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AURORA FLOYD.
by
M. E. BRADDON,
Author of "Lady Audley's Secret."
In Three Volumes.
VOL. I.
Fifth Edition.
London:
Tinsley Brothers, 18 Catherine Steeet,
Strand.
1863.
Dedicated
TO
ADMIRAL AND MRS. BASDEN,
WITH THE
AFFECTIONATE REGARDS
OF
THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. HOW A RICH BANKER MARRIED AN ACTRESS
II. AURORA
III. WHAT BECAME OF THE DIAMOND BRACELET
IV. AFTER THE BALL
V. JOHN MELLISH
VI. REJECTED AND ACCEPTED
VII. AURORA'S STRANGE PENSIONER
VIII. POOR JOHN MELLISH COMES BACK AGAIN
IX. HOW TALBOT BULSTRODE SPENT HIS CHRISTMAS
X. FIGHTING THE BATTLE
XI. AT THE CHÂTEAU D'ARQUES
XII. STEEVE HARGRAVES, THE "SOFTY"
XIII. THE SPRING MEETING
AURORA FLOYD
CHAPTER I.
HOW A RICH BANKER MARRIED AN ACTRESS.
Faint streaks of crimson glimmer here and there amidst the rich
darkness of the Kentish woods. Autumn's red finger has been lightly
laid upon the foliage--sparingly, as the artist puts the brighter tints
into his picture: but the grandeur of an August sunset blazes upon the
peaceful landscape, and lights all into glory.
The encircling woods and wide lawn-like meadows, the still ponds of
limpid water, the trim hedges, and the smooth winding roads; undulating
hill-tops, melting into the purple distance; labouring men's cottages
gleaming white from the surrounding foliage; solitary roadside inns
with brown thatched roofs and moss-grown stacks of lop-sided chimneys;
noble mansions hiding behind ancestral oaks; tiny Gothic edifices;
Swiss and rustic lodges; pillared gates surmounted by escutcheons hewn
in stone, and festooned with green wreaths of clustering ivy; village
churches and prim school-houses: every object in the fair English
prospect is steeped in a luminous haze, as the twilight shadows steal
slowly upward from the dim recesses of shady woodland and winding
lane, and every outline of the landscape darkens against the deepening
crimson of the sky.
Upon the broad _façade_ of a mighty red-brick mansion, built in the
favourite style of the early Georgian era, the sinking sun lingers
long, making gorgeous illumination. The long rows of narrow windows
are all a-flame with the red light, and an honest homeward-tramping
villager pauses once or twice in the roadway to glance across the
smooth width of dewy lawn and tranquil lake, half fearful that there
must be something more than natural in the glitter of those windows,
and that maybe Maister Floyd's house is a-fire.
The stately red-brick mansion belongs to Maister Floyd, as he is called
in the honest _patois_ of the Kentish rustics; to Archibald Martin
Floyd, of the great banking-house of Floyd, Floyd, and Floyd, Lombard
Street, City.
The Kentish rustics know very little of this City banking-house, for
Archibald Martin, the senior partner, has long retired from any active
share in the business, which is carried on entirely by his nephews,
Andrew and Alexander Floyd, both steady, middle-aged men, with families
and country houses; both owing their fortune to the rich uncle, who had
found places in his counting-house for them some thirty years before,
when they were tall, raw-boned, sandy-haired, red-complexioned Scottish
youths, fresh from some unpronounceable village north of Aberdeen.
The young gentlemen signed their names McFloyd when they first entered
their uncle's counting-house; but they very soon followed that wise
relative's example, and dropped the formidable prefix. "We've nae need
to tell these sootherran bodies that we're Scotche," Alick remarked
to his brother, as he wrote his name for the first time A. Floyd, all
short.
