Mr. Conyers’s temper had been in no manner improved by his night’s dissipation in the town of Doncaster. Heaven knows what entertainment he had found in those lonely streets, that grass-grown marketplace and tenantless stalls, or that dreary and hermetically-sealed building, which looks like a prison on three sides and a chapel on the fourth, and which, during the September meeting, bursts suddenly into life and light with huge posters flaring against its gaunt walls, and a bright blue-ink announcement of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Mathews, or Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean, for five nights only. Normal amusement in the town of Doncaster between these two oases in the year’s dreary circle, the spring and autumn meetings, there is none. But of abnormal and special entertainment there may be much; only known to such men as Mr. James Conyers, to whom the most sinuous alley is a pleasant road, so long as it leads, directly or indirectly, to the betting-man’s god—Money.
However this might be, Mr. Conyers bore upon him all the symptoms of having, as the popular phrase has it, made a night of it. His eyes were dim and glassy; his tongue hot and furred, and uncomfortably large for his parched mouth; his hand so shaky that the operation which he performed with a razor before his looking-glass was a toss-up between suicide and shaving. His heavy head seemed to have been transformed into a leaden box full of buzzing noises; and after getting half through his toilet he gave it up for a bad job, and threw himself upon the bed he had just left, a victim to that biliary derangement which inevitably follows an injudicious admixture of alcoholic and malt liquors.
“A tumbler of Hochheimer,” he muttered, “or even the third-rate Chablis they give one at a table-d’hôte, would freshen me up a little; but there’s nothing to be had in this abominable place except brandy-and-water.”
He called to the “Softy,” and ordered him to mix a tumbler of the last-named beverage, cold and weak.
Mr. Conyers drained the cool and lucid draught, and flung himself back upon the pillow with a sigh of relief. He knew that he would be thirsty again in five or ten minutes, and that the respite was a brief one; but still it was a respite.
“Have they come home?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Mellish, you idiot!” answered the trainer fiercely. “Who else should I bother my head about? Did they come home last night while I was away?”
The “Softy” told his master that he had seen one of the carriages drive past the north gates at a little after ten o’clock on the preceding night, and that he supposed it contained Mr. and Mrs. Mellish.
“Then you’d better go up to the house and make sure,” said Mr. Conyers; “I want to know.”
“Go up to th’ house?”
“Yes, coward!—yes, sneak! Do you suppose that Mrs. Mellish will eat you?”
“I don’t suppose nought o’ t’ sort,” answered the “Softy” sulkily; “but I’d rather not go.”
“But I tell you I want to know,” said Mr. Conyers; “I want to know if Mrs. Mellish is at home, and what she’s up to, and whether there are any visitors at the house, and all about her. Do you understand?”
“Yes, it’s easy enough to understand, but it’s rare and difficult to do,” replied Steeve Hargraves. “How am I to find out? Who’s to tell me?”
“How do I know?” cried the trainer, impatiently; for Stephen Hargraves’s slow, dogged stupidity was throwing the dashing James Conyers into a fever of vexation. “How do I know? Don’t you see that I’m too ill to stir from this bed? I’d go myself if I wasn’t. And can’t you go and do what I tell you without standing arguing there until you drive me mad?”
Steeve Hargraves muttered some sulky apology, and shuffled out of the room. Mr. Conyers’s handsome eyes followed him with a dark frown. It is not a pleasant state of health which succeeds a drunken debauch; and the trainer was angry with himself for the weakness which had taken him to Doncaster upon the preceding evening, and thereby inclined to vent his anger upon other people.
There is a great deal of vicarious penance done in this world. Lady’s-maids are apt to suffer for the follies of their mistresses, and Lady Clara Vere de Vere’s French Abigail is extremely likely to have to atone for young Laurence’s death by patient endurance of my lady’s ill-temper and much unpicking and remaking of bodices, which would have fitted her ladyship well enough in any other state of mind than the remorseful misery which is engendered of an evil conscience. The ugly gash across young Laurence’s throat, to say nothing of the cruel slanders circulated after the inquest, may make life almost unendurable to the poor meek nursery-governess who educates Lady Clara’s younger sisters; and the younger sisters themselves, and mamma and papa, and my lady’s youthful confidantes, and even her haughtiest adorers, all have their share in the expiation of her ladyship’s wickedness. For she will not—or she cannot—meekly own that she has been guilty, and shut herself away from the world, to make her own atonement and work her own redemption. So she thrusts the burden of her sins upon other people’s shoulders, and travels the first stage to captious and disappointed old-maidism.
The commercial gentlemen who make awkward mistakes in the City, the devotees of the turf whose misfortunes keep them away from Mr. Tattersall’s premises on a settling-day, can make innocent women and children carry the weight of their sins, and suffer the penalties of their foolishness. Papa still smokes his Cabanas at fourpence-halfpenny apiece, or his mild Turkish at nine shillings a pound, and still dines at the Crown and Sceptre in the drowsy summer weather, when the bees are asleep in the flowers at Morden College, and the fragrant hay newly stacked in
