“I could have sworn it was about here the shot was fired,” he repeated. “God grant as it was poachers, after all! but it’s given me a turn that’s made me feel like some cockney lubber aboard a steamer betwixt Bristol and Cork. Lord, what a blessed old fool I am!” muttered the captain, after walking slowly round the summerhouse to convince himself that there was no one hidden in it. “One ’ud think I’d never heerd the sound of a ha’p’orth of powder before tonight.”
He put on his hat, and walked a few paces forward, still looking about cautiously, and still listening; but much easier in his mind than when first he had re-entered the wood.
He stopped suddenly, arrested by a sound which has of itself, without any reference to its power of association, a mysterious and chilling influence upon the human heart. This sound was the howling of a dog—the prolonged, monotonous howling of a dog. A cold sweat broke out upon the sailor’s forehead. That sound, always one of terror to his superstitious nature, was doubly terrible tonight.
“It means death!” he muttered, with a groan. “No dog ever howled like that except for death.”
He turned back, and looked about him. The moonlight glimmered faintly upon the broad patch of stagnant water near the summerhouse, and upon its brink the captain saw two figures, black against the summer atmosphere: a prostrate figure, lying close to the edge of the water; and a large dog, with his head uplifted to the sky, howling piteously.
It was the bounden duty of poor John Mellish, in his capacity of host, to sit at the head of his table, pass the claret-jug, and listen to Colonel Maddison’s stories of the pig-sticking and the tiger-hunting, as long as the Indian officer chose to talk for the amusement of his friend and his son-in-law. It was perhaps lucky that patient Mr. Lofthouse was well up in all the stories, and knew exactly which departments of each narrative were to be laughed at, and which were to be listened to with silent and awestricken attention; for John Mellish made a very bad audience upon this occasion. He pushed the filberts towards the colonel at the very moment when “the tigress was crouching for a spring, upon the rising ground exactly above us, sir, and when, by Jove! Charley Maddison felt himself at pretty close quarters with the enemy, sir, and never thought to stretch his legs under this mahogany, or any other man’s, sir”; and he spoiled the officer’s best joke by asking him for the claret in the middle of it.
The tigers and the pigs were confusion and weariness of spirit to Mr. Mellish. He was yearning for the moment when, with any show of decency, he might make for the drawing-room, and find out what Aurora was doing in the still summer twilight. When the door was opened and fresh wine brought in, he heard the rattling of the keys under Mrs. Lofthouse’s manipulation, and rejoiced to think that his wife was seated quietly, perhaps, listening to those sonatas in C flat, which the rector’s wife delighted to interpret.
The lamps were brought in before Colonel Maddison’s stories were finished; and when John’s butler came to ask if the gentlemen would like coffee, the worthy Indian officer said, “Yes, by all means, and a cheroot with it. No smoking in the drawing-room, eh, Mellish? Petticoat government and window-curtains, I dare say. Clara doesn’t like my smoke at the Rectory, and poor Lofthouse writes his sermons in the summerhouse; for he can’t write without a weed, you know, and a volume of Tillotson, or some of these fellows, to prig from—eh, George?” said the facetious gentleman, digging his son-in-law in the ribs with his fat old fingers, and knocking over two or three wineglasses in his ponderous jocosity.
How dreary it all seemed to John Mellish tonight! He wondered how people felt who had no social mystery brooding upon their hearth; no domestic skeleton cowering in their homely cupboard. He looked at the rector’s placid face with a pang of envy. There was no secret kept from him. There was no perpetual struggle rending his heart; no dreadful doubts and fears that would not be quite lulled to rest; no vague terror incessant and unreasoning; no mute argument forever going forward, with plaintiff’s counsel and defendant’s counsel continually pleading the same cause, and arriving at the same result. Heaven take pity upon those who have to suffer such silent misery, such secret despair! We look at our neighbours’ smiling faces, and say, in bitterness of spirit, that A is a lucky fellow, and that B can’t be as much in debt as his friends say he is; that C and his pretty wife are the happiest couple we know; and tomorrow B is in the Gazette, and C is weeping over a dishonoured home, and a group of motherless children, who wonder what mamma has done that papa should be so sorry. The battles are very quiet, but they are forever being fought. We keep the fox hidden under our cloak, but the teeth of the animal are none the less sharp, nor the pain less terrible to bear; a little more terrible, perhaps, for being endured silently. John Mellish gave a long sigh of relief when the Indian officer finished his third cheroot, and pronounced himself ready to join the ladies. The lamps in the drawing-room were lighted, and the curtains drawn before the open windows, when the three gentlemen entered. Mrs. Lofthouse was asleep upon one of the sofas, with a Book of Beauty lying open at her feet, and Mrs. Powell, pale and sleepless—sleepless as trouble and sorrow, as jealousy and hate, as anything that is ravenous and unappeasable—sat at her embroidery, working laborious monstrosities upon delicate cambric muslin.
The colonel dropped heavily into a luxurious
