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TRACKS IN THE SNOW





TRACKS IN THE
SNOW
(LORD) CHARNWOOD
Godfrey Rathbone
Benson, ist baron
Author of "Abraham Lincoln,” etc.
LINCOLN MAC VEAGH
THE DIAL PRESS
NEW YORK · MCMXXVIII


AUTHOR'S EDITION
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, N. Y.


Gio-2-28 LUB
DOROTHEAM
AD





vira
Wahy
9-24-28
17842
TRACKS IN THE SNOW
CHAPTER I
N the morning of a certain 29th of Jan-
uary, Eustace Peters was found murdered
in his bed at his house, Grenvile Combe,
in the parish of Long Wilton, of which I was then
rector.
Much mystery attached to the circumstances of
his death. It was into my hands that chance threw
the clue to this mystery, and it is for me, if for any
one, to relate the facts.
To the main fact of all, the death of my own
friend on the eve, as I sometimes fancy, of a fuller
blossoming of his powers, my writing cannot give
the tragic import due to it, for it touched my own
life too nearly. I had come—I speak of myself, for
they tell me a narrator must not thrust himself
quite into the background—I had come to Long
Wilton, three years before, from a college tutorship
[7]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
at Oxford, to occupy the rectory till, as happened
not long after, the son of the patron became quali-
fied to hold it. Country-bred, fond of country
people and of country pastimes, I had not imagined,
when I came, either the difficulties of a country
parson's task or the false air of sordidness which
those difficulties would at first wear to me; still less
was I prepared for the loneliness which at first be-
fell me in a place where, though many of my neigh-
bours were wise men and good men, none ever
showed intellectual interests or talked with any
readiness of high things. The comradeship of Peters,
who settled there a few months after me, did more
than to put an end to my loneliness; by shrewd,
casual remarks, which were always blunt and unex-
pected but never seemed intrusive or even bore the
semblance of advice, he had, without dreaming of
it-for he cared very little about the things of the
Church-shown me the core of most of my parish
difficulties and therewith the way to deal with them.
So it was that with my growing affection for the
man there was mingled an excessive feeling of men-
tal dependence upon him. So it was that upon that
January morning a great blank entered into my life.
Matters full of interest, in my pursuits of the weeks
[8]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
and months that went before, are gone from my
memory like dreams. My whole sojourn at Long
Wilton, important as it was to mę, is a thing dimly
remembered, like a page of some other man's biog-
raphy. Even as I call to mind that actual morning
I cannot think of the immediate horror, only of the
blank that succeeded and remains. I believe that no
one, upon whom any like loss has come suddenly,
will wonder if I take up my tale in a dry-eyed
fashion. I can use no other art in telling it but that
of letting the facts become known as strictly as may
be in the order in which they became known to me.
Eustace Peters, then, was a retired official of the
Consular Service, and a man of varied culture and
experience—too much varied, I may say. He had
been at Oxford shortly before my time. I gathered
from the school prizes on his library shelves that he
went there with considerable promise; but he left
without taking his degree or accomplishing any-
thing definite except rowing in his college Eight
(a distinction of which I knew not from his lips
but from his rather curious wardrobe). He had
learnt, I should say, unusually little from Oxford,
except its distinctive shyness, and had, character-
istically, begun the studies of his later years in sur-
[9]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
roundings less conducive to study. He left Ox-
ford upon getting some appointment in the East.
Whether this first appointment was in a business
house or in the Consular Service, where exactly it
had been and what were the later stages of his
career, I cannot tell, for he talked very little of
himself. Evidently, however, his Eastern life had
been full of interest for him, and he had found un-
usual enjoyment in mingling with and observing
the strange types of European character which he
met among his fellow-exiles, if I may so call
them. He had ultimately left the Consular Service
through illness or some disappointment, or both.
About that time an aunt of his died and left him
the house, Grenvile Combe, at Long Wilton, in
which a good deal of his boyhood had been spent.
He came there, as I have said, soon after my own
arrival, and stayed on, not, as it seemed to me, from
any settled plan. There he passed much of his time
in long country rambles (he had been, I believe,
a keen sportsman, and had now become a keen nat-
uralist), much of it in various studies, chiefly phil-
osophic or psychological. He was writing a book
on certain questions of psychology, or, perhaps I
should say, preparing to write it, for the book did
[10]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
not seem to me to progress. My wife and I were
convinced that he had a love story, but we gathered
no hint of what it may have been. He was forty-
three when he died.
This is, I think, all that I need now set down as
to the personality of the murdered man. But I
cannot forbear to add that, while his interrupted
career and his somewhat desultory pursuits ap-
peared inadequate to the reputation which he had
somehow gained for ability, he certainly gave me
the impression of preserving an uncompromisingly
high standard, a keenly if fitfully penetrating mind
and a latent capacity for decisive action. As I write
these words it occurs to me that he would be living
now if this impression of mine had not been shared
by a much cleverer man than I.
On the 28th my wife was away from home, and
I had supper at Grenvile Combe, going there about
seven o'clock. There were three other guests at
supper, James Callaghan, C.I.E., William Vane-
Cartwright, and one Melchior Thalberg. Callaghan
was an old school-fellow of Peters, and the two,
though for years they must have seen each other
seldom, appeared to have always kept up some sort
of friendship. I knew Callaghan well by this time,
sev
[i]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
for he had been staying three weeks at Grenvile
Combe, and he was easy to know, or rather easy to
get on with. I should say that I liked the man, but
that I am seldom sure whether I like an Irishman,
and that my wife, a far shrewder judge than I,
could not bear him. He was a great, big-chested
Irishman, of the fair-haired, fresh-coloured type,
with light blue eyes. A weather-worn and battered
countenance (contrasting with the youthful erect-
ness and agility of his figure), close-cut whiskers
and a heavy greyish moustache, a great scar across
one cheek-bone and a massive jaw, gave him at
first a formidable appearance. The next moment
this might seem to be belied by something mobile
about his mouth and the softness of his full voice;
but still he bore the aspect of a man prone to physi-
cal violence. He was plausible; very friendly (was
it, one asked, a peculiarly loyal sort of friendliness
or just the reverse); a copious talker by fits and
starts, with a great wealth of picturesque observa-
tion-or invention. Like most of my Irish acquaint-
ance he kept one in doubt whether he would take an
exceptionally high or an exceptionally low view of
any matter; unlike, as I think, most Irishmen, he
was the possessor of real imaginative power. He had
º
[12]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
(as I gathered from his abundant anecdotes) been
at one time in the Army and later in the Indian
Civil Service. In that service he seemed to have
been concerned with the suppression of crime, and
to have been lately upon the North-West Frontier.
He was, as I then thought, at home on leave, but,
as I have since learned, he had retired. Some notable
exploit or escapade of his had procured him the
decoration which he wore on every suitable and
many unsuitable occasions, but it had also con-
vinced superior authorities that he must on the
first opportunity be shelved.
Vane-Cartwright, with nothing so distinctive in
his appearance, was obviously a more remarkable
man. Something indescribable about him would, I
think, if I had heard nothing of him, have made me
pick him out as a man of much quiet power. He
was in the City, a merchant (whatever that large
term may mean) who had formerly had something
to do with the far East, and now had consider-
able dealings with Italy. He had acquired, I knew,
quickly but with no whisper of dishonour, very
great wealth; and he was about, as I gathered from
some remark of Peters, to marry a very charming
young lady, Miss Denison, who was then absent on
[13]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
the Riviera. He had about a fortnight before come
down to the new hotel in our village for golf, and
had then accidentally met Peters who was walking
with me. I understood that he had been a little
junior to Peters at Oxford, and had since been ac-
quainted with him somewhere in the East. Peters
had asked him to dinner at his house, where Calla-
ghan was already staying. I had heard Peters tell
him that if he came to those parts again he must
stay with him. I had not noted the answer, but
was not surprised afterwards to find that Vane-
Cartwright, who had returned to London the day
after I first met him, had since come back rather
suddenly, and this time to stay with Peters. He now
struck me as a cultured man, very different from
Peters in all else but resembling him in the curious
range and variety of his knowledge, reserved and
as a rule silent but incisive when he did speak.
Thalberg, though not the most interesting of
the company, contributed, as a matter of fact, the
most of my enjoyment on that occasion. I tried
hard some days later to recall my impressions of
that evening, of which every petty incident should
by rights have been engraven on my memory, but
the recollection, which, so to speak, put all the
[14]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
m
country girl, who was both younger and more in-
telligent than she looked. It subsequently appeared
that these two were in the house the whole evening
and night, and, for all that can be known, asleep
all night in the servants' quarters, which formed an
annex to the house connected with it by a short
covered way. In a cottage near the gate into the
lane lived a far more notable person, Reuben
Trethewy, the gardener and doer of odd jobs, a
short, sturdy, grizzled man, of severe countenance,
not over clean. Peters was much attached to him
for his multifarious knowledge and skill. He had
been a seaman at some time, had been, it seemed,
all sorts of things in all sorts of places, and was
emphatically a handy man. He was as his name im-
plies a Cornishman, and had come quite recently to
our neighbourhood, to which in the course of a
roving existence he was attracted by the neighbour-
hood of his uncle, Silas Trethewy, a farmer who
lived some three miles off. He was now a man of
Methodistical professions, and most days, to do him
justice, of Methodistical practice; but I, who was
perhaps prejudiced against him by his hostility to
the Church, believed him to be subject to bitter and
sullen moods, knew that he was given to outbursts
[16]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
of drinking, and heard from his neighbours that
drink took him in a curious way, affecting neither
his gait, nor his head, nor his voice, nor his wits,
but giving him a touch of fierceness which made
men glad to keep out of his way. With him lived
his wife and daughter. The wife was, I thought, a
decent woman, who kept her house straight and
who came to church; but I had then no decided
impression about her, though she had for some
time taught in my Sunday school, and had once or
twice favoured me with a long letter giving her
views about it. The daughter was a slight, childish-
looking girl, whom I knew well, because she was
about to become a pupil teacher, and who was a
most unlikely person to play a part in a story of
this kind.
Our party that evening broke up when, about
ten o'clock, I rose to go: and Thalberg, whose best
way to the hotel lay through the village, accom-
panied me as far as the Rectory, which was a
quarter of a mile off and was the nearest house
in the village. We walked together talking of Ger-
man poetry and what not, and I cannot forget the
disagreeable sense which came upon me in the
course of our talk, that a layer of stupidity or
[17]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
of hard materialism, or both, underlay the upper
crust of culture which I had seemed to find in the
man when he had spoken of music. However, we
parted good friends at the Rectory gate, and I
was just going in when I recollected some questions
about the character of a candidate for Confirma-
tion, on which I had meant to have spoken to
Peters that night. I returned to his house and found
him still in his library. The two guests who were
staying in the house had already gone to bed. I
got the information and advice which I had wanted
-it was about a wild but rather attractive young
fellow who had once looked after a horse which
Peters had kept, but who was now a groom in the
largest private stables in the neighbourhood. As I
was leaving, Peters took up some book, saying that
he was going to read in bed. He stood with me for
a moment at the front door looking at the frosty
starlight. It was a clear but bitterly cold night. I
well remember telling him as we stood there that
he must expect to be disturbed by unusual noises
that night, as a great jollification was taking place
at the inn up the road, and my parishioners, who
realised the prelate's aspiration for a free rather
than a sober England, would return past his house
[18]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
in various stages of riotous exhilaration. He said
that he had more sympathy with them than he
ought to have, and that in any case they should not
disturb him. Very likely, he added, he would soon
be asleep past rousing.
And so about a quarter to eleven, I parted from
him, little dreaming that no friendly eyes would
ever meet his again.
[19]


CHAPTER II
WAS up early on the 29th. Snow lay thick on
| the ground but had ceased falling, and it was
I freezing hard, when, while waiting for break-
fast, I walked out as far as my gate on the village
street to see what the weather was like. Suddenly
Peters' housemaid came running down to the village
on her way, as it proved, to the police-station. Be-
fore passing she paused, and breathlessly told me
the news. I walked quickly to Peters' house. Several
neighbours were already gathering about the gate
of the drive but did not enter. I rang the bell,
was admitted by the housekeeper and walked
straight up to Peters’ bedroom. Callaghan and
Vane-Cartwright were there already, the former
half-dressed, unshaved and haggard-looking, the
latter a neat figure in bedroom slippers and dressing-
gown. We had only exchanged a few words when
the police-sergeant entered, followed a minute or
two later by a tall and pleasant-faced young con-
stable, who brought with him the village doctor,
[20]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
an ambitious, up-to-date youth who had lately
come to those parts.
I have some little difficulty in saying what I then
observed; for indeed, though I looked intently
enough on the dead face and figure, and noticed
much about them that is not to my present pur-
pose, I took in for myself very little that bore on
that problem of detection which has since inter-
ested me so much. I cannot now distinguish the
things which I really saw upon hearing the others
mention them from the things which I imagine
myself seeing because I knew they were mentioned
then or later. In fact I saw chiefly with the eyes of
the Sergeant, who set about his inquiries with a
quiet promptitude that surprised me in one whom I
knew only as a burly, steady, slow-speaking, heavy
member of the force.
There was little to note about the barely fur-
nished room which showed no traces of disorder.
On the top of some drawers on the left of the bed-
head lay a curious, old-fashioned gold watch with
the watchkey by it, a pocket-knife, a pencil, a ring
of keys and a purse, the last containing a good deal
of money. On a small table on the other side of
the bed stood a candlestick, the candle burnt to
[21]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
mm
the socket (the electric light had not yet come to
Long Wilton); by it lay an open book. Under the
table near the bed lay, as if it had fallen from the
dead man's hand or off his bed, a book with several
leaves crumpled and torn, as if, in his first alarm, or
as he died, Peters had caught them in a spasmodic
clutch. I looked to see what it was, merely from
the natural wish to know what had occupied my
friend's mind so near the end. It was Borrow's
Bible in Spain. When I saw the title an indistinct
recollection came to me of some very recent men-
tion of the book by some one, and with it came a
faint sense that it was important I should make this
recollection clear. But either I was too much
stunned as yet to follow out the thought, or I put
it aside as a foolish trick of my brain, and the rec-
ollection, whatever it was, is gone. The position of
the body and the arrangement of the pillows gave
no sign of any struggle having taken place. They
looked as if when he was murdered he had been
sitting up in bed to read. He could hardly have
fallen asleep so, for his head would have found
but an uncomfortable rest on the iron bedstead.
But I repeat, I did not observe this myself, and I
[22]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
cannot be sure that anybody noted it accurately at
the time.
The surgeon stepped quickly to the body, slightly
raised the left arm, drew aside the already open
jacket of the sleeping suit, and silently indicated
the cause of death. This was a knife, a curious, long,
narrow, sharp knife for surgical use, which the
murderer had left there, driven home between two
of his victim's ribs. I say “the murderer,” for the
surgeons first words were, “Not suicide.” I had
no suspicion of suicide, but thought that he pro-
nounced this judgment rather hastily, and that the
Sergeant was right when he asked him to examine
the posture of the body more closely. He did so,
still, as I thought, perfunctorily, and gave certain
reasons which did not impress either my judgment
or my memory. I was more interested by his re-
mark that he had studied in Berlin and was fa-
miliar with the appearance of suicide. I may say
at once that it appeared afterwards, at the inquest,
that there was reason to think that Peters had not
had such a knife, for he never locked up drawers
or cupboards, and his servants knew all his few
possessions well. It appeared, too, that the owner
[23]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
of the knife had taken precautions against being
traced, by carefully obliterating the maker's name
and the other marks on it with a file.
In the midst of our observations in the room a
vexatious interruption happened. I have forgotten
to say that the servants had been sent out of the
room by the police-sergeant, and that, almost im-
mediately after, the constable who brought the doc-
tor had been sent down to examine the outside of
the house. For some reason he was slow in setting
about this; it is possible that he stopped to talk
to the servants, but in any case, he went out
through the kitchen, and explored first the back
of the house, where he thought he knew of an easy
way of making an entrance. Meanwhile the neigh-
bours, who had collected about the gate, had been
drawn by their curiosity into the garden, and by
the time the constable had got round to the front
of the house several were wandering about the drive
and the lawn which lay between it and the road.
They had no more harmful intention than that of
gazing and gaping at the windows, but it led to
the very serious consequence that a number of
tracks had now been made in the snow which might
very possibly frustrate a search for the traces of
[24]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
the criminal. This the Sergeant now noticed from
the window.
As for the actual carriage-drive I was fortunately
able to remember (and it was the only useful thing
that I did observe for myself) that when I had
arrived there had been no foot-marks between the
gate and the front door except the unmistakable
print of the goloshes worn by the housemaid on
her way to call the police. But the tracks on the
lawn and elsewhere about the house might cause
confusion.
Upon seeing what was happening the Sergeant
asked Vane-Cartwright, Callaghan and myself to
await him in Peters' study, while he went out to
drive away the intruders, to make the constable
keep others out and to pursue his own investiga-
tions. While we waited Vane-Cartwright, who had
spoken little but seemed to watch all proceedings
very attentively, made the sensible suggestion that
we should look for Peters' will, as we ought to know
who were his executors. We consulted the house-
keeper, who pointed out the drawer in which the
few papers of importance were kept, and there we
soon found a will in a sealed envelope. The first few
lines, which were all that we read, showed me that,
[25]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
mm
as I had expected, I was Peters' executor along with
an old friend of his whom I had never met but
who, I believed, as was the fact, now lived in
America.
The Sergeant now rejoined us; he had discovered
nothing outside, and, though the tracks of the in-
truders made it difficult to be certain, he believed
that there was nothing to discover; he thought that
the murderer had approached the house before the
snow began to fall, and he found no sign that he
had entered the house in the manner of a house-
breaker. He had, I must say, taken a very short time
about his search. He wished now that the servants
should be summoned, as of course it was necessary
to make inquiries about the movements of all per-
sons connected with the house. But he was here
delayed by Callaghan who had matters of impor-
tance to relate.
He and Vane-Cartwright had been disturbed
during the night in a notable manner. They had
actually had an alarm of murder, and curiously
enough a false and even ludicrous alarm. About
11.30 o'clock they had been roused by loud shouting
outside the house, amid which Callaghan declared
that he had distinguished a cry of "murder.” He
· [26]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
mm mmmmmmmmmmmmm
had come tumbling out of his room, calling Vane-
Cartwright, who slept in the next room, and who
immediately joined him in the passage. Without
waiting to call Peters, whose room was some dis-
tance from theirs and from the staircase by which
they descended (for there were two staircases in
the main part of the house), they went to the front
door and opened it. The flash of a policeman's torch
in the road, the policeman's voice quietly telling
some revellers to go home and the immediate cessa-
tion of the noise, showed them that they had been
roused by nothing more serious than the drunken
uproar which I had predicted to Peters would dis-
turb him. The two men had returned to their rooms
after locking the front door again; they had noticed
that the library door was open and the lights out
in that room; they had noticed also as they went
upstairs (this time by the other staircase) light
shining through the chink under Peters' bedroom
door; and they had heard him knock out the ashes
of a pipe against the mantelpiece. The pipe now lay
on the mantelpiece; and, of course, that particular
noise is unmistakable. They concluded that, though
he was awake and probably reading, he had not
thought the noise outside worth noticing. Callaghan
[27]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
added that he himself had lain awake some time,
and that for half an hour afterwards there had been
occasionally sounds of talking or shouting in the
lane, once even a renewal of something like the first
uproar.
The report subsequently received from the con-
stable who had been on duty along the road that
night confirmed the above, and a little reflection
made it appear that the disturbance outside had
nothing to do with the murder. In fact the only
thing connected with this incident which much
impressed me at the time was Callaghan's manner
in relating it. He had up to now been very silent,
he now began to talk with furious eagerness. He
readily saw and indeed suggested that the disturb-
ance which he related was of little consequence.
But having to tell of it he did so with a vividness
which was characteristic of him, so that one saw the
scene as he described it, saw indeed more than there
was to see, for he spoke of the ground already white
and the snow falling in thick flakes, when he was
pulled up by the Sergeant who said that the snow
had not begun to fall till three o'clock that morn-
ing. Callaghan began angrily persisting, and the
Sergeant appealed to Vane-Cartwright, who up till
[28]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
now had said little, merely confirming Callaghan's
narrative at various points with a single syllable
or with a nod of his head, but who now said that
Callaghan was wrong about the snow. He added
the benevolent explanation that Callaghan, who
was really much excited, had combined the impres-
sions of their false alarm over night with those of
their all too real alarm in the morning.
[29]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
mm
W
stance of Callaghan's statement. But there was a
great deal in it besides substance; the whole of the
conversation, from the moment at which Callaghan
came up, was professedly repeated word for word
with a slight but dramatic touch of mimicry, and
the tone and temper of master and man were
vividly rendered. I can never myself remember the
words of any conversation, and for that reason I am
unable now to set out Callaghan's narrative, and
was unable at the time to put faith in its accuracy.
Here and there a phrase was presumably given
truly because it was given in Trethewy's own dia-
lect, but once at least the unhappy Trethewy was
made responsible for a remark which he surely
never made, for it was pure Irish, and indeed I
think it was the very threat of picturesque ven-
geance which I had myself heard Callaghan address
to a big boy in the street who was on the point of
thrashing a little boy. One detail of the description
was a manifest mistake. Callaghan indicated (truly,
I have some reason to think) the spot in the drive
where such altercation as did happen took place,
but he added that Peters stood watching Trethewy
with his hand upon a young tree. Now Peters had
planted that tree with Trethewy several days later,
[31]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
just before the frost set in; and other details in
the story seemed equally incredible. “Ever since
then,” concluded Callaghan, “I have seen murder in
that fellow's eye. Mind you, I have had to do with
murderers in India. Three times have I marked
that look in a man's eye, and each time the event
has proved me right, though in one case it was
long after. I tell you this man Trethewy ” But
here Vane-Cartwright stopped him. He had already
disconcerted Callaghan a little by pointing out the
Hibernicisms that adorned the alleged remarks of
Trethewy; and now he quelled him with the just,
but, as I thought, unseasonably expressed, sarcasm,
that if he had seen murder portended in Trethewy's
glance it would have been a kind attention to have
given his host warning of the impending doom. He
went on to insist warmly on the totally different
impression he had himself gathered from Treth-
ewy's demeanour to his master. He was not apt to
say more than was needed, but this time he ran on,
setting forth his own favourable view of Trethewy,
till he in turn was stopped by the Sergeant who said,
"Really, sir, I do not think I ought to listen now
to what any gentleman thinks of a man's manner
of speaking, not if it is nothing more than that.”
[32]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
mm
The Sergeant then sent for Trethewy. I had
wondered that we had not seen him before. The
explanation was that he had been away at night,
had returned home very late, and so had come late
to the house in the morning and was still doing
the pumping when the Sergeant sent for him.
However, he seemed at last to have slept off the
effect of whatever his nocturnal potion had been,
and he gave a clear account of his movements with-
out hesitation and with a curiously impressive grav-
ity. He had suddenly made up his mind at dusk
on the previous evening to go to his uncle's house,
where there was a gathering of friends and kinsfolk,
which he had at first intended to avoid. They had
made a night of it. He had started home, as several,
whom he named, could testify, at four o'clock in
the morning (the church clock near his uncle's was
then striking), and the violence of the snowstorm
was abating. He had come across the moor by a
track of which he knew the bearings well. This
track struck into the grass lane which passed near
the back of the house at the other side of the pas-
ture, and which curved round into the road, joining
it close by Trethewy's cottage. As he came along
the lane a man on horseback leading a second horse
[33]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
S
had overtaken him and exchanged greetings with
him. He had seen the man before, but could not tell
his name or dwelling or where he was going. The
snow had done falling when he reached his cot-
tage. Once home, he had turned in and slept sound
till he was aroused soon after eight by his wife with
the news of the murder. He had seen nothing, heard
nothing, guessed nothing which could throw light
on the dreadful deed of the night. Trethewy was
dismissed with a request from the Sergeant to keep
in his house, where he could instantly be found if
information was wanted from him. This he did.
The two servants were now summoned, and the
Sergeant had a number of questions to ask them.
The housekeeper in particular had a good deal to
say about her master's ways, the household arrange-
ments and so forth, and seemed to find satisfaction
in saying it at length. So a lot of trivial details came
forth, which I, who was by this time becoming
exhausted, had little patience to follow. Was the
candle which was found burnt out a new candle
the evening before, or a candle-end, or what? The
question was asked of the housekeeper, but the
housemaid answered with promptitude that it was
a full new candle which she had herself put there
[34]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
mm
last evening, shortly before the master went to bed.
We learnt also that Peters was very irregular about
going to bed; sometimes he would take a fit of
sitting up, working or reading, night after night,
and sometimes he would go to bed early, but always
he had a book with him and lay awake for a while
(often for hours and hours, as he had confessed to
her) reading it after he went to bed. Sometimes it
would be a story book, but more often one of
those dull books of his; and much more on the
same subject would have been forthcoming if the
housekeeper had not at last been stopped, with-
out, as I thought, having told us anything of im-
portance.
At last I went home, to find the churchwarden
irate at my lateness for an appointed interview
about the accounts of the dole charities, and to have
a forgotten but much-needed breakfast pressed
upon me. I would rather have been alone, but Cal-
laghan gave me his company as far as my house,
and expounded his view about Trethewy all the
way. He left me at my door to go in search of
Thalberg, whom up to that moment we had all
forgotten.
In about three-quarters of an hour Callaghan
[35]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
burst in on me. Where he had breakfasted, if at
all, I neglected to ascertain, but he had contrived
to get shaved at the village barber's, and he now
looked fresh and seemed keen. He was this time
in a state of great indignation against Thalberg.
He had been unable to see him, but had ascertained
that he was still at the hotel, and that he had heard
the news of Peters' murder, but had seemed little
interested in it, and had rejected the landlady's sug-
gestion that he might like to go up to the house to
learn the last news of his unhappy friend. It ap-
peared that Thalberg had shut himself up in his
room ever since, but had ordered a cab to drive him
to the afternoon train at the station five miles off.
The landlady and Callaghan seemed to have agreed
that there was something peculiarly heartless in his
omission to call at Peters' or to make any inquiries.
Callaghan soon left me, returning, as I thought,
to Grenvile Combe, while I endeavoured to settle
myself to prepare my sermon for the next day,
Sunday, with a mind hardly indeed awake as yet
to the horror of the morning or to the loss I had
sustained, much less able in any connected way to
think over the meaning of our observations, but
mechanically asking over and over again whether
[36]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
it was reasonable that my now confirmed aversion
from Thalberg was somehow associated in my mind
with the object of our investigations.
I say "our" investigations; as a matter of fact
I had no intention whatever at that time of busy-
ing myself with investigation at all. In the first
place I was quite aware that I had no aptitude for
such work, and in the second, and far more im-
portant place, I, who hold it most undesirable that
a clergyman should be a magistrate, could not but
feel it still less fitting that he should be a detective
in his own parish. But I could not escape altogether.
About 2.45 I received a visit from the Sergeant, a
much-embarrassed man now, for he brought with
him the Superintendent, who had driven over in
hot haste to take charge of the inquiry. The Ser-
geant had zealously endeavoured to rise to the oc-
casion, and to my unpractised judgment seemed to
have shown much sense. Perhaps his zeal did not
endear him the more to the keen, and as I guessed,
ambitious gentleman who now took over the in-
quiry, but any way he had been guilty of real negli-
gence in allowing the snow round the house to be
trampled over by trespassers, and at this the
Superintendent, who had rapidly gathered nearly
[37]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
all that the Sergeant had to tell, seemed greatly
exasperated; moreover, the Superintendent had no-
ticed, if the reader has not, that the public-house
had been open very late the previous night. His
present errand was to ask me to come to the house,
not because I was the deceased man's legal personal
representative, but because he foresaw possible ex-
plorations in which my topographical knowledge
of my large and scattered parish might be of use.
We returned to Grenvile Combe, and the Super-
intendent went straight to the death-chamber
where he remained some minutes with the Sergeant
and me, taking note with much minuteness and
astonishing rapidity of all the details which I have
already mentioned. Suddenly he opened the door
and called up the housemaid; she arrived at length,
the housekeeper, who fetched her, being refused
admittance. “Why,” said the Superintendent point-
ing to one window, of which the latch was un-
fastened so that it sagged perceptibly, “is that win-
dow latch unfastened and the other fastened?” The
housemaid said shyly but quite decidedly that she
did not know, but this she did know, that both had
been fastened by her last night, that one of the
few matters in which her master showed any fussi-
[38]


