Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (popular books of all time .TXT) 📖

thoughtfully at the

child for some minutes before he could get any further.

 

“I dare say you’re hungry, Georgey?” he said, at last.

 

The boy nodded, and the waiter whisked some more invisible dust from the

nearest table as a preparatory step toward laying a cloth.

 

“Perhaps you’d like some lunch?” Mr. Audley suggested, still pulling his

mustache.

 

The boy burst out laughing.

 

“Lunch!” he cried. “Why, it’s afternoon, and I’ve had my dinner.”

 

Robert Audley felt himself brought to a standstill. What refreshment

could he possibly provide for a boy who called it afternoon at three

o’clock?

 

“You shall have some bread and milk, Georgey,” he said, presently.

“Waiter, bread and milk, and a pint of hock.”

 

Master Talboys made a wry face.

 

“I never have bread and milk,” he said, “I don’t like it. I like what

gran’pa calls something savory. I should like a veal cutlet. Gran’pa

told me he dined here once, and the veal cutlets were lovely, gran’pa

said. Please may I have a veal cutlet, with egg and bread-crumb, you

know, and lemon-juice you know?” he added to the waiter: “Gran’pa knows

the cook here. The cook’s such a nice gentleman, and once gave me a

shilling, when gran’pa brought me here. The cook wears better clothes

than gran’pa—better than yours, even,” said Master Georgey, pointing to

Robert’s rough great-coat with a depreciating nod.

 

Robert Audley stared aghast. How was he to deal with this epicure of

five years old, who rejected bread and milk and asked for veal cutlets?

 

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you, little Georgey,” he exclaimed,

after a pause—”I’ll give you a dinner!”

 

The waiter nodded briskly.

 

“Upon my word, sir,” he said, approvingly, “I think the little gentleman

will know how to eat it.”

 

“I’ll give you a dinner, Georgey,” repeated Robert—“some stewed eels, a

little Julienne, a dish of cutlets, a bird, and a pudding. What do you

say to that, Georgey?”

 

“I don’t think the young gentleman will object to it when he sees it,

sir,” said the waiter. “Eels, Julienne, cutlets, bird, pudding—I’ll go

and tell the cook, sir. What time, sir?”

 

“Well, we’ll say six, and Master Georgey will get to his new school by

bedtime. You can contrive to amuse the child for this afternoon, I dare

say. I have some business to settle, and sha’n’t be able to take him

out. I shall sleep here tonight. Good-by, Georgey; take care of

yourself and try and get your appetite in order against six o’clock.”

 

Robert Audley left the boy in charge of the idle waiter, and strolled

down to the water side, choosing that lonely bank which leads away under

the moldering walls of the town toward the little villages beside the

narrowing river.

 

He had purposely avoided the society of the child, and he walked through

the light drifting snow till the early darkness closed upon him.

 

He went back to the town, and made inquiries at the station about the

trains for Dorsetshire.

 

“I shall start early tomorrow morning,” he thought, “and see George’s

father before nightfall. I will tell him all—all but the interest which

I take in—in the suspected person, and he shall decide what is next to

be done.”

 

Master Georgey did very good justice to the dinner which Robert had

ordered. He drank Bass’ pale ale to an extent which considerably alarmed

his entertainer, and enjoyed himself amazingly, showing an appreciation

of roast pheasant and bread-sauce which was beyond his years. At eight

o’clock a fly was brought out for his accommodation, and he departed in

the highest spirits, with a sovereign in his pocket, and a letter from

Robert to Mr. Marchmont, inclosing a check for the young gentleman’s

outfit.

 

“I’m glad I’m going to have new clothes,” he said, as he bade Robert

good-by; “for Mrs. Plowson has mended the old ones ever so many times.

She can have them now, for Billy.”

 

“Who’s Billy?” Robert asked, laughing at the boy’s chatter.

 

“Billy is poor Matilda’s little boy. He’s a common boy, you know.

Matilda was common, but she—”

 

But the flyman snapping his whip at this moment, the old horse jogged

off, and Robert Audley heard no more of Matilda.

 

CHAPTER XXII.

 

COMING TO A STANDSTILL.

 

Mr. Harcourt Talboys lived in a prim, square, red-brick mansion, within

a mile of a little village called Grange Heath, in Dorsetshire. The

prim, square, red-brick mansion stood in the center of prim, square

grounds, scarcely large enough to be called a park, too large to be

called anything else—so neither the house nor the grounds had any name,

and the estate was simply designated Squire Talboys’.

 

Perhaps Mr. Harcourt Talboys was the last person in this world with whom

it was possible to associate the homely, hearty, rural old English title

of squire. He neither hunted nor farmed. He had never worn crimson,

pink, or top-boots in his life. A southerly wind and a cloudy sky were

matters of supreme indifference to him, so long as they did not in any

way interfere with his own prim comforts; and he only cared for the

state of the crops inasmuch as it involved the hazard of certain rents

which he received for the farms upon his estate. He was a man of about

fifty years of age, tall, straight, bony and angular, with a square,

pale face, light gray eyes, and scanty dark hair, brushed from either

ear across a bald crown, and thus imparting to his physiognomy some

faint resemblance to that of a terrier—a sharp, uncompromising,

hard-headed terrier—a terrier not to be taken in by the cleverest

dog-stealer who ever distinguished himself in his profession.

