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Project Gutenberg has the other two volumes of this work.
Volume I: see https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48020
Volume III: see https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48022
AURORA FLOYD.
by
M. E. BRADDON,
Author of "Lady Audley's Secret."
In Three Volumes.
VOL. II.
Fifth Edition.
London:
Tinsley Brothers, 18 Catherine Steeet,
Strand.
1863.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. "LOVE TOOK UP THE GLASS OF TIME, AND TURNED
IT IN HIS GLOWING HANDS"
II. MR. PASTERN'S LETTER
III. MR. JAMES CONYERS
IV. THE TRAINER'S MESSENGER
V. OUT IN THE RAIN
VI. MONEY MATTERS
VII. CAPTAIN PRODDER
VIII. "HE ONLY SAID, I AM A-WEARY"
IX. STILL CONSTANT
X. ON THE THRESHOLD OF DARKER MISERIES
XI. CAPTAIN PRODDER CARRIES BAD NEWS TO HIS NIECE'S HOUSE
XII. THE DEED THAT HAD BEEN DONE IN THE WOOD
CHAPTER I.
"LOVE TOOK UP THE GLASS OF TIME, AND TURNED IT IN HIS GLOWING HANDS."
Talbot Bulstrode yielded at last to John's repeated invitations, and
consented to pass a couple of days at Mellish Park.
He despised and hated himself for the absurd concession. In what a
pitiful farce had the tragedy ended! A visitor in the house of his
rival. A calm spectator of Aurora's every-day, commonplace happiness.
For the space of two days he had consented to occupy this most
preposterous position. Two days only; then back to the Cornish miners,
and the desolate bachelor's lodgings in Queen's Square, Westminster;
back to his tent in life's Great Sahara. He could not for the very
soul of him resist the temptation of beholding the inner life of that
Yorkshire mansion. He wanted to know for certain--what was it to him, I
wonder?--whether she was really happy, and had utterly forgotten him.
They all returned to the Park together, Aurora, John, Archibald Floyd,
Lucy, Talbot Bulstrode, and Captain Hunter. The last-named officer was
a jovial gentleman, with a hook nose and auburn whiskers; a gentleman
whose intellectual attainments were of no very oppressive order, but
a hearty, pleasant guest in an honest country mansion, where there is
cheer and welcome for all.
Talbot could but inwardly confess that Aurora became her new position.
How everybody loved her! What an atmosphere of happiness she created
about her wherever she went! How joyously the dogs barked and leapt
at sight of her, straining their chains in the desperate effort to
approach her! How fearlessly the thorough-bred mares and foals ran
to the paddock-gates to bid her welcome, bending down their velvet
nostrils to nestle upon her shoulder, responsive to the touch of
her caressing hand! Seeing all this, how could Talbot refrain from
remembering that this same sunlight might have shone upon that dreary
castle far away by the surging western sea? She might have been his,
this beautiful creature; but at what price? At the price of honour; at
the price of every principle of his mind, which had set up for himself
a holy and perfect standard--a pure and spotless ideal for the wife of
his choice. Forbid it, manhood! He might have weakly yielded; he might
have been happy, with the blind happiness of a lotus-eater, but not the
reasonable bliss of a Christian. Thank Heaven for the strength which
had been given to him to escape from the silken net! Thank Heaven for
the power which had been granted to him to fight the battle!
Standing by Aurora's side in one of the wide windows of Mellish Park,
looking far out over the belted lawn to the glades in which the deer
lay basking drowsily in the April sunlight, he could not repress the
thought uppermost in his mind.
"I am--very glad--to see you so happy, Mrs. Mellish."
She looked at him with frank, truthful eyes, in whose brightness there
was not one latent shadow.
"Yes," she said, "I am very, very happy. My husband is very good to
me. He loves--and trusts me."
She could not resist that one little stab--the only vengeance she ever
took upon him; but a stroke that pierced him to the heart.
"Aurora! Aurora! Aurora!" he cried.
That half-stifled cry revealed the secret of wounds that were not yet
healed. Mrs. Mellish turned pale at the traitorous sound. This man must
be cured. The happy wife, secure in her own stronghold of love and
confidence, could not bear to see this poor fellow still adrift.
