“Well,” he continued, “if you do not quite know what you are going to do, I will ask one thing of you. Before you give me up to justice, take me somewhere where I can talk with you two alone. I want to tell you my story. It will not make you alter your purpose, I know that; but it will make you respect me a little more than you do. It is odd that I should want that, but I do.”
“Well, gentlemen?” he said questioningly, as we still hesitated, and his old self-possession returning for a moment, a smile of positive amusement came over his face.
I confess that if I had acted on my own impulse I should have taken my antagonist at his word when he suggested that we should call the nearest policeman. But Callaghan had been taking the lead in our late movements, and I felt that the occasion belonged to Callaghan; and Callaghan was more generous.
“If you have anything to say, sir,” he said, “come to my chambers and say it. Four-wheeler!”
In a moment more we were in a cab—how slow the cab seemed—Callaghan sitting opposite Vane-Cartwright and watching him narrowly lest he should play us a trick, while I too watched him all through the interminable drive, very ill at ease as to the wisdom of our conduct, and wondering what could be the meaning of the unexpected and desperate hazard which our antagonist was now taking. He was evidently going to confess to us. But why? If the knowledge we already possessed was sufficient, as perhaps it was, to secure his conviction, yet he could only partly guess what that knowledge was; of the two most telling pieces of evidence against him, the fact about the window-latch which the surgeon had told us, and the fact that Thalberg had recognised him afar from his window in the hotel, he must have been quite unaware. And then what did he expect to gain by the interview which he had sought with us? What opinion had he formed of the mental weaknesses of the two men with whom he was playing? Was he relying overmuch upon the skill and mastery of himself and others which he would bring to bear in this strange interview? Had the fearful strain under which he had been living of late taken away the coolness and acuteness of his judgment? Could he rely so much upon the chance of enlisting our compassion that he could afford to give us a certainty of his guilt, which, for all he knew, we had not got before, and to throw away the hope of making an escape by flight, which with a man of his resource might easily have been successful? Or had he some other far more sinister hope than that of stirring us to unworthy pity or generosity? I could not resolve these questions, but I was inclined to an explanation which he was himself about to give us. If the cause of suspicion against him became public he would have lost everything for which he greatly cared, and he was ready to risk all upon any chance, however faint, of avoiding this. I was, as I have said, ill at ease about it all. I did not feel that after the conversation I had held with him before, Vane-Cartwright would get over me, but it is an experience which one would do much to avoid, that of listening obdurate to an appeal into which another man puts his whole heart; and more especially would one wish to have avoided consenting to hear that appeal in a manner which might raise false hopes. But for a more serious reason it had been a mistake to acquiesce in this interview; I had learned to know not only Callaghan’s goodness of heart but his cleverness and his promptitude, but I had not learned to credit him with wisdom or with firmness; and the sort of impulsiveness, which had made him at once grant the request for this interview, might easily have further and graver consequences.
At last we were in Callaghan’s room and seated ourselves round a table.
“I see,” said Vane-Cartwright, “that it puzzles you gentlemen why I should ask for this interview. You think I am an ordinary criminal, which perhaps I am, and you thought that like an ordinary criminal I should try all means to save a disgraced life, which I certainly shall not do. I know that you have not got the knowledge which would convict me of murder. I do not suppose you think you have, and in any case you have not. And, if you had, I think you know I have contrivance enough to take myself off and live comfortably out of reach of the law. But I do not care for escape, and I do not care for acquittal. You have the means to throw suspicion on me, and that is enough for me. I cared for honour and success, and I do not care for life when they are lost.” He was looking at each of us alternately with an inscrutable but quite unflinching gaze, but he now hid his eyes, and he added as if with difficulty, “Yet I did care for one other thing besides my position in the world, but that has gone from me too.
“And now,” he resumed, “that my struggle is over, and that the people—more people and bigger people than you would think—who have been courting me for the last twelve months will think of me only with as just abhorrence as Thalberg himself does, I have an odd fancy, and it is this: I should like to stand a little better in the eyes of the very men who, far from courting me, have had the courage to suspect me and the tenacity to drag me down.” He had raised his eyes again, but this time fixed them on Callaghan only, for he doubtless saw
