CHAPTER VII.

FIRST BLOOD TO ERCELDONNE.

Mother Felicitas sat in her white-walled parlor, and her lean face looked gray against the whitewashed background from which the pictured saints and martyrs looked down indifferent-eyed. Opposite her sat her man of business--for even convents have such things--and his matter-of-fact manner was driving her mad.

“You traced that misguided child,” she said smoothly, “to Blackpool, I think you said.” She could hardly sit still in her chair.

“Easily. And then to St. Anne’s. But I regret to say I was too late. She had been hiding on an old wreck there starving, for nearly a fortnight, till a lamplighter found her and took her to the workhouse. I went there, of course, but the matron, a civil-spoken woman, told me the girl had been taken away only that morning by a Mrs. Fuller, who wished to adopt her.”

“Did they hand her over to a strange woman without any references?” said the mother, moistening her dry lips.

“It seems so,” he answered bluntly. “They had the address in Liverpool, but when I went there the caretaker told me Mrs. Fuller had that morning gone to the Continent with a young lady till the spring. Oh, I fancy it’s all right, reverend mother! You are too troubled about a good-for-nothing runaway.”

“Yes,” she said, and hid her hands in her sleeves that he might not see the trembling of them.

“But her well-being is naturally a--sacred charge to me. I feel all this terribly.” She wondered while she spoke how she was to find out what was racking her, indeed.

“Lord Erceldonne is lord of the manor at St. Anne’s--I suppose--he had not been interested in the sad case,” she observed.

“He was away. I heard by chance.” The lawyer had not got speech of Ebenezer Davids, who was too unimportant. “He had not been there for months.”

Mother Felicitas’ heart gave a bound of relief.

Then it was, after all, what it looked! Some tender-hearted fool had adopted the girl. She was not beaten--yet!

“Yes, yes!” she said indifferently. “But did the child, by the way, tell her name?”

“Certainly,” he answered, rather surprised; but Mother Felicitas, of course, had never raised her saintly eyes and did not see.

That was a blow; but still Erceldonne was away and he would certainly never see the workhouse register. He was in her power still.

“That is all, I think. Thank you,” she said calmly. “We must first wait till this Mrs. Fuller returns. You have her address? And then perhaps our stray may be induced to return to us. You will take some refreshment before you leave, Mr. Mayhew?”

But when he was gone Mother Felicitas sat cold and speechless. Perhaps she saw herself excommunicated if the whole story of her connection with Beryl Corselas ever came out.

“At least, he does not know and never shall,” she thought, when thought would come. “He shall fear me till he dies, as he has feared me this many a year. He shall pay, as he has always paid, to the enrichment of our order,” for she, of all the convent, had alone known the source of the roll of notes that came anonymously each year to her.

She frowned thoughtfully as she began to write a letter, dignified and guarded. It might be months in reaching the man it was meant for, but it would reach him in the end. It informed the guardians of the workhouse at St. Anne’s that the lady who had so kindly adopted the stray child had been authorized to do so by her only friend, the Mother Superior of the Convent of St. Mary; and that it was hoped the arrangement would be most satisfactory.

“As I hear that Viscount Erceldonne had kindly interested himself in the case, perhaps you would be so good as to let him know the ending,” the letter concluded, and when it was gone Mother Felicitas breathed more easily. Erceldonne should know that she was in keeping of his secret still; that the sword that hung over his head had not left her grasp.

But, clever as she was, she never dreamed of Erceldonne’s face when the letter was forwarded to him in London. He was very busy, but he let his business stand while he chuckled over that courteous epistle.

“There’s nothing so dangerous as being too clever,” he said, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes; “and this is too good! Mrs. Fuller--oh! Mother Felicitas! since that’s your name now--truly you have strange friends, for a nun.”

He drew from his pocket two papers, the very ones to which his hand had flown on the night he had met the lamplighter. On one was written in an uneducated scrawl: “The Gurl is gone Run Away.”

It had never entered the mind of the reverend mother that Lord Erceldonne had no idea of paying the hush-money for a dead or vanished girl, or that he had established a spy in her very house in the shape of the loutish boy who carried her vegetables to market, the only male being in her employ. It did not even strike her when, in a week or so, the boy gave warning and returned to his natural orbit in Lord Erceldonne’s employ. He was used to watching ladies for his master, and this was only a queerer item than usual on the list.

The other letter was the “coincidence” his son had thought worth telling him--a letter that would have been wasted but for the lamplighter. Lord Erceldonne had reason to laugh that night.

He swept his correspondence into a drawer as a light knock came on his door.

“Come in!” he cried, and rose punctiliously, yet mockingly, for he knew who his visitor was.

A little woman, exceedingly pretty, charming mannered, and exquisitely dressed, stood on the threshold.

“May I?” her voice was not quite of a piece with the rest of her. “Dear Erceldonne! how warm your room is!” she exclaimed, seating herself.

“Bad habit!” he returned vaguely. “I suppose you’ve come to say you’re off?”

She nodded.

“Paris!” she cried gaily. “Having accomplished your lordship’s wishes and played nursemaid for a month, I suppose I may go and amuse myself again. My kind godmother, as you know,” she said flippantly, “is on the Continent!”

Erceldonne laughed. Truly that Mrs. Fuller whose address in Liverpool he had borrowed knew nothing of this one, nor of Beryl Corselas, either.

“What are you going to do with that child?” she continued. “Not bring her here, surely. It would not be edifying--for Raimond!”

Erceldonne’s middle-aged handsome face was utterly blank. He had no idea of telling his charming friend anything. She had served his purpose, and now the sooner he saw the last of her pretty person the better.

“St. John’s Wood is still standing,” he remarked easily. “As for Raimond, no one sees less of him than I,” yet she had made him angry; there was no one weaker than Raimond about a handsome face, and he had been struck with this penniless girl already.

“I hear the lovely Andria is----” she hesitated.

“Gone the way of all flesh, I believe, in hope of further exaltation,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

No one would have believed how hard he had worked to obtain just that result as he sat looking at his visitor with critical admiration. She really wore wonderfully!

“Well, you’re off! And you may have those diamonds you wanted, to take with you.” He had caught her expectant eyes. “What! Something finer?”

“I--I would rather have that paper of mine. Please, Erceldonne!” she said, with an earnestness that sat ill on her.

He rose, flicked her cheek lightly, and laughed.

“Not yet, my dear Emeline; I can’t spare it.”

There were tears in her hard eyes as he put a velvet case in her hand, but she dared not implore him. She knew him. She had got his “fancy” for him; she had hoped that would have wiped off the old score; but the man was too careful a blackguard.

Only one shot did the supposed “Mrs. Fuller” fire as she said good-by.

“The girl is a handful, even for you. I don’t think you can do anything with her.”

“Perhaps not.” Lord Erceldonne laughed in that sudden, unpleasant, loud cackle. “Oh, my dear Emeline! you have a short memory.”

The poor, painted, little sinner started; for the blow was cruel. Erceldonne laughed again as she crept out of the room she had entered so jauntily. He knew all her secrets; and she had not even touched the garment’s hem of his.