NINA’S DESPAIR.
Doctor Fielding secured one of the ablest lawyers in the country as
Nina’s counsel. He carefully collected all the evidence for and against
her. He weighed it carefully, and the result did not please him.
“The case looks very unfavorable to my client,” he admitted frankly to
the doctor. “I can see but one chance for her acquittal in the awful
array of damning evidence against her.”
“And that chance?”
“Is the chance of proving an _alibi_ at the hour of the murder,”
answered Mr. Davenport, the lawyer, gravely and decidedly.
“I fear that it will be impossible to do that,” Doctor Fielding
answered with a heavy sigh, and from that moment hope began to fail in
his breast.
“You told me that you saved her from attempted suicide that night.
Surely you must have some idea of the time when it occurred,” said Mr.
Davenport.
“It must have been near midnight, although I cannot tell exactly. But
I remember that every person on the yacht had retired hours before and
left me alone upon the deck, with my solitary cigar.”
“You say that Captain Travers assisted you in the rescue of the young
lady that night. Might he not remember the exact hour at which the
attempted suicide occurred?”
“Captain Travers is dead,” replied the doctor, despondently.
“Dead!” exclaimed the lawyer, with a start.
“Yes, he died very suddenly of apoplexy in a few days after the tragedy
at Selwyn Heights.”
“And the young lady herself--has she no knowledge of the hour at which
she left her home?” the lawyer anxiously inquired.
“I do not believe that she has, but it would perhaps be better to ask
her,” Doctor Fielding replied.
So they went to see Nina in her prison cell.
Up to that moment Mr. Davenport had had a private opinion that his
client was guilty. Everything looked so black against her, the evidence
was so conclusive there scarcely seemed room for doubt. It all seemed
to have come about so naturally, her jealousy of the dead woman,
her passionate anger and open resentment seemed to have led up so
inevitably to the crime of murder that Mr. Davenport had decided in his
mind that his client had scarcely the shadow of a case.
But all this was before he had seen Nina Strangemore.
After they went to the prison, after he beheld the lovely, hapless
creature whose life, as it were, seemed hanging on his hands, a great
revulsion of feeling came over the lawyer.
He said to himself that although he might never be able to prove her
innocence in a court of law, that the angels in heaven were not more
pure and guiltless than this martyred girl.
And yet she could throw no light on the subject which involved so much
to her.
“No, I cannot remember,” she said, hopelessly, when he entreated her
to try to recall the hour when she had left her home. “It might have
been midnight, or it might have been earlier, I do not know how long
I sat there dazed and wretched after Mrs. St. Alban’s cruel words to
me. I was too miserable to note the lapse of time. When I had decided
despairingly in my mind that I would drown myself, I rose, wrote a
brief note which I left for my husband, mechanically donned some dark
clothing, and went away. It was quite late, I suppose. I heard and saw
no one, and the lights were all out in the house.”
“Try to think now,” he urged. “Did you not look at your watch before
leaving? Most persons do so mechanically before going out.”
“I did not,” she replied.
He did not tell her how hopeless all this made her case appear. He did
not have the heart to do so. The beautiful, anguished young face had
touched him beyond words. He vowed to himself that he would do all that
he could to help her, but he did not believe that he could do much.
But although he did not tell her in what deadly peril she stood, Nina
knew more than he guessed. Kitty’s anxious words to her the night she
returned had disclosed to her her danger. When they had left her alone
again in her gloomy cell, she sank upon her knees with a passionate cry
wrung from the depths of her crushed and despairing young heart.
“Talbot, my husband, come to me! I need you!”
With a passionate yearning beyond all telling, Nina longed for her
husband now. Her heart turned to him instinctively, feeling that his
place was by her side in this hour of her terrible trial.
“Even although he did not love me he would not willingly let me perish
like this,” she thought, and it seemed to her that Talbot if he had
been there could have done more for her than anyone else. It seemed to
her that he had more power than any other man.
But he was far away from her, the husband whom she had loved so dearly
for five long years, for whom she had waited so patiently, and whose
coming at last had brought her such terrible woe. Like a mocking echo
the words of her old song rose in her memory:
“If he would come, to-day, to-day, to-day,
Oh, what a day to-day would be!
But now he’s away, miles and miles away
From me across the sea.
“Oh, little bird, flying, flying, flying,
To your nest in the warm west,
Tell him as you pass that I am dying,
As you fly home to your nest.”
A bitter shame and dread were upon the girl as she shrinkingly
contemplated the close of her trial. She had not been afraid to die at
her own hands, but the horror, the disgrace of her impending doom shook
her soul to its center.
“To die on the scaffold--oh, I cannot bear it! How can they do it
when I am innocent?” she wept, over and over, and it seemed to her
that she would die of terror and shame even before the day appointed
for her trial--a day that was indefinitely postponed because it was
so difficult to find a jury. This case had been discussed months
before by the public, and it was a horrible fact that scarcely a man
could be found who had not already expressed his opinion upon it, an
opinion almost always adverse to the unhappy prisoner. So while the law
tarried, gathering together its terrible weapons of prosecution, Nina
languished in prison, and by some mysterious psychic force the yearning
cry of her soul made itself audible to Talbot far across the sea:
“Talbot, my husband, come to me, I need you!”