Mrs. Walter Powell, having been treated by most of her employers as a species of upper servant, had acquired all the instincts of a servant, and she determined to leave no means untried in order to discover the cause of Aurora’s illness, which the doctor had darkly hinted to her had more to do with the mind than the body. John Mellish had ordered a carpenter to repair the lodge at the north gate for the accommodation of James Conyers, and John’s old trainer, Langley, was to receive his colleague and introduce him to the stables.
The new trainer made his appearance at the lodge-gates in the glowing July sunset; he was accompanied by no less a person than Steeve Hargraves, the softy, who had been lurking about the station upon the look-out for a job, and who had been engaged by Mr. Conyers to carry his portmanteau.
To the surprise of the trainer, Stephen Hargraves set down his burden at the Park gates.
“You’ll have to find some one else to carry it th’ rest ‘t’ ro-ad,” he said, touching his greasy cap, and extending his broad palm to receive the expected payment.
Mr. James Conyers was rather a dashing fellow, with no small amount of that quality which is generally termed “swagger,” so he turned sharply round upon the softy and asked him what the devil he meant.
“I mean that I may n’t go inside yon gates,” muttered Stephen Hargraves; “I mean that I’ve been turned out of yon place that I’ve lived in, man and boy, for forty years — turned out like a dog, neck and crop.”
Mr. Conyers threw away the stump of his cigar, and stared superciliously at the softy.
“What does the man mean?” he asked of the woman who had opened the gates.
“Why, poor fellow, he’s a bit fond, sir, and him and Mrs. Mellish did n’t get on very well; she has a rare spirit, and I have heard that she horsewhipped him for beating her favorite dog. Anyways, master turned him out of his service.”
“Because my lady had horsewhipped him. Servants’-hall justice all the world over,” said the trainer, laughing, and lighting a second cigar from a metal fusee-box in his waistcoat-pocket.
“Yes, that’s justice, a’n’t it?” the softy said, eagerly. “You would n’t like to be turned out of a place as you’d lived in forty year, would you? But Mrs. Mellish has a rare spirit, bless her pretty face!”
The blessing enunciated by Mr. Stephen Hargraves had such a very ominous sound that the new trainer, who was evidently a shrewd, observant fellow, took his cigar from his mouth on purpose to stare at him. The white face, lighted up by a pair of red eyes with a dim glimmer in them, was by no means the most agreeable of countenances; but Mr. Conyers looked at the man for some moments, holding him by the collar of his coat in order to do so with more deliberation; then, pushing the softy away with an affably contemptuous gesture, he said, laughing:
“You’re a character, my friend, it strikes me, and not too safe a character either. I’m dashed if I should like to offend you. There’s a shilling for your trouble, my man,” he added, tossing the money into Steeve’s extended palm with careless dexterity.
“I suppose I can leave my portmanteau here till to-morrow, ma’am?” he said, turning to the woman at the lodge. “I’d carry it down to the house myself, if I was n’t lame.”
He was such a handsome fellow, and had such an easy, careless manner, that the simple Yorkshirewoman was quite subdued by his fascinations.
“Leave it here, sir, and welcome,” she said, courtesying, “and my master shall take it to the house for you as soon as he comes in. Begging your pardon, sir, but I suppose you’re the new gentleman that’s expected in the stables?”
“Precisely.”
“Then I was to tell you, sir, that they’ve fitted up the north lodge for you; but you was to please go straight to the house, and the housekeeper was to make you comfortable and give you a bed for to-night.”
