An Uncanny Girl

Prologue

. CHAP. PAGE I. A Boy Husband ... ... ... ... ... 1 II. Margaret gives up her Child ... ... ... 11 III. Walter Ross trusts Arnold Stillman ... ... 20 IV. Conditions of the Will 26 V. Arnold's Visit to Nick Scud 29 THE STORY. I. Ward and Daughter .. . ... ... ... ... 41 II. The Antidote 55 III. A Murderous Compact 72 IV. Hidden Danger 83 V. Cross Purposes ... ... ... ... ... 104 VI. Remorse 117 VII. A Gambling Den 128 VIII. Abduction of the Heiress 142 IX. Arrested 159 X. A Girl's Hopeless Love 172 XI. She Shall Die 187 XII. Sir Mark Ashton 195 XIII. Joan sends two Telegrams 207 XIV. The Rectory 210 XV. Sir Mark brings a Message 219 XVI. Sick unto Death 227 XVII. A Burning House 238 XVIII. Castle Cosy 251 XIX. Effie learns who her Father is 265 XX. The Kiss of Death 271 XXI. Daphne 282 XXII. "Hope"

PROLOGUE.

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Chapter I

A BOY HUSBAND. " Can you give me some money, Arnold ? I did not like to ask you when you came in so late last night ; but there are seven weeks due for the rent of these rooms to-day, and Mrs. Reeves has said she positively cannot wait any longer." Arnold Stillman turned from the cheap lodging house mirror in which he had complacently been regarding his own handsome boyish face to glance with peevish remonstrance at his young wife. " Money," he said, drawing his hand from its accustomed repose in his trouser pocket, and flinging it abroad with an impatient gesture — " money ! It is always money ! How much do you want now, Margaret ? " "With a deprecating, pleading look, as if she were the most culpable wretch in Cbristendom, his wife named the sum required, and the boy husband broke into a short scornful laugh.

" You might as well ask me for five hundred pounds," he said. " I tell you, Margaret, I have not got one penny. I paid my last fiver away yesterday for my subscription to the Chrysanthemum Club. I couldn't produce a shilling this minute if it was to save my life." " "What are we to do, then ? " asked poor Margaret, looking the picture of dismay. " I'm sure I don't know. Ask your mother for it. I know the old lady has a long stocking put by. Do anything you like — only, for Heaven's sake, don't worry me. I'm sick of your endless calls on me for money," added Arnold all the more irritably because he saw signs of fast-gathering tears in his wife's meek, blue eyes. " I cannot ask my mother for money, Arnold," Mar garet said, choking back the tears which she knew well enraged her husband. " Last time she helped us she said it would be the last we should get from her.

She has not got any money, Arnold," added Margaret, speaking with a certain degree of firmness ; " and if she had, I would not go to her. She says hard things of you, and then we come to high words, for even from my mother I cannot brook to hear anything ill of you." " 111 words break no bones," rejoined Arnold carelessly ; " but it would have been better perhaps," he went on with a bitter laugh, " if, instead of abusing me now, your mother had recognized my sins before instead of after my marriage with you. I told her the truth more than once — that I was only nineteen, which she knew ; that I had literally nothing on which to support a wife ; but, in spite of all, she persisted in forcing you upon me — and why ? Because she thought that, instead of being the youngest son, I was the heir of Sir Ralph Stillman.

Heaven knows how she came by such a delusion, but I have to pay the penalty of it. I am tied for life to grinding poverty and a wife for whom I never really eared." In justice to Arnold, it must be said that he had utterly forgotten his wife's presence at this moment. He was selfish and weak of purpose, but at this stage of his career, at least, he was not absolutely brutal. He was simply carried away by the bitterness of his regret, and thought he was making to empty air the complaint which he had so frequently made to himself during the past year. He was recalled to himself, and stopped short with something like a feeling of confusion and shame, when a swift movement and the passionate clasp of two arms upon his neck told him how he had wounded the weak, pretty, loving woman who had been just as completely sacrificed to the covetous ambition of her mother as he had been.

" Oh, Arnold, for (rod's sake don't say that ! For pity's sake take back your cruel words ! " cried poor Margaret, her slender shoulders quivering with the violence of her grief. For a long time Margaret had feared and suspected that her husband had never cared for her, but until this terrible moment she had been always more or less successful in keeping the suspicion at bay. Even now she fought against it, clinging to her husband, waiting for his answer, and weeping passionately. She had no thought of self-control now, no fear of her husband's anger. Arnold shrugged his shoulders impatiently. He hated the sight of a woman in tears, but he had still enough chivalry to be ashamed of their cause, so he b patted one of the trembling shoulders and stroked the pale-brown hair caressingly. "There now, don't go and make a scene, little woman, and upset yourself," he said soothingly.

