Chapter XVIICrondall is a small market town on a chalk stream in a Southern county, and about two miles from it down the valley lies the shooting- and fishing-box which Vane-Cartwright, as I found, had lately taken, with a very considerable shooting in the well-wooded hills, which lay behind it reaching up to the chalk downs, and with a mile or so of fishing in the trout-stream which passed through the garden. People shoot because it is the thing to do, but as a rule they do not hunt or fish unless they like it. So it was for the shooting that Vane-Cartwright had taken this place, a very charming place for a bachelor, and within easy reach of town. Trethewy, however, had been engaged as a sort of water-bailiff and to look after the fishing, which he was more or less competent to do. I found him installed in a queer old thatched cottage which stood on an island, formed by two branches of the stream, at the lower end of the 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 morning 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. It followed that one or more of the family was, to the knowledge of Vane-Cartwright, in possession of information which, if it came out, would establish Vane-Cartwright’s guilt. It did not follow that any of them had guilty knowledge; probably 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 abstinence 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 horror 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 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 husband, and anxiety that her daughter, for whose upbringing she was so careful, should know nothing 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 bundled 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 overflowing 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 times during his stay with Peters; and that it was after a talk with him that she sent the girl away to her grandmother’s. That the suggestion had actually come from him she did not say, it was a mere guess of mine that he had contrived to put it into her head. With the girl, whom she sent on an errand to Crondall, I got no opportunity of talk that night, and I had to return to my inn ill-satisfied with my exploration so far, and puzzled how to proceed.I got my bathe next morning in the pool of which I have spoken (this is not quite so unimportant as it may seem). Trethewy managed to ensure me privacy for the purpose, and after that I called on the Trethewy family again. I have remarked already that I supposed myself to have heard all that any grown-up person in my old parish could tell in regard to the murder and its surrounding circumstances. It had been borne on my mind strongly since my meeting with Vane-Cartwright at Florence, that others besides adults have eyes and memories, that Trethewy’s girl had been near the house at the time of the murder and on the following day, and that I could not count on having heard from her parents all that she 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 roundabout 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 besides) about the course of the proceedings against him. The girl, not quite trusting her grandmother, had procured and carefully read the newspaper account of the trial before the magistrates. She had never doubted for one instant, she told me, that her father was innocent, and it was with more than common understanding that she studied the details in the story which might make his innocence clear. “Is it very wicked of me, Mr. Driver?” she said, “that I do not feel a bit, not a bit grateful to Mr. Vane-Cartwright, and I do not believe father does. I do believe he would have gone to the workhouse rather, if he had known it when we came here that he was to be under Mr. Vane-Cartwright. But he thought the gentleman who sent for us, and who was really his agent, was the master of the place; and, once we were here, mother begged him so not to go. Mother is always saying how good Mr. Cartwright has been to us, and father never answers a word; but I am sure he has a plan to take us away somewhere far off.” “Tell me,” I said, “what makes you say all this. Have you seen anything in Mr. Vane-Cartwright to make you think he had some wrong reason for getting your father to come here?” “Oh, I do not say that,” she said, “but I have always feared his looks. Always, I think, since he first came to our house to talk to father, and much more since I saw him at the window that dreadful morning when poor Mr. Peters lay dead.” “Why, what could you see that morning?” 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. Trimmer 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 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 every one 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 obvious place of all. Perhaps I may be forgiven for having all these fifteen months been doing something analogous. I had not only overlooked Trethewy’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 by others, who had been in the room, that none but Vane-Cartwright unlatched that window.I make this obvious reflexion 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 standing then on the lawn that Vane-Cartwright had taken the step, when every unnecessary step involved 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 luggage 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 and a pressingly urged dinner. But then (for an idea struck me) I would, if I had finished the sermon I was writing for a Saint’s day service (not in the calendar, I fear) at a neighbouring church to-morrow, stroll over to Vane-Cartwright’s after my supper if he was in any case going to be in. He would in any case be in, and delighted to see me. He would be in from seven onwards. He dined at 7.30, and if I thought better of it would be delighted to see me then, and I must not dress. For the present, as Ellen had to go home, might he not show me the short way to my inn. It was not what I should have thought a short way, but it was delightfully secluded, and it led us by quite a curious number of places (a rather slippery plank over a disused lock will do as an example), where I fancied that an accident might have befallen an unwary man with a too wary companion. Perhaps it was only the condition of my nerves that day that made me a little proudly fancy such things, for I was not only highly strung, I was unusually exhilarated. It was a great change since our last meeting, for this time I felt that I had at last gained a definite advantage, and, little as he showed it, I thought I was talking with a desperate man. It is 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 handsome 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 perhaps 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 conversation, and I was surprised and pleased with myself to think that I was doing it well. Perhaps I was doing it well, but I do not think it was my guidance of the talk which brought it back to the subject of Trethewy. Vane-Cartwright managed to tell me that he hoped no rumour of suspicion attached to Trethewy here, or to any one at all connected 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” (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 doings 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, 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. “Naturally,” 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 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.
