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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Wyllard's Weird," Mary Elizabeth Braddon masterfully weaves a tapestry of mystery and intrigue against the backdrop of Victorian society. Characterized by her deft use of suspenseful narrative and rich character development, Braddon delves into themes of familial duty, social expectation, and the supernatural. The novel centers on the enigmatic figure of Wyllard, whose secrets gradually unravel as the plot progresses, leading to a myriad of twisted relationships and dark revelations, all couched in the atmospheric settings characteristic of the Gothic genre. This work exemplifies Braddon's ability to combine psychological depth with thrilling storytelling, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the eerie world she creates. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a prolific Victorian writer, gained recognition for her pioneering contributions to the genre of sensational fiction. Her personal experiences and the tumultuous societal changes of her time influenced her narratives, particularly regarding women's independence and moral complexities. Having experienced considerable upheaval in her own life, including the challenges of a career as a female author in a male-dominated literary landscape, Braddon's works frequently question societal norms and illuminate the darker sides of human nature. "Wyllard's Weird" is highly recommended for readers who appreciate intricate plots fused with psychological depth. This novel is not only a captivating mystery but also a profound exploration of characters shaped by their society's expectations. Braddon's acute observations and the tension that permeates the narrative make this work a compelling addition to the Mystery Classics Series, appealing to both seasoned readers and newcomers alike.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Wyllard's Weird (Mystery Classics Series)
Table of Contents
Introduction
A disturbing occurrence unsettles a carefully ordered world, drawing respectable lives into a tightening web where private desire, public duty, and inexorable fate press against one another.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a leading figure of Victorian sensation fiction, brings her seasoned craft to Wyllard’s Weird, a novel that blends mystery with social and domestic drama. Working in the late nineteenth century, Braddon helped shape a genre that married suspense with sharp observation of manners. First appearing in the later Victorian decades, this book belongs to that period’s rich culture of serialized storytelling and popular fiction. Set within recognizably English milieus of the era—drawing on provincial society, travel, and fashionable resorts—it situates its intrigue against the moral expectations and bustling social currents of late-Victorian life.
The premise unfolds from an ambiguous incident that invites inquiry and whispers, placing the Wyllard name under a scrutiny that will not easily be soothed. Braddon orchestrates the aftermath through interlocking perspectives and steadily accumulating detail, allowing suspicion to thicken as motives, memories, and half-known histories collide. Rather than offering a single sleuth’s tidy path, the narrative moves through parlors, inns, and outwardly innocuous meetings, where chance remarks and small gestures carry weight. The reading experience is one of mounting unease and intellectual play, guided by a voice that balances sympathy with irony while inviting the reader to weigh evidence and character.
Themes central to sensation fiction—secrecy, reputation, and the precarious boundary between respectability and scandal—take firm hold here. The title’s invocation of “weird” in its older sense of fate signals Braddon’s interest in how choice and circumstance interlace to shape lives. Questions of class position and gendered expectation surface in conflicts over trust, marriage, and the economic realities that underwrite social ambition. Braddon’s characters navigate the powerful undertow of gossip, the vulnerability of private histories, and the stubborn persistence of past acts. Throughout, the novel meditates on how truth is constructed, contested, and, at times, dangerously misread by those eager to believe.
Braddon’s style is brisk yet patient, a product of serial culture that favors momentum while rewarding attention to detail. Scenes are economically sketched, then revisited with new emphasis, creating an elastic pacing that alternates between quiet accumulation and decisive turns. Dialogue carries subtext, and descriptions hint at character as much as place. The tone hovers between intimate observation and cool appraisal, maintaining moral complexity without lapsing into didacticism. Readers encounter a narrative architecture that conceals and reveals with deliberate craft: letters, chance encounters, and shifting confidences act as both clues and misdirections, sustaining an atmosphere of uncertainty tinged with psychological acuity.
For contemporary readers, the novel resonates in its portrayal of reputation as a fragile currency—shaped by rumor, surveillance, and performance—that can elevate or undo a person overnight. Its exploration of constrained choices, especially for women, speaks to ongoing conversations about autonomy, social judgment, and the costs of secrecy. The book’s attention to how communities process ambiguity—filling gaps with conjecture and moral fervor—feels strikingly current. In place of sensational shocks for their own sake, Braddon offers a sustained inquiry into what we think we know about others, why we are compelled to investigate, and how certainty can mislead as readily as it can console.
Approached as both a gripping mystery and a window onto the late-Victorian imagination, Wyllard’s Weird rewards readers who appreciate supple plotting and nuanced character work. It offers the satisfactions of a carefully assembled puzzle without sacrificing the social textures that make the stakes feel human and immediate. Read for its atmosphere of quiet dread, for its ethical shading, and for the disciplined pleasures of its reveal-and-withhold design. Whether discovered as part of a modern classics series or encountered anew, this novel exemplifies Braddon’s ability to entwine suspense with insight, inviting us to follow the clues while scrutinizing our own desire to know.
Synopsis
Set in late Victorian England, Wyllard's Weird opens within a prosperous provincial community where social routines, visits, and charitable duties shape daily life. At its center stands a respected country gentleman whose name anchors the title, a figure admired for his position yet shadowed by hints of private unease. The narrative introduces a close-knit circle that includes an observant young woman, a trusted companion, and neighbors who watch one another with polite curiosity. Early chapters establish place and tone, balancing public decorum with subtle undercurrents of anxiety. The notion of weird, in the sense of fate, quietly hovers over these introductions.
A sudden shock disturbs the calm when a death occurs under ambiguous circumstances during a journey. Rumor quickly amplifies unanswered questions, and an inquest weighs accident, misadventure, and darker possibilities without resolving the matter. The event widens into a local sensation, drawing in the country household at the story’s heart and prompting official attention. Timetables, chance meetings, and missing explanations become central points of inquiry. The community responds with sympathy and speculation in equal measure, while the principal characters confront the unsettling idea that ordinary lives can be overturned by one unforeseen moment.
As investigation begins, small details gain disproportionate importance. Letters surface, appointments are reconsidered, and alibis are tested against memory and clocks. The police proceed methodically, but an intelligent amateur pursues side paths overlooked by routine procedure. The gentleman who anchors the story remains helpful yet reserved, his past travels and previous associations mentioned without conclusion. Neighbors and visitors come under scrutiny. Some details suggest an outsider’s involvement; others point inward toward the familiar circle. The narrative stays neutral, presenting facts and impressions as characters encounter them, and allowing uncertainty to grow as each new clue complicates prior assumptions.
