And why not, it might be asked, by Callaghan, against whom at one time such good grounds of suspicion were to be found? The reader must by this time have seen that the eccentric and desultory proceedings of Callaghan, even his strange whim of staying in that crime-stricken house and the silly talk with which he had put me off about his aim, had, as he once boasted to me, a method, which though odd and over-ingenious, was rational and very acute. The neglected memorandum he had made for the police was enough in itself (without his frankness under cross-examination) to set his proceedings since the murder in a clear light. Callaghan, moreover, was the life-long friend of Peters. True it was that (as the defence scented out) he had owed Peters £2,000, and Peters’ will forgave the debt. True, but it was now proved no less true, that since that will was made the debt had been paid, and paid in a significant manner. Callaghan had first remitted to Peters £500 from India. Peters, thereupon, had sent Callaghan an acquittance of the whole debt. Callaghan’s response was an immediate payment of £250 more. And the balance, £1,250, had been paid a very few days before Peters was killed. This was what an ill-inspired cross-examination revealed, and if the guilt lay between Vane-Cartwright and Callaghan, there could be no doubt which was the criminal.

So Callaghan and I had gone through tangled enquiries and at least some perilous adventures to solve a puzzle of which the solution lay all the while at our feet, and at the feet of others.

It would be melancholy now to dwell on the daring and brilliance of the defence. No witness was called for it. It opened with a truly impressive treatment of Vane-Cartwright’s confession; and the broken state of his temperament, originally sensitive and now harassed by suspicion and persecution, was described with a tenderness of which the speaker might have seemed incapable, and which called forth for the hard man in the dock a transient glow of human sympathy. Every other part of his conduct, so far as it was admitted, was made the subject of an explanation, by itself plausible. But little was admitted. Every separate item of the evidence was made the subject of a doubt, by itself reasonable. If a witness had been called to tell some very plain matter of fact, that kind of plain fact under one’s eyes was notoriously the sort of thing about which the most careless mistakes were made. If a witness had had a longer tale to tell he had revealed some poisonous pre-possession. I, for example, a most deleterious type of cleric, had, besides a prejudice against unorthodox Vane-Cartwright, an animus to defend Trethewy, arising from that sickly sentiment towards Miss Trethewy which I betrayed when I fled to her from my ailing family at Florence. In Trethewy’s case again there had been a confession of a very different order; and the suggestion was dexterously worked that something still lay concealed behind Trethewy’s story. Withal the vastness of the region of possibility was exhibited with vigorous appeals to the imagination. Strong in every part, the defence as a whole was bound to be weak; the fatality which made so many lies and blunders work together for evil was beyond belief; the conduct which needed so much psychology to defend it was indefensible.

So the verdict was given and the sentence was passed.

Chapter XXIII

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.