Murder Mask

With conflicting emotions in his faded eyes, the stooped and wrinkled butler bowed Colletti into the sun-flooded drawing-room.

"I will tell the master and mistress you are here, sir," the old servitor's cracked voice quavered, as he backed away. "I would as soon meet the Devil!" he spat and crossed himself hastily as soon as he was out of the visitor's sight. "With his hypocrite's smile and his cruel, green eyes!" He shuddered. "Ugh!"

Colletti, tall, dark, slender, prematurely graying at the temples, set his hat, gloves and stick on the nearest chair and with the lithe, slinking movements of a velvet-footed jungle beast advanced to the center table. His inscrutable gaze fastened on the gardenia in his lapel, he drew a bit of silk from the inside pocket of his coat. For a clock-tick or two he scrutinized it. Then, sucking in his breath with a reptilian hiss, he let it slip from his tapering fingers to the sun-splashed table top. It lay like a clot of blood on the polished mahogany. From a vest pocket he thumbed a rectangle of pasteboard, dog-eared and time-yellowed, which bore the badly faded, delicately penned legend:

Who wears this mask Is doomed to slay Whom he loves best, Ere break of day!

As Colletti stood, holding the worn card between his thumb and forefinger, a hideous change crept over him. The ghost of a smile playing about the corners of his thin-lipped mouth grew sardonic. His whole bearing became as deadly, as sinister, as a rattler ready to strike. Like a miasma lifting from a fen, he exuded an aura of evil that polluted the atmosphere around him and took the warmth from the sunlight.

His features grew wolfish and hardened into olive granite, while his eyes blazed feverishly, as he thought of his dead grandfather's will, that left all the eccentric importer's estate to his ward, Nita Tosca, in trust for her children, if she married either of his nephews, Antonio Colletti or Tomaso Romani, but divided the income equally among the trio if the girl remained single or married somebody else. In such a contingency, upon the demise of the last of the three, the principal was to be distributed to stipulated charities.

Nita had rejected Colletti's passionate suit and married Romani. Hiding his real feelings, Colletti had contrived to act as his cousin's best man. After the wedding, feeling cheated, nursing his wounded vanity, with hatred of the newly-weds festering in his veins, he fled to Europe. That was six months ago. Now he was back in his dead grandfather's house with a handful of silk, a frayed card, an all-consuming hate, an inexorable determination to get Nita and her husband out of the picture and----

"Tony!" A voice like the tinkling of silver bells roused Colletti from his devilish introspection.

Thrusting the card away, a quick smile driving the satanic expression from his face, he jerked around like an automaton, as a slip of a woman, blue-eyed, golden-haired, ivory-skinned, came fluttering toward him. Behind her, in the doorway, her husband paused. At first glance and to the superficial observer, he was strikingly like Colletti. Closer study of the cousins, however, brought out subtle differences. Whereas Colletti was soft, hinting of unclean, forbidden things, with the unhealthy pallor of a plant too long away from the sun, Romani was as hard as a shining rapier, as clean as the salt tang of the sea, as frank as the day itself.