Chapter XIXThere 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 afterwards 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 homeless 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. Trethewy 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-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 Callaghan and I had gone into the village, 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 by which a man taking a casual and innocent stroll was extremely unlikely to have gone, especially in frost and snow.The inference was convincing enough to me, but then, as I knew, I was ready to be convinced. Vane-Cartwright was not likely, I felt, to have done so much to prevent the girl revealing merely this. Was there nothing more?Yes, there was, but it was something of which Ellen did not feel sure. During that twenty minutes the sun shone out brilliantly upon the snow, and tempted her to stroll out a little way up the drive, when she stood for awhile to look, in spite of the horror of the time, with delight at the spotless covering of the lawn and the shining burden of the cedar branches, and then up at the sun. Her eyes were soon so dazzled that all sorts of fancied shapes danced before them. Turning suddenly and looking towards the field, she thought for an instant, but only an instant, that she saw between two trees a man up in the field, about half-way up, walking towards the hedge, towards a spot in the hedge which we already know. She covered her eyes with her hand and looked again with clearer vision. There was no one there, and she tried to brush aside the fancy that she had seen any one. But somehow she had often wondered since about what she had seen, and somehow she connected it in her fancy with the murder. She could not connect it with the making of the tracks, for she had only read of them in a muddled newspaper report which had given an entirely wrong impression as to whereabouts they were found. Now it was all obvious. Vane-Cartwright, while he made those very tracks, had passed before her eyes; he had seen her standing and looking towards him, and he could not entertain the hope, though it was true, that her eyes did not see him clear.This much being plain, my first thought was of amazement at the coolness of Vane-Cartwright on the evening after the murder, while he could not be sure that the discovery of the tracks had not been told to the girl and had not already drawn forth from her an explanation which, if believed, must be fatal to him. My second thought was of great disappointment that the identification of him with the maker of the tracks was still to so large an extent a matter of inference. I cannot say whether I myself, or Trethewy, or the girl, who, having long brooded over these matters without the 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 Peters’ room. I was ready immediately to rush off to Long Wilton and see whether Sergeant Speke could recollect anything of importance about the movements of the persons who were in the room that morning. It was the girl who suggested 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 continued 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 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 trap 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 trap 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 arrived 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 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 communication 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 had not been so stiff and chilled from my adventure 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 recognise, answering him vigorously; 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 surprise 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, bestowed on me a mere smile of recognition, and poured himself forth upon Vane-Cartwright with an exuberance of pleasure at the unexpected meeting 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 miserable 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 manœuvred 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.As to the former question, I got no further than the reflexion, 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 weaknesses to putting up with them and occasionally reproving them. I learned now that a few hours after I had left her, my wife had telegraphed to Callaghan through a mutual friend whom she believed would have his address, stating the sort of errand on which I had gone, and the few particulars 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 one communication only, a telegram to a registered telegraphic address in London, that address being the word by which Callaghan had accosted the stranger.As I afterwards learned, my wife, directly I had departed, had removed to Vane-Cartwright’s hotel. Vane-Cartwright did not know her by sight, and, if he had discovered her, he was the sort of man who would probably despise the intelligence of any nice woman. She had taken the best rooms in the hotel, close to Vane-Cartwright’s, and had otherwise set about, for the first time in her life, and for a few hours, to throw money about in showy extravagance. By money and flattery she had contrived to be informed of the address of every letter and telegram that Vane-Cartwright sent before his departure, of the name and nationality (nothing more was known of him) of his only visitor that morning, and of the further fact that shortly after Vane-Cartwright’s departure that visitor had returned and had enquired whether she had moved to that hotel, but had not asked to see her. She learned also that Vane-Cartwright had been at the station when the Milan train started, but had returned and waited 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 only informed that he was abroad. He left London by the first train in the morning armed with aBradshawand a map. Study ofBradshawhad 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, Callaghan shook me awake. It appeared to me that Vane-Cartwright, who had not been conversational 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 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 hansom; still he did not enter it till the driver of an invalid carriage 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 invalid carriage?” said Callaghan to me. “It was ordered for you.”