The scene shifts to London, where newspapers, clubs, and lodging houses widen the field of inquiry. Here the story introduces cosmopolitan figures and cross-channel connections that complicate identity and motive. Records, addresses, and translators become as necessary as carriage wheels. The observing heroine conducts interviews with tact, drawing out memories that may matter. Meanwhile, the central gentleman’s composure wavers, not in open confession but in restless movement and guarded remarks. London’s speed contrasts with the countryside’s steadiness, amplifying the sense that the past is never far behind and that explanations may lie in multiple cities, not only at home.
Parallel concerns emerge in drawing rooms and counting houses. Questions of money, inheritance, and future prospects touch nearly every character, expanding the range of possible motives without deciding the point. A younger relative’s path, a marriage prospect, and the stability of estates all depend upon reputations that the mystery threatens. Social visits frame careful conversations, where hints are exchanged under the cover of politeness. The novel accumulates details rather than pronouncements, mapping how personal hopes intersect with legal responsibilities. Through it all, official inquiry advances step by deliberate step, while private anxieties produce impulsive choices that later demand explanation.
Following a thin but persuasive clue, the action crosses the Channel. Parisian streets, provincial records, and quiet institutional archives provide testimony unavailable in England. Here the story touches on old acquaintances, a vanished companion, and a choice made years earlier whose consequences resonate now. Identities are checked against ledgers and recollections; names appear in unexpected combinations. Language and custom slow progress, yet the determined investigator persists, gathering fragments that suggest a link between the recent death and long-ago decisions. The atmosphere remains factual and restrained, avoiding melodrama while showing how distance and time veil, but do not erase, truth.
Back in England, tensions crest as suspicion narrows. An accusation, once unthinkable, becomes plausible enough to divide loyalties. Some characters rally around the accused, arguing that coincidence and malice distort perception. Others read the same facts as confirmation. The central gentleman confronts the weight of his weird, or fate, acknowledging that events he hoped to surpass still govern present choices. Private interviews at twilight, a stormy journey, and an urgent summons signal that a turning point approaches. Evidence is weighed again, this time with a sharper awareness of how character, opportunity, and secrecy can converge in a single decisive hour.
The resolution gathers through testimonies, documents, and reconstructed timelines that align at last. Misread gestures and misleading circumstances are placed in context, and the central question of the death receives a coherent explanation without sensational disclosure. The novel clarifies relationships, reassigns responsibility, and restores a measure of public calm. Final chapters show consequences rather than celebrate triumph, emphasizing that legal closure does not erase memory. Commitments are reaffirmed, future plans adjusted, and the disturbance to social order slowly recedes. In keeping with its measured tone, the narrative closes doors thoughtfully, leaving only the sense that order has been earned.
Wyllard's Weird underscores how fate, in the Victorian sense of an inherited or chosen path, shapes outward lives as powerfully as any visible cause. Within its mystery framework, it traces the interplay of community scrutiny, institutional inquiry, and private conscience. The story maintains neutrality, presenting events in sequence and letting their significance emerge through accumulation rather than verdict. Its central message is that past actions persist, sometimes silently, until circumstances force their reckoning. Appearances can mislead, but patient investigation and moral courage can clarify them. In the end, everyday stability resumes, tempered by a sober recognition of responsibility and consequence.
Historical Context
Set in late Victorian Britain, the novel unfolds against the social geography of the 1870s–1880s, oscillating between rural estates of the West Country and the metropolitan magnetism of London. Country houses, parish communities, and coastal landscapes supply a milieu shaped by declining local industries, seasonal tourism, and tightening ties to the capital through rail and telegraph. The time is one of accelerated mobility and information flow, but also of anxieties over property, lineage, and respectability. Cross-Channel travel to northern France and the broader European orbit was common, lending cosmopolitan color to characters, while still grounding the story in recognizably English legal, social, and ecclesiastical frameworks.
The decline of Cornish mining and regional industry forms a vivid historical backdrop. The Camborne–Redruth district’s copper boom peaked by the 1860s before global competition depressed prices, while tin markets fluctuated sharply through the 1870s and 1880s. As returns fell, tens of thousands of miners emigrated to South Australia, the Lake Superior copper range, and South Africa; Cornwall’s population stagnated or declined between 1861 and 1901. This contraction unsettled rural hierarchies and strained estate incomes dependent on mineral royalties and local rents. The novel’s West Country setting mirrors these pressures, using precarious fortunes and outward migration to motivate alliances, marriages, and contested inheritances.
Railway expansion and the telegraph reconfigured distance and secrecy in Victorian life. Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash (1859) completed the mainline link into Cornwall, and by the 1860s–1870s express services connected provincial towns to London within a day. The Post Office nationalized inland telegraphs in 1870, standardizing rapid communication, while improved steamship links accelerated cross-Channel travel. These innovations compressed timeframes for alibis, forged or intercepted letters, and sudden departures—devices central to sensation-era plotting. The narrative’s movement between countryside and city, and the speed with which information circulates among characters, reflects a society learning to live with instant messages and swift journeys.
The Long Depression (1873–1896) and the Agricultural Depression reshaped gentry finances and middle-class security. Floods of North American grain, carried cheaply by steamships and rail, cut British wheat prices nearly in half by the 1890s; 1879’s disastrously wet season compounded losses and became proverbial for rural distress. Landlords renegotiated or reduced rents, mortgaged estates, or sold ancestral properties. Earlier financial shocks—such as the Overend Gurney collapse (1866)—had already exposed speculative vulnerabilities. The novel channels this climate of fiscal fragility: indebted estates, anxious trustees, and the lure of profitable marriages or dubious investments supply credible motives for concealment, social climbing, and daring transgressions within respectable circles.
