A HIDDEN EMMY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 11544, 1 December 1900, Page 3 (Supplement)

A HIDDEN EMMY.

[PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT.]

BY ADELAIDE STIRLING, Author of "The Purple Mask," " Th% Girl of His Heart," " Nerine's Second Choice," "Lover or Husband?" etc., etc.

CHAPTER IX. MRS. KEITHAND A CHINAMAN. "Magdalen"!" cried Dolly, blankly, flying into the small room they had elected to sit in instead of the cold and hideous drawingroom. " Did you ever hear anything like it.' I can't send her away !" "Who?" lazily questioned Magdalen. She had been out roaming the lonely hillsides in the wet, and if Ardmoi'e Castle were not not a bright abode it was better to come back to than an unpair-for flat, with no prospect of dinner. " Mrs. Keith," with wrath. " You know when she came back yesterday I thought everything would be all right. She was civil enough for a sour old Scotchwoman. You haven't seen her, have you?" breaking oft".

" No!" she had no fancy for bothering about other people's servants. Pearce' was different since it was she, not Dolly, who had engaged! her. " Why?"

" Because she's an insolent old hag," vindictively. " To-day, when you were out, I thought I'd go over the house and see what rooms I'd take instead of the barns we have. I want Ronald to have all the sunshine there is in this dismal country," with a cross glance at the rain that had never ceased sine; their arrival. " I saw the old woman looking at me over the stairs as I rambled round, and when I got up to that cross corridor on the second storey there she was, with both maids, and a perfect storm of sweeping the afternoon. I told them to stop, and Airs. Keith never took any notice. Said it was the regular day. Then I ordered her to get the keys of the locked rooms downstairs; so she did. And when I opened them I saw her grin, for they were all empty. Just bare,' cobwebbed holes. When we got up to that corridor again I marched over Sophy and the tea leaves," with fresh annoy'ance, " and found three locked doors at the very end of it, quitd cut off from our part of the house. I asked for the keys— what do you think she said? That they were Strath - arden's rooms, and not to be opened without his leave. Stratlmrden's rooms, in my own house!—and the very best southern aspect in the place, for upstairs there are no windows on that side. Mrs. Keith looked at me as if I were ust nobody, and didn't even pretend to obey me." " Perhaps he wias always allowed those rooms," Magdalen pondered. " You don't know, Dolly!" " I know I'm not going to have shut-up rooms in my house, and I said so. I told her she must get more servants, that I would not have that doddering old David to wait on table; he drops things so frequently that I cannot resist screaming." " What did she say?" " Said there were servants enough for people who came from the Lord knows where. So then I told her to go, bag and baggage." " Then we'd better write to London tonight. Did she seem routed''" "She turned round and said I was wasting breath. Th!at old David and she could not be sent away by me, Mr. Stratharden, or anyone. That his lordship's will (and she didn't mean Barnysdale's, but his father's), forbade it. And" her eyes were just like gimlets in her horrid old head." Magdalen sat up. " I suppose they can be retired as superannuated," she observed. " That old lady doesn't seem to think of that. We can't live like this. I've rung for tea four times, and not a soul has come."

" Superannuated! I'll Kave her put in gaol," violently. "Do you know Pearce has gone?".

"Pearce! Who sent her? What forV"

" Mrs. Keith. I went up and found Ronald alone, and rant; for Pearce. By and by Sophy came and said she had gone, that Mrs. Keith had dismissed her for impertinence, and had her ferried over to the station."

"But why did Pearce take her warning?" Magdalen asked, utterly confounded. " She could have come to you, to me!" " You were out. I was exploring the garrets. I found a nolo from Peiarce, who had evidently thought I had deputed Mrs. Keith to get rid of her. Ho then I sent for the old woman again. She said, quite coolly, that she could not bear strange women about the place, and that she'd paid Pearce and told her I should not require her any longer. Then she turned her back on me and walked out, just as if she were the mistress, not I."

