FIGHTING THE BATTLE.
The new year began in sadness at Felden Woods, for it found Archibald
Floyd watching in the sick-room of his only daughter.
Aurora had taken her place at the long dinner-table upon the night
of Talbot's departure; and except for being perhaps a little more
vivacious and brilliant than usual, her manner had in no way changed
after that terrible interview in the bay-windowed room. She had talked
to John Mellish, and had played and sung to her younger cousins; she
had stood behind her father, looking over his cards through all the
fluctuating fortunes of a rubber of long whist; and the next morning
her maid had found her in a raging fever, with burning cheeks and
blood-shot eyes, her long purple-black hair all tumbled and tossed
about the pillows, and her dry hands scorching to the touch. The
telegraph brought two grave London physicians to Felden before noon;
and the house was clear of visitors by nightfall, only Mrs. Alexander
and Lucy remaining to assist in nursing the invalid. The West-End
doctors said very little. This fever was as other fevers to them. The
young lady had caught a cold perhaps; she had been imprudent, as these
young people will be, and had received some sudden chill. She had very
likely overheated herself with dancing, or had sat in a draught, or
eaten an ice. There was no immediate danger to be apprehended. The
patient had a superb constitution; there was wonderful vitality in the
system; and with careful treatment she would soon come round. Careful
treatment meant a two-guinea visit every day from each of these learned
gentlemen; though, perhaps, had they given utterance to their inmost
thoughts, they would have owned that, for all they could tell to the
contrary, Aurora Floyd wanted nothing but to be let alone, and left
in a darkened chamber to fight out the battle by herself. But the
banker would have had all Saville Row summoned to the sick-bed of his
child, if he could by such a measure have saved her a moment's pain;
and he implored the two physicians to come to Felden twice a day
if necessary, and to call in other physicians if they had the least
fear for their patient. Aurora was delirious; but she revealed very
little in that delirium. I do not quite believe that people often make
the pretty, sentimental, consecutive confessions under the influence
of fever which are so freely attributed to them by the writers of
romances. We rave about foolish things in those cruel moments of
feverish madness. We are wretched because there is a man with a white
hat on in the room; or a black cat upon the counterpane; or spiders
crawling about the bed-curtains; or a coal-heaver who _will_ put a sack
of coals on our chest. Our delirious fancies are like our dreams, and
have very little connection with the sorrows or joys which make up the
sum of our lives.
So Aurora Floyd talked of horses and dogs, and masters and governesses;
of childish troubles that had afflicted her years before, and of
girlish pleasures, which, in her normal state of mind, had been utterly
forgotten. She seldom recognized Lucy or Mrs. Alexander, mistaking them
for all kinds of unlikely people; but she never entirely forgot her
father, and, indeed, always seemed to be conscious of his presence,
and was perpetually appealing to him, imploring him to forgive her for
some act of childish disobedience committed in those departed years of
which she talked so much.
John Mellish had taken up his abode at the Grayhound Inn, in Croydon
High Street, and drove every day to Felden Woods, leaving his phaeton
at the park-gates, and walking up to the house to make his inquiries.
The servants took notice of the big Yorkshireman's pale face, and set
him down at once as "sweet" upon their young lady. They liked him a
great deal better than Captain Bulstrode, who had been too "'igh"
and "'aughty" for them. John flung his half-sovereigns right and
left when he came to the hushed mansion in which Aurora lay, with
loving friends about her. He held the footman who answered the door
by the button-hole, and would have gladly paid the man half-a-crown
a minute for his time while he asked anxious questions about Miss
Floyd's health. Mr. Mellish was warmly sympathized with, therefore,
in the servants' hall at Felden. His man had informed the banker's
household how he was the best master in England, and how Mellish Park
was a species of terrestrial Paradise, maintained for the benefit of
trustworthy retainers; and Mr. Floyd's servants expressed a wish that
their young lady might get well, and marry the "fair one," as they
called John. They came to the conclusion that there had been what they
called "a split" between Miss Floyd and the captain, and that he had
gone off in a huff; which was like his impudence, seeing that their
young lady would have hundreds of thousands of pounds by-and-by, and
was good enough for a duke instead of a beggarly officer.
