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Title: Aurora Floyd, Vol. 2

Author: M. E. Braddon

Release date: January 19, 2015 [eBook #48021]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Clare Graham and Marc D'Hooghe (http://www.freeliterature.org) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)


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      Project Gutenberg has the other two volumes of this work.
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      Volume III: see https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48022





AURORA FLOYD.

by

M. E. BRADDON,

Author of "Lady Audley's Secret."

In Three Volumes.

VOL. II.

Fifth Edition.







London:
Tinsley Brothers, 18 Catherine Steeet,
Strand.
1863.




CONTENTS.

  CHAPTER   I. "LOVE TOOK UP THE GLASS OF TIME, AND TURNED
                  IT IN HIS GLOWING HANDS"
           II. MR. PASTERN'S LETTER
          III. MR. JAMES CONYERS
           IV. THE TRAINER'S MESSENGER
            V. OUT IN THE RAIN
           VI. MONEY MATTERS
          VII. CAPTAIN PRODDER
         VIII. "HE ONLY SAID, I AM A-WEARY"
           IX. STILL CONSTANT
            X. ON THE THRESHOLD OF DARKER MISERIES
           XI. CAPTAIN PRODDER CARRIES BAD NEWS TO HIS NIECE'S HOUSE
          XII. THE DEED THAT HAD BEEN DONE IN THE WOOD




CHAPTER I.


"LOVE TOOK UP THE GLASS OF TIME, AND TURNED IT IN HIS GLOWING HANDS."


Talbot Bulstrode yielded at last to John's repeated invitations, and
consented to pass a couple of days at Mellish Park.

He despised and hated himself for the absurd concession. In what a
pitiful farce had the tragedy ended! A visitor in the house of his
rival. A calm spectator of Aurora's every-day, commonplace happiness.
For the space of two days he had consented to occupy this most
preposterous position. Two days only; then back to the Cornish miners,
and the desolate bachelor's lodgings in Queen's Square, Westminster;
back to his tent in life's Great Sahara. He could not for the very
soul of him resist the temptation of beholding the inner life of that
Yorkshire mansion. He wanted to know for certain--what was it to him, I
wonder?--whether she was really happy, and had utterly forgotten him.
They all returned to the Park together, Aurora, John, Archibald Floyd,
Lucy, Talbot Bulstrode, and Captain Hunter. The last-named officer was
a jovial gentleman, with a hook nose and auburn whiskers; a gentleman
whose intellectual attainments were of no very oppressive order, but
a hearty, pleasant guest in an honest country mansion, where there is
cheer and welcome for all.

Talbot could but inwardly confess that Aurora became her new position.
How everybody loved her! What an atmosphere of happiness she created
about her wherever she went! How joyously the dogs barked and leapt
at sight of her, straining their chains in the desperate effort to
approach her! How fearlessly the thorough-bred mares and foals ran
to the paddock-gates to bid her welcome, bending down their velvet
nostrils to nestle upon her shoulder, responsive to the touch of
her caressing hand! Seeing all this, how could Talbot refrain from
remembering that this same sunlight might have shone upon that dreary
castle far away by the surging western sea? She might have been his,
this beautiful creature; but at what price? At the price of honour; at
the price of every principle of his mind, which had set up for himself
a holy and perfect standard--a pure and spotless ideal for the wife of
his choice. Forbid it, manhood! He might have weakly yielded; he might
have been happy, with the blind happiness of a lotus-eater, but not the
reasonable bliss of a Christian. Thank Heaven for the strength which
had been given to him to escape from the silken net! Thank Heaven for
the power which had been granted to him to fight the battle!

Standing by Aurora's side in one of the wide windows of Mellish Park,
looking far out over the belted lawn to the glades in which the deer
lay basking drowsily in the April sunlight, he could not repress the
thought uppermost in his mind.

"I am--very glad--to see you so happy, Mrs. Mellish."

She looked at him with frank, truthful eyes, in whose brightness there
was not one latent shadow.

"Yes," she said, "I am very, very happy. My husband is very good to
me. He loves--and trusts me."

She could not resist that one little stab--the only vengeance she ever
took upon him; but a stroke that pierced him to the heart.

"Aurora! Aurora! Aurora!" he cried.

That half-stifled cry revealed the secret of wounds that were not yet
healed. Mrs. Mellish turned pale at the traitorous sound. This man must
be cured. The happy wife, secure in her own stronghold of love and
confidence, could not bear to see this poor fellow still adrift.

She by no means despaired of his cure, for experience had taught her,
that although love's passionate fever takes several forms, there are
very few of them incurable. Had she not passed safely through the
ordeal herself, without one scar to bear witness of the old wounds?

She left Captain Bulstrode staring moodily out of the window, and went
away to plan the saving of this poor shipwrecked soul.

She ran in the first place to tell Mr. John Mellish of her discovery,
as it was her custom to carry to him every scrap of intelligence great
and small.

"My dearest old Jack," she said--it was another of her customs to
address him by every species of exaggeratedly endearing appellation; it
may be that she did this for the quieting of her own conscience, being
well aware that she tyrannized over him--"my darling boy, I have made a
discovery."

"About the filly?"

"About Talbot Bulstrode."

John's blue eyes twinkled maliciously. He was evidently half prepared
for what was coming.

"What is it, Lolly?"

Lolly was a corruption of Aurora, devised by John Mellish.

"Why, I'm really afraid, my precious darling, that he hasn't quite got
over----"

"My taking you away from him!" roared John. "I thought as much. Poor
devil--poor Talbot! I could see that he would have liked to fight me
on the stand at York. Upon my word, I pity him!" and in token of his
compassion Mr. Mellish burst into that old joyous, boisterous, but
musical laugh, which Talbot might almost have heard at the other end of
the house.

This was a favourite delusion of John's. He firmly believed that he
had won Aurora's affection in fair competition with Captain Bulstrode;
pleasantly ignoring that the captain had resigned all pretensions to
Miss Floyd's hand nine or ten months before his own offer had been
accepted.

The genial, sanguine creature had a habit of deceiving himself in this
manner. He saw all things in the universe just as he wished to see
them; all men and women good and honest; life one long, pleasant voyage
in a well-fitted ship, with only first-class passengers on board.
He was one of those men who are likely to cut their throats or take
prussic acid upon the day they first encounter the black visage of Care.

"And what are we to do with this poor fellow, Lolly?"

"Marry him!" exclaimed Mrs. Mellish.

"Both of us?" said John simply.

"My dearest pet, what an obtuse old darling you are! No; marry him to
Lucy Floyd, my first cousin once removed, and keep the Bulstrode estate
in the family."

"Marry him to Lucy!"

"Yes; why not? She has studied enough, and learnt history, and
geography, and astronomy, and botany, and geology, and conchology, and
entomology enough; and she has covered I don't know how many China jars
with impossible birds and flowers; and she has illuminated missals, and
read High-Church novels. So the next best thing she can do is to marry
Talbot Bulstrode."

John had his own reasons for agreeing with Aurora in this matter. He
remembered that secret of poor Lucy's, which he had discovered more
than a year before at Felden Woods: the secret which had been revealed
to him by some mysterious sympathetic power belonging to hopeless love.
So Mr. Mellish declared his hearty concurrence in Aurora's scheme,
and the two amateur match-makers set to work to devise a complicated
man-trap, in the which Talbot was to be entangled; never for a moment
imagining that, while they were racking their brains in the endeavour
to bring this piece of machinery to perfection, the intended victim was
quietly strolling across the sunlit lawn towards the very fate they
desired for him.

Yes, Talbot Bulstrode lounged with languid step to meet his Destiny,
in a wood upon the borders of the Park; a part of the Park, indeed,
inasmuch as it was within the boundary-fence of John's domain. The
wood-anemones trembled in the spring breezes, deep in those shadowy
arcades; pale primroses showed their mild faces amid their sheltering
leaves; and in shady nooks, beneath low-spreading boughs of elm and
beech, oak and ash, the violets hid their purple beauty from the vulgar
eye. A lovely spot, soothing by its harmonious influence; a very forest
sanctuary, without whose dim arcades man cast his burden down, to enter
in a child. Captain Bulstrode had felt in no very pleasant humour as he
walked across the lawn; but some softening influence stole upon him, on
the threshold of that sylvan shelter, which made him feel a better man.
He began to question himself as to how he was playing his part in the
great drama of life.

"Good heavens!" he thought, "what a shameful coward, what a negative
wretch, I have become by this one grief of my manhood! An indifferent
son, a careless brother, a useless, purposeless creature, content to
dawdle away my life in feeble pottering with political economy. Shall I
ever be in earnest again? Is this dreary doubt of every living creature
to go with me to my grave? Less than two years ago my heart sickened
at the thought that I had lived to two-and-thirty years of age, and
had never been loved. Since then--since then--since then I had lived
through life's brief fever; I have fought manhood's worst and sharpest
battle, and find myself--where? Exactly where I was before; still
companionless upon the dreary journey; only a little nearer to the end."

He walked slowly onward into the woodland aisle, other aisles branching
away from him right and left into deep glades and darkening shadow. A
month or so later, and the mossy ground beneath his feet would be one
purple carpet of hyacinths, the very air thick with a fatal-scented
vapour from the perfumed bulbs.

"I asked too much," said Talbot, in that voiceless argument we are
perpetually carrying on with ourselves; "I asked too much; I yielded to
the spell of the siren, and was angry because I missed the white wings
of the angel. I was bewitched by the fascinations of a beautiful woman,
when I should have sought for a noble-minded wife."

He went deeper and deeper into the wood, going to his fate, as
another man was to do before the coming summer was over; but to what
a different fate! The long arcades of beech and elm had reminded
him from the first of the solemn aisles of a cathedral. The saint
was only needed. And coming suddenly to a spot where a new arcade
branched off abruptly on his right hand, he saw, in one of the sylvan
niches, as fair a saint as had ever been modelled by the hand of artist
and believer,--the same golden-haired angel he had seen in the long
drawing-room at Felden Woods,--Lucy Floyd, with the pale aureola about
her head, her large straw-hat in her lap filled with anemones and
violets, and the third volume of a novel in her hand.

How much in life often hangs, or seems to us to hang, upon what is
called by playwrights, "a situation!" But for this sudden encounter,
but for thus coming upon this pretty picture, Talbot Bulstrode might
have dropped into his grave ignorant to the last of Lucy's love for
him. But, given a sunshiny April morning (April's fairest bloom,
remember, when the capricious nymph is mending her manners, aware
that her lovelier sister May is at hand, and anxious to make a good
impression before she drops her farewell curtsy, and weeps her last
brief shower of farewell tears)--given a balmy spring morning,
solitude, a wood, wild-flowers, golden hair and blue eyes, and is the
result difficult to arrive at?

Talbot Bulstrode, leaning against the broad trunk of a beech, looked
down at the fair face, which crimsoned under his eyes; and the first
glimmering hint of Lucy's secret began to dawn upon him. At that moment
he had no thought of profiting by the discovery, no thought of what he
was afterwards led on to say. His mind was filled with the storm of
emotion that had burst from him in that wild cry to Aurora. Rage and
jealousy, regret, despair, envy, love, and hate,--all the conflicting
feelings that had struggled like so many demons in his soul at sight of
Aurora's happiness, were still striving for mastery in his breast; and
the first words he spoke revealed the thoughts that were uppermost.

"Your cousin is very happy in her new life, Miss Floyd?" he said.

Lucy looked up at him with surprise. It was the first time he had
spoken to her of Aurora.

"Yes," she answered quietly, "I think she is happy."

Captain Bulstrode whisked the end of his cane across a group of
anemones, and decapitated the tremulous blossoms. He was thinking,
rather savagely, what a shame it was that this glorious Aurora could
be happy with big, broad-shouldered, jovial-tempered John Mellish. He
could not understand the strange anomaly; he could not discover the
clue to the secret; he could not comprehend that the devoted love of
this sturdy Yorkshireman was in itself strong enough to conquer all
difficulties, to outweigh all differences.

Little by little, he and Lucy began to talk of Aurora, until Miss Floyd
told her companion all about that dreary time at Felden Woods, during
which the life of the heiress was well-nigh despaired of. So she had
loved him truly, then, after all; she had loved, and had suffered, and
had lived down her trouble, and had forgotten him, and was happy. The
story was all told in that one sentence. He looked blankly back at the
irrecoverable past, and was angry with the pride of the Bulstrodes,
which had stood between himself and his happiness.

He told sympathizing Lucy something of his sorrow; told her that
misapprehension--mistaken pride--had parted him from Aurora. She
tried, in her gentle, innocent fashion, to comfort the strong
man in his weakness, and in trying revealed--ah, how simply and
transparently!--the old secret, which had so long been hidden from him.

Heaven help the man whose heart is caught at the rebound by a
fair-haired divinity, with dove-like eyes, and a low tremulous voice
softly attuned to his grief. Talbot Bulstrode saw that he was beloved;
and, in very gratitude, made a dismal offer of the ashes of that fire
which had burnt so fiercely at Aurora's shrine. Do not despise this
poor Lucy if she accepted her cousin's forgotten lover with humble
thankfulness; nay, with a tumult of wild delight, and with joyful
fear and trembling. She loved him so well, and had loved him so long.
Forgive and pity her, for she was one of those pure and innocent
creatures whose whole being resolves itself into _affection;_ to whom
passion, anger, and pride are unknown; who live only to love, and who
love until death. Talbot Bulstrode told Lucy Floyd that he had loved
Aurora with the whole strength of his soul, but that, now the battle
was over, he, the stricken warrior, needed a consoler for his declining
days: would she, could she, give her hand to one who would strive to
the uttermost to fulfil a husband's duty, and to make her happy? Happy!
She would have been happy if he had asked her to be his slave; happy if
she could have been a scullery-maid at Bulstrode Castle, so that she
might have seen the dark face she loved once or twice a day through the
obscure panes of some kitchen window.

But she was the most undemonstrative of women, and, except by her
blushes, and her drooping eyelids, and the tear-drop trembling upon the
soft auburn lashes, she made no reply to the captain's appeal, until at
last, taking her hand in his, he won from her a low-consenting murmur
which meant Yes.

Good heavens! how hard it is upon such women as these that they feel
so much and yet display so little feeling! The dark-eyed, impetuous
creatures, who speak out fearlessly, and tell you that they love
or hate you--flinging their arms round your neck or throwing the
carving-knife at you, as the case may be--get full value for all their
emotion; but these gentle creatures love, and make no sign. They sit,
like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief; and no one reads the
mournful meaning of that sad smile. Concealment, like the worm i' the
bud, feeds on their damask cheeks; and compassionate relatives tell
them that they are bilious, and recommend some homely remedy for their
pallid complexions. They are always at a disadvantage. Their inner life
may be a tragedy, all blood and tears, while their outer existence
is some dull domestic drama of every-day life. The only outward sign
Lucy Floyd gave of the condition of her heart was that one tremulous,
half-whispered affirmative; and yet what a tempest of emotion was going
forward within! The muslin folds of her dress rose and fell with the
surging billows; but, for the very life of her, she could have uttered
no better response to Talbot's pleading.

It was only by-and-by, after she and Captain Bulstrode had wandered
slowly back to the house, that her emotion betrayed itself. Aurora
met her cousin in the corridor out of which their rooms opened, and,
drawing Lucy into her own dressing-room, asked the truant where she had
been.

"Where have you been, you runaway girl? John and I have wanted you half
a dozen times."

Miss Lucy Floyd explained that she had been in the wood with the last
new novel,--a High-Church novel, in which the heroine rejected the
clerical hero because he did not perform the service according to the
Rubric. Now Miss Lucy Floyd made this admission with so much confusion
and so many blushes, that it would have appeared as if there were some
lurking criminality in the fact of spending an April morning in a
wood; and being further examined as to why she had stayed so long, and
whether she had been alone all the time, poor Lucy fell into a pitiful
state of embarrassment, declaring that she had been alone; that is to
say, part of the time--or at least most of the time; but that Captain
Bulstrode----

But in trying to pronounce his name,--this beloved, this sacred
name,--Lucy Floyd's utterance failed her; she fairly broke down, and
burst into tears.

Aurora laid her cousin's face upon her breast, and looked down, with a
womanly, matronly glance, into those tearful blue eyes.

"Lucy, my darling," she said, "is it really and truly as I think--as I
wish:--Talbot loves you?"

"He has asked me to marry him," Lucy whispered.

"And you--you have consented--you love him?"

Lucy Floyd only answered by a new burst of tears.

"Why, my darling, how this surprises me! How long has it been so, Lucy?
How long have you loved him?"

"From the hour I first saw him," murmured Lucy; "from the day he first
came to Felden. O Aurora! I know how foolish and weak it was; I hate
myself for the folly; but he is so good, so noble, so----"

"My silly darling; and because he is good and noble, and has asked you
to be his wife, you shed as many tears as if you had been asked to go
to his funeral. My loving, tender Lucy, you loved him all the time,
then; and you were so gentle and good to me--to me, who was selfish
enough never to guess----My dearest, you are a hundred times better
suited to him than ever I was, and you will be as happy--as happy as I
am with that ridiculous old John."

Aurora's eyes filled with tears as she spoke. She was truly and
sincerely glad that Talbot was in a fair way to find consolation, still
more glad that her sentimental cousin was to be made happy.

Talbot Bulstrode lingered on a few days at Mellish Park;--happy, ah!
too happy days for Lucy Floyd--and then departed, after receiving the
congratulations of John and Aurora.

He was to go straight to Alexander Floyd's villa at Fulham, and plead
his cause with Lucy's father. There was little fear of his meeting
other than a favourable reception; for Talbot Bulstrode of Bulstrode
Castle was a very great match for a daughter of the junior branch
of Floyd, Floyd, and Floyd, a young lady whose expectations were
considerably qualified by half a dozen brothers and sisters.

So Captain Bulstrode went back to London as the betrothed lover of
Lucy Floyd; went back with a subdued gladness in his heart, all unlike
the stormy joys of the past. He was happy in the choice he had made
calmly and dispassionately. He had loved Aurora for her beauty and her
fascination; he was going to marry Lucy because he had seen much of
her, had observed her closely, and believed her to be all that a woman
should be. Perhaps, if stern truth must be told, Lucy's chief charm
in the captain's eyes lay in that reverence for himself which she so
_naïvely_ betrayed. He accepted her worship with a quiet, unconscious
serenity, and thought her the most sensible of women.

Mrs. Alexander was utterly bewildered when Aurora's sometime lover
pleaded for her daughter's hand. She was too busy a mother amongst
her little flock to be the most penetrating of observers, and she had
never suspected the state of Lucy's heart. She was glad, therefore,
to find that her daughter did justice to her excellent education, and
had too much good sense to refuse so advantageous an offer as that of
Captain Bulstrode; and she joined with her husband in perfect approval
of Talbot's suit. So, there being no let or hindrance, and as the
lovers had long known and esteemed each other, it was decided, at the
captain's request, that the wedding should take place early in June,
and that the honeymoon should be spent at Bulstrode Castle.

At the end of May, Mr. and Mrs. Mellish went to Felden, on purpose to
attend Lucy's wedding, which took place with great style at Fulham,
Archibald Floyd presenting his grand-niece with a cheque for five
thousand pounds after the return from church.

Once during that marriage ceremony Talbot Bulstrode was nigh upon
rubbing his eyes, thinking that the pageant must be a dream. A dream
surely; for here was a pale, fair-haired girl by his side, while the
woman he had chosen two years before stood amidst a group behind
him, and looked on at the ceremony, a pleased spectator. But when he
felt the little gloved hand trembling upon his arm, as the bride and
bridegroom left the altar, he remembered that it was no dream, and that
life held new and solemn duties for him from that hour.

Now my two heroines being married, the reader versed in the physiology
of novel writing may conclude that my story is done, that the green
curtain is ready to fall upon the last act of the play, and that I have
nothing more to do than to entreat indulgence for the shortcomings of
the performance and the performers. Yet, after all, does the business
of the real life-drama always end upon the altar-steps? Must the play
needs be over when the hero and heroine have signed their names in the
register? Does man cease to be, to do, and to suffer when he gets
married? And is it necessary that the novelist, after devoting three
volumes to the description of a courtship of six weeks' duration,
should reserve for himself only half a page in which to tell us the
events of two-thirds of a lifetime? Aurora is married, and settled,
and happy; sheltered, as one would imagine, from all dangers, safe
under the wing of her stalwart adorer; but it does not therefore follow
that the story of her life is done. She has escaped shipwreck for a
while, and has safely landed on a pleasant shore; but the storm may
still lower darkly upon the horizon, while the hoarse thunder grumbles
threateningly in the distance.




CHAPTER II.


MR. PASTERN'S LETTER.


Mr. John Mellish reserved to himself one room upon the ground-floor
of his house: a cheerful, airy apartment, with French windows opening
upon the lawn; windows that were sheltered from the sun by a verandah
overhung with jessamine and roses. It was altogether a pleasant room
for the summer season, the floor being covered with an India matting
instead of a carpet, and many of the chairs being made of light
basket-work. Over the chimney-piece hung a portrait of John's father,
and opposite to this work of art there was the likeness of the deceased
gentleman's favourite hunter, surmounted by a pair of brightly polished
spurs, the glistening rowels of which had often pierced the sides of
that faithful steed. In this chamber Mr. Mellish kept his whips, canes,
foils, single-sticks, boxing-gloves, spurs, guns, pistols, powder and
shot flasks, fishing-tackle, boots, and tops; and many happy mornings
were spent by the master of Mellish Park in the pleasing occupation
of polishing, repairing, inspecting, and otherwise setting in order,
these possessions. He had as many pairs of hunting-boots as would have
supplied half Leicestershire--with tops to match. He had whips enough
for all the Melton Hunt. Surrounded by these treasures, as it were in a
temple sacred to the deities of the race-course and the hunting-field,
Mr. John Mellish used to hold solemn audiences with his trainer and his
head-groom upon the business of the stable.

It was Aurora's custom to peep into this chamber perpetually, very much
to the delight and distraction of her adoring husband, who found the
black eyes of his divinity a terrible hindrance to business; except,
indeed, when he could induce Mrs. Mellish to join in the discussion
upon hand, and lend the assistance of her powerful intellect to the
little conclave. I believe that John thought she could have handicapped
the horses for the Chester Cup as well as Mr. Topham himself. She was
such a brilliant creature, that every little smattering of knowledge
she possessed appeared to such good account as to make her seem an
adept in any subject of which she spoke; and the simple Yorkshireman
believed in her as the wisest as well as the noblest and fairest of
women.

Mr. and Mrs. Mellish returned to Yorkshire immediately after Lucy's
wedding. Poor John was uneasy about his stables; for his trainer was a
victim to chronic rheumatism, and Mr. Pastern had not as yet made any
communication respecting the young man of whom he had spoken on the
Stand at York.

"I shall keep Langley," John said to Aurora, speaking of his old
trainer; "for he's an honest fellow, and his judgment will always be
of use to me. He and his wife can still occupy the rooms over the
stables; and the new man, whoever he may be, can live in the lodge on
the north side of the Park. Nobody ever goes in at that gate; so the
lodge-keeper's post is a sinecure, and the cottage has been shut up for
the last year or two. I wish John Pastern would write."

"And I wish whatever you wish, my dearest life," Aurora said dutifully
to her happy slave.

Very little had been heard of Steeve Hargraves, the "Softy," since
the day upon which John Mellish had turned him neck and crop out of
his service. One of the grooms had seen him in a little village close
to the Park, and Stephen had informed the man that he was getting his
living by doing odd jobs for the doctor of the parish, and looking
after that gentleman's horse and gig; but the "Softy" had seemed
inclined to be sulky, and had said very little about himself or his
sentiments. He made very particular inquiries, though, about Mrs.
Mellish, and asked so many questions as to what Aurora did and said,
where she went, whom she saw, and how she agreed with her husband,
that at last the groom, although only a simple country lad, refused to
answer any more interrogatories about his mistress.

Steeve Hargraves rubbed his coarse, sinewy hands, and chuckled as he
spoke of Aurora.

"She's a rare proud one,--a regular high-spirited lady," he said, in
that whispering voice that always sounded strange. "She laid it on
to me with that riding-whip of hers; but I bear no malice--I bear no
malice. She's a beautiful creature, and I wish Mr. Mellish joy of his
bargain."

The groom scarcely knew how to take this, not being fully aware if
it was intended as a compliment or an impertinence. So he nodded to
the "Softy," and strode off, leaving him still rubbing his hands
and whispering about Aurora Mellish, who had long ago forgotten her
encounter with Mr. Stephen Hargraves.

How was it likely that she should remember him, or take heed of him?
How was it likely that she should take alarm because the pale-faced
widow, Mrs. Walter Powell, sat by her hearth and hated her? Strong in
her youth and beauty, rich in her happiness, sheltered and defended
by her husband's love, how should she think of danger? How should she
dread misfortune? She thanked God every day that the troubles of her
youth were past, and that her path in life led henceforth through
smooth and pleasant places, where no perils could come.

Lucy was at Bulstrode Castle, winning upon the affections of her
husband's mother, who patronized her daughter-in-law with lofty
kindness, and took the blushing timorous creature under her sheltering
wing. Lady Bulstrode was very well satisfied with her son's choice.
He might have done better, certainly, as to position and fortune,
the lady hinted to Talbot; and in her maternal anxiety, she would
have preferred his marrying any one rather than the cousin of that
Miss Floyd who ran away from school, and caused such a scandal at the
Parisian seminary. But Lady Bulstrode's heart warmed to Lucy, who was
so gentle and humble, and who always spoke of Talbot as if he had been
a being far "too bright and good," &c., much to the gratification of
her ladyship's maternal vanity.

"She has a very proper affection for you, Talbot," Lady Bulstrode said,
"and, for so young a creature, promises to make an excellent wife; far
better suited to you, I am sure, than her cousin could ever have been."

Talbot turned fiercely upon his mother, very much to the lady's
surprise.

"Why will you be for ever bringing Aurora's name into the question,
mother?" he cried. "Why cannot you let her memory rest? You parted us
for ever,--you and Constance,--and is not that enough? She is married,
and she and her husband are a very happy couple. A man might have
a worse wife than Mrs. Mellish, I can tell you; and John seems to
appreciate her value in his rough way."

"You need not be so violent, Talbot," Lady Bulstrode said, with
offended dignity. "I am very glad to hear that Miss Floyd has altered
since her school-days, and I hope that she may continue to be a good
wife," she added, with an emphasis which insinuated that she had no
very great hopes of the continuance of Mr. Mellish's happiness.

"My poor mother is offended with me," Talbot thought, as Lady Bulstrode
swept out of the room. "I know I am an abominable bear, and that nobody
will ever truly love me so long as I live. My poor little Lucy loves
me after her fashion; loves me in fear and trembling, as if she and I
belonged to different orders of beings; very much as the flying woman
must have loved my countryman, Peter Wilkins, I think. But, after all,
perhaps my mother is right, and my gentle little wife is better suited
to me than Aurora would have been."

So we dismiss Talbot Bulstrode for a while, moderately happy, and yet
not quite satisfied. What mortal ever was _quite_ satisfied in this
world? It is a part of our earthly nature always to find something
wanting, always to have a vague, dull, ignorant yearning which cannot
be appeased. Sometimes, indeed, we are happy; but in our wildest
happiness we are still unsatisfied, for it seems then as if the cup of
joy were too full, and we grow cold with terror at the thought that,
even because of its fulness, it may possibly be dashed to the ground.
What a mistake this life would be, what a wild feverish dream, what an
unfinished and imperfect story, if it were not a prelude to something
better! Taken by itself, it is all trouble and confusion; but taking
the future as the keynote of the present, how wondrously harmonious
the whole becomes! How little does it signify that our joys here are
not complete, our wishes not fulfilled, if the completion and the
fulfilment are to come hereafter!

Little more than a week after Lucy's wedding, Aurora ordered her
horse immediately after breakfast, upon a sunny summer morning, and,
accompanied by the old groom who had ridden behind John's father, went
out on an excursion amongst the villages round Mellish Park, as it was
her habit to do once or twice a week.

The poor in the neighbourhood of the Yorkshire mansion had good reason
to bless the coming of the banker's daughter. Aurora loved nothing
better than to ride from cottage to cottage, chatting with the simple
villagers, and finding out their wants. She never found the worthy
creatures very remiss in stating their necessities, and the housekeeper
at Mellish Park had enough to do in distributing Aurora's bounties
amongst the cottagers who came to the servants' hall with pencil orders
from Mrs. Mellish. Mrs. Walter Powell sometimes ventured to take Aurora
to task on the folly and sinfulness of what she called indiscriminate
almsgiving; but Mrs. Mellish would pour such a flood of eloquence upon
her antagonist, that the ensign's widow was always glad to retire from
the unequal contest. Nobody had ever been able to argue with Archibald
Floyd's daughter. Impulsive and impetuous, she had always taken her own
course, whether for weal or woe, and nobody had been strong enough to
hinder her.

Returning on this lovely June morning from one of these charitable
expeditions, Mrs. Mellish dismounted from her horse at a little
turnstile leading into the wood, and ordered the groom to take the
animal home.

"I have a fancy for walking through the wood, Joseph," she said;
"it's such a lovely morning. Take care of Mazeppa; and if you see Mr.
Mellish, tell him that I shall be home directly."

The man touched his hat, and rode off, leading Aurora's horse.

Mrs. Mellish gathered up the folds of her habit, and strolled slowly
into the wood, under whose shadow Talbot Bulstrode and Lucy had
wandered on that eventful April day which sealed the young lady's fate.

Now Aurora had chosen to ramble homewards through this wood because,
being thoroughly happy, the warm gladness of the summer weather filled
her with a sense of delight which she was loth to curtail. The drowsy
hum of the insects, the rich colouring of the woods, the scent of
wild-flowers, the ripple of water,--all blended into one delicious
whole, and made the earth lovely.

There is something satisfactory, too, in the sense of possession; and
Aurora felt, as she looked down the long avenues, and away through
distant loopholes in the wood to the wide expanse of park and lawn,
and the picturesque, irregular pile of building beyond, half Gothic,
half Elizabethan, and so lost in a rich tangle of ivy and bright
foliage as to be beautiful at every point,--she felt, I say, that all
the fair picture was her own, or her husband's, which was the same
thing. She had never for one moment regretted her marriage with John
Mellish. She had never, as I have said already, been inconstant to him
by one thought.

In one part of the wood the ground rose considerably; so that the
house, which lay low, was distinctly visible whenever there was a break
in the trees. This rising ground was considered the prettiest spot in
the wood, and here a summer-house had been erected: a fragile, wooden
building, which had fallen into decay of late years, but which was
still a pleasant resting-place upon a summer's day, being furnished
with a wooden table and a broad bench, and sheltered from the sun and
wind by the lower branches of a magnificent beech. A few paces away
from this summer-house there was a pool of water, the surface of which
was so covered with lilies and tangled weeds as to have beguiled a
short-sighted traveller into forgetfulness of the danger beneath.
Aurora's way led her past this spot, and she started with a momentary
sensation of terror on seeing a man lying asleep by the side of the
pool. She quickly recovered herself, remembering that John allowed the
public to use the footpath through the wood; but she started again when
the man, who must have been a bad sleeper to be aroused by her light
footstep, lifted his head, and displayed the white face of the "Softy."

He rose slowly from the ground upon seeing Mrs. Mellish, and crawled
away, looking at her as he went, but not making any acknowledgment of
her presence.

Aurora could not repress a brief terrified shudder; it seemed as if her
footfall had startled some viperish creature, some loathsome member of
the reptile race, and scared it from its lurking-place.

Steeve Hargraves disappeared amongst the trees as Mrs. Mellish walked
on, her head proudly erect, but her cheek a shade paler than before
this unexpected encounter with the "Softy."

Her joyous gladness in the bright summer's day had forsaken her as
suddenly as she had met Stephen Hargraves; that bright smile, which
was even brighter than the morning sunshine, faded out, and left her
face unnaturally grave.

"Good heavens!" she exclaimed, "how foolish I am! I am actually afraid
of that man,--afraid of that pitiful coward who could hurt my feeble
old dog. As if such a creature as that could do one any mischief!"

Of course this was very wisely argued, as no coward ever by any chance
worked any mischief upon this earth since the Saxon prince was stabbed
in the back while drinking at his kinswoman's gate, or since brave King
John and his creature plotted together what they should do with the
little boy Arthur.

Aurora walked slowly across the lawn towards that end of the house at
which the apartment sacred to Mr. Mellish was situated. She entered
softly at the open window, and laid her hand upon John's shoulder, as
he sat at a table covered with a litter of account-books, racing-lists,
and disorderly papers.

He started at the touch of the familiar hand.

"My darling, I'm so glad you've come in. How long you've been!"

She looked at her little jewelled watch. Poor John had loaded her
with trinkets and gewgaws. His chief grief was that she was a wealthy
heiress, and that he could give her nothing but the adoration of his
simple, honest heart.

"Only half-past one, you silly old John," she said. "What made you
think me late?"

"Because I wanted to consult you about something, and to tell you
something. Such good news!"

"About what?"

"About the trainer."

She shrugged her shoulders, and pursed up her red lips with a
bewitching little gesture of indifference.

"Is that all?" she said.

"Yes; but aint you glad we've got the man at last--the very man to suit
us, I think? Where's John Pastern's letter?"

Mr. Mellish searched amongst the litter of papers upon the table, while
Aurora, leaning against the framework of the open window, watched him,
and laughed at his embarrassment.

She had recovered her spirits, and looked the very picture of careless
gladness as she leaned in one of those graceful and unstudied
attitudes peculiar to her, supported by the framework of the window,
and with the trailing jessamine waving round her in the soft summer
breeze. She lifted her ungloved hand, and gathered the roses above her
head as she talked to her husband.

"You most disorderly and unmethodical of men," she said, laughing; "I
wouldn't mind betting five to one you won't find it."

I'm afraid that Mr. Mellish muttered an oath as he tossed about the
heterogeneous mass of papers in his search for the missing document.

"I had it five minutes before you came in, Aurora," he said, "and now
there's not a sign of it----Oh, here it is!"

Mr. Mellish unfolded the letter, and, smoothing it out upon the table
before him, cleared his throat preparatory to reading the epistle.
Aurora still leaned against the window-frame, half in and half out of
the room, singing a snatch of a popular song, and trying to gather an
obstinate half-blown rose which grew provokingly out of reach.

"You're attending, Aurora?"

"Yes, dearest and best."

"But do come in. You can't hear a word there."

Aurora shrugged her shoulders, as who should say, "I submit to the
command of a tyrant," and advanced a couple of paces from the window;
then looking at John with an enchantingly insolent toss of her head,
she folded her hands behind her, and told him she would "be good."
She was a careless, impetuous creature, dreadfully forgetful of what
Mrs. Walter Powell called her "responsibilities;" every mortal thing
by turns, and never any one thing for two minutes together; happy,
generous, affectionate; taking life as a glorious summer's holiday, and
thanking God for the bounty which made it so pleasant to her.

Mr. John Pastern began his letter with an apology for having so long
deferred writing. He had lost the address of the person he had wished
to recommend, and had waited until the man wrote to him a second time.

"I think he will suit you very well," the letter went on to say, "as
he is well up in his business, having had plenty of experience, as
groom, jockey, and trainer. He is only thirty years of age, but met
with an accident some time since, which lamed him for life. He was half
killed in a steeple-chase in Prussia, and was for upwards of a year
in a hospital at Berlin. His name is James Conyers, and he can have a
character from----"

The letter dropped out of John Mellish's hand as he looked up at his
wife. It was not a scream which she had uttered. It was a gasping cry,
more terrible to hear than the shrillest scream that ever came from the
throat of woman in all the long history of womanly distress.

"Aurora! Aurora!"

He looked at her, and his own face changed and whitened at the sight
of hers. So terrible a transformation had come over her during the
reading of that letter, that the shock could not have been greater had
he looked up and seen another person in her place.

"It's wrong; it's wrong!" she cried hoarsely; "you've read the name
wrong. It can't be that!"

"What name?"

"What name?" she echoed fiercely, her face flaming up with a wild
fury,--"that name! I tell you, it _can't_ be. Give me the letter."

He obeyed her mechanically, picking up the paper and handing it to her,
but never removing his eyes from her face.

She snatched it from him; looked at it for a few moments, with her eyes
dilated and her lips apart; then, reeling back two or three paces, her
knees bent under her, and she fell heavily to the ground.




CHAPTER III.


MR. JAMES CONYERS.


The first week in July brought James Conyers, the new trainer, to
Mellish Park. John had made no particular inquiries as to the man's
character of any of his former employers, as a word from Mr. Pastern
was all-sufficient.

Mr. Mellish had endeavoured to discover the cause of Aurora's agitation
at the reading of John Pastern's letter. She had fallen like a dead
creature at his feet; she had been hysterical throughout the remainder
of the day, and delirious in the ensuing night, but she had not uttered
one word calculated to throw any light upon the secret of her strange
manifestation of emotion.

Her husband sat by her bedside upon the day after that on which she had
fallen into the death-like swoon; watching her with a grave, anxious
face, and earnest eyes that never wandered from her own.

He was suffering very much the same agony that Talbot Bulstrode had
endured at Felden on the receipt of his mother's letter. The dark wall
was slowly rising and separating him from the woman he loved. He was
now to discover the tortures known only to the husband whose wife is
parted from him by that which has more power to sever than any width of
land or wide extent of ocean--_a secret_.

He watched the pale face lying on the pillow; the large, black,
haggard eyes, wide open, and looking blankly out at the faraway purple
tree-tops in the horizon; but there was no clue to the mystery in
any line of that beloved countenance; there was little more than an
expression of weariness, as if the soul, looking out of that white
face, was so utterly enfeebled as to have lost all power to feel
anything but a vague yearning for rest.

