He read no more. One glance told him that the rest of the letter consisted of motherly cautions, and admonitions as to how he was to act in this perplexing business.
He thrust the crumpled paper into his bosom, and dropped into a chair by the hearth.
It was so, then! There was a mystery in the life of this woman. The doubts and suspicions, the undefined fears and perplexities, which had held him back at the first, and caused him to wrestle against his love, had not been unfounded. There was good reason for them all, ample reason for them; as there is for every instinct which Providence puts into our hearts. A black wall rose up round about him, and shut him forever from the woman he loved; this woman whom he loved, so far from wisely, so fearfully well; this woman, for whom he had thanked God in the church only a few hours before. And she was to have been his wife; the mother of his children, perhaps. He clasped his cold hands over his face and sobbed aloud. Do not despise him for those drops of anguish: they were the virgin tears of his manhood. Never since infancy had his eyes been wet before. God forbid that such tears as those should be shed more than once in a lifetime! The agony of that moment was not to be lived through twice. The hoarse sobs rent and tore his breast as if his flesh had been hacked by a rusty sword; and when he took his wet hands from his face, he wondered that they were not red; for it seemed to him as if he had been weeping blood. What should he do?
Go to Aurora, and ask her the meaning of that letter? Yes; the course was plain enough. A tumult of hope rushed back upon him, and swept away his terror. Why was he so ready to doubt her? What a pitiful coward he was to suspect her—to suspect this girl, whose transparent soul had been so freely unveiled to him; whose every accent was truth! For in his intercourse with Aurora, the quality which he had learned most to reverence in her nature was its sublime candour. He almost laughed at the recollection of his mother’s solemn letter. It was so like these simple country people, whose lives had been bounded by the narrow limits of a Cornish village—it was so like them to make mountains out of the veriest molehills. What was there so wonderful in that which had occurred? The spoiled child, the wilful heiress, had grown tired of a foreign school, and had run away. Her father, not wishing the girlish escapade to be known, had placed her somewhere else, and had kept her folly a secret. What was there from first to last in the whole affair that was not perfectly natural and probable, the exceptional circumstances of the case duly considered?
He could fancy Aurora, with her cheeks in a flame, and her eyes flashing lightning, flinging a page of blotted exercises into the face of her French master, and running out of the schoolroom, amid a tumult of ejaculatory babble. The beautiful, impetuous creature! There is nothing a man cannot admire in the woman he loves, and Talbot was half inclined to admire Aurora for having run away from school.
The first dinner-bell had rung during Captain Bulstrode’s agony; so the corridors and rooms were deserted when he went to look for Aurora, with his mother’s letter in his breast.
She was not in the billiard-room or the drawing-room, but he found her at last in a little inner chamber at the end of the house, with a bay-window looking out over the park. The room was dimly lighted by a shaded lamp, and Miss Floyd was seated in the uncurtained window, with her elbow resting on a cushioned ledge, looking out at the steel-cold wintry sky and the whitened landscape. She was dressed in black; her face, neck, and arms gleaming marble-white against the sombre hue of her dress; and her attitude was as still as that of a statue.
She neither stirred nor looked round when Talbot entered the room.
“My dear Aurora,” he said, “I have been looking for you everywhere.”
She shivered at the sound of his voice.
“You wanted to see me?”
“Yes, dearest. I want you to explain something to me. A foolish business enough, no doubt, my darling, and, of course, very easily explained; but, as your future husband, I have a right to ask for an explanation; and I know, I know, Aurora, that you will give it in all candour.”
She did not speak, although Talbot paused for some moments, awaiting her answer. He could only see her profile, dimly lighted by the wintry sky. He could not see the mute pain, the white anguish, in that youthful face.
“I have had a letter from my mother, and there is something in that letter which I wish you to explain. Shall I read it to you, dearest?”
His voice faltered upon the endearing expression, and he remembered afterwards that it was the last time he had ever addressed her with a lover’s tenderness. The day came when she had need of his compassion, and when he gave it freely; but that moment sounded the death-knell of love. In that moment the gulf yawned, and the cliffs were rent asunder.
“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
