Saved from herself or, On the edge of doom
wronged them, mother and daughter?
The old man coughed irritably as he sat in the library at Marchant’s
Hold, where Sir Gaspard had written that fateful letter to Helen
Trelane. Miles Cylmer, who sat there, too, as Sir Gaspard’s old friend
had a right, rose suddenly and aroused the old lawyer from his thoughts.
The library door was opening; the hour had come for Cristiane le
Marchant; from now, good or bad, gentlewoman or adventuress, Helen
Trelane held her fate to mold at her will.
And Cristiane came in first, slowly, reluctantly, as if to hear the
wishes of her father, who had been her all, cut her to the heart, now
that she would hear his voice no more. Ismay, her head held high as she
saw Miles Cylmer without seeming even to let her eyes rest on his face,
followed close behind. Last came the woman whom both the men standing
up to receive distrusted and despised.
Calm, pale, handsome, Mrs. Trelane swept in, and read nothing friendly
in those waiting faces.
Well, they would read the will! And then there would be the world to
face again for Helen Trelane.
There was not even a flicker of her lowered eyelids as she sat down.
There would be no use in begging for mercy from men like these. She was
ready for dismissal, as a man who has lost all is ready for death. Mr.
Bolton, anxious to get his work over and be done, opened the envelope
containing the two foolscap pages that Gaspard le Marchant had never
signed. As he read, the silence of death was in the room.
The world was going round dizzily to Mrs. Trelane as she listened.
She, who sat there sick and hopeless, without a penny, was to have
the sole guardianship of Cristiane till she was twenty-one; was to be
allowed five hundred pounds a year for her life, to be shared with
her daughter; was--her heart fairly turned over in her breast as the
next clause came out--to be sole inheritrix if Cristiane were to die
unmarried, or without children, and in that case everything would be
Ismay’s in the end.
She tried to speak, but there was only a queer little sound in her
throat; and opposite her, in her pride and triumph, sat Miles Cylmer,
who last night had insulted her when she was in despair. A hand of
steel clutched her arm at the thought.
“Don’t look like that!” Ismay’s furious whisper was low in her ear, as
the lawyer went on reading unimportant clauses as to legacies to old
servants. “Play your game! Be careful!”
No one else heard the words, or knew even that the girl had spoken.
Mrs. Trelane, with the paleness of death on her face, sat without
moving, as quiet and apparently as calm as when she entered the room.
Yet her heart was beating madly.
“Safety, luxury, power!” it pounded in her ear. “Yours, all yours. A
dead past, a living present! No more duns, no more striving.” In sheer
terror, lest she should scream aloud in her joyful relief, lest it
should be written on her face that Gaspard le Marchant was no more to
her than a dead dog, Ismay tightened her warning hand till sheer pain
brought her mother to her senses.
Once more the girl’s wits had been her salvation. As the lawyer
finished the short will and sat looking quietly at the neat sheets,
wherein he and Miles Cylmer were executors with the woman whose past
they knew, Mrs. Trelane rose to her feet. Her ghastly pallor, her
statuesque quiet, were magnificent as she faced them, only her eyes
were not on theirs. “Cristiane,” she said very gently, “this has
surprised me, and you, too! If you do not want me to live here and try
to make you happy, say so. And Mr. Bolton can perhaps make some other
arrangement.”
Both men gasped stupidly in their amazement. The lawyer’s distrust of
her was already shaken--it vanished utterly at her words. Cylmer could
have killed her for daring to speak and propose what she knew could not
be done. And yet, as his eyes fell on Ismay, he could not help feeling
relief at the knowledge that she was not to be turned out as she had
foreseen.
In the silence Cristiane spoke between her sobs.
“No, no! Daddy wished it,” she cried out. “Oh, don’t go! I have no one
else, and I--I’m so lonely.”
She crossed swiftly to where the elder woman stood waiting, and flung
her arms round her neck, where she stood faintly redolent of the
peach-blossom which had sickened Miles Cylmer as she entered.
“You won’t leave me! I would die without you and Ismay! Ismay, who is
like my sister already.” Cristiane pleaded imploringly, and at the
sight of her young innocence, as she clung to the woman, it was not
in human nature that either of the men who looked on should repress a
start. Cylmer kept down a furious word, somehow, but he could not keep
from making a long step toward Cristiane, even though he knew he had no
right to tear her from the woman she clasped so closely.
Yet some one else was more sick than he at the sight, though Helen
Trelane was her own mother. A touch gentle as velvet, more compelling
than steel, somehow had drawn Cristiane a yard away.
“Hush, dear!” Ismay said softly. “Everything shall be as you say. But
let Mr. Bolton talk a little to mother.”
She did not hold the girl; her touch was scarcely more innocent of
evil than her mother’s; and at the sharp flash of gratitude in Miles
Cylmer’s eyes her own were lowered angrily.
“I suppose the will stands!” Mrs. Trelane was saying gently.
“H’m! Yes--yes--of course!” Mr. Bolton returned. “If Cristiane did
not approve I suppose it could be put in chancery and guardians
appointed”--in his heart knowing it impossible.
“But I do approve!” Cristiane cried imperiously. “It is what daddy
wanted, and what I wish, too. I will not have his will questioned in
courts.”
All the wilfulness she had from her mother awoke in her; she looked at
the old lawyer with cried-out eyes that yet were steady.
