CHAPTER III.

ACCUSED OF FRAUD.

“Will you bring me some roses, Italy?” Mrs. Murray asked one day, handing the girl a pretty willow basket.

She had discovered that Italy was always restless and unhappy in the house, and that she liked best to wander alone in the garden among the flowers, or down by the beach, where the great waves came rolling in with their hollow, mysterious murmur of ships gone down at sea.

Italy wandered along the graveled paths, snipping roses into her basket until it overflowed with the fragrant beauties, then she sat down to rest on a rustic bench beneath a magnificent tree.

Her lovely, pensive face grew sad even to pathos. She drew a little heart-shaped gold locket from the chain at her throat, and, unclasping the lids, gazed long and earnestly at a face within. Then she kissed it with clinging lips.

“My dearest one!” she cried passionately aloud.

An approaching step made her conceal the pretty souvenir. The intruder was Francis Murray. There was a strange expression upon his face, something of aroused interest, and, instead of passing by, he bowed and seated himself at the other end of the bench.

“She has a lover, this fair young thing. It was his face she kissed in her locket, it was of him she spoke,” he thought.

He gazed with intent and thoughtful eyes at the slender, white-gowned figure, with its dainty, curving outlines and the lovely face with its proud, dusky eyes.

The lights and shadows of the August moon shifted down through the leaves upon the purplish-dark of her rich, waving hair, and the delicate coloring of her skin, that deepened warmly under his strange gaze. Her heart fluttered with something like pain, and she rose to go.

“No, stay, Miss Vale. I wish to speak to you,” said Francis Murray, in gently imperative tones, and she paused, startled, yet half-defiant, awaiting his will. Looking straight into her face, he asked:

“Miss Vale, are you a sleep-walker?”

Startled, she answered breathlessly:

“No!”

“Are you sure?” quizzically.

“Certainly,” she answered, cresting her little dark head angrily.

“Yet,” said Francis Murray coolly, “you were in the library last night at midnight, dressed in your night-robes. You carried a small night-lamp that you placed upon my desk while you proceeded to search all its compartments that were accessible to your prying eyes. Failing in your eager search, you sighed despairingly, and left the room.”

“Impossible!” cried the girl, in something like horror. Waves of crimson went over her face at first, then it became dead white.

For answer, he held out to her a little comb of carved dead gold, crusted with rubies. He said:

“While you were searching my desk I took this from your hair without waking you. Permit me to restore it.”

She took it with trembling fingers, her face burning with mortification.

“Miss Vale, what motive was it that dominated you in your sleep, and sent you upon that fruitless quest?”

“I cannot tell you,” she faltered, drooping in her seat, her eyes hot with the tears she was too proud to let fall.

“Then I will tell _you_,” said Francis Murray sternly. “You were searching for your father’s lost diary, the one on whose disappearance so much anxiety hung during your mother’s trial for her husband’s murder.”

Her pale lips parted with a gasp, then closed again without a sound. She could only stare at him with somber, dilated dark eyes.

“I shall tell you something else, also, Miss Vale,” he continued almost angrily, his handsome face quite pale, his blue-gray eyes gleaming with repressed excitement. “I have found you out. You are not the innocent, friendless orphan you pretended when you came here. You are a beautiful little fraud, a clever schemer! No, hear me out--what I have to say.”

Had a yawning chasm opened at her very feet, Italy Vale could scarcely have been more startled and alarmed than she was at the bold accusation of Francis Murray. A smothered cry escaped her lips, and she fell back, half-fainting, in her seat, her dilated dark eyes staring wildly at her accuser, while his words seemed to ring in her ears in clarion tones:

“I have found you out. You are a beautiful little fraud, a clever schemer!”

Yet his voice, though deep and stern, had been very low. He did not wish to attract listeners.

Her stifled outcry, her alarm, looked to him like detected guilt, so that, after that stern, “You _shall_ hear what I have to say,” he went on determinedly:

“You came here, Miss Vale, with a settled purpose. You wish to find out the real murderer of your father. You suspect _me_. Your only grounds of suspicion are the simple and shallow ones that I was the only beneficiary by your parent’s death. So you came to Winthrop to watch me, to hound me down. Would to God that your wretched mother had lived to save you from this madness!”

“Madness!” echoed the pale, writhing lips of the girl.

He answered hoarsely:

“Yes, madness! You think to avenge your father’s murder. A laudable ambition, Miss Vale, but one fraught for you with inconceivable horrors, for the closer you trace the thread of damning guilt, the deeper will you blacken the memory of your dead mother.”

In her fierce anger she found voice:

“How dare you adjudge her guilty whom the law found innocent?”

Francis Murray groaned:

“I crave your pardon, Miss Vale, for filial affection always merits respect and honor. But, alas, in warning you and dissuading you from this Quixotic venture, my interest and my care are all for Ronald Vale’s daughter--for his memory and for your sake. I conjure you as a friend, let the case rest where it is. Be satisfied with the verdict of the jury--not guilty.”

“Not guilty by the jury, but guilty by the world’s verdict,” she muttered, half to herself, and in her eyes there gleamed a helpless wrath more terrible than tears.

“Will you give up this insane quest?” he demanded earnestly.

The somber eyes flashed defiantly, as she breathed:

“I have not owned to that charge, remember.”

“Yet I have been reading it in your face and actions ever since the first day you came to The Lodge.”

