“Oh, Innocent,” said Mrs. Eastwood, “how often have I told you, dear, that you are mistaken. Do not give this gentleman a false idea. It is a delusion, a mere delusion——”
“Let her tell me her own story,” said Mr. Serjeant Ryder, the lawyer. He was impatient of interference, and it seemed to him that a woman in tears, ready to interrupt his unfortunate client’s story by weak denials of a guilt which the culprit confessed, was a most undesirable assistant at this interview. “Let her tell me her own story,” he repeated, “there is nothing so important as that I should know the whole truth.”
He had heard the story already, and had been led to believe the case simple enough. But an experimental lawyer, accustomed to all the subtilities of crime, does not easily believe in the most obvious story. “Mere delusion” might, indeed, tempt a fool to accuse himself, but it was not enough to explain a criminal prosecution, and all the solemnities involved. I cannot describe the feelings with which the two bystanders kept silence, and listened to Innocent’s story, which she repeated as she had so often repeated it. Sir Alexis did not say a word, and he put his hand on Mrs. Eastwood’s arm, restraining her when she would have spoken. Innocent was left free to tell her own tale, which she did in her simplicity, giving all the details with absolute exactness and that curious matter-of-fact truth which was as characteristic of her as her visionary looks. She forgot nothing, she left out no circumstances. It was not until the second time of going over it that she even interposed that gentle profession of innocence, “I did not mean it,” in the midst of her full confession of guilt.
“You did not mean it?”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Eastwood, unable to keep silence, “how can you ask her such a question? She mean it! She did not even do it, though she thinks so—but mean it? Oh, Sir Alexis, this is too much.”
“I must take my own way,” said the lawyer. “I beg your pardon, but I cannot be interrupted. You did not mean what? To hurt the sick woman, or to put more than twenty drops in the glass? These, you perceive, are two different things. Pray let me put my questions my own way. If I could be permitted to see Lady Longueville alone, it would be much better. Your feelings, I am sure, are perfectly natural, but if I could see her alone——”
Innocent put out her hand and caught at her aunt’s dress with a low cry. “Oh, do not go away!” she cried, roused out of her usual calm. “It would be better to kill me than to leave me here alone. Oh, if you knew what it is to be alone!—all strange faces—nothing you ever saw before—and not even the window as there used to be in Pisa, and Niccolo to come in before he went away. Oh, Niccolo, Niccolo!” cried the girl, her voice rising in a cry of such loneliness as went to the heart even of the men who questioned her. She calmed down next moment, and looked with a faint smile from one to another—from her aunt to her husband. “When it is day and you are here it is different; but at night it is all a mist and dark, and there seems no one but Niccolo in all the world, and Niccolo is not here.”
“Oh, Innocent, my darling,” said Mrs. Eastwood, “if they would but let me stay with you night and day——”
“Niccolo never stayed the night,” said Innocent, wandering off, with a vague smile, into her recollections. “When he had put down the salad and said, ‘Felicissima notte,’ he went away. I could hear his steps all the way down the stairs; but I never was frightened. If he would but come in and say, ‘Good-night,’ I should be happier—for sometimes I think I am in Pisa now, only the room is smaller and there is no window,” she said, looking up wistfully at the high window in the wall, which, with all her exertions, she could not reach. While she was thus gazing with her head turned away, the two lawyers exchanged significant glances. Mr. Serjeant Ryder looked at Sir Alexis with a faint elevation of his eyebrows, and shut his note-book with something between impatience and despair.
“I don’t think,” he said, “that I need trouble Lady Longueville any further to-day.”