NAMING THE BABY.
Italy Vale sat looking at the beautiful, excited young widow with a
white face of utter consternation. The words that she had spoken seemed
to burn themselves in on her brain in letters of fire.
“The boy says that he would know that beautiful face anywhere, and he
is watching for it, and will let me know if he sees it again.”
It seemed to Italy as if she were walking over a powder-mine that might
at any moment explode beneath her feet. Yet she knew that she was not
guilty of Craig Severn’s death.
She knew who was, for the wild white face was indelibly printed on her
memory, and often, when she had seen it--proud, gay, smiling--she had
wondered how Mrs. Dunn could smile with that terrible deed upon her
soul.
And yet she did not wish to betray the guilty woman, for, no matter
how she had come to be peeping in through the window, Italy believed
that the fatal shot had been fired to protect herself from a villain’s
power, and she had kept silent from blended feelings of gratitude and
honor.
Yet she had often wondered at the apparent unconsciousness of Mrs.
Dunn upon the subject, wondered the more because she knew herself to
be an object of dislike to her, and therefore thought it strange that
she had cared enough to protect her from the stranger’s insults by the
perpetration of a crime.
But the real facts were quite different from what Italy imagined, and
Mrs. Dunn was ignorant both of the name of the man she had slain and of
the girl whose honor she had defended.
She was a woman of strong passions and the fiercest jealousy, and
while vainly awaiting the coming of her laggard lover at Winthrop, had
conceived the idea that he was entertaining guests at his suburban home
a few miles from Boston. Curiosity and resentment had led her upon a
secret mission of discovery to the house, and at the moment when Craig
Severn had stooped to embrace the struggling Italy, Mrs. Dunn had just
arrived and become a witness of the scene.
Severn’s back was toward her, and in the dim light he looked so exactly
like Percy Seabright, that she had no doubt of his identity with her
lover. The girl she did not recognize; but, believing that she must
be both young and beautiful, she was seized with an impulse of such
murderous hate, that, pressing her pistol against the window-pane, she
fired pointblank at her rival.
What was her horror when she saw the man fall dead in a pool of his
spouting life-blood, and the girl she hated with such murderous fury
standing erect, terrified, but entirely unharmed?
With a wild cry of horror and despair, she threw up her white hands,
from which the instrument of death had fallen unheeded, and a minute
later fled from the scene as though pursued by avenging furies,
believing that she had slain her lover.
Accordingly, when Percy Seabright came to Winthrop the next day, she
fell fainting at his feet, believing for an instant that his wraith had
appeared to haunt her for her sin. But later on the truth came home to
her. She had made a mistake. It was not her lover she had killed, but
another man, an entire stranger. She wondered whom it could be; but she
kept her own counsel, and though she read in the papers of the finding
of Craig Severn’s murdered body in the river, she did not by any means
associate the fact with her own sin.
In an impulse of mad, unreasoning jealousy she had committed a terrible
deed, but the name of her victim and of the girl from whom she saved
him remained a sealed mystery to her--but a mystery that haunted her,
for often in her dreams she lived over those dreadful moments and
the night of horror in which she believed that she had killed Percy
Seabright, and she would awaken with her face bathed in a cold dew of
anguish. But all the time she believed that her dread secret was known
to God alone--to God and her own self.
Little did she dream that her life lay in the slender white hands of
the girl she hated, but who, knowing herself thus hated and persecuted,
was too generous to betray her foe.
So Italy, knowing all the fatal truth, was suddenly confronted with
the startling fact that a Nemesis was on the track of Craig Severn’s
slayer--a Nemesis in the shape of the beautiful young widow, who held
it as a holy mission to bring the criminal to justice and avenge his
death. She was startled, unnerved, utterly confounded by the suddenness
of the knowledge.
She felt that if she stayed there another moment with Craig Severn’s
portrait staring at her from the easel, and his broken-hearted widow
whispering to her of the clue she had found, she would have to scream
out aloud in her distress. She rose up abruptly, her lovely young face
as white as it would ever be in its coffin.
