CHAPTER XX.

THE EDGE OF DOOM.

A cold black void; a struggle that was agony to get out of it; a falling through deep waters that were loud in her ears, then blackness once more, deep and awful. Slowly, slowly, it faded, and with a sickness like death at her heart Ismay was conscious again. Where was she? What was this?

She lifted her head from the wintry earth, and let it fall again.

“Lie still; don’t move.” Cylmer was kneeling beside her, inwardly cursing himself for a fool, when he knew her horror of death.

“Ismay, darling, forgive me, and forget it. I might have known it was enough to sicken any woman.”

“Death--murder--you!” she cried incoherently. “Ever since I came here death has been round me, I”--her voice was shrill, hysterical--“I smell death in Marchant’s Hold, and I meet it.” Her eyes closed again.

“No, no! Don’t talk like that, my sweet,” gathering her close with protecting arms. “I was a brute to tell you such things. You were tired out, unstrung already. I was too rough and careless with you, my heart.”

But she shrank away.

“You--to bring any one to their death; to find clues that would hang them!”

“It is not I, it is justice. Oh! don’t draw away from me.”

“Justice on the poor, the tempted!” A sudden sense of the danger that her words held checked her. “Oh, why did you tell me? Why should I know you are helping to hunt any poor wretch down?”

“Oh, the tender woman’s soul that cannot bear anything to be hurt!” he thought swiftly, loving her all the more for her weakness.

“Would you let things go, and have the innocent suffer for the guilty?” he said gravely. “I think not, dear.”

The innocent! Was there any one in the world innocent? She had no reason to love her mother, yet now, in her peril, she was ready to fight, tooth and nail, for her, even when her enemy was Miles Cylmer, whose kiss had opened heaven.

All that he was doing she must know, and make of no avail, and at the task before her the girl’s brave spirit quailed. Somehow she must save her mother, and keep him! Her brain reeled as she thought that some one, no matter how innocent, must have that crime brought home to them to save the mother who was guilty.

Ismay summoned all her strength, and sat up, very white.

“Did you know I was such a baby?” she whispered. “I hate hearing of horrors, and it startled me to know you had anything to do with things like that. But you’re quite right. I won’t be so silly any more. Only I--I was ready to cry in any case. I loved you, and you kissed me, and----”

“And then I had not any more sense than to blurt out things you should never hear of,” he finished for her, kissing her again, very softly. “I’m going to take you home now, and we’ll never speak of Abbotsford again.”

“You can as much as you like, now,” and if her lips were wan he did not notice. “I know whatever you do will be for the right,” speaking the truth, but not adding, “no matter the cost to me and mine.”

“My little sweetheart,” he said, fastening the fur collar of her coat, that he had unfastened to give her room to breathe when she lay unconscious. “I wish I could carry you home. You aren’t fit to walk.”

“I am fit to go anywhere with you,” she smiled, with all the strange sorcery that was hers, a smile that covered deadly terror. “Bring my roses. They are the first thing you ever gave me,” pointing to the great bunch of blood-red flowers lying on the ground in the early twilight.

“They are not half so sweet and fine as you,” Cylmer said, as he saw her put them to her face. “Do you know how beautiful you are? I wish you would marry me to-morrow, so that you could put away all that black, and let me see you in a white gown.”

With a little shiver, she drew closer to him, where she walked within his arm in the sheltering dusk.

“Tell me about Lord Abbotsford,” she said, as his arm tightened round her, for she must know; she dared not let him go back to talk of that love that might turn so bitter in the end.

“And make you faint again? Not I!”

“I won’t. It wasn’t that.” He could not know the sweet shyness of her voice was put there to cover the first lie she had ever told him. “I was--tired.”

And in the languor of happiness that was in his own blood, he believed her.

“But you hate those things!”

“Not if you say they are right.”

“They are, I suppose,” he answered slowly. “A man’s blood cries from the ground for justice, and I was his only friend. But I don’t think I ought to talk about it--to you.”

“If I am going to be your wife, will you always hide unpleasant things from me?” softly. “I don’t think I should like that.”

“I’m never going to hide anything from you,” he cried, with love in his voice. “But there isn’t much to tell.”

She listened with a heart like ice as he told her all that she knew so well--the missing photograph, the money, the diamonds--she had to hold herself hard not to forestall him as he talked. Would he never come to something new? But when he came to it she was thankful for the darkness that hid her face.

“The diamonds vanished utterly,” he was saying; “but the other day, one of them, a very curious stone, with a pink tinge in it, turned up in Amsterdam. The tracing of it will be long, but certain in the end; it will ruin the man or woman who took it.”

“Or woman!” The interruption was nearly a cry. “What woman would do such things?”

