Tracks in the snow

by Baron Godfrey Rathbone Benson Charnwood

“And now I must tell you about Longhurst. He had been at some time, I suppose, a clever man; at least he had a wonderful store of practical knowledge about forests, mining and other matters, and he had travelled a great deal in all parts of that region of the world, and picked up many things which he wanted to turn to account. He had made a little money which he wished to increase, and he had a great scheme of organising and developing the trade of South-Eastern Asia and its islands in various valuable kinds of timber, spices, gum, shellac, etc., etc. He promised any one who could join him that in a few years, by exploiting certain yet undeveloped but most profitable sources of supply, he could get a monopoly of several important trades, the sago trade, for example. He set forth his scheme to the company generally at the English Club the first time I met him, and everybody laughed at him except me, who saw that if he got into the right hands there was something to be made out of his discoveries for him and other people. And as a matter of fact we did make something of them, more than I expected, but not what he expected. I did not make a large sum out of our joint venture, not much more than I could have made by staying where I was, but I got the knowledge of Eastern commerce, which has enabled me since to do what I have done.

“I saw you smile just now, Mr. Callaghan, when I spoke of Longhurst getting into the right hands. Well he did; and I did not. He had been, as I said, a clever man, and there was something taking about him with his bluff, frank, burly air, but he was going off when I met him. People do go downhill if they spend all their lives in odd corners of the earth; and, though I did not know it at first, he had taken the surest road downhill, for he had begun to drink, and very soon it gained upon him like wildfire. When he once goes wrong no one can be so wrong-headed as a man like that, who thinks that he knows the world from having knocked about it a great deal doing nothing settled; and I should have found Longhurst difficult to deal with in any case. As it was, Longhurst dined with Peters the night before we left Saigon together. On the first day of our voyage he was very surly to me, and he said, ‘I heard something funny about you last night, Master Cartwright. I wish I had heard it before, that’s all.’ When I fired up and told him to say straight out what it was, he looked at me offensively, and went off into the smoking-room of the steamer to have another drink. That was not a cheerful beginning of our companionship, and I had my suspicion as to whom I ought to thank for it. I believe the same tale-bearer that I mentioned before had been telling Peters some yarn about my arrangements with Longhurst, which looked as if I was trying to swindle him, and that Peters had passed it on. I very soon found that Longhurst was not so simple as he seemed. I daresay he had meant honestly enough by me at first, but having got it into his thick head that I was a little too sharp, he made up his mind to be the sharper of the two; and the result was that if I was to be safe in dealing with him I must take care to keep the upper hand of him, and before long I made up my mind that my partner should go out of the firm. I could have made his fortune if he would have let me, but I meant that the concern should be mine and not his, and I did not disguise it from him. That was my great mistake. I do not know what story, if any, you have picked up about my dealings with Longhurst. He put about many stories when we had begun to quarrel—for he had begun by that time, if not before, to drink freely—but the matter that we finally quarrelled about was this. Of the various concessions which we started by obtaining (at least I started by obtaining them; that was to be my great contribution to the partnership), two only proved of very great importance—one was from the Spanish Government of the Philippines and the other from the Government of Anam, and these, as it happened, were for three and four years, renewable under certain conditions but also revocable earlier in certain events. There was no trickery about that, though Longhurst may have thought there was. I simply could not get larger concessions with the means of persuasion (bribery, in other words) at our command. Subsequently I got renewals and extensions of these concessions to myself alone. To the best of my belief then and now the transaction held water in law and in equity, but whatever a lawyer might think of it, the common-sense was this: Longhurst had become so reckless and so muddle-headed that nothing could any longer prosper under his control, if he had the control, and besides that, I never could have got the extended concessions at all if he was to be one of the concessionaires. There are some things which an Eastern Government or a Spanish Government cannot stand, and Longhurst’s treatment of the natives was one of them. But I must go back a bit. There were other things besides this which contributed to our quarrel. For one thing, odd as it may sound in speaking of two grown-up men, Longhurst bullied me—physically bullied me. He was a very powerful man, more so, I should think, even than you, Mr. Callaghan, and when, as often happened, we were travelling alone together, he used to insist on my doing as he liked in small arrangements, by the positive threat of violence. To do him justice he did not do it when he was sober, and though in those days I was a weakly and timid man compared to what I have become, I soon learned how to stop it altogether. But you can easily imagine that I did not love him; and a bitter feeling towards his chief companion is not a wholesome thing for a man to carry about through a year or two of hard work in that climate (for it is a climate! none of the dry heat and bracing winters you have in Northern India); still I hope I did not bear him malice so much for that as for other things. I have said I have no scruples, but I have no liking for ruffianism and cruelty. I hate them for the same reason for which I hate some pictures and some architecture, because they are not to my taste. But I had, in out-of-the-way places, among weak savages, where law and order had not come, to put up with seeing deeds done which people here at home would not believe were done by their countrymen, and which a man who has served his days in an honourable service like the Indian Civil could believe in least of all. He had kicked a wretched man to death (for I have no doubt he died of it) the day he died himself.

