Christina Part 26

"I wish to do nothing unfair," was Sir Arthur's chilly rejoinder; "if, as Miss Moore tells us, that pendant belonged to her mother, she will be able to tell us, too, what the initials signify."

"I--don't--know," Christina faltered. "I--have often wondered--I----"

"Perhaps one of them is the initial of your mother's maiden name?" Miss Doubleday said gently, anxious to do everything in her power to help the now trembling girl.

"I--don't know my mother's maiden name----" Christina was beginning, when a short laugh broke from Sir Arthur.

"You do not know your mother's maiden name?" he said slowly; "come, come, surely you cannot expect us to believe that."

"I don't know whether you will believe it or not," Christina answered, with a sudden flash of defiance, "it is true. And I don't know what the initials are, but--my mother gave me the pendant. I am telling you the simple truth. I cannot say more."

"Perhaps you will tell us you never tried to--sell--or p.a.w.n that piece of jewellery, at a p.a.w.nbroker's shop in Chelsea a few weeks ago?" Sir Arthur asked next, his glance taking in the look of consternation that flashed over her face, the new, shrinking terror in her eyes. "Ah! you cannot deny that fact?"

"No, oh! no," Christina put out her hands as if to ward off an actual blow. "I did try to p.a.w.n it. I was so dreadfully poor, but--the man frightened me. I came away from the shop, then----"

"Exactly; they frightened you, because they showed you plainly that they suspected you of having come by the pendant dishonestly. You ran away from the shop."

The dreadful truth of every word spoken, the dreadful difficulty--nay, so it seemed to Christina, the impossibility of refuting the accusation levelled against her, made her feel helpless, tongue-tied, like some creature caught in a trap, from which there was no way of escape. She had no means, none at all, of proving her own story. Her mother, who had given her the jewel, was dead. She had never shown it to anyone; she had never had occasion to show it to anybody; as far as she knew, there was not a living soul in the world, who could come forward to declare that the pendant was hers. Even Mrs. Donaldson, her late employer, could not have vouched for her truth and honesty in this respect, for Mrs. Donaldson had not known that she possessed the beautiful thing; she had only been her mother's acquaintance, not even an intimate friend.

"But surely," the practical Miss Doubleday here intervened, "surely, if Miss Moore were guilty of stealing the pendant, she would not wear it here, under your very eyes, Sir Arthur. It is not likely----"

"I understood Miss Moore to say she was ignorant of the meaning of the initials above the pendant," the old gentleman answered coldly; "presumably, therefore, she is not aware that C stands for Congreve.

There is no reason to suppose that she knew from whose bag she was taking the pendant, when she took it."

"But I did not take it," Christina cried; "indeed, indeed, I did not.

It is my own, my very own; all I have told you is true." Sir Arthur ignored her words, turning gravely to his cousin.

"My dear Cicely, I am very sorry to be unintentionally the cause of so much unpleasantness for you, but I am afraid that, in the interests of justice, I shall be obliged to make this the subject of police investigation."

CHAPTER XVII.

"WHO DO YOU MEAN BY SIR ARTHUR?"

Boxing Day had dawned bright and sunny, but before the afternoon, rain began to fall, and a rising wind was sweeping over the moor, when, between three and four o'clock, Denis Fergusson drove along the upland road. A case of pneumonia in a desolate hamlet had suddenly taken a grave turn, and as he sped across the open stretch of country, his thoughts were concentrated on his patient, and on the gravity of her condition. Having threshed out in his mind all the possibilities with regard to this anxious charge, he allowed his thoughts to drift back to his afternoon at Bramwell Castle two days before, to Baba's winsome ways, to the sweetness of Baba's mother, to his own dream idyll, the dreaming of which had, he was convinced, been such an absurdity, and yet--and yet, the dream had seemed so wonderful.

"People may scoff at the bare idea of love at first sight," he mused, as the car pa.s.sed on its rapid way in the gathering twilight, "but--sometimes it happens--even to the most prosaic of us." And out of the grey mists that crept over the brown expanse of heather and bracken, he seemed to see Cicely's face, smiling that fascinating smile of hers, which was so childlike, so appealing, so sweet.

