“Yes, my regiment—that is, the Eleventh is still at Windsor; but I have sold out.”
“Sold out!” Both Aurora and her cousin opened their eyes at this intelligence.
“Yes; I was tired of the army. It’s dull work now the fighting is all over. I might have exchanged and gone to India, certainly,” he added, as if in answer to some argument of his own; “but I’m getting middle-aged, and I am tired of roaming about the world.”
“I should like to go to India,” said Aurora, looking seaward as she spoke.
“You, Aurora! but why?” exclaimed Lucy.
“Because I hate England.”
“I thought it was France you disliked.”
“I hate them both. What is the use of this big world, if we are to stop forever in one place, chained to one set of ideas, fettered to one narrow circle of people, seeing and hearing of the persons we hate forever and ever, and unable to get away from the odious sound of their names? I should like to turn female missionary, and go to the centre of Africa with Dr. Livingstone and his family; and I would go if it wasn’t for papa.”
Poor Lucy stared at her cousin in helpless amazement. Talbot Bulstrode found himself falling back into that state of bewilderment in which this girl always threw him. What did she mean, this heiress of nineteen years of age, by her fits of despondency and outbursts of bitterness? Was it not perhaps, after all, only an affectation of singularity?
Aurora looked at him with her brightest smile while he was asking himself this question. “You will come and see papa?” she said.
Captain Bulstrode declared that he desired no greater happiness than to pay his respects to Mr. Floyd, in token whereof he walked with the young ladies towards the East Cliff.
From that morning, the officer became a constant visitor at the banker’s. He played chess with Lucy, accompanied her on the piano when she sang, assisted her with valuable hints when she painted in watercolours, put in lights here and glimpses of sky there, deepened autumnal browns, and intensified horizon purples, and made himself altogether useful to the young lady, who was, as we know, accomplished in all ladylike arts. Mrs. Powell, seated in one of the windows of the pleasant drawing-room, shed the benignant light of her faded countenance and pale-blue eyes upon the two young people, and represented all the proprieties in her own person; Aurora, when the weather prevented her riding, occupied herself more restlessly than profitably by taking up books and tossing them down, pulling Bow-wow’s ears, staring out of the windows, drawing caricatures of the promenaders on the cliff, and dragging out a wonderful little watch, with a bunch of dangling inexplicable golden absurdities, to see what o’clock it was.
Talbot Bulstrode, while leaning over Lucy’s piano or drawing-board, or pondering about the next move of his queen, had ample leisure to watch the movements of Miss Floyd, and to be shocked at the purposeless manner in which that young lady spent the rainy mornings. Sometimes he saw her poring over Bell’s Life, much to the horror of Mrs. Walter Powell, who had a vague idea of the iniquitous proceedings recited in that terrible journal, but who was afraid to stretch her authority so far as to forbid its perusal.
Mrs. Powell looked with silent approbation upon the growing familiarity between gentle Lucy Floyd and the captain. She had feared at first that Talbot was an admirer of Aurora’s; but the manner of the two soon dispelled her alarm. Nothing could be more cordial than Miss Floyd’s treatment of the officer; but she displayed the same indifference to him that she did to everything else, except her dog and her father. Was it possible that well-nigh perfect face and those haughty graces had no charm for the banker’s daughter? Could it be that she could spend hour after hour in the society of the handsomest and most aristocratic man she had ever met, and yet be as heart-whole as when the acquaintance began? There was one person in the little party who was forever asking that question, and never able to answer it to her own satisfaction, and that person was Lucy Floyd. Poor Lucy Floyd, who was engaged, night and day, in mentally playing that old German game which Faust and Margaret played together with the full-blown rose in the garden—“He loves me—loves me not!”
Mrs. Walter Powell’s shallow-sighted blue eyes might behold in Lucy Captain Bulstrode’s attraction to the East Cliff; but Lucy herself knew better—bitterly, cruelly better.
“Captain Bulstrode’s attentions to Miss Lucy Floyd were most evident,” Mrs. Powell said one day when the captain left, after a long morning’s music and singing and chess. How Lucy hated the prim phrase! None knew so well as she the value of those “attentions.” They had been at Brighton six weeks, and for the last five the captain had been with them nearly every morning. He had ridden with them on the downs, and driven with them to the Dyke, and lounged beside them listening to the band, and stood behind them in their box at the pretty little theatre, and crushed with them into the Pavilion to hear Grisi and Mario, and Alboni and poor Bosio. He had attended them through the whole round of Brighton amusements, and had never seemed weary of their companionship. But for all this, Lucy knew what the last leaf upon the rose would tell her, when the many petals should be plucked away, and the poor stem be left bare. She knew how often he forgot to turn over the leaf in the Beethoven sonatas; how often he put streaks of green into an horizon that should have been purple, and touched up the trees in her foreground with rose-pink, and
