by Ellen Wood
The Collected Works of
ELLEN WOOD
(1814-1887)
Contents
The Novels
DANESBURY HOUSE
EAST LYNNE
A LIFE’S SECRET
MRS. HALLIBURTON’S TROUBLES
THE CHANNINGS
THE FOGGY NIGHT AT OFFORD
THE SHADOW OF ASHLYDYAT
VERNER’S PRIDE
LORD OAKBURN’S DAUGHTERS
OSWALD CRAY
TREVLYN HOLD
WILLIAM ALLAIR
MILDRED ARKELL
IT MAY BE TRUE
ELSTER’S FOLLY
ST. MARTIN’S EVE
ROLAND YORKE
WITHIN THE MAZE
THE STORY OF CHARLES STRANGE
The Shorter Fiction
THE ELCHESTER COLLEGE BOYS
THE GHOST OF THE HOLLOW FIELD
JOHNNY LUDLOW
JOHNNY LUDLOW, SECOND SERIES
JOHNNY LUDLOW. THIRD SERIES
JOHNNY LUDLOW. FOUR SERIES
JOHNNY LUDLOW. FIFTH SERIES
JOHNNY LUDLOW. SIXTH SERIES
The Short Stories
LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
The Non-Fiction
OUR CHILDREN
The Biography
MEMORIALS OF MRS. HENRY WOOD by Charles W. Wood
The Delphi Classics Catalogue
© Delphi Classics 2015
Version 1
The Collected Works of
ELLEN WOOD
By Delphi Classics, 2015
COPYRIGHT
Collected Works of Ellen Wood
First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by Delphi Classics.
© Delphi Classics, 2015.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.
Delphi Classics
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Hastings, East Sussex
United Kingdom
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The Novels
The city of Worcester — where Ellen Wood was born in 1814
DANESBURY HOUSE
Wood’s first novel, Danesbury House was published in 1860 by the Scottish Temperance League and is a didactic morality tale about the dangers of the demon drink. Although this was her first novel, Wood was already an experienced writer, having contributed over a hundred short stories to various periodicals. Her initial attempts to interest publishers and editors in commissioning her to write a full-length novel had met with little enthusiasm. However, a friend alerted Wood to a competition run by the Scottish Temperance League, who were offering £100 (by no means a small sum in 1860) to the person who could write “the best temperance tale illustrative of the injurious effects of intoxicating drinks, the advantages of personal abstinence, and the demoralised operations of the liquor traffic”. The result was Danesbury House which, though written extremely quickly, won the competition and became a bestseller.
Title page of an early American edition
CONTENTS
ADVERTISEMENT.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXL
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Illustration by Sydney Cowell from a later edition of the novel
ADVERTISEMENT.
The Directors of the Scottish Temperance League having offered a prize of £100 sterling for the “best Temperance Tale illustrative of the injurious effects of Intoxicating Drinks, the advantages of Personal Abstinence, and the demoralizing operations of the Liquor Traffic,” the MSS. sent in for the competition were placed in the hands of the Rev. J. Masson, Dundee, the Rev. N. L. Walker, Dysart, and the Rev. A. Hannay, Dundee, who unanimously gave their award in favor of the tale entitled “Danesbury House.” The Directors issue the Tale with the fervent hope and prayer that it may contribute largely to the progress of the Temperance Cause and kindred movements.
League Office, 108 Hope Street,
Glasgow, 28th Feb., 1860.
CHAPTER I.
THE MISTAKE. THE DINNER-TABLE.
It was a winter’s afternoon, cold and bright, and the large nursery window of Danesbury House looked out on an extensive and beautiful prospect. Seated at it, occupied in repairing some fine lace, was a smart young woman of twenty, an upper maid, sensible and sharp-looking, with quick, dark eyes, and a healthy colour.
“There’s the baby, Glisson,” she suddenly exclaimed, as a child’s cry was heard from the adjoining room.
Glisson, the person she addressed, was a woman of middle age, active and slender, the valued nurse in the Danesbury family. She was sitting in a low rocking-chair, right in front of the fire, nodding at intervals. She half opened her eyes and turned them on Jessy, with a somewhat dull or stupid expression.
“Did you speak?” she asked.
“The baby, Glisson. Don’t you hear him?”
Glisson rose, and stepping into the night-nursery, brought forth little William Danesbury, a lovely child of nine months old. His cheeks were flushed to a crimson damask, his pretty mouth was like a rosebud, and his eyes were large and dark and brilliant. She sat down with him on the low chair; he seemed somewhat fractious, as infants will be on awaking from sleep, and Glisson laid him fiat upon her knee and rocked the chair backward and forward.
“The idea of your trying to hush the child off to sleep again!” exclaimed Jessy. “I’m sure he has slept long enough — all the time we were at dinner!”
