Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “If — if,” he said, “my fate had been happier, I know how proud my father, poor old Sir John, would have been of his eldest son’s choice.”

  How ashamed he felt of the meanness of this speech! The artful sentence had been constructed in order to remind Aurora whom she was refusing. He was trying to bribe her with the baronetcy which was to be his in due time. But she made no answer to the pitiful appeal. Talbot was almost choked with mortification. “I see — I see,” he said, “that it is hopeless. Good-night, Miss Floyd.”

  She did not even turn to look at him as he left the balcony; but, with her red drapery wrapped tightly round her, stood shivering in the moonlight, with the silent tears slowly stealing down her cheeks.

  “Higher views!” she cried bitterly, repeating a phrase that Talbot used—”higher views! God help him!”

  “I must wish you good-night and good-by at the same time,” Captain Bulstrode said as he shook hands with Lucy.

  “Good-by?”

  “Yes; I leave Brighton early to-morrow.”

  “So suddenly?”

  “Why not exactly suddenly. I always meant to travel this winter. Can I do anything for you — at Cairo?”

  He was so pale, and cold, and wretched-looking that she almost pitied him in spite of the wild joy growing up in her heart. Aurora had refused him — it was perfectly clear — refused him! The soft blue eyes filled with tears at the thought that a demigod should have endured such humiliation. Talbot pressed her hand gently in his own clammy palm. He could read pity in that tender look, but possessed no lexicon by which he could translate its deeper meaning.

  “You will wish your uncle good-by for me, Lucy,” he said. He called her Lucy for the first time; but what did it matter now? His great affliction set him apart from his fellowmen, and gave him dismal privileges. “Good-night, Lucy; good-night and good-by. I — I — shall hope to see you again in a year or two.”

  The pavement of the East Cliff seemed so much air beneath Talbot Bulstrode’s boots as he strode back to the Old Ship; for it is peculiar to us, in our moments of supreme trouble or joy, to lose all consciousness of the earth we tread, and to float upon the atmosphere of sublime egotism.

  But the captain did not leave Brighton the next day on the first stage of his Egyptian journey. He staid at the fashionable watering-place; but he resolutely abjured the neighborhood of the East Cliff, and, the day being wet, took a pleasant walk to Shoreham through the rain; and Shoreham being such a pretty place, he was, no doubt, much enlivened by that exercise.

  Returning through the fog at about four o’clock, the captain met Mr. John Mellish close against the turnpike outside Cliftonville.

  The two men stared aghast at each other.

  “Why, where on earth are you going?” asked Talbot.

  “Back to Yorkshire by the first train that leaves Brighton.”

  “But this is n’t the way to the station!”

  “No; but they’re putting the horses in my portmanteau, and my shirts are going by the Leeds cattle-train, and—”

  Talbot Bulstrode burst into a loud laugh, a harsh and bitter cachinnation, but affording wondrous relief to that gentleman’s over-charged breast.

  “John Mellish,” he said, “you have been proposing to Aurora Floyd.”

  The Yorkshireman turned scarlet. “It — it — was n’t honorable of her to tell you,” he stammered.

  “Miss Floyd has never breathed a word to me upon the subject. I’ve just come from Shoreham, and you’ve only lately left the East Cliff. You’ve proposed, and you’ve been rejected.”

  “I have,” roared John; “and it’s doosed hard, when I promised her she should keep a racing-stud if she liked, and enter as many colts as she pleased for the Derby, and give her own orders to the trainer, and I’d never interfere; and — and — Mellish Park is one of the finest places in the county; and I’d have won her a bit of blue ribbon to tie up her bonny black hair.”

  “That old Frenchman was right,” muttered Captain Bulstrode; “there is a great satisfaction in the misfortunes of others. If I go to my dentist, I like to find another wretch in the waiting-room; and I like to have my tooth extracted first, and to see him glare enviously at me as I come out of the torture-chamber, knowing that my troubles are over, while his are to come. Good-by, John Mellish, and God bless you. You’re not such a bad fellow, after all.”