mething TRACKS IN THE SNOW
ness was insisting that a window should be latched
· whenever it was shut, and that he never neglected
this himself, though, she added, he generally opened
his own window wide last thing at night. Why had
the Sergeant not noticed this in the morning? Poor
Sergeant Speke, already crest-fallen, had no answer;
at least he made none. Our stay in the room was
short. The Superintendent, I believe, returned there
that evening and spent an hour or two in searching
microscopically for traces of the criminal; but now
he was in haste to search the garden. "I shall begin,"
he said, "at the point under that window. It is past
three already. Come on, there is not a minute of
daylight to be lost.” At the point under the un-
latched window he made a startling discovery, star-
tling in that it had not been made before.
[39]


CHAPTER IV
· AM now driven to attempt the task, which I
had hoped to escape, of a topographical des-
cription. To begin with what is of least
importance for the present, the village of Long
Wilton lies in the valley of a little stream, and two
roads run Northwards from the village along the
opposite side of the valley. The road along the
Western side leads up a steep hill to the church,
built at some distance from the village for the bene-
fit of the former owners of the manor house. Just
beyond the church lies a house which was the
manor house, but has now lost its identity in im-
provements and extensions and become a new and
not very beautiful hotel. This hotel owes its origin
to the South-Western Counties Development Com-
pany, Limited, which discovered in its neighbour-
hood promising golf links, whose promise may be
fulfilled when the extension of the railway is com-
pleted. I ought to, but do not thank the Company
for a liberal contribution made for the reseating of
[40]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
V1
mm
the church in the days of my predecessor. The hotel
spoils the view from Grenvile Combe, across the
valley. Its upper windows command a prospect of
the whole of Peters' grounds. This, however, does
not concern us yet.
The road on the other side of the valley leads
to some outlying hamlets which form part of the
parish. On the right of it, as you go Northwards,
the ground rises steeply towards a wide tract of
moorland. About a quarter of a mile out of the vil-
lage a grass lane diverges from the road and leads
in a North-Easterly direction. Grenvile Combe is
a little property of some ten acres lying between
the grass lane and the road, and bordered on the
North by a fir plantation which extends from the
road to the lane. The cottage, or lodge, which was
then Trethewy's, stands close to the Southern
corner of the grounds, where the grass lane turns
off; and the gate of the drive is close by. The
garage, which Peters had not much use for, stands
on a detached piece of the property across the road.
The house itself is near the fir plantation. The back
of it looks out upon a steeply rising pasture field
which lies along the grass lane. The front looks
(across the drive, a strip of lawn and the road) to
[41]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
mm
the stream and to the church and that ugly hotel
on the little hill beyond. Peters' study was in the
front of the house at the North-West corner of the
main block of the building, in other words, it was
on your left as you entered at the front door; and
his bedroom was just above it. A path leads from
the drive under the North wall of the house to the
kitchen entrance, and on the left of this path, as
one goes towards the kitchen, stands an outbuilding
in which is the pump. A shrubbery of berberis and
box and laurel, starting near the house, just across
the path, skirts round the blind end of the drive,
and straggling along under the low brick wall,
which separates the drive and front lawn from the
fir plantation, ends at a fine old yew tree which
stands just by the road. All along the front of the
house there is a narrow "half area," intended to
give so much light and air as servants were once
held to deserve, to the now disused dungeons where
the dinners of former owners had been cooked.
In that area right below the unlatched window
we saw a ladder lying, a short light ladder, but just
long enough for an active man to have reached
the window by it. Now the snow had come with
a North-East wind, and any one who may have
[42]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
wrestled with my essay in topography will readily
understand that just here was a narrow tract where
very little snow had fallen and the frozen ground
was mostly bare. There was accordingly no clear
indication that the ladder had ever actually been
reared towards the window, but it might have been.
The path to the kitchen door was clear enough too,
and a man might have picked his way just there-
abouts and left not a footprint behind. Casting
about like a hound, the Superintendent had found
some footprints near, before his companions had
begun seeking; footprints pointing both ways. He
immediately returned to the house and got some
bundles of chips for kindling, with which to mark
the place of the footprints he discovered. Callaghan
had joined us, and he and I and the Sergeant fol-
lowed the Superintendent, keeping, as he bade us,
carefully a little behind him. In a moment it was
plain that some man had climbed the wall out of
the fir plantation, not far from the yew tree, that
he had crept along the edge of the lawn, planting
his feet most of the way under the edge of the
berberis shrub, but now and then, for no obvious
cause, but perhaps in guilty haste, deviating on to
the lawn where his tracks now showed in the snow.
[43]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
He had made his stealthy way, not quite stealthy
enough for him, round the end of the drive; no
doubt he had found the ladder somewhere up that
side path, no doubt he had opened the latch in the
well-known way, entered through the window,
done the deed, slipped out and left his ladder where
we found it; and there were his footprints, return-
ing by the way he came to the same point in the
wall.
Here we paused for a moment. Not a word was
said as to the inferences that we all drew from those
few footprints, but the Superintendent sharply
asked the Sergeant, "Why was that trail not found
and followed to an end this morning?” Poor Ser-
geant Speke looked for an instant like a detected
criminal, but he pulled himself together and made
sturdy answer: "I think, sir, it was not there this
morning." "Think!” said the Superintendent, and
in a very few minutes from the discovery of the
first footprint, he and all of us were over the wall
and in the fir plantation. And there we paused
again, for the fir boughs also had kept out the
snow, and the carpet of fir needles showed no dis-
tinct traces of feet. Eventually—it seemed a long
time but it was a short time we found where
[44]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
wer
the fugitive had emerged from the fir plantation
over some iron hurdles into Peters' field and along
a little sort of gully that there ran from the plan-
tation halfway along the field. “Not the best
place to break cover, but their wits are not always
about them,” said the Superintendent, and he
pointed to a wedge-shaped snowless tract which,
caused by some extra shelter from the wind, ex-
tended from the wall, tapering towards a clump
of gorse bushes. Then he sped on the trail, making
the rest of us spread out to make sure that there
were no other tracks across the field. Southwards,
right along the field, the trail led till he, and we
rejoining him, scrambled out of the field, where
our quarry must have scrambled, into the green
lane about two hundred yards from Trethewy's
cottage. Thus far, but no farther; along the now
well-trodden snow of the lane it was idle to look
for the print of any particular foot. “I am think-
ing of the hours of lost daylight,” said the Super-
intendent, now depressed. “Was this a likely way
for a man making for the moors, Rector?” “You
need not look that far,” said Callaghan; "these
footprints were the man Trethewy's. Down at the
cottage yonder,” he added for the Superintendent's
[45]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
mmm
benefit. “They are the track of hobnailed boots,
sir,” said the Superintendent, "that's all that they
are.” “Do you see that pattern?” said Callaghan;
and there was something odd about the pattern of
the nails in the last footprint just beneath our eyes.
"You never saw it in any footprint before, but I
did, and it is the pattern I saw in Trethewy's foot-
mark not a fortnight ago when last there was
snow.” He was strung up again now, and he had
strangely quick eyes when he was strung up. "That
is the man's footprint,” he said, "and there are the
man's boots.” Some way along the ditch, under
brambles and among old kettles and sardine tins
and worn-out boots (for plentiful rubbish had
been dumped just here), lay quite a good pair of
boots, old boots truly, but not boots that I should
have thrown away, whatever a poorer man might
do. The Superintendent had them instantly. "Odd
they are so full of snow,” said Callaghan; "he did
not lace them or they were much too big for him.
But what possessed him to throw them away, any-
how?” “Oh," said the Superintendent, "they
mostly have plenty of half-clever ideas. It takes
a stupid one to escape me, sir,” he interposed to
[46]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
me with a sort of chuckle, for he had lost no more
time in appropriating the discovery than he had
done in picking up the boots. "The clever idea this
time,” he added, "was just this: The lane is trampled
enough now, but in the morning, when fewer
feet had been along it, you might have picked out
the print of a particular boot by careful looking.
But a fellow in his socks could shuffle along among
the few footmarks and make no trace that you
could swear to; only he would not go far like that
by daylight when the people he passed would notice
his feet. Of course it was madness not to hide the
boots better, but I expect he had taken a good deal
of liquor to screw himself up to his work. Is that
Mr. Trethewy's house, sir?” for we were by this
time close to it.
I had been keen enough, as any man would have
been, from the moment we saw the ladder till now,
but I hope it will be easily understood why I did
not accompany the hunters to Trethewy's cottage.
I went back to the house to find Vane-Cartwright,
who had stayed there, as it seemed, reading gloom-
ily and intently all the afternoon, and to arrange
for the prompt removal of him and Callaghan
[47]


CHAPTER V
N Wednesday, the 2nd of February, Can-
dlemas Day, I read the burial service over
my friend's body. I will not dwell upon
what that service was to me, but like many funerals
of my friends it is associated in my mind with the
singing of birds. The inquest had taken place on
the Monday and Tuesday, and while it clearly es-
tablished the fact that the death had been caused by
murder, not suicide, nothing was laid before the
jury which would have justified a verdict against
any particular person. I believe that some doubt
had arisen as to the identification of the boots. The
village shoemaker, whose expert opinion was asked,
had said that though he never arranged hobnails in
that way himself, he had seen the same arrangement
in boots that had been brought to him to be re-
paired, by some man who was not Trethewy. Later
on, however, it was ascertained, I fancy through
Callaghan's ingenuity, that Trethewy, who liked
dabbling in various handicrafts, had cobbled and
[49]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
mm
nailed some boots for a friend, that this friend
was the man whose hobnails had been noticed by
the shoemaker, and that he had been safe out of the
way at the time of the murder. Moreover—perhaps
I forgot it, perhaps I assumed that they would find
it out for themselves and preferred that they should
-anyhow I had not mentioned to the police that
I heard Trethewy alone had had access to the lad-
der (they found it out later).
Callaghan and Vane-Cartwright stayed with me
for the funeral. A large crowd of merely imperti-
nent people, as I confess I regarded them, collected
from the neighbourhood and even from far away
for the occasion. Two only of Peter's family were
there, or could have been there. He had two
nephews in the Army, but they were then in India.
The rest of his near relatives were an old gentle-
man (a cousin of his father's, whom I had heard
Peters himself describe as a relative whom he had
only met at burials, but whom he regarded as an
essential part of the funeral ceremony) and a
maiden aunt, his mother's sister. Both of them
came; both insisted on staying at the hotel, instead
of at the Rectory, for the night before, but they
had luncheon and tea at the Rectory after the ..
[so]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
funeral, and departed by the evening train. The
old gentleman was, I believe, a retired stipendiary
magistrate. Vane-Cartwright very obligingly de-
voted himself to entertaining him and took him for
a walk after luncheon, while Callaghan roamed
about, observing the people who had come for the
funeral, expecting, as he told me, that there might
be something to discover by watching them. I was
thus left alone for a while with Peters' aunt, who,
by the way, appeared to have known Vane-Cart-
wright as a boy.
Having with some difficulty overcome her for-
midable reserve and shyness, I learned from her
much that I had not known about my friend, her
nephew, how really remarkable had been the prom-
ise of his early days, though he had idled a little at
Oxford, and how he had left Oxford prematurely
and taken up an appointment abroad, because he
felt that his parents could not well afford to keep
him at the university until he could earn his living
in a profession at home. Of his later life too, includ-
ing his latest projects of study, she had much to tell
me, for she had followed him and his pursuits with
an affectionate interest. This contrasted strangely
--- both with her evident indifference on her own ac-
[si]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
mmmmmmm
count to books and such matters as delighted him,
and with the strange calmness with which she
seemed to regard his death and the manner of his
death. I was becoming greatly attracted by this
quiet, lonely old lady, when the return of the
cousin and Vane-Cartwright and of Callaghan at
the same time put an end to our conversation.
Probably it was only that she did not feel equal
to the company of such a number of gentlemen,
but I half-fancied that some one of the number-
I could not guess which, but I suspected it was the
old cousin—was antipathetic to her.
I went to London myself that night, returning
next afternoon. I had to go and see my wife and
children. They had gone soon after Christmas to
stay with my wife's father, and she had taken the
children for a night to London on their way home.
She was compelled to stop there because my daugh-
ter, who was delicate, caught a bad chill. It was now
so cold for travelling that I urged her to remain in
London yet a little longer.
I am not sure why I am being so precise in re-
cording our movements at that time. Perhaps it
is merely from an impulse to try and live over again
a period of my life which was one of great and of
[s2]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
increasing, not diminishing, agitation. But having
begun, I will proceed.
· I returned to my rectory the day after the
funeral hoping to be free from any share in a kind
of investigation which consorted ill with the ordi-
nary tenor of my work. But of course I could not
remove myself from the atmosphere of the crime.
To begin with, I had an important interview with
Trethewy (which I will relate later) the day
after my return. But, besides, rumours of this clue
or that, which had been discovered, came to me in
the common talk of my parish, for every supposed
step towards the discovery of the criminal seemed
to be matter of general knowledge. So the crime
went with me in my parish rounds, and in the
privacy of my house I was still less able to escape
from it, for Callaghan was with me, and Callag-
han's mind was on fire with the subject.
I discovered very soon that Callaghan, whom I
had asked to stay for the funeral, was bent upon
staying in the village as long as he could. He con-
ceived that, with the knowledge he possessed and
his experience in India, he might, if on the spot, be
able to contribute to the ends of justice; and he
seemed to find a morbid satisfaction, most unlike
[53]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
my own feeling, in being near to the scene of crime
and the scene of detection. Moreover, he exhibited
an esteem and love for Peters and a desolate grief
at his loss which, though I had not known that
the two men were quite such friends, I was almost
forced to think unaffected. So I readily invited him
to stay at the Rectory, and he stayed there some
ten days altogether, when he declared that he would
put himself upon me no more and would move to
the hotel. At the last moment he changed his mind,
and said he had taken a fancy to stay at Peters'
house if he might. I was persuaded to acquiesce in
this, and there he stayed with occasional absences
in London, till nearly a month later, shortly after
the time when, as I shall tell, Trethewy was com-
mitted for trial at the Assizes.
Vane-Cartwright, who remained quiet and re-
served, thanked me very much the night after the
murder for having him at the Rectory, saying, with
a feeling that I had not quite expected, that either
to hurry away on that day of agitation or to stay
a night longer in Peters' house, would have been
a trial for him. He added that he purposed return-
ing to London immediately after the funeral, and
after an important City meeting, for which he
[54]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
m
must stay in England, he was going out to meet his
young lady on the Riviera. I suppose that without
intending I betrayed before the funeral the fact
that I was a little worried by my impending duties
as executor, duties which strangely enough I had
never had to perform before, and in which I was
now a little embarrassed by the absence from Eng-
land of my fellow-executor and the principal
legatees, and by the prospect of having to carry out
a charitable bequest which left me a large dis-
cretion and might possibly involve litigation.
Vane-Cartwright very unobtrusively put me in
the way of doing whatever was immediately in-
cumbent on me. I suppose I appeared as grate-
ful as I felt; anyhow, it ended with a delicate sug-
gestion from Vane-Cartwright' that he would be
very glad to stay at the hotel for a day or two and
make himself useful to me in any way that he
could. Of course I pressed him to stay at the Rec-
tory, and, in spite of an apparent preference for
staying at the hotel, he after a while agreed. I was
expecting that I might soon be leaving home for
some time, as it might be necessary to take my little
daughter for a month abroad in a warmer climate,
and after that I knew I should be very busy with
[រ]


