Ned Mitchell, although he had let Meredith Brander off easily at
the moment of the discovery of the body, had no intention of letting
his sister’s murderer escape the just punishment of his crime. The
discovery of the vicar’s ring inside the poor girl’s remains had not
been altogether unexpected by Ned and by the doctor, whom he had taken
into his confidence. He had had the wit to connect the vicar’s loss
of his ring, which the girl must have stolen and secreted unnoticed
by him in the course of their last fatal interview, with the strange
threat Nellie Mitchell had uttered to Martha Lowndes. He had confided
his suspicions to the doctor, who had thus been on the alert to prevent
Meredith from touching the remains of the murdered girl before he
himself had examined them.
After a few words of explanation to old Mr. Williams, and a little
substantial advice to the two workmen who had dug out the skeleton, Ned
marched off with Abel Squires in the direction of Rishton Vicarage. On
the way they passed Vernon Brander, who wished to stop Ned. But the
latter hurried on, and to all the entreaties he tried to utter, turned
a deaf ear.
“If you’ve been fool enough to hold your tongue for ten years, and bear
the blame of somebody else’s crime, that’s nothing to do with me. You
may talk till you’re tired, but my sister’s murderer shall get what he
deserves.”
And he walked on stubbornly with the tramp.
When they reached the Vicarage, and asked to see the vicar, they were
shown into the drawing-room, and left waiting there for some minutes.
When the door opened, it was Mrs. Brander, instead of her husband, who
came in.
“What, has he run away already?” asked Ned, in a hard, jeering tone.
“No, my husband does not yet know you are here,” she answered, in a
very sad voice. “I knew you would come, and so I told the servant to
announce your arrival to me.”
“What’s the good of that?” asked Ned, roughly. “You’ve done no harm,
and we’ve nothing to do with you, except that we’re going to set you
free from a rascal.”
Abel Squires had withdrawn to the farthest window, and tried to hide
himself behind the curtain. Rough fellow as he was, to hear a man speak
in a bullying tone to that beautiful, dignified lady was too much for
him.
Mrs. Brander had never in her life before looked so handsome as she
looked now, standing erect before this coarse man, with a flush of deep
humiliation in her cheeks, and passionate entreaty softening her proud
eyes.
“But, my children, my poor children: they have done less harm in the
world than your sister did, and if you hurt my husband you sacrifice
them. Think of that. You have children of your own. You don’t dote on
them passionately any more than I do on mine; therefore you can enter
into my feelings. Is it fair, is it just, that they should suffer?
I don’t appeal for myself, for you don’t like me. But just think of
this: for ten years I have been a dutiful wife to this man, who was
unfaithful to me even in my fresh youth, when I was beautiful, so they
said, and loving, and devoted. Listen. I knew of the murder on the
night he committed it; for he came straight back with stained hands,
and a face I never shall forget. Do you not think that was something to
forgive? But I did it, and I implore you to do it too. I am not asking
you an impossible thing, for I have done it myself. And think under
what circumstances!”
But Ned remained as hard as nails.
“I suppose--no offence to you, madam--your motives were not entirely
unselfish; and even if they were, that’s no business of mine. If you
chose to put up with him, that was your lookout. I came back here to
punish my sister’s murderer, and I’m not going to be made a fool of by
a woman when the game’s in my own hands.”
Ned spoke the more harshly, that he was really rather touched by
her beauty and her high spirit. There was something in her frank,
straightforward manner of pleading more to his taste than any amount of
tearful, hysterical incoherence would have been. But Mrs. Brander had
a most unexpected ally near at hand. Thumpety-thump came Abel Squires,
with his wooden leg, out of his hiding place. He did not look at the
lady, but going straight up to Ned, jerked his thumb over his shoulder
in the direction of where she was standing.
