CHAPTER XLII
In spite of his outward nonchalance and sang froid, Leslie Noble at heart was restless and impatient and consumed by a burning anxiety.
Six weeks had elapsed since he had incarcerated his beautiful prisoner in the ruined old house in the wood, and in all that time he had been afraid to venture back to see her, owing to a keen suspicion he had imbibed regarding the close espionage that was kept upon his movements by the employes of Colonel Lockhart.
The slight flesh wound Lady Vera had inflicted on his arm had entirely healed, and with it had died out his futile anger against her, giving place again to the weak love that had urged him to that desperate recourse of abducting her.
"I was rash and hasty in my last interview with her," he tells himself, "I should have remembered that love cannot be forced. I must woo her gently, with respectful looks and reverential words. I must sue for her favor humbly, as if she were a queen and I her humble slave. Many a woman has been won by flattery."
The longing came over him to woo her with rich gifts and costly jewels poured lavishly at her feet as if naught were too splendid and costly for his beautiful idol.
Alas! his splendid fortune had dwindled to a wretched competency under the various extravagances of Ivy and her mother.
"Weak fool that I was to allow Ivy to retain those magnificent jewels," he thinks, bitterly. "She ruthlessly sacrificed my fortune to obtain them, and by every right on earth they belong to Lady Vera, who is my real wife, not to the woman who usurped her place."
Fostering these thoughts and feelings ceaselessly in his breast, Leslie Noble at last conceived a dastardly design to possess himself of the jewels which he had at first decided should remain the property of his deserted and repudiated second wife.
Accordingly one morning, when he had ascertained that his mother-in-law was away from home, and not likely to return for several hours, he sent up his card to Ivy, who, after some little delay in arranging her toilet, received him in the shabby-genteel little parlor.
In the trembling hope that she might yet win back the recreant, Ivy had made herself as fair as she could without the assistance of her maid, with whose services her mother's parsimony had compelled her to dispense.
"Overdressed and daubed with paint, as usual," was Mr. Noble's disgusted, inward comment, but he allowed none of this feeling to appear upon his face. Instead, he threw a glance of deep tenderness and contrition into his soft, dark eyes, and held out his arms, exclaiming sadly:
"My injured wife! Can you ever forgive me the sorrow I have caused you?"
"Oh, Leslie, you have repented!" the lady sobs, throwing herself into the open arms.
And for a while we will draw the curtain of absence over this touching picture of sacred conjugal love and reunion, while we seek others of our friends.
On the afternoon of that same day Colonel Lockhart received a call from the chief detective.
"I have discovered," he says briefly, "that Mr. Noble has hired a conveyance to take him down into the country about twenty-five miles to-night."
"Well?" Colonel Lockhart inquires, his blue eyes blazing with excitement.
"I have hired a fast trap for myself, and intend to give secret chase to the gentleman," Mr. Sharp replies.
"That is right. I will accompany you," decides his employer, eagerly, and with a springing hope in his breast.
CHAPTER XLIII
It is late noon when Mrs. Cleveland returns to her lodgings, and finds Ivy lounging on a sofa in the shabby parlor, in a state of blissful beatitude.
"You have been out, Ivy?" she exclaims, in surprise, glancing at the elegant carriage dress of brocaded black silk and sparkling jet.
"Yes," Ivy answers complacently.
"Where?" her mother inquires, surprised, for hitherto Ivy has spent all her time in the seclusion of her chamber, bewailing her untoward fate.
"I have been—to the jeweler's," Mrs. Noble answers, with shining eyes, and enjoying her mother's amazement with all the zest of one who has taken new hold on life.
Mrs. Cleveland lifts her kidded hands in real dismay.
"You have never been selling your jewels—oh, Ivy!" she cries.
"Don't be a fool, mother!" cries the dutiful daughter. "Of course I haven't sold them. You know I would die before I would part with my diamonds!"
"Then why have you been to the jeweler's?" Mrs. Cleveland asks, sharply, and Ivy answers, with a little, cunning, triumphant laugh:
"I have left my pearls and diamonds to be reset. You know I have wanted them reset ever since we came to London. At last I have my wish, and they are to be done in truly royal style."
Mrs. Cleveland stares at the speaker, the color fading from her cheeks and lips, her eyes startled.
"And who is to pay for this last mad extravagance of yours?" she demands, in a low, angry voice.
"Leslie Noble, of course," Ivy answers, laughing in her mother's face.
"She is mad, I fear—stark, raving mad," Mrs. Cleveland exclaims, gazing apprehensively at her daughter.
