“I’ll take my second marriage-certificate back with me,” John said, as he left the church; “and then I should like to see who’ll dare to look me in the face, and tell me that my darling is not my own lawfully-wedded wife.”
He was thinking of Mrs. Powell as he said this. He was thinking of the pale, spiteful eyes that had looked at him, and of the woman’s tongue that had stabbed him with all a little nature’s great capacity for hate. He would be able to defy her now; he would be able to defy every creature in the world who dared to breathe a syllable against his beloved wife.
Early the next morning the marriage took place. Archibald Floyd, Talbot Bulstrode, and Lucy were the only witnesses; that is to say, the only witnesses with the exception of the clerk and the pew-opener, and a couple of men who lounged into the church when the ceremony was half over, and slouched about one of the side aisles, looking at the monuments, and talking to each other in whispers, until the parson took off his surplice, and John came out of the vestry with his wife upon his arm.
Mr. and Mrs. Mellish did not return to Halfmoon Street; they drove straight to the Great Northern Station, whence they started by the afternoon express for Doncaster. John was anxious to return; for remember that he had left his household under very peculiar circumstances, and strange reports might have arisen in his absence.
The young squire would perhaps have scarcely thought of this, had not the idea been suggested to him by Talbot Bulstrode, who particularly urged upon him the expediency of returning immediately.
“Go back, John,” said Mr. Bulstrode, “without an hour’s unnecessary delay. If by any chance there should be some further disturbance about this murder, it will be much better for you, and Aurora too, to be on the spot. I will come down to Mellish myself in a day or two, and will bring Lucy with me, if you will allow me.”
“Allow you, my dear Talbot!”
“I will come, then. Goodbye, and God bless you! Take care of your wife.”
XXXIII
Captain Prodder Goes Back to Doncaster
Mr. Samuel Prodder, returning to London after having played his insignificant part in the tragedy at Mellish Park, found that city singularly dull and gloomy. He put up at some dismal boardinghouse, situated amid a mazy labyrinth of brick and mortar between the Tower and Wapping, and having relations with another boardinghouse in Liverpool. He took up his abode at this place, in which he was known and respected. He drank rum-and-water, and played cribbage with other seamen, made after the same pattern as himself. He even went to an East-End theatre upon the Saturday night after the murder, and sat out the representation of a nautical drama, which he would have been glad to have believed in, had it not promulgated such wild theories in the science of navigation, and exhibited such extraordinary experiments in the manoeuvring of the man-of-war, upon which the action of the play took place, as to cause the captain’s hair to stand on end in the intensity of his wonder. The things people did upon that ship curdled Samuel Prodder’s blood, as he sat in the lonely grandeur of the eighteenpenny boxes. It was quite a common thing for them to walk unhesitatingly through the bulwarks and disappear in what ought to have been the sea. The extent of browbeating and humiliation borne by the captain of that noble vessel; the amount of authority exercised by a sailor with loose legs; the agonies of seasickness, represented by a comic countryman, who had no particular business on board the gallant bark; the proportion of hornpipe-dancing and nautical ballad-singing gone through, as compared to the work that was done—all combined to impress poor Samuel with such a novel view of her Majesty’s naval service, that he was very glad when the captain who had been browbeaten suddenly repented of all his sins—not without a sharp reminder from the prompter, who informed the dramatis personae, in a confidential voice that it was parst twelve, and they’d better cut it short—joined the hands of the contumacious sailor and a young lady in white muslin, and begged them to be ’appy.
It was in vain that the captain sought distraction from the one idea upon which he had perpetually brooded since the night of his visit to Mellish Park. He would be wanted in Yorkshire to tell what he knew of the dark history of that fatal night. He would be called upon to declare at what hour he had entered the wood, whom he had met there, what he had seen and heard there. They would extort from him that which he would have died rather than tell. They would cross-examine, and bewilder, and torment him, until he told them everything—until he repeated, syllable by syllable, the passionate words that had been said—until he told them how, within a quarter of an hour of the firing of
