Sylvia Arden. A novel

Front matter

SYLVIA ARDEN mrds-eye View of SCARFEIX CHACE. <3 . t>f>c TTWiMotm of <*** GUnfruw^ SYLVIA ARDEN A NOVEL BY OSWALD CRAWFURD AUTHOR OF " BEYOND THE SEAS," " THE WORLD WE LIVE IN," ETC. LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., I, PATERNOSTER SQUARE {The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved.} CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. Gregory Morson ... ... ... ... i II. Scarfell Chace ... ... ... 12 III. The Old Miners ... ... ... ... 23 IV. A Crime ... ... ... ... 30 V. Across Scarfell Chace ... ... ... 50 VI. Gregory Morson's Way of thinking ... 62 VII. On the Track ... ... ... ... 77 VIII. Further Discoveries ... ... ... 89 IX. The Ruined Church ... ... ... 103 X. Foul Play ... ... ... ... 118 XI. Mrs. Garrell on the Way of the World 128 XII. Gregory Morson's Suspicions ... ... 139 XIII. Lady Raby's Opinions ... ... ... 149 XIV.

Lady Raby's Revelations ... ... 164 XV. An Unexpected Light ... ... ... 174 XVI. Lady Raby's Communication ... ... 189 XVII. Revelations ... ... ... ... 197 XVIII. Further Revelations ... ... ... CONTENTS. VI CHAPTER PAGE XIX. Sylvia Arden's Story ... ... ... 218 XX. Sylvia Arden's Accusation ... ... 231 XXI. Captain Bearcroft's Plans ... ... 241 XXII. Sylvia Arden ... ... ... 254 XXIII. The Italian Doctor ... ... ... 261 XXIV. Between Life and Death ... ... 274 XXV. Night and Nothingness ... ... ... 286 XXVI. Rescue ... ... ... ... 296 XXVII. A Struggle for Liberty ... ... 308 XXVIII. The Secret of the Cavern ... ... 316 XXIX. Doings in the Sea-Cavern ... ... 329 XXX. Dimitri Klistos ... ... ... 338 XXXI. The Italian's Fate ... ... ... 352 XXXII. Conclusion ... ... ... ... SYLVIA ARDEN.

Chapter I. Gregory Morson

I AM not a person of any consideration or im portance in the world. I have led a life of ad venture abroad, and nothing has come of it. I have achieved nothing. I am one of the failures in life. I have had my chances, and I have mis used them : anyhow, I have missed fortune. I have not gained a single one of those objects which men chiefly set themselves to gain ; neither money nor useful friends, nor recognition and con sideration and a position of my own among my fellow-men. In short, I am the rolling stone that has gathered no moss. I have lost my own small fortune in various unfortunate enterprises in every corner of the known world, and I have just man aged to scrape together the barest competence. B Yet I cannot say that my conscience greatly pricks me : I have never shirked hard work, and I have tried every chance that seemed to offer.

When the event occurred which begins this stoiy, I had been away from England for nearly ten years, my age being thirty, and I was sitting alone in the stalls of a London theatre, a stranger among strangers, and feeling not a little lonely and, though it is against my principles to repine, not a little bitter. Certainly there is nothing like a crowd of this sort for making a man feel lonesome. I declare that I have felt far less of a longing for human companionship and human sympathy than I did at this moment, as I have lain camped out by night in the Andes, scores of miles from any sound or sight of a human being, the black vault of heaven above me, set with the desolate stars. I was in the act of making the reflections which I have put down above, and I was beginning to speculate why it is that some men, in the battle of life, always fail and fall, and others, apparently no better equipped, invariably succeed.

What is the winning faculty ? At this moment the unoccupied seat next to me was taken by the very man who, if I had pursued my train of thought, would naturally have GREGORY MORSON. 3 occurred to me as the typical successful man. He and I are of an age, were playmates as children, schoolfellows afterwards, with, so far as I could foresee, equal chances in life. His father and mine, squires in the western part of the country, and neighbours, had done that very thing which friends, squires, and neighbours should never do— they had gone to law over a bit of land. My father had been ruined first, and most of my patri mony went to the lawyers ; but my father main tained to his dying day, which was but a year or two afterwards, that he should have won had he been able to afford to carry his appeal up to the House of Lords.

