The Opal-Eyed Fan Part 16

The doctor left the room, taking from the bosun as he pa.s.sed a lantern the man carried in one hand, as a balance perhaps for the unsheathed cutla.s.s in the other.

Persis came to the table, pulled to her an empty gla.s.s and splashed into it, with no regard for the drops which flew out to stain the napery further, a good portion of wine. She pushed it into Crewe's hand. Almost absentmindedly he raised it to his lips and drank. She watched that pinched look about his lips. How long could he hold out? He should be in his bed right now, not trying his fading strength further and further. Yet she knew instinctively that no one would ever stop him until he was ready.

Lydia's loud sobs had died away to sniffles. Her face was blotched and she kept her eyes down, huddling into the chair where she had sat earlier with such an a.s.sumption of pride of place.

"Cousin," Grillon broke the short silence, "if I have you to thank for taking a hand in this matter-"

But it was not Crewe who interrupted him, but Lydia. She pulled herself erect and pointed with a shaking hand.

"Don't you see it!" her voice near shrilled into another scream. "Look at what she holds! She-the Lady-"

Persis had near forgotten the blade. Now she stared down at it and allowed it to fall from her hand onto the table where its black hilt was dull, but where the narrowed jeweled eyes of the watching cats glittering in the light, coldly, removed from all which was real and of this time and place.

"It-it was in a fan-a false fan which would not open," she said. "Yet the fan looked the same."

"Even the ghosts," Lydia wailed, "don't you see-even the ghosts were against us!"

Persis expected either Grillon or Crewe to refute such folly. But when she looked from the face of one man to the other, she saw that instead their attention was riveted upon the fan as if it were some strange and unexplainable omen.

"The ghosts-" Grillon's voice was lower, far less a.s.sured now than he had ever heard it before. "Maybe you are right, m'dear-" Then he turned to Crewe: "The greatest folly of all-"

"And that being?" Crewe asked as if Grillon's half sentence made some sense to him.

"That of always choosing the wrong woman. Dona Isabelle had that in her which put an end to her worst enemy-is that not so, Valdez-?"

Now the dark man who had claimed the Key, was staring also wide-eyed at the false fan. He gave a visible shudder.

"They told tales of her once," he said. "She knew too much, they claimed, of things better forgotten. The fan was part of her dowry; she was never without it about her. But that there were two fans-that there is no history of. Only-it was also said that she had such courage as a man might envy."

"She was not alone in that," Crewe returned. He reached over the sharp blade which the false fan had hidden, and before Persis knew what he was about his fingers caught and held hers in a warming, demanding hold against which she discovered she had no will nor need to struggle.

"As I said," Grillon seemed determined to have the last word, "always the wrong woman, Leverett. Your infernal luck has not failed you yet."

"And it never will," Crewe answered with the same firmness as the grip of that hand holding hers. For once in her life Persis Rooke found she could believe anything at all-provided a wrecker captain chose to say it.

The End