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