Victorian legal reforms concerning marriage, property, and guardianship profoundly frame the stakes and strategies available to women and their families. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 shifted divorce from ecclesiastical to civil courts, making it possible—though still costly and unequal—for spouses to seek dissolution; men could sue for adultery alone, while women generally had to prove adultery aggravated by cruelty or desertion. The Married Women’s Property Act 1870 allowed wives to own earnings, investments up to £200, and certain legacies; crucially, the broader Married Women’s Property Act 1882 established married women’s separate legal property as if unmarried, transforming dowries, settlements, and inheritances into instruments of genuine autonomy rather than merely trusteeship under a husband. The 1878 Matrimonial Causes (Married Women’s Property) Act facilitated separation orders and maintenance in cases of aggravated assault, and the Guardianship of Infants Act 1886 granted mothers expanded rights concerning their children. These statutes altered how estates were settled, how guardians controlled heiresses, and how secrecy and coercion could be exerted within households. In fiction concerned with wills, wards, and the circulation of wealth through marriage, the letter of the law becomes plot-engine: a clandestine union may jeopardize an inheritance; a trust deed might limit a profligate heir; a wife’s separate property can embolden or imperil her choices. Wyllard’s Weird leverages this legal environment to dramatize negotiations around settlements and legitimacy, showing how a woman’s fortune could provoke rivalry, how guardianship could be contested, and how moral authority and legal authority did not always coincide. The narrative’s tensions over consent, reputation, and material independence thereby echo parliamentary reforms whose dates—1857, 1870, 1882, 1886—map directly onto the evolving possibilities and perils faced by Braddon’s heroines.
The professionalization of policing and criminal investigation marked the period. The Metropolitan Police established a Detective Branch in 1842; after a corruption scandal, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) was reorganized in 1878. High-profile cases—Road Hill House (1860), the Charles Bravo poisoning (1876), and the Pimlico Mystery (1886)—fed public fascination with domestic crime, toxicology, and circumstantial evidence. Telegraphic circulars, photographic portraits, and nascent forensic methods tightened nets around suspects while fueling sensational journalism. The novel resonates with this milieu: private inquiries, contested testimony, and the social theater of suspicion reflect a culture where detection became both institutional practice and drawing-room obsession.
Political reform and imperial debates shaped everyday alignments. The Representation of the People Act 1884 expanded the franchise to rural householders and lodgers on terms similar to boroughs, followed by the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885, which redrew constituencies. The Irish Land War (1879–1882), led by the Land League (Michael Davitt) with Parliamentary leadership from Charles Stewart Parnell, and the Phoenix Park murders (1882) roiled British politics, culminating in Gladstone’s First Home Rule Bill (1886). Country houses and clubs buzzed with partisanship as newspapers polarized opinion. The novel’s conversations about loyalty, rank, and obligation mirror these tensions, showing county society adapting to broader electorates and fraught imperial questions.
As social and political critique, the book dissects how respectability masks coercion and how legal reforms fail to eradicate material dependence. It exposes the fragility of status when capital markets falter, the moral compromises forged by debt and entail, and the asymmetries that persist despite women’s expanded property rights. By pitting provincial codes against metropolitan mobility and investigative publicity, it questions who controls narrative truth in a world of telegraphs and gossip. The result is an indictment of class complacency and patriarchal guardianship, using inheritance, secrecy, and surveillance to reveal the era’s structural injustices rather than merely individual failings.
Wyllard's Weird (Mystery Classics Series)
Chapter 1. In A Cornish Valley.
There are some travellers who think when they cross the Tamar[1], over that fairy bridge of Brunel’s[2], hung aloft between the blue of the river and the blue of the sky, that they have left England behind them on the eastern shore—that they have entered a new country, almost a new world. This land of quiet woods and lonely valleys, and bold brown hills, barren, solitary—these wild commons and large moorlands of Cornwall seem to stand apart, as they did in the days gone by, when this province was verily a kingdom, complete in itself, and owning no sovereignty but its own.
It is a beautiful region which the traveller sees, perchance for the first time, as the train skims athwart the quaint little waterside village of Saltash, and pierces the rich depths of the woodland, various, enchanting. Now the line seems strung like a thread of iron in mid-air above a deep gorge, now winds sinuous as a snake through a labyrinth of hills. A picturesque bit of road, this between Plymouth and Bodmin Road, at all times; but, perhaps, loveliest in the still evening hour, when the summer sunset steeps the land in golden light, while the summer wind scarcely stirs the woods.
In the mellow light of a July eventide the express from Paddington swept with slackened speed round the curve which marked the approach to a viaduct between Saltash and Bodmin Road—a heavy wooden structure, spanning a vale of Alpine beauty. An exquisite little bit of scenery, upon which the stranger is apt to look with some touch of fear mingled in the cup of his delight: but to the dweller in the district, familiar with every yard of the journey, the transit is as nothing. He is carried through the air serenely, as he smokes his cigar and reads his paper, and the notion of peril never occurs to him.
One man, sitting by the window of a third-class carriage near the end of the train, looked out at the familiar scene dreamily to-night. He was an elderly, gray-headed man, a parish doctor, hard-worked and poorly paid; but he had a keen eye for the beautiful in Nature, dead or living, and familiar as this spot was to his eye, it always impressed him. He sat with his face to the engine, puffing lazily at his black briarwood, and gazing at the landscape, in that not unpleasant condition of bodily and mental fatigue, when the mind seems half asleep, and the external world is little more than a dream-picture.
The train was not a long one, a good many of the London coaches having been left behind at Plymouth. Dr. Menheniot put out his head, and surveyed the line of carriages as they rounded the curve. There was a figure here and there by a window; but the train seemed sparsely occupied. They were nearing the viaduct. That narrow thread of water trickling over its rocky bed in the depth of the gorge was in winter a rushing torrent. The line at this point was under repair, and the wooden palisade had been removed in the progress of the work. The actual danger was in nowise increased by the absence of this barrier, which would have crumbled like matchwood before the weight of the train, had the engine run off the rails—but there was a seeming insecurity to the eye of the traveller as he looked into the gulf below; and Dr. Menheniot gave an involuntary shudder. Another moment and the engine came on the viaduct. Menheniot started up with a half-articulate exclamation, “What, in God’s name—” he began.
He opened the carriage-door, seemed as if he were going to clamber out, to try and make his way along the footboard to a distant carriage, outside which a girl was standing, holding on to the brass hand-rail at the side of the door. She had that instant stepped out, or been thrust out; Menheniot knew not which. He had seen nothing till he saw her standing there, a slender figure in a light-coloured gown, thin draperies fluttering in the wind—standing there, hanging between life and death, a creature to be rescued somehow, were it at the hazard of a man’s life.
