Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source:
http://books.google.com/books?id=hT4VAAAAQAAJ
(Oxford University)
2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
MIRACLE GOLD.
New Novels at the Libraries.
* * * * *
MARVEL. By the Author of "Molly Bawn." 3 vols.
FOR FREEDOM. By TIGHE HOPKINS. 2 vols.
MOLLY'S STORY; a Family History. 3 vols.
AN ADVENTURESS. 2 vols.
LADY STELLA AND HER LOVER. 3 vols.
ONE MAID'S MISCHIEF. By G. M. FENN. 3 vols.
UNCLE BOB'S NIECE. By LESLIE KEITH. 3 vols.
A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS. By C. FOTHERGILL. 3 vols.
* * * * *
WARD & DOWNEY, PUBLISHERS, LONDON.
MIRACLE GOLD.
A Novel.
BY
RICHARD DOWLING,
AUTHOR OF
"The Mystery of Killard," "The Weird Sisters,"
"Tempest Driven," "Under St. Paul's," &c.
_IN THREE VOLUMES_.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
WARD AND DOWNEY,
12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
1888.
[_All rights reserved_.]
PRINTED BY
KELLY AND CO., GATE STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS,
AND KINGSTON-ON-THAMES.
CONTENTS.
CHAP.
I.--Too Late.
II.--Voices of the Unseen.
III.--An Offer of Marriage.
IV.--On The Wing.
V.--Mr. Leigh's Deputy.
VI.--Oscar Leigh's Cave of Magic.
VII.--The Negro Juggler.
VIII.--The Juggler's Last Feat.
IX.--"Only a Woman."
X.--Leigh Promises One Visit and Pays Another.
XI.--Stranger than Miracle Gold.
XII.--An Omen.
MIRACLE GOLD.
MIRACLE GOLD.
CHAPTER I
TOO LATE.
"The 8.45 for London, miss? Just gone. Gone two or three minutes. It's
the last train up to town this evening, miss. First in the morning at
6.15, miss."
"Gone!" cried the girl in despair. She reached out her hand and caught
one of the wooden pillars supporting the roof of the little station at
Millway, near the south-east coast of England.
"Yes, miss, gone," said the porter. He was inclined to be very civil
and communicative, for the last train for London had left, the
enquirer seemed in great distress, and she was young and beautiful.
"Any luggage, miss? If you have you can leave it in the cloak-room
till the first train to-morrow. The first train leaves here at a
quarter past six."
She did not speak. She looked up and down the platform, with dazed,
bewildered eyes. Her lips were drawn back and slightly parted. She
still kept her hand on the wooden pillar. She seemed more afraid of
becoming weak than in a state of present weakness.
The porter, who was young and good-looking, and a very great admirer
of female charms, thought the girl was growing faint. He said: "If you
like, miss, you can sit down in the waiting-room and rest there."
She turned her eyes upon him without appearing to see him, and shook
her head in mechanical refusal of his suggestion. She had no fear of
fainting. For a moment her mental powers were prostrated, but her
physical force was in no danger of giving way. With a start and a
shiver, she recovered enough presence of mind to realize her position
on the platform, and the appearance she must be making in the eyes of
the polite and well-disposed railway porter.
"Thank you, I have no luggage--with me." She looked around
apprehensively, as though dreading pursuit.
"Would you like me to call a fly for you, miss?"
"No. Oh, no!" she cried, starting back from him in alarm. Then seeing
the man retire a pace with a look of surprise and disappointment, she
added hastily, "I do not want a cab, thank you. It is most unfortunate
that I missed the train. Is it raining still?"
"Yes, miss; heavy."
From where she stood she could have seen the rain falling on the
metals and ballast of the line; she was absolutely looking through the
rain as she asked the question, but she was in that half-awakened
condition when one asks questions and hears answers without interest
in the one or attention to the other. She knew heavy summer rain was
falling and had been falling for more than an hour; she knew that she
had walked two miles through the rain with only a light summer cloak
and small umbrella to protect her from it, and she knew that she could
not use a cab or fly for two reasons; first, she could not spare the
money; second, she durst not drive back, if back she must go, for she
must return unperceived. When she thought of getting back, and the
reason for concealment, an expression of disgust came over her face,
and she shuddered as one shudders at a loathsome sight unexpectedly
encountered.
The porter lingered in the hope of being of use. He had no mercenary
motive. He wanted merely to remain as long as possible near this
beautiful girl. He would have done any service he could for her merely
that he might come and go near where she stood, within the magic
radius of her eyes. Even railway porters, when they are in quiet
stations, are no more than other men in the presence of the beauty of
woman.
It was almost dark now. Nine o'clock had struck. The straight warm
rain was falling through the dusky, windless air. It was an evening
towards the end of June--the last Wednesday of that month. There was
not a sound but the dull muffling beat of the rain upon the roof. Not
a soul visible but the girl and porter.
She took her hand away from the wooden pillar, and gathered her cloak
round her, in preparation for going.
"Can I do anything for you, miss? Have you far to walk?" asked the
man. Offering service was the nearest thing he could do to rendering
service.
She did not answer his question; she asked instead: "Do you think the
rain will stop soon?"
