She threw her apron over her head, and sobbed as if her heart would burst.
"I will show you, Mother, how one crime produces another," I was about to say, when a loud rap at the door recalled my self-possession; and I was summoned to attend the sitting of the magistrates, and tell all I knew about the murder.
CHAPTER XX.
A LAST LOOK AT OLD FRIENDS.
I made my deposition minutely and circumstantially, from the time of my conversation with Adam Hows until the time when, accompanied by George Norton, we encountered him and Bill Martin in the plantations, and took the latter prisoner. My statement was so clear, so plausible, so perfectly matter-of-fact, that this hideous lie was received by wise and well-educated men as God's truth. I heard myself spoken of as a sober, excellent young man, well worthy of the confidence and affection of the 'Squire, and extremely grateful for the many favours he had bestowed upon me; while the character that Martin bore, and his previous pursuits, were enough to condemn him, independently of the startling evidence that I, and others from among his own wild companions, had given against him. A conversation that one of these men had accidentally heard between him and Adam Hows, proclaiming their intention to rob and murder Mr. Carlos, was indeed more conclusive of their guilt than my own account, though that was sufficient to have hung him twice over.
Bill kept his eye fixed on me during the examination. I met it with a degree of outward calmness; but it thrilled me to the soul, and has haunted me ever since. He made no attempt at vindication. He said that the evidence brought against him was circumstantially correct, yet, for all that, neither he nor his accomplice had actually murdered the Squire, and that God, who looked deeper than man, knew that what he said was true.
Of course no one listened to such an absurd statement. But, to cut this painful part of my story short—for it is agony to dwell upon it—he was tried, condemned, and finally executed at ——. I saw him hung.
Yes, Reader, you may well start back from the page in horror. To be sure that my victim was dead, I actually witnessed his last struggles, and returned home satisfied that the tongue I most dreaded upon earth—the only living creature who suspected my guilt—was silenced and cold for ever.
Shallow fool that I was! Conscience never sleeps! The voice of remorse sounds up from the lowest deeps, with the clang of the archangel's trump blasting the guilty ear with its judgment-peal. With him, my peace of mind, self-respect, and hopes of heaven, vanished for ever!