not only prominent Italian politicians, but even
foreigners who had large commercial dealings with Italy, sometimes
found it convenient to be on good terms with that society. But she was
little interested in political facts which did not connect themselves
with any particular personality, and I thought she had hardly heard
me, though she raised her eyes to listen from the volume of Senator
Villari’s _Savonarola_ which she was finishing. I little imagined that
before another day had closed this chance remark of mine would have
acquired the closest personal interest for her, and have been turned
to very practical account.

Later in the day she was in the Pitti Galleries, and I came there from
Cook’s office to join her. She was looking with puzzled interest at a
picture by Botticelli, when a tall man, dressed like an Englishman,
placed himself with assumed unconsciousness just in front of her, in a
position of vantage for fixing his connoisseur’s gaze upon it. She
turned away and met me, and was saying, half-amused, that after all
there were Englishmen who could be as rude as any foreigner, when,
looking at him again as he moved away to leave the gallery, she
started and said: “Oh, Robert, I know his face”. I too knew his face,
and knew, as she did not, his name. “It is that dreadful man that I
told you about who was at Crema. Do not you remember I told you how he
would keep the only good room at the hotel when I arrived there with
mother so terribly ill, the time she had that first stroke. And oh, I
took such pains to write him the nicest note I could”—and very nice
her notes could be—“and I could just see his horrid face as he glanced
at it and said nothing but ‘tell the lady I cannot’ to the waiter. And
oh, poor mother did suffer in the dreadful hot room with all the
kitchen noises and the smells.” I did remember her story well, an
ordinary story enough, of one of those neglects of courtesy which,
once in fifty times it may be, are neglects of elementary mercy; but I
said little, and I did not tell her that her rediscovered enemy was my
enemy already, William Vane-Cartwright. I said to myself that I would
not tell her because she would feel an unreasonable relenting towards
Vane-Cartwright, if once she realised that she herself owed him a
grudge. Really I did not tell her because I had promptly formed a
design which she would have discovered and disapproved.

That evening I left my wife on some pretext, and having discovered
Vane-Cartwright’s hotel, I paid him a friendly call. I suppose it was
dishonourable; at least, I have often reproached myself for it, but
truly I do not know if it was really dishonourable. I do know that I
was very foolish to dream, as I did, that I should ferret something
out of him. He received me in his private sitting-room with
cordiality, or, I should rather say, effusiveness. He sent a rather
urgent message to his friend who was travelling with him, as if (I
thought) he did not wish to be alone with me, but he was far from
embarrassed. “Tell me, Mr. Driver,” he began, as soon as we were
seated, “has anything further been heard about the murder of our
friend Peters?” I answered that Trethewy had been released and had
left the neighbourhood, having found a situation, through some friends
unknown to me, and that to the best of my belief, the police had
discovered no further clue. “I am glad about Trethewy,” he said. “You
know I always suspected there had been some mistake there, and
besides, I always liked the man. I do not think the police will
discover a clue,” he said, “I rather think that the solution of the
mystery will occur to some of us, his friends, if a solution ever is
found.” I was silent. I could not tell whether he had a design to
allay possible suspicions of mine, or a design to goad me into
betraying whether I had those suspicions, or whether he was merely
keeping himself in practice. I wanted to drop the subject if I could.
“Do you know,” he persisted, “whether they have found any other way in
which the house could be entered from outside except the window of his
room, by which I don’t believe the murderer did enter?” I said there
was a small window to a housemaid’s closet which was not fastened, and
that the housemaid could not be quite certain that the door of the
closet was really locked overnight, for it did not shut properly; but
it was very doubtful whether a man could get through the window. “Who
in the world,” he said, “could have a motive for killing Peters, dear
old Eustace Peters?” I was beginning to lose my head, for I felt I was
playing an unworthy part. “Well,” I said, with no particular purpose,
“it seems certain that it cannot have been Mr. Thalberg.” “Certain, I
should say,” he answered. “Oh, no,” he added, more energetically, “I
know Thalberg well, and he is not the man. As for Callaghan, one might
as well suspect you or me—me, I should say,” and he turned away to
fetch a cigar, or perhaps to watch me for a moment in the mirror. “The
fact is,” he said returning, “it must be far easier than we, who have
never had occasion to give our wits to it, think to commit a murder
and hide one’s tracks absolutely. But here is Mr. Poile, let me
introduce you, and let us, for Heaven’s sake, talk of a more cheerful
subject.” So we did turn to a subject which I should have thought had
no pitfalls, the subject of Italian brocades, of which Vane-Cartwright
was an amateur. He produced a large parcel of ancient and gorgeous
stuffs which had come up on approval from a shop. He talked, in a way
that really held all my interest for the time, about the patterns;
and, starting from the more conventional of the designs before us, he
proceeded to discuss the history of common patterns, telling me
curious things about the patterns and the fabrics of the Eastern
Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula. Suddenly he picked up a really
noble piece of brocade, and turning to me, with a face of winning
simplicity and kindliness which he could not have learnt to assume if
it had not at some time been natural, he said: “Oh, Mr. Driver, I am
so fond of picking up these things, and it is so hard to find any
satisfactory use for them, it would be a real kindness if you would
accept this as an altar-cloth for your church. It will be wasted in a
museum otherwise.” It was too much for me. The proposition that I
should accept an altar-cloth for my church from the man that I was
seeking to convict of murder, sent a visible shudder through my frame,
and all the more because I felt that it was illogical to recoil from
this when I had not recoiled from affecting friendship to him. I said
“No” quite violently, and, when I collected my wits to utter thanks
and explanations, they were at once too effusive and too lame to have
blinded a stupider man than Vane-Cartwright.

I stayed long with him—should have outstayed my welcome, if I had ever
been welcome—for I was demoralised, and had resolved in mere dull
obstinacy both to disarm his suspicions somehow and to get something
out of him. The first would have been impossible for any one, the
second was impossible for me then, and at last I took leave, praying
him not to come down with me, and descended the stairs a very
miserable man. I had behaved stupidly, that was certain. I had behaved
badly, that was possible. I had shown him that I suspected him, that
was certain. I ought to have known beforehand that he would guess it,
for my refusal to visit him in London (as I happened to have promised
I would, before he left Long Wilton) had been marked enough to set him
thinking. Had I done nothing worse than betray vague suspicions? Yes,
in my floundering efforts I had recurred to his Eastern patterns, and
so led him to Eastern travels and towards topics dangerous to him,
only to fall into my own trap. He must have seen that I had somehow
heard before, as not one Englishman in twenty thousand has heard, of
the little island of Sulu.

Wholly sick with myself I stood in the hall of the hotel, absently
watching the porter set out the newly arrived letters in little heaps
on a table. There was one for Vane-Cartwright. Had I not noticed that
handwriting before? Yes, it was a marked hand, one so obviously that
of a servant and yet so well-formed and with such an elegance. I gazed
at the handwriting (somehow I thought of Sunday schools). I had just
time to note the postmark before another letter covered it.

The corner of my eye had half-caught a vision of some one coming
downstairs, coming very quietly but very quickly. A light step on the
rug beside me, an unpleasantly gentle hand taking my arm, the fingers,
I half-fancied, seeming to take measure of the size and hardness of my
muscle, and Vane-Cartwright’s too cultivated voice saying lightly,
“Looking to see if there is any one else that you know coming to the
hotel, Mr. Driver? I always do that. Well, good-night again, and so
many thanks.” “Caught again,” I reflected, as I turned into the
street, and nothing gained by spying and being caught spying. Yes,
something gained, that letter for Vane-Cartwright with the postmark
Crondall is in the handwriting of Mrs. Trethewy.


One question alone occupied me as I walked back: What was the exact
significance of the almost certain fact that the situation which the
Trethewys had obtained was really in Vane-Cartwright’s service? Had I
learnt that fact a day sooner, I might have thought that, murderer or
not, he had done a true and unobtrusive kindness in secretly engaging
them, but the little scene in the Pitti, and the trivial story of the
best bedroom at Crema, shut that explanation out of my mind. I had not
resolved this question when I got to the hotel and to my wife, who was
now anxiously expecting me. I had not even thought of the other
questions, to which it led, but I had at least returned in far too
sensible a mood to think any further of disguising anything from her.
Our talk lasted well into the night. I record so much of the substance
of its close as really concerns my story. “But still I do not see,” I
said, “why you should say I have spoilt our holiday.” “Because you
must go by the first train to-morrow. Not a moment later. Oh, Robert,
cannot you see why I have been so angry? I have looked forward so to
our stay alone together at Rome, and at another time I should be very
angry to lose it; but it is not that. Oh, Robert, I could find it in
my heart to beg you not to do your duty. It is your duty; you would
not be so full of passion against the man if it was not that you knew
it was your duty; and I know it too, and you must follow up that clue
at once before he makes it too late. But, oh, what am I saying, it is
not your duty I am thinking of. I would beg you to let the duty be if
that would save you. But it is too late now; it’s a race for life
between you and him. Peters has been killed, and Verschoyle has been
killed, and oh!”

The thought was not in the least new to me except so far as it
concerned Verschoyle. I had foreseen a time when my life would be in
danger from Vane-Cartwright. Stupid as it may seem, I had not realised
yet that that time was now, and anyway I had resolved to treat it
lightly myself, and hoped that it might not occur to her. We spent a
while without words. Then I said, in the foolish persuasion that it
was a manly utterance: “I do not think that I am brave, but somehow
the idea of being murdered, even if I put the likelihood of it far
higher than I do, is not one which, apart from the thought of you,
would weigh much with me”. Whatever I may have been going to add, I
was allowed to go no further. I was made to see in a minute that the
risk to my life was a real consideration which it was selfish and, in
a man of normal courage, very cheap to overlook; but anyway, the need
for haste was real, and, after a very short rest, I was to start. To
get ahead of Vane-Cartwright, who would probably look out for my
departure, I had resolved to take horses and carriage in the early
morning, post to Prato, and take the railway there. My wife was to go
with our daughter to our friend’s villa. So the next morning found me
on my way to England, sad to go, and yet, I must confess, not a little
exhilarated, against all reason, by the sense that perhaps it really
was a race for life on which I had started, and a race with a
formidable competitor.



Chapter XVII

Crondall is a small market town on a chalk stream in a Southern
county, and about two miles from it down the valley lies the
shooting- and fishing-box which Vane-Cartwright, as I found, had
lately taken, with a very considerable shooting in the well-wooded
hills, which lay behind it reaching up to the chalk downs, and with a
mile or so of fishing in the trout-stream which passed through the
garden. People shoot because it is the thing to do, but as a rule they
do not hunt or fish unless they like it. So it was for the shooting
that Vane-Cartwright had taken this place, a very charming place for a
bachelor, and within easy reach of town. Trethewy, however, had been
engaged as a sort of water-bailiff and to look after the fishing,
which he was more or less competent to do. I found him installed in a
queer old thatched cottage which stood on an island, formed by two
branches of the stream, at the lower end of the garden. The cottage
could be approached by a narrow footbridge from a private footpath
which led from Crondall. On the other side of the stream a public
footpath led towards the small village and the once famous fishing
inn, at which I took up my quarters for a few nights. The bridge just
mentioned was formed by two narrow brick arches, and above them were
hatches which were now raised; and just below the bridge the stream
was spanned by one of the old-fashioned fish-houses which are
occasionally found on South-country streams, under the floor of which
were large eel traps in which eels migrating down stream were caught.
Under the fish-house, which was entered from Trethewy’s cottage, the
stream rushed in two pent-up channels which joined again in a broad,
reed-fringed pool, with a deep dark hole immediately below the
fish-house. My eye fastened on this pool at once as the best morning
bath which had been offered me for some years.

Why was Trethewy there? Was Trethewy after all an accomplice in the
crime? My wife and I were agreed in not inclining to that explanation,
though in some ways it looked the most plausible. It followed that one
or more of the family was, to the knowledge of Vane-Cartwright, in
possession of information which, if it came out, would establish
Vane-Cartwright’s guilt. It did not follow that any of them had guilty
knowledge; probably they were not aware of the significance of what
they knew. Which of them held this dark secret, and how was I to
elicit it?

In the call just after their tea-time, which I lost no time in paying,
I found that each of the family was for a different reason hard to
approach on the topic on which I was so impatient to enter. I was
welcomed respectfully and cordially enough, but they were evidently
puzzled and surprised at my visit. I tried Trethewy first. He struck
me as much improved by his season of adversity, by the more active
life he now led, or by the rigid abstinence to which, as I soon
gathered, he had brought himself; but he told me quite firmly he never
spoke, never wished to speak of the question of Peters’ death. He had
himself suffered the horror of being accused when he was innocent; he
wished to run no risk of bringing the same on some other possibly
innocent man. Besides, the guilt of his own thought and motives still
weighed on him, and he had no wish to judge any other. Nevertheless,
he said plainly, when I asked how he liked his new position, that he
was ill at ease to have come and hoped soon to get away. From his
impenetrable manner, I began to fancy that, contrary to what I had at
first thought, the secret rested with him, and in that case the secret
would be very difficult to extract. As for Mrs. Trethewy, from the
time of the murder two thoughts had mainly occupied her mind: anxiety
for her husband, and anxiety that her daughter, for whose upbringing
she was so careful, should know nothing of the suspicion that had
rested on her father, and hear as little as possible of the horror
that had occurred so near her. The girl had been bundled away, the
very day after the discovery, to stay with Mrs. Trethewy’s mother, who
lived thirty miles away from their home. And to this day, the mother
told me, the girl had no idea that her father had been in prison
charged with the crime. Accordingly, Mrs. Trethewy was overflowing
with gratitude to Vane-Cartwright, who had found them this new home
far away. She told me that he had always seemed to take a fancy to her
husband, and had visited their cottage several times during his stay
with Peters; and that it was after a talk with him that she sent the
girl away to her grandmother’s. That the suggestion had actually come
from him she did not say, it was a mere guess of mine that he had
contrived to put it into her head. With the girl, whom she sent on an
errand to Crondall, I got no opportunity of talk that night, and I had
to return to my inn ill-satisfied with my exploration so far, and
puzzled how to proceed.

I got my bathe next morning in the pool of which I have spoken (this
is not quite so unimportant as it may seem). Trethewy managed to
ensure me privacy for the purpose, and after that I called on the
Trethewy family again. I have remarked already that I supposed myself
to have heard all that any grown-up person in my old parish could tell
in regard to the murder and its surrounding circumstances. It had been
borne on my mind strongly since my meeting with Vane-Cartwright at
Florence, that others besides adults have eyes and memories, that
Trethewy’s girl had been near the house at the time of the murder and
on the following day, and that I could not count on having heard from
her parents all that she might have to say that might be interesting
to me. When I called on the Trethewys again, I found it an easy matter
to get a walk by the river-side alone with the girl. I had anticipated
that, if I were to pay any decent regard to her mother’s hitherto
successful wishes for her ignorance, I might have to talk long and
roundabout before I could elicit what I wanted. I soon found that it
was not so. Ellen Trethewy, though little taller than before, had
mentally grown in those fifteen months from a shy and uninteresting
schoolgirl to a shy but alert, quick-witted and, as it now struck me,
rather interesting young woman.

