Mrs. Powell rose, pale, menacing, terrible; terrible in the intensity of her feeble wrath, and in the consciousness that she had power to stab the heart of the man who had affronted her.
“You have merely anticipated my own intention, Mr. Mellish,” she said. “I could not possibly have remained a member of your household after the very unpleasant circumstances that have lately transpired. My worst wish is, that you may find yourself involved in no greater trouble through your connection with Mr. Floyd’s daughter. Let me add one word of warning before I have the honour of wishing you good evening. Malicious people might be tempted to smile at your enthusiastic mention of your ‘wife’; remembering that the person to whom you allude is Aurora Conyers, the widow of your groom, and that she has never possessed any legal claim to the title you bestow upon her.”
If Mrs. Powell had been a man, she would have found her head in contact with the Turkey carpet of John’s dining-room before she could have concluded this speech; as she was a woman, John Mellish stood looking her full in the face, waiting till she had finished speaking. But he bore the stab she inflicted without flinching under its cruel pain, and he robbed her of the gratification she had hoped for. He did not let her see his anguish.
“If Lofthouse has told her the secret,” he cried, when the door had closed upon Mrs. Powell, “I’ll horsewhip him in the church.”
XXX
An Unexpected Visitor
Aurora found a civil railway official at the Doncaster station, who was ready to take a ticket for her, and find her a comfortable seat in an empty carriage; but before the train started, a couple of sturdy farmers took their seats upon the spring cushions opposite Mrs. Mellish. They were wealthy gentlemen, who farmed their own land, and travelled express; but they brought a powerful odour of the stable-yard into the carriage, and they talked with that honest northern twang which always has a friendly sound to the writer of this story. Aurora, with her veil drawn over her pale face, attracted very little of their attention. They talked of farming-stock and horse-racing, and looked out of the window every now and then to shrug their shoulders at somebody else’s agriculture.
I believe they were acquainted with the capabilities of every acre of land between Doncaster and Harrow, and knew how it might have been made “worth ten shillin’ an acre more than it was, too, sir,” as they perpetually informed each other.
How wearisome their talk must have seemed to the poor lonely creature who was running away from the man she loved—from the man who loved her, and would love to the end of time!
“I didn’t mean what I wrote,” she thought. “My poor boy would never love me less. His great heart is made up of unselfish love and generous devotion. But he would be so sorry for me; he would be so sorry! He could never be proud of me again; he could never boast of me any more. He would be always resenting some insult, or imagining some slight. It would be too painful for him. He would see his wife pointed at as the woman who had married her groom. He would be embroiled in a hundred quarrels, a hundred miseries. I will make the only return that I can ever make to him for his goodness to me: I will give him up, and go away and hide myself from him forever.”
She tried to imagine what John’s life would be without her. She tried to think of him in some future time, when he should have worn out his grief, and reconciled himself to her loss. But she could not, she could not! She could not endure any image of him in which he was separated from his love for her.
“How should I ever think of him without thinking of his love for me?” she thought. “He loved me from the first moment in which he saw me. I have never known him except as a lover; generous, pure, and true.”
And in this mind Aurora watched the smaller stations, which looked like mere streaks of whitened woodwork as the express tore past them; though every one of them was a milestone upon the long road which was separating her from the man she loved.
Ah, careless wives, who think it a small thing, perhaps, that your husbands are honest and generous, constant and true, and who are apt to grumble because your next-door neighbours have started a carriage, while you are fain to be content with eighteenpenny airings in vehicles procured at the nearest cabstand—stop and think of this wretched girl, who in this hour of desolation recalled a thousand little wrongs she had done to her husband, and would have laid herself under his feet to be walked over by him could she have thus atoned for her petty tyrannies, her pretty caprices! Think of her in her loneliness, with her heart yearning to go back to the man she loved, and with her love arrayed against herself and pleading for him. She changed her mind a hundred times during that four hours’ journey; sometimes thinking that she would go back by the next train, and then again remembering that her first impulse had been, perhaps, after all, only too correct, and that John Mellish’s
