Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  “I meant to set up the Arden family in my person. I should have taken the name. My father relented on his deathbed, and left me his money. I went to New York, and received it. I made a new start in life. On the Bourse in Paris, and in Vienna, I made a fortune by speculation; I improved it in London. You may take it all by my will. Do with half the interest as you please, during your lifetime. The other half pay to Miss Alice Arden, and the entire capital you are to secure to her on your death.

  “I had taken assignments of all the mortgages affecting the Arden estates. They must go to Miss Arden, and be secured unalienably to her.

  “My life has been arduous and direful. That miserable crime hung over me, and its dangers impeded me at every turn.

  “You have played your game well, but with all the odds of the position in your favour. I am tired, beaten. The match is over, and you may rise now and say Checkmate.

  “WALTER LONGCLUSE.”

  That Longcluse had committed suicide, of course I can have no doubt. It must have been effected by some unusually subtle poison. The post-mortem examination failed to discover its presence. But there was found in his desk a curious paper, in French, published about five months before, upon certain vegetable poisons, whose presence in the system no chemical test detects, and no external trace records. This paper was noted here and there on the margin, and had been obviously carefully read. Any of these tinctures he could without much trouble have procured from Paris. But no distinct light was ever thrown upon this inquiry.

  In a small and lonely house, tenanted by Longcluse, in the then less crowded region of Richmond, were found proofs, no longer needed, of Longcluse’s identity, both with the horseman who had met Paul Davies on Hampstead Heath, and the person who crossed the Channel from Southampton with David Arden, and afterwards met him in the streets of Paris, as we have seen. There he had been watching his movements, and traced him, with dreadful suspicion, to the house of Vanboeren. The turn of a die had determined the fate of David Arden that night. Longcluse had afterwards watched and seized an opportunity of entering Vanboeren’s house. He knew that the baron expected the return of his messenger, rang the bell, and was admitted. The old servant had gone to her bed, and was far away in that vast house.

  Longcluse would have stabbed him, but the baron recognised him, and sprang back with a yell. Instantly Longcluse had used his revolver; but before he could make assurance doubly sure, his quick ear detected a step outside. He then made his exit through a window into a deserted lane at the side of the house, and had not lost a moment in commencing his flight for London.

  With respect to the murder of Lebas, the letter of Longcluse pretty nearly explains it. That unlucky Frenchman had attended him through his recovery under the hands of Vanboeren; and Longcluse feared to trust, as it now might turn out, his life, in his giddy keeping. Of course, Lebas had no idea of the nature of his crime, or that in England was the scene of its perpetration. Longcluse had made up his mind promptly on the night of the billiard-match played in the Saloon Tavern. When every eye was fixed upon the balls, he and Lebas met, as they had ultimately agreed, in the smoking-room. A momentary meeting it was to have been. The dagger which he placed in his keeping, Longcluse plunged into his heart. In the stream of blood that instantaneously flowed from the wound Longcluse stepped, and made one distinct impression of his boot-sole on the boards. A tracing of this Paul Davies had made, and had got the signatures of two or three respectable Londoners before the room filled, attesting its accuracy, he affecting, while he did so, to be a member of the detective police, from which body, for a piece of over-cleverness, he had been only a few weeks before dismissed. Having made his tracing, he obscured the blood-mark on the floor.

  The opportunity of distinguishing himself at his old craft, to the prejudice of the force, whom he would have liked to mortify, while earning, perhaps, his own restoration, was his first object. The delicacy of the shape of the boot struck him next. He then remembered having seen Longcluse — and his was the only eye that observed him — pass swiftly from the passage leading to the smoking-room at the beginning of the game. His mind had now matter to work upon; and hence his visit to Bolton Street to secure possession of the boot, which he did by an audacious ruse.

  His subsequent interview with Mr. Longcluse, in presence of David Arden, was simply a concerted piece of acting, on which Longcluse, when he had made his terms with Davies, insisted, as a security against the reopening of the extortion.