“Mind your own business,” cried Glisson.
Jessy was one who rather liked to have the last word. “He wants amusing, nurse; he doesn’t want more sleep: and I dare say he is hungry.”
Glisson made no reply. She had closed her eyes, perhaps with a view to finish her own doze, and was gently keeping the chair on the rock. The child, soothed to quiet, lay still. Jessy paused in her work, turned her head sideways, and kept her eyes fixed for the full space of a minute on Mrs
. Glisson.
Presently a fit of coughing took the baby. The nurse put him to sit up, and patted his back, but he coughed violently. He had had a bad cough for more than a week past, but it was getting better. Glisson rose and looked on the mantle-piece for his cough mixture. She could not see it.
“What have you done with the baby’s medicine?” she exclaimed to Jessy.
“I have not done any thing with it,” was the reply. “I have not touched it.”
“You must have touched it, or else it would be here,” sharply retorted Mrs. Glisson.
“I tell you I have not,” answered Jessy. “Where did you put it when you had used it last?”
“Where should I put it but in its place on the mantelpiece? I gave him some last night when I undressed him, and I put the bottle back. Somebody has been here, meddling,” continued the nurse in an angry tone; “but I’ll find out who it was. I’ll let the house know that nobody shall come into my nursery with impunity. Perhaps it’s carried into mistress’s room.”
She flung off, not in the best of tempers, the child coughing in her arms.
“Have you found it?” inquired Jessy, when she returned.
“Found it? of course I have,” replied the nurse. “There shall be a stir about this; how dare any body come and carry off my nursery things? It was in Mrs. Danesbury’s closet, put among the spirits of camphor, and the magnesia, and the other bottles. They thought to play me a trick, I suppose, for they have been clearing the direction off: maybe they’ll get one played to them, in a way they won’t like, before the day’s out. It’s that impudent Sarah! She said, at dinner, she’d be up to pranks, now mistress was away.”
Mrs. Glisson poured out a tea-spoonful of the mixture, and gave it to the child. Jessy, meanwhile, was thinking how very improbable it was that any servant, even Sarah, the careless and frolicsome under-housemaid, should presume to meddle with any thing belonging to the nurse and baby. All in a moment — she could not tell how or why — a doubt flashed over her. Could Mrs. Glisson have overlooked the bottle? Letting her work fall, she started up, and with one bound cleared the space between the window and the mantle-piece. Sure enough, there was the missing bottle, pushed out of sight behind a child’s toy.
“Oh, nurse, what have you done?” she uttered. “Here’s the baby’s medicine behind Miss Isabel’s doll-house! What have you given to him?”
The nurse looked confounded, and turned her gaze from the bottle in Jessy’s hand to the bottle in her own. They were precisely similar in shape and size, small round bottles, each about half full, with what, to appearance, might be taken for the same mixture. Jessy snatched the strange bottle from her, uncorked it and smelt it. She turned deadly pale.
“Mrs. Glisson, as true as that you are alive, you have killed the baby! This is laudanum.”
“You are a fool for saying it,” shrieked out Glisson, in her terror. “It can’t be the laudanum bottle!”
Jessy knew that it was; she recognized it as that which was kept in Mrs. Danesbury’s private closet. She laid her two hands upon the woman’s shoulders, and hissed forth strange words, in her grief and excitement. “You are not yourself, and you know it: you are not in a state clearly to distinguish one bottle from another.”
There was not a moment to be lost. She left the woman to her own reflections, to the two bottles, and the child, and tore down the stairs. In the hall she encountered a man-servant, and Jessy laid hold of him, and dragged him toward the front door. The man thought she was wild.
“The baby’s dying, Ralph. Fly for Mr. Pratt; don’t let him lose an instant.”
Ralph, after a prolonged stare of bewilderment, started off down the steps. Jessy followed him, and was running in a different direction, when a thought struck her, and she called again to the man.
“Tell him what it is, Ralph; it may save time. The baby has bad a dose of laudanum given him, in mistake for his cough-mixture.”
To the right, at a distance of nearly a quarter of a mile, rose the large and extensive buildings known by the name of the Danesbury Works. Jessy gained the spot, flew through the outer grounds, the passages, and into the private room of her master. Mr. Danesbury, a tall man of commanding presence, with nobly intelligent features and earnest blue eyes, now some years past thirty, was standing by his fire, engaged with two gentlemen. To see one of his handmaids burst upon them in that unceremonious fashion astonished him considerably: he thought her wild, as Ralph had done.
“Oh, sir,” she panted, “there has been a sad accident at home. Mrs. Glisson has made a mistake, and given the baby the wrong medicine.”
“Wrong medicine?” uttered Mr. Danesbury.
