Chapter 12

Before Laurence Laughton could answer, the door opened gently and Mrs. Manning entered the room. Laurence rose to greet his friend's wife, but the act was none the less a homage to her resplendent beauty. In spite of the worn look of her face, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She had tawny tigress hair and hungry tigress eyes. The eyes indeed were fathomless and indescribable, and their fitful glance had something uncanny about it. The hair was nearly of the true Venetian color, and she had the true Venetian sumptuousness of appearance, simple as was her attire. She seemed as though she had just risen from the couch whereon she reclined before Titian or Tintoretto, and, having clothed herself, had walked forth in this nineteenth century and these United States. She was a strange and striking figure, and Laurence found it impossible to analyze exactly the curious and weird impression she produced on him. Her voice, as she greeted him, gave him a peculiar thrill; and when he shook hands with her he seemed to feel himself face to face with some strange being from another land and another century. She inspired him with a supernatural awe he was not wont to feel in the presence of woman. He had a dim consciousness that there lingered in his memory the glimmering image of some woman seen somewhere, he knew not when, who was like unto the woman before him.

As she took her seat by the side of the bed, she gave Laurence Laughton a look that seemed to peer into his soul. Laurence felt himself quiver under it. It was a look to make a man fearful. Then John Manning, who had moved uneasily as his wife entered, said, "Laurence, can you see any resemblance in my wife to any one you ever saw before?"

Their eyes met again, and again Laurence had a vague remembrance as though he and she had stood face to face before in some earlier existence. Then his wandering recollections took shape, and he remembered the face and the form and the haunting mystery of the expression, and he felt for a moment as though he had been permitted to peer into the cabalistic darkness of an awful mystery, though he failed wholly to perceive its occult significance--if significance there were of any sort.

"I think I do remember," he said at last. "It was in Venice--at the church of Santa Maria Madalena--the picture there that--"

"You remember aright!" interrupted John Manning. "My wife is the living image of the Venetian woman for whose beauty Marco Manin was one day stabbed in the back with a glass stiletto and Giovanni Manin fled from the place of his birth and never saw it again. It is idle to fight against the stars in their courses. We met here in the New World, she and I, as they met in the Old World so long ago--and the end is the same. It was to be ... it was to be!"

Laurence Laughton gave a swift glance at his friend's wife to see what effect these words might have on her, and he was startled to detect on her face the same enigmatic smile which was the chief memory he had retained of the Venetian picture. Truly, the likeness between the painting and the wife of his friend was marvellous; and Laurence tried to shake off a morbid wonder whether there might be any obscure and inscrutable survival from one generation to another across the seas and across the years.

"If you remember the picture," said John Manning, "perhaps you remember the quaint goblet of Venetian glass I bought the same day?"

"Of course I do," said Larry, glad to get Manning started on a topic of talk a little less personal.

"Perhaps you know what has become of it?" asked Manning.

"I can answer 'of course' to that, too," replied Larry, "because I have it here."

"Here?"

"Here--in a little square box, in the hall," answered Larry. "I had it in my trunk, you know, when we took passage on the _Vanderbilt_ at Havre that May morning. I forgot to give it to you in the hurry of landing, and I haven't had a chance since. This is the first time I have seen you for nearly three years. I found the box this morning, and I thought you might like to have it again, so I brought it up."

John Manning rang the bell at the head of his bed. The black crone answered it, and soon returned with the little square box. Manning impatiently broke the seals and cords that bound its cover and began eagerly to release the goblet from the cotton and tissue paper in which it had been carefully swathed and bandaged. Mrs. Manning, though her moods were subtler and more intense, showed an anxiety to see the goblet quite as feverish as her husband's. In a minute the last wrapping was twisted off and the full beauty of the Venetian glass was revealed to them. Assuredly no praise was too loud for its delicate and exquisite workmanship.

"Does Mrs. Manning know the story of the goblet?" asked Larry; "has she been told of the peculiar virtue ascribed to it?"

"She has too great a fondness for the horrible and the fantastic not to have heard the story in its smallest details," said Manning.

Mrs. Manning had taken the glass in her fine, thin hands. Evidently it and its mystic legend had a morbid fascination for her. A strange light gleamed in her wondrous eyes, and Laughton was startled again to see the extraordinary resemblance between her and the picture they had looked at on the day the goblet had been bought.

"When the poison was poured into it," she said at last, with quick and restless glances at the two men, "the glass broke--then the tale was true?"

"It was a coincidence only, I'm afraid," said her husband, who had rallied and regained strength under the unwonted excitement.

Just then the old-fashioned clock on the stairs struck five. Mrs. Manning started up, holding the goblet in her hand.

"It is time for your medicine," she said.

"As you please," answered her husband wearily, sinking back on his pillow. "My wife insists on giving me every drop of my potions with her own hands. I shall not trouble her much longer, and I doubt if it is any use for her to trouble me now."

"I shall give you everything in this glass after this," she said.

"In the Venetian glass?" asked Larry.

"Yes," she said, turning on him fiercely; "why not?"

"Do you think the doctor is trying to poison me?" asked her husband.

"No, I do not think the doctor is trying to poison you," she repeated mechanically as she moved toward a little sideboard in a corner of the room. "But I shall give you all your medicines in this hereafter."

She stood at the little sideboard, with her back toward them, and she mingled the contents of various phials in the Venetian goblet. Then she turned to cross the room to her husband. As she walked with the glass in her hand there was a rift in the clouds high over the other side of the river, and the rays of the setting sun thrust themselves through the window and lighted up the glory of her hair and showed the strange gleam in her staring eyes. Another step, and the red rays fell on the Venetian glass, and it burned and glowed, and the green serpents twined about its ruby stem seemed to twist and crawl with malignant life, while their scorching eyes shot fire. Another step, and she stood by the bedside. As John Manning reached out his hand for the goblet, a tremor passed through her, her fingers clinched the fragile stem, and the glass fell on the floor and was shattered to shivers as its fellow had been shattered three centuries ago and more. She still stared steadily before her; then her lips parted, and she said, "The glass broke--the glass broke--then the tale is true!" And with one hysteric shriek she fell forward amid the fragments of the Venetian goblet, unconscious thereafter of all things.

End of Project Gutenberg's Stories by American Authors, Volume 3, by Various