The Fiery Furnace. A tale in two acts

Front matter

THE FIEBY FURNACE BY THE SAME AUTHOR. The New Kinqdom. An Essay on State Socialism. SWAN SONNENSCHEIN CO. 2b. 6d. Poem? /nd Sonnet? (With Portrait of the Author.) T. FISHEE DNWIN. 5b. THE FIEBY FUENACE a Œale in Gwo acts BY F. KEGINALD STATHAM A " Neither was their hair singed, nor the smell of fire passed upon them " LONDON GIBBINGS AND COMPANY, Ltd. 18, BUBY STBEET, BLOOMSBUEY gieMcctteb TO ALL SUFFEEING WOMEN. CONTENTS. ACT I. CHAP- PAGE I. A certain island . . . , .- i II. a day in the glen .... 10 III. the complete angler . . . , .24 IV. a woman's letter ..... 37 v. a man's reply . . .... 49 VI. downstairs and upstairs .... 62 vii. pause ...... 76 vin. catastrophe ..... 89 IX. george tremorthen ..... 102 x. afterwards ...... 114 xi. a legal interview . . . . . 128 XII. a covetous repentance .... 143 XIII. two communications ..... 157 XIV. transformation . . . . . 171 xv. a visitor in dalsey . . . 186 xvi. rejection ...... 200 xvit. revelation . . . . . .215 xviii, pursuit . . . . . .

V CONTENTS. ACT II. CHAP. PAGE i. a change of scenery ..... 247 II. THREE WOMEN . . . . • 259 III. A REFUSAL ...... 273 IV. THE " RED LION " . . . ■ 292 V. A GAMBLER'S PROJECT . . . • • 306 VI. AHAB AND JEZEBEL .... 314 VII. THE " AGONY COLUMN " .... 333 VIII. THE FIRST SKIRMISH .... 347 IX. WHEN ROGUES FALL OUT .... 362 X. INTO THE LABYRINTH .... 373 XI. DIMMING THE GLASS . . . 385 XII. COMPLICATIONS . . . . . 401 XIII. A VISIT AND AN APPARITION . . . 422 XIV. LAYING A MINE .,..,. 437 XV. THE EVENTS OF AN EVENING .... 459 XVI. DISSUASIONS ....... 484 XVII. THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW ...... 504 XVIII. REWARD ...... ACT I

Chapter I

A CEETAIN ISLAND. AN island in the very middle of the Hibernian sea — green, rain-washed, sea-beaten, beautiful. You see it first from the bridge or from the paddle-box of the great red-funnelled steamers that cross over daily — daily, that is, in the summer-time— from smoke-bound Seaborough. Casting off from the great floating pier, along the sides and between the pontoons of which the ebb-tide runs gurgling and splashing ; circling round in the yellow river till the steamer's bow points seaward, and the huge bright engines, with their swinging cylinders, are put at full speed ; flying down past vessels straining in the tide-way to their cables, past long forests of masts and endless sea-walls, past fussy white-funnelled ferry steamers, past the brown sandstone battery and the lighthouse beyond — starting thus, and meeting the clear north-west breeze as you go, you emerge through buoyed channels and past strange floating lighthouses into the bluer water of the Hibernian sea.

It is time by then to discover who is a born or trained disciple of Neptune, and who is not. Already the loud voiced knots of Manchester excursionists have subsided into silent heaps under the bulwarks, while in the corners of the velvet-seated deckhouse you may come upon tucked up figures endeavouring to drown misery in sleep. The blue-jerseyed crew have carefully hauled down the red ensign that was fluttering so gaily astern, and while just above the gilded knob of the flagstaff you catch a faint glimpse of the tall chimney which is all that remains visible of Seaborough, a splash of salt spray over the port paddle-box sparkles into the air. The drops dry into white 2 » salt on the red funnel ; the skipper looks up to windward as if wondering whether it might be worth while to have his sou'-wester ready; and the cowering crowd of excursionists press closer together under the weather bulwarks.

