Saved from herself or, On the edge of doom
be civil, you needn’t worry.”
Her eyes alert, her cheek feverish, she watched him come in.
“What do you want?” she inquired calmly, as he hesitated on the
threshold.
“To see for myself that you’re all right,” his cold sneering manner all
gone. “Ought you to be up? But you look quite well, quite yourself.”
“I am quite myself. What made you think I shouldn’t be?” she said dryly.
“The shock, the wetting,” he hesitated.
“Neither the shock nor the wetting have affected me,” she assured him.
Could she suspect anything about that tea? he gave her a searching
glance with narrowed eyes. But her face was as openly hostile as usual,
with no underlying doubt.
“If you’re going to stay, sit down,” she yawned laughingly. “You make
me nervous fidgeting there by the door.”
He drew a chair near to her sofa, and she let her eyes close sleepily.
Through their dark fringes they looked him all over searchingly.
Evening clothes, a shirt and collar as immaculate as usual, a neat
black tie, two pearl studs, rather flawed and too large. So he had a
taste for jewels.
His hands, long, deceitful, cruel, lay on his knees. On one of them was
a diamond ring, too big for a man, too sparkling.
“His cuffs!” she thought, with inspiration. But they were hidden under
his black coat-sleeve. One day she had laughed at Cylmer’s plain
mother-of-pearl cuff-studs, and he had said that there was nothing a
man was so wedded to as a peculiar kind of cuff-stud.
“If he wears links, he always wears links, generally of the same
pattern. If he wears studs, he never changes the make.”
The blood beat hard in her temples. That bluey-green Egyptian beetle
could well have been half of a cuff-link, florid, expensive, odd, as
were those shirt-studs of pearls and greenish gold.
“Why are you so thoughtful, Ismay? Why will you go on hating me?” Wray
asked slowly. “Don’t you know it’s no use?”
There was a biting answer on her tongue, but she kept it back. She
must say something--anything--that would make him hold out his hand to
her with a sharp, hasty gesture that would clear his shirt-cuff, links
upward, from his sleeve.
“And if I did not hate you, what would you do for me?” she moved her
hand toward him as if by accident.
The next instant he had seized it, was holding it in a grasp that was
loathsomely hot and strong. Words she did not listen to poured in a low
whisper from his lips. Intent, her face alight with eagerness, she was
gazing at his wrist, moving her hand till his lay palm upward under
hers.
But if she expected to see the scarabs, of which she had one, she was
wrong. And yet her heart leaped. For he did wear links, not studs, and
they were showy and costly. Ovals of pink coral set round with seed
pearls.
As she gazed, his low voice in her ears killed the sound as Cristiane
parted the curtain. Wray, with his back to the door and off his guard,
saw nothing, and Cylmer, cut to the heart, had seen enough.
If Cylmer had been one moment later he would have seen her snatch her
hand away; wipe it with insolent care on her handkerchief; laugh, with
utter scorn in Marcus Wray’s furious face, as, her aim attained, she
spoke out:
“You might give me the whole earth, and I should hate you,” she cried
out with insane bravery. “I hate death, but I would die before I
married a man like you!”
Dazed, taken aback, he looked at her.
“You can go,” she said, smiling like Circe, treacherous and merciless;
“I’m done with you.”
In the long moment’s pause a door shut somewhere, and she could not
know it was Miles, going away. And Wray did not hear it. His hands
trembled, his face full of evil, he looked down at her insolent beauty.
“But I am not done with you,” he said very low.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
“MY NAME IS YESTERDAY.”
Ismay was gay as any lark that next morning. Her path, that had been so
hard to tread, seemed sure and easy now; her course of action plain.
When Miles came, as of course he would come to see how she was, she
would tell him all--everything. With those showy cuff-links of Marcus
Wray’s in her remembrance, that broken jewel in her keeping, that had
never been her mother’s, she had something to go on. Miles should know
all; she would keep nothing back, and then they two, together, should
bring guilt home to Marcus Wray.
For, with the certainty of a person whose intuitions are never wrong,
she was sure that it was he who had poisoned Abbotsford, he who had
managed so cleverly that if anything were discovered, it was Mrs.
Trelane who should bear the whole brunt.
But the morning passed, and no Miles. The waiting, the hope deferred,
made her pale. And there was too much at stake--she could not afford to
wait. She slipped out to the stable and sent a groom with a note.
“Please come to the stile at four. I’m quite well to-day, and I must
see you. I have something to tell you.
“ISMAY.”
Something to tell him! Cylmer’s face hardened as he read. He heard
beforehand the smooth, plausible story she would have made ready when
Cristiane--as Cristiane was sure to do--had told her of the night
before.
“I won’t go. I can’t see her,” he thought wretchedly, and yet his
longing was too much for him. He would see her once more--once more
feast his eyes on her fatal beauty that had weaned him from all simple
loves forever; he would tell her that he knew, and bid her save herself
and her mother, and go.
“I will be there at four,” he wrote, without beginning or signature,
and Ismay as she read it only thought how careful he was to write
nothing that could matter if other hands opened his note.
“He hates writing. He never even says he is glad I’m all right.” She
kissed the little note before she burned it, not thinking that never
again would Miles Cylmer write to Ismay Trelane.
She evaded the others that afternoon with some trouble, so that she
was late at the stile. Miles was there before her, very tall, very
handsome in the gray light. For the day was thawing drearily.
