Good heavens! how hard it is upon such women as these that they feel so much and yet display so little feeling! The dark-eyed, impetuous creatures, who speak out fearlessly, and tell you that they love or hate you—flinging their arms round your neck or throwing the carving-knife at you, as the case may be—get full value for all their emotion; but these gentle creatures love, and make no sign. They sit, like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief; and no one reads the mournful meaning of that sad smile. Concealment, like the worm i’ the bud, feeds on their damask cheeks; and compassionate relatives tell them that they are bilious, and recommend some homely remedy for their pallid complexions. They are always at a disadvantage. Their inner life may be a tragedy, all blood and tears, while their outer existence is some dull domestic drama of everyday life. The only outward sign Lucy Floyd gave of the condition of her heart was that one tremulous, half-whispered affirmative; and yet what a tempest of emotion was going forward within! The muslin folds of her dress rose and fell with the surging billows; but, for the very life of her, she could have uttered no better response to Talbot’s pleading.
It was only by-and-by, after she and Captain Bulstrode had wandered slowly back to the house, that her emotion betrayed itself. Aurora met her cousin in the corridor out of which their rooms opened, and, drawing Lucy into her own dressing-room, asked the truant where she had been.
“Where have you been, you runaway girl? John and I have wanted you half a dozen times.”
Miss Lucy Floyd explained that she had been in the wood with the last new novel—a High-Church novel, in which the heroine rejected the clerical hero because he did not perform the service according to the Rubric. Now Miss Lucy Floyd made this admission with so much confusion and so many blushes, that it would have appeared as if there were some lurking criminality in the fact of spending an April morning in a wood; and being further examined as to why she had stayed so long, and whether she had been alone all the time, poor Lucy fell into a pitiful state of embarrassment, declaring that she had been alone; that is to say, part of the time—or at least most of the time; but that Captain Bulstrode—
But in trying to pronounce his name—this beloved, this sacred name—Lucy Floyd’s utterance failed her; she fairly broke down, and burst into tears.
Aurora laid her cousin’s face upon her breast, and looked down, with a womanly, matronly glance, into those tearful blue eyes.
“Lucy, my darling,” she said, “is it really and truly as I think—as I wish:—Talbot loves you?”
“He has asked me to marry him,” Lucy whispered.
“And you—you have consented—you love him?”
Lucy Floyd only answered by a new burst of tears.
“Why, my darling, how this surprises me! How long has it been so, Lucy? How long have you loved him?”
“From the hour I first saw him,” murmured Lucy; “from the day he first came to Felden. O Aurora! I know how foolish and weak it was; I hate myself for the folly; but he is so good, so noble, so—”
“My silly darling; and because he is good and noble, and has asked you to be his wife, you shed as many tears as if you had been asked to go to his funeral. My loving, tender Lucy, you loved him all the time, then; and you were so gentle and good to me—to me, who was selfish enough never to guess—My dearest, you are a hundred times better suited to him than ever I was, and you will be as happy—as happy as I am with that ridiculous old John.”
Aurora’s eyes filled with tears as she spoke. She was truly and sincerely glad that Talbot was in a fair way to find consolation, still more glad that her sentimental cousin was to be made happy.
Talbot Bulstrode lingered on a few days at Mellish Park;—happy, ah! too happy days for Lucy Floyd—and then departed, after receiving the congratulations of John and Aurora.
He was to go straight to Alexander Floyd’s villa at Fulham, and plead his cause with Lucy’s father. There was little fear of his meeting other than a favourable reception; for Talbot Bulstrode of Bulstrode Castle was a very great match for a daughter of the junior branch of Floyd, Floyd, and Floyd, a young lady whose expectations were considerably qualified by half a dozen brothers and sisters.
So Captain Bulstrode went back to London as the betrothed lover of Lucy Floyd; went back with a subdued gladness in his heart, all unlike the stormy joys of the past. He was happy in the choice he had made calmly and dispassionately. He had loved Aurora for her beauty and her fascination; he was going to marry Lucy because he had seen much of her, had observed her closely, and believed her to be all that a woman should be. Perhaps, if stern truth must be told, Lucy’s chief charm in the captain’s eyes lay in that reverence for himself which she so naively betrayed. He accepted her worship with a quiet, unconscious serenity, and thought her the most sensible of women.
Mrs. Alexander was utterly bewildered when Aurora’s sometime lover pleaded for her daughter’s hand. She was too busy a mother amongst her little flock to be the most penetrating of observers, and she had never suspected the state of Lucy’s heart. She was glad, therefore, to find that her daughter did justice to her excellent education, and had too much good sense to refuse so advantageous an offer as that of Captain Bulstrode; and she joined with her husband in perfect approval of Talbot’s suit. So, there being no
