“Then I should go through with it as well as a man may.”
“And if I let you off the full penalty,” said Ned, wondering if it were possible to disturb this stolid serenity, “what would you feel towards me?”
“Nothing,” answered the vicar, promptly. “You would do it, not for my sake, but out of admiration for my wife, pity for my children, and because my arrest would involve my brother’s, as an accessory after the fact. He saw me immediately after the—the deed: the crime, in fact: and he concurred, if he did not assist, in the concealment of the body, as Abel here probably knows.”
“Ay,” said Abel Squires, who was standing, awkwardly, as near the door as possible. “Mester Vernon and me had walked nigh all t’ way from Sheffield together, and we heerd cries o’ ‘Murder!’ An’ Mester Vernon he left me, an’ he jumped o’er t’ wall into t’ churchyard, an’ when he coom back he looked skeered loike, and his reight hond wur stained red, as if he’d held another hond that wur redder still. An’ somehow Ah guessed whose hond it wur as he’d been holdin’.”
Abel, after delivering this speech in a mumbling, shamefaced manner, ended abruptly, and looked at the door, as if he felt that his unpleasant mission was over. The vicar listened with interest, and nodded assent to the latter portion of the tramp’s words. Ned Mitchell continued to gaze at Meredith like a bear baulked of his prey.
“I don’t believe you’ve even felt much remorse all these years,” he said, savagely.
The vicar faced him frankly.
“To tell the truth, I haven’t,” he said. “That’s not in my temperament. I suppose this sounds especially remarkable because I am a clergyman. But my profession was forced upon me; I had to put an unnatural curb upon myself, and succeeded in attaining a pitch of outward decorum such as none of my family had ever reached before. But the strain was too great, for I am not by temperament virtuous; none of my family are. Vernon has an accident, and not his nature, to thank for his superiority. That is all I have to say.”
The vicar leaned back in his chair, as if weary of the discussion.
“Then you don’t seem to have any conscience,” said Ned, regarding him in bewilderment.