CHAPTER VIII.

THE LUCK OF MARCUS WRAY.

Sir Gaspard le Marchant sat before an untasted breakfast in a Paris hotel.

He felt curiously ill; far worse than he had ever known himself; he breathed with an effort that made his man servant nervous as he stood behind his chair. Parker alone knew the secret of his master’s state of health, knew that their journey to Rome had been put off first that Sir Gaspard might consult a Parisian specialist, and then because the man who bore his pain so bravely had not the strength to travel.

“He looks pleased with Miss Cristiane’s letter; perhaps that’ll do him good!” the man thought distressedly. “I wish he’d turn round and go home.”

“Parker,” Sir Gaspard said suddenly, and with almost his old cheerfulness, “I’ve heard from Marchant’s Hold, and Miss Le Marchant is very well.”

“Yes, sir? I’m glad, sir.”

“But I don’t think I’m feeling much better this morning; perhaps I’m nervous. At any rate, I have a little piece of business to see to. Go down and ask the proprietor if he could give you the address of some good English lawyer, and then go and bring him here.”

There were drops of cold dampness on his forehead as he finished speaking. Parker, after one glance at him, went out with noiseless haste.

Yet, for all his pain, it was with a great thankfulness at his heart that Sir Gaspard lay back in his chair. The letter from Cristiane had been full of pleasant things concerning Helen Trelane and her daughter. She was very happy with them, and if he did not mind, would he ask them to stay on a little while when he came back. There was not a word about Miles Cylmer in the letter; only praises of the two women.

“So I can make it all right this morning,” the man thought feverishly, “if only Parker can find the lawyer. And then I’ll go on to Rome.”

His head felt light and dizzy with pain. He had but two thoughts, oddly intermingled: to make everything easy for Cristiane, and then to creep away to die where his love had died, so many years ago.

He looked up in surprise as Parker came back.

“I didn’t have to leave the hotel, sir,” he said; “there is an English lawyer staying here, and I brought him up.”

“You’re sure he’s all right--qualified--and that?” anxiously. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“Sure, sir. They know him well here.”

“All right. Bring him in.”

He looked at the stranger Parker ushered in with a momentary curiosity. He was a very ugly man; tall, dark, thick-lipped, almost repulsive. But he was well-dressed and clean-shaved, and moved with a certain air of gentlemanliness. His voice, too, was cultivated. Sir Gaspard noticed this as he introduced himself, and gave a card with his address in London Chambers.

“Mr. Marcus Wray,” the card read.

The name meant nothing to Sir Gaspard, though his own lawyers could have told him it was that of a clever man who sailed perilously close to the wind, and had once very nearly been disbarred. Only his cleverness had saved him; there were no proofs ever to be found against Mr. Marcus Wray. His business in Paris just now was not too safe, but he stayed at a good hotel and went about it so carefully as to pass for a model of English propriety.

He talked very little as Sir Gaspard gave his instructions. He wished, he said, to make a new will, and draw up some papers for the guardianship of his only daughter.

“Please make it all short,” Le Marchant ended. “I had meant to have my own lawyer do it when I got back to England, but----” he did not finish.

Marcus Wray made no answer as he sat at a table Parker had covered with writing-materials. The man was ill enough to have no time to lose, it was plain--but not an inkling of that opinion showed itself on the lawyer’s ugly, impassive face.

The will was simple enough, yet at a certain name in it only an iron self-control kept Marcus Wray from a sharp exclamation.

So they had left London! And tried to shake him off. What a piece of luck it was this man’s being taken ill in Paris! Without it, Helen Trelane might have escaped him, and feathered her nest alone. Now----

“I beg your pardon, I did not catch that last.”

Mr. Wray looked up with an unmoved face, though the beating of his own heart was loud in his ears.

Here was he, Marcus Wray, writing at the bidding of an utter stranger words which would bring him the desire of his heart--aye, and gold to gild it!

He looked furtively at the pale, handsome man who seemed dying before his eyes. Was this Helen’s last victim? Or could it be possible that he was only a simple fool who believed in her? It must be, since he was giving over his only daughter and heiress to her guardianship till she was twenty-one.

Well, even he had gone near to believing in her once! It was funny, though, that this last game she had been at such pains to hide from him should have been played straight into his hands like this. He held his pen in air, looking at Sir Gaspard.

“There is one thing, sir--if your daughter dies unmarried, or before the age of twenty-one----” he left the sentence unfinished.

“Unlikely, the girl is young, strong.” His hearer had winced. “But if it were to happen, the place,” obstinately, “must go to a Le Marchant, and Mrs. Trelane is the only one. It and the money can go to her, if my daughter--but she won’t, she won’t!”

“As you say, it is most unlikely.”

