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.