Slighted love or, At her heart's expense
now bending down under the weight of the snow, was the same house to
which Craig Severn had carried her that never-to-be-forgotten night
when he was murdered--the house from which she had escaped, she knew
not how, to be found at midnight wandering the streets of Boston in her
night-robe.
With these rushing thoughts came the memory of the portrait of Percy
Seabright that she had seen on the wall.
“It is _his_ house. Why did I never suspect it before?” she wondered;
then she heard Emmett Harlow saying, in a voice of disgust:
“That old house ought to be razed to the ground. Percy Seabright has
made it a sort of club-house for a fast lot of men, and the most
reckless gambling goes on inside its walls. There are dark hints of
several suicides committed there by men stripped of everything in
reckless play.”
“Oh, I don’t think it can be as bad as that!” cried generous Alexie.
“Mr. Seabright keeps up the house all the time, though, he says, and
gives card-parties now and then to his young friends; but Aunt Ione
detests the place as much as you do, Emmett, and she says as soon as
she is back from her wedding-tour she means to have it torn down.”
“It strikes me that Mrs. Dunn is preparing to rule her husband with
a heavy hand. I hope you are not inoculated with her propensity to
rule or ruin,” Ralph cried, a little testily, and the girl laughed
good-naturedly. She was as sweet and gentle a soul as ever lived, and
would always yield to Love’s gentle guidance.
They had left the red-brick house in the distance now, and perhaps no
one thought of it again but Italy--Italy who had such cause to remember
it.
“I wish,” she said to herself, “I wish I could get into that old house
and search--for my father’s missing diary that my mother believes holds
the clue to my father’s fate. Perhaps--perhaps--Percy Seabright has it!
My mother’s revelations to-day have roused in me suspicions that can
never be dispelled until I know the truth. Oh, what shall I do, what
shall I do?”
Alexie’s voice broke in suddenly on the girl’s troubled thoughts:
“Speaking of Aunt Ione, reminds me that she has refused to chaperon our
theater-party to-night. Going with Mr. Seabright to a grand ball, you
know--and grandmama seldom goes out in public. Italy, will you come
with us--you and Mrs. Vale?”
“We can ask her when we go back. She admires Bernhardt very much.”
“So does Professor Doepkin. He has actually promised to make one of our
box-party to-night,” said Emmett, and that decided Italy to go.
She had heard so much of the big blond German she felt quite curious
over him. But when the second act of the play was over and he had not
come, she began to think she was going to be disappointed.
“He has forgotten his engagement,” said Alexie.
“No, he could not find his dress-coat,” laughed Ralph.
“It is neither, for I saw him just now down there near the orchestra
watching us. I beckoned him, and he dodged. The fact is, he is as
bashful as a school-boy, and too timid, I suppose, to join us,” said
Emmett.
A minute later he said to Italy:
“Look, I will point him out to you. You see that big man with the shock
of blond curls and whiskers, and the broad shoulders?--Ralph, you’re
right, he didn’t find his dress-coat--well, that is he. He’s looking at
us now through those glasses.”
Italy looked, and saw the German looking at her through his
opera-glasses.
A strange, unaccountable thrill shook her from head to foot.
“Oh, I feel so strangely!”--she half-shuddered and tried to laugh. “Oh,
Mr. Harlow, your German hasn’t got the evil eye, I hope.”
“No, indeed; the prettiest blue-gray eyes in the world, only so
near-sighted. Perhaps he will get ashamed of his shyness and come to us
presently.”
From that moment Italy could see no one in the vast, fashionable
throng except the broad shoulders and leonine hair and beard of the
near-sighted German.
She kept watching him, and always with a strange and subtile thrill of
blended pain and pleasure. Even when the curtain rose, and the peerless
Bernhardt came on the stage again, her glance would wander to him.
“You seem to admire my German,” whispered Emmett, and Italy blushed
vividly.
“I--oh, no--that is----” she began incoherently, then paused and said,
with lovely frankness:
“I _am_ interested in him, and I have just found out why. There is
something about him that makes me think of--Francis Murray!”
The last word came with a sort of gasp.
“His broad shoulders, yes, and he is blond, too, like Mr. Murray,”
returned Emmett. “And, do you know, I think if Doepkin would make the
most of himself, he would make as rarely a handsome man as Francis
Murray was. I say _was_; for, poor fellow, I begin to fear there can’t
be any mistake in the report of his death.”
“Oh, don’t!” she half-sobbed. “I--I can’t bear to believe him dead, for
I was with him, you know, and I feel--I feel as though I had killed
him.”
He caught a repressed note of anguish in the clear young voice, and
looked at her keenly.
A light broke in on his mind, a pang like a dagger-thrust stabbed his
heart. By the light of his own love he read her guarded secret. No
wonder he had wooed her in vain. Her heart belonged to noble, handsome
Francis Murray.
The German professor was watching them both. As he saw them gazing into
each other’s eyes he started violently:
“What! has she learned to love him, after all? Must I lose her--my
love, my love?” he thought in sudden agony; and, rising impulsively,
made his way to the box.
CHAPTER XXIV.
PROFESSOR DOEPKIN’S HEROISM.
Professor Doepkin opened the door of the box, and paused, his heart
throbbing in a fashion quite strange for a staid German devoted to
scientific researches.
