A NET FOR HER FEET.
Mrs. Trelane, her face drawn and gray, stood staring out of the window.
As Ismay returned she turned with sharp relief.
“Where have you been? Why did you go out like that and stay so long?”
she demanded fiercely. “I have been almost wild here, with no one to
speak to. Do you know that we’re ruined? That Sir Gaspard is dead?”
The girl nodded.
“I saw the flag half-mast--I asked Thomas.” Her face was suddenly very
tired. “How did you hear--and are you sure it’s true?”
“True enough. Look here.” She tossed a telegram toward the girl, who
caught the fluttering paper deftly.
“From Bolton & Carey to Mrs. Trelane,” the message ran. “Fatal accident
on the railway just before Aix. Have received wire that Sir Gaspard
le Marchant and servant are among those killed, and fear there is no
doubt it is not true. Break news to daughter. Will send particulars as
soon as they can be obtained.”
“How did they know you were here?”
“Sir Gaspard told them I was to be here during his absence. I know Mr.
Bolton--or I did when I was Helen le Marchant,” impatiently. “There’s
no mystery about that.”
“Have you told Cristiane?”
“No!” Mrs. Trelane flung herself into a chair and twisted her smooth
fingers uneasily. “She’s asleep. She came in dead tired and lay down.
Her maid is watching to tell her when she wakes. How can I tell her? If
I do it, it will make her hate me.”
With quick contempt Ismay glanced at her.
“On the contrary, it may be your only chance with her,” she said
angrily. “Tell me, had you any arrangement, any bargain, with Sir
Gaspard?”
“None,” with a sullen shake of the head. “We were asked here on a
visit, you and I, ’till things could be arranged,’ he said. But I know
that we were here on approval, if you like to call it so. If the girl
liked us we were to stay on indefinitely----”
“And you sit here when you know that, and run the chance of having that
maid whom she has had for years tell her that her father is dead!”
Ismay flung out her hands in exasperation. “Can’t you see that if any
one tells her but you or I we shall be outside of it all to Cristiane?
Move, please.” Mrs. Trelane’s chair blocked her path to the door. “I’m
going to tell her this minute.”
With the grace of an angry animal, she was out of the room and up the
corridor to Cristiane’s door. Jessie, the girl’s own maid, opened it,
her face swelled with crying.
“She’s asleep still, the poor lamb!” the woman whispered.
With unnatural strength Ismay kept the contempt from her face; the
woman was in a very luxury of woe, and would have blurted out her bad
news, without doubt, the very instant her mistress awoke. What luck
that she had come home in time!
“Oh, Jessie!” she said softly. “It’s so dreadful. And you must be
tired. Go and get your tea, and I’ll stay till you come back.”
Jessie cast a glance backward at the bed.
Cristiane, in a white dressing-gown, slept like a baby, her rose-leaf
lips just parted, her lovely cheek flushed. There was no sign of her
waking till dinner, and down-stairs there would be tea and muffins, and
solemn waggings of the head. Cook would be telling her dreams--she was
a great one for dreams. The prospect was too tempting.
“Thank you, miss,” she said. “I’d be glad of a cup of tea. I’ll be back
in a jiffy; long before she wakes.”
“Then you’ll be a clever woman, my good Jessie!” the girl thought, as
she nodded and passed silently by the woman, who stood respectfully out
of her way.
She looked around the room, where a fire burned softly between brass
andirons, where the floor was covered with a pale-blue and rose carpet,
and the walls hung with blue silk that was covered with pink roses. At
the side of the bed, where she might slip her bare feet upon it as she
got up in the mornings, was Cristiane’s only legacy from her mother, a
great, white bearskin, brought long ago from farthest Russian snows.
Not one atom of the prodigal luxury about the room was lost on those
green, dilated eyes that stared so mercilessly. The very silver of
the toilet-trays and bottles, the white vellum binding of the rows of
books, the rose velvet dressing-gown lined with white fur that hung by
the bedside, each and all struck Ismay with a separate stab.
