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.