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"The Secret of Wyvern Towers" in THE ARGOSY, VOLUME XXVI.
(DECEMBER, 1897), No. 1, pp. 1-78, published by
Frank A. Munsey in 1898.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
VERY STRANGE TIDINGS.
CHAPTER II.
AFTER THE TELLING OF THE NEWS.
CHAPTER III.
SIR JOHN CONDUCTS THE INQUIRY.
CHAPTER IV.
A BACKWARD GLANCE.
CHAPTER V.
IN THE LEFT WING.
CHAPTER VI.
RECREANT LOVER.
CHAPTER VII.
AN AMAZING CONFESSION.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
CHAPTER IX.
WAITING FOR THE VERDICT.
CHAPTER X.
IN THE LAST RESORT.
CHAPTER XI.
ONE STEP NEARER.
CHAPTER XII.
ON THE BRINK.
CHAPTER XIII.
LAST THINGS.
CHAPTER XIV.
WITH ALL SPEED.
CHAPTER XV.
THE SECRET OP WYVERN TOWERS.
THE SECRET OF WYVERN TOWERS.*
[*_Copyright, 1897, by T. W. Speight_.]
BY T. W. SPEIGHT.
Being an account of the circumstances that shadowed the happiness of
Felix Drelincourt--Why two persons proclaimed themselves guilty of a
fearful crime, on account of which a vagabond's life was placed in
jeopardy--The blotting out of an identity brought about by an
unexpected legacy.
(_Complete in This Issue_.)
CHAPTER I.
VERY STRANGE TIDINGS.
On a certain sunny May morning, about forty years ago, the owner of
Wyvern Towers stepped into a lovely glade of Barras Wood, which was a
portion of his extensive property.
Felix Drelincourt was a man who stood a little over six feet in
height. His black, silky hair had a careless wave in it, and his thin
mustache, with its up curled tips, was the cause of his often being
taken for a foreigner.
But his eyes were the most striking feature of a striking personality.
They were black, and of an extraordinarily piercing quality, with a
sort of veiled, somber glow in them at times, as it might be the glow
thrown out from between the bars of some hidden furnace, the fire in
which was eating its heart away in the flame of its own burning
unrest. It was not easy to judge his age, but one might put it down as
being somewhere between eight and twenty and four or five and thirty.
This morning he was dressed in a velveteen shooting jacket, with cord
breeches and leggings, and was wearing a low crowned felt hat.
"What has brought me here on this one morning of all mornings of the
year?" he said. "Ah, what! Am I wrong in terming it a force--a
magnetic attraction--I was powerless to resist? This is _her_
birthday. Where is she? Does an English sun shine here on this
morning, or that of some far off land? Vain questions, and idle as
vain."
He took a couple of turns from end to end of the glade with compressed
lips and bent brows. Then his thoughts again took articulate form.
"This is the spot--the forest temple--the grove sacred to the memory
of that hour--where, only three short years ago, Madeline told me that
she loved me! Only three little years ago, and yet I seem to have
lived through a cycle since then. Yes, here our lips met in love's
first kiss, and here we vowed that nothing on earth should divide us.
Poor fools that we were! We did not dream of treachery; we hardly knew
there was such a word."
He came to a halt by a sturdy young oak at the upper end of the
opening.
"It was in the bark of this tree that I cut her initials and my own.
Here they are still to convince me I am not dreaming of something
which never happened. Time's obliterating fingers have dealt tenderly
with them, as though the old graybeard knew they were a lover's
handiwork, and remembered a far off eon when he was young himself."
At this moment the clock of a distant church began to strike the hour.
Drelincourt stood listening till the last stroke had died into
silence.
"Nine of them," he said. "It's time to think of going back to the Cot.
At what hour did I leave it? There's the mystery. It must have been
near midnight before I fell asleep, dog tired. The rest is an absolute
blank till I---- Ah! Some one is calling me. It sounds like Rodd's
voice. What can he want with me at this hour?"
Taking a silver whistle from his pocket, he put it to his lips and
blew. Its keen, shrilly scream cut the silence, like a knife.
Two minutes later a man came brushing roughly through the underwood.
At the edge of the glade he paused for a moment, while he took off his
hat and mopped his brow.
Drelincourt stood motionless, his eyes turned upon him. Under his
breath he said: "He has the look of one charged with a message of
doom."
The newcomer, Roden Marsh by name, was Felix Drelincourt's foster
brother. He was a tall, gaunt man, with a pronounced stoop of the
shoulders which detracted considerably from his height. He had a long,
thin face, a high ridged, prominent nose, thoughtful, deep set eyes,
and a profusion of straw colored hair parted down the middle.
His clothes, generally more or less worn and threadbare--not from
necessity, but because he was both indifferent to appearances and
parsimoniously inclined--hung loosely on his lean and bony frame. By
strangers he was often taken for the village schoolmaster.
As he advanced into the glade, any one familiar with his customary
phlegmatic and unemotional manner would have seen at once that he was
the bearer of no ordinary tidings.
