Chapter XXXVI: The Trial

The slow days waned and faded, and Nina seemed fading with them, so pallid and hollow grew her cheek, so large and dark her sweet, sad eyes. It was summer now, but little of its bloom and fragrance penetrated the gloomy cell where she was immured. Miss Strangemore and faithful Kitty had taken lodgings near the prison and visited her every day. They would have remained with her all the time but this was not allowable.

Miss Drusilla was nearly crazed with grief and horror over Nina’s trouble. She would have given a year out of her life to have known where to find Talbot Strangemore.

She knew that he ought to be there, that it was simply terrible for him to be absent in this hour of Nina’s supreme peril, and she had, besides, an innate knowledge that in spite of all her cruel wrongs the unhappy girl secretly longed for her husband’s presence. It seemed to them both that Talbot, knowing that she had come to this awful strait by his weakness and folly, would put forth a superhuman effort to save her.

But if the exiled husband had been dead and buried he could not have remained more silent to all the efforts that were made to find him. Miss Drusilla wrote to the American Consuls at all the foreign countries. She advertised in the leading papers at home and abroad. She made every possible effort to communicate with the wanderer, but dead silence rewarded her in every instance. And meantime a jury had been convened, and the day of Nina’s trial had been set.

Oh, that awful day of fate! The frail, weak, shuddering girl wondered how she should live through it when they led her into court to face all those cold, curious faces. A low murmur ran from lip to lip, and the frightened creature believed that it was a whisper of execration. She sank shivering into her seat.

“This is what her love for a man has brought her to, poor innocent, suffering child! I wish that all the men were swept from the face of the earth,” muttered Miss Strangemore in bitter wrath, as she sat down beside her niece, and glowered in impatient anger at judge and jury.

Then the trial began.

No such romantically tragic case had been before the public for years.

The beauty, the youth, the great wealth, the high standing of the prisoner at the bar made a great sensation. The court-room was packed with interested people. Marmaduke Cameron and his yachting friends greatly to their chagrin had been summoned as witnesses to the prosecuting attorney. Cameron indeed was the most important witness, for it was he who had taken down Mrs. St. Alban’s dying deposition.

“I wish that I had been a thousand miles away that fatal night. It goes to my heart to testify against that lovely forlorn young creature. Even if she killed Mrs. St. Alban it was because she was driven mad by jealousy and disappointed love,” he whispered to Virgie Mason, who was bathed in tears over Nina’s fate.

“But she did not do it, oh, no, no, no, I will never believe that she did,” sobbed the fair and gentle girl “And it almost breaks my heart to think that they have made Helen and me come here to repeat all the things she said that night when Sibyl had driven her mad by her heartless coquetries with Mr. Strangemore. I know she did not mean half that she said, and it seems cruel for us to have to tell it for the purpose of condemning her.”

But they had no choice in the matter. They were compelled to obey the stern mandate of the law.

Nina’s lawyer argued her case in his best and most forcible style. He brought witnesses to testify to the sweet and gentle nature of the accused. No one that knew her believed that she was guilty. They knew that it was impossible for her to have committed such an act. He admitted that she had had great provocation to anger, and that she had called down the vengeance of heaven upon her triumphant and insolent rival, but he said that the very fact that she had called upon heaven to avenge her wrongs proved that she had not attempted to take the punishment of the cruel coquette into her own young hands. Nay, she had gone away and made two attempts at suicide in order to free her unloving husband that he might be happy with the woman he preferred beyond her. He harangued the court for several hours, and after a brilliant, but almost hopeless effort sat down to listen to the closing speech of the prosecution.