Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  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 among 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 toward 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-colored dress, which shimmered in the dusk; the man leaning on a stick, and obviously very lame.

  “It is 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 toward 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 ever 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 laces and ribbons, or coroners’ 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 bark 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 is n’t her husband, surely, for he don’t look like a gentleman. But if he a’n’t 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, would n’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 bat 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 toward 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 among 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 farther, 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 is n’t. I ought to have knocked him down, and I would have done it too,” added the captain, resolutely, “if it had n’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 among 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 a’n’t goin’ 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 would n’t keep you much longer, for I thought you’d think I was dead.”

  “I did a’most,” answered the charioteer, candidly. “My word, a’n’t 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, a’n’t she?” asked Samuel, with affected carelessness.

  The young man from the “Reindeer” shook his head dubiously.

  “I doant know about that,” he said; “she’s a rare favorite 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 did n’t exactly harmonize with his idea of the beautiful 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 talkin’ 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 had 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 into 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 amid 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 were n’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 among 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 croaki
ng 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 stooped 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 tonight.

  “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.