She lifted her dark head proudly, the angry color flaming into her lovely face again.

“So then you are my only accuser--you--and upon no evidence but your own fancy--I will not say a guilty fancy!”

She saw him wince under her intolerable sarcasm, and was bitterly glad that the poisoned dart had struck home.

He looked at her in grave displeasure for a moment, then asked pointedly:

“Do you deny my accusation?”

But Italy was ready with her answer.

“I neither deny nor acknowledge. You have made specific charges against me. It remains for you to prove them!”

But in spite of the pride of her look and tone, he saw that she was ready to burst into tears. She was barely more than a child, in spite of her keen intelligence, but she had been tutored in the hard school of experience, poor Italy. She rose from the seat, taking up the basket of flowers with trembling little hands.

“One more word--Italy!” he exclaimed, with repressed agitation, and she made an impatient pause.

“You are very angry, I know,” he said; “but, believe me, child, all I have said to you was for your own good. I know more of these past matters than you do, more than you ever shall know, if I can keep it from you. No effort of yours, poor child, can ever fasten on me the stigma of a crime of which I am innocent. Let the dead past rest. You must do so. I command you, as your father’s kinsman, as your present guardian, not to interfere with the long-pronounced verdict of the jury--and the world!”

His voice sank almost to a whisper and his face was pale as death, but the pose of the girl’s dark head spoke only defiant scorn. Her eyes met his one moment, and in their somber depths he read her frank conviction of his guilt. Then Italy left him without a word, going along the path to the house, a slim, white shape, peerless in her pride and in her beauty, the flowers carried carelessly upon her rounded arm.

Francis Murray remained some time where she had left him, with a very grave expression on his fair, handsome face. Some troubled words escaped him.

“How beautiful she is, and how wilful and defiant! Will nothing turn her from her purpose?--nothing except the confession to her of the terrible evidence against her dead mother that was withheld at the trial by a true friend for sweet pity’s sake? How could I tell her that, how stab her loyal young heart with the knowledge of her mother’s guilt? Heaven help me, I could not do it. I must find some other way to thwart her insane purpose.”

A strange restlessness had come upon the grave, self-possessed man. Over and over in his mind arose the vision of Italy in every phase in which he had seen her--Italy as she had looked the first day she came, and the days following--Italy last night searching his desk in her somnambulistic sleep--Italy to-day kissing the face in her locket with tender lips--Italy a little later, proud, sarcastic, defiant, yet beautiful in every phase.

He did not feel like returning to the house. He went around to the stable, and had his favorite horse, Rex, saddled, and rode for some time along the beach, until the soothing murmur of old ocean had calmed his restless thoughts.

Later, when he reentered his library, a little white note lay on his desk, addressed to himself, in a refined and girlish hand distinctively beautiful. He read:

“Although I have been your guest for two weeks, I have not failed to understand that I was at The Lodge merely on sufferance, an intruder treated courteously for my dead father’s sake. After what you have said to me to-day, it seems quite clear that you wish me to go away. I will not wait for you to put your desire into plainer words, but, taking the hint, go at once. I hope that you will permit my trunk to remain at The Lodge until I can make it convenient to take it away.

“Begging your pardon for having trespassed so long upon your hospitality,

“Sincerely yours, ITALY VALE.”

Pale with excitement, he burst into his mother’s presence, and thrust the note before her eyes.

“Do you know aught of this?”

She read it with startled eyes.

“Nothing--except that I saw her go out two hours ago, dressed in the plain gray costume she wore when she first came here. I thought she was going to walk by the sea, or, perhaps, for a sail with the young people. She must have gone straight to Boston.”

“To whom?” he asked.

Mrs. Murray mused a moment, then said:

“Did not Mrs. Vale’s lawyer--the only one who believed in her innocence--live in Boston? Perhaps she has gone to him.”

“Gardner, yes, there can scarcely be a doubt of it. I will follow and bring her back.”

He was turning hastily, when suddenly his mother’s hand fell on his coat-sleeve detainingly:

“Frank!”

It was his boyhood’s name. His dignified mother only called him that now in her tenderest moments. He looked back, and she said:

“Lawyer Gardner will take the best of care of the headstrong girl. Why not leave her where she is?”

“Mother!”

Unheeding his surprise, she went on:

“Believe me, it would be for the best. Frank, I have never felt well pleased with Italy’s being at The Lodge. I cannot tell you why, but ever since her coming I have been haunted by a subtle premonition that evil would result from her presence here. There is something not quite frank about her--a veiled something in her eyes that haunts and troubles me. She will bring us sorrow in some shape or form we do not foresee. Let her stay with Lawyer Gardner if she chooses. She is not dependent. Her mother left her a small income that will support her in comfort.”

There was a look in his blue-gray eyes she did not like nor understand.

“I am surprised at you, mother. The girl is our kinswoman; to Lawyer Gardner she is only the daughter of a woman who employed him to defend her against a charge of murder. She has no claim on him.”

“Nor on us,” she ventured feebly.

“Mother, you are unjust. She came to us, she claimed our protection in her orphanage, remember. And she is Ronald Vale’s daughter. Had she been a son, this noble inheritance would never have come to me. We have been cold and unsympathetic to her, both of us. By harsh words to-day I drove her from The Lodge. I shall follow and bring her back at once to a kinder home.”