She had withdrawn her hand and now sat with averted face, the faint flicker of hope his presence had enkindled extinguished by his evasive answer. Only when he repeated the question did she reply, and then in a mere whisper, without lifting her head: “Yes, I am English.”
“And your people, are they where you can reach them?”
She did not answer; there was nothing to be gained by yielding to his curiosity. Nor did she intend to reply to any more of his questions. He was only one of those kind priests who looked after the poor and whose sympathy, however well meant, would be of little value. If she told him how cruel had been the wrong done her, and how unjust had been her arrest, it would make no difference; he could not help her.
“There must be somebody,” he urged. He had read her indecision in the nervous play of her fingers, as he had read many another human emotion in his time. “There must be somebody,” he repeated.
“There is only Martha,” she answered at last, yielding to his influence. “She was my nurse when I was a child. She is as poor as I am. She will come to me if you will send word to her. They would not listen to me at Rosenthal's when I begged them to bring her to the store.” She lifted her head and stared wildly about her. “Oh, the injustice of it all—and the awful horror of this place! How can men do such things? I told them the truth, Father, I told them the truth. I never stole it. How could I ever steal anything? How dared he speak to me as he did?”
She turned, straining her whole body as if in mortal anguish; then, with her shoulder against the hard, whitewashed wall, she broke at last into sobs.
The priest sat still, waiting and watching, as a surgeon does a patient slowly emerging from delirium.
“Men are seldom reasonable, my good woman, when they lose their property, and they often do things which they regret afterward. Of what were you accused?”
His tone reassured her, and, for the first time, she looked directly at him. “Of stealing a mantilla which I had taken to my rooms to repair.”
“Whose was it?”