Talbot's letter to Mr. Floyd reached Felden Woods on the 27th of
December; but it lay for some time unopened upon the library table.
Archibald had scarcely heeded his intended son-in-law's disappearance,
in his anxiety about Aurora. When he did open the letter, Captain
Bulstrode's words were almost meaningless to him, though he was just
able to gather that the engagement had been broken,--by his daughter's
wish, as Talbot seemed to infer.
The banker's reply to this communication was very brief; he wrote:
"MY DEAR SIR,--Your letter arrived here some days since, but
has only been opened by me this morning. I have laid it aside,
to be replied to, D.V., at a future time. At present I am
unable to attend to anything. My daughter is seriously ill.
"Yours obediently,
"ARCHIBALD FLOYD."
"Seriously ill!" Talbot Bulstrode sat for nearly an hour with the
banker's letter in his hand, looking at those two words. How much
or how little might the sentence mean? At one moment, remembering
Archibald Floyd's devotion to his daughter, he thought that this
serious illness was doubtless some very trifling business,--some
feminine nervous attack, common to young ladies upon any hitch in their
love affairs; but five minutes afterwards he fancied that those words
had an awful meaning--that Aurora was dying; dying of the shame and
anguish of that interview in the little chamber at Felden.
Heaven above! what had he done? Had he murdered this beautiful
creature, whom he loved a million times better than himself? Had he
killed her with those impalpable weapons, those sharp and cruel words
which he had spoken on the 25th of December? He acted the scene over
again and again, until the sense of outraged honour, then so strong
upon him, seemed to grow dim and confused; and he began almost to
wonder why he had quarrelled with Aurora. What if, after all, this
secret involved only some school-girl's folly? No; the crouching figure
and ghastly face gave the lie to that hope. The secret, whatever it
might be, was a matter of life and death to Aurora Floyd. He dared
not try to guess what it was. He strove to close his mind against the
surmises that would arise to him. In the first days that succeeded that
terrible Christmas he determined to leave England. He would try to
get some Government appointment that would take him away to the other
end of the world, where he could never hear Aurora's name--never be
enlightened as to the mystery that had separated them. But now, now
that she was ill,--in danger, perhaps,--how could he leave the country?
How could he go away to some place where he might one day open the
English newspapers and see her name among the list of deaths?
Talbot was a dreary guest at Bulstrode Castle. His mother and his
cousin Constance respected his pale face, and held themselves aloof
from him in fear and trembling; but his father asked what the deuce
was the matter with the boy, that he looked so chapfallen, and why he
didn't take his gun and go out on the moors, and get an appetite for
his dinner, like a Christian, instead of moping in his own rooms all
day long, biting his fingers' ends.
Once, and once only, did Lady Bulstrode allude to Aurora Floyd.
"You asked Miss Floyd for an explanation, I suppose, Talbot?" she said.
"Yes, mother."
"And the result?"
"Was the termination of our engagement. I had rather you would not
speak to me of this subject again, if you please, mother."
Talbot took his gun, and went out upon the moors, as his father
advised; but it was not to slaughter the last of the pheasants, but
to think in peace of Aurora Floyd, that the young man went out.
The low-lying clouds upon the moorlands seemed to shut him in like
prison-walls. How many miles of desolate country lay between the dark
expanse on which he stood and the red-brick mansion at Felden!--how
many leafless hedge-rows!--how many frozen streams! It was only a day's
journey, certainly, by the Great Western; but there was something cruel
in the knowledge that half the length of England lay between the
Kentish woods and that far angle of the British Isles upon which Castle
Bulstrode reared its weather-beaten walls. The wail of mourning voices
might be loud in Kent, and not a whisper of death reach the listening
ears in Cornwall. How he envied the lowest servant at Felden, who knew
day by day and hour by hour of the progress of the battle between Death
and Aurora Floyd! And yet, after all, what was she to him? What did it
matter to him if she were well or ill? The grave could never separate
them more utterly than they had been separated from the very moment in
which he discovered that she was not worthy to be his wife. He had done
her no wrong; he had given her a full and fair opportunity of clearing
herself from the doubtful shadow on her name; and she had been unable
to do so. Nay, more, she had given him every reason to suppose, by her
manner, that the shadow was even a darker one than he had feared. Was
he to blame, then? Was it his fault if she were ill? Were his days to
be misery, and his nights a burden because of her? He struck the stock
of his gun violently upon the ground at the thought, and thrust the
ramrod down the barrel, and loaded his fowling-piece furiously with
nothing; and then, casting himself at full length upon the stunted
turf, lay there till the early dusk closed in about him, and the soft
evening dew saturated his shooting-coat, and he was in a fair way to be
stricken with rheumatic fever.
