Countess Vera; or, The Oath of Vengeance
She glares at him with fiery eyes from which the momentary fear has fled, leaving them filled with the mocking light of a wicked triumph.
"You should have known my motive, Lawrence Campbell," she bursts out, passionately. "When I first met you in society, the plain, untitled English gentleman, I was a young, beautiful, wealthy widow, and by your attentions and visits you led me to believe that you loved me.
"Then Edith came home from her boarding-school, and with her baby-face and silly school-girl shyness won you from me. You married her, and the very torments of the lost were mine, for I loved with a passion of which she, poor, weak-natured creature, could never dream. Did you think I could tamely bear the slight that was put upon me? No, no, I swore revenge—a deep and deadly revenge, and I have had it; ha, ha! a costly cup, full to the brim and running over!"
She pauses with a wild and maniacal laugh. The man stares at her with starting eyes and a death-white face. The enormity of the wrong that has been done him seems to strike him dumb.
"I have had a glorious revenge," she goes on, wildly, seeing that he cannot speak; "you fell an easy prey to my plan of vengeance through your foolish and ridiculous jealousy. Through the efficient help of a poor, weak fool who loved me I made you believe Edith false and vile, and taunted you into deserting her! Have you suffered? Ah, God, so did I! I was on fire with jealousy and hate. Every pang I made you and Edith suffer was like balm to my heart. I parted you, I came between your wedded hearts, and made your life and hers a hell! Aye, and your child's, too—ha, ha, I made her weep for the hour in which she was born!"
She tosses her white arms wildly in the air, and laughs low and wickedly with the glare of malice and revenge in her flashing, black eyes. She is transformed from the handsome, clever woman of the world into a mocking devil. Even Ivy, who knows her mother's heartlessness as none other know, stares with distended eyes at the infuriated woman. She involuntarily recalls a verse she has somewhere read:
"Earth has no spell like love to hatred turned,And hell no fury like a woman scorned.""My child," the man breaks out, with a yearning heart-hunger in his melancholy eyes. "She lives then—my child, and Edith's! Oh, God, will she ever forgive me the wrong I have done her mother? Speak, woman—devil, rather—and tell me where to find my Edith and her little one!"
"Little one!" mocks Mrs. Cleveland, scornfully. "Do you forget, Lawrence Campbell, that seventeen years have come and gone since you deserted Edith and her unborn child?"
"No, I am not likely to forget," he answers, with the bitterness of remorse in his low voice. "The child must be a woman now. But I will atone to Edith and her child for all I have made them suffer through your sin. I am rich, now, and I have fallen heir to a title in my native land. Edith will be a countess, our child a wealthy heiress. And I will make them happy yet. My heart is young, although my hair is gray. I love my wife yet, with all the fire of youth. Tell me where to find them, Marcia Cleveland, and for that one act of grace, I will forgive you all the black and sinful past."
He pauses, with his hollow, burning eyes fixed eerily upon her, waiting her reply. The autumn winds wail sharply round the house, the chilly rain taps at the window pane with ghostly fingers, as if to hint of those two graves lying side by side under the cold and starless sky of night.
"Tell me," she says, putting aside his questions scornfully. "How did you learn that I had deceived you?"
"From the dying lips of your tool—Egbert Harding. He was in London—dying of the excesses brought on by a fast and wicked life. At the last he repented of his sins, afraid to face the God whom his wicked life had outraged. He sent for me and confessed all—how he had lent himself to your diabolical plan to dupe and deceive me. He swore to me that my beautiful Edith was as innocent as an angel. I left him, poor, frightened, despairing wretch, at his last gasp, and came across the seas to seek for you and my wronged wife. Tell me, Marcia, for I can wait no longer; my heart is half-broken with grief and suspense. Where shall I find my wife and child?"
"In their graves!" she answers, with the hollow and exultant laugh of a fiend.
Lawrence Campbell reels backward as if some invisible hand had smitten him across the face. He throws up his thin, white, quivering hands in the air, as though in the agonies of death. But in a moment he rallies himself and looks at the tormenting fiend with lurid, blazing eyes.
"You lie!" he exclaims, hoarsely. "You are false to the core of your heart, Marcia. I will not believe you. God, who knows how much I have suffered, would not afflict me so cruelly. I ask you again—where are they?"