Wray wrote hard as he spoke. The man seemed very weak and ill; better to get everything signed and sealed as fast as possible.

He rang the bell sharply for Parker, and sent him for the proprietor and a well-known London clergyman who happened to be staying in the house. They would be unimpeachable witnesses to the will; there must be nothing doubtful about it. But Marcus Wray’s strong fingers were tapping his knee with that curious hammering motion, while the two men wrote their names.

“What luck!” he thought, his eyes averted lest the gleam in them might show. “All that money--for Helen--when this man dies. And he might die to-morrow.”

To Cristiane, the daughter, he never gave a thought. With a will like that, and Helen Trelane knowing of it, she was not likely to come of age to marry.

And the money would be his, Marcus Wray’s, as the diamonds had been, as anything belonging to Helen Trelane would be, at his nod. No more slaving, no more risky transactions. The man rose abruptly and went over to the window. He dared not think the thoughts that rang like bells in his brain.

Yet his face was absolutely quiet and gentle as he turned to see the two witnesses to the will leaving the room, while Sir Gaspard, very white and still, leaned back in his chair.

“You are leaving for Rome, I think your man said?” The question was kind, interested. Sir Gaspard was surprised, but he nodded.

“You forgive my asking, but it seems a long journey,” musingly. “Might it not be wiser to go home?”

Parker waited breathlessly for the answer; it came loud, imperative.

“No! I must go to Rome. I have to go.” He pointed to the signed will, spread on the table. “Put it in an envelope, address it to my solicitors, Bolton & Carey, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. It can be sent there, Parker, when I die.” With curious gentleness he put it in the breast pocket of his coat, and Marcus Wray knew, with the intuition of a man who lives by his wits, that there it would stay till Sir Gaspard’s eyes were shut to this world forever. He shrugged his shoulders as he left the room.

“Rome--and he wants to die there! I wonder why. Bah! he can die now in the gutter, for all I care. He might have paid me my fee, though. It may be a good while to wait for the indirect harvest.”

He mounted to his room in the fourth story and had barely time to light a cigar before there was a discreet knock on his door. It was Sir Gaspard’s man servant with a note. As he took it, Wray noticed the curious likeness of the man to his master, but only for the instant.

“Discarded wardrobe does it, I suppose,” he thought, as he shut his door and opened the note.

“DEAR SIR: Permit me to discharge my great obligation to you, with my best thanks.

“Faithfully yours, “GASPARD LE MARCHANT.”

Two five-pound notes fell from the open envelope, but Wray scarcely looked at them. Instead, he stared hard at the careless, gentlemanly signature before him. At sight of it a thought had flashed up in his brain, so daring that even he almost feared it.

But it was so insistent, and it seemed so safe.

“Nothing more will be heard of it--if he lives! If he dies, I can always say I acted by his orders--dying men do curious things,” he muttered.

With his door locked, the lawyer worked hard for two hours. When at last he stopped, with a long-drawn breath, a second copy of Sir Gaspard le Marchant’s will lay before him, on the selfsame blue paper on which the first had been written. On the floor lay many spoiled sheets of paper covered with imperfect signatures; on the will itself the name of Gaspard le Marchant was exact. The man himself could hardly have sworn he had not written it.

The ticklish part was yet to come--the witnesses. Wray shut his teeth hard as he realized that he dared not try any guesswork about their handwriting.

Yet when he had cleared away all evidences of his morning’s work, and put the folded will in his coat pocket, his face was quite passive. So far the second will was only an experiment, concerning no one but himself. If it proved impracticable--Mr. Wray shrugged his shoulders as he went down-stairs to luncheon.

Yet, as he entered the long salle-a-manger he almost started.

At one of the first tables sat Sir Gaspard, and he beckoned Wray to join him.

“I was tired of my own society,” he said--and if ever a man’s face was weary it was his!--“so I came down. If you are not afraid of a dull companion, will you lunch with me?”

Mr. Marcus Wray would be delighted.

He sat down and did his best to be amusing; by the time the sweets appeared Sir Gaspard was smiling.

At the far end of the room, behind the baronet, Wray saw the stout form of the London clergyman who had witnessed the will. He was enjoying his luncheon, waited on by the proprietor in person. Truly, whatever gods there were stood friendly to the man who sat so calmly with a forged signature in his pocket.

“I have forgotten something,” he said suddenly. “If you will excuse me, Sir Gaspard, for one moment, I have a little matter to arrange with the dean there. I know he is leaving immediately.”

Sir Gaspard nodded, and, with quick, noiseless steps, Marcus Wray had joined the dean.

“I regret having to trouble you again,” he said courteously, “but my poor friend over there wishes a copy of his will left here with the proprietor. He wishes to know if you will be good enough to witness it; Dubourg also,” to the affable little proprietor.

