While Talbot was watching her, full of wondering pity and horror, a young man hurried up to the spot where she was seated, and reminded her of an engagement for the quadrille that was forming. She looked at her tablets of ivory, gold, and turquoise, and with a certain disdainful weariness rose and took his arm. Talbot followed her receding form. Taller than most among the throng, her queenly head was not soon lost sight of.
“A Cleopatra with a snub nose two sizes too small for her face, and a taste for horse-flesh!” said Talbot Bulstrode, ruminating upon the departed divinity. “She ought to carry a betting-book instead of those ivory tablets. How distraite she was all the time she sat here! I dare say she has made a book for the Leger, and was calculating how much she stands to lose. What will this poor old banker do with her? put her into a mad-house, or get her elected a member of the jockey club? With her black eyes and fifty thousand pounds, she might lead the sporting world. There has been a female pope, why should there not be a female ‘Napoleon of the Turf?’”
Later, when the rustling leaves of the trees in Beckenham Woods were shivering in that cold gray hour which precedes the advent of the dawn. Talbot Bulstrode drove his friend away from the banker’s lighted mansion. He talked of Aurora Floyd during the whole of that long cross-country drive. He was merciless to her follies; he ridiculed, he abused, he sneered at and condemned her questionable taste. He bade Francis Louis Maldon marry her at his peril, and wished him joy of such a wife. He declared that if he had such a sister he would shoot her, unless she reformed and burnt her betting-book. He worked himself up into a savage humor about the young lady’s delinquencies, and talked of her as if she had done him an unpardonable injury by entertaining a taste for the turf; till at last the poor meek young ensign plucked up a spirit, and told his superior officer that Aurora Floyd was a very jolly girl, and a good girl, and a perfect lady, and that if she did want to know who won the Leger, it was no business of Captain Bulstrode’s, and that he, Bulstrode, needn’t make such a howling about it.
While the two men are getting to high words about her, Aurora is seated in her dressing-room, listening to Lucy Floyd’s babble about the ball.
“There was never such a delightful party,” that young lady said; “and did Aurora see so-and-so, and so-and-so, and so-and-so? and above all, did she observe Captain Bulstrode, who had served all through the Crimean war, and who walked lame, and was the son of Sir John Walter Raleigh Bulstrode, of Bulstrode Castle, near Camelford?”
Aurora shook her head with a weary gesture. No, she hadn’t noticed any of these people. Poor Lucy’s childish talk was stopped in a moment.
“You are tired, Aurora dear,” she said; “how cruel I am to worry you!”
Aurora threw her arms about her cousin’s neck, and hid her face upon Lucy’s white shoulder.
“I am tired,” she said, “very, very tired.”
She spoke with such an utterly despairing weariness in her tone, that her gentle cousin was alarmed by her words.
“You are not unhappy, dear Aurora?” she asked, anxiously.
“No, no, only tired. There, go, Lucy. Good-night, good-night.”
She gently pushed her cousin from the room, rejected the services of her maid, and dismissed her also. Then, tired as she was, she removed the candle from the dressing-table to a desk on the other side of the room, and, seating herself at this desk, unlocked it and took from one of its inmost recesses the soiled pencil scrawl which had been given her a week before by the man who tried to sell her a dog in Cockspur street.
The diamond bracelet, Archibald Floyd’s birthday gift to his daughter, lay in its nest of satin and velvet upon Aurora’s dressing-table. She took the morocco case in her hand, looked for a few moments at the jewel, and then shut the lid of the little casket with a sharp metallic snap.
“The tears were in my father’s eyes when he clapsed the bracelet on my arm,” she said, as she reseated herself at the desk. “If he could see me now!”
She wrapped the case in a sheet of foolscap, secured the parcel in several places with red wax and a plain seal, and directed it thus:
“J. C.,
Care of Mr. Joseph Green,
Bell Inn,
Doncaster.”
Early the next morning Miss Floyd drove her aunt and cousin into Croydon, and, leaving them at a Berlin wool-shop, went alone to the post-office, where she registered and posted this valuable parcel.
CHAPTER 4
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 school-master, 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 among 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 on 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 have 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 dishonored 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 have I 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 of no use among 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 the 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 afterward, 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 Germain? 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,” said he; “your horses will want a rest. Of course you will dine with us. We shall have a full moon tonight, and you’ll have it as light as day for your drive back.”
Talbot looked at Francis Lewis M
aldon, 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.
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 toward 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.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 120