"And I tell you they are dead!" she answers, hoarsely. "If you will not believe me, go to Glenwood. You know our family burial-plot. There you will find two new-made graves. Ask the sexton whose they are, and he will tell you Mrs. Campbell's and her daughter Vera's. Your wife died three nights ago—died of a broken heart, while I, her sister who hated her, was dancing at a ball! Your daughter, Vera, died the night before last by her own hand—died the death of the suicide! Ha, ha!" she laughed, sneeringly, "have I not had a glorious revenge for my slighted love?"
"I will not believe you—I cannot. It is too terrible," Lawrence Campbell moans, with his hands pressed to his head, and a dazed look in his great, black eyes.
"You may, for it is true," exclaims Ivy, coming forward into the light, with a wicked triumph in her pale-blue eyes. "If you will not believe my mother, go to the graveyard and see, as she bade you."
He lifts his eyes and stares at her a moment, a white, dizzy horror on his face. The next moment he reels forward blindly, like some slaughtered thing, and falls in a white and senseless heap upon the floor.
"You have killed him, too, mamma," Ivy exclaims, exultantly.
The heartless woman, turning around, spurns the fallen body with her foot.
"A fit ending to the tragedy," she utters, cruelly. "Ring the bell for a servant, Ivy."
In a moment a white-aproned menial appears in the room. Mrs. Cleveland looks at him frowningly.
"John, who admitted this drunken fellow into the house?" she inquires, sharply.
"I did, madam. He said he was an old friend of yours," the man answers respectfully. "Is anything wrong about it, madam? He seems," bending over him, "to be dead."
"Dead drunk," the woman utters, scornfully. "Drag him out of the house, John, and throw him into the street."
The man stares in consternation.
"It's pouring down rain, ma'am," he exclaims, deprecatingly, "and pitchy dark. Hadn't I best call the police?"
"Do as I bid you," Mrs. Cleveland storms. "Throw him into the street, and leave him there. And mind how you admit such characters into the house again, or you may lose your place!"
She stands still with lowering brows, watching the man as he executes her orders, dragging the heavy, unconscious form from the room, and along the hall to the door.
When the lumbering sound has ceased, and the heavy clang of the outer door grates sharply on the silence, she draws a deep breath of relief.
"Now I know why you always hated Vera and her mother so much," Ivy exclaims. "Why did you never tell me, mamma?"
"It was no business of yours," Mrs. Cleveland answers, sharply.
"Oh, indeed, we are very lofty!" Ivy comments, impudently.
Mrs. Cleveland makes her no answer. She has sunk into the depths of a velvet-cushioned chair, and with lowered eyelids and protruding lips seems to be grimly brooding. Her form seems to have collapsed and grown smaller, her face is ashy white.
"You are a smarter and wickeder woman than I gave you credit for," Ivy resumes, curiously. "So, then, the tale you told Leslie Noble about Vera's dissipated father was altogether false."
"Yes," her mother mutters, mechanically.
But presently she starts up like one in a panic.
"Ivy, we must go away from here," she exclaims, in a strange and hurried voice. "I am afraid to stay."
"Afraid of what?" Ivy queries, impatiently.
"Of Lawrence Campbell's vengeance," the woman answers, fearfully. "It is a fearful wrong I have done him, and he will strike me back. We must fly—fly from his wrath!"
CHAPTER VIII
The unconscious man who has been so heartlessly thrust forth in the bleak, inclement night, lies still upon the wet and flinty pavement, his ghastly face upturned to the uncertain flicker of the street lamps, his eyes closed, his lips half parted as if he were, indeed, dead. No one is passing, no one notes that the form of an apparently dead man has been hustled out of the inhospitable gates of the stately Cleveland Mansion. None care to be abroad this wet and windy night. The chilly rain beats down into the still, white face, and at last revives him. He drags himself wearily up to his feet, and clinging to the iron spokes of the ornamental lawn fence, stares up at the dark, gloomy-looking building which now, with closed and darkened windows, appears dreary as a tomb. He shudders, and his eyes flash luridly in the darkness.
"May the curse of God light upon her," he murmurs, distractedly. "She robbed me of everything, and laid my life bare and desolate. My heart is a bare and empty ruin where the loathsome bats and shrieking night birds of remorse flap their ebon wings in the haunted darkness. Edith, Vera, my wronged, my murdered darlings—would God that you might have lived to forgive me for the madness that ruined your lives, and broke your tender hearts!"