Mr. Conyers nodded, thanked her, wished her good-night, and limped slowly away, through the shadows of the evening, and under the shelter of the overarching trees. He stepped aside from the broad carriage-drive on to the dewy turf that bordered it, choosing the softest, mossiest places, with a sybarite’s instinct. Look at him as he takes his slow way under those glorious branches, in the holy stillness of the summer sunset, his face sometimes lighted by the low, lessening rays, sometimes dark with the shadows from the leaves above his head. He is wonderfully handsome — wonderfully and perfectly handsome — the very perfection of physical beauty; faultless in proportion, as if each line in his face and form had been measured by the sculptor’s rule, and carved by the sculptor’s chisel. He is a man about whose beauty there can be no dispute, whose perfection servant-maids and duchesses must alike confess, albeit they are not bound to admire; yet it is rather a sensual type of beauty, this splendor of form and color, unallied to any special charm of expression. Look at him now, as he stops to rest, leaning against the trunk of a tree, and smoking his big cigar with easy enjoyment. He is thinking. His dark blue eyes, deeper in color by reason of the thick black lashes which fringe them, are half closed, and have a dreamy, semi-sentimental expression, which might lead you to suppose the man was musing upon the beauty of the summer sunset. He is thinking of his losses on the Chester Cup, the wages he is to get from John Mellish, and the perquisites likely to appertain to the situation. You give him credit for thoughts to match with his dark, violet-hued eyes, and the exquisite modelling of his mouth and chin; you give him a mind as æsthetically perfect as his face and figure, and you recoil on discovering what a vulgar every-day sword may lurk under that beautiful scabbard. Mr. James Conyers is, perhaps, no worse than other men of his station, but he is decidedly no better. He is only very much handsomer; and you have no right to be angry with him because his opinions and sentiments are exactly what they would have been if he had had red hair and a pug nose. With what wonderful wisdom has George Eliot told us that people are not any better because they have long eye-lashes! Yet it must be that there is something anomalous in this outward beauty and inward ugliness; for, in spite of all experience, we revolt against it, and are incredulous to the last, believing that the palace which is outwardly so splendid can scarcely be ill furnished within. Heaven help the woman who sells her heart for a handsome face, and awakes, when the bargain has been struck, to discover the foolishness of such an exchange.
It took Mr. Conyers a long while to walk from the lodge to the house. I do not know how, technically, to describe his lameness. He had fallen, with his horse, in the Prussian steeple-chase, which had so nearly cost him his life, and his left leg had been terribly injured. The bones had been set by wonderful German surgeons, who put the shattered leg together as if it had been a Chinese puzzle, but who, with all their skill, could not prevent the contraction of the sinews, which had left the jockey lamed for life, and no longer fit to ride in any race whatever. He was of the middle height, and weighed something over eleven stone, and had never ridden except in Continental steeple-chases.
Mr. James Conyers paused a few paces from the house, and gravely contemplated the irregular pile of buildings before him.
“A snug crib,” he muttered; “plenty of tin hereabouts, I should think, from the look of the place.”
Being ignorant of the geography of the neighborhood, and being, moreover, by no means afflicted by an excess of modesty, Mr. Conyers went straight to the principal door, and rang the bell sacred to visitors and the family.
He was admitted by a grave old man-servant, who, after deliberately inspecting his brown shooting-coat, colored shirt-front, and felt hat, asked him, with considerable asperity, what he was pleased to want.
Mr. Conyers explained that he was the new trainer, and that he wished to see the housekeeper; but he had hardly finished doing so when a door in an angle of the hall was softly opened, and Mrs. Walter Powell peeped out of the snug little apartment sacred to her hours of privacy.
“Perhaps the young man will be so good as to step in here,” addressing herself apparently to space, but indirectly to James Conyers.
The young man took off his hat, uncovering a mass of luxuriant brown curls, and limped across the hall in obedience to Mrs. Powell’s invitation.
“I dare say I shall be able to give you any information you require.”
James Conyers smiled, wondering whether the bilious-looking party, as he mentally designated Mrs. Powell, could give him any information about the York summer meeting; but he bowed politely, and said he merely wanted to know where he was to hang out — he stopped and apologized — where he was to sleep that night, and whether there were any letters for him. But Mrs. Powell was by no means inclined to let him off so cheaply. She set to work to pump him, and labored so assiduously that she soon exhausted that very small amount of intelligence which he was disposed to afford her, being perfectly aware of the process to which he was subjected, and more than equal to the lady in dexterity. The ensign’s widow, therefore, ascertained little more than that Mr. Conyers was a perfect stranger to John Mellish and his wife, neither of whom he had ever seen.
