As we left Thalberg’s office and walked down the narrow court which
led to the street, I daresay our looks and voices, if not our words,
betrayed the exultation of men who see a long-sought object at last
within reach. As we turned into the street we were stopped by
Vane-Cartwright.
Only the day before I had been expecting to find him lurking for me
round every corner; but now and here it startled me to meet him. When
I learnt why he met us, it startled me still more, and looking back
upon it, I still find it unaccountable.
“Mr. Driver, Mr. Callaghan,” he said, addressing us in turn in tones
as quiet as ever, but with a pale face and highly-strung manner, “I am
your prisoner.” I suppose we stared for a moment, for he repeated, “I
am your prisoner. I will go with you where you like; or you can give
me in charge to the nearest constable. There is one. You see you have
beaten me. You probably do not yet know it yourselves, but you have.”
“Well,” he continued, “if you do not quite know what you are going to
do, I will ask one thing of you. Before you give me up to justice,
take me somewhere where I can talk with you two alone. I want to tell
you my story. It will not make you alter your purpose, I know that;
but it will make you respect me a little more than you do. It is odd
that I should want that, but I do.”
“Well, gentlemen?” he said questioningly, as we still hesitated, and
his old self-possession returning for a moment, a smile of positive
amusement came over his face.
I confess that if I had acted on my own impulse I should have taken my
antagonist at his word when he suggested that we should call the
nearest policeman. But Callaghan had been taking the lead in our late
movements, and I felt that the occasion belonged to Callaghan; and
Callaghan was more generous.
“If you have anything to say, sir,” he said, “come to my chambers and
say it. Four-wheeler!”
In a moment more we were in a cab—how slow the cab seemed—Callaghan
sitting opposite Vane-Cartwright and watching him narrowly lest he
should play us a trick, while I too watched him all through the
interminable drive, very ill at ease as to the wisdom of our conduct,
and wondering what could be the meaning of the unexpected and
desperate hazard which our antagonist was now taking. He was evidently
going to confess to us. But why? If the knowledge we already possessed
was sufficient, as perhaps it was, to secure his conviction, yet he
could only partly guess what that knowledge was; of the two most
telling pieces of evidence against him, the fact about the
window-latch which the surgeon had told us, and the fact that Thalberg
had recognised him afar from his window in the hotel, he must have
been quite unaware. And then what did he expect to gain by the
interview which he had sought with us? What opinion had he formed of
the mental weaknesses of the two men with whom he was playing? Was he
relying overmuch upon the skill and mastery of himself and others
which he would bring to bear in this strange interview? Had the
fearful strain under which he had been living of late taken away the
coolness and acuteness of his judgment? Could he rely so much upon the
chance of enlisting our compassion that he could afford to give us a
certainty of his guilt, which, for all he knew, we had not got before,
and to throw away the hope of making an escape by flight, which with a
man of his resource might easily have been successful? Or had he some
other far more sinister hope than that of stirring us to unworthy pity
or generosity? I could not resolve these questions, but I was inclined
to an explanation which he was himself about to give us. If the cause
of suspicion against him became public he would have lost everything
for which he greatly cared, and he was ready to risk all upon any
chance, however faint, of avoiding this. I was, as I have said, ill at
ease about it all. I did not feel that after the conversation I had
held with him before, Vane-Cartwright would get over me, but it is an
experience which one would do much to avoid, that of listening
obdurate to an appeal into which another man puts his whole heart; and
more especially would one wish to have avoided consenting to hear that
appeal in a manner which might raise false hopes. But for a more
serious reason it had been a mistake to acquiesce in this interview; I
had learned to know not only Callaghan’s goodness of heart but his
cleverness and his promptitude, but I had not learned to credit him
with wisdom or with firmness; and the sort of impulsiveness, which had
made him at once grant the request for this interview, might easily
have further and graver consequences.
At last we were in Callaghan’s room and seated ourselves round a
table.