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Confirmation classes and other matters, so that I
was anxious to make immediate progress, if I could,
with winding up Peters' estate, and was very glad
that Vane-Cartwright would stay, as he did stay,
at the Rectory. On the Saturday however (a week
after the murder) he received a telegram which
compelled him to leave that afternoon. I had by
this time begun to like him, which I confess I did
not at first; men of his stamp, who have long relied
on themselves alone and been justified in their re-
liance, often do not show their attractive qualities
till the emergency occurs in which we find them
useful.
Trethewy was arrested the day that Vane-
Cartwright left. I wondered why he was not ar-
rested earlier (for there did not seem to be any real
room for doubt that he had made those footmarks),
but I have never ascertained, and can only guess
that the police felt sure of securing him if he at-
tempted to escape, and hoped that, if left alone,
he might betray himself by such an attempt or
otherwise. He never did. He sat in his cottage, as
I gathered, constantly reading the Bible, but once
or twice a day pacing thoughtfully and alone up
and down the drive. He did the few necessary jobs
vas
urr
[56]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
for the house with punctuality, but he never lin-
gered in it, never visited the field or the lane, and
hardly spoke to any one, except on the day before
his arrest, when, to my astonishment (for he was
known to be hostile to the Church), he sent for me,
and we had the memorable interview to which I
have already referred.
During the days before his arrest, as well as after,
all sorts of enquiry, of which I knew little, were
going on. Thalberg's movements after the murder
were traced. Some attempt was made, I believe, to
find the man who, according to Trethewy, had
passed him with two horses in the lane. But there
seems to have been some bungling about this, and
the man, about whom there was no real mystery
(he was a farm servant who had started off early
to take a horse, which his master had sold, to its
new owner), was not then found. Two important
discoveries were made about Trethewy. After his
arrest his cottage was searched, and he was found
to be the possessor of inconceivably miscellaneous
articles. Among them were several weapons which
he might naturally have picked up on his travels,
but among them (which was more to the point)
was a small case of surgical instruments. Two in-
[7]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
struments were missing from that case, and the
instrument used by the murderer might, though
not very neatly, have fitted into one of the vacant
places. The case was found, as Callaghan, who con-
trived to be present, told me, at the back of a shelf
in a cupboard filled with all sorts of lumber and
litter that had lain there who can say how long.
Callaghan, however, professed to have observed,
from marks on the dust of the shelf, that the con-
tents of the cupboard had been recently disturbed,
in order, he had no doubt, to hide the instrument
case at the back of everything.
The other new discovery had occurred two days
before. Trethewy's uncle and the guests who had
been at his party on that ill-omened night were of
course sought and questioned. They all corrobo-
rated Trethewy's own account of his movements,
but they added something more. Trethewy it
seemed had been normal and cheerful enough as
the evening began, but, as the night and the drink-
ing went on, fell first into melancholy, then into
sullenness, lastly and a little before he went home
into voluble ferocity. He recurred to the topic, to
which his uncle said he had more than once alluded
on previous days when he had met him, of his
CO
[58]


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mm
quarrel with Peters, against whom he had con-
ceived an irrational resentment, and he actually,
though those who heard him did not take him
seriously at the time, uttered threats against his
life.
[39]


CHAPTER VI
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 reflection 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 posi-
tion 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. Start-
ing with this declaration he plunged into a long
and uninterrupted discourse of which I should find
[60]


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less life, had become suddenly impressed by deep
religious feelings, no less than by precise and in-
flexible 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 passion-
ate, began to come upon him again in prolonged
fits of intense wrath, intensified, I suppose, by re-
action 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, Tre-
thewy was already brooding perversely over some
trumpery or altogether fancied grievance. He was
[62]


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m
deeply under the influence of drink at that mo-
ment, 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 spirit-
ual 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 Peter's death, and the threat which Cal-
laghan 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. Per-
haps 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 Peter's 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
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mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
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 plot-
ting 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 inven-
tion for accounting for the known quarrel and the
known threats? Was the story true with this grave
correction that Trethewy had carried out his in-
tent? Was it the simple truth all through? Did it
[64]


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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 the prosecution of Trethewy had gone
far, a letter arrived which excited my imagination
unaccountably, or rather two letters arrived. The
day before Vane-Cartwright had left, a letter had
come 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
XCII
[65]


CHAPTER VII
FTER several remands, the proceeding
against Trethewy before the magistrates
came to a close about the end of February.
There was nothing much to note about these pro-
ceedings, which ended, as I suppose they must have
ended, in his being committed for trial. The reader
knows by this time pretty nearly the whole case
against him. That Peters had been murdered was
certain. The accused had had several altercations
with the murdered man. In one of them he had
expressed a wish to kill him, and he had repeated
this wish to others upon the fatal night. Footprints
had been found which, as the reader knows, seemed
at first sight plainly indicative of his guilt. Then
there was the ladder. It was undoubtedly kept, be-
fore the murder, locked up in a place of which only
Trethewy had the key. That any one could have
had access to it between the murder and the dis-
covery of the ladder was a view supported only
by the uncorroborated statement of the accused
[67]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
that he had left the key of the pump-house that
morning, when summoned to speak to the police,
and had forgotten to go back for it until the next
day. Lastly, the finding of the instrument case,
though not very important, at any rate disposed of
any improbability that Trethewy would have had
such an instrument as the knife that was used.
I daresay this would have been enough to hang
a man if this was all; and against this there was
nothing to be set, except the immovable persistency
of Trethewy and his wife from the first in the tale
which they told.
Nothing, that is, till after he had been commit-
ted for trial. But the very evening after his com-
mittal, a slight but almost conclusive circumstance
was brought to light, and entirely altered the aspect
of the case. That evening I received a visit from
Peters' housemaid, Edith Summers. She had, she
said, something on her mind. She had told a false-
hood to the police-sergeant on the morning after
the murder. She had interrupted the housekeeper
to say that the candle by Peters' bed had been a
long candle the night before; she had said this be-
cause she had been very severely scolded by the
housekeeper for forgetting to put fresh candles in
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From this and what we already knew the conclu-
sion was almost inevitable. Peters was murdered be-
fore two inches of ordinary candle, which was
burning at 11.30 p.m. on the 28th of January,
burnt down.
Stupid as it may seem, I had for some time been
convinced of Trethewy's innocence, and yet had
never really drawn the necessary inference from
it. Of course with the two premises in my mind
--Peters was murdered, Trethewy did not murder
him-I had been aware, in a sense, of the conclu-
sion, but it had taken no hold of my attention.
Now, however, I had evidence of Trethewy's in-
nocence, which was no longer a private intuition
of my own, but was something of which every one
must appreciate the force. Perhaps it was from this,
perhaps it was from the sentimental effect of hav-
ing the time of the crime fixed within such narrow
limits; anyhow the thought, "Some one other than
Trethewy murdered Peters," came upon me with
a sudden horror which could hardly have been
[70]


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greater if I had only that moment become aware
of the original fact of the murder.
I instantly went over in my mind the list of those
few who were so placed as to lie within the reach
of suspicion. Trethewy could no longer be sus-
pected. Thalberg surely could not. I dismissed the
two women servants from my mind immediately.
There remained two men—three men—three men,
of whom I was one. I knew how easily I could clear
myself, for the door had been locked behind me
before that candle was lit. But I was the last man
known to have seen Peters, and my confused cur-
rent of thought included me as a man to be sus-
pected. I asked myself of each in turn, is he the
guilty man? and in each case I answered no. As
I look back now, it seems to me, that the answer
"no" did not come to my mind with the same
whole-hearted conviction in each case. But I did
not in the few moments for which I then reflected,
I did not till long after do more than go round in
this circle: One of us three men murdered Peters.
Was it-each of us in turn? No. Could it after
all be one of the servants? No! Was there not then
in the vast region of possibility some way of ac-
[71]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
police are so ready to back up one another. He
answered immediately and with conviction:
"Well, you see, sir, it is not for me to judge.” The
answer was on the face of it preposterous. He alone
had searched the front of the house that morning,
and it was for him alone, of all men, to say whether
the tracks were there. He obviously did not see
this at all, and I was wise enough to let go an op-
portunity for moralising to him. I beguiled him,
with a glass of wine and other devices of the temp-
ter, into feeling himself off duty for the while, and
talking with me as fellow-mortal to fellow-mortal.
I very soon discovered, first, that Sergeant Speke
had searched carefully enough around the house
that morning to have seen the tracks if they had
been there, and, secondly, that the man, Speke, as
distinct from the Sergeant, knew perfectly well
that they were not there.
Not till then did I summon the girl Edith from
the servants' hall where she was waiting. I made
her tell her tale. I saw the Sergeant take a due note
of it for transmission to those, to me mysterious,
headquarters, where I supposed all such matters
were digested. I got the assurance that Sergeant
Speke was really man enough to see that his own
[73]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
evidence, as to the non-existence of the tracks that
morning, would be noted and digested too. I dis-
missed the Sergeant and Edith, and went slowly to
bed. Did I suspect this person? No! Did I suspect
that person? N-no. At last I determined that I
would not let my suspicions fasten on any one man,
while it might be just as reasonable that his suspi-
cions should fasten on me. But my mind remained
full of horror and of the image of a candle-end
sputtering out, while the man, who had lighted it
to read by, lay dead in those bloody sheets. Very,
very glad I was that my wife was at last coming
home next day.
I suppose it was from the association of two
female names that my dreams, when at last I slept,
were of nothing more horrible than the ship Elea-
nor, which, as the reader remembers, probably still
sailed the seas.
[24]


CHAPTER VIII
ITH some doubt as to whether it was
what I ought to do, but with no doubt
that it was what I wanted to do, I
sought out Callaghan next morning for a final talk
with him before he left; for he was at last to tear
himself away from the scene which he haunted.
I tried on him, I do not know why, the effects of
Edith's disclosure without telling him what I now
knew about the tracks. I could see that he accepted
the truth of the girl's statement, and had grasped,
much more quickly than I had, what it imported.
It was therefore wearisome to me, and, in my then
state of mind, most jarring, that for some time he
persisted in playing with the idea that Trethewy
might still be guilty. He supported it, as he went
on, with more and more farfetched arguments, so
that my patience was nearly at an end, when, to
my amazement, I found my friend off at full speed
again upon a fresh track, that of Thalberg. I
listened, and this time seriously, to several things
[75]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
which he told me about Thalberg, which were new
to me and threw an unpleasant light upon him.
Then I interposed. Thalberg had left the house
with me, and it had been made all but certain that
he went straight to his hotel and never left it until
many hours after the murder had been discovered.
In any case it was not he who had made those
tracks, for he had certainly kept in his hotel from
early morning on the 29th till he left. And I then
told Callaghan my reason for believing that those
tracks were made in the middle of the day on the
29th. “My dear friend,” he exclaimed, this time
with all the appearance of earnestness, “I no more
really believe than you do that Thalberg actu-
ally did the deed. He is not man enough. But I
have a method, I have a method. I am used to these
things. I am off to town now; I shall be there some
time; you know my address. I mean,” he added
grandiloquently, to work through all the outside
circumstances and possibilities of the case, and nar-
row down gradually to the real heart of the prob-
lem; it is my method.”
Well, there may have been some method in his
madness, for there was certainly some madness in
his method. I took leave of him (after he had
[76]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
called, that afternoon, to renew acquaintance with
my wife) little foreseeing what his two next steps
would be. He stopped on his way to London at
the county town, where he went to the county
police office to communicate some information or
theory about Thalberg. He went on to London,
as he had said he would, but, instead of remaining
there as he had said, he suddenly departed next
day for the Continent, leaving no address behind.
We have now arrived at the first week in March.
The several events (if I may include under the
name of events the slow emergence of certain
thoughts in my own mind) which prepared the
way for the eventual solution of our mystery, oc-
curred at intervals, and in an order of which my
memory is not quite distinct, during that and the
remaining nine months of the year.
The resolution at which I had arrived, not to
occupy my mind with suspicions, or to regard the
detection of crime as part of my business, was not
a tenable resolution, and it was entirely dissipated
by my wife in a talk which we had on the first
evening after her arrival. I was aware that she
would not be able to share with me in the deter-
mination not to harbour suspicions of any particu-
[77]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
lar person, but I had thought she would be averse
to my taking positive steps towards the detection
of the crime. She, however, was indignant at the
idea that I could let things be. “Several innocent
men will be under a cloud all their lives,” she
said, unless the guilty man is found. There is
Trethewy, I suppose they will let him out some
day; but who is going to employ him? Not that
uncle of his; and we cannot. Who do you suppose.
is going to see this through if you do not?” She
was powerfully seconded in this by a neighbour of
ours, now an old man, who had had much experi-
ence as a justice. "Mr. Driver,” he said, "you may
think this is the business of the police, but re-
member who the police are. They do their ordi-
nary work excellently, but their ordinary work is
to deal with ordinary crime. This was not an ordi-
nary crime, and it was done by no ordinary man.
If it is ever discovered, it will be by a man whose
education gives him a wider horizon than that of
professional dealers with criminals.”
I do not know how far the reader may have
been inclined to suspect Callaghan (that depends
I suppose, on whether the reader has been able to
[78]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
form any idea of his character, and I myself had
not, so far, formed any coherent idea of his char-
acter; there seemed little coherence in it), but the
police certainly had begun to suspect him.
On a superficial view of the matter there was
every reason to do so. Short of bolting on the
night of the murder, before it was discovered, he
had done all that, theoretically, a guilty man
should have done. He had lost no time whatever
in attempting to put suspicion on one innocent
man. He had striven to intermeddle officiously in
the investigations conducted by the police. There
was more than one apparent lie in the information
he had given. He had haunted the scene of the
crime as though it fascinated him. When the first
innocent man was cleared, he had at once sug-
gested another man, who was almost certainly
innocent also, and he had then, after giving false
accounts of his intentions, quitted the country
without leaving his address. Then he was cer-
tainly in the house when the crime was committed.
His movements on the following day were nearly
accounted for, but not so fully that he could not
have made those false tracks. After all it was a
[79]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
circumstance of deep suspicion that he had been
so quick to recognise the peculiar print of Tre-
thewy's boot.
Alas, even to the test cui bono, “that stock
question of Cassius, 'whom did it profit?!” Cal-
laghan responded ill. I knew, and somewhat later
in reply to an enquiry by the police, it was my
duty to say, that Callaghan was in a certain sense
a gainer by Peters' death. He had been a most im-
prudent investor (not, I believe, a speculator),
and had in his embarrassment borrowed £2,000
from Peters. Peters, while living, would not have
been at all hard on him if he had been honestly
unable to pay, but was just the man to have made
Callaghan's life a burden to him if he thought he
was not doing his best to keep above water. Peters'
will cancelled the debt, and it was not impossible
that Callaghan knew it. But this last point illus-
trates the real weakness of the argument against
him. Nobody could know Callaghan a little and
think that either his interest in the will or any other
point in this hypothetical story of his crime, how-
ever much it might be like human nature, was in
the least like him.
Here, for want of a good description of him,
[80]


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matter to the test of my wife's judgment. I knew
that, at least at her earlier meetings with Cal-
laghan, she had disliked him, and, out of the facts
which she knew already, I made what I flattered
myself was a very telling case against him. It did
not disconcert me that the lady, who, when told of
his flight, had trusted he would remain out of
England till she went abroad, said without much
interest, “What stuff," and then suddenly kin-
dling, exclaimed, “What, Robert, are you turning
against the poor man?” When I asked for the rea-
sons why she scouted the idea of his guilt, she
seemed to consider the request quite frivolous; but
at last I extracted from her a sentence which ex-
pressed what I think was at the root of my own
thought. “Mr. Callaghan,” she said, “is violent
enough to commit a murder and cunning enough
to conceal anything, but I cannot imagine his vio-
lence and his cunning ever working together.”
Of course we both thought of him as sane,
though he was just one of those people to whose
doings one constantly applies the epithet "mad.”
[82]


CHAPTER IX
HE enquiry upon which I had now stirred
myself to enter, could not be an easy one,
but it should have seemed for the present
to be narrowed down to a question about a single
man. Perhaps it was from repugnance against con-
sciously going about to hang a man who had shel-
tered under my roof, that I did not even then defi-
nitely put to myself the question of that man's
guilt. By some half-conscious sequence of thought
I was led to begin my search far afield. It started
with the two letters which had come for Peters
from Mr. Charles Bryanston, or rather first with
the later letter.
I had some time before written briefly and for-
mally to Mr. Bryanston to acquaint him with the
fact of Peters' murder, but had, for a while since,
thought no more of him. Now I began to do what
one very seldom does, steadily and methodically
think. I mooned up and down with a pipe in my
garden or in the lanes. I sat, with those letters in
[83]


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my hand, alone before the fire. I sat at my writing-
table with paper before me, and made incoherent
jottings with a pencil. I should be afraid to say
how often and how long I did all these seemingly
idle things, till at last, in the time between tea
and dinner, with the children playing in the room,
I arrived at actually spelling the matter out.
"This time I will not delay my answer." "This
time " Then at other times he did delay his
answer. That might have some significance when
I turned to the earlier letter. “This time I will
not delay my answer.” It was an answer to a ques-
tion in a letter just received from Peters, an an-
swer probably by return of post. Why not delay
it this time as usual? Why, of course, because the
question was one which both to Peters and to
Bryanston seemed important, perhaps moment-
ous. Simple enough so far. "Longhurst did sail in
the Eleanor, and she did not go down.” It was
clear enough that some one had thought that
Longhurst had sailed in a ship that did go down.
Peters had thought otherwise, and Peters was
right. What of that? There is nothing momentous
in that. Stop, though. It is not necessarily that.
Some one need not have thought it-he may have
[84]


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said it to Peters, and Peters may have thought it
was a lie. And what did it matter, and why did
some one say it? Well, of course, Longhurst would
be dead if the ship had gone down; and Longhurst
was not really dead, and some one was interested
in saying that he was. Perhaps Longhurst was the
next heir to some property, and search ought to
have been made for him; and my mind wandered
over all the stories I had ever read of lost heirs, in
fact or in fiction. Or perhaps Who said Long-
hurst and his ship went down? “C.” said it, who-
ever "C.” might be.
Then I took up the earlier letter. I knew from
the other letter that this had been sent late. There
was nothing further to be gained from the words
of it, but a flood of suspicion broke upon me as I
held it in my hand. Had "C.” another initial to
his surname, a double name? Did I know this “C."?
Had I not seen this very letter in the hands of
"C.”? Had I not thought it rather odd that he, a
man so decidedly "all there,” had opened and read
it before it was given to me? Had I not rather won-
dered at the pains he had kindly taken to help
me with several letters before? Did he not laugh
rather strangely as he read it, though I never
ma
[85]


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heard him laugh at anything amusing? Did he not
go away just after the letter came, though he had
not been intending to go so soon? Was it conceiv-
able that he knew that Peters had asked that ques-
tion, and thought the first letter (very uninform-
ing," as he called it) was the answer to that ques-
tion, and an answer which made him safe? After
that one laugh I thought he became suddenly
downcast. Had he really read in that letter that he
need not have feared Peters, and that he had-yes,
murdered him for nothing? Had the accident that
Peters had written, perhaps long before, some un-
important question to Bryanston, and the accident
that Bryanston had delayed his answer betrayed this
man into leaving me alone with my letters a week
too soon; and would this trifling mistake lead him
to-to the gallows? and I remembered with a start
the grim end which I was preparing. Yes, all this
was conceivable. There is an old maxim that you
should beware of going back upon your first in-
stinctive impressions of liking or dislike when you
happen to have them. There are qualifications to
it; the repulsions that start from ugliness or
strangeness or difference of opinion may not be
safe guides. But broadly the maxim is true. It was
[86]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
true in this instance. No, I too had never liked "C.”
It is strange that I should have received Mr.
Bryanston's answer the very next morning, a long,
full, warm-hearted letter on the death of the friend
to whose letters in life-and what letters Peters
wrote!—he made such scrappy replies. In a P. S.
at the end, as if the writer had hesitated whether
to write it, were the words: “It is curious and may
be news to you that Mr. Peters, at the time he was
murdered, was unravelling the mystery of another
murder, committed, as he suspected, many years
ago.”
So then, as I had half-guessed, Longhurst was
dead. It was not that he was alive and Cartwright
pretended he was dead; he was dead, and Cart-
wright had a motive for falsely pretending he was
drowned.
[37]


