Slighted love or, At her heart's expense
Ralph lingered for a few moments’ chat with her before he strolled off
to his studio. He was a rising young artist.
“I saw Alexie yesterday, and promised her for you that all three of us
would go to the theater this evening. Was I impertinent?” he queried
brightly.
“Not at all. I shall be very glad,” she replied smilingly; for Ralph
seemed like a brother to her, he was so genial and kind. She was going
up-stairs for her hat and jacket when she met Mrs. Mays coming down.
“Miss Vale, you have been so kind. Will you do me another favor?” she
inquired deprecatingly, and as Italy gazed at her inquiringly she added:
“Will you come in and see Isabel a few moments. She is so grateful for
your kindness last night, and wants to thank you herself.”
“It was nothing----” Italy began, but she followed Mrs. Mays along the
hall to her daughter’s room.
The invalid was lying in bed propped up in pillows, with the dimpled
little baby held to her breast with one arm. A warm shawl of
rose-colored cashmere was draped about her shoulders, and above it
shone a face of wondrous beauty, dark in the eyes and hair, arch in the
features, but ghastly pale and wasted now, with big eyes, too solemn
and somber for her age, that could not have exceeded nineteen at the
most.
Mrs. Mays led Italy to the side of the bed.
“My dear, I’ve brought her, the sweet girl that took care of baby last
night, so that you could thank her for her goodness to us. Miss Vale,
my daughter, Mrs. Severn.”
Italy bowed, muttered some almost inaudible words, then sank helplessly
into a chair by the bedside, her brain whirling.
Severn! Severn! That name had struck her like a blow! She recalled what
she had read in the papers about the beautiful young wife of Craig
Severn who was nearly crazed by his tragic end! Could this be Craig
Severn’s widow?
“Miss Vale, are you ill? You have grown very pale,” cried Mrs. Mays.
“No, no, it is nothing serious--just a dizziness! I am all right now,”
gasped Italy, lifting her head quickly, then she looked at Mrs. Severn.
“I am glad that you are better. I hope you will soon be well,” she said.
“I don’t want to get well--I want to die!” was the answer, in a voice
of passionate despair.
“Isabel!” cried her mother remonstratingly, but the unhappy creature
looked at Italy, exclaiming:
“You don’t blame me, do you? Oh, Miss Vale, you know my sad story,
of course. I had the dearest husband in the world, and he was
murdered--foully murdered--before we had been married a year. What is
there left for me to live for now?”
“The baby,” Italy said falteringly.
“Yes, yes, my little treasure!” cried the poor young mother, pressing
the infant to her breast. Then her dark eyes gleamed. “Yes, I must
live, live to hunt down Craig’s murderer and bring him to justice!”
Italy’s eyes had been wandering helplessly around the room. Suddenly
they stopped at a portrait on an easel. Her frame seemed to grow rigid.
“It is the face of that monster--and I have lived two months under the
same roof with his widow--the woman he was false to--yet who mourns him
so truly,” she thought shudderingly.
Again Mrs. Mays interposed anxiously:
“Isabel, dear, do not talk so wildly! You frighten Miss Vale with your
talk of bringing murderers to justice.”
“Mama, go away and leave us, please, I want to ask Miss Vale to help
me name baby. You know she has never had a name yet,” the sick girl
answered more calmly, and with a wan smile.
Mrs. Mays, mindful of pressing household duties, retired, and then Mrs.
Severn resumed eagerly:
“Mama does not care anything about poor Craig because she hates him and
believed slanders about him; but they were not true, Miss Vale, indeed
they were not true. He loved me devotedly, and I worshiped him. Yes,
and I have sworn to bring the murderer to justice.”
A faint film seemed to pass before Italy’s eyes. The room seemed to
fade, and in its place gleamed a window-pane shattered by a bullet.
Behind it shone the white face and lifted, writhing hands of the
murderess! She was back in fancy with that fatal night, struggling with
the villain who had lured her to that house where he met his sudden
death.
“Miss Vale,” began Mrs. Severn, and Italy came back to the present with
a dreadful start, and looked into the big, solemn black eyes opposite.
Their owner was saying:
“I have the greatest faith that I shall succeed, for already I have one
important clue. You see, my husband was never seen alive after he left
Mr. Gardner’s law-office on the evening of the eighteenth of August.
But there was a woman mixed up in the mystery, somehow. Mr. Gardner’s
office-boy has told me that a beautiful young girl went into the office
just before closing-time, and that my husband took her away afterward
in a cab. The boy says that he would know the girl’s beautiful face
again anywhere. He is watching for that face and will let me know when
he sees it again.”
CHAPTER XIII.
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