Chapter XIBy 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 criticism. 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 Riviera. 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 difference of age was too great; they were still more against the flighty breach of it; but she was obdurate. 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 confidence. 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 defend 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 before 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-Cartwright’s wife.So much my wife told me. Then, with that precipitancy in travelling to remote conclusions which sometimes seems so perilous in able women, she said, as quietly as if it were the most obvious comment, “Robert, it was Vane-Cartwright that did the murder”. Now she had never even spoken to him.Accordingly, she received my theory of the murder almost with enthusiasm. None the less, she immediately 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 suspected 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 Eustace.” Then she turned on me with a woman’s promptitude and a woman’s injustice: “You can always argue me down,” she said, “but he did murder 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 waiting for what would turn up. In the neighbourhood of the murder there was probably very little 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 already heard all, and more than all that any person 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 neighbours there. It soon occurred to me that the murder 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 proofs of it, and probably, as I searched his voluminous 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 immediate 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; nothing, that is, which threw direct light on this mystery, for indeed his psychological notes and my discussions with a friend of his, an Oxford philosophy 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 he would tell me to whom he alluded as “C.,” whether Longhurst was the man whom Peters suspected 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 disposal 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 Callaghan. 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 ways, admirably qualified for his post. He was, I believe, excellent in the discipline he maintained among his subordinates and in all the dispositions he made for meeting the common public requirements. I am told also that he had wonderful 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 sympathy 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 Trethewy’s release, and learnt that it was being carefully considered, but he could not be set free immediately. 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 produced any impression. My visitor listened, if I may say so, with the air of a man who completely takes in the fact 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 something might yet turn up to repair the seemingly 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 movements, 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 matters 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 physician well versed in the symptoms of insanity. The police then were not being guided by those superficial and so to speak conventional notes of guilt, of which I had thought, to the exclusion to 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 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, irresponsibility 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 reflected, 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.
By 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 criticism. 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 Riviera. 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 difference of age was too great; they were still more against the flighty breach of it; but she was obdurate. 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 confidence. 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 defend 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 before 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-Cartwright’s wife.
So much my wife told me. Then, with that precipitancy in travelling to remote conclusions which sometimes seems so perilous in able women, she said, as quietly as if it were the most obvious comment, “Robert, it was Vane-Cartwright that did the murder”. Now she had never even spoken to him.
Accordingly, she received my theory of the murder almost with enthusiasm. None the less, she immediately 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 suspected 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 Eustace.” Then she turned on me with a woman’s promptitude and a woman’s injustice: “You can always argue me down,” she said, “but he did murder 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 waiting for what would turn up. In the neighbourhood of the murder there was probably very little 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 already heard all, and more than all that any person 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 neighbours there. It soon occurred to me that the murder 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 proofs of it, and probably, as I searched his voluminous 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 immediate 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; nothing, that is, which threw direct light on this mystery, for indeed his psychological notes and my discussions with a friend of his, an Oxford philosophy 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 he would tell me to whom he alluded as “C.,” whether Longhurst was the man whom Peters suspected 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 disposal 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 Callaghan. 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 ways, admirably qualified for his post. He was, I believe, excellent in the discipline he maintained among his subordinates and in all the dispositions he made for meeting the common public requirements. I am told also that he had wonderful 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 sympathy 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 Trethewy’s release, and learnt that it was being carefully considered, but he could not be set free immediately. 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 produced any impression. My visitor listened, if I may say so, with the air of a man who completely takes in the fact 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 something might yet turn up to repair the seemingly 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 movements, 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 matters 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 physician well versed in the symptoms of insanity. The police then were not being guided by those superficial and so to speak conventional notes of guilt, of which I had thought, to the exclusion to 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 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, irresponsibility 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 reflected, 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.