CHAPTER X
NOUT comprendre, c'est tout pardonner,"
is, I do not doubt, a saying which has its
2 truth. Nevertheless, I have generally no-
ticed, 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 cir-
cumstances, 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 cir-
cumstances of the crime, as I now conceived them,
a great hatred of Vane-Cartwright possessed my
[88]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
soul. There was a passage in my subsequent course
with regard to him, when a reason personal to my-
self 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 im-
pure desire, or that it consorted ill with the inner
meaning of those precepts which it was my profes-
sion 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 circum-
spectly. I was conscious that the structure of my
theory was held together by no firm rivets of veri-
fiable fact, but by something which must be called
feeling. I did not distrust my theory on that ac-
count; 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
[89]


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m
Bagdad. I also verified my impression as to the
date of that occasion when Vane-Cartwright, stay-
ing 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 fetch 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 care-
ful 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-Cart-
wright upon this, I myself, fantastically no doubt,
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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 busi-
ness 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 im-
pression to be of use to any one but me. Then the
attribution of that early murder to Vane-Cart-
wright 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 de-
nounced 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 fabri-
cated evidence against him, he contrived by his
words to cast on Callaghan alone the risk of there-
after appearing as an innocent man's traducer. But
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his cunning had made a slip. It was gratuitous in
doing so to have uttered a refutable lie as to Treth-
ewy'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 a man like Treth-
ewy should confess the full extent of his wrong
conduct to me. And so, not from any want of cool-
ness, 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.
[92]


CHAPTER XI
Y the time that my wife, who had been
again obliged to be in London while I was
spelling out this story, had returned, I had
long come to the conclusion that my theory had
enough in it to be worth submitting to her criti-
cism. But she forestalled me with news of her own,
and news which concerned Vane-Cartwright. The
young lady, Miss Denison, whom he was to have
married had suddenly broken off the engagement
within two days of his joining her upon the Ri-
viera. The girl could give no good reason for her
conduct, and her own people loudly condemned it;
they had been against the engagement, for the dif-
ference of age was too great; they were still more
against the flighty breach of it; but she was ob-
durate. She and her people returned home for
Easter, and my wife, who had already known her
a little, now met her several times at the house
of a common friend in London. The foolish or
unhappy young lady had given my wife her con-
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fidence. Far from having any suspicion about the
murder, she had never even heard, when she made
her decision, that there had been a murder at all;
for she and her mother did not read news of that
order, and Vane-Cartwright, though he had said
that he had been through a dreadful experience,
of which he was anxious to tell her, had not yet
said what it was. There had evidently been a quite
unaccountable quarrel in which the high-tempered
girl had, in all things external, begun, continued
and ended in the wrong; and she did not now de-
fend herself. Somehow, she said, he was changed.
No, not in his manner to her; she had not doubted
his attachment to her. Only she had thought she
had loved him before, and she knew now that she
did not. Something, which she had seen in him be-
fore but not disliked, now jarred upon her feelings
in a new way. She had been very, very foolish, very,
very wrong; she could explain nothing; she was
very unhappy, very angry with herself; but this she
knew, and this alone she knew, that it would be
wrong for her to become William Vane-Cart-
wright's wife.
So much my wife told me. Then, with that pre-
cipitancy in travelling to remote conclusions which
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VE
sometimes seems so perilous in able women, she
said, as quietly as if it were the most obvious com-
ment, “Robert, it was Vane-Cartwright that did
the murder.” Now she had never even spoken to
him.
Accordingly, she received my theory of the mur-
der almost with enthusiasm. None the less, she im-
mediately put her finger upon the weakest part of
it. "I wonder, all the same," she exclaimed, "why
he murdered Eustace?" "Why,” I said, "he saw in
a moment that Eustace knew he was lying and sus-
pected him of the murder.” “That would not have
been enough,” she said; "he must be a very cool-
headed man from the way he behaved after the
murder, and he would never have run the risk he
ran by a second murder, if there had not been
much more than suspicion of the first.” “Then,”
I suggested, "perhaps Eustace already knew it, and
the lie he told only provoked Eustace into showing
it.” “If,” she replied, “Eustace knew it, he would
never have had him within his doors.” “Well,” I
said wearily, because I could not immediately see
how to answer, "perhaps he did not murder Eus-
tace.” Then she turned on me with a woman's
promptitude and a woman's injustice: "You can al-
[95]


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ways argue me down,” she said, “but he did mur-
der Eustace Peters, and you have got to find out
all about it and bring him to justice. I am sure
you have the ability to do it. You may have to wait,
but, if you wait patiently and keep your eyes open,
all sorts of things will turn up to help you. I shall
be very angry with you,” she added, in a tone not
at all suggestive of anger, "if you do not do it.”
I felt, like my wife, that it was a matter of wait-
ing for what would turn up. In the neighbour-
hood of the murder there was probably very lit-
tle to turn up. The police, I felt no doubt, had
made all manner of enquiries; and as for anything
that I was likely to pick up, I supposed I had al-
ready heard all, and more than all that any per-
son in the neighbourhood knew about the matter.
I may anticipate a little and say that in the whole
of the four months, which, as it proved, were all
that remained to me as Rector of Long Wilton,
no fresh information was given to me by my neigh-
bours there. It soon occurred to me that the mur-
der of Longhurst, far away and long ago, might
be easier to trace than the recent, but perhaps more
carefully veiled, crime committed to cover it.
Peters, I reasoned, must have been in possession of
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m
mm
proofs of it, and probably, as I searched his volumi-
nous papers, something would appear to indicate
the nature of those proofs. I began, as in any case
I should have done, a careful reading of his papers.
It took up no small part of my spare time, for I
found that he had prepared little enough for im-
mediate publication, but fuller and more valuable
materials for his projected book of psychology than
I should at all have expected from his manner of
proceeding. But, of what now interested me more
than my friend's philosophy, I found nothing in
all this mass of letters and notes and journals; noth-
ing, that is, which threw direct light on this mys-
tery, for indeed his psychological notes and my
discussions with a friend of his, an Oxford phi-
losophy tutor, to whom I eventually committed
them, did, I think, influence me not a little in one
important part of my enquiry later.
In pushing enquiries further afield there was
need for some caution. An indiscretion might have
brought what I was doing unnecessarily soon to
the notice of the suspected man, and the great
ability with which I credited him might suggest
some effective scheme for baffling my search. But
of course I wrote early to Mr. Bryanston to ask if
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he would tell me to whom he alluded as “C.,”
whether Longhurst was the man whom Peters sus-
pected had been murdered, and whether I inferred
rightly that “C.” was involved in this suspicion.
It was my duty to put all that I knew at the dis-
posal of the police, and the opportunity for doing
so soon presented itself in the visit, which, as I
have said, was paid to me to enquire about Cal-
laghan. My visitor was an important official, since
dead, whom I need not more clearly indicate. He
had been a military man, and he struck me as,
in some way, admirably qualified for his post. He
was, I believe, excellent in the discipline he main-
tained among his subordinates and in all the dis-
positions he made for meeting the common public
requirements. I am told also that he had wonder-
ful familiarity with the ways of ordinary law-
breakers, but he did not appear to me to have
much elasticity of mind. After answering fully his
question about Callaghan, I thought it right to
give my own impression of his innocence. My
visitor answered me with a somewhat mysterious
reference to those who really guided the conduct
of the affair. He could not himself, he said, go
behind their views. Then, with an evident sym-
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pathy for my concern about Callaghan, he told
me in confidence and still more mysteriously that
the opinion of an eminent specialist had been taken.
I then ventured to press the question of Tre-
thewy's release, and learnt that it was being care-
fully considered, but he could not be set free im-
mediately. Then I told my visitor of the statement
of Vane-Cartwright when Callaghan first spoke
of Trethewy, and how Trethewy's confession
proved this to have been a deliberate falsehood. I
showed him and gave him copies of the letters of
Bryanston to Peters and to me. I informed him,
and at my request he noted, that Vane-Cartwright
had opened the first letter. I stated what I had
myself observed of Vane-Cartwright's conduct,
and indicated frankly the conclusion which I was
disposed to draw. It did not seem to me that I pro-
duced any impression. My visitor listened, if I may
say so, with the air of a man who takes in the fact
accurately and sees that it should be put in some
pigeon-hole, but is without either apprehension or
wonder as to its real bearing. I gathered, on the
whole, that the official mind was chiefly taken up
with the theory that Callaghan was guilty; but that
there was also thought to be an off-chance that
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SCO
something might yet turn up to repair the seem-
ingly shattered case against Trethewy. I gathered
too, and, I hope, gave due weight to the fact, that
there was some likely way, of which I had before
heard nothing, by which an unknown person might
have entered and escaped from the house that night.
One thing more I learnt; nothing suspicious had
been discovered about Thalberg's movement, but it
appeared, and this seemed to be considered as in
his favour, that he had a great deal to do with Vane-
Cartwright.
After my visitor had taken courteous leave of
me, it dawned upon me what was meant by his
dark sayings about Callaghan. I had wondered how
the opinions of an eminent specialist in police mat-
ters could be so cogent in a case about which he
knew nothing at first hand. Suddenly it occurred
to me that the eminent specialist really was a phy-
sician well versed in the symptoms of insanity. The
police then were not being guided by those super-
ficial and so to speak conventional notes of guilt,
of which I had thought, to the exclusion of all
those sides of character which I had noted. On the
contrary they had a view of their own on which
these two conflicting sets of phenomena might be
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reconciled, a view which explained why Callaghan
was to me so inexplicable. The man was not sane.
I could not conceal from myself that there was
at least something plausible in this view. There
is a sort of marked eccentricity and, as it were, ir-
responsibility of conduct of which I had always
thought as something not merely different from
incipient madness but very far removed from it.
Yet I had once before been terribly mistaken in
thinking thus about a friend, and I might, I re-
flected, be mistaken now. The natural effect upon
me was, or should have been, a keener sense of the
unsubstantial nature of the story which I had built
up about Vane-Cartwright. But I believed it still.
[101]


CHAPTER XII
N the course of the summer my wife and I paid
our annual visit together to London, and I
I had a few days in Oxford before the end of
the summer term.
I heard a good deal about Vane-Cartwright in
London, for he had become a man of some mark
in society, and moved in a little set, which was
known among its members by a rather precious
name, now forgotten though celebrated in the gos-
sip of that time, and which included a statesman
or two of either party and several men of eminence
in letters, law or learning. By a strange coincidence
of the sort which is always happening, I met at an
evening party a friend who mentioned Longhurst,
and I had just heard from him something of no
moment about this man whose fate so deeply exer-
cised me, when I saw Vane-Cartwright himself
standing in another part of the throng. I took the
opportunity of watching him, unobserved myself,
as I supposed. I have hitherto forborne to describe
[102]


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mmmmmmm
his appearance, because such descriptions in books
seldom convey a picture to me. But I must say
that seen now in a room where there were several
distinguished people, he made no less impression on
me than before. He was, I should say, five foot
eleven in height, thin and with a slight stoop, but
with the wiry look which sometimes belongs to men
who were unathletic and perhaps delicate when
young, but whose physical strength has developed
in after years. Hair which had turned rather grey,
while the soft texture and uniformly dark hue of
his skin still retained a certain beauty of youth,
probably accounted for a good deal of his distinc-
tion of appearance, for he was not handsome,
though his forehead, if narrow, was high, and his
eyes which were small were striking-of a dark
greenish-grey colour, I think. The expression of
the mouth and of the clear-cut and firm-set jaw
was a good deal hidden by a long though rather
thin moustache, still black. I had time while he
stood there to notice again one trick, which I
already knew; he was, I supposed, bent upon be-
ing agreeable, so he was talking with animation,
and when, in so talking, he smiled and showed his
white teeth, his eyelashes almost completely veiled
[103]


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Was
his eyes. To me, naturally, it gave him a hateful ex-
pression, yet I could see a certain fascination about
it. Then he moved farther off-very quietly, but I
could see as he made his way through the crowd
that in reality every motion was extraordinarily
quick.
Some ten minutes after, I was about to go, when
he suddenly came from behind and addressed me,
asking me to choose a day for dinner or luncheon
at his club. I declined, and freed myself as courte-
ously and as quickly as I could, and thought, for
the moment, that there had been nothing marked
in the way in which, obeying irresistible impulse,
I had shaken off the man whom I suspected on such
slight grounds but so rootedly.
A few days afterwards a great robbery was at-
tempted at Vane-Cartwright's house. The robbers
were after a well-chosen and valuable collection of
gold ornaments of early periods or from strange
countries, which he had begun to make. It was re-
ported in the papers that the theft had been with
great presence of mind interrupted and prevented
by the owner of the ill-guarded treasures. But the
robbers themselves got away. The matter was much
talked of, and conflicting tales were told about it,
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but it seems that Vane-Cartwright, hearing some
unusual noise, had come downstairs and surprised
the two men who had entered the house before
they had succeeded in removing any of their spoil.
As he came down he had rung up the police by the
District Messenger Company's apparatus which
was in the house. Coming quietly upon them, and
standing in the dark while they were in full light,
he had first ordered them to hold up their hands,
and had then made each of them singly turn out his
pockets and restore the smaller stolen articles which
they had already secreted in them. He then, it was
said, kept them standing there to await the police.
But, by some ruse, they distracted his attention for
a moment, and then, suddenly putting out the
light, made a rush past him and escaped. Such at
any rate appears to have been the information
which he gave to the police who arrived soon after.
The police actually arrested two men, already
known to them as suspicious characters, who had
been observed lurking near the house together and
afterwards slinking away separately, and they were
at first confident that they had secured the authors
of the attempted robbery. But Vane-Cartwright
not only could not identify the arrested men as
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in the comparatively few of her sons whose road
to distinction is through commerce; and, more-
over, he had lately given to the University Mu-
seum a valuable collection of East Indian weapons,
fabrics, musical instruments and what not, which
he had got together with much judgment. Thus
it happened that I heard there one or two things
about him which were of interest to me. A friend
of mine, an old tutor, the Bursar of the college at
which Vane-Cartwright had been, described him
as he was in his undergraduate days. He had, in
his opinion, been badly brought up, had never
gone to school, but been trained at home by par-
ents who were good people with peculiar views,
highly scientific and possibly highly moral views.
He had not fallen into either of the two common
classes of undergraduates which my old friend
understood and approved the sportsmanlike and
boyishly fashionable class, or the studious class
who studied on the ordinary lines; still less into
the smaller, but still not small, class which com-
bines the merits of the two. He had attainments
of his own, which the old tutor did not value
sufficiently, for he was proficient in several modern
languages and modern literatures; moreover, the
[107]


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mm
necessary mathematics, Greek and Latin gram-
mar, formal logic, etc., which he had to get up,
gave him not the slightest trouble. Altogether he
had plenty of cleverness of his own sort, but it
was a sort which the Bursar thought unwholesome.
He was quite well conducted, and ought to have
been a gentleman, coming of the family of which
he came, but somehow he was not quite a gentle-
man. Thus it was a great surprise to the possibly
conventional instructor of his youth that he had
done so well in the world.
Then I heard of him from another man, justly
esteemed in financial circles, who was on a visit to
his son at Oxford, and whom I met in a common-
room after dinner. Somebody had hazarded the
remark that Vane-Cartwright must have been
either a very hard worker or a very lucky specu-
lator. "No,” said this gentleman, who was a col-
league of his on the Board of one of the only two
companies of which he was a director, “I should
not say that a man like that worked hard as you
would understand work at Oxford, or at least as
a few of you would. His hard work was done
when he was young. Most of his business is what
one of his clerks could run, and probably does
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run, for many weeks together, on lines which he
has planned very carefully and revises whenever
occasion requires. Nor is he what most people
would call a speculator. I fancy he very seldom
takes any uncommon sort of risk, but he always
does it at the right moment. He has succeeded
because he is very quick in making his calcula-
tions and very bold in taking action on them. He
does not seem to be constantly watching things,
but when a special emergency or a special oppor-
tunity occurs he seems to grasp it instantly, and I
believe he troubles himself very little, too little
perhaps, about any affairs of his when it is once
well in train.”
Lastly, I heard a story, the narrator of which
could give me few precise details, of the pains
which Vane-Cartwright had taken to search out
the few relations of an old partner of his in the
East who had died before their affairs turned out
so successfully, and of the generosity with which
he had set up these people in life though they had
very little claim on him. Here at least was some-
thing which took its place in the story which I was
weaving; the rest of what I had heard was little
to the purpose, though it served to give life
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and colour to my idea of the man's character.
Now, however, I was really to discover some-
thing definite. When we returned to our home at
Long Wilton, only a little before we finally left
it, I completed my examination of Peters' papers.
His various diaries and notebooks, notes of travel
and notes of study, jottings and completed pas-
sages for his psychological book, I found to be of
fascinating interest, and I lingered over them
long, but there was not a hint among them all of
Longhurst, the Eleanor or any kindred topic.
One of the journals, I noticed, had had some
leaves cut out. The last place of my search was
a small wooden trunk which I had brought home
from his house (now sold). On the top of it lay a
sheet of paper with, written in his mother's hand,
"Some little things which I have put aside for
Eustace. His wife or his children may care to see
them hereafter.” It may have been from a false
sense of pathos, but my eyes filled with tears, and
I was indisposed to rifle callously these relics so
lovingly put aside with natural hopes which now
could never be fulfilled. I was about to make a
bonfire of the box and all its contents, reverently
but with speed, when my wife arrested me in
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m
amazement at my folly. "Why,” she said, “can-
not you see? His letters to his mother will be in it.
His letters from the East,” she added, as I still did
not comprehend. And they were in it.
[111]


CHAPTER XIII.
HERE set down in order of their date sey-
eral extracts from Peters' letters to his
1 mother written from Saigon during the
years of his stay in the East.
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 be-
cause 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 conversa-
tion 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,
[112]


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mm
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, Long-
hurst, 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 part-
ner 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
[113]


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as
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 a certain
time when you were at Nagasaki, and you will
remember Longhurst's being there and his sail-
ing. 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
[115]


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mm
you saw them off, and that they both sailed to-
gether 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 Long-
hurst 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
[116]


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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 inquiries I dismissed it sum-
marily, 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.
[117]


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of July and August. From this it appeared that
Peters had at that time accompanied one Dr. Kuy-
per, 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 re-
quested assistance in burying the body of his com-
panion. 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 ex-
cited, and seemed suspicious about it, but that the
manner and the answers of the European travel-
ler 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 for-
mer acquaintance, Longhurst. He recorded also
that they had found two bullets from a revolver
[119]


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in the back of the head, and he made a note as to
the size and pattern of revolver which these bul-
lets 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 re-
corded 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 fragmen-
tary, that Peters and Kuyper proceeded immed-
iately afterwards to Manilla, very likely to com-
municate 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
om.
[120]


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supposed they were to be found. Unfortunately,
it was just in these particulars that the abbrevia-
tions 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 that same year.
Further, on a separate sheet of paper, I found
an indication of the reason why Peters had de-
sisted 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 Novem-
ber, " The description corresponded very
well with that given in the journal of the presum-
able 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 Sula.
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
[121]


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agreement made in between X. and L.” Mac-
Andrew'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 cer-
tain 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 proceed-
ings.
[122]


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viction satisfied me that the idea of his lunacy was
really, as I had at first supposed, quite unfounded
and foolish.
Anyway, I at last invited Callaghan to stay for
a couple of days in our new home. He accepted,
but for one night only. He arrived in the after-
noon full of his Parisian adventures and to a less
extent of his detective researches. With these, or
with an adorned version of them, he entertained
me for an hour or so before dinner. It seems that
his sudden departure for Paris was not altogether
motiveless. He had, on his arrival in London, heard
by some accident of a gentleman in Paris who was
a correspondent and intimate of Thalberg. He had
immediately conceived the notion of scraping ac-
quaintance with this gentleman and using him as
a means of information about Thalberg, and he was
further drawn towards Paris by a fancy that he
would like to study French methods of criminal
investigation, into which, through the good offices
of some friend of his, he thought he could get
some insight. In the latter respect he was gratified.
Now it seems that he had already begun before
Peters' death to cherish the ambition of getting
high employment in the Criminal Investigation
ca
[124]


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III
Department at Scotland Yard. So it came to pass
that his studies in the science of criminal investi-
gation generally, occupied more of his attention
from that time till our present meeting than the
particular investigation which had at first fasci-
nated him. Moreover, before he had been long in
Paris he discovered, to his huge amusement, that
he was himself the subject of suspicion and of close
observation, and without regard to how this might
affect his cherished ambition of an appointment at
Scotland Yard, he entered upon, and continued
during three whole months, an elaborate scheme
of mystification for the French officials who were
observing him, and, through them, for that very
Department in which he wished to fill a high place.
Nevertheless, he had pursued ingenious enquiries
in regard to the (as I still thought him) unfor-
tunate Thalberg, for which purpose he paid several
flying visits to London and elsewhere. The result
of these enquiries he related to me, mingling it up
with the tale of his other adventures in such a man-
ner that it was hard for me to grasp what its im-
portance might be. I was able to see that Callaghan
had employed quite extraordinary ingenuity and
pains in picking up the facts about Thalberg which
les
[125]


