Saved from herself or, On the edge of doom
“I regret having to trouble you again,” he said courteously, “but my
poor friend over there wishes a copy of his will left here with the
proprietor. He wishes to know if you will be good enough to witness it;
Dubourg also,” to the affable little proprietor.
The latter produced pen and ink from somewhere with incredible
quickness, and the dean wrote his ponderous signature with a glance at
Sir Gaspard, who seemed to sit expectant of his emissary’s return.
“The poor monsieur is of the dying,” the landlord said, as he added his
name. Wray nodded.
“I fear so,” he said. “This is to be deposited in your safe, Mr.
Dubourg,” he added, in an undertone as the man preceded him across
the room to draw out his chair at Sir Gaspard’s table. “Sealed, you
understand, and to remain there! In case you hear of Sir Gaspard’s
death you are to forward it. Otherwise, nothing is to be said about it.”
The little man bowed.
“I understand, it is for making sure,” he assented. “The poor man
leaves us to-night for Rome.”
Sir Gaspard, quite unconscious of the meaning of the proprietor’s
compassionate glance, retired almost on Wray’s return, to rest for his
journey. But that individual, whose business in Paris was finished, did
not take the mail-train for London, as he had intended. The motto of
his existence was: “Never desert your luck”--that luck of Marcus Wray
that was a proverb in the Inns of Court. To go back to London and dream
of a golden future would be to act like a fool; many a dying man had
lived to laugh at his heirs, and so might this one.
A prescience that the time was heavy with fate bade the lawyer not lose
sight of the invalid. Instead of going to London, his cab was just
behind Sir Gaspard’s on the way to the station. His last act before
leaving the hotel had been to deposit his sealed document in Monsieur
Dubourg’s safe. On bad news it was to be at once forwarded to Sir
Gaspard’s solicitors in London.
As the southern train rushed on through the night, Sir Gaspard,
sleepless on his comfortable bed, never dreamed that in the very last
carriage of the train his acquaintance of the morning slept the sleep
of the unjust, that is sounder than any.
The last carriage--truly there was something in that famous luck of
Marcus Wray! For as the pale light of dawn grew in the east something
happened; what, there was hardly time to say. Only a jar, a crash;
then for most people on that train a great void, a blotting out. The
train had left the track; the engine was down an embankment; all the
carriages but the very last a sickening, telescoped mass of shapeless
wood.
In that last carriage Marcus Wray was flung on the floor from a sound
sleep. The lamp had gone out, in the dark a woman screamed, and the
sharp sound brought back his senses. The train was wrecked!
With a quickness beyond belief he was on his feet, had slipped between
his struggling fellow passengers, and out the window, his narrow
shoulders doing him good service.
“Sir Gaspard--the will!”
He ran frantically along the track, passing the dead and dying,
thrusting a woman out of his way with brutal fingers. There was light
now beside the coming dawn, the light of burning carriages; and from
the reeking mass came sounds to turn a man sick, who had time to listen.
This man with unerring instinct found the carriage in which he had been
too poor to travel; it was to be entered now without paying his fare,
for the whole side of it gaped.
In the light of its burning roof he dragged at a heap that looked like
clothing, but he knew that ten minutes since it had been living men.
He lifted with all his strength, and dragged off the first figure of
the mass. As if he were searching for one he loved, he turned the face
to the light.
A dead man--a stranger in a fur coat! He dropped the bleeding head as
if it were but stone.
The next? He panted as he tugged, for the dead are heavy, and the heat
was scorching. This was a man, too, with his arms round another in a
last instinctive protection. Parker--and he had given his life for his
master! For the servant’s brains oozed warm under the lifting hands.
Try as he might, Marcus Wray could not loosen the arms that were
around that inert figure that had been Gaspard le Marchant! Was he
dead--living? He could not tell.
The heat was scorching the searcher as he dragged the two that lay
clasped so close from the burning carriage together. In its light
he knelt down beside them, gasping for breath in the cold dawn. Sir
Gaspard’s face was hidden on the breast of his faithful servant. As
a man who seeks a friend, Wray turned it toward him, tenderly, never
forgetting that anywhere in that dreadful place there might be watchful
eyes upon him.
In spite of his caution, his breath came in a great sigh of relief.
Sir Gaspard le Marchant lay with closed eyes and stilled heart, his
face uninjured, his clothes scarcely disordered, only something in that
strange machine we call a body out of gear forever.
“Dead!” the man breathed it softly in the light of the flaming
carriages, but if he had shrieked it to the sky above him it could not
have sounded louder in his own ears. The sound brought back his caution.
His long fingers groped deftly in the breast pocket of Sir Gaspard’s
coat, and the luck of Marcus Wray lay in his hand!
The man was drunk with his success as he turned away. This will need
never appear. When the news of Sir Gaspard’s death was telegraphed to
Paris an hour later Dubourg would forward his will to Bolton & Carey.
Marcus Wray would be out of the transaction, except for being the
lawyer employed by chance.
Now, the sooner he was out of this the better. He turned away, careless
whether the dead were out of the way of the fire or not. Sir Gaspard
living, had served him well; Sir Gaspard dead, might burn or be buried.
It was all one to Marcus Wray.
CHAPTER IX.