But it is nothing, probably, after all ; a cross sea near the edge of the banks, and nothing worse to come behind it. There is nothing now visible astern save the white line of eddying foam, with the sea-gulls wheeling wildly over it as they make plunges at the scraps from the steamer's kitchen. There is nothing visible, either, ahead. Only on the left, half seen through trails of flying mist, there is the long blue outline of the Cambrian hills, seeming to end in a headland whose rocky mass is quite detached from the horizon. An hour more, two hours more, and even the hills have gone, and the only incident has been the meeting with the steamer bound the other way — a meeting emphasised by the courteous dipping of ensigns specially hoisted for the occasion. A little longer, and then, straight over the steamer's bow, and seemingly cut in two by the wire stay of the foremast, appears a shadow.

A shadow it seems, nothing more. There is a bank of white mist hanging above the horizon, rather to the starboard of the steamer's course than otherwise. Underneath this mist the horizon seems to be of a darker purple than elsewhere, and just where the mists terminate towards the left there is a faint, faint sloping line wdrich, after having watched it for a quarter of an hour, you know cannot possibly be cloud. A little longer, and the sloping line has visibly strengthened, while the shadow under the cloud has become darker and denser. Then, far away on the left, as it seems, and entirely detached from the land right ahead, sharp conical peaks begin to show themselves above the horizon. On the right, too, more peaks seem to be rising up, and presently the sharp outline of a precipitous headland.

Then more peaks appear to the left, and at last long saddles of land that connect them together and all with the high ridge towards which the steamer ploughs her way rapidly, through water so clear as to appear, in the eddies from the paddles, almost blue-black. There is green visible on the hillsides, white specks also which may be houses, while the white splash of waves is clearly seen at the foot of the gray crags that buttress up the green slopes. On the right is a bay curving round like the famed one of Naples, with a gardened palace (which is, after all, only an hotel) half-way along the strand. The engineers get their signal to "stand by"; the huge, bright engines are slowed ; the Manchester excursionists wake up to a sense of renewed existence ; and between a lighthoused jetty on one hand and a gray headland on the other, the red-funnelled steamer, under a salute of one gun from a toy battery, draws up by the crowded pier.

This is the town of Athole, the steep-streeted capital of the beautiful island that has for its heraldic device the three mailed arms, and whose cats are distinguished by an unex plained Darwinian eccentricity. The capital, yet not the capital ; for the Viceroy of the island holds his court and his parliament in a little weather-beaten village twelve miles to the south, near to the shelter of those conical peaked hills that were seen to rise like pyramids from the horizon. There has long been Home Rule established in this green-hilled island, and any London stationer would, twenty years ago, have told you why playing-cards were cheaper in the island than in England, and why gold buttoned revenue officers were always on the look-out to pounce upon packs of cards in the act of being surreptitiously conveyed to England by departing visitors.

There, in the bleak village at the bleak end of the island, in the midst of a population that does little save catch herrings and cure them, the Viceroy holds his parliament and his court, occupying the halls of a black-walled castle, and looking down upon a street whose one inn possesses the well-used billiard table which forms the one excitement of undergraduates engaged in that long-vacation idleness known by the name of reading-parties. Here, at this bleak end of the island, there are varied traditions of danger and disaster. There is the perpendicular headland beneath which, it is said, lie, with all their wealth of golden doubloons, shattered ships of the Spaniard's Armada. There are the mysterious chasms opening in rifts from the cliff-tops, and penetrating, it is said, through a labyrinth of sheer descents, below the very level of the sea.

There is the narrow sound dividing the little island from the mainland — the little island crowned with the double lighthouse that helps to beacon the highway from the great port of Seaborough to the Atlantic — there is the narrow sound, with its fierce and dangerous tides, and with its ghastly tradition of a powder-laden ship that exploded at dead of night, hurling shattered human remains to a couple of miles' distance. There is the land-locked harbour of refuge. There are the deep, dim copper mines ; the headlands looking across to the Irish coast ; the bills with the quaint Gaelic names, running up into the purple pyramid of South Balorna. And then, further north, and opposite Athole, the social capital of the island, there is the old town with its older sea-girt castle— the castle whose vaults are haunted by the mysterious and diabolical black dog, and in whose halls Julian Peveril served as a page before he was sent on his wild-goose errand to England.

