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 lady’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, cl
osing 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.
Delicious as the guns were, and delightful though it was to draw one of the revolvers up to his shoulder, and take aim at an imaginary pheasant, the pistols were even still more attractive, for with them he could not refrain from taking imaginary aim at his enemies; sometimes at James Conyers, who had snubbed and abused him, and had made the bread of dependence bitter to him; very often at Aurora; once or twice at poor John Mellish; but always with a darkness upon his pallid face which would have promised little mercy had the pistol been loaded and the enemy near at hand.
There was one pistol, a small one, and an odd one apparently, for he could not find its fellow, which took a peculiar hold upon his fancy. It was as pretty as a lady’s toy, and small enough to be carried in a lady’s pocket; but the hammer snapped upon the nipple, when the softy pulled the trigger, with a sound that evidently meant mischief.
“To think that such a little thing as this could kill a big man like you,” muttered Mr. Hargraves, with a jerk of his head in the direction of the north lodge.
He had this pistol still in his hand when the door was suddenly opened, and Aurora Mellish stood upon the threshold.
She spoke as she opened the door, almost before she was in the room.
“John, dear,” she said, “Mrs. Powell wants to know whether Colonel Maddison dines here to-day with the Lofthouses.”
She drew back with a shudder that shook her from head to foot as her eyes met the softy’s hated face instead of John’s familiar glance.
In spite of the fatigue and agitation which she had endured within the last few days, she was not looking ill. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, and a feverish color burned in her cheeks. Her manner, always impetuous, was restless and impatient to-day, as if her nature had been charged with a terrible amount of electricity, till she were likely at any moment to explode in some tempest of anger or woe.
“You here!” she exclaimed.
The softy, in his embarrassment, was at a loss for an excuse for his presence. He pulled his shabby hare-skin cap off, and twisted it round and round in his great hands, but he made no other recognition of his late master’s wife.
“Who sent you to this room?” asked Mrs. Mellish; “I thought you had been forbidden this place — the house at least,” she added, her face crimsoning indignantly as she spoke, “although Mr. Conyers may choose to bring you to the north lodge. Who sent you here?”
“Him,” answered Mr. Hargraves, doggedly, with another jerk of his head toward the trainer’s abode.
“James Conyers?”
“Yes.”
“What does he want here, then?”
“He told me to come down t’ th’ house, and see if you and the master’d come back.”
“Then you can go and tell him that we have come back,” she said con
temptuously, “and that if he’d waited a little longer, he would have had no occasion to send his spies after me.”
The softy crept toward the window, feeling that his dismissal was contained in these words, and looking rather suspiciously at the array of driving and hunting whips over the mantle-piece. Mrs. Mellish might have a fancy for laying one of these about his shoulders if he happened to offend her.
“Stop!” she said, impetuously, as he laid his hand upon the shutter to push it open; “since you are here, you can take a message, or a scrap of writing,” she said, contemptuously, as if she could not bring herself to call any communication between herself and Mr. Conyers a note or letter. “Yes; you can take a few lines to your master. Stop there while I write.”
She waved her hand with a gesture which expressed plainly, “Come no nearer; you are too obnoxious to be endured except at a distance,” and seated herself at John’s writing-table.
She scratched two lines with a quill pen upon a slip of paper, which she folded while the ink was still wet. She looked for an envelope among her husband’s littered paraphernalia of account-books, bills, receipts, and price-lists, and, finding one after some little trouble, put the folded paper into it, fastened the gummed flaps with her lips, and handed the missive to Mr. Hargraves, who had watched her with hungry eyes, eager to fathom this new stage in the mystery.
Was the two thousand pounds in that envelope? he thought. No, surely such a sum of money must be a huge pile of gold and silver — a mountain of glittering coin. He had seen checks sometimes, and bank-notes, in the hands of Langley, the trainer, and he had wondered how it was that money could be represented by those pitiful bits of paper.
“I’d rayther have ‘t i’ goold,” he thought; “if ‘t was mine, I’d have it all i’ goold and silver.”
He was very glad when he found himself safely clear of the whips and Mrs. John Mellish, and, as soon as he reached the shelter of the thick foliage upon the northern side of the Park, he set to work to examine the packet which had been intrusted to him.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 146