“No, no!” protested Bessie. “It is not success enough for you. No success is enough for you. You deserve everything that ever man did deserve. And here you are insulted, trampled upon, and threatened. O, it is shameful and horrible!”
“My child, you must not help to break me down,” implored Foster, feeling that he was turning weak under the thought of his calamity.
She started towards him in a spasm of remorse; it was as if she had suddenly become aware that she had stabbed him; her face and her attitude were full of self-reproach.
“O my darling, do I make you more wretched?” she asked, “when I would die for you! when you are my all! O, there is not a minute when I am worthy of you!”
These interviews left Foster possessed of a few minutes of consolation and peace, which would soon change into an increased poverty of despair and rage. For the first few days of his imprisonment his prevalent feeling was anger. He could not in the least accept his position; he would not look upon himself as one who was suspected with justice, or even with the slightest show of probability; he would not admit that society was pardonable for its doubts of him. He was not satisfied with mere hope of escape; on the contrary, he considered his accusers shamefully and wickedly blameworthy; he was angry at them, and wanted to wreak upon them a stern vengeance.
As the imprisonment dragged on, however, and his mind lost its tension under the pressure of trouble, there came moments when he did not quite know himself. It seemed to him that this man, who was charged with murder, was some one else, for whose character he could not stand security, and who might be guilty. He almost looked upon him with suspicion; he half joined the public in condemning him unheard. Perhaps this mental confusion was the foreshadowing of that insane state of mind in which prisoners have confessed themselves guilty of murders which they had not committed, and which have been eventually brought home to others. There are twilights between reason and unreason. The descent from the one condition to the other is oftener a slope than a precipice.
Meanwhile Bessie had, as a matter of course, plans for saving her lover; and these plans, almost as a matter of course too, were mainly impracticable. As with all young people and almost all women, she rebelled against the fixed procedures of society when they seemed likely to trample on the dictates of her affections. Now that it was her lover who was under suspicion of murder, it did not seem a necessity to her that the law should take its course, and, on the contrary, it seemed to her an atrocity. She knew that he was guiltless; she knew that he was suffering; why should he be tried? When told that he must have every legal advantage, she assented to it eagerly, and drove at once to see Mr. Patterson, and overwhelmed him with tearful implorations “to do everything,—to do everything that could be done,—yes, in short, to do everything.” But still she could not feel that anything ought to be done, except to release at once this beautiful and blameless victim, and to make him every conceivable apology. As for bringing him before a court, to answer with his life whether he were innocent or guilty, it was an injustice and an outrage which she rebelled against with all the energy of her ardent nature.
Who could prevent this infamy? In her ignorance of the machinery of justice, it seemed to her that her grandfather might. Notwithstanding the little sympathy that there had been between them, she went to the grim old man with her sorrows and her plans, proposing to him to arrest the trial. In her love and her simplicity she would have appealed to a mountain or to a tiger.
“What!” roared the Squire. “Stop the trial? Can’t do it. I’m not the prosecutor. The State’s attorney is the prosecutor.”