CHAPTER XVII.
Camille could not get home fast enough, she was so eager to go down to the river and search for the fatal bouquet that Lord Stuart had sent her. It had rushed over her suddenly that when Robert Lacy had come upon her he had carried something in his hand—the flowers, of course—and in his astonishment at seeing her they had fallen from his grasp. They must be lying there now, and she must hasten to destroy them before they were found.
She sprung hastily from the carriage, and went into the house with eager footsteps.
“Norman, I am going upstairs to rest,” she said. “This affair has completely unnerved me. To think that that poor man should have destroyed himself when upon an errand to me. It is simply horrible. I shall take some valerian and lie down for an hour. And you, I suppose, will go and sit awhile with your mother and the little invalid?”
“Yes,” he replied, mechanically, and they went upstairs arm in arm. Then they paused, for Camille had put up her face to be kissed.
He stooped and pressed his lips gently to hers.
“I am sorry you are so unnerved. Do not forget to take the valerian, dear,” he said, and held her in his arms tenderly for a moment.
If she had known that this was the last, last time they would hold her, would she have been so impatient to be gone?
But she could think of nothing but the tell-tale flowers lying on the river-bank ready to betray her at any moment. She felt as if she could fly to the spot.
She turned quickly from him and sought her own apartments, but she only remained long enough to make sure that he had entered his mother’s room ere she fled from the house, as if driven by pursuing fiends, to the river-bank.
Then ensued a frenzied search for Lord Stuart’s flowers—a hopeless search—under the shade of the dark cypress-trees, for the tokens of Robert Lacy’s presence here that might betray her crime.
Camille flung herself at last upon her knees, crawling about in the long grass, peering here and there with pitiful intentness for the missing flowers. She did not hear a light, quickstep coming toward her. The murmur of the river drowned every sound. She did not feel the glance of the dark eyes fastened upon her in a kind of horror. She believed herself utterly alone in this secluded spot. The Verelands grounds were private.
“Good heavens! what if some one has found it!” she muttered, fearfully. “But, no, it must be here; or if any one had found it, I should have heard of it from Norman. It is here somewhere.” She continued groping about on her hands and knees until all at once she came upon a little pool of blood in the damp grass. “Blood!” she cried, in a startled tone of horror, and fell to work dipping water from the river in her jeweled hands and flinging it on the crimson spot till the clear water mingled with the gory stains and flowed away in a tiny stream through the grass. Then Camille began to collect handfuls of dead leaves which she flung hurriedly on the fatal spot. All the while her face and actions were so full of guilty consciousness that the unseen watcher behind a neighboring tree gazed and listened appalled.
She paused at last in her frenzied search, and muttered:
“What am I to do? I can not find it, yet it must be here. Oh, God, how wicked I feel! Why do I keep thinking of Lady Macbeth washing her hands and crying: ‘Out, out, damned spot!’ He might have been alive now, if he would have let me make terms with him, the brutal wretch! for the keeping of that hideous secret. Oh, God! his dead face will always haunt me; but there was no other way—no other way!”
She sprung to her feet, wringing her hands despairingly.
“I can not find it. Pray Heaven no one else will; for I can stay no longer—I must go. My husband will be seeking me. He must find me at home—he must not suspect this!”
She caught up her pretty beaded wrap, that had fallen in a glittering heap on the grass, flung it about her shoulders, turned to go, then recoiled with a piercing cry.
“Norman!”
For it was her husband who had come upon her in the solitude where she groped wildly for the missing flowers—her husband who had been gazing in horror at the pale, distorted features of the guilty woman—who had listened in shocked silence to the utterances by which she had convicted herself of her terrible sin. It came upon her with a shock like that of doom that Norman knew all her guilty secret—that he had been a witness of her frenzied search and her bitter disappointment.
So terrible was the shock that Camille thought she was going to fall down dead at her husband’s feet, slain by shame and despair at her own ignominy.
But her heart kept beating on, though wildly and tumultuously. Her trembling limbs still upheld her, and by degrees, as he forbore to speak, some of her native audacity returned to her. She determined to make one bold effort to regain lost ground.
She lifted her drooping lids, gazed at him appealingly, and cried:
“Oh, Norman, how you startled me! I—I—did not know you were here! I have lost one of my diamond rings—the prettiest one I had—and I’ve been searching for it everywhere. You haven’t seen it, have you, dear?”