  Nothing will induce Alice to accept one farthing of Longcluse’s magnificent legacy. Secretly Uncle David is resolved to make it up to her from his own wealth, which is very great.

  Richard Arden’s story is not known to any living person but the Jew Levi, and vaguely to his sister, in whose mind it remains as something horrible, but never approached.

  Levi keeps the secret for reasons more cogent than charitable. First he kept it to himself as a future instrument of profit. But on his insinuating something that promised such relations to Sir Richard, the young gentleman met it with so bold a front, with fury so unaffected, and with threats so alarming, founded upon a trifling matter of which the Jew had never suspected his knowledge, that Mr. Levi has not ventured either to “utilise” his knowledge, in a profitable way, or afterwards to circulate the story for the solace of his malice. They seem, in Mr. Rooke’s phrase, to have turned their backs on one another; and as some years have passed, and lapse of time does not improve the case of a person in Mr. Levi’s position, we may safely assume that he will never dare to circulate any definite stories to Sir Richard’s prejudice. A sufficient motive, indeed, for doing so exists no longer, for Sir Richard, who had lived an unsettled life travelling on the Continent, and still playing at foreign tables when he could afford it, died suddenly at Florence in the autumn of ‘69.

  Vivian Darnley has been in “the House,” now, nearly four years. Uncle David is very proud of him; and more impartial people think that he will, at last, take an honourable place in that assembly. His last speech has been spoken of everywhere with applause. David Arden’s immensely increased wealth enables him to entertain very magnificent plans for this young man. He intends that he shall take the name of Arden, and earn the transmission of the title, or the distinction of a greater one.

  A year ago Vivian Darnley married Alice Arden, and no two people can be happier.

  Lady May, although her girlish ways have not forsaken her, has no present thoughts of making any man happy. She had a great cry all to herself when Sir Richard died, and she now persuades herself that he never meant one word he said of her, and that if the truth were known, although after that day she never spoke to him more, he had never really cared for more than one woman on earth. It was all spite of that odious Lady Wynderbroke!

  Alice has never seen Mortlake since the night of her flight from its walls.

  The two old servants, Crozier and Martha Tansey, whose acquaintance we made in that suburban seat of the Ardens, are both, I am glad to say, living still, and extremely comfortable.

  Phœbe Chiffinch, I am glad to add, was jilted by her uninteresting lover, who little knew what a fortune he was slighting. His desertion does not seem to have broken her heart, or at all affected her spirits. The gratitude of Alice Arden has established her in the prosperous little Yorkshire town, the steep roof, chimneys, and church tower of which are visible, among the trees, from the windows of Arden Court. She is the energetic and popular proprietress of the “Cat and Fiddle,” to which thriving inn, at a nominal rent, a valuable farm is attached. A fortune of two thousand pounds from the same grateful friend awaits her marriage, which can’t be far off, with the handsome son of rich Farmer Shackleton.

  THE END

  THE ROSE AND THE KE

  Y

  This sensation novel was first published in three volumes by Chapman and Hall in 1871, following its serialisation in Charles Dickens’s journal All the Year Round. It is a shocking examination of the horrors and misdemeanours of the private Vict
orian lunatic asylum, to which many inmates (especially women) were often feared to have been wrongly confined. Such a theme would have been familiar to contemporary readers from other sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859). As well as a typical sensation novel it is also an example of the Victorian ‘social problem’ novel, in which fictional stories were used to highlight potential abuses in the social and legal system. The story builds up an atmosphere of dread gradually as the heroine, Maud, becomes increasingly aware of the terrible forces closing in upon her from within her own family (in the form of the machinations of her mother Lady Vernon) and from foreign intruders (notably the powerful mesmerist Doctor Antomarchi).

  The first single volume edition of the novel

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III.

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  CHAPTER XI.

  CHAPTER XII.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  CHAPTER XV.

  CHAPTER XVI.

  CHAPTER XVII.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  CHAPTER XIX.