“I will have them all before I die--all!” she said deliberately. “And
she’s got to help me, for now, at least, I can’t turn out into the
world again after I’ve seen this.”
Noiselessly she turned and bolted the door; she would have no maid
coming to interfere with her work. With that same silent, sinuous grace
she walked to the bedside, and if there had been eyes to see her as
she knelt there they might have looked away as at the sight of a snake
ready to strike.
Yet the hand she laid softly on Cristiane’s was utterly tender.
Perhaps the beauty of the gold-red hair that streamed over the
lace-trimmed pillow and the white satin quilt, the exquisite
unconsciousness of the lovely, girlish face, touched the onlooker in
some strange way, for her face softened miraculously.
“Cristiane,” she whispered. “Cristiane, dear, wake up.”
The girl stirred, muttered something with smiling lips, and was fast
asleep again.
“Cristiane!” Ismay repeated; she touched her more firmly, for time was
going.
“Yes.” The sleepy answer almost startled her. “Oh, it’s Ismay!”
Cristiane sat up, rubbing her eyes, drawing her hand from Ismay’s to
do it. “I’ve been asleep; I was so tired. Did you win a pair of gloves
from me?”
Ismay’s eyes filled with tears; she did not know herself if they were
real or if she were merely warming up to her part.
“I had such a funny dream!” Cristiane cried, with a little laugh of
pleasure. “I dreamed about daddy; he said he was coming home.” She
caught the look on Ismay’s face as she spoke.
“You’re crying! What’s the matter?” The sleepy sound was gone from
the voice at once. “Ismay, what is it?” with both her hands on the
shoulders of the girl kneeling by the bed.
“Mother has had a telegram. There was an accident----” Was it her own
voice that faltered so strangely?
“Not from father--he’s not hurt?” the hands on Ismay’s shoulders fairly
bruised them.
“Look at me, tell me!” Cristiane cried fiercely. “Is he hurt?”
Ismay lifted her face, and saw Cristiane’s eyes, black, dilated,
imperious.
“He’s not hurt!” she said dully; and then she flung her arms suddenly
round the girl who sat crouched in her white gown as though it were a
garment of fiery torture. “My dearest, nothing will ever hurt him any
more,” she said, in slow desperation.
“You mean he’s dead!” The words seemed to come after an interminable
interval of time, in which the ticking of the silver clock, the
murmur of the fire burning in the gate, had sounded loud and somewhat
threatening to Ismay Trelane. With a face as hard as stone Cristiane
had risen from her bed and stood on the white bearskin, her eyes
narrowed, her lips set.
“I mean he is happy”--as she had never thought in her life, Ismay
thought now for the words that would not come. “I mean he has gone to
be with your mother--till you come!”
To the speaker the words were a childish fable, a lie; but they went
home.
Cristiane swayed where she stood, and like a flash Ismay’s arms were
around her; but she seemed not to feel them.
“What is that to me?” she cried, with a dreadful harshness, trembling
like a leaf. Over her shoulder Ismay saw the clock. It was after five.
At any moment some old friend might come and touch that chord in the
girl’s heart for which she was trying in vain.
“Think!” she said quietly. “Put yourself in your father’s place. Your
mother loved him as you do. She died for his sake and yours when she
was but little older than you.”
As she spoke, she was thankful she had drawn the story from her mother
one day in bored curiosity. “Do you think she did not beg him to hurry
after her? Do you think the years were not long to the man she left
behind? Think of the time when you were only a child and busy with
lessons and play; think how your father sat alone at night with his
sorrow; think of the things he could never say to her, and how he
longed for the touch of her hand many a time--and then say, if you can,
that it is nothing to you that they are together again, you that he
loved, you that she died for!”
With a great cry Cristiane flung out her arms.
“Ismay! Ismay! Help me to bear it! I know--I’ve always known--he wanted
her!” Tears came at last from her frozen eyes. She clung wildly to the
girl who held her. “But I never thought he’d leave me.”
