hours afterward, and Talbot had no longer any excuse for delay.
The November evening was mild, and the three windows in the drawing-room were open from floor to ceiling. It was pleasant to look out from the hot gas-light upon that wide sweep of moonlit ocean, with a white sail glimmering here and there against the purple night. Captain Bulstrode sat near one of the open windows, watching that tranquil scene, with, I fear, very little appreciation of its beauty. He was wishing that the people would drop off and leave him alone with Aurora. It was close upon eleven o’clock, and high time they went. John Mellish would of course insist upon waiting for Talbot; this was what a man had to endure on account of some old school-boy acquaintance. All Rugby might turn up against him in a day or two, and dispute with him for Aurora’s smiles. But John Mellish was engaged in a very animated conversation with Archibald Floyd, having contrived, with consummate artifice, to ingratiate himself in the old man’s favor, and, the visitors having one by one dropped off, Aurora, with a listless yawn that she took little pains to conceal, strolled out into the broad iron balcony. Lucy was sitting at a table at the other end of the room, looking at a book of beauty. Oh, my poor Lucy! how much did you see of the Honorable Miss Brownsmith’s high forehead and Roman nose? Did not that young lady’s handsome face stare up at you dimly through a blinding mist of tears that you were a great deal too well educated to shed? The chance had come at last. If life had been a Haymarket comedy, and the entrances and exits arranged by Mr. Buckstone himself, it could have fallen out no better than this. Talbot Bulstrode followed Aurora on to the balcony; John Mellish went on with his story about the Beverly fox-hounds; and Lucy, holding her breath at the other end of the room, knew as well what was going to happen as the captain himself.
Is not life altogether a long comedy, with Fate for the stage-manager, and Passion, Inclination, Love, Hate, Revenge, Ambition, and Avarice, by turns, in the prompter’s box? A tiresome comedy sometimes, with dreary, talkee, talkee front scenes which come to nothing, but only serve to make the audience more impatient as they wait while the stage is set and the great people change their dresses; or a “sensation” comedy, with unlooked-for tableaux and unexpected dénoûments; but a comedy to the end of the chapter, for the sorrows which seem tragic to us are very funny when seen from the other side of the foot-lights; and our friends in the pit are as much amused with our trumpery griefs as the Haymarket habitués when Mr. Box finds his gridiron empty, or Mr. Cox misses his rasher. What can be funnier than other people’s anguish? Why do we enjoy Mr. Maddison Morton’s farces, and laugh till the tears run down our cheeks at the comedian who enacts them? Because there is scarcely a farce upon the British stage which is not, from the rising to the dropping of the curtain, a record of human anguish and undeserved misery. Yes, undeserved and unnecessary torture — there is the special charm of the entertainment. If the man who was weak enough to send his wife to Camberwell had crushed a baby behind a chest of drawers, his sufferings would n’t be half so delightful to an intellectual audience. If the gentleman who became embroiled with his laundress had murdered the young lady in the green boots, where would be the fun of that old Adelphi farce in which poor Wright was wont to delight us? And so it is with our friends on the other side of the foot-lights, who enjoy our troubles all the more because we have not always deserved them, and whose sorrows we shall gloat over by and by, when the bell for the next piece begins, and it is their turn to go on and act.
Talbot Bulstrode went out on to the balcony, and the earth stood still for ten minutes or so, and every steel-blue star in the sky glared watchfully down upon the young man in this the supreme crisis of his life.
Aurora was leaning against a slender iron pilaster, looking aslant into the town, and across the town into the sea. She was wrapped in an opera cloak; no stiff, embroidered, young ladified garment, but a voluminous drapery of soft scarlet woollen stuff, such as Semiramide herself might have worn. “She looks like Semiramide,” Talbot thought. “How did this Scotch banker and his Lancashire wife come to have an Assyrian for their daughter?”
He began brilliantly, this young man, as lovers generally do.
“I am afraid you must have fatigued yourself this evening, Miss Floyd,” he remarked.
Aurora stifled a yawn as she answered him. “I am rather tired,” she said.
It was n’t very encouraging. How was he to begin an eloquent speech, when she might fall asleep in the middle of it? But he did; he dashed at once into the heart of his subject, and he told her how he loved her; how he had done battle with this passion, which had been too strong for him; how he loved her as he never thought to love any creature upon this earth; and how he cast himself before her in all humility, to take his sentence of life or death from her dear lips.
She was silent for some moments, her profile sharply distinct to him in the moonlight, and those dear lips trembling visibly. Then, with a half-averted face, and in words that seemed to come slowly and painfully from a stifled throat, she gave him his answer.
That answer was a rejection!
Not a young lady’s No, which means yes to-morrow, or which means perhaps that you have not been on your knees in a passion of despair, like Lord Edward Fitz Morkysh in Miss Oderose’s last novel. Nothing of this kind; but a calm negative, carefully and tersely worded, as if she feared to mislead him by so much as one syllable that could leave a loop-hole through which hope might creep into his heart. He was rejected. For a moment it was quite as much as he could do to believe it. He was inclined to imagine that the signification of certain words had suddenly changed, or that he had been in the habit of mistaking them all his life, rather than that those words meant this hard fact, namely, that he, Talbot Raleigh Bulstrode, of Bulstrode Castle, and of Saxon extraction, had been rejected by the daughter of a Lombard-street banker.
He paused — for an hour and a half or so, as it seemed to him — in order to collect himself before he spoke again.
“May I— venture to inquire,” he said — how horribly commonplace the phrase seemed; he could have used no worse had he been inquiring for furnished lodgings —“may I ask if any prior attachment — to one more worthy —”
“Oh no, no, no!”
The answer came upon him so suddenly that it almost startled him as much as her rejection.
“And yet your decision is irrevocable?”
“Quite irrevocable.”
“Forgive me if I am intrusive; but — but Mr. Floyd may perhaps have formed some higher views.”
He was interrupted by a stifled sob as she clasped her hands over her averted face.
“Higher views!” she said; “poor, dear old man, no, no, indeed.”
“It is scarcely strange that I bore you with these questions. It is so hard to think that, meeting you with your affections disengaged, I have yet been utterly unable to win one shadow of regard upon which I might build a hope for the future.”
Poor Talbot! Talbot, the splitter of metaphysical straws and chopper of logic, talking of building hopes on shadows with a lover’s delirious stupidity.
“It is so hard to resign every thought of your ever coming to alter your decision of tonight, Aurora”— he lingered on her name for a moment, first because it was so sweet to say it, and, secondly, in the hope that she would speak —“it is so hard to remember the fabric of happiness I had dared to build, and to lay it down here to-night for ever.”
Talbot quite forgot that, up to the time of the arrival of John Mellish, he had been perpetually arguing against his passion, and had declared to himself over and over again that he would be a consummmate fool if he was ever beguiled into making Aurora his wife. He