The wide casement windows were open, but the day was hot and
oppressive--oppressively still and sunny; the landscape sweltering
under a yellow haze, as if the very atmosphere had been opaque with
molten gold. Even the roses in the garden seemed to feel the influence
of the blazing summer sky, dropping their heavy heads like human
sufferers from headache. The mastiff Bow-wow, lying under an acacia
upon the lawn, was as peevish as any captious elderly gentleman, and
snapped spitefully at a frivolous butterfly that wheeled, and spun,
and threw somersaults about the dog's head. Beautiful as was this
summer's day, it was one on which people are apt to lose their tempers,
and quarrel with each other, by reason of the heat; every man feeling
a secret conviction that his neighbour is in some way to blame for
the sultriness of the atmosphere, and that it would be cooler if he
were out of the way. It was one of those days on which invalids are
especially fractious, and hospital nurses murmur at their vocation;
a day on which third-class passengers travelling long distances by
excursion train are savagely clamorous for beer at every station, and
hate each other for the narrowness and hardness of the carriage seats,
and for the inadequate means of ventilation provided by the railway
company; a day on which stern business men revolt against the ceaseless
grinding of the wheel, and, suddenly reckless of consequences, rush
wildly to the Crown and Sceptre, to cool their overheated systems with
water souchy and still hock; an abnormal day, upon which the machinery
of every-day life gets out of order, and runs riot throughout twelve
suffocating hours.

John Mellish, sitting patiently by his wife's side, thought very little
of the summer weather. I doubt if he knew whether the month was January
or June. For him earth only held one creature, and she was ill and in
distress--distress from which he was powerless to save her--distress
the very nature of which he was ignorant.

His voice trembled when he spoke to her.

"My darling, you have been very ill," he said.

She looked at him with a smile so unlike her own that it was more
painful to him to see than the loudest agony of tears, and stretched
out her hand. He took the burning hand in his, and held it while he
talked to her.

"Yes, dearest, you have been ill; but Morton says the attack was merely
hysterical, and that you will be yourself again to-morrow, so there's
no occasion for anxiety on that score. What grieves me, darling, is to
see that there is something on your mind; something which has been the
real cause of your illness."

She turned her face upon the pillow, and tried to snatch her hand from
his in her impatience, but he held it tightly in both his own.

"Does my speaking of yesterday distress you, Aurora?" he asked gravely.

"Distress me? Oh, no!"

"Then tell me, darling, why the mention of that man, the trainer's
name, had such a terrible effect upon you."

"The doctor told you that the attack was hysterical," she said coldly;
"I suppose I was hysterical and nervous yesterday."

"But the name, Aurora, the name. This James Conyers--who is he?"
He felt the hand he held tighten convulsively upon his own, as he
mentioned the trainer's name.

"Who is this man? Tell me, Aurora. For God's sake, tell me the truth."

She turned her face towards him once more, as he said this.

"If you only want the truth from me, John, you must ask me nothing.
Remember what I said to you at the Château d'Arques. It was a secret
that parted me from Talbot Bulstrode. You trusted me then, John,--you
must trust me to the end; if you cannot trust me----" she stopped
suddenly, and the tears welled slowly up to her large, mournful eyes,
as she looked at her husband.

"What, dearest?"

"We must part; as Talbot and I parted."

"Part!" he cried; "my love, my love! Do you think there is anything
upon this earth strong enough to part us, except death? Do you think
that any combination of circumstances, however strange, however
inexplicable, would ever cause me to doubt your honour; or to tremble
for my own? Could I be here if I doubted you? could I sit by your side,
asking you these questions, if I feared the issue? Nothing shall shake
my confidence; nothing can. But have pity on me; think how bitter a
grief it is to sit here, with your hand in mine, and to know that there
is a secret between us. Aurora, tell me,--this man, this Conyers,--what
is he, and who is he?"

"You know that as well as I do. A groom once; afterwards a jockey; and
now a trainer."

"But you know him?"

"I have seen him."

"When?"

"Some years ago, when he was in my father's service."

John Mellish breathed more freely for a moment. The man had been a
groom at Felden Woods, that was all. This accounted for the fact of
Aurora's recognizing his name; but not for her agitation. He was no
nearer the clue to the mystery than before.

"James Conyers was in your father's service," he said thoughtfully;
"but why should the mention of his name yesterday have caused you such
emotion?"

"I cannot tell you."

"It is another secret, then, Aurora," he said reproachfully; "or has
this man anything to do with the old secret of which you told me at the
Château d'Arques?"

She did not answer him.

"Ah, I see; I understand, Aurora," he added, after a pause. "This man
was a servant at Felden Woods; a spy, perhaps; and he discovered the
secret, and traded upon it, as servants often have done before. This
caused your agitation at hearing his name. You were afraid that he
would come here and annoy you, making use of this secret to extort
money, and keeping you in perpetual terror of him. I think I can
understand it all. I am right; am I not?"

She looked at him with something of the expression of a hunted animal
that finds itself at bay.

"Yes, John."

"This man--this groom--knows something of--of the secret."

"He does."

John Mellish turned away his head, and buried his face in his hands.
What cruel anguish! what bitter degradation! This man, a groom, a
servant, was in the confidence of his wife; and had such power to
harass and alarm her, that the very mention of his name was enough to
cast her to the earth, as if stricken by sudden death. What, in the
name of heaven, could this secret be, which was in the keeping of a
servant, and yet could not be told to him? He bit his lip till his
strong teeth met upon the quivering flesh, in the silent agony of that
thought. What could it be? He had sworn, only a minute before, to trust
in her blindly to the end; and yet, and yet---- His massive frame shook
from head to heel in that noiseless struggle; doubt and despair rose
like twin-demons in his soul; but he wrestled with them, and overcame
them; and, turning with a white face to his wife, said quietly--

"I will press these painful questions no further, Aurora. I will write
to Pastern, and tell him that the man will not suit us; and----"

He was rising to leave her bedside, when she laid her hand upon his arm.

"Don't write to Mr. Pastern, John," she said; "the man will suit you
very well, I dare say. I had rather he came."

"You wish him to come here?"

"Yes."

"But he will annoy you; he will try to extort money from you."

"He would do that in any case, since he is alive. I thought that he was
dead."

"Then you really wish him to come here?"

"I do."

John Mellish left his wife's room inexpressibly relieved. The secret
could not be so very terrible after all, since she was willing that
the man who knew it should come to Mellish Park; where there was at
least a remote chance of his revealing it to her husband. Perhaps,
after all, this mystery involved others rather than herself,--her
father's commercial integrity--her mother? He had heard very little of
that mother's history; perhaps she----Pshaw! why weary himself with
speculative surmises? He had promised to trust her, and the hour had
come in which he was called upon to keep his promise. He wrote to Mr.
Pastern, accepting his recommendation of James Conyers, and waited
rather impatiently to see what kind of man the trainer was.

He received a letter from Conyers, very well written and worded, to the
effect that he would arrive at Mellish Park upon the 3rd of July.

Aurora had recovered from her brief hysterical attack when this letter
arrived; but as she was still weak and out of spirits, her medical
man recommended change of air; so Mr. and Mrs. Mellish drove off to
Harrogate upon the 28th of June, leaving Mrs. Powell behind them at the
Park.

The ensign's widow had been scrupulously kept out of Aurora's room
during her short illness; being held at bay by John, who coolly shut
the door in the lady's sympathetic face, telling her that he'd wait
upon his wife himself, and that when he wanted female assistance he
would ring for Mrs. Mellish's maid.

Now Mrs. Walter Powell, being afflicted with that ravenous curiosity
common to people who live in other people's houses, felt herself deeply
injured by this line of conduct. There were mysteries and secrets
afloat, and she was not to be allowed to discover them; there was a
skeleton in the house, and she was not to anatomize the bony horror.
She scented trouble and sorrow as carnivorous animals scent their prey;
and yet she who hated Aurora was not to be allowed to riot at the
unnatural feast.

Why is it that the dependents in a household are so feverishly
inquisitive about the doings and sayings, the manners and customs,
the joys and sorrows, of those who employ them? Is it that, having
abnegated for themselves all active share in life, they take an
unhealthy interest in those who are in the thick of the strife? Is
it because, being cut off in a great measure by the nature of their
employment from family ties and family pleasures, they feel a malicious
delight in all family trials and vexations, and the ever-recurring
breezes which disturb the domestic atmosphere? Remember this, husbands
and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and
sisters, when you quarrel. _Your servants enjoy the fun._ Surely
that recollection ought to be enough to keep you for ever peaceful
and friendly. Your servants listen at your doors, and repeat your
spiteful speeches in the kitchen, and watch you while they wait at
table, and understand every sarcasm, every innuendo, every look, as
well as those at whom the cruel glances and the stinging words are
aimed. They understand your sulky silence, your studied and over-acted
politeness. The most polished form your hate and anger can take is as
transparent to those household spies as if you threw knives at each
other, or pelted your enemy with the side-dishes and vegetables, after
the fashion of disputants in a pantomime. Nothing that is done in
the parlour is lost upon these quiet, well-behaved watchers from the
kitchen. They laugh at you; nay worse, they pity you. They discuss your
affairs, and make out your income, and settle what you can afford to
do and what you can't afford to do; they prearrange the disposal of
your wife's fortune, and look prophetically forward to the day when you
will avail yourself of the advantages of the new Bankruptcy Act. They
know why you live on bad terms with your eldest daughter, and why your
favourite son was turned out of doors; and they take a morbid interest
in every dismal secret of your life. You don't allow them followers;
you look blacker than thunder if you see Mary's sister or John's poor
old mother sitting meekly in your hall; you are surprised if the
postman brings them letters, and attribute the fact to the pernicious
system of over-educating the masses; you shut them from their homes and
their kindred, their lovers and their friends; you deny them books, you
grudge them a peep at your newspaper; and then you lift up your eyes
and wonder at them because they are inquisitive, and because the staple
of their talk is scandal and gossip.

Mrs. Walter Powell, having been treated by most of her employers, as a
species of upper servant, had acquired all the instincts of a servant;
and she determined to leave no means untried in order to discover the
cause of Aurora's illness, which the doctor had darkly hinted to her
had more to do with the mind than the body.

John Mellish had ordered a carpenter to repair the lodge at the north
gate, for the accommodation of James Conyers; and John's old trainer,
Langley, was to receive his colleague and introduce him to the stables.

The new trainer made his appearance at the lodge-gates in the glowing
July sunset; he was accompanied by no less a person than Steeve
Hargraves the "Softy," who had been lurking about the station upon the
look out for a job, and who had been engaged by Mr. Conyers to carry
his portmanteau.

To the surprise of the trainer, Stephen Hargraves set down his burden
at the park gates.

"You'll have to find some one else to carry it th' rest 't' ro-ad," he
said, touching his greasy cap, and extending his broad palm to receive
the expected payment.

Mr. James Conyers was rather a dashing fellow, with no small amount of
that quality which is generally termed "swagger," so he turned sharply
round upon the "Softy" and asked him what the devil he meant.

"I mean that I mayn't go inside yon geates," muttered Stephen
Hargraves; "I mean that I've been toorned oot of yon pleace that I've
lived in, man and boy, for forty year,--toorned oot like a dog, neck
and crop."

Mr. Conyers threw away the stump of his cigar and stared superciliously
at the "Softy."

"What does the man mean?" he asked of the woman who had opened the
gates.

"Why, poor fellow, he's a bit fond, sir, and him and Mrs. Mellish
didn't get on very well: she has a rare spirit, and I _have_ heard that
she horsewhipped him for beating her favourite dog. Any ways, master
turned him out of his service."

"Because my lady had horsewhipped him. Servants'-hall justice all the
world over," said the trainer, laughing, and lighting a second cigar
from a metal fusee-box in his waistcoat pocket.

"Yes, that's joostice, aint it?" the "Softy" said eagerly. "You
wouldn't like to be toorned oot of a pleace as you'd lived in forty
year, would you? But Mrs. Mellish has a rare spirit, bless her pretty
feace!"

The blessing enunciated by Mr. Stephen Hargraves had such a very
ominous sound, that the new trainer, who was evidently a shrewd,
observant fellow, took his cigar from his mouth on purpose to stare
at him. The white face, lighted up by a pair of red eyes with a dim
glimmer in them, was by no means the most agreeable of countenances;
but Mr. Conyers looked at the man for some moments, holding him by
the collar of his coat in order to do so with more deliberation: then
pushing the "Softy" away with an affably contemptuous gesture, he said,
laughing--

"You're a character, my friend, it strikes me; and not too safe a
character either. I'm dashed if I should like to offend you. There's
a shilling for your trouble, my man," he added tossing the money into
Steeve's extended palm with careless dexterity.

"I suppose I can leave my portmanteau here till to-morrow, ma'am?" he
said, turning to the woman at the lodge. "I'd carry it down to the
house myself if I wasn't lame."

He was such a handsome fellow, and had such an easy, careless manner,
that the simple Yorkshire woman was quite subdued by his fascinations.

"Leave it here, sir, and welcome," she said, curtsying, "and my master
shall take it to the house for you as soon as he comes in. Begging your
pardon, sir, but I suppose you're the new gentleman that's expected in
the stables?"

"Precisely."

"Then I was to tell you, sir, that they've fitted up the north
lodge for you: but you was to please go straight to the house, and
the housekeeper was to make you comfortable and give you a bed for
to-night."

Mr. Conyers nodded, thanked her, wished her good night, and limped
slowly away, through the shadows of the evening, and under the
shelter of the over-arching trees. He stepped aside from the broad
carriage-drive on to the dewy turf that bordered it, choosing the
softest, mossiest places with a sybarite's instinct. Look at him as he
takes his slow way under those glorious branches, in the holy stillness
of the summer sunset, his face sometimes lighted by the low, lessening
rays, sometimes darkened by the shadows of the leaves above his head.
He is wonderfully handsome--wonderfully and perfectly handsome--the
very perfection of physical beauty; faultless in proportion, as if each
line in his face and form had been measured by the sculptor's rule, and
carved by the sculptor's chisel. He is a man about whose beauty there
can be no dispute, whose perfection servant-maids and duchesses must
alike confess--albeit they are not bound to admire; yet it is rather a
sensual type of beauty, this splendour of form and colour, unallied to
any special charm of expression. Look at him now, as he stops to rest,
leaning against the trunk of a tree, and smoking his big cigar with
easy enjoyment. He is thinking. His dark-blue eyes, deeper in colour by
reason of the thick black lashes which fringe them, are half closed,
and have a dreamy, semi-sentimental expression, which might lead you
to suppose the man was musing upon the beauty of the summer sunset.
He is thinking of his losses on the Chester Cup, the wages he is to
get from John Mellish, and the perquisites likely to appertain to the
situation. You give him credit for thoughts to match with his dark,
violet-hued eyes, and the exquisite modelling of his mouth and chin;
you give him a mind as æsthetically perfect as his face and figure, and
you recoil on discovering what a vulgar, every-day sword may lurk under
that beautiful scabbard. Mr. James Conyers is, perhaps, no worse than
other men of his station; but he is decidedly no better. He is only
very much handsomer; and you have no right to be angry with him because
his opinions and sentiments are exactly what they would have been if he
had had red hair and a pug nose. With what wonderful wisdom has George
Eliot told us that people are not any better because they have long
eyelashes! Yet it must be that there is something anomalous in this
outward beauty and inward ugliness; for, in spite of all experience,
we revolt against it, and are incredulous to the last, believing that
the palace which is outwardly so splendid can scarcely be ill furnished
within. Heaven help the woman who sells her heart for a handsome
face, and awakes when the bargain has been struck, to discover the
foolishness of such an exchange!

It took Mr. Conyers a long while to walk from the lodge to the house. I
do not know how, technically, to describe his lameness. He had fallen,
with his horse, in the Prussian steeple-chase, which had so nearly
cost him his life, and his left leg had been terribly injured. The
bones had been set by wonderful German surgeons, who put the shattered
leg together as if it had been a Chinese puzzle, but who, with all
their skill, could not prevent the contraction of the sinews, which
had left the jockey lamed for life, and no longer fit to ride in any
race whatever. He was of the middle height, and weighed something
over eleven stone, and had never ridden except in Continental
steeple-chases.

Mr. James Conyers paused a few paces from the house, and gravely
contemplated the irregular pile of buildings before him.

"A snug crib," he muttered; "plenty of tin hereabouts, I should think,
from the look of the place."

Being ignorant of the geography of the neighbourhood, and being,
moreover, by no means afflicted by an excess of modesty, Mr. Conyers
went straight to the principal door, and rang the bell sacred to
visitors and the family.

He was admitted by a grave old man-servant, who, after deliberately
inspecting his brown shooting-coat, coloured shirt-front, and felt hat,
asked him, with considerable asperity, what he was pleased to want.

Mr. Conyers explained that he was the new trainer, and that he wished
to see the housekeeper; but he had hardly finished doing so, when a
door in an angle of the hall was softly opened, and Mrs. Walter Powell
peeped out of the snug little apartment sacred to her hours of privacy.

"Perhaps the young man will be so good as to step in here," she said,
addressing herself apparently to space, but indirectly to James Conyers.

The young man took off his hat, uncovering a mass of luxuriant brown
curls, and limped across the hall in obedience to Mrs. Powell's
invitation.

"I dare say I shall be able to give you any information you require."

James Conyers smiled, wondering whether the bilious-looking party, as
he mentally designated Mrs. Powell, could give him any information
about the York Summer Meeting; but he bowed politely, and said he
merely wanted to know where he was to hang out--he stopped and
apologized--where he was to sleep that night, and whether there were
any letters for him. But Mrs. Powell was by no means inclined to
let him off so cheaply. She set to work to pump him, and laboured
so assiduously that she soon exhausted that very small amount of
intelligence which he was disposed to afford her, being perfectly aware
of the process to which he was subjected, and more than equal to the
lady in dexterity. The ensign's widow, therefore, ascertained little
more than that Mr. Conyers was a perfect stranger to John Mellish and
his wife, neither of whom he had ever seen.

Having failed to gain much by this interview, Mrs. Powell was anxious
to bring it to a speedy termination.

"Perhaps you would like a glass of wine after your walk?" she said;
"I'll ring for some, and I can inquire at the same time about your
letters. I dare say you are anxious to hear from the relatives you have
left at home."

Mr. Conyers smiled for the second time. He had neither had a home nor
any relatives to speak of, since the most infantine period of his
existence; but had been thrown upon the world a sharp-witted adventurer
at seven or eight years old. The "relatives" for whose communication
he was looking out so eagerly were members of the humbler class of
book-men with whom he did business.

The servant despatched by Mrs. Powell returned with a decanter of
sherry and about half a dozen letters for Mr. Conyers.

"You'd better bring the lamp, William," said Mrs. Powell, as the man
left the room; "for I'm sure you'll never be able to read your letters
by this light," she added politely to Mr. Conyers.

The fact was, that Mrs. Powell, afflicted by that diseased curiosity of
which I have spoken, wanted to know what kind of correspondents these
were whose letters the trainer was so anxious to receive, and sent for
the lamp in order that she might get the full benefit of any scraps of
information to be got at by rapid glances and dexterously stolen peeps.

The servant brought a brilliant camphine-lamp, and Mr. Conyers, not at
all abashed by Mrs. Powell's condescension, drew his chair close to the
table, and after tossing off a glass of sherry, settled himself to the
perusal of his letters.

The ensign's widow, with some needlework in her hand, sat directly
opposite to him at the small round table, with nothing but the pedestal
of the lamp between them.

James Conyers took up the first letter, examined the superscription
and seal, tore open the envelope, read the brief communication upon
half a sheet of note-paper, and thrust it into his waistcoat-pocket.
Mrs. Powell, using her eyes to the utmost, saw nothing but a few lines
in a scratchy plebeian handwriting, and a signature which, seen at a
disadvantage upside-down, didn't look unlike "Johnson." The second
envelope contained only a tissue-paper betting-list; the third held a
dirty scrap of paper with a few words scrawled in pencil; but at sight
of the uppermost envelope of the remaining three Mr. James Conyers
started as if he had been shot. Mrs. Powell looked from the face of
the trainer to the superscription of the letter, and was scarcely less
surprised than Mr. Conyers. The superscription was in the handwriting
of Aurora Mellish.

It was a peculiar hand; a hand about which there could be no mistake;
not an elegant Italian hand, sloping, slender, and feminine, but large
and bold, with ponderous up-strokes and down-strokes, easy to recognize
at a greater distance than that which separated Mrs. Powell from the
trainer. There was no room for any doubt. Mrs. Mellish had written to
her husband's servant, and the man was evidently familiar with her
hand, yet surprised at receiving her letter.

He tore open the envelope, and read the contents eagerly twice over,
frowning darkly as he read.

Mrs. Powell suddenly remembered that she had left part of her
needlework upon a cheffonier behind the young man's chair, and rose
quietly to fetch it. He was so much engrossed by the letter in his
hand that he was not aware of the pale face which peered for one brief
moment over his shoulder, as the faded, hungry eyes stole a glance at
the writing on the page.

The letter was written on the first side of a sheet of note-paper, with
only a few words carried over to the second page. It was this second
page which Mrs. Powell saw. The words written at the top of the leaf
were these:--"Above all, _express no surprise_.--A."

There was no ordinary conclusion to the letter; no other signature than
this big capital A.




CHAPTER IV.


THE TRAINER'S MESSENGER.


Mr. James Conyers made himself very much at home at Mellish Park. Poor
Langley, the invalid trainer, who was a Yorkshireman, felt himself
almost bewildered by the easy insolence of his town-bred successor.
Mr. Conyers looked so much too handsome and dashing for his office,
that the grooms and stable-boys bowed down to him, and paid court to
him as they had never done to simple Langley, who had been very often
obliged to enforce his commands with a horsewhip or a serviceable
leather strap. James Conyers's handsome face was a capital with which
that gentleman knew very well how to trade, and he took the full amount
of interest that was to be got for it without compunction. I am sorry
to be obliged to confess that this man, who had sat in the artists'
studios and the life academies for Apollo and Antinous, was selfish
to the backbone; and so long as he was well fed and clothed and housed
and provided for, cared very little whence the food and clothing came,
or who kept the house that sheltered him, or filled the purse which he
jingled in his trousers-pocket. Heaven forbid that I should be called
upon for his biography. I only know that he sprang from the mire of
the streets, like some male Aphrodite rising from the mud; that he
was a blackleg in the gutter at four years of age, and a "welsher" in
the matter of marbles and hardbake before his fifth birthday. Even
then he was for ever reaping the advantage of a handsome face; for
tender-hearted matrons, who would have been deaf to the cries of a
snub-nosed urchin, petted and compassionated the pretty boy.

In his earliest childhood he learned therefore to trade upon his
beauty, and to get the most that he could for that merchandise;
and he grew up utterly unprincipled, and carried his handsome face
out into the world to help him on to fortune. He was extravagant,
lazy, luxurious, and selfish; but he had that easy indifferent grace
of manner which passes with shallow observers for good-nature. He
would not have gone three paces out of his way to serve his best
friend; but he smiled and showed his handsome white teeth with equal
liberality to all his acquaintance; and took credit for being a frank,
generous-hearted fellow on the strength of that smile. He was skilled
in the uses of that gilt gingerbread of generosity which so often
passes current for sterling gold. He was dexterous in the handling of
those cogged dice which have all the rattle of the honest ivories. A
slap on the back, a hearty shake of the hand, often went as far from
him as the loan of a sovereign from another man, and Jim Conyers was
firmly believed in by the doubtful gentlemen with whom he associated,
as a good-natured fellow who was nobody's enemy but his own. He had
that superficial Cockney cleverness which is generally called knowledge
of the world; knowledge of the worst side of the world, and utter
ignorance of all that is noble upon earth, it might perhaps be more
justly called. He had matriculated in the streets of London, and
graduated on the race-course; he had never read any higher literature
than the Sunday papers and the 'Racing Calendar,' but he contrived to
make a very little learning go a long way, and was generally spoken
of by his employers as a superior young man, considerably above his
station.

Mr. Conyers expressed himself very well contented with the rustic lodge
which had been chosen for his dwelling-house. He condescendingly looked
on while the stable-lads carried the furniture, selected for him by
the housekeeper from the spare servants' rooms, from the house to the
lodge, and assisted in the arrangement of the tiny rustic chambers,
limping about in his shirt-sleeves, and showing himself wonderfully
handy with a hammer and a pocketful of nails. He sat upon a table and
drank beer with such charming affability, that the stable-lads were as
grateful to him as if he had treated them to that beverage. Indeed,
seeing the frank cordiality with which James Conyers smote the lads
upon the back, and prayed them to be active with the can, it was almost
difficult to remember that he was not the giver of the feast, and that
it was Mr. John Mellish who would have to pay the brewer's bill. What,
amongst all the virtues, which adorn this earth, can be more charming
than the generosity of upper servants? With what hearty hospitality
they pass the bottle! how liberally they throw the seven-shilling
gunpowder into the teapot! how unsparingly they spread the twenty-penny
fresh butter on the toast! and what a glorious welcome they give to
the droppers-in of the servants' hall! It is scarcely wonderful that
the recipients of their bounty forget that it is the master of the
household who will be called upon for the expenses of the banquet, and
who will look ruefully at the total of the quarter's housekeeping.

It was not to be supposed that so dashing a fellow as Mr. James Conyers
could, in the lodging-house-keepers' _patois_, "do for" himself. He
required a humble drudge to black his boots, make his bed, boil his
kettle, cook his dinner, and keep the two little chambers at the lodge
in decent order. Casting about in a reflective mood for a fitting
person for this office, his recreant fancy hit upon Steeve Hargraves
the "Softy." He was sitting upon the sill of an open window in the
little parlour of the lodge, smoking a cigar and drinking out of a can
of beer, when this idea came into his head. He was so tickled by the
notion, that he took his cigar from his mouth in order to laugh at his
ease.

"The man's a character," he said, still laughing, "and I'll have him
to wait upon me. He's been forbid the place, has he? Turned out neck
and crop because my Lady Highropes horsewhipped him. Never mind that;
_I'll_ give him leave to come back, if it's only for the fun of the
thing."

He limped out upon the high-road half an hour after this, and went into
the village to find Steeve Hargraves. He had little difficulty in doing
this, as everybody knew the "Softy," and a chorus of boys volunteered
to fetch him from the house of the doctor, in whose service he did odd
jobs, and brought him to Mr. Conyers five minutes afterwards, looking
very hot and dirty, but as pale of complexion as usual.

Stephen Hargraves agreed very readily to abandon his present occupation
and to wait upon the trainer, in consideration of five shillings a week
and his board and lodging; but his countenance fell when he discovered
that Mr. Conyers was in the service of John Mellish, and lived on the
outskirts of the park.

"You're afraid of setting foot upon his estate, are you?" said the
trainer, laughing. "Never mind, Steeve, _I_ give you leave to come, and
I should like to see the man or woman in that house who'll interfere
with any whim of mine. _I_ give you leave. You understand."

The "Softy" touched his cap and tried to look as if he understood;
but it was very evident that he did not understand, and it was some
time before Mr. Conyers could persuade him that his life would be safe
within the gates of Mellish Park. But he was ultimately induced to
trust himself at the north lodge, and promised to present himself there
in the course of the evening.

Now Mr. James Conyers had exerted himself as much in order to overcome
the cowardly objections of this rustic clown as he could have done
if Steeve Hargraves had been the most accomplished body servant
in the three Ridings. Perhaps there was some deeper motive than
any regard for the man himself in this special preference for the
"Softy;" some lurking malice, some petty spite, the key to which was
hidden in his own breast. If, while standing smoking in the village
street, _chaffing_ the "Softy" for the edification of the lookers-on,
and taking so much trouble to secure such an ignorant and brutish
esquire,--if one shadow of the future, so very near at hand, could
have fallen across his path, surely he would have instinctively
recoiled from the striking of that ill-omened bargain.

But James Conyers had no superstition; indeed, he was so pleasantly
free from that weakness as to be a disbeliever in all things in heaven
and on earth, except himself and his own merits; so he hired the
"Softy," for the fun of the thing, as he called it, and walked slowly
back to the park gates to watch for the return of Mr. and Mrs. Mellish,
who were expected that afternoon.

The woman at the lodge brought him out a chair, and begged him to rest
himself under the portico. He thanked her with a pleasant smile, and
sitting down amongst the roses and honeysuckles, lighted another cigar.

"You'll find the north lodge dull, I'm thinking, sir," the woman
said, from the open window, where she had reseated herself with her
needlework.

"Well, it isn't very lively, ma'am, certainly," answered Mr. Conyers,
"but it serves my purpose well enough. The place is lonely enough for
a man to be murdered there and nobody be any the wiser; but as I have
nothing to lose, it will answer well enough for me."

He might perhaps have said a good deal more about the place, but at
this moment the sound of wheels upon the high-road announced the return
of the travellers, and two or three minutes afterwards the carriage
dashed through the gate, and past Mr. James Conyers.

Whatever power this man might have over Aurora, whatever knowledge
of a compromising secret he might have obtained and traded upon, the
fearlessness of her nature showed itself now as always, and she never
flinched at the sight of him. If he had placed himself in her way on
purpose to watch the effect of his presence, he must surely have been
disappointed; for except that a cold shadow of disdain passed over
her face as the carriage drove by him, he might have imagined himself
unseen. She looked pale and care-worn, and her eyes seemed to have
grown larger, since her illness; but she held her head as erect as
ever, and had still the air of imperial grandeur which constituted one
of her chief charms.

"So that is Mr. Mellish," said Conyers, as the carriage disappeared.
"He seems very fond of his wife."

"Ay, sure; and he is too. Fond of her! Why, they say there isn't
another such couple in all Yorkshire. And she's fond of him, too, bless
her handsome face! But who wouldn't be fond of Master John?"

Mr. Conyers shrugged his shoulders; these patriarchal habits and
domestic virtues had no particular charm for him.

"She had plenty of money, hadn't she?" he asked, by way of bringing the
conversation into a more rational channel.

"Plenty of money! I should think so. They say her pa gave her fifty
thousand pounds down on her wedding-day; not that our master wants
money; he's got enough and to spare."

"Ah, to be sure," answered Mr. Conyers; "that's always the way of it.
The banker gave her fifty thousand, did he? If Miss Floyd had married a
poor devil, now, I don't suppose her father would have given her fifty
sixpences."

"Well, no; if she'd gone against his wishes, I don't suppose he would.
He was here in the spring,--a nice, white-haired old gentleman; but
failing fast."

"Failing fast. And Mrs. Mellish will come into a quarter of a million
at his death, I suppose. Good afternoon, ma'am. It's a queer
world." Mr. Conyers took up his stick, and limped away under the
trees, repeating this ejaculation as he went. It was a habit with
this gentleman to attribute the good fortune of other people to some
eccentricity in the machinery of life, by which he, the only really
deserving person in the world, had been deprived of his natural rights.
He went through the wood into a meadow where some of the horses under
his charge were at grass, and spent upwards of an hour lounging about
the hedgerows, sitting on gates, smoking his pipe, and staring at
the animals, which seemed about the hardest work he had to do in his
capacity of trainer. "It isn't a very hard life, when all's said and
done," he thought, as he looked at a group of mares and foals, who,
in their eccentric diversions, were performing a species of Sir Roger
de Coverley up and down the meadow. "It isn't a very hard life; for
as long as a fellow swears hard and fast at the lads, and gets rid of
plenty of oats, he's right enough. These country gentlemen always judge
a man's merits by the quantity of corn they have to pay for. Feed their
horses as fat as pigs, and never enter 'em except among such a set of
screws as an active pig could beat; and they'll swear by you. They'd
think more of having a horse win the Margate Plate, or the Hampstead
Heath Sweepstakes, than if he ran a good fourth in the Derby. Bless
their innocent hearts! I should think fellows with plenty of money
and no brains must have been invented for the good of fellows with
plenty of brains and no money; and that's how we contrive to keep our
equilibrium in the universal see-saw."

Mr. James Conyers, puffing lazy clouds of transparent blue smoke from
his lips, and pondering thus, looked as sentimental as if he had been
ruminating upon the last three pages of the 'Bride of Abydos,' or the
death of Paul Dombey. He had that romantic style of beauty peculiar
to dark-blue eyes and long black lashes; and he could not wonder what
he should have for dinner without a dreamy pensiveness in the purple
shadows of those deep-blue orbs. He had found the sentimentality of his
beauty almost of greater use to him than the beauty itself. It was this
sentimentality which always put him at an advantage with his employers.
He looked like an exiled prince doing menial service in bitterness of
spirit and a turned-down collar. He looked like Lara returned to his
own domains to train the horses of a usurper. He looked, in short, like
anything but what he was,--a selfish, good-for-nothing, lazy scoundrel,
who was well up in the useful art of doing the minimum of work, and
getting the maximum of wages.

He strolled slowly back to his rustic habitation, where he found the
"Softy" waiting for him; the kettle boiling upon a handful of bright
fire, and some tea-things laid out upon the little round table. Mr.
Conyers looked rather contemptuously at the humble preparations.

"I've mashed the tea for 'ee," said the "Softy;" "I thought you'd like
a coop."

The trainer shrugged his shoulders.

"I can't say I'm particular attached to the cat-lap," he said,
laughing; "I've had rather too much of it when I've been in
training,--half-and-half, warm tea and cold-drawn castor-oil. I'll send
you into Doncaster for some spirits to-morrow, my man: or to-night,
perhaps," he added reflectively, resting his elbow upon the table and
his chin in the hollow of his hand.

He sat for some time in this thoughtful attitude, his retainer
Steeve Hargraves watching him intently all the while, with that
half-wondering, half-admiring stare with which a very ugly creature--a
creature so ugly as to know it is ugly--looks at a very handsome one.

At the close of his reverie, Mr. Conyers took out a clumsy silver
watch, and sat for a few minutes staring vacantly at the dial.

"Close upon six," he muttered at last. "What time do they dine at the
house, Steeve?"

"Seven o'clock," answered the "Softy."

"Seven o'clock. Then you'd have time to run there with a message, or a
letter, and catch 'em just as they're going in to dinner."

The "Softy" stared aghast at his new master.

"A message or a letter," he repeated; "for Mr. Mellish?"

"No; for Mrs. Mellish."

"But I daren't," exclaimed Stephen Hargraves; "I daren't go nigh
the house; least of all to speak to her. I don't forget the day she
horsewhipped me. I've never seen her since, and I don't want to see
her. You think I am a coward, don't 'ee?" he said, stopping suddenly,
and looking at the trainer, whose handsome lips were curved into
a contemptuous smile. "You think I'm a coward, don't 'ee, now?" he
repeated.

"Well, I don't think you are over-valiant," answered Mr. Conyers, "to
be afraid of a woman, though she was the veriest devil that ever played
fast and loose with a man."

"Shall I tell you what it is I am afraid of?" said Steeve Hargraves,
hissing the words through his closed teeth in that unpleasant
whisper peculiar to him. "It isn't Mrs. Mellish. It's myself. It's
_this_"--he grasped something in the loose pocket of his trousers as he
spoke,--"it's _this_. I'm afraid to trust myself a-nigh her, for fear I
should spring upon her, and cut her thro-at from ear to ear. I've seen
her in my dreams sometimes, with her beautiful white thro-at laid open,
and streaming oceans of blood; but, for all that, she's always had the
broken whip in her hand, and she's always laughed at me. I've had many
a dream about her; but I've never seen her dead or quiet; and I've
never seen her without the whip."

The contemptuous smile died away from the trainer's lips as Steeve
Hargraves made this revelation of his sentiments, and gave place to a
darkly thoughtful expression, which overshadowed the whole of his face.

"I've no such wonderful love for Mrs. Mellish myself," he said; "but
she might live to be as old as Methuselah, for aught I care, if
she'd----" He muttered something between his teeth, and walked up the
little staircase to his bedroom, whistling a popular tune as he went.

He came down again with a dirty-looking leather desk in his hand; which
he flung carelessly on to the table. It was stuffed with crumpled
untidy-looking letters and papers, from among which he had considerable
difficulty in selecting a tolerably clean sheet of note-paper.

"You'll take a letter to Mrs. Mellish, my friend," he said to Stephen,
stooping over the table and writing as he spoke; "and you'll please to
deliver it safe into her own hands. The windows will all be open this
sultry weather, and you can watch till you see her in the drawing-room;
and when you do, contrive to beckon her out, and give her this."

He had folded the sheet of paper by this time, and had sealed it
carefully in an adhesive envelope.

"There's no need of any address," he said, as he handed the letter to
Steeve Hargraves; "you know who it's for, and you won't give it to
anybody else. There, get along with you. She'll say nothing to _you_,
man, when she sees who the letter comes from."

The "Softy" looked darkly at his new employer; but Mr. James Conyers
rather piqued himself upon a quality which he called determination, but
which his traducers designated obstinacy, and he made up his mind that
no one but Steeve Hargraves should carry the letter.

"Come," he said, "no nonsense, Mr. Stephen! Remember this: if I choose
to employ you, and if I choose to send you on any errand whatsoever,
there's no one in that house will dare to question my right to do it.
Get along with you!"

He pointed, as he spoke, with the stem of his pipe, to the Gothic
roof and ivied chimneys of the old house gleaming amongst a mass of
foliage. "Get along with you, Mr. Stephen, and bring me an answer to
that letter," he added, lighting his pipe and seating himself in his
favourite attitude upon the window-sill,--an attitude which, like
everything about him, was a half-careless, half-defiant protest of his
superiority to his position. "You needn't wait for a written answer.
Yes or No will be quite enough, you may tell Mrs. Mellish."

The "Softy" whispered something, half inaudible, between his teeth;
but he took the letter, and pulling his shabby rabbit-skin cap over
his eyes, walked slowly off in the direction to which Mr. Conyers had
pointed, with a half-contemptuous action, a few moments before.

"A queer fish," muttered the trainer, lazily watching the awkward
figure of his attendant; "a queer fish; but it's rather hard if I can't
manage _him_. I've twisted his betters round my little finger before
to-day."

