THE MISSING GIRL.
By the help of her maid, Fair had found a temporary refuge in London
with Betty’s parents. The sale of her diamonds at a price much below
their real value had enabled her to pay her board and remain in close
hiding until the search for her in England had blown over.
Betty, having lost her situation at the villa by the flight of Fair,
soon came home, too, and not a day too early, for she had to nurse Fair
through a long spell of fever, in which she very nearly lost the life
that had now become so valueless and dreary that she regretted that she
did not die.
When she began to convalesce, she found that five months had elapsed
since she fled from the villa. Her stock of money began to run low, and
she knew that she would have to go to work to earn her daily bread.
Her thoughts turned to Sadie Allen and the factory where she had worked
for years, and a sudden resolve came to her.
“I will go back. Carl Bernicci would not think of going to New York to
look for me.”
The idea of any one else looking for her never occurred to her mind.
Mrs. Howard had flung her out of her heart and care as a disgraced,
unworthy creature, and Bayard Lorraine was perhaps dead by now--dead by
the hand of the man who claimed her as his wife, she thought, with a
violent shudder.
Yes, no one would search for her but the man whose love had been her
fate. He would pursue her with a love more unrelenting than hate, and
all her life she would have to evade him.
“I shall never dare to venture abroad without a disguise again,” she
thought anxiously, and when she sailed, a few weeks later, for America,
she went as a steerage passenger, an ignorant Irish girl, going to New
York to marry her lover, an Irish hod-carrier, who had left the old
country two years before, and was rich enough now to send money to his
sweetheart to follow him.
But when she applied at the factory for work, the Irish girl had
disappeared, and she was Widow Karrick, an Englishwoman, who dropped
her h’s persistently and wore blue glasses over her brown eyes, and a
little cap, in the English fashion, over a mop of thick black hair, in
which there were many streaks of gray.
She was dressed in rusty black, ill-made and ill-fitting, and was
altogether so shabby and ordinary-looking that very few noticed what
pretty features she had, as a dark, muddy complexion obscured their
beauty.
She was given a machine, and Mrs. Jones found that she was a good
worker. Beyond that she never took much notice of Mrs. Karrick, for, as
she said to her husband, when discussing the new hand, “foreigners were
never to her taste.”
Months came and went, and Fair, in her character of Widow Karrick,
worked on patiently and without molestation or recognition, among the
very companions she had dwelt among for years.
“They have forgotten my very name and existence,” she thought bitterly,
for in all those months no one ever recalled the past, or mentioned her
name. It had been so long ago that new interests absorbed the working
girls.
But their forgetfulness did not wound her half so much as the fact that
she had been disappointed in finding her old friend, Sadie Allen.
She had expected that Sadie would be working still at the machine next
her own, but she was mistaken. The kind, homely face of her friend
never made its appearance in the workrooms again, and she dared not
make any inquiries.
“Perhaps she never came back from Philadelphia,” she thought. “Perhaps
her sister died, and she had to remain there and take care of her
little orphan children.”
This belief seemed so plausible that she began at last to accept it as
the correct view. It never occurred to her that Sadie could be married.
To her knowledge, the girl had never had a beau. Young men did not care
for her because her face was so plain.
So gradually Fair gave up the hope of finding Sadie again. She saw that
Waverley Osborne, her old admirer, whom she had snubbed so cruelly, was
still a clerk in the warerooms under the factory, but she did not dream
that he could have led her straight to Sadie, who was now his wife.
In all her life, she would never forget the sick horror of that day
when Prince Gonzaga came to the factory to search for her. She believed
that somehow she had been betrayed, and that now, after all her
struggles, she was about to fall into the spider’s net. It was with
difficulty that she repressed a cry of despair and bowed her head over
her machine, expecting every moment that a heavy hand would fall upon
her shoulder and a triumphant voice exclaim: “I have found you at last!”
But little by little, her fear wore off. There was nothing about the
shabby little widow, in her rusty black dress and disfiguring cap, to
suggest beautiful, dainty Fairfax Fielding. He had only come to inquire
if she was there, and after he had told his story to the forewoman he
went away and left her undiscovered and jubilant at her narrow escape.
Then, indeed, Fair heard her own name enough, for the girls talked
nothing else for many days but Prince Gonzaga and his missing bride,
and they declared that it was the strangest thing in the world that she
should hide herself from him now that he was so rich and grand.
But Mrs. Jones always took her part.
“I think Fair was quite right in running away, for there is no doubt
that he frightened poor, foolish Mrs. Fielding to death,” she said.
The months wore on, and Fair began to feel easy again, although she
knew that Prince Gonzaga was yet in New York.
She heard the rumor among the working girls that he had a private
detective in his employ, but she did not credit the story. She believed
it was simply gossip, for she had found out through the daily papers
that he was quite a favorite in society, and she hoped that he would
forget her amid the fascinations of the world.
There was one thing that she noticed, and for which she found it easy
to account in her own mind:
Belva Platt, since the prince’s appearance at the factory, had
blossomed out in new finery and jewelry, whose value was so far above
her wages that it created much unpleasant gossip among her companions,
the honest working girls.
Belva did not care for their gossip. In fact, she enjoyed it. She liked
to flaunt her silk dress and diamond earrings in the face of Waverley
Osborne, whom she hated now with all the venom of a mean nature.
“I’ve a rich beau. He gives me all these things, and he is going to
marry me soon,” she said boastingly to Mrs. Jones, who answered coldly:
“I hope he will, for such things are not becoming to a working girl.”
Belva tossed her head, and declared, in an audible aside to her best
friend, that it was all envy. Anybody had a right to wear fine things
who could get them.
Fair did not believe the story of the rich beau. She remembered that
Belva Platt had had some sort of power over Carl Bernicci that enabled
her to make him a tool when she chose, and she guessed now that the
wicked girl was levying blackmail upon Prince Gonzaga.
Her suspicion was true. Belva was indeed extorting hush money from the
prince, in whose past life there was a secret to which she held the
key. Indeed, her ambition had taken such a turn that she hinted to him
that it would be politic for him to obtain a divorce from his runaway
wife and marry her, in order to be sure that his secret should remain
untold.
“How I should like to be the Princess Gonzaga, rich and grand, and look
down upon Waverley Osborne and his ugly wife!” she thought longingly,
little dreaming that the real Princess Gonzaga was but a few feet away
from her, earning her daily bread by her labor at the sewing machine,
and preferring that life to one of gilded splendor as a prince’s bride.
The day came at last when all of Fair’s peace was to be broken up and
her heart racked anew by the mingled joy and misery of that love which
she had said so often had been her fate.
She had believed for many months that Bayard Lorraine was dead, when
one day he suddenly made his appearance in the workroom, startling
her so that she nearly betrayed herself by a wild shriek, but she
remembered herself just in time to pretend to her next neighbor that
she had pierced her thumb with a machine needle.
Watching her lost love with adoring eyes, whose expression was hidden
behind the disfiguring blue glasses, she heard all his questions and
Mrs. Jones’ replies, and so found out that Sadie Allen was the wife of
Waverley Osborne. She also heard Sadie’s address, and resolved that she
would call upon her old friend and find out what Bayard Lorraine wanted.
“My darling--how kindly he speaks of me!” she thought, with a thrill
of rapture. “Ah, he does not believe me wholly wicked. I always felt
that he would pity me and take my part if he knew all.”
When she left the factory that afternoon, she found that she was
followed by a strange man, and trembled as she remembered the gossip
about Prince Gonzaga’s private detective.