DELIVERED.
The jury were not agreed. Though the case lay in a nutshell, the nut was
for the moment too hard for them. One or two indignant Battyites held
the field against the gentler souls who had been so overjoyed to seize
upon the possibility of a favourable verdict. If she had been a poor
girl, who would have inquired whether or not there was time for the
poison to take effect, and what had that to do with the question? asked
the recalcitrants. Murder was meant--could any one doubt it, when the
murderess herself confessed it? What had justice and Englishmen come to
if they let a criminal off because she was “my lady”? Thus two
revolutionaries dissolved the court, kept in tortures of suspense the
unhappy persons most concerned, and filled the town once more with the
buzzing and commotion of a curious crowd. The unhappy twelve were shut
up again, far from their homes and comfort; the judge wended his way
with dissatisfied countenance to his dinner, at which he spoke in terms
not flattering of the British juryman; and a group of very miserable
people assembled in the lodging opposite to the prison. They were doubly
miserable, because none of them were allowed to see the unfortunate girl
whom they knew to be there alone, unsupported by any sympathy, bearing
the burden of suspense without any alleviation. They gathered round the
table, making a miserable pretence at a meal, from which Sir Alexis,
however, escaped ere it was half over, in the restlessness of misery to
wander under the window where his poor little bride, the unfortunate
young creature with whose name his name and fame were inextricably
connected, lay alone, beyond the reach of any gentle voice, while poor
Nelly withdrew weeping to conceal the additional pangs of her own
unthought-of pain. Was it Ernest whose face she had seen? Was he coming
back again to rend or to console her heart? Was he waiting the result to
decide the question for him? She hated herself for being able to think
of this personal question; yet how was it possible to shut it out?
Mr. Justice Molyneux had his own troubles on that painful day. He
disliked having anything to do with cases in which what he called
“private feeling” must be more or less involved. He was angry with the
Eastwoods for being connected prospectively with himself, and with
Innocent for being connected with the Eastwoods. He was angry with his
son for keeping on that lingering, absurd engagement which ought to have
come to a conclusion one way or another a year ago. He hoped now that
Ernest would see his folly; and yet privately within himself the man
who--whatever he was besides--was a man and no weakling, despised his
son for not standing by the girl whom he professed to love. He had seen
this girl, whom he himself had, so to speak, received into his family,
to whom he had given a fatherly kiss as Ernest’s future wife, by
herself, with the high though passive courage of a woman, standing by
her cousin in her trouble; and though he was glad on the whole that his
son “kept himself out of it,” yet in the depths of his soul he was
ashamed that a son of his should have so poorly played the man. Had
Ernest been there, dancing attendance on the family in trouble, his
father would have denounced him as an incurable fool; but he would have
respected him, notwithstanding his folly. Now, he was glad that things
had turned out as they had done; but he despised Ernest, and blushed--so
far as a judge and man of the world _can_ blush--at the thought that he
himself had been instrumental in bringing such a poor creature into the
world. He was wroth, too, to have this wretched business prolonged for
another day--to have those Eastwoods constantly before his eyes, and
that solitary Nelly with her white face. They were as much in his way as
ever Haman was to Mordecai. He hated to see them--he felt ashamed before
them--he wished the business well over for the poor little idiot at the
bar, who was as mad as a March hare no doubt, but pretty, poor thing!
Mad for Frederick Eastwood? Heaven above, what idiots women are!
These reflections, however, did not interfere with his dinner, of which
the excellent judge had great need--for hard work in which there is a
mixture of emotion (as much emotion again as a judge can be expected to
feel) is very exhausting, and whets a naturally excellent appetite. He
had fortunately come to the end of the more substantial part of his
repast, when a sudden message was brought to him. The jury had made up
their minds! What was to be done? Were they to be held in vile durance
for a whole night after this desirable result had been obtained? Was the
accused to be kept in the agonies of suspense for the same period? And
finally--which was, perhaps, the most important of all--was business to
be delayed next morning by the re-introduction of this case, which had
already taken up the court during two days? The judge made up his mind,
though not without some internal groanings. He called his retinue about
him; sent hasty warnings to the counsel for the different sides, and to
all the principal parties involved; and, donning his robes, took his way
once more to the Town Hall, causing great commotion among the groups in
the streets. Lights were hastily lighted, doors hastily thrown open, and
the agitated street emptied itself at once in a throng--gentle and
simple together--the ragamuffin and the righteous member of society for
once in their lives side by side--into the dim and dingy Town Hall, with
its huge, staring portraits of mayors and lord-lieutenants, faintly
lighted up by the flaring gas, and its dust-coloured walls looking more
dingy than ever in the unwonted light.