Crondall is a small market town on a chalk stream in a Southern county, and about two miles from it down the valley lies the shooting- and fishing-box which Vane-Cartwright, as I found, had lately taken, with a very considerable shooting in the well-wooded hills, which lay behind it reaching up to the chalk downs, and with a mile or so of fishing in the trout-stream which passed through the garden. People shoot because it is the thing to do, but as a rule they do not hunt or fish unless they like it. So it was for the shooting that Vane-Cartwright had taken this place, a very charming place for a bachelor, and within easy reach of town. Trethewy, however, had been engaged as a sort of water-bailiff and to look after the fishing, which he was more or less competent to do. I found him installed in a queer old thatched cottage which stood on an island, formed by two branches of the stream, at the lower end of the 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 morning 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. It followed that one or more of the family was, to the knowledge of Vane-Cartwright, in possession of information which, if it came out, would establish Vane-Cartwright’s guilt. It did not follow that any of them had guilty knowledge; probably 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 abstinence 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 horror 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 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 husband, and anxiety that her daughter, for whose upbringing she was so careful, should know nothing 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 bundled 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 overflowing 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 times during his stay with Peters; and that it was after a talk with him that she sent the girl away to her grandmother’s. That the suggestion had actually come from him she did not say, it was a mere guess of mine that he had contrived to put it into her head. With the girl, whom she sent on an errand to Crondall, I got no opportunity of talk that night, and I had to return to my inn ill-satisfied with my exploration so far, and puzzled how to proceed.
I got my bathe next morning in the pool of which I have spoken (this is not quite so unimportant as it may seem). Trethewy managed to ensure me privacy for the purpose, and after that I called on the Trethewy family again. I have remarked already that I supposed myself to have heard all that any grown-up person in my old parish could tell in regard to the murder and its surrounding circumstances. It had been borne on my mind strongly since my meeting with Vane-Cartwright at Florence, that others besides adults have eyes and memories, that Trethewy’s girl had been near the house at the time of the murder and on the following day, and that I could not count on having heard from her parents all that she 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 roundabout 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 besides) about the course of the proceedings against him. The girl, not quite trusting her grandmother, had procured and carefully read the newspaper account of the trial before the magistrates. She had never doubted for one instant, she told me, that her father was innocent, and it was with more than common understanding that she studied the details in the story which might make his innocence clear. “Is it very wicked of me, Mr. Driver?” she said, “that I do not feel a bit, not a bit grateful to Mr. Vane-Cartwright, and I do not believe father does. I do believe he would have gone to the workhouse rather, if he had known it when we came here that he was to be under Mr. Vane-Cartwright. But he thought the gentleman who sent for us, and who was really his agent, was the master of the place; and, once we were here, mother begged him so not to go. Mother is always saying how good Mr. Cartwright has been to us, and father never answers a word; but I am sure he has a plan to take us away somewhere far off.” “Tell me,” I said, “what makes you say all this. Have you seen anything in Mr. Vane-Cartwright to make you think he had some wrong reason for getting your father to come here?” “Oh, I do not say that,” she said, “but I have always feared his looks. Always, I think, since he first came to our house to talk to father, and much more since I saw him at the window that dreadful morning when poor Mr. Peters lay dead.” “Why, what could you see that morning?” 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. Trimmer 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 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 every one 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 obvious place of all. Perhaps I may be forgiven for having all these fifteen months been doing something analogous. I had not only overlooked Trethewy’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 by others, who had been in the room, that none but Vane-Cartwright unlatched that window.
I make this obvious reflexion 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 standing then on the lawn that Vane-Cartwright had taken the step, when every unnecessary step involved 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 luggage 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 and a pressingly urged dinner. But then (for an idea struck me) I would, if I had finished the sermon I was writing for a Saint’s day service (not in the calendar, I fear) at a neighbouring church to-morrow, stroll over to Vane-Cartwright’s after my supper if he was in any case going to be in. He would in any case be in, and delighted to see me. He would be in from seven onwards. He dined at 7.30, and if I thought better of it would be delighted to see me then, and I must not dress. For the present, as Ellen had to go home, might he not show me the short way to my inn. It was not what I should have thought a short way, but it was delightfully secluded, and it led us by quite a curious number of places (a rather slippery plank over a disused lock will do as an example), where I fancied that an accident might have befallen an unwary man with a too wary companion. Perhaps it was only the condition of my nerves that day that made me a little proudly fancy such things, for I was not only highly strung, I was unusually exhilarated. It was a great change since our last meeting, for this time I felt that I had at last gained a definite advantage, and, little as he showed it, I thought I was talking with a desperate man. It is 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 handsome 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 perhaps 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 conversation, and I was surprised and pleased with myself to think that I was doing it well. Perhaps I was doing it well, but I do not think it was my guidance of the talk which brought it back to the subject of Trethewy. Vane-Cartwright managed to tell me that he hoped no rumour of suspicion attached to Trethewy here, or to any one at all connected 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” (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 doings 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, 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. “Naturally,” 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 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.