His adversary came as near almost to ruin as himself; so was it that we two boys had been thrown on the world early. Both of us had since our boyhood travelled over the world, seeking after fortune. Gregory Morson had found favour with that fickle divinity, how I hardly knew, but rumours of his prosperity and his great wealth had reached me from time to time in my own wanderings in various remote regions of the earth. His very face and manner and appearance to-night announced his prosperity. His air breathed contentment and satisfaction with the world as he greeted me. " I am glad to see you, Bearcroft ; but what is the matter? Have you had a fever? You are very thin— your eyes are like saucers— you look pulled down. My dear fellow, you are more like Don Quixote than ever ! What is it ? Down on your luck ?

" Then, without giving me time to answer, he told me of his own doings and plans for the future. " I am living at Scarfell Towers now. I have smartened the old place up ; you would hardly know it again. You must come and see me there, will you? Say next month? By-the-bye, I can give you a job there if you like." " You are very kind." " I can, really. You are the very man I want. You are still in the mining line, I suppose?" I should observe that I had last met Morson in Asiatic Turkey. This was over five years agrj. I never could discover what had taken him there. It was not to make his fortune, for he lived in some state and luxury, owning a steam yacht, which met him from time to time on the coast with supplies, travelling with horses and tents and a retinue of servants from place to place, and, as he alleged, for pleasure.

My own business in that country was mining. I had tried my hand at various things, and this seeming to promise best I had persevered, and at last GREGORY As ORSON. 5 the very small measure of my success had been the discovery of a fairly productive lead mine in Asiatic Turkey. My modest income was derived wholly from this source. " What do you call yourself now ? " asked Mor son. " What is your profession ? " It had not occurred to me before that a man in a civilized country, unless indeed he be a mere drone, must ticket himself in some way, and I mentally ran through my titles to a pro fession. After a term of service in the army, which had left me with my company, I had owned a sheep station in Queensland and ten thousand sheep ; I had held a great cattle farm in the Plate ; had tried being a lawyer in the state of Arkansas ; but I had lost my cattle through Indians, my sheep by drought, and my clients I should have lost too, had I ever had any to lose.

" Only a rolling stone," I said, " and I have been one all these years ; but if I know about anything at all well it is mining. I have explored and prospected, and failed and tried again, pretty nearly all over the world, and so I shall call myself a mining engineer." " Good. You are just the man I have been looking for. I can give you work." Where ? " " At Scarfell Chace. I think there is something in your line to be done there. I want a man I can trust to look at the place. I have come to the conclusion there is gold there." I shook my head. " Played out, my dear Morson. There is not much gold-mining to be done in this country. All the good things were worked out centuries ago, when gold was dearer and labour cheaper. Trust me." He was curiously persistent. " Come down. I know you are a practical man ; you shall tell me where you think the lodes lie."

" ' Lodes ' is a big word. I would bet anything you like there is nothing of the kind on Scarfell Chace." Then he began to talk somewhat vaguely about rock formation and quartz veins, and so forth ; but I declined to give any opinion till I had seen the place again myself. " You know all about it, I see, and I don't. You must positively come down." Then he abruptly changed the talk. He now began to inquire, with some apparent interest, as to my past and my suture plans. I told him I had but just come to England, and having transacted my business would depart again to Turkey. GREGORY MORSON. 7 " And stay there for good ? " " Yes, I suppose so. I have my mine to look after." "And you have not many friends in town, I suppose?" " Not many that I know of. After ten years one finds " "And you are here to-night all alone?" he asked, looking about him.

Yes ; just as you are, I suppose." " I ? Oh, I am not alone. I saw you here in the stalls as I came into the theatre, and I came to have a talk with you." " Ah ! " I said ; " to get a professional opinion ? " There was now, as there always had been, some thing antagonistic between Morson and myself. We had the faculty of rubbing each other up the wrong way, as people say, and we had a disagreeable way of putting unfriendly constructions on what the other said. " You need not be so infernally sharp," he said laughing. I saw he did not want to take offence. " Look up there," he said, " that is my party, but I have not been near them yet ; " and he nodded towards a large box near the stage in the first tier. " Do you see that girl in front — the thin, fair girl smiling and moving her fan — in black, with a lot of brown, rough hair ?

" " She is extraordinarily pretty." " You don't find her a little thin, do you, and her hair rather untidy ? " " Not a bit ; she is wonderfully pretty' " Glad you think so ! I am going to marry her." I laughed, thinking it a particularly bad joke. " Then why are you not in her box ? " I asked ; " I see there is room." " Well," he answered, with a quite detestable self-sufficiency, " to tell you the truth, English women bore me. I suppose I have lived too long in the East. They are too independent, and mostly far too sharp. That girl there is a great deal too sharp to please me." There was at times a disagreeable frankness about Morson which invariably put me out of temper, though, as a matter of fact, my temper happens to be a singularly good one, and his cynicism had this bad effect now. "Then why the devil do you want to marry her ?

