Gerald could not stand it any longer. As he left the room and the house, Roland went up to the bed with a burst, and confessed all. To have kept in the secret would have choked him.
Gerald was the enemy who had done it all; Gerald Yorke had been the one to sow the tares amid wheat in his neighbour's field.
A moment of exquisite pain for Hamish; a slight, short struggle with the human passions, not yet quite dead within his aching breast; and then his loving-kindness resumed its sway, never again to quit him.
"Bring him back to me, dear Roland; bring him back that I may send him on his way with words of better comfort," he whispered, with his ineffable smile of peace.
[CHAPTER XL.]
GODFREY PITMAN'S TALE.
Shut in with closed doors, George Winter told his tale. Not quite all he could tell; and not the truth in one very important particular. If that single item of fact might be kept secret to the end, the speaker's will was good for it.
They were all standing. Not one sat. And the room seemed filled with the six men in it, most of whom were tall. The crimson curtain, that Annabel Channing had mended, was drawn before the bookcase: on the table-cover lay pens and ink and paper, for Mr. Greatorex sometimes wrote at night in his own room. He and Judge Kene were near each other; the clergyman was almost within the shadow of the window curtain; Bede a little farther behind. On the opposite side of the table, telling his tale, with the light of the bright winter's day falling full upon him, illumining every turn of his face, and, so to say, every word he uttered, was George Winter. And, at right angles with the whole assemblage, his keen eyes and ears taking in every word and look in silence, stood the detective, Jonas Butterby.
Mr. Greatorex, in spite of his son Bede's protestations, had refused to sanction any steps for the release of Alletha Rye from custody. As for Butterby, in that matter he seemed more inexorably hard than a granite stone. "Show us that the young woman is innocent before you talk about it," said they both with reason. And so George Winter was had in to relate what he knew; and Mr. Greatorex--not to speak of some of the rest--felt that his senses were temporarily struck out of him when he discovered that his efficient and trusted clerk, Brown, was the long-sought after and ill-reputed Godfrey Pitman.
With a brief summary of the circumstances which had led him, disguised, and under the false name of Pitman, to Mrs. Jones's house at Helstonleigh, George Winter passed on to the night of the tragedy, and to the events which had taken him back to the house after his departure from it in the afternoon. If ever Mr. Butterby's silent eyes wore an eager light, it was then; not the faintest turn of a look, not the smallest syllable was lost upon him.