However, all readers - sooner or later - find for themselves a literary genre that is fundamentally different from all others. Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (popular books of all time .TXT) 📖
- Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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if I failed I should never look upon her face again. I divided the
remainder of our money—something over forty pounds—into two equal
portions, leaving one for her, and putting the other in my pocket. I
knelt down and prayed for my wife and child, with my head upon the white
counterpane that covered them. I wasn’t much of a praying man at
ordinary times, but God knows that was a heartfelt prayer. I kissed
her once, and the baby once, and then crept out of the room. The
dining-room door was open, and the old man was nodding over his paper.
He looked up as he heard my step in the passage, and asked me where I
was going. ‘To have a smoke in the street,’ I answered; and as this was
a common habit of mine he believed me. Three nights after I was out at
sea, bound for Melbourne—a steerage passenger, with a digger’s tools
for my baggage, and about seven shillings in my pocket.”
“And you succeeded?” asked Miss Morley.
“Not till I had long despaired of success; not until poverty and I had
become such old companions and bed-fellows, that looking back at my past
life, I wondered whether that dashing, reckless, extravagant, luxurious,
champagne-drinking dragoon could have really been the same man who sat
on the damp ground gnawing a moldy crust in the wilds of the new world.
I clung to the memory of my darling, and the trust that I had in her
love and truth was the one keystone that kept the fabric of my past life
together—the one star that lit the thick black darkness of the future.
I was hail-fellow-well-met with bad men; I was in the center of riot,
drunkenness, and debauchery; but the purifying influence of my love kept
me safe from all. Thin and gaunt, the half-starved shadow of what I once
had been, I saw myself one day in a broken bit of looking-glass, and was
frightened by my own face. But I toiled on through all; through
disappointment and despair, rheumatism, fever, starvation; at the very
gates of death, I toiled on steadily to the end; and in the end I
conquered.”
He was so brave in his energy and determination, in his proud triumph of
success, and in the knowledge of the difficulties he had vanquished,
that the pale governess could only look at him in wondering admiration.
“How brave you were!” she said.
“Brave!” he cried, with a joyous peal of laughter; “wasn’t I working for
my darling? Through all the dreary time of that probation, her pretty
white hand seemed beckoning me onward to a happy future! Why, I have
seen her under my wretched canvas tent sitting by my side, with her boy
in her arms, as plainly as I had ever seen her in the one happy year of
our wedded life. At last, one dreary foggy morning, just three months
ago, with a drizzling rain wetting me to the skin, up to my neck in clay
and mire, half-starved, enfeebled by fever, stiff with rheumatism, a
monster nugget turned up under my spade, and I was in one minute the
richest man in Australia. I fell down on the wet clay, with my lump of
gold in the bosom of my shirt, and, for the first time in my life, cried
like a child. I traveled post-haste to Sydney, realized my price, which
was worth upward of �20,000, and a fortnight afterward took my passage
for England in this vessel; and in ten days—in ten days I shall see my
darling.”
“But in all that time did you never write to your wife?”
“Never, till the night before I left Sydney. I could not write when
everything looked so black. I could not write and tell her that I was
fighting hard with despair and death. I waited for better fortune, and
when that came I wrote telling her that I should be in England almost as
soon as my letter, and giving her an address at a coffee-house in London
where she could write to me, telling me where to find her, though she is
hardly likely to have left her father’s house.”
He fell into a reverie after this, and puffed meditatively at his cigar.
His companion did not disturb him. The last ray of summer daylight had
died out, and the pale light of the crescent moon only remained.
Presently George Talboys flung away his cigar, and turning to the
governess, cried abruptly, “Miss Morley, if, when I get to England, I
hear that anything has happened to my wife, I shall fall down dead.”
“My dear Mr. Talboys, why do you think of these things? God is very good
to us; He will not afflict us beyond our power of endurance. I see all
things, perhaps, in a melancholy light; for the long monotony of my life
has given me too much time to think over my troubles.”
“And my life has been all action, privation, toil, alternate hope and
despair; I have had no time to think upon the chances of anything
happening to my darling. What a blind, reckless fool I have been! Three
years and a half and not one line—one word from her, or from any mortal
creature who knows her. Heaven above! what may not have happened?”
In the agitation of his mind he began to walk rapidly up and down the
lonely deck, the governess following, and trying to soothe him.
“I swear to you, Miss Morley,” he said, “that till you spoke to me
tonight, I never felt one shadow of fear, and now I have that sick,
sinking dread at my heart which you talked of an hour ago. Let me alone,
please, to get over it my own way.”
She drew silently away from him, and seated herself by the side of the
vessel, looking over into the water.