" I asked, with something of his own plainness of speech. " I don't." " I should imagine she can't want to marry you ! " GREGORY AIORSON. 9 I looked at him critically, and was by no means sure I was right in hazarding this suggestion. He was certainly extremely good looking ; a strongly built, six-foot man, black-bearded and handsome in something of a red-cheeked, red-lipped, well to-do, full-blown way. He was not actually stout as yet, but the lines both of his face and figure had the genial curves which denote prosperity. He laughed. " There is a refreshing coolness about you, Bearcroft, that has always fetched me ; I remember you were like that at Eton. No, I hardly suppose she can want to marry me, except that most women are fools." " Don't talk like that of a woman you are going to make your wife."

" Bosh ! " When Morson and I were boys, conversation between us when it reached such a point as this was generally adjourned to an open space, and continued otherwise than by word of mouth, and with a ring of spectators round us. In the angry pause which followed Morson's last expletive, and adjournment for the aforesaid purpose being out of the question, I contented myself with remarking to myself, " As great a brute as ever ! " Then I glanced to the box where the girl sat. She was looking curiously SYLVIA ARDEN. 10 at us, and for the moment seriously, wondering perhaps at our suddenly darkened faces. Then seeing our look upon her, she smiled again, easily and pleasantly. Dwelling upon what Morson was, I felt sorry for this woman, whose name even was unknown to me. Morson seemed to read my thoughts ; he recovered his patience first.

" Money, my dear Bearcroft ; of course it is money. She is an heiress. Look at that big man behind her chair ! That is her brother." " Not the stout man with the black moustache ? Impossible ! " " That is Miss Arden's brother, but he is not stout ; it is all muscle. Wait till he stands up, and you will see he is about the tallest, biggest shouldered man you ever saw in your life. Why did you say ' impossible ' when I told you he was her brother ? " " Because he is so unlike Miss Arden in face, in figure, in everything. I don't fancy that man at all. It is a hateful face. He looks like a prize-fighter with that jaw and bull neck, and some one has broken his nose. I am glad of it, but it doesn't improve his looks ! " " What a fellow you are, Bearcroft ! " said Morson, laughing. " Now you have offended me.

John Arden is my dearest friend ; we are almost GREGORY MORSON. 11 like brothers. You must have heard of him in Turkey — Colonel Arden, in the Turkish Service." " Yes ; I'm afraid I have heard of him. So you are going to marry Arden's sister?" " Only his half-sister. She is her mother's heiress — owns half Scarfell Chace. Poor Arden hasn't a penny." At parting with Morson at the end of the per formance — he did not leave the stalls till it was over — he repeated his invitation to me : " Come down to Scarfell Towers next month," he said ; " we shall have rather a lively party there. Arden and his sister are coming, and I want to talk to you about the mine."

Chapter II. Scarfell Chace

Scarfell Chace, in the midst of which I passed some of my schoolboy days, is one of the strangest and wildest districts in this country. It is an isolated region lying on the western coast ; a deep and rapid river cuts it off from the land side, and a chain of hills, not lofty but exceedingly steep, blocks all approach to it along the coast from the north, except by one narrow road through the defiles and passes of the hills. Consequently the whole district, extending to some nine or ten miles in length and breadth, is inaccessible, for there is neither boat nor bridge on the river, nor ford, for the whole ten miles of its course along Scarfell Chace. The Towers, an old house of no very great size, but with four pinnacled round towers at the four corners of an inner quadrangle, belongs to the Morsons, who have from time immemorial possessed manorial rights over the Chace.

I was glad to accept Morson's invitation to Scarfell Towers, far less to see him, or his home, or his friends, than to visit again a part of the country which has always held a very distinct place in my memory. As the time came round for my departure, I grew impatient to see the old place, and the idea occurred to me to run down by a late train the night before, to sleep at the inn of a little town about nine miles from the Towers, and to take a conveyance to the house as early next morning as it was light. It was already November, the daylight late and the weather wintry, — so that I proposed to myself to make my appearance at the house only at dinner time. By this arrangement I might spend the whole day in exploring the Chace, and thus be in a position to give Morson, on my arrival, the information he sought as to its mining capabilities.