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he told me, but that very ingenuity struck me as
ludicrously disproportionate to the importance of
the facts which he had found, or was ever likely
to find along this road. Thalberg was a solicitor in
the City who had been in a small way of business,
till the firm of which he was now the sole surviving
partner began, a good many years before, to be
employed by Vane-Cartwright. Vane-Cartwright
got this firm appointed solicitors to a company
which was formed to take over his original ven-
ture in the East, and he still continued to employ
Thalberg from time to time upon private busi-
ness of his own. Thalberg's family were interested
in Eastern commerce, and he had correspondence
with many persons in various parts of the far
East. Years before he had transacted for Vane-
Cartwright a good deal of correspondence of a
nature so secret as to be unknown to his clerks,
and in the course of this very year he had again
returned to an employment of the like kind for
some one or other. It appeared that it might have
been upon an errand connected with this secret
correspondence that he had come down to Long
Wilton. Callaghan was much excited about a dis-
covery which he had made that Thalberg had in
CO
[126]


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mm
January of this year been in correspondence with
a personage in Madrid, telegraphing to him in a
cipher employed by the Spanish consulate in Lon-
don, of which he was able to make use through
an official in that Consulate who had since been
discharged for misconduct and was now in Paris.
There was more of this nature as to the myste-
rious proceedings of Thalberg, but I cannot well
remember how much Callaghan told me on that
occasion, and I must observe that I have set down
what he then told me as I understand it now. I
was not able to understand it completely at the
time owing to the fact that throughout his talk
that afternoon Callaghan did not once allude to
Vane-Cartwright by his name.
I wondered then, and I wonder now, how far
up to this time Callaghan suspected Vane-
Cartwright. I believe that he did not like to avow
to himself the full suspicion that he felt, and that
this was why he hesitated to name him to me. I
am sure that in his heart he disliked him very
much; he had always seemed to do so. But I think
that, to my Irish friend, Vane-Cartwright ap-
peared the embodiment of those characteristics of
the Englishman which an Irishman knows he dis-
[127]


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likes, but thinks that he ought to respect. So I
should guess that, as long as he could, he had duti-
fully forced himself to believe in Vane-Cartwright
as a very estimable person full of English rectitude.
In any case, for all the pains he took to follow up
his suspicion that Thalberg was somehow con-
nected with the crime, I know that he had not
fully seen the conclusion to which this was leading
him.
When I went up to dress for dinner, I reminded
my wife of certain passages in Peters' manuscripts
on psychology which we had read together with
very great interest. Among these was a curious
paper on “Imagination, Truth-telling and Lying,”
in which, beginning with the paradox that the
correct perception of fact depended far more on
moral qualities, and truthfulness in ordinary
speech far more on intellectual qualities than was
generally supposed, he proceeded to describe with
great wealth of illustration some of the types under
which races and individual men fall, in respect of
their power of getting hold of truth and of giving
it out. Scattered through these pages were a num-
ber of remarks which came to my mind in this
talk with Callaghan. With most of them I will
[128]


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on
not trouble the reader, but in one passage in par-
ticular Peters had pointed out the mistake of think-
ing that a man who commits glaring inaccuracies
is necessarily on that account not worth listening
to. Ludicrous inaccuracies, even glaring falsehoods
as they may seem, spring often, he insisted, from
the peculiar abundance and vivacity of the impres-
sions which a man receives from what passes be-
fore his eyes. A person with this gift may fre-
quently in his memory put something that he has
truly noticed into a wrong connection, or combine
two scattered fragments of observation, true in
themselves, into a single totally erroneous recol-
lection of fact. But a man who gets things wrong
in this way, is, said Peters, often more full of in-
formation than a more sober observer, because he
has noticed far more, and after all, a very large
part of what he has noticed is sure to be accurately
retained. In another passage, which I am afraid I
may mar by summarising it, Peters described how,
with all men in some degree, but with some in a
wonderful degree, intellectual faculties are the
servants of emotional interests, so that not only the
power of inference, but even memory itself will
do work at the bidding of pain or pleasure, liking
[129]


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study to smoke pipes. He sat for a long while
silent, and I thought that he had gone to sleep, or
should have thought so but for the contraction of
his brows. Suddenly he sat upright in his chair.
"Faith!” he exclaimed with great energy, and with
the air of a man to whom a really thrilling thought
has just occurred, “I know what became of those
eyeglasses of mine." "What eyeglasses?" I asked,
disappointed and annoyed at the triviality of what
came forth as the issue of his cogitation. "Why,”
he said, “I once took for a short time to wearing
eyeglasses. I was looking at the stars with a man
one night and I found I could not count seven
Pleiades. So I went to an oculist who said he would
pass me for the Navy, but as I was paying him a
fee I might take a prescription for a pair of double
eyeglasses which I never could keep steady on my
nose.” “Well?” I said sulkily. "Well,” he answered,
"'it is only that I lost them while I was staying with
Peters. Of course they went into that big despatch-
box, which Vane-Cartwright always kept in his
room. My dear Mr. Driver,” he said in a more
serious tone, "do you really suppose that Vane-
Cartwright had not possessed himself of something
handy for throwing suspicion upon you, if you
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TRACKS IN THE SNOW
had turned out to be the convenient man? I might
easily have been the convenient man, and in that
case, the morning after the murder, my eyeglasses
would have been found smashed and lying on the
floor of Peters' bedroom, as if he had knocked them
off in struggling with me. Only (fortunately for
you and me, Mr. Driver), Trethewy was chosen
as the suitable man, and accidents that we know
of prevented the plot against Trethewy working
as well as perhaps the plot against you or me might
have worked. Well,” he continued with a smile,
"I have a good deal more to tell you about Mr.
Thalberg, but that will keep for a bit, and we
shall understand it better later. I suspect there is
something different that you wanted to ask me
about now.”
I asked him for anything that he remembered
of that evening when Vane--Cartwright had first
visited Peters at Long Wilton, while Callaghan
was already staying in the house. He recounted to
me and to my wife, whom we called in, the con-
versation and events of that evening in great detail.
An indescribable change seemed to have come over
him for a time; not only was the matter which he
had to relate weighty, but the man himself gave
[132]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
me an impression of force and character which I
had not previously suspected. I repeat only so much
of his narrative as was of special interest for my
purpose. "After a bit,” said Callaghan, "Peters and
Vane-Cartwright got away on to the subject of
their experiences in some Cannibal Islands, or
French possessions, or I do not know where. I was
not much interested, and I dozed a bit, till sud-
denly I was aroused and saw that there was some-
thing up. I do not know what Vane-Cartwright
had said, but suddenly Peters said, 'Sailed in what?'
three times as quick and three times as loud as his
usual way of speaking. That was what woke me
up. 'In the'-—I don't remember the name, I did
not quite catch it, for Vane-Cartwright was speak-
ing very quietly, though I could see that his face
was set hard and that his eyes were bright, and I
began to think he did not look such a dull fellow
as I thought him at first. Peters said nothing but
‘Oh, and this time very quietly. Then he got
up and strode slowly about the room with his
hands clenched. He did not seem to notice Vane-
Cartwright much, and Vane-Cartwright went on
talking, in as indifferent a way as he could, about
cyclones and things, the usual sort of travellers'
[133]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
talk, only without the lies that I should have thrown
in; but he was watching Peters all the time like a
cat. After a while Peters sat down again and seemed
quite composed, and talked again in quite a friendly
way, but it seemed to be an effort. Then he went
and wrote a letter at the other end of the room,
two letters rather; one I noticed was addressed to
Bombay, or Beirut, or somewhere beginning with
a B. Both the letters had twopenny-halfpenny
stamps on them. Soon it was bedtime; but Peters
was for taking his letters down to the post that
they might go early in the morning, and Vane-
Cartwright was very anxious to take the letters
for him, as it would be very little out of his way to
go down to the post. Peters thanked him in that
very polite way which he had with him when he
did feel really obstinate. I was not going with them,
for I thought I was in the way, but, just as he was
leaving, Peters turned back and asked me rather
pressingly to come too. I suppose he would have
felt lonely in that man's company, for certainly
he did not want to talk to me. I do not think he
said more than two words to me after we parted
from Vane-Cartwright, who, by the way, kept
with us all the way to the post office, which was
[134]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
that several times, while he was being thus drawn
out, Peters showed curious irritation. It appeared
most strikingly from Callaghan's recital that Vane-
Cartwright had throughout shown the coolest
readiness to talk about the scene of his crime, if
he had committed one, and to take Peters' recol-
lection back to the old days of his association with
Longhurst.
But now I must explain that through all that
Callaghan told me, ran the same strain of odd and
fantastic inaccuracy to which I have more than
once alluded. Several times, for example, he said
that I was present at conversations at which I
certainly was not present. He repeated to me re-
marks of my own, which, if I ever said anything
like them, were made on a totally different occasion
from that of which he spoke. One of those remarks
had really been made within three hours of the
time when he repeated it to me, and could not
have been made previously. This is perhaps the
best example that I can give of what caused me a
most exasperating sense of disappointment. Dis-
appointment because, where I could not check him,
Callaghan seemed to be supplying me, in the great-
est fullness and in the most credible manner, with
[137]


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just the information that I desired; but where I
could check him, though he was now and then
curiously accurate in his recollection of circum-
stances well known to me, which I had not thought
he could have observed, it still more often hap-
pened that he was under some grotesque mistake.
Worst of all, he gave me new details about the
fatal night, which if they could have been trusted,
would have had greater weight than any other
piece of evidence that had yet come to me, but
they were just of the sort in which he was likely
to be mistaken. Speaking of the moment at which
he was called out from his room by the disturb-
ance in the street, he declared that knocking im-
mediately at Vane-Cartwright's door he heard, as
Vane-Cartwright answered from the far corner of
the room, a click which he was certain came from
the lock of the despatch-box which he had men-
tioned. He conjectured that among various articles
which were there for a dark purpose, the knife
which was the instrument of Peters' death lay in
that box, and that he had interrupted Vane-
Cartwright in the act of taking it forth. This of
course was mere conjecture, but what followed
seemed at first evidence enough to have hanged the
[138]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
mm
m
like a paper-knife. Anyway here was proof that
after the hour at which either of us saw Peters
alive, after Vane-Cartwright, by his own account
had last seen him, that man entered Peters' room.
"But,” I exclaimed, as all this ran through my
mind, "you spoke just now of the day when I
was riding at Long Wilton, whereas I was on a
horse to-day for the first time for four years. Ten
times at least I have known you put things out of
time or out of place just like that, by way of giv-
ing colour to your story. How do I know that you
have not done so now, that you did not really see
that book in Vane-Cartwright's room any one of
the other times that you went there, that it had not
been back in Peters' library and been brought up
again by Peters himself?”
To my surprise Callaghan answered most hum-
bly. He was quite aware, he said, of this evil trick
of his mind; he had had it from a boy, and his
parents ought to have flogged it out of him. As
to the particular point on which I challenged him,
he could not himself be quite sure.
During the remainder of his stay with me I
gave him an outline of what I had so far discovered,
and we compared notes upon it, but he was not
[140]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
long with me, as he had an important engagement
next evening, and our conference was not so full
as it should have been. So it easily happened that
neither of us gained the enlightenment which he
might have gained if our talk had been fuller. But
I must confess that I fell into the fault which he
called English. My disclosure was more incomplete
than it need have been; I had not quite got over
my instinctive wish to keep him at arm's length,
and my pride rebelled a little at the discovery that
this erratic Irishman was not a man whom I could
afford to patronise.
[141]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
conviction that Vane-Cartwright was guilty of
two murders, doubted whether the facts which I
had got together would move the authorities to
take up the matter actively. Still he undertook,
with my approval, to talk about the subject with
some one in the Public Prosecutor's office or in the
Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland
Yard, I do not know which. Nothing resulted
from this, and the failure needs little explanation.
Some want of touch between town and country
police, some want of eagerness on the part of a
skilled official who had lately incurred blame and
disappointment through the ludicrous failure of
a keen pursuit upon a somewhat similar trail, these
might account for it all. But besides, Callaghan
had been beforehand with us, and on this occasion
had managed to raise a spirit of incredulity about
it all. Perhaps too even hardened experts recoiled
instinctively from associating with guilt one of the
few great men of finance who were at once well
known to the outside public and respected in the
City itself.
For me then there was nothing but to wait for
the further things which I somehow felt certain
would turn up. As for Callaghan it happened
[143]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
just about this time that he became keenly en-
amoured of an invention, made by an engineer
friend of his, through which he persuaded him-
self that he could make his own and his friend's
fortune. Henceforward for some time the affair
of Peters seems to have passed from his mind, and
he was prevented from meeting me at the few
times at which I should have been able to see him.
In the course of December I had a letter from
my old parish from a friend who was kind enough
to keep me posted in the gossip of the place. He
said that the police were now busy over a new
clue as to the murder. It may be remembered that
according to Trethewy he had, as he returned
home on the night of the murder, been passed in
the lane by a man riding a horse and leading an-
other. Well, report said now that a man in a
neighbouring parish, who had been greatly excited
about the murder at the time, had been having
dreams about it night after night, which impressed
him with the notion that he was to discover the
truth. Rooting about for all the recollections of
the time which he could find among his neigh-
bours, he heard that in the early morning after the
murder a man with two horses had been seen be-
[144]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
tween Peters' house and the village, that another
man, a stranger to the village, had come up from
the direction of Peters' house and had mounted the
second horse, and that the two had ridden off to-
gether. Report added that the man whom Tre-
thewy had seen had now been traced by the police,
and that his answers as to the man who had joined
him and ridden off with him were unsatisfactory
and suspicious; and it added one more telling
detail. The police (as I may have mentioned) had
before I left Long Wilton noticed one window
at the back of the house as in some respects the
readiest way by which the house could have been
wrongfully entered. It belonged to a housemaid's
closet, of which the door did not shut properly.
It was very easy to climb up to it; but then the
window itself was very small, and it was a ques-
tion whether a man of ordinary stature could pos-
sibly have squeezed himself through it; now the
strange man of this rumour was described as being
ridiculously small and thin. There were many
more picturesque details related, but the whole
story professed only to consist of unsifted rumour.
I believed little of it, but I naturally did accept
the statement (quite mistaken) that the police
[145]


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m
were busy in the matter. With my fixed idea about
Vane-Cartwright, I felt sure that they were upon
a false scent. But I thought it very likely that this
would for the present absorb their attention, and,
between this and the great pressure of work in a
new parish and of certain family anxieties, I made
no further attempt at this time to secure attention
to the discovery which I believed I had made.
Twice in the few weeks just before Christmas
my hopes of making further discoveries were
vainly aroused. I made a call of civility in my new
parish upon a notable Nonconformist parishioner,
and, in my rapid survey of his sitting-room before
he came to me, I noticed several indications that
he had been in Australia, and saw in the mantel-
piece a framed photograph. It was rather a hazy
and faded photograph which gave me no clear
impression of its subject, but under it was written,
to my amazement, "Walter Longhurst, Mel-
bourne.” Could that be my Longhurst, and was this
one of those relations of his, whom, as I heard,
Vane-Cartwright had treated with suspicious gen-
erosity? Might he not, in that case, be the posses-
sor of information more valuable than he knew?
He now came in. He was a truly venerable man,
[146]


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who in spite of great age was still active as a lay-
preacher of one of the Methodist Churches, and
I was attracted by the archaic but evidently sin-
cere piety of his greeting when he entered the
room. But unfortunately, when by adjusting his
gold spectacles he had discovered of what profes-
sion I was, a cloud of suspicion seemed to arise
in his mind, and he was more anxious to testify, in
all charity but with all plain dealing, con-
cerning priestly pretensions and concerning that
educational policy which was then beginning
to gather strength, than to enter into any such
conversation as I desired. I made out, neverthe-
less, that this Walter Longhurst was probably my
Longhurst, and my expectation rose unreasonably.
My new friend (if he will let me call him so)
was no relation of his, but had known him at a
time when both were in Australia. Longhurst was
from his point of view outside the fold besides
being a rough kind of man, or, as he put it, a
"careless liver”; but he evidently flattered himself
that he had exercised a good influence over Long-
hurst, and the latter had given money, which he
could then ill afford, though he made a good deal
of money later, to help religious work with which
[147]


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mm
my lay-preaching friend was connected. Later on,
when my informant had returned to England and
was for some time incapacitated by an accident
which happened on the voyage, Longhurst, to his
surprise, had from time to time sent him presents
of money. They came in the form of banknotes,
sent by a mysterious agent in London, who gave
no address to which they could be returned, but
who wrote stating Longhurst's desire that he
should use them for himself, or, if he absolutely
would not, should at least use them in his work. All
this the old man's gratitude obliged him to relate,
but, when I pressed him for information about
Longhurst's relations or friends, either he knew
nothing or his ill-defined suspicion of me returned
and shut his mouth. I did, however, ascertain that
some years before (after Longhurst's death) a rich
gentleman, whose name the old man had forgot-
ten, though I thought I could supply it, had heard
of him in some way as one of Longhurst's bene-
ficiaries, and pressed upon him a pension which he
had refused, as he would, if he could, have re-
fused Longhurst's bounty.
Two days later, on Christmas Eve, I was
urgently summoned to visit Peters' aunt, Miss
[148]


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the end seen something of a rather neglected
widowed cousin of William Vane-Cartwright's.
Of course I have no ground for thinking that she
had any grave disclosure to make to me.
Christmas, that year, came sadly to me. We
must in any case have been full of memories of
the last Christmas, at which Peters had joined
our party and added much to the children's and
our own delight. This Christmas he was dead; the
hope, not perhaps consonant with Christmas
thoughts, of avenging him had arisen in my mind
and was dying, and I came home from the death-
bed of the last remaining person of his kin who
had loved him better than we did, and who in the
little I had seen of her had reflected to me some
indefinable trace of the same noble qualities as I
discovered in him.
I attended her funeral. So did the old cousin
who had come with her to Peter's funeral. He
recognised me and greeted me courteously, re-
marking what a charming person that Mr. Vane-
Cartwright was whom he had met at my house.
He looked to me older; his previously grey hair
was mysteriously turning auburn; he was as un-
attractive to me as the rest of the appanage of
[yo]


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funerals, but I was grateful to him for being one
of the very few who came to honour the remains
of the old woman, almost a stranger to me, whom
I yet so truly respected.
But the time the anniversary of Peter's death
came round I was again alone; it had been neces-
sary after Christmas that my daughter should go
South, and my wife had taken her. I was busy
and therefore happy enough, and I did not often
but I did sometimes ask myself, would nothing
more ever turn up? Yes, before long something
did turn up; something not to help me on but to
show me that, in thinking ever to unravel the dark
history of Longhurst's fate, I had started upon a
hopeless task. Early in February a letter came to
me re-directed to Peters from the dead letter office
at Siena, where it had long lain entombed. It was
a letter written by Peters to a certain Reverend
James Verschoyle, D.D.; addressing him as a per-
son Peters well knew and had seen quite lately.
It bore the date of Vane-Cartwright's first eve-
ning at Grenvile Combe. It reminded Dr. Vers-
choyle of a conversation which he had had with
Peters, at their last meeting, about a very mys-
terious event in the Philippines, and of the great
[ i]


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mo
surprise which Peters had expressed at what Vers-
schoyle then told him. “To tell the truth,” said
Peters, “it should have revived a suspicion which
I had long ago entertained against a man who was
once my friend. Or rather, it should have done
more than that, it should have convinced me of
his guilt and given me the means of proving it.
How I came to put it from my mind I hardly
know. I think that my recollection of what you
told me is precise, but I should be greatly obliged
if you would refer to your journals of the months
May to October of that year and perhaps help me
by copying out for me all that has any bearing
on this matter. I am sorry to trouble you, but I
am convinced that the ends of justice may be
served by your doing this for me, and I suspect
that if they are to be served, I must act as quickly
as I may.”
I lost no time in tracing the Rev. James Vers-
choyle, D.D., who had about a year before been
at Siena. He had, after a sojourn in Germany,
come back to England. He had, I found, been a
missionary in the East. I managed to trace him to
his latest address, only to find that he had died
in the previous August. I had an interview with
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some of his family, and found them most oblig-
ingly willing to search for the journals in ques-
tion. It was strange that the journals for the years
in question could nowhere be found. I was con-
vinced that they had contained those crucial facts
to which Peters had referred in his letter to
Bryanston.
Evidently there had been information in Dr.
Verschoyle's possession which in Peters' hands
might have led to the conviction of Vane-Cart-
wright. Evidently Peters had once seen that in-
formation, but had disregarded it, more or less
wilfully, in his determination to think his old
acquaintance innocent, and to put the guilt on
Arkell who had been hanged at Singapore. Evi-
dently the full significance of Verschoyle's facts
came to his mind when Vane-Cartwright, that
evening at Grenvile Combe, had revived his first
suspicion, and he wrote at once to recover the
precise details. But of what nature that inform-
tion was, and how Vane-Cartwright, seeing Vers-
choyle's name on an envelope, could have grasped
the full extent of the danger to himself, I could
not guess then, and I cannot guess now.
[153]


