Lady Carradine's letter, figuratively speaking, smote poor Nell, like a bolt from the blue. She had imagined several things, any one of which might have delayed Dare's coming--he had given her to understand that his business in London would not take up more than a fortnight at the most--but no faintest dread or suspicion that, after so long a time, he would be arrested and cast for trial on a charge connected with his past career had ever entered her mind. It was like a stab in the dark by an unseen hand, and she reeled under it, and felt for a while as if she were hurt in a vital part past hope of recovery.
She did not sleep a wink during the whole of the night after her receipt of the news. Now and then she lay down for a little while on a couch, but for the most part she spent the long dark hours in pacing her room restlessly from end to end. No sooner, however, had the first streak of daylight appeared in the sky than she quitted the house, and, making her way down to the banks of the little river which ran past the foot of the park, she followed its solitary windings for some miles, till it drew near the village of Mosscrags, where the early housewives were now astir, and the laborers going forth to their work; then she turned and retraced the way she had come. It had seemed to her that she could think more clearly and coherently under the free air of heaven than in the confined space of her own chamber.
All her thinking had for its intent the answering of one question: "What can I do to help him?" But so bitterly did the sense of her powerlessness weigh upon her that she could have beaten her head against the wall in a tempest of rage and impotent passion. She could do nothing--nothing; a month-old babe would be as competent to help him as she was. The four walls of a jail held him, and there was no door of escape open to him save that last one of all which led to the gallows. Several times in the course of the night the shadows that seem to lurk so thickly around one at such times had shaped themselves into the ghastly semblance of a cross-tree with its dangling rope, which, all imaginary though it was, had caused her soul to shudder and grow sick within her.
In the days to which our narrative refers the old barbarous and inhuman penal code was still in full operation, and crimes which a short term of imprisonment with hard labor would now expiate had the last dread sentence of the law pronounced on them without hope of reprieve. At the Lanchester spring assizes of that year, as Miss Baynard did not fail to call to mind, a couple of men had been condemned to death, one of them for sheep-stealing and the other for shop-lifting. In the eye of the law the crime for which Geoffrey Dare stood committed was of a much more heinous kind than either of those, and should the charge be proved against him, as there seemed every likelihood of its being, then would the gallows seen by Nell with the eyes of her imagination develop into a very real erection on the roof of Lanchester jail. In such a case as Dare's--whether or no they succeeded in identifying him with "Captain Nightshade"--the death penalty would indubitably be exacted. Justice would demand her victim, while Mercy wept with her face turned to the wall.
And still Nell's heart echoed persistently with the cry, "What can I do to help him?" But it was a cry which both earth and heaven flung back, and to which no answer was vouchsafed her. All that day and all the next night she was like a distracted creature, but distracted after the quiet fashion of one who craves for absolute solitude, and to whom even the society of those nearest and dearest is distasteful, if not positively unbearable.
Kind-hearted Mrs. Budd was greatly put about, being altogether at a loss to divine what was the matter with Nell, and whether the strangeness of her manner was due to a mental or bodily cause. Never before had she developed such peculiar symptoms, for no more sane and healthy being ever existed. She had never swooned in her life, although swooning, at proper times and season, was regarded rather as a fashionable accomplishment than otherwise. She never fancied that she was ill when nothing ailed her, or pretended that she had lost her appetite; she was never troubled with qualms, or spasms, or "the vertigo"; and as for being dyspeptic, she did not know the meaning of the word. She had been rendered very anxious and unhappy by the abduction of Evan, and proportionately happy by his recovery, but there had been nothing in the way she bore herself at that time which at all resembled the peculiar and inexplicable mood of which she had been the victim for the last four-and-twenty hours.
It was in a certain measure due to Mrs. Budd's instinctive tact, which taught her when it was advisable to speak and when to keep silent, that she and Miss Baynard had got on so well together. On the present occasion her instinct told her that Nell was in no mood to bear questioning, and she kept a guard on her tongue accordingly. But by the afternoon of the second day her uneasiness had grown to such an extent that she felt she should be lacking in her duty to one so much younger than herself if she refrained any longer from endeavoring to discover what it was that had changed Miss Baynard so unaccountably in so short a space of time.
"My dear Elinor, what is it that ails you? Whatever is the matter with you?" she at length summoned up courage to ask. "You are not like the same girl that you were at breakfast-time yesterday."
"Am I not? And yet I am the same," replied Nell with a smile which had more of tears than mirth in it. "What is't that ails me, do you ask! Nothing more serious than a fit of the megrims, I assure you. But I am apt to be dangerous at such times. You had better not come too near me; I might grow worse and bite you."
Then, before the astonished lady had time to collect her faculties, she found herself hugged and kissed, and left alone. Half a minute later she heard Miss Baynard singing as she went upstairs to her room. Then a door clashed somewhere in the distance, and all was still.