"Oh, no, I am not, mamma. Leslie was with me at the jeweler's. He has been here and begged my pardon for everything. He does not believe now that Lady Fairvale is his wife. I am going to live with him again."
"Where? At Darnley House?" Mrs. Cleveland asks, almost stupefied at this unexpected news.
"No, for Darnley House is sold, and he cannot get it back. But he means to take another just as fine for me, and I am to choose all the furniture. Oh, mamma, he is so sorry for the bad way in which he treated me. He loves me still. There is nothing strange about that, is there, that you look so incredulous? I was his first love, you know. And he thinks me beautiful still. He is ready to do anything to prove his repentance."
"Did you put him to the test?" Mrs. Cleveland inquires, ironically.
"Yes, indeed! You know how often he has refused to have my jewels reset for me. So I said, 'if you really mean that, Leslie, let me have my pearls and diamonds put into a more elegant setting.'"
"Oh!" groans Mrs. Cleveland, wringing her hands.
"He was delighted at the idea," pursues Ivy, triumphantly, "and proposed that we should see about it at once. We drove down to the jeweler's, taking the pearls and diamonds with us. I selected the design for the settings at a terrible outlay, but Leslie did not murmur. He was glad to be forgiven on any terms."
"Oh!" Mrs. Cleveland groans again.
"Mother, I never saw you act so much like a simpleton!" Ivy exclaims. "Leslie is coming again to-morrow. He wants you to forgive him, too."
"Oh, Ivy, you blind, credulous, silly little fool!" exclaims Mrs. Cleveland, in a towering passion.
"What do mean?" the daughter cries, indignantly, springing to her feet.
"I mean that you will never see Leslie Noble or your jewels again. It was all a plot to rob you of them. He has taken them for Vera, whom he has abducted and hidden away in obscurity."
"He denies the charge, mamma. He believes with Mr. Gilbert that Vera has run away herself. But my jewels—oh, mamma, do you really believe he would rob me of them? Let us go down to the jeweler's and bring them back at once," exclaims Ivy, in feverish terror.
"I will go with you, but I doubt if we shall find them there. He would no doubt take them away on some clever pretext as soon as he left you. Oh, how foolish you were to trust that villain's exaggerated repentance."
"Let us go," Ivy answers, with feverish energy, tying on her bonnet, and hurrying her mother from the room.
The sequel proved Mrs. Cleveland right.
Leslie Noble had already taken away the jewels on the shallow pretext of his wife's change of mind. Poor Ivy was driven back to her lodgings, this time in real genuine hysterics.
CHAPTER XLIV
"This is no time for hysterics, Ivy," Mrs. Cleveland tells her daughter sharply. "You would do better to rally your strength and calmness, and consider what you are to do to get back your jewels."
Ivy struggles up to a sitting posture, her pale-blue eyes all drowned in tears over the loss of her diamonds—the golden calf of her vain heart's worship.
"If you have nothing to do but ridicule me, you had better leave the room," cries Ivy, flushing to angriest crimson. "I thought you were going to suggest something to help me."
"That would be hard to do," Mrs. Cleveland answers, with an irrepressible angry sneer.
Never in all her life has she been so angry with her silly, petted daughter.
Ivy bursts into petulant sobs again, bewailing her fate in having such a hard-hearted mother and wicked husband.
"I will go and see Mr. Noble, if you wish me," Mrs. Cleveland announces, after a moment's pause.
"Oh, pray do, mamma," her daughter cries out eagerly. "Perhaps you may get them back for me, if you manage him right. Leslie used to be quite under your thumb."
"That was long ago," Mrs. Cleveland answers dryly. "But I will do the best I can to remedy your dreadful mistake."
Still in her street dress, she has only to tie on her bonnet and depart on her mission.
Ivy, after hearing the door close behind her, lies down again, with a sigh of relief and a sensation of hope in her breast. She has great faith in the diplomatic powers of her mother.
After waiting in suspense an hour or two she falls asleep easily on the corner of the sofa and dreams that she is an eastern queen and that her robe of cloth of gold is all frosted with sparkling diamonds.
The gray dusk is falling when Mrs. Cleveland re-enters the room. She stands for some moments looking down at Ivy's wan, sleeping face, with the trace of tears still on the pale, thin cheeks, then wakes her with an impatient shake.
"I should have thought that your suspense would be too great to allow you to sleep so profoundly," she exclaims wrathfully, her ill-temper hightened by non-success in her errand.
