Tracks in the Snow

of which the speaker might have seemed incapable, and which called forth for the hard man in the dock a transient glow of human sympathy. Every other part of his conduct, so far as it was admitted, was made the subject of an explanation, by itself plausible. But little was admitted. Every separate item of the evidence was made the subject of a doubt, by itself reasonable. If a witness had been called to tell some very plain matter of fact, that kind of plain fact under one’s eyes was notoriously the sort of thing about which the most careless mistakes were made. If a witness had had a longer tale to tell he had revealed some poisonous prepossession. I, for example, a most deleterious type of cleric, had, besides a prejudice against unorthodox Vane-Cartwright, an animus to defend Trethewy, arising from that sickly sentiment towards Miss Trethewy which I betrayed when I fled to her from my ailing family at Florence. In Trethewy’s case again there had been a confession of a very different order; and the suggestion was dexterously worked that something still lay concealed behind Trethewy’s story. Withal the vastness of the region of possibility was exhibited with vigorous appeals to the imagination. Strong in every part, the defence as a whole was bound to be weak; the fatality which made so many lies and blunders work together for evil was beyond belief; the conduct which needed so much psychology to defend it was indefensible.

So the verdict was given and the sentence was passed.

XXIII

Once again I saw William Vane-Cartwright. At his own request I was summoned to visit him in the gaol. It was not the interview of penitent and confessor; none the less I am bound to silence about it, even though my silence may involve the suppression of something which tells in his favour. One thing I may and must say. Part of his object in sending for me was to make me his agent in several acts of kindness.

As I look back, I often ask myself: Was there indeed no truth, beyond what we knew, in the tale that this man told to Callaghan and me, and which was skilfully woven to accord as far as possible with many things which we might have and had in fact discovered. In point of vital facts it was certainly false. I could now disprove every syllable of that love story; his acquaintance with Miss Denison was only a few months old; she had never known Peters; and the letter that he showed us was a forgery of course. I happen, moreover, too late for any useful purpose, to have met several people who knew Longhurst well; all agree that he was rough and uncompanionable, all that he was strictly honest and touchingly kind; all testify that in his later days he was a total abstainer.

Yet, in the face of this, I believe that Vane-Cartwright described fairly, as well as with insight, the influences which in boyhood and early manhood told so disastrously upon him. I now know, as it happens, a good deal about his parents, for one of my present neighbours was a family friend of theirs. They were a gifted but eccentric couple, with more “principles” than any two heads can safely hold. Little as I like their beliefs, I cannot but suspect that their home life was governed by a conscientiousness and a tender affection for their child, from which, if he had wished to be guided right, some light must have fallen on his path. Yet without doubt their training was as bad a preparation as could be for what he was to undergo. He lost his fortune early, and was exiled to a settlement in the East which, by all accounts, was not a school of Christian chivalry. Almost everything in his surroundings there jarred upon his sensibility which on the aesthetic side was more than commonly keen. Dozens of English lads pass through just such trials unshaken, some even unspotted, but they have been far otherwise nurtured than he. Peters too had an influence upon his youth. I, who knew Peters so well, know that he cannot have done the spiteful things which Vane-Cartwright said, but I do not doubt for one moment that he did repel his young associate when he need not have done so. Peters was young too, and may well be forgiven, but I can imagine that by that chill touch he sped his comrade on the downward course which chanced to involve his own murder.

Altogether it is easy enough to form some image, not merely monstrous, of the way in which that character formed itself out of its surroundings; to understand how the poor lad became more and more centred in himself; to praise him just in so far as that concentration was strength; to note where that strength lay, in the one virtue which in fact he had claimed as his own, in the unflinching avowal to himself of the motive by which he meant to live.

That motive, a calculated resolve to be wealthy, to become detached in outward fact as he was already in feeling from the sort of people and the sort of surroundings amid which his present lot was cast, had already been formed when the partnership with Longhurst offered him his opportunity. One may well believe him that the three years of that partnership cost him much. His one companion was a man whom, I take it, he was incapable of liking, and his position at first was one of subjection to him. He had lied to us much about Longhurst, but I fancy that he had spoken of him with genuine, however unjust, dislike. What particular fraud he played upon him, or whether it was, strictly speaking, a fraud at all, I do not know. But no doubt he was by nature mean (though ready enough to spend money), and he was probably