“But why do I make all these excuses? for, after all, what did I do that needs so much excuse? I told Longhurst plainly what I had done about the concessions and what I proposed to do for him, and he seemed to fall in with it all, and then he went home for a month’s holiday in England. I suppose he saw some lawyer, probably Thalberg, and got it into his head that he could make out a case of fraud against me. At any rate, when he returned, he seemed surly; he did not have it out with me straight, but he began to make extravagant demands of me and threaten me vaguely with some exposure if I did not give in to them, which of course I did not. Then he quarrelled about it in his cups, for the cups were getting more and more frequent, and several times over he got so violent as to put me in actual fear of my life. And at last, unhappily for him, it came to a real encounter. We had visited the island of Sulu, where I had reason to think we might establish a branch of our business, and after two or three days in an inland town we were returning to the coast, expecting to be picked up by a Chinese junk which was to take us back. The evening before we started down he produced a packet of documents and brandished it at me as if it contained something very damaging to me, and I could see plainly (for I have an eye for handwriting) that on the top of it was an envelope addressed by Peters. I am not justified in inferring from this that Peters—who had seen Longhurst several times since he had seen me—had again been repeating to him some malicious falsehood with which he had been stuffed before he left Saigon; but can you wonder that I did infer it? On the march down—when we were alone, for we had sent on our servants before—Longhurst began again more savagely than ever, and for about an hour he heaped all sorts of charges and vile insinuations upon me, which I answered for a while as patiently as I could. At last, breaking off in the middle of a curse, he fell into silence. He strode on angrily ahead for a hundred yards or so. Then at a rocky part of the path, where I was below him, he turned suddenly. He hurled at me a great stone which narrowly missed me, and then he came rushing and clambering back down the path at me. I fired (he turned as I fired). That was the end. Was it murder?” He paused and then braced himself up as he answered his own question. “Yes, it was, because I was angry, not afraid, and because I could easily have run away, only for some reason I did not mean to.

“But I am foolish to weary you with all this long preliminary story, for, after all, what do you care about Longhurst; it is Peters, your own friend, about whom you care. You think that he came to suspect me of murdering Longhurst, and I killed him for that; but as sure as I killed him, that was not—that was not what made me do it.”

Vane-Cartwright sat for a long time with his face covered with his hands. At last he sat up and looked me straight in the face. “Mr. Driver, did you never suspect there was a romance in Peters’ life of which you knew nothing? I did know of it, and I honoured him for it, but I hated him for it too. Certainly you did not suspect that there was a romance in mine. It does not seem likely that a great passion should come to a calculating man like me, with the principles of conduct of which I have made no secret to-day. But such things do happen, and a great passion came late in life to me. And here is the cruel thing, which almost breaks my philosophy down, and makes me think that after all there is a curse upon crime. It ought to have enriched and ennobled my life, ought it not? It came at just the moment, in just the shape, and with all the attendant accidents to ruin me.

