The girl from nowhere

by Mrs. Baillie Reynolds

"Normansgrave!" he repeated over and over to himself. "Why, that's the Vanstons' place! His brother's place! Well, of all the fools, that detective of mine, Burnett, was the worst! And yet, of all the places that I should have thought he would not have taken her to, his brother's place was certainly the one." He was so thoroughly disconcerted that he actually grinned. "I thought they had slipped through his fingers somewhere," he reflected. "He said he was certain that he sent her across from Plymouth—such stuff! I told him. I said, 'He left her somewhere between London and Basingstoke, or my name's not Rankin Leigh.' But they always think they know best, these blooming detectives! Well, it's a queer thing! Young Vanston must have brought her here, yet I'll swear that he never went near the place himself, and, what's more, I can swear that his brother didn't know where he was, unless Denzil Vanston, Esq., is the most finished liar on the face of the earth. Why, at that very time, he was paying the police a pretty penny to find the ticket-of-leaver—or his corpse! Humph! Well, I thought I had only a woman to deal with, but if the two Vanstons are in it the difficulties will be greater than I had foreseen. What did become of the other one, after all? Well, there may be some information to be got up at the hotel yonder, that's one thing."

He hurried back to the second-rate inn where he had put up, and, in the course of an hour or two, had found out something of some importance. The Squire had just gone abroad—very unexpectedly. It was even known at the post-office that he had had a cable from Siberia. This was good news. Leigh determined upon his plan of action. He would ask humbly, but with firmness, so as to imply that he could enforce obedience if he chose—he would ask that his niece be allowed to come and stay with him in his flat in London, to show that all was right between them. He would speculate; he would hire a furnished flat in a good position for a month, no matter at what cost. And he would take the girl about—give her clothes and a few jewels; take her to the theater and to race-meetings—he believed that the men to whom he could introduce her would do the rest.

For all the latter part of his life, the man had been a hanger-on at stage doors, a theatrical agent, a go-between of the profession. He believed all women to be like those with whom he was in daily contact—greedy, grasping, pleasure-loving, non-moral. To him, the life he found Rona living—going to church with a maiden lady—was a life from which any handsome young girl would escape, if she could.

If she once found that her beauty would bring to her—and incidentally to him—diamonds, motors, life on the champagne standard, he literally could not conceive that she could hesitate. What was the good of having a girl like that in your power if you could not make her keep you? He was determined to have an old age of comfort, as a result of the earnings of Rona. He knew all the ropes. He knew all there was to know about the "Profession." He knew that, given material of the quality of that girl, success, with the right steps taken, the right course adopted, was quite certain.

He sat smoking, and thinking it over, with his whisky on the table beside him. He considered what, or how much, he could or should tell Rona of what he suspected of her parentage. He was himself the son of a solicitor, and had received a good education. But there was a bad strain in the blood. Both he and his brother had gone to the bad, and his brother had died young, leaving an orphan girl, whose early associations were those of a life of discreditable shifts, but who had developed the backbone lacking in her father and uncle, had insisted upon qualifying to teach, and when her education was complete, had obtained a post as governess in the family of Mauleverer, a well-known old house of the Roman faith in the North of England. But it seemed as if this girl, too, were infected by the obliquity of the family morals, for, after a time, she disappeared from her uncle's view, his letters being returned to him marked "Gone away. Address unknown." One day he received a letter with a London postmark, written at her dictation. It said that she was married, that she had just become a mother, that she was dying. The letter, which bore no address, was only to be posted in case of her actual death, and then not until after a month had elapsed. She did not reveal the name of her husband, but said that her tiny daughter was to be brought up in a certain convent—the address of which she gave him—under the name of Leigh. She begged him to inquire from time to time of the child's health.

Her uncle and she had never been in sympathy. Evidently she had nobody else at all to whom she could appeal for her baby's sake to take some interest in her. She had always been a good and very quiet, steady girl, yet her uncle found it a little hard to believe in the story of her marriage.

There was a young man at Vane Abbey—John Mauleverer, the eldest son. But he was a shy, retiring, delicate youth, by no means the kind of man whom one suspects of making love to the governess. Rankin Leigh had made a few inquiries at the time, but had learnt nothing to confirm such a suspicion.

Other young men had come and gone, visitors at the Abbey; and as all these were Roman Catholics, the fact of the baby's being sent to a convent was not of much significance. Young Mauleverer married, a wife of his own rank, not long after the death of Veronica's mother. If he were the man, this gave some color to the dead girl's solemn assertion that she had been actually married. The fact that the supplies for Veronica's maintenance stopped upon John Mauleverer's death made Rankin Leigh morally certain that he was, after all, the father. He left a family of several children. Had Veronica been a boy, it would have been worth her uncle's while to incur the expense and trouble of hunting up evidence, and establishing her claims on the property. But since she was a girl, and her father had sons, he did not care to follow up the clew. And when, summoned to the convent by a letter from the solicitors explaining that the supplies had ceased, he saw his niece, he felt that she would be a more lucrative and less risky source of income than the levying of blackmail.

But what he had not cared to set on foot, he had little doubt that the Vanstons might be willing to undertake, if he told them the truth. Should he? He was still meditating on the subject, when the waiter looked in.

"Mr. Leigh! Gentleman of the name of Burnett to see you, sir."