There, too, is the glen full of waterfalls, where the fairies may still be seen to dance on Midsummer Eve; there is the Hill of the Law, from which all new enactments are yearly proclaimed, and from which the bishop, in lawn sleeves and with his arms out spread, solemnly blesses the herring fishery at the com mencement of every season. And here, too, on the north side of the valley which nearly cuts the island straight across, the great slopes begin that lead up into the long ridge of Snowfell, the ridge where the clouds almost perpetually rest, and which looks down in clear weather into every valley in the island. On both sides of Snowfell, and along its fringes, broad and smooth high-roads run northward ; on the west side through undulating fields, past the sheltered Gothic turrets of the bishop's palace, past the spot where for years the harmless maniac stood at his cottage gate, shouting his incoherent grievance straight up into the summer sky.

And on the east side, starting along the strand of the Bay of Athole, climbing over headlands with the sea hundreds of feet below, passing beneath the gigantic water-wheel that drains the lead mines at Loxly ; climbing again and rounding the shoulder of high-peaked North Balorna, the northern sentry of the great mountain range, the road drops down amid trees and hedges full of roses till it meets the western road in the centre of the little town of Dalsey. A town — for it might be called a town, even if on no other ground than the fact of its being a shade bigger than the viceregal village — a town of shreds and patches, of different ages and different styles. The old town, a collection of gray-walled buildings, sometimes rough-dashed, sometimes showing the hues of the native stone quarry, standing on the verge of the old harbour.

As, however, the old harbour had, at the particular juncture here referred to, partially ceased to be the harbour, so the old town had partially ceased to be the town. New elements had been imported and new industries set to work, and the result of new elements and new industries had been the erection of a harbour breakwater about which as many controversies existed as exist about all breakwaters. The one thing certain about the breakwater, an affair of teak planks and creosoted piles that ran out along one side of the harbour entrance, was that it was the proper place to frequent when ever the weekly direct steamer came in from Seaborough — an event which marked Monday evenings with a white stone in the minds of the rising generation. New elements had been imported. You met them in the shape of retired naval and military officers, who had come thither in search of a cheap location.

These you might find in little cottages far in the country, or lodging in small rows of continuous villas that crept about the skirts of the old town. Higher up the Hill — it was always called "the Hill," though only a sandy rise looking out to the northward — were to be found families in which the male element was singularly wanting. Of widows there were few ; of grasswidows there were many. They and their daughters — the sons, if there were any, always seemed to move in some different orbit — might be counted all up the side of the sandy road up the Hill, and they formed, indeed, a large proportion of the congregation of the new chapel of ease that nestled securely among their dwellings. Where the husbands and fathers of these manless families were no one ever quite knew ; and, indeed, ifc was a point of etiquette among them never to ask each other.

If Mrs. Smith's husband had gone to the bad in India, or if Mrs. Robinson's husband had been a fraudulent bankrupt in Birmingham, that was only the business of Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Robinson respectively. Living and house-rent were cheap ; the girls chummed together and called each other by their Christian names ; new ribbons were to be had for the adorning of old frocks whenever festivities occurred ; and the eagle-eyed young curate flirted with and smiled over all. This new element, in its way, prospered. It had picnics at its desire, and occasionally thereby caught husbands for the junior members of its circle. The new element, how ever, had not made such an alteration in the town of Dalsey as had the new industry. Why, in a place like Dalsey, in a neighbourhood possessing neither coal nor iron, and with a harbour but seldom possessing water, any person should have thought it advisable and lit to establish an iron ship building industry, was a matter of marvel and conjecture to many both in Great Britain and in the island.

