CHAPTER XXXIV.

“AND WHO IS THIS?”

For a day and a night he watched her as she lay. Sometimes he leaned over her in sudden fright that she had ceased to breathe; sometimes he fancied she stirred, that her eyelids quivered. But neither the good nor the bad was true. The slow hours came and passed and died, and there was no change on that quiet face.

Cylmer turned away as the nurse approached the bed, bearing wine and a spoon. He hated that useless cruelty of trying to feed her. It sickened him to see the things they gave her ooze from the corners of her lips.

He stood leaning by the window and watched with listless inattention a carriage driving to the door. Curious visitors came by the score, to be turned away. Cristiane had no heart to see them; Mrs. Trelane, with the prospect of going into court to account for those stolen diamonds before her, would face no one.

A quick, cautious cry from the nurse made Cylmer turn. With two strides he was at the bedside. Had Ismay gone--passed from him without a word, while he looked out on the sky whose glory was gone forever?

“She’s not----”

“Quick! Go tell the doctor to come here! He’s down-stairs with the specialist from London. She swallowed that champagne.”

Before the woman could lay down the spoon Cylmer was back, with the two men at his heels.

Ismay turned on her side, moaned. Slowly, very slowly, her eyes opened, then shut again, seeing nothing.

“Ismay! Is she--dying?” his tongue cleaving to his mouth.

The little doctor laid a hand on Cylmer’s shoulder.

“Dying! No; she’s saved.” For with a steady hand the nurse was putting more wine to the lips that closed now on the spoon.

With a little sigh Ismay Trelane opened her eyes.

The shock in her brain had made her forget all recent things--Marcus Wray, Davids, her quarrel with Cylmer, were all gone from her mind, as a slate is sponged off. All she saw was the man she loved bending over her, holding her hands.

With a heavenly smile of rest and peace she smiled at him.

“Miles,” she whispered. “My Miles!”

“Lie still, my heart! I’m here,” he answered simply.

“Hold my hand,” she sighed, and closed her eyes happily, in a sleep that was sweet and natural.

And, kneeling by her bed, he held that hand he loved, till with the hours he, too, slept.

When she woke again it was he who fed her, and then, and not till then, he went away, cramped and stiff, but happy as he had not been in his life.

As he washed and dressed himself in the clothes that had come for him from Cylmer’s Ferry, he heard a whispered conversation at his door, then a knock that made him leap to open it. Was Ismay worse?

But it was not Ismay.

A man stood on the threshold--two men.

Mr. Bolton, the lawyer, and another--bearded, thin, but hale and strong. And yet Cylmer could not believe his senses. Had his long watching made him see visions?

“Gaspard!” he cried, wondering who this man could be that was so like the man that was in his grave. “Not Gaspard--but who?”

“It’s I, fast enough,” the man answered simply. “Let us in. I only got to England to-day.”

“To England?” Cylmer started foolishly. “But----”

“But I was never killed, and never buried. I had lent my coat to a Frenchman, and they buried what was left of him for me. I came to myself and wandered away, quite cracked. When I woke up I was in bed in a cottage, and a woman was looking after me. I didn’t know my own name, even, and I was in hideous pain.

“I lay like that for I don’t know how long. When I came to myself they told me I was in the lodge of the country-house of the Duke of Tours, and that he, on hearing a man was ill there, had sent his doctor from Paris. He had done an operation that meant kill or cure, and it was cure.”

“But Bolton told me you were dying of heart-disease?”

“So my doctors thought, but this one was young and very clever. He thought it was something else, and it was. He cut it away. That’s all.” He smiled in Cylmer’s puzzled face.

“But the railway people. How was it they didn’t know?”

Sir Gaspard laughed out.

“You’re very anxious I should be an impostor. Did you wish to marry my heiress?” he cried cheerfully. “There was no mark or wound on me; the woman never connected me with the accident to the train, nor did any one, till I was recovered and able to tell them. It was all so simple that no one ever thought of it.”