I might fill chapters with the foolish sufferings of this young man;
but I fear he must have become very wearisome to my afflicted readers;
to those, at least, who have never suffered from this fever. The
sharper the disease, the shorter its continuance; so Talbot will be
better by-and-by, and will look back at his old self, and laugh at his
old agonies. Surely this inconstancy of ours is the worst of all--this
fickleness, by reason of which we cast off our former selves with no
more compunction than we feel in flinging away a worn-out garment. Our
poor threadbare selves, the shadows of what we were! With what sublime,
patronizing pity, with what scornful compassion, we look back upon the
helpless dead and gone creatures, and wonder that anything so foolish
could have been allowed to cumber the earth! Shall I feel the same
contempt ten years hence for myself as I am to-day, as I feel today
for myself as I was ten years ago? Will the loves and aspirations, the
beliefs and desires of to-day, appear as pitiful then as the dead loves
and dreams of the bygone decade? Shall I look back in pitying wonder,
and think what a fool that young man was, although there was something
candid and innocent in his very stupidity, after all? Who can wonder
that the last visit to Paris killed Voltaire? Fancy the octogenarian
looking round the national theatre, and seeing himself, through an
endless vista of dim years, a young man again, paying his court to a
"goat-faced cardinal," and being beaten by De Rohan's lackeys in broad
daylight.
Have you ever visited some still country town after a lapse of years,
and wondered, O fast-living reader! to find the people you knew in
your last visit still alive and thriving, with hair unbleached as
yet, although you have lived and suffered whole centuries since then?
Surely Providence gives us this sublimely egotistical sense of Time
as a set-off against the brevity of our lives! I might make this book
a companion in bulk to the Catalogue of the British Museum, if I were
to tell all that Talbot Bulstrode felt and suffered in the month of
January, 1858,--if I were to anatomize the doubts and confusions and
self-contradictions, the mental resolutions made one moment to be
broken the next. I refrain, therefore, and will set down nothing but
the fact, that on a certain Sunday midway in the month, the captain,
sitting in the family pew at Bulstrode church, directly facing the
monument of Admiral Hartley Bulstrode, who fought and died in the
days of Queen Elizabeth, registered a silent oath that, as he was a
gentleman and a Christian, he would henceforth abstain from holding any
voluntary communication with Aurora Floyd. But for this vow he must
have broken down, and yielded to his yearning fear and love, and gone
to Felden Woods to throw himself, blind and unquestioning, at the feet
of the sick woman.
* * * * *
The tender green of the earliest leaflets was breaking out in bright
patches upon the hedge-rows round Felden Woods; the ash-buds were no
longer black upon the front of March, and pale violets and primroses
made exquisite tracery in the shady nooks beneath the oaks and beeches.
All nature was rejoicing in the mild April weather, when Aurora lifted
her dark eyes to her father's face with something of their old look
and familiar light. The battle had been a long and severe one; but it
was well-nigh over now, the physicians said. Defeated Death drew back
for a while, to wait a better opportunity for making his fatal spring;
and the feeble victor was to be carried down-stairs to sit in the
drawing-room for the first time since the night of December the 25th.
