CHAPTER LVI.
It was quite true that a footstep had paused outside the nursery-door. Thea’s quick ear had detected it, and she waited eagerly for the entrance of the nurse, as she supposed it to be, but a hand turned the knob, and as the door swung lightly ajar two women crossed the threshold and advanced into the room.
Thea turned her face listlessly a moment on the pillow and stared at the intruders, then sprung to her feet with a startled cry.
The nurse had not returned. Two strange white faces were there instead of Mary’s familiar black one. Their eyes swept Thea’s face and the room with a sort of insolent contempt.
A thrill of indescribable terror went through the girl’s supple frame, and just then the foremost woman spoke. She pointed a slender gloved hand at the crib, and asked, sharply, angrily:
“Whose child is that?”
“It is mine,” Thea answered, with such pride in her tone and cresting her golden head with so queenly an air that the woman lifted her hand with a gesture of threatening, as if to strike her down at her feet.
Thea saw it, but she did not falter. A sudden courage had come to her in this moment which she subtly felt to be full of some unexplained peril to herself.
She gazed fixedly at the foremost woman, a tall, graceful creature, clothed in soft, lusterless silk, with a bonnet ofshining jet set lightly on a head of beautiful wavy red hair. The handsome face beneath was no longer young, but Thea thought it looked like the faces of women she had seen in Paris, enameled and made up to be beautiful forever by the artistes in that profession. But the great reddish-hazel eyes had a fire all their own, and they glared upon the beautiful young wife as if they would destroy her with their baleful light.
“The child is yours?” she uttered, in a low and hissing voice. “And you?”
“I am Mrs. de Vere,” was the proud reply.
“Norman de Vere’s wife?”
“Yes.”
The handsome, stately woman threw back her haughty head with an insolent movement that made the jets in her bonnet glitter.
“Ha! ha!” she laughed, scornfully; and the creature behind her, yellow-faced and with beady black eyes, evidently her maid, echoed her insolent mirth: “Ha! ha!”
Thea’s lovely face crimsoned with anger, and she asked, haughtily:
“Who are you, madame, and why have you entered my house in this bold manner?”
The woman came a step nearer, and held out to her a slip of cardboard.
“Read!” she said, imperatively; and, without touching it, Thea obeyed. On the white card was written, in the same small, feminine characters as the letter she had found among her toys but yesterday, a name:
“Camille de Vere.”
One moment Thea gazed in awful, statue-like quiet at the fatal card, then, with a cry of fear, she fled toward Alan’s crib for protection. She believed that she was gazing upon a ghost.
But how horribly real it all seemed—the two women, their faces, their voices. A shuddering horror overpowered her, and with the echo of her startled cry in their ears they saw her slip down senseless at their feet.
But baby Alan slept on peacefully in the soft, downy nest, his round cheeks softly flushed, the gold rings lying in shining disorder on the noble white brow, heedless of the hapless mother lying there upon the floor a crumpled heap of pale-blue cashmere and golden curls while her enemies bent gloatinglyabove her, noting with fierce loathing every young and tender charm.
“I could kill her, Finette,” Camille breathed fiercely, her fingers working with convulsive eagerness, her throat swelling.
“Hush, miladi! Life will be more cruel to her than death. And how young she is! Think how long she will have to live to bear her deep disgrace!”
She unstoppered the silver vinaigrette that swung from her belt, and held it to Thea’s nostrils. A minute more and the girl sighed faintly, then the blue eyes flared wide open upon Finette’s curious face.
“You are better, miss?” she cried, pertly. “Oh, no; don’t faint again. You took us for ghosts, I know, but that was a mistake. There’s been several mistakes, you see, and one of them was made by Mr. Norman de Vere when he thought his first wife was dead and took a second.”
Thea lay there, too dazed and weak to lift a finger, her blue eyes fixed intently on the woman’s malicious face. Over her shoulder she could see the face of the scornful woman who claimed to be Camille de Vere.
“Hush, Finette; you forestall my triumph!” cried that derisive voice. Her hazel eyes blazed. “Listen, you nameless foundling!” she went on, sharply, her very voice a sword. “I am Camille de Vere, Norman de Vere’s legal wife. I was never dead, as he believed. It was a plot to deceive him that I might punish him for all I suffered at his hands. Well, I am avenged! You, girl, have never been his wife for an hour, and that child there—ha! ha! ha!—is illegitimate!”
Those words—those bitter, taunting words—seemed to sting Thea into new life. She sprung unsteadily to her feet, and leaning over the crib, flung one arm protectingly about her son, and lifted her face, deathly white, but all alive and quivering with the blue fire of her eyes, to the face of her foe.
“You speak falsely!” she cried, with passionate indignation. “You are an impostor, and I command you to leave the house at once!”
Camilla laughed in cool derision.
“It is you who will have to go. I have come to stay,” she said. “Finette, go prepare my old rooms for me, while I talk to this creature who has usurped my place almost two years. When I have finished explaining matters to her, I think she will be glad to take her illegitimate child in her arms and go and hide their shame in the river.”