CHAPTER XIII.
Days passed, and no matter how angry it made the young girls at the hotel, no one could deny that Lord Stuart admired the married coquette more than any of the others. He was always to be found in Camille’s train. He danced with her at the balls; he was only too proud to carry her fan and her bouquet. If she had been free, she might have become Lady Stuart at any time, said the gossips.
It was no wonder that every one was indignant with the red-haired siren, for every single woman at the hotel had had hopes of his lordship. It was a shame for them to be disappointed for the sake of a married woman who had made a conquest of him simply to gratify her own vanity. Her dear five hundred friends said hard things about her behind her back—spiteful things that when they came to the ears of Norman de Vere made him grind his white teeth in fury.
He had watched Camille’s course with bitter disapproval all these weeks, but when he remonstrated with her, she flung her white arms about him, vowing that she loved him only, that she was but amusing herself with my lord to show those spiteful women her power.
“They are only angry because I have rivaled them, that isall,” she said, caressing him fondly, for she began to think that she had punished him enough.
He had suffered, and she knew it. Her wayward heart had been touched by the look she had sometimes seen in his eyes. She began to relent—to feel ashamed of herself.
“Camille, will you not come home now? The child is almost over the fever. I do not think there can be any fear of infection now,” he said, pleadingly.
She started and frowned. Her white arms fell from his neck.
“I thought you told me the child would die!” she cried, sharply.
“We feared so. The doctor had but little hope during those days when Sweetheart lay in that deep stupor without taking food for so long. But thanks to my mother’s excellent nursing, she survived the terrible disease, and is now on the way to recovery.”
The frown on the beautiful face, half turned away from him, grew dark and deep. There was murder in Camille’s heart.
“Oh, God! how I hate the little wretch!” she thought, feverishly; and turning to him, she asked: “Have you never had any answer to the advertisements you sent to the papers?”
“None,” he replied.
“And so it is quite settled that I am to be taxed with the littlefoundling’s support!” she exclaimed, malevolently.
A deep-red flush came to the young man’s handsome face.
“No, Camille; the expense of the child’s maintenance will fall upon my mother, who has a small income of her own, you know. It is her wish.”
“She is very foolish,” Camille said, bitterly.
Then she paused abruptly. She remembered that she had to keep up some pretense of kindness toward the child, else Norman would discredit Finette’s clever story by which she had saved her mistress.
She put on her sweetest smile, and promised that she would go back to Verelands as soon as he wished.
“Of course I will keep away from the child’s apartments until she is quite well, for I am horribly afraid of that fever,” she said. “But I am heartily tired of the life here, and long to be at home, where I can have more of your society, Norman. Indeed, you ought not to blame me for amusing myself with other men, when you have been spending half of your time at Verelands with your mother and Little Sweetheart.”
“Come back with me, and you shall not have to complain of any lack of my society,” he replied, gayly; and she agreed to go that very day.
The ladies at the hotel were heartily glad to hear of her going, but Lord Stuart declared that he wasdésolé.
“I shall haunt Verelands,” he declared.
“Oh, pray do not threaten anything so ghostly. I give you leave to call in the orthodox fashion,” she replied, carelessly.
In truth, she did not care in the least whether she ever saw the infatuated nobleman again. He had served her purpose—helped her to punish Norman—and now she was ready to fling him aside like a worn-out glove.
But her grace and beauty, her coquettish wiles, had thrown a glamour over the mature man’s heart. He believed that she was weary of her boy-husband; he pitied her and despised Norman de Vere. What right had that boy to appropriate this peerless creature?
So strong was his passion that he began to indulge dreams of winning her for his own—honorably, of course. Lord Stuart was the soul of honor. But what was there to hinder a divorce? She no longer loved that smooth-faced boy, and he fancied that she had shown signs that she cared for himself.
Carried away by an irresistible spell, the nobleman thought of no rights but his own. The withdrawal of Camille’s constant presence from the hotel almost made him frantic. He began to make daily calls at Verelands, but these brief glimpses of her did not satisfy his craving. It occurred to him one day that it would be romantic to send her flowers daily—flowers whose delicate petals should hide dainty notes with love verses written within them.
Camille had great gardens full of flowers, but that did not matter to Lord Stuart. Perhaps one flower from his hand would be dearer than all the rest. He was mad enough to think so.
He spent a whole afternoon with the poets choosing an appropriate verse to accompany the bouquet of deep-red roses he had selected. At the witching hour of twilight he dispatched his valet, a handsome, saturnine-looking fellow, with the fragrant offering.
Camille was walking that twilight hour by the river which skirted the lawn at Verelands. She had left the house in a rage because her husband had excused himself for an hourthat he might spend some time with the little invalid in his mother’s room.
Lord Stuart’s valet had never yet seen the lady his master adored. Indeed, the valet was a reserved, unsociable fellow, and did not have much to do with the other servants at the hotel. He spent the greater part of his time in his master’s rooms attending to his wardrobe, and he did not seem to take any interest in anything else, said the aggrieved maids at the hotel. If he had not been so good-looking they would not have minded it so much, but the fellow, with his black hair and eyes and silky black beard, was handsome in an evil, morose sort of way, and not one of them but would have been charmed if Robert Lacy had noticed her. But he did not seem to care for any one. He was gloomy and morose always, as if brooding over some secret trouble.
But when Robert Lacy heard it whispered at the hotel that his master was in love, he woke up to a feeble sort of curiosity, coupled with vexation. He had a good place as valet to a bachelor, and he felt that he would be sorry indeed if the condition of affairs was changed. Life could not be half so pleasant for him should Lord Stuart marry. When he found out later on that his master was enamored of a married lady he did not feel much easier in his mind. There was no telling what would happen. They might take it into their heads to elope. That would be quite as bad as a marriage.