John Mellish, happening to be at Felden that day, was allowed the
supreme privilege of carrying the fragile burden in his strong arms,
from the door of the sick chamber to the great sofa by the fire in
the drawing-room; attended by a procession of happy people bearing
shawls and pillows, vinaigrettes and scent-bottles, and other invalid
paraphernalia. Every creature at Felden was devoted to this adored
convalescent. Archibald Floyd lived only to minister to her; gentle
Lucy waited on her night and day, fearful to trust the service to
menial hands; Mrs. Powell, like some pale and quiet shadow, lurked
amidst the bed-curtains, soft of foot and watchful of eye, invaluable
in the sick-chamber, as the doctors said. Throughout her illness,
Aurora had never mentioned the name of Talbot Bulstrode. Not even
when the fever was at its worst, and the brain most distraught, had
that familiar name escaped her lips. Other names, strange to Lucy, had
been repeated by her again and again: the names of places and horses
and slangy technicalities of the turf, had interlarded the poor girl's
brain-sick babble; but whatever were her feelings with regard to
Talbot, no word had revealed their depth or sadness. Yet I do not think
that my poor dark-eyed heroine was utterly feelingless upon this point.
When they first spoke of carrying her down-stairs, Mrs. Powell and Lucy
proposed the little bay-windowed chamber, which was small and snug, and
had a southern aspect, as the fittest place for the invalid; but Aurora
cried out shuddering, that she would never enter that hateful chamber
again.
As soon as ever she was strong enough to bear the fatigue of the
journey, it was considered advisable to remove her from Felden; and
Leamington was suggested by the doctors as the best place for the
change. A mild climate and a pretty inland retreat, a hushed and quiet
town, peculiarly adapted to invalids, being almost deserted by other
visitors after the hunting season.
Shakespeare's birthday had come and gone, and the high festivals at
Stratford were over, when Archibald Floyd took his pale daughter to
Leamington. A furnished cottage had been engaged for them a mile and
a half out of the town; a pretty place, half villa, half farmhouse,
with walls of white plaster chequered with beams of black wood, and
well-nigh buried in a luxuriant and trimly-kept flower-garden; a
pleasant place, forming one of a little cluster of rustic buildings
crowded about a gray old church in a nook of the roadway, where two
or three green lanes met, and went branching off between overhanging
hedges; a most retired spot, yet clamorous with that noise which is of
all others cheerful and joyous,--the hubbub of farmyards, the cackle of
poultry, the cooing of pigeons, the monotonous lowing of lazy cattle,
and the squabbling grunt of quarrelsome pigs. Archibald could not have
brought his daughter to a better place. The chequered farmhouse seemed
a haven of rest to this poor weary girl of nineteen. It was so pleasant
to lie wrapped in shawls, on a chintz-covered sofa, in the open window,
listening to the rustic noises in the straw-littered yard upon the
other side of the hedge, with her faithful Bow-wow's big fore-paws
resting on the cushions at her feet. The sounds in the farmyard were
pleasanter to Aurora than the monotonous inflections of Mrs. Powell's
voice; but as that lady considered it a part of her duty to read aloud
for the invalid's delectation, Miss Floyd was too good-natured to own
how tired she was of 'Marmion' and 'Childe Harold,' 'Evangeline,' and
'The Queen of the May,' and how she would have preferred in her present
state of mind to listen to a lively dispute between a brood of ducks
round the pond in the farmyard, or a trifling discussion in the pigsty,
to the sublimest lines ever penned by poet, living or dead. The poor
girl had suffered very much, and there was a certain sensuous, lazy
pleasure in this slow recovery, this gradual return to strength. Her
own nature revived in unison with the bright revival of the genial
summer weather. As the trees in the garden put forth new strength and
beauty, so the glorious vitality of her constitution returned with
much of its wonted power. The bitter blows had left their scars behind
them, but they had not killed her, after all. They had not utterly
changed her even, for glimpses of the old Aurora appeared day by day
in the pale convalescent; and Archibald Floyd, whose life was at best
but a reflected existence, felt his hopes revive as he looked at his
daughter. Lucy and her mother had gone back to the villa at Fulham,
and to their own family duties; so the Leamington party consisted
only of Aurora and her father, and that pale shadow of propriety, the
ensign's light-haired widow. But they were not long without a visitor.
