Before Trethewy was brought before the magistrates, a letter arrived which excited my imagination unaccountably, or rather two letters arrived. The day before Vane-Cartwright had left, a letter had arrived for Peters, bearing the postmark of Bagdad. Vane-Cartwright carelessly opened it. He had, I think, at my request, on the day when I was away in London, opened some letters which arrived for Peters’ executors. So he had a good excuse for opening this. “Well, that is very uninforming,” he said, passing the letter over to me, with an apology for his mistake, and laughing more than was usual with him. Uninforming it certainly was.
“Dear Eustace,” it ran, “I am sorry I can tell you nothing about it.—Yours, C. B.”
Just a week later, after Vane-Cartwright had left, came another letter from the same place, in the same hand, and almost, but not quite, as brief:
“Dear Eustace, This time I will not delay my answer. Longhurst sailed in the Eleanor and she did not go down. To the best of my belief she still sails the seas. I never liked C.—Yours ever, Charles Bryanston.”
VII
After several remands, the proceedings against Trethewy before the magistrates came to a close about the end of February. There was nothing much to note about these proceedings, which ended, as I suppose they must have ended, in his being committed for trial. The reader knows by this time pretty nearly the whole case against him. That Peters had been murdered was certain. The accused had had several altercations with the murdered man. In one of them he had expressed a wish to kill him, and he had repeated this wish to others upon the fatal night. Footprints had been found which, as the reader knows, seemed at first sight plainly indicative of his guilt. Then there was the ladder. It was undoubtedly kept, before the murder, locked up in a place of which only Trethewy had the key. That anyone could have had access to it between the murder and the discovery of the ladder was a view supported only by the uncorroborated statement of the accused that he had left the key of the pump-house that morning, when summoned to speak to the police, and had forgotten to go back for it until the next day. Lastly, the finding of the instrument case, though not very important, at any rate disposed of any improbability that Trethewy would have had such an instrument as the knife that was used.
I daresay this would have been enough to hang a man if this was all; and against this there was nothing to be set, except the immovable persistency of Trethewy and his wife from the first in the tale which they told.
Nothing, that is, till after he had been committed for trial. But the very evening after his committal, a slight but almost conclusive circumstance was brought to light, and entirely altered the aspect of the case. That evening I received a visit from Peters’ housemaid, Edith Summers. She had, she said, something on her mind. She had told a falsehood to the police-sergeant on the morning after the murder. She had interrupted the housekeeper to say that the candle by Peters’ bed had been a long candle the night before; she had said this because she had been very severely scolded by the housekeeper for forgetting to put fresh candles in the candlestick; and so she had said what was false, not meaning any harm, but thinking for the moment (as she now tried to explain) that it was true, and that she had done what she had intended. She had confessed to the housekeeper since, but the housekeeper had only said she was an impudent girl to have put in her word then, and had better not put it in again. She had gone to the court expecting to be a witness on some small point and determined to make the matter clear then; but she had not been called. She had spoken to a policeman, and had been told to speak to one of the lawyers. She had tried to get the attention of Trethewy’s lawyer, but he had been too busy to listen to her.
I am ashamed to say that listening to her rather long explanation, I entirely failed to see the significance of what she told me. I said something quite well intentioned about the evil of saying what was not true, and then told the girl kindly, that I did not think there was any harm done. But she had thought about it and was in earnest, and she made me see it in a moment. There were, she explained, other candles in the room, but they were new candles, and they were not lighted that night. From this and what we already knew the conclusion was almost inevitable. Peters was murdered before two inches of ordinary candle, which was burning at 11:30 p.m. on the 28th of January, burnt down.
Stupid as it may seem, I had for some time been convinced of Trethewy’s innocence, and yet had never really drawn the necessary inference
