Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Mrs. Powell paused, almost terrified by her unlooked-for discovery.

  What, in the name of all that was darkly mysterious, could Mrs. Mellish have to do between nine and ten o’clock on the north side of the Park — the wildly-kept, deserted north side, in which, from year’s end to year’s end, no one but the keepers ever walked.

  The blood rushed hotly up to Mrs. Powell’s pale face as she suddenly remembered that the disused, dilapidated lodge upon this north side had been given to the new trainer as a residence. Remembering this was nothing, but remembering this in connection with that mysterious letter signed “A” was enough to send a thrill of savage, horrible joy through the dull veins of the dependent. What should she do? Follow Mrs. Mellish, and discover where she was going? How far would this be a safe thing to attempt?

  She turned back and looked once more through the windows of John’s room. He was still bending over the papers, still in an apparently hopeless confusion of mind. There seemed little chance of his business being finished very quickly. The starless night and her dark dress alike sheltered the spy from observation.

  “If I were close behind her, she would never see me,” she thought.

  She struck across the lawn to the iron gate, and passed into the Park. The brambles and the tangled undergrowth caught at her dress as she paused for a moment looking about her in the summer night.

  There was no trace of Aurora’s white figure among the leafy alleys stretching in wild disorder before her.

  “I’ll not attempt to find the path she took,” thought Mrs. Powell; “I know where to find her.”

  She groped her way into the narrow footpath leading to the lodge. She was not sufficiently familiar with the place to take the short cut which the softy had made for himself through the grass that afternoon, and she was some time walking from the iron gate to the lodge.

  The front windows of this rustic lodge faced the road and the disused north gates; the back of the building looked toward the path down which Mrs. Powell went, and the two small windows in this back wall were both dark.

  The ensign’s widow crept softly round to the front, looked about her cautiously, and listened. There was no sound but the occasional rustle of a leaf, tremulous even in the still atmosphere, as if by some internal prescience of the coming storm. With a slow, careful footstep, she stole toward the little rustic window, and looked into the room within.

  She had not been mistaken when she had said that she knew where to find Aurora.

  Mrs. Mellish was standing with her back to the window. Exactly opposite to her sat James Conyers, the trainer, in an easy attitude, and with his pipe in his mouth. The little table was between them, and the one candle which lighted the room was drawn close to Mr. Conyers’ elbow, and had evidently been used by him for the lighting of his pipe. Aurora was speaking. The eager listener could hear her voice, but not her words; and she could see by the trainer’s face that he was listening intently. He was listening intently; but a dark frown contracted his handsome eyebrows, and it was very evident that he was not too well satisfied with the bent of the conversation.

  He looked up when Aurora ceased speaking, shrugged his shoulders, and took his pipe out of his mouth. Mrs. Powell, with her pale face close against the window-pane, watched him intently.

  He pointed with a careless gesture to an empty chair near Aurora, but she shook her head contemptuously, and suddenly turned toward the window; so suddenly that Mrs. Powell had scarcely time to recoil into the darkness before Aurora had unfastened the iron latch and flung the narrow casement open.

  “I can not endure this intolerable heat,” she exclaimed, impatiently; “I have said all I have to say, and need only wait for your answer.”

  “You don’t give me much time for consideration,” he said, with an insolent coolness which was in strange contrast to the restless vehemence of her manner. “What sort of answer do you want?”

  “Yes or no.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “No, nothing more. You know my conditions; they are all written here,” she added, putting her hand upon an open paper which lay upon the table; “they are all written clearly enough for a child to understand. Will you accept them? Yes or no?”

  “That depends upon circumstances,” he answered, filling his pipe, and looking admiringly at the nail of his little finger as he pressed the tobacco into the bowl.

  “Upon what circumstances?”

  “Upon the inducement which you offer, my dear Mrs. Mellish.”

  “You mean the price?”

  “That’s a low expression,” he said, laughing; “but I suppose we both mean the same thing. The inducement must be a strong one which will make me do all that” — he pointed to the written paper—”and it must take the form of solid cash. How much is it to be?”

