CHAPTER XXIII.

A GHOSTLY EAVESDROPPER.

Mr. Wray sat by the library fire the next night as the clock chimed twelve. There was whisky beside him, and soda, but he was not drinking, only staring at the hearth, and tapping with his finger on his knee, with the old action of driving in a nail.

The day had been long, hideously long, to every one but Cristiane le Marchant, who had drunk in specious, covert admiration as a thirsty man drinks water. To Mrs. Trelane it had been one effort of the nerves not to give way to her misgivings; to Ismay the hours had dragged, and yet flown, in her fears that to-morrow might be fraught with danger that could not be evaded; her longing, that was yet a dread, for Cylmer’s return. And, come what might, Wray must not see them together.

Marcus, until ten o’clock, had been coldly uneasy, despite all his careful politeness. Since then the deep lines about his mouth were drawn less tightly, and yet the look on his face did not reassure Helen Trelane, as she came noiselessly into the room.

“Well, you have not overexerted yourself to get here!” he did not stop the tapping that was enough to get on an innocent woman’s nerves.

“Do you know I have been waiting for an hour? Though, of course I should be at your disposal till four in the morning!” with sarcastic deference.

“I couldn’t come,” she retorted. “Cristiane came to my room to brush her hair, and I had to pretend to get ready for bed.”

“Evidently.” For her carefully dressed hair had been changed to a small coil that made her ten years older. “Well, now you are here, I have some news!”

“Mark!” she caught him by the arm. “Quick, tell me. Good, or bad?”

“It is always ‘Mark’ when you are afraid of your neck!” his tone was smoothly uncivil, his action openly brutal as he shook off her hand.

“Good, if one can believe it,” he took a telegram from his pocket.

“And don’t you?”

“I’ve no particular reason to; Van Hoeft was always a liar,” coolly. “Yet I think he knows it wouldn’t pay to lie to me.”

“Who’s Van Hoeft? Give it to me.” She snatched it from his hand.

“A henchman of mine, in Amsterdam. Be good enough,” peremptorily, “not to read it at the top of your sweetly penetrating voice.”

“There’s no one to hear.” But she did moderate the strained pitch of her voice a little.

“‘The parcel cannot be traced beyond Paris. Will wire if any news of it.’”

“The parcel. Does he mean the diamonds?” she cried, raging at his sullen calm. “Why don’t you answer?”

“Of course he does, else why would it be good news?”

“And you think he may be deceiving you?”

“I think he may be fool enough to try to keep me quiet while he saves his own skin.”

“Then why don’t you go and find out,” her voice was harsh, ringing. “Are you going to sit here and let us both be ruined?”

“I am going to sit here, because I am afraid to be seen in either Paris or Amsterdam,” he returned as carelessly as if he spoke of avoiding a draft of air. “And because I’ve a good thing here, and the sooner it’s managed the better.”

Twice the woman tried to speak and could not.

“What was in that paragraph, exactly?” she said at last.

“Exactly this.” He drew out a clipping from his pocketbook and read it aloud.

“There is at last some clue to the mystery surrounding the death of the late Lord Abbotsford, whose tragic end our readers will remember. Some of the missing diamonds have been found at Amsterdam by a clever detective, and the tracing of their whole history since their disappearance can now be only a matter of time.”

“You’re sure that’s all?” she moistened her lip with his full tumbler of whisky and soda.

“It’s enough, isn’t it? Oh, pray keep my drink!” as she handed it to him. “I prefer a clean glass.”

“Mark, you must see,” she wailed wretchedly, “that it’s no time to have a nine days’ wonder here. It would be madness to draw attention to either of us, now.” She leaned forward, haggard, imploring. “I’ll give you anything, all I have, if you only go away and let the girl be.”

“I told you before that was abject rot,” he exclaimed icily. “I’m not playing for the few pounds you would forget to send when I was out of your way. I mean to have all this”--glancing around him--“and Ismay, in a satin gown, to take off my boots.” For once his calm was gone; he breathed sharply. Mrs. Trelane rocked to and fro in her chair, with fear and loathing.

“She’ll never have you,” she said through her teeth.

“Then you can swing,” said Mr. Wray, with a significant finger at his own throat.

And this time she made no protestation of her innocence. Any one listening might well have believed in her guilt. When she spoke again her voice was hollow, like a dying woman’s.

“You can’t poison her without being found out.”

Mr. Wray threw back his head and laughed noiselessly, as was his habit. The joke, for some unknown reason, was apparently an excellent one.

“Dear lady, how your mind reverts to a groove,” he said, surveying her with half-shut eyes that made him more hideous than ever. “Your method is not going to be employed again,” and he laughed once more, unmercifully.

“Mark,” she was crying hysterically, “don’t laugh like that! You’ll kill me if you laugh. You frighten me--I could scream”--her sobs broke her words. “Tell me what you mean, and let me go.”

“I mean an accident, then; a common or garden accident. There couldn’t be any fuss about that; it might happen to every one. And the less you know about it the better. If you knew you’d do something foolish, and the whole thing would be made a mess of.”

“It will put us both in our graves, never mind what I do.” She turned on him fiercely.

He got up coolly and pulled up the blind, staring out into the moonlight night.

“Does it interest you to know that it’s freezing hard? And there’s not a breath of wind on the lake,” he asked.

“Nothing interests me while you live to curse my eyes,” she said with unutterable bitterness, and in the silence of the room he laughed to himself.

“Then let me advise you to drink that whisky and go to bed,” he said, dropping the blind and turning around. “Also to rejoice that you will not encounter any one in the passages,” glancing distastefully at the channels her tears had marked through her powder.

