Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 January 1893 — TRVE AS STEEL [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

TRVE AS STEEL

MRS ALVARI JORDAN GARTH

CHAPTER XVI. missing! When Edna Deane glanced into the loom at tne Hopedale Hotel where the marriage ceremony between the man she loved and the woman who had so cruelly deceived her was taking place, one member only of the coterie there had caught sight of her white, stricken face. Lured on by the deft manipulation of Dr. Simms and Beatrice Mercer, Baymond Marshall had agreed to solace the dying moments of the girl wno had saved his father from financial rtiin and disgrace by wedding her. The bridegroom of a few brief hours, destined to benefit by her fortune whether he so elected or not, too crushed over his grief to care what became of him, he went through the form of a mere mockery of marriage, and spoko the words that signalized the culmination of the scheming siren’s deft plot. It was just at the commencement of the ceremony that he chanced to glance at the half-open door connecting with the adjoining apartment. The others did not see, the others did not mark, the vivid start, the quick pallor, the gasping breath, as he stared bofore him as if he had seen a wraith. “Edna!" he panted; and then, feeling that it was a delusion of the senses, a reproachful, haunting visitation from the womhn the memory of whose love could never sanctify even a marriage of necessity and pity, he tottered through the doorway into the next room. “Edna!”

His voice rang out less vaguely now. It was no wraith—no trick of the senses. She was at the threshold of that hall door now. Her face flashed plainly, unmistakably, across his vision. “It is she—alive!” he gasped. “Oh, can it be true?” Madly he rushed for the corridor. The shock of the perfect recognition, however, had blinded, confused him. She had disappeared, and in his excitement he ran the wrong way, got lost in inextricable side passages of the hotel, and reached its street exit two minutes behind the flying fugitive. A lour.gVirat the door told an excitable story of the fleeting form, and indicated the direction in which it had disappeared. Not stopping to analyze his vivid emotions nor the strange situation in ■which his acquiescence to the pleadings of Beatrice had placed him, Baymond Marshall thought only of the dead come back to life with a great, feverish joy and wonder. Vainly, however, he scoured the vicinity. Edna Deane had come like a phantom and had disappeared like a flash.

Jaded, perplexed, an hour later Baymond Marshall started back for the hotel. His brow was black with suspicion, his keenest sensibilities aroused to the fever-pitch of augury and suspense. Edna was alive —he was satisfied on that point As he looked back over the events or the past hour, and realized how he had allowed his despair and sympathy to lead him into a net. he realized, too, that it might all be part of a plot. The newspaper item was a falsehood! The siren had again deluded him, and now—he was chained to her,. Be her illness simulation or reality, she was his legally wedded wife. The thought that Edna knew and understood all this drove him frantic. Hot with hate and excitement, he regained the room at the hotel. He would have an understanding with Beatrice! She should, at least, tell him the truth about Edna, and the mystery of her absence and reappearance. Ho paused as he reached the parlor of the .suite. A glance into the next apartment rooted him to the spot. His father, the false nurse, the strange minister had departed, but there yet lingered Doctor Simms, and there, too, no longer the incumbent, white-faced dying bride, but in all her usual regal boldness of beauty, sat Beatrice, conversing animatedly with her tool and colleague in plotting, her cousin, the doctor.

“Marshall has probably gone home,” the latter was saying, "but I cannot account for his strange abrupt departure. We will not think of that, however, Beatrice. Your scheme has succeeded; you are his wife.” “Yes," cried Beatrice, triumphantly, “my fondest hopes have succeeded.” “We had better, therefore, hasten our other arrangements at once. As I understand it, you are to be removed to my home?” “Still posing as the dying invalid, yes,” assented the crafty Beatrice. “However little Baymond Marshall may care for me, he will call daily to inquire for me. His sympathy will cause him to do that. He will see me gradually recover. When he finds he has married a well woman instead of a dying one he will accept the situation, and my love will win him to forget Edna, and he will never know the plot we have played against him.” "He knows it now!” The two schemers started back in dismay. A towering monument of wrath, their victim suddenly sprang into view.

