After my visitor had taken courteous leave of me, it dawned upon me what was meant by his dark sayings about Callaghan. I had wondered how the opinions of an eminent specialist in police matters could be so cogent in a case about which he knew nothing at first hand. Suddenly it occurred to me that the eminent specialist really was a physician well versed in the symptoms of insanity. The police then were not being guided by those superficial and so to speak conventional notes of guilt, of which I had thought, to the exclusion to all those sides of character which I had noted. On the contrary they had a view of their own on which these two conflicting sets of phenomena might be reconciled, a view which explained why Callaghan was to me so inexplicable. The man was not sane.
I could not conceal from myself that there was at least something plausible in this view. There is a sort of marked eccentricity and, as it were, irresponsibility of conduct of which I had always thought as something not merely different from incipient madness but very far removed from it. Yet I had once before been terribly mistaken in thinking thus about a friend, and I might, I reflected, be mistaken now. The natural effect upon me was, or should have been, a keener sense of the unsubstantial nature of the story which I had built up about Vane-Cartwright. But I believed it still.
XII
In the course of the summer my wife and I paid our annual visit together to London, and I had a few days in Oxford before the end of the summer term.
I heard a good deal about Vane-Cartwright in London, for he had become a man of some mark in society, and moved in a little set, which was known among its members by a rather precious name, now forgotten though celebrated in the gossip of that time, and which included a statesman or two of either party and several men of eminence in letters, law or learning. By a strange coincidence of the sort which is always happening, I met at an evening party a friend who mentioned Longhurst, and I had just heard from him something of no moment about this man whose fate so deeply exercised me, when I saw Vane-Cartwright himself standing in another part of the throng. I took the opportunity of watching him, unobserved myself, as I supposed. I have hitherto forborne to describe his appearance, because such descriptions in books seldom convey a picture to me. But I must say that seen now in a room where there were several distinguished people, he made no less impression on me than before. He was, I should say, five foot eleven in height, thin and with a slight stoop, but with the wiry look which sometimes belongs to men who were unathletic and perhaps delicate when young, but whose physical strength has developed in after years. Hair which had turned rather grey, while the soft texture and uniformly dark hue of his skin still retained a certain beauty of youth, probably accounted for a good deal of his distinction of appearance, for he was not handsome, though his forehead, if narrow, was high, and his eyes which were small were striking—of a dark greenish-grey colour, I think. The expression of the mouth and of the clear-cut and firm-set jaw was a good deal hidden by a long though rather thin moustache, still black. I had time while he stood there to notice again one trick, which I already knew; he was, I supposed, bent upon being agreeable, so he was talking with animation, and when, in so talking, he smiled and showed his white teeth, his eyelashes almost completely veiled his eyes. To me, naturally, it gave him a hateful expression, yet I could see a certain fascination about it. Then he moved farther off—very quietly, but I could see as he made his way through the crowd that in reality every motion was extraordinarily quick.
Some ten minutes after, I was about to go, when he suddenly came from behind and addressed me, asking me to choose a day for dinner or luncheon at his club. I declined, and freed myself as courteously and as quickly as I could, and thought, for the moment, that there had been nothing marked in the way in which, obeying irresistible impulse, I had shaken off the man whom I suspected on such slight grounds but so rootedly.
A few days afterwards a great robbery was attempted at Vane-Cartwright’s house. The robbers were after a well-chosen and valuable collection of gold ornaments of early periods or from strange countries, which he had begun to make. It was reported in the papers that the theft had been with great presence of mind interrupted and prevented by the owner of the ill-guarded treasures. But the robbers themselves got away. The matter was much talked of, and conflicting tales were told about it, but it seems that Vane-Cartwright, hearing some unusual noise, had come downstairs and surprised the two men who had entered the house before they had succeeded in removing any of their spoil. As he came down he had rung up the police by the District Messenger Company’s apparatus which was in the house. Coming quietly upon them, and