  “That is for you to say. Remember what I have told you. Decline to-night, and I telegraph to my father to-morrow morning, telling him to alter his will.”

  “Suppose the old gentleman should be carried off in the interim, and leave that pleasant sheet of parchment standing as it is. I hear that he’s old and feeble; it might be worth while calculating the odds upon such an event. I’ve risked my money on a worst chance before to-night.”

  She turned upon him with so dark a frown as he said this that the insolently heartless words died upon his lips, and left him looking at her gravely.

  “Egad,” he said, “you’re as great a devil as ever you were. I doubt if that is n’t a good offer after all. Give me ten thousand down, and I’ll take it.”

  “Ten thousand pounds!”

  “I ought to have said twenty, but I’ve always stood in my own light.”

  Mrs. Powell, crouching down beneath the open casement, had heard every word of this brief dialogue; but at this juncture, half-forgetful of all danger in her eagerness to listen, she raised her head until it was nearly on a level with the window-sill. As she did so, she recoiled with a sudden thrill of terror. She felt a puff of hot breath upon her cheek, and the garments of a man rustling against her own.

  She was not the only listener.

  The second spy was Stephen Hargraves, the softy.

  “Hush!” he whispered, grasping Mrs. Powell by the wrist, and pinning her in her crouching attitude by the muscular force of his horny hand; “it’s only me, Steeve the Softy, you know; the stable-helper that she” (he hissed out the personal pronoun with such a furious impetus that it seemed to whistle sharply through the stillness)—”the fondy that she horsewhipped. I know you, and I know you’re here to listen. He sent me into Doncaster to fetch this” (he pointed to a bottle under his arm); “he thought it would take me four or five hours to go and get back; but I ran all the way, for I knew there was summat oop.”

  He wiped his streaming face with the ends of his coarse neckerchief as he finished speaking. His breath came in panting gasps, and Mrs. Powell could hear the laborious beating of his heart in the stillness.

  “I won’t tell o’ you,” he said, “and you won’t tell o’ me. I’ve got the stripes upon my shoulder where she cut me with the whip to this day; I look at ‘m sometimes, and they help to keep me in mind. She’s a fine madam, a’n’t she, and a great lady too? Ay, sure she is; but she comes to meet her husband’s servant on the sly, after dark, for all that. Maybe the day is n’t far off when she’ll be turned away from these gates, and warned off this ground, and the merciful Lord send that I live to see it. Hush!”

  With her wrist still pinioned in his strong grasp, he motioned her to be silent, and bent his pale face forward, every feature rigid in the listening expectancy of his hungry gaze.

  “Listen,” he whispered; “listen! Every fresh word damns her deeper than the last.”

  The trainer was the first to speak after this pause in the dialogue within the cottage. He had quietly smoked out his pipe, and had emptied the ashes of his tobacco upon the table before he took up the thread of the conversation at the point at which he had dropped it.

  �
��Ten thousand pounds,” he said; “that is the offer, and I think it ought to be taken freely. Ten thousand down, in Bank of England notes (fives and tens; higher figures might be awkward), or sterling coin of the realm. You understand; ten thousand down. That’s my alternative; or I leave this place to-morrow morning, with all belonging to me.”

  “By which course you would get nothing,” said Mrs. John Mellish, quietly.

  “Should n’t I? What does the chap in the play get for his trouble when the blackamoor smothers his wife? I should get nothing — but my revenge upon a tiger-cat whose claws have left a mark upon me that I shall carry to my grave.” He lifted his hair with a careless gesture of his hand, and pointed to a scar upon his forehead — a white mark, barely visible in the dim light of the tallow-candle. “I’m a good-natured, easy-going fellow, Mrs. John Mellish, but I don’t forget. Is it to be the ten thousand pounds, or war to the knife?”

