Aurora Floyd

by M. E. Braddon

  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 génie 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 't is."

  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, among 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 XXII.

  STILL CONSTANT.

  Mr. James Conyers took his breakfast in his own apartment upon the morning of his visit to Doncaster, and Stephen Hargraves waited upon him, carrying him a basin of muddy coffee, and enduring his ill humor 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 keens 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' 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, the 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 those 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 Hockheimer," 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 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 upon 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 naught 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 Hargrave'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 was n'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' 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 lad
y'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 can not—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 half-penny 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 in 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 upward 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 was n'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 blue-bottle fly blundering and wheeling about among 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, it 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 tap-room 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 Conjurer; 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 among 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 backward 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 parti-colored 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-darknesses 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 water-fall 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 veranda 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 around and about the house, ventured into the garden, and crept stealthily toward 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 earshot 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 by the pleasing occupation of inspecting and cleaning the fire-arms, which formed the chief ornaments 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 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 thrill 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 shutters a little way farther 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.