Emmett Harlow looked around, and, quickly advancing, drew him forward,
presenting him to each of the ladies in turn, making Italy the last one.
And he watched, with a keen, almost breathless, anxiety, the meeting
between his German friend and his dark-eyed love. He was close enough
to see that the man caught his breath, with a stifled gasp of emotion,
before the beauty of the young girl.
She stood before him, a slender, stately creature, graceful as a young
palm-tree, her dark head lifted with a staglike motion, her eyes
beaming with a subtile fire. Her gown was of white, very soft and fine
and clinging, with white chrysanthemums for the corsage-bouquet. On
her bare throat and arms were strings of lustrous pearls clasped with
diamonds, and a Grecian fillet, of the same pure jewels, bound the
dark, curly locks to the proud young head. The pure white costume was a
trying one, but the brilliancy of her coloring, the gleaming eyes, the
coral lips, the sea-shell glow of her cheeks made an exquisite contrast.
The German’s blue-gray eyes gleamed beneath their disfiguring glasses
with keen admiration, and he bowed low before the exquisite creature,
who was murmuring, in a voice of flutelike melody:
“I have been wishing to know you ever since I first heard of you from
Mr. Harlow.”
“I thank you,” he replied huskily, and in another moment found himself
seated by her side in the chair that generous Emmett had vacated for
his benefit.
But the curtain was rising, and Bernhardt, that incarnation of genius,
was advancing across the stage. They gave her all their attention now,
or at least they pretended to do so, but this newly introduced pair
never lost for one moment the thrilling consciousness of each other’s
presence.
At the meeting of their eyes an electric shock had seemed to thrill
from heart to heart.
Italy could remember nothing like it except her first meeting with
Francis Murray, when her heart had seemed for a moment to suspend
its beating before the magnetic force of the man’s personality. She
felt her face burning and her heart beating wildly at the German’s
proximity, but the long lashes drooped to her cheeks, and she gazed
steadily at the stage.
The German stole furtive glances at her while he seemed to be observing
Madam Bernhardt’s grand conception of her part. Now and then he looked
from her rather curiously at Mrs. Vale.
The marble pallor of the exquisite blonde face, with its frame of
golden locks and its tragic, deep-blue eyes, had a sort of fascination
for him.
“It is the face of a suffering angel,” he thought. “How could any one
ever have believed her a murderess?”
He was deeply interested in all that had been told him of this woman,
and when the curtain fell on the third act he addressed some trifling
remark to her about the play, just to hear her speak.
She turned her dark-blue eyes on him and replied to him very
pleasantly, for somehow she had been favorably impressed at first sight
with Professor Doepkin.
Italy drew back a little and listened in silent pleasure to the sound
of his low and well-trained voice whose cadences thrilled her heart
with strange delight.
But suddenly he became aware that the others were listening to him with
interest, and that moment he abruptly withdrew into himself as though
overcome with shyness. Ralph and Emmett smiled at each other, and threw
themselves into the breach, and the professor was extremely quiet all
the rest of the time, but he kept his place at Italy’s side, and at the
close of the play escorted her to the carriage and handed her in, even
standing still a moment on the curbstone with a tender air to watch it
roll away.
“The old chap is coming out finely. He will not forget his dress-coat
the next time he is to join a theater-party with Miss Vale,” laughed
Ralph Allen.
But the smitten German’s romance went even farther that night.
Long after the midnight hour had struck, and the streets of Boston
were almost deserted, he paced the snowy street across the way from
Italy’s home, and gazed with yearning eyes up at the darkened windows,
wondering which curtained casement belonged to her, his peerless
goddess.
Decidedly the professor was far gone, very far gone, on that road that
every man travels once at least before he dies. All at once he seemed
to realize it himself, and hurried abruptly away.
“Ach, I was really making a fool of myself,” he grunted. “What if any
one had seen me? At my age, too!”
And he walked resolutely several blocks toward his boarding-house. All
at once he stopped short and listened to the rising wind intently.
“Am I dreaming, or am I crazed?” he muttered. “Perhaps my head is
wrong, for I fancied _she_ was calling to me, praying me to return. It
is the wind, I know, only the wind, but yet--I will go back!”
And, impatient at his own folly, he yet resolutely retraced his steps.
As he turned the corner nearest the house a man almost rushed past
him, hurrying by in a sort of frenzied haste that made Professor
Doepkin start and give him a keen look. The pedestrian dashed past
and disappeared round the corner, and the German recoiled with an
exclamation of amazement, as though in recognition.
The stranger was tall and slight, his figure muffled in a long
fur-lined overcoat. A dark derby hat was drawn low over his brows,
but the professor caught a glimpse of a pale, dark face with wild,
gleaming dark eyes and mustached lips curved in a demoniac expression
of terrible cruelty. Then he flashed past, and Doepkin hurried on,
exclaiming:
“Percy Seabright! But what an expression! It was that of a madman!”
He turned the corner toward Mrs. Vale’s house, then suddenly he saw
that the whole neighborhood was illuminated by a glare of light as
bright as noonday. In another moment he saw fiery flames and smoke
bursting out of the windows of Italy’s home, wrapping the whole house
in a winding-sheet of flame.
A loud and prolonged shriek divided the shuddering midnight air.
“Fire! Fire! Fire!”