Mr. Conyers forgot that there are some natures which, although inferior
in everything else, are strong by reason of their stubbornness, and
not to be twisted out of their natural crookedness by any trick of
management or skilfulness of handling.

The evening was sunless but sultry; there was a lowering darkness in
the leaden sky, and an unnatural stillness in the atmosphere that
prophesied the coming of a storm. The elements were taking breath for
the struggle, and lying silently in wait against the breaking of
their fury. It would come by-and-by, the signal for the outburst, in a
long, crackling peal of thunder that would shake the distant hills and
flutter every leaf in the wood.

The trainer looked with an indifferent eye at the ominous aspect of
the heavens. "I must go down to the stables, and send some of the boys
to get the horses under cover," he said; "there'll be a storm before
long." He took his stick and limped out of the cottage, still smoking;
indeed, there were very few hours in the day, and not many during the
night, in which Mr. Conyers was unprovided with his pipe or cigar.

Steeve Hargraves walked very slowly along the narrow pathway which led
across the park to the flower-garden and lawn before the house. This
north side of the park was wilder and less well kept than the rest;
but the thick undergrowth swarmed with game, and the young hares flew
backwards and forwards across the pathway, startled by the "Softy's"
shambling tread, while every now and then the partridges rose in pairs
from the tangled grass, and skimmed away under the low roof of foliage.

"If I was to meet Mr. Mellish's keeper here, he'd look at me black
enough, I dare say," muttered the "Softy," "though I aint after the
game. Lookin' at a pheasant's high treason in his mind, curse him!"

He put his hands low down in his pockets, as if scarcely able to resist
the temptation to wring the neck of a splendid cock-pheasant that was
strutting through the high grass, with a proud serenity of manner that
implied a knowledge of the game-laws. The trees on the north side of
the Park formed a species of leafy wall which screened the lawn, so
that, coming from this northern side, the "Softy" emerged at once
from the shelter into the smooth grass bordering this lawn, which was
separated from the Park by an invisible fence.

As Steeve Hargraves, still sheltered from observation by the trees,
approached the place, he saw that his errand was shortened, for Mrs.
Mellish was leaning upon a low iron gate, with the dog Bow-wow, the dog
that he had beaten, at her side.

He had left the narrow pathway and struck in amongst the undergrowth,
in order to make a shorter cut to the flower-garden, and as he came
from under the shelter of the low branches which made a leafy cave
about him, he left a long track of parted grass behind him, like the
track of the footstep of a tiger, or the trail of a slow, ponderous
serpent creeping towards its prey.

Aurora looked up at the sound of the shambling footstep, and, for the
second time since she had beaten him, she encountered the gaze of the
"Softy." She was very pale, almost as pale as her white dress, which
was unenlivened by any scrap of colour, and which hung about her in
loose folds that gave a statuesque grace to her figure. She was dressed
with such evident carelessness that every fold of muslin seemed to tell
how far away her thoughts had been when that hasty toilette was made.
Her black brows contracted as she looked at the "Softy."

"I thought Mr. Mellish had dismissed you," she said, "and that you had
been forbidden to come here?"

"Yes, ma'am, Muster Mellish did turn me out of the house I'd lived in,
man and boy, nigh upon forty year; but I've got a new pleace now, and
my new master sent me to you with a letter."

Watching the effect of his words, the "Softy" saw a leaden change come
over the pale face of his listener.

"What new master?" she asked.

Steeve Hargraves lifted his hand and pointed across his shoulder. She
watched the slow motion of that clumsy hand, and her eyes seemed to
grow larger as she saw the direction to which it pointed.

"Your new master is the trainer, James Conyers,--the man who lives at
the north lodge?" she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"What does he want with you?" she asked.

"I keep his place in order for him, ma'am, and run errands for him; and
I've brought a letter."

"A letter? Ah, yes, give it me."

The "Softy" handed her the envelope. She took it slowly, without
removing her eyes from his face, but watching him with a fixed and
earnest look that seemed as if it would have fathomed something beneath
the dull red eyes which met hers. A look that betrayed some doubtful
terror hidden in her own breast, and a vague desire to penetrate the
secrets of his.

She did not look at the letter, but held it half crushed in the hand
hanging by her side.

"You can go," she said.

"I was to wait for an answer."

The black brows contracted again, and this time a bright gleam of fury
kindled in the great black eyes.

"There is no answer," she said, thrusting the letter into the bosom
of her dress, and turning to leave the gate; "there is no answer, and
there shall be none till I choose. Tell your master that."

"It wasn't to be a written answer," persisted the "Softy;" "it was to
be Yes or No, that's all; but I was to be sure and wait for it."

The half-witted creature saw some feeling of hate and fury in her face
beyond her contemptuous hatred of himself, and took a savage pleasure
in tormenting her. She struck her foot impatiently upon the grass, and
plucking the letter from her breast, tore open the envelope, and read
the few lines it contained. Few as they were, she stood for nearly five
minutes with the open letter in her hand, separated from the "Softy" by
the iron fence, and lost in thought. The silence was only broken during
this pause by an occasional growl from the mastiff, who lifted his
heavy lip, and showed his feeble teeth for the edification of his old
enemy.

She tore the letter into a hundred morsels, and flung it from her
before she spoke. "Yes," she said at last; "tell your master that."

Steeve Hargraves touched his cap and went back through the grassy trail
he had left, to carry this message to the trainer.

"She hates me bad enough," he muttered, as he stopped once to look back
at the quiet white figure on the lawn, "but she hates t'oother chap
worse."




CHAPTER V.


OUT IN THE RAIN.


The second dinner-bell rang five minutes after the "Softy" had left
Aurora, and Mr. John Mellish came out upon the lawn to look for his
wife. He came whistling across the grass, and whisking the roses
with his pocket-handkerchief in very gaiety of heart. He had quite
forgotten the anguish of that miserable morning after the receipt of
Mr. Pastern's letter. He had forgotten all but that his Aurora was
the loveliest and dearest of women, and that he trusted her with the
boundless faith of his big, honest heart. "Why should I doubt such a
noble, impetuous creature?" he thought; "doesn't every feeling and
every sentiment write itself upon her lovely, expressive face in
characters the veriest fool could read? If I please her, what bright
smiles light up in her black eyes! If I vex her,--as I do, poor awkward
idiot that I am, a hundred times a day,--how the two black arches
contract over her pretty impertinent nose, while the red lips pout
defiance and disdain! Shall I doubt her because she keeps one secret
from me, and freely tells me I must for ever remain ignorant of it;
when an artful woman would try to set my mind at rest with some shallow
fiction invented to deceive me? Heaven bless her! no doubt of her shall
ever darken my life again, come what may."

It was easy for Mr. Mellish to make this mental vow, believing fully
that the storm was past, and that lasting fair weather had set in.

"Lolly darling," he said, winding his great arm round his wife's waist,
"I thought I had lost you."

She looked up at him with a sad smile.

"Would it grieve you much, John," she said in a low voice, "if you were
really to lose me?"

He started as if he had been struck, and looked anxiously at her pale
face.

"Would it grieve me, Lolly!" he repeated; "not for long; for the
people who came to your funeral would come to mine. But, my darling,
my darling, what can have made you ask this question? Are you ill,
dearest? You have been looking pale and tired for the last few days,
and I have thought nothing of it. What a careless wretch I am!"

"No, no, John," she said; "I don't mean that. I know you would grieve,
dear, if I were to die. But suppose something were to happen which
would separate us for ever,--something which would compel me to leave
this place never to return to it,--what then?"

"What then, Lolly?" answered her husband, gravely. "I would rather see
your coffin laid in the empty niche beside my mother's in the vault
yonder,"--he pointed in the direction of the parish church, which was
close to the gates of the park,--"than I would part with you thus. I
would rather know you to be dead and happy than I would endure any
doubt about your fate. Oh, my darling, why do you speak of these
things? I couldn't part with you--I couldn't! I would rather take you
in my arms and plunge with you into the pond in the wood; I would
rather send a bullet into your heart, and see you lying murdered at my
feet."

"John, John, my dearest and truest!" she said, her face lighting up
with a new brightness, like the sudden breaking of the sun through a
leaden cloud, "not another word, dear: we will never part. Why should
we? There is very little upon this wide earth that money cannot buy;
and it shall help to buy our happiness. We will never part, darling;
never."

She broke into a joyous laugh as she watched his anxious,
half-wondering face.

"Why, you foolish John, how frightened you look!" she said. "Haven't
you discovered yet that I like to torment you now and then with such
questions as these, just to see your big blue eyes open to their widest
extent? Come, dear; Mrs. Powell will look white thunder at us when we
go in, and make some meek conventional reply to our apologies for this
delay, to the effect that she doesn't care in the least how long she
waits for dinner, and that on the whole she would rather never have any
dinner at all. Isn't it strange, John, how that woman hates me?"

"Hates _you_, dear, when you're so kind to her!"

"But she hates me for being kind to her, John. If I were to give her
my diamond-necklace, she'd hate me for having it to give. She hates us
because we're rich and young and handsome," said Aurora, laughing;
"and the very opposite of her namby-pamby, pale-faced self."

It was strange that from this moment Aurora seemed to regain her
natural gaiety of spirits, and to be what she had been before the
receipt of Mr. Pastern's letter. Whatever dark cloud had hovered over
her head, since the day upon which that simple epistle had caused
such a terrible effect, seemed to have been suddenly removed. Mrs.
Walter Powell was not slow to perceive this change. The eyes of love,
clear-sighted though they may be, are dull indeed beside the eyes
of hate. _Those_ are never deceived. Aurora had wandered out of the
drawing-room, listless and dispirited, to stroll wearily upon the
lawn;--Mrs. Powell, seated in one of the windows, had watched her
every movement, and had seen her in the distance speaking to some
one (she had been unable to distinguish the "Softy" from her post
of observation);--and this same Aurora returned to the house almost
another creature. There was a look of determination about the beautiful
mouth (which female critics called too wide), a look not usual to
the rosy lips, and a resolute brightness in the eyes, which had some
significance surely, Mrs. Powell thought, if she could only have found
the key to that hidden meaning. Ever since Aurora's brief illness, the
poor woman had been groping for this key--groping in mazy darknesses
which baffled her utmost powers of penetration. Who and what was this
groom, that Aurora should write to him, as she most decidedly had
written? Why was he to express no surprise, and what cause could there
be for his expressing any surprise in the simple economy of Mellish
Park? The mazy darknesses were more impenetrable than the blackest
night, and Mrs. Powell well-nigh gave up all hope of ever finding any
clue to the mystery. And now behold a new complication had arisen
in Aurora's altered spirits. John Mellish was delighted with this
alteration. He talked and laughed until the glasses near him vibrated
with his noisy mirth. He drank so much sparkling Moselle that his
butler Jarvis (who had grown gray in the service of the old squire,
and had poured out Master John's first glass of champagne) refused at
last to furnish him with any more of that beverage; offering him in
its stead some very expensive hock, the name of which was in fourteen
unpronounceable syllables, and which John tried to like, but didn't.

"We'll fill the house with visitors for the shooting season, Lolly,
darling," said Mr. Mellish. "If they come on the 1st of September,
they'll all be comfortably settled for the Leger. The dear old Dad will
come of course, and trot about on his white pony like the best of men
and bankers in Christendom. Captain and Mrs. Bulstrode will come too;
and we shall see how our little Lucy looks, and whether solemn Talbot
beats her in the silence of the matrimonial chamber. Then there's
Hunter, and a host of fellows; and you must write me a list of any nice
people you'd like to ask down here; and we'll have a glorious autumn;
won't we, Lolly?"

"I hope so, dear," said Mrs. Mellish, after a little pause, and a
repetition of John's eager question. She had not been listening very
attentively to John's plans for the future, and she startled him rather
by asking him a question very wide from the subject upon which he had
been speaking.

"How long do the fastest vessels take going to Australia, John?" she
asked quietly.

Mr. Mellish stopped with his glass in his hand to stare at his wife as
she asked this question.

"How long do the fastest vessels take to go to Australia?" he
repeated. "Good gracious me, Lolly, how should I know? Three weeks or
a month--no, I mean three months; but, in mercy's name, Aurora, why do
you want to know?"

"The average length of the voyage is, I believe, about three months;
but some fast-sailing packets do it in seventy, or even in sixty-eight
days," interposed Mrs. Powell, looking sharply at Aurora's abstracted
face from under cover of her white eyelashes.

"But why, in goodness name, do you want to know, Lolly?" repeated John
Mellish. "You don't want to go to Australia, and you don't know anybody
who's going to Australia."

"Perhaps Mrs. Mellish is interested in the Female Emigration movement,"
suggested Mrs. Powell: "it is a most delightful work."

Aurora replied neither to the direct nor the indirect question. The
cloth had been removed (for no modern customs had ever disturbed the
conservative economy of Mellish Park), and Mrs. Mellish sat, with a
cluster of pale cherries in her hand, looking at the reflection of her
own face in the depths of the shining mahogany.

"Lolly!" exclaimed John Mellish, after watching his wife for some
minutes, "you are as grave as a judge. What can you be thinking of?"

She looked up at him with a bright smile, and rose to leave the
dining-room.

"I'll tell you one of these days, John," she said. "Are you coming with
us, or are you going out upon the lawn to smoke?"

"If you'll come with me, dear," he answered, returning her smile with
the frank glance of unchangeable affection which always beamed in his
eyes when they rested on his wife. "I'll go out and smoke a cigar, if
you'll come with me, Lolly."

"You foolish old Yorkshireman," said Mrs. Mellish, laughing, "I verily
believe you'd like me to smoke one of your choice cigars, by way of
keeping you company."

"No, darling, I'd never wish to see you do anything that didn't
square--that wasn't compatible," interposed Mr. Mellish, gravely,
"with the manners of the noblest lady, and the duties of the truest
wife in England. If I love to see you ride across country with a red
feather in your hat, it is because I think that the good old sport of
English gentlemen was meant to be shared by their wives, rather than
by people whom I would not like to name; and because there is a fair
chance that the sight of your Spanish hat and scarlet plume at the meet
may go some way towards keeping Miss Wilhelmina de Lancy (who was born
plain Scroggins, and christened Sarah) out of the field. I think our
British wives and mothers might have the battle in their own hands,
and win the victory for themselves and their daughters, if they were
a little braver in standing to their ground; if they were not quite
so tenderly indulgent to the sins of eligible young noblemen, and, in
their estimate of a man's qualifications for the marriage state, were
not so entirely guided by the figures in his banker's book. It's a sad
world, Lolly; but John Mellish, of Mellish Park, was never meant to set
it right."

Mr, Mellish stood on the threshold of a glass-door which opened on
to a flight of steps leading to the lawn, as he delivered himself of
this homily, the gravity of which was quite at variance with the usual
tenour of his discourse. He had a cigar in his hand, and was going to
light it, when Aurora stopped him.

"John, dear," she said, "my most unbusiness-like of darlings, have
you forgotten that poor Langley is so anxious to see you, that he may
give you up the old accounts before the new trainer takes the stable
business into his hands? He was here half an hour before dinner, and
begged that you would see him to-night."

Mr. Mellish shrugged his shoulders.

"Langley's as honest a fellow as ever breathed," he said. "I don't want
to look into his accounts. I know what the stable costs me yearly on an
average, and that's enough."

"But for his satisfaction, dear."

"Well, well, Lolly, to-morrow morning, then."

"No, dear, I want you to ride out with me to-morrow."

"To-morrow evening."

"You 'meet the Captains at the Citadel,'" said Aurora, laughing; "that
is to say, you dine at Holmbush with Colonel Pevensey. Come, darling,
I insist on your being business-like for once in a way; come to your
sanctum sanctorum, and we'll send for Langley, and look into the
accounts."

The pretty tyrant linked her arm in his, and led him to the other end
of the house, and into that very room in which she had swooned away
at the hearing of Mr. Pastern's letter. She looked thoughtfully out at
the dull evening sky as she closed the windows. The storm had not yet
come, but the ominous clouds still brooded low over the earth, and the
sultry atmosphere was heavy and airless. Mrs. Mellish made a wonderful
show of her business habits, and appeared to be very much interested
in the mass of cornchandlers', veterinary surgeons', saddlers', and
harness-makers' accounts with which the old trainer respectfully
bewildered his master. But about ten minutes after John had settled
himself to his weary labour, Aurora threw down the pencil with which
she had been working a calculation (by a process of so wildly original
a nature, as to utterly revolutionize Cocker, and annihilate the
hackneyed notion that twice two are four), and floated lightly out of
the room, with some vague promise of coming back presently, leaving Mr.
Mellish to arithmetic and despair.

Mrs. Walter Powell was seated in the drawing-room reading, when Aurora
entered that apartment with a large black-lace shawl wrapped about
her head and shoulders. Mrs. Mellish had evidently expected to find
the room empty; for she started and drew back at the sight of the
pale-faced widow, who was seated in a distant window, making the most
of the last faint rays of summer twilight. Aurora paused for a moment a
few paces within the door, and then walked deliberately across the room
towards the farthest window from that at which Mrs. Powell was seated.

"Are you going out in the garden this dull evening, Mrs. Mellish?"
asked the ensign's widow.

Aurora stopped half-way between the window and the door to answer her.

"Yes," she said coldly.

"Allow me to advise you not to go far. We are going to have a storm."

"I don't think so."

"What, my dear Mrs. Mellish, not with that thunder-cloud yonder?"

"I will take my chance of being caught in it then. The weather has been
threatening all the afternoon. The house is insupportable to-night."

"But you will surely not go far?"

Mrs. Mellish did not appear to hear this last remonstrance. She hurried
through the open window, and out upon the lawn, striking northwards
towards that little iron gate across which she had talked to the
"Softy."

The arch of the leaden sky seemed to contract above the tree-tops in
the park, shutting in the earth as if with a roof of hot iron, after
the fashion of those cunningly-contrived metal torture-chambers which
we read of; but the rain had not yet come.

"What can take her into the garden on such an evening as this?" thought
Mrs. Powell, as she watched the white dress receding in the dusky
twilight. "It will be dark in ten minutes, and she is not usually so
fond of going out alone."

The ensign's widow laid down the book in which she had appeared so
deeply interested, and went to her own room, where she selected a
comfortable gray cloak from a heap of primly folded garments in
her capacious wardrobe. She muffled herself in this cloak, hurried
downstairs with a soft but rapid step, and went out into the garden
through a little lobby near John Mellish's room. The blinds in the
squire's sanctum were not drawn down, and Mrs. Powell could see the
master of the house bending over his paper under the light of a reading
lamp, with the rheumatic trainer seated by his side. It was by this
time quite dark, but Aurora's white dress was faintly visible upon the
other side of the lawn.

Mrs. Mellish was standing beside the little iron gate when the ensign's
widow emerged from the house. The white dress was motionless for some
time, and the pale watcher, lurking under the shade of a long verandah,
began to think that her trouble was wasted, and that perhaps, after
all, Aurora had no special purpose in this evening ramble.

Mrs. Walter Powell felt cruelly disappointed. Always on the watch for
some clue to the secret whose existence she had discovered, she had
fondly hoped that even this unseasonable ramble might be some link
in the mysterious chain she was so anxious to fit together. But it
appeared that she was mistaken. The unseasonable ramble was very likely
nothing more than one of Aurora's caprices--a womanly foolishness
signifying nothing.

No! The white dress was no longer motionless, and in the unnatural
stillness of the hot night Mrs. Powell heard the distant scrooping
noise of a hinge revolving slowly, as if guided by a cautious hand.
Mrs. Mellish had opened the iron gate, and had passed to the other
side of the invisible barrier which separated the gardens from the
Park. In another moment she had disappeared under the shadow of the
trees which made a belt about the lawn.

Mrs. Powell paused, almost terrified by her unlooked-for discovery.

What, in the name of all that was darkly mysterious, could Mrs. Mellish
have to do between nine and ten o'clock on the north side of the
Park--the wildly kept, deserted north side, in which, from year's end
to year's end, no one but the keepers ever walked?

The blood rushed hotly up to Mrs. Powell's pale face, as she suddenly
remembered that the disused, dilapidated lodge upon this north side
had been given to the new trainer as a residence. Remembering this was
nothing, but remembering this in connection with that mysterious letter
signed "A." was enough to send a thrill of savage, horrible joy through
the dull veins of the dependent. What should she do? Follow Mrs.
Mellish, and discover where she was going? How far would this be a safe
thing to attempt?

She turned back and looked once more through the window of John's
room. He was still bending over the papers, still in as apparently
hopeless confusion of mind. There seemed little chance of his business
being finished very quickly. The starless night and her dark dress
alike sheltered the spy from observation.

"If I were close behind her, she would never see me," she thought.

She struck across the lawn to the iron gate and passed into the Park.
The brambles and the tangled undergrowth caught at her dress as she
paused for a moment looking about her in the summer night.

There was no trace of Aurora's white figure among the leafy alleys
stretching in wild disorder before her.

"I'll not attempt to find the path she took," thought Mrs. Powell; "I
know where to find her."

She groped her way into the narrow footpath leading to the lodge.
She was not sufficiently familiar with the place to take the short
cut which the "Softy" had made for himself through the grass that
afternoon, and she was some time walking from the iron gate to the
lodge.

The front windows of this rustic lodge faced a road that led to the
stables; the back of the building looked towards the path down which
Mrs. Powell went, and the two small windows in this back wall were both
dark.

The ensign's widow crept softly round to the front, looked about her
cautiously, and listened. There was no sound but the occasional rustle
of a leaf, tremulous even in the still atmosphere, as if by some
internal prescience of the coming storm. With a slow, careful footstep,
she stole towards the little rustic window and looked into the room
within.

She had not been mistaken when she had said that she knew where to find
Aurora.

Mrs. Mellish was standing with her back to the window. Exactly opposite
to her sat James Conyers the trainer, in an easy attitude, and with
his pipe in his mouth. The little table was between them, and the one
candle which lighted the room was drawn close to Mr. Conyers's elbow,
and had evidently been used by him for the lighting of his pipe. Aurora
was speaking. The eager listener could hear her voice, but not her
words; and she could see by the trainer's face that he was listening
intently. He was listening intently, but a dark frown contracted his
handsome eyebrows, and it was very evident that he was not too well
satisfied with the bent of the conversation.

He looked up when Aurora ceased speaking, shrugged his shoulders, and
took his pipe out of his mouth. Mrs. Powell, with her pale face close
against the window-pane, watched him intently.

He pointed with a careless gesture to an empty chair near Aurora, but
she shook her head contemptuously, and suddenly turned towards the
window; so suddenly, that Mrs. Powell had scarcely time to recoil into
the darkness before Aurora had unfastened the iron latch and flung the
narrow casement open.

"I cannot endure this intolerable heat," she exclaimed, impatiently; "I
have said all I have to say, and need only wait for your answer."

"You don't give me much time for consideration," he said, with an
insolent coolness which was in strange contrast to the restless
vehemence of her manner. "What sort of answer do you want?"

"Yes or No."

"Nothing more?"

"No, nothing more. You know my conditions; they are all written here,"
she added, putting her hand upon an open paper which lay upon the
table; "they are all written clearly enough for a child to understand.
Will you accept them? Yes or No?"

"That depends upon circumstances," he answered, filling his pipe, and
looking admiringly at the nail of his little finger, as he pressed the
tobacco into the bowl.

"Upon what circumstances?"

"Upon the inducement which you offer, my dear Mrs. Mellish."

"You mean the price?"

"That's a low expression," he said, laughing; "but I suppose we both
mean the same thing. The inducement must be a strong one which will
make me do all that,"--he pointed to the written paper,--"and it must
take the form of solid cash. How much is it to be?"

"That is for you to say. Remember what I have told you. Decline
to-night and I telegraph to my father to-morrow morning, telling him to
alter his will."

"Suppose the old gentleman should be carried off in the interim, and
leave that pleasant sheet of parchment standing as it is. I hear that
he's old and feeble; it might be worth while calculating the odds upon
such an event. I've risked my money on a worse chance before to-night."

She turned upon him with so dark a frown as he said this, that the
insolently heartless words died upon his lips and left him looking at
her gravely.

"Egad," he said, "you're as great a devil as ever you were. I doubt if
that isn't a good offer after all. Give me two thousand down, and I'll
take it."

"Two thousand pounds!"

"I ought to have said twenty, but I've always stood in my own light."

Mrs. Powell, crouching down beneath the open casement, had heard every
word of this brief dialogue; but at this juncture, half-forgetful of
all danger in her eagerness to listen, she raised her head until it was
nearly on a level with the window-sill. As she did so, she recoiled
with a sudden thrill of terror. She felt a puff of hot breath upon her
cheek, and the garments of a man rustling against her own.

She was not the only listener.

The second spy was Stephen Hargraves the "Softy."

"Hush!" he whispered, grasping Mrs. Powell by the wrist, and pinning
her in her crouching attitude by the muscular force of his horny hand;
"it's only me; Steeve the 'Softy,' you know; the stable-helper that
_she_" (he hissed out the personal pronoun with such a furious impetus
that it seemed to whistle sharply through the stillness),--"the fondy
that she horsewhipped. I know you, and I know you're here to listen.
He sent me into Doncaster to fetch this" (he pointed to a bottle under
his arm); "he thought it would take me four or five hours to go and get
back; but I ran all the way, for I knew there was soommat oop."

He wiped his streaming face with the ends of his coarse neckerchief as
he finished speaking. His breath came in panting gasps, and Mrs. Powell
could hear the laborious beating of his heart in the stillness.

"I won't tell o' you," he said, "and you won't tell o' me. I've got the
stripes upon my shoulder where she cut me with the whip to this day. I
look at 'em sometimes, and they help to keep me in mind. She's a fine
madam, aint she, and a great lady too? Ay, sure she is; but she comes
to meet her husband's servant on the sly, after dark, for all that.
Maybe the day isn't far off when _she'll_ be turned from these gates,
and warned off this ground; and the merciful Lord send that I live to
see it. Hush!"

With her wrist still pinioned in his strong grasp, he motioned her to
be silent, and bent his pale face forward; every feature rigid, in the
listening expectancy of his hungry gaze.

"Listen," he whispered; "listen! Every fresh word damns her deeper than
the last."

The trainer was the first to speak after this pause in the dialogue
within the cottage. He had quietly smoked out his pipe, and had emptied
the ashes of his tobacco upon the table before he took up the thread of
the conversation at the point at which he had dropped it.

"Two thousand pounds," he said, "that is the offer, and I think it
ought to be taken freely. Two thousand down, in Bank-of-England notes
(fives and tens, higher figures might be awkward), or sterling coin of
the realm. You understand; two thousand down. That's _my_ alternative;
or I leave this place to-morrow morning--with all belonging to me."

"By which course you would get nothing," said Mrs. John Mellish,
quietly.

"Shouldn't I? What does the chap in the play get for his trouble when
the blackamoor smothers his wife? I should get nothing--but my revenge
upon a tiger-cat, whose claws have left a mark upon me that I shall
carry to my grave." He lifted his hair with a careless gesture of his
hand, and pointed to a scar upon his forehead, a white mark, barely
visible in the dim light of the tallow-candle. "I'm a good-natured,
easy-going fellow, Mrs. John Mellish, but I don't forget. Is it to be
the two thousand pounds, or war to the knife?"

Mrs. Powell waited eagerly for Aurora's answer; but before it came,
a round heavy rain-drop pattered upon the light hair of the ensign's
widow. The hood of her cloak had fallen back, leaving her head
uncovered. This one large drop was the warning of the coming storm. The
signal peal of thunder rumbled slowly and hoarsely in the distance,
and a pale flash of lightning trembled on the white faces of the two
listeners.

"Let me go," whispered Mrs. Powell, "let me go; I must get back to the
house before the rain begins."

The "Softy" slowly relaxed his iron grip upon her wrist. He had held it
unconsciously, in his utter abstraction to all things except the two
speakers in the cottage.

Mrs. Powell rose from her knees, and crept noiselessly away from the
lodge. She remembered the vital necessity of getting back to the house
before Aurora, and of avoiding the shower. Her wet garments would
betray her if she did not succeed in escaping the coming storm. She was
of a spare, wizen figure, encumbered with no superfluous flesh, and she
ran rapidly along the narrow sheltered pathway leading to the iron gate
through which she had followed Aurora.

The heavy rain-drops fell at long intervals upon the leaves. A second
and a third peal of thunder rattled along the earth, like the horrible
roar of some hungry animal creeping nearer and nearer to its prey. Blue
flashes of faint lightning lit up the tangled intricacies of the wood,
but the fullest fury of the storm had not yet burst forth.

The rain-drops came at shorter intervals as Mrs. Powell passed out of
the wood, through the little iron gate; faster still as she hurried
across the lawn; faster yet as she reached the lobby-door, which she
had left ajar an hour before, and sat down panting upon a little bench
within, to recover her breath before she went any further. She was
still sitting on this bench, when the fourth peal of thunder shook the
low roof above her head, and the rain dropped from the starless sky
with such a rushing impetus, that it seemed as if a huge trap-door had
been opened in the heavens, and a celestial ocean let down to flood the
earth.

"I think my lady will be nicely caught," muttered Mrs. Walter Powell.

She threw her cloak aside upon the lobby bench, and went through a
passage leading to the hall. One of the servants was shutting the
hall-door.

"Have you shut the drawing-room windows, Wilson?" she asked.

"No, ma'am; I am afraid Mrs. Mellish is out in the rain. Jarvis
is getting ready to go and look for her, with a lantern and the
gig-umbrella."

"Then Jarvis can stop where he is; Mrs. Mellish came in half an hour
ago. You may shut all the windows, and close the house for the night."

"Yes, ma'am."

"By-the-by, what o'clock is it, Wilson? My watch is slow."

"A quarter past ten, ma'am, by the dining-room clock."

The man locked the hall-door, put up an immense iron bar, which worked
with some rather complicated machinery, and had a bell hanging at
one end of it, for the frustration of all burglarious and designing
ruffians.

From the hall the man went to the drawing-room, where he carefully
fastened the long range of windows; from the drawing-room to the lobby;
and from the lobby to the dining-room, where he locked the half-glass
door opening into the garden. This being done, all communication
between the house and the garden was securely shut off.

"He shall know of her goings-on, at any rate," thought Mrs. Powell,
as she dogged the footsteps of the servant to see that he did his
work. The Mellish household did not take very kindly to this deputy
mistress; and when the footman went back to the servants' hall, he
informed his colleagues that SHE was pryin' and pokin' about sharper
than hever, and watchin' of a feller like a old 'ouse-cat. Mr. Wilson
was a cockney, and had been newly-imported into the establishment.

When the ensign's widow had seen the last bolt driven home to its
socket, and the last key turned in its lock, she went back to the
drawing-room and seated herself at the lamp-lit table, with some
delicate morsel of old-maidish fancy-work, which seemed to be the
converse of Penelope's embroidery, as it appeared to advance at night,
and retrograde by day. She had hastily smoothed her hair and rearranged
her dress, and she looked as uncomfortably neat as when she came down
to breakfast in the fresh primness of her matutinal toilette.

She had been sitting at her work for about ten minutes when John
Mellish entered the room, emerging weary but triumphant from his
struggle with the simple rules of multiplication and subtraction. Mr.
Mellish had evidently suffered severely in the contest. His thick brown
hair was tumbled into a rough mass that stood nearly upright upon his
head, his cravat was untied, and his shirt-collar thrown open for the
relief of his capacious throat; and these and many other marks of the
struggle he bore upon him when he entered the drawing-room.

"I've broken loose from school at last, Mrs. Powell," he said, flinging
his big frame upon one of the sofas, to the imminent peril of the
German-spring cushions; "I've broken away before the flag dropped, for
Langley would have liked to keep me there till midnight. He followed me
to the door of this room with fourteen bushels of oats that was down
in the cornchandler's account and was not down in the book he keeps to
check the cornchandler. Why the deuce don't he put it down in his book
and make it right, then, I ask, instead of bothering me? What's the
good of his keeping an account to check the cornchandler if he don't
make his account the same as the cornchandler's? But it's all over!" he
added, with a great sigh of relief, "it's all over! and all I can say
is, I hope the new trainer isn't honest."

"Do you know much of the new trainer, Mr. Mellish?" asked Mrs. Powell,
blandly; rather as if she wished to amuse her employer by the exertion
of her conversational powers than for the gratification of any mundane
curiosity.

"Deuced little," returned John, indifferently. "I haven't even seen the
fellow yet; but John Pastern recommended him, and he's sure to be all
right; besides, Aurora knows the man: he was in her father's service
once."

"Oh, indeed!" said Mrs. Powell, giving the two insignificant words a
significant little jerk; "oh, indeed! Mrs. Mellish knows him, does she?
Then of course he's a trustworthy person. He's a remarkably handsome
young man."

"Remarkably handsome, is he?" said Mr. Mellish, with a careless laugh.
"Then I suppose all the maids will be falling in love with him, and
neglecting their work to look out of the windows that open on to the
stable-yard, hey? That's the sort of thing when a man has a handsome
groom, aint it? Susan and Sarah, and all the rest of 'em, take to
cleaning the windows, and wearing new ribbons in their caps?"

"I really don't know anything about that, Mr. Mellish," answered the
ensign's widow, simpering over her work as if the question they were
discussing was so very far away that it was impossible for her to
be serious about it; "but my experience has thrown me into a very
large number of families." (She said this with perfect truth, as she
had occupied so many situations that her enemies had come to declare
she was unable to remain in any one household above a twelvemonth,
by reason of her employers' discovery of her real nature.) "I have
occupied positions of trust and confidence," continued Mrs. Powell,
"and I regret to say that I have seen much domestic misery arise from
the employment of handsome servants, whose appearance and manners are
superior to their station. Mr. Conyers is not at all the sort of person
I should like to see in a household in which I had the charge of young
ladies."

A sick, half-shuddering faintness crept through John's herculean frame
as Mrs. Powell expressed herself thus; so vague a feeling that he
scarcely knew whether it was mental or physical, any better than he
knew what it was that he disliked in this speech of the ensign's widow.
The feeling was as transient as it was vague. John's honest blue eyes
looked, wonderingly round the room.

"Where's Aurora?" he said; "gone to bed?"

"I believe Mrs. Mellish has retired to rest," Mrs. Powell answered.

"Then I shall go too. The place is as dull as a dungeon without her,"
said Mr. Mellish, with agreeable candour. "Perhaps you'll be good
enough to make me a glass of brandy-and-water before I go, Mrs. Powell,
for I've got the cold shivers after those accounts."

He rose to ring the bell; but before he had gone three paces from the
sofa, an impatient knocking at the closed outer shutters of one of the
windows arrested his footsteps.

"Who, in mercy's name, is that?" he exclaimed, staring at the direction
from which the noise came, but not attempting to respond to the summons.

Mrs. Powell looked up to listen, with a face expressive of nothing but
innocent wonder.

The knocking was repeated more loudly and impatiently than before.

"It must be one of the servants," muttered John; "but why doesn't he go
round to the back of the house? I can't keep the poor devil out upon
such a night as this, though," he added good-naturedly, unfastening
the window as he spoke. The sashes opened inwards, the Venetian
shutters outwards. He pushed these shutters open, and looked out into
the darkness and the rain.

Aurora, shivering in her drenched garments, stood a few paces from him,
with the rain beating down straight and heavily upon her head.

Even in that obscurity her husband recognized her.

"My darling," he cried, "is it you? You out at such a time, and on such
a night! Come in, for mercy's sake; you must be drenched to the skin."

She came into the room; the wet hanging in her muslin dress streamed
out upon the carpet on which she trod, and the folds of her lace shawl
clung tightly about her figure.

"Why did you let them shut the windows?" she said, turning to Mrs.
Powell, who had risen, and was looking the picture of ladylike
uneasiness and sympathy. "You knew that I was in the garden."

"Yes, but I thought you had returned, my dear Mrs. Mellish," said the
ensign's widow, busying herself with Aurora's wet shawl, which she
attempted to remove, but which Mrs. Mellish plucked impatiently away
from her. "I saw you go out, certainly; and I saw you leave the lawn in
the direction of the north lodge; but I thought you had returned some
time since."

The colour faded out of John Mellish's face.

"The north lodge!" he said. "Have you been to the north lodge?"

"I have been in the _direction of the north lodge_," Aurora answered,
with a sneering emphasis upon the words. "Your information is perfectly
correct, Mrs. Powell, though I did not know you had done me the honour
of watching my actions."

Mr. Mellish did not appear to hear this. He looked from his wife to
his wife's companion with a half-bewildered expression--an expression
of newly-awakened doubt, of dim, struggling perplexity--that was very
painful to see.

"The north lodge!" he repeated; "what were you doing at the north
lodge, Aurora?"

"Do you wish me to stand here in my wet clothes while I tell you?"
asked Mrs. Mellish, her great black eyes blazing up with indignant
pride. "If you want an explanation for Mrs. Powell's satisfaction, I
can give it here; if only for your own, it will do as well upstairs."

She swept towards the door, trailing her wet shawl after her, but not
less queenly, even in her dripping garments; Semiramide and Cleopatra
may have been out in wet weather. On the threshold of the door she
paused and looked back at her husband.

"I shall want you to take me to London to-morrow, Mr. Mellish," she
said. Then with one haughty toss of her beautiful head, and one bright
flash of her glorious eyes, which seemed to say, "Slave, obey and
tremble!" she disappeared, leaving Mr. Mellish to follow her, meekly,
wonderingly, fearfully; with terrible doubts and anxieties creeping,
like venomous living creatures, stealthily into his heart.




CHAPTER VI.


MONEY MATTERS.


Archibald Floyd was very lonely at Felden Woods without his daughter.
He took no pleasure in the long drawing-room, or the billiard-room
and library, or the pleasant galleries, in which there were all
manner of easy corners, with abutting bay-windows, damask-cushioned
oaken benches, china vases as high as tables, all enlivened by the
alternately sternly masculine and simperingly feminine faces of
those ancestors whose painted representations the banker had bought
in Wardour Street. (Indeed, I fear those Scottish warriors, those
bewigged worthies of the Northern Circuit, those taper-waisted ladies
with pointed stomachers, tucked-up petticoats, pannier-hoops, and
blue-ribbon bedizened crooks, had been painted to order, and that there
were such items in the account of the Wardour Street _rococo_ merchant
as, "To one knight banneret, killed at Bosworth 25_l._ 5_s._") The old
banker, I say, grew sadly weary of his gorgeous mansion, which was of
little avail to him without Aurora.

People are not so very much happier for living in handsome houses,
though it is generally considered such a delightful thing to occupy
a mansion which would be large enough for a hospital, and take your
simple meal at the end of a table long enough to accommodate a board
of railway directors. Archibald Floyd could not sit beside both the
fireplaces in his long drawing-room, and he felt strangely lonely
looking from the easy-chair on one hearth-rug, through a vista of
velvet-pile and satin-damask, walnut-wood, buhl, malachite, china,
parian, crystal, and ormolu, at that solitary second hearth-rug and
those empty easy-chairs. He shivered in his dreary grandeur. His
five-and-forty by thirty feet of velvet-pile might have been a patch
of yellow sand in the Great Sahara for any pleasure he derived from
its occupation. The billiard-room, perhaps, was worse; for the cues
and balls were every one made precious by Aurora's touch; and there
was a great fine-drawn seam upon the green cloth, which marked the
spot where Miss Floyd had ripped it open that time she made her first
juvenile essay at a cannon.

The banker locked the doors of both these splendid apartments, and gave
the keys to his housekeeper.

"Keep the rooms in order, Mrs. Richardson," he said, "and keep them
thoroughly aired; but I shall only use them when Mr. and Mrs. Mellish
come to me."

And having shut up these haunted chambers, Mr. Floyd retired to that
snug little study in which he kept his few relics of the sorrowful past.

It may be said that the Scottish banker was a very stupid old man,
and that he might have invited the county families to his gorgeous
mansion; that he might have summoned his nephews and their wives, with
all grand nephews and nieces appertaining, and might thus have made
the place merry with the sound of fresh young voices, and the long
corridors noisy with the patter of restless little feet. He might have
lured literary and artistic celebrities to his lonely hearth-rug,
and paraded the lions of the London season upon his velvet-pile. He
might have entered the political arena, and have had himself nominated
for Beckenham, Croydon, or West Wickham. He might have done almost
anything; for he had very nearly as much money as Aladdin, and could
have carried dishes of uncut diamonds to the father of any princess
whom he might take it into his head to marry. He might have done almost
anything, this ridiculous old banker; yet he did nothing but sit
brooding over his lonely hearth--for he was old and feeble, and he sat
by the fire even in the bright summer weather--thinking of the daughter
who was far away.

He thanked God for her happy home, for her devoted husband, for her
secure and honourable position; and he would have given the last drop
of his blood to obtain for her these advantages; but he was, after all,
only mortal, and he would rather have had her by his side.

Why did he not surround himself with society, as brisk Mrs. Alexander
urged, when she found him looking pale and care-worn?

Why? Because society was not Aurora. Because all the brightest
_bon-mots_ of all the literary celebrities who have ever walked this
earth seemed dull to him when compared with his daughter's idlest
babble. Literary lions! Political notabilities! Out upon them! When
Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton and Mr. Charles Dickens should call in Mr.
Makepeace Thackeray and Mr. Wilkie Collins, to assist them in writing
a work, in fifteen volumes or so, about Aurora, the banker would be
ready to offer them a handsome sum for the copyright. Until then, he
cared very little for the best book in Mr. Mudie's collection. When
the members of the legislature should bring their political knowledge
to bear upon Aurora, Mr. Archibald Floyd would be happy to listen to
them. In the interim, he would have yawned in Lord Palmerston's face or
turned his back upon Earl Russell.

The banker had been a kind uncle, a good master, a warm friend, and a
generous patron; but he had never loved any creature except his wife
Eliza and the daughter she had left to his care. Life is not long
enough to hold many such attachments as these; and the people who love
very intensely are apt to concentrate the full force of their affection
upon one object. For twenty years this black-eyed girl had been the
idol before which the old man had knelt; and now that the divinity
is taken away from him, he falls prostrate and desolate before the
empty shrine. Heaven knows how bitterly this beloved child had made
him suffer, how deeply she had plunged the reckless dagger to the
very core of his loving heart, and how freely, gladly, tearfully, and
hopefully he had forgiven her. But she had never atoned for the past.
It is poor consolation which Lady Macbeth gives to her remorseful
husband when she tells him that "what's done cannot be undone;" but
it is painfully and terribly true. Aurora could not restore the year
which she had taken out of her father's life, and which his anguish
and despair had multiplied by ten. She could not restore the equal
balance of the mind which had once experienced a shock so dreadful as
to shatter its serenity, as we shatter the mechanism of a watch when
we let it fall violently to the ground. The watchmaker patches up the
damage, and gives us a new wheel here, and a spring there, and sets the
hands going again; but they never go so smoothly as when the watch was
fresh from the hands of the maker, and they are apt to stop suddenly
with no shadow of warning. Aurora could not atone. Whatever the nature
of that girlish error which made the mystery of her life, it was not
to be undone. She could more easily have baled the ocean dry with a
soup-ladle,--and I dare say she would gladly have gone to work to spoon
out the salt water, if by so doing she could have undone that bygone
mischief. But she could not; she could not! Her tears, her penitence,
her affection, her respect, her devotion, could do much; but they could
not do this.

The old banker invited Talbot Bulstrode and his young wife to make
themselves at home at Felden, and drive down to the Woods as freely
as if the place had been some country mansion of their own. They
came sometimes, and Talbot entertained his great uncle-in-law with
the troubles of the Cornish miners, while Lucy sat listening to her
husband's talk with unmitigated reverence and delight. Archibald Floyd
made his guests very welcome upon these occasions, and gave orders
that the oldest and costliest wines in the cellar should be brought
out for the captain's entertainment, but sometimes in the very middle
of Talbot's discourses upon political economy the old man would
sigh wearily, and look with a dimly yearning gaze far away over the
tree-tops in a northward direction, towards that distant Yorkshire
household in which his daughter was the queen.

Perhaps Mr. Floyd had never quite forgiven Talbot Bulstrode for the
breaking off of the match between him and Aurora. The banker had
certainly of the two suitors preferred John Mellish; but he would have
considered it only correct if Captain Bulstrode had retired from the
world upon the occasion of Aurora's marriage, and broken his heart in
foreign exile, rather than advertising his indifference by a union
with poor little Lucy. Archibald looked wonderingly at his fair-haired
niece, as she sat before him in the deep bay-window, with the sunshine
upon her amber tresses and the crisp folds of her peach-coloured dress,
looking for all the world like one of the painted heroines so dear to
the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, and marvelled how it was that Talbot
could have come to admire her. She was very pretty, certainly, with
pink cheeks, a white nose, and rose-coloured nostrils, and a species of
beauty which consists in very careful finishing off and picking out
of the features; but, oh, how tame, how cold, how weak, beside that
Egyptian goddess, that Assyrian queen with the flashing eyes and the
serpentine coils of purple-black hair!

Talbot Bulstrode was very calm, very quiet, but apparently
sufficiently happy. I use that word "sufficiently" advisedly. It is a
dangerous thing to be too happy. Your high-pressure happiness, your
sixty-miles-an-hour enjoyment, is apt to burst up and come to a bad
end. Better the quietest parliamentary train, which starts very early
in the morning and carries its passengers safe into the terminus when
the shades of night come down, than that rabid, rushing express, which
does the journey in a quarter of the time, but occasionally topples
over a bank, or rides pickaback upon a luggage train, in its fiery
impetuosity.

Talbot Bulstrode was substantially happier with Lucy than he ever
could have been with Aurora. His fair young wife's undemonstrative
worship of him soothed and flattered him. Her gentle obedience, her
entire concurrence in his every thought and whim, set his pride at
rest. She was not eccentric, she was not impetuous. If he left her
alone all day in the snug little house in Halfmoon Street which he
had furnished before his marriage, he had no fear of her calling for
her horse and scampering away into Rotten Row, with not so much as
a groom to attend upon her. She was not strong-minded. She could be
happy without the society of Newfoundlands and Skye terriers. She
did not prefer Landseer's dog-pictures above all other examples of
modern art. She might have walked down Regent Street a hundred times
without being once tempted to loiter upon the curb-stone and bargain
with suspicious-looking merchants for a "noice leetle dawg." She was
altogether gentle and womanly, and Talbot had no fear to trust her to
her own sweet will, and no need to impress upon her the necessity of
lending her feeble little hands to the mighty task of sustaining the
dignity of the Raleigh Bulstrodes.

She would cling to him sometimes half lovingly, half timidly, and,
looking up with a pretty deprecating smile into his coldly handsome
face, ask him, falteringly, if he was _really_, REALLY happy.

"Yes, my darling girl," the Cornish captain would answer, being very
well accustomed to the question, "decidedly, very happy."

His calm business-like tone would rather disappoint poor Lucy, and she
would vaguely wish that her husband had been a little more like the
heroes in the High-Church novels, and a little less devoted to Adam
Smith, McCulloch, and the Cornish mines.

"But you don't love me as you loved Aurora, Talbot?" (There were
profane people who corrupted the captain's Christian name into
"Tal;" but Mrs. Bulstrode was not more likely to avail herself of
that disrespectful abbreviation than she was to address her gracious
Sovereign as "Vic.") "But you don't love me as you loved Aurora,
Talbot dear?" the pleading voice would urge, so tenderly anxious to be
contradicted.

"Not _as_ I loved Aurora, perhaps, darling."

"Not as much?"

"As much and better, my pet; with a more enduring and a wiser love."

If this was a little bit of a fib when the captain first said it, is
he to be utterly condemned for the falsehood? How could he resist the
loving blue eyes so ready to fill with tears if he had answered coldly;
the softly pensive voice, tremulous with emotion; the earnest face;
the caressing hand laid so lightly upon his coat-collar? He must have
been more than mortal had he given any but loving answers to those
loving questions. The day soon came when his answers were no longer
tinged with so much as the shadow of falsehood. His little wife crept
stealthily, almost imperceptibly, into his heart; and if he remembered
the fever-dream of the past, it was only to rejoice in the tranquil
security of the present.

Talbot Bulstrode and his wife were staying at Felden Woods for a few
days during the burning July weather, and sat down to dinner with
Mr. Floyd upon the day succeeding the night of the storm. They were
disturbed in the very midst of that dinner by the unexpected arrival
of Mr. and Mrs. Mellish, who rattled up to the door in a hired vehicle
just as the second course was being placed upon the table.

Archibald Floyd recognized the first murmur of his daughter's voice,
and ran out into the hall to welcome her.

She showed no eagerness to throw herself into her father's arms,
but stood looking at John Mellish with a weary, absent expression,
while the stalwart Yorkshireman allowed himself to be gradually
disencumbered of a chaotic load of travelling-bags, sun-umbrellas,
shawls, magazines, newspapers, and over-coats.

"My darling, my darling!" exclaimed the banker, "what a happy surprise,
what an unexpected pleasure!"

She did not answer him, but, with her arms about his neck, looked
mournfully into his face.

"She would come," said John Mellish, addressing himself generally; "she
would come. The deuce knows why! But she said she must come, and what
could I do but bring her? If she asked me to take her to the moon, what
could I do but take her? But she wouldn't bring any luggage to speak
of, because we're going back to-morrow."

"Going back to-morrow!" repeated Mr. Floyd; "impossible!"

"Bless your heart!" cried John, "what's impossible to Lolly? If she
wanted to go to the moon, she'd go, don't I tell you? She'd have a
special engine, or a special balloon, or a special something or other,
and she'd go. When we were in Paris she wanted to see the big fountains
play; and she told me to write to the Emperor and ask him to have them
set going for her. She did, by Jove!"

Lucy Bulstrode came forward to bid her cousin welcome; but I fear
that a sharp jealous pang thrilled through that innocent heart at the
thought that those fatal black eyes were again brought to bear upon
Talbot's life.

Mrs. Mellish put her arms about her cousin as tenderly as if she had
been embracing a child.

"You here, dearest Lucy!" she said. "I am so very glad!"

"He loves me," whispered little Mrs. Bulstrode, "and I never, never can
tell you how good he is."

"Of course not, my darling," answered Aurora, drawing her cousin
aside while Mr. Mellish shook hands with his father-in-law and Talbot
Bulstrode. "He is the most glorious of princes, the most perfect of
saints, is he not? and you worship him all day; you sing silent hymns
in his praise, and perform high mass in his honour, and go about
telling his virtues upon an imaginary rosary. Ah, Lucy, how many kinds
of love there are! and who shall say which is the best or highest? I
see plain, blundering John Mellish yonder, with unprejudiced eyes; I
know his every fault, I laugh at his every awkwardness. Yes, I laugh
now, for he is dropping those things faster than the servants can pick
them up."

She stopped to point to poor John's chaotic burden.

"I see all this as plainly as I see the deficiencies of the servant who
stands behind my chair; and yet I love him with all my heart and soul,
and I would not have one fault corrected, or one virtue exaggerated,
for fear it should make him different to what he is."

Lucy Bulstrode gave a little half-resigned sigh.

"What a blessing that my poor cousin is happy!" she thought; "and yet
how can she be otherwise than miserable with that absurd John Mellish?"

What Lucy meant, perhaps, was this:--How could Aurora be otherwise
than wretched in the companionship of a gentleman who had neither a
straight nose nor dark hair? Some women never outlive that school-girl
infatuation for straight noses and dark hair. Some girls would have
rejected Napoleon the Great because he wasn't "tall," or would have
turned up their noses at the author of 'Childe Harold' if they had
happened to see him in a stand-up collar. If Lord Byron had never
turned down his collars, would his poetry have been as popular as
it was? If Mr. Alfred Tennyson were to cut his hair, would that
operation modify our opinion of 'The Queen of the May'? Where does that
marvellous power of association begin and end? Perhaps there may have
been a reason for Aurora's contentment with her commonplace, prosaic
husband. Perhaps she had learned at a very early period of her life
that there are qualities even more valuable than exquisitely-modelled
features or clustering locks. Perhaps, having begun to be foolish very
early, she had outstripped her contemporaries in the race, and had
earlier learned to be wise.

Archibald Floyd led his daughter and her husband into the dining-room,
and the dinner-party sat down again with the two unexpected guests, and
the luke-warm salmon brought in again for Mr. and Mrs. Mellish.

Aurora sat in her old place on her father's right hand. In the old
girlish days Miss Floyd had never occupied the bottom of the table, but
had loved best to sit close to that foolishly-doting parent, pouring
out his wine for him in defiance of the servants, and doing other
loving offices which were deliciously inconvenient to the old man.

To-day Aurora seemed especially affectionate. That fondly-clinging
manner had all its ancient charm to the banker. He put down his glass
with a tremulous hand to gaze at his darling child, and was dazzled
with her beauty, and drunken with the happiness of having her near him.

"But, my darling," he said, by-and-by, "what do you mean by talking
about going back to Yorkshire to-morrow?"

"Nothing, papa, except that I _must_ go," answered Mrs. Mellish,
determinedly.

"But why come, dear, if you could only stop one night?"

"Because I wanted to see you, dearest father, and talk to you
about--about money matters."

"That's it," exclaimed John Mellish, with his mouth half full of salmon
and lobster-sauce. "That's it! Money matters! That's all I can get out
of her. She goes out late last night, and roams about the garden, and
comes in wet through and through, and says she must come to London
about money matters. What should she want with money matters? If she
wants money, she can have as much as she wants. She shall write the
figures, and I'll sign the cheque; or she shall have a dozen blank
cheques to fill in just as she pleases. What is there upon this earth
that I'd refuse her? If she dipped a little too deep, and put more
money than she could afford upon the bay filly, why doesn't she come to
me instead of bothering you about money matters? You know I said so in
the train, Aurora, ever so many times. Why bother your poor papa about
it?"

The poor papa looked wonderingly from his daughter to his daughter's
husband. What did it all mean? Trouble, vexation, weariness of spirit,
humiliation, disgrace?

Ah, Heaven help that enfeebled mind whose strength has been shattered
by one great shock! Archibald Floyd dreaded the token of a coming storm
in every chance cloud on the summer's sky.

"Perhaps I may prefer to spend my _own_ money, Mr. John Mellish,"
answered Aurora, "and pay any foolish bets I have chosen to make out of
my _own_ purse, without being under an obligation to any one."

Mr. Mellish returned to his salmon in silence.

"There is no occasion for a great mystery, papa," resumed Aurora; "I
want some money for a particular purpose, and I have come to consult
with you about my affairs. There is nothing very extraordinary in that,
I suppose?"

Mrs. John Mellish tossed her head, and flung this sentence at the
assembly, as if it had been a challenge. Her manner was so defiant,
that even Talbot and Lucy felt called upon to respond with a gentle
dissenting murmur.

"No, no, of course not; nothing more natural," muttered the captain;
but he was thinking all the time,--"Thank God I married the other one."

After dinner the little party strolled out of the drawing-room windows
on to the lawn, and away towards that iron bridge upon which Aurora
had stood, with her dog by her side, less than two years ago, on the
occasion of Talbot Bulstrode's second visit to Felden Woods. Lingering
upon that bridge on this tranquil summer's evening, what could the
captain do but think of that September day, barely two years agone?
Barely two years! not two years! And how much had been done and thought
and suffered since! How contemptible was the narrow space of time! yet
what terrible eternities of anguish, what centuries of heart-break,
had been compressed into that pitiful sum of days and weeks! When the
fraudulent partner in some house of business puts the money which is
not his own upon a Derby favourite, and goes home at night a loser,
it is strangely difficult for that wretched defaulter to believe that
it is not twelve hours since he travelled the road to Epsom confident
of success, and calculating how he should invest his winnings. Talbot
Bulstrode was very silent, thinking of the influence which this family
of Felden Woods had had upon his destiny. His little Lucy saw that
silence and thoughtfulness, and, stealing softly to her husband, linked
her arm in his. She had a right to do it now. Yes, to pass her little
soft white hand under his coat-sleeve, and even look up, almost boldly,
in his face.

"Do you remember when you first came to Felden, and we stood upon this
very bridge?" she asked: for she too had been thinking of that faraway
time in the bright September of '57. "Do you remember, Talbot dear?"

She had drawn him away from the banker and his children, in order to
ask this all-important question.

"Yes, perfectly, darling. As well as I remember your graceful figure
seated at the piano in the long drawing-room, with the sunshine on your
hair."

"You remember that!--you remember _me!_" exclaimed Lucy, rapturously.

"Very well, indeed."

"But I thought--that is, I know--that you were in love with Aurora
then."

"I think not."

"You only think not?"

"How can I tell!" cried Talbot. "I freely confess that my first
recollection connected with this place is of a gorgeous black-eyed
creature, with scarlet in her hair; and I can no more disassociate her
image from Felden Woods than I can, with my bare right hand, pluck
up the trees which give the place its name. But if you entertain one
distrustful thought of that pale shadow of the past, you do yourself
and me a grievous wrong. I made a mistake, Lucy; but, thank Heaven! I
saw it in time."

It is to be observed that Captain Bulstrode was always peculiarly
demonstrative in his gratitude to Providence for his escape from the
bonds which were to have united him to Aurora. He also made a great
point of the benign compassion in which he held John Mellish. But in
despite of this, he was apt to be rather captious and quarrelsomely
disposed towards the Yorkshireman; and I doubt if John's little
stupidities and weaknesses were, on the whole, very displeasing to
him. There are some wounds which never quite heal. The jagged flesh
may reunite; cooling medicines may subdue the inflammation; even the
scar left by the dagger-thrust may wear away, until it disappears in
that gradual transformation which every atom of us is supposed by
physiologists to undergo; but the wound _has been_, and to the last
hour of our lives there are unfavourable winds which can make us wince
with the old pain.

Aurora treated her cousin's husband with the calm cordiality which she
might have felt for a brother. She bore no grudge against him for the
old desertion; for she was happy with her husband. She was happy with
the man who loved and believed in her, with a strength of confidence
which had survived every trial of his simple faith. Mrs. Mellish and
Lucy wandered away among the flower-beds by the water-side, leaving the
gentlemen on the bridge.

"So you are very, very happy, my Lucy?" said Aurora.

"Oh, yes, yes, dear. How could I be otherwise? Talbot is so good to me.
I know, of course, that he loved you first, and that he doesn't love me
quite--in the same way, you know--perhaps, in fact--not as much." Lucy
Bulstrode was never tired of harping on this unfortunate minor string.
"But I am very happy. You must come and see us, Aurora dear. Our house
is so pretty!"

Mrs. Bulstrode hereupon entered into a detailed description of the
furniture and decorations in Halfmoon Street, which is perhaps scarcely
worthy of record. Aurora listened rather absently to the long catalogue
of upholstery, and yawned several times before her cousin had finished.

"It's a very pretty house, I dare say, Lucy," she said at last, "and
John and I will be very glad to come and see you some day. I wonder,
Lucy, if I were to come in any trouble or disgrace to your door,
whether you would turn me away?"

"Trouble! disgrace!" repeated Lucy looking frightened.

"You wouldn't turn me away, Lucy, would you? No; I know you better
than that. You'd let me in secretly, and hide me away in one of the
servants' bedrooms, and bring me food by stealth, for fear the captain
should discover the forbidden guest beneath his roof. You'd serve two
masters, Lucy, in fear and trembling."

Before Mrs. Bulstrode could make any answer to this extraordinary
speech the approach of the gentlemen interrupted the feminine
conference.

It was scarcely a lively evening, this July sunset at Felden Woods.
Archibald Floyd's gladness in his daughter's presence was something
damped by the peculiarity of her visit; John Mellish had some shadowy
remnants of the previous night's disquietude hanging about him; Talbot
Bulstrode was thoughtful and moody; and poor little Lucy was tortured
by vague fears of her brilliant cousin's influence. I don't suppose
that any member of that "attenuated" assembly felt very much regret
when the great clock in the stable-yard struck eleven, and the jingling
bedroom candlesticks were brought into the room.

Talbot and his wife were the first to say good-night. Aurora lingered
at her father's side, and John Mellish looked doubtfully at his dashing
white sergeant, waiting to receive the word of command.

"You may go, John," she said; "I want to speak to papa."

"But I can wait, Lolly."

"On no account," answered Mrs. Mellish sharply. "I am going into papa's
study to have a quiet confabulation with him. What end would be gained
by your waiting? You've been yawning in our faces all the evening.
You're tired to death, I know, John; so go at once, my precious pet,
and leave papa and me to discuss our money matters." She pouted her
rosy lips, and stood upon tiptoe, while the big Yorkshireman kissed her.

"How you do henpeck me, Lolly!" he said rather sheepishly. "Good-night,
sir. God bless you! Take care of my darling."

He shook hands with Mr. Floyd, parting from him with that
half-affectionate, half-reverent manner which he always displayed
to Aurora's father. Mrs. Mellish stood for some moments silent and
motionless, looking after her husband; while her father, watching her
looks, tried to read their meaning.

How quiet are the tragedies of real life! That dreadful scene between
the Moor and his Ancient takes place in the open street of Cyprus,
according to modern usage. I can scarcely fancy Othello and Iago
debating about poor Desdemona's honesty in St. Paul's Churchyard, or
even in the market-place of a country town; but perhaps the Cyprus
street was a dull one, a _cul-de-sac_, it may be, or at least a
deserted thoroughfare, something like that in which Monsieur Melnotte
falls upon the shoulder of General Damas and sobs out his lamentations.
But our modern tragedies seem to occur indoors, and in places where we
should least look for scenes of horror. Who can forget that tempestuous
scene of jealous fury and mad violence which took place in a second
floor in Northumberland Street, while the broad daylight was streaming
in through the dusty windows, and the common London cries ascending
from the pavement below?

Any chance traveller driving from Beckenham to West Wickham would have
looked, perhaps enviously, at the Felden mansion, and sighed to be
lord of that fair expanse of park and garden; yet I doubt if in the
county of Kent there was any creature more disturbed in mind than
Archibald Floyd the banker. Those few moments during which Aurora stood
in thoughtful silence were as so many hours to his anxious mind. At
last she spoke.

"Will you come to the study, papa?" she said; "this room is so big, and
so dimly lighted. I always fancy there are listeners in the corners."

She did not wait for an answer; but led the way to a room upon the
other side of the hall,--the room in which she and her father had been
so long closeted together upon the night before her departure for
Paris. The crayon portrait of Eliza Floyd looked down upon Archibald
and his daughter. The face wore so bright and genial a smile that it
was difficult to believe that it was the face of the dead.

The banker was the first to speak.

"My darling girl," he said, "what is it you want with me?"

"Money, papa. Two thousand pounds."

She checked his gesture of surprise, and resumed before he could
interrupt her.

"The money you settled upon me on my marriage with John Mellish is
invested in our own bank, I know. I know, too, that I can draw upon
my account when and how I please; but I thought that if I wrote a
cheque for two thousand pounds the unusual amount might attract
attention,--and it might possibly fall into your hands. Had this
occurred you would perhaps have been alarmed, at any rate astonished. I
thought it best, therefore, to come to you myself and ask you for the
money, especially as I must have it in notes."

Archibald Floyd grew very pale. He had been standing while Aurora
spoke; but as she finished he dropped into a chair near his little
office table, and resting his elbow upon an open desk leaned his head
on his hand.

"What do you want money for, my dear?" he asked gravely.

"Never mind that, papa. It is my money, is it not; and I may spend it
as I please?"

"Certainly, my dear, certainly," he answered, with some slight
hesitation. "You shall spend whatever you please. I am rich enough to
indulge any whim of yours, however foolish, however extravagant. But
your marriage settlement was rather intended for the benefit of your
children--than--than for--anything of this kind; and I scarcely know
if you are justified in touching it without your husband's permission;
especially as your pin-money is really large enough to enable you to
gratify any reasonable wish."

The old man pushed his gray hair away from his forehead with a weary
action and a tremulous hand. Heaven knows that even in that desperate
moment Aurora took notice of the feeble hand and the whitening hair.

"_Give_ me the money, then, papa," she said. "Give it me from your own
purse. You are rich enough to do that."

"Rich enough! Yes, if it were twenty times the sum," answered the
banker slowly. Then, with a sudden burst of passion, he exclaimed, "O
Aurora, Aurora! why do you treat me so badly? Have I been so cruel
a father that you can't confide in me? Aurora, why do you want this
money?"

She clasped her hands tightly together, and stood looking at him for a
few moments irresolutely.

"I cannot tell you," she said, with grave determination. "If I were
to tell you--what--what I think of doing, you might thwart me in my
purpose. Father! father!" she cried, with a sudden change in her voice
and manner, "I am hemmed in on every side by difficulty and danger; and
there is only one way of escape--except death. Unless I take that one
way, I must die. I am very young,--too young and happy, perhaps, to die
willingly. Give me the means of escape."

"You mean this sum of money?"

"Yes."

"You have been pestered by some connection--some old associate of--his?"

"No!"

"What then?"

"I cannot tell you."

They were silent for some moments. Archibald Floyd looked imploringly
at his child, but she did not answer that earnest gaze. She stood
before him with a proudly downcast look: the eyelids drooping over
the dark eyes, not in shame, not in humiliation; only in the stern
determination to avoid being subdued by the sight of her father's
distress.

"Aurora," he said at last, "why not take the wisest and the safest
step? Why not tell John Mellish the truth? The danger would disappear;
the difficulty would be overcome. If you are persecuted by this low
rabble, who so fit as he to act for you? Tell him, Aurora--tell him
all!"

"No, no, no!"

She lifted her hands and clasped them upon her pale face.

"No, no; not for all this wide world!" she cried.

"Aurora," said Archibald Floyd, with a gathering sternness upon his
face, which overspread the old man's benevolent countenance like some
dark cloud,--"Aurora,--God forgive me for saying such words to my own
child,--but I must insist upon your telling me that this is no new
infatuation, no new madness, which leads you to----" He was unable to
finish his sentence.

Mrs. Mellish dropped her hands from before her face, and looked at him
with her eyes flashing fire, and her cheeks in a crimson blaze.

"Father," she cried, "how dare you ask me such a question? New
infatuation! New madness! Have I suffered so little, do you think, from
the folly of my youth? Have I paid so small a price for the mistake
of my girlhood, that you should have cause to say these words to me
to-night? Do I come of so bad a race," she said, pointing indignantly
to her mother's portrait, "that you should think so vilely of me? Do
I----"

Her tragical appeal was rising to its climax, when she dropped suddenly
at her father's feet, and burst into a tempest of sobs.

"Papa, papa, pity me!" she cried; "pity me!"

He raised her in his arms, and drew her to him, and comforted her, as
he had comforted her for the loss of a Scotch terrier-pup twelve years
before, when she was small enough to sit on his knee, and nestle her
head in his waistcoat.

"Pity you, my dear!" he said. "What is there I would not do for you
to save you one moment's sorrow? If my worthless life could help you;
if----"

"You will give me the money, papa?" she asked, looking up at him half
coaxingly through her tears.

"Yes, my darling; to-morrow morning."

"In bank-notes?"

"In any manner you please. But, Aurora, why see these people? Why
listen to their disgraceful demands? Why not tell the truth?"

"Ah, why, indeed!" she said thoughtfully. "Ask me no questions, dear
papa; but let me have the money to-morrow, and I promise you that this
shall be the very last you hear of my old troubles."

She made this promise with such perfect confidence that her father was
inspired with a faint ray of hope.

"Come, darling papa," she said; "your room is near mine; let us go
up-stairs together."

She entwined her arm in his, and led him up the broad staircase; only
parting from him at the door of his room.

Mr. Floyd summoned his daughter into the study early the next morning,
while Talbot Bulstrode was opening his letters, and Lucy strolling up
and down the terrace with John Mellish.

"I have telegraphed for the money, my darling," the banker said.
"One of the clerks will be here with it by the time we have finished
breakfast."

Mr. Floyd was right. A card inscribed with the name of a Mr. George
Martin was brought to him during breakfast.

"Mr. Martin will be good enough to wait in my study," he said.

Aurora and her father found the clerk seated at the open window,
looking admiringly through festoons of foliage, which clustered round
the frame of the lattice, into the richly-cultivated garden. Felden
Woods was a sacred spot in the eyes of the junior clerks in Lombard
Street, and a drive to Beckenham in a Hansom cab on a fine summer's
morning, to say nothing of such chance refreshment as pound-cake and
old Madeira, or cold fowl and Scotch ale, was considered no small treat.

Mr. George Martin, who was labouring under the temporary affliction of
being only nineteen years of age, rose in a confused flutter of respect
and surprise, and blushed very violently at sight of Mrs. Mellish.

Aurora responded to his reverential salute with such a pleasant nod as
she might have bestowed upon the younger dogs in the stable-yard, and
seated herself opposite to him at the little table by the window. It
was such an excruciatingly narrow table that the crisp ribbons about
Aurora's muslin dress rustled against the drab trousers of the junior
clerk as Mrs. Mellish sat down.

The young man unlocked a little morocco pouch which he wore suspended
from a strap across his shoulder, and produced a roll of crisp notes;
so crisp, so white and new, that, in their unsullied freshness, they
looked more like notes on the Bank of Elegance than the circulating
medium of this busy, money-making nation.

"I have brought the cash for which you telegraphed, sir," said the
clerk.

"Very good, Mr. Martin," answered the banker. "Here is my cheque ready
written for you. The notes are----?"

"Twenty fifties, twenty-five twenties, fifty tens," the clerk said
glibly.

Mr. Floyd took the little bundle of tissue-paper, and counted the notes
with the professional rapidity which he still retained.

"Quite correct," he said, ringing the bell, which was speedily answered
by a simpering footman. "Give this gentleman some lunch. You will
find the Madeira very good," he added kindly, turning to the blushing
junior; "it's a wine that is dying out; and by the time you're my age,
Mr. Martin, you won't be able to get such a glass as I can offer you
to-day. Good morning."

Mr. George Martin clutched his hat nervously from the empty chair on
which he had placed it, knocked down a heap of papers with his elbow,
bowed, blushed, and stumbled out of the room, under convoy of the
simpering footman, who nourished a profound contempt for the young men
from the "hoffice."

"Now, my darling," said Mr. Floyd, "here is the money. Though, mind, I
protest against----"

"No, no, papa, not a word," she interrupted; "I thought that was all
settled last night."

He sighed with the same weary sigh as on the night before, and seating
himself at his desk, dipped a pen into the ink.

"What are you going to do, papa?"

"I'm only going to take the numbers of the notes."

"There is no occasion."

"There is always occasion to be business-like," said the old man
firmly, as he checked the numbers of the notes one by one upon a sheet
of paper with rapid precision.

Aurora paced up and down the room impatiently while this operation was
going forward.

"How difficult it has been to me to get this money!" she exclaimed.
"If I had been the wife and daughter of two of the poorest men in
Christendom, I could scarcely have had more trouble about this two
thousand pounds. And now you keep me here while you number the notes,
not one of which is likely to be exchanged in this country."

"I learnt to be business-like when I was very young, Aurora," answered
Mr. Floyd, "and I have never been able to forget my old habits."

He completed his task in defiance of his daughter's impatience, and
handed her the packet of notes when he had done.

"I will keep the list of numbers, my dear," he said. "If I were to give
it to you, you would most likely lose it."

He folded the sheet of paper and put it in a drawer of his desk.

"Twenty years hence, Aurora," he said, "should I live so long, I should
be able to produce this paper, if it were wanted."

"Which it never will be, you dear methodical papa," answered Aurora.
"My troubles are ended now. Yes," she added, in a graver tone, "I pray
God that my troubles may be ended now."

She encircled her arms about her father's neck, and kissed him tenderly.

"I must leave you, dearest, to-day," she said; "you must not ask me
why,--you must ask me nothing! You must only love and trust me,--as my
poor John trusts me,--faithfully, hopefully, through everything."




CHAPTER VII.


CAPTAIN PRODDER.


While the Doncaster express was carrying Mr. and Mrs. Mellish
northwards, another express journeyed from Liverpool to London with its
load of passengers.

Amongst these passengers there was a certain broad-shouldered and
rather bull-necked individual, who attracted considerable attention
during the journey, and was an object of some interest to his
fellow-travellers and the railway officials at the two or three
stations where the train stopped.

He was a man of about fifty years of age, but his years were worn very
lightly, and only recorded by some wandering streaks and patches of
gray amongst his thick blue-black stubble of hair. His complexion,
naturally dark, had become of such a bronzed and coppery tint by
perpetual exposure to meridian suns, tropical hot winds, the fiery
breath of the simoom, and the many other trifling inconveniences
attendant upon an out-door life, as to cause him to be frequently
mistaken for the inhabitant of some one of those countries in which the
complexion of the natives fluctuates between burnt sienna, Indian red,
and Vandyke brown. But it was rarely long before he took an opportunity
to rectify this mistake, and to express that hearty contempt and
aversion for all _furriners_ which is natural to the unspoiled and
unsophisticated Briton.

Upon this particular occasion he had not been half an hour in the
society of his fellow-passengers before he had informed them that
he was a native of Liverpool, and the captain of a merchant vessel
trading, in a manner of speaking, he said, everywhere; that he had
run away from his father and his home at a very early period of his
life; and had shifted for himself in different parts of the globe ever
since: that his Christian name was Samuel and his surname Prodder, and
that his father had been, like himself, a captain in the merchant's
service. He chewed so much tobacco and drank so much fiery Jamaica rum
from a pocket-pistol in the intervals of his conversation, that the
first-class compartment in which he sat was odorous with the compound
perfume. But he was such a hearty, loud-spoken fellow, and there
was such a pleasant twinkle in his black eyes, that the passengers
(with the exception of one crusty old lady) treated him with great
good-humour, and listened very patiently to his talk.

"Chewin' aint smokin', you know, is it?" he said, with a great guffaw,
as he cut himself a terrible block of Cavendish; "and railway companies
aint got any laws against that. They can put a fellow's pipe out, but
he can chew his quid in their faces; though I won't say which is wust
for their carpets, neither."

I am sorry to be compelled to confess that this brown-visaged
merchant-captain, who said _wust_, and chewed Cavendish tobacco, was
uncle to Mrs. John Mellish of Mellish Park; and that the motive for
this very journey was neither more nor less than his desire to become
acquainted with his niece.

He imparted this fact--as well as much other information relating to
himself, his tastes, habits, adventures, opinions, and sentiments--to
his travelling companions in the course of the journey.

"Do you know for why I'm going to London by this identical train?" he
asked generally, as the passengers settled themselves into their places
after taking refreshment at Rugby.

The gentlemen looked over their newspapers at the talkative sailor,
and a young lady looked up from her book; but nobody volunteered to
speculate an opinion upon the mainspring of Mr. Prodder's actions.

"I'll tell you for why," resumed the merchant captain, addressing the
assembly, as if in answer to their eager questioning. "I'm going to see
my niece, which I have never seen before. When I ran away from father's
ship, the _Ventur'some_, nigh upon forty year ago, and went aboard
the craft of a captain by the name of Mobley, which was a good master
to me for many a day, I had a little sister as I had left behind at
Liverpool, which was dearer to me than my life." He paused to refresh
himself with rather a demonstrative sip from the pocket-pistol. "But if
_you_," he continued generally, "if _you_ had a father that'd fetch you
a clout of the head as soon as look at you, _you'd_ run away perhaps;
and so did I. I took the opportunity to be missin' one night as father
was settin' sail from Yarmouth Harbour; and not settin' that wonderful
store by me which some folks do by their only sons, he shipped his
anchor without stoppin' to ask many questions, and left me hidin' in
one of the little alleys which cut the Town of Yarmouth through and
across, like they cut the cakes they make there. There was many in
Yarmouth that knew me, and there wasn't one that didn't say, 'Sarve him
right,' when they heard how I'd given father the slip; and the next day
Cap'en Mobley gave me a berth as cabin-boy aboard the _Mariar Anne_."

Mr. Prodder again paused to partake of refreshment from his portable
spirit-store, and this time politely handed the pocket-pistol to the
company.

"Now perhaps you'll not believe me," he resumed, after his friendly
offer had been refused, and the wicker-covered vessel replaced in his
capacious pocket,--"you won't perhaps believe me when I tell you, as I
tell you candid, that up to last Saturday week I never could find the
time nor the opportunity to go back to Liverpool, and ask after the
little sister that I'd left no higher than the kitchen table, and that
had cried fit to break her poor little heart when I went away. But
whether you believe it or whether you don't, it's as true as gospel,"
cried the sailor, thumping his ponderous fist upon the padded elbow
of the compartment in which he sat; "it's as true as gospel. I've
coasted America, North and South; I've carried West-Indian goods to
the East Indies, and East-Indian goods to the West Indies; I've traded
in Norwegian goods between Norway and Hull; I've carried Sheffield
goods from Hull to South America; I've traded between all manner of
countries and all manner of docks; but somehow or other I've never had
the time to spare to go on shore at Liverpool, and find out the narrow
little street in which I left my sister Eliza, no higher than the
table, more than forty years ago, until last Saturday was a week. Last
Saturday was a week I touched at Liverpool with a cargo of furs and
poll-parrots,--what you may call fancy goods; and I said to my mate,
I said, 'I'll tell you what I'll do, Jack; I'll go ashore, and see my
little sister Eliza.'"

He paused once more, and a softening change came over the brightness
of his black eyes. This time he did not apply himself to the
pocket-pistol. This time he brushed the back of his brown hand across
his eye-lashes, and brought it away with a drop or two of moisture
glittering upon the bronzed skin. Even his voice was changed when he
continued, and had mellowed to a richer and more mournful depth, until
it very much resembled the melodious utterance which twenty-one years
before had assisted to render Miss Eliza Percival the popular tragedian
of the Preston and Bradford circuit.

"God forgive me," continued the sailor, in that altered voice; "but
throughout my voyages I'd never thought of my sister Eliza but in two
ways; sometimes one, sometimes t'other. One way of thinking of her,
and expecting to see her, was as the little sister that I'd left, not
altered by so much as one lock of her hair being changed from the
identical curl into which it was twisted the morning she cried and
clung about me on board the _Ventur'some_, having come aboard to wish
father and me good-bye. Perhaps I oftenest thought of her in this way.
Anyhow, it was in this way, and no other, that I always saw her in my
dreams. The other way of thinking of her, and expectin' to see her,
was as a handsome, full-grown, buxom, married woman, with a troop of
saucy children hanging on to her apron-string, and every one of 'em
askin' what Uncle Samuel had brought 'em from foreign parts. Of course
this fancy was the most rational of the two; but the other fancy, of
the little child with the long black curly hair, would come to me very
often, especially at night when all was quiet aboard, and when I took
the wheel in a spell while the helmsman turned in. Lord bless you,
ladies and gentlemen! many a time of a starlight night, when we've been
in them latitudes where the stars are brighter than common, I've seen
the floating mists upon the water take the very shape of that light
figure of a little girl in a white pinafore, and come skipping towards
me across the waves. I don't mean that I've seen a ghost, you know; but
I mean that I could have seen one if I'd had the mind, and that I've
seen as much of a one as folks ever do see upon this earth: the ghosts
of their own memories and their own sorrows, mixed up with the mists
of the sea or the shadows of the trees wavin' back'ards and for'ards
in the moonlight, or a white curtain agen a window, or something of
that sort. Well, I was such a precious old fool with these fancies and
fantigs,"--Mr. Samuel Prodder seemed rather to pride himself upon the
latter word, as something out of the common,--"that when I went ashore
at Liverpool, last Saturday was a week, I couldn't keep my eyes off
the little girls in white pinafores as passed me by in the streets,
thinkin' to see my Eliza skippin' along, with her black curls flyin' in
the wind, and a bit of chalk, to play hop-scotch with, in her hand; so
I was obliged to say to myself, quite serious, 'Now, Samuel Prodder,
the little girl you're a lookin' for must be fifty years of age, if
she's a day, and it's more than likely that she's left off playin'
hop-scotch and wearin' white pinafores by this time.' If I hadn't kept
repeatin' this, internally like, all the way I went, I should have
stopped half the little girls in Liverpool to ask 'em if their name
was Eliza, and if they'd ever had a brother, as ran away and was lost.
I had only one thought of how to set about findin' her, and that was
to walk straight to the back street in which I remembered leavin' her
forty years before. I'd no thought that those forty years could make
any more change than to change her from a girl to a woman, and it
seemed almost strange to me that they could make as much change as
that. There was one thing I never thought of; and if my heart beat loud
and quick when I knocked at the little front-door of the very identical
house in which we'd lodged, it was with nothing but hope and joy. The
forty years that had sent railways spinning all over England hadn't
made much difference in the old house; it was forty years dirtier,
perhaps, and forty years shabbier, and it stood in the very heart of
the town instead of on the edge of the open country; but, exceptin'
that, it was pretty much the same; and I expected to see the same
landlady come to open the door, with the same dirty artificial flowers
in her cap, and the same old slippers down at heel scrapin' after her
along the bit of oilcloth. It gave me a kind of a turn when I didn't
see this identical landlady, though she'd have been turned a hundred
years old if she'd been alive; and I might have prepared myself for
the disappointment if I'd thought of that, but I hadn't; and when the
door was opened by a young woman with sandy hair, brushed backwards
as if she'd been a Chinese, and no eyebrows to speak of, I did feel
disappointed. The young woman had a baby in her arms, a black-eyed
baby, with its eyes opened so wide that it seemed as if it had been
very much surprised with the look of things on first comin' into the
world, and hadn't quite recovered itself yet; so I thought to myself,
as soon as I clapped eyes on the little one, why, as sure as a gun,
that's my sister Eliza's baby; and my sister Eliza's married, and lives
here still. But the young woman had never heard the name of Prodder,
and didn't think there was anybody in the neighbourhood as ever had. I
felt my heart, which had been beatin' louder and quicker every minute,
stop all of a sudden when she said this, and seemed to drop down like a
dead weight; but I thanked her for her civil answers to my questions,
and went on to the next house to inquire there. I might have saved
myself the trouble, for I made the same inquiries at every house on
each side of the street, going straight from door to door, till the
people thought I was a sea-farin' tax-gatherer; but nobody had never
heard the name of Prodder, and the oldest inhabitant in the street
hadn't lived there ten years. I was quite disheartened when I left the
neighbourhood, which had once been so familiar, and which seemed so
strange and small and mean and shabby now. I'd had so little thought of
failing to find Eliza in the very house in which I'd left her, that I'd
made no plans beyond. So I was brought to a dead stop; and I went back
to the tavern where I'd left my carpet-bag, and I had a chop brought me
for my dinner, and I sat with my knife and fork before me thinkin' what
I was to do next. When Eliza and I had parted forty years before, I
remembered father leavin' her in charge of a sister of my mother's (my
poor mother had been dead a year), and I thought to myself, the only
chance there is left for me now is to find Aunt Sarah."

By the time Mr. Prodder arrived at this stage of his narrative
his listeners had dropped off gradually, the gentlemen returning
to their newspapers, and the young lady to her book, until the
merchant-captain found himself reduced to communicate his adventures
to one goodnatured-looking young fellow, who seemed interested in the
brown-faced sailor, and encouraged him every now and then with an
assenting nod or a friendly "Ay, ay, to be sure."

"'The only chance I can see,' ses I," continued Mr. Prodder, "'is to
find aunt Sarah.' I found aunt Sarah. She'd been keepin' a shop in the
general line when I went away forty year ago, and she was keepin' the
same shop in the general line when I came back last Saturday week;
and there was the same flyblown handbills of ships that was to sail
immediate, and that had sailed two year ago, accordin' to the date upon
the bills; and the same wooden sugar-loaves wrapped up in white paper;
and the same lattice-work gate, with a bell that rang as loud as if
it was meant to give the alarm to all Liverpool as well as to my aunt
Sarah in the parlour behind the shop. The poor old soul was standing
behind the counter, serving two ounces of tea to a customer, when I
went in. Forty years had made so much change in her, that I shouldn't
have known her if I hadn't known the shop. She wore black curls upon
her forehead, and a brooch like a brass butterfly in the middle of the
curls, where the parting ought to have been, and she wore a beard; and
the curls were false, but the beard wasn't; and her voice was very
deep, and rather manly, and she seemed to me to have grown manly
altogether in the forty years that I'd been away. She tied up the two
ounces of tea, and then asked me what I pleased to want. I told her
that I was little Sam, and that I wanted my sister Eliza."

The merchant-captain paused, and looked out of the window for upwards
of five minutes before he resumed his story. When he did resume it, he
spoke in a very low voice, and in short detached sentences, as if he
couldn't trust himself with long ones for fear he should break down in
the middle of them.

"Eliza had been dead one-and-twenty years. Aunt Sarah told me all about
it. She'd tried the artificial flower-makin'; and she hadn't liked it.
And she'd turned play-actress. And when she was nine-and-twenty, she'd
married; she'd married a gentleman that had no end of money; and she'd
gone to live at a fine place somewheres in Kent. I've got the name of
it wrote down in my memorandum-book. But she'd been a good and generous
friend to aunt Sarah; and aunt Sarah was to have gone to Kent to see
her, and to stop all the summer with her. But while aunt was getting
ready to go for that very visit, my sister Eliza died, leaving a
daughter behind her, which is the niece that I'm goin' to see. I sat
down upon the three-legged wooden stool against the counter, and hid
my face in my hands; and I thought of the little girl that I'd seen
playin' at hop-scotch forty years before, until I thought my heart
would burst; but I didn't shed a tear. Aunt Sarah took a big brooch
out of her collar, and showed me a ring of black hair behind a bit of
glass, with a gold frame round it. 'Mr. Floyd had this brooch made a
purpose for me,' she said; 'he has always been a liberal gentleman to
me, and he comes down to Liverpool once in two or three years, and
takes tea with me in yon back parlour; and I've no call to keep a shop,
for he allows me a handsome income; but I should die of the mopes if it
wasn't for the business.' There was Eliza's name and the date of her
death engraved upon the back of the brooch. I tried to remember where
I'd been and what I'd been doing that year. But I couldn't, sir. All
the life that I looked back upon seemed muddled and mixed up, like a
dream; and I could only think of the little sister I'd said good-bye
to, aboard the _Ventur'some_ forty years before. I got round by little
and little, and I was able half an hour afterwards to listen to aunt
Sarah's talk. She was nigh upon seventy, poor old soul, and she'd
always been a good one to talk. She asked me if it wasn't a great thing
for the family that Eliza had made such a match; and if I wasn't proud
to think that my niece was a young heiress, that spoke all manner of
languages, and rode in her own carriage? and if that oughtn't to be a
consolation to me? But I told her that I'd rather have found my sister
married to the poorest man in Liverpool, and alive and well, to bid
me welcome back to my native town. Aunt Sarah said if those were my
religious opinions, she didn't know what to say to me. And she showed
me a picture of Eliza's tomb in Beckenham churchyard, that had been
painted expressly for her by Mr. Floyd's orders. Floyd was the name of
Eliza's husband. And then she showed me a picture of Miss Floyd, the
heiress, at the age of ten, which was the image of Eliza all but the
pinafore; and it's that very Miss Floyd that I'm going to see."

"And I dare say," said the kind listener, "that Miss Floyd will be
very much pleased to see her sailor uncle."

"Well, sir, I think she will," answered the captain. "I don't say it
from any pride I take in myself, Lord knows; for I know I'm a rough
and ready sort of a chap, that 'u'd be no great ornament in a young
lady's drawing-room; but if Eliza's daughter's anything like Eliza,
I know what she'll say and what she'll do, as well as if I see her
saying and doing it. She'll clap her pretty little hands together, and
she'll clasp her arms round my neck, and she'll say, 'Lor, uncle, I
am _so_ glad to see you!' And when I tell her that I was her mother's
only brother, and that me and her mother was very fond of one another,
she'll burst out a cryin', and she'll hide her pretty face upon my
shoulder, and she'll sob as if her dear little heart was going to break
for love of the mother that she never saw. That's what she'll do," said
Captain Prodder, "and I don't think the truest born lady that ever was
could do any better."

The goodnatured traveller heard a great deal more from the captain of
his plans for going to Beckenham to claim his niece's affections, in
spite of all the fathers in the world.

"Mr. Floyd's a good man, I dare say, sir," he said; "but he's kept his
daughter apart from her aunt Sarah, and it is but likely he'll try
to keep her from me. But if he does he'll find he's got a toughish
customer to deal with in Captain Samuel Prodder."

The merchant-captain reached Beckenham as the evening shadows were
deepening amongst the Felden oaks and beeches, and the long rays of
red sunshine fading slowly out in the low sky. He drove up to the
old red-brick mansion in a hired fly, and presented himself at the
hall-door just as Mr. Floyd was leaving the dining-room, to finish the
evening in his lonely study.

The banker paused, to glance with some slight surprise at the
loosely-clad, weather-beaten looking figure of the sailor, and
mechanically put his hand amongst the gold and silver in his pocket. He
thought the seafaring man had come to present some petition for himself
and his comrades. A life-boat was wanted somewhere on the Kentish
coast, perhaps: and this pleasant-looking, bronze-coloured man had come
to collect funds for the charitable work.

He was thinking this, when, in reply to the town-bred footman's
question, the sailor uttered the name of Prodder; and in the one moment
of its utterance his thoughts flew back over one-and-twenty years, and
he was madly in love with a beautiful actress, who owned blushingly to
that plebeian cognomen. The banker's voice was faint and husky as he
turned to the captain, and bade him welcome to Felden Woods.

"Step this way, Mr. Prodder," he said, pointing to the open door of the
study. "I am very glad to see you. I--I--have often heard of you. You
are my dead wife's runaway brother."

Even amidst his sorrowful recollection of that brief happiness of the
past, some natural alloy of pride had its part, and he closed the
study-door carefully before he said this.

"God bless you, sir," he said, holding out his hand to the sailor. "I
see I am right. Your eyes are like Eliza's. You and yours will always
be welcome beneath my roof. Yes, Samuel Prodder,--you see I know
your Christian name;--and when I die you will find you have not been
forgotten."

The captain thanked his brother-in-law heartily, and told him that he
neither asked or wished for anything except permission to see his
niece, Aurora Floyd.

As he made this request, he looked towards the door of the little room,
evidently expecting that the heiress might enter at any moment. He
looked terribly disappointed when the banker told him that Aurora was
married, and lived near Doncaster; but that if he had happened to come
ten hours earlier he would have found her at Felden Woods.

Ah! who has not heard those common words? Who has not been told that,
if they had come sooner, or gone earlier, or hurried their pace, or
slackened it, or done something that they have not done, the whole
course of life would have been otherwise? Who has not looked back
regretfully at the past, which, differently fashioned, would have made
the present other than it is? We think it hard that we cannot take the
fabric of our life to pieces, as a mantua-maker unpicks her work, and
make up the stuff another way. How much waste we might save in the
cloth, how much better a shape we might make the garment, if we only
had the right to use our scissors and needle again, and re-fashion the
past by the experience of the present!

"To think, now, that I should have been comin' yesterday!" exclaimed
the captain; "but put off my journey because it was a Friday! If I'd
only knowed!"

Of course, Captain Prodder, if you had only known what it was not given
you to know, you would no doubt have acted more prudently; and so would
many other people. If Mr. William Palmer had known that detection was
to dog the footsteps of crime, and the gallows to follow at the heels
of detection, he would most likely have hesitated long before he mixed
the strychnine-pills for the friend whom, with cordial voice, he was
entreating to be of good cheer. We spend the best part of our lives in
making mistakes, and the poor remainder in reflecting how very easily
we might have avoided them.

Mr. Floyd explained, rather lamely, perhaps, how it was that the
Liverpool spinster had never been informed of her grand-niece's
marriage with Mr. John Mellish; and the merchant-captain announced his
intention of starting for Doncaster early the next morning.

"Don't think that I want to intrude upon your daughter, sir," he said,
as if perfectly acquainted with the banker's nervous dread of such
a visit. "I know her station's high above me, though she's my own
sister's only child; and I make no doubt that those about her would
be ready enough to turn up their noses at a poor old salt that has
been tossed and tumbled about in every variety of weather for this
forty year. I only want to see her once in a way, and to hear her say,
perhaps, 'Lor, uncle, what a rum old chap you are!' There!" exclaimed
Samuel Prodder, suddenly, "I think if I could only once hear her call
me uncle, I could go back to sea, and die happy, though I never came
ashore again."




CHAPTER VIII.


"HE ONLY SAID, I AM A-WEARY."


Mr. James Conyers found the long summer's days hang rather heavily upon
his hands at Mellish Park, in the society of the rheumatic ex-trainer,
the stable-boys, and Steeve Hargraves the "Softy," and with no literary
resources except the last Saturday's 'Bell's Life,' and sundry flimsy
sheets of shiny, slippery tissue-paper, forwarded him by post from King
Charles's Croft, in the busy town of Leeds.

He might have found plenty of work to do in the stables, perhaps, if
he had had a mind to do it; but after the night of the storm there was
a perceptible change in his manner; and the showy pretence of being
very busy, which he had made on his first arrival at the Park, was now
exchanged for a listless and undisguised dawdling and an unconcerned
indifference, which caused the old trainer to shake his gray head, and
mutter to his hangers-on that the new chap warn't up to mooch, and was
evidently too grand for his business.

Mr. James cared very little for the opinion of these simple
Yorkshiremen; and he yawned in their faces, and stifled them with his
cigar smoke, with a dashing indifference that harmonized well with the
gorgeous tints of his complexion and the lustrous splendour of his
lazy eyes. He had taken the trouble to make himself very agreeable on
the day succeeding his arrival, and had distributed his hearty slaps
on the shoulder and friendly digs in the ribs, right and left, until
he slapped and dug himself into considerable popularity amongst the
friendly rustics, who were ready to be bewitched by his handsome face
and flashy manner. But after his interview with Mrs. Mellish in the
cottage by the north gates, he seemed to abandon all desire to please,
and to grow suddenly restless and discontented: so restless and so
discontented that he felt inclined even to quarrel with the unhappy
"Softy," and led his red-haired retainer a sufficiently uncomfortable
life with his whims and vagaries.

Stephen Hargraves bore this change in his new master's manner with
wonderful patience. Rather too patiently, perhaps; with that slow,
dogged, uncomplaining patience of those who keep something in reserve
as a set-off against present forbearance, and who invite rather than
avoid injury, rejoicing in anything which swells the great account, to
be squared in future storm and fury. The "Softy" was a man who could
hoard his hatred and vengeance, hiding the bad passions away in the
dark corners of his poor shattered mind, and bringing them out in the
dead of the night to "kiss and talk to," as the Moor's wife kissed and
conversed with the strawberry-embroidered cambric. There must surely
have been very little "society" at Cyprus, or Mrs. Othello could
scarcely have been reduced to such insipid company.

However it might be, Steeve bore Mr. Conyers's careless insolence
so very meekly that the trainer laughed at his attendant for a
poor-spirited hound, whom a pair of flashing black eyes and a lady's
toy riding-whip could frighten out of the poor remnant of wit left
in his muddled brain. He said something to this effect when Steeve
displeased him once, in the course of the long, temper-trying summer's
day; and the "Softy" turned away with something very like a chuckle
of savage pleasure in acknowledgment of the compliment. He was more
obsequious than ever after it, and was humbly thankful for the ends of
cigars which the trainer liberally bestowed upon him, and went into
Doncaster for more spirits and more cigars in the course of the day,
and fetched and carried as submissively as that craven-spirited hound
to which his employer had politely compared him.

Mr. Conyers did not even make a pretence of going to look at the horses
on this blazing 5th of July, but lolled on the window-sill, with his
lame leg upon a chair, and his back against the framework of the little
casement, smoking, drinking, and reading his price-lists all through
the sunny day. The cold brandy-and-water which he poured, without half
an hour's intermission, down his handsome throat, seemed to have far
less influence upon him than the same amount of liquid would have had
upon a horse. It would have put the horse out of condition, perhaps;
but it had no effect whatever upon the trainer.

Mrs. Powell, walking for the benefit of her health in the north
shrubberies, and incurring imminent danger of a sun-stroke for the
same praiseworthy reason, contrived to pass the lodge, and to see Mr.
Conyers lounging, dark and splendid, on the window-sill, exhibiting
a kit-cat of his handsome person framed in the clustering foliage
which hung about the cottage walls. She was rather embarrassed by
the presence of the "Softy," who was sweeping the door-step, and who
gave her a glance of recognition as she passed,--a glance which might
perhaps have said, "We know his secrets, you and I, handsome and
insolent as he is; we know the paltry price at which he can be bought
and sold. But we keep our counsel; we keep our counsel till time ripens
the bitter fruit upon the tree, though our fingers itch to pluck it
while it is still green."

Mrs. Powell stopped to give the trainer good day, expressing as much
surprise at seeing him at the north lodge as if she had been given to
understand that he was travelling in Kamschatka; but Mr. Conyers cut
her civilities short with a yawn, and told her with easy familiarity
that she would be conferring a favour upon him by sending him that
morning's 'Times' as soon as the daily papers arrived at the Park.
The ensign's widow was too much under the influence of the graceful
impertinence of his manner to resist it as she might have done, and
returned to the house, bewildered and wondering, to comply with his
request. So through the oppressive heat of the summer's day the trainer
smoked, drank, and took his ease, while his dependent and follower
watched him with a puzzled face, revolving vaguely and confusedly in
his dull, muddled brain the events of the previous night.

But Mr. James Conyers grew weary at last even of his own ease; and
that inherent restlessness which caused Rasselas to tire of his happy
valley, and sicken for the free breezes on the hill-tops and the
clamour of the distant cities, arose in the bosom of the trainer,
and grew so strong that he began to chafe at the rural quiet of
the north lodge, and to shuffle his poor lame leg wearily from one
position to another in sheer discontent of mind, which, by one of
those many subtle links between spirit and matter that tell us we are
mortal, communicated itself to his body, and gave him that chronic
disorder which is popularly called "the fidgets." An unquiet fever,
generated amidst the fibres of the brain, and finding its way by that
physiological telegraph, the spinal marrow, to the remotest stations on
the human railway.

Mr. James suffered from this common complaint to such a degree, that as
the solemn strokes of the church-clock vibrated in sonorous music above
the tree-tops of Mellish Park in the sunny evening atmosphere, he threw
down his pipe with an impatient shrug of the shoulders, and called to
the "Softy" to bring him his hat and walking-stick.

"Seven o'clock," he muttered, "only seven o'clock. I think there must
have been twenty-four hours in this blessed summer's day."

He stood looking from the little casement-window with a discontented
frown contracting his handsome eyebrows, and a peevish expression
distorting his full, classically-moulded lips, as he said this. He
glanced through the little casement, made smaller by its clustering
frame of roses and clematis, jessamine and myrtle, and looking like
the port-hole of a ship that sailed upon a sea of summer verdure. He
glanced through the circular opening left by that scented framework of
leaves and blossoms, into the long glades, where the low sunlight was
flickering upon waving fringes of fern. He followed with his listless
glance the wandering intricacies of the underwood, until they led his
weary eyes away to distant patches of blue water, slowly changing to
opal and rose-colour in the declining light. He saw all these things
with a lazy apathy, which had no power to recognize their beauty, or to
inspire one latent thrill of gratitude to Him who had made them. He had
better have been blind; surely he had better have been blind.

He turned his back upon the evening sunshine, and looked at the white
face of Steeve Hargraves, the "Softy," with every whit as much pleasure
as he had felt in looking at nature in her loveliest aspect.

"A long day," he said,--"an infernally tedious, wearisome day. Thank
God, it's over."

Strange that, as he uttered this impious thanksgiving, no subtle
influence of the future crept through his veins to chill the slackening
pulses of his heart, and freeze the idle words upon his lips. If he had
known what was so soon to come; if he had known, as he thanked God for
the death of one beautiful summer's day, never to be born again, with
its twelve hours of opportunity for good or evil,--surely he would have
grovelled on the earth, stricken with a sudden terror, and wept aloud
for the shameful history of the life which lay behind him.

He had never shed tears but once since his childhood, and then those
tears were scalding drops of baffled rage and vengeful fury at the
utter defeat of the greatest scheme of his life.

"I shall go into Doncaster to-night, Steeve," he said to the "Softy,"
who stood deferentially awaiting his master's pleasure, and watching
him, as he had watched him all day, furtively but incessantly; "I
shall spend the evening in Doncaster, and--and--see if I can pick up
a few wrinkles about the September meeting; not that there's anything
worth entering amongst this set of screws, Lord knows," he added,
with undisguised contempt for poor John's beloved stable. "Is there a
dog-cart, or a trap of any kind, I can drive over in?" he asked of the
"Softy."

Mr. Hargraves said that there was a Newport Pagnell, which was sacred
to Mr. John Mellish, and a gig that was at the disposal of any of the
upper servants when they had occasion to go into Doncaster, as well as
a covered van, which some of the lads drove into the town every day for
the groceries and other matters required at the house.

"Very good," said Mr. Conyers; "you may run down to the stables, and
tell one of the boys to put the fastest pony of the lot into the
Newport Pagnell, and to bring it up here, and to look sharp."

"But nobody but Muster Mellish rides in the Newport Pagnell," suggested
the "Softy," with an accent of alarm.

"What of that, you cowardly hound?" cried the trainer contemptuously.
"I'm going to drive it to-night, don't you hear? D--n his Yorkshire
insolence! Am I to be put down by _him?_ It's his handsome wife that
he takes such pride in, is it? Lord help him! Whose money bought the
dog-cart, I wonder? Aurora Floyd's, perhaps. And I'm not to ride in
it, I suppose, because it's my lord's pleasure to drive his black-eyed
lady in the sacred vehicle. Look you here, you brainless idiot, and
understand me, if you can!" cried Mr. James Conyers in a sudden rage,
which crimsoned his handsome face, and lit up his lazy eyes with a new
fire,--"look you here, Stephen Hargraves! if it wasn't that I'm tied
hand and foot, and have been plotted against and thwarted by a woman's
cunning, at every turn, I could smoke my pipe in yonder house, or in a
better house, this day."

He pointed with his finger to the pinnacled roof, and the reddened
windows glittering in the evening sun, visible far away amongst the
trees.

"Mr. John Mellish!" he said. "If his wife wasn't such a she-devil as to
be too many guns for the cleverest man in Christendom, I'd soon make
_him_ sing small. Fetch the Newport Pagnell!" he cried suddenly, with
an abrupt change of tone; "fetch it, and be quick! I'm not safe to
myself when I talk of this. I'm not safe when I think how near I was to
half a million of money," he muttered under his breath.

He limped out into the open air, fanning himself with the wide brim of
his felt hat, and wiping the perspiration from his forehead.

"Be quick!" he cried impatiently to his deliberate attendant, who had
listened eagerly to every word of his master's passionate talk, and who
now stood watching him even more intently than before, "be quick, man,
can't you? I don't pay you five shillings a week to stare at me. Fetch
the trap! I've worked myself into a fever, and nothing but a rattling
drive will set me right again."

The "Softy" shuffled off as rapidly as it was within the range of his
ability to walk. He had never been seen to run in his life; but had
a slow, side-long gait, which had some faint resemblance to that of
the lower reptiles, but very little in common with the motions of his
fellow-men.

Mr. James Conyers limped up and down the little grassy lawn in front of
the north lodge. The excitement which had crimsoned his face gradually
subsided, as he vented his disquietude in occasional impatient
exclamations. "Two thousand pounds!" he muttered; "a pitiful, paltry
two thousand! Not a twelvemonth's interest on the money I ought to have
had--the money I should have had, if----"

He stopped abruptly, and growled something like an oath between his
set teeth, as he struck his stick with angry violence into the soft
grass. It is especially hard when we are reviling our bad fortune, and
quarrelling with our fate, to find at last, on wandering backwards to
the source of our ill-luck, that the primary cause of all has been our
own evil-doing. It was this that made Mr. Conyers stop abruptly in his
reflections upon his misfortunes, and break off with a smothered oath,
and listen impatiently for the wheels of the Newport Pagnell.

The "Softy" appeared presently, leading the horse by the bridle.
He had not presumed to seat himself in the sacred vehicle, and he
stared wonderingly at James Conyers as the trainer tumbled about the
chocolate-cloth cushions, arranging them afresh for his own ease and
comfort. Neither the bright varnish of the dark-brown panels, nor the
crimson crest, nor the glittering steel ornaments on the neat harness,
nor any of the exquisitely-finished appointments of the light vehicle,
provoked one word of criticism from Mr. Conyers. He mounted as easily
as his lame leg would allow him, and taking the reins from the "Softy,"
lighted his cigar preparatory to starting.

"You needn't sit up for me to-night," he said, as he drove into the
dusty high road: "I shall be late."

Mr. Hargraves shut the iron gates with a loud clanking noise upon his
new master.

"But I shall, though," he muttered, looking askant through the bars at
the fast disappearing Newport Pagnell, which was now little more than
a black spot in a white cloud of dust; "but I shall sit up, though.
You'll come home drunk, I lay." (Yorkshire is so pre-eminently a
horse-racing and betting county, that even simple country folk who
have never wagered a sixpence in the quiet course of their lives say "I
lay" where a Londoner would say "I dare say.") "You'll come home drunk,
I lay; folks generally do from Doncaster; and I shall hear some more of
your wild talk. Yes, yes," he said in a slow, reflective tone; "it's
very wild talk, and I can't make top nor tail of it yet--not yet; but
it seems to me somehow as if I knew what it all meant, only I can't put
it together--I can't put it together. There's something missin', and
the want of that something hinders me putting it together."

He rubbed his stubble of coarse red hair with his two strong, awkward
hands, as if he would fain have rubbed some wanting intelligence into
his head.

"Two thousand pound!" he said, walking slowly back to the cottage. "Two
thousand pound! It's a power of money! Why it's two thousand pound
that the winner gets by the great race at Newmarket, and there's all
the gentlefolks ready to give their ears for it. There's great lords
fighting and struggling against each other for it; so it's no wonder a
poor fond chap like me thinks summat about it."

He sat down upon the step of the lodge-door to smoke the cigar-ends
which his benefactor had thrown him in the course of the day; but he
still ruminated upon this subject, and he still stopped sometimes,
between the extinction of one cheroot-stump and the illuminating of
another, to mutter, "Two thousand pound! Twenty hundred pound! Forty
times fifty pound!" with an unctuous chuckle after the enunciation of
each figure, as if it was some privilege even to be able to talk of
such vast sums of money. So might some doating lover, in the absence of
his idol, murmur the beloved name to the summer breeze.

The last crimson lights upon the patches of blue water died out beneath
the gathering darkness; but the "Softy" sat, still smoking, and still
ruminating, till the stars were high in the purple vault above his
head. A little after ten o'clock he heard the rattling of wheels and
the tramp of horses' hoofs upon the high road, and going to the gate he
looked out through the iron bars. As the vehicle dashed by the north
gates he saw that it was one of the Mellish-Park carriages which had
been sent to the station to meet John and his wife.

"A short visit to Loon'on," he muttered. "I lay she's been to fetch t'
brass."

The greedy eyes of the half-witted groom peered through the iron bars
at the passing carriage, as if he would have fain looked through its
opaque panels in search of that which he had denominated "the brass."
He had a vague idea that two thousand pounds would be a great bulk of
money, and that Aurora would carry it in a chest or a bundle that might
be perceptible through the carriage-window.

"I'll lay she's been to fetch t' brass," he repeated, as he crept back
to the lodge-door.

He resumed his seat upon the door-step, his cigar-ends, and his
reverie, rubbing his head very often, sometimes with one hand,
sometimes with both, but always as if he were trying to rub some
wanting sense or power of perception into his wretched brains.
Sometimes he gave a short restless sigh, as if he had been trying all
this time to guess some difficult enigma, and was on the point of
giving it up.

It was long after midnight when Mr. James Conyers returned, very much
the worse for brandy-and-water and dust. He tumbled over the "Softy,"
still sitting on the step of the open door, and then cursed Mr.
Hargraves for being in the way.

"B't s'nc' y' h'v' ch's'n t' s't 'p," said the trainer, speaking a
language entirely composed of consonants, "y' m'y dr'v' tr'p b'ck t'
st'bl's."

By which rather obscure speech he gave the "Softy" to understand that
he was to take the dog-cart back to Mr. Mellish's stable-yard.

Steeve Hargraves did his drunken master's bidding, and leading the
horse homewards through the quiet night, found a cross boy with a
lantern in his hand waiting at the gate of the stable-yard, and by no
means disposed for conversation, except, indeed, to the extent of the
one remark that he, the cross boy, hoped the new trainer wasn't going
to be up to this game every night, and hoped the mare, which had been
bred for a racer, hadn't been ill used.

All John Mellish's horses seemed to have been bred for racers, and
to have dropped gradually from prospective winners of the Derby,
Oaks, Chester Cup, Great Ebor, Yorkshire Stakes, Leger, and Doncaster
Cup,--to say nothing of minor victories in the way of Northumberland
Plates, Liverpool Autumn Cups, and Curragh Handicaps, through every
variety of failure and defeat,--into the every-day ignominy of harness.
Even the van which carried groceries was drawn by a slim-legged,
narrow-chested, high-shouldered animal called the "Yorkshire Childers,"
and bought, in its sunny colt-hood, at a great price by poor John.

Mr. Conyers was snoring aloud in his little bedroom when Steeve
Hargraves returned to the lodge. The "Softy" stared wonderingly at
the handsome face brutalized by drink, and the classical head flung
back upon the crumpled pillow in one of those wretched positions which
intoxication always chooses for its repose. Steeve Hargraves rubbed
his head harder even than before, as he looked at the perfect profile,
the red, half-parted lips, the dark fringe of lashes on the faintly
crimson-tinted cheeks.

"Perhaps I might have been good for summat if I had been like _you_,"
he said, with a half-savage melancholy. "I shouldn't have been ashamed
of myself then. I shouldn't have crept into dark corners to hide
myself, and think why I wasn't like other people, and what a bitter,
cruel shame it was that I wasn't like 'em. _You've_ no call to hide
yourself from other folks; nobody tells you to get out of the way for
an ugly hound, as you told me this morning, hang you! The world's
smooth enough for you."

So may Caliban have looked at Prospero with envy and hate in his
heart before going to his obnoxious tasks of dish-washing and
trencher-scraping.

He shook his fist at the unconscious sleeper as he finished speaking,
and then stooped to pick up the trainer's dusty clothes, which were
scattered upon the floor.

"I suppose I'm to brush these before I go to bed," he muttered, "that
my lord may have 'em ready when he wakes in th' morning."

He took the clothes on his arm and the light in his hand, and went down
to the lower room, where he found a brush and set to work sturdily,
enveloping himself in a cloud of dust, like some ugly Arabian genii who
was going to transform himself into a handsome prince.

He stopped suddenly in his brushing, by-and-by, and crumpled the
waistcoat in his hand.

"There's some paper!" he exclaimed. "A paper sewed up between stuff and
linin'."

He omitted the definite article before each of the substantives, as is
a common habit with his countrymen when at all excited.

"A bit o' paper," he repeated, "between stuff and linin'! I'll rip t'
waistcoat open and see what 'tis."

He took his clasp-knife from his pocket, carefully unripped a part
of one of the seams in the waistcoat, and extracted a piece of paper
folded double,--a decent-sized square of rather thick paper, partly
printed, partly written.

He leaned over the light with his elbows on the table and read the
contents of this paper, slowly and laboriously, following every word
with his thick forefinger, sometimes stopping a long time upon one
syllable, sometimes trying back half a line or so, but always plodding
patiently with his ugly forefinger.

When he came to the last word, he burst suddenly into a loud chuckle,
as if he had just succeeded in guessing that difficult enigma which had
puzzled him all the evening.

"I know it all now," he said. "I can put it all together now. His
words; and hers; and the money. I can put it all together, and make
out the meaning of it. She's going to give him the two thousand pound
to go away from here and say nothing about this."

He refolded the paper, replaced it carefully in its hiding-place
between the stuff and lining of the waistcoat, then searched in his
capacious pocket for a fat leathern book, in which, amongst all sorts
of odds and ends, there were some needles and a tangled skein of black
thread. Then, stooping over the light, he slowly sewed up the seam
which he had ripped open,--dexterously and neatly enough, in spite of
the clumsiness of his big fingers.




CHAPTER IX.


STILL CONSTANT.


Mr. James Conyers took his breakfast in his own apartment upon the
morning after his visit to Doncaster, and Stephen Hargraves waited upon
him; carrying him a basin of muddy coffee, and enduring his ill-humour
with the long-suffering which seemed peculiar to this hump-backed,
low-voiced stable-helper.

The trainer rejected the coffee, and called for a pipe, and lay smoking
half the summer morning, with the scent of the roses and honeysuckle
floating into his close chamber, and the July sunshine glorifying the
sham roses and blue lilies that twisted themselves in floricultural
monstrosity about the cheap paper on the walls.

The "Softy" cleaned his master's boots, set them in the sunshine
to air, washed the breakfast-things, swept the door-step, and then
seated himself upon it to ruminate, with his elbows on his knees and
his hands twisted in his coarse red hair. The silence of the summer
atmosphere was only broken by the drowsy hum of the insects in the
wood, and the occasional dropping of some early-blighted leaf.

