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

dinner,

and I want to see Sir Michael; I have not seen him since ten o’clock

this morning. Please let it be tomorrow.”

 

There was a painful piteousness in her tone. Heaven knows how painful to

Robert’s heart. Heaven knows what horrible images arose in his mind as

he looked down at that fair young face and thought of the task that lay

before him.

 

“I must speak to you, Lady Audley,” he said. “If I am cruel, it is you

who have made me cruel. You might have escaped this ordeal. You might

have avoided me. I gave you fair warning. But you have chosen to defy

me, and it is your own folly which is to blame if I no longer spare you.

Come with me. I tell you again I must speak to you.”

 

There was a cold determination in his tone which silenced my lady’s

objections. She followed him submissively to the little iron gate which

communicated with the long garden behind the house—the garden in which

a little rustic wooden bridge led across the quiet fishpond into the

lime-walk.

 

The early winter twilight was closing in, and the intricate tracery of

the leafless branches that overarched the lonely pathway looked black

against the cold gray of the evening sky. The lime-walk seemed like some

cloister in this uncertain light.

 

“Why do you bring me to this horrible place to frighten me out of my

poor wits?” cried my lady, peevishly. “You ought to know how nervous I

am.”

 

“You are nervous, my lady?”

 

“Yes, dreadfully nervous. I am worth a fortune to poor Mr. Dawson. He is

always sending me camphor, and sal volatile, and red lavender, and all

kinds of abominable mixtures, but he can’t cure me.”

 

“Do you remember what Macbeth tells his physician, my lady?” asked

Robert, gravely. “Mr. Dawson may be very much more clever than the

Scottish leech, but I doubt if even he can minister to the mind that

is diseased.”

 

“Who said that my mind was diseased?” exclaimed Lady Audley.

 

“I say so, my lady,” answered Robert. “You tell me that you are nervous,

and that all the medicines your doctor can prescribe are only so much

physic that might as well be thrown to the dogs. Let me be the physician

to strike to the root of your malady, Lady Audley. Heaven knows that I

wish to be merciful—that I would spare you as far as it is in my power

to spare you in doing justice to others—but justice must be done. Shall

I tell you why you are nervous in this house, my lady?”

 

“If you can,” she answered, with a little laugh.

 

“Because for you this house is haunted.”

 

“Haunted?”

 

“Yes, haunted by the ghost of George Talboys.”

 

Robert Audley heard my lady’s quickened breathing, he fancied he could

almost hear the loud beating of her heart as she walked by his side,

shivering now and then, and with her sable cloak wrapped tightly around

her.

 

“What do you mean?” she cried suddenly, after a pause of some moments.

“Why do you torment me about this George Talboys, who happens to have

taken it into his head to keep out of your way for a few months? Are you

going mad, Mr. Audley, and do you select me as the victim of your

monomania? What is George Talboys to me that you should worry me about

him?”

 

“He was a stranger to you, my lady, was he not?”

 

“Of course!” answered Lady Audley. “What should he be but a stranger?”

 

“Shall I tell you the story of my friend’s disappearance as I read that

story, my lady?” asked Robert.

 

“No,” cried Lady Audley; “I wish to know nothing of your friend. If he

is dead, I am sorry for him. If he lives, I have no wish either to see

him or to hear of him. Let me go in to see my husband, if you please,

Mr. Audley, unless you wish to detain me in this gloomy place until I

catch my death of cold.”

 

“I wish to detain you until you have heard what I have to say, Lady

Audley,” answered Robert, resolutely. “I will detain you no longer than

is necessary, and when you have heard me you shall take your own course

of action.”

 

“Very well, then; pray lose no time in saying what you have to say,”

replied my lady, carelessly. “I promise you to attend very patiently.”

 

“When my friend, George Talboys, returned to England,” Robert began,

gravely, “the thought which was uppermost in his mind was the thought of

his wife.”

 

“Whom he had deserted,” said my lady, quickly. “At least,” she added,

more deliberately, “I remember your telling us something to that effect

when you first told us your friend’s story.”

 

Robert Audley did not notice this observation.

 

“The thought that was uppermost in his mind was the thought of his wife,”

he repeated. “His fairest hope in the future was the hope of making her

happy, and lavishing upon her the pittance which he had won by the force

of his own strong arm in the gold-fields of Australia. I saw him within

a few hours of his reaching England, and I was a witness to the joyful

pride with which he looked forward to his re-union with his wife. I was

also a witness to the blow which struck him to the very heart—which

changed him from the man he had been to a creature as unlike that former

self as one human being can be unlike another. The blow which made that

cruel change was the announcement of his wife’s death in the Times

newspaper. I now believe that that announcement was a black and bitter

lie.”

 

“Indeed!” said my lady; “and what reason could any one have for

announcing the death of Mrs. Talboys, if Mrs. Talboys had been alive?”

