While Lady Vera's friends are seeking with heavy hearts some clew to
her strange fate, the fair young countess, half distracted with grief,
remains a closely-guarded captive in the ruined mansion in the lonely
wood. In spite of all her tears and protestations Betsy Robson persists
in believing her to be a dangerous lunatic, and in treating her as
such, albeit always kind and complaisant as to an ailing child.
The summer days glide slowly past, each one bearing some portion of
hope from Vera's lonely heart. With the dawn of each day she had
hoped for release--with the sunset of each day she had wept over her
disappointment. The days were so long and lonely without books, music
or occupation to beguile them of their length and dreariness. It seemed
to Lady Vera almost as if she were dead and buried, living in this
lonely house, seeing, hearing no one save stolid Betsy Robson, who
glided about like another ghost in this strange world of the dead.
"If rescue does not come soon I shall either die or go mad, as that
woman already believes me to be," Lady Vera tells herself in a passion
of despair.
She wonders why Philip does not come to her aid. In her despair and
loneliness bitter thoughts begin to creep into her mind.
"Perhaps he has no care over me now that I am lost to him forever," she
thinks. "He has turned to Miss Montgomery or Lady Eva, perhaps. Either
one would be glad enough to console him."
From the world without there came no answer to these silent accusations
against her lost lover. The world seemed dead to her as she appeared to
it. All her companions were memory and sorrow.
As the weeks rounded slowly into a month, Lady Vera's fierce anger
against Leslie Noble, her restlessness, her impatience, began to settle
down into the calmness of despair.
She gave up pacing the floor, and weeping and grieving over her
captivity like some poor caged bird beating the bars of its prison with
unavailing wings. She began to sit still in her chair for long hours
daily, with her white hands folded on her lap and her dark eyes fixed
on vacancy--long hours in which the color and roundness fled from her
face and form, leaving behind a startling pallor and delicacy that
frightened Mrs. Robson, who thought that her charge had developed a new
phase of her mania.
"Them still and cunning ones is always the most dangerous, so I've
heard," she confides to the tabby cat that is her only companion in the
kitchen. "I do wish she would ha' give up that sharp little knife she
carries in her bosom. And I do wish Mr. Noble would come and see her.
I can't think what keeps him away this long. He said he should come
soon. Lucky he laid in a good store of provisions, or we might starve
to death in this lonely wilderness afore he comes."
She busies herself in preparing little dainties to tempt the appetite
of her charge, but Lady Vera scarcely tastes the delicate morsels.
"Be you a-grievin' for your husband, my poor dear?" Mrs. Robson asks
her kindly one day.
"I have no husband," Lady Vera answers, disdainfully, with a
smouldering fire in her great, dark eyes.
She accuses herself of no falsehood in uttering those words, for she
never means to acknowledge Leslie Noble's claim upon her, and she has
mentally decided that if she ever goes free again she will appeal to
the strong arm of the law to sever the hated bonds that hold her.
After that one flash of wrath she subsides into mournful apathy again.
Two weeks more roll by into the irrevocable past. Lady Vera droops more
and more, like some gently fading rose. Betsy Robson, frightened and
alarmed, sees that her hold on life is slowly loosening day by day.
The flowers she brings her from the tangled, neglected garden fall
lightly from her grasp, as if her hands were too weak to hold them. She
lies all day on her couch now, too weak or too weary to rise, and the
snowy pillow day by day is drenched with her languid, hopeless tears.
"It is too bad that Mr. Noble does not come," Mrs. Robson mutters to
herself. "His poor young wife is dying, I honestly think. She has gone
so thin and white, and her big, black eyes frighten one with their
uncanny look. She has fretted herself to death. It goes on to seven
weeks now since he brought her here. I wonder if aught has happened
him? I do wish I could let him know some way that she's a-dying."
