Aurora Lane

“ The pale of her face and her dress in the moonlight made Lew think of an angel that he had seen in some graveyard, and his heart leapt up in anger that she should come to such as Charlie Deland. Then a knocking at the outer door wheeled him to it with quicker anger in his eyes. For no living man had the right to pry here on this night.
He had forgotten all the life outside the room until the world beyond the outer door showed him the Aurora's first mate, with the smell of the sea heavy on him. And the Aurora's first mate was uncivil. ”

“ All the ponderous doors in the great house at Felden Woods could not drown the feeblest murmur of that infant voice to those ever-anxious, loving ears.
He watched her growth as a child watches an acorn it hopes to rear to an oak. He repeated her broken baby-syllables till people grew weary of his babble about the child. Of course the end of all this was, that, in the common acceptation of the term, Aurora was spoiled. We do not say a flower is spoiled because it is reared in a hot-house where no breath of heaven can visit it too roughly ”

“ This country is a factory of Auroras. Dozens of her pass under that window every day, all turned out to sample as if by machinery, all run by the same interior clockwork, all well made, well dressed, well educated—in the American sense; also well able to milk a cow or to carry one on their backs, but preferring to harangue clubs all day, to dance all night, in any case to circumvent the ingenuity of life in playing us nasty tricks. They won’t do anything they don’t like, and they shut their eyes to the dark o’ the moon.
Just what Aurora wanted of Michael, I can’t say. ”

“ There is something satisfactory, too, in the sense of possession; and Aurora felt, as she looked down the long avenues, and away through distant loopholes in the wood to the wide expanse of park and lawn, and the picturesque, irregular pile of building beyond, half Gothic, half Elizabethan, and so lost in a rich tangle of ivy and bright foliage as to be beautiful at every point,—she felt, I say, that all the fair picture was her own, or her husband's, which was the same thing. She had never for one moment regretted her marriage with John Mellish. ”

“ Any chance traveller driving from Beckenham to West Wickham would have looked, perhaps enviously, at the Felden mansion, and sighed to be lord of that fair expanse of park and garden; yet I doubt if in the county of Kent there was any creature more disturbed in mind than Archibald Floyd the banker. Those few moments during which Aurora stood in thoughtful silence were as so many hours to his anxious mind. At last she spoke.
"Will you come to the study, papa?" she said; "this room is so big, and so dimly lighted. I always fancy there are listeners in the corners." ”

“ A lady in a scarlet riding-habit and three-cornered beaver hat, a white pony, and a pack of greyhounds, a bit of stone terrace and sloping turf, a flower-bed, and a fountain, made poor John's idea of a pretty picture; and he had half a dozen variations of such familiar subjects in his spacious mansion. He sat down to-night, and looked hopelessly round the pleasant chamber, wandering whether Aurora and he would ever be happy again: wondering if this dark, mysterious, storm-threatening cloud would ever pass from the horizon of his life, and leave the future bright and clear. ”

“ Who could hope to catch and reproduce the continuous lively thrill which traversed the frame of the escaped book-worm as every moment there was repeated to his consciousness the knowledge that he was walking across the vault of heaven with the evening star on his arm--at least, that he was, at her instigation, killing time along the dim, ill-lighted trottoirs of the rue Chartres, with Aurora listening sympathetically at his side. ”

“ When I get to training, I can’t resist the impulse; I don’t know where to stop. But that wasn’t enough to make him want to stick a knife in me, was it? It was only fun. It was true. He had seemed to be trying to manage me so’s I’d take a fancy to Landini, and I couldn’t for the life of me see what it mattered to him.”
“I tell Aurora,” came in Estelle, “that a little joke like that would rankle terribly in any but a real goodnatured man.” ”

“ It was so pleasant to lie wrapped in shawls, on a chintz-covered sofa, in the open window, listening to the rustic noises in the straw-littered yard upon the other side of the hedge, with her faithful Bow-wow's big fore-paws resting on the cushions at her feet. The sounds in the farmyard were pleasanter to Aurora than the monotonous inflections of Mrs. Powell's voice ”

“ Aurora had replied, “if you knew the sort of thing we talk about when you’re not there you wouldn’t worry. If you can see Gerald Fane in the part of my beau you must be cracked. And if you think I’m soft on him, you’re only a little bit less cracked. Can’t you see we’re just friends? It’s nice for him to come here and it’s nice for us to have him. We want friends, don’t we?”
“All I say is don’t go ahead with your eyes shut till you find before you know it that you’re landed in a case of, ‘Mother, I can’t live without him!’ For, Nell, it won’t do, you know it won’t.” ”

“ Lucy Floyd's cheeks had lost much of their delicate colour when she returned to Felden, and it was pronounced, by all who observed the change, that the air of the East Cliff, and the autumn winds drifting across the bleak downs, had been too much for the young lady's strength.
Aurora seemed to have burst forth into some new and more glorious beauty since the morning upon which she had accepted the hand of Talbot Bulstrode. There was a proud defiance in her manner, which became her better than gentleness becomes far lovelier women. ”

“ Mellish was standing beside the little iron gate when the ensign's widow emerged from the house. The white dress was motionless for some time, and the pale watcher, lurking under the shade of a long verandah, began to think that her trouble was wasted, and that perhaps, after all, Aurora had no special purpose in this evening ramble.
Mrs. Walter Powell felt cruelly disappointed. Always on the watch for some clue to the secret whose existence she had discovered, she had fondly hoped that even this unseasonable ramble might be some link in the mysterious chain she was so anxious to fit together. ”

