Saved from herself or, On the edge of doom
returned, stopping in front of them, his handsome head glossy in the
sun as he lifted his hat. “So I came to ask you if I might put her in
your stable instead of taking her all the way home. I don’t know how it
happened; slipped, I fancy; she didn’t fall.”
“I knew you’d do it some day. You go at your banks too fast.” Cristiane
frowned as she touched the mare’s shoulder with knowledgable fingers.
“Poor Molly! It’s a shame.”
Mr. Cylmer was annoyed. Few men rode with more judgment than he, and he
knew it.
“You needn’t think I like it, any more than Molly,” he returned, a
trifle crossly.
“Come along to the stables,” Cristiane said. “The sooner she is seen to
the better. I’m glad you brought her. Come on, Ismay.”
She had had time to recollect that Miles, who had forgotten her in his
sorrow, could remember now that she could be useful. She marched on in
front, leading the limping mare. Ismay and Cylmer were left to follow.
“You’ve cut your hand,” said Ismay, and her voice fell softly on his
ears, that Cristiane’s words had left tingling. “It’s bleeding.”
“It’s all right,” he replied shamefacedly. “I was stooping to make a
gap in the hedge for Molly, and she trod on it.”
It was cut and bruised so that it ached abominably. He winced with pain
as he tried to move it.
Ismay’s handkerchief, white, filmy, fine, and smelling of nothing but
fresh linen, was out in a second.
“There is no sense in getting yourself all horrid with it,” she said
practically. “Hold out your hand.”
There was an ugly circular jag across the back of the fingers, where
the horse’s shoe had come.
“It’s too beastly,” he said. He did not want her to look at the mingled
blood and dirt that covered his hand.
But she only laughed, a little low laugh, like a woman comforting the
hurt of a child.
“Hold it out,” she repeated, and through the cool linen he could feel
the touch of her slim, deft fingers, a touch that somehow made him
thrill.
Cristiane had never even seen his hand!
She stood by while he and a groom saw to Molly, and then as they turned
away the bandage caught her eye.
“What a baby you are, Miles!” she laughed. “Fancy binding up your whole
hand for a cut!”
“It’s smashed flat,” he returned quietly. “And you’re an unsympathetic
little wretch. By the way, didn’t I meet a stranger driving down your
avenue?”
“He isn’t a stranger,” she retorted. “It was Mr. Wray, a friend
of--father’s.” Her lips quivered suddenly.
“Wray? I never heard of him”--soberly.
Cristiane stamped her foot.
“Well, you hear now!” she cried. “Ismay has been horrid about him, and
now I suppose you’re going to be; but I won’t stay and hear it. She
can tell you why”--with a great sob--“why he came!” and before the
astonished Cylmer could breathe, she had run away like a hare, in a
very tempest of tears.
“What’s the matter with her? She is not at all like herself!” he
exclaimed.
“She’s unstrung, poor little soul! And I don’t wonder. He came to tell
her he was with Sir Gaspard when he died.”
“What!” But after that one quick word he listened in silence, as Ismay
told him all she saw fit to tell.
“Why did she say you had been horrid about him?” he asked as she
finished.
“I don’t like him. Mother and I knew him in London. He is so ugly--oh!
so ugly that I shiver when I look at him,” she returned lightly, yet
he saw there was something behind her words. Even in a casual glance
there had been something repulsive to him, too, in the face of the man
who had passed him so quickly; not a nice person to have make love to
you, as he guessed he had done to Miss Trelane.
“Send for me if he comes again and you want to get rid of him,” he said
as lightly as she. “I’d like to see him, too”--with sudden gravity. “It
was strange, his being with Sir Gaspard at the end!”
“He is a strange man, here to-day and gone to-morrow.” She spoke
wearily. “But, of course, I really know very little about him. I was
angry because his coming upset Cristiane so.”
“Poor child.” But the tone in his voice was not that with which he
would have spoken of the girl a fortnight before. “Time and letting
alone are what she wants.” He glanced at the house as they neared it.
“Do you think I am to be admitted?” he said. “Is your mother----” He
did not finish.
“My mother can afford to forgive you”--with unconscious bitterness.
“And Cristiane would not like it if you did not come in.”
“I don’t think it would disturb her,” he replied dryly. But he followed
Ismay into the house.
They sat by the hall fire, that glowed with a gentle warmth, and talked
softly of nothings; with one consent of anything but the things that
were past. As the girl’s green eyes met his, the spell of her beauty
fell on him, till his love for Cristiane seemed a childish dream. Soft,
white, sinuous, she sat in her great chair, and as she looked at him
Miles Cylmer was powerlessly under her sway.
“I will come to-morrow to bring back the horse,” he said softly,
forgetting it was not his house. “May I?”
And his blood was quick in him as she gave a little languid nod, so
sweet and full of sorcery were her marvelous eyes.
If he had dared he would have told her then and there that she was the
only woman in the world for him. He knew now that pity and affection
and an idle heart had made him fancy he cared for Cristiane.
“You don’t hear what I’m saying, Mr. Cylmer!”
Ismay’s little laugh roused him, and the man who had been loved by many
women in his time looked up in boyish confusion.
“I beg your pardon. What was it?”
“It was like me, a thing of no importance,” she answered lazily. “But
I wonder where your thoughts are”--and her hand, as if by accident,
covered for one instant her scarlet lips.
Was she a witch who had read his thoughts? For all he knew, she might
be a very Circe, false as water, and yet he would have sworn that she
was heavenly true.