The Scottish banking-house had thriven wonderfully in the hospitable
English capital. Unprecedented success had waited upon every
enterprise undertaken by the old-established and respected firm of
Floyd, Floyd, and Floyd. It had been Floyd, Floyd, and Floyd for
upwards of a century; for as one member of the house dropped off some
greener branch shot out from the old tree; and there had never yet
been any need to alter the treble repetition of the well-known name
upon the brass plates that adorned the swinging mahogany doors of the
banking-house. To this brass plate Archibald Martin Floyd pointed when,
some thirty years before the August evening of which I write, he took
his raw-boned nephews for the first time across the threshold of his
house of business.
"See there, boys," he said; "look at the three names upon that brass
plate. Your uncle George is over fifty, and a bachelor,--that's the
first name; our first cousin, Stephen Floyd, of Calcutta, is going to
sell out of the business before long,--that's the second name; the
third is mine, and I'm thirty-seven years of age, remember, boys, and
not likely to make a fool of myself by marrying. Your names will be
wanted by-and-by to fill the blanks; see that you keep them bright in
the mean time; for let so much as one speck rest upon them, and they'll
never be fit for that brass plate."
Perhaps the rugged Scottish youths took this lesson to heart, or
perhaps honesty was a natural and inborn virtue in the house of Floyd.
Be it as it might, neither Alick nor Andrew disgraced their ancestry;
and when Stephen Floyd, the East-Indian merchant, sold out, and Uncle
George grew tired of business and took to building, as an elderly,
bachelor-like hobby, the young men stepped into their relatives'
shoes, and took the conduct of the business upon their broad northern
shoulders. Upon one point only Archibald Martin Floyd had misled his
nephews, and that point regarded himself. Ten years after his address
to the young men, at the sober age of seven-and-forty, the banker not
only made a fool of himself by marrying, but, if indeed such things
are foolish, sank still further from the proud elevation of worldly
wisdom, by falling desperately in love with a beautiful but penniless
woman, whom he brought home with him after a business-tour through the
manufacturing districts, and with but little ceremony introduced to
his relations and the county families round his Kentish estate as his
newly-wedded wife.
The whole affair was so sudden, that these very county families had
scarcely recovered from their surprise at reading a certain paragraph
in the left-hand column of the 'Times,' announcing the marriage of
"Archibald Martin Floyd, banker, of Lombard Street and Felden Woods,
to Eliza, only surviving daughter of Captain Prodder," when the
bridegroom's travelling carriage dashed past the Gothic lodge at his
gates, along the avenue and under the great stone portico at the side
of the house, and Eliza Floyd entered the banker's mansion, nodding
good-naturedly to the bewildered servants, marshalled into the hall to
receive their new mistress.
The banker's wife was a tall young woman, of about thirty, with a dark
complexion, and great flashing black eyes that lit up a face, which
might otherwise have been unnoticeable, into the splendour of absolute
beauty.
Let the reader recall one of those faces, whose sole loveliness lies in
the glorious light of a pair of magnificent eyes, and remember how far
they surpass all others in their power of fascination. The same amount
of beauty frittered away upon a well-shaped nose, rosy pouting lips,
symmetrical forehead, and delicate complexion, would make an ordinarily
lovely woman; but concentrated in one nucleus, in the wondrous lustre
of the eyes, it makes a divinity, a Circe. You may meet the first any
day of your life; the second, once in a lifetime.
Mr. Floyd introduced his wife to the neighbouring gentry at a
dinner-party which he gave soon after the lady's arrival at Felden
Woods, as his country seat was called; and this ceremony very briefly
despatched, he said no more about his choice either to his neighbours
or his relations, who would have been very glad to hear how this
unlooked-for marriage had come about, and who hinted the same to the
happy bridegroom, but without effect.
