Suspense, Volume II by Henry Seton Merriman
Henry Seton Merriman's "Suspense, Volume II" opens aboard a steamer returning from Ceylon to England in the autumn of 1876, where the ship's captain gently draws out the unhappy, beautiful Mrs. Alice Huston, who has fled her drunken, dissipated husband. In their shipboard conversation the captain reveals his admiration for Theodore Trist, a renowned war-correspondent presently covering the Servian-Turkish conflict and the looming Russo-Turkish crisis, and it becomes clear that Trist figures painfully in Alice's past. At Plymouth, Alice is met by her plainer but far stronger-willed younger sister, Brenda Gilholme, currently living with the recently widowed Mrs. Wylie (whose husband, an Arctic explorer, died on an earlier expedition chronicled in the preceding volume, "The Slave of the Lamp"). The sisters discuss Alice's flight from Captain Huston and her hope that Trist—an old family friend to whom both women are quietly, differently attached—might be summoned to help, a suggestion Brenda firmly refuses. Settled at Mrs. Wylie's London flat, the household is soon disturbed by Captain Huston's arrival. Drunk and violent, he strikes Brenda when she will not disclose Alice's whereabouts. Trist, who happens to be present (having secretly crossed paths with Huston, unrecognized, during a bout of delirium tremens on the voyage home), knocks Huston down. While Brenda distracts her brother-in-law, Trist spirits Alice away by train to a quiet Suffolk fishing village, arranging for Brenda to join her the next day, all without revealing his own presence in England to anyone who might gossip. During the journey, Alice pleads for sympathy and hints at wanting a divorce, even suggesting she could manufacture grounds against Trist himself; he coolly rebuffs her and urges reconciliation with her husband instead. Meanwhile in London, Trist visits his newspaper editor, Sir Edward, and announces his intention to retire from war-reporting after one final campaign—the anticipated Russo-Turkish War—since the work is wearing him down and he wishes to build a stable, settled life, though he will not yet say why or for whom. Mrs. Wylie, resuming her role as steady confidante and family fixer, takes charge of negotiating between the Hustons, interviewing both Alice's husband and Trist separately while declining to let Trist intervene too visibly, mindful of the damage gossip could do to Brenda's reputation. Captain Huston, self-pitying and ashamed, admits he was cashiered from the army for drunkenness and that his marriage has been a mutual failure; Mrs. Wylie, sympathetic but realistic, urges patience rather than blame. In the Suffolk village, Brenda and Alice pass days of strained, hollow companionship, their old childhood intimacy eroded by years of divergent temperament—Alice frivolous and self-absorbed, Brenda increasingly serious, self-possessed, and, unknown even fully to herself, in love with Trist. Brenda discovers in the bleak coastal scenery and the sound of the sea a new and passionate attachment, and in a moment of private anguish prays for a war so that Trist might be called away and spared entanglement with Alice. Back in London, the vain, dilettantish painter William Hicks—who nurses his own quiet admiration for Brenda—learns from Captain Huston and general drawing-room gossip that Alice's flight is being attributed to a supposed unbroken attachment to Trist, with rumors that Huston intends to shoot the correspondent. Motivated by mixed jealousy and genuine concern for Brenda's good name, Hicks confronts Trist at a society ball and presses him to scotch the scandal. Trist calmly proposes a public countermeasure: he will arrive at the ball arm-in-arm with Huston himself, and put about that Alice is merely visiting relations in the country, to kill the gossip by open, unremarkable friendliness rather than denial. Brenda arrives at the same ball, dances under Hicks's watchful, half-suspicious eye, and waits all evening for Trist to appear with Huston as planned, maintaining a brave, composed front despite inward dread while whispers about her sister circulate through the room. Midnight passes, then one o'clock, then two—Trist never comes, and only Hicks, lingering to the end, notices his conspicuous absence, leaving the reconciliation plan, and the fate of Alice's marriage, unresolved as the volume's opening movement closes on a note of suspended anxiety. Throughout, Merriman contrasts Trist's stoic self-command and Mrs. Wylie's philosophy of watchful non-interference against Alice's weak self-absorption and Huston's ruinous idleness, while tracing the unspoken, restrained devotion growing between Trist and Brenda—a bond both recognize but neither will name, overshadowed by Alice's claims on Trist's chivalry and by the gathering political storm in the East that will soon draw him away again.
By Henry Seton Merriman · First published 1899 · Genre: Domestic Drama, Victorian Social Novel, Psychological Fiction · 14 chapters · 45,753 words
First lines
One fine day late in the autumn of eighteen hundred and seventy-six, a steamer emerged from the haze that lay over the Atlantic and the northern waters of the Bay of Biscay. Those who were working in the fields behind the lighthouse of the Pointe de Raz saw her approach the land, sight the lighthouse, and then steer outwards again on a course due north through the channel dividing the Ile de Sein from the rocky headland jutting out from this most western point of Europe into the Atlantic.
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Suspense, Volume II is listed on Textopian as a novel by Henry Seton Merriman, dated 1899 CE.
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- Work type: Novel
- Author: Henry Seton Merriman
- Date: 1899 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Domestic Drama, Victorian Social Novel, Psychological Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance
- Length: 45,753 words
- Structure: 14 chapters, 1,074 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
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- Work identity for Suspense, Volume II by Henry Seton Merriman
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
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Genres
- Domestic Drama — The narrative centers on the personal crises and emotional conflicts within the Huston marriage, Alice's escape, and the family relationships of the Gilholme sisters, with extensive focus on domestic turmoil and household affairs.
- Victorian Social Novel — The text contains pervasive authorial commentary on Victorian society, social conventions, gender roles, beauty versus intellect, class dynamics, and social gossip, critiquing the manners and morality of the era.
- Psychological Fiction — There is deep exploration of character motivations, inner conflicts, emotional states, and psychological realism, particularly in examining Alice's weakness, Brenda's silent suffering, and Theo's emotional restraint.
- Literary Fiction — The work demonstrates sophisticated narrative technique, extensive authorial digressions on philosophical matters, complex sentence structures, and self-aware literary commentary typical of nineteenth-century literary fiction.
Tags
suspense · adventure · thriller · mystery · British literature · Victorian · classic fiction · short stories · intrigue · psychological · action · dramatic
Contents
- At Sea
- Sisters
- Alice Returns
- To the Front
- Under Fire
- Trist Acts on his own Responsibility
- Quicksands
- Masked
- In Case of War
- A Problem
- Mrs. Wylie Leads
- The Philosophy of the Sea
- Cross-Purposes
- A Social Conspiracy