“I WILL POSSESS HIM OR DIE.”
Ismay Trelane stood alone in the great hall at Marchant’s Hold,
immaculately dressed in tight-fitting, dark-green cloth that showed
every curve of her slim body and seemed reflected in her strange eyes.
Her cheeks for once were flushed, and there was a curious light in
the glance that she swept deliberately over the luxury around her and
finally let rest on her own reflection in the old mirror that hung over
the wide fireplace.
“All this for one girl!” she whispered. The scarlet of her lips paled
with the tight pressure that drew them together. “And she has had it
all her life! If I had had one-tenth of it and been brought up like
her with white frocks in summer and good warm serge in winter, I might
have been quite--a nice girl!” She laughed at her own image in the new
clothes bought with Sir Gaspard’s money. But though she laughed, her
heart was not merry. She had seen too much that morning of how rich and
respectable people lived.
She had risen as early as she dared, too restless to stay in bed,
and made a slow, careful progress through the big house, fresh from
the housemaid’s dusters. The carpets, the silver, the carvings and
tapestries, all so solid, so different from those flimsy London
furnishings that had been her nearest approach to luxury, made her
close her white teeth hard together. They had the same blood in their
veins, Cristiane le Marchant and she, and the one had lived like this,
while the other--Ismay sickened at the thought of her own neglected,
hungry girlhood, that the price of one Turkey carpet might have made at
least bearable.
“It isn’t fair,” she thought hotly, “but it’s the way they manage the
world. And now I have a chance the world shall pay me all it owes.
Shabby clothes that were too tight,” she checked off her list on her
fingers airily, “one-quarter enough to eat, chilblains--I shall charge
a good price for chilblains”--remembering her swollen purple fingers
and her shame of them; “hateful girls who sneered at my stockings and
the holes in them--they were generally all holes--and a mother who did
not care whether I was alive or dead so that I was out of her way.
I have all that to make up to myself, and I will do it with--Miles
Cylmer.”
She started; she had all but spoken his name aloud, and standing behind
her fresh as day was Cristiane le Marchant. Ismay’s veiled glance took
her in swiftly. Her tailor-made serge was not new, but it looked as if
she wore it every day; not like Ismay’s own, as if it were a new thing
to be well dressed at breakfast.
“They told me you were down, so I hurried,” Cristiane said quickly. “I
was afraid you might be starving, and I did not think you would ring
for breakfast.”
“I always got up early at school,” said Ismay, her voice light and
hard; “but I dare say I shall get over it. Mother is tired; she said I
was to ask you if she might breakfast up-stairs.”
“Of course; I’ll send it up,” Cristiane said absently. “Come along and
we’ll have ours,” linking her arm through the slender one that was as
strong as steel, and never dreaming that Mrs. Trelane’s daughter had
rejoiced exceedingly that a bad night had reduced her mother’s temper
and complexions to an unpresentable state.
They had been two weeks at Marchant’s Hold, and never till now had
Mrs. Trelane left the two girls together. It was not safe, while Ismay
had that mad freak in her head about Cylmer, of Cylmer’s Ferry. A
chance word, a too hard-pressed question, might in those early days
have turned Cristiane’s growing liking for mother and daughter into
jealous distrust--that liking on which their safety and peace depended.
Mrs. Trelane worked harder to gain this one girl’s affection than she
had ever done for that of all the men who had loved her. With almost
superhuman cleverness she had warded off all mention of Cylmer’s name,
for who knew what wild thing Ismay might say? Mrs. Trelane felt chilly
as she remembered the ring of the girl’s voice that first day at
Marchant’s Hold.
“If he belonged to all the saints in heaven, he should come to me at
the end.”
It was no echo of her own voice, nor of Mrs. Trelane’s, and it made her
shiver.
But this morning neuralgia made her forgetful; a chance sight some days
since of some words in Cristiane’s letter to her father left to dry on
the library table had soothed her soul to peace. She turned comfortably
to sleep in her warm bed up-stairs, careless that Ismay was at last
alone with her hostess.
Cristiane was almost hidden behind the high silver urn and the tea and
coffee-pots. Ismay, as she began to drink her coffee, moved her chair
so that she could see the lovely face under its crown of gold-red hair.
She waited till Thomas, the old butler, had supplied her with hot cakes
and cold game, and taken himself silently out of the room. Then she
laughed as she caught Cristiane’s eye.
“It is rather different from school here,” she observed frankly. “Do
you think I might come and pinch you to see if you’re real?”
“Indeed I don’t,” retorted Miss Le Marchant. “But I don’t see why you
didn’t like school. I found lessons with a governess very dull. Don’t
you miss the girls?”
Ismay made a mental review of them; ugly, bad-mannered, eager to curry
favors with the principal by carrying tales of the girl whose bills
were unpaid.
“I hated them,” she returned candidly. “You would have, too. Some of
them had warts on their hands and dropped their h’s.”
“Oh, don’t!” Cristiane gave a little shriek, and covered her ears. “Why
did you stay there?”
Ismay caught the truth on her lips and kept it back.
“We had no money for a better school; mother never knew how horrid it
was,” she said quietly. “The nastiest thing about it was that all the
first class were in love with some dreadful man or other; one used to
be wild about the postman. I hate men.”