The adventures of Dora Bell, detective

by Mrs. George Corbett

My judgment proved correct, and I was presently fully confided in. It was the old story of blind trust and deliberate betrayal, and is soon told. Lucy Markham had been well educated and delicately reared, but was without relatives or near friends at the time I found her. Her mother had died eighteen months before this. The penury consequent upon the previous death of the father had been partly met by disposing of the furniture and other effects, and when Lucy was left unprotected she was also quite without means.

But she meant to be very industrious and attentive to her duties, and quite expected to earn her living easily in London. So she migrated from the quiet little Surrey village where she had seen so much sorrow to seek and to find employment in one of the greatest hives of wickedness the world has ever known, to wit – London.

When her employer began to pay her little attentions, she felt flattered. When he requested her to observe the strictest secrecy regarding his stealthily bestowed attention, she believed his representation that her fellow employees would be spitefully jealous if they suspected which way the wind was blowing. When he took her to a pretty house, she never doubted his assertion that marriage would follow immediately upon her transference thither, and it was with a feeling of rapturous pride that she obeyed his injunctions to the letter, and allowed herself to be introduced to the servant as “Mrs Maynard,” “just for the look of the thing” as Mr Collinson said.

Asked what the servant would think of her being called “Mrs Collinson” soon, the specious schemer replied that the servant really knew all particulars, and that it was the neighbours for whose benefit the little temporary deception was intended.

But it soon transpired that Lucy herself was the object of deception. The self-styled Mr Maynard had ever some excuse ready for putting off the marriage until his victim felt herself hopelessly compromised. The servant was his willing tool; and when he got tired of his toys, he had no difficulty in getting the servant to help him further in his rascally work. The latter contrived to tell Lucy that all the neighbours already looked down upon her, and that she, being kept by a man to whom she was not married, was considered beyond the pale of respectability. Innocent the girl was. But who would believe her protestations to that effect? In the face of her apparent guilt, no one would do it.

“It’s no use crying over spilt milk,” said the servant. “The master will be kind and generous to you as long as he likes you. But you will have to give up such a notion as marrying so rich a man as he is. Take my advice, and get all you can out of him while you have the chance. He’ll soon fall in love with somebody else.”

Lucy’s heartbroken threat to expose her betrayer only provoked the derision of the servant.

“You would very likely get locked up for attempted blackmailing,” she said. “He has been too careful for such a greenhorn as you to circumvent him. He has never been here to see either you or the house except after dark, and nobody would believe you if you said that Mr Maynard was Mr Collinson. For he is a great man at church, and subscribes to everything. He is supposed to have nearly broken his heart when his wife died, and if ever anybody was looked upon by the world as a pattern of virtue, it is the man whom you, a bit of a shopgirl, expected to marry you. You would only get yourself laughed at and despised. So take my advice and don’t be fool enough to fly in the face of fortune yet.”

Even after these revelations the poor child could hardly believe in the utter baseness of her betrayer. But in her next interview with him she was soon convinced of the fact that the man whom she, in common with the rest of the world, regarded as a pattern of virtue, was, in reality, a monster of deceit and vice.

That night she escaped from her pretty home, and from then until I saved her from self-destruction she had undergone all manner of rebuffs, disappointments, and privations, which were enough to drive any other modest girl to the refuge of the wretched.