But, although the search for Sweetheart baffled every one who undertook it, Norman was more fortunate as regarded his mother. He found her where Camille had declared she was—at the cabin of Nance, the whilom chamber-maid at Verelands. The negro girl had degenerated into a thriftless, lazy sloven, much addicted to drink, and sprung eagerly at any chance that offered money without work, so she accepted Camille’s golden bribe, even though it was offered for the injury of the old mistress who had in past days been most generous and kind to her servant. But Nance had all the proverbial ingratitude of the negro race, and did not hesitate to bind the aristocratic lady tightly down upon a low cot-bed, where, after placing a sufficient quantity of water and coarse food within easy reach, she left her to her fate, locking the doors of the cabin and beating a hasty retreat to another city—for she well knew that, when this outrage was discovered, her punishment would be little short of lynching.
Here, after she had been imprisoned for a week, Norman de Vere found his beloved and revered mother ill unto death with fever and raving in delirium. Too low to be removed, he had to fit the cabin up as comfortably as possible for transient occupancy. Here he remained with some trusty servants in the squalid negro cabin, nursing his mother, while up at Verelands, his beautiful home, the fiendish Camille held complete sway, and the city rang with the story of the wicked revenge she had taken on her husband for his obstinacy in refusing to forgive her for a harmless flirtation. There were many who condemned her, but a few people sympathized with her, saying that Norman had been too hard upon her and deserved his punishment. A few people even called out of curiosity, but Finette sent them curtly away with the excuse that her mistress was ill and could see no one. This was not a falsehood, for Camille really lay upon Sweetheart’s pretty bed from day to day, raging, raving in alternate hatred and despair, realizing, after her long plotting for vengeance, that her triumph had left her ruined life waste and empty as before of the one blessing she had craved so madly—the love of the man whom she had turned against her by her terrible crime. Finette was changing daily, too. Her once cringing manner had turned to insolence, and she affected to tremble every time the door-bell rang, vowing that she listened daily for the officers to come and arrest her mistress for the murder with which Norman de Vere had charged her. In vain Camille protested her innocence, for her scared eyes betrayed her guilt. She had seen the murdered Robert Lacy so often in her dreams that she began to fancy he haunted her, and could not bear for the maid to leave her alone for a minute in the beautiful room where she had once been so wildly happy, but which now seemed peopled with fiends from Hades, grinning at her from over one another’s shoulders.
Lying there, watched by the sullen, insolent creature who had aided and abetted her in all of her cruel, wicked schemes for the sake of the golden bribe she offered, what visions came to Camille, the proud beauty whose unbridled passions had made shipwreck of her life! Visions of the past and of the glorious opportunities for happiness she had wasted and flung into the yawning pit of sin. Beautiful, rich, madly beloved—she had been all these, yet now she lay shivering, terrified, friendless, waiting, fearing, dreading the—prison cell.
Yes, she could think of nothing else but Norman’s mad threat that now he would betray the dark secret kept so long, and so free himself from the incubus she had made of herself, and punish her for the sorrow she had brought upon those dearer to him than his own life.
“Will he do it? Can he doom me to the gallows-tree?” the half-mad creature asked herself hourly; and as each day rolled away she began to feel more secure. “He can not do it, much as he hates me. I know he could not harm me, even for her sake. The past makes me sacred in his eyes still,” she began to think with keen triumph in her power.
CHAPTER LXIII.
In the trouble that had fallen upon him, Norman de Vere quite forgot Lord Stuart and his sister, the guests whom he was soon to receive at Verelands, or he would have written to them of all that had happened during his trip to New York and since his return to Jacksonville.
But, half crazed with trouble and anxiety, the young man could remember nothing except that his dear mother lay upon a sick, perhaps death-bed, and that his darling wife and child had gone into a most impenetrable exile, hounded from home and love by the most fiendish plot the brain of a wicked woman ever devised. While duty held him chained to his mother’s side, he had committed to a clever detective the task of tracing Sweetheart, and every moment a prayer went up from his heart that she might soon be found. That she could no longer be his—that Camille’s life had thrust their lives apart—he realized, but that a home must be provided for Sweetheart and the child, he felt imperatively necessary. If Heaven spared his mother’s life, she would go and live with them, he knew, and for himself nothing remained but to denounce Camille for the murder of Robert Lacy—to denounce her and doom her to the solitude of the prison cell. The murder had been committed so long ago that she would not be hung for it, he knew. Time, and the fact that she was a woman, would both be in her favor. Southern juries were chivalrous, too. He recalled all this with satisfaction, for bitterly as Camille had wronged him and his, the man’s heart shrunk at thought of the vengeance he must take on the fair, faulty creature who had once been his wife, for whom he had felt a boy’s delirious passion.
“But I can not spare her if I would, for she has rushed madly, recklessly upon her fate. For Sweetheart’s sake, for our child’s sake, this guilty woman must be placed behind prison bars. Then the law will free me forever from her hated claim, and the marriage ceremony shall make Sweetheart once more my own,” he thought. But while his mother lay ill he made no effort to molest Camille in her triumphant occupation of Verelands. His anxiety over his loved ones tortured him too cruelly.
Meantime, the days rolled by, and Lord Stuart and Lady Edith Moreland left New York for Jacksonville. They did not think it necessary to write or telegraph to their friends, still carrying out their fancy for surprising Sweetheart.