There 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 afterwards 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 homeless 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. Trethewy 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-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 Callaghan and I had gone into the village, 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 by which a man taking a casual and innocent stroll was extremely unlikely to have gone, especially in frost and snow.
The inference was convincing enough to me, but then, as I knew, I was ready to be convinced. Vane-Cartwright was not likely, I felt, to have done so much to prevent the girl revealing merely this. Was there nothing more?
Yes, there was, but it was something of which Ellen did not feel sure. During that twenty minutes the sun shone out brilliantly upon the snow, and tempted her to stroll out a little way up the drive, when she stood for awhile to look, in spite of the horror of the time, with delight at the spotless covering of the lawn and the shining burden of the cedar branches, and then up at the sun. Her eyes were soon so dazzled that all sorts of fancied shapes danced before them. Turning suddenly and looking towards the field, she thought for an instant, but only an instant, that she saw between two trees a man up in the field, about half-way up, walking towards the hedge, towards a spot in the hedge which we already know. She covered her eyes with her hand and looked again with clearer vision. There was no one there, and she tried to brush aside the fancy that she had seen any one. But somehow she had often wondered since about what she had seen, and somehow she connected it in her fancy with the murder. She could not connect it with the making of the tracks, for she had only read of them in a muddled newspaper report which had given an entirely wrong impression as to whereabouts they were found. Now it was all obvious. Vane-Cartwright, while he made those very tracks, had passed before her eyes; he had seen her standing and looking towards him, and he could not entertain the hope, though it was true, that her eyes did not see him clear.
This much being plain, my first thought was of amazement at the coolness of Vane-Cartwright on the evening after the murder, while he could not be sure that the discovery of the tracks had not been told to the girl and had not already drawn forth from her an explanation which, if believed, must be fatal to him. My second thought was of great disappointment that the identification of him with the maker of the tracks was still to so large an extent a matter of inference. I cannot say whether I myself, or Trethewy, or the girl, who, having long brooded over these matters without the 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 Peters’ room. I was ready immediately to rush off to Long Wilton and see whether Sergeant Speke could recollect anything of importance about the movements of the persons who were in the room that morning. It was the girl who suggested 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 continued 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 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 trap 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 trap 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 arrived 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 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 communication 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 had not been so stiff and chilled from my adventure 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 recognise, answering him vigorously; 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 surprise 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, bestowed on me a mere smile of recognition, and poured himself forth upon Vane-Cartwright with an exuberance of pleasure at the unexpected meeting 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 miserable 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 manœuvred 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.
As to the former question, I got no further than the reflexion, 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 weaknesses to putting up with them and occasionally reproving them. I learned now that a few hours after I had left her, my wife had telegraphed to Callaghan through a mutual friend whom she believed would have his address, stating the sort of errand on which I had gone, and the few particulars 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 one communication only, a telegram to a registered telegraphic address in London, that address being the word by which Callaghan had accosted the stranger.
As I afterwards learned, my wife, directly I had departed, had removed to Vane-Cartwright’s hotel. Vane-Cartwright did not know her by sight, and, if he had discovered her, he was the sort of man who would probably despise the intelligence of any nice woman. She had taken the best rooms in the hotel, close to Vane-Cartwright’s, and had otherwise set about, for the first time in her life, and for a few hours, to throw money about in showy extravagance. By money and flattery she had contrived to be informed of the address of every letter and telegram that Vane-Cartwright sent before his departure, of the name and nationality (nothing more was known of him) of his only visitor that morning, and of the further fact that shortly after Vane-Cartwright’s departure that visitor had returned and had enquired whether she had moved to that hotel, but had not asked to see her. She learned also that Vane-Cartwright had been at the station when the Milan train started, but had returned and waited 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 only informed that he was abroad. He left London by the first train in the morning armed with aBradshawand a map. Study ofBradshawhad 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, Callaghan shook me awake. It appeared to me that Vane-Cartwright, who had not been conversational 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 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 hansom; still he did not enter it till the driver of an invalid carriage 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 invalid carriage?” said Callaghan to me. “It was ordered for you.”