All that night lights were burning in the Ralston House, where the judge sat by his wife, who lay with her eyes closed and tears constantly running down her cheeks until it seemed as if she could not cry any more.
“My boy, my boy! I must go to him,” she kept saying, and nothing but the assurance that she should do so could quiet her.
“It will not harm her as much to go as it will to stay,” the doctor said when he came in the morning, and not long after Paul had breakfasted she was with him, sobbing in his arms, while he tried to comfort her, mastering his own grief for her sake, telling her it would all be right, and that he was very comfortable.
“Tom brought a lot of things last night, and he says there’s a whole load coming by and by. I shall be housed too luxuriously for a prisoner,” he said, trying to laugh.
“Oh, Paul, don’t call yourself that dreadful name. I can’t bear it,” Mrs. Ralston said, clinging closer to him and covering his face with kisses.
She was lovely and gracious to every one, but she was very proud of her own family name and that of the Ralstons, too. None was better in Massachusetts, and that it should be tarnished by her son’s arrest and imprisonment was galling to her pride. But over and above this was the thought of possible conviction, which must not,—should not be. She would fight for her boy and rescue him from his traducers.
“Tell me about it,—all you know. People think it was accidental, and that you should say so at once. Tell me everything.”
She was a little woman, and she was in Paul’s lap, with her arms around his neck and her face against his cheek, while he told her all he knew,—the same story he had repeated so many times and which she believed, for he had never told her a lie. Naturally she felt indignant at Elithe, who was expected to be the main witness against him.
“I shall see her and know what she means,” she said.
“No, mother, don’t worry Elithe,” Paul rejoined. “She thinks she saw me. I have asked for her to come here and explain. Perhaps I can convince her she was mistaken. I want to see Clarice, too. If you could come to-day she surely can and will. How is she?”