The murder had been an impulsive, not a premeditated act.

Four-and-twenty hours ago I would have shot the man who could have thought me capable of perpetrating such a deed.

The clocks in the village were striking eight when I entered the lodge.

My mother was sitting in her easy chair, supported by pillows. Her face was deathly pale, and she had been crying violently. Two women, our nearest neighbours, were standing by her side, bathing her wrists and temples with hartshorn.

"Oh, Noe," exclaimed Mrs. Jones, "I'm glad thee be come to thy mother.

She hath been in fits ever since she heard the dreadful news."

"We could not persuade her that you were safe," said Mrs. Smith. "She will be content when she sees you herself."

"Mother,"--and I went up to her and kissed her rigid brow--"are you better now?"

She took my hand and clasped it tightly between her own, but made no reply. Her face became convulsed, the tears flowed over her cheeks like rain, and she fainted in my arms.

"She is dying!" screamed both women.

"She will be better presently," I said. "Open the window--give me a gla.s.s of water! There--there, she is coming to! Speak to me, dear Mother!"

"Is it true, Noah?" she gasped out, but broke down several times before she could make her meaning plain. "Is he--is the Squire dead?--murdered?"

"Too true, Mother! I have just helped to carry the body up to the Hall."

"Oh, oh!" she groaned, rocking herself to and fro in a strange agony; "I hoped it had been false."

"It is a shocking piece of business--but why should it affect you in this terrible way?"

"That's what I say," cried Mrs. Jones. "It do seem so strange to us that she should take on in this here way for a mere stranger."

"Don't ask me any questions, Noah," said my mother, in a low, firm voice. "I am better now. The sight of you has revived me; and these kind neighbours may return home."

"At ten o'clock the magistrates meet at the Market Hall to examine the prisoners," I said, "and I must be there, to make a deposition of what I know. I can stay with you till then."

"Oh, Noe! thee must tell us all about it!" said Mrs. Smith, who was dying with curiosity. "How did it come about?"

I was not prepared for this fresh agony; but I saw that there was no getting rid of our troublesome visitors without endeavouring to satisfy their insatiable greed for news; and I went through the dreadful task with more nerve than I expected. My mother listened to the recital with breathless interest, and the women clung to me with open eyes and mouth, as if their very life depended upon my words, often interrupting me with uncouth exclamations of surprise and horror. At length all was told that I could tell. My mother again broke into pa.s.sionate tears.

"Poor Mrs. Martin!" she sobbed, "how dreadful it must be to her. I pity her from my very soul!"

I had never given Martin's unfortunate mother a single thought. I was not naturally cruel, and this planted a fresh arrow in my heart.

"It is about eight years ago that she lost her husband," said neighbour Smith. "He died from the bite of a mad dog. He was the 'Squire's gamekeeper then. Little Sally was not born until five months after her father's death. I don't know how the widow has contrived to scratch along, and keep out of the workhouse. But she was always a hard-working woman. She had no friend like the Squire, to take _her_ by the hand and give her son a genteel education. She did get along, however, and sent that Bill to Mr. Bullen's school; but she half starved herself to do it--and what good? He has been a world of trouble to her, and almost broke her heart before he run off to 'Meriky. This fresh misfortune will go nigh to kill her outright."

"And was it to add to this poor devoted creature's sorrows," I asked myself, "that I was prepared to give false evidence against her son?"

For well I knew, that his life depended upon that evidence.

For Martin I felt no pity. His death never filled me with remorse like the murder of the 'Squire. He was born for the gallows. I had only forestalled him in the deed that would send him to the grave. He had sought the spot with the intention to rob and kill. I had no doubts on that head; and I persuaded myself that he had richly merited the fate that awaited him. But the grief of his unhappy mother awakened a pang in my breast that was not so easily a.s.suaged.

The women at length took their leave, and I was alone with my mother.

For some minutes she remained silent, her hands pressed tightly over her breast, and her tear-swollen eyes fixed mournfully on the ground.

"Noah," she said, at length, slowly raising her head, and looking me earnestly in the face, "do you think that the family would allow me to look at the corpse?"

I actually started with horror. I felt the blood recede from my cheeks, and a cold chill creep from my hair downwards.

"Good G.o.d! Mother, what should make you wish to see him? He is a frightful spectacle!--so frightful that I would not look at him again for worlds!"

"Oh," groaned my mother, "it is hard to part from him for ever, without one last look!"

"Mother, Mother!" I cried--while a horrid suspicion darted through, my brain--"what is the meaning of this strange conduct, and still stranger words? In the name of Heaven! what was Squire Carlos to you?"

"Noah, he was your father!" returned my mother, slowly and solemnly. "I need not tell you what he was to me."

Had she stabbed me with a red-hot knife, the effect would have been less painful.

"My father!" I cried, with a yell of agony, as I sank down, stunned with horror, at her feet. "Mother!--Mother! for my sake--for your own sake, recal those dreadful words!"

Some minutes elapsed before I again awoke to the consciousness of my terrible guilt. My crime appeared to me in a new aspect--an aspect that froze my soul, and iced the warm stream of my young blood with despair.

I had been excited--agitated--almost maddened, with the certainty of being a murderer; but there was something of human pa.s.sion in those tumultuous feelings. But the certainty that I was not only a murderer, but a parricide,--had killed my own father for the sake of a few hundred pounds, which I now knew that I could never enjoy, chilled me into a stupid, hardened apathy. There could be no forgiveness for a crime like mine, neither in this world--nor in the world to come.

I could have cursed my wretched mother for having so long concealed from me an important fact, which, if known, had saved the life of her worthless paramour. Her silence might have been the effect of shame. But no--when I recalled the frequency of Mr. Carlos's visits, his uniform kindness to me, the very last conversation I held with him, and the dark hints that from time to time Bill Martin had so insultingly thrown out, I felt convinced that she had all along been living with him on terms of abandoned intimacy, and that her crime had been the parent of my own.

Yet, in spite of these bitter recriminations, when I raised my eyes to her, and met her sad, pleading, tearful glance, all my love for her returned, and, clasping her knees, as I still sat upon the ground at her feet, I said, "Mother, why did you keep this guilty secret from me for so many years? I should have felt and acted very differently towards that unhappy man, if I had known that he was my father."

"Noah, it is hard to acknowledge one's sin to one's own child. It is a sin, however, that I have been bitterly punished for committing."

"But you still continued to live on those terms with him?"

"Alas! Noah, I loved him!"

She threw her ap.r.o.n 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 circ.u.mstantially, 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 G.o.d'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 circ.u.mstantially correct, yet, for all that, neither he nor his accomplice had actually murdered the Squire, and that G.o.d, 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.