“I will tell you where they were some day,” he said, wondering if
all the time she knew. For as she talked and he looked at her the
remembrance of her lips on his in that kiss he had taken on that
morning at his gates had come back to him with shame.
He had kissed her as if she had been a pretty dairymaid and he a king.
Now his soul went out in longing to have her for his own, to kiss her
as his queen, his wife. How had he dared to think of her in any other
way?
Her history, her mother, were as nothing to him in face of her
loveliness that bewitched him.
When at last his borrowed horse came to the door he rose reluctantly.
“Till to-morrow. I must bring it back, you know,” he said, and at
something in his eyes she flushed, ever so faintly.
“Till to-morrow,” she echoed quietly.
And he never imagined that she watched him out of sight as he rode
away, her heart fairly plunging with rapture.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE SPINET.
It was tea-time when Cristiane appeared again from her bedroom, where
she had fled in her anger with Cylmer. She came straight to Ismay,
where she sat in the drawing-room with her mother, and kissed her
penitently.
“I was horrid this morning,” she observed childishly. “But Miles was so
stupid. You forgive me, don’t you?”
“I haven’t any need”--smiling, for she could have had no greater
service done to her. “But I had to go for a walk by myself this
afternoon, and I got drenched.”
“The rain came on slowly enough,” Cristiane laughed, listening for a
minute to the driving flood that rustled at the windows. “But you are
such a town person! You might have known it was coming.”
“I had to go out. I couldn’t sleep last night. It was very funny”--with
sudden animation--“perhaps you know something about it?”
“What was funny?” Cristiane moved a little as Thomas arrived with the
tea, and began to arrange the table close to the two girls.
“Why--the music! I don’t suppose you were playing on the piano at two
in the morning, were you? For some one was.”
She looked at Cristiane with a little, puzzled frown. Then she started.
Thomas, his face like ashes, had dropped the cream-jug; as he stood
staring at the ruin she caught his eyes on her in beseeching warning.
“I was asleep,” said Cristiane. “Oh, Thomas, never mind! There is
plenty of cream, you needn’t look like that.”
“Yes, miss! No, miss! I’m very sorry,” the old man said confusedly. “I
will fetch some more.”
“What did you say about a piano? You must have been dreaming.”
“I suppose I was”--slowly. “But I thought I woke up and heard some one
playing a queer tune on a piano. But, of course, it was a dream!” She
finished quietly, for there was something in the old servant’s face to
make her hold her tongue.
“It is rather odd,” Cristiane said, as she carried Mrs. Trelane’s cup
to her, “for Jessie had the same dream once, and Thomas nearly ate her
for telling it. She is his daughter, you know.”
Ismay drank her tea as lazily as usual, and watched her chance to slip
away after a while.
Last night’s music had been no dream, and Thomas’ face had mystified
her. As soon as Cristiane and her mother was settled at a game of Halma
for chocolates, she departed unnoticed, and sought Thomas, who was in
his pantry.
Miss Trelane walked in and closed the door behind her.
“Why did you look at me like that in the drawing-room, Thomas?” she
asked, with a bluntness very foreign to her. “Why did not you want me
to speak of last night?”
The old man turned from the decanters he was filling.
“Because I won’t have Miss Cristiane made nervous,” he said doggedly.
“That’s why, Miss Trelane.”
“How could it make her nervous to know I heard a piano in the night?
Robbers don’t play on pianos, Thomas.”
“It’s not robbers I’m thinking of, and if you’re wise you’ll not
mention it again, miss,” he spoke imploringly.
“I’ll speak of it now, once for all, then,” she said. “For I know it
wasn’t a dream, and you can’t scold me like you did Jessie”--with her
lovely smile.
“Jessie’s a fool, for all her forty years,” he grumbled, “if she told
you that.”
“She didn’t, it was Miss Cristiane. Listen, Thomas! Last night I woke
up, broad awake, as I never do, and I heard quite plainly some one
playing a queer tinkling tune on a piano, somewhere up-stairs. It
sounded so uncanny that I sat up to listen, and then I got out of bed
and found my door was open into the hall; out there I heard the music
plainer still, and it made me feel cold. But I thought I’d go and see
who it was.”
The old man stood staring at her, his face twitching.
“Well, I went up-stairs, in the dark, till I got to a hall I didn’t
know, and from a room that opened off it I heard that music as plainly
as you hear me now! But the door was shut.”
“You didn’t go in? For God’s sake, Miss Trelane, never go in!” His
voice, full of horror, startled her.
“Why? Who’s there? Who was playing that piano?”
“No one”--heavily. “And it’s no piano, but a spinet that belonged to
Sir Gaspard’s grandmother. It’s haunted, that’s what it is, and to hear
it means trouble to this house. Jessie heard it before the master was
killed. But Miss Cristiane knows naught of it, and don’t you tell her.”
“It’s mice in the strings,” she said. “Anything else is nonsense.” Yet
with a shudder she remembered the thing had played a tune. “If you
think it’s haunted, why don’t you break it up?”
“Because we can’t. It isn’t healthy in that room,” he stammered.
“Before Lady Le Marchant died I was in there with one of the footmen,
and we opened the thing and looked all through it. There wasn’t a sign
of mice. And when we turned from it, it began to play, first a scale,
and then a tune that queer that we couldn’t move. And there in broad
daylight a wind went by us that was cold like snow. I’ve never been in
there since.”
He wiped his forehead that was wet.