Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Wyllard's Weird
(Mystery Classics Series)
Murder Mystery Novel
Published by
Books
- Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -
2019 OK Publishing
EAN 4057664560087
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. In A Cornish Valley.
Chapter 4. Bothwell Declines to Answer.
Chapter 6. A Clerical Warning.
Chapter 7. A Rapid Conversion.
Chapter 10. “Touch Lips and Part with Tears.”
Chapter 13. A Student of Men and Women.
Chapter 14. Bothwell Begins to See his Way.
Chapter 15. The Home of the past.
Chapter 16. A Face from the Grave.
Chapter 18. The General Receives A Summons.
Chapter 23. Lady Valeria Fights her Own Battle.
Chapter 24. An Elopement on New Lines.
Chapter 25. In the Land of Bohemia.
Chapter 26. Reaping the Whirlwind.
Chapter 27. How Such Things End.
Chapter 28. One who Must Remember.
Chapter 30. Waiting for his Doom.
Chapter 31. “Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven.”
Chapter 32. “Sweet is Death for Evermore.”
Chapter 33. “Who Knows Not Circe?”
Chapter 34. “How like A Winter Hath Thy Absence Been.”
Chapter 1.
In A Cornish Valley.
There are some travellers who think when they cross the Tamar, over that fairy bridge of Brunel’s, hung aloft between the blue of the river and the blue of the sky, that they have left England behind them on the eastern shore—that they have entered a new country, almost a new world. This land of quiet woods and lonely valleys, and bold brown hills, barren, solitary—these wild commons and large moorlands of Cornwall seem to stand apart, as they did in the days gone by, when this province was verily a kingdom, complete in itself, and owning no sovereignty but its own.
It is a beautiful region which the traveller sees, perchance for the first time, as the train skims athwart the quaint little waterside village of Saltash, and pierces the rich depths of the woodland, various, enchanting. Now the line seems strung like a thread of iron in mid-air above a deep gorge, now winds sinuous as a snake through a labyrinth of hills. A picturesque bit of road, this between Plymouth and Bodmin Road, at all times; but, perhaps, loveliest in the still evening hour, when the summer sunset steeps the land in golden light, while the summer wind scarcely stirs the woods.
In the mellow light of a July eventide the express from Paddington swept with slackened speed round the curve which marked the approach to a viaduct between Saltash and Bodmin Road—a heavy wooden structure, spanning a vale of Alpine beauty. An exquisite little bit of scenery, upon which the stranger is apt to look with some touch of fear mingled in the cup of his delight: but to the dweller in the district, familiar with every yard of the journey, the transit is as nothing. He is carried through the air serenely, as he smokes his cigar and reads his paper, and the notion of peril never occurs to him.
One man, sitting by the window of a third-class carriage near the end of the train, looked out at the familiar scene dreamily to-night. He was an elderly, gray-headed man, a parish doctor, hard-worked and poorly paid; but he had a keen eye for the beautiful in Nature, dead or living, and familiar as this spot was to his eye, it always impressed