Once again I saw William Vane-Cartwright. At his own request I was
summoned to visit him in the gaol. It was not the interview of
penitent and confessor; none the less I am bound to silence about it,
even though my silence may involve the suppression of something which
tells in his favour. One thing I may and must say. Part of his object
in sending for me was to make me his agent in several acts of
kindness.
As I look back, I often ask myself: Was there indeed no truth, beyond
what we knew, in the tale that this man told to Callaghan and me, and
which was skilfully woven to accord as far as possible with many
things which we might have and had in fact discovered. In point of
vital facts it was certainly false. I could now disprove every
syllable of that love story; his acquaintance with Miss Denison was
only a few months old; she had never known Peters; and the letter that
he showed us was a forgery of course. I happen, moreover, too late for
any useful purpose, to have met several people who knew Longhurst
well; all agree that he was rough and uncompanionable, all that he was
strictly honest and touchingly kind; all testify that in his later
days he was a total abstainer.
Yet, in the face of this, I believe that Vane-Cartwright described
fairly, as well as with insight, the influences which in boyhood and
early manhood told so disastrously upon him. I now know, as it
happens, a good deal about his parents, for one of my present
neighbours was a family friend of theirs. They were a gifted but
eccentric couple, with more “principles” than any two heads can safely
hold. Little as I like their beliefs, I cannot but suspect that their
home life was governed by a conscientiousness and a tender affection
for their child, from which, if he had wished to be guided right, some
light must have fallen on his path. Yet without doubt their training
was as bad a preparation as could be for what he was to undergo. He
lost his fortune early, and was exiled to a settlement in the East
which, by all accounts, was not a school of Christian chivalry. Almost
everything in his surroundings there jarred upon his sensibility which
on the æsthetic side was more than commonly keen. Dozens of English
lads pass through just such trials unshaken, some even unspotted, but
they have been far otherwise nurtured than he. Peters too had an
influence upon his youth. I, who knew Peters so well, know that he
cannot have done the spiteful things which Vane-Cartwright said, but I
do not doubt for one moment that he did repel his young associate when
he need not have done so. Peters was young too, and may well be
forgiven, but I can imagine that by that chill touch he sped his
comrade on the downward course which chanced to involve his own
murder.
Altogether it is easy enough to form some image, not merely monstrous,
of the way in which that character formed itself out of its
surroundings; to understand how the poor lad became more and more
centred in himself; to praise him just in so far as that concentration
was strength; to note where that strength lay, in the one virtue which
in fact he had claimed as his own, in the unflinching avowal to
himself of the motive by which he meant to live.
That motive, a calculated resolve to be wealthy, to become detached in
outward fact as he was already in feeling from the sort of people and
the sort of surroundings amid which his present lot was cast, had
already been formed when the partnership with Longhurst offered him
his opportunity. One may well believe him that the three years of that
partnership cost him much. His one companion was a man whom, I take
it, he was incapable of liking, and his position at first was one of
subjection to him. He had lied to us much about Longhurst, but I fancy
that he had spoken of him with genuine, however unjust, dislike. What
particular fraud he played upon him, or whether it was, strictly
speaking, a fraud at all, I do not know. But no doubt he was by nature
mean (though ready enough to spend money), and he was probably more
mean when his strength was not full fledged and his nascent sense of
power found its readiest enjoyment in tricks. Assuredly he intended
from the first to use the partnership as much as possible for himself
and as little as possible for his partner. I am told that this is in
itself a perilous attitude from a legal point of view, and that it is,
in many relations of life, harder than laymen think to keep quite out
of reach of the law by any less painful course than that of positive
honesty. Let us suppose that he did only the sort of thing which his
own confession implied, obtaining for himself alone the renewal of
concessions originally made to his firm. Even so, I understand, he may
have found himself in this position, that Longhurst would have been
entitled to his share (the half or perhaps much more, according to the
terms of partnership) of extremely valuable assets upon which
Vane-Cartwright had counted as his own. Moreover, that possibly stupid
man would have had his voice about the vital question of how and when
to sell this property.
Even if this was all, it still meant that the hope upon which
Vane-Cartwright had set his soul, the hope not of a competence but of
eminent wealth, was about to slip away, and to slip away perhaps
irretrievably. For, as I have lately learnt, he was then ill, could
not remain in that climate, would not, if he fell down the ladder, be
able to start again, with more money and more experience, where he had
started three years before. In the choice which then arose he was not
the man to set his personal safety in the scales against his ambition.
And so the incredible deed was done, and fortune favoured the murderer
with the report that his victim had been lost in a wrecked ship
(possibly even he had met with that report before he killed him).
Henceforward, watchful as he had to be for a while, the chief burden
which his guilt laid upon him was that of bearing himself with
indifference.