She by no means despaired of his cure, for experience had taught her,
that although love's passionate fever takes several forms, there are
very few of them incurable. Had she not passed safely through the
ordeal herself, without one scar to bear witness of the old wounds?
She left Captain Bulstrode staring moodily out of the window, and went
away to plan the saving of this poor shipwrecked soul.
She ran in the first place to tell Mr. John Mellish of her discovery,
as it was her custom to carry to him every scrap of intelligence great
and small.
"My dearest old Jack," she said--it was another of her customs to
address him by every species of exaggeratedly endearing appellation; it
may be that she did this for the quieting of her own conscience, being
well aware that she tyrannized over him--"my darling boy, I have made a
discovery."
"About the filly?"
"About Talbot Bulstrode."
John's blue eyes twinkled maliciously. He was evidently half prepared
for what was coming.
"What is it, Lolly?"
Lolly was a corruption of Aurora, devised by John Mellish.
"Why, I'm really afraid, my precious darling, that he hasn't quite got
over----"
"My taking you away from him!" roared John. "I thought as much. Poor
devil--poor Talbot! I could see that he would have liked to fight me
on the stand at York. Upon my word, I pity him!" and in token of his
compassion Mr. Mellish burst into that old joyous, boisterous, but
musical laugh, which Talbot might almost have heard at the other end of
the house.
This was a favourite delusion of John's. He firmly believed that he
had won Aurora's affection in fair competition with Captain Bulstrode;
pleasantly ignoring that the captain had resigned all pretensions to
Miss Floyd's hand nine or ten months before his own offer had been
accepted.
The genial, sanguine creature had a habit of deceiving himself in this
manner. He saw all things in the universe just as he wished to see
them; all men and women good and honest; life one long, pleasant voyage
in a well-fitted ship, with only first-class passengers on board.
He was one of those men who are likely to cut their throats or take
prussic acid upon the day they first encounter the black visage of Care.
"And what are we to do with this poor fellow, Lolly?"
"Marry him!" exclaimed Mrs. Mellish.
"Both of us?" said John simply.
"My dearest pet, what an obtuse old darling you are! No; marry him to
Lucy Floyd, my first cousin once removed, and keep the Bulstrode estate
in the family."
"Marry him to Lucy!"
"Yes; why not? She has studied enough, and learnt history, and
geography, and astronomy, and botany, and geology, and conchology, and
entomology enough; and she has covered I don't know how many China jars
with impossible birds and flowers; and she has illuminated missals, and
read High-Church novels. So the next best thing she can do is to marry
Talbot Bulstrode."
John had his own reasons for agreeing with Aurora in this matter. He
remembered that secret of poor Lucy's, which he had discovered more
than a year before at Felden Woods: the secret which had been revealed
to him by some mysterious sympathetic power belonging to hopeless love.
So Mr. Mellish declared his hearty concurrence in Aurora's scheme,
and the two amateur match-makers set to work to devise a complicated
man-trap, in the which Talbot was to be entangled; never for a moment
imagining that, while they were racking their brains in the endeavour
to bring this piece of machinery to perfection, the intended victim was
quietly strolling across the sunlit lawn towards the very fate they
desired for him.
Yes, Talbot Bulstrode lounged with languid step to meet his Destiny,
in a wood upon the borders of the Park; a part of the Park, indeed,
inasmuch as it was within the boundary-fence of John's domain. The
wood-anemones trembled in the spring breezes, deep in those shadowy
arcades; pale primroses showed their mild faces amid their sheltering
leaves; and in shady nooks, beneath low-spreading boughs of elm and
beech, oak and ash, the violets hid their purple beauty from the vulgar
eye. A lovely spot, soothing by its harmonious influence; a very forest
sanctuary, without whose dim arcades man cast his burden down, to enter
in a child. Captain Bulstrode had felt in no very pleasant humour as he
walked across the lawn; but some softening influence stole upon him, on
the threshold of that sylvan shelter, which made him feel a better man.
He began to question himself as to how he was playing his part in the
great drama of life.
