Chapter XXIX: Nina Learns the Truth

Miss Drusilla, the maid-servants, the boy-of-all-work, all in various disheveled stages of attire that but for the warmth of the night might have been productive of colds and catarrhs, appeared precipitately in the room, and when they saw the young mistress of Selwyn Heights they thought they understood the meaning of Kitty’s outcry.

“It is the ghost, the ghost! Kitty said she would sleep in the room and catch it,” cried the maids, and one or two, more fearful than the rest, ran out into the hall again, unable to endure the proximity of a visitant from the other world.

But Miss Drusilla Strangemore being made of sterner stuff than those weak-minded ones, walked straight up to her niece and laid her hand on her shoulder.

“So it is really you, Nina,” she said, with a touch of tenderness in her stern, old voice, “Oh, my dear, how glad I am that you have come home at last. We have grieved for you so much, for we believed you dead.”

And she put her arms around the trembling girl and shed some furtive tears of joy on the top of the golden head.

“I would have been dead if I had had my way, Aunt Drusilla,” the girl answered, bitterly, but she returned the caresses of the old lady, and felt as she had done with Kitty that it was pleasant to be with her again, for although Miss Drusilla had a hard, stern nature, she had always been kind to the orphan girl confided to her care.

“And you, Kitty,” said Miss Drusilla, looking over the top of Nina’s head, and feeling compelled to scold somebody to check her rushing tears, “aren’t you ashamed of yourself, shrieking out, and raising a regular hullabaloo at the sight of your young mistress? Didn’t you have sense enough to know that she was not a ghost?”

“Why yes, ma’am, of course. It wasn’t Miss Nina that frightened me--no, not if it _had_ been her ghost instead of her dear blessed self. It was the other one that made me scream,” Kitty answered.

“The other one?” Miss Strangemore interrogated, with an air of mystification.

“Mrs. St. Alban, ma’am,” explained Kitty.

“Lord-a-mercy!”

“Um-me, tother one, too!”

“_She_ walks!”

“I leaves this haunted house to-morrow!”

These disjointed exclamations from the servants followed pell mell upon Kitty’s words. The women huddled together with frightened faces, gazing half terrified at Nina, as if her ghostliness and the other’s combined, were too much for weak human endurance.

“Kitty, you are crazy.” Miss Strangemore said, shortly.

“Very well, ma’am, you may doubt my word if you like, but ask Miss Nina here what made me scream.”

Nina lifted her pale, weary looking face from her aunt’s shoulder.

“We were in here alone, Kitty and I,” she said, simply. “She had just been telling me that----that Mr. Strangemore had gone abroad again, when the door into the hall there suddenly opened wide. We both looked up, and we saw that woman----I mean Sibyl St. Alban----standing in the door, clad in a soft, loose white dress, with her hair hanging down over her shoulders. When she saw us looking at her she turned around and fled from us.”

A renewed chorus of groans and whispers greeted Nina’s words. Even Miss Drusilla looked pale and troubled. She gazed blankly into Nina’s face.

“Are you quite sure, my love, that it was Mrs. St. Alban?” she asked.

“I am perfectly certain of it,” was the confident reply, and then the girl burst out, reproachfully, “Oh, Aunt Drusilla, I did not think you could have tolerated that woman here so long! Why is she here still? It cannot be that Talbot has already married her and made her the mistress of my home?”

They gazed at her blankly, what wild words was she saying?

“Nina, where have you been all this time?” her aunt asked, with seeming irrelevance.

“I have been in Baltimore!”

“So near, and not know all that has happened at Selwyn Heights since you went away? Are you jesting with me, child?”

“No, I am telling you the truth, dear Aunt Drusilla. I have been very ill for months. I know nothing, I have heard nothing, I have not read a newspaper since I went away. What has happened? Tell me, Aunt Drusilla,” said the girl, with innocent unconsciousness.

Miss Drusilla groaned, and did not answer. Nina looked at Kitty.

“Has anything bad happened? Tell me the truth,” she said.

Kitty answered, agitatedly:

“Mrs. St. Alban is dead, Miss Nina!”

* * * * *

After one moment’s blank, shocked silence, a cry of amaze burst from Nina’s lips:

“Are you mad, Kitty? Did I not see Mrs. St. Alban there in the door looking at me ten minutes ago?”

“You saw her ghost, dear Miss Nina,” said the girl, solemnly, “Mrs. St. Alban is dead and buried long ago, but they do say that bad people can’t rest in their graves, and so I guess that is why her spirit walks at night.”

A great tremor ran over Nina at the maid’s dreadful words. Her sweet face grew ashen, she leaned against Kitty for support.

“Dead,” she murmured, in a tone of awe and wonder. “How long has it been, Aunt Drusilla?”

“About three days after you went away,” the old lady replied, and the wonder in Nina’s eyes grew deeper.

“But she was young and well and strong,” she said, “What was it that killed her so suddenly?”

Miss Drusilla’s heart gave a great throb of dread. She answered almost against her own will:

“She was murdered!”

She never forgot Nina’s ghastly white, horrified face, and she hurried on to the end of her story for fear the girl would faint.

“Someone went into her room the very night you went away and stabbed her in the breast with a sharp dagger.”

“Oh, my God, how horrible!” shivered the girl, “Oh, she was hard, she was cruel and relentless, but she was so beautiful, so weak, who could have had the heart to kill her? Who did it, Aunt Drusilla? Who murdered Mrs. St. Alban?”

Miss Drusilla turned away from the appealing look in those dark eyes. She could not speak.

“Who was it, Kitty?” said the girl, startled by Miss Strangemore’s emotion, “It was not, oh, no, no, never--it was not my husband?”

“No, it was not Mr. Strangemore,” several voices answered her at once.

Nina clasped her hands together.

“Oh, I am so glad,” she cried. “You all acted so strangely I knew not what to think. But who was it, then, that killed Mrs. St. Alban? Aunt Drusilla, why don’t you speak to me?”

Thus adjured Miss Drusilla’s pale lips parted stiffly, and she answered, desperately.

“I don’t know what to say to you, Nina!”

“Was there ever such a strange answer given to anyone,” Nina asked herself in wonder, and she looked back at her maid.

“And you, Kitty,” she said, “Are you dumb, too, because you know not what to say to me? Can’t you tell me who killed Mrs. St. Alban?”

“Miss Nina, darling, I don’t know who killed her!” the maid responded, doggedly.

The answer was simple enough but Nina’s strained, alert senses detected something beyond it.

“You are keeping something back from me, all of you,” she said, looking round upon their white, scared faces.

“Lucy,” she added, turning around to the chambermaid, who was regarding her through a swift rain of quick tears, “why are you crying, child?”

“About you, Mrs. Strangemore,” sobbed the girl, “because--because--that bad, wicked woman said before she died that it was--was _you_ that had killed her!”

Those words blurted out by Lucy in her grief, seemed to have killed Nina too, for a moment. She stood still an instant like one transfixed, her form and face rigid and statue-like, her white features looking marble-like, and her eyes wild and wide with horror. Presently one single word, uttered in tones of deepest dismay and wonder, fell from her blanched lips:

“I!”

“Yes, you, Miss Nina,” Lucy reiterated. “She made them put it down upon a paper that you had stole into her room and killed her and then run away!”

“My God!” the poor girl uttered, in a voice of horror, and then her voice failed her. She reeled dizzily a moment, then dropped heavily, like one dead, to the floor.