Of course this very reticence on the part of Archibald Floyd himself
only set the thousand tongues of rumour more busily to work. Round
Beckenham and West Wickham, near which villages Felden Woods was
situated, there was scarcely any one debased and degraded station of
life from which Mrs. Floyd was not reported to have sprung. She had
been a factory-girl, and the silly old banker had seen her in the
streets of Manchester, with a coloured handkerchief on her head, a
coral necklace round her throat, and shoeless and stockingless feet
tramping in the mud: he had seen her thus, and had fallen incontinently
in love with her, and offered to marry her there and then. She was an
actress, and he had seen her on the Manchester stage; nay, lower still,
she was some poor performer, decked in dirty white muslin, red-cotton
velvet, and spangles, who acted in a canvas booth, with a pitiful set
of wandering vagabonds and a learned pig. Sometimes they said she was
an equestrian, and it was at Astley's, and not in the manufacturing
districts, that the banker had first seen her; nay, some there were,
ready to swear that they themselves had beheld her leaping through
gilded hoops, and dancing the cachuca upon six bare-backed steeds, in
that sawdust-strewn arena. There were whispered rumours that were more
cruel than these; rumours which I dare not even set down here, for the
busy tongues that dealt so mercilessly with the name and fame of Eliza
Floyd were not unbarbed by malice. It may be that some of the ladies
had personal reasons for their spite against the bride, and that many
a waning beauty, in those pleasant Kentish mansions, had speculated
upon the banker's income, and the advantages attendant upon a union
with the owner of Felden Woods.
The daring, disreputable creature, with not even beauty to recommend
her,--for the Kentish damsels scrupulously ignored Eliza's wonderful
eyes, and were sternly critical with her low forehead, doubtful nose,
and rather wide mouth,--the artful, designing minx, at the mature age
of nine-and-twenty, with her hair growing nearly down to her eye-brows,
had contrived to secure to herself the hand and fortune of the richest
man in Kent--the man who had been hitherto so impregnable to every
assault from bright eyes and rosy lips, that the most indefatigable of
manoeuvring mothers had given him up in despair, and ceased to make
visionary and Alnaschar-like arrangements of the furniture in Mr.
Floyd's great red-brick palace.
The female portion of the community wondered indignantly at the
supineness of the two Scotch nephews, and the old bachelor brother,
George Floyd. Why did not these people show a little spirit--institute
a commission of lunacy, and shut their crazy relative in a madhouse?
He deserved it.
The ruined _noblesse_ of the Faubourg St.-Germain could not have
abused a wealthy Bonapartist with more vigorous rancour than these
people employed in their ceaseless babble about the banker's wife.
Whatever she did was a new subject for criticism; even at that first
dinner-party, though Eliza had no more ventured to interfere with the
arrangements of the man-cook and housekeeper than if she had been a
visitor at Buckingham Palace, the angry guests found that everything
had degenerated since "that woman" had entered the house. They hated
the successful adventuress,--hated her for her beautiful eyes and her
gorgeous jewels, the extravagant gifts of an adoring husband,--hated
her for her stately figure and graceful movements, which never betrayed
the rumoured obscurity of her origin,--hated her, above all, for her
insolence in not appearing in the least afraid of the lofty members of
that new circle in which she found herself.
If she had meekly eaten the ample dish of humble-pie which these county
families were prepared to set before her,--if she had licked the dust
from their aristocratic shoes, courted their patronage, and submitted
to be "taken up" by them,--they might perhaps in time have forgiven
her. But she did none of this. If they called upon her, well and good;
she was frankly and cheerfully glad to see them. They might find her
in her gardening-gloves, with rumpled hair and a watering-pot in her
hands, busy amongst her conservatories; and she would receive them
as serenely as if she had been born in a palace, and accustomed to
homage from her very babyhood. Let them be as frigidly polite as they
pleased, she was always easy, candid, gay, and good-natured. She would
rattle away about her "dear old Archy," as she presumed to call her
benefactor and husband; or she would show her guests some new picture
he had bought, and would dare--the impudent, ignorant, pretentious
creature!--to talk about Art, as if all the high-sounding jargon with
which they tried to crush her was as familiar to her as to a Royal
Academician. When etiquette demanded her returning these stately
visits, she would drive boldly up to her neighbours' doors in a tiny
basket-carriage, drawn by one rough pony; for it was a whim of this
designing woman to affect simplicity in her tastes, and to abjure all
display. She would take all the grandeur she met with as a thing of
course, and chatter and laugh, with her flaunting theatrical animation,
much to the admiration of misguided young men, who could not see the
high-bred charms of her detractors, but who were never tired of talking
of Mrs. Floyd's jolly manner and glorious eyes.
