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

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of any favorable change.”

 

But Mr. Audley was not destined to see his cousin that evening, for the

servants at the Clarendon told him that Sir Michael and his daughter had

left by the morning mail for Paris, on their way to Vienna.

 

Robert was very well pleased to receive this intelligence; it afforded

him a welcome respite, for it would be decidedly better to tell the

baronet nothing of his guilty wife until he returned to England, with

health unimpaired and spirits re-established, it was to be hoped.

 

Mr. Audley drove to the Temple. The chambers which had seemed dreary to

him ever since the disappearance of George Talboys, were doubly so

tonight. For that which had been only a dark suspicion had now become a

horrible certainty. There was no longer room for the palest ray, the

most transitory glimmer of hope. His worst terrors had been too well

founded.

 

George Talboys had been cruelly and treacherously murdered by the wife

he had loved and mourned.

 

There were three letters waiting for Mr. Audley at his chambers. One was

from Sir Michael, and another from Alicia. The third was addressed in a

hand the young barrister knew only too well, though he had seen it but

once before. His face flushed redly at the sight of the superscription,

and he took the letter in his hand, carefully and tenderly, as if it had

been a living thing, and sentient to his touch. He turned it over and

over in his hands, looking at the crest upon the envelope, at the

postmark, at the color of the paper, and then put it into the bosom of

his waistcoat with a strange smile upon his face.

 

“What a wretched and unconscionable fool I am!” he thought. “Have I

laughed at the follies of weak men all my life, and am I to be more

foolish than the weakest of them at last? The beautiful brown-eyed

creature! Why did I ever see her? Why did my relentless Nemesis ever

point the way to that dreary house in Dorsetshire?”

 

He opened the first two letters. He was foolish enough to keep the last

for a delicious morsel—a fairy-like dessert after the commonplace

substantialities of a dinner.

 

Alicia’s letter told him that Sir Michael had borne his agony with such

a persevering tranquility that she had become at last far more alarmed

by his patient calmness than by any stormy manifestation of despair. In

this difficulty she had secretly called upon the physician who attended

the Audley household in any cases of serious illness, and had requested

this gentleman to pay Sir Michael an apparently accidental visit. He had

done so, and after stopping half an hour with the baronet, had told

Alicia that there was no present danger of any serious consequence from

this great grief, but that it was necessary that every effort should be

made to arouse Sir Michael, and to force him, however unwillingly, into

action.

 

Alicia had immediately acted upon this advice, had resumed her old

empire as a spoiled child, and reminded her father of a promise he had

made of taking her through Germany. With considerable difficulty she had

induced him to consent to fulfilling this old promise, and having once

gained her point, she had contrived that they should leave England as

soon as it was possible to do so, and she told Robert, in conclusion,

that she would not bring her father back to his old house until she had

taught him to forget the sorrows associated with it.

 

The baronet’s letter was very brief. It contained half a dozen blank

checks on Sir Michael Audley’s London bankers.

 

“You will require money, my dear Robert,” he wrote, “for such

arrangements as you may think fit to make for the future comfort of the

person I committed to your care. I need scarcely tell you that those

arrangements cannot be too liberal. But perhaps it is as well that I

should tell you now, for the first and only time, that it is my earnest

wish never again to hear that person’s name. I have no wish to be told

the nature of the arrangements you may make for her. I am sure that you

will act conscientiously and mercifully. I seek to know no more.

Whenever you want money, you will draw upon me for any sums that you may

require; but you will have no occasion to tell me for whose use you want

that money.”

 

Robert Audley breathed a long sigh of relief as he folded this letter.

It released him from a duty which it would have been most painful for

him to perform, and it forever decided his course of action with regard

to the murdered man.

 

George Talboys must lie at peace in his unknown grave, and Sir Michael

Audley must never learn that the woman he had loved bore the red brand

of murder on her soul.

 

Robert had only the third letter to open—the letter which he had placed

in his bosom while he read the others; he tore open the envelope,

handling it carefully and tenderly as he had done before.

 

The letter was as brief as Sir Michael’s. It contained only these few

lines:

 

“DEAR MR. AUDLEY—The rector of this place has been twice to see Marks,

the man you saved in the fire at the Castle Inn. He lies in a very

precarious state at his mother’s cottage, near Audley Court, and is not

expected to live many days. His wife is attending him, and both he and

she have expressed a most earnest desire that you should see him before

he dies. Pray come without delay.

 

“Yours very sincerely,

 

“CLARA TALBOYS.

 

“Mount Stanning Rectory, March 6.”

