Baby Daisy.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 124, 14 July 1871, Page 6

Baby Daisy.

(Concluded from our last.)

lll.—'The Lost Pleaid.— (Continued).

Edgar was silent, glad of any respite, however brief, from the trial before him. For some time he stood with Daisy clinging to him. The sunset streamed rosy and golden about them, and fell in long broken strips into the wood, lighting up tile brown trunks of the trees,, and glimmering on a black pool in a hollow aa:ong their roots.

" Speak now, darling," at length Daisy whispered ; "I will listen to you." "Oh! Daisy, Daisy," said he, gently disengaging her hands, but still holding them, " you do not know how grieved I am that it has come to this."

The poor girl's head fell on his bosom, and her face burned crimson.

" But it is not too late. I will take you -away from here. You must come with me now. To-morrow you can write home and tell them you are well and safe. I have engaged comforta*ble lodgings for you, where the people believe yon are married. You will be well cared for in the meantime ; for the future I will provide." " Edgar, what do you mean ?" she cried, starting away from him with a terrified face. Dashwood was silent. "Oh ! Edgar, speak; have you been playing me false all this time ?" Then seizing his hands, "Oh ! forgive me, forgive me; but do say you are still true to me. You seem so strange, I don't know what to think. Do speak, Edgar!" "Daisy," replied Dashwood in a hoarse voice, " I would give my right hand could this thing be undone. But it is too late. We must now forestall the consequences. G-od knows, I was in earnest with you from the first, but a cursed fatality has tied my hands. I will love you, toil for you, starve for you, but I cannot make you my wife."

Daisy dropped his hand as he uttered the last word. The color fled from her face : her lips turned dry and white ; an intense light dilated her eyes ; she stood cold and rigid, stricken by that paralysis of despair which turns the heart to ice and the limbs to stone. " You are already married, Edgar ?" " No, I am not married, Daisy." " You are engaged to be married ?" There was no answer. " Yes, you are engaged to be married! I knew it; months ago I knew it —months ago. Your letters betrayed your secret. Is she poor and fatherless, Edgar; a village girl; a mere baby ; unsuspicious of evil, Edgar ; easily persuaded with easy promises ? Pure, and too sweet and good for human nature's daily food," she said, with bitter irony recalling the words he had once used to her. "Is she untainted, a flower no hand has ever touched ? And you will marry her ? Ha! ha! The old, old story, ending in the sad, old way!" " Daisy, I beg of you to be silent; my own remorse is as much as I can bear," Dashwood broke in. His face was flushed; a large vein between his brows started out purple and knotty. " No, no," Daisy continued, heedless of his interruption; " she is wealthy, beautiful ; one wise enough in the world's ways; who knows ? a lady of rank, with friends ready enough to avenge insult. And you are engaged. Yes ; you will marry her; you coward!" The fierce burst of scorn in the last word was electric. Dashwood stamped his foot and thundered. " Curse your woman's tongue. Speak no more." His hands were clenched, and he trembled with suppressed passion. "..Poor fool! poor fool..!" continued

Daisy in a low tone, as if speaking to herself ; " poor fool! If she knew all, knew all!" Then raising her hand to Heaven : " Dashwood, there is a God who sees us two, who knows us too, who will not forget our faces, and I call him to witness. I will live and bear my shame. But I will live for, one end. I will step between you and your victims ; I will brand you in the face of the world. You are engaged, but you are not married, and you never shall be, never, never,fnever!"

With one spring the enraged man flung himself on his victim and clutched her by the throat. There struggle, but his hands grasped like iron. Hissing inarticulate curses, blind with fury, he did not hear the last gasping sob, did not see the face turn purple and white foam gather on the lips. There was another throe of agony, a fluttering of the limbs, and Daisy fell lifeless at his feet. In a moment the madman was sobered. He flung himself on his knees beside the lifeless form. He lifted her head, kissed her, called her his Baby Daisy, his darling, his little wife! But Daisy made no answer. He rushed into the wood and filled his hat at the pool. He dashed the water over her face: bat no recognition appeared in the staring eyes, no flutter of breath on the foamy lips. He tore open her dress in a desperate hope. Could he feel but one heartbeat, all might yet be well. A faint pulse made his hand thrill, but it was not Daisy's. The mother's heart was stilled for ever.

