Saved from herself or, On the edge of doom
lip, could not take away from her unearthly beauty as her mother stared
at her.
“Do something!” she retorted. “I’ve done all I can. That is what’s the
matter. And we sha’n’t certainly sit here and starve, for I heard this
morning that we are to be turned out on Saturday and our things sold
for rent. We shall starve more romantically in the street.”
“I sha’n’t.”
“What can you do? Go back to your school as a pupil teacher?”
“Do I look like a pupil teacher?” asked Ismay, with a sarcastic glance
at herself.
“You look--well, I don’t know whether you are very beautiful or very
ugly!” the elder woman returned listlessly, trying to break some dry
bread with distasteful fingers.
“You’ll soon be told! Mother”--with sudden energy--“if you can’t find
some way out of this, I shall. I can sing, and I’m going round to every
music-hall I know till some man gives me a chance. Do you suppose”--she
stripped back the sleeve of her dingy dressing-gown from an arm that
was curiously slender, yet round, and of a milky whiteness--“that I am
going to let that starve?”
“And what about me? I suppose I can go out charing!”
Ismay shrugged her shoulders. There was no waste of courtesy between
the two.
In the silence that fell, the postman’s knock seemed to thunder through
the quiet. Mrs. Trelane put her cup down on the table.
“You go,” she said, for at the sudden noise her head swam. Surely she
had not lost her nerve, that had stood her in such stead this many a
year!
“Two letters--notes--for you.”
Ismay threw them down on the table, and, after one glance of sick
terror lest they might not be what she waited for, Mrs. Trelane seized
them. Both were in the writing she had not seen for years, both sealed
with the Le Marchant lion crouching with his paw on his prey. But why
were there two? Had he promised something, and then repented?
Sick with terror, Helen Trelane tore one open, and at first dared not
read it. Then the sense of it seemed to flash on her, and the reaction
made her dizzy.
It was all right! The last card, on which she had staked her all, had
not failed her. The writer would be in London on Friday, and would come
to see her at twelve o’clock, when he hoped to have some better plan to
propose than what she had suggested in her letter.
“Till then,” he ended kindly, “please do not fret about your own or
your daughter’s future, for I can promise you that I will arrange
something.
“Affectionately yours,
“G. LE MARCHANT.”
There was not a word in it about his daughter. Sir Gaspard was too
careful of her to do things blindly, but he meant when he wrote to
provide for Helen Trelane, even if she turned out unfit to be trusted
with his child.
Ismay took the note calmly from her mother’s nerveless hand.
“Who’s Gaspard le Marchant, and why is he yours affectionately?” she
asked curiously. “But it doesn’t matter. The chief thing is that he is
‘yours affectionately’ just in the nick of time. What’s in the other
note?”
“I don’t know.” Mrs. Trelane lay back, nerveless, in her hard chair;
she had conquered fate once more, but the relief was too acute yet to
be pleasant. With a shaking finger she opened the other note, and there
fell out two strips of paper.
“You may need this, and you and I can settle later.
“G. LE M.”
The yellow slip enclosed was a check for a hundred pounds.
When another woman would have cried with gratitude, Mrs. Trelane only
caught her breath cynically. “A fool and his money were soon parted,”
but what a mercy it was that he had been so easily managed!
“What about the music-halls, Ismay?” she said bitterly, lifting her
triumphant eyes to her daughter’s astonished face.
“Go out,” said the girl, “and cash this, and we’ll have meat for lunch.
But tell me first, who is he? And why didn’t you try him before?”
“He is Sir Gaspard le Marchant, and the only relation I own. And I did
try him before, in a way. He sent me money once before, but I didn’t
need it especially, and I didn’t want to have to go and stay in a
stupid country house or have my dear cousin come hunting me up. So I
did not write to him till it looked as though camping on the cold, cold
ground was going to be our fate.”
“Is he married?”
“His wife has been dead for years.”
“And you never tried to be Lady Le Marchant?”
Mrs. Trelane’s cheek grew slowly red.
“His first wife, my dear, was a Russian adventuress,” she returned
cuttingly, “and only a born adventuress could hope to succeed her. You
have all the qualifications--you might try for the place.”
And she walked airily out of the room, quite transformed from the
haggard woman she had been when she entered it. But, though she was
tall and fair and handsome, she was not in the least like the girl who
sat alone looking with eager interest at the Le Marchant seal, the
Le Marchant motto, on the back of one of the torn envelopes. No Le
Marchant and no Trelane had ever had those strange eyes, that uncanny,
colorless beauty, that mouth as red as new blood.
“What Marchant held let Marchant hold!” she read aloud from the
seal. “Well, half of me is Le Marchant, and the other half ‘born
adventuress’! I feel sorry--really sorry--for Sir Gaspard.” And she
slipped gracefully to the floor, and went after her mother. But in the
hall a knock and ring at their front door made her run noiselessly to
the bedroom, where Mrs. Trelane was putting on her bonnet.
“He’s here,” Ismay cried; “it must be he; for it’s twelve o’clock, and
it’s Friday! You’ll have to go and let him in, I can’t.”
“No, you can’t! Don’t you come near us,” said her mother, with quick
insistence, “unless I call you. Mind--for you might spoil everything!
And when I do call you, come in a decent frock, with a plain linen
collar, and behave yourself. Don’t make eyes at him whatever you do,
and be affectionate to me. Remember, now!”
