Then I took up the earlier letter. I knew from the other letter that this had been sent late. There was nothing further to be gained from the words of it, but a flood of suspicion broke upon me as I held it in my hand. Had “C.” another initial to his surname, a double name? Did I know this “C.”? Had I not seen this very letter in the hands of “C.”? Had I not thought it rather odd that he, a man so decidedly “all there,” had opened and read it before it was given to me? Had I not rather wondered at the pains he had kindly taken to help me with several letters before? Did he not laugh rather strangely as he read it, though I never heard him laugh at anything amusing? Did he not go away just after the letter came, though he had not been intending to go so soon? Was it conceivable that he knew that Peters had asked that question, and thought the first letter (“very uninforming,” as he called it) was the answer to that question, and an answer which made him safe? After that one laugh I thought he became suddenly downcast. Had he really read in that letter that he need not have feared Peters, and that he had—yes, murdered him for nothing? Had the accident that Peters had written, perhaps long before, some unimportant question to Bryanston, and the accident that Bryanston had delayed his answer betrayed this man into leaving me alone with my letters a week too soon; and would this trifling mistake lead him to—to the gallows? and I remembered with a start the grim end which I was preparing. Yes, all this was conceivable. There is an old maxim that you should beware of going back upon your first instinctive impressions of liking or dislike when you happen to have them. There are qualifications to it; the repulsions that start from ugliness or strangeness or difference of opinion may not be safe guides. But broadly the maxim is true. It was true in this instance. No, I too had never liked “C.”
It is strange that I should have received Mr. Bryanston’s answer the very next morning, a long, full, warmhearted letter on the death of the friend to whose letters in life—and what letters Peters wrote!—he made such scrappy replies. In a P.S. at the end, as if the writer had hesitated whether to write it, were the words: “It is curious and may be news to you that Mr. Peters, at the time he was murdered, was unravelling the mystery of another murder, committed, as he suspected, many years ago.”
So then, as I had half-guessed, Longhurst was dead. It was not that he was alive and Cartwright pretended he was dead, he was dead, and Cartwright had a motive for falsely pretending he was drowned.
X
“Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner,” is, I do not doubt, a saying which has its truth. Nevertheless, I have generally noticed, when I have read much about murders or other great crimes, or about the social or political misdeeds which are not called crimes, that every piece of additional knowledge about the manner in which the thing was done, the inducements that led to it, the conduct that followed it, has, for me at least, set the capital act of wrong in a more hideous light. It is not, I think, that the picturesque circumstances, like the guttering candle whose image got on my nerves that night, affect me profoundly. It is, I believe, that, while many men, most if you like, are middling, the distinctly bad are really much worse and the distinctly good are really much better than the world of middling people is at all ready to allow. When I looked at the whole circumstances of the crime, as I now conceived them, a great hatred of Vane-Cartwright possessed my soul. There was a passage in my subsequent course with regard to him, when a reason personal to myself had just been added to the cause of my hate, upon which I look back sometimes with self-disgust, but I cannot think that the desire, which first prompted me to fasten myself upon Vane-Cartwright and try to drag him down, was an impure desire, or that it consorted ill with the inner meaning of those precepts which it was my profession to teach.
Whether it was right or wrong, the strength of the feeling which then animated me showed itself in my resolve to think calmly and to act circumspectly. I was conscious that the structure of my theory was held together by no firm rivets of verifiable fact, but by something which must be called feeling. I did not distrust my theory on that account; but I did distrust myself, and I determined, in what lay before me, to take as few impulsive steps and to draw as few impulsive conclusions as I could.
Reflecting, next morning, on what could be done immediately to bring my hypothesis to the test of fact, I looked in the Postal Guide for such information as it gave about the mails to and from Bagdad. I also