"Oh, mamma, I felt so relieved when you went after Leslie, and so sure that you would get the diamonds, that I fell asleep without knowing it," Ivy answers, with some contrition. "But, mamma, you saw him—he gave them back, did he not?" she continued, eagerly, stretching out her hand for her treasures.
For answer, Mrs. Cleveland holds up her empty hands expressively, and Ivy utters a wail of woe.
"What did he say to you?" Ivy inquires, after a little, pausing in her angry sobs.
"I did not see him. He had gone out, and his servant could not tell me where," her mother answers.
"Then you will go again to-morrow. He will be at home then," Ivy exclaims, with renewed hope.
"No, for he is leaving town to-night," is the short reply.
"Leaving town!" Ivy's voice and look are full of consternation.
"Yes, I learned that much by bribing his servant. He is going down into the country to-night in a hired conveyance, some twenty-five miles or more."
"For what reason?" Ivy asks, dimly divining a certain significance in her mother's manner.
"I do not know, but I strongly suspect it is to visit his captive countess, and present her with your diamonds," Mrs. Cleveland answers, divining the truth with a woman's ready wit.
"Oh, mamma!" screams Ivy.
"But I intend to follow him," pursues Mrs. Cleveland, "I mean to checkmate him if I can."
"I am going with you—remember that, mamma," her daughter cries out, hastily.
CHAPTER XLV
While Lady Vera's friends are seeking with heavy hearts some clew to her strange fate, the fair young countess, half distracted with grief, remains a closely-guarded captive in the ruined mansion in the lonely wood. In spite of all her tears and protestations Betsy Robson persists in believing her to be a dangerous lunatic, and in treating her as such, albeit always kind and complaisant as to an ailing child.
The summer days glide slowly past, each one bearing some portion of hope from Vera's lonely heart. With the dawn of each day she had hoped for release—with the sunset of each day she had wept over her disappointment. The days were so long and lonely without books, music or occupation to beguile them of their length and dreariness. It seemed to Lady Vera almost as if she were dead and buried, living in this lonely house, seeing, hearing no one save stolid Betsy Robson, who glided about like another ghost in this strange world of the dead.
"If rescue does not come soon I shall either die or go mad, as that woman already believes me to be," Lady Vera tells herself in a passion of despair.
She wonders why Philip does not come to her aid. In her despair and loneliness bitter thoughts begin to creep into her mind.
"Perhaps he has no care over me now that I am lost to him forever," she thinks. "He has turned to Miss Montgomery or Lady Eva, perhaps. Either one would be glad enough to console him."
From the world without there came no answer to these silent accusations against her lost lover. The world seemed dead to her as she appeared to it. All her companions were memory and sorrow.
As the weeks rounded slowly into a month, Lady Vera's fierce anger against Leslie Noble, her restlessness, her impatience, began to settle down into the calmness of despair.
She gave up pacing the floor, and weeping and grieving over her captivity like some poor caged bird beating the bars of its prison with unavailing wings. She began to sit still in her chair for long hours daily, with her white hands folded on her lap and her dark eyes fixed on vacancy—long hours in which the color and roundness fled from her face and form, leaving behind a startling pallor and delicacy that frightened Mrs. Robson, who thought that her charge had developed a new phase of her mania.
"Them still and cunning ones is always the most dangerous, so I've heard," she confides to the tabby cat that is her only companion in the kitchen. "I do wish she would ha' give up that sharp little knife she carries in her bosom. And I do wish Mr. Noble would come and see her. I can't think what keeps him away this long. He said he should come soon. Lucky he laid in a good store of provisions, or we might starve to death in this lonely wilderness afore he comes."
She busies herself in preparing little dainties to tempt the appetite of her charge, but Lady Vera scarcely tastes the delicate morsels.
"Be you a-grievin' for your husband, my poor dear?" Mrs. Robson asks her kindly one day.
"I have no husband," Lady Vera answers, disdainfully, with a smouldering fire in her great, dark eyes.
She accuses herself of no falsehood in uttering those words, for she never means to acknowledge Leslie Noble's claim upon her, and she has mentally decided that if she ever goes free again she will appeal to the strong arm of the law to sever the hated bonds that hold her.
After that one flash of wrath she subsides into mournful apathy again. Two weeks more roll by into the irrevocable past. Lady Vera droops more and more, like some gently fading rose. Betsy Robson, frightened and alarmed, sees that her hold on life is slowly loosening day by day.
