She stopped at that last word, and pointed suddenly over Fabio’s shoulder.
“The Yellow Mask!” she exclaimed. “Oh, sir, draw her away into the ballroom, and give Nanina a chance of getting out!”
Fabio turned directly, and approached the Mask, who, as they looked at each other, slowly retreated before him. The waiting-woman, seeing the yellow figure retire, hastened back to Nanina in the refreshment-room.
Slowly the masked woman retreated from one apartment to another till she entered a corridor brilliantly lighted up and beautifully ornamented with flowers. On the right hand this corridor led to the ballroom; on the left to an ante-chamber at the head of the palace staircase. The Yellow Mask went on a few paces toward the left, then stopped. The bright eyes fixed themselves as before on Fabio’s face, but only for a moment. He heard a light step behind him, and then he saw the eyes move. Following the direction they took, he turned round, and discovered Nanina, wrapped up in the old cloak which was to enable her to get downstairs unobserved.
“Oh, how can I get out? how can I get out?” cried the girl, shrinking back affrightedly as she saw the Yellow Mask.
“That way,” said Fabio, pointing in the direction of the ballroom. “Nobody will notice you in the cloak; it will only be thought some new disguise.” He took her arm as he spoke, to reassure her, and continued in a whisper, “Don’t forget to-morrow.”
At the same moment he felt a hand laid on him. It was the hand of the masked woman, and it put him back from Nanina.
In spite of himself, he trembled at her touch, but still retained presence of mind enough to sign to the girl to make her escape. With a look of eager inquiry in the direction of the mask, and a half suppressed exclamation of terror, she obeyed him, and hastened away toward the ballroom.
“We are alone,” said Fabio, confronting the gleaminng black eyes, and reaching out his hand resolutely toward the Yellow Mask. “Tell me who you are, and why you follow me, or I will uncover your f ace, and solve the mystery for myself.”
The woman pushed his hand aside, and drew back a few paces, but never spoke a word. He followed her. There was not an instant to be lost, for just then the sound of footsteps hastily approaching the corridor became audible.
“Now or never,” he whispered to himself, and snatched at the mask.
His arm was again thrust aside; but this time the woman raised her disengaged hand at the same moment, and removed the yellow mask.
The lamps shed their soft light full on her face.
It was the face of his dead wife.
CHAPTER IV.
SIGNOR ANDREA D’ARBINO, searching vainly through the various rooms in the palace for Count Fabio d’Ascoli, and trying as a last resource, the corridor leading to the ballroom and grand staircase, discovered his friend lying on the floor in a swoon, without any living creature near him. Determining to avoid alarming the guests, if possible, D’Arbino first sought help in the antechamber. He found there the marquis’s valet, assisting the Cavaliere Finello (who was just taking his departure) to put on his cloak.
While Finello and his friend carried Fabio to an open window in the antechamber, the valet procured some iced water. This simple remedy, and the change of atmosphere, proved enough to restore the fainting man to his senses, but hardly–as it seemed to his friends–to his former self. They noticed a change to blankness and stillness in his face, and when he spoke, an indescribable alteration in the tone of his voice.
“I found you in a room in the corridor,” said D’Arbino. “What made you faint? Don’t you remember? Was it the heat?”
Fabio waited for a moment, painfully collecting his ideas. He looked at the valet, and Finello signed to the man to withdraw.
“Was it the heat?” repeated D’Arbino.
“No,” answered Fabio, in strangely hushed, steady tones. “I have seen the face that was behind the yellow mask.”
“Well?”
“It was the face of my dead wife.”
“Your dead wife!”
“When the mask was removed I saw her face. Not as I remember it in the pride of her youth and beauty–not even as I remember her on her sick-bed–but as I remember her in her coffin.”
“Count! for God’s sake, rouse yourself! Collect your thoughts–remember where you are–and free your mind of its horrible delusion.”
