time that Felden seems like an old man’s home. Your friend Bulstrode stops with us” (Mellish winced as he received this intelligence), “and I shan’t think it friendly if you refuse to join our party.”
What a pitiful coward this John Mellish must have been to accept the banker’s invitation, and send the Newton Pagnell back to the Gloucester, and suffer himself to be led away by Mr. Floyd’s own man to a pleasant chamber a few doors from the chintz rooms occupied by Talbot! But I have said before that love is a cowardly passion. It is like the toothache; the bravest and strongest succumb to it, and howl aloud under the torture. I don’t suppose the Iron Duke would have been ashamed to own that he objected to having his teeth out. I have heard of a great fighting man who could take punishment better than any other of the genii of the ring, but who fainted away at the first grip of the dentist’s forceps. John Mellish consented to stay at Felden, and he went between the lights into Talbot’s dressing-room to expostulate with the captain upon his treachery.
Talbot did his best to console his doleful visitant.
“There are more women than one in the world,” he said, after John had unbosomed himself of his grief — he did n’t think this, the hypocrite, though he said it —“there are more women than one, my dear Mellish, and many very charming and estimable girls, who would be glad to win the affections of such a fellow as you.”
“I hate estimable girls,” said Mr. Mellish; “bother my affections, nobody will ever win my affections; but I love her, I love that beautiful black-eyed creature down stairs, who looks at you with two flashes of lightning, and rides so well; I love her, Bulstrode, and you told me that she’d refused you, and that you were going to leave Brighton by the eight o’clock express, and you did n’t, and you sneaked back and made her a second offer, and she accepted you, and, damme, it was n’t fair play.”
Having said which, Mr. Mellish flung himself upon a chair, which creaked under his weight, and fell to poking the fire furiously.
It was hard for poor Talbot to have to excuse himself for having won Aurora’s hand. He could not very well remind John Mellish that if Miss Floyd had accepted him, it was perhaps because she preferred him to the honest Yorkshireman. To John the matter never presented itself in this light. The spoiled child had been cheated out of that toy above all other toys, upon the possession of which he had set his foolish heart. It was as if he had bidden for some crack horse at Tattersall’s, in fair and open competition with a friend, who had gone back after the sale to outbid him in some underhand fashion. He could not understand that there had been no dishonesty in Talbot’s conduct, and he was highly indignant when that gentleman ventured to hint to him that perhaps, on the whole, it would have been wiser to have kept away from Felden Woods.
Talbot Bulstrode had avoided any further allusion to Mr. Matthew Harrison, the dog-fancier, and this, the first dispute between the lovers, had ended in the triumph of Aurora.
Miss Floyd was not a little embarrassed by the presence of John Mellish, who roamed disconsolately about the big rooms, seating himself ever and anon at one of the tables to peer into the lenses of a stereoscope, or to take up some gorgeously bound volume and drop it on the carpet in gloomy absence of mind, and who sighed heavily when spoken to, and was altogether far from pleasant company. Aurora’s warm heart was touched by the piteous spectacle of this rejected lover, and she sought him out once or twice, and talked to him about his racing-stud, and asked him how he liked the hunting in Surrey; but John changed from red to white, and from hot to cold, when she spoke to him, and fled away from her with a scared and ghastly aspect, which would have been grotesque had it not been so painfully real.
But by and by John found a more pitiful listener to his sorrows than ever Talbot Bulstrode had been, and this gentle and compassionate listener was no other than Lucy Floyd, to whom the big Yorkshireman turned in his trouble. Did he know, or did he guess, by some wondrous clairvoyance, that her griefs bore a common likeness to his own, and that she was just the one person, of all others, at Felden Woods to be pitiful to him and patient with him? He was by no means proud, this transparent, boyish, babyish good fellow. Two days after his arrival at Felden he told all to poor Lucy.
“I suppose you know, Miss Floyd,” he said, “that your cousin rejected me? Yes, of course you do; I believe she rejected Bulstrode about the same time; but some men have n’t a ha’porth of pride; I must say I think the captain acted like a sneak.”
A sneak! Her idol, her adored, her demigod, her dark-haired and gray-eyed divinity, to be spoken of thus! She turned upon Mr. Mellish with her fair cheeks flushed into a pale glow of anger, and told him that Talbot had a right to do what he had done, and that whatever Talbot did was right.
Like most men whose reflective faculties are entirely undeveloped, John Mellish was blessed with a sufficiently rapid perception — a perception sharpened just then by that peculiar sympathetic prescience, that marvellous clairvoyance of which I have spoken; and in those few indignant words, and that angry flush, he read poor Lucy’s secret; she loved Talbot Bulstrode as he loved Aurora — hopelessly.
How he admired this fragile girl, who was frightened of horses and dogs, and who shivered if a breath of the winter air blew across the heated hall, and who yet bore her burden with this quiet, uncomplaining patience; while he, who weighed fourteen stone, and could ride forty miles across country with the bitterest blasts of December blowing on his face, was powerless to endure his affliction. It comforted him to watch Lucy, and to read in these faint signs and tokens, which had escaped even a mother’s eye, the sad history of her unrequited affection.
Poor John was too good-natured and unselfish to hold out for ever in the dreary fortress of despair which he had built up for his habitation; and on Christmas eve, when there were certain rejoicings at Felden, held in especial honor of the younger visitors, he gave way, and joined in their merriment, and was more boyish than the youngest of them, burning his fingers with blazing raisins, suffering his eyes to be bandaged at the will of noisy little players at blind-man’s -buff, undergoing ignominious penalties in their games of forfeits, performing alternately innkeepers, sheriff’s officers, policemen, clergymen, and justices in the acted charades, lifting the little ones who wanted to see “de top of de Kitmat-tee” in his sturdy arms, and making himself otherwise agreeable and useful to young people of from three to fifteen years of age, until at last, under the influence of all this juvenile gayety, and perhaps two or three glasses of Moselle, he boldly kissed Aurora Floyd beneath the branch of mistletoe hanging, “for this night only,” in the great hall at Felden Woods.
And having done this, Mr. Mellish fairly lost his wits, and was “off his head” for the rest of the evening, making speeches to the little ones at the supper-table, and proposing Mr. Archibald Floyd and the commercial interests of Great Britain with three times three; leading the chorus of those tiny treble voices with his own sonorous bass, and weeping freely — he never quite knew why — behind his table-napkin. It was through an atmosphere of tears, and sparkling wines, and gas, and hot-house flowers, that he saw Aurora Floyd, looking — ah! how lovely, in those simple robes of white which so much became her, and with a garland of artificial holly round her head. The spiked leaves and the scarlet berries formed themselves into a crown — I think, indeed, that a cheese-plate would have been transformed into a diadem if Miss Floyd has been pleased to put it on her head — and she looked like the genius of Christmas: something bright and beautiful — too beautiful to come more than once a year.
When the clocks were striking 2 A. M., long after the little ones had been carried away muffled up in opera-cloaks, terribly sleepy, and I’m afraid, in some instances, under the influence of strong drink — when the elder guests had all retired to rest, and the lights, with a few exceptions, were fled, the garlands dead, and all but Talbot and John Mellish departed, the two young men walked up and down the long billiard-room, in the red glow of the two declining fires, and talked to each other confidentially. It was the morning of Christmas day, and it would have
