Confusion reigned within him, and yet he found himself powerless to correlate his thoughts or suggest reasons for the strange happenings of the last few days. It seemed to him that he was in a dream wherein reason played no part. In the indictment he was arraigned for the murder of Peter Craigmile, Jr.,––as Richard Kildene,––and yet he had seen his cousin lying dead before him, during 410 all the years that had passed since he had fled from that sight. In battle he had seen men clubbed with the butt end of a musket fall dead with wounded temples, even as he had seen his cousin––stark––inert––lifeless. He had felt the strange, insane rage to kill that he had seen in others and marveled at. And now, after he had felt and done it, he was arrested as the man he had slain.
All the morning he paced his cell and tried to force his thoughts to work out the solution, but none presented itself. Was he the victim of some strange form of insanity that caused him to lose his identity and believe himself another man? Drunken men he had seen under the delusion that all the rest of the world were drunken and they alone sober. Oh, madness, madness! At least he was sane and knew himself, and this was a confusion brought about by those who had undertaken his arrest. He would wait for the Elder to come, and in the meantime live in his memories, thinking of Amalia, and so awaken in himself one living emotion, sacred and truly sane. In the sweetness of such thinking alone he seemed to live.
He drew the little ivory crucifix from his bosom and looked at it. “The Christ who bore our sins and griefs”––and again Amalia’s words came to him. “If they keep you forever in the prison, still forever are you free.” In snatches her words repeated themselves over in his mind as he gazed. “If you have the Christ in your heart––so are you high––lifted above the sin.” “If I see you no more here, in Paradise yet will I see you, and there it will be joy––great––joy; for it is the love that is all of life, and all of eternity, and lives––lives.”
Bertrand Ballard and his wife and daughter stood in the small room opening off from the corridor that led to the rear of the courthouse where was the jail, waiting for the jailer to bring his keys from his office, and, waiting thus, Betty turned her eyes beseechingly on her father, and for the first time since her talk with her mother in the studio, opened her lips to speak to him. She was very pale, but she did not tremble, and her voice had the quality of determination. Bertrand had yielded the point and had taken her to the jail against his own judgment, taking Mary with him to forestall the chance of Betty’s seeing the young man alone. “Surely,” he thought, “she will not ask to have her mother excluded from the interview.”
“I don’t want any one––not even you––or––or––mother, to go in with me.”
“My child, be wise––and be guided.”
“Yes, father,––but I want to go in alone.” She slipped her hand in her mother’s, but still looked in her father’s eyes. “I must go in alone, father. You don’t understand––but mother does.”
“This young man may be an impostor. It is almost unmaidenly for you to wish to go in there alone. Mary––”
But Mary hesitated and trusted to her daughter’s intuition. “Betty, explain yourself,” was all she said.