AURORA.
The child which Eliza Floyd left behind her, when she was so suddenly
taken away from all earthly prosperity and happiness, was christened
Aurora. The romantic-sounding name had been a fancy of poor Eliza's;
and there was no caprice of hers, however trifling, that had not
always been sacred with her adoring husband, and that was not doubly
sacred now. The actual intensity of the widower's grief was known to
no creature in this lower world. His nephews and his nephews' wives
paid him pertinacious visits of condolence; nay, one of these nieces by
marriage, a good motherly creature, devoted to her husband, insisted
on seeing and comforting the stricken man. Heaven knows whether her
tenderness did convey any comfort to that shipwrecked soul! She found
him like a man who had suffered from a stroke of paralysis, torpid,
almost imbecile. Perhaps she took the wisest course that could possibly
have been taken. She said little to him upon the subject of his
affliction; but visited him frequently, patiently sitting opposite
to him for hours at a time, he and she talking of all manner of easy
conventional topics,--the state of the country, the weather, a change
in the ministry, and such subjects as were so far remote from the grief
of his life, that a less careful hand than Mrs. Alexander Floyd's could
have scarcely touched upon the broken chords of that ruined instrument,
the widower's heart.
It was not until six months after Eliza's death that Mrs. Alexander
ventured to utter her name; but when she did speak of her, it was with
no solemn hesitation, but tenderly and familiarly, as if she had been
accustomed to talk of the dead. She saw at once that she had done
right. The time had come for the widower to feel relief in speaking of
the lost one; and from that hour Mrs. Alexander became a favourite with
her uncle. Years after, he told her that, even in the sullen torpor of
his grief, he had had a dim consciousness that she pitied him, and that
she was "a good woman." This good woman came that very evening into
the big room, where the banker sat by his lonely hearth, with a baby in
her arms,--a pale-faced child, with great wondering black eyes, which
stared at the rich man in sombre astonishment; a solemn-faced, ugly
baby, which was to grow by-and-by into Aurora Floyd, the heroine of my
story.
That pale, black-eyed baby became henceforth the idol of Archibald
Martin Floyd, the one object in all this wide universe for which it
seemed worth his while to endure life. From the day of his wife's death
he had abandoned all active share in the Lombard-Street business, and
he had now neither occupation nor delight, save in waiting upon the
prattlings and humouring the caprices of this infant daughter. His love
for her was a weakness, almost verging upon a madness. Had his nephews
been very designing men, they might perhaps have entertained some vague
ideas of that commission of lunacy for which the outraged neighbours
were so anxious. He grudged the hired nurses their offices of love
about the person of his child. He watched them furtively, fearful lest
they should be harsh with her. All the ponderous doors in the great
house at Felden Woods could not drown the feeblest murmur of that
infant voice to those ever-anxious, loving ears.
He watched her growth as a child watches an acorn it hopes to rear to
an oak. He repeated her broken baby-syllables till people grew weary of
his babble about the child. Of course the end of all this was, that, in
the common acceptation of the term, Aurora was spoiled. We do not say a
flower is spoiled because it is reared in a hot-house where no breath
of heaven can visit it too roughly; but then, certainly, the bright
exotic is trimmed and pruned by the gardener's merciless hand, while
Aurora shot whither she would, and there was none to lop the wandering
branches of that luxuriant nature. She said what she pleased; thought,
spoke, acted as she pleased; learned what she pleased; and she grew
into a bright impetuous being, affectionate and generous-hearted as her
mother, but with some touch of native fire blended in her mould that
stamped her as original. It is the common habit of ugly babies to grow
into handsome women, and so it was with Aurora Floyd. At seventeen she
was twice as beautiful as her mother had been at nine-and-twenty, but
with much the same irregular features, lighted up by a pair of eyes
that were like the stars of heaven, and by two rows of peerlessly white
teeth. You rarely, in looking at her face, could get beyond these eyes
and teeth; for they so dazzled and blinded you that they defied you
to criticise the doubtful little nose, or the width of the smiling
mouth. What if those masses of blue-black hair were brushed away from
a forehead too low for the common standard of beauty? A phrenologist
would have told you that the head was a noble one; and a sculptor would
have added that it was set upon the throat of a Cleopatra.
