But Clode had nothing to say, except “What shall you do?”
“Fight!” replied Lindo briskly, getting up and approaching the table. “That of course. And it was about that I came to you. I do not think there is any lawyer here I should like to employ. Did not you tell me the other day who the archdeacon’s were? Some people in Birmingham, I think?”
“I think I did,” the curate answered. He had overcome his first fear, and, as he spoke, looked down at the table, on which he was still leaning. His hasty movement had disordered his own papers, but none of the tell-tale letters were visible so far as he could see. But what if the rector took up the newspaper? Or casually put it aside? The curate grew hot again, despite his great self-control. He felt himself on the edge of a precipice down which he dared not cast his eye.
“Well, can you give me their address?” the rector continued.
“Certainly!” the curate answered. Indeed he leapt at the suggestion, for it seemed to offer some chance of escape—at least a way by which he might rid himself of his visitor.
“Just write it down, that is a good fellow, then,” said the rector, unconscious of what was passing in his mind.
The curate said he would, and tore off at random—-the rector was leaning his hand on the newspaper, and might at any moment be taken with a fancy to raise it—the back sheet of the first stray note that came to his fingers, and wrote the address upon it. “There, that is it,” he said; and as he gave it to Lindo—he had written it standing up and stooping—he almost pushed him away from the table. “That will serve you, I think. They may be trusted, I am told. The best you can do, I am sure, will be to place the matter in their hands at once.”
“I will write before I sleep!” the younger clergyman answered heartily. “You cannot think how the narrowness of these people provokes me! But I will not keep you now. I see you are busy. Come round early in the morning, will you, and talk it over?”
“I will come the moment I have had breakfast,” the curate answered, making no attempt to detain his visitor.
The rector thereupon going, he stood eyeing the newspaper askance until the other’s footsteps died away on the pavement outside. Then he swept it off and stood contemplating the half-dozen letters with abhorrence. He loathed and detested them. They had suddenly become to him such an incubus as his victim’s body becomes to the murderer. The desire which had tempted him to the crime was gone, and he felt them only as a burden. They were the visible proof of his shame. To keep them was to become a thief, and yet he shrank with a nervous terror quite new and strange to him from the task of returning them—of going to the study at the rectory and putting them back in the cupboard. It had been easy to get possession of them; but to return them seemed a task so thankless, and withal so perilous, that he quailed before it. With shaking hands he bundled them together and locked them in the lowest drawer of his writing table. He would return them to-morrow.