Chapter XXVI: I Must Have Money

Doctor Fielding had forgotten that the door of the room where he sat with his wife was ajar, and that it opened into the pretty little chamber where Nina was lying back listlessly with half-shut eyes in the comfortable reclining chair he had procured for her. When he had gone in a little while ago to speak to her she had been asleep, but now she was broad awake, and every word of the conversation had reached her ears.

She awoke suddenly to a fact that had never occurred to her mind before.

“The Fieldings are poor people, and I have been here two months, weakly brooding over my troubles without giving a thought to the fact that I am a burden and expense to them almost heavier than they can bear,” she said to herself with lively compunction, although she might well have been excused for her thoughtlessness. Having been reared in an atmosphere of wealth and luxury, she had perhaps never given a thought to the fact that there is so much want, misery and sorrow in the world, all caused by the lack of money.

But her sensitive conscience, spurred into activity by the words she had overheard, was on the alert now.

“I must go away from here and relieve these kind true friends of the burden of my support, and I must try to reimburse them for the expense I have been to them,” she decided.

But in a moment came the thought:

“Where shall I go?”

“Not back to Selwyn Heights,” and she shivered, “Not back to my faithless, unloving husband, and my triumphant rival. They believe me dead as I would have been but for Doctor Fielding. They may think so still. I shall never intrude upon them. Doubtless they will be married soon, and _she_ will reign in my old home, queen of the heart I could not win although I was his wedded wife.”

With a smothered moan she rose and walked unsteadily across the room to where her dark cloak hung upon a peg in the corner. She slipped her hand into the pocket and drew out a little port-monnaie of pearl and silver.

“I always had plenty of money in my purse,” she thought, “Perhaps I have enough to give the Fieldings some now.”

She opened it and an exclamation of disappointment broke from her pale lips.

There was only a five dollar bill and some loose change in it. She remembered then that she had left home on so desperate a mission that she had taken nothing with her. It was by the merest accident, and not by design that the little purse had been in her pocket.

“Only five dollars, and I wanted to help them so much,” she sobbed, bursting into babyish tears. It was the first time in her young life that she had ever felt the need of money.

And while she stood there forlornly weeping she remembered that only one day before Talbot Strangemore had come home she had put away five hundred dollars in the secret bottom of her jewel casket for safe-keeping.

“If I only had that five hundred dollars out of all the wealth I have left behind me, how rich I would feel,” she murmured, “I would give every penny to these noble people. We could go to the sea-shore then, and it would do Mrs. Fielding and the baby as much good as it would me.”

She began to revolve all sorts of schemes in her mind for obtaining possession of the money hidden in her jewel casket at Selwyn Heights.

“I believe that I could easily enter the house by night, obtain the money, and slip away again unobserved,” she thought.

The fancy took possession of her mind. Perhaps there was blended with it an undefined longing to know what Talbot and the rest of them were doing now that they believed her dead and lost to them forever. She persuaded herself that nothing could be easier than to go to Selwyn Heights, get her money, and come away again, all without being discovered.

“And I am compelled to have it,” she reasoned, “I intend to cast my lot with the Fieldings henceforth, and I must have money to live upon until I get strong enough to work for my daily bread.”

A faint smile crossed her lips at the thought of one of the Selwyns, whose pride and wealth had descended to them through many generations, working like a pauper for daily bread.

“But even that would not be so bad as what that dreadful woman talked about so coolly,” Nina thought, with a lump in her throat, that hurt her cruelly, “I could bear anything rather than the world should say that Nina Selwyn was put away by her husband because he did not love her. It is a shame to a woman to be divorced. I could not have borne the disgrace of it. Talbot was cruelly hard and unkind to suggest it to that woman!”

She was proud and sensitive. She had chosen death rather than the public disgrace of the divorce she believed that Talbot intended to have. She could not think of anything more terrible than that. If any one had told her that a degradation even deeper awaited her, that before long she would be convicted of a murder, that the shadow of the gallows tree hung over her head, and that ere many months she would feel the horrible rope of the hangman about her fair white throat, she would never have lived to endure it, she would have fallen down dead with the very horror of the thought.

But she did not dream of all that impended over her. She did not know that her husband had gone abroad, that Sibyl St. Alban was dead, and that she herself lay under the ban of murder. The Fieldings had kept everything from her in the kindness of their hearts, waiting until she grew strong enough to bear it.

So in utter ignorance of all that awaited her, of the tragedy that loomed over her darkly, Nina went straight to her fate.

* * * * *

The next morning she was gone and Mrs. Fielding found a brief note upon the pillow the tired head had been wont to press.

“Do not be alarmed about me, dear friends,” the poor sick girl had written. “I am not going to make another effort at self destruction. I am simply gone away upon an imperative matter of business, and I shall return to you in a few hours never to leave you again if you will let me stay with you. I have forever renounced home and name and husband, and I desire that no one shall ever know that Nina Strangemore still lives upon the cruel earth--no one at least except you two who have been so good to me!”