‘I always did believe it, until your own lips told me otherwise.’
‘Yes, yes! but in confession I wished to make the worst of my error, in order to see if I should have absolution for the worst. But it really was an accident! I assure you, on my honour.’
‘Mr Hindes,’ said Father Walcheren, sternly, ‘let us have no fooling, if you please! I cannot listen to two stories. Last week you said, distinctly, that you did it by design. Now you want to make out it was an accident. But I shall choose to believe that what you said in the confessional, when you thought you were speaking to a stranger, was the true version of the story.’
‘It was, it was; but it is safe with you!’ cried Hindes, as though he felt himself beaten, and declined to fight any longer. ‘I will tell you the whole truth, indeed I will! It will be a comfort to get it clean off my soul.’
At this critical moment it flashed through Father Walcheren’s mind that he should warn his penitent that he was not in the confessional, but he could not. Jenny—his murdered Jenny, seemed to flit before him, with her beautiful features all soiled with the damps of death and almost indistinguishable through corruption, crying aloud for justice on her assassin, and, right or wrong, he could not, and he did not, speak.
‘It happened just as I told you the other day,’ continued Henry Hindes. ‘I loved her—don’t be angry with me, it is all over now, you know—and I would not have harmed her for the world, but I loved her long before she ever knew you, and her marriage made me jealous as well as angry. Mr Crampton deputed me to follow her down to Dover and make her an offer to return home, on the condition that she gave you up and allowed her father to annul the marriage, on a plea that you took a false oath concerning her age. When I arrived at the hotel she had gone out, and I wandered on the cliffs to beguile the time, and there I met her.’
‘Go on!’ said Frederick, curtly.
‘I told you the rest,’ replied Hindes, beginning to feel uneasy at the other’s manner.
‘I wish to hear it again. Whilst you are about it, you had better tell all.’
‘I had no intention of injuring her, Mr Walcheren; indeed, you must believe that! I told her all her father had commissioned me to say, and she laughed in my face at the idea. She wanted to know what business it was of mine to interfere in her affairs, and why her father had not gone down himself to make his proposals in person. And then, I was mad enough to tell her the reason that I took such an interest in all that concerned her. I told her how long I had loved her.’