We had many things belonging to old times to talk over, but I found
her anxious herself to talk on the very subject on which I was bent,
and I found in a moment that her mother’s precautions had been
absolutely vain. Knowing her mother’s wish, she had never alluded to
the matter since; but her grandmother, who disliked Trethewy, had
taken a keen pleasure in acquainting her with all that she herself
knew (and a good deal more besides) about the course of the
proceedings against him. The girl, not quite trusting her grandmother,
had procured and carefully read the newspaper account of the trial
before the magistrates. She had never doubted for one instant, she
told me, that her father was innocent, and it was with more than
common understanding that she studied the details in the story which
might make his innocence clear. “Is it very wicked of me, Mr. Driver?”
she said, “that I do not feel a bit, not a bit grateful to Mr.
Vane-Cartwright, and I do not believe father does. I do believe he
would have gone to the workhouse rather, if he had known it when we
came here that he was to be under Mr. Vane-Cartwright. But he thought
the gentleman who sent for us, and who was really his agent, was the
master of the place; and, once we were here, mother begged him so not
to go. Mother is always saying how good Mr. Cartwright has been to us,
and father never answers a word; but I am sure he has a plan to take
us away somewhere far off.” “Tell me,” I said, “what makes you say all
this. Have you seen anything in Mr. Vane-Cartwright to make you think
he had some wrong reason for getting your father to come here?” “Oh, I
do not say that,” she said, “but I have always feared his looks.
Always, I think, since he first came to our house to talk to father,
and much more since I saw him at the window that dreadful morning when
poor Mr. Peters lay dead.” “Why, what could you see that morning?” I
said. “Oh, very little,” she said. “You see, of course we heard the
news as Edith passed by on her way to call the police, and mother told
me to keep within doors, and she kept in herself, and then she went to
father and woke him, and she stayed there talking to him, and I was
alone and I felt so frightened. And then the policeman came, and you,
sir, and the doctor; and by-and-by some neighbours came looking in.
One of them was Mrs. Trimmer who kept the baker’s shop, and I was fond
of her, and I do not know whether it was that I was frightened to be
alone, or just inquisitiveness, for I was a child then, though it is
not so long ago, but, though I never disobeyed mother before, I did so
that time; and I went out, and Mrs. Trimmer took my hand and we walked
up and looked at the house. It was not much we saw, for all we stood
so long staring; but the front door opened and we saw that Irish
gentleman look out, looking so sad, poor man, and then he took a turn
or two up and down in the hall, leaving the door open; and then we
could hear voices, and the rest of you came downstairs and into the
hall, but I could see Mr. Vane-Cartwright come to the window of Mr.
Peters’ room, and he stood there looking out of the window with his
hand leaning on the sash of the window, leaning forward, seeming to be
looking out intently at the people below.” “Did he open the latch of
the window?” I asked at once. “I couldn’t say that,” said she. “Why
were you so frightened?” I asked. “Oh, I do not know,” said she; “he
didn’t look anything very terrible, and I couldn’t see him well for
there was frost on the window, but I knew him by his black moustache.”

I suppose every one of my readers has been guilty of mislaying some
little article of importance and looking for it everywhere but in the
right place, which always turns out to have been the most obvious
place of all. Perhaps I may be forgiven for having all these fifteen
months been doing something analogous. I had not only overlooked
Trethewy’s daughter; I knew when I spoke to Sergeant Speke about those
tracks in the snow that there was something more I had meant to ask
him and had forgotten; and often since I had been dimly conscious of
something forgotten. That something was the window-latch. The girl
could not tell me about it, but at least it might be possible to prove
by others, who had been in the room, that none but Vane-Cartwright
unlatched that window.

I make this obvious reflexion now because I made it then, and in
making it wasted a moment of possible talk with the girl, a trifling
waste which was near to having momentous consequences. Of course it
was not because the girl had been standing then on the lawn that
Vane-Cartwright had taken the step, when every unnecessary step
involved risk, of wiling the Trethewys away in this secret manner. He
knew she had something more to tell; she was about to tell it me. “I
hardly know,” she broke in on my silence, “whether I ought to think as
I do, but I would like to tell you what——” “Well, Ellen!” said, in
cheerful tones, a voice that was somehow not cheerful, “taking a
walk—who is the happy?—why, it is Mr. Driver. I did not expect the
good luck of meeting you again so soon.” Where was I staying, What
good chance brought me there, and Really I must move my luggage
instantly to his house, and so forth, from the last man in the world
whose company I desired at that moment.

I got off staying with him. I got off, I know not on what excuse, true
or false, an afternoon’s fishing and a pressingly urged dinner. But
then (for an idea struck me) I would, if I had finished the sermon I
was writing for a Saint’s day service (not in the calendar, I fear) at
a neighbouring church to-morrow, stroll over to Vane-Cartwright’s
after my supper if he was in any case going to be in. He would in any
case be in, and delighted to see me. He would be in from seven
onwards. He dined at 7.30, and if I thought better of it would be
delighted to see me then, and I must not dress. For the present, as
Ellen had to go home, might he not show me the short way to my inn. It
was not what I should have thought a short way, but it was
delightfully secluded, and it led us by quite a curious number of
places (a rather slippery plank over a disused lock will do as an
example), where I fancied that an accident might have befallen an
unwary man with a too wary companion. Perhaps it was only the
condition of my nerves that day that made me a little proudly fancy
such things, for I was not only highly strung, I was unusually
exhilarated. It was a great change since our last meeting, for this
time I felt that I had at last gained a definite advantage, and,
little as he showed it, I thought I was talking with a desperate man.
It is not safe to be dealing with a desperate man, but, if you happen
not to pity him, it is not a disagreeable sensation. As we passed over
a footbridge (I was going first, and there were stakes and big stones
below on which a man might hurt himself if he fell) it was probably
one of my fancies that the shadow of my companion, cast before him,
made an odd, quick movement with its arm. Anyhow, I turned my head and
said with a laugh what a handsome stick Mr. Vane-Cartwright was
carrying. I asked what wood it was. I did not ask whether it was
loaded. He told me what wood it was, where he bought it and what he
gave for it. He told me what an interesting medallion was set in the
head of it, but he did not show me that medallion. After that I had a
further fancy. It was that my guide took less polite pains than he had
taken to let me pass first through every narrow place. Let me say at
once that I do not suppose he very seriously thought of attacking me
there; perhaps his eyes were open for any very favourable spot, but
perhaps it was all my fancy. In spite of that fancy I was thoroughly
enjoying my walk. It was a new sensation, to me to be doing most of
the conversation, and I was surprised and pleased with myself to think
that I was doing it well. Perhaps I was doing it well, but I do not
think it was my guidance of the talk which brought it back to the
subject of Trethewy. Vane-Cartwright managed to tell me that he hoped
no rumour of suspicion attached to Trethewy here, or to any one at all
connected with him. Would I mind trying to find this out from the
landlord at the inn. He was a greater gossip than any old woman in the
place, and a shrewder one. “I would not,” he added, “trust everything
he says, for he embroiders on what he has heard; but he hears
everything, and he is shrewd, and I discovered a few weeks back that
he had an acquaintance in your old parish.”

By this time we were at the inn door, and I noticed the landlord’s
name, which was the same as that of a man of doubtful character who
had come to Long Wilton just before I left it. Several people were
about, and they might, if they chose, hear every word of what he
spoke, except when he dropped his voice. “Stop,” he cried, and I stood
still. “I am going to be open with you, Mr. Driver, as open as I
thought you would have been with me. I have been trying to bring
myself to it all this walk, and I will now. I have not said what I
meant” (here he dropped his voice) “about Trethewy. I have really”
(this in a whisper) “begun to suspect him myself. Oh, yes, you laugh;
I know what you suspect of me. Do you think I cannot see what
interpretation you put upon every one of my doings that you know of,
in your own house, at Peters’ before—long ago at the island of Sulu, I
daresay. You think” (this time so loud that I thought the landlord and
other men must hear, though, as I reflected later, the phrase he used
was so chosen that a countryman would not readily take it in), “you
think I am the assassin of Eustace Peters. Well, I am not.” We turned
and walked away again from the inn. “I know,” he continued, “how
things look. I should not wonder if I were fated to hang for this. I
should not greatly care now, for I have thought it so long, but
hanging for it and being guilty of it are different matters.” He kept
his eyes fixed steadily on me all this while. “You thought things
looked ugly for Trethewy once, did you not? But I know you thought him
innocent when it was hard to think so. I do not ask you to believe me,
but I ask you to keep the same firm, clear mind now. You think
Trethewy did not kill Peters. So do I. He did not actually kill him,
he no more did that than you did. Now I know you will answer me
straight. You are too brave a man to care about playing the part you
played at Florence. Have you found or have you not found any direct
evidence whatever, true or false, that convicts any man—convicts him
if it is true—of making those tracks, or of going to or coming from
the place where they were made? Shall I repeat my question? Is it not
clear, or are you still uncertain whether you will answer it?” I could
do no other; I told him truly that I had nothing but inference to go
upon as to who made those tracks, and I told him that my inference
pointed to him. “Naturally,” he said quietly (here we turned and paced
slowly towards the inn again). “Only, till you have something better
than that inference, remember that there may be more subtle motives
than you think of for making false tracks. Anyway (for it is no good
my arguing with you further, I see that), here is one piece of advice
that you may take or leave—honestly, you had better take it if you
value your future peace of mind—keep your mind open a little longer.
Go away from here, and visit Long Wilton again and hear what they say
there now; or, if you will not do that, stay here long enough to
watch Trethewy, and the girl, and the people that you may see about
with them,—one man in particular. Well, good-bye, Mr. Driver,
pardon my saying I respect you in spite of Florence.” The manner of
this last remark was maddening. I was keenly stung. I said, “Mr.
Vane-Cartwright, after all, Peters’ death is not the only mysterious
death you and I know of.” “Oh, Longhurst,” he said, with a light laugh
which this time really took me aback. “I will tell you anything you
can wish to know about poor Longhurst. Not now, as you are not in the
mind for it. To-night, if you think better of your refusal to come, or
any time you may choose. I only wish,” he said sadly, as he finally
turned away, “old Peters had asked me straight out about Longhurst.”
He had puzzled me but he had not shaken me. Could he have imagined
that he was likely to do so? Probably not, but it occurred to me,
directly he was gone, that he now knew for certain that I was
dangerous; knew that in some ways he could play upon me easily, and in
some ways not at all; and knew that I had not yet found out what I
came to find out from Ellen Trethewy.



Chapter XVIII

Whether it was that my fancies pursued me to the inn, or that
Vane-Cartwright’s words had unconsciously impressed me, I took and
have retained a great dislike to the gentleman who was just arriving
at the inn. He came, as he said, for dry-fly fishing, but his accent
and his looks showed him to be native to a land where dry fly-fishing
is, I believe, not practised. He was near me and about me several
times in the course of that day, and though he molested me in no way,
my dislike deepened. It was now near midday and I contemplated taking
no further step till evening, so I had plenty of time for thought, and
I needed it. It may be imagined that I was in a state of some tension.
I had rested little since I left Vane-Cartwright’s hotel at Florence,
and on arriving at the inn I had news which increased my agitation. My
wife had telegraphed to my home saying she had gone for a day or two
to the Hôtel de Brunswick, saying also, that I must pay no attention
to any wire, purporting to be from her, which did not contain the word
“Fidele”. Evidently there was some one in Florence whom she suspected
would send false messages. I conjectured that Vane-Cartwright had an
understanding with the Mafia, and had obtained through them the
services of some villain. Well, here was a wire: “Regret to acquaint
respected sir, Mrs. Driver suddenly unwell.—Direttore Hôtel
Brunswick.”

There is one advantage about being tired. It prevents the mind from
wandering away on so many side tracks. But with all that advantage,
whatever it may be worth, it took me a full half-hour to make up my
mind how to regard this; but I came back to my first impulse, not on
the first occasion to disregard what my wife herself had undoubtedly
telegraphed.

On the other main points I may acquit myself of having wavered, and I
will not mystify the reader more than I mystified myself. I had not
the faintest doubt that Vane-Cartwright’s suggestion about the
Trethewy family, whatever its object might be, was a well-acted lie.
However, I determined to follow the suggestion to some extent. I got
hold of the landlord; he was all that Vane-Cartwright had said, and on
a very slight hint he began talking of the Long Wilton murder and of
the charge against Trethewy. I was disgusted to find that suspicion
had followed the people here. It was not clearly to Vane-Cartwright’s
interest that it should follow them, and I suppose it was accident. I
found that the landlord was well posted as to Trethewy’s story and all
the proceedings in regard to him. As he went on hinting suspicion of
him, I said it was a curious thing about those tracks. “Ah,” said he,
“little feet can wear big shoes;” and he looked wise. “About that lass
now of Trethewy’s, not but what I like the lass,” he was continuing
after a solemn interval, but I need not try to repeat his talk. The
upshot of the suggestion was simply this, that the girl had stepped
out in her father’s boots and made the tracks, knowing full well that
she could ensure the detection of the false tracks hereafter, but for
which of two reasons rumour was not certain. Either it was really to
fasten false suspicion on her father till the guilty man, a lover of
hers presumably, made good his escape; or her father had committed the
crime, and she knew it, and to save him had fabricated against him
evidence which he and she knew would be broken down.

It was not a likely story to tell to me, and I was inclined now, not
for the first time, to be thankful that however great a fool I might
be, I looked a greater fool than I was. By putting me up to eliciting
this story, Vane-Cartwright had merely supplied me with knowledge
about the situation of the Trethewys which I might find useful in
dealing with them.

I felt that I had brought danger not only upon myself but also upon
the Trethewys. I was in some doubt whether by going to them again that
night I might not be bringing danger nearer them, but the impulse to
be beside them if danger were there impelled me to go. I arrived about
nightfall. I found Trethewy himself preparing to leave the house. He
had been bidden to go and help in repairing a threatening breach of a
mill-dam some way up the stream, and he evidently felt surprised and
suspicious about the errand on which he was sent. Replying to a look
of enquiry in my face, he said: “Sir, I never disobeyed my master’s
orders yet”. “No,” he added, looking suddenly abashed, “I behaved
badly enough by my old master, but I never disobeyed orders, and I
should not like to begin doing so now.” I said that, if he went I
should stay at his house till he returned. He said, “It would be a
kindness that I should always remember, sir”. And so he went.

