“It was that drove me to send a message to him,” cried the miserable old woman. “I told him he needn’t expect on that account to escape the consequences of his deuced deed, but that I’d prove it against him, and ruin him with his fine new lady none the less, if he didn’t come to terms.”
“Exactly. And he answered?”
“He answered, O the devil, by turning up with a live baby as his fine lady had borne to another, and by proposing to exchange it for the dead one. She’d never know, he said, and Georgie would never know neither, as they was both, the two of them, lying light-headed from their confinements. It was true of my daughter, anyhow; and, when she came to herself at last, she never thought but to accept the other one’s baby for her own, though to be sure, as things turned out, she never could abide it. He told me, for his part, that he’d no mind as the child of another should come to inherit his lady’s money; and so we agreed to make the exchange, and he paid me to keep the secret, and that is the devil and all of the truth, so God burst my lungs if it isn’t.”
“And bad enough, old lady. It couldn’t be much worse, to my mind, short of murder.”
“I never killed nothing,” she moaned. “I wouldn’t put my hand to such a wickedness.”
“You’ll have to put it to a document attesting all this, though,” said the detective, “if you want to save your bacon.”
“I’ll do it, sir,” she said; “I’ll do it, on the deuce of my honour, if you’ll only promise not to let him get at me.”
Mr Shapter, standing with me in the background, caught and pressed my hand congratulatory, and then stepped forward.
“Come, Jannaway,” he said; “paper and ink. We’ll clinch this matter while we are about it.”
It was what I had half expected, half foreseen; but the assurance of its actuality found me stunned from speech. I could only look on and listen in a sort of stupor, while the lawyer wrote, and finished, and read out what he had written—the evidence—circumstantial, if you like—to my parentage.