  Talbot felt almost cheerful as he walked back to the Ship, and he took a mutton cutlet and tomato sauce, and a pint of Moselle for his dinner; and the food and wine warmed him; and, not having slept a wink on the previous night, he fell into a heavy indigestible slumber, with his head hanging over the sofa-cushion, and dreamed that he was at Grand Cairo (or at a place which would have been that city had it not been now and then Bulstrode Castle, and occasionally chambers in the Albany), and that Aurora Floyd was with him, clad in imperial purple, with hieroglyphics on the hem of her robe, and wearing a clown’s jacket of white satin and scarlet spots, such as he had once seen foremost in a great race. Captain Bulstrode arose early the next morning, with the full intention of departing from Sussex by the 8.45 express; but suddenly remembering that he had but poorly acknowledged Archibald Floyd’s cordiality, he determined on sacrificing his inclinations on the shrine of courtesy, and calling once more at the East Cliff to take leave of the banker. Having once resolved upon this line of action, the captain would fain have hurried that moment to Mr. Floyd’s house; but, finding that it was only half-past seven, he was compelled to restrain his impatience and await a more seasonable hour. Could he go at nine? Scarcely. At ten? Yes, surely, as he could then leave by the eleven o’clock train. He sent his breakfast away untouched, and sat looking at his watch in a mad hurry for the time to pass, yet growing hot and uncomfortable as the hour drew near.

  At a quarter to ten he put on his hat and left the hotel. Mr. Floyd was at home, the servant told him — up stairs in the little study, he thought. Talbot waited for no more. “You need not announce me,” he said; “I know where to find your master.”

  The study was on the same floor as the drawing-room, and close against the drawing-room door Talbot paused for a moment. The door was open; the room empty — no, not empty: Aurora Floyd was there, seated with her back toward him, and her head leaning on the cushions of her chair. He stopped for another moment to admire the back view of that small head, with its crown of lustrous raven hair, then took a step or two in the direction of the banker’s study, then stopped again, then turned back, went into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind him.

  She did not stir as he approached her, nor answer when he stammered her name. Her face was as white as the face of a dead woman, and her nerveless hands hung over the cushions of the arm-chair. A newspaper was lying at her feet. She had quietly swooned away sitting there by herself, with no one by to restore her to consciousness.

  Talbot flung some flowers from a vase on the table, and dashed the water over Aurora’s forehead; then, wheeling her chair close to the open window, he set her with her face to the wind. In two or three moments she began to shiver violently, and soon afterward opened her eyes and looked at him; as she did so, she put her hands to her head, as if trying to remember something. “Talbot!” she said, “Talbot!”

  She called him by his Christian name, she who five-and-thirty hours before had coldly forbidden him to hope.

  “Aurora,” he cried, “Aurora, I thought I came here to wish your father good-by; but I deceived myself. I came to ask you once more, and once for all, if your decision of the night before last was irrevocable?”

  “Heaven knows I thought it was when I uttered it.”

  “But it was not?”

  “Do you wish me to revoke it?”

  “Do I wish? do I—”

  “Because, if you really do, I will revoke it: for you are a brave and honorable man, Captain Bulstrode, and I love you very dearly.”

  Heaven knows into what rhapsodies he might have fallen, but she put up her hand, as mu
ch as to say, “Forbear to-day, if you love me,” and hurried from the room. He had accepted the cup of bang which the siren had offered, and had drained the very dregs thereof, and was drunken. He dropped into the chair in which Aurora had sat, and, absent-minded in his joyful intoxication, picked up the newspaper that had lain at her feet. He shuddered in spite of himself as he looked at the title of the journal; it was Bell’s Life — a dirty copy, crumpled, and beer-stained, and emitting rank odors of inferior tobacco. It was directed to Miss Floyd, in such sprawling penmanship as might have disgraced the pot-boy of a sporting public house:

  “MISS FLOID,

  fell dun wodes,

  kent.”

  The newspaper had been redirected to Aurora by the housekeeper at Felden. Talbot ran his eye eagerly over the front page; it was almost entirely filled with advertisements (and such advertisements!), but in one column there was an account headed “FRIGHTFUL ACCIDENT IN GERMANY: AN ENGLISH JOCKEY KILLED.”