“It looked as if a woman had taken away the photograph.” He drew her closer. “Look out, the path is slippery!”

“Very slippery,” said Ismay Trelane, keeping down the dry sob in her throat. Slippery, and on the very edge of doom, this path that she must walk to the end.

“You see, there must have been a woman in it somewhere, for Abbotsford was going to be married, and he was leaving all the people he had been friendly with, and arranging all his affairs.”

“Say it plainly,” said the old Ismay Trelane, who had been brought up to uncanny knowledge.

“I can’t say it--to you,” Cylmer returned, with shame.

“Go on, then, I know what you mean. Let us say the photograph was the woman’s he was leaving for his wife.”

“Then, don’t you see, it must have either been she or some man for her who came back and took it.”

“I think it must have been a man!” Her voice through her white lips sounded almost indifferent. “A woman would not dare.”

“Whichever it was, they were mad to take the diamonds. I don’t know,” he continued, “that it’s going to make much difference. The diamonds may be traced, of course, but they are not the clue I spoke about. Kivers tells me there was something found in the room when they were getting things ready for the new Lord Abbotsford’s family. It will probably show clearly enough whether the murderer was a man or not.”

“Something found! What, I wonder?” like lightning she was going over that day. Her mother had not dropped or lost anything; she could not have, or she would have missed it, and said so, Ismay thought, in new terror. “Why must it belong to the man who killed him? What was found, I mean? Fifty people may have been in and out of that room since he died.”

“No one has; it was locked and sealed after the inquest by my--the detective,” quickly correcting himself. “It was only opened two days ago by him, when he made a last search, before giving up hope, and before the new family came to him. And in the last search he found something.”

“What?” Her impatience made her eyes burn in the dusk.

“That’s what I’m going up to see. ‘A trinket, or a part of one,’ he said.”

“A trinket!” involuntarily the words escaped her, with an anxiety that was pain. Yet she was sure that her mother had not lost anything that awful day, unless--she had not known she did!

“It may be something I have seen before,” said Cylmer coolly, and once more that hand of ice was on her heart. “So I shall go up to-morrow.”

“To-morrow!” What should she do all the long day when he was gone. When each minute might be bringing detection nearer? “You won’t stay long?” she added imploringly. “You’ll come back?”

“As soon as I possibly can; the next day at farthest. Shall you miss me?”

“Miss you!” She gathered all her strength and laughed lightly, without a trace of care. “I have not had you long enough to miss you.”

They were close to Marchant’s Hold now. The lighted lamps shone rosy from the drawing-room windows, and she kept carefully out of the patches of light on the gravel where they stood.

“I shall miss you, then, every second! And, look here, Ismay! I hate the business. I only do it because he was my friend, and I feel bound to it. Do you understand?”

“I dare say you will hate it more before it is done,” she said, as if in idleness, and afterward he remembered, when the stone he had set rolling threatened to crush all he loved on earth. “But it interests me in a dreadful sort of way. When you come back you will tell me what you found, won’t you? I won’t tell. It shall be your secret, like your loving me is mine.”

“I’ll tell you anything you ask,” he said tenderly. “But I wish you would let me have my way, and be engaged to you openly. I would like to go in and tell Cristiane now!” He moved toward the great door with so much purpose that she flew after him.

“No, no!” she cried. “Mother hates you; she’d send me away straight off; you’d never see me again. If you tell it means that I shall suffer.”

“Then I’ll wait forever.” In the shadow of an evergreen he caught her to him, as a man holds his only love on earth. “Till you tell me to speak I will hold my tongue. Will that satisfy you? And, instead of my coming to Marchant’s Hold, will you meet me at the stile, at five, the day after to-morrow? It will be best, if we are to keep our secret.”

She gave a long sigh of relief, resting for perhaps the last time against the strong shoulders of the man who might know things when he came from London that would part them forever.

“That is all I want,” she said; “just to let no one know but us two! I must go now; good-by.”

“But I want to come in.” He had not let her go.

She smiled in the darkness.

“And even Thomas would know from your face! And how should I look coming home at this hour with you?”

“You are too worldly-wise. How do you know all these things?” half-proud of her shrewdness and sense. “You’re too young to know them.”

“Sometimes I feel old, so old,” she answered gravely, “as if I had lived lives and lives.”

“And loved?” catching her jealously, as if they were not talking nonsense. “And loved, Ismay?”

For answer her arms went round his neck in quick passion.

“I never loved any one on earth till I loved you,” she whispered. “There is only you for me now, till I die. Even if you tire of me--or hate me.”

She stepped away from him and into the house before he could answer, before he could even tighten his arms to hold her. He turned away for his long walk home with a strange loneliness, as if his very soul had left him when Ismay went.