‘Three weeks,’ sadly replied the Doctor.
‘There was a gleam of sunshine when I got out of the van yesterday. I never knew before what sunshine was. I hope it will be a sunny day when I go out for the last time!’
‘My dear boy, I have good hopes of saving you. There’s not a creature in Stoneborough, or round it, that is not going to petition for you—and at your age—’
Leonard shook his head in dejection. ‘It has all gone against me,’ he said. ‘They all say there’s no chance. The chaplain says it is of no use unsettling my mind.’
‘The chaplain is an old—’ began Dr. May, catching himself up only just in time, and asking, ‘How do you get on with him!’
‘I can hear him read,’ said Leonard, with the look that had been thought sullen.
‘But you cannot talk to him?’
‘Not while he thinks me guilty.’ Then, at a sound of warm sympathy from his friend, he added, ‘I suppose it is his duty; but I wish he would keep away. I can’t stand his aiming at making me confess, and I don’t want to be disrespectful.’
‘I see, I see. It cannot be otherwise. But how would it be if Wilmot came to you?’
‘Would Mr. May?’ said Leonard, with a beseeching look.
‘Richard? He would with all his heart; but I think you would find more support and comfort in a man of Mr. Wilmot’s age and experience, and that Mr. Reeve would have more trust in him; but it shall be exactly as will be most comforting to you.’
‘If Mr. Wilmot would be so good, then’ said Leonard, meekly. ‘Indeed, I want help to bear it patiently! I don’t know how to die; and yet it seemed not near so hard a year ago, when they thought I did not notice, and I heard Ave go away crying, and my mother murmuring, again and again, “Thy will be done!”—the last time I heard her voice. Oh, well that she has not to say it now!’
‘Well that her son can say it!’
‘I want to be able to say it,’ said the boy, fervently; ‘but this seems so hard—life is so sweet.’ Then, after a minute’s thought: ‘Dr. May, that morning, when I awoke, and asked you for them—papa and mamma—you knelt down and said the Lord’s Prayer. Won’t you now?’
And when those words had been said, and they both stood up again, Leonard added: ‘It always seems to mean more and more! But oh, Dr. May! that forgiving—I can’t ask any one but you if—’ and he paused.
‘If you forgive, my poor boy! Nay, are not your very silence and forbearance signs of practical forgiveness? Besides, I have always observed that you have never used one of the epithets that I can’t think of him without.’
‘Some feelings are too strong for common words of abuse,’ said Leonard, almost smiling; ‘but I hope I may be helped to put away what is wrong.—Oh, must you go?’
‘I fear I must, my dear; I have a patient to see again, on my way back, and one that will be the worse for waiting.’
‘Henry has not been able to practise. I want to ask one thing, Dr. May, before you go. Could not you persuade them, since home is poisoned to them, at any rate to go at once? It would be better for my sisters than being here—when—and they would only remember that last Sunday at home.’
‘Do you shrink from another meeting with Averil?’
His face was forced into calmness. ‘I will do without it, if it would hurt her.’
‘It may for the time, but to be withheld would give her a worse heartache through life.’
‘Oh, thank you!’ cried Leonard, his face lighting up; ‘it is something still to hope for.’
‘Nay, I’ve not given you up yet,’ said the Doctor, trying for a cheerful smile. ‘I’ve got a prescription that will bring you through yet—London advice, you know. I’ve great faith in the consulting surgeon at the Home Office.’
By the help of that smile and augury, the Doctor got away, terribly beaten down, but living on his fragment of hope; though obliged to perceive that every one who merely saw the newspaper report in black and white, without coming into personal contact with the prisoner, could not understand how the slightest question of the justice of the verdict could arise. Even Mr. Wilmot was so convinced by the papers, that the Doctor almost repented of the mission to which he had invited him, and would, if he could, have revoked what had been said. But the vicar of Stoneborough, painful as was the duty, felt his post to be by the side of his unhappy young parishioner, equally whether the gaol chaplain or Dr. May were right, and if he had to bring him to confession, or to strengthen him to ‘endure grief, suffering wrongfully.’
And after the first interview, no more doubts on that score were expressed; but the vicar’s tone of pitying reverence in speaking of the prisoner was like that of his friends in the High Street.
Tom May spared neither time nor pains in beating up for signatures for the petition, but he had a more defined hope, namely, that of detecting something that might throw the suspicion into the right quarter. The least contradiction of the evidence might raise a doubt that would save Leonard’s life, and bring the true criminal in peril of the fate he so richly deserved. The Vintry Mill was the lion of the neighbourhood, and the crowds of visitors had been a reason for its new master’s vacating it, and going into lodgings in Whitford; so that Tom, when he found it convenient to forget his contempt of the gazers and curiosity hunters who thronged there, and to march off on a secret expedition of investigation, found no obstacle in his way, and at the cost of a fee to Mrs. Giles, who was making a fortune, was free to roam and search wherever he pleased. Even his careful examination of the cotton blind, and his scraping of the window-sill with a knife, were not remarked; for had not the great chair been hacked into fragmentary relics, and the loose paper of the walls of Leonard’s room been made mincemeat of, as memorials of ‘the murderer, Ward’?
One long white hair picked out of a mat below the window, and these scrapings of the window-sill, Tom carried off, and also the scrapings of the top bar of a stile between the mill and the Three Goblets. That evening, all were submitted to the microscope. Dr. May was waked from a doze by a very deferential ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ and a sudden tweak, which abstracted a silver thread from his head; and Mab showed somewhat greater displeasure at a similar act of plunder upon her white chemisette. But the spying was followed by a sigh; and, in dumb show, Ethel was made to perceive that the Vintry hair had more affinity with the canine than the human. As to the scrapings of the window, nothing but vegetable fibre could there be detected; but on the stile, there was undoubtedly a mark containing human blood-disks; Tom proved that both by comparison with his books, and by pricking his own finger, and kept Ethel to see it after every one else was gone up to bed. But as one person’s blood was like another’s, who could tell whether some one with a cut finger had not been through the stile? Tom shook his head, there was not yet enough on which to commit himself. ‘But I’ll have him!—I’ll have him yet!’ said he. ‘I’ll never rest while that villain walks the earth unpunished!’
Meantime, Harvey Anderson did yeoman’s service by a really powerful article in a leading paper, written from the very heart of an able man, who had been strongly affected himself, and was well practised in feeling in pen and ink. Every word rang home to the soul, and all the more because there was no defence nor declamation against the justice of the verdict, which was acknowledged to be unavoidable; it was merely a pathetic delineation of a terrible mystery, with a little meditative philosophy upon it, the moral of which was, that nothing is more delusive than fact, more untrue than truth. However, it was copied everywhere, and had the great effect of making it the cue of more than half the press to mourn over, rather than condemn, ‘the unfortunate young gentleman.’
Mrs. Pugh showed every one the article, and confided to most that she had absolutely ventured to suggest two or three of the sentences. But a great deal might be borne from Mrs. Pugh, in consideration of her indefatigable exertions with the ladies’ petition, and it was a decided success. The last census had rated Market Stoneborough at 7561 inhabitants, and Mrs. Pugh’s petition bore no less than 3024 female names, in which she fairly beat that of the mayor; but then she had been less scrupulous as to the age at which people should be asked to sign; as long as the name could be written at all, she was not particular whose it was.