The Wyvern mystery

In the small breakfast parlour of Oulton, a pretty girl, Miss Alice Maybell, with her furs and wrappers about her, and a journey of forty miles before her--not by rail--to Wyver...

In about an hour and a half this chaise reached the Pied Horse, on Elverstone Moor. Having changed horses at this inn, they resumed their journey, and Miss Alice Maybell, who ha...

The excited nerves of children people the darkness of the nursery with phantoms. The moral and mental darkness of suspense provokes, after its sort, a similar phantasmagoria. Al...

Wyvern is a very pretty old house. It is built of a light gray stone, in the later Tudor style. A portion of it is overgrown with thick ivy. It stands not far away from the high...

Alice Maybell grew up very pretty; not a riant beauty, without much colour, rather pale, indeed, and a little sad. What struck one at first sight was a slender figure, with a pr...

He talked very little that night in the old-fashioned drawing-room, where Alice played his favourite old airs for him on the piano, which he still called the “harpsichord.” He s...

Thus was old Squire Fairfield unexpectedly transformed, and much to the horror of pretty Alice Maybell, appeared in the character of a lover, grim, ungainly, and without the lea...

“And I have been so miserable. Oh, Ry--that heart-breaking disappointment--that dreadful moment--you’ll never know half I felt; as I knocked at that door, expecting to see my ow...

The sun, as I have said, was sinking among the western clouds with a melancholy glare; Captain Fairfield was pacing slowly to and fro upon the broad terrace that extends, with a...

The old Squire of Wyvern wandered from room to room, and stood in this window and that. An hour after the scene on the terrace, he was trembling still and flushed, with his teet...

“Oh, darling, I can scarcely believe it,” she murmured, smiling, and gazing up with her large soft eyes into his, “it seems to me like heaven that I can look, and speak, and say...

The high wall that surrounded the courtyard, and the towering foliage of the old trees, were gloomy. Still if the quaint stone front of the house had shown through its many wind...

Through an open door, at the end of this short gallery, the pleasant firelight gleamed, sufficiently indicating the room that had been prepared for her reception. She felt a lit...

“Nor I, darling, I am sure; perhaps she has had a winding-sheet on her candle, or a coffin flew out of the fire, or a death-watch ticked in the wainscot,” he answered.

“How does Madam Fairfield?” bawled Master Harry, as he strode across the floor, and kissed Alice’s pretty cheek. “Odds bobbins!--as the man says in the playhouse--I believe I bu...

“I’d tip you a stave, only I’ve got a hoarseness since yesterday, and I’d ask Alice to play a bit, only there’s no piano here to kick up a gingle with, and Charlie never sang a...

As she reached the top of the stairs she called to the old servant, not, I think, caring to traverse the haunted flooring that intervened alone. She heard Dulcibella talking, an...

Tom had saddled the horse, and at the first summons led him out; and Harry, with a nod and a grin, for he was more prodigal of his smiles than of his shillings, took the bridle...

“I’m sorry, my darling, but I fancied he had a great deal more to tell me than he really had. I don’t think I’m likely, at least for a little time, to be pressed by my duns--and...

It was about four o’clock one afternoon, while Charles was smoking a cigar--for notwithstanding his self-denying resolutions, his case was always replenished still--that his bro...

“She never heard anything about it at any time, then?--and mind, my dear fellow, I’m only asking. You know much better than me what’s best to be done; but the old brute will giv...

Down the glen, all the way to the ruined windmill, sauntered Charles Fairfield, before he put his rod together and adjusted his casting line. Very nervous he was, almost miserab...

The carriage which Charles Fairfield had seen rounding the picturesque ruin of Gryce’s Mill, was that of Lady Wyndale. Mrs. Tarnley opened the door to her summons, and acting on...

When Charles Fairfield came into the wainscoted dining-room a few minutes later it looked very cosy. The sun had broken the pile of western clouds, and sent low and level a red...

That night the broad-shouldered child, Lilly Dogger, was up later than usual. An arrear of pots and saucepans to scour, along with customary knives and forks to clean, detained...

“’Twas not toothache--a worse thing,” said the stranger, demurely, who, with closed eyes, and her hand propping her head, seemed to have composed herself for a doze in the great...

This stalwart lady stumbled and groped her way back to her chair, and sat down again in the kitchen. The chair in which she sat was an old-fashioned arm-chair of plain wood, unc...

“Will that beast never go to bed--even there, I mind, she used to sleep with an eye open and an ear cocked--and nowhere safe from her never--here and there, up and down, without...

When she reached the foot of the stairs that leads to the gallery on which the room occupied by Alice opens, instead of pursuing her way to the kitchen she turned into a narrow...

“Well, old Tarnley, there’s no good in talking where you can’t right yourself, and where you can revenge, there’s no good in talk either; but gone it is, and the doctors say no...

A pretty medley was revolving in old Mildred’s brain as she stood outside this door, on the gallery. The epileptic old soldier, the puce _gros de Naples_, Tom on outpost duty on...