Having failed to gain much by this interview, Mrs. Powell was anxious to bring it to a speedy termination.
“Perhaps you would like a glass of wine after your walk?” she said; “I’ll ring for some, and I can inquire at the same time about your letters. I dare say you are anxious to hear from the relatives you have left at home.”
Mr. Conyers smiled for the second time. He had neither had a home nor any relatives to speak of since the most infantine period of his existence, but had been thrown upon the world a sharp-witted adventurer at seven or eight years old. The “relatives” for whose communication he was looking out so eagerly were members of the humbler class of bookmen with whom he did business.
The servant despatched by Mrs. Powell returned with a decanter of sherry and about half a dozen letters for Mr. Conyers.
“You’d better bring the lamp, William,” said Mrs. Powell, as the man left the room, “for I’m sure you’ll never be able to read your letters by this light,” she added politely to Mr. Conyers.
The fact was, that Mrs. Powell, afflicted by that diseased curiosity of which I have spoken, wanted to know what kind of correspondents these were whose letters the trainer was so anxious to receive, and sent for the lamp in order that she might get the full benefit of any scraps of information to be got at by rapid glances and dexterously stolen peeps.
The servant brought a brilliant camphene lamp, and Mr. Conyers, not at all abashed by Mrs. Powell’s condescension, drew his chair close to the table, and, after tossing off a glass of sherry, settled himself to the perusal of his letters.
The ensign’s widow, with some needle-work in her hand, sat directly opposite to him at the small round table, with nothing but the pedestal of the lamp between them.
James Conyers took up the first letter, examined the superscription and seal, tore open the envelope, read the brief communication upon half a sheet of note-paper, and thrust it into his waistcoat-pocket. Mrs. Powell, using her eyes to the utmost, saw nothing but a few lines in a scratchy, plebeian handwriting, and a signature which, seen at a disadvantage upside down, did n’t look unlike “Johnson.” The second envelope contained only a tissue-paper betting-list; the third held a dirty scrap of paper with a few words scrawled in pencil; but at sight of the uppermost envelope of the remaining three Mr. James Conyers started as if he had been shot. Mrs. Powell looked from the face of the trainer to the superscription of the letter, and was scarcely less surprised than Mr. Conyers. The superscription was in the handwriting of Aurora Mellish.
It was a peculiar hand — a hand about which there could be no mistake; not an elegant Italian hand, sloping, slender, and feminine, but large and bold, with ponderous up-strokes and down-strokes, easy to recognize at a greater distance than that which separated Mrs. Powell from the trainer. There was no room for any doubt. Mrs. Mellish had written to her husband’s servant, and the man was evidently familiar with her hand, yet surprised at receiving her letter.
He tore open the envelope, and read the contents eagerly twice over, frowning darkly as he read.
Mrs. Powell suddenly remembered that she had left part of her needle-work upon a chiffonnier behind the young man’s chair, and rose quietly to fetch it. He was so much engrossed by the letter in his hand that he was not aware of the pale face which peered for one brief moment over his shoulder, as the faded, hungry eyes stole a glance at the writing on the page.
The letter was written on the first side of a sheet of note-paper, with only a few words carried over to the second page. It was this second page which Mrs. Powell saw. The words written at the top of the leaf were these: “Above all, express no surprise. — A.”
There was no ordinary conclusion to the letter; no other signature than this big capital A.
CHAPTER 17
The Trainer’s Messenger.