"Thank Heaven I have found you!" were his first words, and there could
be no doubt of the sincerity with which they were spoken.
"It is a small mercy to be thankful for," replied the other, with the
ghost of a smile.
"A terrible discovery has been made at the Towers."
"Those are strong words, my dear Rodd, but they fail to convey any
definite idea to my mind. They may mean much or they may mean very
little."
"Mrs. Drelincourt has been murdered in her sleep."
"Murdered!" Drelincourt staggered back a pace or two, and then,
putting forth his right hand, he caught hold of an oak sapling and
gripped it hard. For a few seconds his body rocked like that of a man
whose brain has been stunned and dizzied by some great shock.
"That is indeed a terrible discovery to have made," he went on, after
a pause. "Kate dead! It seems incredible; altogether beyond belief."
"For all that, it is true."
"But what possible motive could any one have for the commission of
such a crime?"
Roden's thin lips tightened. Evidently the question was one which he
either would not or could not answer.
"When and by whom was the discovery made?" asked Mr. Drelincourt,
after a brief pause.
"It was made by Lucille, nearly a couple of hours ago. She went as
usual to take her mistress an early cup of chocolate, and--and found
her dead in bed."
"Go on. Tell me all the particulars known to you."
"Mrs. Drelincourt had been stabbed to the heart, most probably while
she was asleep."
"So! Has the weapon with which the deed was committed been found?"
"It had not when I left the Towers."
Drelincourt seated himself on the fallen trunk, and resting his elbows
on his knees, he bent his eyes on the ground.
"As soon as the crime became known," resumed the other, "I sent off a
groom on horseback to fetch Dr. Carew. On the way he met Mr. Ormsby
and told him the news, and was ordered by him to at once communicate
with the police."
"A very proper thing to do."
"Mr. Ormsby, accompanied by another gentleman, a stranger, had just
reached the Towers before I left it."
"To come in search of me?"
"Exactly. It has taken me nearly an hour to find you. I hurried, first
of all, to the Cot, but you were not there. Margery Trant had not
heard you leave the house, and was unable to tell me in which
direction you had gone. I set out to look for you, and it must have
been instinct which directed my steps to this place."
He paused. A throstle in the wood piped a few notes and then ceased.
"Go on," said Drelincourt, without looking up. "You have something
more to tell me."
"As I bent over Mrs. Drelincourt's dead body, I found this close by
her pillow."
As he finished speaking, he drew from one of his pockets a white
handkerchief bordered with a thin line of black, and having shaken it
out, held it up to the light. On it were three or four crimson stains.
"It is yours. Here are your initials in one corner," he said.
He had a softly modulated voice, but just now there was no more
emotion either in it or his manner than if he had been discussing the
state of the weather.
Drelincourt started to his feet, his face blanched to the lips. A
moment or two he stared at the handkerchief as though it had for him a
horrible fascination. Then the eyes of the two men met in a silence
which seemed charged with hidden meaning.
"A dumb witness, but enough to hang a man," said Drelincourt at
length, as he turned away with a shudder.
Marsh did not reply, but, after a keen glance round, as if to make
sure there was no lurking onlooker, he let the handkerchief drop to
the ground, and then, dropping on one knee, he set it alight with a
match from his fusee box.
Drelincourt, his back supported by a tree, stood looking on in silence
till the flame had burned itself out, and nothing was left save a
little fine ash, which a wandering breeze presently caught up and
frolicked off with into the depths of the wood.
"This also I found," resumed Roden. "It was lying open on the writing
table in your dressing room at the Towers for anybody to see. It is in
your writing, and is dated today."
As he spoke, he produced a letter from his breast pocket and handed it
to Drelincourt, who took it mechanically and like a half dazed man.
It was without an envelope, and was simply folded in two. Opening it,
he read it in silence and with growing amazement.
"An unfinished letter to my friend, Professor Ridsdale. And you say
that you found it in my dressing room at the Towers?"
"I do."
"It refers to certain chemical experiments in which my friend and I
are interested. It is the very letter, almost word for word, which I
made up my mind to write to him the first thing after breakfast this
morning.. And yet I slept last night at the Cot, while you found this
an hour or more ago at the Towers!"
Again the eyes of the two met in pregnant silence.
"Rodd, you must have guessed the truth?"
"I have, Felix."
"Yes, no other explanation is possible. Yet it seems
monstrous--unbelievable. And by my hand! Oh!"
He ended with a groan, turned his face aside, and was silent. For
once this man, usually so proudly self-centered, so stoically
self-repressed, was moved to the depths of his soul as never in his
life before.
Crossing to him, Roden Marsh grasped one of his hands in both his own.
"Felix, between you and me not a word more is needed--I comprehend.
You have suffered. Your life has been made a burden almost too bitter
to be borne. I have seen and known it for long. I have suffered with
your sufferings; my heart has bled for you times without number. I can
speak now; hitherto I have had to look on and be dumb."
"Yes, you have seen something--perchance much; but you know no more
than your eyes have shown you, whatever you may have guessed. Of the
details of her treachery--_hers_, Rodd--which was black as hell, you
know nothing. Sit you there and listen. The tale shall be told, now
and here, from beginning to end."
