The Master of the Ceremonies. Fenn George Manville

shivering visibly.

      “It is true,” said Claire. “No, no, it cannot be. I must be wrong. Quick! It may be some terrible fit!”

      She clung to his hand, and tried to hurry him out of the room, but he drew back.

      “No,” he stammered, “not yet. Your – your news – agitated me, Claire. Does – wait a minute – does anyone – in the – in the house know?”

      “No, dear. I thought I heard a cry, and I came down, and she – ”

      “A fit,” he said hastily, as he took the glass from the top of the water-bottle, filled it, gulped the water down, and set bottle and glass back in their places. “A fit – yes – a fit.”

      “Come with me, father, quick!” cried Claire.

      “Yes. Yes, I’ll go with you – directly,” he said, fumbling for his handkerchief in the tail of the coat thrown over the chair, finding his snuff-box, and taking a great pinch.

      “Come, pray come!” she cried again, as she gazed at him in a bewildered way, his trembling becoming contagious, and her lips quivering with a new dread greater than the horror at the end of the passage.

      “Yes – yes,” he faltered – “I’ll come. So alarming to be woke up – like this – in the middle of the night. Shall I – shall I ring, Claire? Or will you call the maids?”

      “Come with me first,” cried Claire. “It may not be too late.”

      “Yes,” he cried, “it is – it is too late.”

      “Father!”

      “You – you said she was dead,” he cried hastily. “Yes – yes – let us go. Perhaps only a fit. Come.”

      He seemed to be now as eager to go as he had been to keep back, and, holding his child’s hand tightly, he hurried with her to Lady Teigne’s apartment, where he paused on the mat to draw a long, catching breath.

      The next moment the door had swung to behind them, and father and daughter stood gazing one at the other.

      “Don’t, don’t,” he cried, in a low, angry voice, as he turned from her. “Don’t look at me like that, Claire. What – what do you want me to do?”

      Claire turned her eyes from him to gaze straight before her in a curiously dazed manner; and then, without a word, she crossed to the bedside and drew back the curtain, fixing her father with her eyes once more.

      “Look!” she said, in a harsh whisper; “quick! See whether we are in time.”

      The old man uttered a curious supplicating cry, as if in remonstrance against the command that forced him to act, and, as if in his sleep, and with his eyes fixed upon those of his child, he walked up close to the bed, bent over it a moment, and then with a shudder he snatched the curtain from Claire’s hand, and thrust it down.

      “Dead!” he said, with a gasp. “Dead!”

      There was an awful silence in the room for a few moments, during which the ticking of the little clock on the table beyond the bed sounded painfully loud, and the beat of the waves amid the shingle rose into a loud roar.

      “Father, she has been – ”

      “Hush!” he half shrieked, “don’t say so. Oh, my child, my child!”

      Claire trembled, and it was as though a mutual attraction drew them to gaze fixedly the one at the other, in spite of every effort to tear their eyes away.

      At last, with a wrench, the old man turned his head aside, and Claire uttered a low moan as she glanced from him to the bed and then back towards the window.

      “Ah!” she cried, starting forward, and, bending down beside the dressing-table, she picked up the casket that was lying half hidden by drapery upon the floor.

      But the jewel-casket was quite empty, and she set it down upon the table. It had been wrenched open with a chisel or knife-blade, and the loops of the lock had been torn out.

      “Shall we – a doctor – the constables?” he stammered.

      “I – I do not know,” said Claire hoarsely, acting like one in a dream; and she staggered forward, kicking against something that had fallen near the casket.

      She involuntarily stooped to pick it up, but it had been jerked by her foot nearer to her father, who bent down with the quickness of a boy and snatched it up, hiding it hastily beneath his dressing-gown, but not so quickly that Claire could not see that it was a great clasp-knife.

      “What is that?” she cried sharply.

      “Nothing – nothing,” he said.

      They stood gazing at each other for a few moments, and then the old man uttered a hoarse gasp.

      “Did – did you see what I picked up?” he whispered; and he caught her arm with his trembling hand.

      “Yes; it was a knife.”

      “No,” he cried wildly. “No; you saw nothing. You did not see me pick up that knife.”

      “I did, father,” said Claire, shrinking from him with an invincible repugnance.

      “You did not,” he whispered. “You dare not say you did, when I say be silent.”

      “Oh, father! father!” she cried with a burst of agony.

      “It means life or death,” he whispered, grasping her arm so tightly that his fingers seemed to be turned to iron. “Come,” he cried with more energy, “hold the light.”

      He crossed the room and opened the folding-doors, going straight into the drawing-room, when the roar of the surf upon the shore grew louder, and as Claire involuntarily followed, she listened in a heavy-dazed way as her father pointed out that a chair had been overturned, and that the window was open and one of the flower-pots in the balcony upset.

      “The jasmine is torn away from the post and balustrade,” he said huskily; “someone must have climbed up there.”

      Claire did not speak, but listened to him as he grew more animated now, and talked quickly.

      “Let us call up Isaac and Morton,” he said. “We must have help. The doctor should be fetched, and – and a constable.”

      Claire gazed at him wildly.

      “Did – did you hear anything?” he said hurriedly, as he closed the folding-doors.

      “I was asleep,” said Claire, starting and shuddering as she heard his words. “I thought I heard a cry.”

      “Yes, a cry,” he said; “I thought I heard a cry and I dressed quickly and was going to see, when – when you came to me. Recollect that you will be called up to speak, my child – an inquest – that is all you know. You went in and found Lady Teigne dead, and you came and summoned me. That is all you know.”

      She did not answer, and he once more gripped her fiercely by the wrist.

      “Do you hear me?” he cried. “I say that is all you know.”

      She looked at him again without answering, and he left her to go and summon Morton and the footman.

      Claire stood in the drawing-room, still holding the candlestick in her hand, with the stiffening form of the solitary old woman, whose flame of life had been flickering so weakly in its worldly old socket that the momentary touch of the extinguisher had been sufficient to put it out, lying just beyond those doors; on the other hand the roar of the falling tide faintly heard now through the closed window. She heard her father knocking at the door of her brother’s room. Then she heard the stairs creak as he descended to call up the footman from the pantry below; and as she listened everything seemed strange and unreal, and she could not believe that a horror had fallen upon them that should make a hideous gulf between her and her father for ever, blast her young life so that she would never dare again to give her innocent love to the man by whom she knew she was idolised, and make her whole future a terror – a terror lest that which she felt she knew must be discovered, if she,