CHAPTER LXV.
Lord Stuart grasped the back of a chair to steady himself, and stared aghast.
“My lord, I am very happy to meet you. You see I have come back to my own,” said Camille, with her old dazzling smile and radiant glance that he so well remembered.
She had advanced to the center of the beautiful apartment, and was holding out her white, ringed hand to him, but he did not appear to notice it. He only gasped as if she had thrown ice-water over him.
“Are you ill, my lord?” she continued, in her most gracious manner. “Pray be seated. I will ring for wine.”
But he put up his hand with a gesture of dissent, and his pale lips gasped a feeble negative.
Camille’s smile began to fade.
“I do not understand. Has the mere sight of an old friend so overcome you?” she asked, with a little of her old coquetry; and, going nearer, she laid her white hand on his arm, but he shrunk in horror from her light touch.
“I—I—thought—you—dead!” he managed to mutter, in disconnected words; and she removed her hand from his arm and fell back a pace from him.
“You thought me dead? Ah, then, you did not come here to see me?” bitterly.
“Certainly not,” he answered, regaining himself in a measure, though he was still ghastly white and trembling.
“I thought you dead four years ago. Norman de Vere had married again. It was to see his second wife that I came to Verelands.”
“His second wife? What was she to you or your sister?” Camille asked, with a sneer.
“A dear and valued friend,” he replied, gazing at her with eyes of steady scorn that made her burst out angrily:
“The poor foundling creature, basely born, no doubt, was fortunate in finding nobly born friends like Lady Moreland and Lord Stuart?”
“I do not understand your allusions,” Lord Stuart said, icily.
“Do you not?” she asked, in wonder. She gazed steadily at him, then said, eagerly: “Lord Stuart, possibly you do not know the whole story of my bitter wrongs at the hands of my faithless husband. Will you not sit down and let me tell you all?”
He was about to refuse, but with her eager white hands she pushed him gently into a chair.
“Do not refuse,” she pleaded. “Once you were a very good friend of mine. Why not now? God knows I have suffered enough at my husband’s hands through your admiration for you to make me the small atonement of pitying me, of sympathizing with me in this hour.”
She flung herself into a chair opposite to him, and hurried into what she called the relation of her wrongs, and the first complaint began with the bringing of Little Sweetheart to Verelands.
“Of course I was wrong in believing the child his own, as he proved my suspicions false by marrying the girl afterward,” she admitted. “But do you not think with me, Lord Stuart, that he should have taken the child away when I requested, nay, commanded it?”
“You must excuse me for not passing judgment upon the master of Verelands under his own roof. That would be discourteous,” he said; but she noticed that he was very curious over the things she told him. He did not disdain to ask questions, and he extracted from her all the information she could impart regarding the origin of Sweetheart.
“Norman believed that the woman on the train with the child was her mother,” said Camille. “But the child, when asked, denied it. She said the woman’s name was Mattie. My own theory, Lord Stuart, was that the woman was some circus creature, and that the child had been trained to act upon the stage. She was pert and precocious for one of her age.”
When the subject of Sweetheart had been exhausted, she took up her innocent flirtation with himself.
“For these simple faults I was driven like a criminal from his heart and home,” she cried, bitterly. “Can you wonder, Lord Stuart, that, driven to madness by his scorn, I planned and carried out such a bitter revenge upon my cruel husband?”
He looked at her inquiringly; and with fiendish joy that made her appear most revolting to him, she told him all that she had done—how a pauper’s dead body had been palmed off on Norman de Vere as her own, and how in the hour of his most exquisite happiness she had struck the full cup of happiness from his lips, and driven the girl he loved away with her child into exile and misery.
He listened without one word of reply. Bad as he knew her to be, he could scarcely credit this crowning act of fiendishness.
As soon as she paused he arose.
“Can you tell me where to find Mr. de Vere?” he asked.
“I can not,” she answered, stiffly, although she knew perfectly well through her spy, Finette, where he was. But she saw, with bitter mortification, that Lord Stuart’s sympathies were not with her, but had gone out silently to the noble man of whose life she had made such a foot-ball of fate. “You take his part against me!” she said, with flashing eyes and her most regal air.
He was going to the door; but he turned back, very pale and moved, and gazed steadfastly into her excited face.
“I take your part against yourself,” he answered, gravely. “I would save you from the fate you are bringing down upon yourself, because—well, because I loved you once, although I am ashamed of it now. But, Camille, if you stay on here at Verelands, this horrible vengeance of which you boast is going to recoil in terrible disaster on your own head. Be warned in time. Tell the truth, and crave Norman de Vere’s pardon for your wickedness. If you will not do that, go away far from here and hide yourself as far as possible from the storm of disgrace that is going to break on your head.”
A tremor ran over her at the earnestness with which he spoke, but she laughed aloud with the recklessness of a desperate woman.
“I shall never leave Verelands again, and I defy the disasters you predict, Lord Stuart,” she replied, daringly.
He did not reply. He simply bowed and hastened from her presence, drawing a breath of relief at his escape.
“Oh, brother, how strange you look! What is it?” Lady Edith cried, starting up anxiously to meet him.
“It is nothing,” he said, drawing his arm about the trembling figure. “I told you,” he added, “that there was some mistake. Mr. de Vere and his wife are both away from home, Edith.”
“But the girl said that Thea was sick.”
“She said that Mrs. de Vere was sick. It was the elder lady.”
“Norman’s mother?”
“Yes. Heaven forgive me, but she must not know yet,” he added to himself.
“But where are they gone? It is rather strange; for he knew we were coming!” cried poor Lady Edith, in disappointment and distress.
“It was a compulsory trip, Edith—something connected with that fraudulent telegram, you know,” evasively. “But, my dear, as Mrs. de Vere is so ill, I think I will take you to a hotel for the present.”
“Yes, yes, that will be better,” she assented, with a sigh of the most bitter disappointment.
She rose obediently and went away with him to the carriage, which was still waiting for them at the gate, with the prim English maid in it wondering if her mistress was ever going to summon her into the house, or if she were making a ceremonious call only at the handsome Southern mansion.
Lord Stuart put his sister into the carriage, gave the driver his order for a hotel, and then they drove away from Verelands, Lord Stuart, pale and excited, his sister pensive and tearful over the bitter disappointment of finding her beloved Thea away from her home.