Lady Audley’s Secret M. E. Braddon (best historical fiction books of all time TXT) 📖

face. He rose, when Robert had finished speaking, and looked at his watch once more.

“I can only spare you twenty minutes,” he said. “I will see the lady, if you please. You say her mother died in a madhouse?”

“She did. Will you see Lady Audley alone?”

“Yes, alone, if you please.”

Robert rung for my lady’s maid, and under convoy of that smart young damsel the physician found his way to the octagon antechamber, and the fairy boudoir with which it communicated.

Ten minutes afterward, he returned to the library, in which Robert sat waiting for him.

“I have talked to the lady,” he said, quietly, “and we understand each other very well. There is latent insanity! Insanity which might never appear; or which might appear only once or twice in a lifetime. It would be a dementia in its worst phase, perhaps; acute mania; but its duration would be very brief, and it would only arise under extreme mental pressure. The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence. I will tell you what she is, Mr. Audley. She is dangerous!”

Dr. Mosgrave walked up and down the room once or twice before he spoke again.

“I will not discuss the probabilities of the suspicion which distresses you, Mr. Audley,” he said, presently, “but I will tell you this much, I do not advise any esclandre. This Mr. George Talboys has disappeared, but you have no evidence of his death. If you could produce evidence of his death, you could produce no evidence against this lady, beyond the one fact that she had a powerful motive for getting rid of him. No jury in the United Kingdom would condemn her upon such evidence as that.”

Robert Audley interrupted Dr. Mosgrave, hastily.

“I assure you, my dear sir,” he said, “that my greatest fear is the necessity of any exposure⁠—any disgrace.”

“Certainly, Mr. Audley,” answered the physician, coolly, “but you cannot expect me to assist you to condone one of the worst offenses against society. If I saw adequate reason for believing that a murder had been committed by this woman, I should refuse to assist you in smuggling her away out of the reach of justice, although the honor of a hundred noble families might be saved by my doing so. But I do not see adequate reason for your suspicions; and I will do my best to help you.”

Robert Audley grasped the physician’s hands in both his own.

“I will thank you when I am better able to do so,” he said, with emotion; “I will thank you in my uncle’s name as well as in my own.”

“I have only five minutes more, and I have a letter to write,” said Dr. Mosgrave, smiling at the young man’s energy.

He seated himself at a writing-table in the window, dipped his pen in the ink, and wrote rapidly for about seven minutes. He had filled three sides of a sheet of notepaper, when he threw down his pen and folded his letter.

He put this letter into an envelope, and delivered it, unsealed, to Robert Audley.

The address which it bore was:

“Monsieur Val,

“Villebrumeuse,

“Belgium.”

Mr. Audley looked rather doubtfully from this address to the doctor, who was putting on his gloves as deliberately as if his life had never known a more solemn purpose than the proper adjustment of them.

“That letter,” he said, in answer to Robert Audley’s inquiring look, “is written to my friend Monsieur Val, the proprietor and medical superintendent of a very excellent maison de santé in the town of Villebrumeuse. We have known each other for many years, and he will no doubt willingly receive Lady Audley into his establishment, and charge himself with the full responsibility of her future life; it will not be a very eventful one!”

Robert Audley would have spoken, he would have once more expressed his gratitude for the help which had been given to him, but Dr. Mosgrave checked him with an authoritative gesture.

“From the moment in which Lady Audley enters that house,” he said, “her life, so far as life is made up of action and variety, will be finished. Whatever secrets she may have will be secrets forever! Whatever crimes she may have committed she will be able to commit no more. If you were to dig a grave for her in the nearest churchyard and bury her alive in it, you could not more safely shut her from the world and all worldly associations. But as a physiologist and as an honest man, I believe you could do no better service to society than by doing this; for physiology is a lie if the woman I saw ten minutes ago is a woman to be trusted at large. If she could have sprung at my throat and strangled me with her little hands, as I sat talking to her just now, she would have done it.”

“She suspected your purpose, then!”

“She knew it. ‘You think I am mad like my mother, and you have come to question me,’ she said. ‘You are watching for some sign of the dreadful taint in my blood.’ Good day to you, Mr. Audley,” the physician added hurriedly, “my time was up ten minutes ago; it is as much as I shall do to catch the train.”

XXXVII Buried Alive

Robert Audley sat alone in the library with the physician’s letter upon the table before him, thinking of the work which was still to be done.

The young barrister had constituted himself the denouncer of this wretched woman. He had been her judge; and he was now her jailer. Not until he had delivered the letter which lay before him to its proper address, not until he had given up his charge into the safekeeping of the foreign madhouse doctor, not until then would the dreadful burden be removed from him and his duty done.

He wrote a few lines to my lady, telling her that he was going to carry her away from Audley Court