Chapter XXXIII: Talbot’s Dreams

Talbot brooded more than ever over the memory of his dead bride after those words with Oswald Ferris. That night he dreamed of her.

Not that he had not dreamed of her before in his dreary, remorseful exile, for there were few nights when her image did not brood above his pillow. But his visions of his poor wronged Nina had been most unsatisfactory ones. She appeared to him always cold, proud, repellant, as she had been after she overheard the foolish confidence he had reposed in his aunt. To-night there was a change.

Sometimes Talbot fancied that it had been a real vision not merely a dream that came to him that night, it was so strangely real.

He had not retired, he had merely dropped into a doze over his book, when the form of Nina rose clearly before his mind’s eye, and the beautiful, despairing young face with its hollow, pleading dark eyes, made an ineffaceable impression on his memory. Her golden hair floated like a vail over her shoulders, and her delicate white hands were raised and clasped as she murmured in tones of agonizing entreaty:

“Talbot, my husband, come to me! I need you!”

Talbot Strangemore started forward to inclose that suppliant figure with his arms, but they only clasped the empty air. The vision had dissolved, faded, even while the low, entreating tones seemed to tremble on the air.

“Nina!” he cried, but no voice answered him back. He saw that he was alone, that his lamp had burned low, and his book fallen to the floor. He looked at his watch and saw that it was midnight, the hour when restless spirits revisit the earth.

“Was it her restless ghost come to summon me to the other world?” he asked himself with throbbing pulses, and a certain sense of pleasure came to him with the thought.

“By that token I know that she has forgiven me,” he thought. “She knows now all my sorrow, all my repentance, all my love, and she forgives me and summons me to join her in that dark, mysterious Beyond, whither she so rashly precipitated herself.”

There was joy to him in the fancy that his wronged young wife desired his presence in that other world where she was gone. He knew it would be sin to take his own life, yet for a moment the temptation came over him almost too strongly to be resisted. The beautiful vision seemed to beckon him away, the voice seemed to draw him by invisible chains.

“She needs me,” he said to himself, and he was only held back from throwing himself into the blue waves of the sea that flowed beneath the windows of the old chateau where he was staying, by a sudden warning thought:

“I must live to track Oswald Ferris down to conviction for his crime, and clear my darling’s name from the shadow of a sin before I go hence to join her.”

So he whispered to Nina as if she were present in spirit and could hear him, that she must wait a little while until his mission on earth was accomplished before he was ready to join her in the spirit world. Then he would come to her, oh, so gladly.

After that day he watched Oswald Ferris furtively but closely. He was determined that he would ferret out the secret the man had hid so cleverly, leaving a lovely, innocent, unhappy girl to bear the brunt of his sin.

“The coward, the villain,” he said to himself many times, and he was half tempted to take the wretch by the throat and throttle him until he confessed the truth.

But calmer thoughts prevailed. He knew that it was necessary to hide the suspicions he had once imprudently uttered, or Ferris would fly with his guilty secret to the uttermost ends of the earth.

“I must bide my time. I must watch and wait even though my little Nina is calling me to join her in the other world,” he thought, and no prescience came to him that Nina still dwelt upon this lower earth, and that by one of the strange and wondrous operations of the mind a miracle had been accomplished--that Nina, kneeling on the hard floor of her cruel prison cell, her pride, her resentment, her coldness all beaten down by her unutterable woe, had sent her soul’s cry for him ringing across leagues of sea and land that divided them, ringing on, and on, and on, until it reached his heart.