  CHAPTER XX.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  CHAPTER XXV.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  CHAPTER XXX.

  CHAPTER XXXI.

  CHAPTER XXXII.

  CHAPTER XXXIII.

  CHAPTER XXXIV.

  CHAPTER XXXV.

  CHAPTER XXXVI.

  CHAPTER XXXVII.

  CHAPTER XXXVIII.

  CHAPTER XXXIX.

  CHAPTER XL.

  CHAPTER XLI.

  CHAPTER XLII.

  CHAPTER XLIII.

  CHAPTER XLIV.

  CHAPTER XLV.

  CHAPTER XLVI.

  CHAPTER XLVII.

  CHAPTER XLVIII.

  CHAPTER XLIX.

  CHAPTER L.

  CHAPTER LI.

  CHAPTER LII.

  CHAPTER LIII.

  CHAPTER LIV.

  CHAPTER LV.

  CHAPTER LVI.

  CHAPTER LVII.

  CHAPTER LVIII.

  CHAPTER LIX.

  CHAPTER LX.

  CHAPTER LXI.

  CHAPTER LXII.

  CHAPTER LXIII.

  CHAPTER LXIV.

  CHAPTER LXV.

  CHAPTER LXVI.

  CHAPTER LXVII.

  CHAPTER LXVIII.

  CHAPTER LXIX.

  CHAPTER LXX.

  CHAPTER LXXI.

  CHAPTER LXXII.

  CHAPTER LXXIII.

  CHAPTER LXXIV.

  CHAPTER LXXV.

  CHAPTER LXXVI.

  CHAPTER LXXVII.

  CHAPTER LXXVIII.

  CHAPTER LXXIX.

  CHAPTER LXXX.

  CHAPTER LXXXI.

  CHAPTER LXXXII.

  CHAPTER LXXXIII.

  CHAPTER LXXXIV.

  CHAPTER LXXXV.

  CHAPTER LXXXVI.

  CONCLUSION.

  A rare complete set of All the Year Round from 1871 – Charles Dickens’s journal, in which the novel was initially serialised

  CHAPTER I.

  UNOCULUS.

  The level light of a summer sunset, over a broad heath, is brightening its brown undulations with a melancholy flush, and turning all the stalks of heather in the foreground into twisted sticks of gold. Insect wings sparkle dimly in the air; the lagging bee drones homeward, and a wide drift of crows, cawing high and faint, show like shadows against the sea-green sky, flecked with soft crimson, as they sail away to the distant dormitories of Westwold Forest.

  Toward the sunset end of this savage heath stand four gigantic fir-trees, casting long shadows. One, indeed, is little more than a rotten stump, some twelve feet high; all bend eastwards, shorn of their boughs nearly to the top, and stretching the arms that remain, some yellow and stripped of their bark, in the same direction, as if they all signalled to the same distant point. These slanting fir-trees look like the masts of a mighty wreck; and antiquaries say that they are the monumental relics of a forest that lies buried under the peat.

  A young lady, her dress of dark serge, with a small black straw-hat, a little scarlet feather in it, and wearing a pair of boots, such as a country artist might produce, made of good strong leather, with thick soles, but, in spite of coarse work and clumsy material, showing a wonderfully pretty little foot, is leaning lightly against one of these great firs. Her companion, an elderly lady, slight and merry, sits on a little hillock of turf at her feet.

  The dress of the elder lady corresponds with that of the younger. It is that of a person inured to the practice of a strict but not uncomfortable economy.

  The young lady has dropped a little japanned colour-box and a block-book at her feet. Is she an artist? Possibly a governess? At all events, she is one of the loveliest creatures eyes ever lighted on. Is there any light more becoming than that low, richly tinted beam, that comes subdued through the mists of sunset?

  With a pleased look — the listening look which such spiritual delight assumes — with parted lips, the light touching the edge of her little teeth, with eyes a-glow with rapture, drinking in the splendour and beauty of the transitory hour and scene, as if she could look on in silence and beatitude for ever, the girl leans her little shoulder to the ancient tree.

