“We might. In fact, we will, if you will promise––”
She could not wait for his formal conclusion. She broke in: “I’ll promise anything––anything! Oh I don’t want to be free just for the sake of escaping punishment! No, no. I just want a chance to––to expiate the evil I have done. I want to do some good to undo all the bad I’ve brought about. I won’t try to shift any blame. I want to confess. It will take this awful load off my heart to tell people what a wicked fool I’ve been.”
Verrinder checked her: “But that is just what you must not do. Unless you can assure us that you will carry this burden about with you and keep it secret at no matter what cost, then we shall have to proceed with the case––legally. We shall have to exhume Sir Joseph and Lady Webling, as it were, and drag the whole thing through the courts. We’d really rather not, but if you insist––”
“Oh, I’ll promise. I’ll keep the secret. Let them rest.”
She was driven less by the thought of her own liberty than the terror of exposing the dead. The mere thought brought back pictures of hideous days when the grave was not refuge enough from vengeance, when bodies were dug up, gibbeted, haled by a chain along the unwashed cobblestones, quartered with a sword in the market-place and then flung back to the dark.
Verrinder may have feared that Marie Louise yielded under duress, and that when she was out of reach of the law she would forget, so he said
“Would you swear to keep this inviolate?”
“Yes!”
“Have you a Bible?”
She thought there must be one, and she searched for it among the bookshelves. But first she came across one in the German tongue. It fell open easily, as if it had been a 73 familiar companion of Sir Joseph’s. She abhorred the sight of the words that youthful Sunday-school lessons had given an unearthly sanctity as she recognized them twisted into the German paraphrase and printed in the twisted German type. But she said: