The Lady of the Barge: reference groups

Refused, the cousin offers to sell compromising old letters, threatening to sell them to a rival suitor; the rich man seizes him and is stopped only by a servant entering.

Late at night one co-owner of a house and a business sits hating his partner, who has discovered his embezzlement and ordered him to leave both by morning.

The honest partner refuses to cover the theft quietly, offers the exile two hundred pounds, and mentions the servants are away until morning.

The stranger greets the landlord by another name, a wanted pirate's, and demands clothes, lodging and money in return for silence.

The landlord gives him money; the blackmailer draws a pistol, declares he will take half of everything from now on, and settles in.

The landlord says he has lived honestly for fifteen years and warns the man not to wake the devil in him; the blackmailer meets the landlord's stepdaughter and says he will stay.

The landlord sides with the blackmailer, who threatens to ruin the girl and have the landlord hanged; the landlord pleads for peace.

The blackmailer threatens to inform; the dying man begs for time and promises to reveal his money that night if his daughter gets a share.

The mate refuses to back the skipper's story; the skipper hides the girl below as they arrive to find his wife waiting on the quay.

The mate pulls meaningful faces behind the skipper's back until the wife grows suspicious; the skipper invents a toothache and tries to steer her away.

The man walks with his fiancée to a disused well in the park, her favourite spot; he urges her not to sit on its edge.

She asks about the missing cousin and defends him; the man bursts out that the cousin was a blackmailer, a liar and a cur.

She is startled by a whisper she imagines saying 'Jem, help me out'; shaken, he tries to take her indoors, but she insists on staying.

She drops her mother's diamond bracelet down the well and wants it drained; he looks at her in horror, then covers it by saying he feared she was falling.

He promises to recover the bracelet himself by morning and makes her swear to tell no one; his mother suggests filling the well in.

At night he secretly fishes the well with a line and hook, and dredges up keys instead of the bracelet.

The hook snags; he gives up, spends a sleepless night, and at dawn meets his grooms, whom he has ordered to lower him into the well.

His groom offers to go down instead, since the master looks ill; he refuses curtly and starts to test the air with a candle.

The wife abuses the girl, knocks her purse into the water, and orders her off; the mate, now remorseful, takes responsibility and defends her.

The cousin walks out into the park to let him think it over; the rich man follows, and later tells his mother the cousin has gone for good after a quarrel over money.

Suspicion turns to a widow who visited that morning; the uncle finds muddy footprints on the stairs, which are in fact the husband's, and he stays guiltily quiet.

Finding the library door open, he locks someone inside, then realises it is a burglar he can blame for the killing.

He fires through the door, raises the alarm, and the police break in and seize the terrified intruder.

The intruder swears the body was there when he arrived; the sergeant uncovers it, and the killer feigns horror.

The killer names his friend and accuses the intruder, who accuses him back; the sergeant seems to side with the killer.

He stages the scene as a robbery and returns to bed as the drugged nurse unwittingly provides his alibi.

The skipper insists on chaperoning the girl at meals himself, leaving the mate to steer and eat cold leftovers while she laughs at the skipper's stories.

Jealous, the mate hints at the skipper's wife, is mocked by the pair, is rude to the girl, and is sent away.

The officer confides he is going to propose to a widow; his friend, equally dressed up, says he is on the same errand, and the two race along the road.

Followed by jeering boys, they stop and agree they cannot propose together, but neither will yield the day, each pleading an excuse.

Each claims precedence; the officer vows that if they go together he will match any proposal on the spot, and refuses to be put off.

The winner tidies himself in the loser's house and goes off to propose; the loser waits up all night and next morning goes to hear the result.

The rival was refused, but holds the officer to the condition and plans to keep proposing until the widow accepts him.

The rival says he will warn the widow off the officer, suggests the officer court her companion instead, and the officer storms out and sulks for weeks.

The suitors outbid each other with compliments; the wife's temper frays, and the visitors are shown out with the door shut hard.

The family, wanting to keep the money, fail to warn the widow; the slow dealer, losing ground to his glib rival, hatches a plan and enlists a small-time dealer.

The dealer bribes an accomplice, who holds out for a bigger fee, to tell the rival in confidence that the widow has lost her fortune; the rival swallows it.

The boy proposes the man fake an accident to get quartered aft; the man refuses and secretly flatters the officer, asking to buy his mattress as a keepsake.

The officer plays up the mattress's value and the sailor, afraid to seem eager, settles at two pounds, to be handed over ashore.

The officer proposes they play one game of chess for the right to propose first; the friend agrees, on condition that if the winner is refused, the loser may not propose without his permission.

The officer offers his rival a large brandy, which the rival sets aside; after a long game the rival checkmates him with a bishop the officer had forgotten.

With the rival gone, the dealer courts the widow alone, preaching the virtues of poverty, and loses seven games of draughts to her on purpose.

The schemer reveals he thinks the boy kept the money; the two agree to split it, and search the boy's bunk and pockets at night without success.

When the sailor heads to tell the captain, the boy gives in: he kept the money but, frightened by the searches, hid it in an officer's mattress where he cannot now reach it.

Neither the man nor the boy can get aft unseen, the officer sleeps on the money every night, and the two partners blame each other.

The sailor now plans to cut the boy out and split with the narrator alone, but the suspicious boy shadows him all the way into port.

The officer delays the hand-over with a long speech until the boy arrives, sees the sack, and refuses to let them leave without his share.

His friend tries to threaten legal consequences but is too sick to finish; the two bicker over which of them was drunk.

An old watchman recalls a shipmate, an aged miser worth six hundred pounds, who fell ill a month out on the voyage home.

The dying miser refuses to believe he is dying and leave his money; his shipmates circle hopefully, and one finds a money belt on him and guesses his plan to be buried with it.

The boy insists he threw the money overboard; they search him, offer him a third, then threaten to have him searched ashore and jailed.

Local men suddenly befriend the brother-in-law; his wife points out that two old dealers are courting the heiress for her money.

The brother-in-law watches the two suitors flatter the widow and tries to undercut them by announcing her age, nearly giving away his wife's.

The guest explains the paw grants three men three wishes each, that he has had his, and that the last owner wished for death; asked if he would wish again, he wavers.

The guest throws the paw on the fire; the host snatches it back and keeps it despite repeated warnings to wish sensibly or not at all.

Egged on by his joking son, the old man wishes for two hundred pounds to clear the house; the paw twists in his hand, but no money appears.

The son leaves for work; later the mother, half-hoping for money, sees a well-dressed stranger hesitate several times at the gate before coming in.

The firm denies liability but offers compensation of exactly two hundred pounds; the father collapses. They bury their son and sink into silent grief.

At a crowded family breakfast, a poor widow living with her sister's family gets a letter and reads it so slowly that the others nearly burst with impatience.

The widow fears the letter is a hoax; her brother-in-law thinks so too, until her sister reads it and rejoices.

The widow has inherited two thousand pounds from a former employer; the brother-in-law grumbles that nobody ever left him anything, and spreads the news through the town.

The mate fakes drowning; the skipper rescues him, sees him wink while the girl kisses him, and the wife boxes his ears.

The boy stays on deck while the men cut the mattress open below; it is empty, and when they come up the boy has vanished.

The boy never returns, not even for his pay, and the officer smilingly asks the sailor how he slept.

Below, something drags at the rope; the grooms haul up the dead cousin's face with their master behind it, let go in horror, and both fall back into the water.

The sergeant takes the pistol, handcuffs the killer without warning, and sends for a doctor, since the victim is not dead.

The dying partner opens his eyes and speaks; the sergeant takes notes and leads the killer away.

The inn decays under the blackmailer's rule; the landlord collapses with a fit, which upsets the blackmailer's plans.

At night the blackmailer drugs the nurse and demands the money; the landlord extracts his promise about the daughter.

He blows her kisses and fusses over a bumped head, invites himself back, and walks home sure the money is his.

He spreads the rumour of her ruin through the town, then proposes publicly 'now that she is poor', to look noble.

She accepts; the family, touched, apologise for misjudging him, then mention a letter that arrived.

The lawyers' letter says a later will was found and she has nothing; the dealer, now engaged to a poor woman, is left alone with her to court.

The husband brings the widow home early; the uncle, trapped inside, hides in the larder, and the husband settles in for beer and begins praising him.

The 'dying' landlord seizes and strangles him, revealing he has been shamming weakness and planning to blame the killing on the blackmailer's own followers.

Seasick and far from land, he goes aft and demands to be taken home; the officer calls him mad and orders him forward.

The captain says they signed on as cook and seaman, calls them drunk impostors, and threatens jail; they are put to work.

The crew mocks their claims of being drugged and of sobriety; their airs make the officers dislike them all the more.

The captain humiliates the cook; the cook obeys, tidies the cabin, and comes back with a secret smile and something in his pocket, telling his friend it won't be for long.

The captain is struck with violent pains; the cook refuses to treat him, as he 'only shipped as cook', until he agrees to pay a professional fee.

The cook prescribes, collects his fee, scares the captain about making a will, and has the mate sent out for snuffling.

The cook hints he dosed the food from the medicine chest; the mate falls ill too, and the cook demands to be treated as surgeon.

The cook treats and weakens all three officers; the captain and mate pay the other man to draw up their wills; they recover slowly as they reach port.

Ashore, the cook tells the captain he ate something that disagreed with him, and leaves with a wave.

The skipper tries to refuse the young woman passage but cannot bring himself to say so, and ends up eating supper with the couple.

The husband, who resents the uncle living with them for his wife's hopes of an inheritance, plans to let the widow catch the uncle searching her house, and shadows him.

He pushes in at the family breakfast table, eyes the stepdaughter, hints at the landlord's past before her, and goes out to buy new clothes.

Within a month the blackmailer runs the inn; the landlord, failing in health, backs him in sacking a loyal old servant, and his daughter demands to know who is master.

An uneasy night passes; in the morning the family laugh off their fears, though the father recalls that the wishes come true in ways that look like coincidence.

Nothing seems to happen; then a stealthy knock comes at the door, and the mother cries that it is their son while the father holds her back.

The mother breaks free and struggles with the bolt; the father finds the paw and makes the third wish, and the door opens on an empty road.

At one o'clock he hears creaks on the stairs, and fears the dead man is moving about the house.

News comes that the circus tiger has escaped nearby; a tramp comes running to the inn shouting that the tiger is after him, and the drinkers rush indoors.

The landlord bars the door against the tramp; a man knocks the landlord down to get out to protect the families, and the tramp gets in.

The men sleep at the inn; the tramp is gone by morning; the village lives in fear, though the local rogue laughs at the whole thing.

A countryman sets him on the road but warns him away from a lit house nearby, said to hide something monstrous; tired, he goes to it anyway.

A grim old woman and a huge old man answer; after a furtive exchange the man insists he stay for dinner, and he feels trapped.

The host says his son will dine with them in the dark because of his eyes; he puts out the candles, and a strange voice speaks.

The host leaves him alone with the unseen son, and the guest thinks he sees wild eyes shining at him across the table.

The screen falls, and firelight shows the son's ruined face; the father lights the candles and explains his son was disfigured in a fire.

A week later the grieving mother remembers the paw's other two wishes and demands that her husband wish their son alive; he calls it madness.

The father tells her their son was mutilated beyond recognition, but she insists; terrified, he fetches the paw and makes the second wish.

The miser dies boasting that he had a boy throw his banknotes overboard; one sailor scares the boy into silence, and the narrator threatens to tell unless let in on the scheme.

The husband refuses to have a guest trapped in his house; the uncle secretly tells his niece he will search the widow's cottage without leave.

The exile demands the matter be hushed up, draws a sword from the wall, and stabs his partner when he refuses.

The painter shares his beer, and the old man begins the tale of a travelling circus that stopped in the village.

The tramp, revived with free brandy, tells a vivid tale of fleeing the tiger, and the men are afraid to go home.

Children claim sightings, and a villager staggers in describing how the tiger chased him up a tree.

When one man questions the story, the rogue 'confirms' it, claiming he watched from another tree; the storyteller, caught out, goes home silent.

In an inn, men trade ghost stories; a sceptical old sailor mocks sailors' visions, then admits one uncanny experience on land.

The wife stamps her foot, the hidden girl appears, and the mate lets his brother-in-law take the blame while pretending to shield him.

An old man losing at chess to his son grumbles at the weather and their remote house while waiting for a guest, who arrives: an old friend back from long service abroad.

The husband eats a lozenge from the evidence box and cannot stop laughing; the uncle establishes that no one could have entered the bedroom unheard.

The husband slyly deflects the footprint evidence, then exchanges silent signals with his wife until the uncle demands to know what is funny.

Within the uncle's hearing, the husband tells the widow the uncle is shy and devoted to her, and has been asking whether she likes jewellery.

Asked for bread and cheese, the widow opens the larder, the uncle bursts out, and her friend takes his hiding there as a bashful suitor's courtship.

The armed men crowd into the rogue's cottage, pushing him ahead of them, despite his protests.

His kitchen is full of pork and poultry; accused of theft, he brazenly claims to have gone into the meat trade.

He turns their own tiger sightings against them: those who swore they saw it would have to repeat it on oath.

Meeting the widow by chance, the officer confesses the chess game to explain his absence; she is indignant, then laughs.

A skipper waiting up for his late-returning mate and brother-in-law has just lost a shouted argument with a neighbouring crew; the mate arrives and answers his rebuke with cheek.

The mate tells the skipper he has invited his sweetheart on the voyage without asking; the skipper is appalled and asks what his wife will say.

The girl balks at her cramped quarters but stays; the skipper warns that his wife will blame him, and the mate says his sister can mind her own business.

A farmer's wife, her husband, and her retired-policeman uncle discuss a stolen brooch; the uncle has been hiding under their bed hoping to catch the thief, and the wife casts suspicion on a neighbour while accusing her husband of not caring.

The servant's box held nothing; the husband defends her and is snapped at, while the uncle, pencil and notebook out, pursues the investigation with great ceremony.

A night search is foiled when a ticklish shipmate wakes screaming; a week of prodding the boy finds nothing, so they corner him and demand the money outright.

The uncle declares everyone guilty until proven innocent; the wife recounts missing the brooch, accusing and sacking her servant, who cried on her box.

The husband reveals he thinks the widow is after the uncle, not the brooch; the uncle is outraged, then proposes inviting her to tea to trap her into confessing.

A villager's hens are taken; he carries the evidence to the constable in the next village, who shoves him away as drunk.

He claims to have receipts, offers to sell them the meat, and gets away with it; he and the tramp turn out to have known each other.

A man wakes up thirsty in a cramped, reeking bunk, with a stranger's face swearing at him, and cannot tell where he is.

He realises he is on a ship, dressed in rags; he finds his friend among the sleepers and learns the ship's name.

As a young man back from abroad, the narrator found his relatives away, took lodgings at a dull inn, and set out on a long country walk.

He loses his way in the marshes as fog and night come down, and at last finds a road and hears footsteps.

The mate dives repeatedly for the purse to win the girl back; she begs him to come out but refuses to make up.

The wife takes the girl home to breakfast, leaving both men soaked, while the skipper fends off the mate's apologies with a boathook.

The guest apologises warmly; they celebrate the son's birthday until midnight, and the father toasts the children his son saved.

The girl snubs the mate as 'only the mate'; he turns the tables by threatening to let the skipper explain her presence to his wife alone.

Warmed by whisky, the guest tells tales of distant lands; pressed by his host, he reluctantly produces a dried monkey's paw he calls magic.

The stranger, from the son's employers, tells the parents their only son has been killed in the machinery.

A rich man soon to marry sits with his idle, indebted cousin, who needles him about his wealth and his fiancée's goodness.

The cousin hints that the fiancée would drop him if she knew what he really was, then says he needs fifteen hundred pounds within a fortnight or faces prison.

The candle is lost; he stops the groom fetching another, strips, and sits a long time on the well's edge before going down.

Sickened, the killer turns out the lights, flees to the gate, and sees a constable coming up the road.

He bids the constable good night, returns inside, and gathers his cash and valuables, reckoning he has eight hours' start.

He plans his escape, weighing a crowded district against the seaside, and finds every choice may mean life or death.

A ragged stranger swaggers into the best inn in a small town, bullies the waiter who tries to turn him out, and demands to see the landlord.

The blackmailer orders the best supper and room, and sleeps with his door barricaded and a pistol under his pillow.

The landlord lies dying, anxious to please the blackmailer, while his daughter nurses him; the blackmailer resolves to get the hidden money before he dies.

An old villager chats with a travelling painter repainting the inn sign, which had been mistaken for a portrait of a king.

Pigs vanish night after night; the authorities do nothing, and neighbours squabble over whether to take animals indoors.

The neighbouring town and the clergyman say there was no tiger; after more losses a former militiaman raises a band of seventeen to hunt it.

The hunt searches the wood timidly and finds nothing; back at the inn, an old man reports the tiger has just gone into the rogue's cottage.

A retired officer, dressed with great care, sets out on a hot afternoon and overtakes a friend who stares uneasily at his loud tie.

She says she is angry with him for losing, and proposes a plan so that he can win at cards what he lost at chess, under the rival's eyes.

Playing cards, the widow asks the officer if he would like her hand; he takes it and kisses it, she 'meant the cards', then lets him keep it, and the rival is left fuming.

The mate haggles over the fee; the second officer falls ill too; the sick captain scolds the sick mate for being ill at all.