Chapter XXXVIII: 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.”