IV.—Bloodhounds. Daisy had disappeared, without leaving a trace to strengthen hope or confirm despair. She had not been missed till nightfall, and when anxiety because of her absence had grown unbearable, and eager inquiries were made through the village, it was found that no one had seen her—no one could give any information. We pass over in silence the long and fruitless search. The excitement of the village calmed down by degrees, and after the first burst of anguish and dismay Mrs Fairweather began to gather in her mind little incidents in Daisy's recent conduct, which were then unnoticed, but seemed now the windings of a clue that might lead to the discovery of her lost darling. She remembered the sudden joyful change which had taken place a few days before. In her mind's eye she saw her as she had seen her last, bright and happy, but subdued, as though busy with some thought which, if serious, was not unpleasant. On her being missed her room was found in disorder. She had dressed in her best, and had put on all her little trinketry. In these things was much food for hope. The poor mother would never recognise the possibility of her Baby's death. Most people encouraged her in her hopes; among the rest Charley Heatherstone, Daisy's old lover. But in the meanwhile the girl had disappeared. Whither? Charley had good grounds for conjecture, which he communicated to the minister, whereupon followed a consultation, the result of which was a delicate letter addressed to Dashwood.

Patiently they waited, but no answer was returned. Silence confirmed Charley's conviction. The minister wrote a second time. His letter was sent back to him. Edgar, too, had disappeared. Him we can follow in his distracted flight from the scene of that fatal catastrophe. How he reached home he never knew. That rapid journey and its consequences seemed a dream—a terrible nightmare which left his limbs still trembling, and his brow clammy with cold sweat. In vain he endeavored to compose himself to his usual occupations. His hand had lost its steadiness ; that faint pulsation still shook it like an aspen* leaf; the power of his mind was gone; the canvas before him grew

I into a dark, livid face, working its glassy

eye and mouth, white with foam. He dashed his palette on the ground and rushed from the house. At that time a strange, reckless being began to frequent the gaming tables ; a wild-looking man, with pale, haggard face and long matted hair. He was met in every scene of dissipation, vice, and debauchery. His luck» profusion, and dare-devil appearance won him a gloomy pre-eminence. As suddenly as he had appeared, he vanished. He reappeared at Paris, at Baden, at Berlin, at all the most fashionable and dissolute watering-places. Like a malignant meteor he glared upon them for a season, and then was seen no more. It was Dashwood.

Fruitless, however, was the flight from that remorse which had fixed about his soul, like the devil-fish in the story, and was bringing him rapidly to his grave. Revelry and debauch could not banish that strangled face or drown the voice which was ringing day and night in his ears. Sleep was 1 denied him, at least such sleep as recruits failing nature. Night and darkness were a season of manifold terror which he spent in orgies. Stricken with, fever, worn out with dissipation, half stupified with drink or the fumes of opium, he would return at morning to his lodgings, and, throwing himself on a couch, close his eyes to undergo a torture to which he then could make no resistance. Then the horror raised its veil. He dreamed he was stauding at the skirt of the dark pine wood. A little way within its shadow was the black pool with a narrow strip of sunset fallen half across it; a fiery strip which burned with intolerable intensity on the black water, lightening the undersides of the brown branches overhead; a terrible light which riveted the eyes and attracted passing footsteps ; a finger of fire pointing out his dead secret. Then he seemed to be peering into the pool; and far down, fathoms and fathoms down in a nether darkness, whence he heard a thin, far-away sound of wailing, he saw a shape floating up slowly and indistinctly, save that two dilated eyes glittered in the darkness ; floating up and up till the strip of light rippled on a dead face and uplifted throat, which were Daisy's. His dreams were driving him to madness and self-destruction.

Whither should he flee to escape himself? That was not left him to answer. A horrible fascination was dragging him hack, step by step, to the scene of his guilt. Again and again he struggled to master himself. He hurried away over leagues and leagues to outspeed the fatal attraction; but, when he paused, a cold iron grasp was laid upon him, and he again bent his steps homewards. On a snowy evening, towards the close of December, that same year, a eoach-and-four drew up in the yard of the " Angel," the principal inn of the village of Cruden. A solitary passenger alighted, and, entering, engaged an apartment for the night. A more wj etched invalid never fronted the inclemency of such a winter, or endured the exposure of so long a journey, than the traveller who was now cowering over the fire, warming his white, withered hands. As he turned towards the light, his face, once singularly handsome, showed the ravages of a disease beyond all human skill to cure. Death was written on '.he hollow, bloodless cheeks ; death in the sunken eyes, which burned with a wild black lustre from the purple rings which circled them. The long hair tangled about his neck and shoulders bespoke a man still in the prime of life ; but the unsteady step, the drooping body, the aguish hands, were those of one who is entering the Valley of the Shadow. After draining a tumbler of spirits mixed with half the contents of a vial of laudanum, he wrapped his cloak about him, and heedless of the piercing wind and falling snow, passed down the chief street of the village. With a wavering step, and looking right on as though keeping some far object in sight, he pursued his way till he reached Daisy's house. Turning to the right he crossed the bridge and entered the wood. Without pausing, without once looking back, he followed the familiar paths with the unconscious decision of a sleep-walker. He reached the moor, and stood at the old trysting place, the scene of that last meeting. For a while he looked vxcantly about him, then, flinging up his arms, raised a low, wailing cry, " Daisy ! Daisy f

