John Mellish thought very little of the strange disappearance of Captain Prodder. The man had objected to be summoned as a witness, perhaps, and had gone. It was only natural. He did not even know his name; he only knew him as the mouthpiece of evil tidings, which had shaken him to the very soul. That this man Conyers—this man of all others, this man towards whom he had conceived a deeply-rooted aversion, an unspoken horror—should have perished mysteriously by an unknown hand, was an event so strange and appalling as to deprive him for a time of all power of thought, all capability of reasoning. Who had killed this man—this penniless good-for-nothing trainer? Who could have had any motive for such a deed? Who—? The cold sweat broke out upon his brow in the anguish of the thought.
Who had done this deed?
It was not the work of any poacher. No. It was very well for Colonel Maddison, in his ignorance of antecedent facts, to account for it in that manner; but John Mellish knew that he was wrong. James Conyers had only been at the Park a week. He had neither time nor opportunity for making himself obnoxious; and, beyond that, he was not the man to make himself obnoxious. He was a selfish, indolent rascal, who only loved his own ease, and who would have allowed the young partridges to be wired under his very nose. Who, then, had done this deed?
There was only one person who had any motive for wishing to be rid of this man. One person who, made desperate by some great despair, enmeshed perhaps by some net hellishly contrived by a villain, hopeless of any means of extrication, in a moment of madness, might have—No! In the face of every evidence that earth could offer—against reason, against hearing, eyesight, judgment, and memory—he would say, as he said now, No! She was innocent! She was innocent! She had looked in her husband’s face, the clear light had shone from her luminous eyes, a stream of electric radiance penetrating straight to his heart—and he had trusted her.
“I’ll trust her at the worst,” he thought. “If all living creatures upon this wide earth joined their voices in one great cry of upbraiding, I’d stand by her to the very end, and defy them.”
Aurora and Mrs. Lofthouse had fallen asleep upon opposite sofas; Mrs. Powell was walking softly up and down the long drawing-room, waiting and watching—waiting for a fuller knowledge of this ruin which had come upon her employer’s household.
Mrs. Mellish sprang up suddenly at the sound of her husband’s step as he entered the drawing-room.
“Oh, John!” she cried, running to him and laying her hands upon his broad shoulders, “thank Heaven you are come back! Now tell me all! Tell me all, John! I am prepared to hear anything, no matter what. This is no ordinary accident. The man who was hurt—”
Her eyes dilated as she looked at him, with a glance of intelligence that plainly said, “I can guess what has happened.”
“The man was very seriously hurt, Lolly,” her husband answered quietly.
“What man?”
“The trainer recommended to me by John Pastern.”
She looked at him for a few moments in silence.
“Is he dead?” she asked, after that brief pause.
“He is.”
Her head sank forward upon her breast, and she walked away, quietly returning to the sofa from which she had arisen.
“I am very sorry for him,” she said; “he was not a good man. I am sorry he was not allowed time to repent of his wickedness.”
“You knew him, then?” asked Mrs. Lofthouse, who had expressed unbounded consternation at the trainer’s death.
“Yes; he was in my father’s service some years ago.”
Mr. Lofthouse’s carriage had been waiting ever since eleven o’clock, and the rector’s wife was only too glad to bid her friends good night, and to drive away from Mellish Park and its fatal associations; so, though Colonel Maddison would have preferred stopping to smoke another cheroot while he discussed the business with John Mellish, he was fain to submit to feminine authority, and take his seat by his daughter’s side in the comfortable landau, which was an open or a close carriage as the convenience of its proprietor dictated. The vehicle rolled away upon the smooth carriage-drive; the servants closed the hall-doors, and lingered about, whispering to each other, in little groups in the corridors and on the staircases, waiting until their master and mistress should have retired for the night. It was difficult to think that the business of life was to go on just the same though a murder had been done upon the outskirts of the Park, and even the housekeeper, a severe matron at ordinary times, yielded to the common influence, and forgot to drive the maids to their dormitories in the gabled roof.
All was very quiet in the drawing-room where the visitors had left their host and hostess to hug those ugly skeletons which are put away in the presence of company. John Mellish walked slowly up and down the room. Aurora sat staring vacantly at the guttering wax candles in the old-fashioned silver branches; and Mrs. Powell, with her embroidery in full working order, threaded her needles and snipped away the fragments of her delicate cotton as carefully as if there had been no such thing as crime or trouble in the world, and no higher purpose in life than the achievement of elaborate devices upon French cambric.
She paused now and then to utter some polite commonplace. She regretted such an unpleasant catastrophe; she lamented the disagreeable circumstances of the trainer’s death; indeed, she in a manner inferred that Mr. Conyers had shown himself wanting in good taste and respect for his employer by the mode of his death; but the point to which she recurred most frequently was the fact of Aurora’s presence