CHAPTER XVI
C o then the mystery of Longhurst's fate was
not for me to unravel. Peters had held the
clue of it, and had died because he held it;
Verschoyle perhaps had the clue and was dead too,
probably from some other cause; neither had re-
corded his secret, or the record could not be found.
As for the manner of Peters' death, what further
place was there to look in for some fresh dis-
covery? I already had heard all that any of my old
parishioners, any grown man or woman among
them, knew, and it was less than I knew, and I
had searched the neighbourhood for news, quietly,
but I hoped no less effectively; the police, I was
now ready to believe, had searched as zealously
and more wisely. And so Vane-Cartwright was
to go unhanged, and why not, after all? he was
not a homicidal maniac but a wise criminal, rather
more unlikely than most men to commit any
further crime. Even his gains, however ill-gotten,
were not likely to be more harmfully spent than
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those of many a better man. And no innocent man
suffered under suspicion. Trethewy had been found
a good place by some unlooked-for benefactor,
where no memory of the crime would pursue him.
Callaghan's numerous enough friends understood
him far too well to suspect him, and as for his
numerous acquaintances who were not friends,
if they did suspect him, the good man would
be rather amused than otherwise. Let Vane-
Cartwright live and adorn society which is adorned
by men and women worse than he, to whom cir-
cumstances have never brought the opportunity
of dramatic wrong-doing.
Thus I tried to think, as I left England for a
few weeks in the late spring of the following year
to join my wife and our daughter, who was now
much stronger, in Italy; but, whatever I tried to
think, I had always with me that consciousness of a
purpose frustrated or let go, which is perhaps the
hardest thing to bear well and the most enervating
thing to bear ill.
Some ten days later I was in Florence with my
wife. The next day we were to go to Rome, leav-
ing our daughter at the villa of a friend in Fiesole.
I remember at our early breakfast telling my wife
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the facts or reports which I had been picking up
about that strangely powerful secret organisa-
tion, the Mafia. I repeated to her what I had just
heard, that not only prominent Italian politicians
but even foreigners who had large commercial
dealings with Italy, sometimes found it convenient
to be on good terms with that society. But she
was little interested in political facts which did
not connect themselves with any particular per-
sonality, and I thought she had hardly heard me,
though she raised her eyes to listen from the vol-
ume of Senator Villari's Savonarola which she was
finishing. I little imagined that before another day
had closed this chance remark of mine would have
acquired the closest personal interest for her, and
have been turned by her to very practical account.
Later in the day she was in the Pitti Galleries,
and I came there from Cook's office to join her.
She was looking with puzzled interest at a picture
by Botticelli, when a tall man, dressed like an Eng-
lishman, placed himself with assumed unconscious-
ness just in front of her, in a position of vantage
for fixing his connoisseur’s gaze upon it. She
turned away, met me coming in, and began say-
ing, half-amused, that after all there were Eng-
[156]


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lishmen who could be as rude as any foreigner,
when, looking at him again as he moved away to
leave the gallery, she started and said: "Oh, Rob-
ert, I know his face.” Of course I looked. I too
knew his face, and knew, as she did not, his name.
"It is that dreadful man that I told you about
- who was at Crema. Do not you remember I told
you how he would keep the only good room at
the hotel when I arrived there with mother so
terribly ill, the time she had that first stroke. And
oh, I took such pains to write him the nicest note
I could”—and very nice her notes could be
"and I could just see his horrid face as he glanced
at it and said nothing but 'tell the lady I cannot
to the waiter. And oh, poor mother did suffer in
the dreadful hot room with all the kitchen noises
and the smells.” I did remember her story well,
an ordinary story enough, of one of those neglects
of courtesy which, once in fifty times it may be,
are neglects of elementary mercy; but I said lit-
tle, and I did not tell her that her rediscovered
enemy was my enemy already, William Vane-
Cartwright. I said to myself that I would not tell
her because she would feel an unreasonable relent-
ing toward Vane-Cartwright, if once she realised
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suspected there had been some mistake there, and
besides, I always liked the man. I do not think the
police will discover a clue,” he said, "I rather
think that the solution of the mystery will occur
to some of us, his friends, if a solution ever is
found.” I was silent. I could not tell whether he
had a design to allay possible suspicions of mine, or
a design to goad me into betraying whether I had
those suspicions, or whether he was merely keep-
ing himself in practice. I wanted to drop the sub-
ject if I could. “Do you know," he persisted,
"whether they have found any other way in which
the house could be entered from outside except
the window of his room, by which I don't believe
the murderer did enter?” I said there was a small
window to a housemaid's closet which was not
fastened, and that the housemaid could not be
quite certain that the door of the closet was really
locked overnight, for it did not shut properly;
but it was very doubtful whether a man could
get through the window. “Who in the world,”
he said, "could have a motive for killing Peters,
dear old Eustace Peters?” I was beginning to lose
my head, for I felt I was playing an unworthy
part. “Well,” I said, with no particular purpose,
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"it seems certain that it cannot have been Mr.
Thalberg." "Certain, I should say,” he answered.
"Oh, no,” he added, more energetically, "I know
Thalberg well, and he is not the man. As for Cal-
laghan, one might as well suspect you or me-me,
I should say," and he turned away to fetch a cigar,
or perhaps to watch me for a moment in the
mirror. “The fact is,” he said returning, “it must
be far easier than we, who have never had occasion
to give our wits to it, think to commit a murder
and hide one's tracks absolutely. But here is Mr.
Poile, let me introduce you, and let us, for Hea-
ven's sake, talk of a more cheerful subject.” So
we did turn to a subject which I should have
thought had no pitfalls, the subject of Italian bro-
cades, of which Vane-Cartwright was an amateur.
He produced a large parcel of ancient and gor-
geous stuffs which had come up on approval from a
shop. He talked, in a way that really held my in-
terest for the time, about the patterns; and, start-
ing from the more conventional of the designs be-
fore us, he proceeded to discuss the history of com-
mon patterns, telling me curious things about the
patterns and the fabrics of the Eastern Archi-
pelago and the Malay Peninsula. Suddenly he
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picked up a really noble piece of brocade, and
turning to me, with a face of winning simplicity
and kindliness which he could not have meant to
assume if it had not at some time been natural,
he said: "Oh, Mr. Driver, I am so fond of picking
up these things, and it is so hard to find any satis-
factory use for them, it would be a real kindness if
you would accept this as an altar-cloth for your
church. It will be wasted in a museum otherwise.”
It was too much for me. The proposition that I
should accept an altar-cloth for my church from
the man that I was seeking to convict of murder,
sent a visible shudder through my frame, and all
the more because I felt it was illogical to recoil
from this when I had not recoiled from affecting
friendship to him. I said “No” quite violently,
and, when I collected my wits to utter thanks and
explanations, they were at once too effusive and
too lame to have blinded a stupider man than
Vane-Cartwright.
I stayed long with him-should have outstayed
my welcome, if I had ever been welcome-for I
was demoralised, and had resolved in mere dull
obstinacy both to disarm his suspicions somehow
and to get something out of him. The first would
i
[161]


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m
have been impossible for any one, the second was
impossible for me then, and at last I took leave,
praying him not to come down with me, and
descended the stairs a very miserable man. I had
behaved stupidly, that was certain. I had behaved
badly, that was possible. I had shown him that I
suspected him, that was certain. I ought to have
known beforehand that he would guess it, for my
refusal to visit him in London (as I happened
to have promised I would, before he left Long
Wilton) had been marked enough to set him think-
ing. Had I done nothing worse than betray vague
suspicions? Yes, in my floundering efforts I had re-
curred to his Eastern patterns, and so led him to
Eastern travels and towards topics dangerous to
him, only to fall into my own trap. He must have
seen that I had somehow heard before, as not one
Englishman in twenty thousand has heard, of the
little island of Sulu.
Wholly sick with myself I stood in the hall of
the hotel, absently watching the porter set out
the newly arrived letters in little heaps on a table.
There was one for Vane-Cartwright. Had I no-
ticed that handwriting before? Yes, it was a
marked hand, one so obviously that of a servant
[162]


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and yet so well-formed and with such an elegance.
I gazed at the hand-writing (somehow I thought
of Sunday schools). I had just time to note the
postmark before another letter covered it.
The corner of my eye had half-caught a vision
of some one coming downstairs, coming very
quietly but very quickly. A light step on the rug
beside me, an unpleasantly gentle hand taking my
arm, the fingers, I half-fancied, seeming to take
measure of the size and hardness of my muscle,
and Vane-Cartwright's too cultivated voice saying
lightly, “Looking to see if there is any one else that
you know coming to the hotel, Mr. Driver? I al-
ways do that. Well, good-night again, and so many
thanks.” “Caught again,” I reflected, as I turned
into the street, "and nothing gained by spying and
being caught spying. Yes, something gained. That
letter for Vane-Cartwright with the postmark
Crondall is in the handwriting of Mrs. Trethewy."
One question alone occupied me as I walked
back: What was the exact significance of the al-
most certain fact that the situation which the
[163]


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m
not that you knew it was your duty; and I know
it too, and you must follow up that clue at once
before he makes it too late. But, oh, what am I
saying? It is not your duty I am thinking of. I
would beg you to let the duty be if that would
save you. But it is too late now; it's a race for life
between you and him. Peters has been killed, and
Verschoyle has been killed, and oh ...!”
The thought was not in the least new to me
except so far as it concerned Verschoyle. I had
foreseen a time when my life would be in danger
from Vane-Cartwright. Stupid as it may seem, I
had not realised yet that that time was now, and
anyway I had resolved to treat it lightly myself,
and hoped that it might not occur to her. We
spent a while without words. Then I said, in the
foolish persuasion that it was a manly utterance:
"I do not think that I am brave, but somehow the
idea of being murdered, even if I put the likelihood
of it far higher than I do, is not one which, apart
from the thought of you, would weigh much with
me.” Whatever I may have been going to add, I
was allowed to go no further. I was made to see in
a minute that the risk to my life was a real con-
sideration which it was selfish and, in a man of nor-
[165]


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mm
mal courage, very cheap to overlook; but anyway,
the need for haste was real, and, after a very short
rest, I was to start. To get ahead of Vane-
Cartwright, who would probably look out for my
departure, I had resolved to take an automobile
in the early morning, post to Prato, and take the
railway there. My wife was to go with our daugh-
ter to our friend's villa. So the next morning
found me on my way to England, sad to go, and
yet, I must confess, not a little exhilarated, against
all reason, by the sense that perhaps it really was
a race for life on which I had started, and a race
with a formidable competitor.
[166]


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m
garden. The cottage could be approached by a
narrow footbridge from a private footpath which
led from Crondall. On the other side of the stream
a public footpath led towards the small village
and the once famous fishing inn, at which I took
up my quarters for a few nights. The bridge just
mentioned was formed by two narrow brick
arches, and above them were hatches which were
now raised; and just below the bridge the stream
was spanned by one of the old-fashioned fish-
houses which are occasionally found on South-
country streams, under the floor of which were
large eel traps in which eels migrating down
stream were caught. Under the fish-house, which
was entered from Trethewy's cottage, the stream
rushed in two pent-up channels which joined
again in a broad, reed-fringed pool, with a deep
dark hole immediately below the fish-house. My
eye fastened on this pool at once as the best morn-
ing bath which had been offered me for some
years.
Why was Trethewy there? Was Trethewy after
all an accomplice in the crime? My wife and I
were agreed in not inclining to that explanation,
though in some ways it looked the most plausible.
we
some
[168]


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It followed that one or more of the family was,
to the knowledge of Vane-Cartwright, in posses-
sion of information which, if it came out, would
establish Vane-Cartwright's guilt. It did not fol-
low that any of them had guilty knowledge; prob-
ably they were not aware of the significance of
what they knew. Which of them held this dark
secret, and how was I to elicit it?
In the call just after their tea-time, which I
lost no time in paying, I found that each of the
family was for a different reason hard to approach
on the topic on which I was so impatient to enter.
I was welcomed respectfully and cordially enough,
but they were evidently puzzled and surprised at
my visit. I tried Trethewy first. He struck me as
much improved by his season of adversity, by the
more active life he now led, or by the rigid ab-
stinence to which, as I soon gathered, he had
brought himself; but he told me quite firmly he
never spoke, never wished to speak of the question
of Peters' death. He had himself suffered the hor-
ror of being accused when he was innocent; he
wished to run no risk of bringing the same on
some other possibly innocent man. Besides, the
guilt of his own thought and motives still weighed
[169]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
on him, and he had no wish to judge any other.
Nevertheless, he said plainly, when I asked how
he liked his new position, that he was ill at ease
to have come and hoped soon to get away. From
his impenetrable manner, I began to fancy that,
contrary to what I had at first thought, the secret
rested with him, and in that case the secret would
be very difficult to extract. As for Mrs. Trethewy,
from the time of the murder two thoughts had
mainly occupied her mind: anxiety for her hus-
band, and anxiety that her daughter, for whose
upbringing she was so careful, should know noth-
ing of the suspicion that had rested on her father,
and hear as little as possible of the horror that
had occurred so near her. The girl had been bun-
dled away, the very day after the discovery, to
stay with Mrs. Trethewy's mother, who lived
thirty miles away from their home. And to this
day, the mother told me, the girl had no idea that
her father had been in prison charged with the
crime. Accordingly, Mrs. Trethewy was overflow-
ing with gratitude to Vane-Cartwright, who had
found them this new home far away. She told me
that he had always seemed to take a fancy to her
husband, and had visited their cottage several
[170]


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Wa
might have to say that might be interesting to me.
When I called on the Trethewys again, I found
it an easy matter to get a walk by the river-side
alone with the girl. I had anticipated that, if I
were to pay any decent regard to her mother's
hitherto successful wishes for her ignorance, I
might have to talk long and round-about before
I could elicit what I wanted. I soon found that it
was not so. Ellen Trethewy, though little taller
than before, had mentally grown in those fifteen
months from a shy and uninteresting schoolgirl to
a shy but alert, quick-witted and, as it now struck
me, rather interesting young woman.
We had many things belonging to old times to
talk over, but I found her anxious herself to talk
on the very subject on which I was bent, and I
found in a moment that her mother's precautions
had been absolutely vain. Knowing her mother's
wish, she had never alluded to the matter since;
but her grandmother, who disliked Trethewy, had
taken a keen pleasure in acquainting her with all
that she herself knew (and a good deal more be-
sides) about the course of the proceedings against
him. The girl, not quite trusting her grandmother,
had procured and carefully read the newspaper ac-
[172]


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dow that dreadful morning when poor Mr. Peters
lay dead.” “Why, what could you see that morn-
ing?” I said. “Oh, very little,” she said. “You see,
of course we heard the news as Edith passed by on
her way to call the police, and Mother told me to
keep within doors, and she kept in herself, and then
she went to Father and woke him, and she stayed
there talking to him, and I was alone and I felt so
frightened. And then the policeman came, and
you, sir, and the doctor; and by-and-by some
neighbours came looking in. One of them was Mrs.
Trimmer who kept the baker's shop, and I was
fond of her, and I do not know whether it was that
I was frightened to be alone, or just inquisitiveness,
for I was a child then, though it is not so long
ago, but, though I never disobeyed Mother before,
I did so that time; and I went out, and Mrs. Trim-
mer took my hand and we walked up and looked
at the house. It was not much we saw, for all we
stood so long staring; but the front door opened
and we saw that Irish gentleman look out, looking
so sad, poor man, and then he took a turn or two
up and down in the hall, leaving the door open;
and then we could hear voices, and the rest of you
came downstairs and into the hall, but I could see
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Mr. Vane-Cartwright come to the window of Mr.
Peters' room, and he stood there looking out of the
window with his hand leaning on the sash of the
window, leaning forward, seeming to be looking
out intently at the people below." "Did he open the
latch of the window?” I asked at once. “I couldn't
say that,” said she. “Why were you so frightened?”
I asked. “Oh, I do not know,” said she; "he didn't
look anything very terrible, and I couldn't see him
well for there was frost on the window, but I knew
him by his black moustache.”
I suppose everyone of my readers has been guilty
of mislaying some little article of importance and
looking for it everywhere but in the right place,
which always turns out to have been the most ob-
vious place of all. Perhaps I may be forgiven for
having all these fifteen months been doing some-
thing analogous. I had not only overlooked Treth-
ewy's daughter; I knew when I spoke to Sergeant
Speke about those tracks in the snow that there
was something more I had meant to ask him and
had forgotten; and often since I had been dimly
conscious of something forgotten. That something
was the window-latch. The girl could not tell me
about it, but at least it might be possible to prove
с
[175]


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mm
by others, who had been in the room, that none but
Vane-Cartwright unlatched that window.
I make this obvious reflection now because I
made it then, and in making it wasted a moment
of possible talk with the girl, a trifling waste which
was near to having momentous consequences. Of
course it was not because the girl had been stand-
ing then on the lawn that Vane-Cartwright had
taken the step, when every unnecessary step in-
volved risk, of wiling the Trethewys away in this
secret manner. He knew she had something more
to tell; she was about to tell it me. “I hardly know,”
she broke in on my silence, "whether I ought to
think as I do, but I would like to tell you
what- ” "Well, Ellen!” said, in cheerful tones, a
voice that was somehow not cheerful, “taking a
walk—who is the happy?-why, it is Mr. Driver.
I did not expect the good luck of meeting you again
so soon.” Where was I staying? What good chance
brought me there? and Really I must move my lug-
gage instantly to his house, and so forth, from the
last man in the world whose company I desired at
that moment.
I got off staying with him. I got off, I know not
on what excuse, true or false, an afternoon's fishing
[176]


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mmmmm
not safe to be dealing with a desperate man, but, if
you happen not to pity him, it is not a disagreeable
sensation. As we passed over a footbridge (I was
going first, and there were stakes and big stones
below on which a man might hurt himself if he
fell) it was probably one of my fancies that the
shadow of my companion, cast before him, made an
odd, quick movement with its arm. Anyhow, I
turned my head and said with a laugh what a hand-
some stick Mr. Vane-Cartwright was carrying. I
asked what wood it was. I did not ask whether it
was loaded. He told me what wood it was, where
he bought it and what he gave for it. He told me
what an interesting medallion was set in the head
of it, but he did not show me that medallion. After
that I had a further fancy. It was that my guide
took less polite pains than he had taken to let me
pass first through every narrow place. Let me say
at once that I do not suppose he very seriously
thought of attacking me there; perhaps his eyes
were open for any very favourable spot, but per-
haps it was all my fancy. In spite of that fancy I
was thoroughly enjoying my walk. It was a new
sensation to me, to be doing most of the conver-
sation, and I was surprised and pleased with myself
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to think that I was doing it well. Perhaps I was
doing it well, but I do not think it was my guid-
ance of the talk which brought it back to the sub-
ject of Trethewy. Vane-Cartwright managed to
tell me that he hoped no rumour of suspicion at-
tached to Trethewy here, or to any one at all con-
nected with him. Would I mind trying to find this
out from the landlord at the inn? He was a greater
gossip than any old woman in the place, and a
shrewder one. "I would not,” he added, “trust
everything he says, for he embroiders on what he
has heard; but he hears everything, and he is
shrewd, and I discovered a few weeks back that
he had an acquaintance in your old parish.”
By this time we were at the inn door, and I
noticed the landlord's name, which was the same
as that of a man of doubtful character who had
come to Long Wilton just before I left it. Several
people were about, and they might, if they chose,
hear every word of what he spoke, except when he
dropped his voice. “Stop,” he cried, and I stood
still. “I am going to be open with you, Mr. Driver,
as open as I thought you would have been with me.
I have been trying to bring myself to it all this
walk, and I will now. I have not said what I meant"
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(here he dropped his voice) “about Trethewy. I
have really” (this in a whisper) "begun to suspect
him myself. Oh, yes, you laugh; I know what you
suspect of me. Do you think I cannot see what
interpretation you put upon every one of my do-
ings that you know of, in your own house, at
Peters before-long ago at the island of Sulu, I
daresay. You think” (this time so loud that I
thought the landlord and other men must hear,
though, as I reflected later, the phrase he used was
so chosen that a countryman would not readily take
it in), “you think I am the assassin of Eustace
Peters. Well, I am not.” We turned and walked
away again from the inn. "I know," he continued,
"how things look. I should not wonder if I were
fated to hang for this. I should not greatly care
now, for I have thought it so long, but hanging for
it and being guilty of it are different matters.” He
kept his eyes fixed steadily on me all this while.
"You thought things looked ugly for Trethewy
once, did you not? But I know you thought him
innocent when it was hard to think so. I do not ask
you to believe me, but I ask you to keep the same
firm, clear mind now. You think Trethewy did not
kill Peters. So do I. He did not actually kill him,
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he no more did that than you did. Now I know
you will answer me straight. You are too brave a
man to care about playing the part you played at
Florence. Have you found or have you not found
any direct evidence whatever, true or false, that
convicts any man-convicts him if it is true of
making those tracks, or of going to or coming from
the place where they were made? Shall I repeat my
question? Is it not clear, or are you still uncertain
whether you will answer it?” I could do no other;
I told him truly that I had nothing but inference
to go upon as to who made those tracks, and I told
him that my inference pointed to him. “Natur-
ally,” he said quietly (here we turned and paced
slowly towards the inn again). “Only, till you have
something better than that inference, remember
that there may be more subtle motives than you
think of for making false tracks. Anyway (for it is
no good my arguing with you further, I see that),
here is one piece of advice that you may take or
leave-honestly, you had better take it if you value
your future peace of mind-keep your mind open
a little longer. Go away from here, and visit Long
Wilton again and hear what they say there now;
or, if you will not do that, stay here long enough
SO
[181]