  Captain Bulstrode never knew why he read of this accident. It was in no way interesting to him, being an account of a steeple-chase in Prussia, in which a heavy English rider and a crack French horse had been killed. There was a great deal of regret expressed for the loss of the horse, and none for the man who had ridden him, who, the reporter stated, was very little known in sporting-circles; but in a paragraph lower down was added this information, evidently procured at the last moment: “The jockey’s name was Conyers.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Aurora’s Strange Pensioner.

  Archibald Floyd received the news of his daughter’s choice with evident pride and satisfaction. It seemed as if some heavy burden had been taken away, as if some cruel shadow had been lifted from the lives of father and daughter.

  The banker took his family back to Felden Woods, with Talbot Bulstrode in his train; and the chintz rooms — pretty, cheerful chambers, with bow-windows that looked across the well-kept stable-yard into long glades of oak and beech — were prepared for the ex-Hussar, who was to spend his Christmas at Felden.

  Mrs. Alexander and her husband were established with their family in the western wing; Mr. and Mrs. Andrew were located at the eastern angle; for it was the hospitable custom of the old banker to summon his kinsfolk about him early in December, and to keep them with him till the bells of romantic Beckenham church had heralded in the New Year.

  Lucy Floyd’s cheeks had lost much of their delicate color when she returned to Felden and it was pronounced by all who observed the change that the air of East Cliff, and the autumn winds drifting across the bleak downs, had been too much for the young lady’s strength.

  Aurora seemed to have burst forth into some new and more glorious beauty since the morning upon which she had accepted the hand of Talbot Bulstrode. There was a proud defiance in her manner, which became her better than gentleness becomes far lovelier women. There was a haughty insouciance about this young lady which gave new brilliancy to her great black eyes, and new music to her joyous laugh. She was like some beautiful, noisy, boisterous water-fall, for ever dancing, rushing, sparkling, scintillating, and utterly defying you to do anything but admire it. Talbot Bulstrode, having once abandoned himself to the spell of the siren, made no farther struggle, but fairly fell into the pitfalls of her eyes, and was entangled in the meshy net-work of her blue-black hair. The greater the tension of the bowstring, the stronger the rebound thereof; and Talbot Bulstrode was as weak to give way at last as he had long been powerful to resist. I must write his story in the commonest words. He could not help it! He loved her; not because he thought her better, or wiser, or lovelier, or more suited to him than many other women — indeed, he had grave doubts upon every one of these points — but because it was his destiny, and he loved her.

  What is that hard word which M. Victor Hugo puts into the mouth of the priest in The Hunchback of Notre Dame as an excuse for the darkness of his sin? Anakthe!It was his fate. So he wrote to his mother, and told her that he had chosen a wife who was to sit in the halls of Bulstrode, and whose name was to be interwoven with the chronicles of the house; told her, moreover, that Miss Floyd was a banker’s daughter, beautiful and fascinating, with big black eyes, and fifty thousand pounds for her dowry. Lady Raleigh Bulstrode answered her son’s letter upon a quarter of a quire of note-paper, filled with fearful motherly prayers and suggestions; anxious hopes that he had chosen wisely; questionings as to the opinions and religious principles of the young lady — much, indeed, that Talbot would have been sorely puzzled to answer. Inclosed in this was a letter to Aurora, a womanly and tender epistle, in which pride was tempered with love, and which brought big tears welling up to Miss Floyd’s eyes, until Lady Bulstrode’s firm penmanship grew blotted and blurred beneath the reader’s vision.

  And whither went poor slaughtered John Mellish? He returned to Mellish Park, carrying with him his dogs, and horses, and grooms, and phaeton, and other paraphernalia; but his grief — having unluckily come upon him after the racing season — was too much for him, and he fled away from the roomy old mansion, with its pleasant surroundings of park and woodland: for Aurora Floyd was not for him, and it was all flat, stale, and unprofitable. So he went to Paris, or Parry, as he called that imperial city, and established himself in the biggest chambers at Meurice’s, and went backward and forward between that establishment and Galignani’s ten times a day in quest of the English papers. He dined drearily at Véfour’s, the Trois Frères, and the Café de Paris. His big voice was heard at every expensive dining-place in Paris, ordering “Toos killyar de mellyour: vous savez;” but he sent the daintiest dishes away untasted, and would sit for a quarter of an hour counting the toothpicks in the tiny blue vases, and thinking of Aurora. He rode dismally in the Bois de Boulogne, and sat shivering in cafés chantants, listening to songs that always seemed set to the same melody. He haunted the circuses, and was wellnigh in love with a fair manége rider, who had black eyes, and reminded him of Aurora; till, upon buying the most powerful opera-glass that the Rue de Rivoli could afford, he discovered that the lady’s face was an inch deep in a certain whitewash called blanc rosati, and that the chief glory of her eyes were the rings of Indian ink which surrounded them. He could have dashed that double-barrelled truth-revealer to the ground, and trodden the lenses to powder with his heel, in his passion of despair; better to have been for ever deceived, to have gone on believing that woman to be like Aurora, and to have gone to that circus every night until his hair grew white, but not with age, and until he pined away and died.