“Miles”--her voice rang out sweetly, joyfully, as he had heard it in
his dreams--“I’m here! I’m quite well. Aren’t you glad?” She stopped
abruptly as she reached his side, saw his face. “Miles, what’s the
matter?” An agony of terror such as all her hunted life had never known
made her dizzy as she looked.
He could not answer. He was fighting with that worst pain on earth when
a man has learned to distrust and hate all that has been most dear and
sweet and true.
“Are you sorry you saved me?” She tried hard for his old light mirth.
“Is that it?”
Cylmer shivered. Truly he would rather she had died than that he should
have known this of her.
“I don’t know,” he said under his mustache, never moving a step toward
her, his hands, that were wont to clasp hers so eagerly, lax at his
sides.
“What’s the matter? Look at me,” she cried desperately. “Why are you
like this, when I’ve come all this way to tell you something that will
take all my courage to tell?”
“Then you can spare your courage, for I know.”
“Know! You can’t.” She was panting, wild. “What can you know that has
changed you so?”
“I know that it was your mother’s whose photograph was in Abbotsford’s
room,” he said hoarsely.
“I know why you fainted here in my arms when I talked of it. I know how
you and she have made a fool of me; how you have deceived me for Wray.”
“Wray!” She stared aghast. What did he mean?
“I saw you last night--with Wray.”
And at the look on his face the girl’s heart died within her.
“You saw me?” Ismay repeated. “Last night--with Marcus Wray?”
“Last night,” he echoed, “with Marcus Wray. He was alone with you in
your sitting-room, holding your hand. And you, who say you hate him,
lay looking at him so intently that you never knew I was there.”
“You were there!”--her eyes wide, dilated, were almost stupid as she
stared at him. “What brought you there?”
“To see you! But as it was an inconvenient moment”--with a short, angry
laugh--“I did not intrude.”
“Miles,” she cried, “I had a reason; I held his hand for a purpose.”
“I do not doubt it; you always have, I should fancy,” he said bitterly.
“Had you the same purpose in the morning, when you let him kiss you in
the hall, where the whole house might see?”
“Kiss me? He never kissed me.” Her lips, no longer scarlet, were
parted, her forehead suddenly livid.
Kissed her, Marcus Wray? With a sudden dread she remembered she had
dreamed of Cylmer, felt the tweed of his coat under her cheek.
“Miles! Miles!”--with a revulsion that was agony. “I was asleep. I
thought, I dreamed”--faltering--“it was you.”
“You forget, he never kissed you”--disdainfully. “You say you slept.
Do you think I, who loved you, would take advantage of your sleep to
kiss you? But why talk of it”--with a quick, slighting motion of his
hand--“since it is true?”
Yes, it was true. Just as holding his hand last night was true, and yet
hell was no falser.
“Who told you?” she asked quietly, without denial or protest.
“The person who saw you. And because I would not believe I went
up-stairs to see you, and I saw--but I did not come to talk of what you
know so thoroughly.”
“Then why did you come?” For the first time her voice was unsteady. To
his informant, as to Wray’s kisses, she never gave a thought; any one
might have seen her as she slept.
“I came to tell you that I knew it all, everything; that I see now that
from the first day you have been your mother’s daughter. Forgive my
rudeness; it is an easy way--of putting it.”
“I don’t understand.” How cold it was growing, and how dark, she
thought irrelevantly. Why could he not finish and go?
He pulled a card from his pocket.
“Who kept this from Cristiane?” he said roughly. “Was it you?”
“So you want to go back to your Cristiane?” For one second her eyes
flashed.
“I don’t care if I never see her again”--impatiently. “Yesterday, God
forgive me, I would have let her die for you.”
Yesterday! The utter change in his voice hurt.
“Don’t you see it isn’t Cristiane who is in question? It’s what you
did, or did not. Tell me, did you keep that card?”
“I kept it,” very evenly. “I loved you, and I was afraid of her.”
“You loved me?” he laughed, unbelieving. “Why, you had only seen me
once!” The contemptible thought of his money, his position, crowded
into his brain and maddened him. “Oh, not me!” he ended in a tone that
was an insult.
But she never noticed it.
She sat down on the stile, as if she were tired. That stile where the
gate of heaven had been closed on her.
“So you came about that note and Wray!” she said. “Well, I did both
things! What next?”
It was Cylmer’s turn to wince.
“This next,” he answered, and he could not meet her eyes, that once had
been so sweet, so serene. “It was for your sake, because I pitied you,
that I told nothing of all I knew about your mother. When you asked me,
I was silent. And all the time you knew that she was not only unfit to
have charge of an innocent girl, but was a murderess.”
“I thought so. Yes.”
“And then I loved you. And you used my love to find out what the
police were doing. But even your nerves could not keep you from making
mistakes. You fainted when I told you the police were on the murderer’s
track, and I was too blind to know you had excellent reason. And
because I was a fool I gave you that scarab, and I suppose you have
profited by my folly, and destroyed the others, though you had ‘never
seen it before!’”
“Miles, she is my mother.” Yet there was no pleading in her voice.
“And I thought I was your lover. But it seems I was mistaken. There is
Wray. I will leave the field to him.”
For the first time her temper rose.
“And then you will tell what you know of my mother--and me--to the