" She must be mad. Pearce was a fool to go," with a, cold ianger very different from Dollv's.

'• What could the poor soul do? Mrs. Keith said I sent her, paid her, and carted her off. And the unlucky part of it was that Pearce was stupid about Ronald this morning, and I wjas angry with her. She must have thought her dismissal was because of that."

"Don't worry," said Magdalen, as calmly as if she were not raging. " We'll get her back. You go kind bring Ronald down here, and I'll make somebody bring tea. I don't care who does, but bring it they shall." " Good gracious! You do look awful when you scowl," and Dolly really started. " You ought to be able to manage people. I shouldn't like to qiyirrel with a girl with eyes like yours and a dead white face. You'll never be pretty, Magdalen, but you could be dangerous." For the courage and power in her stepsister's face had suddenly flashed on Dolly like a revelation, though she wjas blind to the wild beauty of it. " You couldn't quarrel with me," Magdalen laughed, in spite of herself, remembering the times when Dolly had tried it, and failed. "Go on, I'll get the tea."

And when Dolly came back it was there, ?and Magdalen was laughing. "Poor Sophy!' she observed. " She was between the devil and the deep sea. Now, Dolly, what are you going to do? Give in to Mrs. Keith and take charge of Ronald?"

Dolly's cat's teeth showed,

" I'm going to write to Stratharden this minute, and ask if what she said was true, about my not being able to dismiss her. I'll give the letters to the postboy when he comes wifii the papers. My clear Mrs. Keith would probably claw it out of the bag. Does she think I am to be bullied in my own house?" - Magdalen laughed. "If we can't send her 'away, I'll wrestle with her," she said. " I don't believe you understand Scotch people. You have to get the upper hand once and for all." "How on earth do you know?" " 1!" the girl gave a queer laugh. " I don't know, exactly, but they're just like the Clydeprecisely as I knew they would be. I've the funniest feeling in this house, Dolly, as if I'd seen it 'all before," her wonderful eyes clouding. " Then I've no opinion of your sense. If I'd known what it was like, as you think you did, wild horses wouldn't have got me here. I'd rather be in London, snubbing Starr-Dal ton."

" What made you think of him?" " I only just remembered that I'd never asked him if he were at Krug's that night. Perhaps it was just as well I didn't. He knows my name's Dolly." " What does it matter, since you weren't the Dolly the man meant?" Lady Barnysdale opened her mouth and shut it again with ill-considered words still in it. In silence she wrote and dispatched her outraged letted to Stratharden, beseeching him to deal with Mrs. Keith and send a proper staff of servants. It was two days before she got his answer. Forty-eight hours, when she fretfully refused to go out or leave Ronald, even to let Magdalen try to put the fear of God into Mrs. Keith.

" What's the good when we don't know whether we can do anything?" she demanded, sensibly enough, and Magdalen agreed with a shrug of her lovely shoulders. But she could stay in no four walls, even for Dolly. She tramped up the high hill above Ardmore Castle on the second day, and looked down on all Ronald's property, on the rushing Clyde water that hemmed Ardmore in. And not till then did the full loneliness of the place come over her. Ardmore had been a famous stronghold in its day; even now it was nothing but a rocky island, some live miles long and half !as wide. There was not a village or a house on it but some fishermen's huts that she could scarcely see in the dazzle of the low sunlight. They were far below her on the shore, and three miles off if a yard.

As she watcher she saw a small steamer touch ''at a point and go off again. That must be the ferry Sophy said you must cross by when the Clyde ran too heavily for a rowboat. The opposite shore wis Ronald's, too, and a queer possession it looked, all rolling hills black against the sunset. Magdalen turned and saw on the other side of the river from which they had come to Ardmore more wild hills, higher, more desolate, showing their teeth of crags and gullys as the sun dropped. "Well, I've got my bearings, and much good may it do me," she said, little knowing. But the walk and the air had raised her spirits. She went into the castle humming a song Dolly assuredly had never heard, |and gazed with astonishment when the door was opened to her by an immaculate London footman. Lord Stratharden, then, had not let the gijass grow. The man must have come by that steamer she had seen touch at the point this afternoon.