Miss Floyd knew very little of her poor mother's history. There was
a picture in crayons hanging in the banker's sanctum sanctorum which
represented Eliza in the full flush of her beauty and prosperity; but
the portrait told nothing of the history of its original, and Aurora
had never heard of the merchant-captain, the poor Liverpool lodging,
the grim aunt who kept a chandler's shop, the artificial flower-making,
and the provincial stage. She had never been told that her maternal
grandfather's name was Prodder, and that her mother had played Juliet
to an audience of factory hands, for the moderate and sometimes
uncertain stipend of four-and-twopence a night. The county families
accepted and made much of the rich banker's heiress; but they were
not slow to say that Aurora was her mother's own daughter, and had
the taint of the play-acting and horse-riding, the spangles and the
sawdust, strong in her nature. The truth of the matter is, that before
Miss Floyd emerged from the nursery she evinced a very decided tendency
to become what is called "fast." At six years of age she rejected
a doll, and asked for a rocking-horse. At ten she could converse
fluently upon the subject of pointers, setters, fox-hounds, harriers,
and beagles, though she drove her governess to the verge of despair
by persistently forgetting under what Roman emperor Jerusalem was
destroyed, and who was legate from the Pope at the time of Catherine
of Arragon's divorce. At eleven she talked unreservedly of the horses
in the Lenfield stables as a pack of screws; at twelve she contributed
her half-crown to a Derby sweepstakes amongst her father's servants,
and triumphantly drew the winning horse; and at thirteen she rode
across country with her cousin Andrew, who was a member of the Croydon
hunt. It was not without grief that the banker watched his daughter's
progress in these doubtful accomplishments; but she was so beautiful,
so frank and fearless, so generous, affectionate, and true, that he
could not bring himself to tell her that she was not all he could
desire her to be. If he could have governed or directed that impetuous
nature, he would have had her the most refined and elegant, the most
perfect and accomplished of her sex; but he could not do this, and he
was fain to thank God for her as she was, and to indulge her every whim.
Alexander Floyd's eldest daughter, Lucy, first cousin, once removed,
to Aurora, was that young lady's friend and confidante, and came now
and then from her father's villa at Fulham to spend a month at Felden
Woods. But Lucy Floyd had half a dozen brothers and sisters, and
was brought up in a very different manner to the heiress. She was a
fair-faced, blue-eyed, rosy-lipped, golden-haired little girl, who
thought Felden Woods a paradise upon earth, and Aurora more fortunate
than the Princess Royal of England, or Titania, Queen of the Fairies.
She was direfully afraid of her cousin's ponies and Newfoundland dogs,
and had a firm conviction that sudden death held his throne within a
certain radius of a horse's heels; but she loved and admired Aurora,
after the manner common to these weaker natures, and accepted Miss
Floyd's superb patronage and protection as a thing of course.
The day came when some dark but undefined cloud hovered about the
narrow home-circle at Felden Woods. There was a coolness between the
banker and his beloved child. The young lady spent half her time on
horseback, scouring the shady lanes round Beckenham, attended only by
her groom--a dashing young fellow, chosen by Mr. Floyd on account of
his good looks for Aurora's especial service. She dined in her own room
after these long, lonely rides, leaving her father to eat his solitary
meal in the vast dining-room, which seemed to be fully occupied when
she sat in it, and desolately empty without her. The household at
Felden Woods long remembered one particular June evening on which the
storm burst forth between the father and daughter.
Aurora had been absent from two o'clock in the afternoon until
sunset, and the banker paced the long stone terrace with his watch
in his hand, the figures on the dial-plate barely distinguishable
in the twilight, waiting for his daughter's coming home. He had sent
his dinner away untouched; his newspapers lay uncut upon the table,
and the household spies, we call servants, told each other how his
hand had shaken so violently that he had spilled half a decanter of
wine over the polished mahogany in attempting to fill his glass. The
housekeeper and her satellites crept into the hall, and looked through
the half-glass doors at the anxious watcher on the terrace. The men in
the stables talked of "the row," as they called this terrible breach
between father and child; and when at last horses' hoofs were heard in
the long avenue, and Miss Floyd reined in her thorough-bred chestnut at
the foot of the terrace-steps, there was a lurking audience hidden here
and there in the evening shadow, eager to hear and see.
But there was very little to gratify these prying eyes and ears. Aurora
sprang lightly to the ground before the groom could dismount to assist
her, and the chestnut, with heaving and foam-flecked sides, was led off
to the stable.