Before he could put himself in peril the chance of rescue was over. A wild shriek rang through the wood—a fluttering form went whirling down the ravine, flashing white athwart the sunlit greenery, and lay half buried amidst a tangle of ferns and wild flowers at the bottom of the gorge.
Twenty or thirty heads were thrust out of the windows. The train, which to Dr. Menheniot’s eye just now had seemed almost empty, was now alive with people. The engine slackened speed, and stopped at about a hundred yards from the scene of the catastrophe. A dozen men of different ages and qualities leaped out of the train and clambered down the embankment; among others Julian Wyllard, the Lord of the Manor of Penmorval—a man of middle age, soberly attired, a tall stately figure, a man of mark in this part of the country—before whom all gave way; except little Dr. Menheniot, who hurried on ahead, intent upon affording professional help, if such help could avail.
Julian Wyllard had been an athlete in his boyhood and youth. He walked down the steep, rugged hillside more easily than many men walk down Regent Street. At the bottom of the embankment every one fell back involuntarily, as it were, and allowed Mr. Wyllard to head the procession. They went as fast as it was possible to go over that broken ground, trampling down the ferns and flowers, the tiny scarlet strawberries, and crimson and orange fungi, as they went, every lip breathless, every eye strained towards that one spot in the hollow yonder where the doctor was hastening.
“No use, I fear,” said Mr. Wyllard, as if answering the common thought. “The poor creature must be quite dead.”
“What, in mercy’s name, made her do it?” speculated a burly farmer; “was she frighted, do you think, by some ruffian in the train; or did she want to make away with herself?”
The little cluster of passengers looked at one another curiously, as if seeking among those rustic countenances for the face of a scoundrel capable of assailing unprotected innocence. But if guilt were present in that assembly, there was no outward indication of the diabolical element. Almost every one there was known to the rest: small farmers, a squire or two, the elderly lawyer from Camelford, the curate of Wadebridge, a magistrate of Bodmin, a cornchandler and respectable inhabitant of the same town. Assuredly not among these would one look for that debased and savage humanity which is viler in its instincts than the wild beasts of the jungle.
There might be other passengers lurking in the train, among those loquacious women up yonder, who were all putting their heads out of windows, straining their necks to get their share in the pity and the terror of the tragedy down below.
Mr. Wyllard and his companions found little Dr. Menheniot on his knees beside the piteous figure lying in a heap, like a limp rag, among ferns and ground-ivy.
He had lifted the poor bruised head upon his arm, and he was looking down at the dead face, the open eyes gazing in the set stare of a great horror. Horror at the wretch who flung her down, or at that awful gulf of death self-sought? Who could tell? Those blood-bedabbled lips were mute for evermore, unless the dead could be conjured into speech.
“Is she quite gone?” asked Julian Wyllard, his compassionate countenance calm amidst the agitation of the little crowd.
That spectacle of sudden violent death was no new thing to his eyes. He had lived in Paris during the siege and the Commune, had seen the corpses laid out in long rows in the cemeteries, and piled in bloody heaps in the streets.
“Quite dead, and a blessed thing too,” answered the doctor. “I don’t believe she has a whole bone in her body. She could only have lingered a little while to suffer agonies. Her neck is broken. Poor little thing! She is quite a young creature and must have been pretty.”
Yes, it was a pretty little face, even in the pallor of death. A small retroussé[3] nose; large dark eyes, with long black lashes; pouting, childish lips; a delicately moulded figure, neatly dressed in light-gray alpaca, a linen collar cut low in the front and showing a good deal of the slim white throat, linen cuffs, long thread gloves, and little stuff boots.
“She looks like a furriner,” said Mr. Nicholls, the burly farmer who had speculated as to the cause of her death.
“Hadn’t somebody better examine her pockets for any papers which may identify her?” said a voice behind Wyllard.
It was the voice of a young man who had been the last to leave the train. He had followed the rest at a few paces’ distance, and had only just arrived to look at the dead girl over Wyllard’s shoulder.
“You here, Bothwell?” exclaimed Wyllard, turning quickly.
“Yes, I have been in Plymouth all day, and thought I’d get back by your train,” answered Bothwell Grahame easily. “Don’t you think they ought to examine her pockets?”
“Certainly; but it is a question as to whether it should be done now or later,” said Wyllard. “She was evidently travelling alone, poor creature, and she must have been in a compartment by herself, since nobody seems to know anything about her. The chief thing to be done is to get her carried on to Bodmin Road, where there must be an inquest.”
Everybody agreed that this was the voice of wisdom. Dr. Menheniot turned out the pocket of the neat alpaca gown. There was nothing but a handkerchief, a little bunch of keys, and a second-class railway ticket for Plymouth; no card-case or purse; not even an old letter to offer a clue to the dead girl’s personality. This done, the doctor arranged the poor dislocated form decently, and two sturdy men lifted it from the greenery, and carried it gently up the embankment to the train, where that unconscious clay was laid on the seat of an empty second-class compartment.
“It is the very carriage she was in,” said Bothwell, pointing to a torn strip of gray alpaca hanging on the metal handle. “Her gown must have caught on the handle as she fell, and this shred was left behind.”
Bothwell gave the bit of alpaca to Dr. Menheniot.
“You can show that to the Coroner,” he said; “of course, you will be a witness.”
“About the only one necessary, I should think,” said the doctor. “I saw her fall.”
“Did you?” exclaimed Wyllard. “That’s lucky! And what was your impression as to the manner of her fall—whether she deliberately threw herself out, or whether she was thrown out by a villain?”
This was asked in a lowered voice; since the murderer, if the deed were murder, might be within hearing.
“Upon my soul, I cannot tell,” protested Menheniot, with a troubled look. “The whole thing was so rapid. It passed like a flash. I was smoking, tired, in a dozy condition altogether, and this horrible thing seemed like a dream. I saw no other head at the carriage window. I saw nothing but that girl standing on the footboard as the train came on to the bridge; and then, all in a moment, I saw her whirling down into the gorge, like a feather blown out of a window. If it was suicide she certainly hesitated, for when I first saw her she was standing on the footboard, holding the hand-rail by the side of the door. She did not leap out of the train with one desperate deliberate spring. However determined she may have been to kill herself, she must have faltered in the act.”