Poor Mrs. Trethewy appeared ill-pleased at my presence. She seemed to
guess that my coming was in some way to disturb their peace. I fancied
that, in getting the mastery over his drinking and his wrathful ways,
Trethewy had become very gentle and submissive to his wife. In her
days of difficulty I had been used to admire her for the way in which
she brought up her daughter. I now did not think her improved by
finding herself more the mistress of her house than she was wont to
be. Still she was civil enough, and willing, after the girl had gone
to bed in a sort of cupboard off the parlour-kitchen, to entertain me
with her best conversation. I interrupted by telling her frankly that
I knew she wished to keep her daughter in ignorance of all concerning
Peters’ murder, and the suspicion that had arisen about it, but that I
feared that she would find it impossible, for I had learned that day
that rumour had followed them to their new home. From my heart I
pitied her, for she seemed utterly cast down as she began to realise
that Ellen must come to hear all, if indeed she had not heard it
already.

Suddenly the girl burst into the room and threw her arms round her
mother’s neck. “Oh, mother, mother!” she said, “I cannot keep on
deceiving you. Dear, kind mother, who wanted to deceive me for my
good. I would have given so much that you should not know this, but
grandmother told me all.” “Go to bed now, dear,” said her mother; “I
cannot bear more to-night.” The mother too went to bed, and I lay down
under a rug upon the sofa.

I had no intention of keeping awake all night. Gladly as in my excited
state I would have done so, it was a necessity that I should get such
rest as I could. I lay on a shake-down which Mrs. Trethewy provided
for me, and I thought of Florence and of one whom I had left at
Florence. Then I slept, and I dreamed, dreamed that she was ill and
wanted me. I woke with a horrid start as some one in my dream
pronounced the word “poison”. Thank God, it was a dream. I assured
myself of that and slept again to dream more pleasantly.

I dreamed I was a boy and I was swimming in a clear river. Cool, cool
river!

There was a fish in the river, and I was swimming after the fish.
Cool, cool river!

It was an ugly fish, and I was pursuing it, and the river was warm.

The fish was Vane-Cartwright, and I was pursuing him. Warm, warm
river!

The river was gone from my dream, and I was pursuing Vane-Cartwright
over a great plain. Warmer and warmer!

I pursued him through thick woodlands. Sultry and stifling!

I pursued him over a great mountain. Burning, burning hot!

I leapt to my feet calling “Fire!”

In waking fact, the thatched cottage was in a blaze.

I called with all my might to Mrs. Trethewy. I told her to run out
while I brought out her daughter, and she answered.

I burst into the girl’s little room on the ground floor. It was full
of smoke; she was suffocating before she could wake. I tore her from
her bed, and bore her through the door and on to the footbridge. I
turned my head back towards the house to call again to Mrs. Trethewy,
when a hoarse cry of “Fire!” came from the other direction, and a
man—he seemed an old grey-bearded rustic—ran on to the bridge towards
the door, dashed with full force against us, and overturned me and my
half-conscious burden.

I do not know just how we rolled or fell, but we were in the water. I
had managed still to hold Ellen Trethewy with my right arm, and with
my left hand to catch the edge of the footbridge. I could not by any
effort have pulled us both out or raised her on to the bridge, but it
was easy to hold our heads above water, for we were against the pier
of the bridge, in between the two currents that shot under the arches.
Mrs. Trethewy would be there in a moment and could help us out; or—why
did not that old rustic help us?

They say that men in moments of extreme peril take in all manner of
things with extraordinary rapidity, but I do not know whether I really
saw all as I see it in memory now, or whether what I did was from
accident and the instinct of fear.

I glanced up, and the old rustic stood over us raising a mighty stick
which I thought was not unlike that which Vane-Cartwright had carried
in the morning. So much I did see and think.

One good blow and I should have been stunned, if my brains were not
out. Whether we got entangled in the eel grating or were carried right
under the fish-house into the pool, there was little chance for either
of our lives if that blow had fallen where it was aimed.

I let go my hold on the bridge and threw my head back, and the stick
crashed idly on the bricks of the margin. I tried to get one long
breath before we went under, but I swallowed a horrible gulp of water.
Good chance or my convulsive effort guided us into the arch for which
I would have steered. Under one arch the old eel grating remained. I
did not know its structure, and I did not know whether the trap-door
over it was fastened down, but there was little hope that we should
pass that way alive. Under the other arch, as I had found that
morning, the grating had long been removed, and down that archway the
strong stream was carrying us, safe, if it did not throttle us on the
way. How long a passage I thought it, though the rush of the water
seemed so headlong. I could feel the slimy growth on the brick archway
above us, and my nostrils were for a moment above water though my
mouth was pressed under. Then we were under the floor of the
fish-house, and my head rose and I got a gulp of air, but my head
struck a joist of the floor, and the stream swept me on, ducking
involuntarily under another joist and another. We were out in the
pool, sucked down in the bubble and swirl of the eddy. I opened my
eyes and could see the glare of the fire through great green globes of
water. I was on the surface; I was swimming with great gasps; I was
under again; I was exhausted. My feet struck on pebbles: I was
standing in the shallow water. I still held the body. Was it lifeless?
Three strides and I should land her on the bank. No, my steps sank in
some two feet of almost liquid mud. The dragging of my steps furnished
just the little further effort needed to spend my remaining breath. I
sank forward on the reeds and flags of the margin, with one last
endeavour to push her body in front of me, and I lay, helpless and
panting horribly, beside her, while a man came and jumped into the
marshy fringe of the pool and stood over us. That dire old rustic, I
felt no doubt, and I felt no care. No, it was the girl’s father.

In the morning, shooting down that same dark cool avenue of sweet
water, and swept without an effort far out into the swirling
reed-fringed pool, I could not have imagined how hardly and how ill I
was to pass that way again with a living or lifeless burden.

She lived; the first shock of the water had roused her, and she had
kept a shut mouth, a steady grasp where it least incommoded me and a
heroic presence of mind.



Chapter XIX

There is not much that can be done for a thatched cottage once well
alight, and for such salvage as could be done there were plenty of
ready helpers soon upon the scene. That aged rustic was not among
them, nor did I afterwards see or hear of him; but among them before
long appeared Vane-Cartwright himself, brisk and alert, and forward to
proffer to Trethewy every sort of help and accommodation for his now
homeless family. Trethewy’s response was characteristic—total and
absolute silence.

It seemed late but was still early morning when I had the Trethewys
assembled for breakfast in my private sitting-room in my inn.
Neighbours had readily supplied the women with clothes, and a cart had
been forthcoming to carry them. Trethewy and I walked to the inn
together, and his attitude to Vane-Cartwright was naturally quite
altered. He told me a second time of the dislike, which he had felt
from the first, of being in Vane-Cartwright’s service, and he told me
that he had just decided to accept a situation which was open to him
in Canada, and had expected to sail with his family, who did not yet
know it, in six weeks, but supposed he must put it off now.

At last I really heard what it was that Ellen Trethewy could tell and
for knowing which she had been removed to Crondall, and it did not
come up to my expectations.

About noon after Peters’ murder, after Callaghan and I had gone into
the village, and while Vane-Cartwright, by his own account, had stayed
reading in the house, the girl had twice seen him as she looked out of
the window of the cottage. She had seen him come out of the gate of
the drive and turn to the right up the road away from the village.
About twenty minutes later she had seen him turn in again at the gate,
and this time he came down the green lane. To any one who knew the lie
of the ground, the significance of this was certain. He could not have
got round by road or by any public footpath in that time; either he
had come through the plantation and the fields, where the tracks were
made, or he must have made a round over ditches and hedges and rough
ground by which a man taking a casual and innocent stroll was
extremely unlikely to have gone, especially in frost and snow.

The inference was convincing enough to me, but then, as I knew, I was
ready to be convinced. Vane-Cartwright was not likely, I felt, to have
done so much to prevent the girl revealing merely this. Was there
nothing more?

Yes, there was, but it was something of which Ellen did not feel sure.
During that twenty minutes the sun shone out brilliantly upon the
snow, and tempted her to stroll out a little way up the drive, when
she stood for awhile to look, in spite of the horror of the time, with
delight at the spotless covering of the lawn and the shining burden of
the cedar branches, and then up at the sun. Her eyes were soon so
dazzled that all sorts of fancied shapes danced before them. Turning
suddenly and looking towards the field, she thought for an instant,
but only an instant, that she saw between two trees a man up in the
field, about half-way up, walking towards the hedge, towards a spot in
the hedge which we already know. She covered her eyes with her hand
and looked again with clearer vision. There was no one there, and she
tried to brush aside the fancy that she had seen any one. But somehow
she had often wondered since about what she had seen, and somehow she
connected it in her fancy with the murder. She could not connect it
with the making of the tracks, for she had only read of them in a
muddled newspaper report which had given an entirely wrong impression
as to whereabouts they were found. Now it was all obvious.
Vane-Cartwright, while he made those very tracks, had passed before
her eyes; he had seen her standing and looking towards him, and he
could not entertain the hope, though it was true, that her eyes did
not see him clear.

This much being plain, my first thought was of amazement at the
coolness of Vane-Cartwright on the evening after the murder, while he
could not be sure that the discovery of the tracks had not been told
to the girl and had not already drawn forth from her an explanation
which, if believed, must be fatal to him. My second thought was of
great disappointment that the identification of him with the maker of
the tracks was still to so large an extent a matter of inference. I
cannot say whether I myself, or Trethewy, or the girl, who, having
long brooded over these matters without the necessary clue, now showed
astonishing quickness in grasping them, was first to see the next step
which the enquiry required. Evidence must be sought which would show
whether Vane-Cartwright or some other person had undone the
window-latch in Peters’ room. I was ready immediately to rush off to
Long Wilton and see whether Sergeant Speke could recollect anything of
importance about the movements of the persons who were in the room
that morning. It was the girl who suggested to me a possible witness
rather nearer at hand. The young doctor had been in the room till
nearly the last, and, as her mother happened to have told her, he had
very shortly after the event in question removed to London. Could not
I see him?

I resolved to see him, if I could, that day, for I thought I could
gain nothing by further waiting near Crondall. I was anxious about the
safety of Ellen Trethewy, but I found her father, who was as much
persuaded as I of the peril which continued to hang over her, had
formed his own plan for promptly removing her; he thought we should be
safer separate; and it reassured me to see a reminiscence of his wild
youth sparkle in his now sober countenance as he said that it would
not be the first time that he had baffled a pursuit.

Upon some calculation, prompted perhaps by excessive precaution and
futile craft, such as may well be excused in excited men who have
found themselves surrounded by unimagined dangers, we decided that I
should not start for any of the stations on the branch line that
passes Crondall, but should leave my luggage behind, drive, in a fast
trap which the baker sometimes let out, to an ancient castle in the
neighbourhood, thence, three miles, to the junction on the main
line to London, send the trap back with a note to my landlord, and
go to town by the one fast train in the day which there was easy
time to catch. I suppose we thought I should get some start of
Vane-Cartwright, and that this was worth while, as he was likely to
stick close to me, and had shown already his fertility of baleful
resource.

Accordingly, I arrived at the junction just as the up-train came in.
The train from Crondall had arrived a little while before, and was
standing in a bay on the other side of my platform of departure. I was
by this time so sleepy that I could hardly keep my eyes open as I
walked. I did barely notice the screaming approach of a third train,
which was in fact the down-train from London, but in which of course I
felt no interest, and I noticed some but not quite all of the people
on the platform or in the waiting-shed. I took my seat in the far
corner of a carriage. I began instantly to doze, and the train, I
believe, waited there awhile. I faintly heard shouts and whistles
which heralded the starting of the train, but it did not start
immediately. When the carriage door again opened and two other
passengers got in, I did half-open my eyes; but I started broad awake
when to those half-open eyes my fellow-passengers revealed themselves
as Vane-Cartwright and the foreign visitor at the inn, whose looks I
had irrationally disliked. I say broad awake—but not awake enough to
do the proper thing to be done. The train was already in motion before
they sat down, and my fellow-passengers with their luggage so
encumbered the door that I could not have got back on to the platform.
I ought, I suppose, to have pulled the communication cord. As it was,
I merely sat up, looking at them as indifferently as I could, while
really my heart sank within me, and I wished my muscles had not been
so stiff and chilled from my adventure of the night before.

The train was moving but not yet fast. It seemed to be slowing down
again. There was fresh shouting and whistling on the platform; the
stationmaster saying angrily, “Put him in here”; a voice that sounded
somehow well known, but which I could not recognise, answering him
vigorously; and just as the train began to go faster a big man, still
shouting and very hot with pursuit, tumbled into the carriage. To my
delighted surprise I found myself joined by Callaghan.

The most surprising turns of good fortune, I have learned to think,
are generally the reward of more than common forethought on the part
of some one. My rescue in this case, which I will none the less call
providential, could never have happened but for the zealous care of
Callaghan himself, and of another person many hundred miles from the
scene.

But of all this I was soon to hear. Meanwhile, Callaghan, who was in
the highest of spirits, bestowed on me a mere smile of recognition,
and poured himself forth upon Vane-Cartwright with an exuberance of
pleasure at the unexpected meeting which must have been maddening. It
was the only time, during my acquaintance with Vane-Cartwright, when
he appeared to be in the least at a loss. Hearty good-humour was, I
should think, the only attitude towards him which he did not know how
to meet. So he passed, I take it, a miserable journey. Nor was his
mysterious companion left to enjoy himself. To my astonishment
Callaghan addressed him politely by a strange-sounding name, which I
suppress, but which from the start which the gentleman gave appeared
to be his name.

As for me, Callaghan leaving me in the corner which I had originally
chosen had manœuvred Vane-Cartwright into the other corner of the same
side of the carriage, and the stranger into the seat opposite him,
while he placed himself between me and Vane-Cartwright, and with his
back half-turned towards me entertained them both.

I dozed away again and again, and I daresay I was asleep for a good
part of the journey, but I endeavoured to think out in my waking
moments what was the nature of the peril which had threatened me, for
peril assuredly there was, and how it could have come about that I was
thus rescued.

As to the former question, I got no further than the reflexion, that
to stick me with a knife and jump on the line or make a bolt at the
London terminus (which was our first stop) would have been too crude
for the purpose. As to the latter question, Callaghan, suffering our
fellow-passengers to escape for a moment behind their newspapers,
roused me with a nudge, and surreptitiously passed me what proved to
be several pounds’ worth of telegraphic message from my wife at
Florence to himself. I was hardly yet aware how thoroughly my wife’s
original aversion for Callaghan had given way in the day when he had
been her guest, and when she had passed from observing his weaknesses
to putting up with them and occasionally reproving them. I learned now
that a few hours after I had left her, my wife had telegraphed to
Callaghan through a mutual friend whom she believed would have his
address, stating the sort of errand on which I had gone, and the few
particulars known to her which might determine my movements, and
entreating him to find me, and having found me, never to leave me
alone. But that was not all. The telegram stated that Vane-Cartwright
was on his way home, having sent home one communication only, a
telegram to a registered telegraphic address in London, that address
being the word by which Callaghan had accosted the stranger.

