THE GHOST AGAIN.
They laid Kitty May down in the fresh air and bathed her face and hands
in cold water. Under this vigorous treatment she soon gasped and opened
her eyes. Miss Drusilla who had been bending solicitously over her,
immediately relaxed her anxiety and assumed an expression of acerbity.
“Kitty May, I should like to know what you mean by such foolishness,”
she exclaimed, severely.
Kitty’s eyes flared open with a dazed look upon Miss Drusilla’s face.
“Oh, Miss Strangemore, please don’t be angry. I couldn’t help it,” she
faltered, “I was so frightened. Didn’t you see it yourself, dear Miss
Drusilla?”
“See what, girl? What are you talking about anyway?”
Kitty raised herself to a sitting posture and swept a startled glance
around her. Then a sigh of relief escaped her lips.
“It is gone, it is not here. But I saw it as plain as day in the court
room! Oh, Miss Drusilla,” she added, in a whisper, “it was Mrs. St.
Alban’s ghost again! I saw it right there among a crowd of people. She
was holding a little black veil away from her face and glaring at Miss
Nina fit to kill her! Oh, me, what have I ever done to that woman that
she should haunt me so?” moaned Kitty, despairingly.
“You are crazy, Kitty! you imagined the whole thing or else you
have been deceived by a resemblance,” cried the spinster, in great
displeasure. “Come right back into the court-house and point out to me
furtively the woman you took for Sibyl St. Alban. I’ll warrant it is a
creature of flesh and blood, and that some trivial likeness has misled
you.”
They went back quietly to the crowded room where silence had been
restored and the counsel had gone on with his speech to the judge and
jury, while the prisoner sat pale and drooping like a broken flower
before them. They sat down softly, and then the maid lifted her eyes
half fearfully to the distant spot where she had seen a black-clad
figure sitting with a face like Sibyl St. Alban’s, glaring defiance
upon Nina when she kissed her husband’s letter.
When she had looked, she gave a sigh of blended disappointment and
relief.
Among the closely crowded benches the seat where she had seen the
ghostly figure sitting was empty. The woman had disappeared.
“Now where is the ghost, you silly thing?” whispered the stern old
maid, and Kitty could only nervously indicate the vacant seat and
whisper that it had disappeared.
“It was only your fancy at first. You ought to be ashamed of yourself,
making such a scene for nothing,” returned the lady, tartly, and she
turned her back upon the girl and gave her indignant attention to the
speech of the counsel for the prosecution.
It was said then and afterward that the able lawyer had never made
a more brilliant and effective speech. He brought all his learning,
all his eloquence, all his power to bear. He asked the jury to look
at the facts as they were, not in the distorted light in which Mrs.
Strangemore’s lawyer had presented them. Mr. Davenport had asked them
to remember the youth, the beauty, the high position of the accused.
He desired to remind them that Mrs. St. Alban had been young, lovely,
and wealthy too. Life had been as sweet to her as to the cruel girl
who had sent her out of it into the darkness of the tomb. He said
that Sibyl St. Alban had not been a guilty woman, only a thoughtless
one. She had been the betrothed of Talbot Strangemore when he was a
college student, and after a lover’s quarrel, in a fit of pique, he had
thoughtlessly acceded to his parent’s wish that he should marry the
child-heiress, Nina Selwyn. When in after years the estranged lovers
met again, all their old tenderness revived, but the man was the most
to blame, because he had fostered Sibyl St. Alban’s love, declaring
that he would procure a divorce from his childish bride and marry her.
Nina Selwyn had been the marplot in their whole romantic history. She
had parted them first, and then murdered the lovely, hapless young
widow, whose only fault was that she loved the man who should by every
law, human and divine, have been her husband instead of Nina Selwyn’s.
He went on at length, making a martyr of Sibyl St. Alban, and a human
fiend of Nina until he had exhausted the vocabulary of his eloquent
denunciations, and when he sat down and the jury filed out slowly one
by one, no one doubted what the verdict would be.
Nina had sat and listened to him with a pale, indignant, dismayed face.
That any one could have the heart to so denounce her, misrepresent her,
and abuse her, seemed horrible indeed to the innocent and ignorant
young girl so unversed in the ways of the world. She clung convulsively
to Kitty, and the bitter tears rolled slowly down her cheeks as she
heard him seemingly with malice prepense, arguing her young life away,
and dooming her to a terrible, shameful death.
“I cannot die now, I must live for Talbot’s sake, for he loves me, and
it would grieve him to know that I died such a terrible death,” she
had been saying over and over to herself, in the blissful emotion born
of the letter she clutched tightly in her hand, and the man’s dreadful
denunciatory words thrilled her with horror.
She turned her great haggard dark eyes upon the faces of the jurymen
and scanned them piteously as if trying to read their inmost hearts.
“Oh, Kitty, will they believe that I am as bad as that man says I
am? Will they say that I am guilty, and condemn me to be hung?” she
whispered to her attendant, with an awful shudder.
Kitty pressed the clinging, trembling white fingers fondly in her own.
“No, no, darling, they could not be so cruel,” she whispered back, and
she tried to explain to the trembling, frightened girl that it was
the duty of the prosecuting attorney to make the case out as bad as
possible, but that the jurymen were not bound to believe him, and that
the verdict rested with them alone.
But the long, labored speech, bristling with satire and acrimony, was
over at last. The charge to the jurymen had been given, and they had
filed out with solemn faces, on their errand of life and death. The
court sat waiting in silence or with subdued murmurs of converse for
the verdict.
