CHAPTER XXXVIII.

DREAMS.

As if she were blind and dumb Beryl Corselas followed Mrs. Fuller up-stairs to a bedroom as bare as the rest of the house.

The woman would have talked to her, but she shrank away, conscious that she was a prisoner, and Mrs. Fuller one of her jailers. She saw another thing as time went on--that day and night changed places in this house. There were no blazing fires in the daylight, only smoldering coals that made no smoke that tell a tale of habitation. And the doors were never unlocked, nor was she ever alone to try them.

Mrs. Fuller and Erceldonne were with her turn about. Erle had vanished, and all count of time seemed to have vanished, too.

Day after day went by, and Beryl never opened her lips. Her sullen silence was as hopeless as her pale face, but both got on the nerves of her jailers. If Lord Erceldonne had dared, with what good-will he would have put an end to them!

Raimond had gone to London, and sent back a letter by the round-faced boy that made his father curse at each day passed with nothing done. Would he never come back? Was he out of his senses that he did not see there was no time to lose? Why was he “unexpectedly detained”?

As the third week crawled by Lord Erceldonne lost patience. Night after night he paced the gravel, listening for the wheels that never came. But when the fourth was gone, and the fifth, he dared not listen, for he imagined wheels in each gust of wind. And the wind blew eerily at nights over the moorland.

“The boy is mad!” he said to himself, aloud, alone in that lonely room down-stairs, when the two women were gone to bed.

Behind him some one laughed, or was it outside the open window?

Lord Erceldonne forgot patience. He stared round the empty room, flung open the thick wooden shutters on the gusty spring night, and called aloud:

“Raimond! Raimond! Why the devil don’t you come in?”

There was no answer. From far away he heard the sound of a moorland brook that his strained ears had surely turned into mocking laughter. Yet he drew sharply back from the window, and shut it with frenzied haste. It was no brook that had whispered in his very ear from the darkness under the window.

“Mad, mad!” like an echo.

“It’s the solitude, the cursed waiting.” He wiped his forehead. “It’s got on my nerves.”

For the whispers had been labored, un-English, as if some one repeated sound, not sense; the voice that of the madman on the island. Imagination was making a fool of him; the thing was impossible. Yet he dared not go to bed, and his thoughts even Mother Felicitas might not have envied.

The next afternoon, in broad day, he fairly gasped with astonishment, for his long-looked-for son drove up to the door. Lord Erceldonne, opening it, could hardly contain himself as he saw he was not alone. A quiet man, in black clerical clothes, sat in the carriage.

“Where have you been?” said Erceldonne in a whisper almost soundless, as his son got out, “Who are you bringing here? You’re mad--to dare!”

“Shut up,” returned Raimond, shaking hands as if he greeted him. “Open some windows in this musty hole; make everything look all right. This is the very man we want, and an old friend of mine,” raising his voice, “whom I’ve had hard work to find. Father Maurice,” turning quickly, “this is my father. And he is afraid you will find it rough work staying in a shooting-box like this.”

“I have seen worse places,” said the man.

As he stood on the door-step Erceldonne saw he was a clergyman of the Church of Rome. Might have seen also that here was a man impossible to coerce or deceive, a strange friend for Raimond Erle; but Lord Erceldonne was not the quick-eyed man he had been. Bad dreams had wrought on his nerves.

“Raimond’s friends are always welcome,” he said stiffly, “but we are indeed roughing it here,” and he cursed Raimond silently for having called the place a shooting-box when there was not a gun in the house.

And there were no servants! It was enough even to make “an old friend” suspicious.

“Why did you bring him?” he said, when the priest had been put in his own room for want of another habitable one. “And where have you been?”

“Finding out things.” And now that they were alone his face was haggard enough. “Do you know there is five hundred reward offered for her? Some detective’s at the bottom of it, but God knows who is offering the money!”

“And you stayed away all this time, knowing that?” cried Erceldonne, with uncurbed fury.

“I stayed because I could not help it. I had to get some one to trust, and I had to scour all England for this man,” little knowing by what chance he had found him ready to come.