He became possessed of an ardent curiosity to see the lady who threatened to spoil the ease and comfort of his life with indulgent, easy-going Lord Stuart.
But Mrs. de Vere had returned to Verelands. There was small chance for Robert Lacy to see her now, so he hailed the errand to Verelands with secret delight.
When he made his appearance at Verelands he refused to surrender the magnificent bouquet to the servants. He told them, with unblushing audacity, that his orders were to give the flowers to no one but the lady herself.
Mrs. de Vere was walking in the park, they told him, and Robert Lacy replied that he would find her himself. He turned from the curious negro servants and went into the grounds that now, in the latter part of November, were a wealth of tropical growth and flowers, with here and there a statue gleaming whitely through the twilight gloom and the luxuriant shrubbery.
Camille was walking by the river-bank. It looked weird and gloomy there in the fast-fading light. Tall cypress-trees grew along its banks, and the water, swollen by recent rains,rushed along with a sullen sound. The proud, jealous woman stood leaning against the trunk of a tall cypress-tree, thinking perhaps that the angry, brawling river typified her feelings, when a step near by sent the quick blood to her face with the thought that her husband had followed her there. She turned with a swift smile of eager welcome, but recoiled in terror when she saw beside her a tall, dark, saturnine-looking man with a bunch of red roses in his hand. One swift glance into his face, and a cry of wild alarm and horror issued from her lips.
The dark face of Robert Lacy had arisen like a ghost from her dead past—that past from which she shrank with loathing indescribable.
As for the man, his recognition of her had been swift and instantaneous, too. The red roses dropped from his hands as he flung them up, and her name fell from his lips in accents of wolfish menace, strangely blended with a sort of fierce, angry joy: “Camille!”
Mrs. de Vere fell upon her knees, and crouching, with uplifted hands, wailed, tremulously: “Vanish, in the name of God!”
“Ha! ha! so you take me for a ghost, do you?” jeered Robert Lacy. He bent down and looked into her frightened face and staring eyes with an evil smile, continuing: “Well, it isn’t strange that you do, seeing that the last time we met I was hanging on a gallows-tree, betrayed into the hands of Judge Lynch by you, madame—by you, you false jade! You went away with the rest and left me there for the buzzards to pick my bones, while you fled so fast from the scene that perhaps you never heard how one spectator—one man with a heart—cut me down and saved me from my awful fate. My neck was not broken, and he brought me back to life again. Then I fled from California with him, and have been in his service ever since, with but one thought in my heart, and that was to find my heartless wife and punish her for her perfidy!”
She crouched on the ground, muttering fearfully, with chattering teeth:
“You—you—are mistaken—in the person! I—I—never saw you before, sir!”
Robert Lacy laughed most bitterly.
“That is a lie, madame!” he retorted, scornfully. “You recognized me the moment you saw me, in spite of the twelve years that have passed since those days in California when you loved me at first with a fierce love that turned to a fierce hate—a hate that compassed my death, as you thought. But Iam alive, no thanks to you, Camille. And I have found you at last. Should I not know that red head and those hazel eyes in a thousand, madly as I once loved them—cruelly as I have hated them all these years? Do not dare deny your identity to me! Get up and tell me what you have done, and where you have been all those long years when you believed that my bleached skeleton was swinging still in the wind on the Californian hills!”
He bent threateningly toward her with so fierce an expression that she dragged herself fearfully up to her feet, clinging with both hands to the tree, while she muttered defiantly:
“I will tell you nothing, you miserable horse-thief, only that I am sorry you are not dead as I believed! Go away and leave me. I have naught to do with such as you!”
“We shall see,” he said. “Come, tell me, what you are doing here; why are you so richly dressed? Did you go back to your father in San Francisco and tell him that the handsome book-agent with whom you eloped turned out to be a horse-thief and a desperado, that you betrayed him to the vigilantes, and had him hanged? Did he forgive your disobedience, commend your treachery, and take you back?”
“Hush!” she whispered, fearfully, glancing about her in the purple twilight. “You will be overheard. Nor—Some one will be coming to look for me.”
“You belong here, then?” hissed Robert Lacy, excitedly. “Perhaps you mean to tell me that you are mistress of Verelands—that you are Mrs. de Vere?”
“Oh! no—no! I do not belong here!” she cried out, wildly; but the valet lifted a heavy hand and struck her in the face.
“Quit your lies, Camille Lacy!” he said, brutally. “You’ve known the weight of that hand in the past, and you’ll feel it again if you don’t shut up! Oh, yes, I know you, Mrs. de Vere,” mockingly, “and I’ll tell you what I mean to do to punish you—you false, heartless wife! I always meant to kill you on sight. I’ve carried a knife for your heart for years, but I won’t use it just yet. I will take you to my heart again. Ha! ha! I’ll show you to Lord Stuart, who sent me here to bring you flowers, as the false wife who brought me to the gallows from which he saved me. And this gentleman—this Mr. de Vere that you’ve married, thinking yourself a widow—I’ll show you to him as a traitoress—a woman who hounded her husband to death!” fiercely.
She lifted her bruised face from her hands and moaned:
“Spare me, for God’s sake! I am rich; I will divide thewhole of my fortune with you if you will only go away and leave me in peace.”
“I hate you! I would not forego my sweet revenge for the wealth of a Rothschild or a Vanderbilt,” was the sullen, evilly triumphant reply, and suddenly she flung herself upon him, whether in love or wrath it was so swift he could not determine for a moment. In that fatal moment of indecision Camille’s stealthy hand found the knife in his belt—the knife he meant for her heart. She drew back her hand and struck furiously once—twice—at his breast. The hot blood spurted into her face as she recoiled and flung him from her—flung him so skillfully that his limp form fell into the swollen river and went hurrying away with the blood-stained tide.