“It would be only human to do so. Poor young thing—a mere child!” said Wyllard regretfully.
He talked apart with the guard, recommending that official to keep his eye upon the passengers who got out at Bodmin Road, and at all stations further down the line; to mark any man of ruffianly appearance or agitated demeanour; to give any such person in charge if he saw but the slightest reason for suspicion.
The passengers had resumed their seats by this time, and the train began to move slowly onward. The whole period of delay had not been twenty minutes, and the line between Plymouth and Penzance was tolerably clear at this hour. The train would be able to recover lost time before the end of the journey.
“You had better come into my carriage,” said Wyllard to the young man whom he had addressed as Bothwell.
“I have only a third-class ticket,” answered the other. “I’ve been smoking.”
“I never knew you doing anything else,” said Wyllard, with a touch of scorn. “Go back to your third-class carriage. No doubt you want another pipe.”
“I believe after that shock it will do me good,” replied the young man, producing his tobacco pouch on the instant, and beginning to fill his little clay pipe.
Mr. Wyllard went back to the compartment where he had been sitting at ease all day and alone. There is a mysterious power in the presence of such a man which, save in the stress of the tourist season, can generally secure solitude. The tourist season had not yet begun, and Mr. Wyllard was known to be good for half-a-crown, and never to offer less; so his particular compartment was sacred. Even bishops and notabilities of the land were hustled away from the door, beguiled by the promise of something better elsewhere.
He had strewed the carriage with newspapers and magazines, and now he began to collect all this literature and to strap it neatly together before arriving at his journey’s end. He was neat and methodical in all small matters, yet he was in nowise a prig or a pedant. His tall, powerful frame and strongly marked features were upon a large scale. He had a large brain and a large manner.
Look at him now as he sits in his corner of the luxurious carriage, against a background of light-drab cloth. A man in the prime of manhood, five-and-forty at most; a fine head well set off; light-brown hair, thick and silky, brushed aside from a broad square forehead, in which there are all the indications of intellectual power. Large, full blue eyes, whose normal expression is severe, but the expression softens when the man smiles, brightens and sparkles when the man laughs. He has a beautiful smile, a sonorous laugh, and a voice of power and compass rare among English voices. The features are firmly modelled, bold, massive; the mouth, when the lips are closely set, as they are just now, looks as if it were cut out of stone. A man likely to love profoundly, and not likely to hate lightly. A staunch friend, as everybody knows in this part of the country; but perchance a deadly foe were great provocation given; a man to keep a secret as closely as the grave. A man to give money as freely as if it were water.
The train stopped at Bodmin Road, in a picturesque valley, deep amidst pine-clothed hills, and adjoining a park of exceptional beauty. There was a quiet little roadside inn, about five minutes’ walk from the station, and to this strange hostelry the dead girl was conveyed, a shrouded form lying on a shutter, and carried by two railway-porters. She was laid in a darkened chamber at the back of the house, to await the advent of the Coroner, a gentleman of some importance, who lived ten miles off.
An open carriage was waiting for Julian Wyllard, and in the carriage sat a beautiful woman, smiling welcome upon him as he came out of the station. The dead girl had been carried out by another way. The lady in the carriage knew nothing of the tragedy.
“How late the train is this evening!” she said. “I was beginning to feel uneasy.”
“There has been an accident.”
“An accident! O, how dreadful! But you are not hurt?” she cried anxiously, looking at him from top to toe, suspicious of some deadly injury which he might be heroically concealing.
“No, it was not a railway accident. There is no one hurt except a poor girl who threw herself, or was thrown, out of the train.”
“How terrible!” exclaimed Mrs. Wyllard. “Is it any one we know—any one about here?”
“No, she is quite a stranger, poor child, and from her dress and general appearance I should take her to be a Frenchwoman. But we shall know more after the inquest.”
“How very sad! A stranger alone in a strange land, and to meet such a death! But do you really believe that any one threw her out of the train, Julian? That seems too horrible to be true.”
“My dear, I believe nothing. The poor creature’s fate is shrouded in mystery.[1q] Whether she killed herself or whether any one killed her is an open question. I told the guard and the station-master to be on the alert, and to stop any suspicious character. I shall call at the police-office as we drive through the town. Here is Bothwell,” added Wyllard, as the young man came sauntering lazily along. “Did you know that he had gone to Plymouth?”
“Not I,” replied Mrs. Wyllard. “He did not appear at luncheon, but as he is always erratic I did not even wonder about him. What took you to Plymouth this morning, Bothwell?” she asked, as her cousin came up to the carriage door.
They were first cousins, and it was his cousinship with Julian Wyllard’s beautiful wife which secured Bothwell Grahame free quarters at Penmorval. They were children of twin sisters who had loved each other with more than common love, who had seldom been parted till death parted them untimely. Bothwell’s mother was cut off in the flower of her youth and beauty, leaving her only child an infant, and her husband a broken-hearted man. Captain Grahame went to India with his regiment, less than a year after his wife’s death, to fight and fall in the Punjaub, and Bothwell, the orphan, was brought up by his mother’s sister, Mrs. Tregony Dalmaine, at a fine old manor-house near the Land’s End.
He was two years younger than Theodora Dalmaine, and he was to the child as a younger brother. They were brought up together, played together, and shared the same schoolroom and the same governess, till Bothwell was drafted off to Woolwich, having set his heart upon being a soldier, and in his father’s regiment. The bright, quick-witted girl was considerably in advance of the boy in all their mutual studies. She was industrious where he was idle, for it must be owned that even in the beginning of things Bothwell was somewhat scampish in his mind and habits.
He did pretty well at Woolwich—passed his examinations respectably, if not with éclat. His heart was set upon soldiering, and he did not object to work when his heart was in the labour. He was a good soldier, and one of the most popular men in his regiment. He saw a good deal of service in Afghanistan, as an officer of Engineers, not without distinction: but he came to grief, in spite of his many good qualities. He squandered every shilling of his small patrimony, got into debt, and finally left the army, and thus dropped out of that one career for which nature and education had especially fitted him, turned aside from the one path which might have led him to fame and honour. And now he was an idler, without place or station in the world, money, or repute, an encumbrance and a burden to his family, as he told himself every day. He had vague ideas of chalking out a career for himself; had visions of colonial paradises, where he might do wonders; was always devising some new plan, inclining to some new place; but his aspirations had not yet taken any tangible form. He was continually falling in with some new adviser, who wrenched all his ideas out of the soil in which they had taken root, and transplanted them to another locality.
