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

the safety of the woman who had betrayed

me. I fell upon my feet upon a mass of slush and mire, but my shoulder

was bruised, and my arm broken against the side of the well. I was

stunned and dazed for a few minutes, but I roused myself by an effort,

for I felt that the atmosphere I breathed was deadly. I had my

Australian experiences to help me in my peril; I could climb like a cat.

The stones of which the well was built were rugged and irregular, and I

was able to work my way upward by planting my feet in the interstices of

the stones, and resting my back at times against the opposite side of

the well, helping myself as well as I could with my hands, though one

arm was crippled. It was hard work, Bob, and it seems strange that a man

who had long professed himself weary of his life, should take so much

trouble to preserve it. I think I must have been working upward of half

an hour before I got to the top; I know the time seemed an eternity of

pain and peril. It was impossible for me to leave the place until after

dark without being observed, so I hid myself behind a clump of

laurel-bushes, and lay down on the grass faint and exhausted to wait for

nightfall. The man who found me there told you the rest. Robert.”

 

“Yes, my poor old friend.—yes, he told me all.”

 

George had never returned to Australia after all. He had gone on board

the Victoria Regia, but had afterward changed his berth for one in

another vessel belonging to the same owners, and had gone to New York,

where he had stayed as long as he could endure the loneliness of an

existence which separated him from every friend he had ever known.

 

“Jonathan was very kind to me, Bob,” he said; “I had enough money to

enable me to get on pretty well in my own quiet way and I meant to have

started for the California gold fields to get more when that was gone. I

might have made plenty of friends had I pleased, but I carried the old

bullet in my breast; and what sympathy could I have with men who knew

nothing of my grief? I yearned for the strong grasp of your hand, Bob;

the friendly touch of the hand which had guided me through the darkest

passage of my life.”

 

CHAPTER XLI.

 

AT PEACE.

 

Two years have passed since the May twilight in which Robert found his

old friend; and Mr. Audley’s dream of a fairy cottage has been realized

between Teddington Locks and Hampton Bridge, where, amid a little forest

of foliage, there is a fantastical dwelling place of rustic woodwork,

whose latticed windows look out upon the river. Here, among the lilies

and the rushes on the sloping bank, a brave boy of eight years old plays

with a toddling baby, who peers wonderingly from his nurse’s arms at

that other baby in the purple depth of the quiet water.

 

Mr. Audley is a rising man upon the home circuit by this time, and has

distinguished himself in the great breach of promise case of Hobbs v.

Nobbs, and has convulsed the court by his deliciously comic rendering of

the faithless Nobb’s amatory correspondence. The handsome dark-eyed boy

is Master George Talboys, who declines musa at Eton, and fishes for

tadpoles in the clear water under the spreading umbrage beyond the ivied

walls of the academy. But he comes very often to the fairy cottage to

see his father, who lives there with his sister and his sister’s

husband; and he is very happy with his Uncle Robert, his Aunt Clara, and

the pretty baby who has just begun to toddle on the smooth lawn that

slopes down to the water’s brink, upon which there is a little Swiss

boat-house and landing-stage where Robert and George moor their slender

wherries.

 

Other people come to the cottage near Teddington. A bright,

merry-hearted girl, and a gray-bearded gentleman, who has survived he

trouble of his life, and battled with it as a Christian should.

 

It is more than a year since a black-edged letter, written upon foreign

paper, came to Robert Audley, to announce the death of a certain Madame

Taylor, who had expired peacefully at Villebrumeuse, dying after a long

illness, which Monsieur Val describes as a maladie de langueur.

 

Another visitor comes to the cottage in this bright summer of 1861—a

frank, generous hearted young man, who tosses the baby and plays with

Georgey, and is especially great in the management of the boats, which

are never idle when Sir Harry Towers is at Teddington.

 

There is a pretty rustic smoking-room over the Swiss boat-house, in

which the gentlemen sit and smoke in the summer evenings, and whence

they are summoned by Clara and Alicia to drink tea, and eat strawberries

and cream upon the lawn.

 

Audley Court is shut up, and a grim old housekeeper reigns paramount in

the mansion which my lady’s ringing laughter once made musical. A

curtain hangs before the pre-Raphaelite portrait; and the blue mold

which artists dread gathers upon the Wouvermans and Poussins, the Cuyps

and Tintorettis. The house is often shown to inquisitive visitors,

though the baronet is not informed of that fact, and people admire my

lady’s rooms, and ask many questions about the pretty, fair-haired woman

who died abroad.

 

Sir Michael has no fancy to return to the familiar dwelling-place in

which he once dreamed a brief dream of impossible happiness. He remains

in London until Alicia shall be Lady Towers, when he is to remove to a

house he has lately bought in Hertfordshire, on the borders of his

son-in-law’s estate. George Talboys is very happy with his sister and

his old friend. He is a young man yet, remember, and it is not quite

impossible that he may, by-and-by, find some one who will console him

for the past. That dark story of the past fades little by little every

day, and there may come a time in which the shadow my lady’s wickedness

has cast upon the young man’s life will utterly vanish away.

 

The meerschaum and the French novels have been presented to a young

Templar with whom Robert Audley had been friendly in his bachelor days;

and Mrs. Maloney has a little pension, paid her quarterly, for her care

of the canaries and geraniums.

 

I hope no one will take objection to my story because the end of it

leaves the good people all happy and at peace. If my experience of life

has not been very long, it has at least been manifold; and I can safely

subscribe to that which a mighty king and a great philosopher declared,

when he said, that neither the experience of his youth nor of his age

had ever shown him “the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their

bread.”

 

THE END.

 

End of Project Gutenberg’s Lady Audley’s Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

 

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