"Hush!" he whispered, grasping Mrs. Powell by the wrist, and pinning her in her crouching attitude by the muscular force of his horny hand; "it's only me; Steeve the 'Softy,' you know; the stable-helper that she" (he hissed out the personal pronoun with such a furious impetus that it seemed to whistle sharply through the stillness),—"the fondy that she horsewhipped. I know you, and I know you're here to listen. He sent me into Doncaster to fetch this" (he pointed to a bottle under his arm); "he thought it would take me four or five hours to go and get back; but I ran all the way, for I knew there was soommat oop."
He wiped his streaming face with the ends of his coarse neckerchief as he finished speaking. His breath came in panting gasps, and Mrs. Powell could hear the laborious beating of his heart in the stillness.
"I won't tell o' you," he said, "and you won't tell o' me. I've got the stripes upon my shoulder where she cut me with the whip to this day. I look at 'em sometimes, and they help to keep me in mind. She's a fine madam, aint she, and a great lady too? Ay, sure she is; but she comes to meet her husband's servant on the sly, after dark, for all that. Maybe the day isn't far off when she'll be turned from these gates, and warned off this ground; and the merciful Lord send that I live to see it. Hush!"
With her wrist still pinioned in his strong grasp, he motioned her to be silent, and bent his pale face forward; every feature rigid, in the listening expectancy of his hungry gaze.
"Listen," he whispered; "listen! Every fresh word damns her deeper than the last."
The trainer was the first to speak after this pause in the dialogue within the cottage. He had quietly smoked out his pipe, and had emptied the ashes of his tobacco upon the table before he took up the thread of the conversation at the point at which he had dropped it.
"Two thousand pounds," he said, "that is the offer, and I think it ought to be taken freely. Two thousand down, in Bank-of-England notes (fives and tens, higher figures might be awkward), or sterling coin of the realm. You understand; two thousand down. That's my alternative; or I leave this place to-morrow morning—with all belonging to me."
"By which course you would get nothing," said Mrs. John Mellish, quietly.
"Shouldn't I? What does the chap in the play get for his trouble when the blackamoor smothers his wife? I should get nothing—but my revenge upon a tiger-cat, whose claws have left a mark upon me that I shall carry to my grave." He lifted his hair with a careless gesture of his hand, and pointed to a scar upon his forehead, a white mark, barely visible in the dim light of the tallow-candle. "I'm a good-natured, easy-going fellow, Mrs. John Mellish, but I don't forget. Is it to be the two thousand pounds, or war to the knife?"
Mrs. Powell waited eagerly for Aurora's answer; but before it came, a round heavy rain-drop pattered upon the light hair of the ensign's widow. The hood of her cloak had fallen back, leaving her head uncovered. This one large drop was the warning of the coming storm. The signal peal of thunder rumbled slowly and hoarsely in the distance, and a pale flash of lightning trembled on the white faces of the two listeners.