As I afterwards learned, my wife, directly I had departed, had removed
to Vane-Cartwright’s hotel. Vane-Cartwright did not know her by sight,
and, if he had discovered her, he was the sort of man who would
probably despise the intelligence of any nice woman. She had taken the
best rooms in the hotel, close to Vane-Cartwright’s, and had otherwise
set about, for the first time in her life, and for a few hours, to
throw money about in showy extravagance. By money and flattery she had
contrived to be informed of the address of every letter and telegram
that Vane-Cartwright sent before his departure, of the name and
nationality (nothing more was known of him) of his only visitor that
morning, and of the further fact that shortly after Vane-Cartwright’s
departure that visitor had returned and had enquired whether she had
moved to that hotel, but had not asked to see her. She learned also
that Vane-Cartwright had been at the station when the Milan train
started, but had returned and waited for the next train. The reader
already knows that she had had the intuition that false messages might
be sent me in her name.

Callaghan had been away from home, and had not got the message till
late in the evening before he joined me. He lost no time in going to
my house to ascertain my address and what had last been heard of me.
He called also at Vane-Cartwright’s house, where he was only informed
that he was abroad. He left London by the first train in the morning
armed with a _Bradshaw_ and a map. Study of _Bradshaw_ had led him to
notice that I might possibly be leaving by a train which would be at
the junction about the same time as his. So he was on the look out,
and with his quick sight actually saw me in my train as he arrived. By
running hard and shouting entreaties and promises to the officials, he
had just managed to catch me.

When our train arrived at Paddington, Callaghan shook me awake. It
appeared to me that Vane-Cartwright, who had not been conversational
before, had just started an interesting subject by which he hoped to
detain Callaghan while our mysterious companion got away from the
train. It was not a successful effort. Callaghan pushed me somewhat
rudely out of the carriage, and jumping out after me told me to wait
for him, and kept me, while he stood about on the platform till every
passenger by the train but ourselves had gone away. At last he called
a hansom; still he did not enter it till the driver of an invalid
carriage which had been waiting in the rank of cabs appeared to give
up the expectation that the person for whom he waited was coming, and
drove away.

“Do you see that invalid carriage?” said Callaghan to me. “It was
ordered for you.”



Chapter XX

Here let me mention that I have fancied since that I recognised the
ill-looking foreigner who was with me at the inn and in the train. I
recognised him in a chemist’s shop in a very fashionable shopping
street. I think it would be libellous to name the street. The
telegraphic address which my wife sent to Callaghan was the
telegraphic address of that fashionable chemist’s shop.

I had intended to take leave of Callaghan for the time upon our
arrival at the station, but I found that this was not to be done, for
Callaghan was determined to obey almost to the letter my wife’s behest
to him, not to leave me. He took me to luncheon at a restaurant, and
then prevailed upon me to come with him by one of our fast trains to
my own house, collect there all the papers which I possessed bearing
on the affair of Peters, and bring them to his chambers, where he was
resolved I should at present stay.

When we arrived there, I was for starting at once to seek out the
doctor who had been at Long Wilton, but I was practically overpowered
and sent to bed, after handing over to Callaghan, amongst other
papers, the notes which Peters had made as to the death of Longhurst.

After some hours Callaghan entered my room to tell me that dinner
would be ready in half an hour, that I might get up for it if I liked,
or have it brought to my bedroom. He then turned on me reproachfully.
“Why had I not shown him these papers long ago, when he came to stay
with me?” I was at a loss for an answer, for in fact when I had told
him of my suspicions and my reasons for them, I had done the thing by
halves, because my want of confidence in him lingered.

“Well, well,” said my good-natured friend, “I daresay I can guess the
reason. But these papers explain much to me. You never told me it was
the island of Sulu on which Peters discovered the body, or that he
went there with Dr. Kuyper. I had heard the name of that island and
the doctor before—on the last night of Peters’ life while you were
talking music with Thalberg.”

Next morning I set off early to see the doctor who had been at Long
Wilton. Callaghan, who at first seemed to think it his duty to be with
me everywhere, gave way and consented to go upon some business of his
own about which he was very mysterious; but he put me in the charge of
his servant, a man singularly fitted to be his servant, an Irishman
and an old soldier, who, I discovered, had made himself very useful to
him in his spying upon Thalberg, having entered into a close and I
daresay bibulous friendship with one of Thalberg’s clerks. My new
guardian so far relaxed his precautions as to allow me to be alone
with the doctor in his consulting-room; he otherwise looked after me
as though he thought me a child, and from the very look of him one
could see that I was well protected, though indeed I hardly imagined
then that the perils which beset me at Crondall would follow me
through the streets of London.

I asked the doctor kindly to give me all his recollections as to what
occurred in Peters’ bedroom while he was there. He told me little but
what was of a professional nature, and he informed me rather dryly
that he made it his practice on all occasions to observe only what
concerned him professionally. I therefore put to him with very little
hope the main question which I had come to ask—Had he observed
anything about the windows. “Certainly,” he said, “that, as it
happens, is a professional matter with me. I never enter a sickroom
without glancing at the windows, and I did so from force of habit this
time, though” (and he laughed with an ugly sense of humour) “it didn’t
matter much, as no fresh air could have revived that patient; but the
windows were shut, and (for I often notice that too) they were tight
shut and latched.” “Are you certain,” I said, “that both of them were
latched?” “Certain,” he answered; “they were both latched when I came
into the room, and they were latched when I went out, for I happened
to have looked again. You see that, once one has the habit of noticing
a certain kind of thing, one always notices it and remembers it
easily, however little else one may see.” I asked him then whether he
happened to remember the order in which the persons who had then been
in the room left it. About this he was not so certain, but he had an
impression that only two persons were left in the room after him.
These were the police-sergeant, who held the door open for a moment
while Vane-Cartwright lingered, and who locked it when they had all
left. I may say at once that this was afterwards confirmed by the
police-sergeant, who added that Vane-Cartwright was standing somewhere
not far from the window in question.

I returned by appointment to Callaghan’s chambers some time before
eleven. I was immediately taken out by him again upon an errand which
he refused to explain. We arrived at length at an office in the City
which from the name on the door proved to be that of Mr. Thalberg,
Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths. We were ushered into Mr.
Thalberg’s private room, and it immediately appeared that Callaghan
had come to give instructions for the making of his will. He explained
my being there by saying there was a point in his will about which he
desired to consult both of us. I was thus compelled to be present at
what for a while struck me as a very tedious farce. Callaghan, after
consulting Mr. Thalberg upon the very elementary question whether or
not he thought it an advisable thing that a man should make a will,
and after beating about the bush in various other ways, went on to
detail quite an extraordinary number of bequests, some of them
personal, some of a charitable kind, which he desired to make. There
was a bequest, for example, of the Sèvres porcelain in his chambers to
his cousin, Lady Belinda McConnell (there was no Sèvres porcelain in
his chambers, and I have never had the curiosity to look up Lady
Belinda McConnell in the Peerage). So he went on, disposing, I should
think, of a great deal more property than he possessed, till at last
the will appeared to be complete in outline, when he seemed suddenly
to bethink him of the really difficult matter for which he had desired
my presence. By this time, I should say, it had begun to dawn upon me
that the pretended will-making was not quite so idle a performance as
I had at first thought. Callaghan must in the course of it have
produced on a person, who knew him only slightly, the impression of a
good-natured, eccentric fellow, wholly without cunning and altogether
unformidable. This was one point gained, but moreover, Mr. Thalberg
was rapidly falling into that nervous and helpless condition into
which a weak man of business can generally be thrown by the unkind
expedient of wasting his time. It now appeared that the real subject
on which Mr. Thalberg and I were to be consulted was the disposal of
Callaghan’s papers in the event of his death. Callaghan explained that
he would leave behind him if he died (and he felt, he said, that he
might die suddenly) a great quantity of literary work which he should
be sorry should perish. He would leave all his papers to the
discretion of certain literary executors (he thought these would
perhaps be Mr. George Meredith and Mr. Ruskin), but there were memoirs
among them relating to a sad affair in which persons living, including
Mr. Thalberg and myself, were in a manner concerned. He referred to
the lamented death of Mr. Peters, the circumstances connected with
which had been for him a matter of profound and he trusted not
unprofitable study. He felt that in any directions he might leave in
regard to these memoirs it was only fair that he should consult the
gentlemen present. Mr. Thalberg by this time was in a great state of
expectation, when Callaghan pulled out his watch and, observing that
it was later than he thought, asked if there was a Directory in the
office, that he might find the address of a certain person to whom he
must telegraph to put off an appointment with him. A clerk brought the
London Directory from an outside room, and was about to retire. “Stop
a moment, Mr. Clerk, if you don’t mind,” said Callaghan, and he
slightly edged back his chair, so as to block the clerk’s going out,
“perhaps it is the Suburban Directory that I want. Let us just look,”
and he began turning over the leaves. “Ferndale Avenue,” he said,
“that’s not it; Ferndale Terrace—you see, Mr. Thalberg,” he said, “I
would like to talk this matter out with you before I go—Ferndale
Crescent—right side, No. 43, 44, No.” (all this time his finger was
running down a column under the letter B in the Trades Directory) “45,
46, 47; I thought he was thereabouts. Here’s the name,” he said. “You
see, Mr. Thalberg, your own movements, if they were not explained,
would look rather curious—47, 49, no, that’s not it—look rather
curious, as I was saying, in connexion with that murder of Peters—look
ugly, you know—51 Ferndale Crescent, that’s it. Thank you, Mr. Clerk,”
and he shut the Directory with a bang and handed it back to the clerk
with a bow, and made way for him to leave the room.

Mr. Thalberg bounded from his chair and collapsed into it again.
“Stop, Mr. Manson,” he cried to the clerk, “you must be present at
whatever else this gentleman may have to say.” He sat for a moment
breathing hard, more I thought with alarm than with anger. He did not
seem to me to have any presence of mind or any of the intellectual
attributes, at any rate, of guile, and I could not help wondering as I
watched him, whether this really was the man whom Vane-Cartwright
chose for his agent in employments of much delicacy. “Do you come here
to blackmail me, sir?” cried Mr. Thalberg, forcing himself to assume a
voice and air of fury. There was never seen anything more innocent or
more surprised and pained than the countenance of Callaghan as he
replied. He was amazed that his motive could be so misunderstood; it
was the simple fact that what he was forced in his memoirs to relate
might hereafter suggest suspicions of every one who was in the
neighbourhood of the crime, himself and his friend Mr. Driver in
particular, and, though in a less degree of course, Mr. Thalberg. He
was giving Mr. Thalberg precisely the same opportunity as he had given
to Mr. Driver, of explaining those passages in his (Callaghan’s)
record, which might seem to him to require explanation. Here he
appealed to me (and I confess I backed him up) as to whether he had
not approached me in precisely the same way. Mr. Thalberg appeared to
pass again under the spell of his eccentric visitor’s childlike
innocence, and sat patiently but with an air of increasing discomfort
while Callaghan ran on: “You see, in your case, Mr. Thalberg, it’s not
only your presence at Long Wilton, which was for golf of course,
wasn’t it?—only you went away because of the snow. There is that
correspondence with a Dutch legal gentleman at Batavia which occurred
a little afterwards, or a little before was it? And there were the
messages which I think you sent (though perhaps that was not you) to
Bagdad. Of course I shall easily understand if you do not care to
enlighten me for the purpose of my memoirs which no one may care to
read. Pray tell me if it is so. I daresay it’s enough for you that
your correspondence and movements will of course be fully explained
at the trial.” “What trial?” exclaimed Thalberg, quite aghast. It
was Callaghan’s turn to be astonished. Was it possible that Mr.
Thalberg had not heard the news, which was already in two or three
evening papers, that there was a warrant out for the arrest of
Vane-Cartwright, and that it was rumoured that he had been arrested in
an attempt to escape from the country.

In Mr. Thalberg’s countenance increased anguish now struggled
ludicrously with the suspicion, which even he could not wholly put
aside, that he was being played upon in some monstrous way. He began
some uncertain words and desisted, and looked to his clerk
appealingly. That gentleman (not, I believe, the same that had fallen
under the sway of Callaghan’s faithful servant) seemed the incarnation
of the most solid respectability. He was, I should judge, of the age
at which he might think of retiring upon a well-earned competence, and
he gave Thalberg no help, desiring, I should think, to hear the
fullest explanation of the startling and terrible hint which had been
thrown out before him against his master’s character. While Thalberg
sat irresolute, Callaghan drew a bow at a venture. “At least, Mr.
Thalberg,” he said, “I thought you might like to tell me the results
of your interview with Dr. Verschoyle when you went to Homburg to see
him.” “Sir,” said Thalberg, making a final effort, “do you imagine
that I shall tell you what passed at an interview to which I went upon
my client’s business.” “Thank you, Mr. Thalberg,” said Callaghan. “I
am interested to know that you went to Homburg on your client’s
business (I thought it might have been for the gout), and that you did
see Dr. Verschoyle, for I had not known that till you told me. I did
know, however, about that correspondence with Madrid in the Spanish
Consul’s cipher, and I knew that the enquiries you made through him
were really addressed to an influential person at Manilla.”

At this point Mr. Thalberg abruptly went over, with horse, foot and
artillery, to the enemy. He assured Callaghan of his perfect readiness
to answer fully any questions he might ask about his relations with
Vane-Cartwright, and if he might he would tell him how they began.