And she was gone to open the door for the man who was to change the
very face of the world for her.
Miss Ismay Trelane, left alone, made a face.
“Where does she think I’m going to get a clean collar when the
washerwoman has clawed them all till she’s paid? And I won’t get
dressed for a minute.”
Lithe and slim she moved, without a sound, to a door that opened into
the drawing-room, and, noiselessly setting it ajar, listened with all
her ears.
When she crept away her eyes were blazing.
“It means plenty of money, and getting away from here to where Marcus
Wray will never think of looking for us!” she exulted, as she began
to change her dressing-gown for her only dress; but a sudden thought
dashed her joy.
To leave London would mean never to see again the man whose face had
never left her memory since that night at the Palace Theater.
“Why didn’t I let him tell me his name?” she thought, as she stamped
with impotent rage at her own folly.
CHAPTER VII.
THREEFOLD DANGER.
“Mrs. Trelane is father’s second cousin; and she and her daughter are
coming here for a visit; daddy has to go away, and he can’t take me,
and he won’t leave me alone.”
Cristiane le Marchant leaned against the stem of a huge beech-tree that
overhung the broad lake at Marchant’s Hold. The sunlight came through
the leafless trees, and made the golden-red of her hair ruddier and
more glorious in contrast; her cheeks had a soft rose that melted into
creamy whiteness, and her eyes were very dark.
Mr. Cylmer looked at her. She was certainly provokingly cool.
“What are they like?” she asked curiously.
“It doesn’t matter; they are a nuisance in any case,” said her
companion.
“Why?” she asked, but did not look at him.
“You never had a chaperon before,” he said dryly. “Oh! your father, I
know, but a woman’s--different. I know she’ll be in the way.”
“In your way, Mr. Cylmer!” retorted Miss Le Marchant demurely, but her
eyes flashed mischievously at him through her heavy lashes.
“Mr. Cylmer” kicked at the turf with vicious energy.
“You needn’t rub it in, Cristiane,” he said crossly. “I know you don’t
care a button whether you see me alone or not.”
He was very young-looking for his twenty-eight years; very brown and
big as he stood on the grass in his shooting-clothes. But he had not
been born yesterday for all his debonair face; there was very little
Mr. Cylmer had not done in this world; very little that his quick eye
did not see through.
But all his worldly wisdom was wont to desert him when he found himself
alone with Cristiane. He was her humble slave, and it never occurred
to him that she would have valued him much more if she had known that
Miles Cylmer, who was such an every-day sort of person to her, could
have thrown his handkerchief to half the fine ladies in London, and had
it snapped up on the second; or that every woman he knew adored him,
from duchess to dairymaids.
To Cristiane le Marchant he was plain Miles Cylmer, who had been in
and out of Marchant’s Hold all his life, and was to be regarded as a
convenient or inconvenient elder brother, as things might happen.
“Come on,” she commanded practically, “I have to go to the house to
meet them.”
“Is your father coming with them?”
He stood looking down at her, six feet and to spare, his keen hazel
eyes full of annoyance, and his face quite grave. Had he not given up a
whole day’s shooting to be near Cristiane le Marchant? And now, instead
of a tête-à-tête with her, there would be two women to be disposed of;
two strangers to spoil it.
“But your father’s coming with them,” he repeated, beginning to walk
slowly--very slowly--toward the house.
“No, he isn’t!” Cristiane stopped short. “That’s what’s so funny about
these visitors. Father has sent them here, and he doesn’t know how long
he’ll be away, and he wrote me such a funny note.” And she pulled a
letter out of her pocket.
“‘Write to me and tell me exactly what you think of Mrs. Trelane, if
you like her or not,’ she read. ‘But try and make friends with her
little daughter, for she needs a friend, and take time before you
write. Only write me your candid opinion.’ There, what do you think of
it? Why is this Mrs. Trelane so important, that I am to send daddy my
‘candid opinion.’ I can’t see any sense in it.”
“By George, I can, then!” was on the tip of Mr. Cylmer’s tongue, but he
caught back the words in time. There could be only one meaning to the
letter; Sir Gaspard must be thinking of marrying again.
Somehow Cylmer was unreasonably angry. From his earliest boyhood he had
been wont to gaze at the portrait of Cristiane’s mother, that hung
in Sir Gaspard’s room, with a wondering awe that any one could ever
have been so beautiful; it made him angry now in his manhood that the
husband she had loved should have dared to forget her.
“No, I can’t see any sense,” he said lamely; “only be sure you tell
your father outright if you don’t like this Trelane woman. Otherwise he
might ask her to stay on, or something----”
He jerked at his mustache irritably, quite unconscious how he was
wronging poor innocent Sir Gaspard.
“I never would have thought Le Marchant the sort of man to marry
again,” he thought gloomily. “I’ll see him as soon as he gets back, and
tell him I--I want Cristiane. She sha’n’t have any stepmother about
while there’s a roof at Cylmer’s Ferry!”
He looked doubtfully at the girl as she walked on before him. If only
he dared stoop and kiss those soft gold waves that were swept upward
from the back of her neck: dared to say he loved her from the crown of
her golden head to the tips of her little shoes.
“Cristiane,” he said, “I want to speak to you. Do you know you have
never said you were sorry that these people were coming; never said you