“She missed his cough-mixture, sir, and she found it, as she thought, in my mistress’s closet, and she gave him a tea-spoonful. It was not his mixture, but the laudanum.”
Mr. Danesbury, with a word of apology to the gentlemen, hastened from the room. “You should have sent for Mr. Pratt, Jessy,” he next said.
“I have, sir; I did not lose time; Ralph is gone for him.”
It was a deplorable accident, and it happened at an unusually unfavourable moment, for Mrs. Danesbury was away from home. She had left Eastborough with her two eldest children the previous day, to pay a visit to London.
Eastborough was forthwith up in arms. To see one of the servants from Danesbury House come along, without his hat, at the pace of a steam-engine, dart into Mr. Pratt’s, and to see the two, for happily the surgeon was at home, go steaming back again, caused unheard of consternation. People came out of their houses to wonder, and ask each other what had occurred; and the news soon spread to them from the works; for there Jessy’s errand had been learned by the operatives; little William Danesbury had been poisoned.
Nothing but emetics could have any counteracting effect upon so young a child, and those Mr. Pratt tried; but whether they would save him, could not yet be proved. Mr. Danesbury, the first shock over, began to reflect that it might be better to send for his wife; who, whatever should be the issue, would be the more satisfied to be at home than away. He determined to dispatch Thomas Harding, one of his most esteemed and faithful foremen, who had been in the works many years. “Jessy,” said Mr. Danesbury to the girl, “go back to the factory and tell your uncle to prepare for an immediate journey to London. After he is ready, he must come here to receive my instructions.’’
As Jessy went into the factory to do her master’s bidding, she was assailed on all sides. Was the child dead? Could it be brought round? How did it happen? But she would not answer one inquiry, until she had delivered the message to Mr. Harding, and when she did explain, it was very brief. A mistake of the nurse’s in taking up the wrong bottle, she said, and Mr. Pratt could give no opinion yet, one way or the other.
In those days railroads were not common, and the quickest way of general traveling was by posting. A chaise was ordered from the Ram, and was soon at Danesbury House. Mr. Harding, equipped for the journey, was already there, had taken his orders from his master, and was now standing on the steps outside, talking with Jessy in an under tone. As the chaise rattled up, and turned round, he got inside, and just at that moment Mr. Danesbury came out again.
“Mind, Harding, how you break it to Mrs. Danesbury. Be as cautious as possible. Mr. Pratt does think there may be a little hope, tell her.”
“I’ll do it in the best way that ever I can, sir,” he answered, the tears rising to his eyes with earnestness of feeling.
The chaise drove back at a swift pace, down the hill and through the small town, to the intense delight of the inhabitants, ever rejoicing in excitement, who flocked to their doors and windows to gaze after it as it rolled past, and at Thomas Harding seated bolt upright in it. They would have guessed his errand, had its object not transpired.
Mr. Danesbury had turned into the house again, but Jessy stood and watched the chaise down the hill; through the town she lost sight of it, but speedily saw it again, ascending the opposite hill, for Eastborough, a
very small town, deserving little more than the name of village, was situated in a valley. Jessy was the daughter of a farmer who had a large family. She had received a good plain education, was well-mannered and well-conducted, and her friends had not thought it beneath them to accept a place for her as maid at Mrs. Danesbury’s, to wait upon and walk out with the two eldest children: Jessy had, at first, somewhat rebelled at it, not having thought she should be “sent out to service.” Thomas Harding’s wife was her father’s sister.
While that chaise was nearing the end of its forty-mile journey, a merry party had assembled round a well-lighted dinner-table in a handsome house in Bedford Row, the metropolitan locality where so many men of the law congregate. Mr. and Mrs. Serle were its owners, and eat at either end. By the side of the former, who was an eminent solicitor, sat Mrs. Danesbury, an elegant woman, of thirty years, with beautifully refined features and dark eyes, thoughtful and expressive. Opposite to her, in a drab silk gown, sat Miss St. George, who was the sister of Mrs. Serle, and lived there because she had no other home. Next to Mrs. Serle was a young man, Walter St. George; he was in Mr. Serle’ s office, and had been invited to dinner to meet Mrs. Danesbury; and the middle of the table was occupied by four children, two little Series and Arthur and Isabel Danesbury. Mrs. Danesbury was first cousin to Walter St. George, and both of them were more distantly related to Mrs. Serle and her sister. The children’s dining at this late hour was unusual; but they had been out with the ladies sight-seeing, and had lost their own dinner in the middle of the day. Of course they enjoyed amazingly the dining by candle-light.
“But, sir,” suddenly cried Arthur Danesbury, leaning forward that he might see Mr. St. George, “you have not told me about the Tower. Do you often go to it?”
“Well; no, I don’t,” smiled Mr. St. George. “But I will take you.”