“They will never come!” was my reply, intended only for my comforter’s ears. “They will never come! Something dreadful has happened, and Belle knows it. See how calm and self-satisfied she is now. Remember the state she was in before she came. She vowed that my marriage should not take place. She has made her vow come true!”
Lady Elizabeth cast a startled glance at Belle, but had no time to comment upon my words, for at this moment we heard an excited hubbub near the door, and Marvel, the earl’s valet, came down the aisle with a face which advertised bad news.
“Will your ladyship please leave the church as quickly as you can?” he said to my stepmother. “And take the bride with you. There will be no wedding to-day.”
“For God’s sake, tell me what is the matter!” she exclaimed. “Something dreadful has happened to my father!”
“An accident has occurred to him,” said Marvel, with an attempt to speak as if it were nothing serious. But his voice broke in the endeavor, and he sobbed forth: “Oh, my poor master! it is too dreadful!”
“What is the matter with him?” cried Lady Elizabeth, fairly shaking the man in the intensity of her excitement and dread. “Tell me at once.”
When I heard Marvel’s reply, I neither shrieked nor fainted. For I had felt sure that he would say what he did.
“He is dead!” he said, and my eyes, flaming and accusing now, at once sought Belle’s, flashing my conviction of her guilt in her face. Under that glance she reeled as if from a blow.
I hardly know what else happened that morning. I went home as in a dream, feeling somehow more sorry for Lady Elizabeth than for myself, and wondering if they would hang Belle when it was discovered that she had murdered the earl; for my mind refused to disabuse itself of a conviction of her guilt, although reason pointed to the conclusion that it was impossible for her to have injured the earl, seeing that she had not seen him, or spoken to him, for twenty hours.
The wedding guests returned to their own homes, there to discuss the sensational interruption to what some of them had voted the most sensational wedding of the season. My father reached home soon after we did, and confirmed Marvel’s story in every detail. The Earl of Greatlands had been found by Marvel, who had grown alarmed when he did not rise at eight o’clock, lying in ghastly rigidity in the bed which he had sought some hours earlier in apparently unusually buoyant health and spirits. A glance convinced Marvel that life was quite extinct, and a moment later he was rousing the household with shouts and cries. Of course everybody came rushing up to the earl’s room. And of course several doctors were summoned at once. But it was only too patent from the very first that there was no hope, and though there was much loud lamentation on the part of the servants, and quite a touching display of sorrow on the part of Lord Egreville, or, rather, the new Earl of Greatlands, it was not of the slightest avail, and the fiat speedily went forth to the world that Lionel, ninth Earl of Greatlands, being in an unusually excited state, owing to his prospective marriage, had succumbed to unsuspected heart disease.