The flowers she brings her from the tangled, neglected garden fall lightly from her grasp, as if her hands were too weak to hold them. She lies all day on her couch now, too weak or too weary to rise, and the snowy pillow day by day is drenched with her languid, hopeless tears.
"It is too bad that Mr. Noble does not come," Mrs. Robson mutters to herself. "His poor young wife is dying, I honestly think. She has gone so thin and white, and her big, black eyes frighten one with their uncanny look. She has fretted herself to death. It goes on to seven weeks now since he brought her here. I wonder if aught has happened him? I do wish I could let him know some way that she's a-dying."
The last days of August have passed now. September comes in cool and blustery, inclining to storms. With every day Lady Vera sinks more and more, complaining of no pain or disease, only growing weaker and weaker, paler and thinner, while, as Mrs. Robson says, her great, black eyes look unearthly in her death-white face. If Leslie Noble does not come soon his captive will escape him through the open gates of death.
"It's a-going to storm to-night, Tab," remarks Mrs. Robson to her familiar, as she opens the kitchen door and peers out into the gathering darkness one chilly night; "the moon looks pale and watery, and the clouds keeps scudding over it. There isn't any stars to speak of, and the wind's blustery and damp. It's a-going to storm. You may blink and purr by the fire alone to-night, Tabby, for I must sit up with poor Mrs. Noble. It wouldn't be right to leave the poor, crazy creetur alone, ill as she is, and seems that harmless a body could hardly believe that she stuck a knife into her own husband. Yes, I'll set up with her to-night. Sometimes the spirits ride on storms to carry away the souls of them that's a-dying, and mayhap they may come for that poor young thing's to-night."
She closes the door with a shudder of superstitious terror in the face of the gathering storm, and betakes herself to the gloomy upper chamber where Countess Vera, still robed in the gray silk dress in which she had been brought from her home a captive, lies silently across the gloomy, crimson-hung bed, as white and still as if she were already dead.
"You have eaten no supper, dearie," Mrs. Robson remarks, glancing at the untasted dainties upon the tea-tray that she had brought up two hours before.
"No," the captive answers, with a weary sigh, and relapses into silence.
"There's a storm coming. Do you hear the wind howl, and the rain beating on the windows?" remarks Mrs. Robson, to break the spell of the dreary, brooding silence.
Lady Vera, turning her head listlessly a moment, listens aimlessly to the wail of the autumn wind moaning like a voice in human pain around the ruined gables of the house.
"It is a wild night," she answers, drearily. "What time is it, Mrs. Robson?"
"It is nigh onto eleven o'clock," the woman answers, consulting the broad-faced silver watch stuck in her belt; then, curiously: "You've never asked me that question afore since here you've been, my dearie. Why do you do so now?"
"When the hours of life are few, one is fain to count them," Lady Vera answers, with subdued bitterness.
And again there ensues a silence, filled up by the wild voice of the wind that has now increased to a gale.
The furious rush of the rain is distinctly audible; a flash of lightning quivers into the room in spite of the shielding curtains.
"Mrs. Robson, I believe I am going to die. When your cruel master comes, he will find that his captive has escaped him, after all," Lady Vera says, weakly, and with a faint triumph in her voice.
Before Mrs. Robson can reply, there comes a hasty, thundering rap on the hall door that brings her screaming to her feet. It is thrice repeated before her frightened senses return.
At that strange and unexpected sound, Lady Vera, as if endowed with new strength, starts up to a sitting posture in the bed. Instead of being startled by the noise, she seems to rejoice in it. Her eyes flash with new life.
"Go, Mrs. Robson," she exclaims. "Do you not hear the knocking? Someone is come."
"Who can it be, this dreadful night? Do you think it could be Mr. Noble?" exclaims the woman, timorously.
"God forbid!" exclaims Countess Vera, passionately. "I pray that it may be some friend of mine who has come to bring me deliverance."
But Mrs. Robson, by this, has begun to revive her scattered wits.
"Of course it's my master, Mr. Noble. How foolish I was for a moment. I am main glad that he has come at last," she declares, eagerly, and hastening to leave the room, though not forgetting to lock the door after her as usual.
Countess Vera waits in an agony of suspense for five almost anguished minutes, then footsteps mount the stairs toward her chamber. Mrs. Robson, opening the door, ushers in Leslie Noble.
At the sight of that hated face, at the wild revulsion from ardent hope to absolute despair, Countess Vera utters a heart-wrung cry and falls weakly backward.