“It began five years ago. Miss Denison and her parents were staying at Pau. I was in the same hotel and I met them. I knew nothing then of their position and wealth and all that, for I had not been long in London. I loved her, and a great hope came into my life. One begins to weary after a while of toiling just to make money for oneself. For a few days all seemed changed, the whole world was new and bright to me. Suddenly I got an intimation from the father of the lady that my calls were no longer acceptable. I could not imagine the reason. I asked for an interview to explain matters, and he refused it. I left at once. I did not yet know how hard I should find it to give her up. It was only as I left the hotel that I learned that Peters, Peters whom I had not met since we quarrelled at Saigon, and of whom I last heard of the day that Longhurst died, was in the hotel and had called on my friends. Now I see clearly that I am wrong to draw inferences, but again, I ask, could I help inferring what I did?

“More than four years passed. I tried hard to create new interests for myself in artistic things, making all sorts of collections; and I developed an ambition to be a personage in London society. Then I saw Miss Denison again, and I knew that I had not forgotten her, and could not do so. I knew now what had happened, and so I absolutely insisted on an explanation. I had it out with the father. I satisfied him absolutely. In a few weeks’ time I was engaged. For the first time in my life I was happy. That was only a month before I came to Long Wilton. I must tell you that Peters had known the Denisons long, and that I knew Miss Denison had been fond of him, but we naturally did not talk of him much, and I did not know he was at Long Wilton. There, to my complete surprise, I saw Peters again. I would not avoid him, but I certainly did not wish to meet him. He, however, came up to me and spoke quite cordially. I do not know whether he had reflected and thought he had been hard on me, but he seemed to wish to make amends, and I at that time, just for a few short hours, had not got it in my heart to be other than friendly with any man.

“That evening I spent at his house. You, Mr. Callaghan, were there, and you must have seen that something happened. I at any rate saw that something I said had revived all Peters’ suspicions of me, and this time with the addition of a suspicion, which was true, that I had murdered Longhurst.

“Now, I ask you, if you have any lingering idea that that was why I killed him, how was it possible that he could ever prove me guilty? Have you any inkling of how he could have done it? I have not. Now what could induce me, on account of a mere idle suspicion on the part of a man who need be nothing to me, to run the risk amounting almost to certainty of being hanged for murdering him?

“But my conscience was active then, for a reason which any man who has loved may guess. I wanted to clear up all with Peters. I could not get him alone that evening, and I had to go next day. I returned the first day I could, bringing certain materials for clearing up the early transaction about which he had first suspected me. I was honestly determined to make a clean breast to him about Longhurst. You can hardly wonder that I meant to feel my way with him in this. I tried to get to close quarters with him. Mr. Callaghan saw enough to know how unsuccessful I was. I tried all the time, again and again, to draw Peters into intimate talk about our days in the East, but he always seemed to push me away. I determined very soon to obtain a letter from a friend, whom I will not name now, who knew how Longhurst had treated me, which I could show to Peters; so I wrote to him. But in the meantime relations with Peters grew harder and harder. I will not spin out excuses, but all his old animosity to me returned, and I began while I was waiting for that letter to feel once again the old rancour I had felt. This man had hurt me by suspecting me falsely, when, had he shown me confidence, he could have made a better man of me; he had spoilt my best chance of a career; he had poisoned my relations with Longhurst, and so brought about the very crime of which he was now lying in wait to accuse me; he had thwarted my love for four miserable years. On the top of all that came this letter” (he had held a letter in his hand all the time he was speaking), “and it shall speak for itself. But first one question. You may remember when you first saw me at Long Wilton. Well, I came really as it happened upon an errand for Miss Denison. Mrs. Nicholas, in the village, you may not know, had been her nurse. But that does not matter. Between my first visit and my return, do you happen to remember that a Mrs. Bulteel was staying at the hotel, and visited Mr. Peters of whom she was an old friend?”