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to watch Trethewy, and the girl, and the people
that you may see about with them, one man in
particular. Well, good-bye, Mr. Driver, pardon my
saying I respect you in spite of Florence.” The
manner of this last remark was maddening. I was
keenly stung. I said, "Mr. Vane-Cartwright, after
all, Peters' death is not the only mysterious death
you and I know of.” “Oh, Longhurst,” he said,
with a light laugh which this time really took me
aback. "I will tell you anything you can wish to
know about poor Longhurst. Not now, as you are
not in the mind for it. To-night, if you think better
of your refusal to come, or any time you may
choose. I only wish,” he said sadly, as he finally
turned away, “old Peters had asked me straight
out about Longhurst.” He had puzzled me but he
had not shaken me. Could he have imagined that
he was likely to do so? Probably not, but it occurred
to me, directly he was gone, that he now knew for
certain that I was dangerous; knew that in some
ways he could play upon me easily, and in some
ways not at all; and knew that I had not yet found
out what I came to find out from Ellen Trethewy.
[182]


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mm
tention to any wire, purporting to be from her,
which did not contain the word "Fidele.” Evidently
there was some one in Florence whom she suspected
would send false messages. I conjectured that Vane-
Cartwright had an understanding with the Mafia,
and had obtained through them the services of some
villain. Well, here was a wire: "Regret to acquaint
respected sir, Mrs. Driver suddenly unwell.-
Direttore Hôtel Brunswick.”
There is no advantage about being tired. It pre-
vents the mind from wandering away on so many
side tracks. But with all that advantage, whatever
it may be worth, it took me a full half-hour to
make up my mind how to regard this; but I came
back to my first impulse, not on the first occasion
to disregard what my wife herself had undoubtedly
telegraphed.
On the other main points I may acquit myself
of having wavered, and I will not mystify the
reader more than I mystified myself. I had not the
faintest doubt that Vane-Cartwright's suggestion
about the Trethewy family, whatever its object
might be, was a well-acted lie. However, I deter-
mined to follow the suggestion to some extent. I
got hold of the landlord; he was all that Vane-
[184]


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mm
It was not a likely story to tell to me, and I was
inclined now, not for the first time, to be thankful
that however great a fool I might be, I looked a
greater fool than I was. By putting me up to elicit-
ing this story, Vane-Cartwright had merely sup-
plied me with knowledge about the situation of the
Trethewys which I might find useful in dealing
with them.
I felt that I had brought danger not only upon
myself but also upon the Trethewys. I was in some
doubt whether by going to them again that night
I might not be bringing danger nearer them, but
the impulse to be beside them if danger were there
impelled me to go. I arrived about nightfall. I found
Trethewy himself preparing to leave the house. He
had been bidden to go and help in repairing a
threatening breach of a mill-dam some way up the
stream, and he evidently felt surprised and sus-
picious about the errand on which he was sent.
Replying to a look of enquiry in my face, he said:
"Sir, I never disobeyed my master's orders yet.
No,” he added, looking suddenly abashed, "I be-
haved badly enough by my old master, but I never
disobeyed orders, and I should not like to begin
[186]


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doing so now.” I said that, if he went I should
stay at his house till he returned. He said, "It would
be a kindness that I should always remember, sir.”
And so he went.
Poor Mrs. Trethewy appeared ill-pleased at my
presence. She seemed to guess that my coming was
in some way to disturb their peace. I fancied that,
in getting the mastery over his drinking and his
wrathful ways, Trethewy had become very gentle
and submissive to his wife. In her days of difficulty
I had been used to admire her for the way in which
she brought up her daughter. I now did not think
her improved by finding herself more the mistress
of her house than she was wont to be. Still she was
civil enough, and willing, after the girl had gone
to bed in a sort of cupboard off the parlour-kitchen,
to entertain me with her best conversation. I inter-
rupted by telling her frankly that I knew she
wished to keep her daughter in ignorance of all
concerning Peters' murder, and the suspicion that
had arisen about it, but that I feared that she would
find it impossible, for I had learned that day that
rumour had followed them to their new home.
From my heart I pitied her, for she seemed utterly
[187]


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m
There was a fish in the river, and I was swimming
after the fish. Cool, cool river!
It was an ugly fish, and I was pursuing it, and
the river was warm.
The fish was Vane-Cartwright, and I was pur-
suing him. Warm, warm river!
The river was gone from my dream, and I was
pursuing Vane-Cartwright over a great plain.
Warmer and warmer!
I pursued him through thick woodlands. Sultry
and stifling!
I pursued him over a great mountain. Burning,
burning hot!
I leapt to my feet calling "Fire!”
In waking fact, the thatched cottage was in a
blaze.
I called with all my might to Mrs. Trethewy.
I told her to run out while I brought out her daugh-
ter, and she answered.
I burst into the girl's little room on the ground
floor. It was full of smoke; she was suffocating
before she could wake. I tore her from her bed,
and bore her through the door and on to the foot-
bridge. I turned my head back towards the house
to call again to Mrs. Trethewy, when a hoarse cry
[189]


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of “Fire!" came from the other direction, and a
man-he seemed an old grey-bearded rustic-ran
on to the bridge towards the door, dashed with full
force against us, and overturned me and my half-
conscious burden.
I do not know just how we rolled or fell, but
we were in the water. I had managed still to hold
Ellen Trethewy with my right arm, and with
my left hand to catch the edge of the footbridge.
I could not by any effort have pulled us both out
or raised her on to the bridge, but it was easy to
hold our heads above water, for we were against
the pier of the bridge, in between the two currents
that shot under the arches. Mrs. Trethewy would
be there in a moment and could help us out; or-
why did not that old rustic help us?
They say that men in moments of extreme peril
take in all manner of things with extraordinary
rapidity, but I do not know whether I really saw
all as I see it in memory now, or whether what I
did was from accident and the instinct of fear.
I glanced up, and the old rustic stood over us
raising a mighty stick which I thought was not
unlike that which Vane-Cartwright had carried in
the morning. So much I did see and think.
[190]


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mm
we were under the floor of the fish-house, and my
head rose and I got a gulp of air, but my head
struck a joist of the floor, and the stream swept me
on, ducking involuntarily under another joist and
another. We were out in the pool, sucked down in
the bubble and swirl of the eddy. I opened my eyes
and could see the glare of the fire through great
green globes of water. I was on the surface; I was
swimming with great gasps; I was under again;
I was exhausted. My feet struck on pebbles; I was
standing in the shallow water. I still held the body.
Was it lifeless? Three strides and I should land her
on the bank. No, my steps sank in some two feet
of almost liquid mud. The dragging of my steps
furnished just the little further effort needed to
spend my remaining breath. I sank forward on the
reeds and flags of the margin, with one last en-
deavour to push her body in front of me, and I
lay, helpless and panting horribly, beside her, while
a man came and jumped into the marsh fringe
of the pool and stood over us. That dire old rustic,
I felt no doubt, and I felt no care. No, it was the
girl's father.
In the morning, shooting down that same dark
cool avenue of sweet water, and swept without an
[192]


CHAPTER XIX
HERE is not much that can be done for a
thatched cottage once well alight, and for
such salvage as could be done there were
plenty of ready helpers soon upon the scene. That
aged rustic was not among them, nor did I after-
wards see or hear of him; but among them before
long appeared Vane-Cartwright himself, brisk and
alert, and forward to proffer to Trethewy every
sort of help and accommodation for his now home-
less family. Trethewy's response was characteristic
—total and absolute silence.
It seemed late but was still early morning when
I had the Trethewys assembled for breakfast in
my private sitting-room in my inn. Neighbours had
readily supplied the women with clothes, and a
cart had been forthcoming to carry them. Tre-
thewy and I walked to the inn together, and his
attitude to Vane-Cartwright was naturally quite
altered. He told me a second time of the dislike,
which he had felt from the first, of being in Vane-
[194]


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Cartwright's service, and he told me that he had
just decided to accept a situation which was open
to him in Canada, and had expected to sail with
his family, who did not yet know it, in six weeks,
but supposed he must put it off now.
At last I really heard what it was that Ellen
Trethewy could tell and for knowing which she
had been removed to Crondall, and it did not come
up to my expectations.
About noon after Peters' murder, after Cal-
laghan and I had gone into the villages, and while
Vane-Cartwright, by his own account, had stayed
reading in the house, the girl had twice seen him
as she looked out of the window of the cottage.
She had seen him come out of the gate of the
drive and turn to the right up the road away from
the village. About twenty minutes later she had
seen him turn in again at the gate, and this time
he came down the green lane. To any one who
knew the lie of the ground, the significance of this
was certain. He could not have got round by road
or by any public footpath in that time; either he
had come through the plantation and the fields,
where the tracks were made, or he must have made
a round over ditches and hedges and rough ground
[195]


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necessary clue, now showed astonishing quickness
in grasping them, was first to see the next
step which the enquiry required. Evidence must
be sought which would show whether Vane-
Cartwright or some other person had undone the
window-latch in Peter's room. I was ready imme-
diately to rush off to Long Wilton and see whether
Sergeant Speke could recollect anything of import-
ance about the movements of the persons who were
in the room that morning. It was the girl who sug-
gested to me a possible witness rather nearer at
hand. The young doctor had been in the room till
nearly the last, and, as her mother happened to have
told her, he had very shortly after the event in
question removed to London. Could not I see him?
I resolved to see him, if I could, that day, for I
thought I could gain nothing by further waiting
near Crondall. I was anxious about the safety of
Ellen Trethewy, but I found her father, who was
as much persuaded as I of the peril which con-
tinued to hang over her, had formed his own plan
for promptly removing her; he thought we should
be safer separate; and it reassured me to see a
reminiscence of his wild youth sparkle in his now
[198]


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sober countenance as he said that it would not be
the first time that he had baffled a pursuit.
Upon some calculation, prompted perhaps by
excessive precaution and futile craft, such as may
well be excused in excited men who have found
themselves surrounded by unimagined dangers, we
decided that I should not start for any of the
stations on the branch line that passes Crondall,
but should leave my luggage behind, drive, in a
fast car which the baker sometimes let out, to an
ancient castle in the neighbourhood, thence, three
miles, to the junction on the main line to London,
send the car back with a note to my landlord, and
go to town by the one fast train in the day which
there was easy time to catch. I suppose we thought
I should get some start of Vane-Cartwright, and
that this was worth while, as he was likely to stick
close to me, and had shown already his fertility of
baleful resource.
Accordingly, I arrived at the junction just as the
up-train came in. The train from Crondall had ar-
rived a little while before, and was standing in a
bay on the other side of my platform of departure.
I was by this time so sleepy that I could hardly keep
[199]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
my eyes open as I walked. I did barely notice the
screaming approach of a third train, which was
in fact the down-train from London, but in which
of course I felt no interest, and I noticed some but
not quite all of the people on the platform or in
the waiting-shed. I took my seat in the far corner
of a carriage. I began instantly to doze, and the
train, I believe, waited there awhile. I faintly heard
shouts and whistles which heralded the starting of
the train, but it did not start immediately. When
the carriage door again opened and two other
passengers got in, I did half-open my eyes; but I
started broad awake when to those half-open eyes
my fellow-passengers revealed themselves as Vane-
Cartwright and the foreign visitor at the inn,
whose looks I had irrationally disliked. I say broad
awake—but not awake enough to do the proper
thing to be done. The train was already in motion
before they sat down, and my fellow-passengers
with their luggage so encumbered the door that I
could not have got back on to the platform. I
ought, I suppose, to have pulled the communica-
tion cord. As it was, I merely sat up, looking at
them as indifferently as I could, while really my
heart sank within me, and I wished my muscles
[200]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
had not been so stiff and chilled from my adven-
ture of the night before.
The train was moving but not yet fast. It
seemed to be slowing down again. There was fresh
shouting and whistling on the platform; the
stationmaster saying angrily, "Put him in here”;
a voice that sounded somehow well known, but
which I could not recognize, answering him vigor-
ously; and just as the train began to go faster a
big man, still shouting and very hot with pursuit,
tumbled into the carriage. To my delighted sur-
prise I found myself joined by Callaghan.
The most surprising turns of good fortune, I
have learned to think, are generally the reward of
more than common forethought on the part of
some one. My rescue in this case, which I will
none the less call providential, could never have
happened but for the zealous care of Callaghan
himself, and of another person many hundred
miles from the scene.
But of all this I was soon to hear. Meanwhile,
Callaghan, who was in the highest of spirits, be-
stowed on me a mere smile of recognition, and
poured himself forth upon Vane-Cartwright with
an exuberance of pleasure at the unexpected meet-
[2017


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ing which must have been maddening. It was the
only time, during my acquaintance with Vane-
Cartwright, when he appeared to be in the least
at a loss. Hearty good-humour was, I should think,
the only attitude towards him which he did not
know how to meet. So he passed, I take it, a misera-
ble journey. Nor was his mysterious companion left
to enjoy himself. To my astonishment Callaghan
addressed him politely by a strange-sounding name,
which I suppress, but which from the start which
the gentleman gave appeared to be his name.
As for me, Callaghan leaving me in the corner
which I had originally chosen had maneuvred
Vane-Cartwright into the other corner of the same
side of the carriage, and the stranger into the seat
opposite him, while he placed himself between me
and Vane-Cartwright, and with his back half-
turned towards me entertained them both.
I dozed away again and again, and I daresay I
was asleep for a good part of the journey, but I
endeavoured to think out in my waking moments
what was the nature of the peril which had
threatened me, for peril assuredly there was, and
how it could have come about that I was thus
rescued.
[202]


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As to the former question, I got no further than
the reflection, that to stick me with a knife and
jump on the line or make a bolt at the London
terminus (which was our first stop) would have
been too crude for the purpose. As to the latter
question, Callaghan, suffering our fellow-passengers
to escape for a moment behind their newspapers,
roused me with a nudge, and surreptitiously passed
me what proved to be several pounds' worth of
telegraphic message from my wife at Florence to
himself. I was hardly yet aware how thoroughly
my wife's original aversion for Callaghan had given
way in the day when he had been her guest, and
when she had passed from observing his weak-
nesses to putting up with them and occasionally
reproving them. I learned now that some hours
after I had left her, my wife had telegraphed to
Callaghan through a mutual friend whom she be-
lieved would have his address, stating the sort of
errand on which I had gone, and the few particu-
lars known to her which might determine my
movements, and entreating him to find me, and
having found me, never to leave me alone. But
that was not all. The telegram stated that Vane-
Cartwright was on his way home, having sent home
[203]


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mm
for the next train. The reader already knows that
she had had the intuition that false messages might
be sent me in her name.
Callaghan had been away from home, and had
not got the message till late in the evening before
he joined me. He lost no time in going to my
house to ascertain my address and what had last
been heard of me. He called also at Vane-
Cartwright's house, where he was informed only
that he was abroad. He left London by the first
train in the morning armed with a Bradshaw and
a map. Study of Bradshaw had led him to notice
that I might possibly be leaving by a train which
would be at the junction about the same time as
his. So he was on the look out, and with his quick
sight actually saw me in my train as he arrived. By
running hard and shouting entreaties and promises
to the officials, he had just managed to catch me.
When our train arrived at Paddington, Cal-
laghan shook me awake. It appeared to me that
Vane-Cartwright, who had not been conversa-
tional before, had just started an interesting subject
by which he hoped to detain Callaghan while our
mysterious companion got away from the train.
It was not a successful effort. Callaghan pushed
[205]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
me somewhat rudely out of the carriage, and
jumping out after me told me to wait for him, and
kept me, while he stood about on the platform till
every passenger by the train but ourselves had gone
away. At last he called a taxicab; still he did not
enter it till the driver of a private ambulance which
had been waiting in the rank of cabs appeared to
give up the expectation that the person for whom
he waited was coming, and drove away.
"Do you see that ambulance?” said Callaghan to
me. “It was ordered for you."
[206]


CHAPTER X X
ERE let me mention that I have fancied
since that I recognised the ill-looking
foreigner who was with me at the inn and
in the train. I recognised him in a chemist's shop in
a very fashionable shopping street. I think it would
be libellous to name the street. The telegraphic
address which my wife sent to Callaghan was the
telegraphic address of that fashionable chemist's
shop.
I had intended to take leave of Callaghan for the
time upon our arival at the station, but I found
that this was not to be done, for Callaghan was
determined to obey almost to the letter my wife's
behest to him, not to leave me. He took me to
luncheon at a restaurant, and then prevailed upon
me to come with him by one of our fast trains to
my own house, collect there all the papers which I
possessed bearing on the affair of Peters, and bring
them to his chambers, where he was resolved I
should at present stay.
[207]


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mm
When we arrived there, I was for starting at
once to seek out the doctor who had been at Long
Wilton, but I was practically overpowered and sent
to bed, after handing over to Callaghan, amongst
other papers, the notes which Peters had made as
to the death of Longhurst.
After some hours Callaghan entered my room
to tell me that dinner would be ready in half an
hour, that I might get up for it if I liked, or have
it brought to my bedroom. He then turned on me
reproachfully. “Why had I not shown him these
papers long ago, when he came to stay with me?”
I was at a loss for an answer, for in fact when I
had told him of my suspicions and my reasons for
them, I had done the thing by halves, because my
want of confidence in him lingered.
"Well, well,” said my good-natured friend, "I
daresay I can guess the reason. But these papers ex-
plain much to me. You never told me it was the
island of Sulu on which Peters discovered the body,
or that he went there with Dr. Kuyper. I had
heard the name of that island and the doctor be-
fore-on the last night of Peter's life while you
were talking music with Thalberg.”
Next morning I set off early to see the doctor
[208]


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who had been at Long Wilton. Callaghan, who
at first seemed to think it his duty to be with me
everywhere, gave way and consented to go upon
some business of his own about which he was very
mysterious; but he put me in the charge of his
servant, a man singularly fitted to be his servant,
an Irishman and an old soldier, who, I discovered,
had made himself very useful to him in his spy-
ing upon Thalberg, having entered into a close and
I daresay bibulous friendship with one of Thal-
berg's clerks. My new guardian so far relaxed his
precautions as to allow me to be alone with the
doctor in his consulting-room; he otherwise looked
after me as though he thought me a child, and
from the very look of him one could see that I
was well protected, though indeed I hardly im-
agined then that the perils which beset me at Cron-
dall would follow me through the streets of
London.
I asked the doctor kindly to give me all his
recollections as to what occurred in Peters' bed-
room while he was there. He told me little but
what was of a professional nature, and he in-
formed me rather dryly that he made it his prac-
tice on all occasions to observe only what con-
[209]


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while Vane-Cartwright lingered, and who locked
it when they had all left. I may say at once that
this was afterwards confirmed by the police-
sergeant, who added that Vane-Cartwright was
standing somewhere not far from the window in
question.
I returned by appointment to Callaghan's cham-
bers sometime before eleven. I was immediately
taken out by him again upon an errand which he
refused to explain. We arrived at length at an
office in the City which from the name on the
door proved to be that of Mr. Thalberg, Solicitor
and Commissioner for Oaths. We were ushered
into Mr. Thalberg's private room, and it imme-
diately appeared that Callaghan had come to give
instructions for the making of his will. He ex-
plained my being there by saying there was a point
in his will about which he desired to consult both
of us. I was thus compelled to be present at what
for a while struck me as a very tedious farce.
Callaghan, after consulting Mr. Thalberg upon the
very elementary question whether or not he
thought it an advisable thing that a man should
make a will, and after beating about the bush in
various other ways, went on to detail quite an
[211]


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him. A clerk brought the London Directory from
an outside room, and was about to retire. “Stop
a moment, Mr. Clerk, if you don't mind," said
Callaghan, and he slightly edged back his chair,
so as to block the clerk's going out, “perhaps it is
the Suburban Directory that I want. Let us just
look,” and he began turning over the leaves.
"Ferndale Avenue,” he said, "that's not it; Fern-
dale Terrace—you see, Mr. Thalberg," he said, “I
would like to talk this matter out with you before
I go-Ferndale Crescent-right side, No. 43, 44,
No." (all this time his finger was running down
a column under the letter B in the Trades Direc-
tory) "45, 46, 47; I thought he was thereabouts.
Here's the name,” he said. “You see, Mr. Thal-
berg, your own movements, if they were not ex-
plained, would look rather curious—47, 49, no,
that's not it-look rather curious, as I was saying,
in connection with that murder of Peters-look
ugly, you know-51 Ferndale Crescent, that's it.
Thank you, Mr. Clerk," and he shut the Directory
with a bang and handed it back to the clerk with
a bow, and made way for him to leave the room.
Mr. Thalberg bounded from his chair and col-
lapsed into it again. "Stop, Mr. Manson,” he cried
[214]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
to the clerk, "you must be present at whatever
else this gentleman may have to say." He sat for
a moment breathing hard, more I thought with
alarm than with anger. He did not seem to me
to have any presence of mind or any of the intel-
lectual attributes, at any rate, of guile, and I could
not help wondering as I watched him, whether
this really was the man whom Vane-Cartwright
chose for his agent in employments of much deli-
cacy. "Do you come here to blackmail me, sir?”
cried Mr. Thalberg, forcing himself to assume a
voice and air of fury. There was never seen any-
thing more innocent or more surprised and pained
than the countenance of Callaghan as he replied.
He was amazed that his motive could be so mis-
understood; it was the simple fact that what he
was forced in his memoirs to relate might here-
after suggest suspicions of every one who was in
the neighbourhood of the crime, himself and his
friend Mr. Driver in particular, and, though in a
less degree of course, Mr. Thalberg. He was giving
Mr. Thalberg precisely the same opportunity as
he had given to Mr. Driver, of explaining those
passages in his (Callaghan's) record, which might
seem to him to require explanation. Here he ap-
[215]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
pealed to me (and I confess I backed him up) as
to whether he had not approached me in pre-
cisely the same way. Mr. Thalberg appeared to
pass again under the spell of his eccentric visitor's
childlike innocence, and sat patiently but with an
air of increasing discomfort while Callaghan ran
on: "You see, in your case, Mr. Thalberg, it's not
only your presence at Long Wilton, which was
for golf of course, wasn't it?-only you went away
because of the snow. There is that correspondence
with a Dutch legal gentleman at Batavia which
occurred a little afterwards, or a little before was
it? And there were the messages which I think you
sent (though perhaps that was not you) to Bag-
dad. Of course I shall easily understand if you do
not care to enlighten me for the purpose of my
memoirs which no one may care to read. Pray tell
me if it is so. I daresay it's enough for you that
your correspondence and movements will of course
be fully explained at the trial.” “What trial?” ex-
claimed Thalberg, quite aghast. It was Callaghan's
turn to be astonished. Was it possible that Mr.
Thalberg had not heard the news, which was al-
ready in two or three evening papers, that there
was a warrant out for the arrest of Vane-
[2167


