They stood face to face, the pair, and just for a moment Italy’s eyes sank to the cool, blue-tiled floor, with its litter of white fur rugs. Then she looked up and met Francis Murray’s gaze. Suddenly her breath came in a quick gasp, she trembled strangely, and her lips, that had parted to speak, closed again without a sound. She was stirred in a new and subtile fashion she could not comprehend. It was the magnetic influence of manly beauty and power combined upon a young girl’s heart.
Francis Murray was a large man, with a most attractive personality. He was fair without being strictly blond, his splendid eyes were blue-gray, with a sweet, serious look, his brow was white and square, his nose straight, his face oval with a firm chin, and full, sweet lips shaded by a drooping mustache of silky golden-brown. His hair a few shades darker, clustered in short, wavy masses to a grandly shaped head. He was past the early flush of youth, and looked thirty years old, perhaps a trifle more.
On his side Francis Murray was gazing on a type of beauty entirely distinct from his own, and quite as captivating, but thirty years, and perhaps a store of experience, had made him unimpressionable. His fine eyes expressed only surprise and courteous inquiry as he spoke:
“My name is Francis Murray, Miss----”
“Vale--Italy Vale,” answered the girl, and she saw him start ever so slightly as he motioned to a chair.
“Will you be seated, Miss Vale?”
Italy was trembling strangely; she was glad to accept the courtesy. Then she lifted up her eyes to him and continued in her sweet, liquid voice with its distinctly foreign accent:
“Perhaps my name is familiar to you, Mr. Murray. My father was your kinsman--Ronald Vale.”
“Ah-h!” cried Francis Murray.
He half-started from the chair into which he had gracefully flung himself; his handsome face grew slightly pale. Before he could speak, the low voice went on musically:
“You have a mother, sir, have you not?”
“Yes,” he replied coldly.
“And I, sir, am doubly orphaned. I--I--have--lost--my--dear-- mother----” her voice shook painfully, and her lashes fell, perhaps to crush back rising tears.
He interrupted, in surprise:
“Mrs. Vale is dead! When?”
But the girl was sobbing hysterically in her handkerchief. Some broken words escaped her lips--words of entreaty that he would not question her yet, while her sorrow was so fresh, so new.
He was silent, respecting her grief, but his face was a study, it was so thoughtful, so perturbed.
Italy looked up at him again presently, the bright tears beading her black curly lashes, her lips tremulous.
“When I lost my mother I had--no kinspeople in the world but you,” she sobbed. “Mama had once--told me about you--and--your mother, so I thought I ought to come--home to you two. I call it home, you see, although I was born in Italy and bear that name. But I am an American, after all, you know, and my heart turned to my father’s old home. Was I wrong to come, or--may I stay?”
He sat speechless, staring at her in blank, appalled silence. In some fashion, although it was a far-distant relationship, this girl was akin to him, but--he was one of those who believed in her mother’s guilt. It made his heart freeze to her child.
“May I stay?” she repeated, in a pathetic voice, seconded by great, appealing dark eyes.
“Miss Vale, I must consult my mother first,” he answered bruskly, in spite of himself, and hurriedly left the room.
Italy waited, her slender hands locked together in her lap, her dark eyes gazing through the windows at the restless sea, her face pale, her lips compressed in a scarlet line. Her kinsman’s cold manner had chilled her like ice. She waited a long time, it seemed to her, then the door opened softly and a woman came in--a woman of fifty, with the traces of former beauty still remaining, tall, slight, and distingué as a duchess. She held out an aristocratic hand sparkling with gems.
“So you are Ronald Vale’s daughter? Welcome to The Lodge,” she said courteously, but with a frosty tone that did not escape Italy’s sensitive hearing.
But she bowed with as thoroughbred an air as madam’s own, and presented the tips of her small, cold fingers.
“My son has told me,” continued the sweet, chilly voice, “that your mother is dead, leaving you alone and friendless in the world. You were right to come to us. Your father was my cousin, although a very distant one. I was a Vale before my marriage. You resemble your father very much.”
With those few words Italy Vale was received as a member of the Murray family. There was no attempt at cordiality, no exuberant welcome. She understood clearly that, inasmuch as she had thrust herself upon the Murrays, they accepted the unwelcome charge through a sense of duty, mixed with highbred courtesy.
Soon she stood alone in the luxurious guest-chamber Mrs. Murray had assigned her after promising to have her small amount of luggage brought from the station at once.
Mrs. Murray herself showed Italy her room, and, lingering a moment, said:
“We have some Boston friends staying in the house--the Misses Audenreid, Alys and Alexie, twin sisters, and their aunt, a young widow--also two young men, Ralph Allen and Emmett Harlow. They are all very pleasant people, and I hope you will get on with them. I will go now and send my maid to assist you.”
The door closed, and Italy was alone with her own thoughts.
“It was easy--so far!” she mused. “God grant me success in my mission!” then the dark eyes suddenly dimmed. “But, oh, how I miss you, my dearest one,” she sighed.
Down-stairs there was a little flutter of excitement among the guests, who had learned from Mrs. Murray of the advent of the orphan girl, who would from henceforth be a member of the household.
Alexie Audenreid and Ralph Allen laughed, but Alys frowned at the news. It was an open secret to all that Alys was setting her cap at the master of the house, and that she was jealous of every possible rival.