Mr. Conyers's temper had been in no manner improved by his night's
dissipation in the town of Doncaster. Heaven knows what entertainment
he had found in those lonely streets, that grass-grown market-place and
tenantless stalls, or that dreary and hermetically-sealed building,
which looks like a prison on three sides and a chapel on the fourth,
and which, during the September meeting, bursts suddenly into life and
light with huge posters flaring against its gaunt walls, and a bright
blue-ink announcement of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Mathews, or Mr. and Mrs.
Charles Kean, for five nights only. Normal amusement in the town of
Doncaster between these two oases in the year's dreary circle, the
spring and autumn meetings, there is none. But of abnormal and special
entertainment there may be much; only known to such men as Mr. James
Conyers, to whom the most sinuous alley is a pleasant road, so long as
it leads, directly or indirectly, to the betting-man's god--Money.

However this might be, Mr. Conyers bore upon him all the symptoms of
having, as the popular phrase has it, made a night of it. His eyes were
dim and glassy; his tongue hot and furred, and uncomfortably large
for his parched mouth; his hand so shaky that the operation which he
performed with a razor before his looking-glass was a toss-up between
suicide and shaving. His heavy head seemed to have been transformed
into a leaden box full of buzzing noises; and after getting half
through his toilet he gave it up for a bad job, and threw himself upon
the bed he had just left, a victim to that biliary derangement which
inevitably follows an injudicious admixture of alcoholic and malt
liquors.

"A tumbler of Hochheimer," he muttered, "or even the third-rate
Chablis they give one at a _table-d'hôte_, would freshen me up a
little; but there's nothing to be had in this abominable place except
brandy-and-water."

He called to the "Softy," and ordered him to mix a tumbler of the
last-named beverage, cold and weak.

Mr. Conyers drained the cool and lucid draught, and flung himself back
upon the pillow with a sigh of relief. He knew that he would be thirsty
again in five or ten minutes, and that the respite was a brief one; but
still it was a respite.

"Have they come home?" he asked.

"Who?"

"Mr. and Mrs. Mellish, you idiot!" answered the trainer fiercely. "Who
else should I bother my head about? Did they come home last night while
I was away?"

The "Softy" told his master that he had seen one of the carriages drive
past the north gates at a little after ten o'clock on the preceding
night, and that he supposed it contained Mr. and Mrs. Mellish.

"Then you'd better go up to the house and make sure," said Mr. Conyers;
"I want to know."

"Go up to th' house?"

"Yes, coward!--yes, sneak! Do you suppose that Mrs. Mellish will eat
you?"

"I don't suppose nought o' t' sort," answered the "Softy" sulkily; "but
I'd rather not go."

"But I tell you I want to know," said Mr. Conyers; "I want to know if
Mrs. Mellish is at home, and what she's up to, and whether there are
any visitors at the house, and all about her. Do you understand?"

"Yes, it's easy enough to understand, but it's rare and difficult to
do," replied Steeve Hargraves. "How am I to find out? Who's to tell me?"

"How do I know?" cried the trainer, impatiently; for Stephen
Hargraves's slow, dogged stupidity was throwing the dashing James
Conyers into a fever of vexation. "How do I know? Don't you see that
I'm too ill to stir from this bed? I'd go myself if I wasn't. And can't
you go and do what I tell you without standing arguing there until you
drive me mad?"

Steeve Hargraves muttered some sulky apology, and shuffled out of the
room. Mr. Conyers's handsome eyes followed him with a dark frown. It is
not a pleasant state of health which succeeds a drunken debauch; and
the trainer was angry with himself for the weakness which had taken him
to Doncaster upon the preceding evening, and thereby inclined to vent
his anger upon other people.

There is a great deal of vicarious penance done in this world.
Lady's-maids are apt to suffer for the follies of their mistresses, and
Lady Clara Vere de Vere's French Abigail is extremely likely to have
to atone for young Laurence's death by patient endurance of my lady's
ill-temper and much unpicking and remaking of bodices, which would
have fitted her ladyship well enough in any other state of mind than
the remorseful misery which is engendered of an evil conscience. The
ugly gash across young Laurence's throat, to say nothing of the cruel
slanders circulated after the inquest, may make life almost unendurable
to the poor meek nursery-governess who educates Lady Clara's younger
sisters; and the younger sisters themselves, and mamma and papa, and my
lady's youthful confidantes, and even her haughtiest adorers, all have
their share in the expiation of her ladyship's wickedness. For she will
not--or she _cannot_--meekly own that she has been guilty, and shut
herself away from the world, to make her own atonement and work her own
redemption. So she thrusts the burden of her sins upon other people's
shoulders, and travels the first stage to captious and disappointed
old-maidism.

The commercial gentlemen who make awkward mistakes in the City,
the devotees of the turf whose misfortunes keep them away from Mr.
Tattersall's premises on a settling-day, can make innocent women and
children carry the weight of their sins, and suffer the penalties of
their foolishness. Papa still smokes his Cabanas at fourpence-halfpenny
apiece, or his mild Turkish at nine shillings a pound, and still dines
at the Crown and Sceptre in the drowsy summer weather, when the bees
are asleep in the flowers at Morden College, and the fragrant hay
newly stacked in the meadows beyond Blackheath. But mamma must wear
her faded silk, or have it dyed, as the case may be; and the children
must forego the promised happiness, the wild delight, of sunny rambles
on a shingly beach, bordered by yellow sands that stretch away to hug
an ever changeful and yet ever constant ocean in their tawny arms.
And not only mamma and the little ones, but other mothers and other
little ones, must help in the heavy sum of penance for the defaulter's
iniquities. The baker may have calculated upon receiving that
long-standing account, and may have planned a new gown for his wife,
and a summer treat for his little ones, to be paid for by the expected
money; and the honest tradesman, soured by the disappointment of having
to disappoint those he loves, is likely to be cross to them into the
bargain; and even to grudge her Sunday out to the household drudge who
waits at his little table. The influence of the strong man's evil deed
slowly percolates through insidious channels of which he never knows
or dreams. The deed of folly or of guilt does its fatal work when the
sinner who committed it has forgotten his wickedness. Who shall say
where or when the results of one man's evil doing shall cease? The seed
of sin engenders no common root, shooting straight upwards through the
earth, and bearing a given crop. It is the germ of a foul running weed,
whose straggling suckers travel underground beyond the ken of mortal
eye, beyond the power of mortal calculation. If Louis XV. had been a
conscientious man, terror and murder, misery and confusion, might never
have reigned upon the darkened face of beautiful France. If Eve had
rejected the fatal fruit we might all have been in Eden to-day.

Mr. James Conyers, then, after the manner of mankind, vented his spleen
upon the only person who came in his way, and was glad to be able to
despatch the "Softy" upon an unpleasant errand, and make his attendant
as uncomfortable as he was himself.

"My head rocks as if I was on board a steam-packet," he muttered, as he
lay alone in his little bedroom, "and my hand shakes so that I can't
hold my pipe steady while I fill it. I'm in a nice state to have to
talk to _her_. As if it wasn't as much as I can do at the best of times
to be a match for her."

He flung aside his pipe half filled, and turned his head wearily upon
the pillow. The hot sun and the buzz of the insects tormented him.
There was a big bluebottle fly blundering and wheeling about amongst
the folds of the dimity bed-curtains; a fly which seemed the very
genius of delirium tremens; but the trainer was too ill to do more than
swear at his purple-winged tormentor.

He was awakened from a half-doze by the treble voice of a small
stable-boy in the room below. He called out angrily for the lad to come
up and state his business. His business was a message from Mr. John
Mellish, who wished to see the trainer immediately.

"_Mr._ Mellish," muttered James Conyers to himself. "Tell your master
I'm too ill to stir, but that I'll wait upon him in the evening," he
said to the boy. "You can see I'm ill, if you've got any eyes, and you
can say that you found me in bed."

The lad departed with these instructions, and Mr. Conyers returned to
his own thoughts, which appeared to be by no means agreeable to him.

To drink spirituous liquors and play all-fours in the sanded taproom of
a sporting public is no doubt a very delicious occupation, and would be
altogether Elysian and unobjectionable if one could always be drinking
spirits and playing all-fours. But as the finest picture ever painted
by Raphael or Rubens is but a dead blank of canvas upon the reverse, so
there is generally a disagreeable _other_ side to all the pleasures of
earth, and a certain reaction after card-playing and brandy-drinking
which is more than equivalent in misery to the pleasures which have
preceded it. Mr. Conyers, tossing his hot head from side to side upon
a pillow which seemed even hotter, took a very different view of life
to that which he had expounded to his boon companions only the night
before in the tap-room of the Lion and Lamb, Doncaster.

"I should liked to have stopped over the Leger," he muttered, "for I
meant to make a hatful of money out of the Conjuror; for if what they
say at Richmond is anything like truth, he's safe to win. But there's
no going against my lady when her mind's made up. It's take it or leave
it--yes or no--and be quick about it."

Mr. Conyers garnished his speech with two or three expletives common
enough amongst the men with whom he had lived, but not to be recorded
here; and, closing his eyes, fell into a doze; a half-waking,
half-sleeping torpidity; in which he felt as if his head had become a
ton-weight of iron, and was dragging him backwards through the pillow
into a bottomless abyss.

While the trainer lay in this comfortless semi-slumber Stephen
Hargraves walked slowly and sulkily through the wood on his way to the
invisible fence, from which point he meant to reconnoitre the premises.

The irregular façade of the old house fronted him across the smooth
breadth of lawn, dotted and broken by particoloured flower-beds; by
rustic clumps of gnarled oak supporting mighty clusters of vivid
scarlet geraniums, all aflame in the sunshine; by trellised arches
laden with trailing roses of every varying shade, from palest blush to
deepest crimson; by groups of evergreens, whose every leaf was rich in
beauty and luxuriance, whose every tangled garland would have made a
worthy chaplet for a king.

The "Softy," in the semi-darkness of his soul, had some glimmer of
that light which was altogether wanting in Mr. James Conyers. He felt
that these things were beautiful. The broken lines of the ivy-covered
house-front, Gothic here, Elizabethan there, were in some manner
pleasant to him. The scattered rose-leaves on the lawn; the flickering
shadows of the evergreens upon the grass; the song of a skylark too
lazy to soar, and content to warble among the bushes; the rippling
sound of a tiny waterfall far away in the wood,--made a language of
which he only understood a few straggling syllables here and there, but
which was not altogether a meaningless jargon to him, as it was to the
trainer; to whose mind Holborn Hill would have conveyed as much of the
sublime as the untrodden pathways of the Jungfrau. The "Softy" dimly
perceived that Mellish Park was beautiful, and he felt a fiercer hatred
against the person whose influence had ejected him from his old home.

The house fronted the south, and the Venetian shutters were all closed
upon this hot summer's day. Stephen Hargraves looked for his old enemy
Bow-wow, who was likely enough to be lying on the broad stone steps
before the hall-door; but there was no sign of the dog's presence
anywhere about. The hall-door was closed, and the Venetian shutters,
under the rose and clematis shadowed verandah which sheltered John
Mellish's room, were also closed. The "Softy" walked round by the fence
which encircled the lawn to another iron gate which opened close to
John's room, and which was so completely overshadowed by a clump of
beeches as to form a safe point of observation. This gate had been left
ajar by Mr. Mellish himself, most likely, for that gentleman had a
happy knack of forgetting to shut the doors and gates which he opened;
and the "Softy," taking courage from the stillness round and about
the house, ventured into the garden, and crept stealthily towards the
closed shutters before the windows of Mr. Mellish's apartment, with
much of the manner which might distinguish some wretched mongrel cur
who trusts himself within ear-shot of a mastiff's kennel.

The mastiff was out of the way on this occasion, for one of the
shutters was ajar; and when Stephen Hargraves peeped cautiously
into the room, he was relieved to find it empty. John's elbow-chair
was pushed a little way from the table, which was laden with open
pistol-cases and breech-loading revolvers. These, with two or three
silk handkerchiefs, a piece of chamois-leather, and a bottle of oil,
bore witness that Mr. Mellish had been beguiling the morning in the
pleasing occupation of inspecting and cleaning the fire-arms, which
formed the chief ornament of his study.

It was his habit to begin this operation with great preparation, and
altogether upon a gigantic scale; to reject all assistance with scorn;
to put himself in a violent perspiration at the end of half an hour,
and to send one of the servants to finish the business, and restore the
room to its old order.

The "Softy" looked with a covetous eye at the noble array of guns
and pistols. He had that innate love of these things which seems to
be implanted in every masculine breast, whatever its owner's state
or station. He had hoarded his money once to buy himself a gun;
but when he had saved the five-and-thirty shillings demanded by a
certain pawnbroker of Doncaster for an old-fashioned musket, which
was almost as heavy as a small cannon, his courage failed him, and he
could not bring himself to part with the precious coins, whose very
touch could send a shrill of rapture through the slow current of his
blood. No, he could not surrender such a sum of money to the Doncaster
pawnbroker even for the possession of his heart's desire; and as the
stern money-lender refused to take payment in weekly instalments of
sixpences, Stephen was fain to go without the gun, and to hope that
some day or other Mr. John Mellish would reward his services by the
gift of some disused fowling-piece by Forsythe or Manton. But there was
no hope of such happiness now. A new dynasty reigned at Mellish, and a
black-eyed queen, who hated him, had forbidden him to sully her domain
with the traces of his shambling foot. He felt that he was in momentary
peril upon the threshold of that sacred chamber, which, during his
long service at Mellish Park, he had always regarded as a very temple
of the beautiful; but the sight of fire-arms upon the table had a
magnetic attraction for him, and he drew the Venetian shutter a little
way further ajar, and slid himself in through the open window. Then,
flushed and trembling with excitement, he dropped into John's chair,
and began to handle the precious implements of warfare upon pheasants
and partridges, and to turn them about in his big, clumsy hands.

Delicious as the guns were, and delightful though it was to draw one
of the revolvers up to his shoulder, and take aim at an imaginary
pheasant, the pistols were even still more attractive; for with them he
could not refrain from taking imaginary aim at his enemies. Sometimes
at James Conyers, who had snubbed and abused him, and had made the
bread of dependence bitter to him; very often at Aurora; once or twice
at poor John Mellish; but always with a darkness upon his pallid face
which would have promised little mercy, had the pistol been loaded and
the enemy near at hand.

There was one pistol, a small one, and an odd one apparently, for he
could not find its fellow, which took a peculiar hold upon his fancy.
It was as pretty as a lady's toy, and small enough to be carried in a
lady's pocket, but the hammer snapped upon the nipple, when the "Softy"
pulled the trigger, with a sound that evidently meant mischief.

"To think that such a little thing as this could kill a big man like
you," muttered Mr. Hargraves, with a jerk of his head in the direction
of the north lodge.

He had this pistol still in his hand when the door was suddenly opened,
and Aurora Mellish stood upon the threshold.

She spoke as she opened the door, almost before she was in the room.

"John, dear," she said, "Mrs. Powell wants to know whether Colonel
Maddison dines here to-day with the Lofthouses."

She drew back with a shudder that shook her from head to foot, as her
eyes met the "Softy's" hated face instead of John's familiar glance.

In spite of the fatigue and agitation which she had endured within the
last few days, she was not looking ill. Her eyes were unnaturally
bright, and a feverish colour burned in her cheeks. Her manner, always
impetuous, was restless and impatient to-day, as if her nature had been
charged with a terrible amount of electricity, till she were likely at
any moment to explode in some tempest of anger or woe.

"_You_ here!" she exclaimed.

The "Softy" in his embarrassment was at a loss for an excuse for his
presence. He pulled his shabby hair-skin cap off, and twisted it round
and round in his great hands; but he made no other recognition of his
late master's wife.

"Who sent you to this room?" asked Mrs. Mellish; "I thought you had
been forbidden this place. The house at least," she added, her face
crimsoning indignantly as she spoke, "although Mr. Conyers may choose
to bring you to the north lodge. Who sent you here?"

"Him," answered Mr. Hargraves, doggedly, with another jerk of his head
towards the trainer's abode.

"James Conyers?"

"Yes."

"What does he want here, then?"

"He told me to come down t' th' house, and see if you and master'd come
back."

"Then you can go and tell him that we have come back," she said
contemptuously; "and that if he'd waited a little longer he would have
had no occasion to send his spies after me."

The "Softy" crept towards the window, feeling that his dismissal was
contained in these words, and looking rather suspiciously at the
array of driving and hunting whips over the mantelpiece. Mrs. Mellish
might have a fancy for laying one of these about his shoulders, if he
happened to offend her.

"Stop!" she said impetuously, as he had his hand upon the shutter to
push it open; "since you are here, you can take a message, or a scrap
of writing," she said contemptuously, as if she could not bring herself
to call any communication between herself and Mr. Conyers a note, or a
letter. "Yes; you can take a few lines to your master. Stop there while
I write."

She waved her hand with a gesture which expressed plainly, "Come no
nearer; you are too obnoxious to be endured except at a distance," and
seated herself at John's writing-table.

She scratched two lines with a quill-pen upon a slip of paper, which
she folded while the ink was still wet. She looked for an envelope
amongst her husband's littered paraphernalia of account-books, bills,
receipts, and price-lists, and finding one after some little trouble,
put the folded paper into it, fastened the gummed flap with her lips,
and handed the missive to Mr. Hargraves, who had watched her with
hungry eyes, eager to fathom this new stage in the mystery.

Was the two thousand pounds in that envelope? he thought. No; surely,
such a sum of money must be a huge pile of gold and silver,--a mountain
of glittering coin. He had seen cheques sometimes, and bank-notes, in
the hands of Langley the trainer, and he had wondered how it was that
money could be represented by those pitiful bits of paper.

"I'd rayther hav't i' goold," he thought: "if 'twas mine, I'd have it
all i' goold and silver."

He was very glad when he found himself safely clear of the whips and
Mrs. John Mellish, and as soon as he reached the shelter of the thick
foliage upon the northern side of the Park, he set to work to examine
the packet which had been intrusted to him.

Mrs. Mellish had liberally moistened the adhesive flap of the
envelope, as people are apt to do when they are in a hurry; the
consequence of which carelessness was that the gum was still so wet
that Stephen Hargraves found no difficulty in opening the envelope
without tearing it. He looked cautiously about him, convinced himself
that he was unobserved, and then drew out the slip of paper. It
contained very little to reward him for his trouble, only these few
words, scrawled in Aurora's most careless hand:--

"Be on the southern side of the wood, near the turnstile, between
half-past eight and nine."

The "Softy" grinned as he slowly made himself master of this
communication.

"It's oncommon hard wroitin', t' make out th' shapes o' th' letters,"
he said, as he finished his task. "Whoy can't gentlefolks wroit like
Ned Tiller, oop at th' Red Lion,--printin' loike? It's easier to read,
and a deal prettier to look at."

He refastened the envelope, pressing it down with his dirty thumb to
make it adhere once more, and not much improving its appearance thereby.

"He's one of your rare careless chaps," he muttered as he surveyed the
letter; "_he_ won't stop t' examine if it's been opened before. What's
insoide were hardly worth th' trouble of openin' it; but perhaps it's
as well to know it too."

Immediately after Stephen Hargraves had disappeared through the open
window Aurora turned to leave the room by the door, intending to go in
search of her husband.

She was arrested on the threshold by Mrs. Powell, who was standing
at the door, with the submissive and deferential patience of paid
companionship depicted in her insipid face.

"_Does_ Colonel Maddison dine here, my dear Mrs. Mellish?" she asked
meekly; yet with a pensive earnestness which suggested that her life,
or at any rate her peace of mind, depended upon the answer. "I am _so_
anxious to know, for of course it will make a difference with the
fish,--and perhaps we ought to have some mulligatawny; or at any rate
a dish of curry amongst the _entrées;_ for these elderly East-Indian
officers are so----"

"I don't know," answered Aurora, curtly. "Were you standing at the door
long before I came out, Mrs. Powell?"

"Oh, no," answered the ensign's widow, "not long. Did you not hear me
knock?"

Mrs. Powell would not have allowed herself to be betrayed into anything
so vulgar as an abbreviation by the torments of the rack; and would
have neatly rounded her periods while the awful wheel was stretching
every muscle of her agonized frame, and the executioner waiting to give
the _coup de grâce_.

"Did you not hear me knock?" she asked.

"No," said Aurora; "you didn't knock! Did you?"

Mrs. Mellish made an alarming pause between the two sentences.

"Oh, yes, too-wice," answered Mrs. Powell, with as much emphasis as was
consistent with gentility upon the elongated word; "I knocked too-wice;
but you seemed so very much preoccupied that----"

"I didn't hear you," interrupted Aurora; "you should knock rather
louder when you _want_ people to hear, Mrs. Powell. I--I came here
to look for John, and I shall stop and put away his guns. Careless
fellow!--he always leaves them lying about."

"Shall I assist you, dear Mrs. Mellish?"

"Oh, no, thank you."

"But pray allow me--guns are _so_ interesting. Indeed, there is very
little either in art or nature which, properly considered, is not----"

"You had better find Mr. Mellish, and ascertain if the colonel _does_
dine here, I think, Mrs. Powell," interrupted Aurora, shutting the lids
of the pistol-cases, and replacing them upon their accustomed shelves.

"Oh, if you wish to be alone, certainly," said the ensign's widow,
looking furtively at Aurora's face bending over the breech-loading
revolvers, and then walking genteelly and noiselessly out of the room.

"Who was she talking to?" thought Mrs. Powell. "I could hear her voice,
but not the other person's. I suppose it was Mr. Mellish; and yet he is
not generally so quiet."

She stopped to look out of a window in the corridor, and found the
solution of her doubts in the shambling figure of the "Softy," making
his way northwards, creeping stealthily under shadow of the plantation
that bordered the lawn. Mrs. Powell's faculties were all cultivated to
a state of unpleasant perfection, and she was able, actually as well as
figuratively, to see a great deal farther than most people.

John Mellish was not to be found in the house, and on making inquiries
of some of the servants, Mrs. Powell learnt that he had strolled up to
the north lodge to see the trainer, who was confined to his bed.

"Indeed!" said the ensign's widow; "then I think, as we really ought to
know about the colonel and the mulligatawny, I will walk to the north
lodge myself, and see Mr. Mellish."

She took a sun-umbrella from the stand in the hall, and crossed the
lawn northwards at a smart pace, in spite of the heat of the July
noontide.

"If I can get there before Hargraves," she thought, "I may be able to
find out why he came to the house."

The ensign's widow did reach the lodge before Stephen Hargraves, who
stopped, as we know, under shelter of the foliage in the loneliest
pathway of the wood, to decipher Aurora's scrawl. She found John
Mellish seated with the trainer, in the little parlour of the lodge,
discussing the stable arrangement; the master talking with considerable
animation, the servant listening with a listless _nonchalance_ which
had a certain air of depreciation, not to say contempt, for poor
John's racing stud. Mr. Conyers had risen from his bed at the sound of
his employer's voice in the little room below, and had put on a dusty
shooting-coat and a pair of shabby slippers, in order to come down and
hear what Mr. Mellish had to say.

"I'm sorry to hear you're ill, Conyers," John said heartily, with a
freshness in his strong voice which seemed to carry health and strength
in its very tone. "As you weren't well enough to look in at the house,
I thought I'd come over here and talk to you about business. I want to
know whether we ought to take Monte Christo out of his York engagement,
and if you think it would be wise to let Northern Dutchman take his
chance for the Great Ebor. Hey?"

Mr. Mellish's query resounded through the small room, and made the
languid trainer shudder. Mr. Conyers had all the peevish susceptibility
to discomfort or inconvenience which go to make a man above his
station. Is it a merit to be above one's station, I wonder, that people
make such a boast of their unfitness for honest employments, and
sturdy but progressive labour? The flowers in the fables, that want
to be trees, always get the worst of it, I remember. Perhaps that is
because they can do nothing but complain. There is no objection to
their growing into trees, if they can, I suppose; but a great objection
to their being noisy and disagreeable because they can't. With the son
of the simple Corsican advocate who made himself Emperor of France
the world had every sympathy; but with poor Louis Philippe, who ran
away from a throne at the first shock that disturbed its equilibrium,
I fear, very little. Is it quite right to be angry with the world
because it worships success? for is not success, in some manner, the
stamp of divinity? Self-assertion may deceive the ignorant for a time;
but when the noise dies away, we cut open the drum, and find that
it was emptiness that made the music. Mr. Conyers contented himself
with declaring that he walked on a road which was unworthy of his
footsteps; but as he never contrived to get an inch farther upon the
great highway of life, there is some reason to suppose that he had his
opinion entirely to himself. Mr. Mellish and his trainer were still
discussing stable matters when Mrs. Powell reached the north lodge. She
stopped for a few minutes in the rustic doorway, waiting for a pause
in the conversation. She was too well bred to interrupt Mr. Mellish
in his talk, and there was a chance that she might hear something by
lingering. No contrast could be stronger than that presented by the
two men. John, broad-shouldered and stalwart; his short crisp chestnut
hair brushed away from his square forehead; his bright open blue eyes
beaming honest sunshine upon all they looked at; his loose gray clothes
neat and well made; his shirt in the first freshness of the morning's
toilet; everything about him made beautiful by the easy grace which is
the peculiar property of the man who has been born a gentleman, and
which neither all the cheap finery which Mr. Moses can sell, nor all
the expensive absurdities which Mr. Tittlebat Titmouse can buy, will
ever bestow upon the _parvenu_ or the vulgarian. The trainer, handsomer
than his master by as much as Antinous in Grecian marble is handsomer
than the substantially-shod and loose-coated young squires in Mr.
Millais' designs; as handsome as it is possible for this human clay to
be, with every feature moulded to the highest type of positive beauty,
and yet, every inch of him, a boor. His shirt soiled and crumpled, his
hair rough and uncombed; his unshaven chin, dark with the blue bristles
of his budding beard, and smeared with the traces of last night's
liquor; his dingy hands, supporting this dingy chin, and his elbows
bursting half out of the frayed sleeves of his shabby shooting-jacket,
leaning on the table in an attitude of indifferent insolence. His
countenance expressive of nothing but dissatisfaction with his own
lot, and contempt for the opinions of other people. All the homilies
that could be preached upon the time-worn theme of beauty and its
worthlessness, could never argue so strongly as this mute evidence
presented by Mr. Conyers himself in his slouching posture and his
unkempt hair. Is beauty, then, so little, one asks, on looking at the
trainer and his employer? Is it better to be clean, and well dressed,
and gentlemanly, than to have a classical profile and a thrice-worn
shirt?

Finding very little to interest her in John's stable-talk, Mrs. Powell
made her presence known, and once more asked the all-important question
about Colonel Maddison.

"Yes," John answered; "the old boy is sure to come. Let's have plenty
of chutnee, and boiled rice, and preserved ginger, and all the rest of
the unpleasant things that Indian officers live upon. Have you seen
Lolly?"

Mr. Mellish put on his hat, gave a last instruction to the trainer, and
left the cottage.

"Have you seen Lolly?" he asked again.

"Ye-es," replied Mrs. Powell; "I have only lately left Mrs. Mellish in
your room; she had been speaking to that half-witted person--Hargraves,
I think he is called."

"Speaking to _him?_" cried John; "speaking to him in my room? Why,
the fellow is forbidden to cross the threshold of the house, and Mrs.
Mellish abominates the sight of him. Don't you remember the day he
flogged her dog, you know, and Lolly horse--had hysterics?" added Mr.
Mellish, choking himself with one word and substituting another.

"Oh, yes, I remember that little--ahem!--unfortunate occurrence
perfectly," replied Mrs. Powell, in a tone which, in spite of its
amiability, implied that Aurora's escapade was not a thing to be easily
forgotten.

"Then it's not likely, you know, that Lolly would talk to the man. You
must be mistaken, Mrs. Powell."

The ensign's widow simpered and lifted her eyebrows, gently shaking
her head, with a gesture that seemed to say, "Did you ever find _me_
mistaken?"

"No, no, my dear Mr. Mellish," she said, with a half-playful air of
conviction, "there was no mistake on my part. Mrs. Mellish was talking
to the half-witted person; but you know the person is a sort of servant
to Mr. Conyers, and Mrs. Mellish may have had a message for Mr.
Conyers."

"A message for _him!_" roared John, stopping suddenly and planting
his stick upon the ground in a movement of unconcealed passion; "what
messages should she have for _him?_ Why should she want people fetching
and carrying between her and him?"

Mrs. Powell's pale eyes lit up with a faint yellow flame in their
greenish pupils as John broke out thus. "It is coming--it is coming--it
is coming!" her envious heart cried, and she felt that a faint flush of
triumph was gathering in her sickly cheeks.

But in another moment John Mellish recovered his self-command. He was
angry with himself for that transient passion. "Am I going to doubt
her again?" he thought. "Do I know so little of the nobility of her
generous soul that I am ready to listen to every whisper, and terrify
myself with every look?"

They had walked about a hundred yards away from the lodge by this time.
John turned irresolutely, as if half inclined to go back.

"A message for Conyers," he said to Mrs. Powell;--"ay, ay, to be sure.
It's likely enough she might want to send him a message, for she's
cleverer at all the stable business than I am. It was she who told
me not to enter Cherry-stone for the Chester Cup, and, egad! I was
obstinate, and I was licked; as I deserved to be, for not listening to
my dear girl."

Mrs. Powell would fain have boxed John's ear, had she been tall enough
to reach that organ. Infatuated fool! would he never open his dull eyes
and see the ruin that was preparing for him?

"You _are_ a good husband, Mr. Mellish," she said with a gentle
melancholy. "Your wife _ought_ to be happy!" she added, with a sigh
which plainly hinted that Mrs. Mellish was miserable.

"A good husband!" cried John, "not half good enough for her. What can
I do to prove that I love her? What can I do? Nothing, except to let
her have her own way; and what a little that seems! Why, if she wanted
to set that house on fire, for the pleasure of making a bonfire," he
added, pointing to the rambling mansion in which his blue eyes had
first seen the light, "I'd let her do it, and look on with her at the
blaze."

"Are you going back to the lodge?" Mrs. Powell asked quietly, not
taking any notice of this outbreak of marital enthusiasm.

They had retraced their steps, and were within a few paces of the
little garden before the north lodge.

"Going back?" said John; "no--yes."

Between his utterance of the negative and the affirmative he had
looked up, and seen Stephen Hargraves entering the little garden-gate.
The "Softy" had come by the short cut through the wood. John Mellish
quickened his pace, and followed Steeve Hargraves across the little
garden to the threshold of the door. At the threshold he paused. The
rustic porch was thickly screened by the spreading branches of the
roses and honeysuckle, and John was unseen by those within. He did
not himself deliberately listen; he only waited for a few moments,
wondering what to do next. In those few moments of indecision he heard
the trainer speak to his attendant.

"Did you see her?" he asked.

"Ay, sure, I see her."

"And she gave you a message?"

"No, she gave me this here."

"A letter?" cried the trainer's eager voice; "give it me."

John Mellish heard the tearing of the envelope and the crackling
of the crisp paper; and knew that his wife had been writing to his
servant. He clenched his strong right hand until the nails dug into
the muscular palm; then turning to Mrs. Powell, who stood close behind
him, simpering meekly, as she would have simpered at an earthquake, or
a revolution, or any other national calamity not peculiarly affecting
herself, he said quietly--

"Whatever directions Mrs. Mellish has given are sure to be right; I
won't interfere with them." He walked away from the north lodge as he
spoke, looking straight before him, homewards; as if the unchanging
lode-star of his honest heart were beckoning to him across the dreary
Slough of Despond, and bidding him take comfort.

"Mrs. Powell," he said, turning rather sharply upon the ensign's widow,
"I should be very sorry to say anything likely to offend you, in your
character of--of a guest beneath my roof; but I shall take it as a
favour to myself if you will be so good as to remember, that I require
no information respecting my wife's movements from you, or from any
one. Whatever Mrs. Mellish does, she does with my full consent, my
perfect approbation. Cæsar's wife must not be suspected, and by Jove,
ma'am!--you'll pardon the expression,--John Mellish's wife must not be
watched."

"Watched!--information!" exclaimed Mrs. Powell, lifting her pale
eyebrows to the extreme limits allowed by nature. "My dear Mr. Mellish,
when I really only casually remarked, in reply to a question of your
own, that I believed Mrs. Mellish had----"

"Oh, yes," answered John, "I understand. There are several ways by
which you can go to Doncaster from this house. You can go across the
fields, or round by Harper's Common, an out-of-the-way, roundabout
route, but you get there all the same, you know, ma'am. _I_ generally
prefer the high road. It mayn't be the shortest way, perhaps; but it's
certainly the straightest."

The corners of Mrs. Powell's thin lower lip dropped, perhaps the eighth
of an inch, as John made these observations; but she very quickly
recovered her habitually genteel simper, and told Mr. Mellish that
he really had such a droll way of expressing himself as to make his
meaning scarcely so clear as could be wished.

But John had said all that he wanted to say, and walked steadily
onwards; looking always towards that quarter in which the pole-star
might be supposed to shine, guiding him back to his home.

That home so soon to be desolate!--with such ruin brooding above it as
in his darkest doubts, his wildest fears, he had never shadowed forth!




CHAPTER X.


ON THE THRESHOLD OF DARKER MISERIES.


John went straight to his own apartment to look for his wife; but he
found the guns put back in their usual places, and the room empty.
Aurora's maid, a smartly dressed girl, came tripping out of the
servants' hall, where the rattling of knives and forks announced that
a very substantial dinner was being done substantial justice to, to
answer John's eager inquiries. She told him that Mrs. Mellish had
complained of a headache, and had gone to her room to lie down. John
went up-stairs, and crept cautiously along the carpeted corridor,
fearful of every footfall which might break the repose of his wife.
The door of her dressing-room was ajar: he pushed it softly open, and
went in. Aurora was lying upon the sofa, wrapped in a loose white
dressing-gown, her masses of ebon hair uncoiled and falling about her
shoulders in serpentine tresses, that looked like shining blue-black
snakes released from poor Medusa's head to make their escape amid the
folds of her garments. Heaven knows what a stranger sleep may have been
for many a night to Mrs. Mellish's pillow; but she had fallen into a
heavy slumber on this hot summer's day. Her cheeks were flushed with a
feverish crimson, and one small hand lay under her head twisted in the
tangled masses of her glorious hair.

John bent over her with a tender smile.

"Poor girl!" he thought; "thank God that she can sleep, in spite of the
miserable secrets which have come between us. Talbot Bulstrode left her
because he could not bear the agony that I am suffering now. What cause
had he to doubt her? What cause compared to that which I have had a
fortnight ago--the other night--this morning? And yet--and yet I trust
her, and will trust her, please God, to the very end."

He seated himself in a low easy-chair close beside the sofa upon which
his sleeping wife lay, and resting his head upon his arm, watched
her, thought of her, perhaps prayed for her; and after a little while
fell asleep himself, snoring in bass harmony with Aurora's regular
breathing. He slept and snored, this horrible man, in the hour of his
trouble, and behaved himself altogether in a manner most unbecoming in
a hero. But then he is not a hero. He is stout and strongly built, with
a fine broad chest, and unromantically robust health. There is more
chance of his dying of apoplexy than of fading gracefully in a decline,
or breaking a blood-vessel in a moment of intense emotion. He sleeps
calmly, with the warm July air floating in upon him from the open
window, and comforting him with its balmy breath, and he fully enjoys
that rest of body and mind. Yet even in his tranquil slumber there is
a vague something, some lingering shadow of the bitter memories which
sleep has put away from him, that fills his breast with a dull pain,
an oppressive heaviness, which cannot be shaken off. He slept until
half a dozen different clocks in the rambling old house had come to
one conclusion, and declared it to be five in the afternoon; and he
awoke with a start to find his wife watching him, Heaven knows how
intently, with her black eyes filled with solemn thought, and a strange
earnestness in her face.

"My poor John!" she said, bending her beautiful head and resting her
burning forehead upon his hand; "how tired you must have been, to sleep
so soundly in the middle of the day! I have been awake for nearly an
hour, watching you--"

"Watching me, Lolly!--why?"

"And thinking how good you are to me. Oh, John, John! what can I ever
do--what can I ever do to atone to you for all----"

"Be happy, Aurora," he said huskily, "be happy, and--and send that man
away."

"I will, John; he shall go soon, dear,--to-night!"

"What!--then that letter was to dismiss him?" asked Mr. Mellish.

"You know that I wrote to him?"

"Yes, darling, it was to dismiss him,--say that it was so, Aurora. Pay
him what money you like to keep the secret that he discovered, but send
him away, Lolly, send him away. The sight of him is hateful to me.
Dismiss him, Aurora, or I must do so myself."

He rose in his passionate excitement, but Aurora laid her hand softly
upon his arm.

"Leave all to me," she said quietly. "Believe me that I will act for
the best. For the best, at least, if you couldn't bear to lose me; and
you couldn't bear that, could you, John?"

"Lose you! My God, Aurora! why do you say such things to me? I
_wouldn't_ lose you. Do you hear, Lolly? I _wouldn't_. I'd follow you
to the farthest end of the universe, and Heaven take pity upon those
that came between us!"

His set teeth, the fierce light in his eyes, and the iron rigidity of
his mouth, gave an emphasis to his words which my pen could never give
if I used every epithet in the English language.

Aurora rose from her sofa, and twisting her hair into a thickly-rolled
mass at the back of her head, seated herself near the window, and
pushed back the Venetian shutter.

"These people dine here to-day, John?" she asked listlessly.

"The Lofthouses and Colonel Maddison? Yes, my darling; and it's ever so
much past five. Shall I ring for your afternoon cup of tea?"

"Yes, dear; and take some with me, if you will."

I'm afraid that in his inmost heart Mr. Mellish did not cherish any
very great affection for the decoctions of bohea and gunpowder with
which his wife dosed him; but he would have dined upon cod-liver oil
had she served the banquet; and he strung his nerves to their extreme
tension at her supreme pleasure, and affected to highly relish the
post-meridian dishes of tea which his wife poured out for him in the
sacred seclusion of her dressing-room.