This is what it came to. Thalberg had been partner to a lawyer who was
Longhurst’s solicitor. In the early part of 1882, when Longhurst had
spent a month in England, he had consulted Thalberg’s partner about
some matters that troubled him in regard to his partnership with
Vane-Cartwright. Thalberg could not remember (so at least he said) the
precise complaint which Longhurst had laid before his partner, except
that it related to Vane-Cartwright’s having got concessions and
acquired property for himself which Longhurst considered (without
foundation, as Thalberg supposed) should have belonged to the
partnership. Nor did Thalberg know the advice which had been given
Longhurst. He had heard no more of him beyond the mere report that he
had been drowned, till, after his death, Vane-Cartwright, whom
Thalberg had not previously known, came to London and employed the
firm to find out various members of Longhurst’s family who were still
living, and to whom he now behaved with great generosity. Since then
Thalberg had been, as we knew, solicitor of a company which
Vane-Cartwright had founded, and had occasionally done for him private
law work of a quite unexciting nature. But in the middle of January of
last year, 1896, Thalberg had been instructed by Vane-Cartwright to
make for him with the utmost privacy certain enquiries. One was of a
person in Bagdad, as to the identity and previous history of a certain
Mr. Bryanston; one concerned a certain Dr. Kuyper, a physician and
scientist in Batavia, who, it was ascertained, was now dead. Another
was, as Callaghan knew, addressed to a correspondent in Madrid, but
Thalberg declared that this enquiry went no further than to ascertain
the name and address of the person who then filled the office of
Public Prosecutor or, I think, Minister of Justice in the Philippines.
I ventured to ask the name; it was a name that I had seen before in
those notes of Peters’. Lastly, there was an enquiry in regard to Dr.
Verschoyle. Thalberg had been instructed if possible to obtain an
interview with this gentleman before a certain date. The purpose of
the interview, he declared, was to obtain from him some notes and
journals which would be of use in the foundation of a new mission in
the Philippines, under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation
of the Gospel, a project in which Vane-Cartwright appeared, he said,
to be keenly interested (and indeed it was the fact that he had
previously patronised missionary societies). The object of Thalberg’s
visit to Long Wilton was this. He had been told to repair there
without fail by the date on which he actually came, and to inform
Vane-Cartwright by word of mouth of the result, if any, of his
enquiries. That result had been, shortly: that Bryanston was the man
who had at one time been at Nagasaki; that Kuyper was dead; that the
Minister of Justice (or whatever the precise office was) at Manilla
was the person already alluded to; and that Verschoyle was abroad and
had lately been at Siena, but had departed abruptly some weeks
before—for Germany, it was thought, but he had left no address behind
him. All this Thalberg had duly reported to Vane-Cartwright in Peters’
house the afternoon before the murder occurred. And what all this
taught Vane-Cartwright, though in part obscure, is in part obvious. It
taught him that no letter from Verschoyle to Peters need at present be
expected. It taught him that a letter from Bryanston, which must be
expected, might be dangerous and must be intercepted. It taught him
that Peters would remain inactive only till that letter reached his
hands. It taught him also that if Peters were put to silence, Kuyper,
the other European who had seen that body in Sulu, could tell no
tales.

After Peters’ death, Thalberg, still acting under instructions, had
had an interview with Dr. Verschoyle at Homburg, to which he had
traced him, and had taken with him a letter written on the paper of
the S.P.G., and signed, as he believed, by the secretary of that
society. (It has since appeared that the secretary had no knowledge of
such a letter.) Dr. Verschoyle delivered to him some journals which
he, Thalberg, never read, for transmission to Vane-Cartwright, to whom
he duly delivered them. That, he said, was all that he knew of the
subjects on which Callaghan sought information. He denied all
knowledge of further communications made on behalf of Vane-Cartwright
with that important official in the Philippines; but he appeared to me
somewhat nervous in answering Callaghan’s questions on this matter,
and anxious to appease him with the prospect that he might be able,
through friends of his, to ascertain what communications of this
nature had actually taken place.

It was curious to how many questions suggested to us by what he had
said he could give no answer. Indeed he informed us, with an air of
moral self-complacency, that he thought it a very sound maxim for a
professional man to know as little as possible of things which it was
not his business to know. I guessed that perhaps his strict observance
of this precept was the thing which had commended him to the service
of Vane-Cartwright, but I really do believe that Mr. Thalberg knew
nothing behind the facts which he now thought it convenient to himself
to reveal.

However that may be, he made no secret of anything which he could
disclose without injury to himself. We had got from him, or I ought to
say Callaghan had got from him, evidence which might serve to show
plainly enough that Vane-Cartwright was aware of Peters’ suspicions
and concerned himself greatly about them, and, content with this, we
were preparing to go when Mr. Thalberg stopped us saying that there
was one important matter of which we had not asked him yet, and
perhaps should be surprised to know that he could tell us anything. I
have omitted to say that in the course of the conversation he had
heard something from us about the things which had led to
Vane-Cartwright’s being suspected. We had told him in substance the
story about the tracks, and were much surprised to find that he
appeared wholly ignorant of the charge that had been brought against
Trethewy. He now told us a fact which had a great bearing upon the
history of those tracks. He asked us whether or not Peters’ grounds
could be seen from the upper rooms of the hotel. I said that no doubt
they could, for the hotel was only too visible from those grounds. He
then stated that having confined himself to his bedroom until it was
time for him to start for his train, he had at a certain hour noticed
a man walking across Peters’ field (for from his description it was
plain to me that it was Peters’ field, and plain further that the man
was walking pretty much where those tracks were made). This man, even
at that distance, he recognised as Vane-Cartwright; he recognised him
by his fur coat and a cap which Ellen Trethewy had seen him in, and by
some peculiarity about his gait which he knew well. The man was also
swinging his stick in Vane-Cartwright’s own particular manner. The
distance was considerable, but I knew that it would be possible for a
clear-sighted man to recognise at that distance any one whom he knew
very well. The hour which Thalberg named corresponded with what Ellen
Trethewy had told me.



Chapter XXI

As we left Thalberg’s office and walked down the narrow court which
led to the street, I daresay our looks and voices, if not our words,
betrayed the exultation of men who see a long-sought object at last
within reach. As we turned into the street we were stopped by
Vane-Cartwright.

Only the day before I had been expecting to find him lurking for me
round every corner; but now and here it startled me to meet him. When
I learnt why he met us, it startled me still more, and looking back
upon it, I still find it unaccountable.

“Mr. Driver, Mr. Callaghan,” he said, addressing us in turn in tones
as quiet as ever, but with a pale face and highly-strung manner, “I am
your prisoner.” I suppose we stared for a moment, for he repeated, “I
am your prisoner. I will go with you where you like; or you can give
me in charge to the nearest constable. There is one. You see you have
beaten me. You probably do not yet know it yourselves, but you have.”

“Well,” he continued, “if you do not quite know what you are going to
do, I will ask one thing of you. Before you give me up to justice,
take me somewhere where I can talk with you two alone. I want to tell
you my story. It will not make you alter your purpose, I know that;
but it will make you respect me a little more than you do. It is odd
that I should want that, but I do.”

“Well, gentlemen?” he said questioningly, as we still hesitated, and
his old self-possession returning for a moment, a smile of positive
amusement came over his face.

I confess that if I had acted on my own impulse I should have taken my
antagonist at his word when he suggested that we should call the
nearest policeman. But Callaghan had been taking the lead in our late
movements, and I felt that the occasion belonged to Callaghan; and
Callaghan was more generous.

“If you have anything to say, sir,” he said, “come to my chambers and
say it. Four-wheeler!”

In a moment more we were in a cab—how slow the cab seemed—Callaghan
sitting opposite Vane-Cartwright and watching him narrowly lest he
should play us a trick, while I too watched him all through the
interminable drive, very ill at ease as to the wisdom of our conduct,
and wondering what could be the meaning of the unexpected and
desperate hazard which our antagonist was now taking. He was evidently
going to confess to us. But why? If the knowledge we already possessed
was sufficient, as perhaps it was, to secure his conviction, yet he
could only partly guess what that knowledge was; of the two most
telling pieces of evidence against him, the fact about the
window-latch which the surgeon had told us, and the fact that Thalberg
had recognised him afar from his window in the hotel, he must have
been quite unaware. And then what did he expect to gain by the
interview which he had sought with us? What opinion had he formed of
the mental weaknesses of the two men with whom he was playing? Was he
relying overmuch upon the skill and mastery of himself and others
which he would bring to bear in this strange interview? Had the
fearful strain under which he had been living of late taken away the
coolness and acuteness of his judgment? Could he rely so much upon the
chance of enlisting our compassion that he could afford to give us a
certainty of his guilt, which, for all he knew, we had not got before,
and to throw away the hope of making an escape by flight, which with a
man of his resource might easily have been successful? Or had he some
other far more sinister hope than that of stirring us to unworthy pity
or generosity? I could not resolve these questions, but I was inclined
to an explanation which he was himself about to give us. If the cause
of suspicion against him became public he would have lost everything
for which he greatly cared, and he was ready to risk all upon any
chance, however faint, of avoiding this. I was, as I have said, ill at
ease about it all. I did not feel that after the conversation I had
held with him before, Vane-Cartwright would get over me, but it is an
experience which one would do much to avoid, that of listening
obdurate to an appeal into which another man puts his whole heart; and
more especially would one wish to have avoided consenting to hear that
appeal in a manner which might raise false hopes. But for a more
serious reason it had been a mistake to acquiesce in this interview; I
had learned to know not only Callaghan’s goodness of heart but his
cleverness and his promptitude, but I had not learned to credit him
with wisdom or with firmness; and the sort of impulsiveness, which had
made him at once grant the request for this interview, might easily
have further and graver consequences.

At last we were in Callaghan’s room and seated ourselves round a
table.

“I see,” said Vane-Cartwright, “that it puzzles you gentlemen why I
should ask for this interview. You think I am an ordinary criminal,
which perhaps I am, and you thought that like an ordinary criminal I
should try all means to save a disgraced life, which I certainly shall
not do. I know that you have not got the knowledge which would convict
me of murder. I do not suppose you think you have, and in any case you
have not. And, if you had, I think you know I have contrivance enough
to take myself off and live comfortably out of reach of the law. But I
do not care for escape, and I do not care for acquittal. You have the
means to throw suspicion on me, and that is enough for me. I cared for
honour and success, and I do not care for life when they are lost.” He
was looking at each of us alternately with an inscrutable but quite
unflinching gaze, but he now hid his eyes, and he added as if with
difficulty, “Yet I did care for one other thing besides my position in
the world, but that has gone from me too.

“And now,” he resumed, “that my struggle is over, and that the
people—more people and bigger people than you would think—who have
been courting me for the last twelve months will think of me only with
as just abhorrence as Thalberg himself does, I have an odd fancy, and
it is this: I should like to stand a little better in the eyes of the
very men who, far from courting me, have had the courage to suspect me
and the tenacity to drag me down.” He had raised his eyes again, but
this time fixed them on Callaghan only, for he doubtless saw that I
was out of touch with him, and, seeing this, he had art enough to
appear to recognise and acquiesce in it.

“You know something of my story. Let me tell you just a little more of
it, and, please, if it interests you enough, question me on any point
you will. I shall not shrink from answering. If a man is known to have
murdered two of his friends, there cannot be much left that it is
worth his while to conceal. First, I would like to speak of my early
training. If I had been brought up in the gutter, you could make some
allowance for that, and give me some credit for any good qualities I
had shown, however cheerfully you might see me hanged for my crimes.
It is not usual to suppose that any such allowance may have to be made
for a man brought up to luxury and to every sort of refinement, and
yet such a man too may be the victim of influences which would kill
the good in most characters even more than they have in mine. You may
have heard a little about my people, and perhaps know that their views
and ways were not quite usual; I am not going to say one word against
them (I am not that sort of man, whatever I may be), but there were
two things in my boyhood harder for me than the ordinary Englishman
can well imagine. I was brought up in the actual enjoyment of
considerable wealth and the expectation of really great wealth, and
just when I was grown up the wealth and the expectations suddenly
vanished. That has happened to many men who have been none the worse
for it. But then I was brought up soft. You know I am not a limp man
or a coward; but I had all the bringing up of one; cared for hand and
foot, never doing a thing for myself (my good people had great ideas
of republican simplicity, but they were only literary ideas). None of
the games, none of the sport that other boys get; no rubbing shoulders
with my equals at school; no comradeship but only the company of my
elders, mostly invalids. Few people know what it is to be brought up
soft. But there was worse than that. You” (he was addressing
Callaghan) “were piously brought up. Oh, yes, you were really. I
daresay your home was not a strict one, and you were not carefully
taught precepts of religion and morality or carefully shielded from
the sight of evil (perhaps quite the contrary, for I have not the
pleasure of knowing much about you, Mr. Callaghan), but I am quite
sure that you had about you at home or at school, or both, people
among whom there was some tacit recognition of right and wrong of some
sort as things incontrovertible, and that there was some influence in
your childhood which appealed to the heart. But in my childhood
nothing appealed to the heart, nothing was incontrovertible, above
all, nothing was tacit. Everlasting discussion, reaching back to the
first principles of the universe, and branching out into such
questions as whether children should be allowed pop-guns. That was my
moral training, and that was all my moral training. It was very sound
in principle, I daresay—and I am not going to pose as an interesting
convert to the religious way of looking at things, for I am not
one—but it did not take account of practical difficulties, and it was
very, very hard on me. Not one man in ten thousand has had that sort
of upbringing, and I do not suppose you can realise in the least how
hard that sort of thing is.

“So,” he continued, “I found myself at twenty-one suddenly made poor;
more accustomed than most lads to think life only worth living for
refinements which are for the wealthy only; taught not to take
traditional canons of morality for granted; taught to think about the
real utility of every action; landed in a place like Saigon, and
thrown in the society of the sort of gentry who, we all know, do
represent European civilisation in such places; sent there to get a
living; thoroughly out of sympathy with all the tastes and pleasures
of the people round me, and at the same time easily able to discover
that for all my strange upbringing I was by nature more of a man than
any one else there. As a matter of fact, there was only one decent man
there with intellectual tastes, and that was Peters; but Peters, who
was only two or three years older than I, and, as I own I fancied,
nothing like so clever, took me under his protection and made it his
mission to correct me, and it did not do. You can easily imagine how,
in the three years before Longhurst came on the scene, I had got to
hate the prospect of a life of humdrum, money-grubbing among those
people in the hope of retiring with a small competence some day when
my liver and my brain were gone; you would not have thought any the
better of me if I had become content with that. At any rate I did not.
I meant to be quit of it as soon as I could, and I meant more. I
resolved before I had been three weeks in the place to make money on a
scale which would give me the position, the society and the pursuits
for which I had been trained. I resolved in fact to make the sort of
place for myself in the world which every man, except the three men in
this room and Thalberg, thinks I have secured. If I had no scruples as
to the way in which I should carry out that resolve, I differed from
the people around me only in knowing that I had no scruples, and in
having instead a set purpose which I was man enough to pursue through
life. And I am man enough, I hope, not to care much for life now that
that purpose has failed. If I pursued my end without scruple, I think
I was carrying out to its logical conclusion the principles that had
been taught me as a boy; and, as I am not going to seek your sympathy
on false pretences, let me tell you I do not know to-day that there
are any better principles—there may be; I hope there are.