Roden seated himself on the fallen trunk, while Drelincourt, pacing
slowly back and forth, half a dozen yards this way and as many that,
began his narrative.
"You will not have forgotten that about three years ago Colonel
Fenwicke and his niece were staying with the Ormsbys at Denham Lodge,
where I was an occasional visitor. I had met Madeline Fenwicke abroad
in the course of the previous summer, and had fallen in love with her;
but at that time I was comparatively a poor man, and marriage was not
to be thought of. In the interim my father had died, and I had
succeeded to the entail. There was no longer any reason why I should
keep silent. It was in this very glade, Rodd--here--here--that I met
my darling and told her my secret! It was here her lips touched mine
in love's first kiss. O Heaven! To think of all that has happened
between then and now!"
He took a turn or two in silence. Roden sat with crossed legs, nursing
an elbow with one hand, his chin supported in the hollowed palm of the
other.
"Madeline and Kate Ormsby had been schoolfellows, and the former had
no secrets from her friend. The day following our interview I was
called away to London by the illness of my aunt, Mrs. Gascoigne. At
Denham Lodge there is a terrace with a stone balustrade, from which a
flight of steps leads to the lower garden. As Madeline and Kate were
leaning over this balustrade after dark a few evenings later,
listening to a nightingale, two people came along the lower walk, a
man and a woman, judging from their voices. Said the man, as they drew
near:
"'The way Mr. Drelincourt has behaved to the girl is common talk in
the village. Of course he can't marry her--she's too far beneath him
for that--and now they say she's fit to break her heart because he
refuses to have anything more to do with her.'
"'Perhaps he's grown tired of her and found somebody more to his
liking. That's often the way you men have of treating us,' answered
the woman.
"Oh, come! We're not all as bad as that,' said the man with a laugh,
after which they passed out of earshot.
"An hour later Madeline wrote me that all was at an end between us.
The letter, which should have reached me next morning, was kept back
by Kate, and did not come to hand till three days later. Within four
hours of receiving it I was at Denham Lodge, only to find that
Madeline and her uncle had left there the day before.
"My aunt lingered on from week to week. I was her last living
relative, and she would not hear of my leaving for longer than a few
hours at a time. All I could do was to write a note to Madeline,
begging for an explanation, and inclose it under cover to the colonel
at his club. A week later my note was returned to me from Paris,
together with a few lines from the colonel, stating that thenceforward
all communication with me must cease, both on his part and that of his
niece. What I had been guilty of which deserved such a sentence I was
wholly at a loss to conceive. I could not comprehend the meaning of
such an action.
"A month later my aunt died. As soon as I was at liberty, I set out
for the continent, but nowhere could I come across a trace of those I
was in search of. You know what followed a little later: how I was
accidentally wounded while out shooting; how I was carried to Denham
Lodge, and there nursed back to convalescence by Kate Ormsby."
"Some part of what you have now told me I know or guessed already,"
said Roden; "but not the whole of it."
"You did not know how, one day, Kate read to me a passage from a
letter professedly written by her correspondent, Lady Linthorpe, in
which it was stated that Madeline Fenwicke had been married a
fortnight before at Rome. Within six weeks of that day Kate Ormsby had
become my wife."
Seating himself on the tree by the side of Marsh, he began to
manufacture a cigarette. By this time, to all outward seeming, he was
thoroughly himself again.
The shock of the news brought him by his foster brother had stunned,
and in a measure unmanned him for a little while, but his nature was
too self-poised, and his nerves too thoroughly under control, to allow
of his equanimity being seriously disturbed for any length of time.
That which had happened, however much it was to be deplored, belonged
to the past, and not all the powers of Heaven and earth combined could
alter or undo it. The only thing left him was to face the
consequences, and that he was prepared to do.
"It was not a fact, then, that Miss Fenwicke was married?" queried
Roden, after a pause.
"The statement was false from beginning to end. No such letter was
ever written by Lady Linthorpe; but not till about a month ago did
that fact come to my knowledge, and not till then was I in a position
to fathom the depths of my wife's treachery. It was she who arranged
the conversation overheard by Madeline that evening on the terrace,
the actors in it being the son of her father's bailiff and the
governess to her two younger sisters. It was a damnable plot, but it
succeeded."
He proceeded to light his cigarette, which done, he resumed his slow
pacing to and fro.
"It was indeed a black business," said Roden. "Did you tell Mrs.
Drelincourt of your discovery?"
"I did not fail to do so."
"And she----?"
"Laughed at me with that cold blooded laugh of hers which used to go
through me like a knife. In those days, she said, she was such a
simpleton as to fancy herself in love with me, and, in any case, she
had vowed to herself that Miss Fenwicke should never be my wife. She
will never laugh at me again."
"I am glad, Felix, you have told me this," said Roden presently. "It
has served to make clear much that was obscure to me before."
"I have not done yet. Something more remains to be told."
Tossing away what was left of his cigarette, Drelincourt sat down
again on the felled trunk.