“Spare me all remonstrances; I am not fit to bear them. My life has only one object now–the pursuing of this mystery to the end. Will you help me? I am scarcely fit to act for myself.”
He still spoke in the same unnaturally hushed, deliberate tones. D’Arbino and Finello exchanged glances behind him as he rose from the sofa on which he had hitherto been lying.
“We will help you in everything,” said D’Arbino, soothingly. “Trust in us to the end. What do you wish to do first?”
“The figure must have gone through this room. Let us descend the staircase and ask the servants if they have seen it pass.”
(Both D’Arbino and Finello remarked that he did not say her.)
They inquired down to the very courtyard. Not one of the servants had seen the Yellow Mask.
The last resource was the porter at the outer gate. They applied to him; and in answer to their questions he asserted that he had most certainly seen a lady in a yellow domino and mask drive away, about half an hour before, in a hired coach.
“Should you remember the coachman again?” asked D’Arbino.
“Perfectly; he is an old friend of mine.”
“And you know where he lives?”
“Yes; as well as I know where I do.”
“Any reward you like, if you can get somebody to mind your lodge, and can take us to that house.”
In a few minutes they were following the porter through the dark, silent streets. “We had better try the stables first,” said the man. “My friend, the coachman, will hardly have had time to do more than set the lady down. We shall most likely catch him just putting up his horses.”
The porter turned out to be right. On entering the stable-yard, they found that the empty coach had just driven into it.
“You have been taking home a lady in a yellow domino from the masquerade?” said D’Arbino, putting some money into the coachman’s hand.
“Yes, sir; I was engaged by that lady for the evening–engaged to drive her to the ball as well as to drive her home.”
“Where did you take her from?”
“From a very extraordinary place–from the gate of the Campo Santo burial-ground.”
During this colloquy, Finello and D’Arbino had been standing with Fabio between them, each giving him an arm. The instant the last answer was given, he reeled back with a cry of horror.
“Where have you taken her to now?” asked D’Arbino. He looked about him nervously as he put the question, and spoke for the first time in a whisper.
“To the Campo Santo again,” said the coachman.
Fabio suddenly drew his arms out of the arms of his friends, and sank to his knees on the ground, hiding his face. From some broken ejaculations which escaped him, it seemed as if he dreaded that his senses were leaving him, and that he was praying to be preserved in his right mind.
“Why is he so violently agitated?” said Finello, eagerly, to his friend.
“Hush!” returned the other. “You heard him say that when he saw the face behind the yellow mask, it was the face of his dead wife?”
“Yes. But what then?”
“His wife was buried in the Campo Santo.”
CHAPTER V.
OF all the persons who had been present, in any capacity, at the Marquis Melani’s ball, the earliest riser on the morning after it was Nanina. The agitation produced by the strange events in which she had been concerned destroyed the very idea of sleep. Through the hours of darkness she could not even close her eyes; and, as soon as the new day broke, she rose to breathe the early morning air at her window, and to think in perfect tranquillity over all that had passed since she entered the Melani Palace to wait on the guests at the masquerade.
On reaching home the previous night, all her other sensations had been absorbed in a vague feeling of mingled dread and curiosity, produced by the sight of the weird figure in the yellow mask, which she had left standing alone with Fabio in the palace corridor. The morning light, however, suggested new thoughts. She now opened the note which the young nobleman had pressed into her hand, and read over and over again the hurried pencil lines scrawled on the paper. Could there be any harm, any forgetfulness of her own duty, in using the key inclosed in the note, and keeping her appointment in the Ascoli gardens at ten o’clock? Surely not–surely the last sentence he had written, “Believe in my truth and honor, Nanina, for I believe implicitly in yours,” was enough to satisfy her this time that she could not be doing wrong in listening for once to the pleading of her own heart. And besides, there in her lap lay the key of the wicket-gate. It was absolutely necessary to use that, if only for the purpose of giving it back safely into the hand of its owner.