CHAPTER LIX.
Despite his stay of but a few hours in New York and his hasty journey there and back, it was almost a week between the going and coming of Norman de Vere, and his heart was full of anxiety as he dismissed the hack he had hired at the station and walked up the broad steps of his home just as the soft shadows of twilight were settling over the beautiful Southland where his lot was cast.
“On breezy pinion mournful eve came singingOver the silent hills, and to the gladesAnd violet beds a stream of odors bringing,And waking music in the forest shades.“A lovely length of moonlit waters lightlyBroke into sudden brightness on the strand,While through the sky’s soft fleecy fretwork brightlyThe stars looked out upon the stilly land.”
“On breezy pinion mournful eve came singingOver the silent hills, and to the gladesAnd violet beds a stream of odors bringing,And waking music in the forest shades.“A lovely length of moonlit waters lightlyBroke into sudden brightness on the strand,While through the sky’s soft fleecy fretwork brightlyThe stars looked out upon the stilly land.”
“On breezy pinion mournful eve came singingOver the silent hills, and to the gladesAnd violet beds a stream of odors bringing,And waking music in the forest shades.
“On breezy pinion mournful eve came singing
Over the silent hills, and to the glades
And violet beds a stream of odors bringing,
And waking music in the forest shades.
“A lovely length of moonlit waters lightlyBroke into sudden brightness on the strand,While through the sky’s soft fleecy fretwork brightlyThe stars looked out upon the stilly land.”
“A lovely length of moonlit waters lightly
Broke into sudden brightness on the strand,
While through the sky’s soft fleecy fretwork brightly
The stars looked out upon the stilly land.”
Although he had been tormented all the way by a foreboding of indefinable evil, a moment of calm, of almost relief came to him as he paused on the long piazza and ran his hurried gaze over the front of the house. He saw that lights glimmered through all the windows as usual, and it somehow reassured his mind.
“There can be nothing wrong. It was only my foolish fancy,” he muttered; and opened the door with his night-key, anxious to surprise his darling. “She will not be expectingme until to-morrow,” he murmured, and thrilled at the thought of clasping her in another moment to his wildly throbbing heart. “Oh, my love, my darling, how happy she will be! how she will spring to my arms and clasp her warm white arms about my neck!” he thought, with the rapture of a lover, as he mounted the steps, and meeting no one, sought the nursery. She would be there at this moment before she went to dress for dinner—there in some pretty, charmingdéshabille—with their child whom she worshiped with such fond maternal love.
With an eager smile upon his proud, handsome lips, Norman de Vere turned the door-knob and entered the room.
Then he started back in surprise.
Blank silence and darkness greeted him, and a deadly chill struck to his heart.
“Oh, Heaven! not dead—my little Alan dead!” he groaned, in sudden anguish; but it lasted only a moment, for another thought came to him.
“Sweetheart, dear baby that she is, has converted her own room into a nursery in my absence, that she may have her little idol always with her. I shall find them there.”
And turning from the dreary darkened room, he went along the hall with rapid steps to the suite of rooms that had once been occupied by the beautiful Camille, and later on had been refitted and refurnished for Sweetheart when she became his happy bride.
In the subdued light that filtered softly through frosted gas-globes in the hall, he paused, and bending down, listened at her door for the sound of voices.
A low, smothered murmur greeted his ears, and he could no longer restrain his impatience. He opened the door, and stepped quickly over the threshold.
And to the day of his death he always wondered why the sight that met his eyes did not strike him dead as swiftly as if it had been a bolt of the most terrible lightning.
There in Sweetheart’s sacred boudoir, from among the dainty furnishings of blue and gold framed to shrine her fair and youthful beauty, there glared upon him two darker faces, both distorted by fiendish triumph—the face of Camille, beautiful still in an artificial way, breathing, living, and behind her Finette—the artful maid.