“I see,” said Vane-Cartwright, “that it puzzles you gentlemen why I
should ask for this interview. You think I am an ordinary criminal,
which perhaps I am, and you thought that like an ordinary criminal I
should try all means to save a disgraced life, which I certainly shall
not do. I know that you have not got the knowledge which would convict
me of murder. I do not suppose you think you have, and in any case you
have not. And, if you had, I think you know I have contrivance enough
to take myself off and live comfortably out of reach of the law. But I
do not care for escape, and I do not care for acquittal. You have the
means to throw suspicion on me, and that is enough for me. I cared for
honour and success, and I do not care for life when they are lost.” He
was looking at each of us alternately with an inscrutable but quite
unflinching gaze, but he now hid his eyes, and he added as if with
difficulty, “Yet I did care for one other thing besides my position in
the world, but that has gone from me too.
“And now,” he resumed, “that my struggle is over, and that the
people—more people and bigger people than you would think—who have
been courting me for the last twelve months will think of me only with
as just abhorrence as Thalberg himself does, I have an odd fancy, and
it is this: I should like to stand a little better in the eyes of the
very men who, far from courting me, have had the courage to suspect me
and the tenacity to drag me down.” He had raised his eyes again, but
this time fixed them on Callaghan only, for he doubtless saw that I
was out of touch with him, and, seeing this, he had art enough to
appear to recognise and acquiesce in it.
“You know something of my story. Let me tell you just a little more of
it, and, please, if it interests you enough, question me on any point
you will. I shall not shrink from answering. If a man is known to have
murdered two of his friends, there cannot be much left that it is
worth his while to conceal. First, I would like to speak of my early
training. If I had been brought up in the gutter, you could make some
allowance for that, and give me some credit for any good qualities I
had shown, however cheerfully you might see me hanged for my crimes.
It is not usual to suppose that any such allowance may have to be made
for a man brought up to luxury and to every sort of refinement, and
yet such a man too may be the victim of influences which would kill
the good in most characters even more than they have in mine. You may
have heard a little about my people, and perhaps know that their views
and ways were not quite usual; I am not going to say one word against
them (I am not that sort of man, whatever I may be), but there were
two things in my boyhood harder for me than the ordinary Englishman
can well imagine. I was brought up in the actual enjoyment of
considerable wealth and the expectation of really great wealth, and
just when I was grown up the wealth and the expectations suddenly
vanished. That has happened to many men who have been none the worse
for it. But then I was brought up soft. You know I am not a limp man
or a coward; but I had all the bringing up of one; cared for hand and
foot, never doing a thing for myself (my good people had great ideas
of republican simplicity, but they were only literary ideas). None of
the games, none of the sport that other boys get; no rubbing shoulders
with my equals at school; no comradeship but only the company of my
elders, mostly invalids. Few people know what it is to be brought up
soft. But there was worse than that. You” (he was addressing
Callaghan) “were piously brought up. Oh, yes, you were really. I
daresay your home was not a strict one, and you were not carefully
taught precepts of religion and morality or carefully shielded from
the sight of evil (perhaps quite the contrary, for I have not the
pleasure of knowing much about you, Mr. Callaghan), but I am quite
sure that you had about you at home or at school, or both, people
among whom there was some tacit recognition of right and wrong of some
sort as things incontrovertible, and that there was some influence in
your childhood which appealed to the heart. But in my childhood
nothing appealed to the heart, nothing was incontrovertible, above
all, nothing was tacit. Everlasting discussion, reaching back to the
first principles of the universe, and branching out into such
questions as whether children should be allowed pop-guns. That was my
moral training, and that was all my moral training. It was very sound
in principle, I daresay—and I am not going to pose as an interesting
convert to the religious way of looking at things, for I am not
one—but it did not take account of practical difficulties, and it was
very, very hard on me. Not one man in ten thousand has had that sort
of upbringing, and I do not suppose you can realise in the least how
hard that sort of thing is.