“I waited nearly three years, learning all I could about business and
about the East, its trade and its resources, and waiting all the time
for my opportunity which I knew would come, and which came. It came to
me through Longhurst; but I must go back a little. I have said that
Peters was my only equal in our society there. Now let me say, once
for all, that in nothing that I am going to tell you do I wish to
blame Peters more than I blame myself; but from the first we did not
hit it off. Peters, as I have said, took on himself the part of my
protector and adviser a little too obviously; he had not quite tact
enough to do it well, and I was foolish enough in those days to resent
what I thought his patronage. At first there was no harm done; Peters
thought I should be the better if I entered more into such sport as
there was in the place, for which I had very little taste, and he
tried to make me do so by chaffing me about being a duffer, in his
blunt way, which I thought rude, and that before other people. You
would hardly imagine that I was ever shy, but I was; and, absurd as it
seems, this added a good deal to my unhappiness in my new
surroundings. I should very soon have got over that, for I soon found
my way about the place, and my shyness quickly wore off; but worse
than that followed. I was fond of arguing, and used to discuss all
things in heaven and earth with Peters. You can easily suppose that
his views and mine did not agree, and I daresay now that I pained him
a good deal. I did not mean to do that, but I did mean to shock him
sometimes, and so I often took a cynical line, by which I meant
nothing at all, telling him the sharp things that I should do if I got
the chance; and once or twice I was fool enough to pretend that all
sorts of things of which Peters would not approve went on in our
business. To my amazement I discovered after a time that Peters took
all this nonsense seriously. I would have given anything to efface the
impression that I had made, for though there are few men that I ever
respected, Peters was one of them. But Peters became reserved towards
me and impossible to get at. Then gossip came in between us. There is
sometimes very spiteful gossip in a little European settlement in the
East; and I am certain, though I cannot prove it, that a man there,
with whom I had constant business, told Peters a story about a shady
transaction which he said I was in. The transaction was real enough,
but neither I nor my firm had any more to do with it than you. I know
that this man told it to other people, for I have heard so from them,
and I do not doubt that that was what finally turned Peters against
me. I tried to tax Peters with having picked up this story, but he
said something which sounded like disbelieving me, and I lost my
temper and broke off; and from that day till we met again at Long
Wilton we never exchanged any more words together, though we crossed
one another’s path as you shall hear.

“Mind, again, I am not saying it was his fault; but it is in itself
doing a young man a very ill turn to show him that you think him
dishonest when as yet he is not, and it did me harm. Upon my soul, I
was honest then; in fact, in that regard, most of my dealings
throughout life would stand a pretty close scrutiny. But I have often
thought that I might have become a much better man if Peters would
have been my friend instead of suspecting me unjustly; and I confess
that it rankles to this day, and all the more because I always
respected Peters. After that, however, he did me some practical ill
turns, disastrously ill turns; rightly enough, if he thought as he
did. I must tell you that our separation came a very little while
before Longhurst came to the place. Just afterwards I had an opening,
a splendid opening; it would not have made me the rich man that I am,
but it would have given me a good position right away, and what it
would have saved me you shall judge. A very eminent person came to
Saigon; he knew something of Peters and a little of me. He saw a great
deal of Peters at Saigon, and he pressed him to accept a post that was
in his gift in the Chinese Customs service. Peters refused. I suppose
he was at that time thinking of coming home. The great man then spoke
to me about it, and had all but offered it to me. How I should have
jumped at it! But suddenly it all went off and he said no more to me.
I believed that Peters warned him against me; possibly, being sore
against Peters, I was mistaken; but at any rate that was what I ever
afterwards believed. It was partly in desperate annoyance about this
that I plunged into what then seemed my wild venture with Longhurst.

“And now I must tell you about Longhurst. He had been at some time, I
suppose, a clever man; at least he had a wonderful store of practical
knowledge about forests, mining and other matters, and he had
travelled a great deal in all parts of that region of the world, and
picked up many things which he wanted to turn to account. He had made
a little money which he wished to increase, and he had a great scheme
of organising and developing the trade of South-Eastern Asia and its
islands in various valuable kinds of timber, spices, gum, shellac,
etc., etc. He promised any one who could join him that in a few years,
by exploiting certain yet undeveloped but most profitable sources of
supply, he could get a monopoly of several important trades, the sago
trade, for example. He set forth his scheme to the company generally
at the English Club the first time I met him, and everybody laughed at
him except me, who saw that if he got into the right hands there was
something to be made out of his discoveries for him and other people.
And as a matter of fact we did make something of them, more than I
expected, but not what he expected. I did not make a large sum out of
our joint venture, not much more than I could have made by staying
where I was, but I got the knowledge of Eastern commerce, which has
enabled me since to do what I have done.

“I saw you smile just now, Mr. Callaghan, when I spoke of Longhurst
getting into the right hands. Well he did; and I did not. He had been,
as I said, a clever man, and there was something taking about him with
his bluff, frank, burly air, but he was going off when I met him.
People do go downhill if they spend all their lives in odd corners of
the earth; and, though I did not know it at first, he had taken the
surest road downhill, for he had begun to drink, and very soon it
gained upon him like wildfire. When he once goes wrong no one can be
so wrong-headed as a man like that, who thinks that he knows the world
from having knocked about it a great deal doing nothing settled; and I
should have found Longhurst difficult to deal with in any case. As it
was, Longhurst dined with Peters the night before we left Saigon
together. On the first day of our voyage he was very surly to me, and
he said, ‘I heard something funny about you last night, Master
Cartwright. I wish I had heard it before, that’s all.’ When I fired up
and told him to say straight out what it was, he looked at me
offensively, and went off into the smoking-room of the steamer to have
another drink. That was not a cheerful beginning of our companionship,
and I had my suspicion as to whom I ought to thank for it. I believe
the same tale-bearer that I mentioned before had been telling Peters
some yarn about my arrangements with Longhurst, which looked as if I
was trying to swindle him, and that Peters had passed it on. I very
soon found that Longhurst was not so simple as he seemed. I daresay he
had meant honestly enough by me at first, but having got it into his
thick head that I was a little too sharp, he made up his mind to be
the sharper of the two; and the result was that if I was to be safe in
dealing with him I must take care to keep the upper hand of him, and
before long I made up my mind that my partner should go out of the
firm. I could have made his fortune if he would have let me, but I
meant that the concern should be mine and not his, and I did not
disguise it from him. That was my great mistake. I do not know what
story, if any, you have picked up about my dealings with Longhurst. He
put about many stories when we had begun to quarrel—for he had begun
by that time, if not before, to drink freely—but the matter that we
finally quarrelled about was this. Of the various concessions which we
started by obtaining (at least I started by obtaining them; that was
to be my great contribution to the partnership), two only proved of
very great importance—one was from the Spanish Government of the
Philippines and the other from the Government of Anam, and these, as
it happened, were for three and four years, renewable under certain
conditions but also revocable earlier in certain events. There was no
trickery about that, though Longhurst may have thought there was. I
simply could not get larger concessions with the means of persuasion
(bribery, in other words) at our command. Subsequently I got renewals
and extensions of these concessions to myself alone. To the best of my
belief then and now the transaction held water in law and in equity,
but whatever a lawyer might think of it, the common-sense was this:
Longhurst had become so reckless and so muddle-headed that nothing
could any longer prosper under his control, if he had the control, and
besides that, I never could have got the extended concessions at all
if he was to be one of the concessionaires. There are some things
which an Eastern Government or a Spanish Government cannot stand, and
Longhurst’s treatment of the natives was one of them. But I must go
back a bit. There were other things besides this which contributed to
our quarrel. For one thing, odd as it may sound in speaking of two
grown-up men, Longhurst bullied me—physically bullied me. He was a
very powerful man, more so, I should think, even than you, Mr.
Callaghan, and when, as often happened, we were travelling alone
together, he used to insist on my doing as he liked in small
arrangements, by the positive threat of violence. To do him justice he
did not do it when he was sober, and though in those days I was a
weakly and timid man compared to what I have become, I soon learned
how to stop it altogether. But you can easily imagine that I did not
love him; and a bitter feeling towards his chief companion is not a
wholesome thing for a man to carry about through a year or two of hard
work in that climate (for it is a climate! none of the dry heat and
bracing winters you have in Northern India); still I hope I did not
bear him malice so much for that as for other things. I have said I
have no scruples, but I have no liking for ruffianism and cruelty. I
hate them for the same reason for which I hate some pictures and some
architecture, because they are not to my taste. But I had, in
out-of-the-way places, among weak savages, where law and order had not
come, to put up with seeing deeds done which people here at home would
not believe were done by their countrymen, and which a man who has
served his days in an honourable service like the Indian Civil could
believe in least of all. He had kicked a wretched man to death (for I
have no doubt he died of it) the day he died himself.

“But why do I make all these excuses? for, after all, what did I do
that needs so much excuse? I told Longhurst plainly what I had done
about the concessions and what I proposed to do for him, and he seemed
to fall in with it all, and then he went home for a month’s holiday in
England. I suppose he saw some lawyer, probably Thalberg, and got it
into his head that he could make out a case of fraud against me. At
any rate, when he returned, he seemed surly; he did not have it out
with me straight, but he began to make extravagant demands of me and
threaten me vaguely with some exposure if I did not give in to them,
which of course I did not. Then he quarrelled about it in his cups,
for the cups were getting more and more frequent, and several times
over he got so violent as to put me in actual fear of my life. And at
last, unhappily for him, it came to a real encounter. We had visited
the island of Sulu, where I had reason to think we might establish a
branch of our business, and after two or three days in an inland town
we were returning to the coast, expecting to be picked up by a Chinese
junk which was to take us back. The evening before we started down he
produced a packet of documents and brandished it at me as if it
contained something very damaging to me, and I could see plainly (for
I have an eye for handwriting) that on the top of it was an envelope
addressed by Peters. I am not justified in inferring from this that
Peters—who had seen Longhurst several times since he had seen me—had
again been repeating to him some malicious falsehood with which he had
been stuffed before he left Saigon; but can you wonder that I did
infer it? On the march down—when we were alone, for we had sent on our
servants before—Longhurst began again more savagely than ever, and for
about an hour he heaped all sorts of charges and vile insinuations
upon me, which I answered for a while as patiently as I could. At
last, breaking off in the middle of a curse, he fell into silence. He
strode on angrily ahead for a hundred yards or so. Then at a rocky
part of the path, where I was below him, he turned suddenly. He hurled
at me a great stone which narrowly missed me, and then he came rushing
and clambering back down the path at me. I fired (he turned as I
fired). That was the end. Was it murder?” He paused and then braced
himself up as he answered his own question. “Yes, it was, because I
was angry, not afraid, and because I could easily have run away, only
for some reason I did not mean to.

“But I am foolish to weary you with all this long preliminary story,
for, after all, what do you care about Longhurst; it is Peters, your
own friend, about whom you care. You think that he came to suspect me
of murdering Longhurst, and I killed him for that; but as sure as I
killed him, that was not—that was _not_ what made me do it.”

Vane-Cartwright sat for a long time with his face covered with his
hands. At last he sat up and looked me straight in the face. “Mr.
Driver, did you never suspect there was a romance in Peters’ life of
which you knew nothing? I did know of it, and I honoured him for it,
but I hated him for it too. Certainly you did not suspect that there
was a romance in mine. It does not seem likely that a great passion
should come to a calculating man like me, with the principles of
conduct of which I have made no secret to-day. But such things do
happen, and a great passion came late in life to me. And here is the
cruel thing, which almost breaks my philosophy down, and makes me
think that after all there is a curse upon crime. It ought to have
enriched and ennobled my life, ought it not? It came at just the
moment, in just the shape, and with all the attendant accidents to
ruin me.

“It began five years ago. Miss Denison and her parents were staying at
Pau. I was in the same hotel and I met them. I knew nothing then of
their position and wealth and all that, for I had not been long in
London. I loved her, and a great hope came into my life. One begins to
weary after a while of toiling just to make money for oneself. For a
few days all seemed changed, the whole world was new and bright to me.
Suddenly I got an intimation from the father of the lady that my calls
were no longer acceptable. I could not imagine the reason. I asked for
an interview to explain matters, and he refused it. I left at once. I
did not yet know how hard I should find it to give her up. It was only
as I left the hotel that I learned that Peters, Peters whom I had not
met since we quarrelled at Saigon, and of whom I last heard of the day
that Longhurst died, was in the hotel and had called on my friends.
Now I see clearly that I am wrong to draw inferences, but again, I
ask, could I help inferring what I did?

“More than four years passed. I tried hard to create new interests for
myself in artistic things, making all sorts of collections; and I
developed an ambition to be a personage in London society. Then I saw
Miss Denison again, and I knew that I had not forgotten her, and could
not do so. I knew now what had happened, and so I absolutely insisted
on an explanation. I had it out with the father. I satisfied him
absolutely. In a few weeks’ time I was engaged. For the first time in
my life I was happy. That was only a month before I came to Long
Wilton. I must tell you that Peters had known the Denisons long, and
that I knew Miss Denison had been fond of him, but we naturally did
not talk of him much, and I did not know he was at Long Wilton. There,
to my complete surprise, I saw Peters again. I would not avoid him,
but I certainly did not wish to meet him. He, however, came up to me
and spoke quite cordially. I do not know whether he had reflected and
thought he had been hard on me, but he seemed to wish to make amends,
and I at that time, just for a few short hours, had not got it in my
heart to be other than friendly with any man.

“That evening I spent at his house. You, Mr. Callaghan, were there,
and you must have seen that something happened. I at any rate saw that
something I said had revived all Peters’ suspicions of me, and this
time with the addition of a suspicion, which was true, that I had
murdered Longhurst.

“Now, I ask you, if you have any lingering idea that that was why I
killed him, how was it possible that he could ever prove me guilty?
Have you any inkling of how he could have done it? I have not. Now
what could induce me, on account of a mere idle suspicion on the part
of a man who need be nothing to me, to run the risk amounting almost
to certainty of being hanged for murdering him?

“But my conscience was active then, for a reason which any man who has
loved may guess. I wanted to clear up all with Peters. I could not get
him alone that evening, and I had to go next day. I returned the first
day I could, bringing certain materials for clearing up the early
transaction about which he had first suspected me. I was honestly
determined to make a clean breast to him about Longhurst. You can
hardly wonder that I meant to feel my way with him in this. I tried to
get to close quarters with him. Mr. Callaghan saw enough to know how
unsuccessful I was. I tried all the time, again and again, to draw
Peters into intimate talk about our days in the East, but he always
seemed to push me away. I determined very soon to obtain a letter from
a friend, whom I will not name now, who knew how Longhurst had treated
me, which I could show to Peters; so I wrote to him. But in the
meantime relations with Peters grew harder and harder. I will not spin
out excuses, but all his old animosity to me returned, and I began
while I was waiting for that letter to feel once again the old rancour
I had felt. This man had hurt me by suspecting me falsely, when, had
he shown me confidence, he could have made a better man of me; he had
spoilt my best chance of a career; he had poisoned my relations with
Longhurst, and so brought about the very crime of which he was now
lying in wait to accuse me; he had thwarted my love for four miserable
years. On the top of all that came this letter” (he had held a letter
in his hand all the time he was speaking), “and it shall speak for
itself. But first one question. You may remember when you first saw me
at Long Wilton. Well, I came really as it happened upon an errand for
Miss Denison. Mrs. Nicholas, in the village, you may not know, had
been her nurse. But that does not matter. Between my first visit and
my return, do you happen to remember that a Mrs. Bulteel was staying
at the hotel, and visited Mr. Peters of whom she was an old friend?”

