“I am going back this afternoon,” she said, “her story was so incoherent, poor child; and I feared for the effect the shock might have—upon my son.”
“Is he imaginative too?” asked Miss Vane.
“He is my boy,” said Mrs. Eastwood, with a comforting flush of indignation and offence, “naturally my first thought was for him. I go back to my other poor child to-night.”
“A most fatiguing journey for you, I am sure,” said the visitor, and they took a stately leave of each other, with no very friendly feeling. Had the brother only been there instead of the sister! Mrs. Eastwood thought to herself. John Vane was the only person in the world to whom possibly she might have confided the terror she had gone through—who might have advised what was best to be done. Even to Frederick, Mrs. Eastwood reflected, she never could whisper the horrible delusion which had taken possession of Innocent’s mind. For it could be nothing but delusion—yet how vivid, how powerful! Nelly knew of it, and Alice, who were safe as herself; and Mrs. Eastwood could not but recollect the other listener, whose commonplace imagination would never be satisfied by any certainty that the confession she had heard was the outburst of a mere delusion. The experience of life made her very well aware that nothing is ever long concealed which has been put into words in the hearing of an uninterested bystander; and should any emergency arise, what should she—what could she do? There was no one whom she dared trust—not Frederick, not Ernest Molyneux. The secret must be locked in their own bosoms; nothing could be done but to keep it a secret. Even John Vane—but on the thought of him alone her anxious mind reposed with a certain consolation—of all the world, he was the only one who might, perhaps, help them, should any terrible necessity for help ever come.
Miss Vane, on her part, went away shaking her head. “There is something in it all I don’t understand,” she said to the Sister, who awaited her in the pony carriage outside. “Innocent never concealed her dislike to Mrs. Frederick. Though she talked so little, she could talk on that subject.”
“Poor child, she was so simple and sincere, she said what she thought,” answered Sister Emily, whom Innocent’s church-going ways had deeply impressed.
“Oh, sincere! well, I suppose you may call that sincerity,” said Miss Vane; “but few people would like such sincerity in respect to themselves; and why with these feelings Innocent should have been so shocked, I can’t imagine. Depend upon it, there is something more in the whole business than meets the eye. I shall write to my brother all about it to-day.”
CHAPTER XXXVI.
AT HOME.
That was a day never to be forgotten at The Elms. Innocent had been partially soothed during the long Sunday by the constant presence of her aunt and Nelly, and the careful tendance of old Alice. They never left her all day long. She was brought back at her own piteous request from the room she had chosen for herself to the little room within Nelly’s, which had been first prepared for her, and there lay all day long, holding the hand of one or the other, in a state of prostration which it was painful to witness. So long as they were with her she was calm; but if left a moment alone, began to cry out about the eyes that were looking at her, the clutch on her arm. Sometimes she would doze and begin counting over and over again, counting “ten, eleven, fifteen,” and would wake and start with looks of horror, gazing wildly around her, not knowing where she was. Mrs. Eastwood’s expedition to Sterborne had been decided upon by the mother and daughter as they sat together whispering over the fire, when Innocent at last fell asleep. Only one of the two could go, and Mrs. Eastwood decided at once that hers must be the mission. “We must know what is hanging over us—we must ascertain what we have to expect,” she had said. Oh, in what labyrinths of woe and horror did their innocent simple life seem about to lose itself! For neither of them doubted Innocent’s story. They felt that nothing which she had imagined could have produced such an effect upon her, and besides, what could have suggested such a strange idea? Her imagination was not impressionable. The only explanation was that it must be true. Mrs. Eastwood accordingly, after her vigil, set off in the early morning with a heart overweighted with horrible anxiety, not knowing what might have happened before she returned, or what tumult she might meet when she got there. She was prepared to defend the unfortunate girl to the last gasp; but if this dreadful story were true, what could be done? To carry Innocent away at once out of the country, without an hour’s delay, was a thought which had occurred both to Nelly and herself, but this might make doubt into certainty, and precipitate the very danger they feared. Thus she went away, trembling with anxious fears, with traces in her face of the agitation she could not conceal; yet, at the same time, horribly on her guard, watching everybody and everything, to draw the secret if possible from others, and to conceal her own possession of it. The two whom she left behind to guard Innocent were almost more to be pitied than she was. They felt themselves the garrison of the room, to defend it against possible invasion. They locked the door of Nelly’s chamber, through which any visitor must come, and then unlocked it again, fearing to awake suspicion. At every noise they started, and clung to each other, fearing nothing less than the horrible approach of justice to carry a prisoner away; and how many noises there were in the house that day! Carriages drove mysteriously to the door and drove away again, from the very moment about daybreak when Mrs. Eastwood left them, until the dreary afternoon which felt as if it would never be over. In that afternoon all the people left in London, everybody the Eastwoods knew, came to call, and had to be sent away with messages curiously worded to baffle suspicion, if any suspicion existed. The morning’s post had brought a short note from Frederick announcing his wife’s death, and the telegram of inquiry about Innocent which he had sent off on Monday morning closely followed the letter; therefore Nelly felt justified in drawing down all the blinds, and announcing that the death of her sister-in-law made it impossible for her to receive visitors. The maid who had heard Innocent’s confession was the one who waited on them, who came with hard knocks at the door to tell of every new caller, and kept suspicious watch upon everything that passed. How frightened Nelly was of her! How eager to conciliate and turn her thoughts into other channels! But the woman was not to be moved into friendliness. She said nothing of her superior knowledge, but she betrayed a curiosity, and, at the same time, an amount of information which made the very blood run cold in Nelly’s veins. She had not forgotten what she heard; she did not set it down to delusion; she believed what Innocent had said. To the vulgar intelligence it is always so comprehensible that evil should have been done. No questioning as to motive or likelihood takes place in that region; that all men are most likely to go wrong is the one fundamental principle of their belief; they make no distinction between the kinds of crime, that this is more probable than the other. All they know is that guilt is always the most probable hypothesis, and that probably every accused person did what he was accused of, or worse, however unlikely the accusation might be.
And Innocent herself was restless and wretched; less stupefied, more living than on the previous day. She could not bear Nelly to leave her. She talked incessantly—she, whose habit it was never to talk at all, and her talk was all about the event which had made so tremendous an impression on her.