Aurora Floyd (Feminist Classic). Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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СКАЧАТЬ him long for this leisurely employment; for, looking at him with her eyes flashing forked lightnings of womanly fury, and her face crimson with indignation, she asked him, in a sharp, spasmodic tone, whether he had anything to say to her.

      He had a great deal to say to her; but as he put his head in at the carriage-window and made his communication, whatever it might be, in a rum and watery whisper, it reached no ears but those of Aurora herself. When he had done whispering, he took a greasy, leather-covered account-book, and a short stump of lead pencil, considerably the worse for chewing, from his waistcoat-pocket, and wrote two or three lines upon a leaf, which he tore out and handed to Aurora. “This is the address,” he said; “you won’t forget to send?”

      She shook her head, and looked away from him — looked away with an irrepressible gesture of disgust and loathing.

      “You wouldn’t like to buy a spannel dawg,” said the man, holding the sleek, curly, black and tan animal up to the carriage-window, “or a French poodle what’ll balance a bit of bread on his nose while you count ten? Hey? You should have him a bargain — say fifteen pound the two.”

      “No!”

      At this moment Mrs. Alexander emerged from the watchmaker’s, just in time to catch a glimpse of the man’s broad shoulders as he moved sulkily away from the carriage.

      “Has that person been begging of you, Aurora?” she asked, as they drove off.

      “No. I once bought a dog of him, and he recognized me.”

      “And wanted you to buy one to-day?”

      “Yes.”

      Miss Floyd sat gloomily silent during the whole of the homeward drive, looking out of the carriage-window, and not deigning to take any notice whatever of her aunt and cousin. I do not know whether it was in submission to that palpable superiority of force and vitality in Aurora’s nature which seemed to set her above her fellows, or simply in that inherent spirit of toadyism common to the best of us; but Mrs. Alexander and her fair-haired daughter always paid mute reverence to the banker’s heiress, and were silent when it pleased her, or conversed at her royal will. I verily believe that it was Aurora’s eyes rather than Archibald Martin Floyd’s thousands that overawed all her kinsfolk; and that if she had been a street-sweeper dressed in rags and begging for half-pence, people would have feared her and made way for her, and bated their breath when she was angry.

      The trees in the long avenue of Felden Woods were hung with sparkling colored lamps, to light the guests who came to Aurora’s birthday festival. The long range of windows on the ground-floor was ablaze with light; the crash of the band burst every now and then above the perpetual roll of carriage-wheels, and the shouted repetition of visitors’ names, and pealed across the silent woods; through the long vista of half a dozen rooms opening one into another, the waters of a fountain, sparkling with a hundred hues in the light, glittered amid the dark floral wealth of a conservatory filled with exotics. Great clusters of tropical plants were grouped in the spacious hall; festoons of flowers hung about the vapory curtains in the arched door-ways. Light and splendor were everywhere around; and amid all, and more splendid than all, in the dark grandeur of her beauty, Aurora Floyd, crowned with scarlet and robed in white, stood by her father’s side.

      Among the guests who arrive latest at Mr. Floyd’s ball are two officers from Windsor, who have driven across the country in a mail phaeton. The elder of these two, and the driver of the vehicle, has been very discontented and disagreeable throughout the journey.

      “If I’d had the remotest idea of the distance, Maldon,” he said, “I’d have seen you and your Kentish banker very considerably inconvenienced before I would have consented to victimize my horse for the sake of this snobbish party.”

      “But it won’t be a snobbish party,” answered the young man, impetuously. “Archibald Floyd is the best fellow in Christendom, and as for his daughter —”

      “Oh, of course, a divinity, with fifty thousand pounds for her fortune, all of which will no doubt be very tightly settled upon herself if she is ever allowed to marry a penniless scapegrace like Francis Lewis Maldon, of her Majesty’s 11th Hussars. However, I don’t want to stand in your way, my boy. Go in and win, and my blessing be upon your virtuous endeavors. I can imagine the young Scotchwoman — red hair (of course you’ll call it auburn), large feet, and freckles!”

      “Aurora Floyd — red hair and freckles!” The young officer laughed aloud at the stupendous joke. “You’ll see her in a quarter of an hour, Bulstrode,” he said.

      Talbot Bulstrode, Captain of her Majesty’s 11th Hussars, had consented to drive his brother-officer from Windsor to Beckenham, and to array himself in his uniform, in order to adorn therewith the festival at Felden Woods, chiefly because, having at two-and-thirty years of age run through all the wealth of life’s excitements and amusements, and finding himself a penniless spendthrift in this species of coin, though well enough off for mere sordid riches, he was too tired of himself and the world to care much whither his friends and comrades led him. He was the eldest son of a wealthy Cornish baronet, whose ancestor had received his title straight from the hands of Scottish King James, when baronetcies first came into fashion; the same fortunate ancestor being near akin to a certain noble, erratic, unfortunate, and injured gentleman called Walter Raleigh, and by no means too well used by the same Scottish James. Now, of all the pride which ever swelled the breasts of mankind, the pride of Cornishmen is perhaps the strongest; and the Bulstrode family was one of the proudest in Cornwall. Talbot was no alien son of this haughty house; from his very babyhood he had been the proudest of mankind. This pride had been the saving power that had presided over his prosperous career. Other men might have made a downhill road of that smooth pathway which wealth and grandeur made so pleasant, but not Talbot Bulstrode. The vices and follies of the common herd were perhaps retrievable, but vice or folly in a Bulstrode would have left a blot upon a hitherto unblemished escutcheon never to be erased by time or tears. That pride of birth, which was utterly unallied to pride of wealth or station, had a certain noble and chivalrous side, and Talbot Bulstrode was beloved by many a parvenu whom meaner men would have insulted. In the ordinary affairs of life he was as humble as a woman or a child; it was only when Honor was in question that the sleeping dragon of pride which had guarded the golden apples of his youth, purity, probity, and truth, awoke and bade defiance to the enemy. At two-and-thirty he was still a bachelor, not because he had never loved, but because he had never met with a woman whose stainless purity of soul fitted her in his eyes to become the mother of a noble race, and to rear sons who should do honor to the name of Bulstrode. He looked for more than ordinary every-day virtue in the woman of his choice; he demanded those grand and queenly qualities which are rarest in woman-kind. Fearless truth, a sense of honor keen as his own, loyalty of purpose, unselfishness, a soul untainted by the petty baseness of daily life — all these he sought in the being he loved; and at the first warning thrill of emotion caused by a pair of beautiful eyes, he grew critical and captious about their owner, and began to look for infinitesimal stains upon the shining robe of her virginity. He would have married a beggar’s daughter if she had reached his almost impossible standard; he would have rejected the descendant of a race of kings if she had fallen one decimal part of an inch below it. Women feared Talbot Bulstrode; manoeuvring mothers shrank abashed from the cold light of those watchful gray eyes; daughters to marry blushed and trembled, and felt their pretty affectations, their ballroom properties, drop away from them under the quiet gaze of the young officer, till, from fearing him, the lovely flutterers grew to shun and dislike him, and to leave Bulstrode Castle and the Bulstrode fortune unangled for in the great matrimonial fisheries. So at two-and-thirty Talbot walked serenely safe amid the meshes and pitfalls of Belgravia, secure in the popular belief that Captain Bulstrode, of the 11th Hussars, was not a marrying man. This belief was perhaps strengthened by the fact that the Cornishman was by no means the elegant ignoramus whose sole accomplishment consist in parting СКАЧАТЬ