I MUST HAVE MONEY.
Doctor Fielding had forgotten that the door of the room where he sat
with his wife was ajar, and that it opened into the pretty little
chamber where Nina was lying back listlessly with half-shut eyes in the
comfortable reclining chair he had procured for her. When he had gone
in a little while ago to speak to her she had been asleep, but now she
was broad awake, and every word of the conversation had reached her
ears.
She awoke suddenly to a fact that had never occurred to her mind before.
“The Fieldings are poor people, and I have been here two months, weakly
brooding over my troubles without giving a thought to the fact that I
am a burden and expense to them almost heavier than they can bear,”
she said to herself with lively compunction, although she might well
have been excused for her thoughtlessness. Having been reared in an
atmosphere of wealth and luxury, she had perhaps never given a thought
to the fact that there is so much want, misery and sorrow in the world,
all caused by the lack of money.
But her sensitive conscience, spurred into activity by the words she
had overheard, was on the alert now.
“I must go away from here and relieve these kind true friends of the
burden of my support, and I must try to reimburse them for the expense
I have been to them,” she decided.
But in a moment came the thought:
“Where shall I go?”
“Not back to Selwyn Heights,” and she shivered, “Not back to my
faithless, unloving husband, and my triumphant rival. They believe me
dead as I would have been but for Doctor Fielding. They may think so
still. I shall never intrude upon them. Doubtless they will be married
soon, and _she_ will reign in my old home, queen of the heart I could
not win although I was his wedded wife.”
With a smothered moan she rose and walked unsteadily across the room
to where her dark cloak hung upon a peg in the corner. She slipped her
hand into the pocket and drew out a little port-monnaie of pearl and
silver.
“I always had plenty of money in my purse,” she thought, “Perhaps I
have enough to give the Fieldings some now.”
She opened it and an exclamation of disappointment broke from her pale
lips.
There was only a five dollar bill and some loose change in it. She
remembered then that she had left home on so desperate a mission that
she had taken nothing with her. It was by the merest accident, and not
by design that the little purse had been in her pocket.
“Only five dollars, and I wanted to help them so much,” she sobbed,
bursting into babyish tears. It was the first time in her young life
that she had ever felt the need of money.
And while she stood there forlornly weeping she remembered that only
one day before Talbot Strangemore had come home she had put away
five hundred dollars in the secret bottom of her jewel casket for
safe-keeping.
“If I only had that five hundred dollars out of all the wealth I have
left behind me, how rich I would feel,” she murmured, “I would give
every penny to these noble people. We could go to the sea-shore then,
and it would do Mrs. Fielding and the baby as much good as it would me.”
She began to revolve all sorts of schemes in her mind for obtaining
possession of the money hidden in her jewel casket at Selwyn Heights.
“I believe that I could easily enter the house by night, obtain the
money, and slip away again unobserved,” she thought.
The fancy took possession of her mind. Perhaps there was blended with
it an undefined longing to know what Talbot and the rest of them
were doing now that they believed her dead and lost to them forever.
She persuaded herself that nothing could be easier than to go to
Selwyn Heights, get her money, and come away again, all without being
discovered.
“And I am compelled to have it,” she reasoned, “I intend to cast my
lot with the Fieldings henceforth, and I must have money to live upon
until I get strong enough to work for my daily bread.”
A faint smile crossed her lips at the thought of one of the Selwyns,
whose pride and wealth had descended to them through many generations,
working like a pauper for daily bread.
“But even that would not be so bad as what that dreadful woman talked
about so coolly,” Nina thought, with a lump in her throat, that hurt
her cruelly, “I could bear anything rather than the world should say
that Nina Selwyn was put away by her husband because he did not love
her. It is a shame to a woman to be divorced. I could not have borne
the disgrace of it. Talbot was cruelly hard and unkind to suggest it to
that woman!”
She was proud and sensitive. She had chosen death rather than the
public disgrace of the divorce she believed that Talbot intended to
have. She could not think of anything more terrible than that. If any
one had told her that a degradation even deeper awaited her, that
before long she would be convicted of a murder, that the shadow of the
gallows tree hung over her head, and that ere many months she would
feel the horrible rope of the hangman about her fair white throat, she
would never have lived to endure it, she would have fallen down dead
with the very horror of the thought.
But she did not dream of all that impended over her. She did not know
that her husband had gone abroad, that Sibyl St. Alban was dead, and
that she herself lay under the ban of murder. The Fieldings had kept
everything from her in the kindness of their hearts, waiting until she
grew strong enough to bear it.
So in utter ignorance of all that awaited her, of the tragedy that
loomed over her darkly, Nina went straight to her fate.
* * * * *
The next morning she was gone and Mrs. Fielding found a brief note upon
the pillow the tired head had been wont to press.
“Do not be alarmed about me, dear friends,” the poor sick girl had
written. “I am not going to make another effort at self destruction. I
am simply gone away upon an imperative matter of business, and I shall
return to you in a few hours never to leave you again if you will let
me stay with you. I have forever renounced home and name and husband,
and I desire that no one shall ever know that Nina Strangemore still
lives upon the cruel earth--no one at least except you two who have
been so good to me!”