“Spanish America!” said Smith; “don’t think of it. You would be dead in a week. Have you never heard of the vomito negro[4], the deadliest disease known to man? Otaheite is the place for you! A superb climate, a new area for an enterprising young Englishman! You would make your fortune in three years.”
Then came Jones, who laughed at the notion of the South Sea Islands, and advised Bothwell to get a tract of waste land, near the mouth of the Gironde, and grow fir-trees, and export their resin; that was the one certain road to fortune. You had first your resin, a large annual revenue, and then you had your timber for railway sleepers, returning cent per cent. Bothwell did not venture to ask how you got your resin after you had sold your timber.
Anon came Robinson, who recommended Canada and the lumber trade; and after him Brown, who declared that the only theatre for intelligent youth was the interior of Africa. In the multitude of counsellors there is wisdom, says Scripture; but Bothwell found that in the multitude of counsellors there is bewilderment akin to madness. He had an honest desire to get his own living; but so far uncertainty as to the manner of getting it had barred the way to fortune.
“What took me to Plymouth?” he repeated. “Upon my word, I hardly know. It was so deadly quiet at Penmorval this morning. I wanted to hear the voices of my fellow-men. I went third class, you know, Dora. It wasn’t a very extravagant proceeding,” he murmured confidentially. “Shall I ride on the box?”
“You had better come inside,” said Wyllard; “there is plenty of room;” whereupon Bothwell took the back seat of the barouche, opposite his cousin and her husband.
Bodmin town was some miles from Bodmin Road, a lovely drive in the tranquil July eventide; but both those men were haunted by the vision of that dead face, those dislocated limbs, hanging loosely, like a dead stag hauled along by huntsman and whip, while the hounds cluster round their prey. An event so terrible was not to be dismissed lightly.
“I wonder who she was, and where she was going?” said Bothwell.
“Some little nursery governess, I daresay, going to her situation.”
“In that case we shall hear all about her at the inquest. She will have been expected, and her employers will come to the fore.”
“What a terrible thing for her parents, if they are living; most of all for her poor mother!” said Mrs. Wyllard.
She pronounced the last word with peculiar softness. She had an exalted idea of the sacredness of the relationship between mother and child. She had passionately loved her own mother; had passionately longed for a child in the earlier years of her wedded life. But she had been a wife seven years, and no child had lived to bless her. A son had been born within a year of her marriage—born only to die: and now she had left off hoping that she would ever be called upon this earth by the dear name of mother.
They drove past familiar woods and hills, ferny dells, and limpid brooks. They saw the great brown tors standing afar off against the amber sky: but that one haunting thought of a horrible death spoiled all the beauty of the scene. They had no eyes for the landscape, but sat in serious silence.
Mr. Wyllard alighted at the Bodmin police-station, and spent about ten minutes in conversation with the Inspector, who was at once shocked and elated on hearing of the strange death on the railway. He was shocked at the horror of the thing; he was elated at the idea of an inquiry and investigation which might result in honour and profit to himself.
Mrs. Wyllard sat in the carriage with Bothwell, while her husband and the official conversed gravely on the threshold of the station-house. Bothwell talked about the girl and her mysterious death. He described the poor little white face, the look of horror in that glassy stare of death.
“Did she look like a lady?” asked Dora, full of painful interest.
“Hardly, I think. She had that pretty, neat appearance which one sees in French girls of a class just a little above the grisette. Her frock, and her boots, and her cotton gloves must all have suited herself and her station to a nicety. There was no touch of that vulgar finery which makes a half-bred English girl odious. I daresay Wyllard is right, and that she was a poor little governess, going out into a strange land to earn her bread and learn a foreign language. There are thousands who go out every year, I have no doubt; only this one has contrived to jump into notoriety and an early grave at the same time. By Jove! here comes the Coroner. We shall be the first to tell him that he will be wanted tomorrow.”
Mrs. Wyllard blushed faintly as she turned to look at an approaching horseman. She had not, even to this day, left off blushing at any sudden mention of Edward Heathcote’s name; and yet it was seven years since she had jilted him in order to marry Julian Wyllard.
A sad story, all forgiven now, if not forgotten. A deep wrong done by a noble-hearted woman to a noble-hearted man. It was the one act of Theodora Wyllard’s life which she could not look back upon without remorse. In all other relations of life she had been perfect—devoted daughter, devoted wife. But in this one thing she had sinned. This man had loved her faithfully, fondly, from the dawn of her girlish beauty, from the beginning of her womanly grace. She had accepted his love, and had seemed to herself to return it, measure for measure. She had looked forward to the years when they two would be one. And then, in a fatal hour, another face flashed across the foreground of her life—a new voice thrilled her ear—an influence was exercised over her which she had never felt before, a power too potent for resistance—and, in a moment of passionate self-abandonment, she knelt at Edward Heathcote’s feet, and confessed her love for another. Julian Wyllard had broken down all barriers, had asked her to be his wife, knowing her to be engaged to another man. But there are those who think that a great irresistible love outweighs all scruples of honour or conscience.
“Why do you ask me for your freedom, as if it were so great a favour?” Heathcote said bitterly, as he lifted her up from her knees. “Do you think I would have you—this mere beautiful clay—now that your heart has gone from me? Do you think I, who love you a hundred times better than I love myself, would stand between you and happiness? You are free, Dora. I have seen this misery coming upon me ever since this stranger came into your mother’s house.”
“And you will forgive me?” she pleaded, with clasped hands, looking at him with streaming eyes, sorry for him, deeply ashamed of her infidelity.
“Can I be angry with you, loving you as I do? God forgive you, Dora, for all your sins, large or small, as freely as I forgive your sin against me.”
He kissed her unresisting lips for the last time, and so left her, as nearly broken-hearted as a man can be and yet recover.
He did recover, or was, at any rate, supposed to be cured, since, two years after Theodora Dalmaine’s wedding, he married a fair young girl, penniless, friendless, and an orphan; a wife who loved him as he deserved to be loved, and who, after less than two years of wedded life, died, leaving two children, twin daughters. It was three years since the grave had closed upon her, and Edward Heathcote was still a widower, and was believed to have no thought of marriage.
