"Dorian, my love, forgive my weakness!" pleaded Nita wildly; but his eyes flashed back only a limitless wrath and scorn.
"Forgive you! no—not while life lasts! But—farewell forever!"
Then the door opened and closed—Dorian was gone in anger, and Nita was alone with her despair, her heart breaking with its heavy burden.
Slowly and wearily she dragged herself back to her room. She was glad the maid was not there to see her pale, changed face and crumpled ball-gown. She closed the door, and mechanically removed the bitter traces of tears from her face and rearranged her dress.
"For I must not stay away from the ball. That shallow Azalea would think I envied her triumph," she thought in bitter pride, and as one goes to the stake she accompanied the Courtneys to Lady Landon's ball, never telling them that Dorian had sought her out, and that she had sent him away from her, reckless and broken-hearted.
But when Dorian read of it all in the next day's papers that praised the beauty of Miss Farnham, the lovely American, and told how the Earl of Winthrop had paid her such devoted attention, he smiled in bitter mockery.
"It is just as I thought—there is a title in the case, and she means to repudiate me. American girls all run wild over coronets nowadays," he said bitterly, to Captain Van Hise, to whom he had confided the story of Nita's strange behavior.
Van Hise was frankly puzzled. He had believed in beautiful Nita, and he would not give up his faith yet. He remembered the night of the marriage, how she had refused her consent until he had told her that the old miser was dead.
"There is something very strange here. I honestly believe in her professed dread of her guardian," he said thoughtfully. "And as for the title, Dorian, you know how we were told of her coldness and indifference to all her suitors. No, she cares for no one but you, but she will let her guardian's influence wreck both your lives unless you take the matter frankly in hand. What say you? Shall we go home to New York, and have it out with the old miser? Beard the lion in his den, and find out the worst of his power. You consent? Good. We will sail this week."
Lady Landon's ball had indeed been a great success, and the Courtneys were highly elated over the admiration excited by Azalea's delicate blond beauty. Her future sister-in-law had been quite cordial, too, but in her secret heart she would have preferred the magnificent Nita with her calm manner and queenly beauty. She hinted as much to her brother, but he told her bitterly that Miss Farnham aspired to higher rank than a mere baronet, and the attentions of Lord Winthrop certainly lent color to the assertion.
The Courtneys were eager to return to the United States, whither they expected Sir George Merlin to follow them. They wanted to astonish their old set in New York with Azalea's grand match. Then, too, Mrs. Courtney did not desire to offend the old man who had ordered her with no uncertain sound to bring Nita home.
But her charge had set her face like a flint against returning. Rebellious and desperate thoughts were working in the young girl's mind. Why should she return to America? That was the question that tortured her night and day. She had resolved to die rather than live with her husband, and in a few more weeks the end of the year would come. A dreadful existence stretched before her—the price she must pay for this year of luxury—this year that might have been almost happy but for the madness of love that had come so suddenly and so irresistibly into her life.
"Oh, Dorian, Dorian, I loved you but to lose you—yet I cannot live without you—so I will end my life and its sorrows," she sobbed in the sleepless silence of the night. In her short, eventful life she had had few chances to make real friends, and she had no kins-people except old Meg Dineheart, who had declared herself on that first night at Pirate Beach to be her grandmother. For this reason Nita had protected her from arrest for her crimes, but she shuddered and grew heart-sick at the thought of sustaining any relationship to the wicked old hag, and often longed for a mother's love.
"I am alone in the world, with no right to love and happiness like other girls, and surely God will forgive me for ending my wretched life," she sobbed, and began to plan the way in which to end "life's fitful fever."
Mrs. Courtney thought it a strange whim when, instead of attending the opera one evening, Nita went to church. She knew afterward the meaning of the fancy she had combated all in vain. Nita went to church to pray and ask God's pardon for the wicked deed she was about to commit.
She smiled in mournful mockery when her worldly-minded chaperon tried to argue her out of going.
"Dear Mrs. Courtney, I can take my maid; I need not deprive you of the pleasure," she said sadly. "But as for me, I do not care for music to-night. I would rather hear some godly words and prayers."
"It is time enough for piety when you are old and gray," the woman said cynically, and Nita gave her a strange, sad glance.
"What if I do not live to grow old—if I die in my early youth?" she queried.
Mrs. Courtney shrugged her shoulders without replying; but after Nita had gone out, she said significantly to Azalea.
"I think she is suffering from a temporary aberration of the mind. You have noticed how quiet, almost morose, she has been lately. I shall take her home to her guardian without delay. There must be something wrong with her mind, the way she has carried on since she married Dorian."
But Nita had her way and went to church, and if ever a tortured soul, about to launch itself into eternity, prayed earnestly for the pity and pardon of Heaven, she did that night.
And the next morning Mrs. Courtney had a shock that she never forgot till her dying day. Nita's maid came rushing into her room with a pallid face and staring eyes.
"Oh, madam, I've found Miss Farnham dead in her bed with a bottle of poison by her side!" she almost shrieked.
CHAPTER XXVI.
"YOU SHALL KNOW THE SECRET."
In a shabby third-story room of a cheap apartment-house in New York, old Miser Farnham was sitting alone. The hideous old man was, if possible, even more forbidding than on that day in Central Park when the unhappy Nita had shuddered at the first sight of him, then yielded to his temptations, and became his reluctant bride.
The leering hideousness of his face a year ago was increased now by several livid scars received in the railway accident that had almost cost him his life, and his stooping frame was lean and gaunt, his shabby clothing hanging loosely on him.
Thin, grizzled locks straggled over his brow under the worn old hat that he wore habitually in-doors and out, and his keen, gray eyes gleamed with a diabolical light of triumph as they scanned the pages of a letter received several days previous from Mrs. Courtney.
"So she is coming home, my lovely bride," he chuckled to himself. "Coming home, and it lacks barely two weeks to the day when I shall claim her for my own. I wonder if she has come to her senses yet, and if she has concluded that life as an old man's darling with unlimited cash is better than the deep, dark river."
"More beautiful than ever, with a score of titled lovers," he read from Mrs. Courtney's sycophantic letter. "Ha, ha! to think of carrying her off from them all. To think of marrying Juan de Castro's daughter. It is a wonder he does not rise from the grave! Ugh! what if he should"—and he shrank and cowered in sudden fear, whining out—"I do not believe in ghosts."
The miser had one weakness. He believed in the supernatural, and feared it. Many a night he cowered beneath the counterpane, with his hand before his eyes, afraid to look out into the dark lest he encounter some menacing ghost from a wicked past.
The old man had reached the acme of his plans and hopes and ambitions. His marriage to Nita had secured things that else were doubtful. Let her but come now willingly or unwillingly to his arms, and the triumph of his life would be achieved.
He chuckled in fiendish glee, remembering these things, and thinking of the life he would lead with Nita, for he determined that then he would throw off his miserly habits and live in splendor.