 

Robert Audley folded this letter very reverently, and placed it

underneath that part of his waistcoat which might be supposed to cover

the region of his heart. Having done this, he seated himself in his

favorite arm-chair, filled and lighted a pipe and smoked it out, staring

reflectingly at the fire as long as his tobacco lasted. “What can that

man Marks want with me,” thought the barrister. “He is afraid to die

until he has made confession, perhaps. He wishes to tell me that which I

know already—the story of my lady’s crime. I knew that he was in the

secret. I was sure of it even upon the night on which I first saw him.

He knew the secret, and he traded on it.”

 

Robert Audley shrank strangely from returning to Essex. How should he

meet Clara Talboys now that he knew the secret of her brother’s fate?

How many lies he should have to tell, or how much equivocation he must

use in order to keep the truth from her? Yet would there be any mercy in

telling that horrible story, the knowledge of which must cast a blight

upon her youth, and blot out every hope she had even secretly cherished?

He knew by his own experience how possible it was to hope against hope,

and to hope unconsciously; and he could not bear that her heart should

be crushed as his had been by the knowledge of the truth. “Better that

she should hope vainly to the last,” he thought; “better that she should

go through life seeking the clew to her lost brother’s fate, than that I

should give that clew into her hands, and say, ‘Our worst fears are

realized. The brother you loved has been foully murdered in the early

promise of his youth.’”

 

But Clara Talboys had written to him, imploring him to return to Essex

without delay. Could he refuse to do her bidding, however painful its

accomplishment might be? And again, the man was dying, perhaps, and had

implored to see him. Would it not be cruel to refuse to go—to delay an

hour unnecessarily? He looked at his watch. It wanted only five minutes

to nine. There was no train to Audley after the Ipswich mail, which left

London at half-past eight; but there was a train that left Shoreditch at

eleven, and stopped at Brentwood between twelve and one. Robert decided

upon going by this train, and walking the distance between Brentwood and

Audley, which was upwards of six miles.

 

He had a long time to wait before it would be necessary to leave the

Temple on his way to Shoreditch, and he sat brooding darkly over the

fire and wondering at the strange events which had filled his life

within the last year and a half, coming like angry shadows between his

lazy inclinations and himself, and investing him with purposes that were

not his own.

 

“Good Heaven!” he thought, as he smoked his second pipe; “how can I

believe that it was I who used to lounge all day in this easy-chair

reading Paul de Kock, and smoking mild Turkish; who used to drop in at

half price to stand among the pressmen at the back of the boxes and see

a new burlesque and finish the evening with the ‘Chough and Crow,’ and

chops and pale ale at ‘Evans’. Was it I to whom life was such an easy

merry-go-round? Was it I who was one of the boys who sit at ease upon

the wooden horses, while other boys run barefoot in the mud and work

their hardest in the hope of a ride when their work is done? Heaven

knows I have learned the business of life since then: and now I must

needs fall in love and swell the tragic chorus which is always being

sung by the poor addition of my pitiful sighs and, groans. Clara

Talboys! Clara Talboys! Is there any merciful smile latent beneath the

earnest light of your brown eyes? What would you say to me if I told you

that I love you as earnestly and truly as I have mourned for your

brother’s fate—that the new strength and purpose of my life, which has

grown out of my friendship for the murdered man, grows even stronger as

it turns to you, and changes me until I wonder at myself? What would she

say to me? Ah! Heaven knows. If she happened to like the color of my

hair or the tone of my voice, she might listen to me, perhaps. But would

she hear me any more because I love her truly, and purely; because I

would be constant and honest and faithful to her? Not she! These things

might move her, perhaps to be a little pitiful to me; but they would

move her no more! If a girl with freckles and white eylashes adored me,

I should only think her a nuisance; but if Clara Talboys had a fancy to

trample upon my uncouth person, I should think she did me a favor. I

hope poor little Alicia may pick up with some fair-haired Saxon in the

course of her travels. I hope—” His thoughts wandered away wearily and

lost themselves. How could he hope for anything or think of anything,

while the memory of his dead friend’s unburied body haunted him like a

horrible specter? He remembered a story—a morbid, hideous, yet

delicious story, which had once pleasantly congealed his blood on a

social winter’s evening—the story of a man, monomaniac, perhaps, who

had been haunted at every turn by the image of an unburied kinsman who

could not rest in his unhallowed hiding-place. What if that dreadful

story had its double in reality? What if he were henceforth to be

haunted by the phantom of murdered George Talboys?

 

He pushed his hair away from his face with both hands, and looked rather

nervously around the snug little apartment. There were lurking shadows

in the corners of the room that he scarcely liked.