  The party at Felden Woods was a very joyous one. The voices of children made the house pleasant; noisy lads from Eton and Westminster clambered about the balustrades of the staircases, and played battledoor and shuttlecock upon the long stone terrace. These young people were all cousins to Aurora Floyd, and loved the banker’s daughter with a childish worship, which mild Lucy could never inspire. It was pleasant to Talbot Bulstrode to see that, wherever his future wife trod, love and admiration waited upon her footsteps. He was not singular in his passion for this glorious creature, and it could be, after all, no such terrible folly to love one who was beloved by all who knew her. So the proud Cornishman was happy, and gave himself up to his happiness without farther protest.

  Did Aurora love him? Did she make him due return for the passionate devotion, the blind adoration? She admired and esteemed him; she was proud of him — proud of that very pride in his nature which made him so different to herself, and she was too impulsive and truthful a creature to keep this sentiment a secret from her lover. She revealed, too, a constant desire to please her betrothed husband, suppressing, at least, all outward token of the tastes that were so unpleasant to him. No more copies of Bell’s Life littered the ladies’ morning-room at Felden; and when Andrew Floyd asked Aurora to ride to meet with him, his cousin refused the offer, which would once have been so welcome. Instead of following the Croydon hounds, Miss Floyd was content to drive Talbot and Lucy in a basket carriage through the frost-bespangled country-side. Lu
cy was always the companion and confidante of the lovers; it was hard for her to hear their happy talk of the bright future stretching far away before them — stretching down, down the shadowy aisles of Time, to an escutcheoned tomb at Bulstrode, where husband and wife would lie down, full of years and honors, in the days to come. It was hard to have to help them to plan a thousand schemes of pleasure, in which — Heaven pity her! — she was to join; but she bore her cross meekly, this pale Elaine of modern days, and she never told Talbot Bulstrode that she had gone mad and loved him, and was fain to die.

  Talbot and Aurora were both concerned to see the pale cheeks of their gentle companion; but everybody was ready to ascribe them to a cold, or a cough, or constitutional debility, or some other bodily evil, which was to be cured by drugs and boluses; and no one for a moment imagined that anything could possibly be amiss with a young lady who lived in a luxurious house, went shopping in a carriage and pair, and had more pocket-money than she cared to spend. But the lily maid of Astolat lived in a lordly castle, and had doubtless ample pocket-money to buy gorgeous silks for her embroidery, and had little on earth to wish for, and nothing to do, whereby she fell sick for love of Sir Lancelot, and pined and died.

  Surely the secret of many sorrows lies in this. How many a grief has been bred of idleness and leisure! How many a Spartan youth has nursed a bosom-devouring fox for very lack of better employment! Do the gentlemen who write the leaders in our daily journals ever die of grief? Do the barristers whose names appear in almost every case reported in those journals go mad for love unrequited? Did the LADY WITH THE LAMP cherish any foolish passion in those days and nights of ceaseless toil, in those long watches of patient devotion far away in the East? Do the curates of over-crowded parishes, the chaplains of jails and convict-ships, the great medical attendants in the wards of hospitals — do they make for themselves the griefs that kill? Surely not. With the busiest of us there may be some holy moments, some sacred hour snatched from the noise and confusion of the revolving wheel of Life’s machinery, and offered up as a sacrifice to sorrow and care; but the interval is brief, and the great wheel rolls on, and we have no time to pine or die.