She was bent on captivating the wary heart of the grave, handsome host, and in this ambition she was encouraged by her dashing aunt, Mrs. Dunn, who, by the way, was not a widow, as Mrs. Murray had said, but a divorcee. She always spoke of herself as a widow, however, and her friends very kindly supported the little fiction. Truth to tell, Mrs. Murray rather seconded the designs of Alys.
She disliked to see Francis growing into a bachelor past thirty, with no particular interest in the fair sex, indeed with a soupçon of cynical indifference toward it. She wished him to marry, and Alys Audenreid, only twenty years old, pretty, and with a neat fortune, seemed a very suitable match.
Alexie was already engaged to Ralph Allen, and the twin sisters had always planned to be married on the same night.
The wedding-day was set for January, so Alys would have to hasten the wooing of the laggard lover.
Into this coterie of friends, with their selfish aims and desires, Italy Vale had now entered, a jarring, unwelcome element. What would be the outcome of it all?
A week had passed--a month it seemed to the lonely girl who felt herself an alien to those by whom she was surrounded.
To Francis Murray, the man who possessed such a peculiar interest for Italy, she was almost as much a stranger as on the first day she came.
“He avoids me, courteously, yet palpably,” she said to herself bitterly. “But no wonder. It is his guilty conscience. The daughter’s presence is a reminder of the parents whom he wronged. Oh, Heaven, can it be true that this noble-looking man is the criminal I suspect, whom I have vowed to hunt down? But who else was there to profit by my father’s death?” and she watched Francis Murray with a painful intensity, till she grew to know almost every expression of the thoughtful, handsome face that was so grave and cold whenever it turned to her, the girl who had thrust herself upon his care.
Almost the first day of her coming, Mrs. Murray had said to her almost apologetically:
“My son is very quiet and studious. You must not expect him to be very cordial. It is not his way. He likes best to be left alone in his library among his books.”
“I shall not intrude upon him, madam,” the girl answered almost haughtily, and her footsteps never strayed near the beautiful room where she had first met the gaze of the startled, blue-gray eyes of Francis Murray.
She quite understood the delicate hint that she was to keep out of his way. But she did not believe that it was not his way to be cordial. She noticed him with the others. She saw that he could unbend from his grave dignity to jest and laugh with them.
Italy soon found out that Alys Audenreid adored her host. She owned to herself that it was not strange. There was a fascination about this man that made itself felt even without effort of his own.
“I, too, could admire him, but for my terrible suspicions,” she owned to herself, with unwilling candor.
The days went by, and it seemed as if, after all, she might win a few friends in the household. Ralph Allen and Alexie, his pretty fiancée, were kind to her, and soon she found that Emmett Harlow was often at her side, his clear blue eyes expressing a very decided admiration for the handsome stranger. He had a kind heart, and he tried to make up to her for the coldness of the others.
“You must not mind Alys,” he said. “She is jealous of every pretty face that comes under the eyes of Francis Murray, and as for her aunt, she is spiteful because there is a man she likes very much, and she is afraid he will fall in love with you when he comes here next week.”
“He is coming here, then?” she asked, without much interest in the subject, so dull are we when Fate knocks at our doors.
“Oh, yes, he is a particular friend of the Murrays, and a member of our yacht-club--a Bostonian when he is at home, but something of a rover and Bohemian in his tastes. Mrs. Dunn has been in love with him for years, and I do believe he has promised to marry her, only the marrying never comes off, nobody just knows why. Maybe he don’t like it the way she throws herself at his head. Well, you’ll see them together next week, and can judge for yourself. But don’t permit him to make love to you, or she is quite capable of scratching your black eyes out.”
“I shall not enter the lists for her lover’s smiles,” Italy answered coldly, and she felt so little interested that she did not even ask his name. What did she care for the men or women here, save only to find out that for which she had come--the secret, silent purpose that swayed her in remaining the unwelcome guest at The Lodge.
“I have been here a week. It seems like months, but I am no nearer the clue I came to seek,” she sighed. “Oh, that I could find my father’s missing diary--the gold-clasped book--whose contents he guarded so jealously even from my mother’s eyes! She believed that its contents might throw some possible light upon the mystery of his death. What became of that volume? Did my father hide it away before he died, or did the murderer destroy it? My father always kept it in that very desk before which I found Francis Murray sitting the day I came here first--the very desk, the very library where my parent met his tragic death, and which I am tacitly forbidden to enter. Oh, how can that man bear to sit there day by day among his books? I hate him, oh, I hate him!” and she burst into tears.
It chafed her almost to fury, the cold indifference of this man. She repaid it in kind by silent scorn, but beneath it all her heart burned like fire, yearned to punish him, to prove him guilty of that which she suspected.
She did not know that Francis Murray watched her always with a painful interest, and that he had told Mrs. Murray one day that he was glad Italy resembled her father more than her mother. Mrs. Murray had agreed with him, and added:
“She had the face of an angel, but I shudder when I think of those dazzling, dark-blue eyes with their long, curling lashes, and that exquisite face in its framing of golden-brown locks. How beautiful she was, and how wicked! How could she die with her sin unconfessed and not even repented?”
“Italy will tell you nothing of her death?” he asked.
“Nothing. The mere mention of her mother’s death throws her into such agonies of hysterical grief that I am forced to avoid the subject entirely. But it is evident that she loved her far more than she ever deserved!”