In spite of her troubles, as she sat by the fire, looking out through the window, fatigue overcame Mildred, and she nodded. But her brain being troubled, and her attitude uneasy...

Charles Fairfield talked of sleeping. There was little chance of that. He placed the candle on one of the two old oak cupboards, as they were still called, which occupied corres...

In his dream, a pale frightened face approached him slowly, and recoiling uttered a cry. The scream was horribly prolonged as the figure receded. He thought he recognised some o...

Some lean, nervous temperaments, once fairly excited, and in presence of a substantial cause of uneasiness, are very hard to reduce to composure. After she had got back again, M...

Alice had slept quietly for some time. The old clock at the foot of the stairs had purred and struck twice since she had ceased listening and thinking. It was for all that time...

Alice had not gone far when she was seized with a great shivering--the mediate process by which from high hysterical tension, nature brings down the nerves again to their accust...

Her husband was at hand--that is to say, under the same roof, and at that moment in the room in which the blind woman was now sitting, bleeding from head and hand, and smiling a...

So far as a man not very resolute can be said to have made up his mind to anything, Charles Fairfield had quite made up his, driven thus fairly into a corner, to fight his battl...

Having her own misgivings as to the temper in which her master would take this _coup_ of the arrest, Mildred Tarnley prudently kept her own counsel, and retreated nearly to the...

In their homely sitting-room, with old Dulcibella in friendly attendance, Mildred Tarnley found Alice. It is not always that a dreadful impression makes itself immediately manif...

Charles Fairfield, in true Fairfield wrath, had ridden at a hard pace, which helped to keep his blood up, all the way to the bridge of Wykeford. He had expected to overtake the...

Charles rode his horse slowly homeward. The moon got up before he reached the wild expanse of Cressley Common, a wide sea of undulating heath, with here and there a grey stone p...

A few days had passed and a great change had come. Charles Fairfield, the master of the Grange, lay in his bed, and the Wykeford doctor admitted to Alice that he could not say w...

The dreaded day came and passed, and Charles Fairfield was not dead, but better. The fever was abating, but never did the vital spark burn lower in living man. Seeing that life...

About an hour after, old Dulcibella came to the door and knocked. Charles Fairfield had slept a little, and was again awake. Into that still darkened room she came to whisper he...

When a sick man dies he leaves his bed and his physic. His best friend asks him not to stay, and sweetheart and kindred concur in putting him out of doors, to lie in a bed of cl...

In the evening Tom had looked in at his usual hour, and was recruiting himself with his big mug of beer and lump of bread and cheese at the kitchen table, and now the keen edge...

At dead of night Alice was very ill, and Tom was called up to ride across Cressley Common for the Wykeford doctor. Worse and worse she grew. In this unknown danger--without the...

He had a short pipe in his pocket, with a big bowl, and a metal cover to it, into which he stuffed some pinches of tobacco--a shilling went a good way in that sort of smoking, a...

Harry Fairfield was a captain in his county militia. It was right that the House of Fairfield should be represented in that corps. Charlie, who was of an easy compliant temper,...

Harry proved how hungry he was by eating a huge dinner. He had the old dining-room to himself, and sipped his brandy and water there by a pleasant fire of coal and spluttering w...

A few days later Harry Fairfield rode from Wyvern into the picturesque little town of Wykeford, and passing the steep, narrow bridge, pulled up near the church, at the door of D...

“No material change,” replied the doctor. “It’s not a case in which medicine can do much. The most cheering thing about it is that her strength has not given way, but you know i...

Dr. Willett called regularly at the Grange, and kind Lady Wyndale was daily there, taking the doctor’s directions about jellies, wines, and such other good things as the depress...

Sickness was a cross he had never been used to bear, and now that it was laid on his old shoulders he knew that he could not keep his feet very long.

In the sequestered country, about twelve miles south of Twyford, in a pretty nook formed by a wooded hollow close by the old by-road to Warhampton, stands an antique cottage, wi...

Marjory Trevellian was what is accounted among her class “a good scholar,” and she had taught the little boy to read and write, to “say his tables,” and to “cypher,” as she term...

I am going now to describe the occurrences of a particular evening on which my young friend drank tea at Stanlake Farm, which was the name of the house with the old garden to wh...

Little Miss Amy had a slight cold, and the next tea-party was put off for a day. On the evening following Harry’s visit at Stanlake Farm, Marjory Trevellian being at that time a...

Supper-time came, and Tom Orange did not return. Darkness closed over the old cottage, the poplar trees and the town, and the little boy said his prayers under the superintenden...

“I’ll search the house first, ma’am, and if he’s not here I’ll inform the police and have him in the Hue-and-Cry; and if you have had anything to do with the boy’s deserting, or...

At Noulton Farm each day was like its brother. Inflexible hours, inflexible duties, all proceeded with a regimental punctuality. At meals not a word was spoken, and while the ma...

The next day the Sergeant was away in his gig to Wyvern, a long journey, to report to the Squire, and obtain leave of absence from his duties for a day or two. He was to spend t...