Sadly and wearily enough Lady Vera goes to her room and her couch that
night. Having disrobed and retired, she dismisses her maid to the
dressing-room to complete the packing for to-morrow's flitting. Then,
closing her heavy eyelids, she endeavors to woo sleep to her weary
pillow.
Strange, shuddering sighs heave the fair breast as she lies there in
the dim, half-light of the lowered lamp, with her fair arms tossed
above her golden head, and the dark lashes drooping against the pale
and lovely cheeks.
Sir Harry Clive's conversation has revived in her sensitive,
imaginative mind all her horror of that strange, living entombment
through which she has passed years ago, all unknown to herself by
reason of her father's tender, shielding love.
"I have lain in the bosom of the dark earth, the coffin-lid has been
fastened down upon my living breast, the cold, black clods have been
heaped upon me; I have been buried alive. Oh, horrible!" she murmurs,
aloud, and to her excited fancy it seems as if the echo of a low,
diabolical laugh floats through the room.
She starts up on her elbow with a low and frightened cry.
"Elsie, did you speak? did you laugh?" she calls out to her maid in the
dressing-room; but Elsie, absorbed in the prosaic business of packing,
does not hear her voice, and in a moment the countess falls back upon
her pillow, chiding herself for nervousness.
"It was a foolish fancy, merely," she tells herself. "I must not let my
nervous thoughts run on like this through my terror of that mysterious
burial. I will compose myself to sleep. The hour is getting late.
Perhaps Elsie has finished her work and gone."
Once more she vainly tries to lose herself in sleep, but her heart
beats in her ears, her temples throb, some strange, alien, agitating
influence controls her mind, banishing rest and repose.
She puts her hands over her ears, in mortal dread of hearing that low,
eerie, unearthly cackle of malicious mirth again, and shuts her eyes as
if in dread of seeing some strange, unwelcome vision start out from the
shadowy hangings of the darkened room.
"Surely I am going mad under the weight of my troubles," she says to
herself, half-fearfully. "This sleeplessness, these weird, unearthly
fancies must be the premonitions of reason tottering on its throne."
The minutes pass. Gradually Lady Vera becomes conscious of a delicate,
subtle odor floating lightly through the room. She does not recognize
it as a perfume. It is simply an odor, faintly sickening, yet strangely
soothing to her excited senses. Her eyelids fall more heavily. She
seems to sleep.
Sleeping, a hideous vision comes to Lady Vera. A dark-robed, creeping
figure seems to start from the black shadows at the furthest corner of
the room and float across the floor to her bedside.
It is the form of a tall woman, with a hooded head and masked face,
but through the small holes of the mask two murderous black eyes glare
hatred upon her, the malevolent eyes of Marcia Cleveland.
Vera tries to start, to cry out, but she is motionless, dumb, bound
hand and foot by the spell of that subtle, sickening drug diffused
through the room, and which grows stronger as Marcia Cleveland's snowy
handkerchief flutters lightly in her hand.
All this Lady Vera notes in her strange dream, with feelings of
unutterable horror and despair. She tries to awake, to open her dazed
eyes fully, to utter some sound from her poor, parched lips, but they
refuse to obey her will.
And still those murderous black eyes glare with devilish hatred upon
her through the narrow slits in the mask.
Surely that evil glare is baleful enough to kill her of itself, Vera
thinks despairingly, but even at that instant the woman's hand is
drawn backward and upward, and in her murderous grasp glitters the
flashing blade of a dagger poised above the bare, uncovered breast of
the helpless victim, and this time with a last, vain, frenzied effort
to call on God for protection, Vera loses sight and consciousness, and
lies helpless at the mercy of her deadly foe.
The flashing steel glitters sharply in the air, nearer and nearer it
descends over the victim, in another moment it will be sheathed in her
heart, when a sudden cry rings through the room, swift footsteps cross
the floor, strong arms seize the body of the murderess from behind and
wrench her away from her helpless prey.
The gleaming dagger falls clanking to the floor. A man's voice,
passionate, vibrant, intense, cleaves the shuddering air of the night.
"Devil! murderess! If you had slain my darling, that blade should have
been sheathed in your own heart a moment later!"
It is the voice of Colonel Lockhart. Elsie, the maid, comes close
behind him, and together they bind the would-be murderess with strong
cords that prevent her attempted escape.