The news, told her as carefully as it was possible to tell it, and with as much concealed as could be concealed, had sent her into a deadly faint, from which she recovered only to insist that Paul be brought to her, and then to swoon again. This lasted for an hour or more, when she grew quiet, but talked constantly of Paul, begging her husband to go for him and bring him home.
“I can’t, Fanny,” the judge said to her. “They will not let him come yet. There must be an examination, or something, and then we trust he will he free. Tom and I are going to see him by and by. What shall I tell him for you?”
“Tell him to come. His mother is sick and will die if he stays away. Who says he shot Jack Percy?”
They did not tell her the particulars then. She was too weak to hear them. She only knew Paul had been arrested and was lodged in jail and that her husband and Tom were going to get him out. She put a great deal of faith in Tom, who guaranteed Paul’s speedy release over and over again, until she began to believe it, and was comparatively quiet when he started with the judge for the jail,—the carriage as full as it would hold of articles which Tom’s thoughtfulness had suggested.
“There’s more coming to-morrow,” he said to Paul, who could not answer at once.
The sight of his father and Tom and hearing of his mother’s illness had unnerved him again, and he was lying on the cot with his face buried in the pillow he knew was from his own bed.
“Seeing you makes me want to go home so badly,—to mother. Oh, mother, mother,” he said at last.
It was like the heart-broken cry of a child, and it seemed to the judge as if he must die if it were continued.
“Don’t, my boy, don’t,” he said, passing his arm under Paul’s neck and bringing his face up to his own. “It’s not for long. I have offered ten thousand dollars for the arrest of the real man and will offer ten more if necessary. That will bring him down.”
“Then you don’t think I did it, even by accident, as Mrs. Stevens says most people do?” Paul asked, and his father replied: “No, my son. I believe you told the truth when you said you knew nothing of it.”