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 hope you found your little pet safe.”
“Yes, quite safe, thank you.”
“Then sit down again, won’t you, for I was in earnest when I told mama that I wanted you to help me select a name for my baby. I have been so ill and unhappy since she came, I could not choose her name. Won’t you suggest something?”
Italy was so glad that she did not recur to the subject of her husband’s murder that she very willingly consented to this request, and a half-hour was spent by the two new friends in suggesting and weighing the merits of respective names.
“Let it be Mabel,” Mrs. Severn said at last, and then burst into tears. “Oh, to think of Craig being dead, and never seeing and knowing baby,” she sobbed.
Mrs. Mays entered at that moment, and while she was comforting the mourner, Italy made her escape to her own room.
“What shall I do now?” she wondered; “I cannot go to Mr. Gardner as I wished, and I cannot decide whether it is best for me to send for him to come to me and confide in him or not. I will wait until to-morrow before I make up my mind.”
A servant tapped at the door and handed in the morning’s mail, a letter with a foreign postmark. Italy saw that it was in the writing of her young lover, Emmett Harlow. He had been abroad two months now, and absorbed in her recent troubles, she had scarcely thought of him for weeks, but the exquisite poem that dropped out of the envelope when she opened it proved that Emmett had by no means forgotten the fair girl who had rejected his love.
The verses closed without signature, but Italy knew the firm, bold hand too well to doubt who had sent this tender token from across the sea to hint of his unchanged devotion. She sighed as she thought of the warm, true heart whose love she could not return.
Not for one moment did Italy believe Mrs. Dunn’s accusation against Emmett. She thought the lady was mistaken, and that, after all, the whole affair had been an accident. Francis Murray had done all that he could to foster this belief in her mind.
It seemed to him impossible that this young and innocent girl could have a murderous enemy, and he was acting in blind faith when he assured Italy of this belief.