" I never meant it," he went on. " I am such a fellow when I am cross, and you know it must worry me to have this perpetual dunning for money that I have not got; but come now, Margaret, let us kiss and be friends, for I must be off." Poor weak Margaret obeyed her husband, lifting her lips to give the kiss he asked for. She was shaken still, but comparatively happy in this renewal of tenderness. She smiled through her tears, and blushed softly as she whispered that after the baby was born she might be able to find some means of earning a httle money herself. " Perhaps you may, my dear," said Arnold conde scendingly, " but meanwhile we must Hve. Odious as these rooms are " — and he glanced round the mean apartment in Bayswater — " they are better than nothing at all, and Mrs. Reeves won't wait, you say.

Can't you go round, Margaret, and ask your mother for a trifle ? " " Oh, Arnold, I would rather do anything else, and I am sure she will not give it," pleaded the wife. " Nonsense ! " returned her husband crossly, " she got us into this mess, and it is her duty to get us out of it. Now, Margaret, I must be off — mind, though, you don't stay moping here. Put on your bonnet as soon as I'm gone, and go round to your mother. If the old lady has a scrap of conscience left she will give you something." He kissed his wife, and, releasing her, walked to the door carelessly, whistling a few bars of some new comic opera. From the threshold, however, he turned back to tell Margaret that she was not to wait up, for that night there was a supper at the Chrysanthemum, and probably he would be late. After this he went rather hastily, and Margaret, left by herself, sank down in a dishevelled heap on the floor, where for the space of an hour or more she wept bitter, despairing tears.

A few days after this sad specimen of the results of a foolish marriage, Arnold Stillman's wife became the mother of a baby girl, who was christened Joan. This event forced him to take his own share of the responsi bilities and duties which he had hitherto systematically shirked. He saw at last that it was incumbent on him to provide some money, and in despair he wrote to his mother, telling her the whole truth about his marriage, which up to this he had kept a profound secret from all his people. He implored his mother to help him in his dreadful need, expressing some shallow repentance for any pain his late revelation might cause her, after which he sat down with as much patience as he could muster to wait for the reply, which came at the end of a few days. Arnold received it at the club, to which all his home letters were always addressed.

Tearing open the envelope eagerly, the young man found a cheque for one hundred pounds, which he viewed at first with a relief and delight that could find no expression. These feelings were, however, considerably altered on reading the accompanying lines, in which his mother assured him of her unending grief and shame for the course he had pursued. She thanked Heaven that her husband was not alive to witness his son's disgrace, and assured Arnold that the enclosed cheque was the very last help he must expect from her. Henceforth all intercourse between Arnold Stillman and his own people must cease. Arnold's wife, though innocent and pure herself, was the daughter of a woman who let lodgings, and had entrapped a boy of nineteen into marriage. "With such people Lady Stillman could have nothing in common.

Her clear, forcible words made this thoroughly understood, and though she signed herself his still loving mother, Arnold knew that she would never relent or retract her word. The result of Lady Stillman's decision was a letter written by Arnold from his club informing Margaret in most matter-of-fact language that, having discovered their marriage to be a mistake all round, he had thrown up the beggarly appointment which he held, and by the time these lines reached their destination the writer of them would be on his way to Australia, from where, should he succeed, he promised to send his young wife some help from time to time ; but should things fare as badly with him in the new country as they had done in the old, the chances were that neither Margaret nor any one else in England would ever hear of him again.

Out of the cheque received from his mother Arnold sent his wife a portion which would just enable her, he thought, to pay off all debts and make a fresh start. There was more than one bitter invective against the woman at whose door Arnold laid all the blame of this mistaken marriage ; there was also a vague undercurrent of reproach against Margaret herself for having failed in making him (Arnold) happy ; but there was not one tender word of regret or pity, not one breath of compunction or shame for this base and cowardly desertion of the woman who had not yet recovered the pain attendant on the bringing of Arnold Stillman's young child into the world. Before the ink which announced his deed was well dry, Arnold Stillman had completely freed himself from the last lingering sense of duty and responsibility.