Innocent was seated on her poor bed, dull and passive and alone. She had
ceased to think of the sky through the window and the world out of
doors, and the hope of going home. To be without imagination is
sometimes an advantage, but very often it is a great misfortune. Poor
Innocent, being almost destitute of this quality, had not strength of
vitality to remind herself that to-morrow was on its way, and might
bring her deliverance. The dimness and the terrible solitude fell upon
her like things eternal. She could not rouse herself to feel that this
dreary night, which was again closing over her, would ever end. The
darkness had fallen upon her mind like lead, weighing her down to the
very ground. It seemed something from which she could never more get
free, from which escape was impossible. She was not thinking. She was
past the possibility of thought. She sat listless, in a dull trance of
pain, incapable of motion or of feeling. When the key grated in the
lock, when the door was suddenly thrown open, and figures dark against
the light which streamed behind them rushed in with haste and excitement
to call her, she rose, dazed and stupefied, because they told her to do
so, tied on her little bonnet because they bade her, and followed for
the same reason, with her faculties so dull and dead that nothing which
could have happened would have roused, much less surprised her. She held
mechanically by the woman who had attended during those two weary days,
but she did not ask, not even of herself in her thoughts, where they
were taking her, or what was the cause of this sudden interruption of
the dismal stillness. The reign of phantasmagoria had come back again;
the strange dingy court with its lights, the strange sea of faces, all
whirled about the girl--something which had no connexion with her, no
meaning, an inarticulate dream. She gazed straight before her with her
scared eyes which saw nothing. She held fast to the woman, the only
point of reality which felt steady in this whirl of sight and sound.
What it meant was all dark to Innocent. A vague sense that something was
about to be done to her crept gradually upon her bewildered faculties.
Somehow, she could not tell how, the scene seemed to mingle with that
old scene in the Methodist chapel, so that she could not tell whether
some sudden chance had transported her there again, and whether these
moving figures which seemed about to approach her were those of the men
whom she had supposed to threaten her life. She turned wildly to look if
there was any way of escape. Alas! this time poor Innocent could not
flee. She was surrounded, shut in, secured on all sides. It seemed to
her that she heard her own name out of the midst of that terrible,
spectral crowd. Ah, what was coming? what was coming? With a cry which
rang through the whole building, which reached the crowd outside, which
echoed for days through the ears of every one who heard it, she shrank
back into the corner where she stood, back, cowering and hiding her face
with her hands.
What happened next? I do not think that Innocent ever knew. She was the
centre of a confusion and tumult, from which after a while there slowly
merged the face of Sir Alexis close to hers, quivering with emotion and
joy. Then his voice, saying, “It is all over, my darling, we are going
home----” then strange low cries and sounds of weeping--sounds in which
Innocent benumbed had no power to join; then a breath of air, wild,
sweet fresh air of the spring night, suddenly blowing upon her face as
if it had never been caught and confined within four walls; and then she
knew nothing more.
“The girl has gone mad,” said Mr. Justice Molyneux, as he threw off his
robes, “and I have a dozen minds to commit the jurymen for wilful
murder--well--or contempt of court if you will--it comes to much the
same thing.”
She was acquitted--that was the end--whether or not too late to save her
tottering reason no one knew. Even Batty himself and his warmest
partisans had been struck dumb by that cry. “She’s got off; but the Lord
hasn’t let her off,” cried some one of those virulent censors who are so
ready to undertake that God must agree with them; but the crowd cried
“Shame” upon the vindictive suggestion. They kept back the malcontents
with instinctive sympathy while poor Innocent was half led, half carried
out by a side door towards the rooms where Mrs. Eastwood, happily
unconscious of the crisis, was trying to sleep after nights of sleepless
anxiety. As Innocent was thus led away some one else rushed to the door
of the Town Hall, meeting the crowd as it poured forth, meeting the
lawyers who stood about in groups, discussing the matter. “I have
brought the doctor!” he shouted vaguely at the wigged figure of Mr.
