CHAPTER XXXIII.

A DREAM OF VENGEANCE.

“I never touched a hair of her head,” said the man who had merely tied her up to suffocate or be eaten. “Beryl believe me! I knew her long ago, when first she was Heriot’s--friend.”

“I don’t believe you.” She was clasping and unclasping her hands. “Oh,”--she drew her breath and faced him like the little devil he had once called her--“not one word you say is the truth. My cats never touched her. I--they----” but she could not go on.

He had made one mistake--one glaring blunder--that made everything seem the lie. It was when he had linked Heriot’s name with Andria’s to a girl who had his own damnation in her pocket.

“I will never believe you--never! You may kill me, too, if you like,” she added, with a slow malice that made him hasten to clinch his lie.

“It’s true. The black woman told you what she saw. If I don’t tell you all I saw, it’s because I want to spare you.”

But she was not listening. The tireless jar of the engines had stopped; the yacht was lying quiet on a quiet sea.

“We’re at home in England,” said Erle coolly. “What will you do?”

“Accuse you--give you up,” she thought, and said nothing. To be silent was the only chance of doing it. She wished now that she had held her tongue, as she felt in her sash her only proof that he might have had a motive, since Andria was his discarded wife. She must play her game better than this. If he feared her he would never let her go. “Oh,” she said, with a pitiful shrinking from the awful task of avenging the dead, “tell me, swear to me that all you’ve said is true. Then I’ll go away with Amelia and Chloe and never trouble you any more.”

“Look!” said Erle, and pointed out the port-hole. There in a boat with their bundles were Chloe and Amelia Jane.

“You can’t; they won’t take you. All they want is to get safe on shore. Let them go, ungrateful beasts! Do you know they dared to say you had the evil eye?”

Amelia Jane’s queer manner and terror of her returned to Beryl’s memory, all of a piece with her hurry to be gone. He was telling the truth now, and her face grew white and vacant. The black woman had deserted her.

She was too stunned to imagine the truth, that they were being hurried off to join an outbound vessel for Jamaica; they knew too much to be let stay in England.

Erle was quick to see his advantage.

“Let them go,” he repeated, “I do not want any servants who say of you what you say of me--that it was through you death came.”

“Through me!”

“They said--oh, it’s ghastly nonsense! But they said it was you who could make those jaguars come and go as you pleased; that it was you who set them on. You see, I am not the only person who is thought--guilty!”

He did not say how, when Amelia Jane had owned to seeing Beryl play with jaguar cubs, it had been easy to put the rest of the wicked thought in her head, nor who had put it there. But the girl in dumb agony saw where she stood. She was utterly in his power. He might ask her where she meant to go, but it was all pretense. She would never get away from him and his father.

With a strange quiet she turned from him, but it was the silence of danger, not of despair.

“You see,” he said, with the soft voice women had loved, “other people might be as hard to you as you have been to me, mad as it sounds. Can I never make you understand we are your only real friends? If we turn against you----”

“Yes,” she said, “I hear you. Please go, Mr. Erle. I--I can’t talk any more.”

Was the man utterly callous that he did not care that his wife was killed, that he could lie about the dead? As the door closed behind him she stood rigid, in raging, biting desire for vengeance.

“I made a mistake when I taxed him with it,” she thought. “But I know it’s true, for I saw him wince. Oh, my Andria!” the tears coming at last to her burning eyes. “I should have stayed by her, held her tight, never let her go. She warned me what he was like. Why did I ever listen to him? And what am I, that he wants me--that he means to have me, even over a grave? Andria--Heriot----” She crushed her hands against her mouth that she might not cry out the names she loved.

“You died for me,” she whispered, anguish shaking her; “because I am what I am; they killed you to get me. That man was right. It was I who killed you. Oh, who am I, that they drag me with them? That they want me? I would give”--she stopped short, her strange eyes dilated--“I’ll give my life, Andria; I have no more!” she whispered.

Two hours afterward there came a knock at her cabin door. To Erle’s astonishment, she opened it quite readily and stood quietly before him. It had grown dark, and the electric light in the cabin dawned slowly and lit up her face that was white as chalk, but absolutely indifferent.

“Come,” he said, hiding his surprise, “we are going ashore. Let the stewardess pack your things.”

“I have none--not even a hat.”

“It’s dark and warm; it doesn’t matter. You shall have all you want as soon as you land.”

He could hardly take his eyes from the strange beauty of her face. Transcendental, unearthly, she stood in the pale electric light as one who sees a vision. The quick thought came to him that she meant to drown herself as they landed. But, though he kept at her elbow for fear, she never even glanced at the dark water round the ship.

Only as Erceldonne spoke to her did her strange calm flicker; hatred sprang into her eyes as she turned silently away.

In the boat, on the pier, at the station, Erle waited breathlessly for her to break away. But she stood like a statue, and never asked a question--moved when he led her without a sign of dissent. If Mother Felicitas had seen her face she would have been ready for some outburst, effective as it was unexpected. The two men merely thought the shock of what she had heard had cowed her.

All that night as she sat in a railway-carriage, one thought rang like bells in her head. The man at whose door two deaths lay should pay for them. And to do it she must go with him, find out who she was and why she was desirable. If she tried to run away they would catch her; if she went back to the convent she could find out no more than if she were in her grave. She sat with eyes shut till they thought her asleep, and planned and replanned her revenge; that she might not remember Brian Heriot and fall to crying for the face that she would see no more.

They changed carriages at dawn, where, she did not know, nor where they were taking her. She looked for hours at the flying country and could not tell, till, as the train stopped, great, black letters on a white sign-board caught her eye. “Blackpool,” she read in the veiled sunshine of the February morning, and remembered it was here she had first seen the haggard, listless-eyed man who had been her evil genius.

“We change here,” said Erle, rising and not noticing her as he leaned out of the carriage window to glance at the station, which was fuller than he liked. But he was reassured by the look of the crowd, who were excursionists. Neither he nor his father saw her glance at the lining of the hat they had bought for her when they landed. “Pearce, Plymouth,” was stamped on it. They had come all the way across England here; they must have a reason. Were they taking her back to the workhouse at St. Anne’s?

She got out as quietly as if she neither knew nor cared, but half-way across the station she gasped and stood still.

Opposite her, with her back to her, but unmistakable, was Mother Felicitas, Sister De Sales at her side!

They stood, as religious women do, with their eyes cast down; they had not seen her.

“Mother Felicitas!” she said, with a horrible fear, not for herself, but for the vengeance that would slip from her if the superior saw and claimed her. An instinct like an animal told her she would get no credence of her tale in the convent.

“Go on,” said Erceldonne in her ear furiously. “Go on!”

The girl faltered, almost fell, and at Erle’s wondering exclamation Mother Felicitas looked up. Her terror was before her eyes!

For one instant she stood speechless. Before she could move, Beryl Corselas had been hustled into a train that was already moving out of the station.

“The reverend mother has overtaxed her strength,” said Sister De Sales quickly to a porter. “Water, please, and I will get her to a cab.”

She was short-sighted, and had seen nothing. If she had, she would merely have marveled that the reverend mother should lean heavily against her in sudden faintness at the sight of a runaway schoolgirl.