Part 24 (1/2)

”Neither man on earth nor demon from h--ll shall stop me!” broke forth the man, in a voice of thunder, striding off.

In an instant Mr. Waring had intercepted him, holding up a light cane, and exclaiming:

”Stand back, you villain!”

Valentine came on with the evident intention of attempting to pa.s.s.

Mr. Waring met him with a sudden, sharp blow with his cane across the face.

And as Valentine, giddy and blinded for an instant with the blood that streamed from the cut, staggered backward, Mr. Waring, by another heavy stroke with the loaded end of the cane, felled him to the floor, and proceeded to follow up his victory with several other severe blows.

But Valentine was struggling to his feet, and at last sprang up--reeled, righted himself, cleared the blood from his eyes, glared around; and just as Mr. Waring had broken his cane with a final stroke over his shoulder, Valentine saw and seized a heavy oaken stool, and, aiming one fatal blow with all his force, struck his master in the face! The heavy leg of the oaken stool, aimed with all the strength of madness, crushed the eye--entered the brain, and Oswald Waring fell, never to rise again!

But Valentine was maddened! frenzied! and showered blows upon the dying man like one unconscious of his acts, until the agonized screams of women brought him slightly to his senses, when he found himself seized between Mrs. Waring, who was, amid her frantic shrieks, trying to pull him away, and Phaedra, who was crying, distractedly: ”Oh! Valentine, you've murdered him!”

He glared from one to the other, in the amazed, bewildered manner of one half wakened from a horrible dream; looked at the mutilated form before him; looked at the strange weapon in his hand--the foot-stool, with its legs clotted with blood and hair; and then, with a violent start, and an awful change of aspect, as if, for the first time the reality, the horror and the magnitude of his crime had burst upon his consciousness, he stood an instant, and casting the weapon from him, broke from the hands of the women, cleared the porch at a bound, rushed across the yard, leaped the fence, crossed the road and plunged into the shadows of the cypress swamp beyond.

That night, as Fannie lay on the wretched bed of her poor room, in darkness and solitude, and in the semi-delirium of fever, suddenly an apparition, like some ghastly phantom of her husband, gleamed out from the surrounding shadows, stooped over, raised her in its ghostly arms, chattered, raved wildly, incoherently, and--was lost; whether really from the room, or only from her failing consciousness, is not certain--and, indeed, how much of this scene was an actual occurrence, and how much of it was the mere phantasmagoria of frenzy, the sufferer never knew!

CHAPTER VIII.

THE APPARITION.

Ye seem to look on me with asking eyes!

Listen! and I will tell a fearful story!

Since I remember aught about myself, A strange heart sickness almost like to death, A deep remorse for some unacted crime, For some impossible, nameless wickedness, Was on me--in its prophecy I lived; No wretch dragg'd on to execution E'er felt more horrid pangs than then stirr'd up My spirit with remorseful agony.--JOHN WILSON.

Eighteen months had pa.s.sed since the murder of Oswald Waring, and yet the murderer had not been apprehended. Though, upon the night of that fatal catastrophe, both the regular and volunteer police had turned out in great numbers, and scattered themselves over the neighborhood in pursuit of the criminal; though trained sleuth-hounds had been made to smell his clothing, and had been set upon his scent; though, thus with men and dogs, the authorities had hunted him throughout the State, and had offered the largest rewards for his betrayal or apprehension, this length of time had pa.s.sed, and he had not been arrested.

Mr. Waring having died intestate, his property, according to the laws of that commonwealth, fell to the next of kin.

His childless widow inherited none of her late husband's wealth, but returned to New Orleans, and thence retired to the country, to live upon her own reserved patrimony.

The plantation fell into other hands, and the planter pa.s.sed out of memory.

Valentine, with his crime and his fate, overlaid by newer excitements, was already sinking into oblivion. He was supposed to have escaped from the State. But there were three faithful friends who knew that, in all this time, the miserable young man had never left the neighborhood, or wandered five miles from the blood-stained floor of his crime.

Phaedra was set free. The quadroons and mestizzas, with all their fiery vehemence of temperament, have perhaps less of real vital stamina than any other race. They cannot bear up under any great mental or physical pressure. Phaedra, by the terrible blow that had fallen upon her, was crushed into premature age and decrepitude. And, as a useless old crone, she was suffered by her new master to retire to a lone cabin in the pine barrens above the cypress swamp, and, without being required to work, was supplied with rations of food and clothing upon an equal footing with the plantation laborers.

But this poor Naomi, in her desolation, had also her Ruth.

Fannie had almost miraculously recovered from the yellow fever; and, in the mental imbecility that had attended her convalescence, she had been long s.h.i.+elded from the knowledge of the calamity that had fallen upon them all; and at last so gradually did the facts of the catastrophe enter her mind that she could never after say when or how she first learned the sum of her misery; and thus she was spared the sudden shock that must certainly have proved fatal to her.

No one could look upon that fragile form and thin face, with its fair, transparent pallor, and large, mournful eyes, and not know her heart was breaking.

What kept her life power going?