CHAPTER XV.

COILED TO SPRING.

Just how long she sat crouched in the dark Ismay Trelane never knew. She heard a bell ring and lamps brought that shone through the chink straight on her. Then there was a tinkle of glasses, and, as a bottle was opened with a sharp explosion, she dared to steal away.

“Oh, what wickedness! I never dreamed of such wickedness,” she thought, gaining her own room and locking herself in, as though Wray might come to seek her. “But he sha’n’t do it. I swear he sha’n’t do it, unless he kills me first!”

For she knew that somewhere, somehow, death would be lurking in her own house for Cristiane le Marchant; not now, but later on, when people had ceased to talk of Sir Gaspard’s death, and his strange will.

Curiously enough, now that she knew the real danger, all her courage had come back to her. It was with nerves of steel that she sat thinking, thinking; her eyes gleaming green in the darkness like a watching leopard’s, that waits to kill.

“What shall I do? I can’t let mother know I heard--she would tell him, and I wouldn’t have any chance.” Her anguish almost broke out into a cry. “Oh! what have I done to have such a mother?”--her teeth gritting as she kept back the words. “And he will marry me then, will he? He will marry a dose of poison, and I will hang for it first! To sit there in cold blood and talk of murder--and she so young.” She rocked to and fro. Cristiane le Marchant was in her way, but that was a thing to fight and triumph over. Not even to marry Miles Cylmer would Ismay let that awful scheme of death be played out.

And her mother had begged to him, not defied him; that cry of “Mark, Mark!” still rang in the daughter’s ears. Could it be true what he said, that it was she who had poisoned Abbotsford? Had her mother managed to deceive even her when she swore she had no hand in it?

“I will find out!” The girl’s dumb lips were awful in the dusk. “I will make Marcus Wray a thing the world shudders at before I am done. I will take care of Cristiane,” she moaned sharply, remembering how she had said these very words to Cylmer.

“Oh, you’ll love me in the end,” she panted, as though he could hear the thought in her brain. “I would die for you; surely you’ll love me in the end!”

Frightened at her own passion, she got up in the dark and bathed her face in cold water, and washed the hands that were soiled from the dust in her ambush. Her mother would wonder, if she came in before dinner and found her in a dress all gray with dust.

She made a careful toilet, that she might be ready when the gong rang for dinner, and looked at herself in the glass. But her own eyes were dreadful to her, for they were the eyes of a hunted beast at bay. She turned quickly from the glass. She could not think if she saw her own face, and think she must before she had to meet Marcus Wray.

She opened the window to the bitter winter air, and its chill cleared her brain.

First, there was that matter of Lord Abbotsford, and the hold it had given Wray on her mother. He must have proof of what the latter denied, or she would not be in such terror of him. The thought brought no new terror to Ismay Trelane; true or not, the accusation was Marcus Wray’s weapon, and she must look for one of her own that would turn its edge.

Then there was Cylmer. He, too, would be against her mother if he knew all, and Wray would stick at nothing if he once knew that Ismay loved another man. He must know nothing of Cylmer; yet, if he stayed here, how was he to be kept in the dark?

And Cristiane? Suppose Ismay’s dull suspicion were true, and Cylmer loved her, why should she live to come between him and Ismay Trelane?

The girl, sitting, with clenched hands, on her bed, answered her own question.

“Because I hate, hate, hate Marcus Wray!” she whispered hoarsely. “Because he shall never have a penny of Sir Gaspard’s money, nor my little finger, to call his own. I must carry my own sins. I will not be made to help carry Marcus Wray’s! Cristiane----” She went to the glass again, and this time she did not flinch. “Cristiane cannot keep any man from me! I will have it all, all, from marrying Miles Cylmer to beating Marcus Wray at his own game.”

For there faced her in the glass her own beauty, strange and glorious. Not a curve of her milky cheeks, a wave of her flax-white hair, a line of her scarlet mouth was lost on her. She gazed steadily into her own eyes in the mirror till it seemed as if a soul not her own gazed back at her from them. They were no longer the eyes of Ismay Trelane, a girl not eighteen years old, but those of a woman who had lived and loved and known the very wisdom of earth long ago, when the world was very young.

The old, old smile curved the girl’s lips as she turned away.

There was her weapon to fight Marcus Wray--her beauty, her wits, her self-reliance that should never again fail her as it had failed her to-day.

“I shall manage them all!” She flung back her lovely head triumphantly, securely. “Who is Cristiane that I should be afraid of her, when he can look at me? She shall help me with him! She shall be the bait that will bring him to me. And I will not go to him with blood on my hands to save Marcus Wray.”

Not even to herself would she own that in spite of herself Cristiane had grown dear to her, for to care for any one but oneself and a man was to be a fool, to Ismay Trelane. Her mother--bah! Her mother was safe enough while her enemy was playing for such high stakes.

The only danger was lest Wray might think things about Cylmer, and forget his caution in a mad rage of jealousy. That thick, yellow skin, those dark red lips bore the very trade-mark on them of the most ungovernable passion in the world.

“It is I who must take care of that,” Ismay mused. “And before I am done, it is Marcus Wray that shall tremble for his skin, not I, nor my mother, nor Cristiane.”

She went down-stairs as calm as a lake at dawn; cool and silent she bowed to Marcus Wray where he stood with her mother in the drawing-room, dressed for dinner.

She had never seen him in evening clothes, and he was more repulsive in the plain black and white than she had ever dreamed he could be.

“What! You don’t shake hands?” he said, with amusement.

Cristiane was not coming down, and Mrs. Trelane looked at her daughter as if she longed to slap her.

“Don’t be silly, Ismay!” she snapped.

“Let her alone,” Wray said quietly. “It will come to the same thing in the end. The harder it is to get a thing, the more I enjoy it.”

Even Mrs. Trelane felt cold at his hideous, gloating look at her daughter, but Ismay glanced at him with calm distaste, to which her beauty lent a sting.

“Let us go to dinner,” she said, as if he were beneath any direct reply.

And as she sat at his right hand, opposite her mother, not even the luck of Marcus Wray could warn him that a white adder, with gleaming emerald eyes, coiled up to spring, would have been a safer neighbor for him than Ismay Trelane.