CHAPTER XXXVI.

“A BOY!”

“Last autumn,” Andria looked straight at the rigid figure in the chair, “I was in London, deserted, nearly starving. A man who called himself Egerton engaged me, without a character, to travel with his ward. And the ward was Beryl.

“He said we were to go to Bermuda, but he took us to a place the merest child would have known was not that. A lonely island with one house, in miles of scrub”--there was no change on the superior’s face; could she have heard of that island before?--“a house that was locked every night like a fortress for fear of a crazy man and of wild beasts that hunted to the very door. He left us there to die, with no one but three black women to protect us. To die, reverend mother, as a boy died whom he took there five years before.”

Death--Death and the Judgment! Mother Felicitas’ face bore no longer the look of a human countenance.

“Five years,” she said. “A boy?”

“He seemed a boy, Salome said, because he was so young in his ways, had such merry gray eyes and was so gay; but he was twenty. And the jaguars tore him to bits, as they were meant to tear us.”

“No, no, no!” and if there can be such a thing as a whispered shriek it came from the tortured lips of the Mother Superior.

“I frighten you? It’s too horrible to hear? It was more horrible----”

“The boy!” Mother Felicitas clutched Andria’s arm as she had been clutching the table. “The--the poor boy! You said he was called----”

She had said nothing, but she did not remember.

“Guy, Salome called him, but I never heard his other name.”

“Guy.” All hell had opened under Mother Felicitas, but not the hell she had feared. Pain a thousand times worse than the disgrace she had dreaded made her groan aloud, and then a very recklessness of fury shook her, as it might a mother whose only son has been murdered.

“Go on,” she said, and drew her breath through her teeth. “Er-Egerton took him there--and he died.”

“He was killed! Then we came and Beryl could master the jaguars, could master the madman afterward; they never touched us. But we were left for worse than jaguars. Egerton came back, and his son, Raimond Erle. Egerton--I say--but I mean Lord Erceldonne--and they plotted to take Beryl away and marry her to Erle for her money and something else. Think, Mother Felicitas! Can’t you remember anything? Who was the girl that they wanted a waif like her?”

“I--I never knew!” and then in her terror strength came back to her. “I tell you,” she cried fiercely, “I know nothing. How could I know, who have been dead to the world these thirteen years?”

“The year Beryl Corselas was brought here.”

It was said musingly, and yet it carried meaning.

The reverend mother could grow no paler, but her eyes were like living coals now instead of dead ones.

“Is that all?” she said. For the moment Beryl Corselas was nothing to her. She could only think of the boy who had been taken to the uttermost parts of the earth to be got rid of, from mere wanton weariness of his face.

“No, they took--at least Raimond Erle took--Beryl away and left me tied up with cords, towels, anything, that I might die like the boy. Lord Erceldonne--oh!” she cried, “Mother Felicitas, Lord Erceldonne is dead. The jaguars killed him as he meant them to kill us, before something made him change his plans and want Beryl to go with him and marry his son.”

“Dead! When? Speak, Andria.” But if for an instant a fierce hope glowed in her, the next it died.

“Five weeks ago, on the island.”

The Mother Superior dragged herself to her feet.

“Go!” she said, and her voice was strong and resonant. “Go. You said well that you were a wicked woman, when you dare to come here with lies.”

It was a trap. By a very hair she had escaped it. Erceldonne himself must have sent this woman here.

But Andria never stirred. She had been right about what the superior knew--for Mother Felicitas was afraid!

“I’ve not finished,” she said as she looked straight into those awful eyes that seemed to see things that had shriveled them to look on. “That madman said Erceldonne had taken away his daughter years ago, that Beryl was this same daughter come back again. He said----”

“What is it to me?” cried Mother Felicitas. “I know none of them. Why do you come to me?”

For a moment a spirit as harsh as her own looked out of Andria Heathcote’s eyes.

“You do know,” she retorted, “and you will know more unless you help me to stop this marriage and save Beryl Corselas. Do you think if Erceldonne had sent me I should have let out that story about the boy who was killed on the island that you--know of? And he could not send me, for he’s dead!”

She turned to go, but a hand colder than death fell on hers.

“Wait,” said Mother Felicitas, “wait!”

She tottered to her chair, and signed to Andria Heathcote to lock the door.

She was speaking the truth according to her lights, and the reverend mother knew it.