Aurora Floyd (Feminist Classic). Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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      But if the world had been filled with exceptional beings, Mr. Floyd could scarcely have received more answers to his advertisement than came pelting in upon the unhappy little postmaster at Beckenham. The man had serious thoughts of hiring a cart in which to convey the letters to Felden. If the banker had advertised for a wife, and had stated the amount of his income, he could scarcely have had more answers. It seemed as if the female population of London, with one accord, was seized with the desire to improve the mind and form the manners of the daughter of the gentleman to whom terms were no object. Officers’ widows, clergymen’s widows, lawyers’ and merchants’ widows, daughters of gentlemen of high family but reduced means, orphan daughters of all sorts of noble and distinguished people, declared themselves each and every one to be the person who, out of all living creatures upon this earth, was best adapted for the post. Mrs. Alexander Floyd selected six letters, threw the rest into the waste-paper basket, ordered the banker’s carriage, and drove into town to see the six writers thereof. She was a practical and energetic woman, and she put the six applicants through their facings so severely that when she returned to Mr. Floyd it was to announce that only one of them was good for anything, and that she was coming down to Felden Woods the next day.

      The chosen lady was the widow of an ensign who had died within six months of his marriage, and about an hour and a half before he would have succeeded to some enormous property, the particulars of which were never rightly understood by the friends of his unfortunate relict. But, vague as the story night be, it was quite clear enough to establish Mrs. Walter Powell in life as a disappointed woman. She was a woman with straight light hair, and a lady-like droop of the head — a woman who had left school to marry, and after six months wedded life, had gone back to the same school as instructress of the junior pupils — a woman whose whole existence had been spent in teaching and being taught; who had exercised in her earlier years a species of hand-to-mouth tuition, teaching in the morning that which she learned over night; who had never lost an opportunity of improving herself; who had grown mechanically proficient as a musician and an artist, who had a certain parrot-like skill in foreign languages, who had read all the books incumbent upon her to read, and who knew all things imperative for her to know, and who, beyond all this, and outside the boundary of the school-room wall, was ignorant, and soulless, and low-minded, and vulgar. Aurora swallowed the bitter pill as best she might, and accepted Mrs. Powell as the person chartered for her improvement — a kind of ballast to be flung into the wandering bark, to steady its erratic course, and keep it off rocks and quicksands.

      “I must put up with her, Lucy, I suppose,” she said, “and I must consent to be improved and formed by the poor, faded creature. I wonder whether she will be like Miss Drummond, who used to let me off from my lesson and read novels while I ran wild in the gardens and stables. I can put up with her, Lucy, as long as I have you with me; but I think I should go mad if I were to be chained up alone with that grim, pale-faced watch-dog.”

      Mr. Floyd and his family drove from Felden to Brighton in the banker’s roomy travelling carriage, with Aurora’s maid in the rumble, a pile of imperials upon the roof, and Mrs. Powell, with her young charges, in the interior of the vehicle. Mrs. Alexander had gone back to Fulham, having done her duty, as she considered, in securing a protectress for Aurora; but Lucy was to stay with her cousin at Brighton, and to ride with her on the downs. The saddle-horses had gone down the day before with Aurora’s groom, a gray-haired and rather surly old fellow who had served Archibald Floyd for thirty years; and the mastiff called Bow-wow travelled in the carriage with his mistress.

      About a week after the arrival at Brighton, Aurora and her cousin were walking together on the West Cliff, when a gentleman with a stiff leg rose from a bench upon which he had been seated listening to the band, and slowly advanced to them. Lucy dropped her eyelids with a faint blush, but Aurora held out her hand in answer to Captain Bulstrode’s salute.

      “I thought I should be sure to meet you down here, Miss Floyd,” he said. “I only came this morning, and I was going to call at Folthorpe’s for your papa’s address. Is he quite well?”

      “Quite — yes, that is — pretty well.” A shadow stole over her face as she spoke. It was a wonderful face for fitful lights and shades. “But we did not expect to see you at Brighton, Captain Bulstrode; we thought your regiment was still quartered at Windsor.”

      “Yes, my regiment — that is, the Eleventh is still at Windsor; but I have sold out.”

      “Sold out!” Both Aurora and her cousin opened their eyes at this intelligence.

      “Yes; I was tired of the army. It’s dull work now the fighting is all over. I might have exchanged and gone to India, certainly,” he added, as if in answer to some argument of his own; “but I’m getting middle-aged, and I am tired of roaming about the world.”

      “I should like to go to India,” said Aurora, looking seaward as she spoke.

      “You, Aurora! but why?” exclaimed Lucy.

      “Because I hate England.”

      “I thought it was France you disliked?”

      “I hate them both. What is the use of this big world if we are to stop for ever in one place, chained to one set of ideas, fettered to one narrow circle of people, seeing and hearing of the persons we hate for ever and ever, and unable to get away from the odious sound of their names? I should like to turn female missionary, and go to the centre of Africa with Dr. Livingstone and his family — and I would go if it was n’t for papa.”

      Poor Lucy stared at her cousin in helpless amazement. Talbot Bulstrode found himself falling back into that state of bewilderment in which this girl always threw him. What did she mean, this heiress of nineteen years of age, by her fits of despondency and outbursts of bitterness? Was it not perhaps, after all, only an affectation of singularity?

      Aurora looked at him with her brightest smile while he was asking himself this question. “You will come and see papa?” she said.

      Captain Bulstrode declared that he desired no greater happiness than to pay his respects to Mr. Floyd, in token whereof he walked with the young ladies toward the East Cliff.

      From that morning the officer became a constant visitor at the banker’s. He played chess with Lucy, accompanied her on the piano when she sang, assisted her with valuable hints when she painted in water-colors, put in lights here, and glimpses of sky there, deepened autumnal browns, and intensified horizon purples, and made himself altogether useful to the young lady, who was, as we know, accomplished in all lady-like arts. Mrs. Powell, seated in one of the windows of the pleasant drawing-room, shed the benignant light of her faded countenance and pale blue eyes upon the two young people, and represented all the proprieties in her own person. Aurora, when the weather prevented her riding, occupied herself more restlessly than profitably by taking up books and tossing them down, pulling Bow-wow’s ears, staring out of the windows, drawing caricatures of the promenaders on the cliff, and dragging out a wonderful little watch, with a bunch of dangling inexplicable golden absurdities, to see what o’clock it was.

      Talbot Bulstrode, while leaning over Lucy’s piano or drawing-board, or pondering about the next move of his queen, had ample leisure to watch the movements of Miss Floyd, and to be shocked at the purposeless manner in which that young lady spent the rainy mornings. Sometimes he saw her poring over Bell’s Life, much to the horror of Mrs. Walter Powell, who had a vague idea of the iniquitous proceedings recited in that terrible journal, but who was afraid to stretch her authority so far as to forbid its perusal.

      Mrs. Powell looked with silent approbation upon the growing familiarity between gentle Lucy Floyd and the captain. She had feared at first that Talbot was an admirer of Aurora’s; but the manner of the two СКАЧАТЬ