“You never wrote,” wonderingly.

“No! I couldn’t have waited for the answer. When I was fit to write I was fit to travel, so I came straight to Bolton, here, and he told me things that brought me home on the double-quick. It’s all too awful. And to think it was that will I made that was such a pitfall! Will that poor child die?”

“No.” Cylmer put down the hair-brush he had all the time been holding. “Thank God, no!” he said slowly. “For I am going to marry her.”

“Marry her.” It took all Sir Gaspard could do not to exclaim in amazement. “Marry the daughter of a woman not yet out of suspicion of murder, with the theft of the diamonds on her to a certainty!”

Cylmer nodded.

“Wait. I’ll tell you all,” he said, and Sir Gaspard listened in wonder. “Marry her,” he had said, as though she were a leper, and but for her Cristiane would be cold in her grave. He stretched out his hand and took Cylmer’s in a clasp of gratitude, without a spoken word.

“Have you seen Cristiane?” For the first time Cylmer thought of her.

Sir Gaspard smiled.

“Didn’t you hear us in the passage?” he asked. “I only persuaded her to leave me for ten minutes by saying that you were certain to come to the door half-dressed. She’s wild with joy; she can hardly believe in me yet.”

“She missed you.” And if the tone was dry Sir Gaspard did not notice it. Not yet could Mr. Cylmer bear any good-will to Cristiane.

Only one thing troubled Cylmer now. With Sir Gaspard’s return things were smoothed out, indeed, all but this. It hung over him more and more heavily as Ismay grew better, and at last could talk to him.

Those stolen diamonds that could not be explained away! His mind was full of them as he sat with Ismay alone in her sitting-room. But he kept his trouble off his lips, and talked of other things that he might not see it reflected in her eyes.

“You never asked me how I managed the ghost-music,” she said suddenly, with her old, lovely smile, that was so much more wistful than of old.

“No. How did you? For it played of itself before you meddled with it, Thomas says.”

“I went up one night to see, and I was frightened out of my life, at first. And then I found out. There was a spring--just a simple little spring--so light that the weight of a rat on it could set the thing going. And there were plenty of rats there. It was just an ordinary old-fashioned spinet till the spring touched the mechanism, then it played of itself. While it was playing like that you could not sound a note on it. Afterward, when the tune was done, you could play. I made a dress like the ghost’s, or the picture that was supposed to be the ghost’s, so that if any one met me in the passages they would scream and run. And I found out he meant to murder Cristiane while I was behind the library door.”

“Did you know Wray made Sir Gaspard’s will?”

She nodded.

“I heard him say so.”

“And for fear it should go wrong he forged another,” Cylmer went on. “Don’t look sad, darling. He deserves everything.”

But she shivered.

“It has all been such a nightmare. I wish I had had no hand in it. Miles, can you truly love a girl like me?” She was earnest, pale, as she looked at him.

He kissed the hand that was in his, where a new ring shone.

“Who nearly gave her life twice for another’s,” he said, with adoration.

“I liked her, in a way. Till she told you things.”

She hid her face on his arm. “Miles, do you know I meant to let her die the last time? You were my world--she had taken you from me.”

“You never meant it, my heart,” he whispered. “You only thought so.”

“And I stole that card of yours, so that you might come to me.”

Cylmer lifted the head that lay so low, and looked straight into her shamed eyes.

“Do you think a hundred cards would have mattered, if I had loved her?” he demanded. “You were mine, and I was yours, from the first hour, though I was too blind to know.”

“But I meant when I left you to live----” He stopped her words on her lips.

“Let me forget--that day!” he begged, “for it was I who was to blame. If you had slipped from me your life would have been on my head.”

She looked at him with a curious pride.

“Miles,” she said slowly, “I am my mother’s daughter still, and there are the diamonds!”

The man caught her close and hard.

“If they were all the world it would not matter,” he said stoutly. “If I had only seen you and passed by,” his voice full of love, of reverence, “I should be proud of having once seen you, my witch that was so true.”