Aurora Floyd (Feminist Classic). Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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man-cook and housekeeper than if she had been a visitor at Buckingham Palace, the angry guests found that everything had degenerated since “that woman” had entered the house. They hated the successful adventuress — hated her for her beautiful eyes and her gorgeous jewels, the extravagant gifts of an adoring husband — hated her for her stately figure and graceful movements, which never betrayed the rumored obscurity of her origin — hated her, above all, for her insolence in not appearing in the least afraid of the lofty members of that new circle in which she found herself.
If she had meekly eaten the ample dish of humble-pie which these county families were prepared to set before her — if she had licked the dust from their aristocratic shoes, courted their patronage, and submitted to be “taken up” by them — they might, perhaps, in time, have forgiven her. But she did none of this. If they called upon her, well and good; she was frankly and cheerfully glad to see them. They might find her in her gardening-gloves, with rumpled hair and a watering-pot in her hands, busy among her conservatories; and she would receive them as serenely as if she had been born in a palace, and used to homage from her very babyhood. Let them be as frigidly polite as they pleased, she was always easy, candid, gay, and good-natured. She would rattle away about her “dear old Archy,” as she presumed to call her benefactor and husband; or she would show her guests some new picture he had bought, and would dare — the impudent, ignorant, pretentious creature! — to talk about Art, as if all the high-sounding jargon with which they tried to crush her was as familiar to her as to a Royal Academician. When etiquette demanded her returning these stately visits, she would drive boldly up to her neighbors’ doors in a tiny basket carriage, drawn by one rough pony; for it was an affectation of this designing woman to affect simplicity in her tastes, and to abjure all display. She would take all the grandeur she met with as a thing of course, and chatter and laugh, with her flaunting theatrical animation, much to the admiration of misguided young men, who could not see the high-bred charms of her detractors, but who were never tired of talking of Mrs. Floyd’s jolly manners and glorious eyes.
I wonder whether poor Eliza Floyd knew all or half the cruel things that were said of her. I shrewdly suspect that she contrived somehow or other to hear them all, and that she rather enjoyed the fun. She had been used to a life of excitement, and Felden Woods might have seemed dull to her but for these ever-fresh scandals. She took a malicious delight in the discomfiture of her enemies.
“How badly they must have wanted you for a husband, Archy,” she said, “when they hate me so ferociously. Poor, portionless old maids, to think I should snatch their prey from them! I know they think it a hard thing that they can’t have me hung for marrying a rich man.”
But the banker was so deeply wounded when his adored wife repeated to him the gossip which she had heard from her maid, who was a stanch adherent to a kind, easy mistress, that Eliza ever after withheld these reports from him. They amused her, but they stung him to the quick. Proud and sensitive, like almost all very honest and conscientious men, he could not endure that any creature should dare to befoul the name of the woman he loved so tenderly. What was the obscurity from which he had taken her to him? Is a star less bright because it shines on a gutter as well as upon the purple bosom of the midnight sea? Is a virtuous and generous-hearted woman less worthy because you find her making a scanty living out of the only industry she can exercise, and acting Juliet to an audience of factory hands, who gave threepence apiece for the privilege of admiring and applauding her?
Yes, the murder must out; the malicious were not altogether wrong in their conjectures: Eliza Prodder was an actress; and it was on the dirty boards of a second-rate theatre in Lancashire that the wealthy banker had first beheld her. Archibald Floyd nourished a traditional, passive, but sincere admiration for the British Drama. Yes, the British Drama; for he had lived in a day when the drama was British, and when George Barnwell and Jane Shore were among the favorite works of art of a play-going public. How sad that we should have degenerated since those classic days, and that the graceful story of Milwood and her apprentice-admirer is now so rarely set before us! Imbued, therefore, with the solemnity of Shakespeare and the drama, Mr. Floyd, stopping for a night at this second-rate Lancashire town, dropped into the dusty boxes of the theatre to witness the performance of Romeo and Juliet— the heiress of the Capulets being represented by Miss Eliza Percival, alias Prodder.
I do not believe that Miss Percival was a good actress, or that she would ever become distinguished in her profession; but she had a deep, melodious voice, which rolled out the words of her author in a certain rich though rather monotonous music, pleasant to hear; and upon the stage she was very beautiful to look at, for her face lighted up the little theatre better than all the gas that the manager grudged to his scanty audiences.
It was not the fashion in those days to make “sensation” dramas of Shakespeare’s plays. There was no Hamlet with the celebrated water-scene, and the Danish prince taking a “header” to save poor weak-witted Ophelia. In the little Lancashire theatre it would have been thought a terrible sin against all canons of dramatic art had Othello or his Ancient attempted to sit down during any part of the solemn performance. The hope of Denmark was no long-robed Norseman with flowing flaxen hair, but an individual who wore a short, rusty black cotton velvet garment, shaped like a child’s frock and trimmed with bugles, which dropped off and were trodden upon at intervals throughout the performance. The simple actors held, that tragedy, to be tragedy, must be utterly unlike anything that ever happened beneath the sun. And Eliza Prodder patiently trod the old and beaten track, far too good-natured, light-hearted, and easy-going a creature to attempt any foolish interference with the crookedness of the times, which she was not born to set right.
What can I say, then, about her performance of the impassioned Italian girl? She wore white satin and spangles, the spangles sewn upon the dirty hem of her dress, in the firm belief, common to all provincial actresses, that spangles are an antidote to dirt. She was laughing and talking in the whitewashed little green-room the very minute before she ran on to the stage to wail for her murdered kinsman and her banished lover. They tell us that Macready began to be Richelieu at three o’clock in the afternoon, and that it was dangerous to approach or to speak to him between that hour and the close of the performance. So dangerous, indeed, that surely none but the daring and misguided gentleman who once met the great tragedian in a dark passage, and gave him “Good-morrow, ‘Mac,’ “ would have had the temerity to attempt it. But Miss Percival did not take her profession very deeply to heart; the Lancashire salaries barely paid for the physical wear and tear of early rehearsals and long performances; how, then, for that mental exhaustion of the true artist who lives in the character he represents?
The easy-going comedians with whom Eliza acted made friendly remarks to each other on their private affairs in the intervals of the most vengeful discourse; speculated upon the amount of money in the house in audible undertones during the pauses of the scene; and when Hamlet wanted Horatio down at the foot-lights to ask him if he “marked that,” it was likely enough that the prince’s confidant was up the stage telling Polonius of the shameful way in which his landlady stole the tea and sugar.
It was not, therefore, Miss Percival’s acting that fascinated the banker. Archibald Floyd knew that she was as bad an actress as ever played the leading tragedy and comedy for five-and-twenty shillings a week. He had seen Miss O’Neil in that very character, and it moved him to a pitying smile as the factory hands applauded poor Eliza’s poison-scene. But, for all this, he fell in love with her. It was a repetition of the old story. It was Arthur Pendennis at the little Chatteris Theatre bewitched and bewildered by Miss Fotheringay all over again — only that instead of a feeble, impressionable boy, it was a sober, steady-going business-man of seven-and-forty, who had never felt one thrill of emotion in looking on a woman’s face until that night — until that night — and from that night to him the world only held one being, and life only had one object. He went the next evening, and the next, and then contrived to scrape acquaintance with some of the actors at a tavern next the theatre. They sponged upon him cruelly, these seedy comedians, and allowed him to pay for unlimited glasses of brandy and water, and flattered and cajoled him, and plucked out the heart of his mystery; and then went back to Eliza Percival, and told her that she had dropped into a good thing, for that an old chap with no end of money had fallen over head and ears in love with her, and that if she played her cards well,