Innocent was roused a little out of her stupor when she was taken up-stairs to the room where Mrs. Eastwood lay, trying to rest, because she had promised to do so, and wondering what the sounds might be down-stairs, the sounds of as many feet passing outside, which honour and her promise forbade her from noticing. She gave a great cry, and sprang from her sofa to catch Innocent in her arms, when she was led in by Nelly in order that her mother’s eyes when she woke should open upon the saved one.
“As if I could sleep with one of you in danger!” Mrs. Eastwood cried, weeping. Innocent did not leave her all night, and gradually by slow degrees the warmth came back to her heart, as warmth and life come back to the limbs of a creature frozen and benumbed by drowning, or by exposure to the cold. When she slept, which was not for a long time, her smile came back to her in dreams, and then a faint shadow of colour to her white cheek; and when she woke, she woke herself again—the Innocent of Longueville, the budding, half-expanded soul who had begun to reward the toils of all those who had tended her. With wonder and joy they watched her—not mad, not vacant, not stupefied—recovering as a flower does that has been trodden upon, but from which no passing misfortune can take its elasticity. While they wondered and speculated whether it was safe to say anything to her of the proceedings of the past days, she went of herself to the window, and looked across at the dreary old prison walls. They saw her gazing at this dreary building, and waited, no one daring to speak. At last she turned to them with a soft smile.
“Which was my window?” she said.
They all came hurrying round to prove to her how safe she was, how entirely delivered from the gloomy durance of yesterday, and pointed it out to her with smiles and tears.
“That one!” said Innocent, still smiling. “I wish I had known it was so near. What a little way! and you sat here and watched me? It was almost the same as being at home.”
Why did they all kiss her, with those tears? She accepted the kisses and dried the tears with her handkerchief, with a half-laughing gesture like a child’s.
“Yes, almost the same,” she repeated, lingering upon the word with a strange, smiling pathos, which gave to it a double suggestiveness. She stood long at the window thus smiling, saying nothing more—as the soul may smile which has newly arrived in heaven—in a trance of celestial wonder to find out after all how little way it is from the prison window to the light of the everlasting home.
And after this she became perfectly tranquil, and prepared for her journey home, and did what she was told, with no apparent consciousness that anything very extraordinary had happened to her. Sir Alexis, much more shaken, looking old, as though ten years had passed over his head, was eager to take advantage of this calm, and carry her back to Longueville without delay.
“She must be ill—this cannot last. After all that she has gone through her health must give way sooner or later,” he said. But he was much more likely to be ill himself than was Innocent. She, in the simple unity of her feelings, had not felt half nor a third part so much as he had felt—as he felt still. For all the complications of sentiment, the horror of publicity, the man’s humiliation at having his domestic privacy intruded upon, at having his marriage discussed, his wife’s name bandied about from one vulgar mouth to another, every circumstance of his life laid bare, had no existence for Innocent. She had felt the actual horrors of loneliness, vague alarm, sickening personal terror, made stronger by ignorance. But these were all; and when she was alone no longer, when she was freed from her prison, surrounded by her friends, no longer frightened or forsaken, the weight was taken at once from Innocent’s head. She thought nothing of the publicity, and was not conscious of the shame.
But Sir Alexis was conscious of it—very conscious. He felt to his very heart that years would have to elapse before his young bride could be seen anywhere without being pointed out as “the woman who was tried for murder.” He knew that in society most people would believe, or at least say, whether they believed it or not, that she had been guilty; and that everybody would make sure that she had loved Frederick Eastwood, a hypothesis very galling to her husband. Thus, though Innocent was saved, he was not saved, nor could be all his life, from the consequences of this prosecution. The newspapers began to comment upon it immediately after its termination, and to characterize it as entirely vindictive—a case which no good barrister should have undertaken, for which no grand jury ought to have brought in a true bill. “Everybody knows that, under certain physical conditions, there is nothing so common as self-accusation,” said the Thunderer; “and that murder is the favourite crime selected by the victims of this mania.” These discussions were all in Innocent’s favour: but oh, how terrible is the favour of the newspapers to a young girl—a young wife of eighteen! Better a hundred times that they should even damn her instantaneously, and let her go!