In the new country to which he was going he did not intend that the ties of parent or husband should impose the slightest restraint on his actions or his pleasure — a resolve that was only too well and too easily carried out. On the voyage none would have believed, even had they had Arnold's own word for it, that this gay, debonnair young man was both husband and father His fair boyish face and light-hearted careless mirth would have made such a belief almost impossible. Among the passengers were a great many pretty, charming girls, and in the devising and originating of various amusements, and the intoxication of flattery and adulation which fell from all sides to his lot, Arnold's selfish, pleasure-loving nature had found its true vent. None that heard his light-hearted laughter and ready jest, or drank in his subtle compliments, could easily conjure up such pictures as a broken-hearted mother, a child left worse than fatherless in the first page of its life, and a wife slowly recovering from a brain fever brought on by the shock of her husband's heartless desertion.

In Australia Arnold led a bachelor's life, being introduced as a single man to all the best people in the colony. His knowledge of all things equine kept both his fortune and his popularity at a fairly high mark. At horse shows and sales he was a conspicuous figure, and he never missed a single race-meeting. His handsome face and almost marvellous powers of fascination, added to these qualifications, made him a welcome guest every where, winning him friends on every side. He was brilliant over the after-dinner wine, and irresistibly tender in shady drawing-room corners, and all places consecrated to flirtation. But though the draughts of pleasure he loved to mix for himself were both deep and strong, for some time prudence mingled in the cup. Arnold Stillman had had one shackle round his neck, and, having freed himself from that, he would take heed, he was resolved, not to forge for himself another.

One night at a circus, an amusement of which he was particularly fond, Arnold Stillman fell a victim to the fascinations of a young girl who was riding ; and though his prudent resolves were not at once completely overthrown, yet night after night found him in the same place, and each night there was a fresh bouquet to reward the pretty little rider for her clever achieve ments. This went on for over a week, and then at last Arnold contrived a meeting with the girl, whom he found in every way as ignorant of the world as sixteen years could well be. Mabel Scud readily told Arnold her simple, sad httle story. She had a sister to share her unhappiness, and the two, contrary to the last wish of thendead mother, had been brought up almost from babyhood to earn their living in the circus. Nick Scud, a drunken reprobate, spent the children's earnings and ill-treated them ; but though he let them taste all the miseries to the full, for reasons of his own he kept them from the temptations and dangers that surrounded their lives, and Arnold was therefore the first man who had contrived to whisper a word of love into pretty Mabel's ears.

And poor Mabel soon loved Arnold Stillman with all the strength of a young, passionate, and wholly untutored nature ; and this, the first romance of her shoit and wretched life, progressed with fatal smoothness. Whether or not, seeing a man of apparent wealth and gentle breeding, Nick Scud shut his eyes wilfully to the little affair, cannot be said ; but certain it was that nothing interfered with Mabel's happiness, and when at last Arnold tempted her to leave her brutal father and fly with him, the girl had no thought of refusal or resistance. She did not even dream that she was making a sacrifice to her love. Her belief was that she was forsaking the most hopeless misery and degradation for unending love and almost incomprehensible happiness. Arnold Stillman had assured Mabel that, once with him, she would be his as long as she lived, and his word was sufficient bond for the girl, who from her childhood had moved daily among people who had passed their lives together without the sanction of the church.

Such a word as unholy tie, if spoken, would have had no meaning for poor innocent, untaught Mabel. Her one regret in leaving her old miserable life was that she must necessarily part from her sister Maggie, who was her senior by a few years, and had been almost a mother to her. The fact that Maggie was engaged to be married took, however, a large portion of the sting of parting from Mabel's breast, and her love for Arnold did the rest. For a time the poor little circus rider revelled in a very abandonment of happiness. While his passion lasted, Arnold gratified her every wish. Mabel, being pretty and vivacious, held the insecure place she had won longer than might have been expected, but at last Arnold took some fresh fancy. His character and morals were now rapidly deteriorating, and, once he had wearied of her, Mabel was flung aside with as much consideration as he would have bestowed on a worn-out glove.

Penniless, and with the additional burden of an infant daughter, the unfortu nate girl was obliged at last to return to her father, who received her with outward curses but secret delight. Maggie, his eldest daughter, was by this time married, so that her services were lost to him for ever ; but Mabel had always been the cleverer and prettier of the two sisters, and Nick Scud was delighted to have her back again. There had been a sad falling off in the nightly returns of his circus during the past twelve months, and now the manager hoped that with his daughter's return things would very soon pick up again. Poor Mabel still loved the man who had betrayed and deserted her, and though she knew now too well how little real love he had ever felt for her, in her heart she made every excuse for him.

