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.