Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (popular books of all time .TXT) đź“–
- Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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and charge him with his share in the shameful trick which I believe to
have been played upon my poor friend? No; I will not torture that
terror-stricken wretch as I tortured him a few weeks ago. I will go
straight to that arch-conspirator, and will tear away the beautiful veil
under which she hides her wickedness, and will wring from her the secret
of my friend’s fate, and banish her forever from the house which her
presence has polluted.”
He started early the next morning for Essex, and reached Audley before
eleven o’clock.
Early as it was, my lady was out. She had driven to Chelmsford upon a
shopping expedition with her step-daughter. She had several calls to
make in the neighborhood of the town, and was not likely to return until
dinner-time. Sir Michael’s health was very much improved, and he would
come down stairs in the afternoon. Would Mr. Audley go to his uncle’s
room?
No; Robert had no wish to meet that generous kinsman. What could he say
to him? How could he smooth the way to the trouble that was to
come?—how soften the cruel blow of the great grief that was preparing
for that noble and trusting heart?
“If I could forgive her the wrong done to my friend,” Robert thought, “I
should still abhor her for the misery her guilt must bring upon the man
who has believed in her.”
He told his uncle’s servant that he would stroll into the village, and
return before dinner. He walked slowly away from the Court, wandering
across the meadows between his uncle’s house and the village,
purposeless and indifferent, with the great trouble and perplexity of
his life stamped upon his face and reflected in his manner.
“I will go into the churchyard,” he thought, “and stare at the
tombstones. There is nothing I can do that will make me more gloomy than
I am.”
He was in those very meadows through which he had hurried from Audley
Court to the station upon the September day in which George Talboys had
disappeared. He looked at the pathway by which he had gone upon that
day, and remembered his unaccustomed hurry, and the vague feeling of
terror which had taken possession of him immediately upon losing sight
of his friend.
“Why did that unaccountable terror seize upon me,” he thought. “Why was
it that I saw some strange mystery in my friend’s disappearance? Was it
a monition, or a monomania? What if I am wrong after all? What if this
chain of evidence which I have constructed link by link, is woven out of
my own folly? What if this edifice of horror and suspicion is a mere
collection of crotchets—the nervous fancies of a hypochondriacal
bachelor? Mr. Harcourt Talboys sees no meaning in the events out of
which I have made myself a horrible mystery. I lay the separate links of
the chain before him, and he cannot recognize their fitness. He is
unable to put them together. Oh, my God, if it should be in myself all
this time that the misery lies; if—” he smiled bitterly, and shook his
head. “I have the handwriting in my pocketbook which is the evidence of
the conspiracy,” he thought. “It remains for me to discover the darker
half of my lady’s secret.”
He avoided the village, still keeping to the meadows. The church lay a
little way back from the straggling High street, and a rough wooden gate
opened from the churchyard into a broad meadow, that was bordered by a
running stream, and sloped down into a grassy valley dotted by groups of
cattle.
Robert slowly ascended the narrow hillside pathway leading up to the
gate in the churchyard. The quiet dullness of the lonely landscape
harmonized with his own gloom. The solitary figure of an old man
hobbling toward a stile at the further end of the wide meadow was the
only human creature visible upon the area over which the young barrister
looked. The smoke slowly ascending from the scattered houses in the long
High street was the only evidence of human life. The slow progress of
the hands of the old clock in the church steeple was the only token by
which a traveler could perceive that a sluggish course of rustic life
had not come to a full stop in the village of Audley.
Yes, there was one other sign. As Robert opened the gate of the
churchyard, and strolled listessly into the little inclosure, he became
aware of the solemn music of an organ, audible through a half-open
window in the steeple.
He stopped and listened to the slow harmonies of a dreamy melody that
sounded like an extempore composition of an accomplished player.
“Who would have believed that Audley church could boast such an organ?”
thought Robert. “When last I was here, the national schoolmaster used to
accompany his children by a primitive performance of common chords. I
didn’t think the old organ had such music in it.”
He lingered at the gate, not caring to break the lazy spell woven about
him by the monotonous melancholy of the organist’s performance. The
tones of the instrument, now swelling to their fullest power, now
sinking to a low, whispering softness, floated toward him upon the misty
winter atmosphere, and had a soothing influence, that seemed to comfort
him in his trouble.
He closed the gate softly, and crossed the little patch of gravel before
the door of the church. The door had been left ajar—by the organist,
perhaps. Robert Audley pushed it open, and walked into the square porch,
from which a flight of narrow stone steps wound upward to the organ-loft
and the belfry. Mr. Audley took off his hat, and opened the door between
the porch and the body of the church. He stepped softly into the holy
edifice, which had a damp, moldy smell upon week-days. He walked down
the narrow aisle to the altar-rails, and from that point of observation
took a survey of the church. The little gallery was exactly opposite to
him, but the scanty green curtains before the organ were closely drawn,
and he could not get a glimpse of the player.