Callaghan remembered that it was so.

“Mrs. Bulteel is, I have always supposed, the lady referred to in this
letter, which reached me (will you note?) by the five o’clock post at
Peters’ house, seven hours before I killed him.”

He passed the letter to me without looking at me. Callaghan and I read
it together. It was in a lady’s hand, signed with the name of Lady
Denison, the young lady’s mother. It appeared to be written in great
agitation. Its purport was that the young lady had resolved, so her
mother found, to break off her engagement with Vane-Cartwright. She
had formerly loved another man, whose name the mother thought she must
not mention, though probably Vane-Cartwright knew it, but had supposed
that he did not care for her or had given up doing so. She had now
learned from an officious lady friend, who had lately seen this old
lover, that he cared for her still; that he had concealed his passion
when he found she favoured Vane-Cartwright, but that having now
apparently quarrelled with Vane-Cartwright he had authorised her to
let this be known if she saw her opportunity. The mother concluded by
saying that she had so far failed in reasoning with her daughter, who
had wished to write and break off her engagement, and all she could do
was to lay on her the absolute command not to write to Vane-Cartwright
at all for the present.

“There is only one comment to make on that letter,” said
Vane-Cartwright. “You may wonder why I should have assumed that it was
hopeless. Well, I knew the lady better than you, better than her
mother did, and knew that if her old attachment had returned it had
returned to stay. Besides, I read this letter with my rival sitting in
the room (you two gentlemen were sitting in the room too as it
happens), and when hard, self-contained people do come under these
influences, they do not give way to them by halves.

“Thank you,” said Vane-Cartwright, when we had read and returned the
letter. “I am glad you have heard me so patiently. That all this makes
me less of a villain than you thought me, I do not pretend to say; but
I think you will understand why I wished some men whom I respected, as
I respect you, to know my story. I do not suggest for a moment that it
should influence your present action. Here I am, as I said to begin
with, your prisoner. Of course you see that society is just as safe
from future murders from me as from any man. But if your principles of
justice demand life for life, or if human feeling makes you resolve to
avenge your friend, that is just what I came here expecting. I am the
last man in the world who could give an unprejudiced opinion on the
ethics of punishment.”

He ended with a quiet and by no means disagreeable smile.

As I have often said I make no sort of pretence to report any talk
quite correctly, and here, where the manner of the talk is of special
importance, I feel more than ever my incompetence to report it. I can
only say that the singular confession, of which I have striven to
repeat the purport, was in reality delivered with a great deal of
restrained eloquence, and with occasional most moving play of facial
expression, all the more striking in a man whom I had seldom before
seen to move a muscle of his face unnecessarily. It was delivered to
two men of whom one (myself) was physically overwrought, while the
other (Callaghan), naturally emotional, was at the commencement in the
fullest elation of triumphant pursuit, in other words, ready to recoil
violently.

We sat, I do not know how long, each waiting for the other to speak.
Vane-Cartwright sat meanwhile neither looking at us nor moving his
countenance—only the fingers of one hand kept drumming gently upon his
knee.

At last I did what I think I never did but once before, obeyed an
impulse almost physical, to speak words which my mouth seemed to utter
mechanically. If they were the words of reason, they were not the
words of my conscious thought, for that was busy with all, and more
than all the scruples which had ever made this business hard to me.

“Mr. Vane-Cartwright,” I said, “it is my painful duty to tell you at
once that I do not believe one word you have said, except what I knew
already.”

He went white for a moment; then quickly recomposed himself and
inclined his head slightly with a politely disdainful expression.

“Oh, Driver,” said Callaghan, in a gentle tone, and he arose and paced
the room. He was strangely moved. To begin with, though he had felt
nothing but remorseless glee in his share in hunting his victim down,
he would in any case have felt great repugnance at giving him the
_coup de grâce_. But then he had once taken the step of inviting that
victim into his own room; he had sat there for an hour and a half with
that victim by his own fireside, telling his life-story and implicitly
pleading for his life. And the pleading had been conducted under the
flattering pretext that it was not pleading at all but the instinctive
confidence of a redoubtable antagonist, in one whom he respected for
having beaten him. As for the story itself, Callaghan did not exactly
believe it; on the contrary, I found afterwards that, while I had not
got beyond a vague sense that the whole story was a tissue of lies, he
had noted with rapid acuteness each of the numerous points of
improbability in it; but to his mind (Irish, if I may say publicly
what I have said to him) the fact that the story appealed to his
imaginative sympathy was almost as good as its being true, and what in
respect of credibility was wanting to its effect was quite made good
by Callaghan’s admiration for the intrepidity with which the man had
carried out this attempt on us. And the story did appeal to his
sympathy, he had sympathised with his early struggles, he had
sympathised still more with the suggestion of passion in his final
crime, and (Irish again) had ignored the fact that on the criminal’s
own showing the crime conceived in passion had been carried through
with a cold-blooded meanness of which Callaghan’s own nature had no
trace. Lastly, he was genuinely puzzled by the problem as to the
morality of vengeance which Vane-Cartwright had raised with so
dexterously slight a touch.

Whatever his motive, Callaghan was upon the point of resolving that,
at least from his own room, where the criminal had come to appeal to
his mercy, that criminal should go away free. And if Callaghan had so
resolved I should have been powerless for a time; he was prepared and
I was not as to the steps immediately to be taken to secure
Vane-Cartwright’s arrest. But it seems, if for once I may use that
phrase with so little or else so deep a meaning, that the luck had
departed from Vane-Cartwright. At this crisis of his fate a device of
his own recoiled upon him with terrible force.

“I cannot do it! I cannot do it!” Callaghan was exclaiming, when the
door opened and a telegram was brought for me. This was the message:
“Clarissa terribly ill, symptoms poison, Bancroft, Fidele”. It meant
that my wife was dying at the friend’s villa to which she had gone,
and dying by that man’s means, and it was certified by the use of the
password which my wife had told me to expect. I did not reflect and I
did not speak; I grasped Callaghan’s arm and I put the telegram in his
hand. He knew enough to understand the message well. He read it with
an altered face. He passed it to Vane-Cartwright and said: “Read that,
and take it for my answer”. I should doubt if Vane-Cartwright had
often been violently angry, but he was now. He dashed the telegram
down with a curse. “The fool,” he said, and he gasped with passion,
“if he was going to try that trick, why did not he do it before?”
Callaghan stepped up to me, put his big arms round me, and for a
moment hugged me in them, with tears in his eyes. Then without a word
he strode across the room, and, before I could see what was happening,
Vane-Cartwright’s hands were tied behind his back with a great silk
handkerchief.



Chapter XXII

My story draws towards its close, and of mystery or of sudden peril it
has little more to tell. Upon one point, the most vital to me, let me
not give the reader a moment’s suspense. My wife did not die of
poison, had not been poisoned, had not been ill, had not sent that
telegram. What had happened was this: on one single occasion she had
not despatched her own message herself; through the misunderstanding
or too prompt courtesy of her host’s butler, the telegram which she
had written had been taken by a messenger, and it had fallen into the
hands of the enemy’s watchful emissary. It had revealed to him the
password which my wife used to me; and in its place there had gone
over the wires a message which would indeed have called me back at any
stage of the pursuit, but which was fated to arrive neither sooner nor
later than the moment when it must destroy Vane-Cartwright’s last hope
of escape.

I say not later, for indeed I have evidence strong enough for my now
suspicious mind that Vane-Cartwright had endeavoured to prepare his
escape in the event of his failure to persuade Callaghan and myself.
An unoccupied flat immediately below Callaghan’s had the day before
been engaged by a nameless man, who paid a quarter’s rent in advance,
and on the day of his interview with us, several strange persons, who
were never seen there again, arrived with every sign of belated haste;
but, whatever accident had delayed them, they arrived a quarter of an
hour after we had left.

And so on the 15th of May, 1897, nearly sixteen months after Peters’
death, his murderer was handed over to the police, with information
which, including as it did the fact of his confession, ensured their
taking him into custody.

Then I, in my turn, became Callaghan’s prisoner. I arrived at Charing
Cross station in good time for the night train, and found my luggage
already there and registered, and my ticket taken. Our tickets taken,
rather, for, protest as I might, I was escorted by Callaghan, indeed
nursed (and I needed it) the whole way to Florence, and to the villa
where my wife was staying. One item remains untold to complete for the
present the account of the debt which I owe him. We had hardly left
Charing Cross when his quick wits arrived at precisely that
explanation of the telegram which in happy fact was true; but all the
way, talkative man though he was, he refrained from vexing my bruised
mind with a hope which, he knew, I should not be able to trust.

When he had learnt at the door that his happy foreboding was true, no
entreaty would induce him to stay and break bread. He returned at once
to England, leaving me to enter alone to that reunion of which I need
say nothing, nor even tell how much two people had hungered for it.

The reader who is curious in such matters might almost reconstruct for
himself (in spite of the newspaper reports which naturally are
misleading) the trial of William Vane-Cartwright. He might pick out
from these pages the facts capable of legal proof, which, once proved
and once marshalled into their places, could leave no reasonable doubt
of the prisoner’s guilt.

But, however late, the trained intelligence of the police had now been
applied to the matter, and the case wore an altered aspect. No
startling discovery had come to pass, only the revelation of the
obvious. Some points had been ascertained which ought to have been
ascertained long before; still more, facts long known had been
digested, as, surely, it should have been somebody’s business to
digest them from the first. In particular, tardy attention had been
paid to the report of the young constable who, as I mentioned,
followed Sergeant Speke into Peters’ room, and who had incurred some
blame because his apparent slowness had allowed some trespassers to
come and make footprints on the lawn (I fancy his notes had been
overlooked when some officer in charge of the case had been superseded
by another). The observed movements, just after the crime, of two or
three people who were about the scene, had been set down in order.
Enquiries, such as only authority could make, had ultimately been made
among Vane-Cartwright’s acquaintance in the East, and though
disappointing in the main, they yielded one fact of importance.
Moreover, the researches which were made by Callaghan shortly after
the murder, and which I had supposed at the time were so futile, now
appeared in another light. Just before that suspicious flight to
Paris, he had given to the police at Exeter some scrappy and
ill-explained notes; and on a subsequent visit, which I have
mentioned, to Scotland Yard, he had handed in a long and
over-elaborate memorandum. These now received justice. I must,
therefore, attempt to state, with dry accuracy, the case which was
actually presented against the accused.

Upon the fact that he had confessed his guilt, though indeed it
reversed the surface improbability that a man in his position was a
criminal, I must lay no separate emphasis. Neither judge nor
prosecuting counsel did so. The defence dealt with it upon a theory
which turned it to positive advantage. I myself can well conceive that
a man, to whom his life was little and his reputation much, might have
taken the risk of a false confession to us in the hope of binding us
to silence.

But, to begin, Peters was without doubt murdered on a certain night,
and during that night Vane-Cartwright was one of a few who could
easily have had access to him.

Now years before one Longhurst had disappeared; a report had got
abroad that he went down in a certain ship which had been lost; the
report was false; but he never reappeared; several witnesses (traced
out by the enquiry of the police in the East) appeared at the trial,
and swore that Vane-Cartwright had often spoken of Longhurst’s sailing
in that ship; yet he must, according to Mr. Bryanston’s evidence, have
known that this was false; and, according to the same evidence, he had
been in Longhurst’s company after the time when the rest of
Longhurst’s neighbours last saw him. From this (though the other
proved facts of their connexion amounted to little more than they were
reputed partners) it followed that Vane-Cartwright was in a position
in which suspicion of foul play towards Longhurst might easily fall on
him.

Next, Peters at the time of his death not merely entertained this
suspicion but was taking steps to obtain proof of its truth; for there
were his letters to Bryanston and to Verschoyle still extant, and
admissible in evidence as _res gestæ_, the actual first steps which he
had taken with this aim.

Next, Vane-Cartwright knew of Peters’ suspicion and was greatly
perturbed by the knowledge. His whole conduct was in this regard most
significant. Callaghan showed that on the first evening when he had
seen the two men together their intercourse had at first been easy,
but that by the end of the evening something had happened which
completely altered their manners; the one became abstracted and aloof,
the other eagerly watched him. Of the talk which caused this change
Callaghan had only caught Peters’ question, “sailed in what,” but it
was evident now to what that question referred. It was in itself
strange that after this Vane-Cartwright should have availed himself of
a general invitation given by Peters earlier, and have come rather
suddenly to his house, putting off (as it was now shown) for that
purpose a previous important engagement. It was a sinister fact that,
before he did so, he had set on foot mysterious enquiries, some of
which related to the two men to whom, in his presence, Peters had
written letters about the affair of Longhurst, while the rest, though
less obviously, appeared to be connected with the same matter. The
first fruits of these enquiries (and they were telling) had been, by
his arrangement, brought to him on the very afternoon before the
murder. After the murder he had, it now seemed plain, stayed on at my
house merely in the hope of intercepting Bryanston’s answer. By what
means he knew that the sting of Dr. Verschoyle lay in his journals
cannot be conjectured, but there was no mistaking the purpose with
which, a little later, he obtained these journals by deceit.
Altogether his conduct had been that of a man in whom Peters had
aroused an anxiety so intense as to form a possible motive for
murdering him.

And altogether his conduct after the murder bore, now that it could be
fully traced, the flagrant aspect of guilt. He had unlatched the
window; this was now certain, though of course of that act by itself
an innocent account might be given. The reader knows too the whole
course of his action in regard to Trethewy and his family, beginning
with the lie, which made him appear as screening Trethewy when in fact
he was plotting his undoing, and ending with his breaking in upon my
talk with Ellen Trethewy, who had stood where she might have seen him
making those tracks in the snow. The making of the tracks,—this, of
course, was the key to his whole conduct, the one thing, which, if
quite certain, admitted of but one explanation. Only just here, when
last we dealt with that matter, a faint haze still hung. Thalberg
swore to having seen him in the field, where those tracks and no
others were just afterwards found; Ellen Trethewy had seen him start
to go there and again seen him returning. Yet, though the two
corroborated each other, there might be some doubt of the inference to
be drawn from what Ellen Trethewy saw (that depended on knowledge of
the ground), and of the correctness of the observation made by
Thalberg from afar. After all, was it absolutely impossible that
Trethewy had through some strange impulse, rational or irrational,
made those tracks himself,—perhaps, with his sense of guilt and in the
over-refinement of half-drunken cunning, he had fabricated against
himself a case which he thought he could break down.

