The villain mars his
villainy; the virtuous smudge their white record; the deep brain
suddenly runs dry--all because perfection, in good or evil, is
denied to saints and sinners alike."
CHAPTER XVIII
CONFESSION
During the autumn assizes, Michael Pendean was tried at Exeter and
condemned to death for the murders of Robert, Bendigo and Albert
Redmayne. He offered no defence and he was only impatient to return
to his seclusion within the red walls of the county jail, where he
occupied the brief balance of his days with just such a statement as
Peter Ganns had foretold that he would seek to make.
This extraordinary document was very characteristic of the criminal.
It possessed a sort of glamour; but it failed of real distinction
and the quality proper to greatness, even as the crimes it recorded
and the man responsible for them. Pendean's confession revealed an
insensibility, a faulty sense of humour, an affectation and a love
for the glittering and the grandiose that robbed it of any supreme
claim in the annals or literature of murder.
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