I was intent on the report, and not answering, she continued, "I heard nothing of it till I read the shameful account in the paper half an hour agone. The poor slandered girl was, I daresay, afraid or ashamed to send for me."
"This appears to be a very bad case, Mrs. Davies," I said at length. "Three forged ten-pound notes changed in one day at different shops each time, under the pretense of purchasing articles of small amount, and another ten-pound note found in her pocket! All that has, I must say, a very ugly look."
"I don't care," exclaimed Mrs. Davies, quite fiercely, "if it looks as ugly as sin, or if the whole Bank of England was found in her pocket! I know Jane Eccles well: she nursed me last spring through the fever; and I would be upon my oath that the whole story, from beginning to end, is an invention of the devil, or something worse!"
"Jane Eccles," I persisted, "appears to have been unable or unwilling to give the slightest explanation as to how she became possessed of the spurious notes. Who is this brother of hers, 'of such highly-respectable appearance,' according to the report, who was permitted a private interview with her previous to the examination?"
"She has no brother that I have ever heard of," said Mrs. Davies. "It must be a mistake of the papers."
"That is not likely. You observed, of course, that she was fully committed—and no wonder!"
Mrs. Davies's faith in the young woman's integrity was not to be shaken by any evidence save that of her own bodily eyes, and I agreed to see Jane Eccles on the morrow, and make the best arrangements for the defense—at Mrs. Davies's charge—which the circumstances and the short time I should have for preparation—the Old Bailey session would be on in a few days—permitted. The matter so far settled, Mrs. Margaret hurried off to see what had become of little Henry, the prisoner's nephew.
I visited Jane Eccles the next day in Newgate. She was a well-grown young woman of about two or three-and-twenty—not exactly pretty, perhaps, but very well-looking. Her brown hair was plainly worn, without a cap, and the expression of her face was, I thought, one of sweetness and humility, contradicted in some degree by rather harsh lines about the mouth, denoting strong will and purpose. As a proof of the existence of this last characteristic, I may here mention that when her first overweening confidence had yielded to doubt, she, although dotingly-fond of her nephew, at this time about eight years of age, firmly refused to see him, "in order," she once said to me, and the thought brought a deadly pallor to her face—"in order that, should the worst befall, her memory might not be involuntarily connected in his mind with images of dungeons, and disgrace, and shame." Jane Eccles had received what is called in the country "a good schooling," and the books Mrs. Davies had lent her she had eagerly perused. She was, therefore, to a certain extent, a cultivated person; and her speech and manners were mild, gentle, and, so to speak, religious. I generally found, when I visited her, a Bible or prayer-book in her hand. This, however, from my experience, comparatively slight though it was, did not much impress me in her favor—devotional sentiment, so easily, for a brief time, assumed, being, in nine such cases out of ten, a hypocritical deceit. Still she, upon the whole, made a decidedly favorable impression on me, and I no longer so much wondered at the bigotry of unbelief manifested by Mrs. Davies in behalf of her apparently amiable and grateful protégée.
But beyond the moral doubt thus suggested of the prisoner's guilt, my interviews with her utterly failed to extract any thing from her in rebutment of the charge upon which she was about to be arraigned. At first she persisted in asserting that the prosecution was based upon manifest error; that the impounded notes, instead of being forged, were genuine Bank-of-England paper. It was some time before I succeeded in convincing her that this hope, to which she so eagerly, desperately clung, was a fallacious one. I did so at last; and either, thought I, as I marked her varying color and faltering voice, "either you are a consummate actress, or else the victim of some frightful delusion or conspiracy."
"I will see you, if you please, to-morrow," she said, looking up from the chair upon which, with her head bowed and her face covered with her hands, she had been seated for several minutes in silence. "My thoughts are confused now, but to-morrow I shall be more composed; better able to decide if—to talk, I mean, of this unhappy business."