CHAPTER XXX.
It was no empty boast that Camille uttered when she threatened to haunt her husband. She meant it, and in the years that followed she made him realize her vindictive purpose many times.
It was with bitter regret that the young man had deserted his mother, but he knew that only this determined move on his part could break up the intimacy that Camille kept up with her for the selfish purpose of having her husband always under surveillance.
But, although the unhappy mother herself had no clew to her son’s whereabouts, and could only communicate with him through the medium of his employers—a great newspaper firm—Camille was more successful. Perhaps she employed a detective. Certain it was that she pursued Norman from city to city, as she had vowed she would. Whenever he believed that he had finally escaped her she turned up brilliantly beautiful as ever, defiant or humble by turns, as seemed to serve her purpose best. She found him wherever he chose to hide himself. She took possession of his apartments very often by coming in his absence and proclaiming herself his wife. She created lively scandals sometimes by her inveterate habit of falling into hysterics when Norman left her, as he invariably did, in the first moment of their meeting.
The young man was driven to despair.
He was not rich like Camille, and his small stock of moneybegan to give out under the stress of these untoward circumstances. He could not keep his position on the New York paper which had kindly made him one of its traveling correspondents.
Camille’s persecutions began to make him a marked man. She did not suffer him to remain long enough in one place to cull satisfactory material for his journalistic letters. Disappointed love, and the fierce longing to punish Norman for his scorn, had turned beautiful Camille into a restless fiend.
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
It was this struggle for existence under adverse circumstances that first turned the thoughts of the young man to authorship.
“I shall have to give up my position on the paper; I shall have to find work that I can do on the wing, as it were,” he thought, drearily; and his first clever sketch was penneden routeto a distant western city, Camille being left behind until such time as her well-paid detective should hunt him down.
This time his escape and his disguise were so cleverly planned that his fair foe was baffled several years. In the meantime, a publisher was found in the editor of a first-class magazine. The public was pleased with the firstling of his eager pen. He achieved success and a flattering offer—all under anom de plume. At last he had found his vocation.
The unhappy mother, parted now for three long years from her exiled son, heard with delight the news of her idol’s success. She had broken with Camille long ago. Indeed, the heartless woman had coolly dropped her when there was no more comfort to be had out of her. So Norman wrote:
“Mother you must forgive me for deserting you so long. Indeed, there was no other way. I shall try now to make a little home where you can come to me and we can be peaceful, if not happy, after our old fashion. You and I have both had so bitter a lesson that I do not believe you will ever betray me again to Camille.”
“Mother you must forgive me for deserting you so long. Indeed, there was no other way. I shall try now to make a little home where you can come to me and we can be peaceful, if not happy, after our old fashion. You and I have both had so bitter a lesson that I do not believe you will ever betray me again to Camille.”
Mrs. de Vere was quite sure of that. However much she might pity Camille and feel sorry for her, she resolved that she would not interfere again between the unhappy pair. Within a short time she journeyed West to a simple little home where her son was essaying his first ambitious work—a serial for the magazine which had published his sketches for a year past.
Meanwhile, Camille’s detective had been thrown off the track by a clever little ruse of Norman, and he reported to his employer that her husband had sailed for Europe. Thither went Camille and her maid by the next steamer. She remained several years, and strangely enough on her return to America the man she sought had only very recently gone abroad with his mother. Fate seemed to be playing at cross-purposes with the imperious beauty. For five years she had not looked on the face of the man she now loved and hated almost equally in her resentful wrath, for Norman did not return for two years, and eleven years had now passed since the dark days of her terrible sin, when sentence of doom had been passed upon her by her outraged husband.
“Eleven years! My God! only to think of it, Finette! Kept at bay, scorned, despised for eleven years by the man I once had at my feet! And I am an old woman now. Old in spite of the fire that burns in my veins—old in spite of this passionate heart!”
“Non, non, miladi—you look as young as you did ten years ago. Dat artiste in Paree she is one clever mistress of her art. Your skin is smooth and fine as a baby’s; the gray is gone out of your hair—”
“And it is as red as ever!” her mistress interrupted, impatiently. “Don’t try to flatter me, Finette. I am not vain, whatever other faults I may possess. I know my hair is red, my mouth too wide, my skin too pale. I know, too, that I always had some fascinations for men, despite my lack of beauty. But what matter! I am despised by the only man I wish to charm. As for you, Finette, you are a wicked fraud! You promised I should have him back. You lied. It is eleven years, and I am no nearer him than when he cast me off,” she raved, passionately.
Finette raised sullen, defiant eyes to the angry face.
“It is your own fault that I deceived you. You did not tell me all—you kept back things far worse than you confessed, else he could not have held out against all your devotion and—persecution,” she said, boldly.
“How dare you!” her mistress cried; but she quailed as with terror. “I told you everything,” she said, after a minute, defiantly.
