“Have you really never heard of the Trial?” he said.
“Never.”
“I thought it strange,” he went on, “when you told me you had found out your husband’s true name, that the discovery appeared to have suggested no painful association to your mind. It is not more than three years since all England was talking of your husband. One can hardly wonder at his taking refuge, poor fellow, in an assumed name. Where could you have been at the time?”
“Did you say it was three years ago?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I think I can explain my strange ignorance of what was so well known to every one else. Three years since my father was alive. I was living with him in a country-house in Italy—up in the mountains, near Sienna. We never saw an English newspaper or met with an English traveler for weeks and weeks together. It is just possible that there might have been some reference made to the Trial in my father’s letters from England. If there were, he never told me of it. Or, if he did mention the case, I felt no interest in it, and forgot it again directly. Tell me—what has the Verdict to do with my husband’s horrible doubt of us? Eustace is a free man. The Verdict was Not Guilty, of course?”
Major Fitz-David shook his head sadly.
“Eustace was tried in Scotland,” he said. “There is a verdict allowed by the Scotch law, which (so far as I know) is not permitted by the laws of any other civilized country on the face of the earth. When the jury are in doubt whether to condemn or acquit the prisoner brought before them, they are permitted, in Scotland, to express that doubt by a form of compromise. If there is not evidence enough, on the one hand, to justify them in finding a prisoner guilty, and not evidence enough, on the other hand, to thoroughly convince them that a prisoner is innocent, they extricate themselves from the difficulty by finding a verdict of Not Proven.”
“Was that the Verdict when Eustace was tried?” I asked.
“Yes.”