It was nine o’clock before he remembered the necessity of making some pretence of sitting down to dinner. He took his place at the end of the long table, and sent for Mrs. Powell, who appeared in answer to his summons, and seated herself with a well-bred affectation of not knowing that the dinner had been put off for an hour and a half.
“I’m sorry I’ve kept you so long, Mrs. Powell,” he said, as he sent the ensign’s widow a ladleful of clear soup, that was of the temperature of lemonade. “The truth is, that I—I—find I shall be compelled to run up to town by the mail.”
“Upon no unpleasant business, I hope?”
“Oh, dear no, not at all. Mrs. Mellish has gone up to her father’s place, and—and—has requested me to follow her,” added John, telling a lie with considerable awkwardness, but with no very great remorse. He did not speak again during dinner. He ate anything that his servants put before him, and took a good deal of wine; but he ate and drank alike unconsciously, and when the cloth had been removed, and he was left alone with Mrs. Powell, he sat staring at the reflection of the wax-candles in the depths of the mahogany. It was only when the lady gave a little ceremonial cough, and rose with the intention of simpering out of the room, that he roused himself from his long reverie, and looked up suddenly.
“Don’t go just this moment, if you please, Mrs. Powell,” he said. “If you’ll sit down again for a few minutes, I shall be glad. I wished to say a word or two to you before I leave Mellish Park.”
He rose as he spoke, and pointed to a chair. Mrs. Powell seated herself, and looked at him earnestly; with an eager, viperish earnestness, and a nervous movement of her thin lips.
“When you came here, Mrs. Powell,” said John, gravely, “you came as my wife’s guest, and as my wife’s friend. I need scarcely say that you could have had no better claim upon my friendship and hospitality. If you had brought a regiment of dragoons with you, as the condition of your visit, they would have been welcome; for I believed that your coming would give pleasure to my poor girl. If my wife had been indebted to you for any word of kindness, for any look of affection, I would have repaid that debt a thousandfold, had it lain in my power to do so by any service, however difficult. You would have lost nothing by your love for my poor motherless girl, if any devotion of mine could have recompensed you for that tenderness. It was only reasonable that I should look to you as the natural friend and counsellor of my darling; and I did so, honestly and confidently. Forgive me if I tell you that I very soon discovered how much I had been mistaken in entertaining such a hope. I soon saw that you were no friend to my wife.”
“Mr. Mellish!”
“Oh, my dear madam, you think because I keep hunting-boots and guns in the room I call my study, and because I remember no more of the Latin that my tutor crammed into my head than the first line of the Eton Syntax—you think, because I’m not clever, that I must needs be a fool. That’s your mistake, Mrs. Powell; I’m not clever enough to be a fool, and I’ve just sufficient perception to see any danger that assails those I love. You don’t like my wife; you grudge her her youth and her beauty, and my foolish love for her; and you’ve watched, and listened, and plotted—in a ladylike way, of course—to do her some evil. Forgive me if I speak plainly. Where Aurora is concerned, I feel very strongly. To hurt her little finger is to torture my whole body. To stab her once is to stab me a hundred times. I have no wish to be discourteous to a lady; I am only sorry that you have been unable to love a poor girl who has rarely failed to win friends amongst those who have known her. Let us part without animosity, but let us understand each other for the first time. You do not like us, and it is better that we should part before you learn to hate us.”
The ensign’s widow waited in utter stupefaction until Mr. Mellish stopped, from want of breath, perhaps, rather than from want of words.
All her viperish nature rose in white defiance of him as he walked up and down the room, chafing himself into a fury with his recollection of the wrong she had done him in not loving his wife.
“You are perhaps aware, Mr. Mellish,” she said, after an awful pause, “that under such circumstances the annual stipend due to me for my services cannot be expected to cease at your caprice; and that, although you may turn me out of doors,”—Mrs. Powell descended to this very commonplace locution, and stooped to the vernacular in her desire to be spiteful—“you must understand that you will be liable for my salary until the expiration of—”
“Oh, pray do not imagine that I shall repudiate any claim you may
