Mr. James Conyers limped up and down the little grassy lawn in front of the north lodge. The excitement which had crimsoned his face gradually subsided, as he vented his disquietude in occasional impatient exclamations. “Two thousand pounds!” he muttered; “a pitiful, paltry two thousand! Not a twelvemonth’s interest on the money I ought to have had—the money I should have had, if—”
He stopped abruptly, and growled something like an oath between his set teeth, as he struck his stick with angry violence into the soft grass. It is especially hard when we are reviling our bad fortune, and quarrelling with our fate, to find at last, on wandering backwards to the source of our ill-luck, that the primary cause of all has been our own evildoing. It was this that made Mr. Conyers stop abruptly in his reflections upon his misfortunes, and break off with a smothered oath, and listen impatiently for the wheels of the Newport Pagnell.
The “Softy” appeared presently, leading the horse by the bridle. He had not presumed to seat himself in the sacred vehicle, and he stared wonderingly at James Conyers as the trainer tumbled about the chocolate-cloth cushions, arranging them afresh for his own ease and comfort. Neither the bright varnish of the dark-brown panels, nor the crimson crest, nor the glittering steel ornaments on the neat harness, nor any of the exquisitely-finished appointments of the light vehicle, provoked one word of criticism from Mr. Conyers. He mounted as easily as his lame leg would allow him, and taking the reins from the “Softy,” lighted his cigar preparatory to starting.
“You needn’t sit up for me tonight,” he said, as he drove into the dusty high road: “I shall be late.”
Mr. Hargraves shut the iron gates with a loud clanking noise upon his new master.
“But I shall, though,” he muttered, looking askant through the bars at the fast disappearing Newport Pagnell, which was now little more than a black spot in a white cloud of dust; “but I shall sit up, though. You’ll come home drunk, I lay.” (Yorkshire is so preeminently a horse-racing and betting county, that even simple country folk who have never wagered a sixpence in the quiet course of their lives say “I lay” where a Londoner would say “I dare say.”) “You’ll come home drunk, I lay; folks generally do from Doncaster; and I shall hear some more of your wild talk. Yes, yes,” he said in a slow, reflective tone; “it’s very wild talk, and I can’t make top nor tail of it yet—not yet; but it seems to me somehow as if I knew what it all meant, only I can’t put it together—I can’t put it together. There’s something missin’, and the want of that something hinders me putting it together.”
He rubbed his stubble of coarse red hair with his two strong, awkward hands, as if he would fain have rubbed some wanting intelligence into his head.
“Two thousand pound!” he said, walking slowly back to the cottage. “Two thousand pound! It’s a power of money! Why it’s two thousand pound that the winner gets by the great race at Newmarket, and there’s all the gentlefolks ready to give their ears for it. There’s great lords fighting and struggling against each other for it; so it’s no wonder a poor fond chap like me thinks summat about it.”
He sat down upon the step of the lodge-door to smoke the cigar-ends which his benefactor had thrown him in the course of the day; but he still ruminated upon this subject, and he still stopped sometimes, between the extinction of one cheroot-stump and the illuminating of another, to mutter, “Two thousand pound! Twenty hundred pound! Forty times fifty pound!” with an unctuous chuckle after the enunciation of each figure, as if it was some privilege even to be able to talk of such vast sums of money. So might some doting lover, in the absence of his idol, murmur the beloved name to the summer breeze.
The last crimson lights upon the patches of blue water died out beneath the gathering darkness; but the “Softy” sat, still smoking, and still ruminating, till the stars were high in the purple vault above his head. A little after ten o’clock he heard the rattling of wheels and the tramp of horses’ hoofs upon the high road, and going to the gate he looked out through the iron bars. As the vehicle dashed by the north gates he saw that it was one of the Mellish-Park carriages which had been sent to the station to meet John and his wife.
“A short visit to Loon’on,” he muttered. “I lay she’s been to fetch t’ brass.”
The greedy eyes of the half-witted groom peered through the iron bars at the passing carriage, as if he would have fain looked through its opaque panels in search of that which he had denominated “the brass.” He had a vague idea that two thousand pounds would be a great bulk of money, and that Aurora would carry it in a chest or a bundle that might be perceptible through the carriage-window.
“I’ll lay she’s been to fetch t’ brass,” he repeated, as he crept back to the lodge-door.
He resumed his seat upon the doorstep, his cigar-ends, and his reverie, rubbing his head very often, sometimes with one hand, sometimes with both, but always as if he were trying to rub some wanting sense or power of perception into his wretched brains. Sometimes he gave a short restless sigh, as if he had been trying all this time to guess some difficult enigma, and was on the point of giving it up.
It was long after midnight when Mr. James Conyers returned, very much the worse for brandy-and-water and dust. He tumbled over the “Softy,” still sitting
