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.”