“Yes, vicar, and for the credit of your family,” retorted Ned, drily.
Mr. Brander did not look surprised, but only deeply grieved. He laid his handsome white hand on the colonist’s shoulder, and addressed him in tones of almost fatherly expostulation and entreaty.
“Look here,” he said; “I don’t want to preach; there’s nothing I dislike more than preaching out of the pulpit. But I must say a few words to you now I have the chance; and you may be angry with me if you like.”
“All right, vicar, fire away—I mean go on,” he corrected, respectfully. “Let me tell you, it’s not many men of your profession I would listen to (except in church, where you all have a prescriptive right to do your worst on us.) But I’ve learnt something about you quite recently which makes me think you’re different from the rest. So, sir, when you please, I’m all attention.”
“Well, then,” began the vicar in his most persuasive tones, “don’t you think it’s very uncharitable of you to come over here with the fixed intention of ruining a man? And all for what? What good can it do your unfortunate sister now to have the past raked up, and her sins as well as those of others dragged again into the light? Now, do you even think, going to work in the spirit you do, that you are sure to light upon the right person to punish? Isn’t it possible that, acting with such a vindictive feeling as animates you, you may make an innocent man suffer, for lack of finding the guilty one?”
“No; to be plain with you, vicar, I don’t think anything of the kind. As for the feeling which animates me, I think I ought to understand that better than anybody; and I’ll let you know what it is. I’m not a generous man, parson; years ago I might have been, perhaps, at least as far as my favorite sister was concerned. But I’ve roughed it a good bit in the world since then, and all the pretty bloom has been rubbed off my character, d’ye see? But I’m a just man: and I don’t see why, if a man and a woman sin, the woman should get all the kicks and the man all the halfpence. That’s a vulgar way of putting it, but you’ll know what I mean. My poor sister goes wrong. I don’t say she was worth much sympathy; and my private feeling has nothing to do with it; but she had her punishment. She was ruined, and then brutally murdered. Yes, don’t tell me any humbugging stories about her going away of her own accord; I know better. Whatever happened, poor Nell was not the girl to slink off like that, and never be heard of again. She’d have come over to me, if she’d had to work her own passage in men’s clothes, as they say the lasses do sometimes. Well, that’s the woman’s end; now for the man. He gets the woman’s love, for what it’s worth. I don’t put much value on such things myself; but anyhow, he gets it. Then when he’s tired of it and of her, and the girl grows importunate and her love inconvenient, he quietly puts her out of the way, and no questions asked—”
“Oh, but there were questions asked, and very inconvenient ones too,” interrupted the vicar, gently.
Then he bit his lips, as if he had not meant to say so much.
“Aha, vicar, it looks very much as if you had a notion who it is I’m driving at!”
“I don’t pretend to deny that you mean my unlucky brother,” said the vicar, gravely. “To admit that is really to admit nothing, as everybody knows he was suspected, just as they know too that I myself never believed he did it.”