Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 34, Number 77, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 May 1902 — THE WOMAN IN GRAY [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THE WOMAN IN GRAY

BY ROBERT ESTES DURAND.

CHAPTER V.—(Continued.) - When she paused at last, finishing with a question, the stillness in the drawing room might almost have been felt. What would Miss Hope say to her, and to the others, who waited some explanation of the sudden storm-cloud which had discharged its electricity? But Miss Hope only laughed and shrugged her lovely shoulders among their nestling laces. “Dear me, Miss Wynne!” she exclaimed at last, with a pretty little drawl, “do you mean to be melodramatic, or only amusing?” She leaned hack in her chair, gently waving her fan, from which flashed spangled fire as she moved it. “Of course, I have heard all about the Fanny Edwards you mention, but not in America. It was at Martenhead, near Lorn Abbey, the “old family place’ you spoke of just now, and where we met last week. Perhaps you even think”—and her words were interrupted by a little rippling laugh—“or perhaps I’d better say mean to convey,. that I am Fanny Edwards in disguise? How funny! I see that I’m not the only woman in the house with what I call a ‘fine dramatie instinct.’ But I never make scenes; I only act in them sometimes, when they have been made. There's such a difference!” “You act very well, certainly,” retorted Paula, quivering. “Indeed, you would do most things you undertook well, I haven’t a doubt, even to making up beds and tvashing dishes, which was Fanny Edwards’ work at Lorn Abbey.” “Poor girl! How she must have hated it.” “Yes; no doubt it’s pleasanter to write story books.” *Miss Hope laughed again. “What a battle of words! And I see that every one is dying, but afraid, to separate us. If you will tell us all, Miss Wynne, exactly why you fancied I privately rejoiced in the ‘simply unassuming name of Edwards,’ I will get dear Lady Towers to answer for me regarding my genealogy as far as she knows it,” “Do you really wish me to tell—here, before everybody—why I believed, and do still believe, your real name to be Fanny Edwards, not Consuelo Hope?” “Ah, my dear Miss Wynne, you admit it at last! Come, that’s something to go upon. Yes, please give the particulars, by all mear.s.” “You are “The courage of innocence, I assure, you. And here come all the absentees, just in time. Don’t you agree-with me, Sir Wilfrid?” For my uncle, with the other men, had now made his appearance at the door. “It's a foregone conclusion that I do,” he responded gallantly. “Miss Wynne is just about to telb us her reasons for ‘filching from me my good name’ of Hope. No, no; you must not speak, Sir Wilfrid; I shall be angry If you do. Now, if you please, Miss Wynne.” - j Paula was red and white by turns in her anger at being thus baited where she' had thought to score. “You are not ‘Miss Hope' then, if you will have it!” she cried. “I know’, on the authority of as clever a private detective as can be had in London. Oh, I’m not ashamed to confess it! And if you all guessed the slyness, the machinations —” “Paula,” uttered Uncle Wilfrid’s stern voice, “I forbid you to say another w’ord. You bring upon yourself treatment only fit for a child. Leave the room. You shall hoar from me later.” Paula rushed out, and Miss Hope came to the rescue, ftnying: “Of course it began with a joke, and I was very stupid to have kept it up for a moment. It is I who ought to apologize; and, by way of penance and to make you all forget, I’ll sing you the funniest song I know before w*e say good night.” She walked hastily to the piano and began singing a bright little French chanson with a voice that trembled slightly through a verse or two. As she finished and was running lirr white fingers over the piano (the left hand still conspicuous in its pearl sheath), a footman came’into the room, carrying a small silver tray with a twisted bit of note paper upon it. “I beg your pardon, my lady,” he pleaded to Lady Towers, “but I was particularly directed that this was important and immediate.” “Oh, very well,” remarked his mistress, and the tray was presented to Miss Hope. She was gazing at it as though at a loss what she must do, when Sir Thomas expressed the hope that we were not to be cheated oiit of a second song. “Oh, if you will forgive me, I will sing to-morrow instead*” she asid brightly. “You won’t think me rude, will you, Lady Towers, if I bid you good night abruptly. and run away to—to—answer this note? It’s really rather important. It was late, as it happened, for no one had given thought to the flight of time, and, with an evident sense of relief, good nights were speedily ed on all sides. CHAPTER VI. I was in no mood for bed, and the impulse took me to seek Unele Wilfrid. I began going softly down the stairs, meanlug Uud my way tn.tiuiwing ulwru hu slept, and tap at his bedroom door; but as I slowly descended a flicker of firelight, penetrating the small window on the stairway, drew my eyes to the gun room. A ruddy glow wavered over the’ walls, chased by vaguely shaped, grotesque shadows, and in the midst of the red dusk I saw a white figure standing. At first so did the lights and shadows change add melt into one another,! the glimpse of whiteness might have been an optical illusion; but as I paused far an instant, looking deliberately down, to my surprise, I saw that M*was unmistakably Miss Hope, in her fleecy dinner gown, the snow of her neck and uncover'd arms