No answer comes to his wild appeal from the wide and limitless spaces of the black night. Those two whom he adjures so despairingly, lie still "under the sod and the dew," deaf to his yearning calls, though he cry out ever so loudly to them, from his sore and tortured heart.
And at last, tormented with doubts, and longing to know the truth, for he cannot trust the oath of the false Marcia Cleveland, he flings himself into a passing car that goes toward the cemetery, fired with the wild resolve that he would never believe her wicked assertion until he can prove its truth—not until looking into the coffin, and calling on her loved name, he shall know that his wife is surely dead, because she is dumb to the wild and yearning cry of his heart.
A wild resolve—worthy of a madman. But Lawrence Campbell is scarcely sane to-night. Remorse and despair have driven him wild.
Gold—potent gold—what will it not buy? It opens the gates of the cemetery to the wronged, half-maddened husband and father, it throws off the heavy clods that lie between him and the face he yearns for. Quick and fast fall the rapid strokes of the spade, the dull thud of the fresh earth thrown out on the soft grass is continuous.
At last the sexton, pausing to take breath and wipe the beaded dews from his hot brow, utters a smothered cry of dismay:
"What was I thinking of to blunder so? I have made a great mistake, sir. This is the daughter's grave, not the mother's."
"No matter—go on with your work. Let me see the face of the child that I never beheld in life," Lawrence Campbell answers, resolutely.
Seeing how useless would be remonstrance the sexton bends to his task again. In a few minutes the earth is all out, but it requires the united strength of both men to raise the casket and lay it upon the upper ground.
"Now the lid—have it off quickly," groans the wretched man; "and the lantern. Bring it near that I may look on my dead."
Eagerly he kneels on the ground and scans the beautiful white features of the dead. A groan burst from his lips:
"It is she, my wife, my lost Edith, still young and beautiful as when I wooed her to be my own! Ah, even time and death could not efface that surpassing loveliness!"
But the sexton answers, compassionately:
"Ah, sir, it is not your wife, but your daughter. Your wife had grown older and sadder. Her bonny locks were mixed with gray; I used to see her here on many a Sabbath when she came to weep by her parents' graves. This, sir, is your daughter, with her mother's face."
"My daughter, with her mother's face!" he cries, and stoops to press a long-lingering kiss on the white brow beneath the careless rings of sunny hair. He starts back with a loud cry: "My God!"
The sexton trembles with apprehension.
"My dear sir, let me beg you to be more prudent," he whispers. "What if we should be discovered?"
But Lawrence Campbell's face is transfigured with a trembling hope and joy.
"I believe that I am sane," he exclaims, "I do not believe that I am dreaming. Yet when I kissed Vera's brow it felt warm and moist like the flesh of the living. Tell me, am I right?"
The sexton wipes his grimy hand to press it on the fair, girlish brow. He bends his ear to the delicate lips that still retain the warm, natural coloring of life. A smothered cry breaks from him.
"You are right, Mr. Campbell. Her flesh is warm and moist, her color is life-like and natural, and she breathes faintly. Oh, wonderful—most wonderful! She seems to be in a deep trance-like sleep. How terrible—how terrible to think of! Your daughter has been buried alive."
"She lives!" the father echoes, in wild thankfulness.
"She lives and we must carry her to my cottage as soon as possible. She must not awaken in this dreadful place. It would frighten her into real death," answers the sexton.
They lift the slight form out of its grim receptacle and bear her to the sexton's secluded cot where he lives alone, his wife having died a few months previous. They lay her down on his clean bed in the warm, cozy room; and still her strange, deep slumber is unbroken.
"I will watch beside her," says Mr. Campbell. "You must go back, restore the empty coffin to the grave, and throw in the earth again."
"You do not wish that this discovery shall ever be known, then?" the sexton asks, gravely.
"No—at least not now," Mr. Campbell answers, after a pause of silent thought.
A moment later he adds, wistfully:
"My wife's grave—you will open that too? Who knows but that she, too, may be only sleeping?"
"It is scarce probable, sir, but I will do it to satisfy you," the sexton answers, moving away.
The dawn of a new day is breaking when he returns, having just finished his weary task. Lawrence Campbell starts up from his weary vigil by his daughter's silent form.