CHAPTER XLVI
Mrs. Robson hastens forward, with a cry of dismay, to lift her mistress from the pillows, fearing to find her dead. But Lady Vera has not even fainted. Her white, quivering, anguished face turns upon her enemy with scorn and defiance, struggling bravely with pitiful weakness and despair.
"You have almost come too late," she cries, resting against Mrs. Robson's broad shoulder, and looking at him with a strange triumph in her hollow, gleaming eyes. "Death has nearly been here before you. You have but come now to see him wrest your prey from your merciless grasp. You will have nothing but my poor, wasted body to gloat over. The soul that you have tortured out of its earthly tenement will soon be past your power."
He stares at her, growing ghastly pale and alarmed. Mrs. Robson has told him that his wife is ill, that she is fretting herself to death, but he is scarcely prepared for this. It looks like death, indeed, that marble pallor, those wide and brilliant eyes that gleam upon him so weirdly, triumphing over him, even in death. A horrible sense of loss and disappointment thrills through him. Is she dying, indeed, his beautiful Vera, his rich and honored countess, the glories of whose state he has meant to share?
"Vera, my darling, you must not die," he exclaims, going forward and holding out his arms to her entreatingly. "Live for me, my dearest wife. I love you more than life! Give yourself to me, Vera; let me win your heart, and I swear I will make you happy."
She waves him away with a gesture of supreme loathing. In their anger and excitement no one is aware that the door has creaked softly on its hinges, that it is pushed slightly ajar now, and that two faces, lurid with jealous rage and deadly anger, are peering cautiously around it.
"I love you, Vera," he repeats, undaunted by her proud scorn, sure that he must win at last. "I love you, Vera, and I have never loved but you. Thinking you dead, I was lured into that marriage with Ivy Cleveland. She turned out to be a termagant, who only cared for my money, and I hated her long before that blissful night when you, so grand and beautiful that I already adored you, not knowing who you were, boldly claimed me as your husband. You must forgive that ill-starred marriage with your cousin, my precious Vera. She and her base mother made me repent it every hour of my life. I suffered enough through them, Vera, so you ought to be kind to me."
Strange that they do not hear the sibilant whisper of threatening hate that hisses through the room! But they are absorbed in their own passions, and the storm now raging at the hight of its fury has many strange sounds of its own as it surges around the ivy-mantled room.
Now and then a sheet of vivid lightning illuminates the curtained windows, and a peal of terrible thunder shakes the old mansion from garret to cellar. But only Mrs. Robson has any ear or any thought for the fury of the storm.
"Kind to you," Lady Vera repeats, in her faint, but cutting voice, gazing at her cringing suppliant. "Were you kind to me in my sore distress and misery when my mother lay dead in her grave, and I had no one to turn to but you in my bitter desolation and despair? Were you kind and loving to your friendless bride then, in her poverty and woe? No! and it is not Vera Campbell you seek to win now. It is Lady Fairvale, of Fairvale, countess in her own right, with thirty thousand pounds a year. You see, I understand the value of your vapid protestations of love and repentance."
"You mistake me, Lady Vera, in attributing mercenary motives to me," he answers, with pretended sadness and grief. "I love you for yourself alone. I am very rich still, although not so wealthy as you are. I am not yet too poor to woo you as a royal lover. See, my darling, I bring you jewels fine enough for a queen—jewels that even your grandeur need not disdain; diamonds bright as your eyes, pearls as fair as your milk-white skin."
He has drawn two jewel caskets from his breast, and unlocks them before her wondering eyes. The diamonds flash in the light, seeming to fill the gloomy room with sunshine, the large, pale pearls shine with the lustrous whiteness of the moon's chill rays.
His eyes shine as he looks into her face to note the effect. Surely such an offering as this must win her back even from the portals of death to be his own. These must win her love for him, surely. No fair woman ever turned her back on the donor of such sparkling, flashing, burning diamonds, such moon-white, gleaming pearls.
But as he gazes triumphantly into her eyes, her lips curl, she recoils in scorn and aversion.
"I spurn both you and your offerings," she answers, quickly. "They are poor Ivy Cleveland's diamonds and pearls. Oh, how could you be so mean and vile as to rob that poor girl of her jewels now, when already bereft of the jewel of honor?"
"They are not Ivy's jewels," he answers. "I bought them for you to-day in London. Do you think I would offer you aught that had belonged to that woman who had wronged you?"
"Liar! Coward! Robber!" cries a voice of raging hate and jealousy, and like a sudden vision, Ivy Cleveland appears among them, her golden tresses flying in disorder, her face livid with passion, her blue eyes blazing with wrath, in her clenched, white hand, a tiny, gleaming pistol, like a pretty toy.
