Chapter XLIX: 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.