I wonder whether poor Eliza Floyd knew all or half the cruel things
that were said of her! I shrewdly suspect that she contrived somehow or
other to hear them all, and that she rather enjoyed the fun. She had
been used to a life of excitement, and Felden Woods might have seemed
dull to her but for these ever fresh scandals. She took a malicious
delight in the discomfiture of her enemies.
"How badly they must have wanted you for a husband, Archy," she said,
"when they hate me so ferociously! Poor portionless old maids, to think
that I should snatch their prey from them! I know they think it a hard
thing that they can't have me hanged, for marrying a rich man."
But the banker was so deeply wounded when his adored wife repeated
to him the gossip which she had heard from her maid, who was a
stanch adherent to a kind, easy mistress, that Eliza ever afterwards
withheld these reports from him. They amused her; but they stung him
to the quick. Proud and sensitive, like almost all very honest and
conscientious men, he could not endure that any creature should dare
to befoul the name of the woman he loved so tenderly. What was the
obscurity from which he had taken her to him? Is a star less bright
because it shines on a gutter as well as upon the purple bosom of the
midnight sea? Is a virtuous and generous-hearted woman less worthy
because you find her making a scanty living out of the only industry
she can exercise; and acting Juliet to an audience of factory-hands,
who give threepence apiece for the privilege of admiring and applauding
her?
Yes, the murder must out; the malicious were not altogether wrong in
their conjectures: Eliza Prodder was an actress; and it was on the
dirty boards of a second-rate theatre in Lancashire that the wealthy
banker had first beheld her. Archibald Floyd nourished a traditional,
passive, but sincere admiration for the British Drama. Yes, the
_British_ Drama; for he had lived in a day when the drama was British,
and when 'George Barnwell' and 'Jane Shore' were amongst the favourite
works of art of a play-going public. How sad that we should have
degenerated since those classic days, and that the graceful story of
Milwood and her apprentice-admirer is now so rarely set before us!
Imbued, therefore, with this admiration for the drama, Mr. Floyd,
stopping for a night at this second-rate Lancashire town, dropped into
the dusty boxes of the theatre to witness the performance of 'Romeo and
Juliet;' the heiress of the Capulets being represented by Miss Eliza
Percival, alias Prodder.
I do not believe that Miss Percival was a good actress, or that she
would ever have become distinguished in her profession; but she had a
deep melodious voice, which rolled out the words of her author in a
certain rich though rather monotonous music, pleasant to hear; and upon
the stage she was very beautiful to look at, for her face lighted up
the little theatre better than all the gas that the manager grudged to
his scanty audiences.
It was not the fashion in those days to make "sensation" dramas of
Shakespeare's plays. There was no 'Hamlet' with the celebrated
water-scene, and the Danish prince taking a "header" to save poor
weak-witted Ophelia. In the little Lancashire theatre it would have
been thought a terrible sin against all canons of dramatic art, had
Othello or his Ancient attempted to sit down during any part of the
solemn performance. The hope of Denmark was no long-robed Norseman with
flowing flaxen hair, but an individual who wore a short rusty black,
cotton-velvet garment, shaped like a child's frock, and trimmed with
bugles, which dropped off and were trodden upon at intervals throughout
the performance. The simple actors held, that tragedy, to be tragedy,
must be utterly unlike anything that had ever happened beneath the sun.
And Eliza Prodder patiently trod the old and beaten track, far too
good-natured, light-hearted, and easy-going a creature to attempt any
foolish interference with the crookedness of the times, which she was
not born to set right.
What can I say, then, about her performance of the impassioned Italian
girl? She wore white satin and spangles, the spangles sewn upon the
dirty hem of her dress, in the firm belief, common to all provincial
actresses, that spangles are an antidote to dirt. She was laughing and
talking in the white-washed little green-room the very minute before
she ran on to the stage to wail for her murdered kinsman and her
banished lover. They tell us that Macready began to be Richelieu at
three o'clock in the afternoon, and that it was dangerous to approach
or to speak to him between that hour and the close of the performance.
