TALBOT BULSTRODE'S ADVICE.
Talbot Bulstrode went out early upon the quiet Sunday morning after
Aurora's arrival, and walked down to the Telegraph Company's Office
at Charing Cross, whence he despatched a message to Mr. John Mellish.
It was a very brief message, only telling Mr. Mellish to come to town
without delay, and that he would find Aurora in Halfmoon Street. Mr.
Bulstrode walked quietly homewards in the morning sunshine, after
having performed this duty. Even the London streets were bright
and dewy in that early sunlight, for it was only a little after
seven o'clock, and the fresh morning breezes came sweeping over
the house-tops, bringing health and purity from Shooter's Hill and
Highgate, Streatham and Barnsbury, Richmond and Hampstead. The white
morning mists were slowly melting from the worn grass in the Green
Park; and weary creatures, who had had no better shelter than the quiet
sky, were creeping away to find such wretched resting-places as they
might, in that free city, in which, to sit for an unreasonable time
upon a doorstep, or to ask a rich citizen for the price of a loaf, is
to commit an indictable offence.
Surely it was impossible for any young legislator not quite worn out
by a life-long struggle with the time which was never meant to be set
right,--surely it was impossible for any fresh-hearted prosperous young
Liberal to walk through those quiet streets without thinking of these
things. Talbot Bulstrode thought very earnestly and very mournfully. To
what end were his labours, after all? He was fighting for a handful of
Cornish miners; doing battle with the rampant spirit of circumlocution
for the sake of a few benighted wretches, buried in the darkness of a
black abyss of ignorance a hundred times deeper and darker than the
material obscurities in which they laboured. He was working his hardest
and his best that these men might be taught, in some easy, unambitious
manner, the simplest elements of Christian love and Christian duty.
He was working for these poor far-away creatures, in their forgotten
corner of the earth; and here, around and about him, was ignorance more
terrible, because, hand-in-hand with ignorance of all good, there was
the fatal experience of all evil. The simple Cornish miner who uses his
pickaxe in the region of his friend's skull, when he wishes to enforce
an argument, does so because he knows no other species of emphasis.
But in the London universities of crime, knavery and vice and violence
and sin matriculate and graduate day by day; to take their degrees in
the felon's dock or on the scaffold. How could he be otherwise than
sorrowful, thinking of these things? Were the Cities of the Plain worse
than this city; in which there were yet so many good and earnest men
labouring patiently day by day, and taking little rest? Was the great
accumulation of evil so heavy that it rolled for ever back upon the
untiring Sisyphus? Or did they make some imperceptible advance towards
the mountain-top, despite of all discouragement?
With this weary question debating itself in his brain, Mr. Bulstrode
walked along Piccadilly towards the comfortable bachelor's quarters,
whose most commonplace attributes Lucy had turned to favour and to
prettiness; but at the door of the Gloucester Coffee-house Talbot
paused to stare absently at a nervous-looking chestnut mare, who
insisted upon going through several lively performances upon her
hind-legs, very much to the annoyance of an unshaven ostler, and not
particularly to the advantage of a smart little dog-cart to which she
was harnessed.
"You needn't pull her mouth to pieces, my man," cried a voice from the
doorway of the hotel; "use her gently, and she'll soon quiet herself.
Steady, my girl; steady!" added the owner of this voice, walking to the
dog-cart as he spoke.
Talbot had good reason to stop short, for this gentleman was Mr. John
Mellish, whose pale face, and loose, disordered hair betokened a
sleepless night.
He was going to spring into the dog-cart, when his old friend tapped
him on the shoulder.
"This is rather a lucky accident, John; for you're the very person I
want to see," said Mr. Bulstrode. "I've just telegraphed to you."
John Mellish stared with a blank face.
"Don't hinder me, please," he said; "I'll talk to you by-and-by. I'll
call upon you in a day or two. I'm just off to Felden. I've only been
in town an hour and a half, and should have gone down before, if I had
not been afraid of knocking up the family."
He made another attempt to get into the vehicle, but Talbot caught him
by the arm.
"You needn't go to Felden," he said; "your wife's much nearer."
"Eh?"
"She's at my house. Come and have some breakfast."
There was no shadow upon Talbot Bulstrode's mind as his old
schoolfellow caught him by the hand, and nearly dislocated his wrist
in a paroxysm of joy and gratitude. It was impossible for him to look
beyond that sudden burst of sunshine upon John's face. If Mr. Mellish
had been separated from his wife for ten years, and had just returned
from the Antipodes for the sole purpose of seeing her again, he could
scarcely have appeared more delighted at the prospect of a speedy
meeting.
"Aurora here!" he said; "at your house? My dear old fellow, you can't
mean it! But of course I ought to have known she'd come to you. She
couldn't have done anything better or wiser, after having been so
foolish as to doubt me."
"She came to me for advice, John. She wanted me to advise her how to
act for your happiness,--yours, you great Yorkshireman, and not her
own."
"Bless her noble heart!" cried Mr. Mellish, huskily. "And you told
her----"
"I told her nothing, my dear fellow; but I tell you to take your
lawyer down to Doctor's Commons with you to-morrow morning, get a new
licence and marry your wife for the second time, in some quiet, little,
out-of-the-way church in the City."
Aurora had risen very early upon that peaceful Sunday morning. The few
hours of feverish and fitful sleep had brought very little comfort to
her. She stood with her weary head leaning against the window-frame,
and looked hopelessly out into the empty London street. She looked
out into the desolate beginning of a new life, the blank uncertainty
of an unknown future. All the minor miseries peculiar to a toilet in
a strange room were doubly miserable to her. Lucy had brought the
poor luggageless traveller all the paraphernalia of the toilet-table,
and had arranged everything with her own busy hands. But the most
insignificant trifle that Aurora touched in her cousin's chamber
brought back the memory of some costly toy chosen for her by her
husband. She had travelled in her white morning-dress, and the soft
lace and muslin were none the fresher for her journey; but as two of
Lucy's dresses joined together scarcely fitted her stately cousin,
Mrs. Mellish was fain to be content with her limp muslin. What did it
matter? The loving eyes which noted every shred of ribbon, every morsel
of lace, every fold of her garments, were, perhaps, never to look upon
her again. She twisted her hair into a careless mass at the back of
her head, and had completed her toilet, when Lucy came to the door,
tenderly anxious to know how she had slept.
"I will abide by Talbot's decision," she repeated to herself again and
again. "If he says it is best for my dear that we should part, I will
go away for ever. I will ask my father to take me far away, and my poor
darling shall not even know where I have gone. I will be true in what I
do, and will do it thoroughly."
She looked to Talbot Bulstrode as a wise judge, to whose sentence she
would be willing to submit. Perhaps she did this because her own heart
kept for ever repeating, "Go back to the man who loves you. Go back,
go back! There is no wrong you can do him so bitter as to desert him.
There is no unhappiness you can bring upon him equal to the unhappiness
of losing you. Let _me_ be your guide. Go back, go back!"
But this selfish monitor must not be listened to. How bitterly this
poor girl, so old in experience of sorrow, remembered the selfish sin
of her mad marriage! She had refused to sacrifice a school-girl's
foolish delusion; she had disobeyed the father who had given her
seventeen years of patient love and devotion; and she looked at all
the misery of her youth as the fatal growth of this evil seed, so
rebelliously sown. Surely such a lesson was not to be altogether
unheeded! Surely it was powerful enough to teach her the duty of
sacrifice! It was this thought that steeled her against the pleadings
of her own affection. It was for this that she looked to Talbot
Bulstrode as the arbiter of her future. Had she been a Roman Catholic,
she would have gone to her confessor, and appealed to a priest--who,
having no social ties of his own, must, of course, be the best judge
of all the duties involved in domestic relations--for comfort and
succour; but being of another faith, she went to the man whom she most
respected, and who, being a husband himself, might, as she thought, be
able to comprehend the duty that was due to her husband.
She went down-stairs with Lucy into a little inner room upon the
drawing-room floor; a snug apartment, opening into a mite of a
conservatory. It was Mr. and Mrs. Bulstrode's habit to breakfast in
this cosy little chamber, rather than in that awful temple of slippery
morocco, funereal bronze, and ghastly mahogany, which upholsterers
insist upon as the only legitimate place in which an Englishman may
take his meals. Lucy loved to sit opposite her husband at the small
round table, and minister to his morning appetite from her pretty
breakfast equipage of silver and china. She knew--to the smallest
weight employed at Apothecaries' Hall, I think--how much sugar Mr.
Bulstrode liked in his tea. She poured the cream into his cup as
carefully as if she had been making up a prescription. He took the
simple beverage in a great shallow breakfast-cup of fragile turquoise
Sèvres, that had cost seven guineas; and had been made for Madame du
Barry, the _rococo_ merchant had told Talbot. (Had his customer been a
lady, I fear Marie Antoinette would have been described as the original
possessor of this porcelain.) Mrs. Bulstrode loved to minister to her
husband. She picked the bloated livers of martyred geese out of the
Strasburg pies for his delectation; she spread the butter upon his
dry toast; and pampered and waited on him, serving him as only such
women serve their idols. But this morning she had her cousin's sorrows
to comfort; and she established Aurora in a capacious chintz-covered
easy-chair on the threshold of the conservatory, and seated herself at
her feet.
"My poor pale darling!" she said, tenderly, "what can I do to bring the
roses back to your cheeks?"
"Love me and pity me, dear," Aurora answered, gravely; "but don't ask
me any questions."