“Hold hard, Mester Mitchell,” said he, without moving a muscle of his
dried-up face; “Ah didn’t bargain fur this when Ah coom here to-day. A
woman’s a woman. An’ t’ woman ye’re so soft abaht’s dead, but t’ woman
ye’re so hard on’s alive. Steady theer, Mester Mitchell, or Ah’ll hev
to swear Ah killed t’ lass mysen.”
The poor woman broke down at these words from the rough tramp; she
turned away abruptly to hide the tears which sprang to her eyes. Ned,
who was hard, brusque, and determined, but not inhuman, moved uneasily
about the room.
“Women have no business to interfere in these matters,” said he,
angrily.
Mrs. Brander saw that there was hope. She moved nearer to him, clasping
her hands, not in supplication, but because they would twitch and
tremble, and so betray the anguish she was suffering. She tried to
speak, but couldn’t. But with one piteous look out of her proud eyes,
she turned away again.
“Well,” said Ned, in very ill-tempered tones, “we’re wasting our time
here, Abel, and Mrs. Brander’s. So, please, madam, let us see your
husband, and have done with him.”
But Mrs. Brander hastened to intercept him on his way to the door.
“You will not be too hard,” she pleaded, in a breaking voice. “You are
not vindictive, I am sure.”
“I beg your pardon, madam, that’s just what I am,” snarled Ned. “And if
I’m fool enough not to insist on the hanging he deserves, I’m not going
to let him off scot free, I can tell you.”
“Of course not, of course not,” said she, in a tone of great relief.
“He has done wrong--great wrong; and he must suffer for it--we must
suffer for it. Only don’t expose him. Anything but that.”
“Yes, anything but what he deserves, of course. Let us pass, madam,
please. He is in the library, I suppose?”
“I suppose so,” she faltered.
Ned turned round abruptly.
“You suppose so! Well, if he’s given us the slip, and left you to bear
the brunt of it all, it’ll be the worse for him.”
Mrs. Brander drew herself up in the old, proud way, and spoke with her
accustomed cold haughtiness in addressing a person she disliked.
“You need not be afraid, Mr. Mitchell. I can stand by a criminal
husband: I would not by a cowardly one.”
“Do you call it courageous, then, to kill a woman, and let another man
bear the blame for ten years?” asked Ned.
Mrs. Brander did not answer. She led the way across the hall to the
study, and knocked.
“Come in,” called out the vicar, in his usual voice.
She opened the door, and signed to the two men to follow her in. Abel
would have slunk away, but Ned Mitchell kept a tight hold on his
arm. Both, however, kept in the background, near the door, while the
lady went up to her husband, and laid her hand upon his shoulder. He
leant back in his comfortable chair, pen still in hand. He had been
busy writing, and the table was covered with large sheets of MS. He
faced the two intruders with an air of mild annoyance, which would
have made an onlooker think that he was the injured person. Ned, with
astonishment, which he would not admit by word or look, examined the
bland, fair face, with its healthy complexion, frank blue eyes, broad
white forehead, and saw on it no trace of shame, guilt, or even of
anxiety. It was his wife’s face which bore all these signs. As she
stood, upright and daring, by her husband’s side, handsome, majestic,
and brave, Ned Mitchell felt that to deal with Meredith as he deserved,
while she remained there, was impossible. He half turned, as if anxious
to put off the interview. The vicar changed his position, wheeling his
chair round, so that he could face the two men.
“Well,” he said, “you wish to speak to me, do you not?”
His tone was mildly peremptory.
“Yes, we do. But what we have to say we wish to say to you alone.”
“Go, my dear,” said Meredith, turning kindly to his wife.
She hesitated, and he pushed her gently away from him. Then she
stooped, kissed his forehead, and with an imploring, yet still
dignified, look into Ned’s reluctant eyes as she passed him, she slowly
left the room.
“Now,” said Mitchell, in a louder, more assured tone, as if much
relieved, “we’ve got an account to settle with you.”
“Well, sit down, and let us have it out.”