Thirteen years had passed, years of unvarying success. The
watchfulness was now seldom needed, and the indifference had become a
pose. And so at last, on his first evening at Grenvile Combe, he fell
talking in his wonted way of Longhurst, and gave that false account of
his end to one of the only two living men with whom it behoved him to
take care. Instantly the spectre of his crime, which he thought had
been laid, confronted him, and confronted him, as some recollection
warned him, with the real peril of public shame, perhaps conviction
and death. Instantly too there arose, as if to his aid, not as yet the
full strength of his intellect and courage, but the ingrained, dormant
spirit of crime. If he had only said to Peters, “He sailed in the
_Eleanor_ with me. I killed him. I will tell you all about it,” I have
not a shadow of a doubt that his confession would have been kept
inviolate. Only there were trials from which even his nerve recoiled,
and plain facts of human nature which his acuteness never saw. So the
same deed was done again in quiet reliance upon that wonderful luck
which this time also had provided him with a screen against suspicion,
and this time also seemed to require nothing of him after the act was
accomplished except to bear himself carelessly. Indeed, though he
began to bear himself carelessly too soon—for he trusted
characteristically that Peters had this night followed the practice of
opening the window, which he was oddly fond of preaching, and he left
the room without troubling to look behind the curtain—his confidence
seemed justified. There was nothing in the room or in the house,
nothing under the wide vault of that starlit sky that was destined to
tell the tale.
Morning brought to his eyes, though not yet to his comprehension, the
presence of a huge calamity, for the ground was white with snow in
which, if Trethewy had come through it, his tracks would still be
seen. Soon he heard that Trethewy had in fact come home when the snow
lay there. Then at last his whole mind rose to the full height of the
occasion, to a height of composure and energy from which in all his
later doings he never declined far. I have an unbounded hatred for
that prevalent worship of strong men which seems to me to be born of
craven fear. Yet it extorts my most unwilling admiration of this man
that, when safety depended so much upon inaction, the only action he
took was such as at once was appallingly dangerous and yet was the
only way to avoid an even greater peril.
But strangely enough as I shut my mind against that haunting memory
which I have written these pages to expel, far different traits and
incidents from this keep longest their hold upon my imagination. I
remember Peters not as he died but as he lived; and the murderer
stands before me, as I take my leave, not in virtue of signal acts of
crime (which I could more easily have forgiven) but of little acts,
words, even tones of hardness and of concentrated selfishness, faintly
noted in my story, rendered darker to me by the knowledge that he
could be courteous and kind when it suited him. He stands there as the
type to me, not of that rare being the splendid criminal, but of the
man who in the old phrase is “without bowels”. And men (on whose souls
also may God have mercy) are not rare among us, who, without his
intellect or his daring, are as hard as he, but for whom, through
circumstances—not uncommon and I do not call them fortunate—the path
of consistent selfishness does not diverge from the path of a
respectable life.
Strangely too, one of those lesser acts of unkindness was needed to
bring about his downfall. If I had never seen him at Florence, the
spark of my baffled ire would not have been rekindled, nor could I
have met Trethewy’s family till they had gone beyond the seas. And I
should never have seen him at Florence but that my wife, who did not
know his name, recalled upon seeing him that little delinquency at
Crema of which she and I can think no longer with any personal spleen.
It seems as if he might have murdered his partner and murdered his
host with cruel deliberation and gone unpunished; but since one day
without a second thought he refused a common courtesy to a suffering
woman and a harassed girl, he had set in motion the cunning machinery
of fate, and it came to pass in the end that the red hand of the law
seized him and dealt to him the doom which the reader has long
foreseen.
Let some surviving characters of this story briefly bid farewell. For
my wife and me, we are settled in our country rectory, so near in
distance to London and in effect so far off; and, if the now
delightful labours of my calling seem to me not more unsuccessful than
perhaps they should always seem to the labourer, I like to think it
means that what Eustace Peters, half-unknowing, did for me abides.
Callaghan was our guest not two months ago, a welcome guest to us, and
even more to our children. He talked alternately of a project of land
reclamation on the Wash and of an immediate departure for the East in
search of a clue to the questions left unsolved in these pages. He has
since departed from this country, not, I believe, for the East, but
neither we nor any of his friends know where he is, or doubt that
wherever he is, he can take care of himself and will hurt no other
creature. Mr. Thalberg continues his law business in the City, though
the business has changed in character. I bear him no ill-will, and yet
am sorry to be told that (while the disclosures in the trial lost him
several old clients, as well as his clerk, Mr. Manson) on the whole
his business has grown. Trethewy is now our gardener. His daughter is
a board-school mistress in London. I hope he will long remain with us,
for I now like him as a man but could not lay it upon my conscience to
recommend him as a gardener. Peters’ nephews, unseen by the reader,
have hovered close in the background of my tale. Both have
distinguished themselves in India. Yesterday I married the elder to
Miss Denison, on whom, I hope, the reader has bestowed a thought. In
the other, who is engaged to my eldest daughter, his uncle’s peculiar
gifts repeat themselves more markedly and with greater promise of
practical achievement.
Transcriber’s Note
This transcription follows the text of the first edition published
by Longmans, Green, and Co. in 1906. One passage, however, has been
altered, namely the passage in Chapter XVIII that reads: “which I
thought was not that which Vane-Cartwright had carried”. This passage
has been replaced with the corresponding passage in the 1928 reprint
by the Dial Press in New York, so as to read: “which I thought was
not _unlike_ that which Vane-Cartwright had carried”.
All other seeming errors or inconsistencies in the text have been
left unchanged.
The cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public
domain. (The image background is a detail taken from _Throwing
Snowballs_, a painting created by Gerhard Munthe in 1885.)