A gentleman of his birth and tastes, she argued, could not be expected to show much consideration for such a poor ignorant httle creature as she was. She thought of him, not as the deserter and heartless betrayer, but as the father of her child and the devoted lover she had once believed him to be. True or false, he had brought her such happiness as once she never dreamed of, and though it had not lasted, it was none the less sweet as a memory. Her father, however, looked at the matter from a very different point of view. He said little, but in his heart he swore that, whenever the chance was his, Arnold ■Stillman should be made to dearly rue the wrong he had done to Mabel ; and Nick Scud was not a pleasant enemy for a man to have.

Chapter II. Margaret Gives Up Her Child

Meanwhile, trials and griefs had multiplied for Arnold Stillman's deserted wife. Margaret had finally recovered from a long and dangerous brain fever to find her mother dead. Mrs. Jones had succumbed to a sudden and brief attack of the lungs, and left little but debts and money complications of one kind and another behind her ; and as her own long and trying illness had consumed a large portion of the sum left to her by her husband, Margaret found, when some long-standing debts had been paid, that ruin and starvation stared her in the face. She struggled bravely for some time, but weak health, the care of a young child, and all the other numberless odds of life were in the end too much for her. After three years of a hard and exceedingly precarious existence, in which she had never done more than succeed in keeping her head above water, Margaret found that from the shelter of the parish union there was but one alternative, and this, after a sharp struggle with her pride, she resolved to take.

Margaret had still one relative living. Mrs. Grey lived in one of the southern counties of England. Her husband had been a well-to-do farmer, and Mrs. Grrey was now a well-to-do widow, without children, for the one daughter who had been born to her was disowned and cast off because of a disobedient marriage. For the same reason the widow Grey had not spoken to Margaret's mother for a period of time extending over twenty years. Mrs. Jones had married against the direct wish and approval of her parents, and long after these had been laid in their graves, Mrs. Grey, though an only sister, had kept all her first anger alive. She was a stern, unrelenting woman, without pity for those who erred ever so slightly from the line of duty to which she herself had always closely adhered. She was ready to carry justice to any excess, but mercy and forgiveness were -with her the initial signs of a weak mind and unstable nature.

Such was the character of the woman to whom poor Margaret determined in her dire extremity to appeal. She wrote a long, truthful letter explaining the terrible position in which she was placed, but palliating her husband's faults as far as lay in her power. She glossed over the details of his departure, and attributed the utter and complete silence of the past three years to the force of uncontrollable circumstances. Neither time nor cruel treatment had had power to weaken this woman's love for the handsome, worthless boy who had won her heart. Mrs. Grey thought long and carefully over her niece's letter, reading between every line and emphatically denouncing Arnold Stillman as a thoroughly heartless, unprincipled scoundrel. The result of all her thinking was that Mrs. Grey came up to London with a proposition that was almost too much for poor Margaret.

She could only sit and look at her aunt in a dismay and grief that, at first, could find no expression in words. " Give up my child," she exclaimed at last, " and be content never to see it except at such times as you think it wise I should do so ! Promise, that should my husband return, he will never know where his child is, or that httle Joan shall never from my lips hear her father's name ! Aunt Grey, you cannot mean these cruel words. You are only trying me. You must — oh ! " pleaded Margaret, " you must help me on some other conditions than these ! " " These conditions or none," replied Mrs. Grey coldly and firmly. " If you do not fulfil them I shall think that, in spite of the pitiful tale you have told me, you are well able to do without my help ; or, worse still," and Mrs. Grey cast a glance in the direction of the little girl who was playing languidly near, " that you do not really care one jot whether your child dies, as I can see too plainly that it will do in this place."

A cry broke from Margaret. She flung herself on her knees before her aunt, praying with tears that Mrs. Grey would help her without forcing her to make so terrible, so painful a sacrifice. She might have appealed with better success to the ground on which she knelt. Adamant was more responsive than the stern woman who had made up her mind once for all, and who believed implicitly in her heart that she was acting for the best towards Margaret and Margaret's child. She was convinced that it was her duty to use every means in her power in order to punish Arnold Stillman for the desertion of his wife and daughter. She saw, too, that Margaret was weak and totally unfit to have the care and bringing up of a young child. Mrs. Grey had lately developed an idea that her own daughter's error was due to some neglect in her early training, and her education of little Joan should compensate for this, she was resolved.