Ryder, the only one distinguishable in the uncertain light. John Vane
caught at the young man’s arm in the crowd. “It is all over,” he said,
“thank God! She is safe, and it is all over.” Jenny Eastwood fell back
upon the doctor, whom he had hunted after so long, whom he had brought
so far, and who was now surrounded by a crowd of eager friends, shaking
hands with him. If he had been but a year or two younger I think the boy
would have cried in the bitterness of his disappointment. All this for
nothing! and Innocent saved without him, when he was away, without any
need of his services! Though he gulped his trouble down in a moment, and
faced John Vane, who was looking at him kindly, with a countenance
instantaneously subdued out of the quiver of pain that had passed over
it, Jenny had as sharp a pang to bear in that moment as might have
supplied discomfort enough for a year. “Never mind. It was best to do it
anyhow,” he said, feeling the sting go through and through him, and
scarcely conscious of anything else.
“Quite right,” said Vane; “though like most great efforts it is not to
have any reward. Come home with me, Jenny. They are all here. I don’t
think we could have lived out another night.”
“Who are ‘we’?” said Jenny cautiously.
“All of us,” said Vane, with the water in his eyes. He could have cried
too, for other motives than those of Jenny. He had not thought of
himself--he had not even in his generosity thought of Nelly until that
moment. But he had been with her constantly during the few days which
appeared to them all like so many years. He had stood by her when there
was no one else to stand by her, when even her mother, as a witness, was
not allowed to be with her child. He had been Nelly’s brother, her
support, her companion; he and not the other; and was the other to come
in now, when all was over, to take the reward which he had not earned,
to share the ease when he had not shared the trouble? A poignant sense
of injustice began immediately to combat in Vane’s mind with a great
many other feelings. Is there any simple, unmingled feeling, any
primitive unity of thought, possible to men in these days? something of
the sort had been forced upon all this group during Innocent’s danger;
they had been conscious of but one thought and one purpose, that of
saving her. But now that she was saved, do you suppose that simple joy
was enough to fill up these complex souls? They were all off in a
moment, each into his separate labyrinth, conscious of the relief, but
chiefly because that relief allowed the presence of other evils to be
felt. Jenny, poor boy, had a very tangible cause for his disappointment.
He had laboured in vain, and spent his strength for nought, and the
others who had not done half so much as he had got the reward. Thus his
feelings were somewhat analogous to those which had burst into sudden
life in the mind of Vane. Both of them mastered their feelings, and
began to talk of the trial, and how it had come to this happy issue. But
the man and the boy felt very much alike in the sudden shock and
revulsion. They had laboured and suffered, and others had the reward.
Dear reader, I will not insist upon carrying you into all the strange
excitement which filled those little lodgings. Innocent, when she was
taken into the unknown room, seemed to have suddenly frozen again into
the Innocent who had arrived two years before at The Elms. She suffered
Nelly to hang about her, to place her in a chair, to bring her a
footstool, to take off her bonnet with the same passive stare which had
bewildered them all in the old days. I believe if Frederick had come in
at that moment she would have turned to him as she had then, falling
back upon her first friend. But Frederick, fortunately, was not there.
The mob, not willing altogether to lose a victim, and urged on by
certain hot partisans of Batty, had detected him on his way to his
mother’s lodgings, and had so hooted and mobbed and jeered him, that he
had taken refuge in high disgust and profound humiliation in the railway
station. Frederick, as I have often said, held reputation high, though
he did a great deal in secret to forfeit it; and this vulgar assault and
the supreme horror of hearing himself called names--himself, Frederick
Eastwood, the most important figure in the world to his own thinking--so
worked upon him, coupled with the sense that a few ruffians even
lingered without to renew the operation as soon as he re-appeared, that
he took the next train for London, telegraphing from thence to Sir
Alexis his joy and congratulations. He had not cut a very exalted figure
altogether at the trial of his cousin for the murder of his wife. The
Sealing Wax Office is too important a branch of the economy of the State
not to have departments in the larger colonies, and branches all over
the world. Frederick accepted a colonial appointment the very next day.
It was the only thing to be done in his circumstances; and, except his
mother, I doubt if any one much regretted his departure; but mothers
have a way of thinking well of their children--a prejudice which,
perhaps, if not very wise, is still good for the world.
Innocent was roused a little out of her stupor when she was taken
up-stairs to the room where Mrs. Eastwood lay, trying to rest, because
she had promised to do so, and wondering what the sounds might be
down-stairs, the sounds of as many feet passing outside, which honour
and her promise forbade her from noticing. She gave a great cry, and
sprang from her sofa to catch Innocent in her arms, when she was led in
by Nelly in order that her mother’s eyes when she woke should open upon
the saved one.