“Who is he?”

“He had the honor,” said Erle cynically, “of marrying me to the first Mrs. Erle!”

Erceldonne cursed him up and down for a fool.

“Then why, of all things, do you want him here?” he ended.

“To marry me to the second. Oh, don’t waste your breath! I know what you’re going to say, but it will be legal enough this time. He had no right to do it before. I found out afterward that it was before he had entered the church. I can hold that over him if he kicks. But he won’t. He’s sorry for me, because my wife died so soon. He will tie this knot with true pleasure.”

“Do you think that sullen vixen up-stairs will have it tied without raving to him? For I don’t.”

Erle laughed.

“I think she will,” he said suavely. “You can’t manage women with sledge-hammers--unless they love you. That’s where you go wrong! Take the priest out of the way--anywhere--round the moors, and send Beryl here to me. But don’t warn her I’m here.”

Out of doors a mountain mist had fallen, and the damp twilight of it made him nervous as he waited. There would be no coercing her if the wet drove Father Maurice back before the work was done. He went to the window, and fancied he saw the black figures of his father and the priest dimly visible through the fog; and turned impatiently to go to this Vashti who would not come. But the door opened before he could reach it, and even in the twilight he started at Beryl Corselas’ eyes.

“You!” she said, full of amazement not only at his presence, but at the changed look of the room, whose windows were unshuttered as she had never seen them. But it had been a week and more since she had left her bedroom, and they might well have grown careless.

“Yes,” he said. “I--dear; what have they done to you while I was gone? Have they frightened you? You look so pale. I should never have left you. My father is hasty, unjust! But I’ll take care of you now.”

“I don’t want you to,” she said lifelessly. Her eyes were on the window that was open to the fresh air, and she went to it, like a prisoner who is strange to the light of day.

Erle took no notice; it was too high from the ground to be dangerous. He went to the fire, and threw on dry wood till the room was light as day. There was no sense in mystery or concealment now, since the thing must be done and published before a week at farthest. After that detectives could root out what they liked.

As he turned his back she leaned from the window, and her helplessness stung her afresh as she breathed the damp, sweet air. She was high above the ground, there was not even grass to break the fall if she dared to jump out. There was ivy, but not directly below the window; its trails swayed at the sides out of her reach. Swayed--she watched it with vague wonder. Why should it move in the stirless air? Why did the woody stems creak in the twilight at her right hand?

A log Erle laid on the fire slipped, and rolled blazing on the hearth. He kicked it back impatiently, with a noise that must have startled her in the silent room, for she gave a queer, stifled cry.

“Confound the thing!” he said irritably, for the log had slipped again. As he wrestled with it he did not notice her lean from the window perilously, and stare through the twilight at something that was not an ivy branch; something that moved, but not with the chill, evening air.

A lean hand she knew, a hand no one could mistake who had once seen it, was stretched out to her from the ivy where something clung like a hat. It pressed a scrap of paper into her outstretched fingers; a voice whispered in her very ear. But she had no time to hear the low words; Erle’s light, delicate step was coming toward her.

Clutching a scrap of paper, she drew back from the window just in time.

Erle was at her shoulder. And oh! was she mad as they said, to dream she had seen the lunatic she had left thousands of miles away? Her heart thumped till she was sure Erle must hear it. How could she get rid of him long enough to read that paper that seemed to sting in her hand?

“What’s the matter?” he said quickly. “Don’t shake like that; I’m not going to hurt you.”

He looked over her shoulder out the window, fearful the wet would drive back his father and the priest; and Beryl’s heart contracted. Had he seen--been nearer than she knew?

“I’m cold!” she said sharply, and walked away from him to the fire. If he had seen, that paper should burn before he got it! But he did not even follow her.

“What has my father done to you?” he said, his worn, handsome face haggard in the firelight. “But I needn’t ask--I know! I was a fool ever to leave you.”

“Why? I did not miss you.” She stood before the fire, her hands behind her back, so that her face was in shadow, while the light played on his.

