The trainer limped away, Aurora walking by his side, yet holding herself as far aloof from him as the grassy pathway would allow. They were out of hearing, and almost out of sight, before the sea-captain could emerge from a state of utter stupefaction so far as to be able to look at the business in its right bearings.
“I ought to ha’ knocked him down,” he muttered at last, “whether he’s her husband or whether he isn’t. I ought to have knocked him down, and I would have done it, too,” added the captain resolutely, “if it hadn’t been that my niece seemed to have a good fiery spirit of her own, and to be able to fire a jolly good broadside in the way of hard words. I’ll find my skull-thatcher if I can,” said Captain Prodder, groping for his hat amongst the brambles, and the long grass, “and then I’ll just run up to the turnstile and tell my mate to lay at anchor a bit longer with the horse and shay. He’ll be wonderin’ what I’m up to; but I won’t go back just yet, I’ll keep in the way of my niece and that swab with the game leg.”
The captain found his hat, and walked down to the turnstile, where he found the young man from the Reindeer fast asleep, with the reins loose in his hands, and his head upon his knees. The horse, with his head in an empty nosebag, seemed as fast asleep as the driver.
The young man woke at the sound of the turnstile creaking upon its axis, and the step of the sailor in the road.
“I ain’t going to get aboard just yet,” said Captain Prodder; “I’ll take another turn in the wood as the evenin’s so pleasant. I come to tell you I wouldn’t keep you much longer, for I thought you’d think I was dead.”
“I did a’most,” answered the charioteer candidly. “My word!—ain’t you been a time!”
“I met Mr. and Mrs. Mellish in the wood,” said the captain, “and I stopped to have a look at ’em. She’s a bit of a spitfire, ain’t she?” asked Samuel, with affected carelessness.
The young man from the Reindeer shook his head dubiously.
“I doan’t know about that,” he said; “she’s a rare favourite hereabouts, with poor folks and gentry too. They do say as she horsewhipped a poor fond chap as they’d got in the stables, for ill-usin’ her dog; and sarve him right too,” added the young man decisively. “Them Softies is allus vicious.”
Captain Prodder pondered rather doubtfully upon this piece of information. He was not particularly elated by the image of his sister’s child laying a horsewhip upon the shoulders of her half-witted servant. This trifling incident didn’t exactly harmonize with his idea of the beautiful young heiress, playing upon all manner of instruments, and speaking half a dozen languages.
“Yes,” repeated the driver, “they do say as she gave t’ fondy a good whopping; and damme if I don’t admire her for it.”
“Ay, ay!” answered Captain Prodder thoughtfully. “Mr. Mellish walks lame, don’t he?” he asked, after a pause.
“Lame!” cried the driver; “Lord bless your heart! not a bit of it. John Mellish is as fine a young man as you’ll meet in this Riding. Ay, and finer too. I ought to know. I’ve seen him walk into our house often enough, in the race week.”
The captain’s heart sank strangely at this information. The man with whom he had heard his niece quarrelling was not her husband, then. The squabble had seemed natural enough to the uninitiated sailor while he looked at it in a matrimonial light; but seen from another aspect it struck sudden terror to his sturdy heart, and blanched the ruddy hues in his brown face. “Who was he, then?” he thought; “who was it as my niece was talking to—after dark—alone—a mile off her own home—eh?”
Before he could seek for a solution to the unuttered question which agitated and alarmed him, the report of a pistol rang sharply through the wood, and found an echo under a distant hill.
The horse pricked up his ears, and jibbed a few paces; the driver gave a low whistle.
“I thought so,” he said. “Poachers! This side of the wood’s chock full of game; and though Squire Mellish is allus threatenin’ to prosecute ’em, folks know pretty well as he’ll never do it.”
The broad-shouldered, strong-limbed sailor leaned against the turnstile, trembling in every limb.
What was that which his niece said a quarter of an hour before, when the man had asked her whether she would like to shoot him?
“Leave your horse,” he said, in a gasping voice; “tie him to the stile, and come with me. If—if—it’s poachers, we’ll—we’ll catch em.”
The young man looped the reins across the turnstile. He had no very great terror of any inclination for flight latent in the gray horse from the Reindeer. The two men ran in the wood; the captain running in the direction in which his sharp ears told him the shot had been fired.
The moon was slowly rising in the tranquil heavens, but there was very little light yet in the wood.
The captain stopped near a rustic summerhouse falling into decay, and half buried amidst the tangled foliage that clustered about the mouldering thatch and the dilapidated woodwork.
“It was hereabout the shot was fired,” muttered the captain; “about a hundred yards due nor’ard of the stile. I could take my oath as it weren’t far from this spot I’m standin’ on.”
He looked about him in the dim light. He could see no one; but an army might have hidden amongst the trees that encircled the open patch of turf on which the summerhouse had been built. He listened; with his hat off, and his big hand pressed tightly on his heart, as if to still its tumultuous beating. He listened, as eagerly as he had often listened, far out on a glassy sea, for the first faint breath of a rising
