Tracks in the Snow

passed the letter to me without looking at me. Callaghan and I read it together. It was in a lady’s hand, signed with the name of Lady Denison, the young lady’s mother. It appeared to be written in great agitation. Its purport was that the young lady had resolved, so her mother found, to break off her engagement with Vane-Cartwright. She had formerly loved another man, whose name the mother thought she must not mention, though probably Vane-Cartwright knew it, but had supposed that he did not care for her or had given up doing so. She had now learned from an officious lady friend, who had lately seen this old lover, that he cared for her still; that he had concealed his passion when he found she favoured Vane-Cartwright, but that having now apparently quarrelled with Vane-Cartwright he had authorised her to let this be known if she saw her opportunity. The mother concluded by saying that she had so far failed in reasoning with her daughter, who had wished to write and break off her engagement, and all she could do was to lay on her the absolute command not to write to Vane-Cartwright at all for the present.

“There is only one comment to make on that letter,” said Vane-Cartwright. “You may wonder why I should have assumed that it was hopeless. Well, I knew the lady better than you, better than her mother did, and knew that if her old attachment had returned it had returned to stay. Besides, I read this letter with my rival sitting in the room (you two gentlemen were sitting in the room too as it happens), and when hard, self-contained people do come under these influences, they do not give way to them by halves.

“Thank you,” said Vane-Cartwright, when we had read and returned the letter. “I am glad you have heard me so patiently. That all this makes me less of a villain than you thought me, I do not pretend to say; but I think you will understand why I wished some men whom I respected, as I respect you, to know my story. I do not suggest for a moment that it should influence your present action. Here I am, as I said to begin with, your prisoner. Of course you see that society is just as safe from future murders from me as from any man. But if your principles of justice demand life for life, or if human feeling makes you resolve to avenge your friend, that is just what I came here expecting. I am the last man in the world who could give an unprejudiced opinion on the ethics of punishment.”

He ended with a quiet and by no means disagreeable smile.

As I have often said I make no sort of pretence to report any talk quite correctly, and here, where the manner of the talk is of special importance, I feel more than ever my incompetence to report it. I can only say that the singular confession, of which I have striven to repeat the purport, was in reality delivered with a great deal of restrained eloquence, and with occasional most moving play of facial expression, all the more striking in a man whom I had seldom before seen to move a muscle of his face unnecessarily. It was delivered to two men of whom one (myself) was physically overwrought, while the other (Callaghan), naturally emotional, was at the commencement in the fullest elation of triumphant pursuit, in other words, ready to recoil violently.

We sat, I do not know how long, each waiting for the other to speak. Vane-Cartwright sat meanwhile neither looking at us nor moving his countenance⁠—only the fingers of one hand kept drumming gently upon his knee.

At last I did what I think I never did but once before, obeyed an impulse almost physical, to speak words which my mouth seemed to utter mechanically. If they were the words of reason, they were not the words of my conscious thought, for that was busy with all, and more than all the scruples which had ever made this business hard to me.

“Mr. Vane-Cartwright,” I said, “it is my painful duty to tell you at once that I do not believe one word you have said, except what I knew already.”

He went white for a moment; then quickly recomposed himself and inclined his head slightly with a politely disdainful expression.

“Oh, Driver,” said Callaghan, in a gentle tone, and he arose and paced the room. He was strangely moved. To begin with, though he had felt nothing but remorseless glee in his share in hunting his victim down, he would in any case have felt great repugnance at giving him the coup de grâce. But then he had once taken the step of inviting that victim into his own room; he had sat there for an hour and a half with that victim by his own fireside, telling his life-story and implicitly pleading for his life. And the pleading had been conducted under the flattering pretext that it was not pleading at all but the instinctive confidence of a redoubtable antagonist, in one whom he respected for having beaten him. As for the story itself, Callaghan did not exactly believe it; on the contrary, I found afterwards that, while I had not got beyond a vague sense that the whole story was a tissue of lies, he had noted with rapid acuteness each of the numerous points of improbability in it; but to his mind (Irish, if I may say publicly what I have said to him) the fact that the story appealed to his imaginative sympathy was almost as good as its being true, and what in respect of credibility was wanting to its effect was quite made good by Callaghan’s admiration for the intrepidity with which the man had carried out this attempt on us. And the story did appeal to his sympathy, he had sympathised with his early struggles, he had