Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source:
http://archive.org/details/61248333.2041.emory.edu
(Emory University)
AN ISLE OF SURREY.
A Novel.
BY
RICHARD DOWLING,
AUTHOR OF
"THE MYSTERY OF KILLARD," "THE DUKE'S SWEETHEART,"
"UNDER ST. PAUL'S," "MIRACLE GOLD," ETC.
* * * * * * * * * *
_NEW EDITION_.
* * * * * * * * * *
WARD AND DOWNEY,
12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON, W.C.
1891.
PRINTED BY
KELLY AND CO., MIDDLE MILL, KINGSTON-ON-THAMES
AND GATE STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, W.C.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I.--Welford Bridge.
II.--Crawford's House.
III.--The Pine Groves of Leeham.
IV.--The Missing Man.
V.--A Second Apparition.
VI.--Crawford's Investigations.
VII.--A Visitor at Boland's Ait.
VIII.--Father and Son.
IX.--Crawford's Home.
X.--Father and Son.
XI.--"Can I Play with that Little Boy?"
XII.--Philip Ray at Richmond.
XIII.--An Invitation Accepted.
XIV.--The Fire at Richmond.
XV.--How William Goddard changed his Name.
XVI.--At Play.
XVII.--The Postman's Hail.
XVIII.--Private Theatricals.
XIX.--The Tow-path by Night.
XX.--A Hostage at Crawford's House.
XXI.--Crawford Sells a Patent.
XXII.--William Crawford's Nightmare.
XXIII.--"Man Overboard!"
XXIV.--Reward for a Life.
XXV.--A New Visitor at Crawford's House.
XXVI.--A Bridge of Sighs.
XXVII.--A Last Resolve.
XXVIII.--William Crawford's Luck.
XXIX.--An Intruder upon the Ait.
XXX.--Hetty's Visit to the Ait.
XXXI.--By the Boy's Bedside.
XXXII.--Bramwell finds a Sister.
XXXIII.--"I must go to fetch her Home."
XXXIV.--Crawford's Plans for the Future.
XXXV.--Husband and Wife.
XXXVI.--Tea at Crawford's House.
XXXVII.--Crawford Writes Home.
XXXVIII.--William Crawford Free.
XXXIX.--Crawford is Sleepless.
XL.--Crawford Sleeps
AN ISLE OF SURREY.
CHAPTER I.
WELFORD BRIDGE.
There was not a cloud in the heavens. The sun lay low in the west. The
eastern sky of a May evening was growing from blue to a violet dusk.
Not a breath of wind stirred. It was long past the end of the
workman's day.
A group of miserably clad men lounged on Welford Bridge, some gazing
vacantly into the empty sky, and some gazing vacantly into the turbid
water of the South London Canal, crawling beneath the bridge at the
rate of a foot a minute towards its outlet in the Mercantile Docks, on
the Surrey shore between Greenwich and the Pool.
The men were all on the southern side of the bridge: they were loafers
and long-shoremen. Most of them had pipes in their mouths. They were a
disreputable-looking group, belonging to that section of the residuum
which is the despair of philanthropists--the man who has nothing
before him but work or crime, and can hardly be got to work.
One of them was leaning against the parapet with his face turned in
mere idleness up the canal. He was not looking at anything: his full,
prominent, meaningless blue eyes were fixed on nothing. Directly in
the line of his vision, and between him and Camberwell, were
Crawford's Bay and Boland's Ait. The ait, so called by some derisive
humourist, lay in the mouth of the bay, the outer side of it forming
one bank of the canal, and the inner side corresponding with the sweep
of Crawford's Bay, formed forty feet of canal water.
The man looking south was low-sized, red-bearded, red-whiskered,
red-haired, with a battered brown felt hat, a neckerchief of no
determinable colour, a torn check shirt, a dark blue ragged pea-jacket
of pilot cloth, no waistcoat, a pair of brown stained trousers, and
boots several sizes too large for him, turned up at the toes, and so
bagged and battered and worn that they looked as though they could not
be moved another step without falling asunder. This man would have
told a mere acquaintance that his name was Jim Ford, but he was called
by those who knew him Red Jim.
All at once he uttered a strong exclamation of surprise without
shifting his position.
"What is it, Jim?" asked a tall, lank, dark man by his side.
The others of the group turned and looked in the direction in which
Jim's eyes were fixed.
"Why," said Red Jim, in a tone of incredulity and indignation,
"there's some one in Crawford's House!"
"Of course there is, you fool! Why, where have you been? Haven't you
heard? Have you been with the Salvation Army, or only doing a
stretch?"
"Fool yourself!" said Red Jim. "Mind what you're saying, or perhaps
I'll stretch you a bit, long as you are already." The other men
laughed at this personal sally. It reduced long Ned Bayliss to sullen
silence, and restored Red Jim to his condition of objectless vacuity.
"I hear," said a man who had not yet spoken, "that Crawford's House is
let."
"Let!" cried another, as though anyone who mentioned the matter as
news must be ages behind the times. "Let! I should think it is!"
"And yet it isn't so much let, after all," said Ned Bayliss, turning
round in a captious manner. "You can't exactly say a place is let when
a man goes to live in his own house."
"Why, Crawford's dead this long and merry," objected a voice.