" Stratharden must be a marvel," she said, finding Dolly by her sitting-room fire. " Catch me getting servants for 'a lady who'd supplanted me and my son! And such an immaculate footman, too." But there -was no übilation on Dolly's face. .

" He's done the best he can," she returned, " but even he says Mrs. Keith can't be dismissed and begs I'll be patient with her. Where's his letter? Oh, here! List-en: 'I know Keith's crossgrained ways must be a sore trial to you, and for her unpardonable conduct in dismissing your maid I can of course offer no excuse. I can only ;ask you to be patient with her, and remember that she was my son's nurse, and is brokenhearted that he is no longer heir to Ardmore. I hope you can find some capable country girl to look after your boy, and in the meantime,- as I '•am going abroad, it is both a pleasure and a convenience to me to send you my two menservants, hoping pou may keep them till I return. James is a capable servant and used to managing Keith. My Chinese butler you will find better than jany nurse, and most useful to—" " The what?" cried Magdalen. "The Chinese butler. He's dressed like an Englishman, and he speaks perfectly. What about him?"

But Magdalen sat staring, every drop of. blood drained from her cheeks and lips.

■~.„ CHAPTER X. THE MAN WITH TOE WHITE SCAR. " What's the matter? Why are you looking like that?" cried Lady Barnysdale, all the more crossly because she had not liked the highhanded manner in which Stratkarden had supplied her with servants. " Are you going to faint? I often wonder if anyone so white as you can have a proper heart." Magdalen straightened in her chair. " Don't be silly, Dolly," she did not speak quite evenly. "My heart's all right, if my complexion is hideous. You won't keep that— Chinaman" —with a little gulp—" of course you won't " I'll have to, if he makes me comfortable. Stratharden would think it funny if I didn't, after all his trouble." "Trouble!" contemptuously. "Why, he's making a convenience of you. You pay his men while he's gone, which may be an item in his budget, for all vou know, He can't have too much money'."" "That's my fault," said Dolly, sharply. "I suppose the least I can do is— " Oh, if you're going to turn Quixotic!" scornfully. "Be sensible, Dolly. We're too lonely here to have a Chinaman for a butler." " You talk as if the man were a murderer!" said Dolly, wild-eyed. " Magdalen did not answer, because to have your own foolish torrors put into words is not good. And, after all, the whole thing was nothing more than a dream, a coincidence. She leaned forward and poured out the cup of tea that Dolly had never thought of offering, looked from her to her boy playing solemnly with a Noah's ark, and spoke with stupid,"appealing honesty. "Do send the man away, Dolly! I can't bear to think of him in the house." "Why?" so sharply that Magdalen started. Dolly was shrewd enough. A little more and she would guess there was something behind this aversion to the yellow servant: but, if she were no fool, she was a coward. Like a Hash Magdalen knew how Dolly would behave if she heard that dream, with what hysterical terror she would shriek and raise the house to turn the Chinaman out, would transform a perhaps harmless man into the very enemy her step-sister dreaded. " Oh, nothing !" she returned hastily. " I don't like Asiatics, that's all," for there would be no sleeping in peace if once Dollv got nervous. " Let's only pray he'll be too much for Mrs. Keith." Dolly chuckled. " Mrs. Keith's raging," she said. " James tells me she is a very queer old woman, and not very trustworthy." "Oh, James!" slightingly. "For Heaven's sake, Dolly, don't confide in James." She rose as if the warm room stifled her, but when her hand was on the door she turned. " What else did Lord Stratharden say?" she asked. "What about his locked rooms?"