The pool at which he filled his hat glimmered among the snow-clad trees. He directed his steps to it. Dropping his stick on the bank, he stepped on the frozen surface; then falling on his hands and knees he crept across with his face close to the ice and his eyes straining down through the water. Here and there a few snow-flakes had drifted, but otherwise the ice was bare; black as jet and transparent as crystal. The dead, rotting leaves lay distinctly visible on the bottom. Thus he slowly searched his way towards the deeper end of the pool, where he suddenly stopped, wringing his hands and tearing his hair in convulsive agony. Then sinking down with his forehead on the ice, he remained motionless. When his grief had writhed itself out, he arose, grasped his stick, and again, as in a dream, retraced his way.

At that moment a man, who had stealthily dogged his steps, and witnessed his wild gestures and this last paroxysm of remorse, glided from among the trees to the pool, and creeping across the ice as the other had done, at last paused with a cry of horror. At one glance he saw into the dead secret; and so poor Daisy's first lover was the first mourner over her early grave. Charley had met the deathstricken invalid in the street, and as closely as disease had disguised him, his features were too deeply burnt into Charley's heart to be ever forgooten ; he had tracked him and learned Daisy's fate. . With a misery too intense for tears, he followed the slow footsteps to (he inn, and saw the traveller enter. Hastening to Daisy's house, he revealed all he had seen to her brother; then, seizing Frank's arm, hurried with him to the Angel.

" You and the landlord shall watch," said he ; "I will ride to Forres for the police."

They called the landlord and enlisted his co-operation. " The puir man is in his room," said the landlord;" he desired no be disturbit for ae thing till the morn at nine. Ech ! but it's a God's justice, and he i' the noo on the brink o' the grave." He led the way to a large room, lit by a lamp on a bare deal table and a great peat fire. " I will na tak' ye ben; for ye maun ken," said he, pointing to the room above, " he sleeps up abune ye, and ye can hear ilka sound, sould he be stirrin'."

The evening had closed in dark and snowy, but Charley had mounted for his long ride. At starting, he pressed Fairweather's hand and whispered, " Keep up your heart, we shall be back about midnight."

Fortunately the snowstorm kept most of the frequenters of the Angel at home. The inn was closed early, and the landlord joined Frank in his watch. He brought with him a bottle of spirits, but Frank was little disposed to be social, so that mine host was fain to help the time through with solitary glasses, which gradually filled the room with a drowsy haze, till his head sank on his breast, and his heavy breathing showed he had fallen asleep. Wearijy the time crept by. The wind roared and whistled outside, the crickets shrilled in the chimney, the fire muttered and fell in with a hollow rattle, the stertorous breathing of the sleeping man was painful to hear. A nightmare seemed weighing on the house. Eleven struck in some distant room. Another ghostly hour wore through with eerie sounds, ft was twelve o'clock. The fire was very low • the lamp was burning dimly, a feeble flame flickering about the black, clotted wick. Frank rose and trimmed it, threw some peats on the fire; resumed his seat, and relapsed into a long, dismal reverie, from which he was aroused by a strange noise. It was a sound as of water dropping slowly. Drip—drip—drip. It was heard clearly and distinctly through the rumbling and soughing of the wind. Fair weather listened; the sound was in the roomit came from the table. He looked up! A large dark stain was soaking through the ceiling. The drops were fulling from the stain. The table beneath was splashed with red where they fell. Frank's face grew ghastly with sudden horror. He sprang to the landlord's side and shook him. The old man started to his feet, and staring wildly, gasped out—"Eh ! What! what! Escapit us ?" " I am afraid he has," was the answer given in a hoarse, stifled voice. " Look there."

Fairweather pointed with a trembling hand to the table and ceiling, and moveci to the door. The landlord shuddered as in an ague fit, and called to him, "Come back, come back, for God's sake !" But Frank had sprung U p the'staircase, and was knocking loudly at the traveller's room. There was no answer. Ho put his shoulder to the door and forced it open. The blind was drawn from the window; the snow had ceased, and the flying clouds, let white snatches of moonlight fall across the room. A dark shape was stretched along the floor. Edgar Dash wood had oscaped the roach of human justice.