  Mrs. Powell waited eagerly for Aurora’s answer; but before it came a round, heavy rain-drop pattered upon the light hair of the ensign’s widow. The hood of her cloak had fallen back, leaving her head uncovered. This one large drop was the warning of the coming storm. The signal peal of thunder rumbled slowly and hoarsely in the distance, and a pale flash of lightning trembled upon the white faces of the two listeners.

  “Let me go,” whispered Mrs. Powell, “let me go; I must get back to the house before the rain begins.”

  The softy slowly relaxed his iron grip upon her wrist. He had held it unconsciously in his utter abstraction to all things except the two speakers in the cottage.

  Mrs. Powell rose from her knees, and crept noiselessly away from the lodge. She remembered the vital necessity of getting back to the house before Aurora, and of avoiding the shower. Her wet garments would betray her if she did not succeed in escaping the coming storm. She was of spare, wizen figure, encumbered with no superfluous flesh, and she ran rapidly along the narrow sheltered pathway leading to the iron gate through which she had followed Aurora.

  The heavy rain-drops fell at long intervals upon the leaves. A second and a third peal of thunder rattled along the earth like the horrible roar of some hungry animal creeping nearer and nearer to its prey. Blue flashes of faint lightning lit up the tangled intricacies of the wood, but the fullest fury of the storm had not yet burst forth.

  The rain-drops came at shorter intervals as Mrs. Powell passed out of the wood, through the little iron gate; faster still as she hurried across the lawn; faster yet as she reached the lobby-door, which she had left ajar an hour before, and sat down panting upon a little bench within, to recover her breath before she went any farther. She was still sitting on this bench, when the fourth peal of thunder shook the low roof above her head, and the rain dropped from the starless sky with such a rushing impetus that it seemed as if a huge trap-door had been opened in the heavens, and a celestial ocean let down to flood the earth.

  “I think my lady will be nicely caught,” muttered Mrs. Walter Powell.

  She threw her cloak aside upon the lobby-bench, and went through a passage leading to the hall. One of the servants was shutting the hall-door.

  “Have you shut the drawing-room windows, Wilson?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am; I am afraid Mrs. Mellish is out in the rain. Jarvis is getting ready to go and look for her, with a lantern and the gig-umbrella.”

  “Then Jarvis can stop where he is; Mrs. Mellish came in half an hour ago. You may shut all the windows, and close the house for the night.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “By the by, what o’clock is it, Wilson? My watch is slow.”

  “A quarter past ten, ma’am, by the dining-room clock.”

  The man locked the hall-door, and put up an immense iron bar, which worked with some rather complicated machinery, and had a bell hanging at one end of it, for the frustration of all burglarious and designing ruffians.

  From the hall the man went to the drawing-room, where he carefully fastened the long range of windows; from the drawing-room to the lobby; and from the lobby to the dining-room, where he locked the half-glass door opening into the garden. This being done, all communication between the house and the garden was securely cut off.

  “He shall know of her goings on, at any rate,” thought Mrs. Powell, as she dogged the footsteps of the servant to see that he did his work. The Mellish household did not take very kindly to this deputy mistress; and when the footman went back to the servants’ hall, he informed his colleagues that SHE was pryin’ and pokin’ about sharper than hever, and watchin’ of a feller like a hold ‘ouse-cat. Mr. Wilson was a Cockney, and had been newly imported into the establishment.

  When the ensign’s widow had seen the last bolt driven home to its socket, and the last key turned in its lock, she went back to the drawing-room and seated herself at the lamp-lit table, with some delicate morsel of old-maidish fancy-work, which seemed to be the converse of Penelope’s embroidery, as it appeared to advance at night and retrograde by day. She had hastily smoothed her hair and rearranged her dress, and she looked as uncomfortably neat as when she came down to breakfast in the fresh primness of her matutinal toilette.

  She had been sitting at her work for about ten minutes when John Mellish entered the room, emerging weary but triumphant from his struggle with the simple rules of multiplication and substraction. Mr. Mellish had evidently suffered severely in the contest. His thick brown hair was tumbled into a rough mass that stood nearly upright upon his head, his cravat was untied, and his shirt collar was thrown open for the relief of his capacious throat; and these and many other marks of the struggle he bore upon him when he entered the drawing-room.