“You are sure, Cristiane?” Cylmer said sternly.
“Sure!”--with a flash of her spirit.
“You hear her?” Mrs. Trelane, gentle still, spoke to Mr. Bolton. “You
know that I stay, by her wish, not my own.”
“By her wish!” he returned mechanically.
“And the will!” Miles Cylmer murmured sarcastically, knowing she was
safe in her magnanimity, her self-forgetfulness, since no court in
England would doubt that clear will.
“Then I will stay.” With a little sigh, as if she had been seeking
the right path, and at last found it, Mrs. Trelane moved nearer to
Cristiane; not very near, for somehow Ismay stood between them, her
eyes, that only her mother could see, blazing green with warning.
She lowered them as her mother stood back, and was no longer between
her mother and the two men, and so did not see Mrs. Trelane for the
first time look full at Miles Cylmer.
She had reason, since last evening, to hate him, yet it was not her
dislike that made him grow so pale.
The merciless triumph in her hard blue eyes, whence a veil seemed to
have been lifted, the cold derision which said plainly, “Where are your
threats now?” troubled him more than the undying enmity that he saw on
her face. What would come to Cristiane in the hands of a woman like
this, who could act gentleness and magnanimity at one minute, and the
next show the true colors of an adventuress who has outwitted her enemy?
Would she use her power to forbid him the house? Very likely, after
last night’s mad attempt to stay the tide of fate with a straw!
“She will have her work cut out to do it,” he reflected, the muscles
round his mouth very set and grim. He moved quickly toward Cristiane.
“You will let me come and see you sometimes,” he said very low, “even
now that you have new friends?”
For he was sore and smarting that the girl who knew he loved her, who
had known him all her life, had never even given him a look since she
entered the room.
She looked at him now indifferently.
“If you care to come over, please do”--her voice quite cold and level.
“You will let me do anything I can for you--you know I am always at
your service.”
Cristiane’s lip curled, ever so faintly. If he were always at her
service, why had he never come, never written, when the dreadful news
was known? The new friends that he grudged her were more faithful than
the old, very surely! When she had wanted comfort it was not Miles
Cylmer who had given it.
“I don’t think I want anything now,” she said proudly, never dreaming
of how he had tried to do his best for her. “But, of course, come when
you please.”
She went quietly forward to speak to Mr. Bolton, and for a moment
Cylmer stood silent, sick at heart, though he had made his point, and
the door of Marchant’s Hold was not shut to him. Ismay’s eyes were deep
and green as she watched his face; he had made a point for her, too.
“He will come to see Cristiane,” she thought triumphantly; “he shall
stay to see me!” She had no longer any fear lest her mother should
be connected in his mind with that missing photograph. She was too
different in her decorous black from the white-gowned, bare-armed woman
of the picture.
She beckoned Cylmer close to her with a little backward motion of her
head. “Make it up with mother,” she said under her breath, Cylmer’s
broad shoulders shielding her from the others. “She will never really
forgive you, but she will pretend to.”
Cylmer nodded.
“And you?” he said uncomfortably.
Ismay’s eyes met his, and for once they were true.
“I am going to take care of Cristiane.” She little knew of all she
meant when she spoke; of the days of watching, the nights of fear; but
long after Miles Cylmer, remembering this day, knew that in her fashion
she had kept her word.
CHAPTER XIV.
MORE TREACHERY.
“Do you think I should have a crape veil?” Mother and daughter sat
alone in the comfortable sitting-room that was Ismay’s own, when a
week had passed after the reading of the will and their security was
no longer a matter for ceaseless, exulting discussion. Around both of
them lay a wild confusion of dressmakers’ patterns, bits of black stuff
of all sorts, sketches of gowns which had been, till now, only dreams
of Ismay Trelane. Yet she pushed them suddenly off her lap and yawned
listlessly. A whole week had gone by without a sign of Cylmer; and yet
she knew he had patched up a hollow truce with her mother.
“Oh, I wish I knew if he were in love with Cristiane,” she mused
moodily. “I could do more.”
“Do listen, Ismay, and don’t look so sulky!” Mrs. Trelane said smartly.
“Do you think I had better have a crape veil or plain net?”
“Crape. It hides your face more!”--with unpleasant significance. “Ugh!
How I hate mourning. Mother, where is Cristiane?”
“Where she always is; sitting moaning in that library,” was the answer.
“She is so deathly in her plain black serge she makes me cold. And she
won’t talk of anything but her father’s grave, and how we must go to
Rome in the spring. I never heard of such nonsense as having him moved
there. As if he knew where he was buried!”
“I don’t know that I would have dug him up, either,” said Ismay; “but
don’t, for Heaven’s sake, say so.”
A faint, far-off sound, which might have been the clang of the
door-bell down-stairs, reached her as she spoke. Mrs. Trelane, not
nearly so quick-eared, went on gloating over the vision of a soft black
silk gown, that should glitter with jet, all veiled with cloudy crape.
She did not see Ismay stiffen in her chair.
“It must be tea-time,” she suggested absently. “Perhaps you had better
go and find Cristiane.”
“Perhaps I had.” Life in her eyes, the blood scarlet in her lips, Ismay
was up like a flash. It had been the door-bell; she had heard the great
hall door close dully in the silent house. And a visitor could be none
other than Miles Cylmer. Every drop of her blood ached to see him, and
there was another reason that hurried her through the passages. Miles