Ravenshoe

That same day, Lord Saltire and Lady Ascot were sitting in the drawing-room window, in South Audley Street, alone. He had come in, as his custom was, about eleven, and found her...

Shall I insult your judgment by telling you that the whole story of Petre Ravenshoe's marriage at Finchampstead was true? I think not. The register was found, the lawyers were b...

John Marston's first disappointment in life had been his refusal by Mary. He was one of those men, brought up in a hard school, who get, somehow, the opinion that everything whi...

And so we went. At Ravenshoe were assembled General Mainwaring, Lady Ascot, Mary, Gus, Flora, Archy and nurse, William, Charles, Father Tiernay and Father Murtagh Tiernay, John...

Six weeks had passed since the date of Captain Archer's letter before he presented himself in person at Casterton. They were weary weeks enough to Mary, Lord Saltire, and Lady A...

Time, the inexorable, kept mowing away at poor Charles's flowers until the disagreeable old creature had cut them all down but two or three, and mowed right into the morning whe...

Master Charles, blessed with a placid temper and a splendid appetite, throve amazingly. Before you knew where you were, he was in tops and bottoms; before you had thoroughly rea...

The group which Lord Ascot had seen through the glass doors consisted of Charles, the coachman's son, the coachman, and Mr. Sloane. Charles and the coachman's son had got hold o...

It may be readily conceived that a considerable amount of familiarity existed between Charles and his servant and foster-brother William. But, to the honour of both of them be i...

I had intended to have gone into a family history of the Ravenshoes, from the time of Canute to that of her present Majesty, following it down through every change and revolutio...

Lord Ascot had been moved into South Audley Street, his town house, and Lady Ascot was there nursing him. General Mainwaring was off for Varna. But Lord Saltire had been a const...

The villagers at Ravenshoe, who loved Charles, were very much puzzled and put out by his sudden disappearance. Although they had little or no idea of the real cause of his absen...

Oh for the whispering woodlands of Devna! Oh for the quiet summer evenings above the lakes, looking far away at the white-walled town on the distant shore! No more hare-shooting...

Lord Ascot, with his umbrella over his shoulder, swung on down the street, south-westward. The town was pleasant in the higher parts, and so he felt inclined to prolong his walk...

What a happy place a man's bed is--probably the best place in which he ever finds himself. Very few people will like to deny that, I think; that is to say, as a general rule. Af...

In the long watches of the winter night, when one has awoke from some evil dream, and lies sleepless and terrified with the solemn pall of darkness around one--on one of those d...

"I enjoy the same perfect health as ever, I thank you, my lord," said Father Mackworth. "And allow me to say, that I am glad to see your lordship looking just the same as ever....

There was a time, a time we have seen, when Lord Welter was a merry, humorous, thoughtless boy. A boy, one would have said, with as little real mischief in him as might be. He m...

Ha! This was a life again. Better this than dawdling about at the heels of a dandy, or sitting on a wheelbarrow in a mews! There is a scent here sweeter than that of the dunghil...

In the natural course of events, I ought now to follow Charles in his military career, step by step. But the fact is that I know no more about the details of horse-soldiering th...

Old James was to be buried side by side with his old master in the vault under the altar. The funeral was to be on the grandest scale, and all the Catholic gentry of the neighbo...

The road from Ranford to Casterton, which is the name of Lord Hainault's place, runs through about three miles of the most beautiful scenery. Although it may barely come up to C...

Charles's duties were light enough; he often wished they had been heavier. There were such long idle periods left for thinking and brooding. He rather wondered at first why he w...

The stream at Ravenshoe was as low as they had ever seen it, said the keeper's boys, who were allowed to take artists and strangers up to see the waterfall in the wood. The arti...

Hornby was lying on his back on the sofa in the window and looking out. He had sent for Charles, and Charles was standing beside him; but he had not noticed him yet. In a minute...

The servants, I mean the stable servants, who lived in the mews where Charles did, had a club; and, a night or two after he had seen Mary in the square, he was elected a member...

Charles had really no idea where he was going. Although he knew that Hornby had been playing with Lord Welter, yet he thought, from what Hornby had said, that he would not bring...

The funeral was over. Charles had waited with poor weeping Mary to see the coffin carried away under the dark grim archway of the vault, and had tried to comfort her who would n...

There followed on the events above narrated two or three quiet months--a time well remembered by Charles, as one of the quietest and most peaceful in his life, in all the times...

Time jogged on very pleasantly to the party assembled at Ravenshoe that Christmas. There were woodcocks and pheasants in the woods; there were hares, snipes, and rabbits on the...

Mary did not wonder at Marston's silence. She imagined that perhaps he had been sobered by being cast on the shore so unceremoniously, and thought but little more of it. Then sh...

Charles and the good-natured Father Tiernay wandered out across the old court-yard, towards the stables--a pile of buildings in the same style as the house, which lay back towar...

Charles returned to his room, a little easier in his mind than when he left it. There still remained one dreadful business to get over--the worst of all; that of letting his fat...