“So,” he continued, “I found myself at twenty-one suddenly made poor;
more accustomed than most lads to think life only worth living for
refinements which are for the wealthy only; taught not to take
traditional canons of morality for granted; taught to think about the
real utility of every action; landed in a place like Saigon, and
thrown in the society of the sort of gentry who, we all know, do
represent European civilisation in such places; sent there to get a
living; thoroughly out of sympathy with all the tastes and pleasures
of the people round me, and at the same time easily able to discover
that for all my strange upbringing I was by nature more of a man than
any one else there. As a matter of fact, there was only one decent man
there with intellectual tastes, and that was Peters; but Peters, who
was only two or three years older than I, and, as I own I fancied,
nothing like so clever, took me under his protection and made it his
mission to correct me, and it did not do. You can easily imagine how,
in the three years before Longhurst came on the scene, I had got to
hate the prospect of a life of humdrum, money-grubbing among those
people in the hope of retiring with a small competence some day when
my liver and my brain were gone; you would not have thought any the
better of me if I had become content with that. At any rate I did not.
I meant to be quit of it as soon as I could, and I meant more. I
resolved before I had been three weeks in the place to make money on a
scale which would give me the position, the society and the pursuits
for which I had been trained. I resolved in fact to make the sort of
place for myself in the world which every man, except the three men in
this room and Thalberg, thinks I have secured. If I had no scruples as
to the way in which I should carry out that resolve, I differed from
the people around me only in knowing that I had no scruples, and in
having instead a set purpose which I was man enough to pursue through
life. And I am man enough, I hope, not to care much for life now that
that purpose has failed. If I pursued my end without scruple, I think
I was carrying out to its logical conclusion the principles that had
been taught me as a boy; and, as I am not going to seek your sympathy
on false pretences, let me tell you I do not know to-day that there
are any better principles—there may be; I hope there are.
“I waited nearly three years, learning all I could about business and
about the East, its trade and its resources, and waiting all the time
for my opportunity which I knew would come, and which came. It came to
me through Longhurst; but I must go back a little. I have said that
Peters was my only equal in our society there. Now let me say, once
for all, that in nothing that I am going to tell you do I wish to
blame Peters more than I blame myself; but from the first we did not
hit it off. Peters, as I have said, took on himself the part of my
protector and adviser a little too obviously; he had not quite tact
enough to do it well, and I was foolish enough in those days to resent
what I thought his patronage. At first there was no harm done; Peters
thought I should be the better if I entered more into such sport as
there was in the place, for which I had very little taste, and he
tried to make me do so by chaffing me about being a duffer, in his
blunt way, which I thought rude, and that before other people. You
would hardly imagine that I was ever shy, but I was; and, absurd as it
seems, this added a good deal to my unhappiness in my new
surroundings. I should very soon have got over that, for I soon found
my way about the place, and my shyness quickly wore off; but worse
than that followed. I was fond of arguing, and used to discuss all
things in heaven and earth with Peters. You can easily suppose that
his views and mine did not agree, and I daresay now that I pained him
a good deal. I did not mean to do that, but I did mean to shock him
sometimes, and so I often took a cynical line, by which I meant
nothing at all, telling him the sharp things that I should do if I got
the chance; and once or twice I was fool enough to pretend that all
sorts of things of which Peters would not approve went on in our
business. To my amazement I discovered after a time that Peters took
all this nonsense seriously. I would have given anything to efface the
impression that I had made, for though there are few men that I ever
respected, Peters was one of them. But Peters became reserved towards
me and impossible to get at. Then gossip came in between us. There is
sometimes very spiteful gossip in a little European settlement in the
East; and I am certain, though I cannot prove it, that a man there,
with whom I had constant business, told Peters a story about a shady
transaction which he said I was in. The transaction was real enough,
but neither I nor my firm had any more to do with it than you. I know
that this man told it to other people, for I have heard so from them,
and I do not doubt that that was what finally turned Peters against
me. I tried to tax Peters with having picked up this story, but he
said something which sounded like disbelieving me, and I lost my
temper and broke off; and from that day till we met again at Long
Wilton we never exchanged any more words together, though we crossed
one another’s path as you shall hear.