If, said those who knew or professed to know, it costs a certain sum per ton to build iron ships on the Clyde, in the neighbourhood where both coal and iron abound, how much more must it cost per ton when every pound of coal and every iron plate had to be conveyed by sea from the Clyde to Dalsey ? The reflection was one, however, which had not entered into the calculations of some energetic gentle men who, regarding Dalsey as a favourable spot for the putting together of iron ships, had established and founded the " Isle of Middlesea Iron Shipbuilding Company, Limited." That the town of Dalsey profited thereby there could be no question. Workshops, resonant with the pounding of steam-hammers, erected themselves on spaces formerly vacant, while all day long, until the evening bell rang and the workmen trooped home over the wooden bridge across the harbour, the rattle of the riveters was heard by the water-side.

Dalsey flourished and basked beneath the smile of this new prosperity. It gave weight to schemes of extensive harbour improvement ; it brought money, in the shape of weekly wages, to the shops ; it provided, more than all, a wider selection of young men for the daughters of the families on the Hill. It was true that in the outside world the Isle of Middlesea Iron Ship building Company was not much thought of. It had the reputation of building ships of strange and ill-omened design — ships built upon new principles of naval architecture, from which the designer anticipated mighty things, and which in point of fact were failures. These failures, how ever, did not affect the spirits of the inhabitants, male and female (but especially female), of Dalsey, who, when an extra high spring tide so filled up the harbour as to make a ship launch a possibility, turned out in full strength to witness the event, and to listen to the enthusiastic speeches in which the promoters of the Company foretold the future great ness of the town.

It was quite in keeping, Dalsey thought, with the beauty and poetry of such occasions, that nearly all the vessels launched into its harbour were christened with the name of some one of the Nine Muses. When the launch was over and the flags were hauled down, Dalsey harbour reverted to its original state of dulness' with two or three dilapidated smacks lying in the mud at one side, half-a-score of brightly-painted row-boats at the other, a departed timber-laden brig, and a steamer expected. Yet, for all its queer mixtures of things and people, no one could call Dalsey an unpleasant place, so far as its surroundings were concerned. The unrecognised visitor who happened to be stranded at the castellated hotel by the harbour, it is true, found his life almost unendurable, and there was not much, either, in the way of literature to be got from the lending library, where you could obtain skeins of Berlin wool — crewel-work had not come into fashion at the date referred to — together with forgotten copies of songs that were new twenty years previously.

If, however, the visitor took the trouble to seek the country, to cross the bridge of three gray arches, he might find an exquisitely wooded road running westwards, with the spurs of the hills on the left and the open country on the right, the road bordered here and there by low-roofed mansions that seemed to have come out of pictures, overlooking lawns as green and as soft as velvet. Or, ranging more out into the open, he might roam between bramble hedges along sandy lanes, away to where the lonely httle church of Murby showed white against the rain-mists to the west. Or, farther east, there was the long six-mile beach that ran in a single curve from the foot of the Hill to the desolate sandy corner where the northern lighthouse of the island, with its attendant life-boat, kept watch over the channel between the island and the Scottish coast — a beach hardly trodden in the winter months save by a wandering coastguardsman, where the curlews flew past from the inland flats, and where the waves, in mile-long rollers, moved shorewards from beneath the shadow of the great Cumberland hills opposite.

Or there was the road southwards from the town, the road along the sea coast towards Athole, rising gently between hedges till it reached a sharp turn to the left, beyond which few foot-passengers ever passed. There, just on the right of the road, and reached by a field-gate, was the little low roofed church — no one knew exactly how it came to be there — whose churchyard had been from time immemorial .a place for the burial of strangers — a Potter's Field remembered by many far off with many tears. And in front was the gate into Dalsey Glen, most favoured spot for picnic parties — the glen whose path ran up and up between its tall ragged woods and over its rocky platforms, straight towards the steep peak of North Balorna, that filled up all the sky and all the space between the tree-stems, seldom scaled, yet always seeming to beckon onward, with the full sunlight on his head, or the mists of evening trailing from his shoulders.