"Good heavens!" he thought, "what a shameful coward, what a negative
wretch, I have become by this one grief of my manhood! An indifferent
son, a careless brother, a useless, purposeless creature, content to
dawdle away my life in feeble pottering with political economy. Shall I
ever be in earnest again? Is this dreary doubt of every living creature
to go with me to my grave? Less than two years ago my heart sickened
at the thought that I had lived to two-and-thirty years of age, and
had never been loved. Since then--since then--since then I had lived
through life's brief fever; I have fought manhood's worst and sharpest
battle, and find myself--where? Exactly where I was before; still
companionless upon the dreary journey; only a little nearer to the end."
He walked slowly onward into the woodland aisle, other aisles branching
away from him right and left into deep glades and darkening shadow. A
month or so later, and the mossy ground beneath his feet would be one
purple carpet of hyacinths, the very air thick with a fatal-scented
vapour from the perfumed bulbs.
"I asked too much," said Talbot, in that voiceless argument we are
perpetually carrying on with ourselves; "I asked too much; I yielded to
the spell of the siren, and was angry because I missed the white wings
of the angel. I was bewitched by the fascinations of a beautiful woman,
when I should have sought for a noble-minded wife."
He went deeper and deeper into the wood, going to his fate, as
another man was to do before the coming summer was over; but to what
a different fate! The long arcades of beech and elm had reminded
him from the first of the solemn aisles of a cathedral. The saint
was only needed. And coming suddenly to a spot where a new arcade
branched off abruptly on his right hand, he saw, in one of the sylvan
niches, as fair a saint as had ever been modelled by the hand of artist
and believer,--the same golden-haired angel he had seen in the long
drawing-room at Felden Woods,--Lucy Floyd, with the pale aureola about
her head, her large straw-hat in her lap filled with anemones and
violets, and the third volume of a novel in her hand.
How much in life often hangs, or seems to us to hang, upon what is
called by playwrights, "a situation!" But for this sudden encounter,
but for thus coming upon this pretty picture, Talbot Bulstrode might
have dropped into his grave ignorant to the last of Lucy's love for
him. But, given a sunshiny April morning (April's fairest bloom,
remember, when the capricious nymph is mending her manners, aware
that her lovelier sister May is at hand, and anxious to make a good
impression before she drops her farewell curtsy, and weeps her last
brief shower of farewell tears)--given a balmy spring morning,
solitude, a wood, wild-flowers, golden hair and blue eyes, and is the
result difficult to arrive at?
Talbot Bulstrode, leaning against the broad trunk of a beech, looked
down at the fair face, which crimsoned under his eyes; and the first
glimmering hint of Lucy's secret began to dawn upon him. At that moment
he had no thought of profiting by the discovery, no thought of what he
was afterwards led on to say. His mind was filled with the storm of
emotion that had burst from him in that wild cry to Aurora. Rage and
jealousy, regret, despair, envy, love, and hate,--all the conflicting
feelings that had struggled like so many demons in his soul at sight of
Aurora's happiness, were still striving for mastery in his breast; and
the first words he spoke revealed the thoughts that were uppermost.
"Your cousin is very happy in her new life, Miss Floyd?" he said.
Lucy looked up at him with surprise. It was the first time he had
spoken to her of Aurora.
"Yes," she answered quietly, "I think she is happy."
Captain Bulstrode whisked the end of his cane across a group of
anemones, and decapitated the tremulous blossoms. He was thinking,
rather savagely, what a shame it was that this glorious Aurora could
be happy with big, broad-shouldered, jovial-tempered John Mellish. He
could not understand the strange anomaly; he could not discover the
clue to the secret; he could not comprehend that the devoted love of
this sturdy Yorkshireman was in itself strong enough to conquer all
difficulties, to outweigh all differences.
Little by little, he and Lucy began to talk of Aurora, until Miss Floyd
told her companion all about that dreary time at Felden Woods, during
which the life of the heiress was well-nigh despaired of. So she had
loved him truly, then, after all; she had loved, and had suffered, and
had lived down her trouble, and had forgotten him, and was happy. The
story was all told in that one sentence. He looked blankly back at the
irrecoverable past, and was angry with the pride of the Bulstrodes,
which had stood between himself and his happiness.
He told sympathizing Lucy something of his sorrow; told her that
misapprehension--mistaken pride--had parted him from Aurora. She
tried, in her gentle, innocent fashion, to comfort the strong
man in his weakness, and in trying revealed--ah, how simply and
transparently!--the old secret, which had so long been hidden from him.
