Aurora Floyd E-Book

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

• Herausgeber: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

English author of Victorian "sensation" novels. Braddon was an extremely prolific writer, producing some 75 novels with very inventive plots. The most famous one is Lady Audley's Secret (1862), which won her recognition and fortune as well. The novel has been in print ever since, and has been dramatised and filmed several times. Braddon also founded Belgravia Magazine (1866), which presented readers with serialized sensation novels, poems, travel narratives, and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history, science. The magazine was accompanied by lavish illustrations and offered readers a source of literature at an affordable cost. She also edited Temple Bar Magazine.

Leseprobe

Aurora Floyd

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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1.How a Rich Banker Married an Actress.

2.Aurora.

3.What Became of the Diamond Bracelet.

4.After the Ball.

5.John Mellish.

6.Rejected and Accepted.

7.Aurora’s Strange Pensioner.

8.Poor John Mellish Comes Back Again.

9.How Talbot Bulstrode Spent His Christmas.

10.Fighting the Battle.

11.At the Chateau D’arques.

12.Steeve Hargraves, “The Softy.”

13.The Spring Meeting.

14.“Love Took up the Glass of Time and Turned it in His Glowing

Hands.”

15.Mr. Pastern’s Letter.

16.Mr. James Conyers.

17.The Trainer’s Messenger.

18.Out in the Rain.

19.Money Matters.

20.Captain Prodder.

21.“He Only Said I am a-Weary.”

22.Still Constant.

23.On the Threshold of Darker Miseries.

24.Captain Prodder Carries Bad News to His Niece’s House.

25.The Deed that had Been Done in the Wood.

26.At the Golden Lion.

27.“My Wife! MY WIFE! What Wife? I have No Wife.”

28.Aurora’s Flight.

29.John Mellish Finds His Home Desolate.

30.An Unexpected Visitor.

31.Talbot Bulstrode’s Advice.

32.On the Watch.

33.Captain Prodder Goes Back to Doncaster.

34.Discovery of the Weapon with which James Conyers had Been Slain.

35.Under a Cloud.

36.Reunion.

37.The Brass Button, by Crosby, Birmingham.

38.Off the Scent.

39.Talbot Bulstrode Makes Atonement for the Past.

Chapter 1

How a Rich Banker Married an Actress.

Faint streaks of crimson glimmer here and there amid the rich darkness of the Kentish woods. Autumn’s red finger has been lightly laid upon the foliage — sparingly, as the artist puts the brighter tints into his picture; but the grandeur of an August sunset blazes upon the peaceful landscape, and lights all into glory.

The encircling woods and wide lawn-like meadows, the still ponds of limpid water, the trim hedges, and the smooth winding roads; undulating hill-tops, melting into the purple distance; laboring-men’s cottages, gleaming white from the surrounding foliage; solitary roadside inns with brown thatched roofs and moss-grown stacks of lop-sided chimneys; noble mansions hiding behind ancestral oaks; tiny Gothic edifices; Swiss and rustic lodges; pillared gates surmounted by escutcheons hewn in stone, and festooned with green wreaths of clustering ivy; village churches and prim school-houses — every object in the fair English prospect is steeped in a luminous haze, as the twilight shadows steal slowly upward from the dim recesses of shady woodland and winding lane, and every outline of the landscape darkens against the deepening crimson of the sky.

Upon the broad façade of a mighty redbrick mansion, built in the favorite style of the early Georgian era, the sinking sun lingers long, making gorgeous illumination. The long rows of narrow windows are all aflame with the red light, and an honest homeward-tramping villager pauses once or twice in the roadway to glance across the smooth width of dewy lawn and tranquil lake, half fearful that there must be something more than natural in the glitter of those windows, and that may be Maister Floyd’s house is afire.

The stately red-built mansion belongs to Maister Floyd, as he is called in the honest patois of the Kentish rustics; to Archibald Martin Floyd, of the great banking-house of Floyd, Floyd, and Floyd, Lombard street, City.

