“My poor darling, I was a fool to bring you back. I should never have done so, but for Talbot’s advice. He urged me so strongly to come back directly. He said that if there should be any disturbance about the murder, we ought to be upon the spot.”
“Disturbance! What disturbance?” cried Aurora.
Her face blanched as she spoke, and her heart sank within her. What further disturbance could there be? Was the ghastly business as yet unfinished, then? She knew—alas! only too well—that there could be no investigation of this matter which would not bring her name before the world linked with the name of the dead man. How much she had endured in order to keep that shameful secret from the world! How much she had sacrificed in the hope of saving her father from humiliation! And now, at the last, when she had thought that the dark chapter of her life was finished, the hateful page blotted out—now, at the very last, there was a probability of some new disturbance which would bring her name and her history into every newspaper in England.
“Oh, John, John!” she cried, bursting into a passion of hysterical sobs, and covering her face with her clasped hands; “am I never to hear the last of this? Am I never, never, never to be released from the consequences of my miserable folly?”
The butler entered the room as she said this; she rose hurriedly, and walked to one of the windows, in order to conceal her face from the man.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” the old servant said; “but they’ve found something in the park, and I thought perhaps you might like to know—”
“They’ve found something! What?” exclaimed John, utterly bewildered between his agitation at the sight of his wife’s grief and his endeavour to understand the man.
“A pistol, sir. One of the stable-lads found it just now. He went to the wood with another boy to look at the place where—the—the man was shot; and he’s brought back a pistol he found there. It was close against the water, but hid away among the weeds and rushes. Whoever threw it there, thought, no doubt, to throw it in the pond; but Jim, that’s one of the boys, fancied he saw something glitter, and sure enough it was the barrel of a pistol; and I think must be the one that the trainer was shot with, Mr. John.”
“A pistol!” cried Mr. Mellish; “let me see it.”
His servant handed him the weapon. It was small enough for a toy, but none the less deadly in a skilful hand. It was a rich man’s fancy, deftly carried out by some cunning gunsmith, and enriched by elaborate inlaid work of purple steel and tarnished silver. It was rusty, from exposure to rain and dew; but Mr. Mellish knew the pistol well, for it was his own.
It was his own; one of his pet playthings; and it had been kept in the room which was only entered by privileged persons—the room in which his wife had busied herself with the rearrangement of his guns upon the day of the murder.
XXXV
Under a Cloud
Talbot Bulstrode and his wife came to Mellish Park a few days after the return of John and Aurora. Lucy was pleased to come to her cousin; pleased to be allowed to love her without reservation; grateful to her husband for his gracious goodness in setting no barrier between her and the friend she loved.
And Talbot—who shall tell the thoughts that were busy in his mind, as he sat in a corner of the first-class carriage, to all outward appearance engrossed in the perusal of a Times leader?
I wonder how much of the Thunderer’s noble Saxon English Mr. Bulstrode comprehended that morning! The broad white paper on which the Times is printed serves as a convenient screen for a man’s face. Heaven knows what agonies have been sometimes endured behind that printed mask! A woman, married, and a happy mother, glances carelessly enough at the Births and Marriages and Deaths, and reads perhaps that the man she loved, and parted with, and broke her heart for, fifteen or twenty years before, has fallen, shot through the heart, far away upon an Indian battlefield. She holds the paper firmly enough before her face; and her husband goes on with his breakfast, and stirs his coffee, or breaks his egg, while she suffers her agony—while the comfortable breakfast-table darkens and goes away from her, and the long-ago day comes back upon which the cruel ship left Southampton, and the hard voices of well-meaning friends held forth monotonously upon the folly of improvident marriages. Would it not be better, by the by, for wives to make a practice of telling their husbands all the sentimental little stories connected with the pre-matrimonial era? Would it not be wiser to gossip freely about Charles’s dark eyes and moustache, and to hope that the poor fellow is getting on well in the Indian service, than to keep a skeleton, in the shape of a phantom ensign in the 87th, hidden away in some dark chamber of the feminine memory?
But other than womanly agonies are suffered behind the Times. The husband reads bad news of the railway company in whose shares he has so rashly invested that money which his wife believes safely lodged in the jog-trot, three-per-cent.-yielding Consols. The dashing son, with Newmarket tendencies, reads evil tidings of the horse he has backed so boldly, perhaps at the advice of a Manchester prophet, who warranted putting his friends in the way of winning a hatful of money for the small consideration of three-and-sixpence in postage-stamps. Visions of a book that it will not be very easy to square; of a black list of play or pay engagements; of a crowd of angry book-men clamorous for their dues, and not slow to hint at handy horse-ponds, and possible tar