 

Nobody ever remembered getting upon what is popularly called the blind

side of Harcourt Talboys. He was like his own square-built,

northern-fronted, shelterless house. There were no shady nooks in his

character into which one could creep for shelter from his hard daylight.

He was all daylight. He looked at everything in the same broad glare of

intellectual sunlight, and would see no softening shadows that might

alter the sharp outlines of cruel facts, subduing them to beauty. I do

not know if I express what I mean, when I say that there were no curves

in his character—that his mind ran in straight lines, never diverging

to the right or the left to round off their pitiless angles. With him

right was right, and wrong was wrong. He had never in his merciless,

conscientious life admitted the idea that circumstances might mitigate

the blackness of wrong or weaken the force of right. He had cast off his

only son because his only son had disobeyed him, and he was ready to

cast off his only daughter at five minutes’ notice for the same reason.

 

If this square-built, hard-headed man could be possessed of such a

weakness as vanity, he was certainly vain of his hardness. He was vain

of that inflexible squareness of intellect, which made him the

disagreeable creature that he was. He was vain of that unwavering

obstinacy which no influence of love or pity had ever been known to bend

from its remorseless purpose. He was vain of the negative force of a

nature which had never known the weakness of the affections, or the

strength which may be born of that very weakness.

 

If he had regretted his son’s marriage, and the breach of his own

making, between himself and George, his vanity had been more powerful

than his regret, and had enabled him to conceal it. Indeed, unlikely as

it appears at the first glance that such a man as this could have been

vain, I have little doubt that vanity was the center from which radiated

all the disagreeable lines in the character of Mr. Harcourt Talboys. I

dare say Junius Brutus was vain, and enjoyed the approval of

awe-stricken Rome when he ordered his son off for execution. Harcourt

Talboys would have sent poor George from his presence between the

reversed fasces of the lictors, and grimly relished his own agony.

Heaven only knows how bitterly this hard man may have felt the

separation between himself and his only son, or how much the more

terrible the anguish might have been made by that unflinching

self-conceit which concealed the torture.

 

“My son did me an unpardonable wrong by marrying the daughter of a

drunken pauper,” Mr. Talboys would answer to any one who had the

temerity to speak to him about George, “and from that hour I had no

longer a son. I wish him no ill. He is simply dead to me. I am sorry for

him, as I am sorry for his mother who died nineteen years ago. If you

talk to me of him as you would talk of the dead, I shall be ready to

hear you. If you speak of him as you would speak of the living, I must

decline to listen.”

 

I believe that Harcourt Talboys hugged himself upon the gloomy Roman

grandeur of this speech, and that he would like to have worn a toga, and

wrapped himself sternly in its folds, as he turned his back upon poor

George’s intercessor. George never in his own person made any effort to

soften his father’s verdict. He knew his father well enough to know that

the case was hopeless.

 

“If I write to him, he will fold my letter with the envelope inside, and

indorse it with my name and the date of its arrival,” the young man

would say, “and call everybody in the house to witness that it had not

moved him to one softening recollection or one pitiful thought. He will

stick to his resolution to his dying day. I dare say, if the truth was

known, he is glad that his only son has offended him and given him the

opportunity of parading his Roman virtues.”

 

George had answered his wife thus when she and her father had urged him

to ask assistance from Harcourt Talboys.

 

“No my darling,” he would say, conclusively. “It’s very hard, perhaps,

to be poor, but we will bear it. We won’t go with pitiful faces to the

stern father, and ask him to give us food and shelter, only to be

refused in long, Johnsonian sentences, and made a classical example for

the benefit of the neighborhood. No, my pretty one; it is easy to

starve, but it is difficult to stoop.”

 

Perhaps poor Mrs. George did not agree very heartily to the first of

these two propositions. She had no great fancy for starving, and she

whimpered pitifully when the pretty pint bottles of champagne, with

Cliquot’s and Moet’s brands upon their corks, were exchanged for

sixpenny ale, procured by a slipshod attendant from the nearest

beer-shop. George had been obliged to carry his own burden and lend a

helping hand with that of his wife, who had no idea of keeping her

regrets or disappointments a secret.

 

“I thought dragoons were always rich,” she used to say, peevishly.

“Girls always want to marry dragoons; and tradespeople always want to

serve dragoons; and hotel-keepers to entertain dragoons; and theatrical

managers to be patronized by dragoons. Who could have ever expected that

a dragoon would drink sixpenny ale, smoke horrid bird’s-eye tobacco, and

let his wife wear a shabby bonnet?”

 

If there were any selfish feelings displayed in such speeches as these,

George Talboys had never discovered it. He had loved and believed in his

wife from the first to the last hour of his brief married life. The love

that is not blind is perhaps only a spurious divinity after all; for

when Cupid takes the fillet from his eyes it is a