“Suppose that through us a murderer escape?” said Miss Demster. “If he commit another murder, shall we be quite clear of the guilt of the crime?”
“Or the murder may be discovered, but not the right person, and an innocent man be hanged.” Deborah’s terrible suggestion made both the ladies shudder.
“I tell you what we’ll do,” said Miss Demster, after some minutes of painful reflection: “we’ll hurry home and say nothing about the matter, unless some innocent poor man be seized, and then we’ll come forward and declare all that we saw, and give evidence that it was a gentleman—I mean, one who looked like a gentleman—who committed the murder.”
This was a compromise with conscience, and any compromise with conscience is a dangerous thing. However, for the time it half quieted the minds of the two poor ladies.
They hurried home, hardly heeding the furious blast which suddenly rose, and which, had they been at thetop of the cliffs, would almost have blown them off their feet. Miss Demster opened the door of her house with a trembling hand. There was a kind of hope in her mind that once within the quiet little dwelling trouble, like the stormy wind, could be shut out; but memory and consciousness of having evaded a duty could not be excluded. Hard did the sisters try to persuade themselves that they had only done what was natural and right. Betsy thought of the history of Achan, and recalled other instances in Scripture of sin being brought to light. Deborah remembered stories of murder having been found out when there had seemed to be no clue by which to discover who had committed the crime.
A neighbour dropped in just when the ladies were attempting to eat their frugal supper, for which all appetite was gone. The storm by this time had lulled.
“O Miss Demster, Miss Deborah, have you heard the shocking, shocking news?” cried the visitor, throwing herself down on a seat. “Poor young Manly has been found, with his neck and ever so many other bones broken, at the bottom of a cliff!”
“Indeed!” exclaimed the sisters, their consciences pricking them sorely for expressing such hypocritical surprise.
“He had evidently fallen when attempting an impossible feat. You were intending to take a walk in that direction, I know. Did you hear nothing, see nothing, of this dreadful accident?”
Miss Demster actually knocked over the tea-tray, smashed her cherished china, and sent the boiling contents of the pot over the carpet and her visitor’s feet. It was her desperate resource for avoiding giving a reply.