The music, still rolled on. The organist had wandered into a melody of
Mendelssohn’s, a strain whose dreamy sadness went straight to Robert’s
heart. He loitered in the nooks and corners of the church, examining the
dilapidated memorials of the well-nigh forgotten dead, and listening to
the music.
“If my poor friend, George Talboys, had died in my arms, and I had
buried him in this quiet church, in one corner of the vaults over which
I tread to-day, how much anguish of mind, vacillation and torment I
might have escaped,” thought Robert Audley, as he read the faded
inscriptions upon tablets of discolored marble; “I should have known his
fate—I should have known his fate! Ah, how much there would have been
in that. It is this miserable uncertainty, this horrible suspicion which
has poisoned my very life.”
He looked at his watch.
“Half-past one,” he muttered. “I shall have to wait four or five dreary
hours before my lady comes home from her morning calls—her pretty
visits of ceremony or friendliness. Good Heaven! what an actress this
woman is. What an arch trickster—what an all-accomplished deceiver. But
she shall play her pretty comedy no longer under my uncle’s roof. I have
diplomatized long enough. She has refused to accept an indirect warning.
Tonight I will speak plainly.”
The music of the organ ceased, and Robert heard the closing of the
instrument.
“I’ll have a look at this new organist,” he thought, “who can afford to
bury his talents at Audley, and play Mendelssohn’s finest fugues for a
stipend of sixteen pounds a year.” He lingered in the porch, waiting for
the organist to descend the awkward little staircase. In the weary
trouble of his mind, and with the prospect of getting through the five
hours in the best way he could, Mr. Audley was glad to cultivate any
diversion of thought, however idle. He therefore freely indulged his
curiosity about the new organist.
The first person who appeared upon the steep stone steps was a boy in
corduroy trousers and a dark linen smock-frock, who shambled down the
stairs with a good deal of unnecessary clatter of his hobnailed shoes,
and who was red in the face from the exertion of blowing the bellows of
the old organ. Close behind this boy came a young lady, very plainly
dressed in a black silk gown and a large gray shawl, who started and
turned pale at sight of Mr. Audley.
This young lady was Clara Talboys.
Of all people in the world she was the last whom Robert either expected
or wished to see. She had told him that she was going to pay a visit to
some friends who lived in Essex; but the county is a wide one, and the
village of Audley one of the most obscure and least frequented spots in
the whole of its extent. That the sister of his lost friend should be
here—here where she could watch his every action, and from those
actions deduce the secret workings of his mind, tracing his doubts home
to their object, made a complication of his difficulties that he could
never have anticipated. It brought him back to that consciousness of his
own helplessness, in which he had exclaimed:
“A hand that is stronger than my own is beckoning me onward on the dark
road that leads to my lost friend’s unknown grave.”
Clara Talboys was the first to speak.
“You are surprised to see me here, Mr. Audley,” she said.
“Very much surprised.”
“I told you that I was coming to Essex. I left home day before
yesterday. I was leaving home when I received your telegraphic message.
The friend with whom I am staying is Mrs. Martyn, the wife of the new
rector of Mount Stanning. I came down this morning to see the village
and church, and as Mrs. Martyn had to pay a visit to the school with the
curate and his wife, I stopped here and amused myself by trying the old
organ. I was not aware till I came here that there was a village called
Audley. The place takes its name from your family, I suppose?”
“I believe so,” Robert answered, wondering at the lady’s calmness, in
contradistinction to his own embarrassment. “I have a vague recollection
of hearing the story of some ancestor who was called Audley of Audley in
the reign of Edward the Fourth. The tomb inside the rails near the altar
belongs to one of the knights of Audley, but I have never taken the
trouble to remember his achievements. Are you going to wait here for
your friends, Miss Talboys?”
“Yes; they are to return here for me after they have finished their
rounds.”
“And you go back to Mount Stanning with them this afternoon?”
“Yes.”
Robert stood with his hat in his hand, looking absently out at the
tombstones and the low wall of the church yard. Clara Talboys watched
his pale face, haggard under the deepening shadow that had rested upon
it so long.
“You have been ill since I saw you last, Mr. Audley,” she said, in a low
voice, that had the same melodious sadness as the notes of the old organ
under her touch.
“No, I have not been ill; I have been only harassed, wearied by a
hundred doubts and perplexities.”
He was thinking as he spoke to her:
“How much does she guess? How much does she
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