“I do not believe you,” Finette muttered, sulkily; and for some minutes the war of words raged fiercely between them, for in their long years together their respective positions were often forgotten or ignored.
The day came when to her joy Camille found out her husband’shiding-place. It was in New York where he had settled again with his mother on their return from abroad. She knew that he must be prospering, because only a few weeks ago her lawyer had made to her the last payment due to her on the improvements at Verelands.
“Why, it was ten thousand dollars! He must be rich,” Camille cried.
She and Finette consulted again, and the result was a plan more daring than any that had gone before.
There came a night when Norman de Vere awakened from a kind of nightmare dream and struggled for breath in the clasp of warm, round arms with passionate lips clinging tight to his.
At first he thought it was a dream, for once such dreams had visited his pillow, but soon he realized that it was fact. Struggling from the clasp that would have held him, but was too weak, he lighted the gas and saw with a shudder, the Nemesis of his life.
“My God, again!” he cried, hoarsely.
“My place is here. You shall not drive me from you again,” the beautiful creature cried, half pleadingly, half stormily; but she shrunk and cowered at last before his lightning glance of scorn.
“Have you no shame?” he cried. “Can you force your presence thus on a man who loathes you? Listen, then: I will bear this persecution no longer. I threatened you with divorce once, but you begged to be spared this disgrace; you preferred, you said, to go quietly away and fade out of my life. You have broken your promise. That absolves me from mine. To-morrow I shall institute proceedings for a divorce. I will obtain it, even if to gain the suit I have to betray my full knowledge of your wickedness—your foul murder of the man who held some guilty secret in your past life!”
“Hush, for Heaven’s sake! You may be overheard!” she faltered, cowering down beside the bed in her white robes, with a look of guilty terror in her burning eyes; but he gazed at her unmoved.
“What does it matter?” he said, hoarsely. “Every one must know it when the case goes to court, for I swear I will dally no longer. I will free my life from your claim, despite the bitter cost.”
“It will be a bitter contest, then, for I will fight you to the last gasp! You have earned my hate and you shall know its power!” she cried malevolently; but he stayed to hear nomore. Bowing coldly, he quitted the room, and a little later two disguised women glided stealthily down the stairway, and emerging into the street, lost themselves in the lights and windows of the great city. They were Finette and her baffled mistress.
“He has threatened me again with divorce, Finette. I can not bear it. Think of some plan to stave it off. My God! I can not live under such humiliation!” Camille breathed hoarsely, and Finette saw that she was on the verge of hysteria. She began to reassure her at once, promising that she would think of some plan by to-morrow by which to thwart Norman de Vere’s purpose.
Three days later Finette Du Val made her appearance in Norman de Vere’s study with a pale, grief-stricken countenance, and announced that her mistress had committed suicide.
“She threatened yesterday that she would do it rather than bear the shame and grief of a divorce, but I did not believe her. Poor thing, she had said it so often before I thought it was nothing but talk. But when I went to call her this morning, she lay dead, with the bottle of poison by her side,” was the plausible story she told.
Norman de Vere was shocked at the awful closing of Camille’s guilty life. He went with Finette to look at the corpse, and spent some solemn moments gazing into the cold white face of the woman he had loved so well before he found her out in her terrible sin. She was changed and altered very much from the effects of the poison, but the beautiful, wavy red hair was the same, and no suspicion came to Norman that he had been made the victim of a clever trick by the crafty maid. The corpse was buried quietly in Greenwood, but with all due attention. Norman and his mother going as chief mourners; and very soon a tasteful monument marked the last resting-place of the dead woman.
“She promised to leave me all her money, I hope you will see her lawyer for me, sir, as soon as possible,” Finette said; and Norman, touched by the grief she had displayed, went at once to the lawyer. He was told that Mrs. de Vere had withdrawn all her property from his hands. She had told him that she meant to convert everything into money, with which she would purchase unset diamonds, thinking them a safe investment.
Finette protested that she did not know where her mistress had deposited the gems for safe-keeping. She wept because she did not have money enough to carry her home to her belovedParis, and Norman handed her the requisite amount, and gave her possession of all the dead woman’s effects.
He went away then with a heavy heart, hoping he had seen the last of the French woman, whom he had always despised in secret.
Mrs. de Vere grieved very sincerely for poor Camille, as she called her in her thoughts. She thought that Norman had been unnecessarily hard with his wife, and that he must of necessity suffer the pangs of remorse over her tragic death. But she was too wise to utter such thoughts aloud. Camille’s name was never uttered between them any more after the rainy day when they stood side by side and saw the clods falling on the new-made grave in Greenwood, where the dead woman had been laid to rest. That her memory saddened them for many days after was evident by the pale, grave faces they wore so long, but to either heart had come an unowned sense of relief that the restless, unhappy creature was dead.