Chapter XXXV: Nina’s Despair

Doctor Fielding secured one of the ablest lawyers in the country as Nina’s counsel. He carefully collected all the evidence for and against her. He weighed it carefully, and the result did not please him.

“The case looks very unfavorable to my client,” he admitted frankly to the doctor. “I can see but one chance for her acquittal in the awful array of damning evidence against her.”

“And that chance?”

“Is the chance of proving an _alibi_ at the hour of the murder,” answered Mr. Davenport, the lawyer, gravely and decidedly.

“I fear that it will be impossible to do that,” Doctor Fielding answered with a heavy sigh, and from that moment hope began to fail in his breast.

“You told me that you saved her from attempted suicide that night. Surely you must have some idea of the time when it occurred,” said Mr. Davenport.

“It must have been near midnight, although I cannot tell exactly. But I remember that every person on the yacht had retired hours before and left me alone upon the deck, with my solitary cigar.”

“You say that Captain Travers assisted you in the rescue of the young lady that night. Might he not remember the exact hour at which the attempted suicide occurred?”

“Captain Travers is dead,” replied the doctor, despondently.

“Dead!” exclaimed the lawyer, with a start.

“Yes, he died very suddenly of apoplexy in a few days after the tragedy at Selwyn Heights.”

“And the young lady herself--has she no knowledge of the hour at which she left her home?” the lawyer anxiously inquired.

“I do not believe that she has, but it would perhaps be better to ask her,” Doctor Fielding replied.

So they went to see Nina in her prison cell.

Up to that moment Mr. Davenport had had a private opinion that his client was guilty. Everything looked so black against her, the evidence was so conclusive there scarcely seemed room for doubt. It all seemed to have come about so naturally, her jealousy of the dead woman, her passionate anger and open resentment seemed to have led up so inevitably to the crime of murder that Mr. Davenport had decided in his mind that his client had scarcely the shadow of a case.

But all this was before he had seen Nina Strangemore.

After they went to the prison, after he beheld the lovely, hapless creature whose life, as it were, seemed hanging on his hands, a great revulsion of feeling came over the lawyer.

He said to himself that although he might never be able to prove her innocence in a court of law, that the angels in heaven were not more pure and guiltless than this martyred girl.

And yet she could throw no light on the subject which involved so much to her.

“No, I cannot remember,” she said, hopelessly, when he entreated her to try to recall the hour when she had left her home. “It might have been midnight, or it might have been earlier, I do not know how long I sat there dazed and wretched after Mrs. St. Alban’s cruel words to me. I was too miserable to note the lapse of time. When I had decided despairingly in my mind that I would drown myself, I rose, wrote a brief note which I left for my husband, mechanically donned some dark clothing, and went away. It was quite late, I suppose. I heard and saw no one, and the lights were all out in the house.”

“Try to think now,” he urged. “Did you not look at your watch before leaving? Most persons do so mechanically before going out.”

“I did not,” she replied.

He did not tell her how hopeless all this made her case appear. He did not have the heart to do so. The beautiful, anguished young face had touched him beyond words. He vowed to himself that he would do all that he could to help her, but he did not believe that he could do much.

But although he did not tell her in what deadly peril she stood, Nina knew more than he guessed. Kitty’s anxious words to her the night she returned had disclosed to her her danger. When they had left her alone again in her gloomy cell, she sank upon her knees with a passionate cry wrung from the depths of her crushed and despairing young heart.

“Talbot, my husband, come to me! I need you!”

With a passionate yearning beyond all telling, Nina longed for her husband now. Her heart turned to him instinctively, feeling that his place was by her side in this hour of her terrible trial.

“Even although he did not love me he would not willingly let me perish like this,” she thought, and it seemed to her that Talbot if he had been there could have done more for her than anyone else. It seemed to her that he had more power than any other man.

But he was far away from her, the husband whom she had loved so dearly for five long years, for whom she had waited so patiently, and whose coming at last had brought her such terrible woe. Like a mocking echo the words of her old song rose in her memory:

“If he would come, to-day, to-day, to-day,
Oh, what a day to-day would be!
But now he’s away, miles and miles away
From me across the sea.

“Oh, little bird, flying, flying, flying,
To your nest in the warm west,
Tell him as you pass that I am dying,
As you fly home to your nest.”

A bitter shame and dread were upon the girl as she shrinkingly contemplated the close of her trial. She had not been afraid to die at her own hands, but the horror, the disgrace of her impending doom shook her soul to its center.

“To die on the scaffold--oh, I cannot bear it! How can they do it when I am innocent?” she wept, over and over, and it seemed to her that she would die of terror and shame even before the day appointed for her trial--a day that was indefinitely postponed because it was so difficult to find a jury. This case had been discussed months before by the public, and it was a horrible fact that scarcely a man could be found who had not already expressed his opinion upon it, an opinion almost always adverse to the unhappy prisoner. So while the law tarried, gathering together its terrible weapons of prosecution, Nina languished in prison, and by some mysterious psychic force the yearning cry of her soul made itself audible to Talbot far across the sea:

“Talbot, my husband, come to me, I need you!”