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.