But here the late revealed evidence came in. It was certain, first,
that those tracks did not exist in the morning. The constable who had
let the trespassers come in stopped them when he found them, and noted
carefully how far they had gone; he got one of them, an enterprising
young journalist, to verify his observation, and it resulted in this,
that the part of the lawn where those guilty tracks began was
absolutely untrodden then. Next it was certain now that throughout the
time when those tracks were made Trethewy had been in his house. Now,
when the whole course of events that morning was considered, there
could be no doubt that those tracks were made by some one who knew
exactly what the situation was. Since it was not Trethewy, it lay
between Sergeant Speke, myself, Callaghan and Vane-Cartwright.
Sergeant Speke and I could easily give account of our time that day,
but I think I mentioned that there had arisen some doubt as to where
Callaghan had been just at the critical hour. It was explained now;
Callaghan had been too far away; just at that time he had gone again
to the hotel, moved by one of his restless impulses to try and spy
upon Thalberg. It lay then beyond doubt that the tracks were made by
Vane-Cartwright, and it was beyond doubt why he made them.

But the case did not rest there. The front door of Grenvile Combe had
been bolted on the inside that night, before Peters died. Presumably
Peters did it; anyway Vane-Cartwright and Callaghan, as they had said
next morning, found it bolted when they came down disturbed by the
noise, and themselves bolted it again; and Peters was then living, for
they heard him in his room. The other doors had been bolted in like
manner by the servants. Every window but two had also been latched.
The doors had remained bolted till the servants were about in the
morning, when Peters must have been some hours dead. The fastened
windows were still fastened when we came to the house (a window in the
back servants’ quarters had been open for a short while in the
morning, but the servants had been about all the time), for the
constable, before he obeyed the Sergeant and began his search outside,
had been in every room and noticed every fastening. The two exceptions
were Vane-Cartwright’s own open window, which did not matter, and the
little window at the back, already named as a possible means of
entrance. Careful experiment had now been made (Callaghan had long ago
suggested it), and it showed that, whoever could climb to that window,
only an infant could pass through it. No one then had entered the
house by night, or, if he had previously entered it, had escaped by
night; and it was also certain that no one could have lurked there
concealed in the morning. Therefore, Peters was murdered by an inmate
of the house, by the housemaid, or by the cook, or by Vane-Cartwright,
or by Callaghan. Now the housemaid and the cook had passed a wakeful
night; the disturbance in the road had aroused them and left them
agitated and alarmed; each was therefore able to swear that the other
had remained all night in the bedroom which they shared. Therefore,
Peters was murdered either by Vane-Cartwright or by Callaghan.

And why not, it might be asked, by Callaghan, against whom at one time
such good grounds of suspicion were to be found? The reader must by
this time have seen that the eccentric and desultory proceedings of
Callaghan, even his strange whim of staying in that crime-stricken
house and the silly talk with which he had put me off about his aim,
had, as he once boasted to me, a method, which though odd and
over-ingenious, was rational and very acute. The neglected memorandum
he had made for the police was enough in itself (without his frankness
under cross-examination) to set his proceedings since the murder in a
clear light. Callaghan, moreover, was the life-long friend of Peters.
True it was that (as the defence scented out) he had owed Peters
£2,000, and Peters’ will forgave the debt. True, but it was now proved
no less true, that since that will was made the debt had been paid,
and paid in a significant manner. Callaghan had first remitted to
Peters £500 from India. Peters, thereupon, had sent Callaghan an
acquittance of the whole debt. Callaghan’s response was an immediate
payment of £250 more. And the balance, £1,250, had been paid a very
few days before Peters was killed. This was what an ill-inspired
cross-examination revealed, and if the guilt lay between
Vane-Cartwright and Callaghan, there could be no doubt which was the
criminal.

So Callaghan and I had gone through tangled enquiries and at least
some perilous adventures to solve a puzzle of which the solution lay
all the while at our feet, and at the feet of others.

It would be melancholy now to dwell on the daring and brilliance of
the defence. No witness was called for it. It opened with a truly
impressive treatment of Vane-Cartwright’s confession; and the broken
state of his temperament, originally sensitive and now harassed by
suspicion and persecution, was described with a tenderness of which
the speaker might have seemed incapable, and which called forth for
the hard man in the dock a transient glow of human sympathy. Every
other part of his conduct, so far as it was admitted, was made the
subject of an explanation, by itself plausible. But little was
admitted. Every separate item of the evidence was made the subject of
a doubt, by itself reasonable. If a witness had been called to tell
some very plain matter of fact, that kind of plain fact under one’s
eyes was notoriously the sort of thing about which the most careless
mistakes were made. If a witness had had a longer tale to tell he had
revealed some poisonous pre-possession. I, for example, a most
deleterious type of cleric, had, besides a prejudice against
unorthodox Vane-Cartwright, an animus to defend Trethewy, arising from
that sickly sentiment towards Miss Trethewy which I betrayed when I
fled to her from my ailing family at Florence. In Trethewy’s case
again there had been a confession of a very different order; and the
suggestion was dexterously worked that something still lay concealed
behind Trethewy’s story. Withal the vastness of the region of
possibility was exhibited with vigorous appeals to the imagination.
Strong in every part, the defence as a whole was bound to be weak; the
fatality which made so many lies and blunders work together for evil
was beyond belief; the conduct which needed so much psychology to
defend it was indefensible.

So the verdict was given and the sentence was passed.



Chapter XXIII

Once again I saw William Vane-Cartwright. At his own request I was
summoned to visit him in the gaol. It was not the interview of
penitent and confessor; none the less I am bound to silence about it,
even though my silence may involve the suppression of something which
tells in his favour. One thing I may and must say. Part of his object
in sending for me was to make me his agent in several acts of
kindness.

As I look back, I often ask myself: Was there indeed no truth, beyond
what we knew, in the tale that this man told to Callaghan and me, and
which was skilfully woven to accord as far as possible with many
things which we might have and had in fact discovered. In point of
vital facts it was certainly false. I could now disprove every
syllable of that love story; his acquaintance with Miss Denison was
only a few months old; she had never known Peters; and the letter that
he showed us was a forgery of course. I happen, moreover, too late for
any useful purpose, to have met several people who knew Longhurst
well; all agree that he was rough and uncompanionable, all that he was
strictly honest and touchingly kind; all testify that in his later
days he was a total abstainer.

Yet, in the face of this, I believe that Vane-Cartwright described
fairly, as well as with insight, the influences which in boyhood and
early manhood told so disastrously upon him. I now know, as it
happens, a good deal about his parents, for one of my present
neighbours was a family friend of theirs. They were a gifted but
eccentric couple, with more “principles” than any two heads can safely
hold. Little as I like their beliefs, I cannot but suspect that their
home life was governed by a conscientiousness and a tender affection
for their child, from which, if he had wished to be guided right, some
light must have fallen on his path. Yet without doubt their training
was as bad a preparation as could be for what he was to undergo. He
lost his fortune early, and was exiled to a settlement in the East
which, by all accounts, was not a school of Christian chivalry. Almost
everything in his surroundings there jarred upon his sensibility which
on the æsthetic side was more than commonly keen. Dozens of English
lads pass through just such trials unshaken, some even unspotted, but
they have been far otherwise nurtured than he. Peters too had an
influence upon his youth. I, who knew Peters so well, know that he
cannot have done the spiteful things which Vane-Cartwright said, but I
do not doubt for one moment that he did repel his young associate when
he need not have done so. Peters was young too, and may well be
forgiven, but I can imagine that by that chill touch he sped his
comrade on the downward course which chanced to involve his own
murder.

Altogether it is easy enough to form some image, not merely monstrous,
of the way in which that character formed itself out of its
surroundings; to understand how the poor lad became more and more
centred in himself; to praise him just in so far as that concentration
was strength; to note where that strength lay, in the one virtue which
in fact he had claimed as his own, in the unflinching avowal to
himself of the motive by which he meant to live.

That motive, a calculated resolve to be wealthy, to become detached in
outward fact as he was already in feeling from the sort of people and
the sort of surroundings amid which his present lot was cast, had
already been formed when the partnership with Longhurst offered him
his opportunity. One may well believe him that the three years of that
partnership cost him much. His one companion was a man whom, I take
it, he was incapable of liking, and his position at first was one of
subjection to him. He had lied to us much about Longhurst, but I fancy
that he had spoken of him with genuine, however unjust, dislike. What
particular fraud he played upon him, or whether it was, strictly
speaking, a fraud at all, I do not know. But no doubt he was by nature
mean (though ready enough to spend money), and he was probably more
mean when his strength was not full fledged and his nascent sense of
power found its readiest enjoyment in tricks. Assuredly he intended
from the first to use the partnership as much as possible for himself
and as little as possible for his partner. I am told that this is in
itself a perilous attitude from a legal point of view, and that it is,
in many relations of life, harder than laymen think to keep quite out
of reach of the law by any less painful course than that of positive
honesty. Let us suppose that he did only the sort of thing which his
own confession implied, obtaining for himself alone the renewal of
concessions originally made to his firm. Even so, I understand, he may
have found himself in this position, that Longhurst would have been
entitled to his share (the half or perhaps much more, according to the
terms of partnership) of extremely valuable assets upon which
Vane-Cartwright had counted as his own. Moreover, that possibly stupid
man would have had his voice about the vital question of how and when
to sell this property.

Even if this was all, it still meant that the hope upon which
Vane-Cartwright had set his soul, the hope not of a competence but of
eminent wealth, was about to slip away, and to slip away perhaps
irretrievably. For, as I have lately learnt, he was then ill, could
not remain in that climate, would not, if he fell down the ladder, be
able to start again, with more money and more experience, where he had
started three years before. In the choice which then arose he was not
the man to set his personal safety in the scales against his ambition.
And so the incredible deed was done, and fortune favoured the murderer
with the report that his victim had been lost in a wrecked ship
(possibly even he had met with that report before he killed him).
Henceforward, watchful as he had to be for a while, the chief burden
which his guilt laid upon him was that of bearing himself with
indifference.

Thirteen years had passed, years of unvarying success. The
watchfulness was now seldom needed, and the indifference had become a
pose. And so at last, on his first evening at Grenvile Combe, he fell
talking in his wonted way of Longhurst, and gave that false account of
his end to one of the only two living men with whom it behoved him to
take care. Instantly the spectre of his crime, which he thought had
been laid, confronted him, and confronted him, as some recollection
warned him, with the real peril of public shame, perhaps conviction
and death. Instantly too there arose, as if to his aid, not as yet the
full strength of his intellect and courage, but the ingrained, dormant
spirit of crime. If he had only said to Peters, “He sailed in the
_Eleanor_ with me. I killed him. I will tell you all about it,” I have
not a shadow of a doubt that his confession would have been kept
inviolate. Only there were trials from which even his nerve recoiled,
and plain facts of human nature which his acuteness never saw. So the
same deed was done again in quiet reliance upon that wonderful luck
which this time also had provided him with a screen against suspicion,
and this time also seemed to require nothing of him after the act was
accomplished except to bear himself carelessly. Indeed, though he
began to bear himself carelessly too soon—for he trusted
characteristically that Peters had this night followed the practice of
opening the window, which he was oddly fond of preaching, and he left
the room without troubling to look behind the curtain—his confidence
seemed justified. There was nothing in the room or in the house,
nothing under the wide vault of that starlit sky that was destined to
tell the tale.

Morning brought to his eyes, though not yet to his comprehension, the
presence of a huge calamity, for the ground was white with snow in
which, if Trethewy had come through it, his tracks would still be
seen. Soon he heard that Trethewy had in fact come home when the snow
lay there. Then at last his whole mind rose to the full height of the
occasion, to a height of composure and energy from which in all his
later doings he never declined far. I have an unbounded hatred for
that prevalent worship of strong men which seems to me to be born of
craven fear. Yet it extorts my most unwilling admiration of this man
that, when safety depended so much upon inaction, the only action he
took was such as at once was appallingly dangerous and yet was the
only way to avoid an even greater peril.

But strangely enough as I shut my mind against that haunting memory
which I have written these pages to expel, far different traits and
incidents from this keep longest their hold upon my imagination. I
remember Peters not as he died but as he lived; and the murderer
stands before me, as I take my leave, not in virtue of signal acts of
crime (which I could more easily have forgiven) but of little acts,
words, even tones of hardness and of concentrated selfishness, faintly
noted in my story, rendered darker to me by the knowledge that he
could be courteous and kind when it suited him. He stands there as the
type to me, not of that rare being the splendid criminal, but of the
man who in the old phrase is “without bowels”. And men (on whose souls
also may God have mercy) are not rare among us, who, without his
intellect or his daring, are as hard as he, but for whom, through
circumstances—not uncommon and I do not call them fortunate—the path
of consistent selfishness does not diverge from the path of a
respectable life.

Strangely too, one of those lesser acts of unkindness was needed to
bring about his downfall. If I had never seen him at Florence, the
spark of my baffled ire would not have been rekindled, nor could I
have met Trethewy’s family till they had gone beyond the seas. And I
should never have seen him at Florence but that my wife, who did not
know his name, recalled upon seeing him that little delinquency at
Crema of which she and I can think no longer with any personal spleen.
It seems as if he might have murdered his partner and murdered his
host with cruel deliberation and gone unpunished; but since one day
without a second thought he refused a common courtesy to a suffering
woman and a harassed girl, he had set in motion the cunning machinery
of fate, and it came to pass in the end that the red hand of the law
seized him and dealt to him the doom which the reader has long
foreseen.


Let some surviving characters of this story briefly bid farewell. For
my wife and me, we are settled in our country rectory, so near in
distance to London and in effect so far off; and, if the now
delightful labours of my calling seem to me not more unsuccessful than
perhaps they should always seem to the labourer, I like to think it
means that what Eustace Peters, half-unknowing, did for me abides.

Callaghan was our guest not two months ago, a welcome guest to us, and
even more to our children. He talked alternately of a project of land
reclamation on the Wash and of an immediate departure for the East in
search of a clue to the questions left unsolved in these pages. He has
since departed from this country, not, I believe, for the East, but
neither we nor any of his friends know where he is, or doubt that
wherever he is, he can take care of himself and will hurt no other
creature. Mr. Thalberg continues his law business in the City, though
the business has changed in character. I bear him no ill-will, and yet
am sorry to be told that (while the disclosures in the trial lost him
several old clients, as well as his clerk, Mr. Manson) on the whole
his business has grown. Trethewy is now our gardener. His daughter is
a board-school mistress in London. I hope he will long remain with us,
for I now like him as a man but could not lay it upon my conscience to
recommend him as a gardener. Peters’ nephews, unseen by the reader,
have hovered close in the background of my tale. Both have
distinguished themselves in India. Yesterday I married the elder to
Miss Denison, on whom, I hope, the reader has bestowed a thought. In
the other, who is engaged to my eldest daughter, his uncle’s peculiar
gifts repeat themselves more markedly and with greater promise of
practical achievement.