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mmmmmmmm
hurst had laid before his partner, except that it
related to Vane-Cartwright's having got conces-
sions and acquired property for himself which
Longhurst considered (without foundation, as
Thalberg supposed) should have belonged to the
partnership. Nor did Thalberg know the advice
which had been given Longhurst. He had heard
no more of him beyond the mere report that he
had been drowned, till, after his death, Vane-
Cartwright, whom Thalberg had not previously
known, came to London and employed the firm
to find out various members of Longhurst's family
who were still living, and to whom he now be-
haved with great generosity. Since then Thalberg
had been, as we knew, solicitor of a company which
Vane-Cartwright had founded, and had occasion-
ally done for him private law work of a quite
unexciting nature. But sometime in the middle of
January of last year Thalberg had been instructed
by Vane-Cartwright to make for him with the
utmost privacy certain enquiries. One was of a
person in Bagdad, as to the identity and previous
history of a certain Mr. Bryanston; one concerned
a certain Dr. Kuyper, a physician and scientist in
Batavia, who, it was ascertained, was now dead.
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Another was, as Callaghan knew, addressed to a
correspondent in Madrid, but Thalberg declared
that this enquiry went no further than to ascertain
the name and address of the person who then filled
the office of Public Prosecutor or, I think, Minister
of Justice in the Philippines. I ventured to ask
the name; it was a name that I had seen before
in those notes of Peters’. Lastly, there was an en-
quiry in regard to Dr. Verschoyle. Thalberg had
been instructed if possible to obtain an interview
with this gentleman before a certain date. The
purpose of the interview, he declared, was to ob-
tain from him some notes and journals which
would be of use in the foundation of a new mission
in the Philippines, under the auspices of the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel, a project in
which Vane-Cartwright appeared, he said, to be
keenly interested (and indeed it was a fact that
he had previously patronised missionary societies).
The object of Thalberg's visit to Long Wilton was
this. He had been told to repair there without fail
by the date on which he actually came, and to
inform Vane-Cartwright by word of mouth of
the result, if any, of his enquiries. That result had
been, shortly: that Bryanston was the man who
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had at one time been at Nagasaki; that Kuyper
was dead; that the Minister of Justice (or what-
ever the precise office was) at Manila was the per-
son already alluded to; and that Verschoyle was
abroad and had lately been at Siena, but had
departed abruptly some weeks before—for Ger-
many, it was thought, but he had left no address
behind him. All this Thalberg had duly reported
to Vane-Cartwright in Peters' house the after-
noon before the murder occurred. And what all
this taught Vane-Cartwright, though in part ob-
scure, is in part obvious. It taught him that no
letter from Verschoyle to Peters need at present
be expected. It taught him that a letter from
Bryanston, which must be expected, might be
dangerous and must be intercepted. It taught him
that Peters would remain inactive only till that
letter reached his hands. It taught him also that
if Peters were put to silence, Kuyper, the other
European who had seen that body in Sulu, could
tell no tales.
After Peters' death, Thalberg, still acting under
instructions, had had an interview with Dr. Ver-
schoyle at Homburg, whither he had traced him,
and had taken with him a letter written on the
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mm
paper of the S.P.G., and signed, as he believed, by
the secretary of that society. (It has since appeared
that the secretary had no knowledge of such a
letter.) Dr. Verschoyle delivered to him some
journals which he, Thalberg, never read, for trans-
mission to Vane-Cartwright, to whom he duly de-
livered them. That, he said, was all that he knew of
the subjects on which Callaghan sought informa-
tion. He denied all knowledge of further communi-
cations made on behalf of Vane-Cartwright with
that important official in the Philippines; but he
appeared to me somewhat nervous in answering
Callaghan's questions on this matter, and anxious
to appease him with the prospect that he might be
able, through friends of his, to ascertain what
communications of this nature had actually taken
place.
It was curious to how many questions suggested
to us by what he had said he could give no answer.
Indeed he informed us, with an air of moral self-
complacency, that he thought it a very sound
maxim for a professional man to know as little as
possible of things which it was not his business to
know. I guessed that perhaps his strict observance
of this precept was the thing which had com-
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me
mended him to the service of Vane-Cartwright,
but I really do believe that Mr. Thalberg knew
nothing behind the facts which he now thought it
convenient to himself to reveal.
However that may be, he made no secret of any-
thing which he could disclose without injury to
himself. We had got from him, or I ought to say
Callaghan had got from him, evidence which might
serve to show plainly enough that Vane-Cartwright
was aware of Peters' suspicions and concerned him-
self greatly about them, and, content with this, we
were preparing to go when Mr. Thalberg stopped
us, saying that there was one important matter of
which we had not asked him yet, and perhaps
should be surprised to know that he could tell us
anything. I have omitted to say that in the course
of the conversation he had heard something
from us about the things which had led to Vane-
Cartwright's being suspected. We had told him in
substance the story about the tracks, and were
much surprised to find that he appeared wholly
ignorant of the charge that had been brought
against Trethewy. He now told us a fact which
had a great bearing upon the history of those
tracks. He asked us whether or not Peters' grounds
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could be seen from the upper rooms of the hotel.
I said that no doubt they could, for the hotel was
only too visible from those grounds. He then stated
that having confined himself to his bedroom until
it was time for him to start for his train, he had at
a certain hour noticed a man walking across Peters'
field (for from his decription it was plain to me
that it was Peters' field, and plain further that the
man was walking pretty much where those tracks
were made.) This man, even at that distance, he
recognised as Vane-Cartwright; he recognised him
by his fur coat and a cap which Ellen Trethewy
had seen him in, and by some peculiarity about his
gait which he knew well. The man was also swing-
ing his stick in Vane-Cartwright's own particular
manner. The distance was considerable, but I knew
that it would be possible for a clear-sighted man to
recognise at that distance any one whom he knew
very well. The hour which Thalberg named corre-
sponded with what Ellen Trethewy had told me.
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"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. Taxi!”
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
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mm
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 con-
viction, 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 un-
aware. 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 cer-
tainty of his guilt, which, for all he knew, we had
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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 be-
came 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 rea-
son it had been a mistake to acquiesce in this inter-
view; I had learned to know not only Callaghan's
goodness of heart but his cleverness and his promp-
titude, but I had not learned to credit him with
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wisdom or with firmness; and the sort of impul-
siveness, 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 inter-
view. You think I am an ordinary criminal, which
perhaps I am, and you thought that like an ordi-
nary criminal I should try all means to save a dis-
graced 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 es-
cape, 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 look-
ing at each of us alternately with an inscrutable
but quite unflinching gaze, but he now hid his
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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 inter-
ests 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,
sa
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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 address-
ing 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 pre-
cepts 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 incontro-
vertible, and that there was some influence in your
childhood which appealed to the heart. But in
my childhood nothing appealed to the heart, noth-
ing 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
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m
Cd
W
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 re-
finements 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 de-
cent man there with intellectual tastes, and that
was Peters; but Peters, who was only two or three
TO
W
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mm
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 be-
fore 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 re-
tiring 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
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mm
that purpose has failed. If I pursued my end with-
out 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 sym-
pathy 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 oppor-
tunity 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 my-
self; but from the first we did not hit it off. Peters,
as I have said, took on himself the part of my pro-
tector 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
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mm
between us. There is sometimes very spiteful gos-
sip 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
COSS
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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 prac-
tical 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 exploit-
ing certain yet undeveloped but most profitable
sources of supply, he could get a monopoly of sev-
eral 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 some-
thing of them, more than I expected, but not what
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m
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 knowl-
edge 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 go-
ing 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, Mas-
ter Cartwright. I wish I had heard it before, that's
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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 begin-
ning of our companionship, and I had my sus-
picion as to whom I ought to thank for it: I be-
lieve the same tale-bearer that I mentioned before
had been telling Peters some yarn about my ar-
rangements 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 Long-
hurst. He put about many stories when we had be-
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gun 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 re-
vocable 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
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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 re-
turning 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 hand-
writing) that on the top of it was an envelope
addressed by Peters. I am not justified in infer-
ring from this that Peters—who had seen Long-
hurst 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 be-
gan again more savagely than ever, and for about
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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 en-
riched 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 po-
sition 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
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-
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 Long-
hurst 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 in-
sisted on an explanation. I had it out with the fa-
ther. 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
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W
"But my conscience was active then, for a rea-
son 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 cer-
tain materials for clearing up the early transaction
about which he had first suspected me. I was hon-
estly 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 in-
timate talk about our days in the East, but he al-
ways 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 be-
gan 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
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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 Deni-
son, the young lady's mother. It appeared to be
[251]


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mm
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 men-
tion 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 com-
mand 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 attach-
[252]


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SU
ment 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 peo-
ple 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 re-
spect you, to know my story. I do not suggest for
a moment that it should influence your present ac-
tion. Here I am, as I said to begin with, your pris-
oner. 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 disagree-
able smile.
[253]


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mm
SS
wa
laghan did not exactly believe it; on the contrary,
I found afterwards that, while I had not got be-
yond 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 pas-
sion in his final crime, and (Irish again) had ig-
nored 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 moral-
ity 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
[256]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
was now. He dashed the telegram down with a
curse. "The fool,” he said, and he gasped with pas-
sion, “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.
[258]


CHAPTER XXII
Y story draws towards its close, and of
mystery or of sudden peril it has little
more to tell. Upon one point, the most
vital to me, let me not give the reader a moment's
suspense. My wife did not die of poison, had not
been poisoned, had not been ill; no friend sent that
telegram. What had happened was this: on one sin-
gle occasion she had not despatched her own mes-
sage herself; through the misunderstanding or too
prompt courtesy of her host's butler, the telegram
which she had written had been taken by a mes-
senger, and it had fallen into the hands of the ene-
my's watchful emissary. It had revealed to him the
password which my wife used to me; and in its
place there had gone over the wires a message
which would indeed have called me back at any
stage of the pursuit, but which was fated to arrive
neither sooner nor later than the moment when
it must destroy Vane-Cartwright's last hope of es-
cape.
[259]


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told to complete for the present the account of the
debt which I owe him. We had hardly left Charing
Cross when his quick wits arrived at precisely that
explanation of the telegram which in happy fact
was true; but all the way, talkative man though
he was, he refrained from vexing my bruised mind
with a hope which, he knew, I should not be able
to trust.
When he had learnt at the door that his happy
foreboding was true, no entreaty would induce
him to stay and break bread. He returned at once
to England, leaving me to enter alone to that re-
union of which I need say nothing, nor even tell
how much two people had hungered for it.
The reader who is curious in such matters might
· almost reconstruct for himself (in spite of the
newspaper reports which naturally are misleading)
the trial of William Vane-Cartwright. He might
pick out from these pages the facts capable of legal
proof, which, once proved and once marshalled into
their places could leave no reasonble doubt of the
prisoner's guilt.
But, however late, the trained intelligence of
the police had now been applied to the matter,
and the case wore an altered aspect. No startling
[261]


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mmmmmmm
discovery had come to pass, only the revelation of
the obvious. Some points had been ascertained
which ought to have been ascertained long before;
still more, facts long known had been digested, as,
surely, it should have been somebody's business to
digest them from the first. In particular, tardy at-
tention had been paid to the report of the young
constable who, as I mentioned, followed Sergeant
Speke into Peters' room, and who had incurred
some blame because his apparent slowness had al-
lowed some trespassers to come and make footprints
on the lawn (I fancy his notes had been overlooked
when some officer in charge of the case had been
superseded by another). The observed movements,
just after the crime, of two or three people who
were about the scene, had been set down in order.
Enquiries, such as only authority could make, had
ultimately been made among Vane-Cartwright's
acquaintance in the East, and, though disappoint-
ing in the main, they yielded one fact of impor-
tance. Moreover, the researches which were made
by Callaghan shortly after the murder, and which
I had supposed at the time were so futile, now ap-
peared in another light. Just before that suspicious
flight to Paris, he had given to the police at Exeter
[262]


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m
m
nesses (traced out by the enquiry of the police in
the East) appeared at the trial, and swore that
Vane-Cartwright had often spoken of Longhurst's
sailing in that ship; yet he must, according to Mr.
Bryanston's evidence, which was procured by com-
mission, have known that this was false; and, ac-
cording to the same evidence, he had been in Long-
hurst's company after the time when the rest of
Longhurst's neighbours last saw him. From this
(though the other proved facts of their connexion
amounted to little more than they were reputed
partners) it followed that Vane-Cartwright was in
a position in which suspicion of foul play towards
Longhurst might easily fall on him.
Next, Peters at the time of his death not merely
entertained this suspicion but was taking steps to
obtain proof of its truth; for there were his letters
to Bryanston and to Verschoyle still extant, and
admissible in evidence as res gestae, the actual first
steps which he had taken with this aim.
Next, Vane-Cartwright knew of Peters' sus-
picion and was greatly perturbed by the knowl-
edge. His whole conduct was in this regard most
significant. Callaghan showed that on the first eve-
ning when he had seen the two men together their
[264)


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
intercourse had at first been easy, but that by the
end of the evening something had happened which
completely altered their manners; the one became
abstracted and aloof, the other eagerly watched
him. Of the talk which caused this change Cal-
laghan had only caught Peters' question, "sailed in
what?” but it was evident now to what that ques-
tion referred. It was in itself strange that after
this Vane-Cartwright should have availed himself
of a general invitation given by Peters earlier, and
have come rather suddenly to his house, putting off
(as it was now shown) for that purpose a previous
important engagement. It was a sinister fact that,
before he did so, he had set on foot mysterious
enquiries, some of which related to the two men
to whom, in his presence, Peters had written letters
about the affair of Longhurst, while the rest,
though less obviously, appeared to be connected
with the same matter. The first fruits of these en-
quiries (and they were telling) had been, by his
arrangement, brought to him on the very after-
noon before the murder. After the murder he had,
it now seemed plain, stayed on at my house merely
in the hope of intercepting Bryanston's answer. By
what means he knew that the sting of Dr. Ver-
[265]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
Ellen Trethewy had seen him start to go there and
again seen him returning. Yet, though the two cor-
roborated each other, there might be some doubt
of the inference to be drawn from what Ellen
Trethewy saw (that depended on knowledge of
the ground), and of the correctness of the observa-
tion made by Thalberg from afar. After all, was
it absolutely impossible that Trethewy had through
some strange impulse, rational or irrational, made
those tracks himself,-- perhaps, with his sense of
guilt and in the over-refinement of half-drunken
cunning, he had fabricated against himself a case
which he thought he could break down.
But here the late revealed evidence came in.
It was certain, first, that those tracks did not exist
in the morning. The constable who had let the
trespassers come in stopped them when he found
them, and noted carefully how far they had gone;
he got one of them, an enterprising young journal-
ist, to verify his observation, and it resulted in this,
that the part of the lawn where those guilty tracks
began was absolutely untrodden then. Next it was
certain now that throughout the time when those
tracks were made Trethewy had been in his house.
Now, when the whole course of events that morn-
[267]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
ing was considered, there could be no doubt that
those tracks were made by some one who knew
exactly what the situation was. Since it was not
Trethewy, it lay between Sergeant Speke, myself,
Callaghan and Vane-Cartwright. Sergeant Speke
and I could easily give account of our time that
day, but I think I mentioned that there had arisen
some doubt as to where Callaghan had been just at
the critical hour. It was explained now; Callaghan
had been too far away; just at that time he had
gone again to the hotel, moved by one of his restless
impulses to try and spy upon Thalberg. It lay then
beyond doubt that the tracks were made by Vane-
Cartwright, and it was beyond doubt why he' made
them.
But the case did not rest there. The front door
of Grenvile Combe had been bolted on the inside
that night, before Peters died. Presumably Peters
did it; anyway Vane-Cartwright and Callaghan,
as they had said next morning, found it bolted
when they came down disturbed by the noise, and
themselves bolted it again; and Peters was then
living, for they heard him in his room. The other
doors had been bolted in like manner by the sery-
ants. Every window but two had also been latched.
[268]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
The doors had remained bolted till the servants
were about in the morning, when Peters must have
been some hours dead. The fastened windows were
still fastened when we came to the house (a win-
dow in the back servants' quarters had been open
for a short while in the morning, but the servants
had been about all the time), for the constable,
before he obeyed the Sergeant and began his search
outside, had been in every room and noticed
every fastening. The two exceptions were Vane-
Cartwright's own open window, which did not
matter, and the little window at the back, already
named as a possible means of entrance. Careful ex-
periment had now been made (Callaghan had long
ago suggested it), and it showed that, whoever
could climb to that window, only an infant could
pass through it. No one then had entered the
house by night, or, if he had previously entered
it, had escaped by night; and it was also certain
that no one could have lurked there concealed in
the morning. Therefore, Peters was murdered by
an inmate of the house, by the housemaid, or by
the cook, or by Vane-Cartwright, or by Callaghan.
Now the housemaid and the cook had passed a
wakeful night; the disturbance in the road had
[269]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
mm
aroused them and left them agitated and alarmed;
each was therefore able to swear that the other
had remained all night in the bedroom which they
shared. Therefore, Peters was murdered either by
Vane-Cartwright or by Callaghan.
And why not, it might be asked, by Callaghan,
against whom at one time such good grounds of
suspicion were to be found? The reader must by
this time have seen that the eccentric and desultory
proceedings of Callaghan, even his strange whim of
staying in that crime-stricken house and the silly
talk with which he had put me off about his aim,
had, as he once boasted to me, a method, which
though odd and over-ingenious, was rational and
very acute. The neglected memorandum he had
made for the police was enough in itself (without
his frankness under cross-examination) to set his
proceedings since the murder in a clear light. Cal-
laghan, moreover, was the life-long friend of Peters.
True it was that (as the defence scented out) he
had owed Peters £2,000, and Peters' will forgave
the debt. True, but it was now proved no less true
that since that will was made the debt had been
paid, and paid in a significant manner. Callaghan
[270]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
had first remitted to Peters £soo from India. Pet-
ers, thereupon, had sent Callaghan an acquittance
of the whole debt. Callaghan's response was an im-
mediate payment of £250 more. And the balance,
£1,250, had been paid a very few days before Pet-
ers was killed. This was what an ill-inspired cross-
examination revealed, and if the guilt lay between
Vane-Cartwright and Callaghan, there could be no
doubt which was the criminal.
So Callaghan and I had gone through tangled
enquiries and at least some perilous adventures to
solve a puzzle of which the solution lay all the while
at our feet, and at the feet of others.
It would be melancholy now to dwell on the
daring and brilliance of the defence. No witness
was called for it. It opened with a truly impressive
treatment of Vane-Cartwright's confession; and
the broken state of his temperament, originally
sensitive and now harassed by suspicion and perse-
cution, was described with a tenderness of which
the speaker might have seemed incapable, and
which called forth for the hard man in the dock
a transient glow of human sympathy. Every other
part of his conduct, so far as it was admitted, was
[271]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
duct which needed so much psychology to defend
it was indefensible.
So the verdict was given and the sentence was
2s
passed.
[273]


CHAPTER XXIII
NCE again I saw William Vane-Cart-
wright. At his own request I was sum-
moned 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 cer-
tainly false. I could now disprove every syllable
of that love story; his acquaintance with Miss Deni-
son 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
[274]


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mmmmm
than commonly keen. Dozens of English lads pass
through just such trials unshaken, some even un-
spotted, 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 can-
not have done the spiteful things which Vane-
Cartwright said, but I do not doubt for one mo-
ment 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 down-
ward 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 unflinch-
ing 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 al-
IVE.
[276]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW :
ready 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 part-
nership with Longhurst offered him his oppor-
tunity. 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 in-
capable 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 par-
ticular 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 prob-
ably 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
[277]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
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
[278]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
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 indif-
ference.
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 in-
tellect 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 in-
violate. Only there were trials from which even
[279]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
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 un-
kindness 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 without
knowing who he was, 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 suffer-
ing 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
m
[282]


TRACKS IN THE SNOW
him and dealt to him the doom which the reader
has long foreseen.
ea.
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 Lon-
don and in effect so far off; and, if the now delight-
ful labours of my calling seem to me not more un-
successful 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 chil-
dren. 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 crea-
ture. Mr. Thalberg continues his law business in
the City, though the business has changed in char-
[283]


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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGA
BOUND
007 • 1932
3 9015 06351 2993