He glanced at the thin line of dull, dark, leaden sky, visible from
where he stood at a low angle between the roofs of the platform. "No,
miss, I don't think it will. It looks as if 'twould rain all night."
If she had been a plain girl of the dumpy order, or his own degree, he
would have tried to make himself agreeable by prophesying pleasant
things. But the high privilege of answering so exquisitely beautiful a
young lady demanded a sacrifice of some kind, and he laid aside his
desire to be considered an agreeable fellow, and said what he believed
to be the truth.
She sighed, moved her shoulders under the cloak to settle it, and
saying "Thank you," in a listless, half-awake way, moved with down
dropped eyes and drooping head, slowly out of the station, raised her
umbrella and, turning sharply to the left, walked through the little
town of Millway and under the huge beeches of a broad, deserted road
leading southward.
The trees above her head were heavy with leaves, the road was very
dim, almost dark, this night of midsummer. The perpendicular rain fell
unseen through the mute warm evening. A thick perfume of multitudinous
roses made the soft air heavy with richness. No sound reached the
young girl but the faint clatter of the rain upon the viewless leaves
overhead, the pit and splash of the huge drops from the leaves close
to her feet, and the wide, even, incessant dull drumming of the shower
upon the trees, looming dimly abroad in the vapourous azure dusk of
the dark.
After walking a while the girl sighed and paused. Although her pace
had not been quick, she felt her breath come short. The mild, moist,
scent-laden air seemed too rich for freshening life and cooling the
blood. She was tired, and would have liked to sit down and rest, but
neither time nor place allowed of pause. She must get on--she must get
back as quickly as possible, or she might be too late, too late to
regain Eltham House and steal unperceived to her room there. To that
hateful Eltham House, under which to-night rested that odious Oscar
Leigh. Oscar Leigh, the grinning, bold, audacious man.
Edith Grace turned her attention for a moment away from her thoughts
to her physical situation and condition. She listened intently. She
heard the patter of the rain near and the murmur of it abroad upon
grass and trees. But there was some other sound. A sound nearer still
than the patter at her feet, and more loud and distinct, and emphatic
and tumultuous, than the roll of the shower far away.
For a while she listened, catching her breath in fear, not knowing
what this sound could be. Then she started. It was much nearer than
she thought. It was the heavy, fierce, irregular beating of her own
heart.
At first she was alarmed by the discovery. She had never felt her
heart beat in this way before, except after running when a child. Upon
reflection she recollected that nervous excitement sometimes brought
on such unpleasant symptoms, and that the best way to overcome the
affection was by keeping still and avoiding alarm of any kind. She
would stand and, instead of thinking about the unpleasantness and risk
of going back to Eltham House, fix her mind upon the events which
prompted her flight. She could not hope to keep her mind free from
considering her present position, and the occurrences leading to it,
but it is less distressing to review the unpleasant past than to
contemplate a lowering immediate future.
Owing to the loss of the little money left her by her father, she had
been obliged to try and get something to do, as she could not consent
to encroach on the slender income of her grandmother, Mrs. Grace, the
only relative she had in the world. As she had been so long with Mrs.
Grace, she thought the thing to suit her best would be a companionship
to an elderly or invalid lady. She advertised in the daily papers, and
the most promising-looking reply came from Mr. Oscar Leigh, of Eltham
House, Millway, who wanted a companion for his infirm mother. Mr.
Leigh could not give much salary, but if advertiser took the
situation, she would have a thoroughly comfortable and highly
respectable home. Mr. Leigh could make an appointment for a meeting in
London.
The meeting took place at Mrs. Grace's lodgings in Grimsby Street,
Westminster, and although Miss Grace shrank from the appearance and
manners of Mr. Leigh, she accepted the situation. The poor old
grandmother was so much overcome by the notion of impending separation
between her and Edith, that she took no particular notice of Mr.
Leigh, and looked upon him simply as a man indifferent to her, save
that he was arranging to carry beyond her sight the girl she had
brought up, and who now stood in the place of her own dead children
who had clung to her knees in their curly-headed childhood, grown-up,
and long since passed away for ever.
Mr. Oscar Leigh was very short, and had shoulders of unequal height,
and a slight hunch on his back. His face was long and cadaverous, and
hollow-cheeked. The eyes small and black, and piercingly bright. His
expression was saturnine, sinister, cruel; his look at one and the
same time furtive and bold. His arms were long to deformity. His hands
and fingers long, and thin, and bony, and where they were not covered
with lank, shining black hair, they were of a dull brown yellow
colour. His teeth were fang-like and yellow. His voice hollow when he
spoke low, and harsh when he raised it. His breath came in short gasps
now and then, and with sounds, as though it disturbed dry bones in its
course. He drooped towards the right side, and carried a short and
unusually thick stick, with huge rugged and battered crook. When he
stood still for any time, he leant upon this stick, keeping his
skinny, greedy, claw-like hand on the crook, and the crook close
against his right side. He wore a glossy silk hat, a spotless black
frock coat, and moved through a vapour of eau-de-cologne. His feet
were large, out of all proportion to the largest man. They were flat,
with no insteps, more like a monkey's than a man's. She would have
pitied him only for his impudent glances. She would have loathed him
only she could not forget that his deformities were deserving of pity.
