CHAPTER XI.

A NET FOR HER FEET.

Mrs. Trelane, her face drawn and gray, stood staring out of the window. As Ismay returned she turned with sharp relief.

“Where have you been? Why did you go out like that and stay so long?” she demanded fiercely. “I have been almost wild here, with no one to speak to. Do you know that we’re ruined? That Sir Gaspard is dead?”

The girl nodded.

“I saw the flag half-mast--I asked Thomas.” Her face was suddenly very tired. “How did you hear--and are you sure it’s true?”

“True enough. Look here.” She tossed a telegram toward the girl, who caught the fluttering paper deftly.

“From Bolton & Carey to Mrs. Trelane,” the message ran. “Fatal accident on the railway just before Aix. Have received wire that Sir Gaspard le Marchant and servant are among those killed, and fear there is no doubt it is not true. Break news to daughter. Will send particulars as soon as they can be obtained.”

“How did they know you were here?”

“Sir Gaspard told them I was to be here during his absence. I know Mr. Bolton--or I did when I was Helen le Marchant,” impatiently. “There’s no mystery about that.”

“Have you told Cristiane?”

“No!” Mrs. Trelane flung herself into a chair and twisted her smooth fingers uneasily. “She’s asleep. She came in dead tired and lay down. Her maid is watching to tell her when she wakes. How can I tell her? If I do it, it will make her hate me.”

With quick contempt Ismay glanced at her.

“On the contrary, it may be your only chance with her,” she said angrily. “Tell me, had you any arrangement, any bargain, with Sir Gaspard?”

“None,” with a sullen shake of the head. “We were asked here on a visit, you and I, ’till things could be arranged,’ he said. But I know that we were here on approval, if you like to call it so. If the girl liked us we were to stay on indefinitely----”

“And you sit here when you know that, and run the chance of having that maid whom she has had for years tell her that her father is dead!” Ismay flung out her hands in exasperation. “Can’t you see that if any one tells her but you or I we shall be outside of it all to Cristiane? Move, please.” Mrs. Trelane’s chair blocked her path to the door. “I’m going to tell her this minute.”

With the grace of an angry animal, she was out of the room and up the corridor to Cristiane’s door. Jessie, the girl’s own maid, opened it, her face swelled with crying.

“She’s asleep still, the poor lamb!” the woman whispered.

With unnatural strength Ismay kept the contempt from her face; the woman was in a very luxury of woe, and would have blurted out her bad news, without doubt, the very instant her mistress awoke. What luck that she had come home in time!

“Oh, Jessie!” she said softly. “It’s so dreadful. And you must be tired. Go and get your tea, and I’ll stay till you come back.”

Jessie cast a glance backward at the bed.

Cristiane, in a white dressing-gown, slept like a baby, her rose-leaf lips just parted, her lovely cheek flushed. There was no sign of her waking till dinner, and down-stairs there would be tea and muffins, and solemn waggings of the head. Cook would be telling her dreams--she was a great one for dreams. The prospect was too tempting.

“Thank you, miss,” she said. “I’d be glad of a cup of tea. I’ll be back in a jiffy; long before she wakes.”

“Then you’ll be a clever woman, my good Jessie!” the girl thought, as she nodded and passed silently by the woman, who stood respectfully out of her way.

She looked around the room, where a fire burned softly between brass andirons, where the floor was covered with a pale-blue and rose carpet, and the walls hung with blue silk that was covered with pink roses. At the side of the bed, where she might slip her bare feet upon it as she got up in the mornings, was Cristiane’s only legacy from her mother, a great, white bearskin, brought long ago from farthest Russian snows. Not one atom of the prodigal luxury about the room was lost on those green, dilated eyes that stared so mercilessly. The very silver of the toilet-trays and bottles, the white vellum binding of the rows of books, the rose velvet dressing-gown lined with white fur that hung by the bedside, each and all struck Ismay with a separate stab.

“I will have them all before I die--all!” she said deliberately. “And she’s got to help me, for now, at least, I can’t turn out into the world again after I’ve seen this.”

Noiselessly she turned and bolted the door; she would have no maid coming to interfere with her work. With that same silent, sinuous grace she walked to the bedside, and if there had been eyes to see her as she knelt there they might have looked away as at the sight of a snake ready to strike.

Yet the hand she laid softly on Cristiane’s was utterly tender. Perhaps the beauty of the gold-red hair that streamed over the lace-trimmed pillow and the white satin quilt, the exquisite unconsciousness of the lovely, girlish face, touched the onlooker in some strange way, for her face softened miraculously.

“Cristiane,” she whispered. “Cristiane, dear, wake up.”

The girl stirred, muttered something with smiling lips, and was fast asleep again.

“Cristiane!” Ismay repeated; she touched her more firmly, for time was going.

“Yes.” The sleepy answer almost startled her. “Oh, it’s Ismay!” Cristiane sat up, rubbing her eyes, drawing her hand from Ismay’s to do it. “I’ve been asleep; I was so tired. Did you win a pair of gloves from me?”

Ismay’s eyes filled with tears; she did not know herself if they were real or if she were merely warming up to her part.

“I had such a funny dream!” Cristiane cried, with a little laugh of pleasure. “I dreamed about daddy; he said he was coming home.” She caught the look on Ismay’s face as she spoke.

“You’re crying! What’s the matter?” The sleepy sound was gone from the voice at once. “Ismay, what is it?” with both her hands on the shoulders of the girl kneeling by the bed.

“Mother has had a telegram. There was an accident----” Was it her own voice that faltered so strangely?

“Not from father--he’s not hurt?” the hands on Ismay’s shoulders fairly bruised them.

“Look at me, tell me!” Cristiane cried fiercely. “Is he hurt?”

