Aurora Floyd (Feminist Classic). Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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      Chapter 7

      Aurora’s Strange Pensioner.

       Table of Contents

      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 СКАЧАТЬ