He came riding slowly along the street in the fading light, a man of striking appearance, mounted on a fine horse, a man of about three-and-thirty, tall, broad-shouldered. He had a dark complexion, and dark-brown hair, deep-set gray eyes, which looked almost black under dark heavy brows, an aquiline nose, a heavy moustache and beard.
He had begun life as a younger son, and had practised for some years as a solicitor in the town of Plymouth—had been town clerk and a man of public importance in that place—when his elder brother died a bachelor, and Edward Heathcote inherited a snug little estate near Bodmin, with a curious old country house called The Spaniards. The place had been so named on account of the Spanish chestnuts which flourished there in exceeding beauty. On becoming owner of The Spaniards, and the estate that went with it, Edward Heathcote retired from the law, and went to live at the place of his birth, where he looked after the well-being of his baby girls and his young sister, and let his days glide by in the quiet monotony of a country squire’s life, hunting and shooting, sitting in judgment upon poachers and small defaulters at petty sessions, and acting as coroner for his division of the county. He had been leading this life of rural respectability for a year.
He rode up to the carriage and shook hands with Mrs. Wyllard. He was her neighbour, and had visited Penmorval during the last year. There had never been the faintest indication in his manner or his speech that Julian Wyllard’s wife was any more to him than a friend. He was pleased to visit her, anxious that she should be interested in his motherless children, pleased to confide his plans and his thoughts to her. Time had sobered his enthusiasm about all things, and had softened all bitter memories. He took life now as a gentle legato movement. He had lived and suffered, and done his duty, and that which was left to him was rest. He sat down among his fields and his vineyards to take his ease just a little earlier than other men, that was all. A great sorrow suffered in the morning of life ages a man by at least a decade.
“Why are you waiting outside the station-house?” he asked; “have you had an alarm of burglars at Penmorval?”
“It is something much worse than that,” answered Mrs. Wyllard gravely; and then Bothwell related the catastrophe on the railway.
Julian Wyllard came back to the carriage just as the story was finished.
“This will be a job for you, Heathcote,” he said.
“A very sad one. The story has a brutal sound to me, remembering past stories of the same kind,” answered Heathcote. “It shall not be my fault if the ruffian escapes.”
“You think there is a ruffian, then? You don’t take it for a case of suicide?”
“Decidedly not,” replied the other promptly. “Why should a girl choose such a death as that?”
“Why should a girl throw herself off the Monument?” asked Wyllard. “Yet we know girls had a rage for doing that, fifty years ago. However, you will have a good opportunity for the display of your legal acumen in a really mysterious case. I did all I could in my small way to put the officials on the alert along the line; and if any scoundrel had a hand in that poor child’s death, I don’t believe he will get off easily. Where are you riding?”
“Only for an evening stroll over the downs.”
“You had better come home and have supper with us. It will be too late to call it dinner.”
“You are very good, but I dined at seven. Besides, I shall have to arrange about this inquest for tomorrow. I’ll talk to Morris, and then ride on to the Vital Spark, and settle matters with the people there.”
The Vital Spark was the small roadside inn where the dead girl was lying. The Penmorval barouche drove off, while Edward Heathcote stopped to talk to Morris, the Inspector. The jury would have to get notice early next morning. The inquest was to be held at five in the afternoon. This would give time for the tradesmen to get away from their shops. The chief business of the day in Bodmin town would be over.
“It will give time for any one in this neighbourhood, who knows anything about the girl, to come forward,” added Mr. Heathcote. “If she was going to a situation in this part of the world, as Mr. Wyllard suggests, some one must know all about her.”
“What a man he is, Mr. Heathcote!” said the Inspector admiringly. “Such clearness, such decision; always to the point.”
“Yes, he is a very superior man,” answered Heathcote heartily.
He had schooled himself long ago to generous thoughts about his rival. It pleased him to know that Dora had been lucky in her choice, that she had not taken a scorpion into her bosom when she preferred another man to himself. He had wondered sometimes—in a mere idle wonder, when he saw her in her beautiful home at Penmorval—whether it would have been possible for him to make her life happier than Julian Wyllard had made it; whether in his uttermost adoration he could ever have been a better husband to her than Julian Wyllard had been. He had looked searchingly for any flaw in the perfection of that union, and he had perceived none. He was generous-minded enough to be glad that it was so.
The carriage drove slowly up a long hill, and across a wide expanse of heathy ground, before it entered the gate of Penmorval, which was two miles from the town. It was a beautiful old place, standing on high ground, yet so richly wooded as to be shut in from the outer world. Only the Cornish giants, Roughtor and Brown Willie, showed their dark crests above the broad belt of timber which surrounded the good old Tudor mansion. A double avenue of elms and yews led to the old stone porch. The long stone façade facing northward looked out upon a level lawn divided from the park by a haw haw. The southern front was curtained with roses and myrtle, and looked upon one of the loveliest gardens in Cornwall—a garden which had been the pride and delight of many generations—a garden for which the wives and dowagers of three centuries of Cornish squires had laboured and thought. Nowhere could be found more glorious roses, or such a treasury of out-of-the-way flowers, from the finest to the simplest that grows. Nowhere did April sunlight shine upon such tulips and hyacinths, nowhere did June crown herself with fairer lilies, or autumn flaunt in greater splendour of dahlias, hollyhocks, and chrysanthemums. The soil teemed with flowers. There was no room left for a weed.