“Mind, again, I am not saying it was his fault; but it is in itself
doing a young man a very ill turn to show him that you think him
dishonest when as yet he is not, and it did me harm. Upon my soul, I
was honest then; in fact, in that regard, most of my dealings
throughout life would stand a pretty close scrutiny. But I have often
thought that I might have become a much better man if Peters would
have been my friend instead of suspecting me unjustly; and I confess
that it rankles to this day, and all the more because I always
respected Peters. After that, however, he did me some practical ill
turns, disastrously ill turns; rightly enough, if he thought as he
did. I must tell you that our separation came a very little while
before Longhurst came to the place. Just afterwards I had an opening,
a splendid opening; it would not have made me the rich man that I am,
but it would have given me a good position right away, and what it
would have saved me you shall judge. A very eminent person came to
Saigon; he knew something of Peters and a little of me. He saw a great
deal of Peters at Saigon, and he pressed him to accept a post that was
in his gift in the Chinese Customs service. Peters refused. I suppose
he was at that time thinking of coming home. The great man then spoke
to me about it, and had all but offered it to me. How I should have
jumped at it! But suddenly it all went off and he said no more to me.
I believed that Peters warned him against me; possibly, being sore
against Peters, I was mistaken; but at any rate that was what I ever
afterwards believed. It was partly in desperate annoyance about this
that I plunged into what then seemed my wild venture with Longhurst.
“And now I must tell you about Longhurst. He had been at some time, I
suppose, a clever man; at least he had a wonderful store of practical
knowledge about forests, mining and other matters, and he had
travelled a great deal in all parts of that region of the world, and
picked up many things which he wanted to turn to account. He had made
a little money which he wished to increase, and he had a great scheme
of organising and developing the trade of South-Eastern Asia and its
islands in various valuable kinds of timber, spices, gum, shellac,
etc., etc. He promised any one who could join him that in a few years,
by exploiting certain yet undeveloped but most profitable sources of
supply, he could get a monopoly of several important trades, the sago
trade, for example. He set forth his scheme to the company generally
at the English Club the first time I met him, and everybody laughed at
him except me, who saw that if he got into the right hands there was
something to be made out of his discoveries for him and other people.
And as a matter of fact we did make something of them, more than I
expected, but not what he expected. I did not make a large sum out of
our joint venture, not much more than I could have made by staying
where I was, but I got the knowledge of Eastern commerce, which has
enabled me since to do what I have done.
“I saw you smile just now, Mr. Callaghan, when I spoke of Longhurst
getting into the right hands. Well he did; and I did not. He had been,
as I said, a clever man, and there was something taking about him with
his bluff, frank, burly air, but he was going off when I met him.
People do go downhill if they spend all their lives in odd corners of
the earth; and, though I did not know it at first, he had taken the
surest road downhill, for he had begun to drink, and very soon it
gained upon him like wildfire. When he once goes wrong no one can be
so wrong-headed as a man like that, who thinks that he knows the world
from having knocked about it a great deal doing nothing settled; and I
should have found Longhurst difficult to deal with in any case. As it
was, Longhurst dined with Peters the night before we left Saigon
together. On the first day of our voyage he was very surly to me, and
he said, ‘I heard something funny about you last night, Master
Cartwright. I wish I had heard it before, that’s all.’ When I fired up
and told him to say straight out what it was, he looked at me
offensively, and went off into the smoking-room of the steamer to have
another drink. That was not a cheerful beginning of our companionship,
and I had my suspicion as to whom I ought to thank for it. I believe
the same tale-bearer that I mentioned before had been telling Peters
some yarn about my arrangements with Longhurst, which looked as if I
was trying to swindle him, and that Peters had passed it on. I very
soon found that Longhurst was not so simple as he seemed. I daresay he
had meant honestly enough by me at first, but having got it into his
thick head that I was a little too sharp, he made up his mind to be
the sharper of the two; and the result was that if I was to be safe in
dealing with him I must take care to keep the upper hand of him, and
before long I made up my mind that my partner should go out of the
firm. I could have made his fortune if he would have let me, but I
meant that the concern should be mine and not his, and I did not
disguise it from him. That was my great mistake. I do not know what
story, if any, you have picked up about my dealings with Longhurst. He
put about many stories when we had begun to quarrel—for he had begun
by that time, if not before, to drink freely—but the matter that we
