"Why! will you not wait for dinner? Where are you going?"
"To Westport. Not to leave it again until this miserable trial is Over. Good-by." And Stafford hurried from the house, and mounting his still reeking horse, rode rapidly away.
CHAPTER XXX.
SIBYL'S DOOM.
"Great Heaven! how could thy vengeance light
So bitterly on one so bright?
How could the hand that gave such charms,
Blast them again in Love's own arms?"—MOORE.
As Stafford had said, a subp[oe]na was served on Mrs. Brantwell, to be present at the great trial about which everybody was talking. That good lady, who had determined already to go, regarded it as a useless ceremony; but Fate seemed determined to deprive her of that melancholy consolation, for two days before the eventful one on which the trial was to take place, poor Mrs. Brantwell, worn out by excitement and constant weeping, was seized with such a violent sick headache, that she was utterly unable to leave her bed. In vain, when the day "big with fate" came, did she attempt to rise. At the first effort she was seized with such a deadly faintness—such a blinding giddiness, that she was instantly forced to go to bed again. And there, half delirious, with her head throbbing and beating like mad, she was forced to lie, while her physician wrote a certificate of her inability to attend, which Mr. Brantwell was to convey to Westport.
How that day passed, and the next, and the next, Mrs. Brantwell never knew. Lying in her darkened chamber, with bandages wet with vinegar bound around her burning forehead, with servants tiptoeing in and out, and speaking in hushed whispers, the time passed as it does in a dream. With her mind as well as her body utterly prostrate, she was spared the suspense concerning the position of Sibyl she must otherwise have suffered.
But on the fourth day, Saturday, though weak and languid, she was able to rise, and, with the assistance of Jenny, descended to the parlor, where, smothered in shawls, she lay rocking back and forth in her large easy chair.
And now, recovered from the first prostration of bodily illness, she thought of the time that had passed, and began to feel all the tortures of doubt and agonizing suspense again. Sibyl's trial must be over by this time, and—what had been the result?
So unendurable grew this uncertainty, that she was about to dispatch a messenger to Westport to learn the result of the trial, when the clatter of horses' hoofs before the door arrested her attention, and the next instant the door was thrown open, and Will Stafford stood before her.