AFTER THE BALL.
Two days after Aurora's birthnight festival, Talbot Bulstrode's phaeton
dashed once more into the avenue at Felden Woods. Again the captain
made a sacrifice on the shrine of friendship, and drove Francis Maldon
from Windsor to Beckenham, in order that the young cornet might make
those anxious inquiries about the health of the ladies of Mr. Floyd's
household, which, by a pleasant social fiction, are supposed to be
necessary after an evening of intermittent waltzes and quadrilles.
The junior officer was very grateful for this kindness; for Talbot,
though the best of fellows, was not much given to putting himself out
of the way for the pleasure of other people. It would have been far
pleasanter to the captain to dawdle away the day in his own rooms,
lolling over those erudite works which his brother-officers described
by the generic title of "heavy reading," or, according to the popular
belief of those hare-brained young men, employed in squaring the circle
in the solitude of his chamber.
Talbot Bulstrode was altogether an inscrutable personage to his
comrades of the 11th Hussars. His black-letter folios, his polished
mahogany cases of mathematical instruments, his proof-before-letters
engravings, were the fopperies of a young Oxonian rather than an
officer who had fought and bled at Inkermann. The young men who
breakfasted with him in his rooms trembled as they read the titles of
the big books on the shelves, and stared helplessly at the grim saints
and angular angels in the pre-Raphaelite prints upon the walls. They
dared not even propose to smoke in those sacred chambers, and were
ashamed of the wet impressions of the rims of the Moselle bottles which
they left upon the mahogany cases.
It seemed natural to people to be afraid of Talbot Bulstrode, just
as little boys are frightened of a beadle, a policeman, and a
schoolmaster, even before they have been told the attributes of these
terrible beings. The colonel of the 11th Hussars, a portly gentleman,
who rode fifteen stone, and wrote his name high in the Peerage, was
frightened of Talbot. That cold gray eye struck a silent awe into the
hearts of men and women with its straight penetrating gaze that always
seemed to be telling them they were found out. The colonel was afraid
to tell his best stories when Talbot was at the mess-table, for he had
a dim consciousness that the captain was aware of the discrepancies
in those brilliant anecdotes, though that officer had never implied
a doubt by either look or gesture. The Irish adjutant forgot to brag
about his conquests amongst the fair sex: the younger men dropped
their voices when they talked to each other of the side-scenes at Her
Majesty's Theatre; and the corks flew faster, and the laughter grew
louder, when Talbot left the room.
The captain knew that he was more respected than beloved, and like all
proud men who repel the warm feelings of others in utter despite of
themselves, he was grieved and wounded because his comrades did not
become attached to him.
"Will anybody, out of all the millions upon this wide earth, ever
love me?" he thought. "No one ever has as yet. Not even my father and
mother. They have been proud of me; but they never loved me. How many
a young profligate has brought his parents' gray hairs with sorrow
to the grave, and has been beloved with the last heart-beat of those
he destroyed, as I have never been in my life! Perhaps my mother
would have loved me better, if I had given her more trouble; if I had
scattered the name of Bulstrode all over London upon post-obits and
dishonoured acceptances; if I had been drummed out of my regiment, and
had walked down to Cornwall without shoes or stockings, to fall at
her feet, and sob out my sins and sorrows in her lap, and ask her to
mortgage her jointure for the payment of my debts. But I have never
asked anything of her, dear soul, except her love, and that she has
been unable to give me. I suppose it is because I do not know how to
ask. How often I have sat by her side at Bulstrode, talking of all
sorts of indifferent subjects, yet with a vague yearning at my heart
to throw myself upon her breast and implore of her to love and bless
her son; but held aloof by some icy barrier that I have been powerless
all my life to break down! What woman has ever loved me? Not one.
They have tried to marry me, because I shall be Sir Talbot Bulstrode
of Bulstrode Castle; but how soon they have left off angling for the
prize, and shrunk away from me chilled and disheartened! I shudder when
I remember that I shall be three-and-thirty next March, and that I have
never been beloved. I shall sell out, now the fighting is over, for I
am no use amongst the fellows here; and, if any good little thing would
fall in love with me, I would marry her and take her down to Bulstrode,
to my mother and father, and turn country gentleman."
Talbot Bulstrode made this declaration in all sincerity. He wished
that some good and pure creature would fall in love with him, in order
that he might marry her. He wanted some spontaneous exhibition of
innocent feeling which might justify him in saying, "I am beloved!"
He felt little capacity for loving, on his own side; but he thought
that he would be grateful to any good woman who would regard him with
disinterested affection, and that he would devote his life to making
her happy.
