“Seven o’clock,” he muttered, “only seven o’clock. I think there must have been twenty-four hours in this blessed summer’s day.”
He stood looking from the little casement-window with a discontented frown contracting his handsome eyebrows, and a peevish expression distorting his full, classically-moulded lips, as he said this. He glanced through the little casement, made smaller by its clustering frame of roses and clematis, jessamine and myrtle, and looking like the porthole of a ship that sailed upon a sea of summer verdure. He glanced through the circular opening left by that scented framework of leaves and blossoms, into the long glades, where the low sunlight was flickering upon waving fringes of fern. He followed with his listless glance the wandering intricacies of the underwood, until they led his weary eyes away to distant patches of blue water, slowly changing to opal and rose-colour in the declining light. He saw all these things with a lazy apathy, which had no power to recognize their beauty, or to inspire one latent thrill of gratitude to Him who had made them. He had better have been blind; surely he had better have been blind.
He turned his back upon the evening sunshine, and looked at the white face of Steeve Hargraves, the “Softy,” with every whit as much pleasure as he had felt in looking at nature in her loveliest aspect.
“A long day,” he said—“an infernally tedious, wearisome day. Thank God, it’s over.”
Strange that, as he uttered this impious thanksgiving, no subtle influence of the future crept through his veins to chill the slackening pulses of his heart, and freeze the idle words upon his lips. If he had known what was so soon to come; if he had known, as he thanked God for the death of one beautiful summer’s day, never to be born again, with its twelve hours of opportunity for good or evil—surely he would have grovelled on the earth, stricken with a sudden terror, and wept aloud for the shameful history of the life which lay behind him.
He had never shed tears but once since his childhood, and then those tears were scalding drops of baffled rage and vengeful fury at the utter defeat of the greatest scheme of his life.
“I shall go into Doncaster tonight, Steeve,” he said to the “Softy,” who stood deferentially awaiting his master’s pleasure, and watching him, as he had watched him all day, furtively but incessantly; “I shall spend the evening in Doncaster, and—and—see if I can pick up a few wrinkles about the September meeting; not that there’s anything worth entering amongst this set of screws, Lord knows,” he added, with undisguised contempt for poor John’s beloved stable. “Is there a dogcart, or a trap of any kind, I can drive over in?” he asked of the “Softy.”
Mr. Hargraves said that there was a Newport Pagnell, which was sacred to Mr. John Mellish, and a gig that was at the disposal of any of the upper servants when they had occasion to go into Doncaster, as well as a covered van, which some of the lads drove into the town every day for the groceries and other matters required at the house.
“Very good,” said Mr. Conyers; “you may run down to the stables, and tell one of the boys to put the fastest pony of the lot into the Newport Pagnell, and to bring it up here, and to look sharp.”
“But nobody but Muster Mellish rides in the Newport Pagnell,” suggested the “Softy,” with an accent of alarm.
“What of that, you cowardly hound?” cried the trainer contemptuously. “I’m going to drive it tonight, don’t you hear? D⸺n his Yorkshire insolence! Am I to be put down by him? It’s his handsome wife that he takes such pride in, is it? Lord help him! Whose money bought the dogcart, I wonder? Aurora Floyd’s, perhaps. And I’m not to ride in it, I suppose, because it’s my lord’s pleasure to drive his black-eyed lady in the sacred vehicle. Look you here, you brainless idiot, and understand me, if you can!” cried Mr. James Conyers in a sudden rage, which crimsoned his handsome face, and lit up his lazy eyes with a new fire—“look you here, Stephen Hargraves! if it wasn’t that I’m tied hand and foot, and have been plotted against and thwarted by a woman’s cunning, at every turn, I could smoke my pipe in yonder house, or in a better house, this day.”
He pointed with his finger to the pinnacled roof, and the reddened windows glittering in the evening sun, visible far away amongst the trees.
“Mr. John Mellish!” he said. “If his wife wasn’t such a she-devil as to be too many guns for the cleverest man in Christendom, I’d soon make him sing small. Fetch the Newport Pagnell!” he cried suddenly, with an abrupt change of tone; “fetch it, and be quick! I’m not safe to myself when I talk of this. I’m not safe when I think how near I was to half a million of money,” he muttered under his breath.
He limped out into the open air, fanning himself with the wide brim of his felt hat, and wiping the perspiration from his forehead.
“Be quick!” he cried impatiently to his deliberate attendant, who had listened eagerly to every word of his master’s passionate talk, and who now stood watching him even more intently than before, “be quick, man, can’t you? I don’t pay you five shillings a week to stare at me. Fetch the trap! I’ve worked myself into a fever, and nothing but a rattling drive will set me right again.”
The “Softy” shuffled off as rapidly as it was within the range of his ability to walk. He
