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!