Callaghan remembered that it was so.
“Mrs. Bulteel is, I have always supposed, the lady referred to in this letter, which reached me (will you note?) by the five o’clock post at Peters’ house, seven hours before I killed him.”
He passed the letter to me without looking at me. Callaghan and I read it together. It was in a lady’s hand, signed with the name of Lady Denison, the young lady’s mother. It appeared to be written in great agitation. Its purport was that the young lady had resolved, so her mother found, to break off her engagement with Vane-Cartwright. She had formerly loved another man, whose name the mother thought she must not mention, though probably Vane-Cartwright knew it, but had supposed that he did not care for her or had given up doing so. She had now learned from an officious lady friend, who had lately seen this old lover, that he cared for her still; that he had concealed his passion when he found she favoured Vane-Cartwright, but that having now apparently quarrelled with Vane-Cartwright he had authorised her to let this be known if she saw her opportunity. The mother concluded by saying that she had so far failed in reasoning with her daughter, who had wished to write and break off her engagement, and all she could do was to lay on her the absolute command not to write to Vane-Cartwright at all for the present.
“There is only one comment to make on that letter,” said Vane-Cartwright. “You may wonder why I should have assumed that it was hopeless. Well, I knew the lady better than you, better than her mother did, and knew that if her old attachment had returned it had returned to stay. Besides, I read this letter with my rival sitting in the room (you two gentlemen were sitting in the room too as it happens), and when hard, self-contained people do come under these influences, they do not give way to them by halves.
“Thank you,” said Vane-Cartwright, when we had read and returned the letter. “I am glad you have heard me so patiently. That all this makes me less of a villain than you thought me, I do not pretend to say; but I think you will understand why I wished some men whom I respected, as I respect you, to know my story. I do not suggest for a moment that it should influence your present action. Here I am, as I said to begin with, your prisoner. Of course you see that society is just as safe from future murders from me as from any man. But if your principles of justice demand life for life, or if human feeling makes you resolve to avenge your friend, that is just what I came here expecting. I am the last man in the world who could give an unprejudiced opinion on the ethics of punishment.”
He ended with a quiet and by no means disagreeable smile.
As I have often said I make no sort of pretence to report any talk quite correctly, and here, where the manner of the talk is of special importance, I feel more than ever my incompetence to report it. I can only say that the singular confession, of which I have striven to repeat the purport, was in reality delivered with a great deal of restrained eloquence, and with occasional most moving play of facial expression, all the more striking in a man whom I had seldom before seen to move a muscle of his face unnecessarily. It was delivered to two men of whom one (myself) was physically overwrought, while the other (Callaghan), naturally emotional, was at the commencement in the fullest elation of triumphant pursuit, in other words, ready to recoil violently.
We sat, I do not know how long, each waiting for the other to speak. Vane-Cartwright sat meanwhile neither looking at us nor moving his countenance—only the fingers of one hand kept drumming gently upon his knee.
At last I did what I think I never did but once before, obeyed an impulse almost physical, to speak words which my mouth seemed to utter mechanically. If they were the words of reason, they were not the words of my conscious thought, for that was busy with all, and more than all the scruples which had ever made this business hard to me.
“Mr. Vane-Cartwright,” I said, “it is my painful duty to tell you at once that I do not believe one word you have said, except what I knew already.”