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 is all,”
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 little
foundling’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 was _désolé_.
“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 hour that 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 I am 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 the whole 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.