So dangerous, indeed, that surely none but the daring and misguided
gentleman who once met the great tragedian in a dark passage, and gave
him "Good morrow, 'Mac,'" would have had the temerity to attempt it.
But Miss Percival did not take her profession very deeply to heart; the
Lancashire salaries barely paid for the physical wear and tear of early
rehearsals and long performances; how then, for that mental exhaustion
of the true artist who lives in the character he represents?
The easy-going comedians with whom Eliza acted made friendly remarks
to each other on their private affairs in the intervals of the most
vengeful discourse; speculated upon the amount of money in the house
in audible undertones during the pauses of the scene; and when Hamlet
wanted Horatio down at the footlights to ask him if he "marked that,"
it was likely enough that the prince's confidant was up the stage
telling Polonius of the shameful way in which his landlady stole the
tea and sugar.
It was not, therefore, Miss Percival's acting that fascinated the
banker. Archibald Floyd knew that she was as bad an actress as ever
played the leading tragedy and comedy for five-and-twenty shillings
a week. He had seen Miss O'Neil in that very character, and it moved
him to a pitying smile as the factory-hands applauded poor Eliza's
poison scene. But for all this he fell in love with her. It was a
repetition of the old story. It was Arthur Pendennis at the little
Chatteris theatre bewitched and bewildered by Miss Fotheringay all
over again. Only that instead of a fickle, impressionable boy, it was
a sober, steady-going business-man of seven-and-forty, who had never
felt one thrill of emotion in looking on a woman's face until that
night,--until that night,--and from that night the world only held for
him one being, and life only had one object. He went the next evening,
and the next; and then contrived to scrape acquaintance with some of
the actors at a tavern next the theatre. They sponged upon him cruelly,
these seedy comedians, and allowed him to pay for unlimited glasses of
brandy-and-water, and flattered and cajoled him, and plucked out the
heart of his mystery; and then went back to Eliza Percival, and told
her that she had dropped into a good thing, for that an old chap with
no end of money had fallen over head and ears in love with her, and
that if she played her cards well, he would marry her to-morrow. They
pointed him out to her through a hole in the green curtain, sitting
almost alone in the shabby boxes, waiting for the play to begin, and
for her black eyes to shine upon him once more.
Eliza laughed at her conquest; it was only one amongst many such, which
had all ended alike,--leading to nothing better than the purchase of a
box on her benefit night, or a bouquet left for her at the stage-door.
She did not know the power of first love upon a man of seven-and-forty.
Before the week was out, Archibald Floyd had made her a solemn offer of
marriage.
He had heard a great deal about her from her fellow-performers, and
had heard nothing but good. Temptations resisted; insidious proffers
of jewels and gewgaws indignantly declined; graceful acts of gentle
womanly charity done in secret; independence preserved through all
poverty and trial;--they told him a hundred stories of her goodness,
that brought the blood to his face with proud and generous emotion.
And she herself told him the simple history of her life: told him that
she was the daughter of a merchant-captain called Prodder; that she
was born at Liverpool; that she remembered little of her father, who
was almost always at sea--nor of a brother, three years older than
herself, who quarrelled with his father, the merchant-captain, and ran
away, and was never heard of again--nor of her mother, who died when
she, Eliza, was four years old. The rest was told in a few words. She
was taken into the family of an aunt who kept a grocer's shop in Miss
Prodder's native town. She learnt artificial flower-making, and did
not take to the business. She went often to the Liverpool theatres,
and thought she would like to go upon the stage. Being a daring and
energetic young person, she left her aunt's house one day, walked
straight to the stage-manager of one of the minor theatres, and asked
him to let her appear as Lady Macbeth. The man laughed at her, but
told her that, in consideration of her fine figure and black eyes, he
would give her fifteen shillings a week to "walk on," as he technically
called the business of the ladies who wander on to the stage, sometimes
dressed as villagers, sometimes in court costume of calico trimmed
with gold, and stare vaguely at whatever may be taking place in the
scene. From "walking on," Eliza came to play minor parts, indignantly
refused by her superiors; from these she plunged ambitiously into the
tragic lead,--and thus for nine years pursued the even tenour of her
way; until, close upon her nine-and-twentieth birthday, Fate threw the
wealthy banker across her pathway, and in the parish church of a small
town in the Potteries the black-eyed actress exchanged the name of
Prodder for that of Floyd.