The two women sat thus for some time, Aurora's handsome head bent over
Lucy's fair face, and her hands clasped in both Lucy's hands. They
talked very little, and only spoke then of indifferent matters, or of
Lucy's happiness and Talbot's parliamentary career. The little clock
over the chimney-piece struck the quarter before eight--they were
very early, these unfashionable people--and a minute afterwards Mrs.
Bulstrode heard her husband's step upon the stairs, returning from his
ante-breakfast walk. It was his habit to take a constitutional stroll
in the Green Park, now and then, so Lucy had thought nothing of this
early excursion.
"Talbot has let himself in with his latch-key," said Mrs. Bulstrode;
"and I may pour out the tea, Aurora. But listen, dear; I think there's
some one with him."
There was no need to bid Aurora listen; she had started from her low
seat, and stood erect and motionless, breathing in a quick, agitated
manner, and looking towards the door. Besides Talbot Bulstrode's step
there was another, quicker and heavier; a step she knew so well.
The door was opened, and Talbot entered the room, followed by a
visitor, who pushed aside his host with very little attention to the
laws of civilized society, and, indeed, nearly drove Mr. Bulstrode
backwards into a gilded basket of flowers. But this stalwart John
Mellish had no intention of being unmannerly or brutal. He pushed
aside his friend only as he would have pushed, or tried to push, aside
a regiment of soldiers with fixed bayonets, or a Lancaster gun, or a
raging ocean, or any other impediment that had come between him and
Aurora. He had her in his arms before she could even cry his name
aloud, in her glad surprise; and in another moment she was sobbing on
his breast.
"My darling! my pet! my own!" he cried, smoothing her dark hair with
his broad hand, and blessing her and weeping over her,--"my own love!
How could you do this? how could you wrong me so much? My own precious
darling! had you learnt to know me no better than _this_, in all our
happy married life?"
"I came to ask Talbot's advice, John," she said, earnestly; "and I mean
to abide by it, however cruel it may seem."
Mr. Bulstrode smiled gravely, as he watched these two foolish people.
He was very much pleased with his part in the little domestic drama;
and he contemplated them with a sublime consciousness of being the
author of all this happiness. For they were happy. The poet has said,
there are some moments--very rare, very precious, very brief--which
stand by themselves, and have their perfect fulness of joy within their
own fleeting span, taking nothing from the past, demanding nothing of
the future. Had John and Aurora known that they were to be separated by
the breadth of Europe for the remainder of their several lives, they
would not the less have wept joyful tears at the pure blissfulness of
this meeting.
"You asked me for my advice, Aurora," said Talbot, "and I bring it you.
Let the past die with the man who died the other night. The future is
not yours to dispose of; it belongs to your husband, John Mellish."
Having delivered himself of these oracular sentences, Mr. Bulstrode
seated himself at the breakfast-table, and looked into the mysterious
and cavernous interior of a raised pie, with such an intent gaze, that
it seemed as if he never meant to look out of it. He devoted so many
minutes to this serious contemplation, that by the time he looked up
again, Aurora had become quite calm, while Mr. Mellish affected an
unnatural gaiety, and exhibited no stronger sign of past emotion than
a certain inflamed appearance in the region of his eyelids.
But this stalwart, devoted, impressionable Yorkshireman ate a most
extraordinary repast in honour of this reunion. He spread mustard on
his muffins. He poured Worcester sauce into his coffee, and cream over
his devilled cutlets. He showed his gratitude to Lucy by loading her
plate with comestibles she didn't want. He talked perpetually, and
devoured incongruous viands in utter absence of mind. He shook hands
with Talbot so many times across the breakfast-table, that he exposed
the lives or limbs of the whole party to imminent peril from the
boiling water in the urn. He threw himself into a paroxysm of coughing,
and made himself scarlet in the face, by an injudicious use of cayenne
pepper; and he exhibited himself altogether in such an imbecile light
that Talbot Bulstrode was compelled to have recourse to all sorts of
expedients to keep the servants out of the room during the progress of
that rather noisy and bewildering repast.
The Sunday papers were brought to the master of the house before
breakfast was over; and while John talked, ate, and gesticulated, Mr.
Bulstrode hid himself behind the open leaves of the latest edition
of the 'Weekly Dispatch,' reading a paragraph that appeared in that
journal.
This paragraph gave a brief account of the murder and the inquest at
Mellish; and wound up by that rather stereotyped sentence, in which
the public are informed that "the local police are giving unremitting
attention to the affair, and we think we may venture to affirm that
they have obtained a clue which will most probably lead to the early
discovery of the guilty party."
Talbot Bulstrode, with the newspaper still before his face, sat for
some little time frowning darkly at the page upon which this paragraph
appeared. The horrible shadow, whose nature he would not acknowledge
even to himself, once more lowered upon the horizon which had just
seemed so bright and clear.
"I would give a thousand pounds," he thought, "if I could find the
murderer of this man."