Meredith was not in the least discomposed. He took up the pen he had
been using, wiped it carefully, and then crossing his legs and clasping
his hands over them, assumed the attitude in which he was accustomed to
give private advice or consolation to members of his flock.
“I’m afraid we are interrupting you,” said Ned, ironically; so he
prepared to sit down, which Abel shyly refused to do.
“Not at all. I was writing my sermon for next Sunday, but as I suppose
it lies with you whether I shall be allowed to preach it, I can’t
complain of your visit as an interruption.”
“You take this business pretty coolly,” said Ned, losing patience.
Meredith looked at him with a sudden flash of fire in his blue eyes,
a spark of the same fierce spirit which he had revealed to Ned on the
night when he conquered and controlled the bloodhounds at the cottage.
“Do you suppose that I have kept my head for ten years to lose it now?”
Ned was taken back. There was a pause before he said, in almost a
respectful voice--
“You admit everything, then.”
“I admit everything you know, of course. This man here could prove
whatever I might deny. Besides, everybody knows that ring is mine;
I did not know until to-day how I lost it, as you may guess; else I
should have been prepared with some story.”
Ned Mitchell, who had brought the ring with him and had just produced
it, thinking to confound the vicar, slipped it back into his pocket
with uncertain fingers.
“And you are prepared for the consequences?”
“As much prepared as a man ever is for a very unpleasant contingency.”
“Even if the contingency is--what the law prescribes for discovered
murderers?”
“You mean hanging?”
Ned Mitchell nodded, and the vicar paused.
“I won’t say that I am prepared for that; I can’t say that I ever
contemplated such a possibility seriously. It would be a terrible
precedent to hang a vicar. I should probably get off as of ‘unsound
mind,’ and be confined ‘during her Majesty’s pleasure.’”
“And if they shouldn’t be so lenient?”
“Then I should go through with it as well as a man may.”
“And if I let you off the full penalty,” said Ned, wondering if it were
possible to disturb this stolid serenity, “what would you feel towards
me?”
“Nothing,” answered the vicar, promptly. “You would do it, not for my
sake, but out of admiration for my wife, pity for my children, and
because my arrest would involve my brother’s, as an accessory after the
fact. He saw me immediately after the--the deed: the crime, in fact:
and he concurred, if he did not assist, in the concealment of the body,
as Abel here probably knows.”
“Ay,” said Abel Squires, who was standing, awkwardly, as near the door
as possible. “Mester Vernon and me had walked nigh all t’ way from
Sheffield together, and we heerd cries o’ ‘Murder!’ An’ Mester Vernon
he left me, an’ he jumped o’er t’ wall into t’ churchyard, an’ when
he coom back he looked skeered loike, and his reight hond wur stained
red, as if he’d held another hond that wur redder still. An’ somehow Ah
guessed whose hond it wur as he’d been holdin’.”
Abel, after delivering this speech in a mumbling, shamefaced manner,
ended abruptly, and looked at the door, as if he felt that his
unpleasant mission was over. The vicar listened with interest, and
nodded assent to the latter portion of the tramp’s words. Ned Mitchell
continued to gaze at Meredith like a bear baulked of his prey.
“I don’t believe you’ve even felt much remorse all these years,” he
said, savagely.
The vicar faced him frankly.
“To tell the truth, I haven’t,” he said. “That’s not in my
temperament. I suppose this sounds especially remarkable because I
am a clergyman. But my profession was forced upon me; I had to put
an unnatural curb upon myself, and succeeded in attaining a pitch of
outward decorum such as none of my family had ever reached before. But
the strain was too great, for I am not by temperament virtuous; none of
my family are. Vernon has an accident, and not his nature, to thank for
his superiority. That is all I have to say.”
The vicar leaned back in his chair, as if weary of the discussion.
“Then you don’t seem to have any conscience,” said Ned, regarding him
in bewilderment.
“Not much, I suppose,” answered the vicar; “though indeed lately
I have had troubled nights, and shown the family tendency towards
somnambulism; so my wife tells me. And in rather an unfortunate way,”
he added, with a half smile.