" Ob," cheerfully, "he said Mrs. Keith was an officious old idiot! He will only be too glad if I care to use his rooms, but his collection of skulls from Borneo are there, and he wants me to have them put away safely in some other part of the house, and locked up. Fancy collecting skulls!" "It's as good as collecting Chinamen," rather wildly, forgetting that she had just convinced herself that it must have been in Stratharden's mind to ask Dolly to take the man even before she wrote, and that dreams often came from the influence of other people's thoughts. "I think Stratharden must be as peculiar as Barnysdale was. Let's go and get ready for dinner, Dolly! Ronald ought to be put to bedunless you're going to enlist your Chinese treasure to do it."

"No! To tell the truth, the man may be all Stratharden says, but he has an oily look I don't admire. Come along, Ronald." But Magdalen had picked up the child and carried him oft' on her shoulder. By the time the gong rang for dinner she had reasoned herself into cheerfulness.

There were plenty of bogies in the world without hunting for them, and Stratharden would nob be apt to keep a murderer for a butler.

Miss Clyde ran downstairs singing to herself, and letting her silk-lined frock trail after her, as though she had been brought up to silk linings. With good servants, and enough to eat, perhaps there might be some amusement procurable even at Ardmore Castle.

" To-morrow," she thought, " I'll find out if there are any decent people about, though of course Dolly—" The thought never was finished. James threw open the dining-room door, where, for the first time, a decently set table was waiting; and Magdalen, marching in, knew suddenly that if Dolly had not been behind her, she must have turned and run out of the house.

There, behind the table, stood the very Chinaman of her dream! His yellow face, his quiet, inscrutable eyes, were horrifying enough ; but what made her knees shake under her was a white sear on the dingy yellow of his throat. For one second she stood motionless. When she swept on again her face was impassive as the Chinaman's own; no one wouM ever have guessed that every inch of her flesh crawled with terror as he passed behind her to pull out her chair. Somehow she swallowed the soup that not even the influential James had forced Mrs. Keith to cook decently. The oak room, with its cupboards of china, seemed going round and round. The curtained windows into the hall made her sure, when the butler was absent for one instant, that he was looking at her through an upraised crevice, with his long hands crooked to kill. "What makes you so quietV Are you tired?" asked Dolly, wonderingly. " Do you want anything?'' Want anything? Magdalen poured out some sherry and drank it. She did want something/with all her soul, absurd and farfetched as it was. Just to see the face of the man who had helped them in Krug's restaurant. It rose up before her as if it were alive, trustworthy, with comprehension in the eyes. She fairly saw those eyes, thick-lashed, sunk under stern brows, saw the thin sweep of the brown cheek into the strong chin ; the mouth that was sweeter than the eyes— till Dick Lovell laughed. " He said he would help me!" she thought. "If I could only see him now," and then she laughed a loud, harsh laugh, that made Dolly jump. If the, man were here, what had she to tell him? That too much cold mutton, when she was tired, had given her night-

mare? That coincidence had made it tangible "before her eyes? She got up, laughing still. "Come along!" she cried. "This unwonted luxury has gone to my head. DoHy, I'd have given pounds to see Mrs. Keith's face when the new importation arrived!" But Dolly only frowned at her to be silent, as the immaculate footman held open the door. Dolly was always careful before servants. 4 Long after she and Ronald slept, Magdalen Clyde sat up in the dark with her hand on the knob of her locked door. But if she expected it to move slowly under her quiet fingers she was mistaken. There was not a sound outside in the hall, only the lowmutter of the Clyde through the open window. With a laugh at her own foolishness the girl went quietly to bed. "Dolly, I have noticed something strange," she said at breakfast next morning, when they were alone but for Ronaldand what had ever taught Magdalen Clyde to prompt Lady Barnysdale into sending the men away, who shall say? A convent and then Dolly's flat could not have taught her that in grand houses there were no servants in the breakfast-room. " Dolly, why haven't any of the neighbours come to call on you?" "Neighbours! Where are they?" scorn-. fully. " Oh, people in country houses call anyone within fifteen miles neighbours ! Surely there must be someone to come."