She was keenly anxious to bring up the child in her own stern, uncompromising beliefs. • "Margaret," she said, rising at last and smoothing her bonnet strings as she spoke, " I perceive you do not mean to accept my offer, therefore it is useless for me to waste any more time here. I see your poor mother's influence in this selfish adherence to your own will, and,' left under your care, I can foresee that your daughter will, in her turn, make the very same mistakes you have made. I am sorry to have had my journey for nothing, but remember it will be the very last I shall take in your interest." She turned as she spoke, and walked with a hasty, unrelenting step towards the door; but Margaret, who had not taken in one word of her last cruel speech, only realizing that her last resource was slipping away, and that with it her child would be lost, ran frantically after her aunt and caught her before she could cross the threshold.

" Aunt, aunt, do not go yet ! " she cried. " I have reconsidered. Your conditions are hard, but for my child's sake I will accept them. May Heaven forgive me if I am wrong in giving the promise you require, but it is for my child." The tears streamed down her cheeks as she spoke, but Mrs. Grey took no heed of them, she only felt a stern delight that her point was won. She would rescue httle Joan from the equally bad influences of her weak mother and her wicked, worthless father. She really believed that her virtuous action was worthy of a record above as she re-entered the room to discuss with her niece all the plans for httle Joan's removal. She promised that the child should want for nothing with her. She should have country air, good food, and care, and as she grew older her education should not be neglected.

Margaret listened, suppressing her sighs and tears and trying hard to believe that it was for the child's good, and she ought to rejoice. Mrs. Grey gave her niece a generous sum of money for her own requirements (all Joan's expenses should be her care), and promised that Margaret should see her child every now and then for a short time ; but when the young mother implored for frequent written news of her darling's welfare, Mrs. Grey assured her coldly that if the child should fall ill or anything happen she would write, but not otherwise. Margaret must learn to take silence as an assurance of Joan's welfare. The stern, austere woman declared that she did not approve of the practice of unnecessary or frequent letter-writing ; the wilful waste of time and penny postage stamps being a sin for which she would certainly be called to account.

So Mrs. Grey departed, taking the child with her, and leaving an aching sense of desolation behind. Her aunt would have gladly welcomed Margaret to her home if she could have extracted from her a promise that she would never again see or hold any communica tion with her husband, but even the temptation to be with her little one could not blind Margaret's eyes to the sin of such an arrangement. " The day might come," she said to herself, " when Arnold would stand in dire need of her wifely love and help, and then he should find her true to the words in which she had taken him to be her husband for better or worse." Left alone, Margaret toiled among the pupils she had succeeded in getting together, buoying herself up with hopes of seeing her child soon, and in conjured pictures of little Joan growing daily brighter and rosier in the good country air and generous home.

Her aunt's refusal to correspond with her or send one line of news was a bitter trial to the loving, lonely mother; but remembering that Mrs. Grey had stood between her child and death, or at least great privation and suffering, Margaret tried to stifle every hard thought of her. Some two years passed, during which time Margaret was allowed to spend one day out of every three months with her child. How eagerly she watched the passage of the intervening days no word could tell, or when the day came at last how cruelly brief it seemed. The first three months of the third year seemed slower than usual in their passing, and when the day came at last that the lonely mother so eagerly longed for, her happiness could not be set within any limits. Those who have been pent in long darkness can appreciate the restoration to light.

The journey between her and Mrs. Grey's home seemed cruelly long to the traveller's impatient heart. She reached the place at last, and there, to her amazement and terror, she found the great gates of the farm-yard shut and barred, and on them, and on the walls round, were large printed posters, evidently placed there some weeks before, announcing an auction of house, furniture, farm implements, cattle, horses, and produce, to take place on the 26th of January, a date now over two months old. At first Margaret was ready to sink with terror and disappointment, but the longing to know where her child was overcame her weakness. She ran to a cottag-e near by and put eager, breathless question after question to the old woman who occupied it. Where was her child; why was Oak Farm shut up ; and what had taken place there within the last few months ?

The woman was old and seemed bewildered by Margaret's hurried words ; but as soon as she was made to realize that these questions were about Oak Farm, and that the pale, trembling creature before her was a mother in search of her own child, womanly compassion quickened her faculties, and she told all in as kind words as she could find to soften the terrible blow that poor Margaret must bear. In the end of December Mrs. Grey had died quite suddenly, on her return from a journey. She had taken the child with her and come back without it. No one inside the farm or out of it could tell where Mrs. Grey had been, or with what motive her journey had been taken. She had said nothing about the child on the night of her return, and no one had asked her any questions. On the following morning a servant girl had gone into her mistress's room with some message, and not receiving any answer to her repeated appeals, she had, at length, gone close to the bed and discovered that Mrs. Grey was quite dead.