  With a long sigh, she says at last:

  “I was going to ask your forgiveness, dear old cousin Max.”

  “For what?” asked the old lady, turning up a face pleasantly illuminated with the golden light.

  “For making you take so long a walk. I’m a little tired myself. But I don’t beg your pardon, because I think this more than makes amends. Let us look for a minute more, before all fades.”

  The old lady stood up, with a little shrug and screw of her shoulders.

  “So I am — quite stiff — my old bones do complain; but oh, really, it is quite beautiful! I see it so much better standing here; that bank was in my way. How splendid — gorgeous!”

  The scene was indeed worth a detour in their homeward route. Two grand and distant ranges of mountain, approaching from right and left, stop short in precipitous terminations that resemble the confronting castles of two gigantic lines of fortification, leaving an undulating plane between, with the sunset sky, and piles of flaming cloud, for a horizon; and, in the comparatively near foreground, rises between these points an abrupt knoll crowned by the ruined castle of Cardyllion, and, with the village studded with grand old trees, looking like a town on fire.

  In nearer foreground, in the hollow, in solemn purple shadow, are masses of forest; and against the faint green and yellow sky are spread streaks of purple vapour, and the crimson and scarlet fires of sunset.

  “This should reconcile us to very humble ways; and more, I feel that through marble pillars, through great silk curtains, among mirrors, bronzes, china, and all the rest, looking out from a velvet sofa, I could not see, much less enjoy all this, as I do.”

  Cousin Max laughed.

  “Very wise! very philosophical! very romantic!” exclaimed she. “But it is enough to be content with one’s station in life, and not to grow too fond of any. To be content is, simply, not to wish for change. My poor father used to say that those who wished for change were like those who wished for death. They longed for a state of which they had no experience, and for which they might not be so fit as they fancied, for every situation has its liabilities as well as its privileges. That is what he used to say.”

  “Dear Max, I withdraw it, if I said anything sensible, for whenever I do you grow so wise that you bore me to death.” She kissed her. “Do let us be foolish, darling, while we are together, and we shall understand
one another perfectly. See how quickly the scene changes. It is very beautiful, but not quite so glorious now.”

  At this moment the sound of steps, close behind them upon the soft peat, made them both turn their heads.

  A sleek, lean man, lantern-jawed, in a shabby, semi-clerical costume, passed them by in front, from right to left, in an oblique line. He was following a path, and was twirling a stick slowly in his hand by its crooked handle, and gazing up at the sky with one eye — the other was blind — with a smile that was meant to be saintly. In spite of his meek smile, and his seedy and mean exterior, the two ladies had come to connect ideas of the sinister and the dangerous with this man.

  “Upon my life,” said the elder lady, after a pause, “I do believe — I’m almost sure — that is the very man.”

  “I am perfectly certain,” said the young lady, who had followed him with her eyes until he was hidden from view by a screen of furze and hawthorns, a little way to the left. “I can’t imagine what that odious, ill-looking man can possibly mean by following us about as he does.”

  “Perhaps he is asking himself a question very like that about us?” said the old lady, with a laugh.

  “Not he. He is following us.”

  “I saw him at Penmaen Mawr, but nowhere else,” said Miss Max.

  “But I saw him at Chester, and there could be no mistake about his watching us there. I saw him look at our luggage, and look for our names there, and I saw him stand on the step of his carriage at Conway, until he saw us get out with the evident intention of staying there; and then he got down with that little leather bag, that seems to be all that he possesses, and he came to our hotel, simply, I am certain, to watch us. You must recollect, when we returned from our little walk, that I told you I saw him sitting in the room near the stairs, don’t you recollect, writing — don’t you remember?”

  “Yes, I remember your saying there was a man blind of an eye, the same we had observed at Penmaen Mawr, who had followed us, and was in the same place. But the people at the inn said he was a travelling secretary to some religious society, collecting money.”