"It would be something to feel that if I were smashed in a railway
accident, or dropped out of a balloon, some one creature in this world
would think it a lonelier place for lack of me. I wonder whether my
children would love me? I dare say not. I should freeze their young
affections with the Latin grammar; and they would tremble as they
passed the door of my study, and hush their voices into a frightened
whisper when papa was within hearing."
Talbot Bulstrode's ideal of woman was some gentle and feminine creature
crowned with an aureole of pale auburn hair; some timid soul with
downcast eyes, fringed with golden-tinted lashes; some shrinking
being, as pale and prim as the mediæval saints in his pre-Raphaelite
engravings, spotless as her own white robes, excelling in all womanly
graces and accomplishments, but only exhibiting them in the narrow
circle of a home.
Perhaps Talbot thought that he had met with his ideal when he entered
the long drawing-room at Felden Woods with Cornet Maldon on the
seventeenth of September, 1857.
Lucy Floyd was standing by an open piano, with her white dress and
pale golden hair bathed in a flood of autumn sunlight. That sunlit
figure came back to Talbot's memory long afterwards, after a stormy
interval, in which it had been blotted away and forgotten, and the long
drawing-room stretched itself out like a picture before his eyes.
Yes, this was his ideal. This graceful girl, with the shimmering light
for ever playing upon her hair, and the modest droop in her white
eyelids. But undemonstrative as usual, Captain Bulstrode seated himself
near the piano, after the brief ceremony of greeting, and contemplated
Lucy with grave eyes that betrayed no especial admiration.
He had not taken much notice of Lucy Floyd on the night of the ball;
indeed, Lucy was scarcely a candle-light beauty; her hair wanted the
sunshine gleaming through it to light up the golden halo about her
face, and the delicate pink of her cheeks waxed pale in the glare of
the great chandeliers.
While Captain Bulstrode was watching Lucy with that grave contemplative
gaze, trying to find out whether she was in any way different from
other girls he had known, and whether the purity of her delicate beauty
was more than skin deep, the window opposite to him was darkened, and
Aurora Floyd stood between him and the sunshine.
The banker's daughter paused on the threshold of the open window,
holding the collar of an immense mastiff in both her hands, and looking
irresolutely into the room.
Miss Floyd hated morning callers, and she was debating within herself
whether she had been seen, or whether it might be possible to steal
away unperceived.
But the dog set up a big bark, and settled the question.
"Quiet, Bow-wow," she said; "quiet, quiet, boy."
Yes, the dog was called Bow-wow. He was twelve years old, and Aurora
had so christened him in her seventh year, when he was a blundering,
big-headed puppy, that sprawled upon the table during the little girl's
lessons, upset ink-bottles over her copy-books, and ate whole chapters
of Pinnock's abridged histories.
The gentlemen rose at the sound of her voice, and Miss Floyd came into
the room and sat down at a little distance from the captain and her
cousin, twirling a straw hat in her hand and staring at her dog, who
seated himself resolutely by her chair, knocking double-knocks of good
temper upon the carpet with his big tail.
Though she said very little, and seated herself in a careless attitude
that bespoke complete indifference to her visitors, Aurora's beauty
extinguished poor Lucy, as the rising sun extinguishes the stars.
The thick plaits of her black hair made a great diadem upon her low
forehead, and crowned her an Eastern empress; an empress with a
doubtful nose, it is true, but an empress who reigned by right divine
of her eyes and hair. For do not these wonderful black eyes, which
perhaps shine upon us only once in a lifetime, in themselves constitute
a royalty?
Talbot Bulstrode turned away from his ideal to look at this dark-haired
goddess, with a coarse straw hat in her hand and a big mastiff's head
lying on her lap. Again he perceived that abstraction in her manner
which had puzzled him upon the night of the ball. She listened to her
visitors politely, and she answered them when they spoke to her; but it
seemed to Talbot as if she constrained herself to attend to them by an
effort.
"She wishes me away, I dare say," he thought; "and no doubt considers
me a 'slow party,' because I don't talk to her of horses and dogs."
The captain resumed his conversation with Lucy. He found that she
talked exactly as he had heard other young ladies talk; that she knew
all they knew, and had been to the places they had visited. The ground
they went over was very old indeed, but Lucy traversed it with charming
propriety.
"She is a good little thing," Talbot thought; "and would make an
admirable wife for a country gentleman. I wish she would fall in love
with me."
Lucy told him of some excursion in Switzerland, where she had been
during the preceding autumn with her father and mother.
"And your cousin," he asked, "was she with you?"
"No; Aurora was at school in Paris, with the Demoiselles Lespard."