finally quarrelled about was this. Of the various concessions which we
started by obtaining (at least I started by obtaining them; that was
to be my great contribution to the partnership), two only proved of
very great importance—one was from the Spanish Government of the
Philippines and the other from the Government of Anam, and these, as
it happened, were for three and four years, renewable under certain
conditions but also revocable earlier in certain events. There was no
trickery about that, though Longhurst may have thought there was. I
simply could not get larger concessions with the means of persuasion
(bribery, in other words) at our command. Subsequently I got renewals
and extensions of these concessions to myself alone. To the best of my
belief then and now the transaction held water in law and in equity,
but whatever a lawyer might think of it, the common-sense was this:
Longhurst had become so reckless and so muddle-headed that nothing
could any longer prosper under his control, if he had the control, and
besides that, I never could have got the extended concessions at all
if he was to be one of the concessionaires. There are some things
which an Eastern Government or a Spanish Government cannot stand, and
Longhurst’s treatment of the natives was one of them. But I must go
back a bit. There were other things besides this which contributed to
our quarrel. For one thing, odd as it may sound in speaking of two
grown-up men, Longhurst bullied me—physically bullied me. He was a
very powerful man, more so, I should think, even than you, Mr.
Callaghan, and when, as often happened, we were travelling alone
together, he used to insist on my doing as he liked in small
arrangements, by the positive threat of violence. To do him justice he
did not do it when he was sober, and though in those days I was a
weakly and timid man compared to what I have become, I soon learned
how to stop it altogether. But you can easily imagine that I did not
love him; and a bitter feeling towards his chief companion is not a
wholesome thing for a man to carry about through a year or two of hard
work in that climate (for it is a climate! none of the dry heat and
bracing winters you have in Northern India); still I hope I did not
bear him malice so much for that as for other things. I have said I
have no scruples, but I have no liking for ruffianism and cruelty. I
hate them for the same reason for which I hate some pictures and some
architecture, because they are not to my taste. But I had, in
out-of-the-way places, among weak savages, where law and order had not
come, to put up with seeing deeds done which people here at home would
not believe were done by their countrymen, and which a man who has
served his days in an honourable service like the Indian Civil could
believe in least of all. He had kicked a wretched man to death (for I
have no doubt he died of it) the day he died himself.
“But why do I make all these excuses? for, after all, what did I do
that needs so much excuse? I told Longhurst plainly what I had done
about the concessions and what I proposed to do for him, and he seemed
to fall in with it all, and then he went home for a month’s holiday in
England. I suppose he saw some lawyer, probably Thalberg, and got it
into his head that he could make out a case of fraud against me. At
any rate, when he returned, he seemed surly; he did not have it out
with me straight, but he began to make extravagant demands of me and
threaten me vaguely with some exposure if I did not give in to them,
which of course I did not. Then he quarrelled about it in his cups,
for the cups were getting more and more frequent, and several times
over he got so violent as to put me in actual fear of my life. And at
last, unhappily for him, it came to a real encounter. We had visited
the island of Sulu, where I had reason to think we might establish a
branch of our business, and after two or three days in an inland town
we were returning to the coast, expecting to be picked up by a Chinese
junk which was to take us back. The evening before we started down he
produced a packet of documents and brandished it at me as if it
contained something very damaging to me, and I could see plainly (for
I have an eye for handwriting) that on the top of it was an envelope
addressed by Peters. I am not justified in inferring from this that
Peters—who had seen Longhurst several times since he had seen me—had
again been repeating to him some malicious falsehood with which he had
been stuffed before he left Saigon; but can you wonder that I did
infer it? On the march down—when we were alone, for we had sent on our
servants before—Longhurst began again more savagely than ever, and for
about an hour he heaped all sorts of charges and vile insinuations
upon me, which I answered for a while as patiently as I could. At
last, breaking off in the middle of a curse, he fell into silence. He
strode on angrily ahead for a hundred yards or so. Then at a rocky
part of the path, where I was below him, he turned suddenly. He hurled
at me a great stone which narrowly missed me, and then he came rushing
and clambering back down the path at me. I fired (he turned as I
fired). That was the end. Was it murder?” He paused and then braced
himself up as he answered his own question. “Yes, it was, because I
was angry, not afraid, and because I could easily have run away, only
for some reason I did not mean to.
