Aurora Floyd (Feminist Classic). Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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she said; she had been accustomed to exercise and open air, and no doubt pined sadly in the close atmosphere of a school-room.
But Aurora’s was one of those impressionable natures which quickly recover from any depressing influence. Early in September Lucy Floyd came to Felden Woods, and found her handsome cousin almost entirely recovered from the drudgery of the Parisian pension, but still very loath to talk much of that seminary. She answered Lucy’s eager questions very curtly; said that she hated the Demoiselles Lespard and the Rue Saint Dominique, and that the very memory of Paris was disagreeable to her. Like most young ladies with black eyes and blue-black hair, Miss Floyd was a good hater; so Lucy forbore to ask for more information upon what was so evidently an unpleasant subject to her cousin. Poor Lucy had been mercilessly well educated; she spoke half a dozen languages, knew all about the natural sciences, had read Gibbon, Niebuhr, and Arnold from the title-page to the printer’s name, and looked upon the heiress as a big brilliant dunce; so she quietly set down Aurora’s dislike to Paris to that young lady’s distate for tuition, and thought little more about it. Any other reasons for Miss Floyd’s almost shuddering horror of her Parisian associations lay far beyond Lucy’s simple power of penetration.
The fifteenth of September was Aurora’s birthday, and Archibald Floyd determined, upon this, the nineteenth anniversary of his daughter’s first appearance on this mortal scene, to give an entertainment, whereat his country neighbors and town acquaintance might alike behold and admire the beautiful heiress.
Mrs. Alexander came to Felden Woods to superintend the preparations for this birthday ball. She drove Aurora and Lucy into town to order the supper and the band, and to choose dresses and wreaths for the young ladies. The banker’s heiress was sadly out of place in a milliner’s show-room; but she had that rapid judgment as to color, and that perfect taste in form, which bespeak the soul of an artist; and while poor mild Lucy was giving endless trouble, and tumbling innumerable boxes of flowers, before she could find any head-dress in harmony with her rosy cheeks and golden hair, Aurora, after one brief glance at the bright parterres of painted cambric, pounced upon a crown-shaped garland of vivid scarlet berries, with drooping and tangled leaves of dark shining green, that looked as if they had been just plucked from a running streamlet. She watched Lucy’s perplexities with a half compassionate, half contemptuous smile.
“Look at that poor child, Aunt Lizzie,” she said; “I know that she would like to put pink and yellow against her golden hair. Why, you silly Lucy, don’t you know that yours is the beauty which really does not want adornment? A few pearls or forget-me-not blossoms, or a crown of water lilies and a cloud of white areophane, would make you look a sylphide; but I dare say you would like to wear amber satin and cabbage-roses.”
From the milliner’s they drove to Mr. Gunter’s in Berkeley Square, at which world-renowned establishment Mrs. Alexander commanded those preparations of turkeys preserved in jelly, hams cunningly embalmed in rich wines and broths, and other specimens of that sublime art of confectionery which hovers midway between sleight of hand and cookery, and in which the Berkeley Square professor is without a rival. When poor Thomas Babington Macaulay’s New Zealander shall come to ponder over the ruins of St. Paul’s, perhaps he will visit the remains of this humbler temple in Berkeley Square, and wonder at the ice-pails and jelly-moulds, and refrigerators and stewpans, the hot plates, long cold and unheeded, and all the mysterious paraphernalia of the dead art.
From the West End Mrs. Alexander drove to Charing Cross; she had a commission to execute at Dent’s — the purchase of a watch for one of her boys, who was just off to Eton.
Aurora threw herself wearily back in the carriage while her aunt and Lucy stopped at the watchmaker’s. It was to be observed that, although Miss Floyd had recovered much of her old brilliancy and gayety of temper, a certain gloomy shade would sometimes steal over her countenance when she was left to herself for a few minutes — a darkly reflective expression, quite foreign to her face. This shadow fell upon her beauty now as she looked out of the open window, moodily watching the passers-by. Mrs. Alexander was a long time making her purchase, and Aurora had sat nearly a quarter of an hour blankly staring at the shifting figures in the crowd, when a man hurrying by was attracted by her face at the carriage-window, and started, as if at some great surprise. He passed on, however, and walked rapidly toward the Horse Guards; but, before he turned the corner, came to a dead stop, stood still for two or three minutes scratching the back of his head reflectively with his big bare hand, and then walked slowly back toward Mr. Dent’s emporium. He was a broad-shouldered, bull-necked, sandy-whiskered fellow, wearing a cut-away coat and a gaudy neckerchief, and smoking a huge cigar, the rank fumes of which struggled with a very powerful odor of rum and water recently imbibed. This gentleman’s standing in society was betrayed by the smooth head of a bull-terrier, whose round eyes peeped out of the pocket of his cut-away coat, and by a Blenheim spaniel carried under his arm. He was the very last person, among all the souls between Cockspur street and the statue of King Charles, who seemed likely to have anything to say to Miss Aurora Floyd; nevertheless, he walked deliberately up to the carriage, and, planting his elbows upon the door, nodded to her with friendly familiarity.
“Well,” he said, without inconveniencing himself by the removal of the rank cigar, “how do?”
After which brief salutation he relapsed into silence, and rolled his great brown eyes slowly here and there, in contemplative examination of Miss Floyd and the vehicle in which she sat — even carrying his powers of observation so far as to take particular notice of a plethoric morocco bag lying on the back seat, and to inquire casually whether there was “anythink wallable in the old party’s redicule.”
But Aurora did not allow 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