And to Talbot Strangemore so far away from home there came no
prescience of that awful twilight hour when his beautiful bride sat
in the midst of that awful throng, waiting to know whether they were
going to set her free to wait for her husband’s home-coming, or whether
they were going to kill her for a crime she had never committed.
* * * * *
It seemed to Nina a long, long time while she waited there in the great
suffocating court-room crowded full of men and women, all so eager to
know whether the law was going to let her live or die, that they did
not go home to their suppers, but waited long after the night fell,
unwilling to go away until they knew what her fate would be.
Miss Strangemore and Kitty and the Fieldings prayed silently; Nina
sat still as a marble statue, holding tightly clasped in her hands
her husband’s letter and a bouquet of white roses and heliotrope that
Minnie Fielding had given her. In the dense, suffocating air of the
court room that warm June night the fragrance of the flowers was strong
and almost oppressive, but she held them in an almost mechanical grasp,
while her thoughts wandered far from the scene and tried to fancy where
Talbot could be in this hour of her humiliation and awful peril.
“Oh, if I had only known that he repented his folly, and that he loved
me that night, I would not have run away,” she said over and over to
herself. “But that dreadful woman carried away his letter and so ruined
my whole life. Oh, how wicked she was, and what cruel falsehoods she
told me, for in the light of this letter everything she told me was a
lie. Oh, I wish that I could see my husband once more even if I have to
die, to tell him how dearly I loved him all the while, and how I love
him still, although my love has only brought me the cruelest sorrow and
shame!”
It was almost like a religion to her, this love that the dying woman
had solemnly bade her give to Talbot Strangemore. It had an element of
sacredness in it. Heretofore it had been all sacredness and sorrow. Now
it had a thrill of joy and passion in it. Talbot, her husband, loved
her back again, and would have wished no higher joy than to have her
for his bride. She said the words over to herself many times, and her
senses reeled with the joy of the thought until at moments she forgot
the deadly peril that hung over her, and remembered only her husband
and their mutual love.
“He loves me, and he would grieve if I died,” she said, and there was
so much gladness in the thought that she prayed heaven passionately
that she might live to be happy with him yet. She repeated to herself
some lines read long ago, and vaguely remembered:
“Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead,
Wouldst thou miss any life in losing mine,
And would the sun for thee more coldly shine,
Because of grave-damps falling round my head?
I marveled, my Beloved, when I read
Thy thought so in the letter. I am thine----
But ... _so_ much to thee? Can I pour thy wine
While my hands tremble? Then my soul, instead
Of dreams of death resumes life’s lower range!”
The hours waned. People grew impatient in the hot close air, waiting
for the verdict. How long the jury stayed! It was past ten o’clock.
Minnie Fielding pressed close to her friend and former pupil’s side.
She pressed her hand over the small white one that held Talbot’s
letter. It was cold as ice, but Nina’s cheeks were flushed, and her
eyes were bright and burning.
“Oh, my darling how cold your hands are, but your face is on fire. This
suspense is killing you,” she said.
But Nina shook her head.
“No,” she whispered, “I am not impatient. Oh, Mrs. Fielding, do not
laugh at me, please, but in thinking of my letter I forget now and then
why I am here, and what I am waiting for. I am like a man drunken with
strong, new wine.”
The hot tears crowded into the gentle lady’s eyes. She was about to
speak but the words died on her lips, chilled by a fateful sound.
The long vigil of blended hope and fear was over. The jurymen were
returning to the court-room.
Out of doors the heat of the summer night was dissolving in heavy
clouds and pattering rain-drops. A peal of thunder shook the heavens,
and the fierce bright lightning flashed into the room like a
sword-point, keen, blue, intense, as the judge arose to receive the
verdict.
“Guilty of murder in the first degree.”
* * * * *
They had scarcely dared to hope for anything better since the
prosecuting attorney’s speech, but their hearts thrilled with anguish
as the fatal words were spoken.
They could not look for a moment at the beautiful girl who had so
longed to live because she had found out at last that her husband loved
her. A faint cry of mortal agony had escaped her lips, and then she
remained still as a statue, but holding still in her tight clasp the
letter that had suddenly transformed this earth she was doomed to leave
so soon into an Eden. But after that faint cry of startled horror, not
a word escaped her lips.
Men and women gazed at her in pity and curiosity, and their hearts
ached within them at the sight of the slight, dark figure, with the
letter in one hand and the flowers in the other, standing there so
quietly before the judge while his stern, judicial lips slowly and
solemnly pronounced sentence of ignominious death upon her.
* * * * *
It was over, and the curious crowd were leaving the court-room
pell-mell, heedless of the rain-storm raging outside, in their
eagerness to breathe the fresh air again. In the tumult, while the
crowd was pressed close to her, Kitty May fancied she heard a low,
demoniac laugh of exultant triumph close to her ear. She turned around
quickly, but there was no one beside her. In the same moment she saw
Nina looking up at her with wild, scared eyes.
“Oh, Kitty, surely that was a fiend that laughed,” she whispered, and
the maid groaned to herself:
“My God, we both are haunted by the ghost of that murdered woman!”
Doctor Fielding came to lead Nina to the carriage that was to convey
her back to prison.
“Do not be frightened, my child,” he whispered, as he drew the small
hand tenderly through his arm. “You have three months yet, and I intend
to move heaven and earth to secure a pardon for you.”