In wild, fierce denunciation he thrust the abashed doctor aside. In righteous indignation he told the appalled Beatrice that she was unmasked, the full measure of her iniqu.ty known. He almost cursed her in the bitterness of his rage. He told her that if he ned to the uttermost parts of the world, her claim upon him as a husband should be the merest mockery of formality, and then unheeding her frantic appeals of love, he dashed from the room, not even deigning to reveal to her that he had seen Edna Deane, that he knew her to be alive, realizing that any appeal to her to toll him truly what she knew of the poor, persecuted child of destiny would not bring a truthful response from her false lips. Thatnight, baffled, distracted, crushed, Beatrice sought vainly for tho man she loved —at his home, in the village. She could not forget him. So near to success, and careless babbling had lost her the precious prize. i. She lingered at the retirement of the Doctor’s home for several days; she had him Inquire everywhere for Marshall, but the latt r had mysteriously disappeared from the village. “I shall return home,” she told him with anxious, haggard face, finally. “At the first trace you secure of him write or telegraph me. You got the marriage certificate from the clergyman?”

Dr. Simms evaded her questioning glance. “Not yet," he stammered, "but I will'. You see, the village clergyman was away, and I had to arrange with a strange minister who lives in another town. I will attend to it. Oh, you will win Baymond Marshall to your side yet. ” * “Life is torture else,” sighed the disappointed Beatrice. And that night she started back for the home where luxury and wealth were a hollow mockery, with her scheme for Baymond Marshall's love a failure. Had she remained one day longer at Hopedale, she would have seen Baymond Marshall, for he returned twentyfour hours after her departure. If he was pale, worn, jaded before, he was a mere shadow of his former handsome self now. He had sought vainly everywhere for a trace of Edna Deane.

Back at the starting-point of his investigation, ere he went to his home, he visited the hotel. He questioned the landlord about “Miss Leslie,” and inquired particularly about a mysterious visitor on the day of the marriage. “I remember now,” spoke the landlistening to Marshall’s story. “The're was a strange woman here. She sat in the ladies' parlor, but she disappeared mysteriously. However, we found a little saehel there the next morning. ” “A saehel!” ejaculated Marshall eagerly, "can I see it?” The article was produced. Disappointedly Marshall glanced over the few collars and handkerchiefs it contained. They little resembled the dainty neckwear of lii3 Edna. As he noted in red ink on the inside of the saehel an address, however, he decided that it might have belonged to Edna, that it might possibly be a clue. The address was that of a farmer, John Blake. The next afternoon, Baymond Marshall knocked at the door of the humble cottage that had sheltered his lost darling the night of the snowstorm. To her it had been a haven of safety and peace, to him it became the portals of a paradise of hope and love, as with.n ten minutes he knew all the truth. Yes, he had located Edna at last! Mrs. Blake had told him all she knew. He could patch out all the mystery of Edna’s strange disappearance now. Oh! he had found her at last. Found her, however, to lose her again, it seemed. With a sinking heart he listened to the concerned matron as she told him that Edna had been missing for hours.

That day she had gone out for a drive. An hour previous the horse and phaeton had come home, Bruno jogging after, but no driver. Had Edna again fled—had she met with an accident? “Oh! it cannot be, so ncur to finding her, to lose her again!” murmured Marshall, wildly. “Have you no idea where she went, Mrs. Blake?” No, the farmer’s wife could not conjecture, and, about to give Marshall an idea of Edna’s usual route in driving, he interrupted her. “Bruno, the doa!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Come here, good fellow!” He took up a dainty glove from the table that belonged to Edna. He patted the dog, he showed him the glove, he pointed down the road. The intelligent animal seemed to understand what was expected of him. “Find your mistress!” urged the solicitous Marshall. With a sharp bark, Bruno darted through the cottage door. Down the winding road ho ran, the eager, hopeful Baymond Marshall at his heels, realizing uoon how frail a thread hung the fate of the woman he loved.

