Tracks in the Snow

standing in the dark while they were in full light, he had first ordered them to hold up their hands, and had then made each of them singly turn out his pockets and restore the smaller stolen articles which they had already secreted in them. He then, it was said, kept them standing there to await the police. But, by some ruse, they distracted his attention for a moment, and then, suddenly putting out their light, made a rush past him and escaped. Such at any rate appears to have been the information which he gave to the police who arrived soon after. The police actually arrested two men, already known to them as suspicious characters, who had been observed lurking near the house together and afterwards slinking away separately, and they were at first confident that they had secured the authors of the attempted robbery. But Vane-Cartwright not only could not identify the arrested men as the two housebreakers, whom he had of course seen well; he insisted firmly that they were not the men whom he had seen; nor were the right men ever caught. The matter caused some surprise, and the police were freely blamed for their bungling. I have my own reason for doubting whether they were justly blamed.

It is a mere fancy on my part that this incident and my meeting with Vane-Cartwright a few days before may have had a connection with each other and with certain subsequent events in this history. I fear that my experience in that year and the next has made me ready to see fanciful connections; and the reader, when he knows of those subsequent events, will see what I suspect took place upon the discovery of the theft, but will very likely think my suspicion extravagant. However that may be, Vane-Cartwright’s plucky adventure and the celebrity which it helped to give to his artistic collections, caused me to hear all the more of him during my stay in London.

Curiously, however, it was at Oxford, where he had not distinguished himself, that the fame of Vane-Cartwright was most dinned into my ears. The University is apt to be much interested in the comparatively few of her sons whose road to distinction is through commerce; and, moreover, he had lately given to the University Museum a valuable collection of East Indian weapons, fabrics, musical instruments and whatnot, which he had got together with much judgment. Thus it happened that I heard there one or two things about him which were of interest to me. A friend of mine, an old tutor, the Bursar of the college at which Vane-Cartwright had been, described him as he was in his undergraduate days. He had, in his opinion, been badly brought up, had never gone to school, but been trained at home by parents who were good people with peculiar views, highly scientific and possibly highly moral views. He had not fallen into either of the two common classes of undergraduates which my old friend understood and approved⁠—the sportsmanlike and boyishly fashionable class, or the studious class who studied on the ordinary lines; still less into the smaller, but still not small, class which combines the merits of the two. He had attainments of his own, which the old tutor did not value sufficiently, for he was proficient in several modern languages and modern literatures; moreover, the necessary mathematics, Greek and Latin grammar, formal logic, etc., which he had to get up, gave him not the slightest trouble. Altogether he had plenty of cleverness of his own sort, but it was a sort which the Bursar thought unwholesome. He was quite well conducted, and ought to have been a gentleman, coming of the family of which he came, but somehow he was not quite a gentleman. Thus it was a great surprise to the possibly conventional instructor of his youth that he had done so well in the world.

Then I heard of him from another man, justly esteemed in financial circles, who was on a visit to his son at Oxford, and whom I met in a common-room after dinner. Somebody had hazarded the remark that Vane-Cartwright must have been either a very hard worker or a very lucky speculator. “No,” said this gentleman, who was a colleague of his on the Board of one of the only two companies of which he was a director, “I should not say that a man like that worked hard as you would understand work at Oxford, or at least as a few of you would. His hard work was done when he was young. Most of his business is what one of his clerks could run, and probably does run, for many weeks together, on lines which he has planned very carefully and revises whenever occasion requires. Nor is he what most people would call a speculator. I fancy he very seldom takes any uncommon sort of risk, but he always does it at the right moment. He has succeeded because he is very quick in making his calculations and very bold in taking action on them. He does not seem to be constantly watching things, but when a special emergency or a special opportunity occurs he seems to grasp it instantly, and I believe he troubles himself very little, too little perhaps, about any affair of his when it is once well in train.”

Lastly, I heard a story, the narrator of which could give me few precise details, of the pains which Vane-Cartwright had taken to search out the few relations of an old partner of his in the East who had died before their affairs turned out so successfully, and of the generosity with which he had set up these people in life though they had very little claim on him. Here at least was something which took its place in the story which I was weaving; the rest of what I had heard was little to the purpose, though it served to