Bayle gazed at him sternly, but with the strange oppression gone, and the shadow of the vague horror fading into nothingness.
“I’m confessing to you, sir, just as if I were a Roman Catholic, and you were a priest.”
“But I decline to receive your confession on such terms, James Thickens,” cried Bayle sternly. “I warn you that, if you make me the recipient of your confidence, I must be free to lay the case before your employers.”
“Yes, of course,” said Thickens with the same grim smile. “Hear me out, Mr Bayle, sir. You’d never think it of me, who came regularly to church, and never missed—you’d never think I had false keys made to our safe; but I did. Two months ago, in London.”
Bayle involuntarily drew back his chair, and Thickens laughed—a little hard, dry laugh.
“Don’t be hard on the man, Mr Bayle, who advised you not to put your money and securities in at Dixons’.”
“Go on, sir,” said the curate sternly.
“Yes: I will go on!” cried Thickens, speaking now excitedly, in a low, harsh voice. “I can’t carry on that nonsense. Look here, sir,” he continued, shuffling his chair closer to his visitor, and getting hold of his sleeve, “you don’t know our habits at the bank. Everything is locked up in our strong-room, and Hallam keeps the key of that, and carefully too! I go in and out there often, but it’s always when he’s in the room, and when he is not there he always locks it, so that, though I tried for years to get in there, I never had a chance.”
“Wretched man!” cried Bayle, trying to shake off his grip, but Thickens’s fingers closed upon his arm like a claw.
“Yes, I was wretched, and that’s why I had the keys made, and altered again and again till I could get them to fit. Then one day I had my chance. Hallam went over to Lincoln, and I had a good examination of the different securities, shares, deeds—scrip of all kinds—that I had down on a paper, an abstract from my books.”