’Well, next day Sturk was brought home; Nutter was gone, and the suspicion attached to him.  That was well.  But, though Pell pronounced that he must die without recovering consciousness, and that the trepan would kill him instantaneously, I had a profound misgiving that he might recover speech and recollection.  I wrote as exact a statement of the case to my London physician—­a very great man—­as I could collect, and had his answer, which agreed exactly with Doctor Pell’s.  ’Twas agreed on all hands the trepan would be certain death.  Days, weeks, or months—­it mattered not what the interval—­no returning glimmer of memory could light his death-bed.  Still, Sir, I presaged evil.  He was so long about dying.

’I’m telling you everything, you see.  I offered Irons what would have been a fortune to him—­he was attending occasionally in Sturk’s sick-room, and assisting in dressing his wounds—­to watch his opportunity and smother him with a wet handkerchief.  I would have done it myself afterwards, on the sole opportunity that offered, had I not been interrupted.

’I engaged, with Mrs. Sturk’s approval, Doctor Dillon.  I promised him five hundred guineas to trepan him.  That young villain, I could prove, bled Alderman Sherlock to death to please the alderman’s young wife.  Who’d have thought the needy profligate would have hesitated to plunge his trepan into the brain of a dying man—­a corpse, you may say, already—­for five hundred guineas?  I was growing feverish under the protracted suspense.  I was haunted by the apprehension of Sturk’s recovering his consciousness and speech, in which case I should have been reduced to my present rueful situation; and I was resolved to end that cursed uncertainty.

’When I thought Dillon had forgot his appointment in his swinish vices, I turned my mind another way.  I resolved to leave Sturk to nature, and clench the case against Nutter, by evidence I would have compelled Irons to swear.  As it turned out, that would have been the better way.  Had Sturk died without speaking, and Nutter hanged for his death, the question could have opened no more, and Irons would have been nailed to my interest.

’I viewed the problem every way.  I saw the danger from the first, and provided many expedients, which, one after the other, fortune frustrated.  I can’t confidently say even now that it would have been wiser to leave Sturk to die, as the doctors said he must.  I had a foreboding, in spite of all they could say, he would wake up before he died and denounce me.  If ’twas a mistake, ’twas a fated one, and I could not help it.

’So, Sir, you see I’ve nothing to blame myself for—­though all has broken down.

’I guessed when I heard the sound at the hall-door of my house that Sturk or Irons had spoken, and that they were come to take me.  Had I broken through them, I might have made my escape.  It was long odds against me, but still I had a chance—­that’s all.  And the matter affecting my Lord Dunoran’s innocence, I’m ready to swear, if it can serve his son—­having been the undesigned cause of some misfortunes to you, my lord, in my lifetime.’