“I--I must go. Pray excuse me, madam,” she faltered, and hurried to her
own room as fast as her trembling limbs would permit.
Then she fell upon the bed and lay for some time unconscious. She came
back to herself presently with a long, shuddering sigh, and remembered
everything.
“I was going to Mr. Gardner’s office, but--I must not now, for that
terrible boy would see me and know me,” she thought, and she suddenly
realized that it was almost providential--that interview with Mrs.
Severn.
“For if she had not sent for me I should have gone on to the
law-office, and blundered straight upon that terrible boy that is
watching for my face,” she thought.
It seemed to Italy as if the tables had been turned with a vengeance.
Hitherto she had been trying to hunt down a murderer and bring him to
justice. Now she was being hunted down herself. The sensation was not
agreeable. At the end of her cogitations she decided:
“Self-preservation is the first law of nature. If the worst comes to
the worst, and I am accused of Craig Severn’s murder, I shall have to
denounce Mrs. Dunn for her crime.”
Then she began to wonder what Mrs. Severn would think of her wild exit
from the room.
“Perhaps she will suspect me of being the very girl she is after. I
must go and make some excuse,” she thought.
She bit her lips and rubbed her face to bring back some of the vanished
color, then she stopped a minute to pet her canary that was chirping
forlornly in his gilded cage.
“Darling little Frankie, I will lay it all on you,” she cooed sweetly.
She closed the door, and hastened back to the invalid’s room. The young
widow lay back among the pillows, her eyes closed and the dew of tears
glittering on the dark fringe of her lashes.
“Dear Mrs. Severn,” cried Italy, and the invalid looked at her with a
wan smile, “I have come back to apologize for my ridiculous haste in
leaving. I have a canary, you know, I was not certain that I had closed
my door tightly, and I feared the cat might get him.”
“Ah, I thought you had a frightened look!” cried Mrs. Severn. “But I
hope you found your little pet safe.”
“Yes, quite safe, thank you.”
“Then sit down again, won’t you, for I was in earnest when I told mama
that I wanted you to help me select a name for my baby. I have been so
ill and unhappy since she came, I could not choose her name. Won’t you
suggest something?”
Italy was so glad that she did not recur to the subject of her
husband’s murder that she very willingly consented to this request, and
a half-hour was spent by the two new friends in suggesting and weighing
the merits of respective names.
“Let it be Mabel,” Mrs. Severn said at last, and then burst into tears.
“Oh, to think of Craig being dead, and never seeing and knowing baby,”
she sobbed.
Mrs. Mays entered at that moment, and while she was comforting the
mourner, Italy made her escape to her own room.
“What shall I do now?” she wondered; “I cannot go to Mr. Gardner as I
wished, and I cannot decide whether it is best for me to send for him
to come to me and confide in him or not. I will wait until to-morrow
before I make up my mind.”
A servant tapped at the door and handed in the morning’s mail, a letter
with a foreign postmark. Italy saw that it was in the writing of her
young lover, Emmett Harlow. He had been abroad two months now, and
absorbed in her recent troubles, she had scarcely thought of him for
weeks, but the exquisite poem that dropped out of the envelope when she
opened it proved that Emmett had by no means forgotten the fair girl
who had rejected his love.
The verses closed without signature, but Italy knew the firm, bold hand
too well to doubt who had sent this tender token from across the sea to
hint of his unchanged devotion. She sighed as she thought of the warm,
true heart whose love she could not return.
Not for one moment did Italy believe Mrs. Dunn’s accusation against
Emmett. She thought the lady was mistaken, and that, after all, the
whole affair had been an accident. Francis Murray had done all that he
could to foster this belief in her mind.
It seemed to him impossible that this young and innocent girl could
have a murderous enemy, and he was acting in blind faith when he
assured Italy of this belief.