I was little prepared for the surprise that awaited me when I reached the inn in the town of Luxton, the nearest point to the Chace, and ordered a conveyance to take me to Scarfell Towers. The ostler asked if I had written per mission from the owner. I told him I had not, but was going there by Mr. Morson's invitation. " It can't be done, sir," said the man ; " the road through the hills is blocked." He explained to me what I already knew, that there was but one way to the Towers, and indeed to the whole district of Scarfell Chace, in which the house is situated, and this was the private carriage-road thereto. Mr. Morson, he told me, had built a lodge at a point where the only pass over the hills runs between steep and lofty cliffs. The approach passes through an opening in a high wall built across the road in this place, and this opening was now kept closed by a heavy wooden portal, which the lodge-keeper was for bidden to open except upon a written order.

All this was very unaccountable and perverse in Morson. Was the man simply mad, or puffed up by prosperity and an unsociable disposition into this eccentric exclusiveness ? For the moment I was inclined to resent Morson's conduct in in viting me down without acquainting me with this obstacle by the way, until I remembered that he had bidden me telegraph to let him know by what train I should arrive. No doubt he had meant to have me met at the station in the ordinary hos pitable fashion of well-to-do hosts, and it was my own fault if I had baulked his intentions. Still I was vexed ; and when the people of the inn suggested the obvious course of sending a message to the lodge in the hills, whence, no doubt, word could be forwarded to the Towers, I would not condescend to accept the suggestion and await the return of a messenger.

I formed another plan, which was to hire a carriage that should convey my portmanteau to the lodge, with a written message to Morson to be forwarded thence to the Towers, while I myself would be set down at the river's side which separates Scarfell Chace from the tamer agricultural district on the land side. I would walk down the river bank, the whole length of its course to the sea if necessary, and judge with my own eyes if my boyish recollection as to the inaccessibility of the Chace on that side were correct. I made no doubt I should find a ferry or a fisherman's boat, perhaps a ford, or stepping-stones, or a plank bridge. The river, I remembered, was narrow. Accordingly I was taken down to the river's bank. " You can't get across anywhere," the driver had said to me, when I told him of my intention to get over the river somehow into the Chace.

" Then I'll walk down to the sea and get a boat at the Culvers," naming a little cluster of fishermen's huts which I remembered at the mouth of the river. " There ain't no Culvers now," he said. " Least ways, there ain't no fishermen there. 'Twas Mr. Morson's property, and he has broke up the village." " Then I will walk on to Stanhoe, and get a boat there." To this the driver made no objection beyond a doubtful shake of the head. As I started on my walk, the man, seeing that I knew something of the place, observed — " I doubt, sir, but you'll find things mainly changed hereabouts ! " I reached the river and found it, as I expected, narrow — narrower than I had supposed even, for it is seldom that memory does not magnify one's childish impressions ; but I had not exaggerated the impression that had then been made of the current's strength and swiftness.

It was so narrow a stream that I could jerk a pebble across any where without exertion ; but my experiences in wild countries of the earth told me at once it was not a river easily to be crossed by man. The water was deep, and rushed along with swirl and tossing of foam and spray against its jutting rock ledges down a very steep channel. Even if an exceptionally strong swimmer should win across, he might fail to make good his landing, for the rocks on the further side rise sheer and tall and cliff-like from the water's edge, in the form of what, in this part of the country, we call " scars." I walked along, seeing nothing of the mysterious Chace beyond the continuous scar by the river's further edge. This verge of cliff rose everywhere eighty or a hundred feet, and only at one place, where there was a break in the sky-line, could I catch a glimpse of the wild country beyond.

Half-way to the sea, on the highest point of the scar, and close to its very edge, are the ruins of a large church. I remembered it in ruins ; and though there was still a roof both to the nave and belfry tower, the church was, even more than I remembered it, covered and the stonework hidden by a mantle of ivy, so thick and close that hardly a sign of the mullioned tracery of the windows was visible. I wondered again, as I remembered often to have wondered before, why so large a church had ever been erected in so inaccessible a position, and amid a population which must always have been so scanty. Walking on to the sea, I discovered no change in the character of the river, no break in the wall of rock on its further bank. Arrived at the Culvers, I found the houses, as the driver had C SYLVIA ARDEN. 18 led me to expect to find them, unroofed and tenantless.

A fisherman's lug-sailed boat was in the offing, half a mile to sea. I signalled to the men on board with my handkerchief ; and when they neared me, I hailed them and asked them to put me across the mouth of the river and land me on Scarfell Chace. The men brought their boat to land, and I had speech with them. When I offered them quite a handsome fee for this small service, they unaccountably hung back, and asked if I should want to be taken off again. I said I should not. They still hesitated ; and one of the two men observed that there was a roughish set of people on the Chace. " Are they rougher than they used to be ? " I asked. " I knew them pretty well once." The men stared. " How long ago might that be, sir ? " said one man. Well, perhaps fifteen years." Lord, sir ! That lot is all gone.