John Mellish, artfully taking the banker at a disadvantage in some
moment of flurry and confusion at Felden Woods, had extorted from him
an invitation to Leamington; and a fortnight after their arrival he
presented his stalwart form and fair face at the low wooden gates of
the chequered cottage. Aurora laughed (for the first time since her
illness) as she saw that faithful adorer come, carpet-bag in hand,
through the labyrinth of grass and flower-beds towards the open window
at which she and her father sat; and Archibald, seeing that first
gleam of gaiety in the beloved face, could have hugged John Mellish
for being the cause of it. He would have embraced a street tumbler, or
the low comedian of a booth at a fair, or a troop of performing dogs
and monkeys, or anything upon earth that could win a smile from his
sick child. Like the Eastern potentate in the fairy tale, who always
offers half his kingdom and his daughter's hand to any one who can cure
the princess of her bilious headache, or extract her carious tooth,
Archibald would have opened a banking account in Lombard Street, with a
fabulous sum to start with, for any one who could give pleasure to this
black-eyed girl, now smiling, for the first time in that year, at sight
of the big fair-faced Yorkshireman coming to pay his foolish worship at
her shrine.
It was not to be supposed that Mr. Floyd had felt no wonder as to the
cause of the rupture of his daughter's engagement to Talbot Bulstrode.
The anguish and terror endured by him during her long illness had
left no room for any other thought; but since the passing away of the
danger, he had pondered not a little upon the abrupt rupture between
the lovers. He ventured once, in the first week of their stay at
Leamington, to speak to her upon the subject, asking why it was she
had dismissed the captain. Now if there was one thing more hateful
than another to Aurora Floyd, it was a lie. I do not say that she had
never told one in the course of her life. There are some acts of folly
which carry falsehood and dissimulation at their heels as certainly as
the shadows which follow us when we walk towards the evening sun; and
we very rarely swerve from the severe boundary-line of right without
being dragged ever so much farther than we calculated upon across the
border. Alas! my heroine is not faultless. She would take her shoes off
to give them to the barefooted poor; she would take the heart from her
breast, if she could by so doing heal the wounds she has inflicted upon
the loving heart of her father. But a shadow of mad folly has blotted
her motherless youth, and she has a terrible harvest to reap from that
lightly-sown seed, and a cruel expiation to make for that unforgotten
wrong. Yet her natural disposition is all truth and candour; and there
are many young ladies, whose lives have been as primly ruled and
ordered as the fair pleasure-gardens of a Tyburnian square, who could
tell a falsehood with a great deal better grace than Aurora Floyd. So
when her father asked her why she had _dismissed_ Talbot Bulstrode, she
made no answer to that question; but simply told him that the quarrel
had been a very painful one, and that she hoped never to hear the
captain's name again: although at the same time she assured Mr. Floyd
that her lover's conduct had been in nowise unbecoming a gentleman
and a man of honour. Archibald implicitly obeyed his daughter in this
matter, and the name of Talbot Bulstrode never being spoken, it seemed
as if the young man had dropped out of their lives, or as if he had
never had any part in the destiny of Aurora Floyd. Heaven knows what
Aurora herself felt and suffered in the quiet of her low-roofed,
white-curtained little chamber, with the soft May moonlight stealing in
at the casement-windows, and creeping in wan radiance about the walls.
