CHAPTER XXXI.

“SAVE ME FROM MYSELF!”

The conversation had been exciting enough, yet Mr. Wray was bored.

“Where is Ismay?” he asked shortly, as he finished his very late breakfast.

Mrs. Trelane shrugged her shoulders.

“She’s in bed. She told Jessie she wasn’t to be disturbed till she rang.”

Wray’s eyebrows went up. Truly, these were airs in a girl who had been used to cooking her own breakfast, and been glad to have it to cook.

“I’ll go to her.” Mrs. Trelane rose quickly, reading his face anxiously. She had watched him open his letters, and she had seen annoyance in his face.

“What do you want Ismay for?” Cristiane inquired coquettishly.

Wray suppressed a bad word. All the previous evening Cristiane, whose successes had gone to her head, had fairly flung herself at his head. She had sung to him, talked to him, bored him, till he could have strangled her. And now she was hammering the last few nails into her coffin.

“I don’t want her, especially,” he said coldly, wishing the little fool would hold her tongue.

Cristiane laughed.

“Do you know what I think?” she asked. “I think you are in love with her.”

Under the table he shut one hand hard.

“Do you? Why?

“Ain’t people in love when they kneel down beside a girl, and kiss her, once, twice, twenty times?” nodding her head knowingly at each number.

Wray was for a moment taken back.

So the little fool had seen him! Now she had begun to suspect; the next thing she would begin to talk, perhaps to Cylmer; and if he carried out his schemes it would be with a light on them that would make them plain to the world.

Cristiane had signed her own death-warrant. She was no longer innocent, but dangerous and in the way. To-night she should be no longer one nor the other. He looked at her with that frank gaze that always cloaked his worst deceits.

“When a man dare not ask for what he wants, because it is so far above him, do you blame him for taking--what he can get?” His voice, full of hopeless longing, made the blood of triumph spring to her cheeks. Here again she would defeat Ismay!

“Yes,” she said, her eyes on the table-cloth. “You could have--tried! You need not have kissed her,” pettishly, “before my very eyes.”

“Cristiane!” he was on his feet at her side, his voice thrilling with simulated joy and passion; “you’re angry because I kissed her? You care?”

She did not care, beyond her vanity that was piqued, but she was afraid to say so. Somehow the man dominated her till she sat an arrant coward. She trembled before his eyes, that were full of a passion that she thought was love; she had no intuition to tell her that it was hatred and the threat of death.

“I--I don’t know!” she stammered.

“You shall know!” he retorted, knowing better than to plead with her. His hand, softly brutal, was under her chin. “Kiss me,” he ordered. “Tell me you love me.”

Like a frightened child, she repeated the words, and he knew she lied as she spoke. He was right, she was dangerous; weak, obstinate, self-willed, with an utterly unbridled tongue.

“Kiss me,” he repeated, longing to choke her instead, and having nothing but distaste for her peachlike cheek, her parted lips. He was relieved that she sprang away from him--and she never dreamed that he let her go.

From the door she looked back provokingly. “Not now--perhaps to-night!” and she went off singing.

Mrs. Trelane heard her, as, having been in a hurry despite her hasty retreat, she stood leisurely at Ismay’s door. Her shrewd ears caught the excited note in the girl’s voice.

“He’s been making love to her,” she thought astutely.

“Marcus making love at this hour in the morning! Can he mean to go that way for his money, after all?” She knocked, this time with earnestness, at Ismay’s locked door. It opened on the instant.

Ismay, dressed as usual, stood inside, her eyes a little heavy, her face unnaturally flushed. She had got back by the early train, driving from the station to the gate in a fly, moneyless no longer, thanks to Davids; by eight o’clock had gained her room, unseen by any one, since the servants were at breakfast, and the rest of the house waiting till half-past eight should bring their tea and hot water.

As the girl bathed and dressed herself it almost seemed to her that it was a dream, that she could never have been in London and got back again in those few hours while the house slept. Only the instructions she had from Davids told her it was no dream, but reality. At the sight of her mother, for the first time in all her life she flung her arms round her and kissed her.

Mrs. Trelane gazed at her stupidly.

“What’s the matter?” she drawled. “Why do you greet me as if I had been buried for years? This isn’t the resurrection day.”

Ismay smiled wickedly. It was more like the day of judgment, to her mind.

“What on earth have you been shutting yourself up for?” Mrs. Trelane inquired crossly. “And why didn’t you answer last night when there was all that fuss? You must have heard me knocking.”

“What fuss? I told you long ago I wouldn’t open my door at night. I was tired, too. I wanted to rest.”

“You don’t look as if repose had agreed with you,” said her mother acidly. “Your face is blazing, and I don’t see how you could rest with Cristiane screaming. Don’t you want any breakfast?”

“I’ve had it,” shortly, curiosity overwhelming her. “What was she screaming about?”