"Liar! Coward! Robber! I will have your life for my wrongs," she shrieks, and the gleaming pistol covers his heart, there is a terrible report, a flash of thick smoke, and with a cry of horror, Leslie Noble leaps into the air and falls backward—dead!
"He is dead, but I have my jewels again!" the murderess cries, with maniacal triumph, gathering the fallen jewels to her breast and exulting wildly over them.
At the loud report of the pistol, and Ivy's frenzied cry, Mrs. Cleveland rushes into the room and kneels by the side of the prostrate man, whose life-blood has gushed out in a crimson tide upon the faded carpet. She puts her hand over his heart and bends her ear to his lips. But in a moment she lifts her head and regards her daughter with a blank stare of terror.
"Oh, Ivy, Ivy, you have killed your husband!" she exclaims, in a frightened voice.
But Ivy, sitting on the floor like a child, running a diamond necklace lovingly through her fingers, like a stream of light, only glances up carelessly at the dead body on the floor, whose life-blood has crept slowly along the carpet, until it has crimsoned the hem of her dress. She laughs aloud, a chill, blood-curdling laugh.
"He deserved death," she answers, in a strange, unnatural voice. "He stole my pretty jewels from me—my diamonds and my pearls, ha, ha! I am the Queen of England, did you not know that? I beheaded my false subject because he stole the crown jewels. There is a ball to-night. I am engaged to dance with the President of the United States. He is coming for that purpose. Ha, ha! will it not be a fine sight?" and springing to her feet she began to dance wildly around the room, her precious jewels clasped in her arms like a babe to her mother's breast, while she sang in terrible, maniacal glee:
"The king is dead, long live the king!"
Again there crept to the door two watchers who peered in all unheeded by those within the room, who watched with straining, horrified gaze the wild gyrations of the maddened Ivy, whose small figure continued to spin aimlessly around the floor to the accompaniment of gay, lilting tunes sung in a high-pitched, tuneless voice, that was terrible to hear.
"The poor lady is raving crazy!" at last exclaimed Mrs. Robson, finding voice for the first time since she had ushered Mr. Noble into the room. The sudden and unexpected appearance of two strange women on the scene, and the murder of her master had struck her dumb with terror, but all the while she had continued to uphold the exhausted frame of Lady Vera in her strong, protecting arms.
"Yes, she is mad," Lady Vera answers, in a low, sad, pitying tone.
"Who says that I am mad?" demands Ivy, sinking down upon the floor, wearied by her wild performance. "I deny it! I am the Shah of Persia's bride, and these jewels are my dowry from my royal bridegroom!"
Mrs. Cleveland, turning her eyes for the first time from the face of her stricken daughter, rests them upon Countess Vera's wasted, death-white features.
"See what your cursed arts have done," she cried out, harshly. "It is all your work! I am glad that you are dying, Vera Campbell! I have hated you from the hour of your birth! You were born to be my stumbling-block, and to work out my destruction!"
"I was born to be the avenger of my parents' wrongs," Lady Vera answers, proudly. "And though it kill me, I have kept my oath of vengeance!"
The wind moans ominously around the creaking gables, the thunder mutters hoarsely, the blue flame of the lightning casts its ghastly glare into the room. No one heeds the fierce war of the elements in the fiercer war of human passions raging within the gloomy chamber.
"Yes, you have kept your oath, curse you, curse you!" Marcia Cleveland answers, venomously. "You have dragged me and mine down to poverty, to shame, to madness! But live, Vera Campbell, live yet a little longer, and you shall see your weapons turned against yourself. You will be thrust from your splendid home and high estate, branded, disgraced, while I shall reign in your stead! But the sweetness will be taken from my revenge. You have driven my daughter, the light of my eyes and heart, mad, mad! It is a wound that naught on earth can heal. Oh, curse you, curse you! May you never know one hour of peace! May you be racked by every ill that flesh is heir to! May God's–"
The terrible curse she is invoking stays forever on her lips! A blinding flash of forked and vivid blue lightning shatters the window panes, rends the curtains, and darts into the room like a living sword. A peal of awful thunder seems to rend the earth in twain, and the old house rocks for a moment like an infant's cradle. Then the rain rushes wildly again, and the thunder subsides into ominous mutterings and long, rolling sounds of terrible wrath, and Marcia Cleveland lies prone upon the floor, her distorted face upturned to the light, a single blue spot on her temple telling its awful story to the shocked beholders—slain by the lightning!