Heaven only knows the bitterness of the silent battle. Her vitality
made her strong to suffer; her vivid imagination intensified every
throb of pain. In a dull and torpid soul grief is a slow anguish; but
with her it was a fierce and tempestuous emotion, in which past and
future seemed rolled together with the present to make a concentrated
agony. But, by an all-wise dispensation, the stormy sorrow wears itself
out by reason of its very violence, while the dull woe drags its slow
length sometimes through weary years, becoming at last engrafted in
the very nature of the patient sufferer, as some diseases become part
of our constitutions. Aurora was fortunate in being permitted to fight
her battle in silence, and to suffer unquestioned. If the dark hollow
rings about her eyes told of sleepless nights, Archibald Floyd forbore
to torment her with anxious speeches and trite consolations. The
clairvoyance of love told him that it was better to let her alone. So
the trouble hanging over the little circle was neither seen nor spoken
of. Aurora kept her skeleton in some quiet corner, and no one saw the
grim skull, or heard the rattle of the dry bones. Archibald Floyd read
his newspapers, and wrote his letters; Mrs. Walter Powell tended the
convalescent, who reclined during the best part of the day on the sofa
in the open window; and John Mellish loitered about the garden and
the farmyard, leaned on the low white gate, smoking his cigar, and
talking to the men about the place, and was in and out of the house
twenty times in an hour. The banker pondered sometimes in serio-comic
perplexity as to what was to be done with this big Yorkshireman, who
hung upon him like a good-natured monster of six feet two, conjured
into existence by the hospitality of a modern Frankenstein. He had
invited him to dinner, and, lo, he appeared to be saddled with him for
life. He could not tell the friendly, generous, loud-spoken creature
to go away. Besides, Mr. Mellish was on the whole very useful, and he
did much towards keeping Aurora in apparently good spirits. Yet, on
the other hand, was it right to tamper with this great loving heart?
Was it just to let the young man linger in the light of those black
eyes, and then send him away when the invalid was equal to the effort
of giving him his _congé?_ Archibald Floyd did not know that John had
been rejected by his daughter on a certain autumn morning at Brighton.
So he made up his mind to speak frankly, and sound the depths of his
visitor's feelings.
Mrs. Powell was making tea at a little table near one of the windows;
Aurora had fallen asleep with an open book in her hand; and the banker
walked with John Mellish up and down an espaliered alley in the golden
sunset.
Archibald freely communicated his perplexities to the Yorkshireman.
"I need not tell you, my dear Mellish," he said, "how pleasant it is
to me to have you here. I never had a son; but if it had pleased
God to give me one, I could have wished him to be just such a frank,
noble-hearted fellow as yourself. I'm an old man, and have seen a great
deal of trouble--the sort of trouble which strikes deeper home to the
heart than any sorrows that begin in Lombard Street or on 'Change; but
I feel younger in your society, and I find myself clinging to you and
leaning on you as a father might upon his son. You may believe, then,
that _I_ don't wish to get rid of you."
"I do, Mr. Floyd; but do you think that any one else wishes to get rid
of me? Do you think I'm a nuisance to Miss Floyd?"
"No, Mellish," answered the banker energetically. "I am sure that
Aurora takes pleasure in your society, and seems to treat you almost as
if you were her brother; but--but I know your feelings, my dear boy,
and what I fear is, that you may perhaps never inspire a warmer feeling
in her heart."
"Let me stay and take my chance, Mr. Floyd," cried John, throwing
his cigar across the espaliers, and coming to a dead stop upon the
gravel-walk in the warmth of his enthusiasm. "Let me stay and take my
chance. If there's any disappointment to be borne, I'll bear it like a
man; I'll go back to the Park, and you shall never be bothered with me
again. Miss Floyd has rejected me once already; but perhaps I was in
too great a hurry. I've grown wiser since then, and I've learnt to bide
my time. I've one of the finest estates in Yorkshire; I'm not worse
looking than the generality of fellows, or worse educated than the
generality of fellows. I mayn't have straight hair, and a pale face,
and look as if I'd walked out of a three-volume novel, like Talbot
Bulstrode. I may be a stone or two over the correct weight for winning
a young lady's heart; but I'm sound, wind and limb. I never told a lie,
or committed a mean action; and I love your daughter with as true and
pure a love as ever man felt for woman. May I try my luck once more?"
"You may, John."
"And have I,--thank you, sir, for calling me John,--have I your good
wishes for my success?"
The banker shook Mr. Mellish by the hand as he answered this question.
"You have, my dear John, my best and heartiest wishes."
So there were three battles of the heart being fought in that
spring-tide of fifty-eight. Aurora and Talbot, separated from each
other by the length and breadth of half England, yet united by an
impalpable chain, were struggling day by day to break its links; while
poor John Mellish quietly waited in the background, fighting the sturdy
fight of the strong heart, which very rarely fails to win the prize it
is set upon, however high or far away that prize may seem to be.