“That ghost of yours and Thomas’,” she began contemptuously, but her face fell. “It’s too queer to be nice in this big house at night,” she added, closing the door behind her and sitting down. “I don’t wonder the girl screamed. I was frightened to death.”

“My ghost couldn’t have frightened you last night!” For her life, Ismay could not help the retort, but she was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Well, the ghost, then,” quite unconscious of the significance of the girl’s manner. “You were shut up in here, and I went to bed early. Marcus and Cristiane stayed down-stairs----”

“You left them together?” Ismay broke in with real dismay, for Cristiane had probably profited by the opportunity to air Ismay’s acquaintance with Cylmer.

“I’m not Providence!” said the woman smartly; “and, besides, I had neuralgia. At all events they sat up late, and when they came up-stairs they heard that music. Marcus, of course, didn’t know Cristiane had never heard about it, and he told her Thomas’ nonsense about the ghost.”

“How did he know about it?”

“Oh, I told him! I was frightened one night myself. Ismay,” her face changing, “as sure as I see you this minute, I heard those awful steps, coming closer and closer, till I was paralyzed with fear. And, later on, Marcus went up-stairs to see who was playing that piano, and his candle went out the moment he entered the room.”

“I told you this wasn’t a nice house at night. But go on. What happened last night?”

“Well, Cristiane had hysterics--you must have heard her; declared her father couldn’t rest in his grave, and what not. She nearly choked Marcus holding on round his neck, so that he couldn’t go up and see. I couldn’t stop her, and up came Thomas, half-dressed, and Jessie, and altogether we got Cristiane to stop her shrieking.

“Then Marcus ran up-stairs, and Thomas after him, begging him to let the room alone. ‘There was a curse on it.’”

“Well, did he?” with sudden interest.

“That’s the queer part. When he got up there the door was locked, and Thomas said he hadn’t locked it. Marcus was going to break open the door, and I thought the old man would have killed him. He said that his dead master’s orders were that no one was to enter that room, and he was there to see them obeyed. Even Marcus had to give in to him.”

“Good for Thomas!” the girl observed quietly. “Was the spirit playing all this time?”

“No; it was quieter than the grave. So Marcus shrugged his shoulders--you know how he does--and we came down-stairs again. There wasn’t another sound all night. But to-night he and Cristiane are going up to investigate after Thomas is in bed. They planned it at breakfast, and she’s going to get a key. I don’t know what Marcus is up to, for I don’t think he believes in ghosts. I suppose it will be a good opportunity for flirtation, for lately I think he’s made up his mind to marry her.”

“To-night, are they?” For some unknown reason Miss Trelane leaned back in her chair and laughed, wrinkling up her eyes deliciously.

“Oh, I don’t think he’ll marry her,” she remarked. “You forget he means to marry me.”

Mrs. Trelane flushed under her powder.

“How do you know?” she said, with sudden suspicion.

“If I don’t know it’s not for want of hearing,” the retort remarkably misleading in its truth.

“Oh, mother, how I hate him, don’t you? He has been our evil genius ever since Abbotsford was murdered.”

“I hate him well enough,” said her mother sullenly; “but I don’t want him to tell I took those diamonds. I could never prove myself innocent of the other, if it came out that it was I who took those.”

“And yet you are innocent. You haven’t blood enough to sin--like that.”

“Have you?” asked the woman, aghast, for the cold, queer eyes were a thing to shudder at.

“I wouldn’t murder; it’s generally so messy. But I could stand by if I hated a man, and see him commit a murder, just so that I might see him hanged for it. And so,” very deliberately, “would you!”

“Ismay, you know?” the wretched woman, whose cunning had failed her, crouched abjectly in her chair, as she whispered the words.

“I know nothing; neither do you,” Ismay rejoined sternly. “But he would--hang!” The words came out slowly, separately, like the blows of a hammer.

“I couldn’t see it,” the woman was sobbing wildly, the girl’s face set like a rock. “Besides, he’d tell before he died--about the diamonds--it wouldn’t be safe. Ismay, Ismay, you’re stronger than I ever was. For God’s sake, save me from myself!”

And it was the mother who bore her who was agonized at her daughter’s feet, who prayed to her for help against herself.

“Save me from myself!” the girl repeated mechanically. Was that her own prayer, too? She trembled, and did not know.

The next instant she was kneeling by her mother’s chair.

“Mother, don’t look like that; don’t speak like that,” she implored, and even Miles Cylmer would not have known the voice was hers. “I did not mean it. I only said it from wickedness.”

And all through that day that seemed unending, Ismay Trelane, eating, drinking, talking, was fighting a battle between the good and evil in her soul.

Desperately, she thrust aside the importunate cry that rose in her mind, bidding her kneel down and cry it aloud with her lips.

“Save me from myself!”

Fiercely, she tried to kill the best impulse of her life, and harden her heart for the end.

Cristiane, dead, could never get Cylmer back again, and Marcus Wray was doomed already.