CHAPTER VI.

A DREAM OF SAFETY.

“Mother, aren’t you awake?”

Ismay, wrapped in an old flannel dressing-gown, stood knocking sharply at Mrs. Trelane’s bedroom door, her knuckles blue with cold and her face set peevishly.

“Mother,” she repeated, “there isn’t any milk, and the milkman won’t leave us any unless we pay for it. Haven’t you any money?”--running her fingers impatiently over the bedroom door. It opened quietly as she drummed on it. Mrs. Trelane, dressed for the day and exquisitely neat, stood looking at her.

“What’s the matter, what do you want?” she asked angrily. Her face was drawn from a night of waking, and haggard as a gambler’s who has flung down his last card and does not know what remains in his opponent’s hand. “Money? You know I haven’t any. Can’t you do without milk?”

“I suppose I must”--sullenly. “Breakfast’s ready, then--dry bread and tea without milk! What made you sleep so late? It’s nearly eleven.”

“What was the good of waking?” Not even to Ismay could she say that she had never slept the livelong night for waiting for the day and the postman’s knock; that when it came she had run to the door to find only the big blue envelope she had dreaded, and not a word from the man to whom she had turned in her despair.

Ever since she had sat old and haggard in the morning light, her busy brain thinking, to no end. Unless Gaspard le Marchant answered that letter destruction looked her in the face.

She dressed herself at last under the spur of Ismay’s incessant knocking and calling, but though her iron nerve kept her face steady, her knees were trembling under her as she followed the girl into the bare kitchen, where half a loaf of bread and some weak tea represented their morning meal.

Ismay sat down on the table and regarded her mother over the piece of dry bread she held to her lips.

“Look here,” she remarked slowly, “don’t you think it’s about time you did something? Are we going to sit here and starve? And do you know that Marcus Wray was knocking here this morning and I wouldn’t go to the door?”

Even the dirty dressing-gown, the weariness that drew down her upper lip, could not take away from her unearthly beauty as her mother stared at her.

“Do something!” she retorted. “I’ve done all I can. That is what’s the matter. And we sha’n’t certainly sit here and starve, for I heard this morning that we are to be turned out on Saturday and our things sold for rent. We shall starve more romantically in the street.”

“I sha’n’t.”

“What can you do? Go back to your school as a pupil teacher?”

“Do I look like a pupil teacher?” asked Ismay, with a sarcastic glance at herself.

“You look--well, I don’t know whether you are very beautiful or very ugly!” the elder woman returned listlessly, trying to break some dry bread with distasteful fingers.

“You’ll soon be told! Mother”--with sudden energy--“if you can’t find some way out of this, I shall. I can sing, and I’m going round to every music-hall I know till some man gives me a chance. Do you suppose”--she stripped back the sleeve of her dingy dressing-gown from an arm that was curiously slender, yet round, and of a milky whiteness--“that I am going to let that starve?”

“And what about me? I suppose I can go out charing!”

Ismay shrugged her shoulders. There was no waste of courtesy between the two.

In the silence that fell, the postman’s knock seemed to thunder through the quiet. Mrs. Trelane put her cup down on the table.

“You go,” she said, for at the sudden noise her head swam. Surely she had not lost her nerve, that had stood her in such stead this many a year!

“Two letters--notes--for you.”

Ismay threw them down on the table, and, after one glance of sick terror lest they might not be what she waited for, Mrs. Trelane seized them. Both were in the writing she had not seen for years, both sealed with the Le Marchant lion crouching with his paw on his prey. But why were there two? Had he promised something, and then repented?

Sick with terror, Helen Trelane tore one open, and at first dared not read it. Then the sense of it seemed to flash on her, and the reaction made her dizzy.

It was all right! The last card, on which she had staked her all, had not failed her. The writer would be in London on Friday, and would come to see her at twelve o’clock, when he hoped to have some better plan to propose than what she had suggested in her letter.

“Till then,” he ended kindly, “please do not fret about your own or your daughter’s future, for I can promise you that I will arrange something.