"And her eyes are like the speedwell in the June hedges," his thoughts ran on; "such a heavenly blue, and when she looks up into your face, and her eyes look at you, with the wistfulness of a lovely child's eyes, you want to take her in your arms, and kiss her--and kiss her----"

"By Jove, my good fellow, you are a fool," he broke in upon his own inward colloquy, "an abject fool. The little lady of the speedwell eyes, is as far above you as the stars in heaven, and you know it. A struggling South London doctor might quite as well aspire to the planet Venus, as to the lady of Bramwell Castle. The less such ideas are encouraged, the better."

Resolutely thrusting from him the thoughts that had obtruded themselves unbidden, he drove rapidly on, whilst the grey mists deepened upon the country side; the rain that had begun in a fine drizzle, began to come down in torrents, and the wind rose gradually to the fury of a hurricane. Across the open stretch of heathland, the gale broke with terrific force, the rain lashed Fergusson's face and ran in swift streams down his mackintoshed shoulders and arms; and it was with a little sigh of relief that he turned out of the main road, and into the lane at whose bottom stood the lonely house. Here there was a certain amount of shelter from the high hedges and overshadowing trees, though the great gusts of wind shook the trees until they creaked, and groaned, and bent beneath the blast; and even in the depths of the desolate valley itself, Fergusson found himself nearly lifted from his feet by the hurricane, when he alighted at the green gate in the wall.

Elizabeth appeared quickly in answer to his ring, and her grave face made him say sharply--

"She is not worse?"

"She seems less like herself to-night," the servant answered, a little catch in her voice; "she doesn't always know where she is, or who is talking to her. I think--she has got to the end. She can bear no more." The expression used, struck the doctor strangely.

"I think she has got to the end." The same feeling had been in his own mind when last he had visited the beautiful, lonely lady; it had seemed to him, too, as though she had come to the end of her powers of endurance--as though, having borne lash after lash from fortune, she could bear no more.

When he entered her room, he found her lying very still, her face scarcely less white than the pillow against which it rested, her great eyes fixed on the leaping flames of the fire, her hands folded on the sheet, in a way which he had noticed was peculiar to her, the fingers of her right hand close clasped about the plain gold ring, that rested on the third finger of her left.

"Whatever the poor chap who has gone to his account was or did, this woman loved him with an amazing love," Fergusson thought, as he had thought a hundred times before, whilst he spoke gently to his patient, seating himself beside her, and observing her closely, though he talked of everything and anything excepting her health.

"Do you know," she said presently, her voice very low and dreamy. "I think I have come to the end." This repet.i.tion of Elizabeth's words, and of his own thoughts, startled Fergusson, but he did not betray his surprise, only answering gently--

"You are worn out now. You have had a long strain, and you were not quite fit to stand it." She smiled up at him, an infinitely pathetic smile.

"It is not only that. I don't want to be morbid. I don't mean to be morbid. But something--seems to have snapped inside me--some vitality, some power has gone, and--I have come to the end."

"You feel that now, because of the shock and strain, and because, at the best of times, you are not strong. By and by----"

"Ah! but I don't think there will be any by and by," she interrupted quietly, "and I am not sorry. Life has brought so much more pain than joy--that--I am not either sorry or afraid. Only I wish I could have done more for my world, before I went out of it," she added half whimsically, half sadly, a little smile breaking over her face.

"Perhaps what you have been, has had even more influence over your world than what you have done," Fergusson said quietly; "it is not always the most apparently active people, who have the greatest effect on their fellows."

She smiled at him again, but she did not continue the conversation, allowing it to drift away to other topics, until Fergusson, having given her his orders, and promised to send her a new medicine on the morrow, took his departure.