George Talboys walked backward and forward for some time, with his head
bent upon his breast, looking neither to the right nor the left, but in
about a quarter of an hour he returned to the spot where the governess
was seated.
“I have been praying,” he said—“praying for my darling.”
He spoke in a voice little above a whisper, and she saw his face
ineffably calm in the moonlight.
HIDDEN RELICS.
The same August sun which had gone down behind the waste of waters
glimmered redly upon the broad face of the old clock over that
ivy-covered archway which leads into the gardens of Audley Court.
A fierce and crimson sunset. The mullioned windows and twinkling
lattices are all ablaze with the red glory; the fading light flickers
upon the leaves of the limes in the long avenue, and changes the still
fishpond into a sheet of burnished copper; even into those dim recesses
of brier and brushwood, amidst which the old well is hidden, the crimson
brightness penetrates in fitful flashes till the dank weeds and the
rusty iron wheel and broken woodwork seem as if they were flecked with
blood.
The lowing of a cow in the quiet meadows, the splash of a trout in the
fishpond, the last notes of a tired bird, the creaking of wagon-wheels
upon the distant road, every now and then breaking the evening silence,
only made the stillness of the place seem more intense. It was almost
oppressive, this twilight stillness. The very repose of the place grew
painful from its intensity, and you felt as if a corpse must be lying
somewhere within that gray and ivy-covered pile of building—so
deathlike was the tranquillity of all around.
As the clock over the archway struck eight, a door at the back of the
house was softly opened, and a girl came out into the gardens.
But even the presence of a human being scarcely broke the silence; for
the girl crept slowly over the thick grass, and gliding into the avenue
by the side of the fishpond, disappeared in the rich shelter of the
limes.
She was not, perhaps, positively a pretty girl; but her appearance was
of that order which is commonly called interesting. Interesting, it may
be, because in the pale face and the light gray eyes, the small features
and compressed lips, there was something which hinted at a power of
repression and self-control not common in a woman of nineteen or twenty.
She might have been pretty, I think, but for the one fault in her small
oval face. This fault was an absence of color. Not one tinge of crimson
flushed the waxen whiteness of her cheeks; not one shadow of brown
redeemed the pale insipidity of her eyebrows and eyelashes; not one
glimmer of gold or auburn relieved the dull flaxen of her hair. Even her
dress was spoiled by this same deficiency. The pale lavender muslin
faded into a sickly gray, and the ribbon knotted round her throat melted
into the same neutral hue.
Her figure was slim and fragile, and in spite of her humble dress, she
had something of the grace and carriage of a gentlewoman, but she was
only a simple country girl, called Phoebe Marks, who had been nursemaid
in Mr. Dawson’s family, and whom Lady Audley had chosen for her maid
after her marriage with Sir Michael.
Of course, this was a wonderful piece of good fortune for Phoebe, who
found her wages trebled and her work lightened in the well-ordered
household at the Court; and who was therefore quite as much the object
of envy among her particular friends as my lady herself to higher
circles.
A man, who was sitting on the broken woodwork of the well, started as
the lady’s-maid came out of the dim shade of the limes and stood before
him among the weeds and brushwood.
I have said before that this was a neglected spot; it lay in the midst
of a low shrubbery, hidden away from the rest of the gardens, and only
visible from the garret windows at the back of the west wing.
“Why, Phoebe,” said the man, shutting a clasp-knife with which he had
been stripping the bark from a blackthorn stake, “you came upon me so
still and sudden, that I thought you was an evil spirit. I’ve come
across through the fields, and come in here at the gate agen the moat,
and I was taking a rest before I came up to the house to ask if you was
come back.”
“I can see the well from my bedroom window, Luke,” Phoebe answered,
pointing to an open lattice in one of the gables. “I saw you sitting
here, and came down to have a chat; it’s better talking out here than in
the house, where there’s always somebody listening.”
The man was a big, broad-shouldered, stupid-looking clod-hopper of about
twenty-three years of age. His dark red hair grew low upon his forehead,
and his bushy brows met over a pair of greenish gray eyes; his nose was
large and well-shaped, but the mouth was coarse in form and animal in
expression. Rosy-cheeked, red-haired, and bull-necked, he was not unlike
one of the stout oxen grazing in the meadows round about the Court.
The girl seated herself lightly upon the woodwork at his side, and put
one of her hands, which had grown white in her new and easy service,
about his thick neck.
“Are you glad to see me, Luke?” she asked.
“Of course I’m glad, lass,” he answered, boorishly, opening his knife
again, and scraping away at the hedge-stake.
They were first cousins, and had been play fellows in childhood, and
sweethearts in early
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