'Ah,' said Miss Montressor, with a very genuine sigh, 'the bad luck has come in here before the police, not with them, and it will stay after them. Poor creature, how is she?'
'She received the gentlemen quite calm and quiet,' said Mrs. Jenkins; 'but of course I don't know anything, since I was only a minute in the room.'
This short dialogue took place in Helen's boudoir, whither Mrs. Jenkins had gone to seek her sister after she had ushered Helen's ominous visitors into her husband's library, where she was awaiting them. Miss Montressor had by this time awakened from her nap, greatly refreshed and reinvigorated, and was looking very dainty and captivating; she had arranged her hair by the aid of a pocket-comb and a pocket-mirror which invariably accompanied her, together with a cunningly-devised little casket containing pearl-powder, to the use of which, to say the truth, she was too much addicted off the stage; and she was now perfectly prepared to undergo a whole set of new sensations with regard to the Griswold murder, for in that familiar phrase had the at-first-vague calamity ranged itself in the minds of Miss Montressor and Bryan Duval.
The interview between Helen Griswold, her two friends, and the police officers lasted so long, that the grievous apprehension possessed Mrs. Jenkins as to the effect which such sustained interrogation, with all its horrors of assumption and actual pain, must produce on Helen's enfeebled frame. To the acute and experienced eye of Mrs. Jenkins, who had done a great deal in the way of nursing invalids in her time, and who had that quick perception of illness natural to woman, however uneducated, Helen's health had suffered much more severely under the excruciating trial of the last three days than Thornton Carey or Bryan Duval believed. In her very composure Mrs. Jenkins saw partly an unnatural effort and partly physical exhaustion; she did not cry, or scream, or throw herself about, or give way to any violent demonstration of the suffering which was racking her, quite as much because she was unable to do so, as because her good sense and her resolution induced her to give as little trouble and inflict as little distress upon the friends who were nobly endeavouring to aid her as possible; but they perceived only one of these reasons for her quietude.
In voice, that most distinctive symptom, as well as in face, Helen Griswold was changed; something was gone from both destined never to return to them: the sweet clear timbre in the former, the roundlike brightness in the latter. In after years Helen was a handsomer woman than she had been in those days of honoured and happy matronhood, in her splendid home with the husband who was so devoted to her; but the beauty of these latter years was of a different cast from that in which he had taken such delight and it indicated a mind matured and a heart strengthened, both results reached by a process of untold severity.
That Helen would be very ill, so seriously ill that she would be unable to think of anything except her bodily ailments for some time after the immediate pressure of the actual business imposed upon her by her calamity should have been removed, Mrs. Jenkins felt thoroughly convinced, and therefore she was anxious that all the business which could be got through to-day should be got through; and as the time went on, and no sound of departing footsteps could be heard passing the door from the boudoir, where she and Miss Montressor remained, she was satisfied that they were going into all the matters connected with Mr. Griswold's affairs within Helen's sphere of knowledge thoroughly and at once.
In this supposition Mrs. Jenkins was perfectly correct. It had been agreed between Bryan Duval and Thornton Carey that all the information which could possibly be extracted from Mrs. Griswold should be acquired on the present occasion; so that, if possible, she should not again be troubled with the distressing presence of the judicial side of the dreadful occurrence, but left to the tranquillising effect of time and quiet.
So, when the four men were ushered into the presence of the young widow, who received them in her husband's library, to enter which and meddle with the papers to which she had never had, during his lifetime, any access, gave her a pang of exceeding sharpness, they found her, as Mrs. Jenkins had described her to her sister at an earlier hour in the morning, very calm, but mortally pale.
Throughout the whole of that prolonged interview, under all the forms interrogative, retrospective, speculative, and narrative which it assumed, no change fell upon Helen's face, no tinge of colour touched its waxen paleness; she was perfectly collected, and her natural quickness of apprehension was entirely unimpeded, but her eyes had a fixed vagueness and lightness, produced by overwhelming fatigue and the influence of opiate. Her mechanical, unexcited manner, and patient waiting and submission to the question-and-answer mood adopted by her interlocutors, assisted them materially, and caused them no little astonishment. A woman who always gave the exact answer to the exact question, and never required to have it asked twice, was a novelty in their experience; and as the examination, including in it all the circumstances which had preceded Alston Griswold's departure, progressed, it was plain that unless they could find a clue in the information which they were receiving from Mrs. Griswold, that clue must be sought for in a totally different set and combination of circumstances, for there could be no doubt of the retentiveness and accuracy of her memory and the unembarrassed plainness of her statement of facts.
Copious notes were taken of her narrative of everything which had occurred up to the eve of Alston Griswold's departure. She was closely questioned as to his and her own social relations. Her statements on that point were few and simple. She and her husband had a large acquaintance but few friends, in the sense of habitual daily intimates. It was not her taste to cultivate such, and Mr. Griswold, though a man of very genial disposition, was almost as reserved and home-loving as an Englishman; she could, in fact, indicate but one intimacy on her husband's part of the nature and extent which the questions put to her indicated--this intimacy existed in the person of Trenton Warren.