shining up to my eyes in the fitful illumination of the fire. As I did so the firelight flashed up for a second and showed me distinctly the expression of her face. It was that of a brave woman who knows herself confronted with some deadly peril, yet, undismayed, will not flinch before its approach. What was there in that room to bring to the beautiful face a look that belong- 1 ed alone to some terrible crisis? Who, was with her, menacing her, or whispering to her, perhaps, a knowledge of her secret? Had the note I had seen her receive taken her to the gun room? And then something drew my eyes to the big old-fashioned mirror, shaped like a shield, which hung over a gun rack, and directly opposite the window on the stairs. At such an angle was the glass suspended that it reflected the floor of the gun room rather than the wall in front of it. Miss Hope, who faced me with her back to the mirror, was not imaged in the shining surface, but it had been the movement of some living thing reflected there which had caught* my gaze ■ and held it. A sheet of tawny fur, a pair of glittering eyeballs, a sinuous form crouching, as if about to spring! The beautiful, silent woman seemed instinctively to know that a cry for help would be but the signal for the crawling yellow mass to gather itself together and leap upon trer; ——>——— Somehow she must be saved; With my~ eyes I measured the window through which I leaned. It was small, but not too small to prevent the passage of my body. If I equid leap down to the floor of the gun room, only ten or twelve feet below, I should alight behind the tiger. I drew myself upward until I knelt, crouching down, on the sill; and then, with a dizzying vision under my eyes of a slow, striped and tawny length crawling across the floor (it would have a table to cross or.skirt round before it could reach Miss Hope), I dropped my feet over and let myself go. For an instant the shock half stunned • me. A myriad of stars seemed to fall in a cataract out of the darkness, and the roaring of the cataract was in my ears. It was not so much of a jump—ten or a dozen feet —if I could have taken it ip the right way; but I had fallen anyhow, actuated solely by the desire to drop, in what manner it mattered little, yet in less time than is occupied in telling I had staggered to my knees and would have been on my feet had I not had to reckon with the tiger. There had been a sharp cry from Miss Hope, but when I would have looked for her through the falling stars the room was blotted out by the dark shape that had whirled aud loomed over me. A curious pungent stench was in m.v nostrils, and, with a blind impulse bidding me clutch at the creature’s throat, in the instinctive desire for self-preservation which never quite leaves us, I went down again under the blows of the great siedgebammer paws. - There was a grinding pain in my arms and shoulders, a sense of stifling under hot, ill-smelling fur, a rebellious, though scarcely terrified, knowledge that this moment would be my last on earth, that I was grappling with death in grimmest form, and being overmastered by it. -

That was all. And in the midst came a shot, fired so close at hand as to be deafening, a spurt of thick, waj-m blood over my face and a yell of mortal anguish. Blood—not my own—dripped over my eyes, and I dashed it away with the one hand I could lift. My left hung helpless, and for the moment life seemed far away and utterly undesirable. Then I felt her soft fingers grasp my arm with all the will, if not the power, to bring me to my feet again, and the sight of her face so near my own, the sound of her panting breath in my ear, gave me new strength and inspiration. "Thank heaven! Thank heaven!" she wasscrying. I dragged myself up from the floor, but I could not stand, and, reeling back, I leaned against the table, my breath coming in hoarse sobs. Something I had stumbled against as I staggered across the floor. And now I saw that it was a gun, still smoking. The tiger lay still, a supine mass, stretched out at length, half on its back, the soft fur dabbled with the blood in which it would wallow no more. "I have killed it!" she said. “We are saved! But, oh, the horror of it!” “Don’t think of it—don’t look!" I panted, scarce knowing yet what I said, feeling still in imagination, and the throbbing of torn muscles, the death-grip of the tiger on my body. “You saved my life with magnificent courage, and—and— I ” “And you? It was you who saved mine. But, O Mr. Darkmore, it’s over now! The strength has gone out of me. Will no otfe ever come and—take that afiful thing away? I must look; I can't help it. And I'm so deadly, deadly sick!” , 1 sprang forward, forgetting my weakness and my pain. On my right arm. which was uninjured, I caught and held her up. She lay against my breast, her exquisite body soft and pathetically yielding in unconsciousness, and I felt my strength coining buck to me with a rush of fire through my veins. Then there were sounds on the stairs and in the hall outside, with a loud rattling of that door of the gun room which opened into the passage. “For the love of heaven, what’s happened hete?” Sir Thomas’ bluff voice was exclaiming. “Wboever's in there, unlock the door!” “I can’t get to it!" I- cried in return. “Come round to the door on the lawn!” As I shouted my answer, I felt a delicate thrilling arid stirring of the girl’s body in my arms, and a faint sigh told me that her senses were returning. "They’ve corn*—at last," she murmur-