“You have prepared me for a good night’s rest,” she returned heavily, opening the door and making a few steps into the dark hall outside.

The next minute she flew back again.

“Mark, quick--for Heaven’s sake! There’s some one, something, there. I can’t go.”

“You don’t mean you are believing in that crazy lie of Thomas?” he said after a contemptuous survey of the empty hall, lamp in hand. “There isn’t a creature stirring.”

“He believes it; Jessie believes it.”

“And in spite of that they also believe that when any one dies they go either to hell or to heaven,” he jeered. “Can’t you see the thing’s absurd?”

“But I heard something. I did, indeed. Oh, I’m nervous, unstrung. I can’t face those dark stairs and passages. You will have to go up with me.”

“Because Thomas is hanging round to see that all the lights are out,” shrugging his shoulders. “I suppose neither of those two girls would come down for anything.”

Mrs. Trelane shook her head. “Thomas thinks we are all in bed. He hasn’t left a light anywhere. Jessie sleeps in a room off Cristiane’s; she would never let her get out of her bed. And Ismay--oh, Mark! even Ismay is afraid here at night. She locks her door and won’t open it till daylight--for fear.”

“Then she has her weak side, for all her airs.”

He moved, lamp in hand, to the foot of the stairs.

“There, I’ll stay here till you are in your room,” he said resignedly. “I wonder why women were created cowards.”

But she did not answer him. As quickly and almost as lightly as Ismay, she had sped up the stairs and was groping through the dark hall above their own room. When she reached it she was breathless; for just as Ismay had said, she had heard that faint footfall, coming closer every minute; inexorable, ghostly, in the silent house where no one waked save she and Marcus Wray.

The latter had heard nothing, nor would he have cared if he had. In so old a house night noises were a foregone conclusion.

He returned to his neglected whisky and soda, and a cigar. But there was no bite to the whisky, no taste in the tobacco. His mind was not as easy as he liked, in spite of his friend in Amsterdam. There had been a weak point in the underground career of those diamonds, and Mr. Wray knew it.

“What has to be done must be done at once,” he said aloud, stretching out his long legs in Sir Gaspard’s chair. “And then I’ll be off to lie low till I can reap the harvest. My old friend here can’t escape me, even if she dared to try. And the weather has turned cold,” his voice changed abruptly, as if something pleased him. “It’s freezing hard. If all goes well the day after to-morrow will see the fair Helen an heiress, after which I shall spend a few months living retired--in Bohemia.”

Yawning, he extinguished the light and went up-stairs to bed. This country life was at present convenient; in future it would be profitable; but it was certainly deadly dull.

“To-morrow I’ll amuse myself with my dear friend and well-wisher, Ismay,” he reflected. “I like to see her hate me, it adds to the pleasure of having her under my fingers. Hello!” as he stood in his door, candle in hand--the candle he would not give Helen Trelane for pure deviltry--“what’s that?”

From somewhere far off a tinkling tune came softly, yet clearly; an unearthly sound in the midnight hush.

“Thomas is up to some game, I suppose, and I’m damned if I know why! But I’ll choke him off now, once for all.” He started in search of the mysterious sound, kicking off his patent-leather slippers that he might steal unseen on the erring Thomas. At the head of the stairs the music ceased, not suddenly, but with the curious falling cadence that marked the end of the tune. But music was lost on Mr. Wray.

“I’ve got off the track,” he thought, descending once more, somewhat gingerly in his stocking feet. The instant he was in the lower passage the air tinkled out again with a mocking lightness. The sound certainly came from above him, and he ran up again, utterly careless if he were heard or not.

There was only an empty passage to be seen, door after door on each side of it. He flung them open, one by one, but only disused bedrooms met his scrutiny. As he threw the fifth door wide his candle went out, not quickly, but slowly, as if something ailed the wick. Dim and blue it faded slowly and the music that had seemed so near was gone.

A cloud was over the moon; he could not see a yard into the room in front of him, but the same cold disused air met him that he had felt in all the other rooms.

“Thomas and his remarkable ghost seem to be founded on fact,” he thought angrily, jarred, in spite of himself, by that slow fading of his light. “Well, they can play till doomsday for all I care; but first I will make sure of Thomas!”

He stumbled down to his own room in the dark, stubbing his toes unmercifully. Then with a relit candle he sought the small room next the butler’s pantry, where Thomas dwelt to guard his silver.

The door was ajar, the old man peacefully sleeping. Whoever was disturbing the house, it was not the gray-haired servant. Once more Mr. Wray sought his bedroom, stopping only to try Ismay’s door with infinite caution.

It was locked, hard and fast.

“The hypocritical little devil,” he muttered, “who told me that she was never afraid of anything, and is terrified by a musical box that some servant winds up at night! It’s just as well, though. I don’t want Miss Ismay’s company of an evening when I am talking business with her charming mother.”

Ismay, seated somewhat breathless on her bed, shook with impotent rage at that cautious hand on her door.

“Insolent wretch!” she thought furiously. “I hope those doctored library candles were a success. Who would think a schoolgirl trick of a thread soaked in saltpeter and run through with a fine needle would ever come in so usefully. But that was only a side-show. ‘The day after to-morrow,’ he said--and ‘an accident.’ What can he have in his mind? Oh, if I only knew. And if only Miles would come back. I could die with this awful feeling that it is something of my own mother’s that was found in that room.”

She was weak with the vision flashing before her of disgrace, of the police, of discovery, of Miles’ face when he knew, and in them she forgot the most important words Wray had spoken that night, though she had heard them well enough.

“And the weather’s changed. It is freezing hard.”

They carried Cristiane’s life and death, and her own fate hung on them, and, shrewd as she was, Ismay overlooked them.