At twelve o’clock, midnight, fire-works were displayed on the lawn. They lasted over half an hour, and were very creditable. After they had finished, carriages were ordered, and the house guests departed in a steady stream until all were gone. The tenantry and villagers departed to their homes on foot or in wagons, as they had come. The colored lanterns were taken down from the trees; the musicians went away, and the lights one by one died out of the great mansion.
The bridal pair were to remain a week at Hawkhurst, and were then to go to Wynde Heights, the dower house of the baronet’s widow, and it had been arranged that Neva should accompany her step-mother. Rufus Black was to be a member of the party also, and much was hoped by Mr. and Mrs. Craven Black from the enforced propinquity of the young couple.
Silence succeeded to the late noise, confusion and merriment—a silence the more profound by contrast with what had preceded. The household had retired. Neva had long since dismissed her maid and gone to bed, thinking sadly of her father. Even before the last carriage had rolled away, Neva had fallen asleep, not-withstanding her wrapt musings concerning her father, and as the hours went on, and darkness and silence fell, that sleep had deepened into a strange and almost breathless slumber.
But suddenly she sprang up, broad awake, her eyes starting, a cold dew on her forehead, a wild cry upon her lips.
She stared around her with a look of terror. The white curtains of her bed were fluttering in the breeze from her open window, and around her lay the thick gloom of her chamber.
Her voice called through the darkness in a wild, piercing wail:
“Oh, papa, papa! I dreamed—ah, was it a dream?—that he still lives! I saw him, pale and ghastly, at the door of a hut among the Indian hills, and I heard his voice calling the names: ‘Octavia! Neva!’ He is not dead—he is not dead! So surely as I live, I believe that papa too is alive! Oh, my father, my father!”
CHAPTER XXI.
A SCENE IN INDIA.
Neva Wynde had retired to her bed, as will be remembered, upon the marriage night of Lady Wynde and Craven Black, her thoughts all of her father and of his tragic fate in India. All day long she had thought of him with tender yearning, pity and regret, recalling to mind his goodness, nobleness, and grandeur of soul; and when night came, and she lay in her bed with the noise of revellers in the drawing-rooms and on the lawn coming faintly to her ears, she had sobbed aloud at the thought that her father had been so soon forgotten, and that his friends and tenantry were now making merry over the marriage of his widow to a man unworthy to cross the threshold of Hawkhurst.
And thus sobbing and thinking, she had slept, and in her sleep had dreamed that her father still lived, and that she saw him standing at the door of a hut among the far-off Indian hills, and that she heard his voice calling “Octavia! Neva!” And thus dreaming, she had awakened with a cry of terror, to ask of herself if it was only a dream.