“Where’s Lolly?” he asked, looking from Mrs. Lofthouse to Mrs. Powell; “where’s my wife?”
“I really do not know,” answered Mrs. Powell, with icy deliberation. “I’ve not been watching Mrs. Mellish.”
The poisoned darts glanced away from John’s preoccupied breast. There was no room in his wounded heart for such a petty sting as this.
“Where’s my wife?” he cried passionately; “you must know where she is. She’s not here. Is she upstairs? Is she out of doors?”
“To the best of my belief,” replied the ensign’s widow, with more than usual precision, “Mrs. Mellish is in some part of the grounds; she has been out of doors ever since we left the dining-room.”
The French clock upon the mantelpiece chimed the three-quarters after ten as she finished speaking: as if to give emphasis to her words and to remind Mr. Mellish how long his wife had been absent. He bit his lip fiercely, and strode towards one of the windows. He was going to look for his wife; but he stopped as he flung aside the window-curtain, arrested by Mrs. Powell’s uplifted hand.
“Hark!” she said, “there is something the matter, I fear. Did you hear that violent ringing at the hall-door?”
Mr. Mellish let fall the curtain, and re-entered the room.
“It’s Aurora, no doubt,” he said; “they’ve shut her out again, I suppose. I beg, Mrs. Powell, that you will prevent this in future. Really, ma’am, it is hard that my wife should be shut out of her own house.”
He might have said much more, but he stopped, pale and breathless, at the sound of a hubbub in the hall, and rushed to the room-door. He opened it and looked out, with Mrs. Powell and Mr. and Mrs. Lofthouse crowding behind him, and looking over his shoulder.
Half a dozen servants were clustered round a roughly-dressed, seafaring-looking man, who, with his hat off and his disordered hair falling about his white face, was telling in broken sentences, scarcely intelligible for the speaker’s agitation, that a murder had been done in the wood.
XXV
The Deed That Had Been Done in the Wood
The bareheaded seafaring man who stood in the centre of the hall was Captain Samuel Prodder. The scared faces of the servants gathered round him told more plainly than his own words, which came hoarsely from his parched white lips, the nature of the tidings that he brought.
John Mellish strode across the hall, with an awful calmness on his white face; and parting the hustled group of servants with his strong arms, as a mighty wind rends asunder the storm-beaten waters, he placed himself face to face with Captain Prodder.
“Who are you?” he asked sternly: “and what has brought you here?”
The Indian officer had been aroused by the clamour, and had emerged, red and bristling with self-importance, to take his part in the business in hand.
There are some pies in the making of which everybody yearns to have a finger. It is a great privilege, after some social convulsion has taken place, to be able to say, “I was there at the time the scene occurred, sir”; or, “I was standing as close to him when the blow was struck, ma’am, as I am to you at this moment.” People are apt to take pride out of strange things. An elderly gentleman at Doncaster, showing me his comfortably-furnished apartments, informed me, with evident satisfaction, that Mr. William Palmer had lodged in those very rooms.
Colonel Maddison pushed aside his daughter and her husband, and struggled out into the hall.
“Come, my man,” he said, echoing John’s interrogatory, “let us hear what has brought you here at such a remarkably unseasonable hour.”
The sailor gave no direct answer to the question. He pointed with his thumb across his shoulder towards that dismal spot in the lonely wood, which was as present to his mental vision now as it had been to his bodily eyes a quarter of an hour before.
“A man!” he gasped; “a man—lyin’ close agen’ the water’s edge—shot through the heart!”
“Dead?” asked someone, in an awful tone. The voices and the questions came from whom they would, in the awestricken terror of those first moments of overwhelming horror and surprise. No one knew who spoke except the speakers; perhaps even they were scarcely aware that they had spoken.
“Dead?” asked one of those eager listeners.
“Stone dead.”
“A man—shot dead in the wood!” cried John Mellish; “what man?”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the grave old butler, laying his hand gently upon his master’s shoulder: “I think, from what this person says, that the man who has been shot is—the new trainer, Mr.—Mr.—”
“Conyers!” exclaimed John. “Conyers! who—who should shoot him?” The question was asked in a hoarse whisper. It was impossible for the speaker’s face to grow whiter than it had been, from the moment in which he had opened the drawing-room door, and looked out into the hall; but some terrible change not to be translated into words came over it at the mention of the trainer’s name.
He stood motionless and silent, pushing his hair from his forehead, and staring wildly about him.
The grave butler laid his warning hand for a second time upon his master’s shoulder.
“Sir—Mr. Mellish,” he said, eager to arouse the young man from the dull, stupid quiet into which he had fallen—“excuse me, sir; but if my mistress should come in suddenly, and hear of this, she might be upset, perhaps. Wouldn’t it be better to—”
“Yes, yes!” cried John Mellish, lifting his head suddenly, as if aroused into immediate action by the mere suggestion of his wife’s name—“yes! clear out of the hall, every one of you,” he said,
