So through the long summer’s day Talbot reasoned with and comforted his friend, never growing weary of his task, never for one moment losing sight of the interests of Aurora Mellish and her husband.
Perhaps this was a self-imposed penalty for the wrong which he had done the banker’s daughter long ago in the dim starlit chamber at Felden. If it was so, he did penance very cheerfully.
“Heaven knows how gladly I would do her a service,” he thought; “her life has been a troubled one, in spite of her father’s thousands. Thank Heaven, my poor little Lucy has never been forced into playing the heroine of a tragedy like this; thank Heaven, my poor little darling’s life flows evenly and placidly in a smooth channel!”
He could not but reflect with something of a shudder that it might have been his wife whose history was being canvassed throughout the West Riding. He could not be otherwise than pleased to remember that the name of the woman he had chosen had never gone beyond the holy circle of her own home, to be the common talk among strangers.
There are things which are utterly unendurable to some people, but which are not at all terrible in the eyes of others. John Mellish, secure in his own belief in his wife’s innocence, would have been content to carry her away with him, after razing the home of his forefathers to the ground, and defying all Yorkshire to find a flaw or speck upon her fair fame. But Talbot Bulstrode would have gone mad with the agony of the thought that common tongues had defiled the name he loved, and would, in no after-triumph of his wife’s innocence, been able to forget or to recover from the torture of that unendurable agony. There are people who cannot forget, and Talbot Bulstrode was one of them. He had never forgotten his Christmas agony at Felden Woods, and the after-struggle at Bulstrode Castle; nor did he ever hope to forget it. The happiness of the present, pure and unalloyed though it was, could not annihilate the anguish of the past. That stood alone—so many months, weeks, days, and hours of unutterable misery, riven away from the rest of his life, to remain forever a stony memorial upon the smooth plains of the past.
Archibald Martin Floyd sat with his daughter and Lucy, in Mrs. Mellish’s morning-room, the pleasantest chamber for many reasons, but chiefly because it was removed from the bustle of the house, and from the chance of unwelcome intrusion. All the troubles of that household had been made light of in the presence of the old man, and no word had been dropped before him, which could give him reason to guess that his only child had been suspected of the most fearful crime that man or woman can commit. But Archibald Floyd was not easily to be deceived where his daughter’s happiness was in question; he had watched that beautiful face—whose ever-varying expression was its highest charm—so long and earnestly, as to have grown familiar with its every look. No shadow upon the brightness of his daughter’s beauty could possibly escape the old man’s eyes, dim as they may have grown for the figures in his banking-book. It was Aurora’s business, therefore, to sit by her father’s side in the pleasant morning-room, to talk to him and amuse him; while John rambled hither and thither, and made himself otherwise tiresome to his patient companion, Talbot Bulstrode. Mrs. Mellish repeated to her father again and again, that there was no cause for uneasiness; they were merely anxious—naturally anxious—that the guilty man should be found and brought to justice; nothing more.
The banker accepted this explanation of his daughter’s pale face very quietly; but he was not the less anxious—anxious he scarcely knew why, but with the shadow of a dark cloud hanging over him, that was not to be driven away.
Thus the long August day wore itself out, and the low sun—blazing a lurid red behind the trees in Mellish Wood, until it made that pool beside which the murdered man had fallen, seem a pool of blood—gave warning that one weary day of watching and suspense was nearly done.
John Mellish, far too restless to sit long at dessert, had roamed out upon the lawn: still attended by his indefatigable keeper, Talbot Bulstrode, and employed himself in pacing up and down the smooth grass amid Mr. Dawson’s flowerbeds, looking always towards the pathway that led to the house, and breathing suppressed anathemas against the dilatory detective.
“One day nearly gone, thank Heaven, Talbot!” he said, with an impatient sigh. “Will tomorrow bring us no nearer what we want, I wonder? What if it should go on like this for long? what if it should go on forever, until Aurora and I go mad with this wretched anxiety and suspense? Yes, I know you think me a fool and a coward, Talbot Bulstrode; but I can’t bear it quietly, I tell you I can’t. I know there are some people who can shut themselves up with their troubles, and sit down quietly and suffer without a groan; but I can’t. I must cry out when I am tortured, or I should dash my brains out against the first wall I came to, and make an end of it. To think that anybody should suspect my darling! to think that they should believe her to be—”
“To think that you should have believed it, John!” said Mr. Bulstrode, gravely.
“Ah, there’s the cruelest stab of all,” cried John; “if I—I who know her, and love her, and believe in her as man never yet believed in woman—if I could have been
