“Quiet, Martha, I tell ye!  Yes, my lord, I’se tell ye all about it.  I was gone away, wife and I, for more nor a week, to receive money for Mr. Wilson, on account of smuggled goods—­that money, my lord, as was found in the chest.  When we came home on that dreadful Sunday night, my lord, we went in the back way; and hearing a noise, I went up stairs, and found poor Wilson stone-dead on the floor.  I were dreadful skeared, and let drop the candle.  I called to wife, and told her of it.  She screamed out, and amaist fainted away.  And then, my lord, all at once the devil shot into my head to keep the money I had brought; and knowing as the keys of the desk where the mortgage writing was kept was in the bedroom, I crept back, as that false-hearted woman said, got the keys, and took the deed; and then I persuaded wife, who had been trembling in the kitchen all the while, that we had better go out quiet again, as there was nobody in the house but us:  I had tried that woman’s door—­and we might perhaps be taken for the murderers.  And so we did; and that’s the downright, honest truth, my lord.  I’m rightly served; but God bless you, doant hurt the woman—­my wife, my lord, these thirty years.  Five-and-twenty years ago come May, which I shall never see, we buried our two children.  Had they lived, I might have been a better man; but the place they left empty was soon filled up by love of cursed lucre, and that has brought me here.  I deserve it; but oh, mercy, my lord! mercy, good gentlemen!”—­turning from the stony features of the judge to the jury, as if they could help him—­“not for me, but the wife.  She be as innocent of this as a new-born babe.  It’s I!  I! scoundrel that I be, that has brought thee, Martha, to this shameful pass!” The rugged man snatched his life-companion to his breast with passionate emotion, and tears of remorse and agony streamed down his rough cheeks.

I was deeply affected, and felt that the man had uttered the whole truth.  It was evidently one of those cases in which a person liable to suspicion damages his own cause by resorting to a trick.  No doubt, by his act of theft, Armstrong had been driven to an expedient which would not have been adopted by a person perfectly innocent.  And thus, from one thing to another, the charge of murder had been fixed upon him and his hapless wife.  When his confession had been uttered, I felt a species of self-accusation in having contributed to his destruction, and gladly would I have undone the whole day’s proceedings.  The judge, on the contrary, was quite undisturbed.  Viewing the harangue of Armstrong as a mere tissue of falsehood, he cooly pronounced sentence of death on the prisoners.  They were to be hanged on Monday.  This was Friday.

“A bad job!” whispered the counsel for the defence as he passed me.  “That witness of yours, the woman Strugnell, is the real culprit.”