_The wife of Lord Chetwynde!_
Those words stung her like serpents' fangs; a tumult of fierce rage and jealousy at once arose within her; and at this new emotion her sorrow left her, and the weakness arising from her crushed love. With a start she rose to her feet, and hastily prepared to descend.
After summoning Zillah, Obed went in search of Lord Chetwynde. Some time elapsed before he could find him. He had been wandering about the grounds in a state bordering on distraction.
Meanwhile Hilda sat waiting.
Alone in the great room, where now the shadows were gathering, she was left to her own dark reflections. The sufferings through which she had passed had weakened her, and the last scene with Obed had not been adapted to reassure her or console her. The state of suspense in which she now was did not give her any fresh strength. Her nervous system was disorganized, and her present position stimulated her morbid fancy, turning it toward dark and sombre forebodings. And now in this solitude and gloom which was about her, and in the deep suspense in which she was waiting, there came to her mind a thought--a thought which made her flesh creep, and her blood run chill, while a strange, grisly horror descended awfully upon her. She could not help remembering how it had been before. Twice she had made an effort to anticipate fate and grasp at vengeance--once by herself alone, and once in the person of Gualtier. Each attempt had been baffled. It had been frustrated in the same way precisely. To each of them there had come that fearful phantom figure, rising before them awfully, menacingly, with an aspect of terrible import. Well she remembered that shape as it had risen before her at the pavilion--a shape with white face, and white clothing, and burning eyes--that figure which seemed to emerge from the depths of the sea, with the drip of the water in her dark, dank hair, and in her white, clinging draperies. It was no fiction of the imagination, for Gualtier had seen the same. It was no fiction, for she recalled her horror, and the flight through the forest, while the shape pursued till it struck her down into senselessness.
A shudder passed through her once more at the recollection of these things. And there arose a question of awful import. Would it come again? Now was the third attempt--the fateful third! Would she again be baffled, and by _that_? She feared no human foe; but this horror was something which she could never again encounter and live. And there came the terror over her that she might once again see this.
She was alone amidst her terrors. It was growing late. In the great room the dimness was deepening, and the furniture looked ghostly at the farther end of the apartment. It was not long since Obed had gone, but the time seemed to her interminable. It seemed to her as though she were all alone in the great house. She struggled with her fancies, and sat looking at the door fixedly, and with a certain awful expectation in her eyes.
Then, as she looked, a thrill flashed through all her being. For there, slowly and noiselessly, a figure entered--a figure which she knew too well. Robed in white it was; the face was pale and white as the dress; the hair was thick and ebon black, and hung down loosely; the dress clung closely. Was it the drip of the sea-wave--was it the wet clothing that thus clung to the figure which had once more come from the dark ocean depths to avenge her own cause? There, in very deed, stood the shape of horror--
"her garments
Clinging like cerements,