TALBOT’S DREAMS.
Talbot brooded more than ever over the memory of his dead bride after
those words with Oswald Ferris. That night he dreamed of her.
Not that he had not dreamed of her before in his dreary, remorseful
exile, for there were few nights when her image did not brood above
his pillow. But his visions of his poor wronged Nina had been most
unsatisfactory ones. She appeared to him always cold, proud, repellant,
as she had been after she overheard the foolish confidence he had
reposed in his aunt. To-night there was a change.
Sometimes Talbot fancied that it had been a real vision not merely a
dream that came to him that night, it was so strangely real.
He had not retired, he had merely dropped into a doze over his book,
when the form of Nina rose clearly before his mind’s eye, and the
beautiful, despairing young face with its hollow, pleading dark eyes,
made an ineffaceable impression on his memory. Her golden hair floated
like a vail over her shoulders, and her delicate white hands were
raised and clasped as she murmured in tones of agonizing entreaty:
“Talbot, my husband, come to me! I need you!”
Talbot Strangemore started forward to inclose that suppliant figure
with his arms, but they only clasped the empty air. The vision had
dissolved, faded, even while the low, entreating tones seemed to
tremble on the air.
“Nina!” he cried, but no voice answered him back. He saw that he was
alone, that his lamp had burned low, and his book fallen to the floor.
He looked at his watch and saw that it was midnight, the hour when
restless spirits revisit the earth.
“Was it her restless ghost come to summon me to the other world?” he
asked himself with throbbing pulses, and a certain sense of pleasure
came to him with the thought.
“By that token I know that she has forgiven me,” he thought. “She knows
now all my sorrow, all my repentance, all my love, and she forgives me
and summons me to join her in that dark, mysterious Beyond, whither she
so rashly precipitated herself.”
There was joy to him in the fancy that his wronged young wife desired
his presence in that other world where she was gone. He knew it would
be sin to take his own life, yet for a moment the temptation came over
him almost too strongly to be resisted. The beautiful vision seemed to
beckon him away, the voice seemed to draw him by invisible chains.
“She needs me,” he said to himself, and he was only held back from
throwing himself into the blue waves of the sea that flowed beneath
the windows of the old chateau where he was staying, by a sudden
warning thought:
“I must live to track Oswald Ferris down to conviction for his crime,
and clear my darling’s name from the shadow of a sin before I go hence
to join her.”
So he whispered to Nina as if she were present in spirit and could hear
him, that she must wait a little while until his mission on earth was
accomplished before he was ready to join her in the spirit world. Then
he would come to her, oh, so gladly.
After that day he watched Oswald Ferris furtively but closely. He was
determined that he would ferret out the secret the man had hid so
cleverly, leaving a lovely, innocent, unhappy girl to bear the brunt of
his sin.
“The coward, the villain,” he said to himself many times, and he was
half tempted to take the wretch by the throat and throttle him until he
confessed the truth.
But calmer thoughts prevailed. He knew that it was necessary to hide
the suspicions he had once imprudently uttered, or Ferris would fly
with his guilty secret to the uttermost ends of the earth.
“I must bide my time. I must watch and wait even though my little Nina
is calling me to join her in the other world,” he thought, and no
prescience came to him that Nina still dwelt upon this lower earth,
and that by one of the strange and wondrous operations of the mind a
miracle had been accomplished--that Nina, kneeling on the hard floor
of her cruel prison cell, her pride, her resentment, her coldness all
beaten down by her unutterable woe, had sent her soul’s cry for him
ringing across leagues of sea and land that divided them, ringing on,
and on, and on, until it reached his heart.