Even if this was all, it still meant that the hope upon which Vane-Cartwright had set his soul, the hope not of a competence but of eminent wealth, was about to slip away, and to slip away perhaps irretrievably. For, as I have lately learnt, he was then ill, could not remain in that climate, would not, if he fell down the ladder, be able to start again, with more money and more experience, where he had started three years before. In the choice which then arose he was not the man to set his personal safety in the scales against his ambition. And so the incredible deed was done, and fortune favoured the murderer with the report that his victim had been lost in a wrecked ship (possibly even he had met with that report before he killed him). Henceforward, watchful as he had to be for a while, the chief burden which his guilt laid upon him was that of bearing himself with indifference.
Thirteen years had passed, years of unvarying success. The watchfulness was now seldom needed, and the indifference had become a pose. And so at last, on his first evening at Grenvile Combe, he fell talking in his wonted way of Longhurst, and gave that false account of his end to one of the only two living men with whom it behoved him to take care. Instantly the spectre of his crime, which he thought had been laid, confronted him, and confronted him, as some recollection warned him, with the real peril of public shame, perhaps conviction and death. Instantly too there arose, as if to his aid, not as yet the full strength of his intellect and courage, but the ingrained, dormant spirit of crime. If he had only said to Peters, “He sailed in the Eleanor with me. I killed him. I will tell you all about it,” I have not a shadow of a doubt that his confession would have been kept inviolate. Only there were trials from which even his nerve recoiled, and plain facts of human nature which his acuteness never saw. So the same deed was done again in quiet reliance upon that wonderful luck which this time also had provided him with a screen against suspicion, and this time also seemed to require nothing of him after the act was accomplished except to bear himself carelessly. Indeed, though he began to bear himself carelessly too soon—for he trusted characteristically that Peters had this night followed the practice of opening the window, which he was oddly fond of preaching, and he left the room without troubling to look behind the curtain—his confidence seemed justified. There was nothing in the room or in the house, nothing under the wide vault of that starlit sky that was destined to tell the tale.
Morning brought to his eyes, though not yet to his comprehension, the presence of a huge calamity, for the ground was white with snow in which, if Trethewy had come through it, his tracks would still be seen. Soon he heard that Trethewy had in fact come home when the snow lay there. Then at last his whole mind rose to the full height of the occasion, to a height of composure and energy from which in all his later doings he never declined far. I have an unbounded hatred for that prevalent worship of strong men which seems to me to be born of craven fear. Yet it extorts my most unwilling admiration of this man that, when safety depended so much upon inaction, the only action he took was such as at once was appallingly dangerous and yet was the only way to avoid an even greater peril.
But strangely enough as I shut my mind against that haunting memory which I have written these pages to expel, far different traits and incidents from this keep longest their hold upon my imagination. I remember Peters not as he died but as he lived; and the murderer stands before me, as I take my leave, not in virtue of signal acts of crime (which I could more easily have forgiven) but of little acts, words, even tones of hardness and of concentrated selfishness, faintly noted in my story, rendered darker to me by the knowledge that he could be courteous and kind when it suited him. He stands there as the type to me, not of that rare being the splendid criminal, but of the man who in the old phrase is “without bowels.” And men (on whose souls also may God have mercy) are not rare among us, who, without his intellect or his daring, are as hard as he, but for whom, through circumstances—not uncommon and I do not call them fortunate—the path of consistent selfishness does not diverge from the path of a respectable life.
Strangely too, one of
