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 today 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 colour burned in her cheeks. Her manner, always impetuous, was restless and impatient today, 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 hair-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 towards 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 master’d come back.”
“Then you can go and tell him that we have come back,” she said contemptuously; “and that if he’d waited a little longer he would have had no occasion to send his spies after me.”
The “Softy” crept towards 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 mantelpiece. 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 had 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 a 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 amongst 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 flap 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 cheques sometimes, and banknotes, 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 hav’t i’ goold,” he thought: “if ’twas 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 entrusted to him.
Mrs. Mellish had liberally moistened the adhesive flap of the envelope, as people are apt to do when they are in a hurry; the consequence of which carelessness was that the gum was still so wet that Stephen Hargraves found no difficulty in opening the envelope without tearing it. He looked cautiously about him, convinced himself that he was unobserved, and then drew out the slip of paper. It contained very little to reward him for his trouble, only these few words, scrawled in Aurora’s most careless hand:—
“Be on the southern side of the wood, near the turnstile, between half-past eight and nine.”
The “Softy” grinned as he slowly made himself master of this communication.
“It’s oncommon hard wroitin’, t’ make out th’ shapes o’ th’ letters,” he said, as he finished his task. “Whoy can’t gentlefolks wroit like Ned Tiller, oop at th’ Red Lion—printin’ loike? It’s easier to read, and a deal prettier to look at.”
He refastened the envelope, pressing it down with his dirty thumb to make it adhere once more, and not much improving its appearance thereby.
“He’s one of your rare careless chaps,” he muttered as he surveyed the letter; “he won’t stop t’ examine if it’s been opened before. What’s insoide were hardly worth th’ trouble of openin’ it; but perhaps it’s as well to know it too.”
Immediately after Stephen Hargraves had disappeared through the open window Aurora turned to leave the room by the door, intending to go in search of her husband.
She was arrested on the threshold by Mrs. Powell, who was standing at the door, with the submissive and deferential patience of paid companionship depicted in her insipid face.
“Does Colonel Maddison dine here, my dear Mrs. Mellish?” she asked meekly; yet with a pensive earnestness which suggested that her life, or at any rate her peace of mind, depended upon the answer. “I am so anxious to know, for of course it will make a difference with the fish—and perhaps we ought to have some mulligatawny; or