“But I am foolish to weary you with all this long preliminary story,
for, after all, what do you care about Longhurst; it is Peters, your
own friend, about whom you care. You think that he came to suspect me
of murdering Longhurst, and I killed him for that; but as sure as I
killed him, that was not—that was _not_ what made me do it.”
Vane-Cartwright sat for a long time with his face covered with his
hands. At last he sat up and looked me straight in the face. “Mr.
Driver, did you never suspect there was a romance in Peters’ life of
which you knew nothing? I did know of it, and I honoured him for it,
but I hated him for it too. Certainly you did not suspect that there
was a romance in mine. It does not seem likely that a great passion
should come to a calculating man like me, with the principles of
conduct of which I have made no secret to-day. But such things do
happen, and a great passion came late in life to me. And here is the
cruel thing, which almost breaks my philosophy down, and makes me
think that after all there is a curse upon crime. It ought to have
enriched and ennobled my life, ought it not? It came at just the
moment, in just the shape, and with all the attendant accidents to
ruin me.
“It began five years ago. Miss Denison and her parents were staying at
Pau. I was in the same hotel and I met them. I knew nothing then of
their position and wealth and all that, for I had not been long in
London. I loved her, and a great hope came into my life. One begins to
weary after a while of toiling just to make money for oneself. For a
few days all seemed changed, the whole world was new and bright to me.
Suddenly I got an intimation from the father of the lady that my calls
were no longer acceptable. I could not imagine the reason. I asked for
an interview to explain matters, and he refused it. I left at once. I
did not yet know how hard I should find it to give her up. It was only
as I left the hotel that I learned that Peters, Peters whom I had not
met since we quarrelled at Saigon, and of whom I last heard of the day
that Longhurst died, was in the hotel and had called on my friends.
Now I see clearly that I am wrong to draw inferences, but again, I
ask, could I help inferring what I did?
“More than four years passed. I tried hard to create new interests for
myself in artistic things, making all sorts of collections; and I
developed an ambition to be a personage in London society. Then I saw
Miss Denison again, and I knew that I had not forgotten her, and could
not do so. I knew now what had happened, and so I absolutely insisted
on an explanation. I had it out with the father. I satisfied him
absolutely. In a few weeks’ time I was engaged. For the first time in
my life I was happy. That was only a month before I came to Long
Wilton. I must tell you that Peters had known the Denisons long, and
that I knew Miss Denison had been fond of him, but we naturally did
not talk of him much, and I did not know he was at Long Wilton. There,
to my complete surprise, I saw Peters again. I would not avoid him,
but I certainly did not wish to meet him. He, however, came up to me
and spoke quite cordially. I do not know whether he had reflected and
thought he had been hard on me, but he seemed to wish to make amends,
and I at that time, just for a few short hours, had not got it in my
heart to be other than friendly with any man.
“That evening I spent at his house. You, Mr. Callaghan, were there,
and you must have seen that something happened. I at any rate saw that
something I said had revived all Peters’ suspicions of me, and this
time with the addition of a suspicion, which was true, that I had
murdered Longhurst.
“Now, I ask you, if you have any lingering idea that that was why I
killed him, how was it possible that he could ever prove me guilty?
Have you any inkling of how he could have done it? I have not. Now
what could induce me, on account of a mere idle suspicion on the part
of a man who need be nothing to me, to run the risk amounting almost
to certainty of being hanged for murdering him?