As the vicar finished speaking, Ned came forward with his ponderous
tread, laid his hand heavily on the writing-table, and looked down
at the clergyman’s bland face with the air of a strong man who has
definitely made up his mind.
“Now then, parson, I’ll tell you what you’ll have to do. You take that
pen that you’ve just been writing your precious sermons with, and you
write a detailed confession of your intrigue with my sister, your
visits to her at night, your correspondence with her, the way in which
you murdered her, and the way in which you disposed of her body. Then
sign your name and put the date in full, and me and Abel here will
oblige you by putting our signatures as witnesses.”
“And if I do this, what follows?” asked the vicar, taking up the pen
and examining the nib.
“Then you get my permission to leave this country for any other you
choose with your wife and children. And as long as you keep away, this
paper will never go out of my possession.”
“And if I don’t do this?”
“What’s the good of going into that?”
The eyes of the two men met, and they understood each other. Without
wasting more words, Meredith turned to the table, invited Ned with
a gesture to sit down, and proceeded to draw up the prescribed
confession. This he did fully and frankly, adding at the end certain
graceful expressions of contrition which Ned, reading the document
over carefully, took for what they were worth. The main body of the
composition satisfied him, however; and after appending his own
signature to the confession as a witness, and insisting on Abel’s
adding his, he sealed up the paper with great solemnity. Then,
intimating to Meredith Brander that the sooner he carried out the
remaining part of the compact and left the country, the better it
would be for him, he left the room with the curtest of farewells, and
hastened out of the house to avoid what he called “another scene with
the woman.”
Once outside he looked back at the vicarage with great interest.
“If one had to be a rascal,” said he, with some irrepressible
admiration, “that’s the sort of rascal one would choose to be.”
Then Abel Squires left him and hobbled off, and Ned was left to his
pipe and his reflections, both which he chose to enjoy, not at his
garden gate as usual, but at the bottom of the hill, outside Rishton
Hall farmyard.
Before he had been there more than a few minutes, the event he was
prepared for took place. Olivia Denison, pale, excited, tearful, yet
radiant, came to the gate, looking out anxiously. Seeing Ned, she ran
out to him with a cry.
“Oh, Mr. Mitchell,” she said, almost in a whisper, “I must ask you to
forgive me. I had such unjust thoughts of you. I thought, until the
night before last, that you meant to ruin Vernon, in spite of your
promise.”
“Um,” said Ned; “you hadn’t much faith in your lover, now, had you, to
think him capable of----”
“Hush! never mind that. You see, I must have felt at the bottom of my
heart that he was really good. For I loved him all the time just the
same.”
“That doesn’t follow at all. Women always go by contraries. The more
of a villain a man is, the more a woman likes him. Look at the vicar
here, and the way his wife sticks to him. And look at me, as honest a
fellow as ever lived, and what do you think my wife cares for me or my
affections? Not a single straw, I tell you.”
“Well,” said Olivia, smiling, “considering the small amount of
affection you seem to waste on her, I think it’s just as well for her
happiness that she is not dying for love of you.”
“Ah, you’re full of these new fangled notions about the equality of the
sexes. Now, I say, men and women are different. The man does all the
hard work, and even if he goes a little bit off the straight sometimes,
it’s no more than he has a right to, provided he fills the mouths at
home. The woman has nothing to do but look after the home and children,
and mend their clothes and her husband’s. And if she can’t find time
besides to be devoted to her husband, and to think him the finest
fellow on earth in return for what he does for her, why, she ain’t
worth her salt; that’s all. Now that’s my marriage code, Miss Denison,
though I can see by your face it isn’t yours.”
“I really haven’t considered the subject much,” replied Olivia,
demurely, but with a bright blush.