The Kentish rustics knew very little of this city banking-house, for Archibald Martin, the senior partner, has long retired from any active share in the business, which is carried on entirely by his nephews, Andrew and Alexander Floyd, both steady, middle-aged men, with families and country-houses; both owing their fortune to the rich uncle, who had found places in his counting-house for them some thirty years before, when they were tall, raw-boned, sandy-haired, red-complexioned Scottish youths, fresh from some unpronounceable village north of Aberdeen.

The young gentlemen signed their names M‘Floyd when they first entered their uncle’s counting-house; but they very soon followed that wise relative’s example, and dropped the formidable prefix. “We’ve nae need to tell these Southeran bodies that we’re Scotche,” Alick remarked to his brother as he wrote his name for the first time A. Floyd, all short.

The Scottish banking-house had thriven wonderfully in the hospitable English capital. Unprecedented success had waited upon every enterprise undertaken by the old-established and respected firm of Floyd, Floyd, and Floyd. It had been Floyd, Floyd, and Floyd for upward of a century; for, as one member of the house dropped off, some greener branch shot out from the old tree; and there had never yet been any need to alter the treble repetition of the well-known name upon the brass plates that adorned the swinging mahogany doors of the banking-house. To this brass plate Archibald Martin Floyd pointed when, some thirty years before the August evening of which I write, he took his raw-boned nephews for the first time across the threshold of his house of business.

“See there, boys,” he said: “look at the three names upon that brass plate. Your uncle George is over fifty, and a bachelor — that’s the first name; our first cousin, Stephen Floyd, of Calcutta, is going to sell out of the business before long — that’s the second name; the third is mine, and I’m thirty-seven years of age, remember, boys, and not likely to make a fool of myself by marrying. Your names will be wanted by and by to fill the blanks; see that you keep them bright in the meantime; for, let so much as one speck rest upon them, and they’ll never be fit for that brass plate.”

Perhaps the rugged Scottish youths took this lesson to heart, or perhaps honesty was a natural and inborn virtue in the house of Floyd. Be it as it might, neither Alick nor Andrew disgraced their ancestry; and when Stephen Floyd, the East-Indian merchant, sold out, and Uncle George grew tired of business, and took to building, as an elderly, bachelor-like hobby, the young men stepped into their relatives’ shoes, and took the conduct of the business upon their broad Northern shoulders. Upon one point only Archibald Martin Floyd had misled his nephews, and that point regarded himself. Ten years after his address to the young men, at the sober age of seven-and-forty, the banker not only made a fool of himself by marrying, but, if indeed such things are foolish, sank still farther from the proud elevation of worldly wisdom by falling desperately in love with a beautiful but penniless woman, whom he brought home with him after a business tour through the manufacturing districts, and with but little ceremony introduced to his relations and the county families round his Kentish estate as his newly-wedded wife.

The whole affair was so sudden, that these very county families had scarcely recovered from their surprise at reading a certain paragraph in the left-hand column of the Times, announcing the marriage of “Archibald Martin Floyd, Banker, of Lombard street and Felden Woods, to Eliza, only surviving daughter of Captain Prodder,” when the bridegroom’s travelling carriage dashed past the Gothic lodge at the gates, along the avenue and under the great stone portico at the side of the house, and Eliza Floyd entered the banker’s mansion, nodding good-naturedly to the bewildered servants, marshalled into the hall to receive their new mistress.

The banker’s wife was a tall young woman of about thirty, with a dark complexion, and great flashing black eyes that lit up a face which might otherwise have been unnoticeable into the splendor of absolute beauty.

Let the reader recall one of those faces whose sole loveliness lies in the glorious light of a pair of magnificent eyes, and remember how far they surpass all others in their power of fascination. The same amount of beauty frittered away upon a well-shaped nose, rosy, pouting lips, symmetrical forehead, and delicate complexion, would make an ordinarily lovely woman; but concentrated in one nucleus, in the wondrous lustre of the eyes, it makes a divinity, a Circe. You may meet the first any day of your life; the second, once in a lifetime.