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

world who ever loved me has been taken from it in the bloom of youth. What can there be for me henceforth but suffering? What is the cold to me?” she said, flinging back her shawl and baring her beautiful head to the bitter wind. “I would walk from here to London barefoot through the snow, and never stop by the way, if I could bring him back to life. What would I not do to bring him back? What would I not do?”

The words broke from her in a wail of passionate sorrow; and clasping her hands before her face, she wept for the first time that day. The violence of her sobs shook her slender frame, and she was obliged to lean against the trunk of a tree for support.

Robert looked at her with a tender compassion in his face; she was so like the friend whom he had loved and lost, that it was impossible for him to think of her as a stranger; impossible to remember that they had met that morning for the first time.

“Pray, pray be calm,” he said: “hope even against hope. We may both be deceived; your brother may still live.”

“Oh! if it were so,” she murmured, passionately; “if it could be so.”

“Let us try and hope that it may be so.”

“No,” she answered, looking at him through her tears, “let us hope for nothing but revenge. Goodbye, Mr. Audley. Stop; your address.”

He gave her a card, which she put into the pocket of her dress.

“I will send you George’s letters,” she said; “they may help you. Goodbye.”

She left him half bewildered by the passionate energy of her manner, and the noble beauty of her face. He watched her as she disappeared among the straight trunks of the fir-trees, and then walked slowly out of the plantation.

“Heaven help those who stand between me and the secret,” he thought, “for they will be sacrificed to the memory of George Talboys.”

XXIV George’s Letters

Robert Audley did not return to Southampton, but took a ticket for the first up town train that left Wareham, and reached Waterloo Bridge an hour or two after dark. The snow, which had been hard and crisp in Dorsetshire, was a black and greasy slush in the Waterloo Road, thawed by the flaring lamps of the gin-palaces and the glaring gas in the butchers’ shops.

Robert Audley shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the dingy streets through which the Hansom carried him, the cabman choosing⁠—with that delicious instinct which seems innate in the drivers of hackney vehicles⁠—all those dark and hideous thoroughfares utterly unknown to the ordinary pedestrian.

“What a pleasant thing life is,” thought the barrister. “What an unspeakable boon⁠—what an overpowering blessing! Let any man make a calculation of his existence, subtracting the hours in which he has been thoroughly happy⁠—really and entirely at his ease, without one arriere pensée to mar his enjoyment⁠—without the most infinitesimal cloud to overshadow the brightness of his horizon. Let him do this, and surely he will laugh in utter bitterness of soul when he sets down the sum of his felicity, and discovers the pitiful smallness of the amount. He will have enjoyed himself for a week or ten days in thirty years, perhaps. In thirty years of dull December, and blustering March, and showery April, and dark November weather, there may have been seven or eight glorious August days, through which the sun has blazed in cloudless radiance, and the summer breezes have breathed perpetual balm. How fondly we recollect these solitary days of pleasure, and hope for their recurrence, and try to plan the circumstances that made them bright; and arrange, and predestinate, and diplomatize with fate for a renewal of the remembered joy. As if any joy could ever be built up out of such and such constituent parts! As if happiness were not essentially accidental⁠—a bright and wandering bird, utterly irregular in its migrations; with us one summer’s day, and forever gone from us on the next! Look at marriages, for instance,” mused Robert, who was as meditative in the jolting vehicle, for whose occupation he was to pay sixpence a mile, as if he had been riding a mustang on the wild loneliness of the prairies. “Look at marriage! Who is to say which shall be the one judicious selection out of nine hundred and ninety-nine mistakes! Who shall decide from the first aspect of the slimy creature, which is to be the one eel out of the colossal bag of snakes? That girl on the curbstone yonder, waiting to cross the street when my chariot shall have passed, may be the one woman out of every female creature in this vast universe who could make me a happy man. Yet I pass her by⁠—bespatter her with the mud from my wheels, in my helpless ignorance, in my blind submission to the awful hand of fatality. If that girl, Clara Talboys, had been five minutes later, I should have left Dorsetshire thinking her cold, hard, and unwomanly, and should have gone to my grave with that mistake part and parcel of my mind. I took her for a stately and heartless automaton; I know her now to be a noble and beautiful woman. What an incalculable difference this may make in my life. When I left that house, I went out into the winter day with the determination of abandoning all further thought of the secret of George’s death. I see her, and she forces me onward upon the loathsome path⁠—the crooked byway of watchfulness and suspicion. How can I say to this sister of my dead friend, ‘I believe that your brother has been murdered! I believe that I know by whom, but I will take no step to set my doubts at rest, or to confirm my fears’? I cannot say this. This woman knows half my secret; she will soon possess herself of the rest, and then⁠—and then⁠—”

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