Aurora Floyd

Faint streaks of crimson glimmer here and there amidst the rich darkness of the Kentish woods. Autumn’s red finger has been lightly laid upon the foliage⁠—sparingly, as the artist puts the brighter tints into his picture: but the grandeur of an August sunset blazes upon the peaceful landscape, and lights all into glory.

The encircling woods and wide lawn-like meadows, the still ponds of limpid water, the trim hedges, and the smooth winding roads; undulating hilltops, melting into the purple distance; labouring men’s cottages gleaming white from the surrounding foliage; solitary roadside inns with brown thatched roofs and moss-grown stacks of lopsided chimneys; noble mansions hiding behind ancestral oaks; tiny Gothic edifices; Swiss and rustic lodges; pillared gates surmounted by escutcheons hewn in stone, and festooned with green wreaths of clustering ivy; village churches and prim schoolhouses: every object in the fair English prospect is steeped in a luminous haze, as the twilight shadows steal slowly upward from the dim recesses of shady woodland and winding lane, and every outline of the landscape darkens against the deepening crimson of the sky.

Upon the broad façade of a mighty redbrick mansion, built in the favourite style of the early Georgian era, the sinking sun lingers long, making gorgeous illumination. The long rows of narrow windows are all aflame with the red light, and an honest homeward-tramping villager pauses once or twice in the roadway to glance across the smooth width of dewy lawn and tranquil lake, half fearful that there must be something more than natural in the glitter of those windows, and that maybe Maister Floyd’s house is afire.

Aurora threw herself wearily back in the carriage while Mrs. Alexander and Lucy stopped at the watchmaker’s. It was to be observed that, although Miss Floyd had recovered much of her old brilliancy and gaiety 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 passersby. 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 towards 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 towards Mr. Dent’s emporium. He was a broad-shouldered, bull-necked, sandy-whiskered fellow, wearing a cutaway coat and a gaudy neckerchief, and smoking a huge cigar, the rank fumes of which struggled with a very powerful odour 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 cutaway coat, and by a Blenheim spaniel carried under his arm.

While he was wondering what he should say to her, she lifted her eyes to his face, and asked him the strangest question he had ever heard from girlish lips.

“Do you know if Thunderbolt won the Leger?” she asked.

He was too much confounded to answer for a moment, and she continued rather impatiently, “They must have heard by six o’clock this evening in London; but I have asked half a dozen people here tonight, and no one seems to know anything about it.”

Talbot’s close-cropped hair seemed lifted from his head as he listened to this terrible address. Good heavens! what a horrible woman! The hussar’s vivid imagination pictured the heir of all the Raleigh Bulstrodes receiving his infantine impressions from such a mother. She would teach him to read out of the Racing Calendar; she would invent a royal alphabet of the turf, and tell him that “D stands for Derby, old England’s great race,” and “E stands for Epsom, a crack meeting-place,” etc. He told Miss Floyd that he had never been to Doncaster in his life, that he had never read a sporting-paper, and that he knew no more of Thunderbolt than of King Cheops.

She looked at him rather contemptuously. “Cheops wasn’t much,” she said: “he won the Liverpool Autumn Cup in Blink Bonny’s year; but most people said it was a fluke.”

Talbot Bulstrode shuddered afresh; but a feeling of pity mingled with his horror. “If I had a sister,” he thought, “I would get her to talk to this miserable girl, and bring her to a sense of her iniquity.”

Aurora had driven further than usual, and it was striking four as her ponies dashed past Beckenham church and down the hill towards Felden Woods. The afternoon was cold and cheerless; light flakes of snow drifted across the hard road, and hung here and there upon the leafless hedges, and there was that inky blackness in the sky which presages a heavy fall. The woman at the lodge ran out with her apron over her head to open the gates as Miss Floyd’s ponies approached, and at the same moment a man rose from a bank by the roadside, and came close up to the little carriage.

He was a broad-shouldered, stout-built fellow, wearing a shabby velveteen cutaway coat, slashed about with abnormal pockets, and white and greasy at the seams and elbows. His chin was muffled in two or three yards of dirty woollen comforter, after the fashion of his kind; and the band of his low-crowned felt hat was ornamented with a short clay pipe, coloured of a respectable blackness. A dingy white dog, with a brass collar, bow legs, a short nose, bloodshot eyes, one ear, a hanging jaw, and a generally supercilious expression of countenance, rose from the bank at the same moment with his master, and growled ominously at the elegant vehicle and the mastiff Bow-wow trotting by its side.

The stranger was the same individual who had accosted Miss Floyd in Cockspur Street three months before.

I do not know whether Aurora recognized this person; but I know that she touched her ponies’ ears with the whip, and that the spirited animals had dashed past the

“Shall I read you the letter, Aurora?”

“If you please.”

He took the crumpled epistle from his bosom, and, bending over the lamp, read it aloud to Aurora. He fully expected at every sentence that she would interrupt him with some eager explanation; but she was silent until he had finished, and even then she did not speak.

“Aurora, Aurora, is this true?”

“Perfectly true.”

“But why did you run away from the Rue St.-Dominique?”

“I cannot tell you.”

“And where were you between the month of June in the year fifty-six and last September?”

“I cannot tell you, Talbot Bulstrode. This is my secret, which I cannot tell you.”

“You cannot tell me! There is upwards of a year missing from your life; and you cannot tell me, your betrothed husband, what you did with that year?”

“I cannot.”

“Then, Aurora Floyd, you can never be my wife.”

He thought that she would turn upon him, sublime in her indignation and fury, and that the explanation he longed for would burst from her lips in a passionate torrent of angry words; but she rose from her chair, and, tottering towards him, fell upon her knees at his feet. No other action could have struck such terror to his heart. It seemed to him a confession of guilt. But what guilt? what guilt? What was the dark secret of this young creature’s brief life?