ed. “But—but she had locked the door on the outside?* . “Locked the door on the outside?” I asked, in amaze. “Who could have done such a thing?” - . But Miss Hope gave me no ansVer. “Tell them not to be alarmed,” I replied to Sir Thomas’ questioning, hearing the terrified voices of women in the distance. “Miss Hope has—Wied the tiger —that’s all, thank There was a general outburst of exclamations, but no one cared to stop for more inquiries. The obvious thing to do was to take my adviee, and satisfy all efiriosity by coming to us as speedily as possible through the other door. A few moments later we could hear the soft patter of feet as they ran over the frozen lawn, and then the gun room was invaded by the men of the house and several servants in various stages of deshabille. Everybody in the house had fathered in the smoking room, with only two absentees—Paula and the invalid Jerome. One of the grooms had been sent off post-hast^ to the village, a mile away, for a surgeon to dress my wounded shoulder. There seemed a strange fascination for them all in asking the same questions over again, and receiving tlje same answers. Feverishly ready to talk as Miss Hope had apparently become at last, there wag still one portion of the engrossing subject on which she remained oddly reticent, and this led me to £hink. that her volubility on all others had in it a certain method. She evaded inquiries as to how she had happened to go into the gun room, trying to make it appear that she had seen the firelight, and chanced to wander in for a moment before going upstairs to her room. “Then,” she hurried on, as though to make the listeners forget that her explanation had been unsatisfactory, “I walked over to the fire, and, as I stood looking into it, I heard a noise at the other end of the room, something like the purring of an enormous cat. I turned my head, and saw a pair of big eyes glaring at me. It wasn’t long before I knew just wliat was there; that it must have Crept in through the open door on the lawn before I came into the roojn. Suddenly I heard a great crash, saw that a man had leaped through the window over the stairs, and that the tiger had turned onhim. I didn’t know who it was at first, though I think I must have supposed it to be Mr. Darkmore even then—for there’s nobody else in the world so tall as he! But I was sure he had made that leap to save me, and now it was my turn to do something if I could. Quite through selfish motives, you know, for I fancied the tiger was equal to disposing of us both, all in good time. Luckily, I know something about firearms, and, far more fortunate still, the gun I snatched was loaded; else I should have had to beat the tiger about the head, which mightn’t have been so successful. That is all—all my part, and Mr. Darkmore is too modest to speak of his,” she said, with a voice that trembled between tears and laughter. “But the locked door? I don't understand that,” pondered Sir Thomas persistently. **•*•«« A week later it seemed as though Paula had gone cbmpletely out of our lives. The party at Hazelmount had broken up, Miss Hope had left abruptly, saying she was going to a friend at a distance, and Paula, strangely morbid and mysterious, had left home as soon as we got back to London, announcing in a note sent to Sir Wilfrid that she no longer cared to remain under a rpof sheltering persons whom “the wiles of a siren had alienated from their former love and duty” to herself.

We made some inquiries, but found no trace of her, and then, knowing her willful, erratic nature, deemed it best to await her voluntary return, satisfied that she was on a protracted visit to some one of her many old school friends. Later we learned she was traveling in France or Italy with the Annesleys, people my uncle had never liked. Jerome, Uncle Wilfrid’s secretary, was also absent, ostensibly on a holiday. The weeks passed, ami the Woman in Gray did not return to town, as she had said she meant to do. Whether or not Uncle Wilfrid was in the secret of her goings and comings I did not know; but one morning at breakfast I fancied, by the way in which Memyss, the Ymtler, was dismissed, that my uncle had something particular to say to me. “Terry!” he began, as soon as the door had closed after the servant, “I want your congratulations.” “Shall I offer them on faith?” I asked, smiling. “Not quite. At last the ‘Amber Witch’ ’’—and he spoke the little nickname tenderly—“has come back to London. I have seen her, and she has definitely given me her promise.” “I—do from my heart congratulate you?’ I stammered. “Is it—at all settled yet when the marriage will take place?” “The marriage? Good heavens' You didn't suppose . Why, you young fool! I thought you knew me better. Miss Hope is to be my daughter. She has consented to allow me publicly to adopt her, she having no near living relatives of her own. Under the circumstances, the affair must be conducted publicly, you see.” “Of course.” So great was the revulsion of feeling, so intense the sense of relief, that I scarcely trusted my voice to speak. “Two questions, Terry,” he gently said. “Is this plan—this hope of mine—distasteful to you on your own account?" . _ “No; I swear it is not.” 1 . felt my color rising like a school girl’s. , “I’m glad of that. I once made plans for your welfare, and they failed. Paula and you were not suited for each other, and it was well the mistake was righted before it was too late. So now for ray second question, which springs from what I could not help reading in your face. My boy, what is in your heart for Honr ?” “Unde Wilfrid!" I ejaculated. “Forgive me, but—l’m answered! We won't say any more, Terry; that would be premature. Only, remember you are free —free to be happy. Don’t let happiness pass you by.” (To be continued.)