“Not much, I suppose,” answered the vicar; “though indeed lately I have had troubled nights, and shown the family tendency towards somnambulism; so my wife tells me. And in rather an unfortunate way,” he added, with a half smile.
As the vicar finished speaking, Ned came forward with his ponderous tread, laid his hand heavily on the writing-table, and looked down at the clergyman’s bland face with the air of a strong man who has definitely made up his mind.
“Now then, parson, I’ll tell you what you’ll have to do. You take that pen that you’ve just been writing your precious sermons with, and you write a detailed confession of your intrigue with my sister, your visits to her at night, your correspondence with her, the way in which you murdered her, and the way in which you disposed of her body. Then sign your name and put the date in full, and me and Abel here will oblige you by putting our signatures as witnesses.”
“And if I do this, what follows?” asked the vicar, taking up the pen and examining the nib.
“Then you get my permission to leave this country for any other you choose with your wife and children. And as long as you keep away, this paper will never go out of my possession.”
“And if I don’t do this?”
“What’s the good of going into that?”
The eyes of the two men met, and they understood each other. Without wasting more words, Meredith turned to the table, invited Ned with a gesture to sit down, and proceeded to draw up the prescribed confession. This he did fully and frankly, adding at the end certain graceful expressions of contrition which Ned, reading the document over carefully, took for what they were worth. The main body of the composition satisfied him, however; and after appending his own signature to the confession as a witness, and insisting on Abel’s adding his, he sealed up the paper with great solemnity. Then, intimating to Meredith Brander that the sooner he carried out the remaining part of the compact and left the country, the better it would be for him, he left the room with the curtest of farewells, and hastened out of the house to avoid what he called “another scene with the woman.”
Once outside he looked back at the vicarage with great interest.
“If one had to be a rascal,” said he, with some irrepressible admiration, “that’s the sort of rascal one would choose to be.”