CHAPTER XXVI.

“HER MOTHER’S CHILD!”

Cylmer, waiting by the hall fire, his wet clothes steaming, thought the doctor would never come down-stairs.

To Wray he gave no thought; it never occurred to him that that astute person was keeping out of the way, for fear of comments of his idiocy in having taken Cristiane on ice he knew nothing about. And Mrs. Trelane was with Ismay; Cristiane put to bed crying with temper and fright. The empty feeling of the house drove Cylmer wild. He was more glad to see the little country doctor than he had ever been at anything in his life.

“Miss Trelane!” he said bluntly. “Is she----” The words stuck in his throat.

“She’ll do now, I think,” the doctor said thoughtfully. “But it’s a peculiar case. It was not that she was in danger of death from drowning, but there seemed to have been something in the shock. I don’t know”--more briskly--“but she will do well now. She looks frail, but her vitality is tremendous. But, my dear man, you must go home at once unless you wish to die of pneumonia. Come with me in the brougham. You can come back again later on. There’s no sense in shivering to death here when you can’t see either of the victims.”

He carried Cylmer off, and deposited him, rolled in a fur rug, at his own door. And not till he was being stripped of his soaked clothes by his fussy servant did Miles discover that he held something in his hand. It was the card Cristiane had given him, the penciled words only a blur now.

“Does she mean she never got it? Is that why she called Ismay a liar and a thief for the carelessness of some servant?” he thought contemptuously. “I must tell the lady a few plain truths, I fancy. I’d tell her everything this very night if I could get Ismay to consent. But, of course, she won’t be up. I sha’n’t see either of them, probably. If I do Miss Cristiane shall retire in tears,” with a grim smile.

In spite of what the doctor had said, Mr. Cylmer only made a pretense of eating his dinner.

He drove over to Marchant’s Hold without so much as waiting for his coffee. Even Mrs. Trelane, who hated him, would be civil to him to-night, since but for him Ismay would be lying dead.

He went straight into the drawing-room, prepared to meet Mrs. Trelane only. But she was not there. He paused, and saw on a distant sofa Cristiane, her head bowed on her hands.

“Cristiane,” his heart had sickened at her attitude, “what’s the matter? She’s not--not dead?”

“She? Do you mean Ismay?” She lifted her lovely eyes, drowned in tears. “Not she. Why, Miles? Do you care--so much?”

“Never mind what I do. If she is all right why are you crying?” sternly.

“Because she’s made me be so horrid to you!”

“You needn’t cry on my account,” he said, looking down at her, “I can assure you. And how do you mean she had made you horrid to me?”

“Because that card I gave you--I never got it. I thought you had never come near me, and so I hated you.”

“Never got it! But you gave it to me.”

“Ismay pulled it out of her pocket this morning with her handkerchief, and I picked it up. Oh, Miles!” her downcast face sweet, imploring, “can you ever forgive me?”

“Forgive you?”--impatiently. “I don’t know what you’re driving at! You don’t mean you think Ismay kept it from you on purpose? Was that why you dared to call her a thief?”

His tone maddened her. She sat up and looked at him, sorrowfully, with pained surprise.

“Miles, you don’t care for her?” she whispered.

“Why do you speak of her like that? She saved your life”--coldly.

“She didn’t. It was you”--slowly. “I tell you she saw what I was doing and stood waiting. She never ran till she saw you, and knew she must. She would rather I was dead; she hates me.”

“Cristiane, are you out of your senses?” He shook her roughly by the shoulder. “Your ingratitude I cannot help; your abuse of her I will not bear. As for loving her, I love her with all my heart. I’d marry her to-morrow if she would have me.”

And this was the Miles she had thought of as miserable with his love that she would have none of! She was all passion in the frank brutality with which she turned on him.

“She can’t do that; she daren’t! She’s playing a double game with you. She’s a bad, wicked girl”--her voice rising angrily. “I saw her this very day lying with her head on Mr. Wray’s shoulder. She was pretending to be asleep, and she stretched out her arms and put them about his neck, and----”

“Look here, Cristiane,” Miles broke in angrily, frantically. “You can shut up! If it is true I don’t want to hear it, but if it’s a lie, you’ll have to pay for every word of it.”

“Miles,” she said slowly, “it’s every word of it true. I saw her. I was on the stairs and she was lying on the sofa in the hall. I saw him come and kneel beside her. She’s a horrid, horrid girl--I’m so miserable”--with sudden choking tears. “I wish I hadn’t told you. But I know you were with her often lately. I couldn’t let you go on without telling you.”

“Then allow me to tell you your conscientious scruples do you no credit,” he said stoutly. Yet he did not see in his pain that she had changed her tactics utterly, even while he had been talking to her. It was all too much of a piece with that fatal cry of Mark, that senseless terror of having her engagement to him an open thing. Ismay, his Ismay, untrue! The solid ground had been cut away under his feet, yet he was stubbornly faithful. He would not believe this spoiled child, who was not even grateful to the girl who had nearly died to save her.