Mrs. Powell heard the comfortable sound of the chinking of the thin
egg-shell china and the rattling of the spoons, as she passed the
half-open door on her way to her own apartment, and was mutely furious
as she thought that love and harmony reigned within the chamber where
the husband and wife sat at tea.

Aurora went down to the drawing-room an hour after this, gorgeous in
maize-coloured silk and voluminous flouncings of black lace, with
her hair plaited in a diadem upon her head, and fastened with three
diamond stars which John had bought for her in the Rue de la Paix, and
which were cunningly fixed upon wire springs, which caused them to
vibrate with every chance movement of her beautiful head. You will say,
perhaps, that she was arrayed too gaudily for the reception of an old
Indian officer and a country clergyman and his wife; but if she loved
handsome dresses better than simpler attire, it was from no taste for
display, but rather from an innate love of splendour and expenditure,
which was a part of her expansive nature. She had always been taught to
think of herself as Miss Floyd, the banker's daughter, and she had been
taught also to spend money as a duty which she owed to society.

Mrs. Lofthouse was a pretty little woman, with a pale face and hazel
eyes. She was the youngest daughter of Colonel Maddison, and was,
"By birth, you know, my dear, far superior to poor Mrs. Mellish,
who, in spite of her wealth, is only," &c. &c. &c., as Margaret
Lofthouse remarked to her female acquaintance. She could not very
easily forget that her father was the younger brother of a baronet,
and had distinguished himself in some terrific manner by bloodthirsty
demolition of Sikhs, far away in the untractable East; and she thought
it rather hard that Aurora should possess such cruel advantages
through some pettifogging commercial genius on the part of her Glasgow
ancestors.

But as it was impossible for honest people to know Aurora without
loving her, Mrs. Lofthouse heartily forgave her her fifty thousand
pounds, and declared her to be the dearest darling in the wide world;
while Mrs. Mellish freely returned her friendliness, and caressed the
little woman as she had caressed Lucy Bulstrode, with a superb yet
affectionate condescension, such as Cleopatra may have had for her
handmaidens.

The dinner went off pleasantly enough. Colonel Maddison attacked the
side-dishes specially provided for him, and praised the Mellish-Park
cook. Mr. Lofthouse explained to Aurora the plan of a new schoolhouse
which she intended to build for the improvement of John's native
parish. She listened patiently to the rather wearisome details, in
which a bakehouse and a washhouse and a Tudor chimney seemed the
leading features. She had heard so much of this before; for there was
scarcely a church, or a hospital, or a model lodging-house, or a refuge
for any misery or destitution whatever, that had been lately elevated
to adorn this earth, for which the banker's daughter had not helped to
pay. But her heart was wide enough for them all, and she was always
glad to hear of the bakehouse and washhouse and the Tudor chimney all
over again. If she was a little less interested upon this occasion
than usual, Mr. Lofthouse did not observe her inattention, for in the
simple earnestness of his own mind, he thought it scarcely possible
that the schoolhouse topic could fail to be interesting. Nothing is so
difficult as to make people understand that you don't care for what
they themselves especially affect. John Mellish could not believe that
the entries for the Great Ebor were not interesting to Mr. Lofthouse,
and the country clergyman was fully convinced that the details of his
philanthropic schemes for the regeneration of his parish could not be
otherwise than delightful to his host. But the master of Mellish Park
was very silent, and sat with his glass in his hand, looking across the
dinner-table and Mrs. Lofthouse's head, at the sunlit tree-tops between
the lawn and the north lodge. Aurora, from her end of the table, saw
that gloomy glance, and a resolute shadow darkened her face, expressive
of the strengthening of some rooted purpose deep hidden in her heart.
She sat so long at dessert, with her eyes fixed upon an apricot in her
plate, and the shadow upon her face deepening every moment, that poor
Mrs. Lofthouse was in utter despair of getting the significant look
which was to release her from the bondage of hearing her father's
stories of tiger-shooting and pig-sticking for the two or three
hundredth time. Perhaps she never would have got that feminine signal,
had not Mrs. Powell, with a significant "hem!" made some observation
about the sinking sun.

The ensign's widow was one of those people who declare that there is a
perceptible difference in the length of the days upon the twenty-third
or twenty-fourth of June, and who go on announcing the same fact until
the long winter evenings come with the twenty-first of December, and
it is time for them to declare the converse of their late proposition.
It was some remark of this kind that aroused Mrs. Mellish from her
reverie, and caused her to start up suddenly, quite forgetful of the
conventional simpering beck to her guest.

"Past eight!" she said; "no, it's surely not so late?"

"Yes, it is, Lolly," John Mellish answered, looking at his watch; "a
quarter past."

"Indeed! I beg your pardon, Mrs. Lofthouse; shall we go into the
drawing-room?"

"Yes, dear, do," said the clergyman's wife, "and let's have a nice
chat. Papa will drink too much claret if he tells the pig-sticking
stories," she added in a confidential whisper. "Ask your dear, kind
husband not to let him have too much claret; because he's sure to
suffer with his liver to-morrow, and say that Lofthouse ought to have
restrained him. He always says that it's poor Reginald's fault for not
restraining him."

John looked anxiously after his wife, as he stood with the door in his
hand, while the three ladies crossed the hall. He bit his lip as he
noticed Mrs. Powell's unpleasantly-precise figure close to Aurora's
shoulder.

"I think I spoke pretty plainly, though, this morning," he thought, as
he closed the door and returned to his friends.

A quarter-past eight; twenty minutes past; five-and-twenty minutes
past. Mrs. Lofthouse was rather a brilliant pianist, and was never
happier than when interpreting Thalberg and Benedict upon her
friends' Collard-and-Collards. There were old-fashioned people round
Doncaster who believed in Collard and Collard, and were thankful for
the melody to be got out of a good honest grand, in a solid rosewood
case, unadorned with carved glorification, or ormolu fret-work. At
seven-and-twenty minutes past eight Mrs. Lofthouse was seated at
Aurora's piano, in the first agonies of a prelude in six flats; a
prelude which demanded such extraordinary uses of the left hand across
the right, and the right over the left, and such exercise of the
thumbs in all sorts of positions,--in which, according to all orthodox
theories of the pre-Thalberg-ite school, no pianist's thumbs should
ever be used,--that Mrs. Mellish felt that her friend's attention was
not very likely to wander from the keys.

Within the long, low-roofed drawing-room at Mellish Park there was a
snug little apartment, hung with innocent rosebud-sprinkled chintzes,
and furnished with maple-wood chairs and tables. Mrs. Lofthouse had not
been seated at the piano more than five minutes when Aurora strolled
from the drawing-room to this inner chamber, leaving her guest with no
audience but Mrs. Powell. She lingered for a moment on the threshold to
look back at the ensign's widow, who sat near the piano in an attitude
of rapt attention.

"She is watching me," thought Aurora, "though her pink eyelids are
drooping over her eyes, and she seems to be looking at the border
of her pocket-handkerchief. She sees me with her chin or her nose,
perhaps. How do I know? She is all eyes! Bah! am I going to be afraid
of _her_, when I was never afraid of _him?_ What should I fear
except"--(her head changed from its defiant attitude to a drooping
posture, and a sad smile curved her crimson lips)--"except to make you
unhappy, my dear, my _husband_. Yes," with a sudden lifting of her
head, and re-assumption of its proud defiance, "my own true husband!
the husband who has kept his marriage-vow as unpolluted as when first
it issued from his lips!"

I am writing what she thought, remember, not what she said; for she was
not in the habit of thinking aloud, nor did I ever know anybody who was.

Aurora took up a shawl that she had flung upon the sofa, and threw it
lightly over her head, veiling herself with a cloud of black lace,
through which the restless, shivering diamonds shone out like stars in
a midnight sky. She looked like Hecate, as she stood on the threshold
of the French window lingering for a moment with a deep-laid purpose in
her heart, and a resolute light in her eyes. The clock in the steeple
of the village church struck the three-quarters after eight while she
lingered for those few moments. As the last chime died away in the
summer air, she looked up darkly at the evening sky, and walked with a
rapid footstep out upon the lawn towards the southern end of the wood
that bordered the Park.




CHAPTER XI.


CAPTAIN PRODDER CARRIES BAD NEWS TO HISNIECE'S HOUSE.


While Aurora stood upon the threshold of the open window, a man was
lingering upon the broad stone steps before the door of the entrance
hall, remonstrating with one of John Mellish's servants, who held
supercilious parley with the intruder, and kept him at arm's length
with the contemptuous indifference of a well-bred servant.

This stranger was Captain Samuel Prodder, who had arrived at Doncaster
late in the afternoon, had dined at the Reindeer, and had come over to
Mellish Park in a gig driven by a hanger-on of that establishment. The
gig and the hanger-on were both in waiting at the bottom of the steps;
and if there had been anything wanting to turn the balance of the
footman's contempt for Captain Prodder's blue coat, loose shirt-collar,
and silver watch chain, the gig from the Reindeer would have done it.

"Yes, Mrs. Mellish is at home," the gentleman in plush replied, after
surveying the sea-captain with a leisurely and critical air, which was
rather provoking to poor Samuel; "but she's engaged."

"But perhaps she'll put off her engagements for a bit when she hears
who it is as wants to see her," answered the captain, diving into his
capacious pocket. "She'll tell a different story, I dare say, when you
take her that bit of pasteboard."

He handed the man a card, or rather let me say a stiff square of thick
pasteboard, inscribed with his name, so disguised by the flourishing
caprices of the engraver as to be not very easily deciphered by
unaccustomed eyes. The card bore Captain Prodder's address as well as
his name, and informed his acquaintances that he was part-owner of the
_Nancy Jane_, and that all consignments of goods were to be made to him
at &c. &c.

The footman took the document between his thumb and finger, and
examined it as minutely as if it had been some relic of the middle
ages. A new light dawned upon him as he deciphered the information
about the _Nancy Jane_, and he looked at the captain for the first time
with some approach to human interest in his countenance.

"Is it cigars you want to dispose hof?" he asked, "or bandannas?
If it's cigars, you might come round to our 'all, and show us the
harticle."

"Cigars!" roared Samuel Prodder. "Do you take me for a smuggler,
you----?" Here followed one of those hearty seafaring epithets with
which polite Mr. Chucks was apt to finish his speeches. "I'm your
missus's own uncle; leastways, I--I knew her mother when she was a
little gal," he added, in considerable confusion; for he remembered
how far away his sea-captainship thrust him from Mrs. Mellish and her
well-born husband; "so just take her my card, and look sharp about it,
will you?"

"We've a dinner-party," the footman said, coldly, "and I don't know if
the ladies have returned to the drawing-room; but if you're anyways
related to missis--I'll go and see."

The man strolled leisurely away, leaving poor Samuel biting his nails
in mute vexation at having let slip that ugly fact of her relationship.

"That swab in the same cut coat as Lord Nelson wore aboard the
_Victory_, will look down upon her now he knows she's niece to a old
sea-captain that carries dry goods on commission, and can't keep his
tongue between his teeth," he thought.

The footman came back while Samuel Prodder was upbraiding himself for
his folly, and informed him that Mrs. Mellish was not to be found in
the house.

"Who's that playin' upon the pianer, then?" asked Mr. Prodder, with
sceptical bluntness.

"Oh, that's the clugyman's wife," answered the man, contemptuously;
"a _ciddyvong_ guvness, I should think, for she plays too well for a
real lady. Missus don't play--leastways only pawlkers, and that sort of
think. Good night."

He closed the two half-glass doors upon Captain Prodder without farther
ceremony, and shut Samuel out of his niece's house.

"To think that I played hopscotch and swopped marbles for hardbake with
this gal's mother," thought the captain, "and that her servant turns up
his nose at me and shuts the door in my face!"

It was in sorrow rather than in anger that the disappointed sailor
thought this. He had scarcely hoped for anything better. It was only
natural that those about his niece should flout at and contemptuously
treat him. Let him get to _her_--let him come only for a moment face to
face with Eliza's child, and he did not fear the issue.

"I'll walk through the Park," he said to the man who had driven him
from Doncaster; "it's a nice evenin', and there's pleasant walks under
the trees to win'ard. You can drive back into the high road, and wait
for me agen that 'ere turnstile I took notice of as we come along."

The driver nodded, smacked his whip, and drove his elderly gray pony
towards the Park-gates. Captain Samuel Prodder went, slowly and
deliberately enough,--the way that it was appointed for him to go.
The Park was a strange territory to him; but while driving past the
outer boundaries he had looked admiringly at chance openings in the
wood, revealing grassy amphitheatres enriched by spreading oaks, whose
branches made a shadowy tracery upon the sunlit turf. He had looked
with a seaman's wonder at the inland beauties of the quiet domain,
and had pondered whether it might not be a pleasant thing for an old
sailor to end his days amid such monotonous woodland tranquillity,
far away from the sound of wreck and tempest, and the mighty voices of
the dreadful deep; and, in his disappointment at not seeing Aurora, it
was some consolation to the captain to walk across the dewy grass in
the evening shadows in the direction where, with a sailor's unerring
topographical instinct, he knew the turnstile must be situated.

Perhaps he had some hope of meeting his niece in the pathway across the
Park. The man had told him that she was out. She could not be far away,
as there was a dinner-party at the house; and she was scarcely likely
to leave her guests. She was wandering about the Park, most likely,
with some of them.

The shadows of the trees grew darker upon the grass as Captain Prodder
drew nearer to the wood; but it was that sweet summer-time in which
there is scarcely one positively dark hour amongst the twenty-four;
and though the village clock chimed the half-hour after nine as the
sailor entered the wood, he was able to distinguish the outlines of two
figures advancing towards him from the other end of the long arcade,
that led in a slanting direction to the turnstile.

The figures were those of a man and woman; the woman wearing some
light-coloured dress, which shimmered in the dusk; the man leaning on a
stick, and obviously very lame.

"Is it my niece and one of her visitors?" thought the captain; "maybe
it is. I'll lay by to port of 'em, and let 'em pass me."

Samuel Prodder stepped aside under the shadow of the trees to the left
of the grassy avenue through which the two figures were approaching,
and waited patiently until they drew near enough for him to distinguish
the woman's face. The woman was Mrs. Mellish, and she was walking on
the left of the man, and was therefore nearest to the captain. Her head
was turned away from her companion, as if in utter scorn and defiance
of him, although she was talking to him at that moment. Her face,
proud, pale, and disdainful, was visible to the seaman in the chill,
shadowy light of the newly-risen moon. A low line of crimson behind the
black trunks of a distant group of trees marked where the sun had left
its last track, in a vivid streak that looked like blood.

Captain Prodder gazed in loving wonder at the beautiful face turned
towards him. He saw the dark eyes, with their sombre depth, dark in
anger and scorn, and the luminous shimmer of the jewels that shone
through the black veil upon her haughty head. He saw her, and his heart
grew chill at the sight of her pale beauty in the mysterious moonlight.

"It might be my sister's ghost," he thought, "coming upon me in this
quiet place; it's a'most difficult to believe as it's flesh and blood."

He would have advanced, perhaps, and addressed his niece, had he not
been held back by the words which she was speaking as she passed
him--words that jarred painfully upon his heart, telling, as they did,
of anger and bitterness, discord and misery.

"Yes, hate you!" she said in a clear voice, which seemed to vibrate
sharply in the dusk,----"hate you! hate you! hate you!" She repeated
the hard phrase, as if there were some pleasure and delight in uttering
it, which in her ungovernable anger she could not deny herself. "What
other words do you expect from me?" she cried, with a low mocking
laugh, which had a tone of deeper misery, and more utter hopelessness
than any outbreak of womanly weeping. "Would you have me love you? or
respect you? or tolerate you?" Her voice rose with each rapid question,
merging into an hysterical sob, but never melting into tears. "Would
you have me tell you anything else than what I tell you to-night? I
hate and abhor you! I look upon you as the primary cause of every
sorrow I have ever known, of every tear I have ever shed, of every
humiliation I have endured; every sleepless night, every weary day,
every despairing hour, I have ever passed. More than this,--yes, a
thousand, thousand times more,--I look upon _you_ as the first cause
of my father's wretchedness. Yes, even before my own mad folly in
believing in you, and thinking you--what?--Claude Melnotte, perhaps!--a
curse upon the man who wrote the play, and the player who acted in it,
if it helped to make me what I was when I met you! I say again, I hate
you! your presence poisons my home, your abhorred shadow haunts my
sleep--no, not my sleep, for how should I ever sleep knowing that you
are near?"

Mr. Conyers, being apparently weary of walking, leaned against the
trunk of a tree to listen to the end of this outbreak, looking insolent
defiance at the speaker. But Aurora's passion had reached that point
in which all consciousness of external things passes away in the
complete egoism of anger and hate. She did not see his superciliously
indifferent look; her dilated eyes stared straight before her into
the dark recess from which Captain Prodder watched his sister's only
child. Her restless hands rent the fragile border of her shawl in the
strong agony of her passion. Have you ever seen this kind of woman in
a passion? Impulsive, nervous, sensitive, sanguine; with such a one
passion is a madness--brief, thank Heaven! and expending itself in
sharply cruel words, and convulsive rendings of lace and ribbon, or
coroner's juries might have to sit even oftener than they do. It is
fortunate for mankind that speaking daggers is often quite as great a
satisfaction to us as using them, and that we can threaten very cruel
things without meaning to carry them out. Like the little children who
say, "Won't I just tell your mother!" and the terrible editors who
write, "Won't I give you a castigation in the Market-Deeping 'Spirit of
the Times,' or the 'Walton-on-the-Naze Athenæum!'"

"If you are going to give us much more of this sort of thing," said
Mr. Conyers, with aggravating stolidity, "perhaps you won't object to
my lighting a cigar?"

Aurora took no notice of his quiet insolence; but Captain Prodder,
involuntarily clenching his fist, bounded a step forward in his
retreat, and shook the leaves of the underwood about his legs.

"What's that?" exclaimed the trainer.

"My dog, perhaps," answered Aurora; "he's about here with me."

"Curse the purblind cur!" muttered Mr. Conyers, with an unlighted cigar
in his mouth. He struck a lucifer-match against the back of a tree, and
the vivid sulphurous light shone full upon his handsome face.

"A rascal!" thought Captain Prodder;--"a good-looking, heartless
scoundrel! What's this between my niece and him? He isn't her husband,
surely, for he don't look like a gentleman. But if he aint her husband,
who is he?"

The sailor scratched his head in his bewilderment. His senses had
been almost stupefied by Aurora's passionate talk, and he had only a
confused feeling that there was trouble and wretchedness of some kind
or other around and about his niece.

"If I thought he'd done anything to injure her," he muttered, "I'd
pound him into such a jelly that his friends would never know his
handsome face again as long as there was life in his carcass."

Mr. Conyers threw away the burning match, and puffed at his
newly-lighted cigar. He did not trouble himself to take it from his
lips as he addressed Aurora, but spoke between his teeth, and smoked in
the pauses of his discourse.

"Perhaps, if you've--calmed yourself down--a bit," he said, "you'll be
so good as--to come to business. What do you want me to do?"

"You know as well as I do," answered Aurora.

"You want me to leave this place?"

"Yes; for ever."

"And to take what you give me--and be satisfied."

"Yes."

"What if I refuse?"

She turned sharply upon him as he asked this question, and looked at
him for a few moments in silence.

"What if I refuse?" he repeated, still smoking.

"Look to yourself!" she cried, between her set teeth; "that's all. Look
to yourself!"

"What! you'd kill me, I suppose?"

"No," answered Aurora; "but I'd tell all; and get the release which I
ought to have sought for two years ago."

"Oh, ah, to be sure!" said Mr. Conyers; "a pleasant thing for
Mr. Mellish, and our poor papa, and a nice bit of gossip for the
newspapers! I've a good mind to put you to the test, and see if you've
pluck enough to do it, my lady."

She stamped her foot upon the turf, and tore the lace in her hands,
throwing the fragments away from her; but she did not answer him.

"You'd like to stab me, or shoot me, or strangle me, as I stand here;
wouldn't you, now?" asked the trainer, mockingly.

"Yes," cried Aurora, "I would!" She flung her head back with a gesture
of disdain as she spoke.

"Why do I waste my time in talking to you?" she said. "My worst words
can inflict no wound upon such a nature as yours. My scorn is no more
painful to you than it would be to any of the loathsome creatures that
creep about the margin of yonder pool."

The trainer took his cigar from his mouth, and struck the ashes away
with his little finger.

"No," he said with a contemptuous laugh; "I'm not very thin-skinned;
and I'm pretty well used to this sort of thing, into the bargain. But
suppose, as I remarked just now, we drop this style of conversation,
and come to business. We don't seem to be getting on very fast this
way."

At this juncture, Captain Prodder, who, in his extreme desire to
strangle his niece's companion, had advanced very close upon the two
speakers, knocked off his hat against the lower branches of the tree
which sheltered him.

There was no mistake this time about the rustling of the leaves. The
trainer started, and limped towards Captain Prodder's hiding-place.

"There's some one listening to us," he said. "I'm sure of it this
time;--that fellow Hargraves, perhaps. I fancy he's a sneak."

Mr. Conyers supported himself against the very tree behind which the
sailor stood, and beat amongst the undergrowth with his stick, but did
not succeed in encountering the legs of the listener.

"If that soft-headed fool _is_ playing the spy upon me," cried the
trainer, savagely, "he'd better not let me catch him, for I'll make
him remember it, if I do."

"Don't I tell you that my dog followed me here?" exclaimed Aurora
contemptuously.

A low rustling of the grass on the other side of the avenue, and at
some distance from the seaman's place of concealment, was heard as Mrs.
Mellish spoke.

"_That's_ your dog, if you like," said the trainer; "the other was a
man. Come on a little way further, and let's make a finish of this
business; it's past ten o'clock."

Mr. Conyers was right. The church clock had struck ten five minutes
before, but the solemn chimes had fallen unheeded upon Aurora's ear,
lost amid the angry voices raging in her breast. She started as she
looked around her at the summer darkness in the woods, and the flaming
yellow moon, which brooded low upon the earth, and shed no light upon
the mysterious pathways and the water-pools in the wood.

The trainer limped away, Aurora walking by his side, yet holding
herself as far aloof from him as the grassy pathway would allow. They
were out of hearing, and almost out of sight, before the sea-captain
could emerge from a state of utter stupefaction so far as to be able to
look at the business in its right bearings.

"I ought to ha' knocked him down," he muttered at last, "whether he's
her husband or whether he isn't. I ought to have knocked him down, and
I would have done it, too," added the captain resolutely, "if it hadn't
been that my niece seemed to have a good fiery spirit of her own, and
to be able to fire a jolly good broadside in the way of hard words.
I'll find my skull-thatcher if I can," said Captain Prodder, groping
for his hat amongst the brambles, and the long grass, "and then I'll
just run up to the turnstile and tell my mate to lay at anchor a bit
longer with the horse and shay. He'll be wonderin' what I'm up to; but
I won't go back just yet, I'll keep in the way of my niece and that
swab with the game leg."

The captain found his hat, and walked down to the turnstile, where he
found the young man from the Reindeer fast asleep, with the reins loose
in his hands, and his head upon his knees. The horse, with his head in
an empty nose-bag, seemed as fast asleep as the driver.

The young man woke at the sound of the turnstile creaking upon its
axis, and the step of the sailor in the road.

"I aint going to get aboard just yet," said Captain Prodder; "I'll take
another turn in the wood as the evenin's so pleasant. I come to tell
you I wouldn't keep you much longer, for I thought you'd think I was
dead."

"I did a'most," answered the charioteer candidly. "My word!--aint you
been a time!"

"I met Mr. and Mrs. Mellish in the wood," said the captain, "and I
stopped to have a look at 'em. She's a bit of a spitfire, aint she?"
asked Samuel, with affected carelessness.

The young man from the Reindeer shook his head dubiously.

"I doan't know about that," he said; "she's a rare favourite
hereabouts, with poor folks and gentry too. They do say as she
horsewhipped a poor fond chap as they'd got in the stables, for
ill-usin' her dog; and sarve him right too," added the young man
decisively. "Them Softies is allus vicious."

Captain Prodder pondered rather doubtfully upon this piece of
information. He was not particularly elated by the image of his
sister's child laying a horsewhip upon the shoulders of her half-witted
servant. This trifling incident didn't exactly harmonize with his idea
of the beautiful young heiress, playing upon all manner of instruments,
and speaking half a dozen languages.

"Yes," repeated the driver, "they _do_ say as she gave t' fondy a good
whopping; and damme if I don't admire her for it."

"Ay, ay!" answered Captain Prodder thoughtfully. "Mr. Mellish walks
lame, don't he?" he asked, after a pause.

"Lame!" cried the driver; "Lord bless your heart! not a bit of it. John
Mellish is as fine a young man as you'll meet in this Riding. Ay, and
finer too. I ought to know. I've seen him walk into our house often
enough, in the race week."

The captain's heart sank strangely at this information. The man with
whom he had heard his niece quarrelling was not her husband, then. The
squabble had seemed natural enough to the uninitiated sailor while he
looked at it in a matrimonial light; but seen from another aspect it
struck sudden terror to his sturdy heart, and blanched the ruddy hues
in his brown face. "Who was he, then?" he thought; "who was it as my
niece was talking to--after dark,--alone,--a mile off her own home--eh?"

Before he could seek for a solution to the unuttered question which
agitated and alarmed him, the report of a pistol rang sharply through
the wood, and found an echo under a distant hill.

The horse pricked up his ears, and jibbed a few paces; the driver gave
a low whistle.

"I thought so," he said. "Poachers! This side of the wood's chock full
of game; and though Squire Mellish is allus threatenin' to prosecute
'em, folks know pretty well as he'll never do it."

The broad-shouldered, strong-limbed sailor leaned against the
turnstile, trembling in every limb.

What was that which his niece said a quarter of an hour before, when
the man had asked her whether she would like to shoot him?

"Leave your horse," he said, in a gasping voice; "tie him to the stile,
and come with me. If--if--it's poachers, we'll--we'll catch em."

The young man looped the reins across the turnstile. He had no very
great terror of any inclination for flight latent in the gray horse
from the Reindeer. The two men ran in the wood; the captain running in
the direction in which his sharp ears told him the shot had been fired.

The moon was slowly rising in the tranquil heavens, but there was very
little light yet in the wood.

The captain stopped near a rustic summer-house falling into decay,
and half buried amidst the tangled foliage that clustered about the
mouldering thatch and the dilapidated woodwork.

"It was hereabout the shot was fired," muttered the captain; "about
a hundred yards due nor'ard of the stile. I could take my oath as it
weren't far from this spot I'm standin' on."

He looked about him in the dim light. He could see no one; but an army
might have hidden amongst the trees that encircled the open patch
of turf on which the summer-house had been built. He listened; with
his hat off, and his big hand pressed tightly on his heart, as if to
still its tumultuous beating. He listened, as eagerly as he had often
listened, far out on a glassy sea, for the first faint breath of a
rising wind; but he could hear nothing except the occasional croaking
of the frogs in the pond near the summer-house.

"I could have sworn it was about here the shot was fired," he repeated.
"God grant as it _was_ poachers, after all! but it's given me a turn
that's made me feel like some cockney lubber aboard a steamer betwixt
Bristol and Cork. Lord, what a blessed old fool I am!" muttered the
captain, after walking slowly round the summer-house to convince
himself that there was no one hidden in it. "One 'ud think I'd never
heerd the sound of a ha'p'orth of powder before to-night."

He put on his hat, and walked a few paces forward, still looking about
cautiously, and still listening; but much easier in his mind than when
first he had re-entered the wood.

He stopped suddenly, arrested by a sound which has of itself, without
any reference to its power of association, a mysterious and chilling
influence upon the human heart. This sound was the howling of a
dog,--the prolonged, monotonous howling of a dog. A cold sweat broke
out upon the sailor's forehead. That sound, always one of terror to his
superstitious nature, was doubly terrible to-night.

"It means death!" he muttered, with a groan. "No dog ever howled like
that except for death."

He turned back, and looked about him. The moonlight glimmered faintly
upon the broad patch of stagnant water near the summer-house, and
upon its brink the captain saw two figures, black against the summer
atmosphere: a prostrate figure, lying close to the edge of the water;
and a large dog, with his head uplifted to the sky, howling piteously.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was the bounden duty of poor John Mellish, in his capacity of host,
to sit at the head of his table, pass the claret-jug, and listen to
Colonel Maddison's stories of the pig-sticking and the tiger-hunting,
as long as the Indian officer chose to talk for the amusement of his
friend and his son-in-law. It was perhaps lucky that patient Mr.
Lofthouse was well up in all the stories, and knew exactly which
departments of each narrative were to be laughed at, and which were to
be listened to with silent and awe-stricken attention; for John Mellish
made a very bad audience upon this occasion. He pushed the filberts
towards the colonel at the very moment when "the tigress was crouching
for a spring, upon the rising ground exactly above us, sir, and when,
by Jove! Charley Maddison felt himself at pretty close quarters with
the enemy, sir, and never thought to stretch his legs under this
mahogany, or any other man's, sir;" and he spoiled the officer's best
joke by asking him for the claret in the middle of it.

The tigers and the pigs were confusion and weariness of spirit to Mr.
Mellish. He was yearning for the moment when, with any show of decency,
he might make for the drawing-room, and find out what Aurora was doing
in the still summer twilight. When the door was opened and fresh wine
brought in, he heard the rattling of the keys under Mrs. Lofthouse's
manipulation, and rejoiced to think that his wife was seated quietly,
perhaps, listening to those sonatas in C flat, which the rector's wife
delighted to interpret.

The lamps were brought in before Colonel Maddison's stories were
finished; and when John's butler came to ask if the gentlemen would
like coffee, the worthy Indian officer said, "Yes, by all means, and a
cheroot with it. No smoking in the drawing-room, eh, Mellish? Petticoat
government and window-curtains, I dare say. Clara doesn't like my
smoke at the Rectory, and poor Lofthouse writes his sermons in the
summer-house; for he can't write without a weed, you know, and a volume
of Tillotson, or some of these fellows, to prig from--eh, George?" said
the facetious gentleman, digging his son-in-law in the ribs with his
fat old fingers, and knocking over two or three wine-glasses in his
ponderous jocosity.

How dreary it all seemed to John Mellish to-night! He wondered how
people felt who had no social mystery brooding upon their hearth; no
domestic skeleton cowering in their homely cupboard. He looked at the
rector's placid face with a pang of envy. There was no secret kept
from _him_. There was no perpetual struggle rending _his_ heart; no
dreadful doubts and fears that would not be quite lulled to rest; no
vague terror incessant and unreasoning; no mute argument for ever
going forward, with plaintiff's counsel and defendant's counsel
continually pleading the same cause, and arriving at the same result.
Heaven take pity upon those who have to suffer such silent misery,
such secret despair! We look at our neighbours' smiling faces, and
say, in bitterness of spirit, that A is a lucky fellow, and that B
can't be as much in debt as his friends say he is; that C and his
pretty wife are the happiest couple we know; and to-morrow B is in the
'Gazette,' and C is weeping over a dishonoured home, and a group of
motherless children, who wonder what mamma has done that papa should
be so sorry. The battles are very quiet, but they are for ever being
fought. We keep the fox hidden under our cloak, but the teeth of the
animal are none the less sharp, nor the pain less terrible to bear; a
little more terrible, perhaps, for being endured silently. John Mellish
gave a long sigh of relief when the Indian officer finished his third
cheroot, and pronounced himself ready to join the ladies. The lamps
in the drawing-room were lighted, and the curtains drawn before the
open windows, when the three gentlemen entered. Mrs. Lofthouse was
asleep upon one of the sofas, with a Book of Beauty lying open at
her feet, and Mrs. Powell, pale and sleepless,--sleepless as trouble
and sorrow, as jealousy and hate, as anything that is ravenous and
unappeasable,--sat at her embroidery, working laborious monstrosities
upon delicate cambric muslin.

The colonel dropped heavily into a luxurious easy-chair, and quietly
abandoned himself to repose. Mr. Lofthouse awoke his wife, and
consulted her about the propriety of ordering the carriage. John
Mellish looked eagerly round the room. To him it was empty. The rector
and his wife, the Indian officer, and the ensign's widow, were only so
many "phosphorescent spectralities," "phantasm captains;" in short,
they were not Aurora.

"Where's Lolly?" he asked, looking from Mrs. Lofthouse to Mrs. Powell;
"where's my wife?"

"I really do not know," answered Mrs. Powell, with icy deliberation.
"I've not been watching Mrs. Mellish."

The poisoned darts glanced away from John's preoccupied breast. There
was no room in his wounded heart for such a petty sting as this.

"Where's my wife?" he cried passionately; "you _must_ know where she
is. She's not here. Is she up-stairs? Is she out of doors?"

"To the best of my belief," replied the ensign's widow, with more than
usual precision, "Mrs. Mellish is in some part of the grounds; she has
been out of doors ever since we left the dining-room."

The French clock upon the mantelpiece chimed the three-quarters after
ten as she finished speaking: as if to give emphasis to her words and
to remind Mr. Mellish how long his wife had been absent. He bit his
lip fiercely, and strode towards one of the windows. He was going to
look for his wife; but he stopped as he flung aside the window-curtain,
arrested by Mrs. Powell's uplifted hand.

"Hark!" she said, "there is something the matter, I fear. Did you hear
that violent ringing at the hall-door?"

Mr. Mellish let fall the curtain, and re-entered the room.

"It's Aurora, no doubt," he said; "they've shut her out again, I
suppose. I beg, Mrs. Powell, that you will prevent this in future.
Really, ma'am, it is hard that my wife should be shut out of her own
house."

He might have said much more, but he stopped, pale and breathless, at
the sound of a hubbub in the hall, and rushed to the room-door. He
opened it and looked out, with Mrs. Powell and Mr. and Mrs. Lofthouse
crowding behind him, and looking over his shoulder.

Half a dozen servants were clustered round a roughly-dressed,
seafaring-looking man, who, with his hat off and his disordered hair
falling about his white face, was telling in broken sentences, scarcely
intelligible for the speaker's agitation, that a murder had been done
in the wood.




CHAPTER XII.


THE DEED THAT HAD BEEN DONE IN THE WOOD.


The bare-headed seafaring man who stood in the centre of the hall was
Captain Samuel Prodder. The scared faces of the servants gathered round
him told more plainly than his own words, which came hoarsely from his
parched white lips, the nature of the tidings that he brought.

John Mellish strode across the hall, with an awful calmness on his
white face; and parting the hustled group of servants with his strong
arms, as a mighty wind rends asunder the storm-beaten waters, he placed
himself face to face with Captain Prodder.

"Who are you?" he asked sternly: "and what has brought you here?"

The Indian officer had been aroused by the clamour, and had emerged,
red and bristling with self-importance, to take his part in the
business in hand.

There are some pies in the making of which everybody yearns to have
a finger. It is a great privilege, after some social convulsion has
taken place, to be able to say, "I was there at the time the scene
occurred, sir;" or, "I was standing as close to him when the blow was
struck, ma'am, as I am to you at this moment." People are apt to take
pride out of strange things. An elderly gentleman at Doncaster, showing
me his comfortably-furnished apartments, informed me, with evident
satisfaction, that Mr. William Palmer had lodged in those very rooms.

Colonel Maddison pushed aside his daughter and her husband, and
struggled out into the hall.

"Come, my man," he said, echoing John's interrogatory, "let us hear
what has brought you here at such a remarkably unseasonable hour."

The sailor gave no direct answer to the question. He pointed with his
thumb across his shoulder towards that dismal spot in the lonely wood,
which was as present to his mental vision now as it had been to his
bodily eyes a quarter of an hour before.

"A man!" he gasped; "a man--lyin' close agen' the water's edge,--shot
through the heart!"

"Dead?" asked some one, in an awful tone. The voices and the questions
came from whom they would, in the awe-stricken terror of those first
moments of overwhelming horror and surprise. No one knew who spoke
except the speakers; perhaps even they were scarcely aware that they
had spoken.

"Dead?" asked one of those eager listeners.

"Stone dead."

"A man--shot dead in the wood!" cried John Mellish; "what man?"

"I beg your pardon, sir," said the grave old butler, laying his hand
gently upon his master's shoulder: "I think, from what this person
says, that the man who has been shot is--the new trainer, Mr.--Mr.----"

"Conyers!" exclaimed John. "Conyers! who--who should shoot him?" The
question was asked in a hoarse whisper. It was impossible for the
speaker's face to grow whiter than it had been, from the moment in
which he had opened the drawing-room door, and looked out into the
hall; but some terrible change not to be translated into words came
over it at the mention of the trainer's name.

He stood motionless and silent, pushing his hair from his forehead, and
staring wildly about him.

The grave butler laid his warning hand for a second time upon his
master's shoulder.

"Sir--Mr. Mellish," he said, eager to arouse the young man from the
dull, stupid quiet into which he had fallen,--"excuse me, sir; but if
my mistress should come in suddenly, and hear of this, she might be
upset, perhaps. Wouldn't it be better to----"

"Yes, yes!" cried John Mellish, lifting his head suddenly, as if
aroused into immediate action by the mere suggestion of his wife's
name,--"yes! clear out of the hall, every one of you," he said,
addressing the eager group of pale-faced servants. "And you, sir," he
added to Captain Prodder, "come with me."

He walked towards the dining-room door. The sailor followed him, still
bare-headed, still with a semi-bewildered expression in his dusky face.

"It aint the first time I've seen a man shot," he thought; "but it's
the first time I've felt like this."

Before Mr. Mellish could reach the dining-room, before the servants
could disperse and return to their proper quarters, one of the
half-glass doors, which had been left ajar, was pushed open by the
light touch of a woman's hand, and Aurora Mellish entered the hall.

