“I don’t expect you to love me, Aurora,” he said passionately; “how should you? What is there in a big clumsy fellow like me to win your love? I don’t ask that. I only ask you to let me love you, to let me worship you, as the people we see kneeling in the churches here worship their saints. You won’t drive me away from you, will you, Aurora, because I presume to forget what you said to me that cruel day at Brighton? You would never have suffered me to stay with you so long, and to be so happy, if you had meant to drive me away at the last! You never could have been so cruel!”
Miss Floyd looked at him with a sudden terror in her face. What was this? What had she done? More wrong, more mischief? Was her life to be one of perpetual wrongdoing? Was she to be forever bringing sorrow upon good people? Was this John Mellish to be another sufferer by her folly?
“Oh, forgive me!” she cried, “forgive me! I never thought—”
“You never thought that every day spent by your side must make the anguish of parting from you more cruelly bitter. O Aurora, women should think of these things! Send me away from you, and what shall I be for the rest of my life?—a broken man, fit for nothing better than the racecourse and the betting-rooms; a reckless man, ready to go to the bad by any road that can take me there; worthless alike to myself and to others. You must have seen such men, Aurora; men whose unblemished youth promised an honourable manhood; but who break up all of a sudden, and go to ruin in a few years of mad dissipation. Nine times out of ten a woman is the cause of that sudden change. I lay my life at your feet, Aurora; I offer you more than my heart—I offer you my destiny. Do with it as you will.”
He rose in his agitation, and walked a few paces away from her. The grass-grown battlements sloped away from his feet; an outer and inner moat lay below him, at the bottom of a steep declivity. What a convenient place for suicide, if Aurora should refuse to take pity upon him! The reader must allow that he had availed himself of considerable artifice in addressing Miss Floyd. His appeal had taken the form of an accusation rather than a prayer, and he had duly impressed upon this poor girl the responsibility she would incur in refusing him. And this, I take it, is a meanness of which men are often guilty in their dealings with the weaker sex.
Miss Floyd looked up at her lover with a quiet, half-mournful smile.
“Sit down there, Mr. Mellish,” she said, pointing to a campstool at her side.
John took the indicated seat, very much with the air of a prisoner in a criminal dock about to answer for his life.
“Shall I tell you a secret?” asked Aurora, looking compassionately at his pale face.
“A secret?”
“Yes; the secret of my parting with Talbot Bulstrode. It was not I who dismissed him from Felden; it was he who refused to fulfil his engagement with me.”
She spoke slowly, in a low voice, as if it were painful to her to say the words which told of so much humiliation.
“He did!” cried John Mellish, rising, red and furious, from his seat, eager to run to look for Talbot Bulstrode then and there, in order to inflict chastisement upon him.
“He did, John Mellish, and he was justified in doing so,” answered Aurora, gravely. “You would have done the same.”
“O Aurora, Aurora!”
“You would. You are as good a man as he, and why should your sense of honour be less strong than his? A barrier arose between Talbot Bulstrode and me, and separated us forever. That barrier was a secret.”
She told him of the missing year in her young life; how Talbot had called upon her for an explanation, and how she had refused to give it. John listened to her with a thoughtful face, which broke out into sunshine as she turned to him and said—
“How would you have acted in such a case, Mr. Mellish?”
“How should I have acted, Aurora? I should have trusted you. But I can give you a better answer to your question, Aurora. I can answer it by a renewal of the prayer I made you five minutes ago. Be my wife.”
“In spite of this secret?”
“In spite of a hundred secrets. I could not love you as I do, Aurora, if I did not believe you to be all that is best and purest in woman. I cannot believe this one moment, and doubt you the next. I give my life and honour into your hands. I would not confide them to the woman whom I could insult by a doubt.”
His handsome Saxon face was radiant with love and trustfulness as he spoke. All his patient devotion, so long unheeded, or accepted as a thing of course, recurred to Aurora’s mind. Did he not deserve some reward, some requital for all this? But there was one who was nearer and dearer to her, dearer than even Talbot Bulstrode had ever been; and that one was the white-haired old man pottering about amongst the ruins on the other side of the grassy platform.
“Does my father