“You might do worse, though, than consider it, now that things have
shaped themselves a bit,” said Ned, in a dry tone. “Our dear friend
the vicar here is going to leave this country, in consideration of a
certain little matter being hushed up--”
“Oh, I’m so glad!” interrupted Olivia, with a deep-drawn breath
of relief; “that is good of you, Mr. Mitchell. For it would have
been--dreadful--dreadful!”
Ned was looking away over the cornfields, where his sharp eyes detected
a figure he recognized, wandering about in an aimless manner.
“I think you’d better take a walk out into the meadows there,” he said,
after a minute’s pause, turning again to the young lady, with a kindly
look on his hard face. “It will do you good after all the excitement
and botherment of this morning.”
Olivia blushed again.
“Thank you,” she said, with a proud turn of her head. “I don’t care to
go out again this afternoon. The air is much too oppressive.”
“Oh, all right,” said Ned with a dry nod; “then I musn’t keep you
out here talking in the ‘oppressive’ air, I suppose. Good-day, Miss
Denison.”
“Good-bye,” she said, gently, holding out her hand, which he shook with
a firm pressure.
Then he walked up the hill, talking to himself.
“These old-country lasses are fine creatures,” he meditated. “There’s
Mrs. B., whom I didn’t care for, and Miss D. whom I did, and I’m blest
if they haven’t both got too good a spirit to be married at all. Yet
one wouldn’t care to see them old maids, either--nor yet men--nor
yet angels. These high-spirited ladies, who can think and act for
themselves, don’t seem to fit in somehow. One would feel they were kind
of too good for one. Give me a nice, comfortable lass, whom you needn’t
study any more than a potato. You know what to be at with one of them.
By-the-bye, now I suppose I must take ship and see how my own potato is
getting on.”
Nevertheless, from the top of the hill he looked down rather
sentimentally in the direction of the old farm. As he did so, he caught
sight of a girl’s tall figure in the meadows. He laughed maliciously.
“She’s gone to meet him. I thought she would. I’d have let off half a
dozen scoundrels to give that lass her heart’s desire; that I would!”
And he watched her till a rising in the meadow ground, and a thick,
flowering hedge, hid her from sight.
After a few minutes’ arguing with herself, Olivia, who guessed the
reason of Ned Mitchell’s suggestion of a walk in the fields, decided
that she ought without delay to let Vernon Brander know the result
of the interview between his brother and the colonist. So she darted
through the gate and across the road with the agility of a deer, in
spite of the oppressive air. So excited was she, so full of joy at the
turn affairs had taken, that she almost ran along the footpath, beside
the sweet-scented hedges, with an occasional little leap or bound
of most undignified happiness. Thus it happened that when she came
unexpectedly face to face with Vernon Brander on rounding a thicket of
bushes and small trees, she was springing into the air with her face
radiant with delight, and a soft song--something about “birds” and
“love”--upon her lips. Vernon, on his side, looked, if anything, even
more haggard and woebegone than usual. Both stopped short, and Olivia,
who had become on the instant very subdued, drew a deep breath of
confusion.
“Mr. Brander,” she began, in a cool, almost cold, voice, “I--I--er, I
have just met Ned Mitchell, and I think you ought to know what he says.”
“For Heaven’s sake, yes: tell me!”
“He is going to hush it all up, on condition that your brother leaves
the country altogether.”
Vernon drew a deep breath of relief, and almost reeled against the
fence which protected the thicket on one side.
“Thank God!” he whispered.
And he put one hand to his face as if to shut out the fearful picture
his imagination and his fears had been conjuring up. Olivia waited
impatiently as long as she could. At last when she could bear this
neglect no longer, she said, rather tartly--
“Mrs. Brander will have to go too.”
“Of course, of course; she will go with her husband.”
Vernon was still in a dazed state, not yet understanding what a great
change in his prospects of happiness the day’s events had made.
“I think it was very silly of you to keep silence all these years
just to please her. It was she who made you, I suppose--came to
you, and wheedled you. Men are so easily coaxed,” continued Olivia,
disdainfully, with her head in the air.
