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Dorotheam

Chapter I

On the morning of the 29th of January, 1896, Eustace Peters was found murdered in his bed at his house, Grenvile Combe, in the parish of Long Wilton, of which I was then rector.

Much mystery attached to the circumstances of his death. It was into my hands that chance threw the clue to this mystery, and it is for me, if for any one, to relate the facts.

To the main fact of all, the death of my own friend on the eve, as I sometimes fancy, of a fuller blossoming of his powers, my writing cannot give the tragic import due to it, for it touched my own life too nearly. I had come—I speak of myself, for they tell me a narrator must not thrust himself quite into the background—I had come to Long Wilton, three years before, from a college tutorship at Oxford, to occupy the rectory till, as happened not long after, the son of the patron became qualified to hold it. Country-bred, fond of country people and of country pastimes, I had not imagined, when I came, either the difficulties of a country parson’s task or the false air of sordidness which those difficulties would at first wear to me; still less was I prepared for the loneliness which at first befell me in a place where, though many of my neighbours were wise men and good men, none ever showed intellectual interests or talked with any readiness of high things. The comradeship of Peters, who settled there a few months after me, did more than to put an end to my loneliness; by shrewd, casual remarks, which were always blunt and unexpected but never seemed intrusive or even bore the semblance of advice, he had, without dreaming of it—for he cared very little about the things of the Church—shown me the core of most of my parish difficulties and therewith the way to deal with them. So it was that with my growing affection for the man there was mingled an excessive feeling of mental dependence upon him. So it was that upon that January morning a great blank entered into my life. Matters full of interest, in my pursuits of the weeks and months that went before, are gone from my memory like dreams. My whole sojourn at Long Wilton, important as it was to me, is a thing dimly remembered, like a page of some other man’s biography. Even as I call to mind that actual morning I cannot think of the immediate horror, only of the blank that succeeded and remains. I believe that no one, upon whom any like loss has come suddenly, will wonder if I take up my tale in a dry-eyed fashion. I can use no other art in telling it but that of letting the facts become known as strictly as may be in the order in which they became known to me.

Eustace Peters, then, was a retired official of the Consular Service, and a man of varied culture and experience—too much varied, I may say. He had been at Oxford shortly before my time. I gathered from the school prizes on his library shelves that he went there with considerable promise; but he left without taking his degree or accomplishing anything definite except rowing in his college Eight (a distinction of which I knew not from his lips but from his rather curious wardrobe). He had learnt, I should say, unusually little from Oxford, except its distinctive shyness, and had, characteristically, begun the studies of his later years in surroundings less conducive to study. He left Oxford upon getting some appointment in the East. Whether this first appointment was in a business house or in the Consular Service, where exactly it had been and what were the later stages of his career, I cannot tell, for he talked very little of himself. Evidently, however, his Eastern life had been full of interest for him, and he had found unusual enjoyment in mingling with and observing the strange types of European character which he met among his fellow-exiles, if I may so call them. He had ultimately left the Consular Service through illness or some disappointment, or both. About that time an aunt of his died and left him the house, Grenvile Combe, at Long Wilton, in which a good deal of his boyhood had been spent. He came there, as I have said, soon after my own arrival, and stayed on, not, as it seemed to me, from any settled plan. There he passed much of his time in long country rambles (he had been, I believe, a keen sportsman, and had now become a keen naturalist), much of it in various studies, chiefly philosophic or psychological. He was writing a book on certain questions of psychology, or, perhaps I should say, preparing to write it, for the book did not seem to me to progress. My wife and I were convinced that he had a love story, but we gathered no hint of what it may have been. He was forty-three when he died.

This is, I think, all that I need now set down as to the personality of the murdered man. But I cannot forbear to add that, while his interrupted career and his somewhat desultory pursuits appeared inadequate to the reputation which he had somehow gained for ability, he certainly gave me the impression of preserving an uncompromisingly high standard, a keenly if fitfully penetrating mind and a latent capacity for decisive action. As I write these words it occurs to me that he would be living now if this impression of mine had not been shared by a much cleverer man than I.