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. “Why 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 among 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 executions waiting to give the coup de grace.
“Did you not hear me knock?” she asked.
“No,” said Aurora, “you did n’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 did n’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 to 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 northward, 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 learned 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 northward 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 parlor 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 every tone; “as you were n’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 Cristo 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 labor? 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 cloth
es 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’s 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 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 honey-suckle, 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, homeward, as if the unchanging load-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 favor 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,” an
swered 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 may n’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 habitual 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 onward, looking always toward that quarter in which the polestar 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 23
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.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 147
