Britomarte covered her face with her hands, and remained silent for a few moments. Then she looked up and said:
“Do you wonder now at my strange demeanor on that occasion? You remember that on my arrival at Washington, instead of going to Witch Elms, I hastened immediately to the station to catch the train for New York?”
“Yes.”
“I reached the city the next day, and hurried to the humble lodgings of the Signora and got her to accompany me to the house of my dead sister, where the coroner’s inquest was still sitting. There we found the Signor Adriano di Bercelloni under arrest and under strong suspicion. There, partly from the information given me by the Signora, and partly from the evidence elicited by the coroner’s inquest, I learned these facts: That my sister had recovered her health and beauty; and had made considerable progress in her art and in the favor of the public, so that at the time of her death she was one of the most attractive singers in the house. Bercelloni came to fulfil an engagement there that summer, and to his amazement found Mona a member of the company and restored to all her pristine bloom and beauty, and indeed more lovely and alluring than he had ever known her to be.”
“Sorrow does sometimes give a last, perfecting touch to beauty,” said Justin.
“Yes. Bercelloni seemed always to have loved my sister by fits and starts. Now he took a violent fancy to her; a fancy that was stimulated by jealousy into a keen vitality. But while she was very gracious to every other member of the troupe, she would not vouchsafe a word or a look to the man who had so basely deceived and deserted her.”
“She was right. Her course was the only correct one.”
“Yes, but it maddened him. He fiercely claimed her as his wife, haughtily asserted a husband’s rights over her, and absolutely forbade the manager of the Opera House to pay her salary to herself! He told her that the story of his having had another wife was a mere canard; that there was no truth whatever in it; that he had only invented the tale to tease her.”
“The monstrous villain! Who could believe him?”
“Not she, at all events. She denied his statements, ignored his claims, and defied his anger. He become furiously, frantically jealous. And such was the state of affairs between them, when one morning she was found dead in her bed, and weltering in her blood, as I said. The coroner’s inquest, with the usual perspicacity of such bodies, found their verdict, ‘Suicide.’ And as ‘a melancholy case of suicide’ it was recorded in the daily papers.”