Aurora shook her head with a weary gesture. No, she hadn’t noticed any of these people. Poor Lucy’s childish talk was stopped in a moment.
“You are tired, Aurora dear,” she said: “how cruel I am to worry you!”
Aurora threw her arms about her cousin’s neck, and hid her face upon Lucy’s white shoulder.
“I am tired,” she said, “very, very tired.”
She spoke with such an utterly despairing weariness in her tone, that her gentle cousin was alarmed by her words.
“You are not unhappy, dear Aurora?” she asked anxiously.
“No, no—only tired. There, go, Lucy. Good night, good night.”
She gently pushed her cousin from the room, rejected the services of her maid, and dismissed her also. Then, tired as she was, she removed the candle from the dressing-table to a desk on the other side of the room, and seating herself at this desk, unlocked it, and took from one of its inmost recesses the soiled pencil-scrawl which had been given her a week before by the man who tried to sell her a dog in Cockspur Street.
The diamond bracelet, Archibald Floyd’s birthday gift to his daughter, lay in its nest of satin and velvet upon Aurora’s dressing-table. She took the morocco-case in her hand, looked for a few moments at the jewel, and then shut the lid of the little casket with a sharp metallic snap.
“The tears were in my father’s eyes when he clasped the bracelet on my arm,” she said, as she reseated herself at the desk. “If he could see me now!”
She wrapped the morocco case in a sheet of foolscap, secured the parcel in several places with red wax and a plain seal, and directed it thus:—
J. C.,
Care of Mr. Joseph Green,
Bell Inn,
Doncaster.
Early the next morning Miss Floyd drove her aunt and cousin into Croydon, and, leaving them at a Berlin-wool shop, went alone to the post-office, where she registered and posted this valuable parcel.
IV
After the Ball
Two days after Aurora’s birthnight festival, Talbot Bulstrode’s phaeton dashed once more into the avenue at Felden Woods. Again the captain made a sacrifice on the shrine of friendship, and drove Francis Maldon from Windsor to Beckenham, in order that the young cornet might make those anxious inquiries about the health of the ladies of Mr. Floyd’s household, which, by a pleasant social fiction, are supposed to be necessary after an evening of intermittent waltzes and quadrilles.
The junior officer was very grateful for this kindness; for Talbot, though the best of fellows, was not much given to putting himself out of the way for the pleasure of other people. It would have been far pleasanter to the captain to dawdle away the day in his own rooms, lolling over those erudite works which his brother-officers described by the generic title of “heavy reading,” or, according to the popular belief of those harebrained young men, employed in squaring the circle in the solitude of his chamber.
Talbot Bulstrode was altogether an inscrutable personage to his comrades of the 11th Hussars. His black-letter folios, his polished mahogany cases of mathematical instruments, his proof-before-letters engravings, were the fopperies of a young Oxonian rather than an officer who had fought and bled at Inkermann. The young men who breakfasted with him in his rooms trembled as they read the titles of the big books on the shelves, and stared helplessly at the grim saints and angular angels in the pre-Raphaelite prints upon the walls. They dared not even propose to smoke in those sacred chambers, and were ashamed of the wet impressions of the rims of the Moselle bottles which they left upon the mahogany cases.
It seemed natural to people to be afraid of Talbot Bulstrode, just as little boys are frightened of a beadle, a policeman, and a schoolmaster, even before they have been told the attributes of these terrible beings. The colonel of the 11th Hussars, a portly gentleman, who rode fifteen stone, and wrote his name high in the Peerage, was frightened of Talbot. That cold gray eye struck a silent awe into the hearts of men and women with its straight penetrating gaze that always seemed to be telling them they were found out. The colonel was afraid to tell his best stories when Talbot was at the mess-table, for he had a dim consciousness that the captain was aware of the discrepancies in those brilliant anecdotes, though that officer had never implied a doubt by either look or gesture. The Irish adjutant forgot to brag about his conquests amongst the fair sex: the younger men dropped their voices when they talked to each other of the side-scenes at Her Majesty’s Theatre; and the corks flew faster, and the laughter grew louder, when Talbot left the room.
The captain knew that he was more respected than beloved, and like all proud men who repel the warm feelings of others in utter despite of themselves, he was grieved and wounded because his comrades did not become attached to him.
“Will anybody, out of all the millions upon this wide earth, ever love me?” he thought. “No one ever has as yet. Not even my father and mother. They have been proud of me; but they never loved me. How many a young profligate has brought his parents’ gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, and has been beloved with the last heartbeat of those he destroyed, as I have never been in my life! Perhaps my mother would have loved me better, if I had given her more trouble; if I had scattered the name of Bulstrode all over London upon post-obits and dishonoured acceptances; if I had been drummed out of my regiment, and had walked down to Cornwall without shoes or stockings, to fall at her feet, and sob
