He sprang forward as though to strike her down, but she eluded him, and drew a glittering knife to defend herself.
"Lay but a finger on old Meg, and you will be stretched out there by the miser's side," she menaced, and again laughing a horrible laugh, she continued:
"She murdered him, I say it again, and before twenty-four hours go over her head she shall lie in prison for her crime! Ah! she thinks her secret safe now, but barely an hour ago he told me she had been his wife in secret for a year, and that he was going there to claim her to-night!"
Stiff and stark in his last long sleep, Miser Farnham lay in his coffin awaiting burial—this was the end of his plotting and planning—his scheming and sinning.
The inquest was over, and Meg Dineheart, as chief witness, had hounded the hapless girl she hated to a terrible fate. Circumstantial evidence had pointed so strongly to Nita as the slayer of the miser, that she had been consigned to prison to await trial for murder.
There were few who could believe in the young girl's innocence, for the evidence against her was so overwhelmingly strong, and the motive for the murder so plain. And there were not lacking witnesses to prove that the girl had been desperate with despair and misery.
The Courtneys were the first to turn against her, and as witnesses they did their worst. They could tell the story from the beginning of Nita's falling in love with another man, and her fear and hatred of the miser; they could tell of the elopement, of the return, and of Nita's desperate despair and frantic grief when she learned that the miser had survived the dreadful railway accident. They could dwell with telling effect on her wickedness in encouraging Dorian's love when she was another man's wife, they could dilate on the attempted suicide in London.
All their stifled hatred of the girl who had benefited them could be aired now, and without one word of pity for her sorrows, they became old Meg's able allies in hounding her to her doom.
Even Dorian and Captain Van Hise had been compelled to give damning evidence against Nita. They had found her kneeling and then trying to escape from the murdered man's side, her dress and her hands all wet with the blood.
And there was no one else near, no one until old Meg had appeared. All the evidence given at the inquest had pointed straight to Nita's guilt, and there seemed but one extenuating circumstance—it seemed as if she must have suffered for months from emotional insanity.
In a moment of madness, enraged by the knowledge that her husband had contrived a cunning plot to expose her secret and humiliate her in the eyes of the man she madly loved, she had met the old man coming to Gray Gables, and in her blind rage sprang at him and murdered him.
The weapon had not been found, but it was decided to have been a very keen-bladed knife, and there were two wounds in the region of the heart that must either one have proved instantly fatal.
Doubtless she had thrown the knife away, although careful search had failed to find it. But that was not strange. The encroaching tide, of course, had carried it out to sea.
Only three friends rallied round her, only three hearts believed in her innocence—they were Dorian, Van Hise, and kindly Mrs. Hill. It was this only that saved her from utter heart-break.
With Dorian to believe in her still, Dorian to love her and champion her cause, there was still a little gleam of light in the awful darkness of her fate.
And Dorian, when he engaged the best lawyer in New York to defend her, had told him that he was willing to sacrifice his fortune and his life in her defense.
"Oh, sir, I am not guilty—I am not guilty!" she cried piteously, lifting her great, appealing eyes to the face of the great lawyer, as he entered her gloomy prison-cell.
"I shall prove your innocence—be sure of that," he answered kindly, and then he bade her speak to him without reserve, confiding all her story to his sympathy, that he might best judge how to defend her cause.
And Nita opened all her sad young heart freely and without reserve. From early childhood, as far back as she could remember, her home had been with old Meg, at her rude cabin by the seashore, an unwilling, ill-treated drudge, beaten and cuffed at every small rebellion of her proud spirit.
At length she grew to girlhood, and then Jack Dineheart, old Meg's son, began to persecute her with offers of marriage. She hated Jack, and at fifteen years old ran away to New York to escape his persecutions.
Providence watched over the friendless girl, and she soon found friends, poor, but kind, who took her into their shabby home, and helped her to find work.
For three years she struggled on bravely, first as a nurse-girl, then in a store, as a cash-girl. Then the good old man who, with his kind wife, had befriended her, fell sick and died. His wife, old and feeble, soon followed him to the grave.
Nita left the store to attend these sick friends, and the usual lot of the poor in a great, struggling city, fell to her share. Every penny gone, the few sticks of furniture taken for rent, she was turned into the streets, starving and friendless. She could find no work; she was too proud to beg, so she resolved to end her sorrows in the river.
"I lingered in Central Park watching the gay throngs so rich and happy, while I was starving and miserable. I had resolved not to die until sunset," she told the lawyer. "I clung to life, but I was afraid of a night in the streets of the great city, and I was too timid and ashamed to ask strangers for assistance. Then I met the old miser just as I had murmured a desperate prayer for gold. He offered to marry me, and at first I refused. But he finally told me that if I would consent he would give me a chest of gold, and draw up a marriage-contract giving me perfect liberty for one year. I consented; but, oh, sir, I was deceiving him—I never meant to live with him. I only caught at the chance of a little longer life, and luxury that I craved, but had never known."
The lawyer listened to her in the deepest pity, drawing her out with skilful questions. He thought he had never heard anything more pathetic than the story of her love for Dorian, told so frankly and sadly as though he had been her father.
"And have you no relatives, my child?" he asked, and she told him that old Meg had once said that she was cast up by the sea from a wreck, and had afterward claimed to be her grandmother.
"But I do not believe her. My heart shrinks in loathing from that wicked woman. I believe that she and Mr. Farnham knew all my past story, and all about my relatives," added Nita passionately.
"I think you are right, and I shall leave no stone unturned to ferret out the truth and punish the real murderer," said the lawyer; and when he took his leave he left a little ray of hope shining like a star in the heart of the beautiful prisoner in her lonely cell.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE OTHER CLAIMANT
The sensation was three days old before it came to Donald Kayne's knowledge. He had been out on one of his favorite yachting expeditions. Wild, restless, moody, he loved the sea, with its fierce unrest. It seemed like his own nature, restless and stormy.
He came back to New York, and, taking up a newspaper at his club, was attracted by some sensational headlines at the top of a column, and proceeded to read the whole story with breathless interest.
It came upon him like a terrible shock. Within the hour he was on his way to Pirate Beach. When he came in sight of Gray Gables, he beheld a funeral cortège moving away from its doors. Miser Farnham was being borne to the graveyard to his eternal rest, followed by old Meg Dineheart as chief mourner.
By the side of the old woman rode her son, the burly sailor who had come into port a few hours previous, and professed to be quite shocked at the news of the murder.
To several persons he professed profound regret, saying that the miser had been a lifelong friend of his mother, and had often befriended himself, having made him a present of his little fishing-bark.