Heaven help the man whose heart is caught at the rebound by a
fair-haired divinity, with dove-like eyes, and a low tremulous voice
softly attuned to his grief. Talbot Bulstrode saw that he was beloved;
and, in very gratitude, made a dismal offer of the ashes of that fire
which had burnt so fiercely at Aurora's shrine. Do not despise this
poor Lucy if she accepted her cousin's forgotten lover with humble
thankfulness; nay, with a tumult of wild delight, and with joyful
fear and trembling. She loved him so well, and had loved him so long.
Forgive and pity her, for she was one of those pure and innocent
creatures whose whole being resolves itself into _affection;_ to whom
passion, anger, and pride are unknown; who live only to love, and who
love until death. Talbot Bulstrode told Lucy Floyd that he had loved
Aurora with the whole strength of his soul, but that, now the battle
was over, he, the stricken warrior, needed a consoler for his declining
days: would she, could she, give her hand to one who would strive to
the uttermost to fulfil a husband's duty, and to make her happy? Happy!
She would have been happy if he had asked her to be his slave; happy if
she could have been a scullery-maid at Bulstrode Castle, so that she
might have seen the dark face she loved once or twice a day through the
obscure panes of some kitchen window.
But she was the most undemonstrative of women, and, except by her
blushes, and her drooping eyelids, and the tear-drop trembling upon the
soft auburn lashes, she made no reply to the captain's appeal, until at
last, taking her hand in his, he won from her a low-consenting murmur
which meant Yes.
Good heavens! how hard it is upon such women as these that they feel
so much and yet display so little feeling! The dark-eyed, impetuous
creatures, who speak out fearlessly, and tell you that they love
or hate you--flinging their arms round your neck or throwing the
carving-knife at you, as the case may be--get full value for all their
emotion; but these gentle creatures love, and make no sign. They sit,
like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief; and no one reads the
mournful meaning of that sad smile. Concealment, like the worm i' the
bud, feeds on their damask cheeks; and compassionate relatives tell
them that they are bilious, and recommend some homely remedy for their
pallid complexions. They are always at a disadvantage. Their inner life
may be a tragedy, all blood and tears, while their outer existence
is some dull domestic drama of every-day life. The only outward sign
Lucy Floyd gave of the condition of her heart was that one tremulous,
half-whispered affirmative; and yet what a tempest of emotion was going
forward within! The muslin folds of her dress rose and fell with the
surging billows; but, for the very life of her, she could have uttered
no better response to Talbot's pleading.
It was only by-and-by, after she and Captain Bulstrode had wandered
slowly back to the house, that her emotion betrayed itself. Aurora
met her cousin in the corridor out of which their rooms opened, and,
drawing Lucy into her own dressing-room, asked the truant where she had
been.
"Where have you been, you runaway girl? John and I have wanted you half
a dozen times."
Miss Lucy Floyd explained that she had been in the wood with the last
new novel,--a High-Church novel, in which the heroine rejected the
clerical hero because he did not perform the service according to the
Rubric. Now Miss Lucy Floyd made this admission with so much confusion
and so many blushes, that it would have appeared as if there were some
lurking criminality in the fact of spending an April morning in a
wood; and being further examined as to why she had stayed so long, and
whether she had been alone all the time, poor Lucy fell into a pitiful
state of embarrassment, declaring that she had been alone; that is to
say, part of the time--or at least most of the time; but that Captain
Bulstrode----
But in trying to pronounce his name,--this beloved, this sacred
name,--Lucy Floyd's utterance failed her; she fairly broke down, and
burst into tears.
Aurora laid her cousin's face upon her breast, and looked down, with a
womanly, matronly glance, into those tearful blue eyes.
"Lucy, my darling," she said, "is it really and truly as I think--as I
wish:--Talbot loves you?"
"He has asked me to marry him," Lucy whispered.
"And you--you have consented--you love him?"
Lucy Floyd only answered by a new burst of tears.
"Why, my darling, how this surprises me! How long has it been so, Lucy?
How long have you loved him?"
