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 money began 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.”
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 penned _en route_ to 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 a _nom 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.”
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’s
hiding-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 no more. 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 beloved Paris, 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.