Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (popular books of all time .TXT) đ
- Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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circumstances which he had submitted to Georgeâs father. He had simply
told the story of the missing manâs life, from the hour of his arriving
in London to that of his disappearance; but he saw that Clara Talboys
had arrived at the same conclusion as himself, and that it was tacitly
understood between them.
âHave you any letters of your brotherâs, Miss Talboys?â he asked.
âTwo. One written soon after his marriage, the other written at
Liverpool, the night before he sailed for Australia.â
âWill you let me see them?â
âYes, I will send them to you if you will give me your address You will
write to me from time to time, will you not, to tell me whether you are
approaching the truth. I shall be obliged to act secretly here, but I am
going to leave home in two or three months, and I shall be perfectly
free then to act as I please.â
âYou are not going to leave England?â Robert asked.
âOh no! I am only going to pay a long-promised visit to some friends in
Essex.â
Robert started so violently as Clara Talboys said this, that she looked
suddenly at his face. The agitation visible there, betrayed a part of
his secret.
âMy brother George disappeared in Essex,â she said.
He could not contradict her.
âI am sorry you have discovered so much,â he replied. âMy position
becomes every day more complicated, every day more painful. Good-bye.â
She gave him her hand mechanically, when he held out his; but it was
cold as marble, and lay listlessly in his own, and fell like a log at
her side when he released it.
âPray lose no time in returning to the house,â he said earnestly. âI
fear you will suffer from this morningâs work.â
âSuffer!â she exclaimed, scornfully. âYou talk to me of suffering, when
the only creature in this world who ever loved me has been taken from it
in the bloom of youth. What can there be for me henceforth but
suffering? What is the cold to me?â she said, flinging back her shawl
and baring her beautiful head to the bitter wind. âI would walk from
here to London barefoot through the snow, and never stop by the way, if
I could bring him back to life. What would I not do to bring him back?
What would I not do?â
The words broke from her in a wail of passionate sorrow; and clasping
her hands before her face, she wept for the first time that day. The
violence of her sobs shook her slender frame, and she was obliged to
lean against the trunk of a tree for support.
Robert looked at her with a tender compassion in his face; she was so
like the friend whom he had loved and lost, that it was impossible for
him to think of her as a stranger; impossible to remember that they had
met that morning for the first time.
âPray, pray be calm,â he said: âhope even against hope. We may both be
deceived; your brother may still live.â
âOh! if it were so,â she murmured, passionately; âif it could be so.â
âLet us try and hope that it may be so.â
âNo,â she answered, looking at him through her tears, âlet us hope for
nothing but revenge. Good-by, Mr. Audley. Stop; your address.â
He gave her a card, which she put into the pocket of her dress.
âI will send you Georgeâs letters,â she said; âthey may help you.
Good-by.â
She left him half bewildered by the passionate energy of her manner, and
the noble beauty of her face. He watched her as she disappeared among
the straight trunks of the fir-trees, and then walked slowly out of the
plantation.
âHeaven help those who stand between me and the secret,â he thought,
âfor they will be sacrificed to the memory of George Talboys.â
CHAPTER XXIV.
GEORGEâS LETTERS.
Robert Audley did not return to Southampton, but took a ticket for the
first up town train that left Wareham, and reached Waterloo Bridge an
hour or two after dark. The snow, which had been hard and crisp in
Dorsetshire, was a black and greasy slush in the Waterloo Road, thawed
by the flaring lamps of the gin-palaces and the glaring gas in the
butchersâ shops.
Robert Audley shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the dingy streets
through which the Hansom carried him, the cab-man choosingâwith that
delicious instinct which seems innate in the drivers of hackney
vehiclesâall those dark and hideous thoroughfares utterly unknown to
the ordinary pedestrian.
âWhat a pleasant thing life is,â thought the barrister. âWhat an
unspeakable boonâwhat an overpowering blessing! Let any man make a
calculation of his existence, subtracting the hours in which he has been
thoroughly happyâreally and entirely at his ease, without one
arriere pensee to mar his enjoymentâwithout the most infinitesimal
cloud to overshadow the brightness of his horizon. Let him do this, and
surely he will laugh in utter bitterness of soul when he sets down the
sum of his felicity, and discovers the pitiful smallness of the amount.
He will have enjoyed himself for a week or ten days in thirty years,
perhaps. In thirty years of dull December, and blustering March, and
showery April, and dark November weather, there may have been seven or
eight glorious August days, through which the sun has blazed in
cloudless radiance, and the summer breezes have breathed perpetual balm.
