Nellie Netterville; or, One of the Transplanted, Chapter III-V [pp. 175-190]

Nellie Netterville.
it was a corpse already. Very reluctantly she put forth her hand to try if
life were really extinct; but suddenly
discovering that she was dabbling it
in a pool of yet warm blood, she withdrew it with a shudder.
"My God! my God!" she moaned, "what enemy hath done this?
Surely it is one of the soldiers from
the castle, and they will accuse
our people of the murder! Grant
Heaven, indeed, that they are innocent! Would that Hamish were
here to help me. Yet no! they
would certainly in that case try to
fix the guilt on him. I will go hence
and let them discover it as they can.
Yet what if I should meet them? I
am all dabbled in his gore!"
With a new and sharp terror in
her heart, as this thought took possession of it, she began hastily to rub
her hands in the moss and dry leaves
around her, in order to free them
from the blood which clung to them;
and she was still engaged in this
rather equivocal occupation when a
sudden stream of light was cast on
her from behind, and, rising suddenly, she found herself face to face with
the officer who had been left in command of the garrison of the castle.
Half-a-dozen of his men were at
his back, and by the light of the lantern, which he carried, she read in
their faces their conviction of her
guilt. At a sign from their chief
they surrounded her in awful silence,
and he himself laid his hand heavily
on her shoulder:
"Murderess!" he said, "thou art
taken in thy sin!"
"I did it not," cried Mrs. Netterville, so utterly confounded by this
terrible accusation that she hardly
knew what she said. "So help me
Heaven! I am innocent of this
deed!"
"Innocent! sayest thou?" the officer answered firmly. "Innocent!
thou with his blood red upon thy
hands! Yea, and thy very garments
clotted in his gore! If then thou art
innocent, as thou wouldst have us to
believe, say what wert thou doing in
this lonely spot at an hour when
none but the murderer or the wanton
would care to be abroad?"
"I was returning from a visit to
the soldier Jackson-a visit which, as
thou knowest, Master Rippel, I pay
him every evening at the hour of
dusk; and I had well-nigh reached
the castle, when hearing a shot in this
direction, and fearing mischief either
for my own people or for thine, I
came hither if possible to prevent it."
"A likely story, truly 1" replied
the officer, who, unluckily for her,
was one of the fiercest, if not the
saintliest, of the band of warriors
then domiciled at the castle. "Nay,
woman, and for thine own sake hold
thy peace, or out of thine own mouth
thou shalt stand presently condemned. For tell me, my masters," he
added, addressing the other men,
"where will you find a woman, who,
hearing a shot, and dreading mischief, would not have fled from the
danger, instead of incontinently rushing, as she would have us to believe
she did, into its very jaws?"
"Yet have I rushed into the jaws
of danger more than once already
within this fortnight, and that not for
the sake of my own people but of
thine; as none ought to know better
than thou, Master Rippel, and thy
comrades," Mrs. Netterville, now
fairly put upon her mettle, retorted
bravely.
"Nay, and that is naught but the
very truth, though the father of lies
(which is Beelzebub) himself had
said it," one of the men here ventured to remark. "For surely, Captain
Rippel, you cannot have forgotten
that we should have had a soldier
the less in the camp of Israel, if she
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