She had accepted the rich man partly because, moved by a sentiment of
gratitude for the generous ardour of his affection, she was inclined to
like him better than any one else she knew; and partly in accordance
with the advice of her theatrical friends, who told her, with more
candour than elegance, that she would be a jolly fool to let such
a chance escape her; but at the time she gave her hand to Archibald
Martin Floyd, she had no idea whatever of the magnitude of the fortune
he had invited her to share. He told her that he was a banker, and her
active mind immediately evoked the image of the only banker's wife she
had ever known: a portly lady, who wore silk gowns, lived in a square
stuccoed house with green blinds, kept a cook and housemaid, and took
three box-tickets for Miss Percival's benefit.
When, therefore, the doting husband loaded his handsome bride with
diamond bracelets and necklaces, and with silks and brocades that were
stiff and unmanageable from their very richness,--when he carried
her straight from the Potteries to the Isle of Wight, and lodged
her in spacious apartments at the best hotel in Ryde, and flung his
money here and there, as if he had carried the lamp of Aladdin in his
coat-pocket,--Eliza remonstrated with her new master, fearing that his
love had driven him mad, and that this alarming extravagance was the
first outburst of insanity.
It seemed a repetition of the dear old Burleigh story when Archibald
Floyd took his wife into the long picture-gallery at Felden Woods.
She clasped her hands for frank womanly joy as she looked at the
magnificence about her. She compared herself to the humble bride of the
earl, and fell on her knees and did theatrical homage to her lord. "O
Archy," she said, "it is all too good for me! I am afraid I shall die
of my grandeur, as the poor girl pined away at Burleigh House."
In the full maturity of womanly loveliness, rich in health, freshness,
and high spirits, how little could Eliza dream that she would hold even
a briefer lease of these costly splendours than the Bride of Burleigh
had done before her!
Now the reader, being acquainted with Eliza's antecedents, may perhaps
find in them some clue to the insolent ease and well-bred audacity
with which Mrs. Floyd treated the second-rate county families, who
were bent upon putting her to confusion. She was an actress: for nine
years she had lived in that ideal world in which dukes and marquises
are as common as butchers and bakers in work-a-day life; in which,
indeed, a nobleman is generally a poor mean-spirited individual, who
gets the worst of it on every hand, and is contemptuously entreated
by the audience on account of his rank. How should she be abashed on
entering the drawing-rooms of these Kentish mansions, when for nine
years she had walked nightly on to a stage to be the focus of every
eye, and to entertain her guests the evening through? Was it likely
she was to be over-awed by the Lenfields, who were coachbuilders in
Park Lane, or the Miss Manderlys, whose father had made his money by a
patent for starch,--she, who had received King Duncan at the gates of
her castle, and had sat on a rickety throne dispensing condescending
hospitality to the obsequious Thanes at Dunsinane? So, do what they
would, they were unable to subdue this base intruder; while, to add
to their mortification, it every day became more obvious that Mr. and
Mrs. Floyd made one of the happiest couples who had ever worn the bonds
of matrimony, and changed them into garlands of roses. If this were a
very romantic story, it would be perhaps only proper for Eliza Floyd
to pine in her gilded bower, and misapply her energies in weeping for
some abandoned lover, deserted in an evil hour of ambitious madness.