“Do listen and try to trust me,” he said slowly, hunting for words that would terrify her into submission. “You’ve made my father hate you, because of those wild things you said of me when you were shocked, frightened, not yourself. He’s a strange man, and takes fancies that are soon over. His liking for you was one of them.”

“He always hated me,” she said calmly.

Erle shrugged his shoulders.

“That is nonsense. But what I am going to say is earnest, horribly earnest. My father insists you are not in your right mind, that----”

“I am the granddaughter of a madman.” She was strangely cold by the fire. “Well?”

“He’s going to put you in an asylum,” replied Erle brutally. “He will send you away to-morrow.”

Send her away! The house that was her prison seemed suddenly the only place she could not leave.

“He can’t--he daren’t!” she cried. “I would tell all I know.”

“A story of an island, of jaguars, of madness and sudden death,” he continued slowly. “Can’t you see that story would make any doctor call you mad? He wants to get you out of his way; he would stick at nothing to be rid of you.”

“Let me go there!” she muttered.

“Where?” He came toward her, his face changing. “Beryl, do you know what I heard in London? Mother Felicitas is offering a reward for you! How far would you get before she would have you?”

“Mother Felicitas!” she recoiled. She had almost forgotten her.

“A living grave in a convent, or in an asylum, there is not much to choose.” He watched her standing rigid with fear. “Don’t look like that!” he cried, as if pity had overmastered him. “You sha’n’t go to either. I’ll help you; no one shall lay a finger on you.”

“You!”

“I know you hate me,” he said softly, “but I--love you! I’ve forgotten all the cruel things you said, you had had a shock that was enough to drive you wild. And, hate me or not, I mean to take you out of my father’s hands.”

“How?” But she knew.

“In the only way I can. Beryl, marry me. Come away with me out of this nightmare.” He was not acting now, for excellent reasons his very soul was in his eyes. “What have I done to you, but tell you the truth about a woman who was not fit to be near you? Come to me and forget all that. You don’t know what life can be. Are you going to throw yours away? If I could convince my father you are in your right mind I would not tell you all this, but I can’t. All I can do is to make you my wife, and then not all the world can harm you.”

“It is your father who wants you to marry me,” she broke in scornfully. “Why do you pretend?”

“My father would get me the earth if I fancied it. And you may believe me, if he could see you dead rather than my wife, it would suit him equally well, take it or leave it.” For the first time there was a threat in his voice. Where did she get her courage, that she never so much as shrank as he leaned over her?

“To-morrow you can go to the asylum, or marry me! After to-morrow I won’t try to save you. For all I care you can do both!” The words were so easily said, so sinister, that nothing but the scrap of paper in her hand kept her from crying out.

“Scream if you choose,” he said, seeing her tightened lips; “there is no one to hear you. Think, and try, and place, you will see there is no one to help you but me. Oh, Beryl, is it so hard to trust me! You make me brutal, because you make me despair of helping you----”

“Liar! murderer!” she said in his face. For three fierce sentences he had dropped his mask, and she knew there was no love in him, but only most evil passion.

She wrenched away from the hand he stretched out to seize her, and ran from the room.

For once her own was empty. Mrs. Fuller was in the kitchen making ready a decent meal with furious, incapable fingers. Had she been able she would have poisoned the man who forced her to be a servant in his house. Beryl knelt by the fire, and unrolled the paper, all creased from her hot clasp. The next instant she threw it in the fire. It was all a trap. That hand she thought she knew must have been another’s like enough to serve, for the paper held only one sentence, in English, that the madman did not know: “Do all they tell you.”

Dull, lifelessly, Beryl watched it turn to ashes; saw Mrs. Fuller come in and lay a white gown on the bed. And Mrs. Fuller was crying, “Beryl,” and she threw her arms around the motionless girl, “marry him. Give in. Don’t you see?” she pointed to the bed, “it’s a wedding-dress,” she sobbed, for she was frightened for herself now.

“It will do very well,” said Beryl Corselas, with stiff lips, “for a shroud.”