"From the hour I first saw him," murmured Lucy; "from the day he first
came to Felden. O Aurora! I know how foolish and weak it was; I hate
myself for the folly; but he is so good, so noble, so----"
"My silly darling; and because he is good and noble, and has asked you
to be his wife, you shed as many tears as if you had been asked to go
to his funeral. My loving, tender Lucy, you loved him all the time,
then; and you were so gentle and good to me--to me, who was selfish
enough never to guess----My dearest, you are a hundred times better
suited to him than ever I was, and you will be as happy--as happy as I
am with that ridiculous old John."
Aurora's eyes filled with tears as she spoke. She was truly and
sincerely glad that Talbot was in a fair way to find consolation, still
more glad that her sentimental cousin was to be made happy.
Talbot Bulstrode lingered on a few days at Mellish Park;--happy, ah!
too happy days for Lucy Floyd--and then departed, after receiving the
congratulations of John and Aurora.
He was to go straight to Alexander Floyd's villa at Fulham, and plead
his cause with Lucy's father. There was little fear of his meeting
other than a favourable reception; for Talbot Bulstrode of Bulstrode
Castle was a very great match for a daughter of the junior branch
of Floyd, Floyd, and Floyd, a young lady whose expectations were
considerably qualified by half a dozen brothers and sisters.
So Captain Bulstrode went back to London as the betrothed lover of
Lucy Floyd; went back with a subdued gladness in his heart, all unlike
the stormy joys of the past. He was happy in the choice he had made
calmly and dispassionately. He had loved Aurora for her beauty and her
fascination; he was going to marry Lucy because he had seen much of
her, had observed her closely, and believed her to be all that a woman
should be. Perhaps, if stern truth must be told, Lucy's chief charm
in the captain's eyes lay in that reverence for himself which she so
_naïvely_ betrayed. He accepted her worship with a quiet, unconscious
serenity, and thought her the most sensible of women.
Mrs. Alexander was utterly bewildered when Aurora's sometime lover
pleaded for her daughter's hand. She was too busy a mother amongst
her little flock to be the most penetrating of observers, and she had
never suspected the state of Lucy's heart. She was glad, therefore,
to find that her daughter did justice to her excellent education, and
had too much good sense to refuse so advantageous an offer as that of
Captain Bulstrode; and she joined with her husband in perfect approval
of Talbot's suit. So, there being no let or hindrance, and as the
lovers had long known and esteemed each other, it was decided, at the
captain's request, that the wedding should take place early in June,
and that the honeymoon should be spent at Bulstrode Castle.
At the end of May, Mr. and Mrs. Mellish went to Felden, on purpose to
attend Lucy's wedding, which took place with great style at Fulham,
Archibald Floyd presenting his grand-niece with a cheque for five
thousand pounds after the return from church.
Once during that marriage ceremony Talbot Bulstrode was nigh upon
rubbing his eyes, thinking that the pageant must be a dream. A dream
surely; for here was a pale, fair-haired girl by his side, while the
woman he had chosen two years before stood amidst a group behind
him, and looked on at the ceremony, a pleased spectator. But when he
felt the little gloved hand trembling upon his arm, as the bride and
bridegroom left the altar, he remembered that it was no dream, and that
life held new and solemn duties for him from that hour.
Now my two heroines being married, the reader versed in the physiology
of novel writing may conclude that my story is done, that the green
curtain is ready to fall upon the last act of the play, and that I have
nothing more to do than to entreat indulgence for the shortcomings of
the performance and the performers. Yet, after all, does the business
of the real life-drama always end upon the altar-steps? Must the play
needs be over when the hero and heroine have signed their names in the
register? Does man cease to be, to do, and to suffer when he gets
married? And is it necessary that the novelist, after devoting three
volumes to the description of a courtship of six weeks' duration,
should reserve for himself only half a page in which to tell us the
events of two-thirds of a lifetime? Aurora is married, and settled,
and happy; sheltered, as one would imagine, from all dangers, safe
under the wing of her stalwart adorer; but it does not therefore follow
that the story of her life is done. She has escaped shipwreck for a
while, and has safely landed on a pleasant shore; but the storm may
still lower darkly upon the horizon, while the hoarse thunder grumbles
threateningly in the distance.