Ismay lifted her face, and saw Cristiane’s eyes, black, dilated, imperious.

“He’s not hurt!” she said dully; and then she flung her arms suddenly round the girl who sat crouched in her white gown as though it were a garment of fiery torture. “My dearest, nothing will ever hurt him any more,” she said, in slow desperation.

“You mean he’s dead!” The words seemed to come after an interminable interval of time, in which the ticking of the silver clock, the murmur of the fire burning in the gate, had sounded loud and somewhat threatening to Ismay Trelane. With a face as hard as stone Cristiane had risen from her bed and stood on the white bearskin, her eyes narrowed, her lips set.

“I mean he is happy”--as she had never thought in her life, Ismay thought now for the words that would not come. “I mean he has gone to be with your mother--till you come!”

To the speaker the words were a childish fable, a lie; but they went home.

Cristiane swayed where she stood, and like a flash Ismay’s arms were around her; but she seemed not to feel them.

“What is that to me?” she cried, with a dreadful harshness, trembling like a leaf. Over her shoulder Ismay saw the clock. It was after five. At any moment some old friend might come and touch that chord in the girl’s heart for which she was trying in vain.

“Think!” she said quietly. “Put yourself in your father’s place. Your mother loved him as you do. She died for his sake and yours when she was but little older than you.”

As she spoke, she was thankful she had drawn the story from her mother one day in bored curiosity. “Do you think she did not beg him to hurry after her? Do you think the years were not long to the man she left behind? Think of the time when you were only a child and busy with lessons and play; think how your father sat alone at night with his sorrow; think of the things he could never say to her, and how he longed for the touch of her hand many a time--and then say, if you can, that it is nothing to you that they are together again, you that he loved, you that she died for!”

With a great cry Cristiane flung out her arms.

“Ismay! Ismay! Help me to bear it! I know--I’ve always known--he wanted her!” Tears came at last from her frozen eyes. She clung wildly to the girl who held her. “But I never thought he’d leave me.”

“God took him, Cristiane,” said Ismay, and as she said it she believed it.

“Tell me all you know, quick!” her voice thick with sobbing.

With all the strength of her young, lithe body, Ismay lifted her and sat down with her on her bed.

“He was going to Rome--she died there,” she whispered. “The train was wrecked at Aix. He was--Cristiane, it was night, he was asleep, and he woke in paradise with the woman he loved so long!”

Cristiane’s arms clutched her suddenly.

“He didn’t suffer, tell me! I’ll be brave; he always liked me to be brave.”

Brave! Ismay could have laughed outright. If this were bravery, what did you call the other thing? Not all death and hell could have made her cry as Cristiane was crying now.

“He never felt it, he never knew,” she answered, and if her voice hardened Cristiane did not hear it. As if the words tore the very soul out of her, she cried out: “I want father! Oh! I want my father!”

Ismay Trelane at that cry for once was awed to silence. She stooped and kissed the golden head that lay on her shoulder; kissed it with a passion of pity, a sudden feeling of protection that was real, for Cristiane le Marchant.

A knock came on the closed door.

“Tell them to go away,” Cristiane gasped. “Don’t move; don’t go. I don’t want any one but you!”

The leap of sudden rapture in Ismay’s heart made her clutch at her side. This was what she had wanted. Her work was done as no one else could have done it.

“No one shall come in,” she answered softly. “Let me go and speak to whoever it is for a minute and tell them to go away.”

She laid Cristiane deftly on the pillows, and with noiseless swiftness slipped into the passage, closing the door behind her.

Mrs. Trelane was there, pale with nervous fright.

“It’s that man Cylmer. He wants to see her. What shall I do? Does she know about her father?”

“Luckily for us, she does,” said the girl dryly. “Where do you suppose we should have been if the maid had been with her and Mr. Cylmer had come? She would have gone down and heard it from him.”

“Why not him as well as any other?” asked her mother, with quick suspicion.

“Because I meant no one to tell her but me. Don’t you understand that yet?” asked the girl sharply. Oh! how lucky she had been! But for her it might have been Miles Cylmer Cristiane had clung to. Miles Cylmer who had caught her as she swayed. The thought made Ismay sick, and for another reason than the sake of her own bread and butter.

“Shall I go to her?” Mrs. Trelane made a step toward the shut door.

“No, better not! And don’t see Mr. Cylmer. It isn’t proper to see people when there is any one dead,” she added.

“I’m not anxious to see him, you needn’t worry. But he gave Thomas this for Cristiane.” She held out a card. Ismay’s eyes flashed as she read it. Was it thus that a man who was only a friend of her father’s would write to the girl who lay prostrate with grief?

“Be brave, dear. It may not be true. I am going up to town to-night to find out all I can from the lawyers. I will be back as soon as possible. Please let me try to help you. MILES.”

“He must have seen the flag and come over at once,” she thought, a wild, unreasoning terror at her heart that he cared for Cristiane. Men were like that; they kissed one girl when they loved another.

“I’ll give it to her. There’s no answer,” she said. And in the dusky corridor her mother did not see that her lips had grown bloodless. “Tell Thomas to say to Mr. Cylmer that Cristiane can’t see him. And send up some tea or wine, or something.” She leaned hard on the door for support. “I’m worn out; worn out!” She had been full of life five minutes since, but now, when she must go and comfort this girl whom Miles Cylmer had come in such haste to see, Ismay’s knees trembled under her. If only she dared to leave Cristiane long enough to go to him, to tell him----Bah! what could she tell him?

Mr. Cylmer turned away from Marchant’s Hold perfectly unsuspicious that the green witch eyes that had held his were those of no other than Ismay Trelane. If he had known he might not have been the first to spread a net for her feet. But what he did unconsciously she did with meaning. His note never reached the girl to whom it was written.