The Bride of the Tomb and Queenie's Part 58

She sprang to her feet and stood facing him, her dark-blue eyes dilating, her cheeks flushing, her small hands clenched tightly in her breathless anger. An artist's pencil might have handed his name down to immortal fame could he have put on canvas that striking scene--the beautiful room, and the man in his splendid, insolent, satanic beauty, standing before that lovely incarnation of pride and pa.s.sion, with her glorious veil of golden hair falling loosely about her superb form, and the shining folds of her costly bridal robe sweeping far behind her on the rich velvet carpet.

"I _am_ an innocent woman," she said, proudly, and the light shone on her lifted face and the earnest fire in her eyes. "I _am_ an innocent woman! I have done no wrong, though I am a betrayed, unhappy, and insulted victim! I have been sinned against, but I have not sinned!"

He laughed, cruelly, mockingly, insultingly.

"Why do you laugh?" she said. "_You_ know that it is true. You deceived me and betrayed me, but was I to blame? I carried the marriage certificate in my breast as a precious thing! I thought it was true as Heaven, I thought I was pure as the snow! And I _am_! How could _your_ sin touch me?"

Again he laughed mockingly.

"Your mind is strangely warped," he said. "But if you were innocent in the one thing, how about the blow in the dark? Was there no sin in that?"

"I deny that there was sin!" she said, with pa.s.sionate defiance in her look and tone. "It was simple justice--'a blow for a blow.' You drove me mad with the horror and cruelty of all I learned! It seemed to me that I was given back from the grave to rid the world of a monster!"

"You failed," he said, derisively.

"Yes, to my sorrow," she answered. "But, ah! Leon Vinton, surely a day of reckoning will come to you. The justice of G.o.d will not always sleep.

I was not permitted to take your punishment out of His hands who has said 'Vengeance is mine; I will repay.' It will come, it will come!"

"You prate of G.o.d's vengeance," he said, sneeringly, "but it suits you to forget that the preachers call him also a G.o.d of mercy, and love, and forgiveness!"

"Forgiveness!" she echoed, wildly. "Neither G.o.d nor man could forgive you, Leon Vinton! You have committed an unpardonable sin. You have broken my heart, you have tried to kill my soul, you murdered me! Can I ever forgive _this_?"

She swept back the golden waves of hair that shaded her white brow and showed him the livid scar of a deep wound beneath them.

"It is your h.e.l.lish work!" she said. "You ground your cruel boot-heel into the brow your false lips had kissed a thousand times; you strangled my life out with the hands that had caressed me uncounted times! Oh, my G.o.d, can I ever forgive or forget my wrongs?"

"I will kill you the next time more surely, curse you!" he hissed, in ungovernable rage, and striding forward, he caught her white arm rudely, almost crushing it in his iron grasp. "Cease, girl, not another word!"

She wrenched herself out of his grasp and answered, defiantly:

"Let me go, then, if you cannot bear my reproaches. Let me return to my husband."

A sneer curled his thin lips as she spoke with an unconscious accent of tenderness on the words "my husband."

"Your husband, as you call him, shall never know that you are not mouldering yonder in Rose Hill Cemetery. You shall never look upon his face again, Queenie Lyle."

"Mrs. Ernscliffe, if you please," she said, drawing her graceful form erect with a defiant dignity.

"Mrs. Ernscliffe, then, if it pleases you better," he answered, mockingly. "Though why you care for the name I do not know. You do not love the man."

"I _do_ love him," she answered, firmly, her fair head slightly drooped, and a burning blush crimsoning her cheeks.

"Since when?" he queried, sneeringly. "You did not love him when he asked you to marry him. I heard you tell him so."

"You heard me!" she exclaimed, in surprise.

"Yes, I was a witness to that moonlight wooing. I have seldom lost sight of you since you returned to your father's house, and resumed the _role_ of innocent maidenhood."

"A spy!" she said, scornfully.

"Yes, if you put it so," he answered, coolly. "We need not be particular about terms."

She looked at him as if he were something wonderful. The effrontery of his wickedness almost paralyzed her. She clasped her hands and lifted her blue eyes.

"Oh, just Heaven," she said, "why does thy vengeance tarry in smiting this monster?"

"Permit me to commend your dramatic ability," he said, with a mock-courtly bow. "Your tones and gestures would make your fortune on the tragic stage."

She sank into a chair and dropped her face into her hands. She was very weary and physically exhausted, having eaten nothing since the day of her supposed death, but she felt no hunger now, though she was faint and thirsty.

"Your tirade appears to be over," he remarked, with his evil sneer.

She looked up.

"Tell me one thing," she said, trying to speak calmly. "What do you want of me? Why did you care to get me back, when we both hate each other?"

The glare of that hatred of which she spoke flamed luridly up in his dark eyes.

"That is the very reason that I brought you back," he answered; "because I hated you, and because I intended to make your life one long, insufferable weariness to you until you die."

Again she looked at him with wonder. Her gentler nature could not fathom the cruel vindictiveness of his.

"Oh, Leon," she gasped, "you would not be so cruel? Think of all that I have suffered at your hands already. Let me go, I beg you! I am so young, I may make something of my life yet, if I can only go back to the good, true man I have already learned to love and honor."

The words seemed to madden him.

"Never!" he shouted, hoa.r.s.ely, with a terrible oath. "Never! I hate Lawrence Ernscliffe--I have an old grudge against him. I will have my revenge on you both. You shall stay here, locked in these four walls, a hated prisoner, as long as you live. Mrs. Bowers shall be your jailer, and here you shall dwell, eating your heart out in abject wretchedness and misery unutterable. Do you like the picture? _Au revoir, Mrs.

Ernscliffe!_"

CHAPTER XII.

Queenie heard the key grate in the lock and sprang up, uttering wild shrieks of pa.s.sion and despair, almost beside herself with the horror of her new situation.

But no response came to her frenzied screams and cries. Perhaps those gilded walls had echoed such wails of agony before, and the hearts of those who heard them had grown callous with long familiarity.

She ran up and down the room like one mad, alternately skrieking and beating upon the locked door, until she fell upon the floor, conquered by sheer exhaustion.

She lay there awhile, then sprang up restlessly again.

"I will endure it no longer," she said, pa.s.sionately; "I will throw myself down from the window and kill myself!"

Full of that wild, suicidal resolve, she ran to the window and pushed up the sash.

The night was far spent, and that awful darkness that comes just before dawn obscured everything, its blackness intensified by the drizzling rain that still poured steadily down.