“You don’t believe me? Oh, Miles, what can I do?” Cristiane moaned. She hid her angry, tearless eyes that he might think she cried.

“I wouldn’t believe an angel from heaven against Ismay!” he said stoutly.

But he lied, and he knew it.

As for the note Cristiane implied Ismay had kept back, he never gave it a thought. Cristiane and her feelings were nothing to him now. But Ismay and that man from London were another story.

“Don’t dare to say she did not try to save you,” he said to drown his thoughts. “I was there. I did not see your danger, no more did she.”

“And yet--you saved me,” she said quietly, and before he knew it she had kissed his strong hand softly. He drew it away as if her lips had stung.

“I saved you as I would have saved a drowning dog,” he said, his voice ominously level. “Now you know. I care nothing for you. My love for you was only play. I know it now.”

“Miles, don’t,” she gasped; “you kill me. But I can do you one service, and I will. I--I love you now. I will take you to Ismay.”

“You can’t. She’s in bed.”

“She’s up in her sitting-room;” and he could not see the spite in her face.

Marveling at her strange changes, Cylmer followed her, his heart beating uncomfortably. But to see Ismay, to have in one word all his doubts destroyed--for that he would have followed anywhere unquestioning.

“Mrs. Trelane?” he said doubtingly, as they mounted the stairs.

“Is in the library. Besides, what matters?”--dully. “You have the right. You mean to marry her.”

She opened Ismay’s door softly--too softly--and parted the curtains.

“Look,” she whispered in his ear, “there is the girl you love. Now, who is right, you or I?”

Cylmer gave one glance; then, sick, staggered, broken, he turned away.

In a great chair Ismay sat; at her feet was Marcus Wray, holding her hand, talking eagerly, very low. On the girl’s face was no sign of that loathing she had professed, only a beseeching, doubtful look of dread and hope.

“Come away,” whispered Cristiane, and he obeyed her, dazed and stumbling.

Ismay, whom he would have sworn was true, whom he had loved as he had never thought to love, Ismay was her mother’s child!

His face was hard as iron and as relentless as he stopped in the hall.

Cristiane shrank away from him like a child who fears a blow.

“Don’t look like that. I didn’t know,” she lied breathlessly. “But, you see, I told the truth.”

“Curse the truth, and you,” he said between his teeth. “Get out of my way.”

She could not hear what he said, but she turned away again, crying pitifully.

“I couldn’t let you love her and not know. Don’t be so hard to me.”

With an effort that wrenched his very soul, the man mastered himself.

“All right, child. I know you meant to be straight. But run away to bed. I can’t talk.”

Humiliated to the last drop of his blood, he stood in the hall alone, opposite the half-opened door of the library.

Cristiane had spoken the truth again; Mrs. Trelane was there. And the very spirit of evil and recklessness had prompted her to put on that very white gown in which she had been photographed for Lord Abbotsford. Ismay was not there to stop her; she had explained to Cristiane that her black evening gown was torn; and now she stood, ignorant of any stranger’s eyes, before the glass over the fireplace in the very attitude of the photograph.

Her round, languorous throat; her arms, lovely still; the very turn of her head, Miles Cylmer--saw--and remembered.

The mysterious woman of the photograph stood before him.

No wonder Ismay had been interested in Abbotsford’s death; no wonder she had paled when he brought out that broken trinket. She had it still, and probably she and her mother had laughed together at the cleverness with which she had wiled it from him. He had been fooled--fooled by a pair of green eyes, a mouth all love, a smile all witching.

Mechanically, as a man in a dream, he put on his coat and hat and got into his dog-cart that was waiting at the door. Cristiane was right. Ismay Trelane was bad to the core.

But the man could not see the road for the bitterness of his heart as he drove home through the dark.

Cristiane, in spite of her fright at his anger, smiled, well pleased, as she went up-stairs to bed.

She had really seen Marcus Wray kiss Ismay; she had only kept back that the girl’s subtle instinct, even in her sleep, had made her moan and turn away from him, so that he crept away lest she should awake. She was cunning enough not to tell Wray what she had seen, but the sudden enlightenment had made her furious. Was this girl to come here and take every man she saw? Were her own good looks, her fortune, as nothing compared with the strange beauty of the other? Not while Cristiane le Marchant could stop it.

Loved, caressed, guided in her every footstep by her dead father, the girl was utterly spoiled. Without that firm and loving hand she steered her own bark wildly, caring nothing for others, so that her own vanity was satisfied. And Miles Cylmer that night had struck at the self-conceit that was her most vulnerable part.

“He’s going to hate her now,” she thought, with gleeful conviction. “Then he’ll come back to me, and I’ll refuse him again. Oh, how I will refuse him! And I’ll keep Mr. Wray here and make Miles wild.”

She sank to sleep in a blissful reverie of Ismay driven out, Miles sighing in vain, and she herself marrying a duke. She would wear white satin and look very proud and cold. It would be delightful. And that death had to-day only missed her by a hair’s breadth, and to-morrow might strike again, she never thought. Nor that the girl she had betrayed this very night was the only soul on earth who could save her.