“Oh, you never came near. Nobody never came near. Granny got tired of it. ‘I’ll have my revenge,’ said she. So she sent for Dirty Jack, and he took it all down in writing.”
“Took it all down in writing about me?” She nodded her head in the affirmative. “If you know so much, no doubt you know what it was that he took down—eh?”
“Oh, I know right enough.”
“Why not tell me?”
“I know all about it, but I ain’t a-going to split.”
Further persuasion on Kester’s part had no other effect than to induce the girl to assert in still more emphatic terms that “she wasn’t a-going to split.”
Evidently nothing more was to be got from her. But she had said enough already to confirm his worst fears. Mother Mim, out of spite for the neglect with which he had treated her, had made a confession at the last moment, similar in purport to what she had told him when last there. Such a confession—if not absolutely dangerous to him—she having assured him that none of the witnesses were now living—might be made a source of infinite annoyance to him. Such a story, once made public, might bring forth witnesses and evidence from twenty hitherto unsuspected quarters, and fetter him round, link by link, with a chain of evidence from which he might find it impossible to extricate himself. At every sacrifice, Mother Mim’s confession must be destroyed or suppressed. Such were some of the thoughts that passed through Kester’s mind as he stood there biting his nails. Again and again he cursed himself in that he had allowed any such confession to emanate from the dead woman, whose silence a little extra kindness on his part would have effectually secured.
“And where is this Dirty Jack, as you call him?” he said, at last.
“He’s in there”—indicating the hut with a jerk of her head—“fast asleep.”
“Fast asleep in the same room with your grandmother?”