For a childless wife like Dora Wyllard a garden such as this is a kind of spurious family. She has her hopes, her fears, her raptures and anxieties about her roses and chrysanthemums, just as mothers have about their girls and boys. She counts the blossoms on a particular Gloire de Dijon. She remembers the cruel winter when that superb John Hopper succumbed to the frost. She has her nostrums and remedies for green-fly, as mothers have for measles. That glorious old garden helped to fill the cup of Mrs. Wyllard’s happiness, for it gave her inexhaustible employment. Having such a garden she could never say, with the languid yawn of the idle and the prosperous, “What can I do with myself today?” But Dora was not dependent on her garden for occupation. Exacting as the roses and lilies were, manifold as were the cares of the hothouses and ferneries and wildernesses, Mrs. Wyllard’s husband was more exacting still. When Julian was at home she could give but little time to her garden. He could hardly bear his wife to be out of his sight for half an hour. She had to be interested in all his schemes, all his letters, even to the driest business details. She rode and drove with him, and, as he had no taste for field sports, neither his guns nor his hunters took him away from her. He was a studious man, a man of artistic temperament, a lover of curious books and fine bindings, a lover of pictures and statues, and porcelain and enamels—a worshipper of the beautiful in every form. His tastes were such as a woman could easily and naturally share with him. This made their union all the more complete. Other wives wondered at beholding such domestic sympathy. There were some whose husbands could not sit by the domestic hearth ten minutes without dismal yawnings, men who depended upon newspapers for all their delight, men whose minds were always in the stable. Julian Wyllard was an ideal husband, who never yawned in a tête-à-tête with his wife, who shared every joy and every thought with the woman of his choice.
To-night, when they two sat down to the half-past, nine o’clock meal, with Bothwell, who was not much worse than a Newfoundland dog, for their sole companion, the wife’s first question showed her familiarity with the business that had taken her husband to London.
“Well, Julian, did you get the Raffaelle?” she asked.
“No, dear. The picture went for just three times the value I had put upon it.”
“And you did not care to give such a price?”
“Well, no. There are limits, even for a monomaniac like me. I had allowed myself a margin. I was prepared to give a hundred or two over the thousand which I had put down as the price of the picture; but when it went up to fifteen hundred I retired from the contest, and it was finally knocked down to Lamb, the dealer, for two thousand guineas. A single figure—a half-length figure of Christ bearing the cross, against a background of vivid blue sky. But such divinity in the countenance, such pathetic eyes! I saw women turn away with tears after they had looked at that picture.”
“You ought to have bought it,” said Dora, who knew that her husband had a great deal more money than he could spend, and who thought that he had a right to indulge his own caprices.
“My dearest, as I said before, there are limits,” he answered, smiling at her enthusiasm.
“Then you had your journey, and I had to endure the loss of your society for three dreary days, all for nothing?” said Dora.
“Not quite for nothing. There was the pleasure of seeing a very fine collection of pictures, and some magnificent Limoges enamels. I succeeded in buying you a little Greuze. I am told by French art-critics that it is a low thing to admire Greuze, the sign of a vulgar mind. He is the painter of the bourgeois, the épicier. But, for all that, you and I have agreed to like Greuze; so I bought this little picture for your morning-room. I got it for five hundred and fifty, and I believe it is a genuine bit in the painter’s best manner.”
“How good you are to me!” exclaimed Dora, getting up and going over to her husband.
She bent down to kiss him as he sat at the table. They had dismissed the servants from this informal meal, so Mrs. Wyllard was not afraid of being considered eccentric, if she showed that she was grateful. She did not mind Bothwell. Five hundred and fifty! How freely this rich man talked of his hundreds, as it seemed to Bothwell, pinched by the consciousness of debts which the cost of that picture would have covered—little seedlings of debts, scattered long ago by the wayside, and putting forth perennial flowers in the shape of unpleasant letters from creditors, which made him hate the sight of the postman.
Neither Wyllard nor Grahame ate a hearty meal. That picture of the dead face was too vividly present in the minds of both. Meat and drink and pleasant talk were out of harmony with that horror which both had looked upon three hours ago. They took more wine than usual, and hardly ate anything.
“Will you come for a stroll in the garden, Julian?” asked Dora, as they rose from the table.
It was half-past ten o’clock, a lovely summer night. A great golden moon was shining low down in the purple sky, just above the bank of foliage: not that far-off moon which belongs to all the world, but a big yellow lamp lighting one’s own garden.
“Do come,” she said, “it is such a delicious night.”
“I dare not indulge myself, dear; I have my letters to open before I go to bed. I was just going to order a fire in the library.”
“A fire, on such a night as this! I’m afraid you have caught cold.”
“I think it not unlikely,” answered her husband, as he rang the bell.
“Don’t you think your letters might keep till tomorrow morning, Julian?” pleaded Dora. “We could have a fire in the morning-room, and sit and talk.”
“That would be delightful, but I must not allow myself to be tempted. I should not rest to-night with the idea of a pile of unopened letters.”
He gave his orders to the servant. His letters and papers were all on the library table. A fire was to be lighted there immediately.
“You will be late, I am afraid,” said Dora.
“I may be a little late. Don’t wait up for me on any account, dearest. Goodnight!”
He kissed her; and she said good-night, but reserved her liberty to sit up for him all the same. There is no use in a husband saying to a wife of Mrs. Wyllard’s temperament, “Don’t sit up for me, and don’t worry yourself!” Sleep was impossible to Dora until she knew that her husband was at rest; just as happiness was impossible to her when parted from him. She had made herself a part of his being, had merged her very existence in his; she had no value, hardly any individuality, apart from him.
“Julian looks tired and anxious,” she said to her cousin, who stood smoking a cigarette just outside the window.
“You can’t be surprised at that,” answered Bothwell. “That business on the railway was enough to make any man feel queer. I shall not forget it for a long time.”
“It must have been an awful shock. And men with strong features and powerful frames are sometimes more sensitive than your fragile beings with nervous temperaments,” said Dora. “I have often been struck with Julian’s morbid feeling about things which a strong man might be supposed to regard with indifference.”
“He is a deuced good fellow,” said Bothwell, who had been more generously treated by his cousin’s husband than by any of his own clan. “Won’t you come for a turn in the garden? I won’t start another cigarette, if you object.”
“You know I don’t mind smoke,” she answered, joining him. “Why, how your hand shakes, Bothwell! You can hardly light your cigarette.”
“Didn’t I say that I was upset by that business? I don’t suppose I shall sleep a wink to-night.”
They walked in the rose-garden for more than an hour. Garden and night were both alike ideal. An Italian garden, with formal terraces, and beds of roses, and a fountain in the centre, a bold and plenteous jet that rose from a massive marble basin. Roses, magnolia, jasmine, and Mary-lilies filled the air with perfume. The moon had changed from gold to silver, and was high up in heaven.
It was everybody’s moon now, silvering the humble roofs of Bodmin, shining over the church, the gaol, the lunatic asylum, and shining on that humble village inn five or six miles away, beneath whose rustic roof the stranger was lying, with no one to pray beside her bed.