"Lespard, Lespard!" he repeated; "a Protestant pension in the Faubourg
Saint-Dominique. Why, a cousin of mine is being educated there, a
Miss Trevyllian. She has been there for three or four years. Do you
remember Constance Trevyllian at the Demoiselles Lespard, Miss Floyd?"
said Talbot, addressing himself to Aurora.
"Constance Trevyllian! Yes, I remember her," answered the banker's
daughter.
She said nothing more, and for a few moments there was rather an
awkward pause.
"Miss Trevyllian is my cousin," said the captain.
"Indeed!"
"I hope that you were very good friends."
"Oh, yes."
She bent over her dog, caressing his big head, and not even looking
up as she spoke of Miss Trevyllian. It seemed as if the subject was
utterly indifferent to her, and she disdained even to affect an
interest in it.
Talbot Bulstrode bit his lip with offended pride. "I suppose this
purse-proud heiress looks down upon the Trevyllians of Tredethlin," he
thought, "because they can boast of nothing better than a few hundred
acres of barren moorland, some exhausted tin-mines, and a pedigree that
dates from the days of King Arthur."
Archibald Floyd came into the drawing-room while the officers were
seated there, and bade them welcome to Felden Woods.
"A long drive, gentlemen," he said; "your horses will want a rest. Of
course you will dine with us. We shall have a full moon to-night, and
you'll have it as light as day for your drive back."
Talbot looked at Francis Lewis Maldon, who was sitting staring at
Aurora with vacant, open-mouthed admiration. The young officer knew
that the heiress and her fifty thousand pounds were not for him; but
it was scarcely the less pleasant to look at her, and wish that like
Captain Bulstrode he had been the eldest son of a rich baronet.
The invitation was accepted by Mr. Maldon as cordially as it had been
given, and with less than his usual stiffness of manner on the part of
Talbot Bulstrode.
The luncheon-bell rang while they were talking, and the little party
adjourned to the dining-room, where they found Mrs. Alexander Floyd
sitting at the bottom of the table. Talbot sat next to Lucy, with Mr.
Maldon opposite to them, while Aurora took her place beside her father.
The old man was attentive to his guests, but the shallowest observer
could have scarcely failed to notice his watchfulness of Aurora. It was
ever present in his careworn face, that tender, anxious glance which
turned to her at every pause in the conversation, and could scarcely
withdraw itself from her for the common courtesies of life. If she
spoke, he listened,--listened as if every careless, half-disdainful
word concealed a deeper meaning which it was his task to discern and
unravel. If she was silent, he watched her still more closely, seeking
perhaps to penetrate that gloomy veil which sometimes spread itself
over her handsome face.
Talbot Bulstrode was not so absorbed by his conversation with Lucy
and Mrs. Alexander as to overlook this peculiarity in the father's
manner towards his only child. He saw too that when Aurora addressed
the banker, it was no longer with that listless indifference, half
weariness, half disdain, which seemed natural to her on other
occasions. The eager watchfulness of Archibald Floyd was in some
measure reflected in his daughter; by fits and starts, it is true, for
she generally sank back into that moody abstraction which Captain
Bulstrode had observed on the night of the ball; but still it was
there, the same feeling as her father's, though less constant and
intense. A watchful, anxious, half-sorrowful affection, which could
scarcely exist except under abnormal circumstances. Talbot Bulstrode
was vexed to find himself wondering about this, and growing every
moment less and less attentive to Lucy's simple talk.
"What does it mean?" he thought; "has she fallen in love with some man
whom her father has forbidden her to marry, and is the old man trying
to atone for his severity? That's scarcely likely. A woman with a head
and throat like hers could scarcely fail to be ambitious--ambitious and
revengeful, rather than over-susceptible of any tender passion. Did she
lose half her fortune upon that race she talked to me about? I'll ask
her presently. Perhaps they have taken away her betting-book, or lamed
her favourite horse, or shot some pet dog, to cure him of distemper.
She is a spoiled child, of course, this heiress, and I dare say her
father would try to get a copy of the moon made for her, if she cried
for that planet."
After luncheon, the banker took his guests into the gardens that
stretched far away upon two sides of the house; the gardens which poor
Eliza Floyd had helped to plan nineteen years before.
Talbot Bulstrode walked rather stiffly from his Crimean wound, but
Mrs. Alexander and her daughter suited their pace to his, while Aurora
walked before them with her father and Mr. Maldon, and with the mastiff
close at her side.
"Your cousin is rather proud, is she not?" Talbot asked Lucy, after
they had been talking of Aurora.
