He was a great spoiled baby of thirty years of age; and I am afraid that, if the stern truth must be told, he saw Aurora Floyd across a mist, that blurred and distorted the bright face before his eyes. Lucy Floyd came to his relief, by carrying him off to introduce him to her mother; and kindhearted Mrs. Alexander was delighted with his frank, fair English face. He had the good fortune to stand with his back to the light, so that neither of the ladies detected that foolish mist in his blue eyes.
Archibald Floyd would not hear of his visitor’s returning to town either that night or the next day.
“You must spend Christmas with us,” he said, “and see the New Year in, before you go back to Yorkshire. I have all my children about me at this season, and it is the only time that Felden seems like an old man’s home. Your friend Bulstrode stops with us” (Mellish winced as he received this intelligence), “and I shan’t think it friendly if you refuse to join our party.”
What a pitiful coward this John Mellish must have been to accept the banker’s invitation, and send the Newport Pagnell back to the Gloucester, and suffer himself to be led away by Mr. Floyd’s own man to a pleasant chamber, a few doors from the chintz-rooms occupied by Talbot! But I have said before, that love is a cowardly passion. It is like the toothache; the bravest and strongest succumb to it, and howl aloud under the torture. I don’t suppose the Iron Duke would have been ashamed to own that he objected to having his teeth out. I have heard of a great fighting man who could take punishment better than any other of the genii of the ring, but who fainted away at the first grip of the dentist’s forceps. John Mellish consented to stay at Felden, and he went between the lights into Talbot’s dressing-room, to expostulate with the captain upon his treachery.
Talbot did his best to console his doleful visitant.
“There are more women than one in the world,” he said, after John had unbosomed himself of his grief—he didn’t think this, the hypocrite, though he said it—“there are more women than one, my dear Mellish; and there are many very charming and estimable girls, who would be glad to win the affections of such a fellow as you.”
“I hate estimable girls,” said Mr. Mellish; “bother my affections! nobody will ever win my affections; but I love her, I love that beautiful black-eyed creature downstairs, who looks at you with two flashes of lightning, and rides like young Challoner in a cloth habit; I love her, Bulstrode, and you told me that she’d refused you, and that you were going to leave Brighton by the eight o’clock express, and you didn’t; and you sneaked back and made her a second offer, and she accepted you, and, damme, it wasn’t fair play.”
Having said which, Mr. Mellish flung himself upon a chair, which creaked under his weight, and fell to poking the fire furiously.
It was hard for poor Talbot to have to excuse himself for having won Aurora’s hand. He could not very well remind John Mellish that if Miss Floyd had accepted him, it was perhaps because she preferred him to the honest Yorkshireman. To John the matter never presented itself in this light. The spoiled child had been cheated out of that toy above all other toys, upon the possession of which he had set his foolish heart. It was as if he had bidden for some crack horse at Tattersall’s, in fair and open competition with a friend, who had gone back after the sale to outbid him in some underhand fashion. He could not understand that there had been no dishonesty in Talbot’s conduct, and he was highly indignant when that gentleman ventured to hint to him that perhaps, on the whole, it would have been wiser to have kept away from Felden Woods.
Talbot Bulstrode had avoided any further allusion to Mr. Matthew Harrison the dog-fancier; and this, the first dispute between the lovers, had ended in the triumph of Aurora.
Miss Floyd was not a little embarrassed by the presence of John Mellish, who roamed disconsolately about the big rooms, seating himself ever and anon at one of the tables to peer into the lenses of a stereoscope, or to take up some gorgeously-bound volume and drop it on the carpet in gloomy absence of mind, and who sighed heavily when spoken to, and was altogether far from pleasant company. Aurora’s warm heart was touched by the piteous spectacle of this rejected lover, and she sought him out once or twice, and talked to him about his racing stud, and asked him how he liked the hunting in Surrey; but John changed from red to white, and from hot to cold, when she spoke to him, and fled away from her with a scared and ghastly aspect, which would have been grotesque had it not been so painfully real.
But by-and-by John found a more pitiful listener to his sorrows than ever Talbot Bulstrode had been; and this gentle and compassionate listener was no other than Lucy Floyd, to whom the big Yorkshireman turned in his trouble. Did he know, or did he guess, by some wondrous clairvoyance, that her griefs bore a common likeness to his own, and that she was just the one person, of all others at Felden Woods, to be pitiful to him and patient with him? He was by no means proud, this transparent, boyish, babyish good fellow. Two days after his arrival at Felden, he told all to poor Lucy.
“I suppose you know, Miss Floyd,” he said, “that your cousin rejected me. Yes, of course you do; I believe she rejected Bulstrode about the same time; but some men haven’t a ha’porth of pride: I must say I