The last days of August have passed now. September comes in cool and
blustery, inclining to storms. With every day Lady Vera sinks more
and more, complaining of no pain or disease, only growing weaker and
weaker, paler and thinner, while, as Mrs. Robson says, her great, black
eyes look unearthly in her death-white face. If Leslie Noble does not
come soon his captive will escape him through the open gates of death.
"It's a-going to storm to-night, Tab," remarks Mrs. Robson to her
familiar, as she opens the kitchen door and peers out into the
gathering darkness one chilly night; "the moon looks pale and watery,
and the clouds keeps scudding over it. There isn't any stars to speak
of, and the wind's blustery and damp. It's a-going to storm. You may
blink and purr by the fire alone to-night, Tabby, for I must sit up
with poor Mrs. Noble. It wouldn't be right to leave the poor, crazy
creetur alone, ill as she is, and seems that harmless a body could
hardly believe that she stuck a knife into her own husband. Yes, I'll
set up with her to-night. Sometimes the spirits ride on storms to carry
away the souls of them that's a-dying, and mayhap they may come for
that poor young thing's to-night."
She closes the door with a shudder of superstitious terror in the face
of the gathering storm, and betakes herself to the gloomy upper chamber
where Countess Vera, still robed in the gray silk dress in which she
had been brought from her home a captive, lies silently across the
gloomy, crimson-hung bed, as white and still as if she were already
dead.
"You have eaten no supper, dearie," Mrs. Robson remarks, glancing at
the untasted dainties upon the tea-tray that she had brought up two
hours before.
"No," the captive answers, with a weary sigh, and relapses into silence.
"There's a storm coming. Do you hear the wind howl, and the rain
beating on the windows?" remarks Mrs. Robson, to break the spell of the
dreary, brooding silence.
Lady Vera, turning her head listlessly a moment, listens aimlessly to
the wail of the autumn wind moaning like a voice in human pain around
the ruined gables of the house.
"It is a wild night," she answers, drearily. "What time is it, Mrs.
Robson?"
"It is nigh onto eleven o'clock," the woman answers, consulting the
broad-faced silver watch stuck in her belt; then, curiously: "You've
never asked me that question afore since here you've been, my dearie.
Why do you do so now?"
"When the hours of life are few, one is fain to count them," Lady Vera
answers, with subdued bitterness.
And again there ensues a silence, filled up by the wild voice of the
wind that has now increased to a gale.
The furious rush of the rain is distinctly audible; a flash of
lightning quivers into the room in spite of the shielding curtains.
"Mrs. Robson, I believe I am going to die. When your cruel master comes,
he will find that his captive has escaped him, after all," Lady Vera
says, weakly, and with a faint triumph in her voice.
Before Mrs. Robson can reply, there comes a hasty, thundering rap on
the hall door that brings her screaming to her feet. It is thrice
repeated before her frightened senses return.
At that strange and unexpected sound, Lady Vera, as if endowed with new
strength, starts up to a sitting posture in the bed. Instead of being
startled by the noise, she seems to rejoice in it. Her eyes flash with
new life.
"Go, Mrs. Robson," she exclaims. "Do you not hear the knocking? Someone
is come."
"Who can it be, this dreadful night? Do you think it could be Mr.
Noble?" exclaims the woman, timorously.
"God forbid!" exclaims Countess Vera, passionately. "I pray that it may
be some friend of mine who has come to bring me deliverance."
But Mrs. Robson, by this, has begun to revive her scattered wits.
"Of course it's my master, Mr. Noble. How foolish I was for a moment.
I am main glad that he has come at last," she declares, eagerly, and
hastening to leave the room, though not forgetting to lock the door
after her as usual.
Countess Vera waits in an agony of suspense for five almost anguished
minutes, then footsteps mount the stairs toward her chamber. Mrs.
Robson, opening the door, ushers in Leslie Noble.
At the sight of that hated face, at the wild revulsion from ardent hope
to absolute despair, Countess Vera utters a heart-wrung cry and falls
weakly backward.