"Ah, ha!" thought the ensign's widow, who looked on at the scene,
snugly sheltered by Mr. and Mrs. Lofthouse; "my lady is caught a
second time in her evening rambles. What will he say to her goings-on
to-night, I wonder?"

Aurora's manner presented a singular contrast to the terror and
agitation of the assembly in the hall. A vivid crimson flush glowed in
her cheeks and lit up her shining eyes. She carried her head high, in
that queenly defiance which was her peculiar grace. She walked with a
light step; she moved with easy, careless gestures. It seemed as if
some burden which she had long carried had been suddenly removed from
her. But at sight of the crowd in the hall she drew back with a look of
alarm.

"What has happened, John?" she cried; "what is wrong?"

He lifted his hand with a warning gesture,--a gesture that plainly
said: Whatever trouble or sorrow there may be, let her be spared the
knowledge of it; let her be sheltered from the pain.

"Yes, my darling," he answered quietly, taking her hand and leading
her into the drawing-room; "there is something wrong. An accident has
happened--in the wood yonder; but it concerns no one whom you care
for. Go, dear; I will tell you all, by-and-by. Mrs. Lofthouse, you
will take care of my wife. Lofthouse, come with me. Allow me to shut
the door, Mrs. Powell, if you please," he added to the ensign's widow,
who did not seem inclined to leave her post upon the threshold of the
drawing-room. "Any curiosity which you may have about the business
shall be satisfied in due time. For the present, you will oblige me by
remaining with my wife and Mrs. Lofthouse."

He paused, with his hand upon the drawing-room door, and looked at
Aurora.

She was standing with her shawl upon her arm, watching her husband; and
she advanced eagerly to him as she met his glance.

"John," she exclaimed, "for mercy's sake, tell me the truth! _What_ is
this accident?"

He was silent for a moment, gazing at her eager face,--that face whose
exquisite mobility expressed every thought; then, looking at her with
a strange solemnity, he said gravely, "You were in the wood just now,
Aurora?"

"I was," she answered; "I have only just left the grounds. A man passed
me, running violently, about a quarter of an hour ago. I thought he was
a poacher. Was it to him the accident happened?"

"No. There was a shot fired in the wood some time since. Did you hear
it?"

"I did," replied Mrs. Mellish, looking at him with sudden terror and
surprise. "I knew there were often poachers about near the road, and I
was not alarmed by it. Was there anything wrong in that shot? Was any
one hurt?"

Her eyes were fixed upon his face, dilated with that look of wondering
terror.

"Yes; a--a man was hurt."

Aurora looked at him in silence,--looked at him with a stony face,
whose only expression was an utter bewilderment. Every other feeling
seemed blotted away in that one sense of wonder.

John Mellish led her to a chair near Mrs. Lofthouse, who had been
seated, with Mrs. Powell, at the other end of the room, close to the
piano, and too far from the door to overhear the conversation which had
just taken place between John and his wife. People do not talk very
loudly in moments of intense agitation. They are liable to be deprived
of some portion of their vocal power in the fearful crisis of terror
or despair. A numbness seizes the organ of speech; a partial paralysis
disables the ready tongue; the trembling lips refuse to do their duty.
The soft pedal of the human instrument is down, and the tones are
feeble and muffled, wandering into weak minor shrillness, or sinking to
husky basses, beyond the ordinary compass of the speaker's voice. The
stentorian accents in which Claude Melnotte bids adieu to Mademoiselle
Deschapelles mingle very effectively with the brazen clamour of the
Marseillaise Hymn; the sonorous tones in which Mistress Julia appeals
to her Hunchback guardian are pretty sure to bring down the approving
thunder of the eighteenpenny gallery; but I doubt if the noisy energy
of stage-grief is true to nature, however wise in art. I'm afraid that
an actor who would play Claude Melnotte with a pre-Raphaelite fidelity
to nature would be an insufferable bore, and utterly inaudible beyond
the third row in the pit. The artist must draw his own line between
nature and art, and map out the extent of his own territory. If he
finds that cream-coloured marble is more artistically beautiful than a
rigid presentment of actual flesh and blood, let him stain his marble
of that delicate hue until the end of time. If he can represent five
acts of agony and despair without once turning his back to his audience
or sitting down, let him do it. If he is conscientiously true to his
_art_, let him choose for himself how true he shall be to nature.

John Mellish took his wife's hand in his own, and grasped it with a
convulsive pressure that almost crushed the delicate fingers.

"Stay here, my dear, till I come back to you," he said. "Now,
Lofthouse!"

Mr. Lofthouse followed his friend into the hall, where Colonel
Maddison had been making the best use of his time by questioning the
merchant-captain.

"Come, gentlemen," said John, leading the way to the dining-room;
"come, colonel, and you too, Lofthouse; and you, sir," he added to the
sailor, "step this way."

The _débris_ of the dessert still covered the table, but the men did
not advance far into the room. John stood aside as the others went in,
and entering the last, closed the door behind him, and stood with his
back against it.

"Now," he said, turning sharply upon Samuel Prodder, "what is this
business?"

"I'm afraid it's sooicide--or--or murder," answered the sailor gravely.
"I've told this good gentleman all about it."

This good gentleman was Colonel Maddison, who seemed delighted to
plunge into the conversation.

"Yes, my dear Mellish," he said eagerly; "our friend, who describes
himself as a sailor, and who had come down to see Mrs. Mellish, whose
mother he knew when he was a boy, has told me all about this shocking
affair. Of course the body must be removed immediately, and the sooner
your servants go out with lanterns for that purpose the better.
Decision, my dear Mellish, decision and prompt action are indispensable
in these sad catastrophes."

"The body removed!" repeated John Mellish; "the man is dead, then."

"Quite dead," answered the sailor; "he was dead when I found him,
though it wasn't above seven minutes after the shot was fired. I left a
man with him--a young man as drove me from Doncaster--and a dog,--some
big dog that watched beside him,--howling awful, and wouldn't leave
him."

"Did you--see--the man's face?"

"Yes."

"You are a stranger here," said John Mellish; "it is useless,
therefore, to ask you if you know who the man is."

"No, sir," answered the sailor, "I didn't know him; but the young man
from the Reindeer----"

"He recognized him?"

"Yes; he said he'd seen the man in Doncaster only the night before; and
that he was your--trainer, I think he called him."

"Yes, yes."

"A lame chap."

"Come, gentlemen," said John, turning to his friends, "what are we to
do?"

"Send the servants into the wood," replied Colonel Maddison, "and have
the body carried----"

"Not here," cried John Mellish, interrupting him,--"not here; it would
kill my wife."

"Where did the man live?" asked the colonel.

"In the north lodge. A cottage against the northern gates, which are
never used now."

"Then let the body be taken there," answered the Indian soldier; "let
one of your people run for the parish constable; and you'd better send
for the nearest surgeon immediately, though, from what our friend here
says, a hundred of 'em couldn't do any good. It's an awful business!
Some poaching fray, I suppose."

"Yes, yes," answered John quickly; "no doubt."

"Was the man disliked in the neighbourhood?" asked Colonel Maddison;
"had he made himself in any manner obnoxious?"

"I should scarcely think it likely. He had only been with me about a
week."

The servants, who had dispersed at John's command, had not gone very
far. They had lingered in corridors and lobbies, ready at a moment's
notice to rush out into the hall again, and act their minor parts in
the tragedy. They preferred doing anything to returning quietly to
their own quarters.

They came out eagerly at Mr. Mellish's summons. He gave his orders
briefly, selecting two of the men, and sending the others about their
business.

"Bring a couple of lanterns," he said; "and follow us across the Park
towards the pond in the wood."

Colonel Maddison, Mr. Lofthouse, Captain Prodder, and John Mellish,
left the house together. The moon, still slowly rising in the broad,
cloudless heavens, silvered the quiet lawn, and shimmered upon the
tree-tops in the distance. The three gentlemen walked at a rapid pace,
led by Samuel Prodder, who kept a little way in advance, and followed
by a couple of grooms, who carried darkened stable-lanterns.

As they entered the wood, they stopped involuntarily, arrested by
that solemn sound which had first drawn the sailor's attention to the
dreadful deed that had been done--the howling of the dog. It sounded in
the distance like a low, feeble wail: a long monotonous death-cry.

They followed that dismal indication of the spot to which they were to
go. They made their way through the shadowy avenue, and emerged upon
the silvery patch of turf and fern, where the rotting summer-house
stood in its solitary decay. The two figures--the prostrate figure
on the brink of the water, and the figure of the dog with uplifted
head--still remained exactly as the sailor had left them three-quarters
of an hour before. The young man from the Reindeer stood aloof from
these two figures, and advanced to meet the newcomers as they drew near.

Colonel Maddison took a lantern from one of the men, and ran forward
to the water's edge. The dog rose as he approached, and walked slowly
round the prostrate form, sniffing at it, and whining piteously. John
Mellish called the animal away.

"This man was in a sitting posture when he was shot," said Colonel
Maddison, decisively. "He was sitting upon this bench."

He pointed to a dilapidated rustic seat close to the margin of the
stagnant water.

"He was sitting upon this bench," repeated the colonel; "for he's
fallen close against it, as you see. Unless I'm very much mistaken, he
was shot from behind."

"You don't think he shot himself, then?" asked John Mellish.

"Shot himself!" cried the colonel; "not a bit of it. But we'll soon
settle that. If he shot himself, the pistol must be close against him.
Here, bring a loose plank from that summer-house, and lay the body upon
it," added the Indian officer, speaking to the servants.

Captain Prodder and the two grooms selected the broadest plank they
could find. It was moss-grown and rotten, and straggling wreaths of
wild clematis were entwined about it; but it served the purpose for
which it was wanted. They laid it upon the grass, and lifted the body
of James Conyers on to it, with his handsome face--ghastly and horrible
in the fixed agony of sudden death--turned upward to the moonlit sky.
It was wonderful how mechanically and quietly they went to work,
promptly and silently obeying the colonel's orders.

John Mellish and Mr. Lofthouse searched the slippery grass upon the
bank, and groped amongst the fringe of fern, without result. There was
no weapon to be found anywhere within a considerable radius of the body.

While they were searching in every direction for this missing link in
the mystery of the man's death, the parish-constable arrived with the
servant who had been sent to summon him.

He had very little to say for himself, except that he supposed it was
poachers as had done it; and that he also supposed all particklars
would come out at the inquest. He was a simple rural functionary,
accustomed to petty dealings with refractory tramps, contumacious
poachers, and impounded cattle, and was scarcely master of the
situation in any great emergency.

Mr. Prodder and the servants lifted the plank upon which the body lay,
and struck into the long avenue leading northward, walking a little
ahead of the three gentlemen and the constable. The young man from the
Reindeer returned to look after his horse, and to drive round to the
north lodge, where he was to meet Mr. Prodder. All had been done so
quietly that the knowledge of the catastrophe had not passed beyond the
domains of Mellish Park. In the summer evening stillness James Conyers
was carried back to the chamber from whose narrow window he had looked
out upon the beautiful world, weary of its beauty, only a few hours
before.

The purposeless life was suddenly closed. The careless wanderer's
journey had come to an unthought-of end. What a melancholy record, what
a meaningless and unfinished page! Nature, blindly bountiful to the
children whom she has yet to know, had bestowed her richest gifts upon
this man. She had created a splendid image, and had chosen a soul at
random, ignorantly enshrining it in her most perfectly fashioned clay.
Of all who read the story of this man's death in the following Sunday's
newspapers, there was not one who shed a tear for him; there was not
one who could say, "That man once stepped out of his way to do me a
kindness; and may the Lord have mercy upon his soul!"

Shall I be sentimental, then, because he is dead, and regret that he
was not spared a little longer, and allowed a day of grace in which
he might repent? Had he lived for ever, I do not think he would have
lived long enough to become that which it was not in his nature to be.
May God, in His infinite compassion, have pity upon the souls which
He has Himself created; and where He has withheld the light, may He
excuse the darkness! The phrenologists who examined the head of William
Palmer declared that he was so utterly deficient in moral perception,
so entirely devoid of conscientious restraint, that he could not help
being what he was. Heaven keep us from too much credence in that
horrible fatalism! Is a man's destiny here and hereafter to depend
upon bulbous projections scarcely perceptible to uneducated fingers,
and good and evil propensities which can be measured by the compass or
weighed in the scale?

The dismal _cortège_ slowly made its way under the silver moonlight,
the trembling leaves making a murmuring music in the faint summer air,
the pale glowworms shining here and there amid the tangled verdure. The
bearers of the dead walked with a slow but steady tramp in advance of
the rest. All walked in silence. What should they say? In the presence
of death's awful mystery, life made a pause. There was a brief interval
in the hard business of existence; a hushed and solemn break in the
working of life's machinery.

"There'll be an inquest," thought Mr. Prodder, "and I shall have to
give evidence. I wonder what questions they'll ask me?"

He did not think this once, but perpetually; dwelling with a
half-stupid persistence upon the thought of that inquisition which
must most infallibly be made, and those questions that might be
asked. The honest sailor's simple mind was cast astray in the utter
bewilderment of this night's mysterious horror. The story of life was
changed. He had come to play his humble part in some sweet domestic
drama of love and confidence, and he found himself involved in a
tragedy; a horrible mystery of hatred, secrecy, and murder; a dreadful
maze, from whose obscurity he saw no hope of issue.

A beacon-light glimmered in the lower window of the cottage by the
north gates,--a feeble ray, that glittered like a gem from out a bower
of honeysuckle and clematis. The little garden-gate was closed, but it
only fastened with a latch.

The bearers of the body paused before entering the garden, and the
constable stepped aside to speak to Mr. Mellish.

"Is there anybody lives in the cottage?" he asked.

"Yes," answered John; "the trainer employed an old hanger-on of my
own,--a half-witted fellow called Hargraves."

"It's him as burns the light in there, most likely, then," said the
constable. "I'll go in and speak to him first. Do you wait here till I
come out again," he added, turning to the men who carried the body.

The lodge-door was on the latch. The constable opened it softly, and
went in. A rushlight was burning upon the table, the candlestick placed
in a basin of water. A bottle half filled with brandy, and a tumbler,
stood near the light; but the room was empty. The constable took his
shoes off, and crept up the little staircase. The upper floor of the
lodge consisted of two rooms,--one, sufficiently large and comfortable,
looking towards the stable-gates; the other, smaller and darker, looked
out upon a patch of kitchen-garden and on the fence which separated Mr.
Mellish's estate from the high road. The larger chamber was empty; but
the door of the smaller was ajar; and the constable, pausing to listen
at that half-open door, heard the regular breathing of a heavy sleeper.

He knocked sharply upon the panel.

"Who's there?" asked the person within, starting up from a truckle
bedstead. "Is't thou, Muster Conyers?"

"No," answered the constable. "It's me, William Dork, of Little
Meslingham. Come down-stairs; I want to speak to you."

"Is there aught wrong?"

"Yes."

"Poachers?"

"That's as may be," answered Mr. Dork. "Come down-stairs, will you?"

Mr. Hargraves muttered something to the effect that he would make his
appearance as soon as he could find sundry portions of his rather
fragmentary toilet. The constable looked into the room, and watched
the "Softy" groping for his garments in the moonlight. Three minutes
afterwards Stephen Hargraves slowly shambled down the angular wooden
stairs, which wound in a corkscrew fashion, affected by the builders of
small dwellings, from the upper to the lower floor.

"Now," said Mr. Dork, planting the "Softy" opposite to him, with the
feeble rays of the rushlight upon his sickly face,--"now then, I want
you to answer me a question. At what time did your master leave the
house?"

"At half-past seven o'clock," answered the "Softy," in his whispering
voice; "she was stroikin the half-hour as he went out."

He pointed to a small Dutch clock in a corner of the room. His
countrymen always speak of a clock as "she."

"Oh, he went out at half-past seven o'clock, did he?" said the
constable; "and you haven't seen him since, I suppose?"

"No. He told me he should be late, and I wasn't to sit oop for him.
He swore at me last night for sitting oop for him. But is there aught
wrong?" asked the "Softy."

Mr. Dork did not condescend to reply to this question. He walked
straight to the door, opened it, and beckoned to those who stood
without in the summer moonlight, patiently waiting for his summons.
"You may bring him in," he said.

They carried their ghastly burden into the pleasant rustic chamber--the
chamber in which Mr. James Conyers had sat smoking and drinking a few
hours before. Mr. Morton, the surgeon from Meslingham, the village
nearest to the Park-gates, arrived as the body was being carried in,
and ordered a temporary couch of mattresses to be spread upon a couple
of tables placed together, in the lower room, for the reception of the
trainer's corpse.

John Mellish, Samuel Prodder, and Mr. Lofthouse remained outside the
cottage. Colonel Maddison, the servants, the constable, and the doctor,
were all clustered round the corpse.

"He has been dead about an hour and a quarter," said the doctor, after
a brief inspection of the body. "He has been shot in the back; the
bullet has not penetrated the heart, for in that case there would have
been no hæmorrhage. He has respired after receiving the shot; but death
must have been almost instantaneous."

Before making his examination, the surgeon had assisted Mr. Dork, the
constable, to draw off the coat and waistcoat of the deceased. The
bosom of the waistcoat was saturated with the blood that had flowed
from the parted lips of the dead man.

It was Mr. Dork's business to examine these garments, in the hope
of finding some shred of evidence which might become a clue to the
secret of the trainer's death. He turned out the pockets of the
shooting coat, and of the waistcoat; one of these packets contained a
handful of halfpence, a couple of shillings, a fourpenny-piece, and
a rusty watch-key; another held a little parcel of tobacco wrapped
in an old betting-list, and a broken meerschaum pipe, black and
greasy with the essential oil of bygone shag and bird's-eye. In one
of the waistcoat pockets Mr. Dork found the dead man's silver watch,
with a blood-stained ribbon and a worthless gilt seal. Amongst all
these things there was nothing calculated to throw any light upon the
mystery. Colonel Maddison shrugged his shoulders as the constable
emptied the paltry contents of the trainer's pockets on to a little
dresser at one end of the room.

"There's nothing here that makes the business any clearer," he said;
"but to my mind it's plain enough. The man was new here, and he brought
new ways with him from his last situation. The poachers and vagabonds
have been used to have it all their own way about Mellish Park, and
they didn't like this poor fellow's interference. He wanted to play the
tyrant, I dare say, and made himself obnoxious to some of the worst of
the lot; and he's caught it hot, poor chap!--that's all I've got to
say."

Colonel Maddison, with the recollection of a refractory Punjaub strong
upon him, had no very great reverence for the mysterious spark that
lights the human temple. If a man made himself obnoxious to other men,
other men were very likely to kill him. This was the soldier's simple
theory; and, having delivered himself of his opinion respecting the
trainer's death, he emerged from the cottage, and was ready to go home
with John Mellish, and drink another bottle of that celebrated tawny
port which had been laid in by his host's father twenty years before.

The constable stood close against a candle, that had been hastily
lighted and thrust unceremoniously into a disused blacking-bottle, with
the waistcoat still in his hands. He was turning the blood-stained
garment inside out; for while emptying the pockets he had felt a thick
substance that seemed like a folded paper, but the whereabouts of which
he had not been able to discover. He uttered a suppressed exclamation
of surprise presently; for he found the solution of this difficulty.
The paper was sewn between the inner lining and the outer material of
the waistcoat. He discovered this by examining the seam, a part of
which was sewn with coarse stitches and a thread of a different colour
to the rest. He ripped open this part of the seam, and drew out the
paper, which was so much bloodstained as to be undecipherable to Mr.
Dork's rather obtuse vision. "I'll say naught about it, and keep it to
show to th' coroner," he thought; "I'll lay he'll make something out
of it." The constable folded the document and secured it in a leathern
pocket-book, a bulky receptacle, the very aspect of which was wont to
strike terror to rustic defaulters. "I'll show it to th' coroner," he
thought; "and if aught particklar comes out, I may get something for my
trouble."

The village surgeon having done his duty, prepared to leave the crowded
little room, where the gaping servants still lingered, as if loth to
tear themselves away from the ghastly figure of the dead man, over
which Mr. Morton had spread a patchwork coverlet, taken from the bed
in the chamber above. The "Softy" had looked on quietly enough at the
dismal scene, watching the faces of the small assembly, and glancing
furtively from one to another beneath the shadow of his bushy red
eyebrows. His haggard face, always of a sickly white, seemed to-night
no more colourless than usual. His slow whispering tones were not more
suppressed than they always were. If he had a hang-dog manner and a
furtive glance, the manner and the glance were both common to him.
No one looked at him; no one heeded him. After the first question as
to the hour at which the trainer left the lodge had been asked and
answered, no one spoke to him. If he got in anybody's way, he was
pushed aside; if he said anything, nobody listened to him. The dead
man was the sole monarch of that dismal scene. It was to him they
looked with awe-stricken glances; it was of him they spoke in subdued
whispers. All their questions, their suggestions, their conjectures,
were about him, and him alone. There is this to be observed in the
physiology of every murder,--that before the coroner's inquest the sole
object of public curiosity is the murdered man; while immediately after
that judicial investigation the tide of feeling turns; the dead man is
buried and forgotten, and the suspected murderer becomes the hero of
men's morbid imaginations.

John Mellish looked in at the door of the cottage to ask a few
questions.

"Have you found anything, Dork?" he asked.

"Nothing particklar, sir."

"Nothing that throws any light upon this business?"

"No, sir."

"You are going home, then, I suppose?"

"Yes, sir, I must be going back now; if you'll leave some one here to
watch----"

"Yes, yes," said John; "one of the servants shall stay."

"Very well, then, sir; I'll just take the names of the witnesses
that'll be examined at the inquest, and I'll go over and see the
coroner early to-morrow morning."

"The witnesses; ah, to be sure. Who will you want?"

Mr. Dork hesitated for a moment, rubbing the bristles upon his chin.

"Well, there's this man here, Hargraves, I think you called him," he
said presently; "we shall want him; for it seems he was the last that
saw the deceased alive, leastways as I can hear on yet; then we shall
want the gentleman as found the body, and the young man as was with him
when he heard the shot: the gentleman as found the body is the most
particklar of all, and I'll speak to him at once."

John Mellish turned round, fully expecting to see Mr. Prodder at
his elbow, where he had been some time before. John had a perfect
recollection of seeing the loosely-clad seafaring figure standing
behind him in the moonlight; but, in the terrible confusion of his
mind, he could not remember exactly _when_ it was that he had last seen
the sailor. It might have been only five minutes before; it might have
been a quarter of an hour. John's ideas of time were annihilated by
the horror of the catastrophe which had marked this night with the red
brand of murder. It seemed to him as if he had been standing for hours
in the little cottage-garden, with Reginald Lofthouse by his side,
listening to the low hum of the voices in the crowded room, and waiting
to see the end of the dreary business.

Mr. Dork looked about him in the moonlight, entirely bewildered by the
disappearance of Samuel Prodder.

"Why, where on earth has he gone?" exclaimed the constable. "We _must_
have him before the coroner. What'll Mr. Hayward say to me for letting
him slip through my fingers?"

"The man was here a quarter of an hour ago, so he can't be very far
off," suggested Mr. Lofthouse. "Does anybody know who he is?"

No; nobody knew anything about him. He had appeared as mysteriously as
if he had risen from the earth, to bring terror and confusion upon it
with the evil tidings which he bore. Stay; some one suddenly remembered
that he had been accompanied by Bill Jarvis, the young man from the
Reindeer, and that he had ordered the young man to drive his trap to
the north gates, and wait for him there.

The constable ran to the gates upon receiving this information; but
there was no vestige of the horse and gig, or of the young man. Samuel
Prodder had evidently taken advantage of the confusion, and had driven
off in the gig under cover of the general bewilderment.

"I'll tell you what I'll do, sir," said William Dork, addressing
Mr. Mellish. "If you'll lend me a horse and trap, I'll drive into
Doncaster, and see if this man's to be found at the Reindeer. We _must_
have him for a witness."

John Mellish assented to this arrangement. He left one of the grooms
to keep watch in the death chamber, in company with Stephen Hargraves
the "Softy;" and, after bidding the surgeon good night, walked slowly
homewards with his friends. The church clock was striking twelve as
the three gentlemen left the wood, and passed through the little iron
gateway on to the lawn.

"We had better not tell the ladies more than we are obliged to tell
them about this business," said John Mellish, as they approached
the house, where the lights were still burning in the hall and
drawing-room; "we shall only agitate them by letting them know the
worst."

"To be sure, to be sure, my boy," answered the colonel. "My poor
little Maggie always cries if she hears of anything of this kind; and
Lofthouse is almost as big a baby," added the soldier, glancing rather
contemptuously at his son-in-law, who had not spoken once during that
slow homeward walk.

John Mellish thought very little of the strange disappearance of
Captain Prodder. The man had objected to be summoned as a witness,
perhaps, and had gone. It was only natural. He did not even know
his name; he only knew him as the mouthpiece of evil tidings, which
had shaken him to the very soul. That this man Conyers--this man of
all others, this man towards whom he had conceived a deeply-rooted
aversion, an unspoken horror--should have perished mysteriously by
an unknown hand, was an event so strange and appalling as to deprive
him for a time of all power of thought, all capability of reasoning.
Who had killed this man,--this penniless good-for-nothing trainer? Who
could have had any motive for such a deed? Who----? The cold sweat
broke out upon his brow in the anguish of the thought.

Who had done this deed?

It was not the work of any poacher. No. It was very well for Colonel
Maddison, in his ignorance of antecedent facts, to account for it in
that manner; but John Mellish knew that he was wrong. James Conyers had
only been at the Park a week. He had neither time nor opportunity for
making himself obnoxious; and, beyond that, he was not the man to make
himself obnoxious. He was a selfish, indolent rascal, who only loved
his own ease, and who would have allowed the young partridges to be
wired under his very nose. Who, then, had done this deed?

There was only one person who had any motive for wishing to be rid
of this man. One person who, made desperate by some great despair,
enmeshed perhaps by some net hellishly contrived by a villain,
hopeless of any means of extrication, in a moment of madness,
might have--No! In the face of every evidence that earth could
offer,--against reason, against hearing, eyesight, judgment, and
memory,--he would say, as he said now, _No!_ She was innocent! She was
innocent! She had looked in her husband's face, the clear light had
shone from her luminous eyes, a stream of electric radiance penetrating
straight to his heart,--and he had trusted her.

"I'll trust her at the worst," he thought. "If all living creatures
upon this wide earth joined their voices in one great cry of
upbraiding, I'd stand by her to the very end, and defy them."

Aurora and Mrs. Lofthouse had fallen asleep upon opposite sofas; Mrs.
Powell was walking softly up and down the long drawing-room, waiting
and watching,--waiting for a fuller knowledge of this ruin which had
come upon her employer's household.

Mrs. Mellish sprang up suddenly at the sound of her husband's step as
he entered the drawing-room.

"Oh, John!" she cried, running to him and laying her hands upon his
broad shoulders, "thank Heaven you are come back! Now tell me all!
Tell me all, John! I am prepared to hear anything, no matter what. This
is no ordinary accident. The man who was hurt----"

Her eyes dilated as she looked at him, with a glance of intelligence
that plainly said, "I can guess what has happened."

"The man was very seriously hurt, Lolly," her husband answered quietly.

"What man?"

"The trainer recommended to me by John Pastern."

She looked at him for a few moments in silence.

"Is he dead?" she asked, after that brief pause.

"He is."

Her head sank forward upon her breast, and she walked away, quietly
returning to the sofa from which she had arisen.

"I am very sorry for him," she said; "he was not a good man. I am sorry
he was not allowed time to repent of his wickedness."

"You knew him, then?" asked Mrs. Lofthouse, who had expressed unbounded
consternation at the trainer's death.

"Yes; he was in my father's service some years ago."

Mr. Lofthouse's carriage had been waiting ever since eleven o'clock,
and the rector's wife was only too glad to bid her friends good-night,
and to drive away from Mellish Park and its fatal associations; so,
though Colonel Maddison would have preferred stopping to smoke another
cheroot while he discussed the business with John Mellish, he was fain
to submit to feminine authority, and take his seat by his daughter's
side in the comfortable landau, which was an open or a close carriage
as the convenience of its proprietor dictated. The vehicle rolled away
upon the smooth carriage-drive; the servants closed the hall-doors,
and lingered about, whispering to each other, in little groups in
the corridors and on the staircases, waiting until their master and
mistress should have retired for the night. It was difficult to think
that the business of life was to go on just the same though a murder
had been done upon the outskirts of the Park, and even the housekeeper,
a severe matron at ordinary times, yielded to the common influence, and
forgot to drive the maids to their dormitories in the gabled roof.

All was very quiet in the drawing-room where the visitors had left
their host and hostess to hug those ugly skeletons which are put away
in the presence of company. John Mellish walked slowly up and down the
room. Aurora sat staring vacantly at the guttering wax candles in the
old-fashioned silver branches; and Mrs. Powell, with her embroidery in
full working order, threaded her needles and snipped away the fragments
of her delicate cotton as carefully as if there had been no such thing
as crime or trouble in the world, and no higher purpose in life than
the achievement of elaborate devices upon French cambric.

She paused now and then to utter some polite commonplace. She regretted
such an unpleasant catastrophe; she lamented the disagreeable
circumstances of the trainer's death; indeed, she in a manner inferred
that Mr. Conyers had shown himself wanting in good taste and respect
for his employer by the mode of his death; but the point to which she
recurred most frequently was the fact of Aurora's presence in the
grounds at the time of the murder.

"I so much regret that you should have been out of doors at the time,
my dear Mrs. Mellish," she said; "and, as I should imagine from the
direction which you took on leaving the house, actually near the place
where the unfortunate person met his death. It will be so unpleasant
for you to have to appear at the inquest."

"Appear at the inquest!" cried John Mellish, stopping suddenly, and
turning fiercely upon the placid speaker. "Who says that my wife will
have to appear at the inquest?"

"I merely imagined it probable that----"

"Then you'd no business to imagine it, ma'am," retorted Mr. Mellish,
with no very great show of politeness. "My wife will not appear. Who
should ask her to do so? Who should wish her to do so? What has she to
do with to-night's business? or what does she know of it more than you
or I, or any one else in this house?"

Mrs. Powell shrugged her shoulders.

"I thought that, from Mrs. Mellish's previous knowledge of this
unfortunate person, she might be able to throw some light upon his
habits and associations," she suggested mildly.

"Previous knowledge!" roared John. "What knowledge should Mrs. Mellish
have of her father's grooms? What interest should she take in their
habits or associations?"

"Stop," said Aurora, rising and laying her hand lightly on her
husband's shoulder. "My dear, impetuous John, why do you put yourself
into a passion about this business? If they choose to call me as a
witness, I will tell all I know about this man's death; which is
nothing but that I heard a shot fired while I was in the grounds."

She was very pale; but she spoke with a quiet determination, a calm
resolute defiance of the worst that fate could reserve for her.

"I will tell anything that is necessary to tell," she said; "I care
very little what."

With her hand still upon her husband's shoulder, she rested her head on
his breast, like some weary child nestling in its only safe shelter.

Mrs. Powell rose, and gathered together her embroidery in a pretty,
lady-like receptacle of fragile wicker-work. She glided to the door,
selected her candlestick, and then paused on the threshold to bid Mr.
and Mrs. Mellish good night.

"I am sure you must need rest after this terrible affair," she
simpered; "so I will take the initiative. It is nearly one o'clock.
_Good_ night."

If she had lived in the Thane of Cawdor's family, she would have wished
Macbeth and his wife a good night's rest after Duncan's murder; and
would have hoped they would sleep well; she would have curtsied and
simpered amidst the tolling of alarm-bells, the clashing of vengeful
swords, and the blood-bedabbled visages of the drunken grooms. It
must have been the Scottish queen's _companion_ who watched with the
truckling physician, and played the spy upon her mistress's remorseful
wanderings, and told how it was the conscience-stricken lady's habit
to do thus and thus; no one but a genteel mercenary would have been
so sleepless in the dead hours of the night, lying in wait for the
revelation of horrible secrets, the muttered clues to deadly mysteries.

"Thank God, she's gone at last!" cried John Mellish, as the door closed
very softly and very slowly upon Mrs. Powell. "I hate that woman,
Lolly."

Heaven knows I have never called John Mellish a hero; I have never set
him up as a model of manly perfection or infallible virtue; and if he
is not faultless, if he has those flaws and blemishes which seem a
constituent part of our imperfect clay, I make no apology for him; but
trust him to the tender mercies of those who, not being _quite_ perfect
themselves, will, I am sure, be merciful to him. He hated those who
hated his wife, or did her any wrong, however small. He loved those who
loved her. In the great power of his wide affection, all self-esteem
was annihilated. To love her was to love him; to serve her was to do
him treble service; to praise her was to make him vainer than the
vainest school-girl. He freely took upon his shoulders every debt that
she owed, whether of love or of hate; and he was ready to pay either
species of account to the uttermost farthing, and with no mean interest
upon the sum total. "I hate that woman, Lolly," he repeated; "and I
sha'n't be able to stand her much longer."

Aurora did not answer him. She was silent for some moments, and when
she did speak, it was evident that Mrs. Powell was very far away from
her thoughts.

"My poor John!" she said, in a low soft voice, whose melancholy
tenderness went straight to her husband's heart; "my dear, how happy we
were together for a little time! How very happy we were, my poor boy!"

"Always, Lolly," he answered,--"always, my darling."

"No, no, no!" said Aurora suddenly; "only for a little while. What a
horrible fatality has pursued us! what a frightful curse has clung
to me! The curse of disobedience, John; the curse of Heaven upon my
disobedience. To think that this man should have been sent here, and
that he----"

She stopped, shivering violently, and clinging to the faithful breast
that sheltered her.

John Mellish quietly led her to her dressing-room, and placed her in
the care of her maid.

"Your mistress has been very much agitated by this night's business,"
he said to the girl; "keep her as quiet as you possibly can."

Mrs. Mellish's bedroom, a comfortable and roomy apartment, with a low
ceiling and deep bay windows, opened into a morning-room, in which
it was John's habit to read the newspapers and sporting periodicals,
while his wife wrote letters, drew pencil sketches of dogs and horses,
or played with her favourite Bow-wow. They had been very childish and
idle and happy in this pretty chintz-hung chamber; and going into it
to-night in utter desolation of heart, Mr. Mellish felt his sorrows all
the more bitterly for the remembrance of those bygone joys. The shaded
lamp was lighted on the morocco-covered writing-table, and glimmered
softly on the picture-frames, caressing the pretty modern paintings,
the simple, domestic-story pictures which adorned the subdued gray
walls. This wing of the old house had been refurnished for Aurora, and
there was not a chair or a table in the room that had not been chosen
by John Mellish with a special view to the comfort and the pleasure of
his wife. The upholsterer had found him a liberal employer, the painter
and the sculptor a noble patron. He had walked about the Royal Academy
with a catalogue and a pencil in his hand, choosing all the "pretty"
pictures for the ornamentation of his wife's rooms. A lady in a scarlet
riding-habit and three-cornered beaver hat, a white pony, and a pack of
greyhounds, a bit of stone terrace and sloping turf, a flower-bed, and
a fountain, made poor John's idea of a pretty picture; and he had half
a dozen variations of such familiar subjects in his spacious mansion.
He sat down to-night, and looked hopelessly round the pleasant chamber,
wandering whether Aurora and he would ever be happy again: wondering if
this dark, mysterious, storm-threatening cloud would ever pass from
the horizon of his life, and leave the future bright and clear.

"I have not been good enough," he thought; "I have intoxicated myself
with my happiness, and have made no return for it. What am I that I
should have won the woman I love for my wife, while other men are
laying down the best desires of their hearts a willing sacrifice, and
going out to fight the battle for their fellow-men? What an indolent
good-for-nothing wretch I have been! How blind, how ungrateful, how
undeserving!"

John Mellish buried his face in his broad hands, and repented of
the carelessly happy life which he had led for one-and-thirty
thoughtless years. He had been awakened from his unthinking bliss by a
thunder-clap, that had shattered the fairy castle of his happiness, and
laid it level with the ground; and in his simple faith he looked into
his own life for the cause of the ruin which had overtaken him. Yes,
it must be so; he had not deserved his happiness, he had not earned
his good fortune. Have you ever thought of this, ye simple country
squires, who give blankets and beef to your poor neighbours in the
cruel winter-time, who are good and gentle masters, faithful husbands,
and tender fathers, and who lounge away your easy lives in the pleasant
places of this beautiful earth? Have you ever thought that, when all
our good deeds have been gathered together, and set in the balance,
the sum of them will be very small when set against the benefits you
have received? It will be a very small percentage which you will yield
your Master for the ten talents intrusted to your care. Remember John
Howard, fever-stricken and dying; Mrs. Fry labouring in criminal
prisons; Florence Nightingale in the bare hospital chambers, in the
close and noxious atmosphere, amongst the dead and the dying. These
are the people who return cent. per cent. for the gifts intrusted to
them. These are the saints whose good deeds shine amongst the stars for
ever and ever; these are the indefatigable workers who, when the toil
and turmoil of the day is done, hear the Master's voice in the still
even-time; welcoming them to His rest.

John Mellish, looking back at his life, humbly acknowledged that it had
been a comparatively useless one. He had distributed happiness to the
people who had come into his way; but he had never gone out of his way
to make people happy. I dare say that Dives was a liberal master to his
own servants, although he did not trouble himself to look after the
beggar who sat at his gates. The Israelite who sought instruction from
the lips of inspiration was willing to do his duty to his neighbour,
but had yet to learn the broad signification of that familiar epithet;
and poor John, like the rich young man, was ready to serve his Master
faithfully, but had yet to learn the manner of his service.

"If I could save _her_ from the shadow of sorrow or disgrace, I would
start to-morrow barefoot on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem," he thought.
"What is there that I would not do for her? what sacrifice would seem
too great? what burden too heavy to bear?"


END OF VOL. II.





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