Aurora Floyd (Feminist Classic). Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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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. Lucy 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.
So Lucy Floyd, having nothing better to do, nursed and made much of her hopeless passion. She set up an altar for the skeleton, and worshipped at the shrine of her grief; and when people told her of her pale face, and the family doctor wondered at the failure of his quinine mixture, perhaps she nourished a vague hope that before the spring-time came back again, bringing with it the wedding-day of Talbot and Aurora, she would have escaped from all this demonstrative love and happiness, and be at rest.
Aurora answered Lady Raleigh Bulstrode’s letter with an epistle expressive of such gratitude and humility, such earnest hope of winning the love of Talbot’s mother, mingled with a dim fearfulness of never being worthy of that affection, as won the Cornish lady’s regard for her future daughter. It was difficult to associate the impetuous girl with that letter, and Lady Bulstrode made an image of the writer that very much differed from the fearless and dashing original. She wrote Aurora a second letter, more affectionately worded than the first, and promised the motherless girl a daughter’s welcome at Bulstrode.
“Will she ever let me call her ‘mother,’ Talbot?” Aurora asked, as she read Lady Bulstrode’s second letter to her lover. “She is very proud, is she not — proud of your ancient descent. My father comes from a Glasgow mercantile family, and I do not even know anything about my mother’s relations.”
Talbot answered her with a grave smile.
“She will accept you for your native worth, dearest Aurora,” he said, “and will ask no foolish questions about the pedigree of such a man as Archibald Floyd — a man whom the proudest aristocrat in England might be glad to call his father-in-law. She will reverence my Aurora’s transparent soul and candid nature, and will bless me for the choice I have made.”
“I shall love her very dearly if she will only let me. Should I have ever cared about horse-racing, and read sporting papers, if I could have called a good woman ‘mother?’”
She seemed to ask this question rather of herself than of Talbot.
Complete as was Archibald Floyd’s satisfaction at his daughter’s disposal of her heart, the old man could not calmly contemplate a separation from this idolized daughter; so Aurora told Talbot that she could never take up her abode in Cornwall during her father’s lifetime; and it was finally arranged that the young couple were to spend half the year in London, and the other half at Felden Woods. What need had the lonely widower of that roomy mansion, with its long picture-gallery and snug suites of apartments, each of them large enough to accommodate a small family? What need had one solitary old man of that retinue of servants, the costly stud in the stables, the new-fangled vehicles in the coach-houses, the hot-house flowers, the pines, and grapes, and peaches, cultivated by three Scottish gardeners? What need had he of these things? He lived principally in the study, in which he had once had a stormy interview with his only child; the study in which hung the crayon portrait of Eliza Floyd; the room which contained an old-fashioned desk he had bought for a guinea in his boyhood, and in which there were certain letters written by a hand that was dead, some tresses of purple-black hair cut from the head of a corpse, and a pasteboard ticket, printed at a little town in Lancashire, calling upon the friends and patrons of Miss Eliza Percival to come to the theatre, for her especial benefit, upon the night of August 20, 1837.
It was decided, therefore, that Felden Woods was to be the country residence of Talbot and Aurora till such time as the young man should succeed to the baronetcy and Bulstrode Castle, and be required to live upon his estate. In the meantime the ex-Hussar was to go into Parliament, if the electors of a certain little borough in Cornwall, which had always sent a Bulstrode to Westminster, should be pleased to return him.
The marriage was to take place early in May, and the honeymoon was to be spent in Switzerland and at Bulstrode Castle. Mrs. Walter Powell thought that her doom was sealed, and that she would have to quit those pleasant pastures after the wedding-day; but Aurora speedily set the mind of the ensign’s widow at rest by telling her that as she, Miss Floyd, was utterly ignorant of housekeeping, she would be happy to retain her services after marriage as guide and adviser in such matters.
The poor about Beckenham were not forgotten in Aurora Floyd’s morning drives with Lucy and Talbot. Parcels of grocery and bottles of wine often lurked beneath the crimson-lined leopard-skin carriage-rug; and it was no uncommon thing for Talbot to find himself making a footstool of a huge loaf of bread. The poor were very hungry in that bright December weather, and had all manner of complaints, which, however otherwise dissimilar, were all to be benefited by one especial treatment, namely, half-sovereigns, old brown sherry, French brandy, and gunpowder tea. Whether the daughter was dying of consumption, or the father laid up with the rheumatics, or the husband in a raging fever, or the youngest boy recovering from a fall into a copper of boiling water, the above-named remedies seemed alike necessary, and were far more popular than the chicken-broths and cooling fever-drinks,