courteously, as if she had been his partner at a ball. Their hands met with as icy a touch as the hands of two corpses. Ah! how much there was of death in that touch! How much had died between those two within the last few hours — hope, confidence, security, love, happiness, all that makes life worth the holding.
Talbot Bulstrode paused upon the threshold of the little chamber, and spoke once more.
“I shall have left Felden in half an hour, Miss Floyd,” he said; “it will be better to allow your father to suppose that the disagreement between us has arisen from something of a trifling nature, and that my dismissal has come from you. I shall write to Mr. Floyd from London, and, if you please, I will so word my letter as to lead him to think this.”
“You are very good,” she answered. “Yes, I would rather that he should think that. It may spare him pain. Heaven knows I have cause to be grateful for anything that will do that.”
Talbot bowed, and left the room, closing the door behind him. The closing of that door had a dismal sound to his ear. He thought of some frail young creature abandoned by her sister-nuns in a living tomb. He thought that he would rather have left Aurora lying rigidly beautiful in her coffin than as he was leaving her to-day.
The jangling, jarring sound of the second dinner-bell clanged out as he went from the semi-obscurity of the corridor into the glaring gas-light of the billiard-room. He met Lucy Floyd coming toward him in her rustling silk dinner-dress, with fringes, and laces, and ribbons, and jewels fluttering and sparkling about her, and he almost hated her for looking so bright and radiant, remembering, as he did, the ghastly face of the stricken creature he had just left. We are apt to be horribly unjust in the hour of supreme trouble, and I fear that if any one had had the temerity to ask Talbot Bulstrode’s opinion of Lucy Floyd just at that moment, the captain would have declared her to be a mass of frivolity and affectation. If you discover the worthlessness of the only woman you love upon earth, you will perhaps be apt to feel maliciously disposed toward the many estimable people about you. You are savagely inclined when you remember that they for whom you care nothing are so good, while she on whom you set your soul is so wicked. The vessel which you freighted with every hope of your heart has gone down, and you are angry at the very sight of those other ships riding so gallantly before the breeze. Lucy recoiled at the aspect of the young man’s face.
“What is it?” she asked; “what has happened, Captain Bulstrode?”
“Nothing; I have received a letter from Cornwall which obliges me to —”
His hollow voice died away into a hoarse whisper before he could finish the sentence.
“Lady Bulstrode — or Sir John — is ill, perhaps?” hazarded Lucy.
Talbot pointed to his white lips and shook his head. The gesture might mean anything. He could not speak. The hall was full of visitors and children going into dinner. The little people were to dine with their seniors that day, as an especial treat and privilege of the season. The door of the dining-room was open, and Talbot saw the gray head of Archibald Floyd dimly visible at the end of a long vista of lights, and silver, and glass, and evergreens. The old man had his nephews and nieces, and their children grouped about him, but the place at his right hand, the place Aurora was meant to fill, was vacant. Captain Bulstrode turned away from that gayly-lighted scene and ran up the staircase to his room, where he found his servant waiting with his master’s clothes laid out, wondering why he had not come to dress.
The man fell back at the sight of Talbot’s face, ghastly in the light of the wax candles on the dressing-table.
“I am going away, Philman,” said the captain, speaking very fast, and in a thick, indistinct voice. “I am going down to Cornwall by the express to-night, if I can get to town in time to catch the train. Pack my clothes and come after me. You can join me at the Paddington Station. I shall walk up to Beckenham, and take the first train for town. Here, give this to the servants for me, will you?”
He took a confused heap of gold and silver from his pocket, and dropped it into the man’s hand.
“Nothing wrong at Bulstrode, I hope, sir?” said the servant. “Is Sir John ill?”
“No, no; I’ve had a letter from my mother — I— you’ll find me at the Great Western.”
He snatched up his hat, and was hurrying from the room; but the man followed him with his great-coat.
“You’ll catch your death, sir, on such a night as this,” the servant said, in a tone of respectful remonstrance.
The banker was standing at the door of the dining-room when Talbot crossed the hall. He was telling a servant to look for his daughter.
“We are all waiting for Miss Floyd,” the old man said; “we can not begin dinner without Miss Floyd.”
Unobserved in the confusion, Talbot opened the great door softly, and let himself out into the cold winter’s night. The long terrace was all ablaze with the lights in the high, narrow windows, as upon the night when he had first come to Felden; and before him lay the park, the trees bare and leafless, the ground white with a thin coating of snow, the sky above gray and starless — a cold and desolate expanse, in dreary contrast with the warmth and brightness behind. All this was typical of the crisis of his life. He was leaving warm love and hope for cold resignation or icy despair. He went down the terrace-steps, across the trim garden-walks, and out into that wide, mysterious park. The long avenue was ghostly in the gray light, the tracery of the interlacing branches above his head making black shadows, that flickered to and fro upon the whitened ground beneath his feet. He walked for a quarter of a mile before he looked back at the lighted windows behind him. He did not turn until a wind in the avenue had brought him to a spot from which he could see the dimly-lighted bay-window of the room in which he had left Aurora. He stood for some time looking at this feeble glimmer, and thinking — thinking of all he had lost, or all he had perhaps escaped — thinking of what his life was to be henceforth without that woman — thinking that he would rather have been the poorest ploughboy in Beckenham parish than the heir of Bulstrode, if he could have taken the girl he loved to his heart, and believed in her truth.
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