Mr. James Conyers made himself very much at home at Mellish Park. Poor Langley, the invalid trainer, who was a Yorkshireman, felt himself almost bewildered by the easy insolence of the town-bred trainer. He looked so much too handsome and dashing for his office that the grooms and stable-boys bowed down to him, and paid court to him as they had never done to simple Langley, who had been very often obliged to enforce his commands with a horsewhip or a serviceable leather strap. James Conyers’ handsome face was a capital with which that gentleman knew very well how to trade, and he took the full amount of interest that was to be got for it without compunction. I am sorry to be obliged to confess that this man, who had sat in the artists’ studios and the life academies for Apollo and Antinous, was selfish to the backbone; and, so long as he was well fed, and clothed, and housed, and provided for, cared very little whence the food and clothing came, or who kept the house that sheltered him, or filled the purse which he jingled in his trowsers-pocket. Heaven forbid that I should be called upon for his biography. I only know that he sprang from the mire of the streets, like some male Aphrodite rising from the mud; that he was a blackleg in the gutter at four years of age, and a welsher in the matter of marbles and hardbake before his fifth birthday. Even then he was for ever reaping the advantage of a handsome face; for tender-hearted matrons, who would have been deaf to the cries of a snub-nosed urchin, petted and compassionated the pretty boy.
In his earliest childhood he learned therefore to trade upon his beauty, and to get the most that he could for that merchandise; and he grew up utterly unprincipled, and carried his handsome face out into the world to help him on to fortune. He was extravagant, lazy, luxurious, and selfish; but he had that easy, indifferent grace of manner which passes with shallow observers for good-nature. He would not have gone three paces out of his way to serve his best friend; but he smiled and showed his handsome white teeth with equal liberality to all his acquaintance, and took credit for being a frank, generous-hearted fellow on the strength of that smile. He was skilled in the uses of that gilt gingerbread of generosity which so often passes current for sterling gold. He was dexterous in the handling of those cogged dice which have all the rattle of the honest ivories. A slap on the back, a hearty shake of the hand, often went as far from him as the loan of a sovereign from another man; and Jim Conyers was firmly believed in by the doubtful gentlemen with whom he associated as a good-natured fellow who was nobody’s enemy but his own. He had that superficial Cockney cleverness which is generally called knowledge of the world — knowledge of the worst side of the world — and utter ignorance of all that is noble upon earth, it might perhaps be more justly called; he had matriculated in the streets of London, and graduated on the race-course; he had never read any higher literature than the Sunday papers and the Racing Calendar, but he contrived to make a very little learning go a long way, and was generally spoken of by his employers as a superior young man, considerably above his station.
Mr. Conyers expressed himself very well contented with the rustic lodge which had been chosen for his dwelling-house. He condescendingly looked on while the stable-lads carried the furniture selected for him by the housekeeper
from the spare servants’ rooms from the house to the lodge, and assisted in the arrangement of the tiny rustic chambers, limping about in his shirt-sleeves, and showing himself wonderfully handy with a hammer and a pocket full of nails. He sat upon a table and drank beer with such charming affability that the stable-lads were as grateful to him as if he had treated them to that beverage. Indeed, seeing the frank cordiality with which James Conyers smote the lads upon the back, and prayed them to be active with the can, it was almost difficult to remember that he was not the giver of the feast, and that it was Mr. John Mellish who would have to pay the brewer’s bill. What, among all the virtues which adorn this earth, can be more charming than the generosity of upper servants! With what hearty hospitality they pass the bottle! how liberally they throw the seven-shilling gunpowder into the teapot! how unsparingly they spread the twenty-penny fresh butter on the toast! and what a glorious welcome they give to the droppers-in of the servants’ hall! It is scarcely wonderful that the recipients of their bounty forget that it is the master of the household who will be called upon for the expenses of the banquet, and who will look ruefully at the total of the quarter’s housekeeping.
It was not to be supposed that so dashing a fellow as Mr. James Conyers could, in the lodging-house-keeper’s patois, “do for” himself. He required a humble drudge to black his boots, make his bed, boil his kettle, cook his dinner, and keep the two little chambers at the lodge in decent order. Casting about in a reflective mood for a fitting person for this office, his recreant fancy hit upon Steeve Hargraves, the softy. He was sitting upon the sill of an open window in the little parlor of the lodge, smoking a cigar and drinking out of a can of beer, when this idea came into his head. He was so tickled by the notion that he took his cigar from his mouth in order to laugh at his case.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 137