IIIAPTER XVII. AT HER MERCY Edna Deane shrank back to the edge of the pit as she recognized the face of the person who had come in response to her cries for aid. It was Beatrice Mercer; there could be no doubt of it, and the shock of the recognition, a realization of the perfidy of her former friend, drove Edna to sudden ‘silence. She sank to the side of the pit and looked up blankly. “Who is there, I say?“ demanded Beatrice,' peering sharply down. “It is I; Edna—Edna Deane.” “Incredible!” Beatrice recoiled as if dealt a sudden blow, and turneo white to the lips. Edna Deane! For the first time in her reckless, cruel career of subterfuge and deceit the self-reliant schemer faltered. She had met her Waterloo in .the failure of her scheme to delude Raymond Marshall. That had been the first break in her plots, and now How had Edna Deane come here—alive, when she deemed her dead! At this of all places in the world, where a single misstep, a single suspicion aroused on the part of old Mr. Ralston, would strip the impostor of her borrowed plumage and place in her rightful position the persecuted, deceived Edna. For some moments Beatrice shrank back from the edge of the pit, lost in wild augury and suspense. Then her hard, practical mind grasped the situation. She knew that Ralston was confined to his room. Both the steward and the housekeeper had gone to the village and would not return until late that night. She called down to Edna. Word by word, sentence bij sentence, she forced her to tell how she had come there, learned for the first time the entire truth about Edna’s peril and Edua’s deliverance. Unheeding her appeals for rescue she compelled her to relate her story. She knew that Edna would not falsify.

“You must make no outcry,” she said, in a cold, steely tone of voice. “This place is a dangerous one for any stranger. It I release you will you go away and never tell any one you saw me here nor seek to know why I am here, or revisit the place?” “Yes! yes!” assented Edna, eagerly, somehow terrified at the cruel, repeliant expression in the face of her farmer friend. “Only one question—where is Raymond Marshall, your husband?” Beatrice’s tteth closed with a vicious snap. “All is over between you two —he is mine now,” she responded. “Remain here until I return—until it is safe for me to rescue you and get you outside the grounds.” Then she was gone, and darkness and silence supervi ned, and poor Edn i, shr nking, trembling, awaited her fa e, with a confused sense of peril, of mystery in her agitated thoughts. Beatrice had gone to her room in the mansion with a drawn brow and tightly compressed lips. She had a hasd problem to study out, and it was perplexing her. Edna Deane, whom she believed dead, had come across her path aga.n Of late, she had begun to realize the value of wealth; she was not yet hopeless of winning Raymond Marshall to her side; but, If

he learned that Edna was alive, If old Mr. Balston asserted that she was an -impostor, what then? Darker and fiercer glowed the basilisk eyes; more somber and tragic grew the sinister face. She dared not let Edna go free; it meant ultimate disaster to all her hopes and plans. She proceeded, finally, to another room. In one corner of it was a large cabinet. Unlocking and opening its doors, she revealed row after row of phials and bottles, evidently the medicine use by the invalid Balston. K A la> ge bottle, bearing the label “chloroform, ’ attracted her attention, and She took it up, thoughtfully. “I have only a short time to act, for the servants will soon return,” she murmured. “I must quiet her, for I have not time to get her out of the pit before they come back. I will empty the contents of the bottlo into the pit. They will stupefy and silence her. Later, 1 will get her out, imprison her, or —I must take time to think. If the fumes kill her that is not my fault,” continued the heartless siren. She went out into the garden, the bottle in her hand. She reached the pit and uncorked It. “What was that?” She started with the ejaculation, and peered sharply at the near shrubbery, as she fancied she detected a rustling movement there. It was not repeated, however, and she leaned over the edge of the pit once more. Emptying the volatile fluid into the prison-place of her victim, the merciless plotter hastened from the spot, the desperate cruelty of murder in her wicked heart. |TO BE CONTINUED ]