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.