How fondly we recollect these solitary days of pleasure, and hope for
their recurrence, and try to plan the circumstances that made them
bright; and arrange, and predestinate, and diplomatize with fate for a
renewal of the remembered joy. As if any joy could ever be built up out
of such and such constituent parts! As if happiness were not essentially
accidentalâa bright and wandering bird, utterly irregular in its
migrations; with us one summerâs day, and forever gone from us on the
next! Look at marriages, for instance,â mused Robert, who was as
meditative in the jolting vehicle, for whose occupation he was to pay
sixpence a mile, as if he had been riding a mustang on the wild
loneliness of the prairies. âLook at marriage! Who is to say which shall
be the one judicious selection out of nine hundred and ninety-nine
mistakes! Who shall decide from the first aspect of the slimy creature,
which is to be the one eel out of the colossal bag of snakes? That girl
on the curbstone yonder, waiting to cross the street when my chariot
shall have passed, may be the one woman out of every female creature in
this vast universe who could make me a happy man. Yet I pass her
byâbespatter her with the mud from my wheels, in my helpless ignorance,
in my blind submission to the awful hand of fatality. If that girl,
Clara Talboys, had been five minutes later, I should have left
Dorsetshire thinking her cold, hard, and unwomanly, and should have gone
to my grave with that mistake part and parcel of my mind. I took her for
a stately and heartless automaton; I know her now to be a noble and
beautiful woman. What an incalculable difference this may make in my
life. When I left that house, I went out into the winter day with the
determination of abandoning all further thought of the secret of
Georgeâs death. I see her, and she forces me onward upon the loathsome
pathâthe crooked by-way of watchfulness and suspicion. How can I say to
this sister of my dead friend, âI believe that your brother has been
murdered! I believe that I know by whom, but I will take no step to set
my doubts at rest, or to confirm my fearsâ? I cannot say this. This
woman knows half my secret; she will soon possess herself of the rest,
and thenâand thenââ
The cab stopped in the midst of Robert Audleyâs meditation, and he had
to pay the cabman, and submit to all the dreary mechanism of life, which
is the same whether we are glad or sorryâwhether we are to be married
or hung, elevated to the woolsack, or disbarred by our brother benchers
on some mysterious technical tangle of wrong-doing, which is a social
enigma to those outside the forum domesticum of the Middle Temple.
We are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our lifeâthis
unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the
human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the
mainspring be forever hollow, and the hands pointing to purposeless
figures on a shattered dial.
Who has not felt, in the first madness of sorrow, an unreasoning rage
against the mute propriety of chairs and tables, the stiff squareness of
Turkey carpets, the unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of
existence? We want to root up gigantic trees in a primeval forest, and
to tear their huge branches asunder in our convulsive grasp; and the
utmost that we can do for the relief of our passion is to knock over an
easy-chair, or smash a few shillingsâ worth of Mr. Copelandâs
manufacture.
Madhouses are large and only too numerous; yet surely it is strange they
are not larger, when we think of how many helpless wretches must beat
their brains against this hopeless persistency of the orderly outward
world, as compared with the storm and tempest, the riot and confusion
withinâwhen we remember how many minds must tremble upon the narrow
boundary between reason and unreason, mad to-day and sane tomorrow, mad
yesterday and sane to-day.
Robert Audley had directed the cabman to drop him at the corner of
Chancery Lane, and he ascended the brilliantly-lighted staircase leading
to the dining-saloon of The London, and seated himself at one of the
snug tables with a confused sense of emptiness and weariness, rather
than any agreeable sensation of healthy hunger. He had come to the
luxurious eating-house to dine, because it was absolutely necessary to
eat something somewhere, and a great deal easier to get a very good
dinner from Mr. Sawyer than a very bad one from Mrs. Maloney, whose mind
ran in one narrow channel of chops and steaks, only variable by small
creeks and outlets in the way of âbroiled soleâ or âboiled
mackâ-_rill_.â The solicitous waiter tried in vain to rouse poor Robert
to a proper sense of the solemnity of the dinner question. He muttered
something to the effect that the man might bring him anything he liked,
and the friendly waiter, who knew Robert as a frequent guest at the
little tables, went back to his master with a doleful face, to say that
Mr. Audley, from Figtree Court, was evidently out of spirits. Robert ate
his dinner, and drank a pint of Moselle; but he had poor appreciation of
the excellence of the viands or the delicate fragrance of the wine. The
mental monologue still went on, and the young philosopher of the modern
school was arguing the favorite modern question of the nothingness of
everything, and the folly of taking too much trouble to walk upon a road
that went nowhere, or to compass a work that meant nothing.
âI accept the dominion of that pale girl, with the statuesque features
and the calm brown eyes,â he thought. âI recognize the power of a mind
superior to my own, and I yield to it, and bow down to it. Iâve been
acting for myself, and thinking for myself, for the last few months, and
Iâm tired of the unnatural business. Iâve been false to the leading
principle of my life, and Iâve suffered for the folly. I found
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