Despite his stay of but a few hours in New York and his hasty journey
there and back, it was almost a week between the going and coming of
Norman de Vere, and his heart was full of anxiety as he dismissed the
hack he had hired at the station and walked up the broad steps of
his home just as the soft shadows of twilight were settling over the
beautiful Southland where his lot was cast.
“On breezy pinion mournful eve came singing
Over the silent hills, and to the glades
And violet beds a stream of odors bringing,
And waking music in the forest shades.
* * * * *
“A lovely length of moonlit waters lightly
Broke into sudden brightness on the strand,
While through the sky’s soft fleecy fretwork brightly
The stars looked out upon the stilly land.”
Although he had been tormented all the way by a foreboding of
indefinable evil, a moment of calm, of almost relief came to him as
he paused on the long piazza and ran his hurried gaze over the front
of the house. He saw that lights glimmered through all the windows as
usual, and it somehow reassured his mind.
“There can be nothing wrong. It was only my foolish fancy,” he
muttered; and opened the door with his night-key, anxious to surprise
his darling. “She will not be expecting me until to-morrow,” he
murmured, and thrilled at the thought of clasping her in another moment
to his wildly throbbing heart. “Oh, my love, my darling, how happy she
will be! how she will spring to my arms and clasp her warm white arms
about my neck!” he thought, with the rapture of a lover, as he mounted
the steps, and meeting no one, sought the nursery. She would be there
at this moment before she went to dress for dinner--there in some
pretty, charming _déshabille_--with their child whom she worshiped with
such fond maternal love.
With an eager smile upon his proud, handsome lips, Norman de Vere
turned the door-knob and entered the room.
Then he started back in surprise.
Blank silence and darkness greeted him, and a deadly chill struck to
his heart.
“Oh, Heaven! not dead--my little Alan dead!” he groaned, in sudden
anguish; but it lasted only a moment, for another thought came to him.
“Sweetheart, dear baby that she is, has converted her own room into a
nursery in my absence, that she may have her little idol always with
her. I shall find them there.”
And turning from the dreary darkened room, he went along the hall with
rapid steps to the suite of rooms that had once been occupied by the
beautiful Camille, and later on had been refitted and refurnished for
Sweetheart when she became his happy bride.
In the subdued light that filtered softly through frosted gas-globes
in the hall, he paused, and bending down, listened at her door for the
sound of voices.
A low, smothered murmur greeted his ears, and he could no longer
restrain his impatience. He opened the door, and stepped quickly over
the threshold.
And to the day of his death he always wondered why the sight that met
his eyes did not strike him dead as swiftly as if it had been a bolt of
the most terrible lightning.
There in Sweetheart’s sacred boudoir, from among the dainty furnishings
of blue and gold framed to shrine her fair and youthful beauty,
there glared upon him two darker faces, both distorted by fiendish
triumph--the face of Camille, beautiful still in an artificial way,
breathing, living, and behind her Finette--the artful maid.