Aurora, shivering in her drenched garments, stood a few paces from him, with the rain beating down straight and heavily upon her head.
Even in that obscurity her husband recognized her.
“My darling,” he cried, “is it you? You out at such a time, and on such a night! Come in, for mercy’s sake; you must be drenched to the skin.”
She came into the room; the wet hanging in her muslin dress streamed out upon the carpet on which she trod, and the folds of her lace shawl clung tightly about her figure.
“Why did you let them shut the windows?” she said, turning to Mrs. Powell, who had risen, and was looking the picture of ladylike uneasiness and sympathy. “You knew that I was in the garden.”
“Yes, but I thought you had returned, my dear Mrs. Mellish,” said the ensign’s widow, busying herself with Aurora’s wet shawl, which she attempted to remove, but which Mrs. Mellish plucked impatiently away from her. “I saw you go out, certainly; and I saw you leave the lawn in the direction of the north lodge; but I thought you had returned some time since.”
The colour faded out of John Mellish’s face.
“The north lodge!” he said. “Have you been to the north lodge?”
“I have been in the direction of the north lodge,” Aurora answered, with a sneering emphasis upon the words. “Your information is perfectly correct, Mrs. Powell, though I did not know you had done me the honour of watching my actions.”
Mr. Mellish did not appear to hear this. He looked from his wife to his wife’s companion with a half-bewildered expression—an expression of newly-awakened doubt, of dim, struggling perplexity—that was very painful to see.
“The north lodge!” he repeated; “what were you doing at the north lodge, Aurora?”
“Do you wish me to stand here in my wet clothes while I tell you?” asked Mrs. Mellish, her great black eyes blazing up with indignant pride. “If you want an explanation for Mrs. Powell’s satisfaction, I can give it here; if only for your own, it will do as well upstairs.”
She swept towards the door, trailing her wet shawl after her, but not less queenly, even in her dripping garments; Semiramide and Cleopatra may have been out in wet weather. On the threshold of the door she paused and looked back at her husband.
“I shall want you to take me to London tomorrow, Mr. Mellish,” she said. Then with one haughty toss of her beautiful head, and one bright flash of her glorious eyes, which seemed to say, “Slave, obey and tremble!” she disappeared, leaving Mr. Mellish to follow her, meekly, wonderingly, fearfully; with terrible doubts and anxieties creeping, like venomous living creatures, stealthily into his heart.
XIX
Money Matters
Archibald Floyd was very lonely at Felden Woods without his daughter. He took no pleasure in the long drawing-room, or the billiard-room and library, or the pleasant galleries, in which there were all manner of easy corners, with abutting bay-windows, damask-cushioned oaken benches, china vases as high as tables, all enlivened by the alternately sternly masculine and simperingly feminine faces of those ancestors whose painted representations the banker had bought in Wardour Street. (Indeed, I fear those Scottish warriors, those bewigged worthies of the Northern Circuit, those taper-waisted ladies with pointed stomachers, tucked-up petticoats, pannier-hoops, and blue-ribbon bedizened crooks, had been painted to order, and that there were such items in the account of the Wardour Street rococo merchant as, “To one knight banneret, killed at Bosworth ￡25 5s.”) The old banker, I say, grew sadly weary of his gorgeous mansion, which was of little avail to him without Aurora.
People are not so very much happier for living in handsome houses, though it is generally considered such a delightful thing to occupy a mansion which would be large enough for a hospital, and take your simple meal at the end of a table long enough to accommodate a board of railway directors. Archibald Floyd could not sit beside both the fireplaces in his long drawing-room, and he felt strangely lonely looking from the easy-chair on one hearthrug, through a vista of velvet-pile and satin-damask, walnut-wood, buhl, malachite, china, parian, crystal, and ormolu, at that solitary second hearthrug and those empty easy-chairs. He shivered in his dreary grandeur. His five-and-forty by thirty feet of velvet-pile might have been a patch of yellow sand in the Great Sahara for any pleasure he derived from its occupation. The billiard-room, perhaps, was worse; for the cues and balls were every one made precious by Aurora’s touch; and there was a great fine-drawn seam upon the green cloth, which marked the spot where Miss Floyd had ripped it open that time she made her first juvenile essay at a cannon.
The banker locked the doors of both these splendid apartments, and gave the keys to his housekeeper.
“Keep the rooms in order, Mrs. Richardson,” he said, “and keep them thoroughly aired; but I shall only use them when Mr. and Mrs. Mellish come to me.”
And having shut up these haunted chambers, Mr. Floyd retired to that snug little study in which he kept his few relics of the sorrowful past.
It may be said that the Scottish banker was a very stupid old man, and that he might have invited the county families to his gorgeous mansion; that he might have summoned his nephews and their wives, with all grand nephews and nieces appertaining, and might thus have made the place merry with the sound of fresh young voices, and the long corridors noisy with the patter of restless little feet. He might have lured literary and artistic celebrities to his lonely hearthrug, and paraded the lions of the London season upon his velvet-pile. He might have entered the political arena, and have had himself nominated for Beckenham, Croydon, or West Wickham. He might have done almost anything; for he had very nearly as much money as Aladdin, and could have carried dishes of uncut diamonds to the father