"Aurora proud! oh, no, indeed: perhaps, if she has any fault at all
(for she is the dearest girl that ever lived), it is that she has not
sufficient pride; I mean with regard to servants, and that sort of
people. She would as soon talk to one of those gardeners as to you or
me; and you would see no difference in her manner, except that perhaps
it would be a little more cordial to them than to us. The poor people
round Felden idolize her."
"Aurora takes after her mother," said Mrs. Alexander; "she is the
living image of poor Eliza Floyd."
"Was Mrs. Floyd a countrywoman of her husband's?" Talbot asked. He was
wondering how Aurora came to have those great, brilliant, black eyes,
and so much of the south in her beauty.
"No; my uncle's wife belonged to a Lancashire family."
A Lancashire family! If Talbot Raleigh Bulstrode could have known that
the family name was Prodder; that one member of the haughty house had
passed his youth in the pleasing occupations of a cabin-boy, making
thick coffee and toasting greasy herrings for the matutinal meal of a
surly captain, and receiving more corporal correction from the sturdy
toe of his master's boot than sterling copper coin of the realm! If
he could have known that the great aunt of this disdainful creature,
walking before him in all the majesty of her beauty, had once kept a
chandler's shop in an obscure street in Liverpool, and for aught any
one but the banker knew, kept it still! But this was a knowledge which
had wisely been kept even from Aurora herself, who knew little except
that, despite of having been born with that allegorical silver spoon
in her mouth, she was poorer than other girls, inasmuch as she was
motherless.
Mrs. Alexander, Lucy, and the captain overtook the others upon a rustic
bridge, where Talbot stopped to rest. Aurora was leaning over the rough
wooden balustrade, looking lazily at the water.
"Did your favourite win the race, Miss Floyd?" he asked, as he watched
the effect of her profile against the sunlight; not a very beautiful
profile certainly, but for the long black eyelashes, and the radiance
under them, which their darkest shadows could never hide.
"Which favourite?" she said.
"The horse you spoke to me about the other night,--Thunderbolt; did he
win?"
"No."
"I am very sorry to hear it."
Aurora looked up at him, reddening angrily. "Why so?" she asked.
"Because I thought you were interested in his success."
As Talbot said this, he observed, for the first time, that Archibald
Floyd was near enough to overhear their conversation, and, furthermore
that he was regarding his daughter with even more than his usual
watchfulness.
"Do not talk to me of racing; it annoys papa," Aurora said to the
captain, dropping her voice. Talbot bowed. "I was right, then," he
thought; "the turf is the skeleton. I dare say Miss Floyd has been
doing her best to drag her father's name into the 'Gazette,' and yet he
evidently loves her to distraction; while I----" There was something so
very pharisaical in the speech, that Captain Bulstrode would not even
finish it mentally. He was thinking, "This girl, who, perhaps, has been
the cause of nights of sleepless anxiety and days of devouring care,
is tenderly beloved by her father; while I, who am a model to all the
elder sons of England, have never been loved in my life."
At half-past six the great bell at Felden Woods rang a clamorous peal
that went shivering above the trees, to tell the country-side that the
family were going to dress for dinner; and another peal at seven, to
tell the villagers round Beckenham and West Wickham that Maister Floyd
and his household were going to dine; but not altogether an empty or
discordant peal, for it told the hungry poor of broken victuals and
rich and delicate meats to be had almost for asking in the servants'
offices;--shreds of fricandeaux and patches of dainty preparations,
quarters of chickens and carcasses of pheasants, which would have gone
to fatten the pigs for Christmas, but for Archibald Floyd's strict
commands that all should be given to those who chose to come for it.
Mr. Floyd and his visitors did not leave the gardens till after the
ladies had retired to dress. The dinner-party was very animated, for
Alexander Floyd drove down from the City to join his wife and daughter,
bringing with him the noisy boy who was just going to Eton, and who was
passionately attached to his cousin Aurora; and whether it was owing
to the influence of this young gentleman, or to that fitfulness which
seemed a part of her nature, Talbot Bulstrode could not discover, but
certain it was that the dark cloud melted away from Miss Floyd's face,
and she abandoned herself to the joyousness of the hour with a radiant
grace, that reminded her father of the night when Eliza Percival played
Lady Teazle for the last time, and took her farewell of the stage in
the little Lancashire theatre.
It needed but this change in his daughter to make Archibald Floyd
thoroughly happy. Aurora's smiles seemed to shed a revivifying
influence upon the whole circle. The ice melted away, for the sun
had broken out, and the winter was gone at last. Talbot Bulstrode
bewildered his brain by trying to discover why it was that this woman
was such a peerless and fascinating creature. Why it was that, argue
as he would against the fact, he was nevertheless allowing himself to
be bewitched by this black-eyed siren; freely drinking of that cup of
_bang_ which she presented to him, and rapidly becoming intoxicated.
