Tracks in the Snow

to see me again, and, she hoped, talk with me more fully. I took little note of this at the time, but I made up my mind to take my wife to see the old lady when I could, and continued thinking of it and putting it off till I got this summons, which told me that Miss Waterston was very ill and had something which she much wished to tell me. When I arrived at her flat she was dead. The lady who had been looking after her told me that she had several times shown anxiety that I should come soon, but had at last remarked that if I did not come in time she would accept it as a sign that what she had meant to tell me was best untold. She had two weeks before, when she was not yet ill, remarked that she would like to see me soon. Various straws of things that were told me about her suggested that she had lately become concerned afresh about her nephew’s death. She had been intimate with the Cartwright family, and had to the end seen something of a rather neglected widowed cousin of William Vane-Cartwright’s. Of course I have no ground for thinking that she had any grave disclosure to make to me.

Christmas, that year, came sadly to me. We must in any case have been full of memories of the last Christmas, at which Peters had joined our party and added much to the children’s and our own delight. This Christmas he was dead; the hope, not perhaps consonant with Christmas thoughts, of avenging him had arisen in my mind and was dying, and I came home from the deathbed of the last remaining person of his kin who had loved him better than we did, and who in the little I had seen of her had reflected to me some indefinable trace of the same noble qualities as I discovered in him.

I attended her funeral. So did the old cousin who had come with her to Peters’ funeral. He recognised me and greeted me courteously, remarking what a charming person that Mr. Vane-Cartwright was whom he had met at my house. He looked to me older; his grey hair was turning auburn; he was as unattractive to me as the rest of the appanage of funerals, but I was grateful to him for being one of the very few who came to honour the remains of the old woman, almost a stranger to me, whom I yet so truly respected.

By the time the anniversary of Peters’ death came round I was again alone; it had been necessary after Christmas that my daughter should go South, and my wife had taken her. I was busy and therefore happy enough, and I did not often but I did sometimes ask myself, would nothing more ever turn up? Yes, before long something did turn up; something not to help me on but to show me that, in thinking ever to unravel the dark history of Longhurst’s fate, I had started upon a hopeless task. Early in February a letter came to me redirected to Peters from the dead letter office at Siena, where it had long lain entombed. It was a letter written by Peters to a certain Reverend James Verschoyle, D.D., addressing him as a person Peters well knew and had seen quite lately. It bore the date of Vane-Cartwright’s first evening at Grenvile Combe. It reminded him of a conversation which he had had with Peters, at their last meeting, about a very mysterious event in the Philippines, and of the great surprise which Peters had expressed at what Verschoyle then told him. “To tell the truth,” said Peters, “it should have revived a suspicion which I had long ago entertained against a man who was once my friend. Or rather, it should have done more than that, it should have convinced me of his guilt and given me the means of proving it. How I came to put it from my mind I hardly know. I think that my recollection of what you told me is precise, but I should be greatly obliged if you would refer to your journals of the months May to October, 1882, and perhaps you will oblige me by copying out for me all that has any bearing on this matter. I am sorry to trouble you, but I am convinced that the ends of justice may be served by your doing this for me, and I suspect that if they are to be served, I must act as quickly as I may.”

I lost no time in tracing the Rev. James Verschoyle, D.D., who had about a year before been at Siena. He had, after a sojourn in Germany, come back to England. He had, I found, been a missionary in the East. I managed to trace him to his latest address, only to find that he had died in the previous August. I had an interview with some of his family, and found them most obligingly willing to search for the journals in question. It was strange that the journals for the years 1881 to 1883 could nowhere be found. I was convinced that they had contained those crucial facts to which Peters had referred in his letter to Bryanston.

Evidently there had been information in Dr. Verschoyle’s possession which in Peters’ hands could have led to the conviction of Vane-Cartwright. Evidently Peters had once seen that information, but had disregarded it, more or less wilfully, in his determination to think his old acquaintance innocent, and to put the guilt on Arkell who had been hanged at Singapore. Evidently the full significance of Verschoyle’s facts came to his mind when Vane-Cartwright, that evening at Grenvile Combe, had revived his first suspicion, and he wrote at once to recover the precise details. But of what nature that information was, and how Vane-Cartwright, seeing Verschoyle’s name on