COILED TO SPRING.
Just how long she sat crouched in the dark Ismay Trelane never knew.
She heard a bell ring and lamps brought that shone through the chink
straight on her. Then there was a tinkle of glasses, and, as a bottle
was opened with a sharp explosion, she dared to steal away.
“Oh, what wickedness! I never dreamed of such wickedness,” she thought,
gaining her own room and locking herself in, as though Wray might come
to seek her. “But he sha’n’t do it. I swear he sha’n’t do it, unless he
kills me first!”
For she knew that somewhere, somehow, death would be lurking in her own
house for Cristiane le Marchant; not now, but later on, when people had
ceased to talk of Sir Gaspard’s death, and his strange will.
Curiously enough, now that she knew the real danger, all her courage
had come back to her. It was with nerves of steel that she sat
thinking, thinking; her eyes gleaming green in the darkness like a
watching leopard’s, that waits to kill.
“What shall I do? I can’t let mother know I heard--she would tell him,
and I wouldn’t have any chance.” Her anguish almost broke out into a
cry. “Oh! what have I done to have such a mother?”--her teeth gritting
as she kept back the words. “And he will marry me then, will he? He
will marry a dose of poison, and I will hang for it first! To sit there
in cold blood and talk of murder--and she so young.” She rocked to and
fro. Cristiane le Marchant was in her way, but that was a thing to
fight and triumph over. Not even to marry Miles Cylmer would Ismay let
that awful scheme of death be played out.
And her mother had begged to him, not defied him; that cry of “Mark,
Mark!” still rang in the daughter’s ears. Could it be true what he
said, that it was she who had poisoned Abbotsford? Had her mother
managed to deceive even her when she swore she had no hand in it?
“I will find out!” The girl’s dumb lips were awful in the dusk. “I will
make Marcus Wray a thing the world shudders at before I am done. I will
take care of Cristiane,” she moaned sharply, remembering how she had
said these very words to Cylmer.
“Oh, you’ll love me in the end,” she panted, as though he could hear
the thought in her brain. “I would die for you; surely you’ll love me
in the end!”
Frightened at her own passion, she got up in the dark and bathed her
face in cold water, and washed the hands that were soiled from the dust
in her ambush. Her mother would wonder, if she came in before dinner
and found her in a dress all gray with dust.
She made a careful toilet, that she might be ready when the gong rang
for dinner, and looked at herself in the glass. But her own eyes were
dreadful to her, for they were the eyes of a hunted beast at bay. She
turned quickly from the glass. She could not think if she saw her own
face, and think she must before she had to meet Marcus Wray.
She opened the window to the bitter winter air, and its chill cleared
her brain.
First, there was that matter of Lord Abbotsford, and the hold it had
given Wray on her mother. He must have proof of what the latter denied,
or she would not be in such terror of him. The thought brought no new
terror to Ismay Trelane; true or not, the accusation was Marcus Wray’s
weapon, and she must look for one of her own that would turn its edge.
Then there was Cylmer. He, too, would be against her mother if he knew
all, and Wray would stick at nothing if he once knew that Ismay loved
another man. He must know nothing of Cylmer; yet, if he stayed here,
how was he to be kept in the dark?
And Cristiane? Suppose Ismay’s dull suspicion were true, and Cylmer
loved her, why should she live to come between him and Ismay Trelane?
The girl, sitting, with clenched hands, on her bed, answered her own
question.
“Because I hate, hate, hate Marcus Wray!” she whispered hoarsely.
“Because he shall never have a penny of Sir Gaspard’s money, nor my
little finger, to call his own. I must carry my own sins. I will not be
made to help carry Marcus Wray’s! Cristiane----” She went to the glass
again, and this time she did not flinch. “Cristiane cannot keep any man
from me! I will have it all, all, from marrying Miles Cylmer to beating
Marcus Wray at his own game.”
For there faced her in the glass her own beauty, strange and glorious.
Not a curve of her milky cheeks, a wave of her flax-white hair, a line
of her scarlet mouth was lost on her. She gazed steadily into her own
eyes in the mirror till it seemed as if a soul not her own gazed back
at her from them. They were no longer the eyes of Ismay Trelane, a girl
not eighteen years old, but those of a woman who had lived and loved
and known the very wisdom of earth long ago, when the world was very
young.
The old, old smile curved the girl’s lips as she turned away.
There was her weapon to fight Marcus Wray--her beauty, her wits, her
self-reliance that should never again fail her as it had failed her
to-day.
“I shall manage them all!” She flung back her lovely head triumphantly,
securely. “Who is Cristiane that I should be afraid of her, when he can
look at me? She shall help me with him! She shall be the bait that will
bring him to me. And I will not go to him with blood on my hands to
save Marcus Wray.”
Not even to herself would she own that in spite of herself Cristiane
had grown dear to her, for to care for any one but oneself and a man
was to be a fool, to Ismay Trelane. Her mother--bah! Her mother was
safe enough while her enemy was playing for such high stakes.
The only danger was lest Wray might think things about Cylmer, and
forget his caution in a mad rage of jealousy. That thick, yellow skin,
those dark red lips bore the very trade-mark on them of the most
ungovernable passion in the world.
“It is I who must take care of that,” Ismay mused. “And before I am
done, it is Marcus Wray that shall tremble for his skin, not I, nor my
mother, nor Cristiane.”
She went down-stairs as calm as a lake at dawn; cool and silent
she bowed to Marcus Wray where he stood with her mother in the
drawing-room, dressed for dinner.
She had never seen him in evening clothes, and he was more repulsive in
the plain black and white than she had ever dreamed he could be.
“What! You don’t shake hands?” he said, with amusement.
Cristiane was not coming down, and Mrs. Trelane looked at her daughter
as if she longed to slap her.
“Don’t be silly, Ismay!” she snapped.
“Let her alone,” Wray said quietly. “It will come to the same thing in
the end. The harder it is to get a thing, the more I enjoy it.”
Even Mrs. Trelane felt cold at his hideous, gloating look at her
daughter, but Ismay glanced at him with calm distaste, to which her
beauty lent a sting.
“Let us go to dinner,” she said, as if he were beneath any direct reply.
And as she sat at his right hand, opposite her mother, not even the
luck of Marcus Wray could warn him that a white adder, with gleaming
emerald eyes, coiled up to spring, would have been a safer neighbor for
him than Ismay Trelane.