“I will abide by Talbot’s decision,” she repeated to herself again and again. “If he says it is best for my dear that we should part, I will go away forever. I will ask my father to take me far away, and my poor darling shall not even know where I have gone. I will be true in what I do, and will do it thoroughly.”
She looked to Talbot Bulstrode as a wise judge, to whose sentence she would be willing to submit. Perhaps she did this because her own heart kept forever repeating, “Go back to the man who loves you. Go back, go back! There is no wrong you can do him so bitter as to desert him. There is no unhappiness you can bring upon him equal to the unhappiness of losing you. Let me be your guide. Go back, go back!”
But this selfish monitor must not be listened to. How bitterly this poor girl, so old in experience of sorrow, remembered the selfish sin of her mad marriage! She had refused to sacrifice a schoolgirl’s foolish delusion; she had disobeyed the father who had given her seventeen years of patient love and devotion; and she looked at all the misery of her youth as the fatal growth of this evil seed, so rebelliously sown. Surely such a lesson was not to be altogether unheeded! Surely it was powerful enough to teach her the duty of sacrifice! It was this thought that steeled her against the pleadings of her own affection. It was for this that she looked to Talbot Bulstrode as the arbiter of her future. Had she been a Roman Catholic, she would have gone to her confessor, and appealed to a priest—who, having no social ties of his own, must, of course, be the best judge of all the duties involved in domestic relations—for comfort and succour; but being of another faith, she went to the man whom she most respected, and who, being a husband himself, might, as she thought, be able to comprehend the duty that was due to her husband.
She went downstairs with Lucy into a little inner room upon the drawing-room floor; a snug apartment, opening into a mite of a conservatory. It was Mr. and Mrs. Bulstrode’s habit to breakfast in this cosy little chamber, rather than in that awful temple of slippery morocco, funereal bronze, and ghastly mahogany, which upholsterers insist upon as the only legitimate place in which an Englishman may take his meals. Lucy loved to sit opposite her husband at the small round table, and minister to his morning appetite from her pretty breakfast equipage of silver and china. She knew—to the smallest weight employed at Apothecaries’ Hall, I think—how much sugar Mr. Bulstrode liked in his tea. She poured the cream into his cup as carefully as if she had been making up a prescription. He took the simple beverage in a great shallow breakfast-cup of fragile turquoise Sèvres, that had cost seven guineas; and had been made for Madame du Barry, the rococo merchant had told Talbot. (Had his customer been a lady, I fear Marie Antoinette would have been described as the original possessor of this porcelain.) Mrs. Bulstrode loved to minister to her husband. She picked the bloated livers of martyred geese out of the Strasburg pies for his delectation; she spread the butter upon his dry toast; and pampered and waited on him, serving him as only such women serve their idols. But this morning she had her cousin’s sorrows to comfort; and she established Aurora in a capacious chintz-covered easy-chair on the threshold of the conservatory, and seated herself at her feet.
“My poor pale darling!” she said, tenderly, “what can I do to bring the roses back to your cheeks?”
“Love me and pity me, dear,” Aurora answered, gravely; “but don’t ask me any questions.”
The two women sat thus for some time, Aurora’s handsome head bent over Lucy’s fair face, and her hands clasped in both Lucy’s hands. They talked very little, and only spoke then of indifferent matters, or of Lucy’s happiness and Talbot’s parliamentary career. The little clock over the chimneypiece struck the quarter before eight—they were very early, these unfashionable people—and a minute afterwards Mrs. Bulstrode heard her husband’s step upon the stairs, returning from his ante-breakfast walk. It was his habit to take a constitutional stroll in the Green Park, now and then, so Lucy had thought nothing of this early excursion.
“Talbot has let himself in with his latchkey,” said Mrs. Bulstrode; “and I may pour out the tea, Aurora. But listen, dear; I think there’s someone with him.”
There was no need to bid Aurora