That a community such as this should have its sharp social and religious divisions, was only to be expected. As a rule the Hill did not visit with the town, nor the town with the Hill. There were, however, exceptions to this rule. For example, one or two chosen families living in the town— the family of Mr. Peterson, the Advocate, among others— were intimate with families on the Hill, which families in their turn would have nothing to do with the other Hill folk. For there were the old Hill folk, part of the old aristocracy of the island, who lived in their mansions, and the new Hill folk, who lived in their villas, and about whose male relations so much uncertainty existed. Old Mrs. Tremorthen, for example, whose grapes were so famous for ripening in the open air, would drive into town to visit the Petersons, while of her neighbours up on the Hill — the Batsons, the Gregorys, the Whites, and all the rest — she knew no more than she knew of the Esquimaux.

The only family on the Hill — that is, among the new families on the Hill — which Mrs. Tremorthen recognised was the family of the Holts, a family of a mother, less than widowed and more than grass-widowed, and three daughters, who lived in the very last villa at the top of the Hill road. "And I tolerate them," she explained to her old friend Advocate Peterson, "for the sake of the youngest girl, whom my grandson George seems to have a liking for, and who is better than the others. As for her sisters, they are detestable, and the mother's a fool." As for the religious divisions of Dalsey, they followed much the same lines as the social. The town, together with the old dwellers on the Hill, stuck to the parish church — a low-walled building with a rank graveyard shadowed by thickly foliaged trees, that stood in the very midst of the town, a stone's throw from the quay.

The church, which had the appearance of a building gradually sinking into the ground with the very weight of its own weariness, was damp and sleepy, clinging in all its ways — that is, in the year 1864 or thereabouts — to the dullest traditions of the old Evangelical school, and occupied as to its pulpit by an honest but cross-grained Calvinist, who had. survived the perils of a missionary existence in South Africa. The service and the sermons, however, suited the old-fashioued folk who liked to have what they had been used to, and suited also the shopkeepers who liked to derive an example from the old-fashioned folk, who were in many respects their best customers. On the Hill, under the ministrations of the eagle-eyed and fashionable curate in-charge, the Rev. Thomas Eaton, things were different.

There was a church with a high-pitched roof, low seats, a tiled chancel, a carved lectern, an organ (only half paid for) by Hastie and Rogers, the great organ-builders at Hull. There, too, on the Hill, the church-people danced with their parson on Saturday evening — and it was always acknowledged that the Rev. Thomas Eaton was a beautiful dancer — and listened to his twenty-minute sermons (twenty minutes was then a minimum limit) on Sunday morning. Can it be a matter of marvel that friction arose between the church iu the town and the church on the Hill, between the sombre-minded ex-missionary vicar and the light hearted curate-in-charge of the folk up above ? Can it be wondered at that the ex-missionary had made pointed and unmistakable allusions in his sermons to the Scarlet Woman, and hinted the fate of the ancient Church of Thyatira to both priest and people of the other establishment?

Can it be wondered at that the Rev. Thomas Eaton had earnestly canvassed his female friends and supporters, and ascertained that in any crisis that might arise with the ex-missionary they were ready to go with him, if not to prison and to death, at least to a representa tion to the bishop ? And now a crisis had arisen. The ex-missionary had laid claim to and removed a black silk Geneva gown which had always hung in the vestry of the church on the Hill, and which the Rev. Thomas Eaton had always been in the habit of using in the pulpit. All Dalsey was divided and excited on the subject, and the question agitating the whole community, from old Mrs. Tremorthen on the Hill to the baker's boy in the town, was this — "What will Mr. Eaton do? Will he wear a surplice in the pulpit next Sunday ? "

Chapter II

A DAY IN THE GLEN. THE crisis of the gown was expected to take place on Sunday, and on the day preceding there was much festivity in the high woods of Dalsey Glen. Mrs. Holt, the lady whom old Mrs. Tremorthen described as a fool, and who lived with her three daughters in the detached villa at the very top of the Hill road, gave a picnic. It had been a long-promised affair, and had been planned originally without any further design than that of affording a day's enjoyment, with plenty of opportunities for flirtation, to all Mrs. Holt's circle of acquaintance. There had, it is true, been a certain dim and obscure reference in making the arrangements to the possible capturing of Mr. Shadley, the handsome young civil engineer, who had recently arrived for the purpose of taking charge of some proposed extensions of the Dalsey Harbour Works.