Gone ! " " Ay, stock and lot, father and son, mother and daughter — all left the place." " When ? " " Ever since Squire Morson came from abroad. He turned 'em out." I had no wish to inquire further into my host's affairs, strange as I thought it all ; but it seemed to concern myself to ask, " Who are the rough people you speak of ? " '•' The squire's men. There ain't many besides his yacht's crew, and they're foreigners, I've heard say." " What do they do ashore ? " " God-a-mercy knows, sir. Some say it's keepers' work they do. I guess 'tis more likely poachers' ! We see them going to and fro on the Chace there from our boats. I don't expect they're after much good. We gives them a wide berth." " Well, put me ashore anywhere ; that's all I ask you." They hesitated still, for no reason that I could discover, and the man spoke again, " You'll excuse us, sir, but this here Scarfell Chace ain't over well spoke of just now.

There's stories afloat, as a man may say." " What stories ? " The man gave no direct answer. " There was three men, strangers to us, came to Stanhoe, down the coast, and hired a boat to land on Scarfell Chace." " Poachers ? " " They had nets, guns, and a dog. Anyhow, they never returned back no more. That was just four year ago, come Christmas — the year Squire Morson came from abroad." " They were drowned at sea, I suppose, among the rocks and currents." " Maybe so ; but that boat was never seen no more — not so much as a stick of her." " She might have drifted out to sea." " She might, sir. Two years ago there was a gentleman came to Stanhoe. He gave my mate here and me a sovereign to put him ashore on the Chace, and wait to take him off again. We did wait, sir, till it was dark, and came off the point again at daybreak ; but neither sight nor sound of that gentleman was ever got again."

" Was no search made ? " " There was, sir. There was much talk about it among us along the coast, and the magistrates sent round through the hills to the Towers to inquire for the gentleman. Mr. Morson had heard nothing about him." " The man might have lost his way among the dells, might he not, and wandered at dark to the scar, and so slipped over into the river and been drowned ; or he might have fallen into one of the disused shafts ? I remember there used to be several on the Chace from the old mining times." " 'Twas thought so at the time, and there was a search made by the county police. Mr. Morson offered a reward, and they got ladders and went down into as many as a dozen of them shafts. But, bless you, sir, there's dozens more among them hills and dells, many overgrown with brush and bramble, that a man might fall into and never be heard of again."

" They found nothing ? " " No, sir, they found nothing ; but one of the policemen nearly got smothered in the foul air at the bottom of one shaft. He lay there in a swound till they got him up the ladder, with just a dangle of life still in him. After that they looked no further, and thought the gentleman must have fallen over the scar and been carried out to sea ; but some of us considered the thing deeper, and didn't think that was the gentleman's end." I asked no further questions ; and telling them I was a friend of the squire's and expected at the Towers, they made no further difficulty but carried me in their boat across the mouth of the river. We had to sail some way along the coast before we found a creek, where a little stream issued between two high cliffs, through which we pushed the boat.

I landed, and the boatmen lost no time in punting their boat out through the inlet and making off hastily to sea, while I scrambled with some exertion up the steep face of the rock and found myself upon the tablcland of Scarfell Chace. I began this narration by saying that I had led a life of adventure ; it had as yet been fruitless of good to myself and barren of any consequences. I have carefully set down the aforesaid seemingly trivial circumstances of my meeting with Morson and his affianced bride ; of our talk ; and, above all, the almost trifling incidents of this day, because now, looking back, I perceive that each single occurrence, and even each single spoken word, was a necessary link in the chain of events that were to make or mar my own life and that of three other persons. C 23 )

Chapter III. The Old Miners

At last I had succeeded in gaining an entrance to this well-guarded and mysterious Scarfell Chace, and could look about me. I was struck at once by the extreme desolation of the scene. It was a cheerless day in mid-November — dull overhead, with a cold wind that ever and anon whirled a few last snowflakes in its eddies. The air was too cold for a hard snowfall, but the rocky ground of the Chace was whitened still, and only the rock peaks and points showed brown through the thin covering of snow. Scarfell Chace is a treeless moorland waste ; a maze of low, stony hills intersected with deep dells or ravines, in which a stranger might easily lose his way. Though the earth was mostly snow covered, I could see enough of it to perceive that it was a region possessing great subterranean wealth. It seems to be a law of nature that when the soil is rich in mineral below the surface, it is poor and sterile above ground.