“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.