  “I’ve broken loose from school at last, Mrs. Powell,” he said, flinging his big frame upon one of the sofas, to the imminent peril of the German spring cushions; “I’ve broken away before the flag dropped, for Langley would have liked to keep me there till midnight. He followed me to the door of this room with fourteen bushels of oats that was down in the corn-chandler’s account and was not down in the book he keeps to check the corn-chandler. Why the doose don’t he put it down in his book and make it right, then, I ask, instead of bothering me? What’s the good of his keeping an account to check the corn-chandler if he don’t make his account the same as the corn-chandler’s? But it’s all over,” he added, with a great sigh of relief, “it’s all over; and all I can say is, I hope the new trainer is n’t honest.”

  “Do you know much of the new trainer, Mr. Mellish?” asked Mrs. Powell, blandly, rather as if she wished to amuse her employer by the exertion of her conversational powers than for the gratification of any mundane curiosity.

  “Doosed little,” answered John indifferently. “I have n’t even seen the fellow yet; but John Pastern recommended him, and he’s sure to be all right; besides, Aurora knows the man; he was in her father’s service once.”

  “Oh, indeed!” said Mrs. Powell, giving the two insignificant words a significant little jerk; “oh, indeed! Mrs. Mellish knows him, does she? Then of course he is a trustworthy person. He’s a remarkably handsome young man.”

  “Remarkably handsome, is he?” said Mr. Mellish, with a careless laugh. “Then I suppose all the maids will be falling in love with him, and neglecting their work to look out of the windows that open on to the stable-yard, hey? That’s the sort of thing when a man has a handsome groom, a’n’t it? Susan and Sarah, and all the rest of ‘em, take to cleaning the windows, and wearing new ribbons in their caps?”

  “I don’t know anything about that, Mr. Mellish,” answered the ensign’s widow, simpering over her work as if the question they were discussing was so very far away that it was impossible for her to be serious about it; “but my experience has thrown me into a very large number of families.” (She said this with perfect truth, as she had occupied so many situations that her enemies had come to declare she was unable to remain in any one household above a twelvemonth, by reason of her employer’s discovery of her real nature.) “I have occupi
ed positions of trust and confidence,” continued Mrs. Powell, “and I regret to say that I have seen much domestic misery arise from the employment of handsome servants, whose appearance and manners are superior to their station. Mr. Conyers is not at all the sort of person I should like to see in a household in which I had the charge of young ladies.”

  A sick, half-shuddering faintness crept through John’s herculean frame as Mrs. Powell expressed herself thus; so vague a feeling that he scarcely knew whether it was mental or physical, any better than he knew what it was that he disliked in this speech of the ensign’s widow. The feeling was as transient as it was vague. John’s honest blue eyes looked wonderingly round the room.

  “Where’s Aurora?” he said; “gone to bed?”

  “I believe Mrs. Mellish has retired to rest,” Mrs. Powell answered.

  “Then I shall go too. The place is as dull as a dungeon without her,” said Mr. Mellish, with agreeable candor. “Perhaps you’ll be good enough to make me a glass of brandy and water before I go, Mrs. Powell, for I’ve got the cold shivers after those accounts.”

  He rose to ring the bell; but, before he had gone three paces from the sofa, an impatient knocking at the closed outer shutters of one of the windows arrested his footsteps.

  “Who, in mercy’s name, is that?” he exclaimed, staring at the direction from which the noise came, but not attempting to respond to the summons.

  Mrs. Powell looked up to listen, with a face expressive of nothing but innocent wonder.

  The knocking was repeated more loudly and impatiently than before.

  “It must be one of the servants,” muttered John; “but why does n’t he go round to the back of the house? I can’t keep the poor devil out upon such a night as this, though,” he added, good-naturedly, unfastening the window as he spoke. The sashes opened inward, the Venetian shutters outward. He pushed these shutters open, and looked out into the darkness and the rain.