The latter produced pen and ink from somewhere with incredible quickness, and the dean wrote his ponderous signature with a glance at Sir Gaspard, who seemed to sit expectant of his emissary’s return.

“The poor monsieur is of the dying,” the landlord said, as he added his name. Wray nodded.

“I fear so,” he said. “This is to be deposited in your safe, Mr. Dubourg,” he added, in an undertone as the man preceded him across the room to draw out his chair at Sir Gaspard’s table. “Sealed, you understand, and to remain there! In case you hear of Sir Gaspard’s death you are to forward it. Otherwise, nothing is to be said about it.”

The little man bowed.

“I understand, it is for making sure,” he assented. “The poor man leaves us to-night for Rome.”

Sir Gaspard, quite unconscious of the meaning of the proprietor’s compassionate glance, retired almost on Wray’s return, to rest for his journey. But that individual, whose business in Paris was finished, did not take the mail-train for London, as he had intended. The motto of his existence was: “Never desert your luck”--that luck of Marcus Wray that was a proverb in the Inns of Court. To go back to London and dream of a golden future would be to act like a fool; many a dying man had lived to laugh at his heirs, and so might this one.

A prescience that the time was heavy with fate bade the lawyer not lose sight of the invalid. Instead of going to London, his cab was just behind Sir Gaspard’s on the way to the station. His last act before leaving the hotel had been to deposit his sealed document in Monsieur Dubourg’s safe. On bad news it was to be at once forwarded to Sir Gaspard’s solicitors in London.

As the southern train rushed on through the night, Sir Gaspard, sleepless on his comfortable bed, never dreamed that in the very last carriage of the train his acquaintance of the morning slept the sleep of the unjust, that is sounder than any.

The last carriage--truly there was something in that famous luck of Marcus Wray! For as the pale light of dawn grew in the east something happened; what, there was hardly time to say. Only a jar, a crash; then for most people on that train a great void, a blotting out. The train had left the track; the engine was down an embankment; all the carriages but the very last a sickening, telescoped mass of shapeless wood.

In that last carriage Marcus Wray was flung on the floor from a sound sleep. The lamp had gone out, in the dark a woman screamed, and the sharp sound brought back his senses. The train was wrecked!

With a quickness beyond belief he was on his feet, had slipped between his struggling fellow passengers, and out the window, his narrow shoulders doing him good service.

“Sir Gaspard--the will!”

He ran frantically along the track, passing the dead and dying, thrusting a woman out of his way with brutal fingers. There was light now beside the coming dawn, the light of burning carriages; and from the reeking mass came sounds to turn a man sick, who had time to listen.

This man with unerring instinct found the carriage in which he had been too poor to travel; it was to be entered now without paying his fare, for the whole side of it gaped.

In the light of its burning roof he dragged at a heap that looked like clothing, but he knew that ten minutes since it had been living men.

He lifted with all his strength, and dragged off the first figure of the mass. As if he were searching for one he loved, he turned the face to the light.

A dead man--a stranger in a fur coat! He dropped the bleeding head as if it were but stone.

The next? He panted as he tugged, for the dead are heavy, and the heat was scorching. This was a man, too, with his arms round another in a last instinctive protection. Parker--and he had given his life for his master! For the servant’s brains oozed warm under the lifting hands.

Try as he might, Marcus Wray could not loosen the arms that were around that inert figure that had been Gaspard le Marchant! Was he dead--living? He could not tell.

The heat was scorching the searcher as he dragged the two that lay clasped so close from the burning carriage together. In its light he knelt down beside them, gasping for breath in the cold dawn. Sir Gaspard’s face was hidden on the breast of his faithful servant. As a man who seeks a friend, Wray turned it toward him, tenderly, never forgetting that anywhere in that dreadful place there might be watchful eyes upon him.

In spite of his caution, his breath came in a great sigh of relief.

Sir Gaspard le Marchant lay with closed eyes and stilled heart, his face uninjured, his clothes scarcely disordered, only something in that strange machine we call a body out of gear forever.

“Dead!” the man breathed it softly in the light of the flaming carriages, but if he had shrieked it to the sky above him it could not have sounded louder in his own ears. The sound brought back his caution.

His long fingers groped deftly in the breast pocket of Sir Gaspard’s coat, and the luck of Marcus Wray lay in his hand!

The man was drunk with his success as he turned away. This will need never appear. When the news of Sir Gaspard’s death was telegraphed to Paris an hour later Dubourg would forward his will to Bolton & Carey. Marcus Wray would be out of the transaction, except for being the lawyer employed by chance.

Now, the sooner he was out of this the better. He turned away, careless whether the dead were out of the way of the fire or not. Sir Gaspard living, had served him well; Sir Gaspard dead, might burn or be buried. It was all one to Marcus Wray.