“As if I could sleep with one of you in danger!” Mrs. Eastwood cried,
weeping. Innocent did not leave her all night, and gradually by slow
degrees the warmth came back to her heart, as warmth and life come back
to the limbs of a creature frozen and benumbed by drowning, or by
exposure to the cold. When she slept, which was not for a long time, her
smile came back to her in dreams, and then a faint shadow of colour to
her white cheek; and when she woke, she woke herself again--the Innocent
of Longueville, the budding, half-expanded soul who had begun to reward
the toils of all those who had tended her. With wonder and joy they
watched her--not mad, not vacant, not stupefied--recovering as a flower
does that has been trodden upon, but from which no passing misfortune
can take its elasticity. While they wondered and speculated whether it
was safe to say anything to her of the proceedings of the past days, she
went of herself to the window, and looked across at the dreary old
prison walls. They saw her gazing at this dreary building, and waited,
no one daring to speak. At last she turned to them with a soft smile.
“Which was my window?” she said.
They all came hurrying round to prove to her how safe she was, how
entirely delivered from the gloomy durance of yesterday, and pointed it
out to her with smiles and tears.
“That one!” said Innocent, still smiling. “I wish I had known it was so
near. What a little way! and you sat here and watched me? It was almost
the same as being at home.”
Why did they all kiss her, with those tears? She accepted the kisses and
dried the tears with her handkerchief, with a half-laughing gesture like
a child’s.
“Yes, _almost_ the same,” she repeated, lingering upon the word with a
strange, smiling pathos, which gave to it a double suggestiveness. She
stood long at the window thus smiling, saying nothing more--as the soul
may smile which has newly arrived in heaven--in a trance of celestial
wonder to find out after all how little way it is from the prison window
to the light of the everlasting home.
And after this she became perfectly tranquil, and prepared for her
journey home, and did what she was told, with no apparent consciousness
that anything very extraordinary had happened to her. Sir Alexis, much
more shaken, looking old, as though ten years had passed over his head,
was eager to take advantage of this calm, and carry her back to
Longueville without delay.
“She must be ill--this cannot last. After all that she has gone through
her health must give way sooner or later,” he said. But he was much more
likely to be ill himself than was Innocent. She, in the simple unity of
her feelings, had not felt half nor a third part so much as he had
felt--as he felt still. For all the complications of sentiment, the
horror of publicity, the man’s humiliation at having his domestic
privacy intruded upon, at having his marriage discussed, his wife’s name
bandied about from one vulgar mouth to another, every circumstance of
his life laid bare, had no existence for Innocent. She had felt the
actual horrors of loneliness, vague alarm, sickening personal terror,
made stronger by ignorance. But these were all; and when she was alone
no longer, when she was freed from her prison, surrounded by her
friends, no longer frightened or forsaken, the weight was taken at once
from Innocent’s head. She thought nothing of the publicity, and was not
conscious of the shame.
But Sir Alexis was conscious of it--very conscious. He felt to his very
heart that years would have to elapse before his young bride could be
seen anywhere without being pointed out as “the woman who was tried for
murder.” He knew that in society most people would believe, or at least
say, whether they believed it or not, that she had been guilty; and that
everybody would make sure that she had loved Frederick Eastwood, a
hypothesis very galling to her husband. Thus, though Innocent was saved,
he was not saved, nor could be all his life, from the consequences of
this prosecution. The newspapers began to comment upon it immediately
after its termination, and to characterize it as entirely vindictive--a
case which no good barrister should have undertaken, for which no grand
jury ought to have brought in a true bill. “Everybody knows that, under
certain physical conditions, there is nothing so common as
self-accusation,” said the _Thunderer_; “and that murder is the
favourite crime selected by the victims of this mania.” These
discussions were all in Innocent’s favour: but oh, how terrible is the
favour of the newspapers to a young girl--a young wife of eighteen!
Better a hundred times that they should even damn her instantaneously,
and let her go!
Thus Sir Alexis hastened back with his bride to Longueville, telling her
fondly that everything was over that could harm her, and that they
should now begin their old, sweet life once more. But, alas! that sweet
life was gone like the winter snow; for the man who was no longer young,
who could not hope to live to forget or see it forgotten, that life
would return no more.