“Affectionately yours, “G. LE MARCHANT.”

There was not a word in it about his daughter. Sir Gaspard was too careful of her to do things blindly, but he meant when he wrote to provide for Helen Trelane, even if she turned out unfit to be trusted with his child.

Ismay took the note calmly from her mother’s nerveless hand.

“Who’s Gaspard le Marchant, and why is he yours affectionately?” she asked curiously. “But it doesn’t matter. The chief thing is that he is ‘yours affectionately’ just in the nick of time. What’s in the other note?”

“I don’t know.” Mrs. Trelane lay back, nerveless, in her hard chair; she had conquered fate once more, but the relief was too acute yet to be pleasant. With a shaking finger she opened the other note, and there fell out two strips of paper.

“You may need this, and you and I can settle later.

“G. LE M.”

The yellow slip enclosed was a check for a hundred pounds.

When another woman would have cried with gratitude, Mrs. Trelane only caught her breath cynically. “A fool and his money were soon parted,” but what a mercy it was that he had been so easily managed!

“What about the music-halls, Ismay?” she said bitterly, lifting her triumphant eyes to her daughter’s astonished face.

“Go out,” said the girl, “and cash this, and we’ll have meat for lunch. But tell me first, who is he? And why didn’t you try him before?”

“He is Sir Gaspard le Marchant, and the only relation I own. And I did try him before, in a way. He sent me money once before, but I didn’t need it especially, and I didn’t want to have to go and stay in a stupid country house or have my dear cousin come hunting me up. So I did not write to him till it looked as though camping on the cold, cold ground was going to be our fate.”

“Is he married?”

“His wife has been dead for years.”

“And you never tried to be Lady Le Marchant?”

Mrs. Trelane’s cheek grew slowly red.

“His first wife, my dear, was a Russian adventuress,” she returned cuttingly, “and only a born adventuress could hope to succeed her. You have all the qualifications--you might try for the place.”

And she walked airily out of the room, quite transformed from the haggard woman she had been when she entered it. But, though she was tall and fair and handsome, she was not in the least like the girl who sat alone looking with eager interest at the Le Marchant seal, the Le Marchant motto, on the back of one of the torn envelopes. No Le Marchant and no Trelane had ever had those strange eyes, that uncanny, colorless beauty, that mouth as red as new blood.

“What Marchant held let Marchant hold!” she read aloud from the seal. “Well, half of me is Le Marchant, and the other half ‘born adventuress’! I feel sorry--really sorry--for Sir Gaspard.” And she slipped gracefully to the floor, and went after her mother. But in the hall a knock and ring at their front door made her run noiselessly to the bedroom, where Mrs. Trelane was putting on her bonnet.

“He’s here,” Ismay cried; “it must be he; for it’s twelve o’clock, and it’s Friday! You’ll have to go and let him in, I can’t.”

“No, you can’t! Don’t you come near us,” said her mother, with quick insistence, “unless I call you. Mind--for you might spoil everything! And when I do call you, come in a decent frock, with a plain linen collar, and behave yourself. Don’t make eyes at him whatever you do, and be affectionate to me. Remember, now!”

And she was gone to open the door for the man who was to change the very face of the world for her.

Miss Ismay Trelane, left alone, made a face.

“Where does she think I’m going to get a clean collar when the washerwoman has clawed them all till she’s paid? And I won’t get dressed for a minute.”

Lithe and slim she moved, without a sound, to a door that opened into the drawing-room, and, noiselessly setting it ajar, listened with all her ears.

When she crept away her eyes were blazing.

“It means plenty of money, and getting away from here to where Marcus Wray will never think of looking for us!” she exulted, as she began to change her dressing-gown for her only dress; but a sudden thought dashed her joy.

To leave London would mean never to see again the man whose face had never left her memory since that night at the Palace Theater.

“Why didn’t I let him tell me his name?” she thought, as she stamped with impotent rage at her own folly.