Charles, though no genius, had a certain amount of common sense, and, indeed, more of that commodity than most people gave him credit for. Therefore he did not pursue the subjec...

So pursuing the course of our story, we have brought ourselves to the present extraordinary position. That Charles Ravenshoe, of Ravenshoe, in the county Devonshire, Esquire, an...

"I will declare your malpractices to the four winds of heaven, Miss Corby, as soon as I know what they are. Why, why do you come rustling into the room, like a mouse in the dark...

There was a very dull dinner at Ranford that day, Lord Ascot scarcely spoke a word; he was kind and polite--he always was that--but he was very different from his usual self. Th...

The next afternoon Lord Welter and Charles rode up to the door at Ranford. The servants looked surprised; they were not expected. His lordship was out shooting; her ladyship was...

It is a curious sensation, that of meeting, as a young man of two or three-and-twenty, a man one has last seen as a little lad of ten, or thereabouts. One is almost in a way dis...

Lord Welter was now Lord Ascot. I was thinking at one time that I would continue to call him by his old title, as being the one most familiar to you. But, on second thoughts, I...

If you were a lazy yachtsman, sliding on a summer's day, before a gentle easterly breeze, over the long swell from the Atlantic, past the south-westerly shores of the Bristol Ch...

Of course, he did not die; I need not tell you that. B---- and P. H---- pulled him through, and shook their honest hands over his bed. Poor B---- is reported to have winked on t...

Lady Hainault (_née_ Burton, not the Dowager) had asked some one to dinner, and the question had been whom to ask to meet him. Mary had been called into consultation, as she gen...

Charles Ravenshoe had committed suicide--committed suicide as deliberately as any maddened wretch had done that day in all the wide miserable world. He knew it very well, and wa...

Charles's luck seemed certainly to have deserted him at last. And that is rather a serious matter, you see; for, as he had never trusted to anything but luck, it now follows tha...

It was a glorious breezy November morning; the sturdy oaks alone held on to the last brown remnants of their summer finery; all the rest of the trees in the vast sheets of wood...

In the long dark old room with the mullioned windows looking out on the ocean, in the room that had been Charles's bedroom, study, and play-room, since he was a boy, there sat C...

There was ruin in the Ascot family, we know. And Lord Ascot, crippled with paralysis at six-and-forty, was lying in South Audley Street, nursed by Lady Ascot. The boxes, which w...

At Scutari. What happened to him before he got there, no one knows or ever will know. He does not remember, and there is no one else to tell. He was passed from hand to hand and...

A growing anxiety began to take possession of Charles shortly before Christmas, arising from the state of his father's health. Densil was failing. His memory was getting defecti...

The smart of the blow, which had fallen so heavily at first, had become less painful. He knew by intuition that it would be worse on the morrow, and on many morrows; but at pres...

Putney Bridge at half an hour before high tide; thirteen or fourteen steamers; five or six thousand boats, and fifteen or twenty thousand spectators. This is the morning of the...

Passing out of the park, Charles set down his burden at the door of a small farm-house at the further end of the village, and knocked. For some time he stood waiting for an answ...

There is a particular kind of Ghost, or Devil, which is represented by an isosceles triangle (more or less correctly drawn) for the body; straight lines turned up at the ends fo...

With the wailing mother's voice in their ears, those two left the house. The court was quiet enough now. The poor savages who would not stop their riot lest they should disturb...

The second Mrs. Ravenshoe was the handsome dowerless daughter of a Worcester squire, of good standing, who, being blessed with an extravagant son, and six handsome daughters, ha...

Hitherto I have been able to follow Charles right on without leaving him for one instant: now, however, that he is reduced to sitting on a wheelbarrow in a stable-yard, we must...

The night after the terrible lexicon quarrel, which, you will observe, arose entirely from Charles's good resolution to set to work reading--whereby we should take warning not t...

"J. B. can return to his deeply afflicted family if he likes, or remain away if he likes. The A F, one and all, will view either course with supreme indifference. Should he choo...

Charles had always been passionately fond of horses and of riding. He was a consummate horseman, and was so perfectly accomplished in everything relating to horses, that I reall...

"How near the end we are getting, and yet so much to come! Never mind. We will tell it all naturally and straightforwardly, and then there will be nothing to offend you."

I have noticed that the sayings and doings of young gentlemen before they come to the age of, say seven or eight, are hardly interesting to any but their immediate relations and...

Oxford. The front of Magdalen Hall, about which the least said the soonest mended. On the left, further on, All Souls, which seems to have been built by the same happy hand whic...

And so you see here we are all at sixes and sevens once more. Apparently as near the end of the story as when I wrote the adventures of Alured Ravenshoe at the Court of Henry th...

That afternoon Charles said nothing more, but lay and looked out of the window at the rhododendrons just bursting into bloom, at the deer, at the rabbits, at the pheasants; and...

After all the fatigues and adventures of the day before, Charles slept well--long pleasant dreams of roaming in sunny places on summer days fell to his happy lot--and so he was...