“But my conscience was active then, for a reason which any man who has
loved may guess. I wanted to clear up all with Peters. I could not get
him alone that evening, and I had to go next day. I returned the first
day I could, bringing certain materials for clearing up the early
transaction about which he had first suspected me. I was honestly
determined to make a clean breast to him about Longhurst. You can
hardly wonder that I meant to feel my way with him in this. I tried to
get to close quarters with him. Mr. Callaghan saw enough to know how
unsuccessful I was. I tried all the time, again and again, to draw
Peters into intimate talk about our days in the East, but he always
seemed to push me away. I determined very soon to obtain a letter from
a friend, whom I will not name now, who knew how Longhurst had treated
me, which I could show to Peters; so I wrote to him. But in the
meantime relations with Peters grew harder and harder. I will not spin
out excuses, but all his old animosity to me returned, and I began
while I was waiting for that letter to feel once again the old rancour
I had felt. This man had hurt me by suspecting me falsely, when, had
he shown me confidence, he could have made a better man of me; he had
spoilt my best chance of a career; he had poisoned my relations with
Longhurst, and so brought about the very crime of which he was now
lying in wait to accuse me; he had thwarted my love for four miserable
years. On the top of all that came this letter” (he had held a letter
in his hand all the time he was speaking), “and it shall speak for
itself. But first one question. You may remember when you first saw me
at Long Wilton. Well, I came really as it happened upon an errand for
Miss Denison. Mrs. Nicholas, in the village, you may not know, had
been her nurse. But that does not matter. Between my first visit and
my return, do you happen to remember that a Mrs. Bulteel was staying
at the hotel, and visited Mr. Peters of whom she was an old friend?”
Callaghan remembered that it was so.
“Mrs. Bulteel is, I have always supposed, the lady referred to in this
letter, which reached me (will you note?) by the five o’clock post at
Peters’ house, seven hours before I killed him.”
He passed the letter to me without looking at me. Callaghan and I read
it together. It was in a lady’s hand, signed with the name of Lady
Denison, the young lady’s mother. It appeared to be written in great
agitation. Its purport was that the young lady had resolved, so her
mother found, to break off her engagement with Vane-Cartwright. She
had formerly loved another man, whose name the mother thought she must
not mention, though probably Vane-Cartwright knew it, but had supposed
that he did not care for her or had given up doing so. She had now
learned from an officious lady friend, who had lately seen this old
lover, that he cared for her still; that he had concealed his passion
when he found she favoured Vane-Cartwright, but that having now
apparently quarrelled with Vane-Cartwright he had authorised her to
let this be known if she saw her opportunity. The mother concluded by
saying that she had so far failed in reasoning with her daughter, who
had wished to write and break off her engagement, and all she could do
was to lay on her the absolute command not to write to Vane-Cartwright
at all for the present.
“There is only one comment to make on that letter,” said
Vane-Cartwright. “You may wonder why I should have assumed that it was
hopeless. Well, I knew the lady better than you, better than her
mother did, and knew that if her old attachment had returned it had
returned to stay. Besides, I read this letter with my rival sitting in
the room (you two gentlemen were sitting in the room too as it
happens), and when hard, self-contained people do come under these
influences, they do not give way to them by halves.
“Thank you,” said Vane-Cartwright, when we had read and returned the
letter. “I am glad you have heard me so patiently. That all this makes
me less of a villain than you thought me, I do not pretend to say; but
I think you will understand why I wished some men whom I respected, as
I respect you, to know my story. I do not suggest for a moment that it
should influence your present action. Here I am, as I said to begin
with, your prisoner. Of course you see that society is just as safe
from future murders from me as from any man. But if your principles of
justice demand life for life, or if human feeling makes you resolve to
avenge your friend, that is just what I came here expecting. I am the
last man in the world who could give an unprejudiced opinion on the
ethics of punishment.”
He ended with a quiet and by no means disagreeable smile.
As I have often said I make no sort of pretence to report any talk
quite correctly, and here, where the manner of the talk is of special
importance, I feel more than ever my incompetence to report it. I can
only say that the singular confession, of which I have striven to
repeat the purport, was in reality delivered with a great deal of
restrained eloquence, and with occasional most moving play of facial
expression, all the more striking in a man whom I had seldom before
seen to move a muscle of his face unnecessarily. It was delivered to
two men of whom one (myself) was physically overwrought, while the
other (Callaghan), naturally emotional, was at the commencement in the
fullest elation of triumphant pursuit, in other words, ready to recoil
violently.
