Whatever his motive, Callaghan was upon the point of resolving that, at least from his own room, where the criminal had come to appeal to his mercy, that criminal should go away free. And if Callaghan had so resolved I should have been powerless for a time; he was prepared and I was not as to the steps immediately to be taken to secure Vane-Cartwright’s arrest. But it seems, if for once I may use that phrase with so little or else so deep a meaning, that the luck had departed from Vane-Cartwright. At this crisis of his fate a device of his own recoiled upon him with terrible force.
“I cannot do it! I cannot do it!” Callaghan was exclaiming, when the door opened and a telegram was brought for me. This was the message: “Clarissa terribly ill, symptoms poison, Bancroft, Fidele.” It meant that my wife was dying at the friend’s villa to which she had gone, and dying by that man’s means, and it was certified by the use of the password which my wife had told me to expect. I did not reflect and I did not speak; I grasped Callaghan’s arm and I put the telegram in his hand. He knew enough to understand the message well. He read it with an altered face. He passed it to Vane-Cartwright and said: “Read that, and take it for my answer.” I should doubt if Vane-Cartwright had often been violently angry, but he was now. He dashed the telegram down with a curse. “The fool,” he said, and he gasped with passion, “if he was going to try that trick, why did not he do it before?” Callaghan stepped up to me, put his big arms round me, and for a moment hugged me in them, with tears in his eyes. Then without a word he strode across the room, and, before I could see what was happening, Vane-Cartwright’s hands were tied behind his back with a great silk handkerchief.
XXII
My story draws towards its close, and of mystery or of sudden peril it has little more to tell. Upon one point, the most vital to me, let me not give the reader a moment’s suspense. My wife did not die of poison, had not been poisoned, had not been ill, had not sent that telegram. What had happened was this: on one single occasion she had not despatched her own message herself; through the misunderstanding or too prompt courtesy of her host’s butler, the telegram which she had written had been taken by a messenger, and it had fallen into the hands of the enemy’s watchful emissary. It had revealed to him the password which my wife used to me; and in its place there had gone over the wires a message which would indeed have called me back at any stage of the pursuit, but which was fated to arrive neither sooner nor later than the moment when it must destroy Vane-Cartwright’s last hope of escape.
I say not later, for indeed I have evidence strong enough for my now suspicious mind that Vane-Cartwright had endeavoured to prepare his escape in the event of his failure to persuade Callaghan and myself. An unoccupied flat immediately below Callaghan’s had the day before been engaged by a nameless man, who paid a quarter’s rent in advance, and on the day of his interview with us, several strange persons, who were never seen there again, arrived with every sign of belated haste; but, whatever accident had delayed them, they arrived a quarter of an hour after we had left.
And so on the 15th of May, 1897, nearly sixteen months after Peters’ death, his murderer was handed over to the police, with information which, including as it did the fact of his confession, ensured their taking him into custody.
Then I, in my turn, became Callaghan’s prisoner. I arrived at Charing Cross station in good time for the night train, and found my luggage already there and registered, and my ticket taken. Our tickets taken, rather, for, protest as I might, I was escorted by Callaghan, indeed nursed (and I needed it) the whole way to Florence, and to the villa where my wife was staying. One item remains untold to complete for the present the account of the debt which I owe him. We had hardly left Charing Cross when his quick wits arrived at precisely that explanation of the telegram which in happy fact was true; but all the way, talkative man though he was, he refrained from vexing my bruised mind with a hope which, he knew, I should not be able to trust.
When he had learnt at the door that his happy foreboding was true, no entreaty would induce him to stay and break bread. He returned at once to England, leaving me to enter alone to that reunion of which I need say nothing, nor even tell how much two people had hungered for it.
The reader who is curious in such matters might almost reconstruct for himself (in spite of the newspaper reports which naturally are misleading) the trial of William Vane-Cartwright. He might pick out from these pages the facts capable of legal proof, which, once proved and once marshalled into their places, could leave no reasonable doubt of the prisoner’s guilt.
But, however late, the trained intelligence of the police had now been applied to the matter, and the case wore an altered aspect. No startling discovery had come to pass, only the revelation of the obvious. Some points had been ascertained