“ The knocking was repeated more loudly and impatiently than before.
"It must be one of the servants," muttered John; "but why doesn't he go round to the back of the house? I can't keep the poor devil out upon such a night as this, though," he added good-naturedly, unfastening the window as he spoke. The sashes opened inwards, the Venetian shutters outwards. He pushed these shutters open, and looked out into the darkness and the rain.
Aurora, shivering in her drenched garments, stood a few paces from him, with the rain beating down straight and heavily upon her head. ”

“ Nor had Gerald suggested that one of his reasons for wishing her not to haunt his bedside was a fear of her becoming inconveniently fond of him. A hint could be found, if one chose, that he feared becoming too fond of her, but of the other no vestige, no shadow, or ghost of a shadow. Yet by those two points the spirit of Aurora’s reply must be inspired. Centuries of civilization have ground into the female of the species one particular lesson. ”

“ We aren’t impostors, Hat. We’re just having fun, and don’t want our real names to queer it. If they should slip out when we aren’t thinking, they’d simply sound like nicknames we’ve got for each other. But they won’t slip out. I’m too fond of calling you Estelle. Don’t you love to call me Aurora? Hat, how did I behave, far as you could see?”
“Nell, if I hadn’t known you, and had just been seeing you for the first time, I should have said to myself: ‘What a fine, good-looking, beautifully dressed, refined, and ladylike woman that is! ”

“ Mellish could have turned fiercely upon these innocent farmers when they pooh-poohed John's stable, and made light of the reputation of her namesake the bay filly, and declared that no horse that came out of the squire's stables was ever anything better than a plater or a screw.
The journey came to an end, only too quickly, it seemed to Aurora: too quickly, for every mile widened the gulf she had set between herself and the home she loved; every moment only brought the realization of her loss more fully home to her mind. ”

“ Her tangled hair had fallen to her waist by this time, and the whip was broken in half a dozen places.
John Mellish, entering the stable-yard by chance at this very moment, turned white with horror at beholding the beautiful fury.
"Aurora! Aurora!" he cried, snatching the man's collar from her grasp, and hurling him half a dozen paces off. "Aurora, what is it?" ”

“ And so it is with our friends on the other side of the footlights, 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 to the sea. ”

“ His mood couldn’t help wearing off in time. But it did seem to her extraordinary that even now, after knowing him so long, she could tell so little of the workings of Gerald’s mind. All, of course, because he was–such a considerable part of him–a foreigner.
Aurora was one of those healthy sleepers who have no care to guard themselves against the morning light. Her windows stood open, her bed was protected from winged intruders by a veil of white netting gathered at the top into the great overshadowing coronet. ”

“ I shall go on growing more eccentric and solitary, and call myself lucky quite beyond my merits if those particular snares which the devil Melancholy sets for the solitary may be escaped, that I may neither drink, nor drug myself, nor shoot myself, nor marry the cook!”
“Don’t talk like that, Gerald!” cried Aurora. “Don’t say anything so awful! Now keep still while I talk, listen while I tell you. You’re going on painting in your own way, but some one–see?–some one is going to arise bright enough to recognize how perfectly wonderful your pictures are. ”

“ She remembered the vital necessity of getting back to the house before Aurora, and of avoiding the shower. Her wet garments would betray her if she did not succeed in escaping the coming storm. She was of a spare, wizen figure, encumbered with no superfluous flesh, and she ran rapidly along the narrow sheltered pathway leading to the iron gate through which she had followed Aurora.
The heavy rain-drops fell at long intervals upon the leaves. A second and a third peal of thunder rattled along the earth, like the horrible roar of some hungry animal creeping nearer and nearer to its prey. ”

“ The blue jays scream from the roadside oaks, and the last of the blue and purple asters shiver along the wall. And as the sun sinks, reddening all the western clouds to the color of the frosted maples, light lines of the Aurora gush up from the northern hills, and trail their splintered fingers far over the autumn sky.
It is quite dark when you reach home, but you see the bright reflection of a fire within, and presently at the open door Nelly clapping her hands for welcome. But there are sad faces when you enter. Your mother folds you to her heart ”

“ Pride and dignity demand that we be patient, absolutely. For the sake of certain beautiful things and sweet people in the world, we must give it a good name. But hear me! Hear me giving counsels to you–you who without formulating these ideas act on them, whilst with me they are things which I see as fit to be done but can never hope to do.”
“You, too, Gerald, poor boy,” was Aurora’s simple reply–“you, too, have had lots to try you.”
He swept aside by a gesture the subject of his trials, removed it altogether from the horizon, unwilling really that the interest be shifted from her to him. ”

“ Aurora found herself pitying this happier woman, who would, after all, win but the second love of that proud heart; the pale reflection of a sun that has set; the feeble glow of expiring embers when the great blaze has died out. They had made her a couch with shawls and carriage-rugs, outspread upon a rustic seat, for she was still far from strong; and she lay in the bright September sunshine, looking down at the fair landscape, and listening to the hum of beetles and the chirp of grasshoppers upon the smooth turf. ”

“ It is she who throws open the gates of the sky for Phœbus Apollo to start upon his daily journey, just as it is Thetis who shuts them, and brings the twilight, when his journey is done.
Aurora is always glad and beautiful and young; always full of hope, because she closes her splendid wings and goes to sleep before the troubles of the day begin ”

“ When alone with him and Estelle, she was one person; when in company, she was another, not a little like Mrs. Foss, retaining enough of her own irrepressible self to seem just acceptably original. Antonia, the novelist, declared a fondness for people out of the ordinary, the conventional. Gerald thought the American might interest her. But if she did not, little depends, at a reception, upon the hostess being charmed with individual guests; he still believed that Aurora would have a good time–he meant to ensure her doing this. ”