"You promised to come for me, and I waited and waited!" he cries, reproachfully. "You did not do as I bade you."
The old sexton's face is ashen gray as if with the memory of some recent horror.
"Oh, sir, I swear to you, I kept my word," he cries, "but—but—oh, Mr. Campbell, I spared you in mercy that dreadful sight! You would not have known her, you could not have borne to see how death had effaced her beauty. You must remember her as she was—not as she is."
Lawrence Campbell's despairing moan is echoed by a low and fainter one.
Vera's dark eyes open slowly, her lips part in faint, shivering sighs.
"Quick—the wine!" exclaims the sexton. "Pour a few drops between her lips."
Lawrence Campbell obeys gladly, and Vera's lips part thirstily to receive the potent medicine. She lifts her white hand to her brow as if to clear away the shadows that cloud her brain.
"I have been asleep, and my dreams were strange and wild," she murmurs. "I thought I had found my father. You, sir, look at me lovingly and kindly. Can it be–"
"That I am your father—yes, my precious Vera," he answers, pressing a father's holy kiss on the sweet, wistful lips.
Her dark, dreamy eyes look searchingly up into the handsome, noble face.
"Ah, I am so glad," she murmurs, "and you are good and true and noble. I cannot understand why you went away from mamma, but I can tell by your face that you are not the bad and wicked wretch that woman pretended."
"Mrs. Cleveland?" he asks, a spasm of rage and hatred distorting his pallid features.
"Perhaps it will be best not to excite the young lady by talking to her just at first," the sexton interposes, anxiously and respectfully. "She must be very weak, having taken no nourishment for so long. I will go out and prepare a little warm broth for her."
"You must lie still and rest, darling," Lawrence Campbell whispers, pouring a little more of the stimulant between her pale lips—paler now from exhaustion than they were when she lay sleeping in the coffin, and with a faint sigh of assent she closes her eyes and lies silent, while the sexton goes out on his kindly meant errand.
The moments pass, Lawrence Campbell sits still with his head bowed moodily on his hand, his thoughts strangely blended, joy for his daughter's recovery, despairing grief for his wife's loss, and unutterable hate for Marcia Cleveland all mixed inextricably together. All that he has lost by that woman's perjury rushes bitterly over him. In the stillness, broken only by the crackle of the fresh coals upon the fire, and the monotonous ticking of the clock upon the mantel, he broods over his wrongs until they assume gigantic proportions.
And Vera—so strangely rescued from the coffin and the grave—she is very silent also, but none the less is her brain active and her mind busy. One by one she is gathering up the links of memory.
Her strange marriage, her mother's death, her terrible defeat in the triumph she had anticipated over the Clevelands—all come freshly over her memory, with that crowning hour in which wounded to the heart and filled with a deadly despair, she had crept away to die because she could not endure the humiliation and shame of the knowledge she had gained.
"I remember it all now; I could not decide upon the right vial, and by chance I took the wrong one. It was the sleeping potion. How long have I been asleep, and how came I here?"
Unclosing her languid eyes, she repeats the question aloud:
"Father, how came I here?"
He starts, nervously, at the unexpected question.
"My dear, you must not ask questions," he answers. "At least—not yet."
"But just this one, father. It keeps ringing itself in my head. I am filled with wonder. I drank a vial of what I imagined contained death, and lay down on my bed to die. But I only slept, and my dreams were wild. Then I awoke in this strange room, and saw you looking at me so kindly, and I knew you in my heart for my father. My wonder is so great that I cannot rest. Suspense is worse than knowledge. Only tell me how I came to be here?"
He looks at the beautiful, eloquent lips and pleading eyes, looking so dark with the purple shadows around them, and the pale, pale face.
"I must not tell her the truth," he said to himself. "She looks too slight and frail to bear the shock of hearing it. She need not ever know that she had been buried alive, and rescued out of the blackness of the grave. The horror of it would be enough to unhinge her reason."
"The last that I remember," she continues, "I was lying on my bed at Mrs. Cleveland's, waiting for death to come. I awoke here in this strange place. How did it happen?"
"I had you conveyed here in your sleep," he answers. "My dear, I see that you have all of woman's proverbial curiosity. But there is no mystery here. The simple truth is, that I went to Mrs. Cleveland's to seek my wife and child. I found that your mother was dead, and you were locked in a strange, narcotic sleep, almost as deep as death. I had you conveyed here, and watched over you until you awakened from your long slumber. That is all, my dear little daughter. Now, can you rest satisfied?"