" They may not know I'm here. I don't care for them. Ronald's' my lord and I'm my lady, and my debts are paid ! That's ail I care about. Have some jam?" The girl took it absently and pushed it away. It was thin and ugly, like all Mrs. Keith's manufactures. " I suppose someone will come, some day," she said, reflectively. "We can't go on living like this, with no interests but servants. I'm so deadly sick.of discussing servants. Suppose we take to driving about in the afternoons and letting the aristocracy see we're here?" t * Dolly stretched. " We'd only hate them; we're not used to them!" she returned, frankly. "Besides, they may not mean to call. If they're friends of Stratharden's, they may cold-shoulder us." "People are not so faithful," cynically. "'The king is —long live the king.' Stratharden can't ask them Ao dinner. Order the carriagel suppose there is a carriage— three o'clock, and then let's take Ronald and go out. This musty old house is only fit to sleep in. I hate being indoors." Once outside with the reluctant Dolly at her heels, in the fresh air and in the pale winter sun, Miss Clyde's spirits went up. "Did you order the carriage?" she cried. "No? Well, let us go to the stables ourselves. It will be something to do; Ronald can give the horses carrots, like they do in novels," with a laugh,' for she had never been in a stable in her life. But when, after twenty minutes' search, they reached the long stone stables and went in, they stopped with one consent. Facing them were nine empty stalls; the tenth held a rusty country pony, Lady Barnysdale's sole steed.Magdalen turned on a red-headed boy who suddenly appeared from a dark corner. "Are there no other horses?" she cried. "And where are the carriages?" "There's just Tommy there, and he's lame," the boy returned, stolidly. "Oh, aye, there's carriages, but Tommy'll not be drawing them." "Why is he lame?'* "He's old."

And old he was; even to Magdalen's ignorant eyes. Even to drive in a pony-cart lie -was impossible. With a rueful smile she pulled from her pocket the sugar sho had brought for her other horses and gave it to the pony. There was no expecting Dolly to walk, and the old sense of loneliness came back on the girl as she realised how they were cut off from the world in this dreary place. " Dolly," she said, when the red-headed boy had'vanished, " you've money, you must tell James to get you horses, or we can't stay here!" " Dolly sobbed. Even to her heart that lame old pony had appealed. He should do nothing but spend a happy old age, now that she reigned and not Stratharden. " I don't care how much it costs," she cried. " I'll have everything proper. Ronald —Magdalen, where is Ronald'/" "Just behind." Turning back carelessly into the dim stable. Inside it, she caught her breath.

There, as if he had sprung out of the floor, stood Lord Stratharden's immaculate butler, with Ronald in his arms. The boy v.'as clinging to him, smiling. " Bring Lord Barnvsdale here." _ '10 Dolly, who stood in the. doorway, her sister's tone was utterly uncalled for; yet it was all Magdalen could do not to snatch the child from that uncanny hold. The two were standing in a pale sunbeam ; in the dusty shaft of light she saw, under Ronald's clinging hand', the edge of that white scar on the dirty yellow of Ah Lee's throat, and the stale horror of her dream rushed back on her

The quiet of that imaginary scene had been the dreadful part it was quiet here in the same way, for neither man nor child answered her. Pale, and somehow terrible, she towered over the servant, her black eyes burning into his that were as lifeless as those of a dead fish.

" Come to me, Ronald," she said with curious quiet. " I will look after him, Ah Lee." " Yes, madame," said the Chinaman, respectfully, and it came over her that it was the first time she had heard him speak. She drew a long ( breath as she came out into the swet fresh air, with Ronald's hand tight in hers. Common sense told her what she had seen was perfectly innocent; every drop of her blood seemed to beat in her ears that this and nothing else was the beginning of her dream.

(To be continued.)