We sat, I do not know how long, each waiting for the other to speak.
Vane-Cartwright sat meanwhile neither looking at us nor moving his
countenance—only the fingers of one hand kept drumming gently upon his
knee.
At last I did what I think I never did but once before, obeyed an
impulse almost physical, to speak words which my mouth seemed to utter
mechanically. If they were the words of reason, they were not the
words of my conscious thought, for that was busy with all, and more
than all the scruples which had ever made this business hard to me.
“Mr. Vane-Cartwright,” I said, “it is my painful duty to tell you at
once that I do not believe one word you have said, except what I knew
already.”
He went white for a moment; then quickly recomposed himself and
inclined his head slightly with a politely disdainful expression.
“Oh, Driver,” said Callaghan, in a gentle tone, and he arose and paced
the room. He was strangely moved. To begin with, though he had felt
nothing but remorseless glee in his share in hunting his victim down,
he would in any case have felt great repugnance at giving him the
_coup de grâce_. But then he had once taken the step of inviting that
victim into his own room; he had sat there for an hour and a half with
that victim by his own fireside, telling his life-story and implicitly
pleading for his life. And the pleading had been conducted under the
flattering pretext that it was not pleading at all but the instinctive
confidence of a redoubtable antagonist, in one whom he respected for
having beaten him. As for the story itself, Callaghan did not exactly
believe it; on the contrary, I found afterwards that, while I had not
got beyond a vague sense that the whole story was a tissue of lies, he
had noted with rapid acuteness each of the numerous points of
improbability in it; but to his mind (Irish, if I may say publicly
what I have said to him) the fact that the story appealed to his
imaginative sympathy was almost as good as its being true, and what in
respect of credibility was wanting to its effect was quite made good
by Callaghan’s admiration for the intrepidity with which the man had
carried out this attempt on us. And the story did appeal to his
sympathy, he had sympathised with his early struggles, he had
sympathised still more with the suggestion of passion in his final
crime, and (Irish again) had ignored the fact that on the criminal’s
own showing the crime conceived in passion had been carried through
with a cold-blooded meanness of which Callaghan’s own nature had no
trace. Lastly, he was genuinely puzzled by the problem as to the
morality of vengeance which Vane-Cartwright had raised with so
dexterously slight a touch.
Whatever his motive, Callaghan was upon the point of resolving that,
at least from his own room, where the criminal had come to appeal to
his mercy, that criminal should go away free. And if Callaghan had so
resolved I should have been powerless for a time; he was prepared and
I was not as to the steps immediately to be taken to secure
Vane-Cartwright’s arrest. But it seems, if for once I may use that
phrase with so little or else so deep a meaning, that the luck had
departed from Vane-Cartwright. At this crisis of his fate a device of
his own recoiled upon him with terrible force.
“I cannot do it! I cannot do it!” Callaghan was exclaiming, when the
door opened and a telegram was brought for me. This was the message:
“Clarissa terribly ill, symptoms poison, Bancroft, Fidele”. It meant
that my wife was dying at the friend’s villa to which she had gone,
and dying by that man’s means, and it was certified by the use of the
password which my wife had told me to expect. I did not reflect and I
did not speak; I grasped Callaghan’s arm and I put the telegram in his
hand. He knew enough to understand the message well. He read it with
an altered face. He passed it to Vane-Cartwright and said: “Read that,
and take it for my answer”. I should doubt if Vane-Cartwright had
often been violently angry, but he was now. He dashed the telegram
down with a curse. “The fool,” he said, and he gasped with passion,
“if he was going to try that trick, why did not he do it before?”
Callaghan stepped up to me, put his big arms round me, and for a
moment hugged me in them, with tears in his eyes. Then without a word
he strode across the room, and, before I could see what was happening,
Vane-Cartwright’s hands were tied behind his back with a great silk
handkerchief.