"Well," said Ned Bayliss, "and if he is, and if he left all to his
wife for as long as she kept his name, and if she married a second
time and got her new husband to change his name instead of _her_
changing _hers_--how is that, do you think, Matt Jordan?"
It was plain by Ned Bayliss's manner and by the way in which this
speech was received by the listeners that he was looked up to as a
being of extraordinary mental endowment, and possessed preëminently of
the power of lucid exposition.
"True enough," said Matt Jordan humbly, as he hitched up his trousers
and shifted his pipe from one side of his mouth to the other, and
coughed a self-deprecatory cough. "And a snug property he has come
into, I say. I only wish I was in his place."
Jordan was a squat, ill-favoured man of forty.
"Why," said Bayliss derisively, "a man with your points wouldn't throw
himself away on a sickly widow with only a matter of a thousand a-year
or thereabouts out of a lot of ramshackle tenement-houses and canal
wharfs. You'd look higher, Matt. Why, you'd want a titled lady, any
way. With your face and figure, you ought to be able to do a great
deal better than an elderly sickly widow, even if she is rich."
Jordan shifted his felt hat, made no reply, and for a while there was
silence.
Crawford's House, of which the loungers on Welford Bridge were
speaking, stood a few feet back from the inner edge of Crawford's Bay,
about three hundred yards from the bridge. Jim Ford, the first
speaker, had concluded, from seeing all the sashes of the house open,
and a woman cleaning a window, and a strip of carpet hanging out of
another, that a tenant had been found for this lonely and isolated
dwelling, which had been standing idle for years.
"Have you seen this turncoat Crawford?" asked a man after a pause.
No one had seen him.
"He must have a spirit no better than a dog's to change his name for
her money," said Red Jim, without abandoning his study of Crawford's
House, on which his vacant eyes now rested with as much curiosity as
the expressionless blue orbs were capable of.
"It would be very handy for _some_ people to change their names like
that, or in any other way that wouldn't bring a trifle of canvas and a
few copper bolts to the mind of any one in the neighbourhood of the
East India Docks," said Bayliss, looking at that point of the sky
directly above him, lest any one might fancy his words had a personal
application.
With an oath, Red Jim turned round, and, keeping his side close to the
parapet, slouched slowly away towards the King William public-house,
which stood at the bottom of the short approach to the steep
humpbacked bridge.
"Nice chap he is to talk of changing a name for money being
disgraceful!" said Bayliss, when the other was out of hearing. "He was
as near as ninepence to doing time over them canvas and bolts at the
East India. Look at him now, going to the William as if he had money!
_He_ isn't the man that could stand here if he had a penny in his
rags." The speaker jingled some coins in his own pocket to show how
he, being a man of intellectual resources and strong will, could
resist temptation before which common clay, such as Red Jim was made
of, must succumb.
Red Jim did not enter the William. As he reached the door he stopped
and looked along the road. A man coming from the western end drew up
in front of him and said:
"Is that Welford Bridge?" pointing to where the group of loungers
stood, with the upper portions of their bodies illumined by the
western glow against the darkening eastern sky.
"Yes," said Jim sullenly, "that's Welford Bridge."
"Do you know where Crawford's Bay is, here on the South London Canal?
Is that the canal bridge?"
"I know where Crawford's Bay is right enough," said the other
doggedly. He was not disposed to volunteer any information. "Do you
want to go to Crawford's Bay? If you do, I can show you the way. I'm
out of work, gov'nor, and stone broke."
"Very good. Come along and show me Crawford's House. I'll pay you for
your trouble."
Red Jim led the way back to the bridge.
"Who has he picked up?" asked Bayliss jealously, as the two men passed
the group.
None of the loungers answered.
"He's turning down Crawford Street," said Bayliss, when the two men
had gone a hundred yards beyond the bridge.
"So he is," said another. Bayliss was the most ready of speech, and
monopolised the conversation. His mates regarded him as one rarely
gifted in the matter of language; as one who would, without doubt,
have made an orator if ambition had led the way.
"I wonder what Red Jim is bringing that man down Crawford Street for?
No good, I'm sure."
"Seems a stranger," suggested the other man. "Maybe he wants Jim to
show him the way."
"Ay," said Bayliss in a discontented tone. "There's a great deal to be
seen down Crawford Street! Lovely views; plenty of rotting doors. Now,
if they only got in on the wharf, Jim could show him the old empty
ice-house there. Do you know, if any one was missing hereabouts, and a
good reward was offered, I'd get the drags and have a try in the
ice-house. There's ten feet of water in it if there's an inch, so I'm
told."
"It is a lonesome place. I wonder they don't pump the water out."
"Pump it out, you fool! How could they? Why, 'twould fill as fast as
any dozen fire-engines could pump it out. The water from the canal
soaks into it as if the wall was a sieve."
Nothing more was said for a while. Then suddenly, Bayliss, whose eyes
were turned towards the bay, uttered an oath, and exclaimed, "We're a
heap of fools, that's what we are, not to guess. Why, it must be
Crawford, the new Crawford--not the Crawford that's dead and buried,
but the one that's alive and had the gumption to marry the sickly
widow for her money! There he is at the window with that girl I saw
going into the house to-day."
Bayliss stretched out his long lean arm, and pointed with his thin
grimy hand over the canal towards Crawford's House, at one of the
windows of which a man and woman could be seen looking out into the
dark turbid waters of Crawford's Bay.