The dark eyes seek his, still wistfully, and with dawning tenderness.
"Father, you do not know how I love the sound of your voice," she murmurs. "It does not excite nor weary me. It is full of soothing, calming power. It falls on my thirsty, yearning heart like the dew upon flowers. I wish that you would talk to me. Nothing you can say would weary me so much as my own tumultuous thoughts."
He sighs, and smooths back the soft waves of gold that stray over the blue-veined temples.
"What shall I talk of, little one?" he inquires.
"Tell me where you have been all these long years, father, and why you never came for mamma and I when you were so unhappy?" she sighs.
Tears that do not shame his manhood crowd into his dark, sad eyes.
"Vera, you will hate me when I tell you that it was a mad, unreasoning jealousy, aroused and fostered by Marcia Cleveland, that led me to desert my innocent wife, and you, my little child, before you were born," he answers, heavily.
Vera's dark eyes flash with ominous light. She lies silent a moment, brooding over her mother's terrible wrongs.
"I have been a lonely wanderer from land to land ever since," he goes on, slowly. "God only knows what I suffered, Vera, for I could never tear the image of my wife from my breast, although I believed her false and vile. But I was too proud to go back to her. I never knew how she was breaking her heart in silent sorrow for me, her life made doubly wretched by the abuses of the false sister who hated her because I loved her. At last I was recalled from my wanderings. I had fallen heir to a title I had never dreamed of inheriting, and which only filled me with bitterness. I reflected that, but for Edith's falsity, she might have been my countess; as fair a lady as ever reigned in my ancestral halls."
"Poor mamma, leading her slavish life in Mrs. Cleveland's house," the girl murmurs, in vain regret.
"Poor martyr to the sins of others," the man echoes, heavily.
"Yet you came back at last," Vera murmurs. "Had you repented of your hasty desertion?"
"I had learned the truth, Vera, through the dying confession of Mrs. Cleveland's weak tool. I had learned how terribly I had been deceived, and that I had deserted my angel wife for naught. Vera, did she curse my memory when she lay dying of a broken heart?"
"She never named you either in praise or blame, father. I had some vague impression that you were dead. I knew no better until I overheard Mrs. Cleveland telling some one that you had deserted my mother before I was born, and that you were a low, drunken, brutal wretch, who had abused and maltreated her from the first."
"Oh, my God, my God! that such demons should walk the earth!" the man groans through his clenched teeth.
He rises and walks up and down the floor, struggling with his strong, overmastering agitation.
"Vera, we three—you and I, and our lost loved one—have been wronged as, it seems to me, never mortals were before. My heart is on fire with rage and hate for the devil who has so blasted our lives. It seems to me that I can never rest until I strike back. Vera, shall we not avenge ourselves?"
His dark, passionate eyes fill with the fire that rages in his soul. Vera looks up at him, half-fearfully.
"How, father?" she queries, slowly.
The heavy gloom deepens in his night-black eyes.
"How—I cannot tell!" he says, hoarsely. "But I will bide my time. I will wait and watch. Edith's wrongs shall not go unavenged."
The beautiful young face on the pillow softens and saddens.
"Mother was very gentle and forgiving," she murmurs. "She would have said, leave it to Heaven."
"She was an angel—I am but human," he answers. "Vera, we must work together for vengeance. The time will come when we will make Marcia Cleveland bite the dust—when she shall curse the stars that shone over her ill-fated birth."
So the wronged man raves, and Vera's passionate heart is kindled into flames by his burning eloquence. She is with him heart and soul, loyal to the core of her woman's heart.
Strange, that when she tells him the story of her short, sad life she should hold one secret back. The words die on her white lips when she tries to tell him. A passionate shame fills her heart. Oh, the bitter pain, the deep humiliation of the thought that she is Leslie Noble's wife. Leslie Noble whom she scorns and despises. Have they told her father the truth? she wonders.
No, for presently he says, tenderly:
"Do not think that all my thoughts are given up to vengeance, Vera. I shall care for you very tenderly, darling. And if you should ever marry, I pray God that your wedded happiness may not be blighted by such a terrible wrong as mine."
Her heart gives a great throb of relief. He does not know. He never shall know by her telling, she resolves.