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

not do so, Mr. Audley⁠—you will not be false to the memory of your friend. You will see vengeance done upon those who have destroyed him. You will do this, will you not?”

A gloomy shadow spread itself like a dark veil over Robert Audley’s handsome face.

He remembered what he had said the day before at Southampton:

“A hand that is stronger than my own is beckoning me onward, upon the dark road.”

A quarter of an hour before, he had believed that all was over, and that he was released from the dreadful duty of discovering the secret of George’s death. Now this girl, this apparently passionless girl, had found a voice, and was urging him on toward his fate.

“If you knew what misery to me may be involved in discovering the truth, Miss Talboys,” he said, “you would scarcely ask me to pursue this business any farther?”

“But I do ask you,” she answered, with suppressed passion⁠—“I do ask you. I ask you to avenge my brother’s untimely death. Will you do so? Yes or no?”

“What if I answer no?”

“Then I will do it myself,” she exclaimed, looking at him with her bright brown eyes. “I myself will follow up the clue to this mystery; I will find this woman⁠—though you refuse to tell me in what part of England my brother disappeared. I will travel from one end of the world to the other to find the secret of his fate, if you refuse to find it for me. I am of age; my own mistress; rich, for I have money left me by one of my aunts; I shall be able to employ those who will help me in my search, and I will make it to their interest to serve me well. Choose between the two alternatives, Mr. Audley. Shall you or I find my brother’s murderer?”

He looked in her face, and saw that her resolution was the fruit of no transient womanish enthusiasm which would give way under the iron hand of difficulty. Her beautiful features, naturally statuesque in their noble outlines, seemed transformed into marble by the rigidity of her expression. The face in which he looked was the face of a woman whom death only could turn from her purpose.

“I have grown up in an atmosphere of suppression,” she said, quietly; “I have stifled and dwarfed the natural feelings of my heart, until they have become unnatural in their intensity; I have been allowed neither friends nor lovers. My mother died when I was very young. My father has always been to me what you saw him today. I have had no one but my brother. All the love that my heart can hold has been centered upon him. Do you wonder, then, that when I hear that his young life has been ended by the hand of treachery, that I wish to see vengeance done upon the traitor? Oh, my God,” she cried, suddenly clasping her hands, and looking up at the cold winter sky, “lead me to the murderer of my brother, and let mine be the hand to avenge his untimely death.”

Robert Audley stood looking at her with awestricken admiration. Her beauty was elevated into sublimity by the intensity of her suppressed passion. She was different to all other women that he had ever seen. His cousin was pretty, his uncle’s wife was lovely, but Clara Talboys was beautiful. Niobe’s face, sublimated by sorrow, could scarcely have been more purely classical than hers. Even her dress, puritan in its gray simplicity, became her beauty better than a more beautiful dress would have become a less beautiful woman.

“Miss Talboys,” said Robert, after a pause, “your brother shall not be unavenged. He shall not be forgotten. I do not think that any professional aid which you could procure would lead you as surely to the secret of this mystery as I can lead you, if you are patient and trust me.”

“I will trust you,” she answered, “for I see that you will help me.”

“I believe that it is my destiny to do so,” he said, solemnly.

In the whole course of his conversation with Harcourt Talboys, Robert Audley had carefully avoided making any deductions from the circumstances which he had submitted to George’s father. He had simply told the story of the missing man’s life, from the hour of his arriving in London to that of his disappearance; but he saw that Clara Talboys had arrived at the same conclusion as himself, and that it was tacitly understood between them.

“Have you any letters of your brother’s, Miss Talboys?” he asked.

“Two. One written soon after his marriage, the other written at Liverpool, the night before he sailed for Australia.”

“Will you let me see them?”

“Yes, I will send them to you if you will give me your address. You will write to me from time to time, will you not, to tell me whether you are approaching the truth. I shall be obliged to act secretly here, but I am going to leave home in two or three months, and I shall be perfectly free then to act as I please.”

“You are not going to leave England?” Robert asked.

“Oh no! I am only going to pay a long-promised visit to some friends in Essex.”

Robert started so violently as Clara Talboys said this, that she looked suddenly at his face. The agitation visible there, betrayed a part of his secret.

“My brother George disappeared in Essex,” she said.

He could not contradict her.

“I am sorry you have discovered so much,” he replied. “My position becomes every day more complicated, every day more painful. Goodbye.”

She gave him her hand mechanically, when he held out his; but it was cold as marble, and lay listlessly in his own, and fell like a log at her side when he released it.

“Pray lose no time in returning to the house,” he said earnestly. “I fear you will suffer from this morning’s work.”

“Suffer!” she exclaimed, scornfully. “You talk to me of suffering, when the only creature in this