Mr. Shadley had come to Dalsey with a great reputation. He had been a pupil, and it was said a favourite one, of that great engineering light Sir James Hawksley, and it was reported that Sir James had himself recommended this rising young man as the best possible person for the solution of the harbour problem. With such a reputation Mr. Shadley had come to Dalsey. But somehow Dalsey had failed to take his altitude. A tall, dark young man, with marked features and eyes which some of the girls declared were delightfully wicked, he lived in lodgings a good deal by himself, and was in a measure unapproachable. That he could make himself agreeable when he chose, became plain very soon after his arrival ; but at the same time it became plain that he only made himself agreeable when he chose, preferring at other times to regard the little society around him in saturnine silence.

While thus keeping himself at a distance from society Mr. Shadley seemed at the same time somewhat benti electrifying it by startling deeds of strength or daring. He had rowed round Mouse's Head, the perpendicular cliff that bounded Dalsey Bay on the south, in an open boat, by himself and in half a gale of wind. He had made a perilous descent of an abandoned copper mine by lowering himself by his hands from beam to beam of the shaft lining. These feats, coupled with his reserved attitude, created quite a fluttering sense of desire in the little hearts of the Dalsey maidens, and those who had danced with him had been known to declare afterwards that it was quite strangely delicious to dance with a man who seemed quite capable of crushing them up without notice. A picnic, however, might possibly soften Mr. Shadley's heart ; there were so many opportunities at picnics ; and it was with this consideration in view that Mrs. Holt had, quite early in the summer, agreed to give a picnic on a large scale.

In order to do the thing as she wished, how ever, Mrs. Holt had been compelled to enter into an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Mrs. Batson, who lived half way down the road. The position was this — there was a distinct rivalry be tween the heads of the Batson and Holt families. Mrs. Batson had one eligible daughter, and Mrs. Holt had two only two eligible, because Mrs. Holt had some months before scored considerably in the estimation of the whole community by getting her youngest daughter Constance engaged to a certain Captain Rivers, who had stayed in the place through the winter and created great commotion in all susceptible dovecotes. Why Captain Rivers should have fixed his affections on Constance Holt, who was so unlike all the girls whom Dalsey considered attractive, was a mystery.

But, nevertheless, the fact was so ; and Constance, to use an expression which Mr. Shadley cynically put about among his male acquaintances, was out of the running. Between Mary Batson, however, and Helen and Julia Holt there was a strong rivalry. Mary Batson was a strong-limbed, round-faced young woman of five-and-twenty, who affected yachting costumes of blue serge, and, with a glazed hat, short, curly hair, and white throat open a la Byron above a knotted blue silk handkerchief, might have done very well as a model for a figure-head of a " Lively Polly," or " My Own Mary Ann." She was a splendid sailor and a thorough romp. With little education and no vice, she had drunk bottled stout and smoked cigarettes on the half-deck of every yacht frequent ing the port. She was good-nature itself, and, being a splendid swimmer, had all but won a Humane Society's gold medal for jumping off the breakwater one blowy day and rescuing a small fisher boy who had been knocked overboard by the niainboom of his father's smack.

By her male admirers, who were numerous and sincere, she was usually addressed as " Jack " ; it did not seem likely, what ever she or her mother might think, that any one of them would ever address her as " darling Mary." If about Mary, or "Jack" Batson, there was an atmo sphere of Amazonian good-nature, there was about Helen and Julia Holt an atmosphere of selfish refinement. Helen was about Mary's age ; Julia some two years younger. They were tall girls, with elegant figures and fairly good features, though with the thin lips that denote a want of sympathising power. That they were the best-dressed girls on the Hill was admitted ; yet it was an established fact that they made all their rwn dresses, and no milliner's assistant knew better what could be done with limited materials. They read novels of the graver kind ; seemed desirous not to own to having read "Adam Bede;" and pursed up their lips a little tighter at the mention in their presence of the erring Hetty.