“If I was to go, there’d be a regular wreck, and I shouldn’t get a penny of my back wages. If I stay, he may get them two well married, and then there’d be money in the house. Better stay. Lor’, if people only knew all I could tell ’em about this house, and the scraping, and putting off bills, and the troubles with Miss May and the two boys, and—”
Isaac drew a long breath and turned rather white.
“I feel sometimes as if I ought to make a clean breast of it, but I don’t like to. He isn’t such a bad sort, when you come to know him, but that—ugh!”
He shuddered, and began to rattle the knives and forks upon the table, giving one a rub now and then on his shabby livery.
“It’s a puzzler,” he said, stopping short, after breathing in a glass, and giving it a rub with a cloth. “Some day, I suppose, there’ll be a difference, and he’ll be flush of money. I suppose he daren’t start yet. Suppose I—No; that wouldn’t do. He’ll pay all the back, then, and I might—”
Isaac shuddered again, and muttered to himself in a very mysterious way. Then, all at once:
“Why, I might cry halves, and make him set me up for life. Why not? She was good as gone, and—”
He set down the glass, and wiped the dew that had gathered off his brow, looking whiter than before, for just then a memory had come into Isaac’s mental vision—it was a horrible recollection of having been tempted to go and see the execution of a murderer at the county town, and this man’s accomplice was executed a month later.
“Accomplice” was an ugly word that seemed to force itself into Isaac’s mind, and he shook his head and hurriedly finished laying the cloth.
“Let him pay me my wages, all back arrears,” he said. “Perhaps there is a way of selling a secret without being an accomplice, but I don’t know, and—oh, I couldn’t do it. It would kill that poor girl, who’s about worried to death with the dreadful business, without there being anything else.”