The missing Mildred

 Mrs Henry Wood seems to have named a lot of her novels after the first story hook she thought of, and then written a story to fill it out to the required length of a Victorian three-volume novel. Large parts of "Court Netherleigh" don't feature the eponymous residence or the people who live there at all. The title character of "Mrs Halliburton's Troubles" has resolved her troubles and subsided into a minor background role by the half-way point of the novel. "Bessy Rane" is a terrible title, since Bessy dies early on, and the reader is supposed to be surprised when it turns out much later that she wasn't dead at all.

But perhaps the greatest of these is "Mildred Arkell". You can see that Mrs Wood started with the basic idea of Mildred, disappointed in love, going away and returning many years later to save her niece from suffering the same fate. But this means that the title character departs from the plot quite early on, and is completely absent from the adventures of the book's many other characters until it's built to the final climax (many years later; it's a story of epic length). In fact, a fairly big part of the book is devoted to a set of largely unrelated characters who go on to continue their storyline in the later novel "St Martin's Eve", and the reader could be forgiven for entirely forgetting about Mildred.

If you'd picked up the second volume of the book, you'd find a couple of references to the title character - she sends occasional money to her hard-up brother, she's mentioned in passing in her cousin's reminiscences of younger days, but nothing to give the reader any real idea who she is or why the book's named after her. This is the only scene in volume 2 in which Mildred Arkell actually makes an appearance. And she contributes almost nothing to it:

She arrived in an afternoon at Mrs. Dundyke's, having come direct to London Bridge by the steamer from Rotterdam. Robert was out in London, as usual; but Mrs. Dundyke was not alone: Mildred Arkell was with her. Perhaps of all people, next to his wife, Mildred had been most shocked at the fate of Mr. Dundyke. This was the first time she had seen his widow, for she had been away in the country with Lady Dewsbury.

A young, pretty woman, looking little more than a girl, with violet-blue eyes, dark hair, and a flush upon her cheeks. Mrs. Dundyke marvelled at her youth—that she should be a wife since three years, and the mother of two children.

"I wrote to you to be sure to bring the children," said Mrs. Dundyke.

"I know: it was very kind. But I thought, as Robert was ill, they might disturb him with their noise. They are but babies; and I left them behind."

Mrs. Dundyke was considering how she could best impart the news of the suspected birth to this poor, unconscious young lady. "If you could give her a hint of it yourself, should she arrive during my absence!" Robert Carr had said to Mrs. Dundyke that very morning, with the hectic deepen[199]ing on his hollow cheeks. And Mrs. Dundyke began her task.

And a sad shock it proved to be. Mrs. Carr, accustomed to the legal formalities that attend a marriage in the country of her birth, and without which formalities the ceremony cannot be performed, could not for some time be led to understand how, if there was a marriage, it could have been kept a secret. There were many points difficult to make her, a foreigner, understand; but when she had mastered them, she grew strangely interested in the recital of the past, and Mildred Arkell, as a resident in Westerbury at the time, was called upon to repeat every little detail connected with the departure of her husband's father and mother from their native place. In listening, Mrs. Carr's cheek grew hectic as her husband's.

After that, she disappears into obscurity again.