Chapter XII: An Interview Declined

He did not tell her that Miss Drusilla had sent him out of the room with the bitter words:

“Now go back to your charming widow! It will only make Nina worse to come to and find you here. I dare say she hates you now as much as she has loved you these five years. And no wonder, for any one who could prefer that little simpering doll to this beautiful girl, deserves for every sensible woman to hate him!”

“But I have a right to stay by my wife’s side, Aunt Drusilla, and I cannot bear to leave her like this,” he remonstrated, glancing apprehensively at the lovely, death-like face that Kitty was convulsively weeping over.

But the excited old lady actually opened the door, took him by the shoulder, and shoved him out into the hall.

“You may just go, for men-folks are always in the way at times like this,” she said. “I’ll send you word by Kitty when she gets better.”

“Ask her to let me see her as soon as she revives,” he said, “I have something very particular to tell her,” and then he went down to the parlor, carrying with him a troubled consciousness of that lovely, death-white face, but with no presentiment of the years that would elapse before he looked again upon its girlish beauty.

“We shall go away in the morning,” Duke Cameron said to him. “Indeed I believe we owe you all an apology for coming at this time. It was very thoughtless and ill-advised. I hope you will excuse us. We should have remembered that you would want some time to make your wife’s acquaintance before your friends came to see her.”

In their secret hearts every one knew that Sibyl St. Alban had been the motive power in their coming, that she had instigated and urged it. No one had considered the girl-wife until now. Indeed every one’s sympathies had been with Sibyl and Talbot, the two who were openly devoted to each other, and who were cruelly debarred from a union by the existence of an unloved wife whom Talbot himself represented as homely and unlovable.

Sibyl had gone so far as to circulate hints among her friends of an intended divorce that would make Talbot free to marry where he pleased, but this had not been openly discussed, although no one blamed Talbot much for wishing to shake off the fetters that had been thrust upon him. Now since they had come to Selwyn Heights, since they had heard the plaint of pain from the stricken wife, they became suddenly roused to the enormity of what they had been contemplating so carelessly, and there was something almost like contempt in Duke Cameron’s voice as he said:

“I wish from my soul we had not come here. You ought to have told us to stay away, Talbot.”

He was glad that they retired early to their rooms that night, glad that they were going away in the morning. He said to himself that it would have been well, indeed, if they had stayed away as they said.

Kitty came at last to say that her mistress had revived from her long swoon, and was better.

“And I may go to her now--she will see me?” he asked, eagerly.

“No, sir,” and Kitty shook her head in unconscious imitation of Nina’s imperative little nod. “She will not see you to-night.”

“Go and ask her to give me only ten minutes, Kitty. Tell her I pray her, I implore her, to grant me even that short space of time.”

Kitty went back with the message--Miss Drusilla herself brought the answer.

“She utterly declines to see you for even one minute. Be merciful, Talbot, and do not insist upon an interview that cannot be anything but painful to both. Indeed, I should think you must feel ashamed to face the poor girl. It seems she heard everything yesterday; and, then, she saw you in the conservatory with that woman to-night.”

He looked at her with heavy eyes.

“What does she mean to do?” he asked, slowly.

“I do not know, but I should think that she would separate herself from you. Any woman of spirit would!” said the man-hating spinster, decidedly.

Talbot went to his room, desperate.

“I will write her a letter, and I will send it to her to-night,” he said, throwing himself down before his desk in feverish haste. “I will tell her what a fool I have been, and how I repent my folly! I cannot wait until to-morrow.”