[CHAPTER II.]
"MY WIFE! MY WIFE! WHAT WIFE? I HAVE NO WIFE."
The Golden Lion had reassumed its accustomed air of rustic tranquillity when John Mellish returned to it. The jurymen had gone back to their different avocations, glad to have finished the business so easily; the villagers, who had hung about the inn to hear what they could of the proceedings, were all dispersed; and the landlord was eating his dinner, with his wife and family, in the comfortable little bar-parlour. He put down his knife and fork as John entered the sanded bar, and left his meal to receive such a distinguished visitor.
"Mr. Hayward and Mr. Lofthouse are in the coffee-room, sir," he said. "Will you please to step this way?"
He opened the door of a carpeted room, furnished with shining mahogany tables, and adorned by half a dozen gaudily-coloured prints of the Doncaster meetings, the great match between Voltigeur and Flying Dutchman, and other events which had won celebrity for the northern race-course. The coroner was sitting at the bottom of one of the long tables, with Mr. Lofthouse standing near him. William Dork, the Meslingham constable, stood near the door, with his hat in his hand, and with rather an alarmed expression dimly visible in his ruddy face. Mr. Hayward and Mr. Lofthouse were both very pale.
One rapid glance was enough to show all this to John Mellish,—enough to show him this, and something more: a basin of blood-stained water before the coroner, and an oblong piece of wet paper, which lay under Mr. Hayward's clenched hand.
"What is the matter? Why did you send for me?" John asked.
Bewildered and alarmed as he had been by the message which had summoned him hurriedly back to the inn, he was still more so by the confusion evident in the coroner's manner as he answered this question.
"Pray sit down, Mr. Mellish," he said. "I—I—sent for you—at—the—the advice of Mr. Lofthouse, who—who, as a clergyman and a family man, thought it incumbent upon me——"