Mr. Floyd watched the groom and the two horses as they disappeared
through the great gates leading to the stable-yard, and then said very
quietly, "You don't use that animal well, Aurora. A six hours' ride is
neither good for her nor for you. Your groom should have known better
than to allow it." He led the way into his study, telling his daughter
to follow him, and they were closeted together for upwards of an hour.
Early the next morning Miss Floyd's governess departed from Felden
Woods, and between breakfast and luncheon the banker paid a visit to
the stables, and examined his daughter's favourite chestnut mare, a
beautiful filly all bone and muscle, that had been trained for a racer.
The animal had strained a sinew, and walked lame. Mr. Floyd sent for
his daughter's groom, and paid and dismissed him on the spot. The young
fellow made no remonstrance, but went quietly to his quarters, took off
his livery, packed a carpet-bag, and walked away from the house without
bidding good-bye to his fellow-servants, who resented the affront, and
pronounced him a surly brute who had always been too high for this
business.
Three days after this, upon the 14th of June, 1856, Mr. Floyd and his
daughter left Felden Woods for Paris, where Aurora was placed at a
very expensive and exclusive Protestant finishing school, kept by the
Demoiselles Lespard, in a stately mansion _entre cour et jardin_ in the
Rue Saint-Dominique, there to complete her very imperfect education.
For a year and two months Miss Floyd has been away at this Parisian
finishing school; it is late in the August of 1857, and again the
banker walks upon the long stone terrace in front of the narrow windows
of his red-brick mansion, this time waiting for Aurora's arrival from
Paris. The servants have expressed considerable wonder at his not
crossing the Channel to fetch his daughter, and they think the dignity
of the house somewhat lowered by Miss Floyd travelling unattended.
"A poor dear young thing, that knows no more of this wicked world than
a blessed baby," said the housekeeper, "all alone amongst a pack of
moustachioed Frenchmen!"
Archibald Martin Floyd had grown an old man in one day--that terrible
and unexpected day of his wife's death; but even the grief of that
bereavement had scarcely seemed to affect him so strongly as the loss
of his daughter Aurora during the fourteen months of her absence from
Felden Woods.
Perhaps it was that at sixty-five years of age he was less able to bear
even a lesser grief; but those who watched him closely, declared that
he seemed as much dejected by his daughter's absence as he could well
have been by her death. Even now, that he paces up and down the broad
terrace, with the landscape stretching wide before him, and melting
vaguely away under that veil of crimson glory shed upon all things by
the sinking sun; even now that he hourly, nay, almost momentarily,
expects to clasp his only child in his arms, Archibald Floyd seems
rather nervously anxious than joyfully expectant.
He looks again and again at his watch, and pauses in his walk to listen
to Beckenham church clock striking eight; his ears are preternaturally
alert to every sound, and give him instant warning of carriage-wheels
far off upon the wide high-road. All the agitation and anxiety he
has felt for the last week has been less than the concentrated fever
of this moment. Will it pass on, that carriage, or stop at the
lodge-gates? Surely his heart could never beat so loud save by some
wondrous magnetism of fatherly love and hope. The carriage stops. He
hears the clanking of the gates; the crimson-tinted landscape grows
dim and blurred before his eyes, and he knows no more till a pair of
impetuous arms are twined about his neck, and Aurora's face is hidden
on his shoulder.
It was a paltry hired carriage which Miss Floyd arrived in, and it
drove away as soon as she had alighted, and the small amount of luggage
she brought had been handed to the eager servants. The banker led his
child into the study, where they had held that long conference fourteen
months before. A lamp burned upon the library table, and it was to this
light that Archibald Floyd led his daughter.
A year had changed the girl to a woman--a woman with great hollow black
eyes, and pale haggard cheeks. The course of study at the Parisian
finishing school had evidently been too hard for the spoiled heiress.
"Aurora, Aurora," the old man cried piteously, "how ill you look! how
altered! how----"
She laid her hand lightly yet imperiously upon his lips.
"Don't speak of me," she said, "I shall recover; but you--you,
father--you too are changed."
She was as tall as her father, and, resting her hands upon his
shoulders, she looked at him long and earnestly. As she looked, the
tears welled slowly up to her eyes which had been dry before, and
poured silently down her haggard cheeks.
"My father, my devoted father," she said in a broken voice, "if my
heart was made of adamant, I think it might break when I see the change
in this beloved face."
The old man checked her with a nervous gesture, a gesture almost of
terror.
"Not one word, not one word, Aurora," he said hurriedly; "at least,
only one. That person--he is dead?"
"He is."