“God took him, Cristiane,” said Ismay, and as she said it she believed
it.
“Tell me all you know, quick!” her voice thick with sobbing.
With all the strength of her young, lithe body, Ismay lifted her and
sat down with her on her bed.
“He was going to Rome--she died there,” she whispered. “The train was
wrecked at Aix. He was--Cristiane, it was night, he was asleep, and he
woke in paradise with the woman he loved so long!”
Cristiane’s arms clutched her suddenly.
“He didn’t suffer, tell me! I’ll be brave; he always liked me to be
brave.”
Brave! Ismay could have laughed outright. If this were bravery, what
did you call the other thing? Not all death and hell could have made
her cry as Cristiane was crying now.
“He never felt it, he never knew,” she answered, and if her voice
hardened Cristiane did not hear it. As if the words tore the very soul
out of her, she cried out: “I want father! Oh! I want my father!”
Ismay Trelane at that cry for once was awed to silence. She stooped
and kissed the golden head that lay on her shoulder; kissed it with
a passion of pity, a sudden feeling of protection that was real, for
Cristiane le Marchant.
A knock came on the closed door.
“Tell them to go away,” Cristiane gasped. “Don’t move; don’t go. I
don’t want any one but you!”
The leap of sudden rapture in Ismay’s heart made her clutch at her
side. This was what she had wanted. Her work was done as no one else
could have done it.
“No one shall come in,” she answered softly. “Let me go and speak to
whoever it is for a minute and tell them to go away.”
She laid Cristiane deftly on the pillows, and with noiseless swiftness
slipped into the passage, closing the door behind her.
Mrs. Trelane was there, pale with nervous fright.
“It’s that man Cylmer. He wants to see her. What shall I do? Does she
know about her father?”
“Luckily for us, she does,” said the girl dryly. “Where do you suppose
we should have been if the maid had been with her and Mr. Cylmer had
come? She would have gone down and heard it from him.”
“Why not him as well as any other?” asked her mother, with quick
suspicion.
“Because I meant no one to tell her but me. Don’t you understand that
yet?” asked the girl sharply. Oh! how lucky she had been! But for her
it might have been Miles Cylmer Cristiane had clung to. Miles Cylmer
who had caught her as she swayed. The thought made Ismay sick, and for
another reason than the sake of her own bread and butter.
“Shall I go to her?” Mrs. Trelane made a step toward the shut door.
“No, better not! And don’t see Mr. Cylmer. It isn’t proper to see
people when there is any one dead,” she added.
“I’m not anxious to see him, you needn’t worry. But he gave Thomas this
for Cristiane.” She held out a card. Ismay’s eyes flashed as she read
it. Was it thus that a man who was only a friend of her father’s would
write to the girl who lay prostrate with grief?
“Be brave, dear. It may not be true. I am going up to town to-night
to find out all I can from the lawyers. I will be back as soon as
possible. Please let me try to help you. MILES.”
“He must have seen the flag and come over at once,” she thought, a
wild, unreasoning terror at her heart that he cared for Cristiane. Men
were like that; they kissed one girl when they loved another.
“I’ll give it to her. There’s no answer,” she said. And in the dusky
corridor her mother did not see that her lips had grown bloodless.
“Tell Thomas to say to Mr. Cylmer that Cristiane can’t see him. And
send up some tea or wine, or something.” She leaned hard on the door
for support. “I’m worn out; worn out!” She had been full of life five
minutes since, but now, when she must go and comfort this girl whom
Miles Cylmer had come in such haste to see, Ismay’s knees trembled
under her. If only she dared to leave Cristiane long enough to go to
him, to tell him----Bah! what could she tell him?
Mr. Cylmer turned away from Marchant’s Hold perfectly unsuspicious that
the green witch eyes that had held his were those of no other than
Ismay Trelane. If he had known he might not have been the first to
spread a net for her feet. But what he did unconsciously she did with
meaning. His note never reached the girl to whom it was written.