"I could almost fall in love with my fair-haired ideal," he thought,
"but I cannot help admiring this extraordinary girl. She is like Mrs.
Nisbett in her zenith of fame and beauty; she is like Cleopatra sailing
down the Cydnus; she is like Nell Gwynne selling oranges; she is
like Lola Montes giving battle to the Bavarian students; she is like
Charlotte Corday with the knife in her hand, standing behind the friend
of the people in his bath; she is like everything that is beautiful,
and strange, and wicked and unwomanly, and bewitching; and she is just
the sort of creature that many a fool would fall in love with."
He put the length of the room between himself and the enchantress, and
took his seat by the grand piano, at which Lucy Floyd was playing slow
harmonious symphonies of Beethoven. The drawing-room at Felden Woods
was so long, that, seated by this piano, Captain Bulstrode seemed to
look back at the merry group about the heiress as he might have looked
at a scene on the stage from the back of the boxes. He almost wished
for an opera-glass as he watched Aurora's graceful gestures and the
play of her sparkling eyes; and then turning to the piano, he listened
to the drowsy music, and contemplated Lucy's face, marvellously fair
in the light of that full moon of which Archibald Floyd had spoken,
the glory of which, streaming in from an open window, put out the dim
wax-candles on the piano.
All that Aurora's beauty most lacked was richly possessed by Lucy.
Delicacy of outline, perfection of feature, purity of tint, all were
there; but while one face dazzled you by its shining splendour, the
other impressed you only with a feeble sense of its charms, slow
to come and quick to pass away. There are so many Lucys but so few
Auroras; and while you never could be critical with the one, you
were merciless in your scrutiny of the other. Talbot Bulstrode was
attracted to Lucy by a vague notion that she was just the good and
timid creature who was destined to make him happy; but he looked at her
as calmly as if she had been a statue, and was as fully aware of her
defects as a sculptor who criticises the work of a rival.
But she was exactly the sort of woman to make a good wife. She had
been educated to that end by a careful mother. Purity and goodness had
watched over her and hemmed her in from her cradle. She had never seen
unseemly sights, or heard unseemly sounds. She was as ignorant as a
baby of all the vices and horrors of this big world. She was lady-like,
accomplished, well informed; and if there were a great many others of
precisely the same type of graceful womanhood, it was certainly the
highest type, and the holiest, and the best.
Later in the evening, when Captain Bulstrode's phaeton was brought
round to the flight of steps in front of the great doors, the little
party assembled on the terrace to see the two officers depart, and the
banker told his guests how he hoped this visit to Felden would be the
beginning of a lasting acquaintance.
"I am going to take Aurora and my niece to Brighton for a month or so,"
he said, as he shook hands with the captain; "but on our return you
must let us see you as often as possible."
Talbot bowed, and stammered his thanks for the banker's cordiality.
Aurora and her cousin Percy Floyd, the young Etonian, had gone down the
steps, and were admiring Captain Bulstrode's thorough-bred bays, and
the captain was not a little distracted by the picture the group made
in the moonlight.
He never forgot that picture. Aurora, with her coronet of plaits
dead black against the purple air, and her silk dress shimmering
in the uncertain light, the delicate head of the bay horse visible
above her shoulder, and her ringed white hands caressing the animal's
slender ears, while the purblind old mastiff, vaguely jealous, whined
complainingly at her side.
How marvellous is the sympathy which exists between some people and
the brute creation! I think that horses and dogs understood every word
that Aurora said to them,--that they worshipped her from the dim depths
of their inarticulate souls, and would have willingly gone to death
to do her service. Talbot observed all this with an uneasy sense of
bewilderment.
"I wonder whether these creatures are wiser than we?" he thought;
"do they recognize some higher attributes in this girl than we can
perceive, and worship their sublime presence? If this terrible woman,
with her unfeminine tastes and mysterious propensities, were mean,
or cowardly, or false, or impure, I do not think that mastiff would
love her as he does; I do not think my thorough-breds would let her
hands meddle with their bridles: the dog would snarl, and the horses
would bite, as such animals used to do in those remote old days when
they recognized witchcraft and evil spirits, and were convulsed by
the presence of the uncanny. I dare say this Miss Floyd is a good,
generous-hearted creature,--the sort of person fast men would call a
glorious girl,--but as well read in the 'Racing Calendar' and 'Ruff's
Guide' as other ladies in Miss Yonge's novels. I'm really sorry for
her."