 

“The lady herself might have had a reason,” Robert answered, quietly.

 

“What reason?”

 

“How if she had taken advantage of George’s absence to win a richer

husband? How if she had married again, and wished to throw my poor

friend off the scent by this false announcement?”

 

Lady Audley shrugged her shoulders.

 

“Your suppositions are rather ridiculous, Mr. Audley,” she said; “it is

to be hoped that you have some reasonable grounds for them.”

 

“I have examined a file of each of the newspapers published in

Chelmsford and Colchester,” continued Robert, without replying to my

lady’s last observation, “and I find in one of the Colchester papers,

dated July the 2d, 1850, a brief paragraph among numerous miscellaneous

scraps of information copied from other newspapers, to the effect that a

Mr. George Talboys, an English gentleman, had arrived at Sydney from the

gold-fields, carrying with him nuggets and gold-dust to the amount of

twenty thousand pounds, and that he had realized his property and sailed

for Liverpool in the fast-sailing clipper Argus. This is a very small

fact, of course, Lady Audley, but it is enough to prove that any person

residing in Essex in the July of the year fifty-seven, was likely to

become aware of George Talboys’ return from Australia. Do you follow

me?”

 

“Not very clearly,” said my lady. “What have the Essex papers to do with

the death of Mrs. Talboys?”

 

“We will come to that by-and-by, Lady Audley. I say that I believe the

announcement in the Times to have been a false announcement, and a

part of the conspiracy which was carried out by Helen Talboys and

Lieutenant Maldon against my poor friend.”

 

“A conspiracy!”

 

“Yes, a conspiracy concocted by an artful woman, who had speculated upon

the chances of her husband’s death, and had secured a splendid position

at the risk of committing a crime; a bold woman, my lady, who thought to

play her comedy out to the end without fear of detection; a wicked

woman, who did not care what misery she might inflict upon the honest

heart of the man she betrayed; but a foolish woman, who looked at life

as a game of chance, in which the best player was likely to hold the

winning cards, forgetting that there is a Providence above the pitiful

speculators, and that wicked secrets are never permitted to remain long

hidden. If this woman of whom I speak had never been guilty of any

blacker sin than the publication of that lying announcement in the

Times newspaper, I should still hold her as the most detestable and

despicable of her sex—the most pitiless and calculating of human

creatures. That cruel lie was a base and cowardly blow in the dark; it

was the treacherous dagger-thrust of an infamous assassin.”

 

“But how do you know that the announcement was a false one?” asked my

lady. “You told us that you had been to Ventnor with Mr. Talboys to see

his wife’s grave. Who was it who died at Ventnor if it was not Mrs.

Talboys?”

 

“Ah, Lady Audley,” said Robert, “that is a question which only two or

three people can answer, and one or other of those persons shall answer

it to me before long. I tell you, my lady, that I am determined to

unravel the mystery of George Talboy’s death. Do you think I am to be

put off by feminine prevarication—by womanly trickery? No! Link by link

I have put together the chain of evidence, which wants but a link here

and there to be complete in its terrible strength. Do you think I will

suffer myself to be baffled? Do you think I shall fail to discover those

missing links? No, Lady Audley, I shall not fail, for _I know where to

look for them!_ There is a fair-haired woman at Southampton—a woman

called Plowson, who has some share in the secrets of the father of my

friend’s wife. I have an idea that she can help me to discover the

history of the woman who lies buried in Ventnor churchyard, and I will

spare no trouble in making that discovery, unless—”

 

“Unless what?” asked my lady, eagerly.

 

“Unless the woman I wish to save from degradation and punishment accepts

the mercy I offer her, and takes warning while there is still time.”

 

My lady shrugged her graceful shoulders, and flashed bright defiance out

of her blue eyes.

 

“She would be a very foolish woman if she suffered herself to be

influenced by any such absurdity,” she said. “You are hypochondriacal,

Mr. Audley, and you must take camphor, or red lavender, or sal volatile.

What can be more ridiculous than this idea which you have taken into

your head? You lose your friend George Talboys in rather a mysterious

manner—that is to say, that gentleman chooses to leave England without

giving you due notice. What of that? You confess that he became an

altered man after his wife’s death. He grew eccentric and

misanthropical; he affected an utter indifference as to what became of

him. What more likely, then, than that he grew tired of the monotony of

civilized life, and ran away to those savage gold-fields to find a

distraction for his grief? It is rather a romantic story, but by no

means an uncommon one. But you are not satisfied with this simple

interpretation of your friend’s disappearance, and you build up some

absurd theory of a conspiracy which has no existence except in your own

overheated brain. Helen Talboys is dead. The Times newspaper declares

she is dead. Her own father tells you that she is dead. The headstone of

the grave in Ventnor churchyard bears record of her death. By what

right,” cried my lady, her voice