She had never been curt and dictatorial, like this, with him before.
Poor Vernon, quite unskilled in the wiles of her sex, was abashed and
bewildered.
“Yes,” he admitted, humbly. “She came to me and begged me not to say
anything if people suspected me. And, you see, I had been so fond of
her, and she was in delicate health, and I had no wife or children to
be hurt by what people might think of me. And so I promised.”
“And she made you promise not to marry, didn’t she?”
“Well, yes. Poor thing, she had to do the best she could for her
husband and children; and, of course, she thought if I married, I
should let out the secret to my wife, and my wife would insist on
having things explained.”
“I should think so,” said Olivia.
“And now,” said Vernon, who was getting more and more downcast under
the influence of this surprising change in her, “I’m too old and too
sour to marry, and I think I shall go away with them, and have my
little Kitty to console me.”
“Yes,” said Olivia, quietly, her voice losing suddenly all its buoyancy
as well as all its momentary sharpness; “I think that will be a very
good plan. You will let us know when you intend to start, won’t you,
for my father and mother owe you an apology first? Now, I must be
getting back. Good-evening.”
Dull Vernon began at last to have a glimmer of insight into the girl’s
secret feelings. He shook hands with her, let her walk as far as the
very end of the field, noticing with admiration which had suddenly,
after the strain of the morning, again grown passionate, her springing
walk and graceful, erect carriage. Then he ran after her on the wings
of the wind, and placed himself, panting, with his back to the gate she
was approaching.
“I’m sorry to trouble you,” he said, as he looked with sparkling eyes
into her face. “But you seem to forget I’ve lent you thirty pounds. I
shall want it back to pay my passage.”
Olivia caught her breath, and her face, which was wet with tears, grew
happy again.
“I’d forgotten all about it,” said she, in a tremulous voice, half
saucily, half demurely. “But anyhow, you can’t have it.”
“And why not, Miss Denison?” asked Vernon, coming a step nearer.
“Because I--I don’t want you to go away,” answered she.
And she fell into his arms without further invitation, and gave him
a tender woman’s kiss, an earnest of the love and sympathy he had
hungered for these ten years!
The true story of the murder at St. Cuthbert’s never became commonly
known. At the inquest which was opened on the remains found in the
crypt, nobody who had anything to tell told anything worth hearing.
But, then, nobody was very anxious to discover the truth, for rumors
too dreadful for investigation began to fly about; and nobody was
astonished when, the health of his children requiring a change to a
warmer climate, the Reverend Meredith Brander got, by the interest of
his uncle, Lord Stannington, an appointment at Malta, for which place
he started, with his wife and family, without delay.
The vacant living of Rishton was given by Lord Stannington to his other
nephew, Vernon; and Olivia, though lamentably unlike the popular ideal
of a clergyman’s wife, became as much idolized by the poor of the
parish as her husband was already.
John Oldshaw got Rishton Hall Farm; for Mr. Denison’s friends persuaded
him to give up farming while he had still something left to lose. But
the farmer did not long survive his coveted happiness. Dying in a fit
of apoplexy, he left his broad acres in the care of his son Mat, who,
instead of setting up as a country gentleman, as his sisters declared
he would do if he had any spirit, married little Lucy, made her a good
husband, and remained for ever, in common with his wife, the idolatrous
slave of her late mistress.
“Theer bean’t more’n one woman in t’ world,” he would say, “too good
for Parson Brander. Boot theer be one, and thot’s his wife.”
But though “Parson Brander” himself agreed with this, he was mistaken;
for, like every other good woman, she was the better, and the little
world around her was the better, for the fact that she was the noble
and true mate of a noble and true man.
THE END.
Transcriber’s Note
In this file, text in _italics_ is indicated by underscores.
Printer’s errors were corrected where they could be clearly identified.
Otherwise, original spelling and punctuation were preserved wherever
possible.