"What a baffling mystery the woman is," he reflected, as he walked across the garden to the door in the wall. "I am not more curious than the average man, but I confess she has aroused my curiosity. What has her life been? And why has she----" At this point in his meditations he opened the door, and was on the point of pa.s.sing out into the road, when he became aware of a figure, leaning against the wall close to the door itself. The last remnants of daylight had almost died away, the rain was falling in pitiless torrents, and Fergusson, peering through the twilight gloom, recognised with horror the face of Christina Moore, looking terribly white and exhausted in the dimness. Her crouching position seemed to indicate that she was tired out, and when Fergusson went quickly to her side, and put a hand on her shoulder, she shrank back and s.h.i.+vered from head to foot, lifting such frightened eyes to his, that he peered this way and that, thinking she must be fleeing from some dastardly pursuer. But, excepting for the moaning of the wind in the trees, and the swis.h.i.+ng of the rain, no sound broke the silence, and save the girl herself, there was no sign of any other human being in the lane.

"What has happened?" he asked, speaking very quietly, to calm her overmastering excitement; "come into the house out of the rain, and tell me what is the matter. Why, you are wet through," he added sharply, as he put his hand through the girl's arm, and drew her up the flagged path to the front door.

"Yes, I'm wet through," she answered in slow, mechanical tones. "I--I believe it has rained ever since I left the station."

"The station? Have you walked from the station?" They were standing in the hall now, and by the light of a hanging lamp in its centre, Fergusson could see that the wet was running from Christina's garments, and dropping in small pools on the floor, and that the look of exhaustion was deepening on her face.

"Yes, I walked," she said. "I hadn't much money. I was afraid I shouldn't have enough for the cab. They might have called me a thief again--and--I am not a thief--indeed, indeed, I am not." Her eyes met his once more, with so strange and dazed a look, that he began to wonder whether some great shock had unhinged her brain, but he only said, more quietly than before:--

"I am quite sure you are not a thief. I will call Elizabeth, and she will take care of you. Does Mrs. Stanforth expect you?"

"Oh! no, no," Christina spoke breathlessly; "only I was so frightened, I didn't know what to do, when they said I was a thief, for I can't prove that I am not. I can't prove anything. I have only my bare word. Everybody who could help me is dead."

Feeling more and more mystified by every word she spoke, Fergusson rang the bell, and when Elizabeth promptly answered his summons, and stared in mute surprise at the dripping figure standing under the lamp, he said tersely:--

"Miss Moore has arrived unexpectedly, and she is very wet. Will you put her to bed with hot bottles, and give her something hot to drink?

Don't let her talk to-night. I will come round and see her in the morning."

Perhaps Elizabeth, in the long years of her service with Margaret, had learnt to accustom herself to surprises, and she expressed no astonishment now; but a look of compa.s.sion for the drenched and exhausted girl crossed her kindly face; and, with a comprehending nod to the doctor, she took Christina's hand and led her upstairs, the girl going with her, as unresistingly as a little child might have done.

"Worn out, utterly worn out, and frightened to death," Fergusson commented inwardly; "now what can have happened to bring her here in this condition, and to make her say such extraordinary things about not being a thief. I must tell Mrs. Stanforth what liberties I have taken with her house, and come back as early as I can to-morrow." He ran lightly upstairs again to his patient's room, and told her of Christina's unlooked-for arrival, finding, to his relief, that she was in no wise startled or upset by what she heard.

"Poor little girl," was her soft comment; "we will take great care of her. Elizabeth loves having a young thing to mother; we will do our best for her, and perhaps in the morning she will be able to explain herself. It is difficult to imagine what can have happened; she seemed to be so happy in her work."

"It is impossible to suppose that Lady Cicely can have been unkind to her," Fergusson answered thoughtfully; "she could not be unkind to a living soul. However, speculation is a fruitless task; we must wait till Miss Moore can tell us her own story. I did not dare question her to-night, she was already completely overwrought."

And it was still a very wan and white Christina, who was taken the next morning into Margaret's room by Elizabeth; and Margaret's observant eyes saw at once that all the girl's nerves were on the stretch, that she was in a condition of acute tension. The wish to help this young thing in her hour of need, the sudden necessity for stretching out a succouring hand to another human being, acted as a trumpet call to Margaret's own strong character, and she looked more herself this morning, than she had done for many weeks.