"You will have one unpleasantness to endure," he had said. "You will
have to make your mind up to one cruel privation." He smiled a hard,
cruel, evil smile.
"May I know what my child will have to do without?" asked Mrs. Grace.
And then, without waiting for an answer, she said: "I know what _I_
shall have to do without."
"And what is that, madam? What will you have to do without?"
"I shall have to do without _her_."
"Ah, that _would_ be a loss," he said, with hideous, offensive
gallantry. "You are to be pitied, madam. You are, indeed, to be
pitied, madam. Miss Grace will have to make up her mind on her side to
do without----"
"Me; I know it," broke in the old woman, bursting into tears.
"Yes, madam; but that is not what I was going to say. I was about to
say your granddaughter will have to do without _me!_" Here he leered
at Edith. "I am much occupied with my mechanical studies in London,
and am seldom at Eltham House. I hope you may be always able in your
heart to do without _me_." He was standing leaning his misshapen,
crooked body on his misshapen, crooked stick. He did not move his
right hand from his waist, into which it was packed and driven by the
weight of his body upon the handle of the stick. He put his long,
lean, left, dark hand on his right breast, and bowed low by swinging
himself to the right and downward on the crook of his stick. "Miss
Grace will see, oh! so little of me," he added, as he rose and looked
with his bold eyes at Edith and her grandmother.
"Oh!" cried the unhappy, tactless old woman, "I dare say she can
manage that."
"I dare say she can," he said, gazing at Edith with eyes in which
boldness and scorn seemed strangely, abominably blended, or rather
conflicting.
At the time she felt she could cry for joy at the notion of seeing
little of this hideous, deformed, monstrous dwarf.
The bargain was there and then completed, and it had been arranged
that she should go to Eltham House that day week.
This night that was now upon her and around her, this dull, dark,
heavy-perfumed, rain-drowned midsummer night, was the night of that
day week. Only one week lay between the visit of this hunchback to
their place in Grimsby Street, Westminster, and this day. This morning
she had left London and seen Millway for the first time in her life.
She had got there at noon and driven straight to Eltham House, two
miles south of the little coast town. The hire of the cab had made
considerable inroad on the money in her pocket. The sum was now
reduced to only a few pence more than her mere train fare to
London--not allowing even for a cab from Victoria Terminus to Grimsby
Street, Westminster. When she got to Victoria she should have to walk
home. Oh! walking home through the familiar streets thronged with
everyday folk, would be so delightful compared with this bleak,
solitary Eltham House, this hideous, insolent, monstrous, deformed
dwarf.
It was impossible for her to stay at Eltham House, utterly impossible.
This man Leigh had told her he should see little or nothing of her at
the place, and yet when she reached the house his was the first face
and figure she laid eyes on. He had opened the door for her and
welcomed her to Eltham House, and on the very threshold he had
attempted to kiss her! Great heavens! it was incredibly horrible, but
it was true! The first man who had ever dared to try to kiss her was
this odious beast, this misshapen fiend, this scented monster!
Ugh! The very attempt was degradation.
The girl shuddered and looked around her into the dim, dark gloom
abroad, beyond the trees where the grass and corn lay under the
invisible sky, and where the darkness of the shadow of trees did not
reach.
And yet, when she halted here, she had been on her way back to Eltham
House! There was no alternative. She had nowhere else to go. For lack
of courage and money she could not venture upon an hotel. She had
never been from home alone before, and she felt as if she were in a
new planet. She was not desperate, but she was awkward, timid, afraid.
Wet and lonely as the night was, she would have preferred walking
about till morning rather than return to that house, if going back
involved again meeting that horrible man. All the time she was in the
house he had forced his odious, insolent attentions upon her. He had
followed her about the passages, and lain in wait for her with
expostulations for her prudery in not allowing him to welcome her in
patriarchal fashion to his house! Patriarchal fashion, indeed! He had
himself said he knew he was not an Adonis, but that he was not a
Methuselah either, and his poor, simple, paralysed mother told her he
was thirty-five years old. She would not take all the money in the
world to stay in a house to which he was free. At eight o'clock that
evening she had pleaded fatigue and retired to her own room for the
night. She then had no thought of immediate flight. When she found
herself alone with the door locked, she thought over the events of the
day and her position, and in the end made up her mind to escape and
return to town at once, that very evening. She wrote a line to the
effect that she was going, and placed it on the dressing-table by the
window.
Her room was on the ground-floor, and the window wide open. Mrs.
Brown, the only servant at the house, slept not in the house but in
the gate lodge. Mrs. Brown had told her the gate was never locked
until eleven o'clock, when she locked it before going to bed in the
lodge. So that if she got back at any hour before eleven, she could
slip in through the gate and get over the low sill of her bed-room
window. She could creep in and change her wet boots and clothes and
sit up in the easy-chair till morning. Then she could steal away
again, walk to the railway station and take the first train for
London.
She felt rested and brave now. She would go on. Heaven grant she might
meet no one on the way!