But as my story is a true one,--not only true in a general sense, but
strictly true as to the leading facts which I am about to relate,--and
as I could point out, in a certain county, far northward of the lovely
Kentish woods, the very house in which the events I shall describe took
place, I am bound also to be truthful here, and to set down as a fact
that the love which Eliza Floyd bore for her husband was as pure and
sincere an affection as ever man need hope to win from the generous
heart of a good woman. What share gratitude may have had in that love,
I cannot tell. If she lived in a handsome house, and was waited on by
attentive and deferential servants; if she ate of delicate dishes,
and drank costly wines; if she wore rich dresses and splendid jewels,
and lolled on the downy cushions of a carriage, drawn by high-mettled
horses, and driven by a coachman with powdered hair; if, wherever she
went, all outward semblance of homage was paid to her; if she had but
to utter a wish, and, swift as the stroke of some enchanter's wand,
that wish was gratified,--she knew that she owed all to her husband,
Archibald Floyd; and it may be that she grew not unnaturally to
associate him with every advantage she enjoyed, and to love him for
the sake of these things. Such a love as this may appear a low and
despicable affection when compared to the noble sentiment entertained
by the Nancys of modern romance for the Bill Sykeses of their choice;
and no doubt Eliza Floyd ought to have felt a sovereign contempt for
the man who watched her every whim, who gratified her every caprice,
and who loved and honoured her as much, _ci-devant_ provincial actress
though she was, as he could have done had she descended the steps of
the loftiest throne in Christendom to give him her hand.
She was grateful to him, she loved him, and she made him perfectly
happy; so happy that the strong-hearted Scotchman was sometimes almost
panic-stricken at the contemplation of his own prosperity, and would
fall down on his knees and pray that this blessing might not be taken
from him; that, if it pleased Providence to afflict him, he might be
stripped of every shilling of his wealth, and left penniless, to begin
the world anew,--but with her. Alas, it was this blessing, of all
others, that he was to lose!
For a year Eliza and her husband lived this happy life at Felden
Woods. He wished to take her on the Continent, or to London for the
season; but she could not bear to leave her lovely Kentish home.
She was happier than the day was long amongst her gardens, and
pineries, and graperies, her dogs and horses, and her poor. To these
last she seemed an angel, descended from the skies to comfort them.
There were cottages from which the prim daughters of the second-rate
county families fled, tract in hand, discomfited and abashed by the
black looks of the half-starved inmates; but upon whose doorways the
shadow of Mrs. Floyd was as the shadow of a priest in a Catholic
country--always sacred, yet ever welcome and familiar. She had the
trick of making these people like her before she set to work to reform
their evil habits. At an early stage of her acquaintance with them,
she was as blind to the dirt and disorder of their cottages as she
would have been to a shabby carpet in the drawing-room of a poor
duchess; but by-and-by she would artfully hint at this and that little
improvement in the _ménages_ of her pensioners, until in less than
a month, without having either lectured or offended, she had worked
an entire transformation. Mrs. Floyd was frightfully artful in her
dealings with these erring peasants. Instead of telling them at once in
a candid and Christian-like manner that they were all dirty, degraded,
ungrateful, and irreligious, she diplomatized and finessed with them
as if she had been canvassing the county. She made the girls regular in
their attendance at church by means of new bonnets and smartly bound
prayer-books; she kept married men out of the public-houses by bribes
of tobacco to smoke at home, and once (oh, horror!) by the gift of a
bottle of gin for moderate and social consumption in the family circle.
She cured a dirty chimney-piece by the present of a gaudy china vase
to its proprietress, and a slovenly hearth by means of a brass fender.
She repaired a shrewish temper with a new gown, and patched up a family
breach of long standing with a chintz waistcoat. But one brief year
after her marriage,--while busy landscape-gardeners were working at the
improvements she had planned; while the steady process of reformation
was slowly but surely progressing amongst the grateful recipients of
her bounty; while the eager tongues of her detractors were still waging
war upon her fair fame; while Archibald Floyd rejoiced as he held a
baby-daughter in his arms,--without one forewarning symptom to break
the force of the blow, the light slowly faded out of those glorious
eyes, never to shine again on this side of eternity, and Archibald
Martin Floyd was a widower.