Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics)

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Sometimes, when the weather was very hot, and he had exhausted himself with the exertion of smoking his German pipe, and reading French novels,* he would stroll into the Temple Gardens, and lying in some shady spot, pale and cool, with his shirt collar turned down and a blue silk handkerchief tied loosely about his neck, would tell grave benchers* that he had knocked himself up with overwork.

  The sly old benchers laughed at the pleasing fiction; but they all agreed that Robert Audley was a good fellow; a generous-hearted fellow; rather a curious fellow too, with a fund of sly wit and quiet humour, under his listless, dawdling, indifferent, irresolute manner. A man who would never get on in the world; but who would not hurt a worm. Indeed, his chambers were converted into a perfect dog-kennel by his habit of bringing home stray and benighted curs, who were attracted by his looks in the street, and followed him with abject fondness.

  Robert always spent the hunting season at Audley Court; not that he was distinguished as a Nimrod,* for he would quietly trot to covert upon a mild-tempered, stout-limbed, bay hack, and keep at a very respectful distance from the hard riders; his horse knowing quite as well as he did that nothing was further from his thoughts than any desire to be in at the death.

  The young man was a great favourite with his uncle, and by no means despised by his pretty, gipsy-faced, light-hearted, hoydenish cousin, Miss Alicia Audley. It might have seemed to other men that the partiality of a young lady who was sole heiress to a very fine estate, was rather well worth cultivating, but it did not so occur to Robert Audley. Alicia was a very nice girl, he said, a jolly girl, with no nonsense about her—a girl of a thousand; but this was the highest point to which enthusiasm could carry him. The idea of turning his cousin’s girlish liking for him to some good account never entered his idle brain. I doubt if he even had any correct notion of the amount of his uncle’s fortune, and I am certain that he never for one moment calculated upon the chances of any part of that fortune ultimately coming to himself. So that when one fine spring morning, about three months before the time of which I am writing, the postman brought him the wedding cards of Sir Michael and Lady Audley, together with a very indignant letter from his cousin, setting forth how her father had just married a wax-dollish young person, no older than Alicia herself, with flaxen ringlets and a perpetual giggle; for, I am sorry to say, that Miss Audley’s animus caused her so to describe that pretty musical laugh which had been so much admired in the late Miss Lucy Graham—when, I say, these documents reached Robert Audley—they elicited neither vexation nor astonishment in the lymphatic nature* of that gentleman. He read Alicia’s angry, crossed and re-crossed letter without so much as removing the amber mouthpiece of his German pipe from his moustachioed lips. When he had finished the perusal of the epistle, which he read with his dark eyebrows elevated to the centre of his forehead (his only manner of expressing surprise, by the way), he deliberately threw that and the wedding cards into the waste-paper basket, and putting down his pipe, prepared himself for the exertion of thinking out the subject.

  ‘I always said the old buffer would marry,’ he muttered, after about half an hour’s reverie. ‘Alicia and my lady, the step-mother, will go at it hammer and tongs. I hope they won’t quarrel in the hunting season, or say unpleasant things to each other at the dinner-table: rows always upset a man’s digestion.’

  At about twelve o’clock on the morning following that night upon which the events recorded in my last chapter had taken place, the baronet’s nephew strolled out of the Temple, Blackfriars-ward, on his way to the City. He had in an evil hour obliged some necessitous friend by putting the ancient name of Audley across a bill of accommodation,* which bill not having been met by the drawer, Robert was called upon to pay. For this purpose he sauntered up Ludgate Hill, with his blue necktie fluttering in the hot August air, and thence to a refreshingly cool banking-house in a shady court out of St Paul’s Churchyard, where he made arrangements for selling out a couple of hundred pounds worth of consols.*

  He had transacted this business, and was loitering at the corner of the court, waiting for a chance Hansom,* to convey him back to the Temple, when he was almost knocked down by a man of about his own age, who dashed headlong into the narrow opening.

  ‘Be so good as to look where you’re going, my friend!’ Robert remonstrated, mildly, to the impetuous passenger; ‘you might give a man warning before you throw him down and trample upon him.’

  The stranger stopped suddenly, looked very hard at the speaker, and then gasped for breath.

  ‘Bob!’ he cried, in a tone expressive of the most intense astonishment; ‘I only touched British ground after dark last night, and to think that I should meet you this morning!’

  ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before, my bearded friend,’ said Mr Audley, calmly scrutinising the animated face of the other, ‘but I’ll be hanged if I can remember when or where.’

  ‘What!’ exclaimed the stranger, reproachfully, ‘you don’t mean to say that you’ve forgotten George Talboys?’

  ‘No, I have not!’ said Robert, with an emphasis by no means usual to him; and then hooking his arm into that of his friend, he led him into the shady court, saying with his old indifference, ‘and now, George, tell us all about it.’

  George Talboys did tell him all about it. He told that very story which he had related ten days before to the pale governess on board the Argus; and then, hot and breathless, he said that he had a bundle of Australian notes in his pocket, and that he wanted to bank them at Messrs ——, who had been his bankers many years before.

  ‘If you’ll believe me, I’ve only just left their counting-house,’ said Robert. ‘I’ll go back with you, and we’ll settle that matter in five minutes.’

  They did contrive to settle it in about a quarter of an hour; and then Robert Audley was for starting off immediately for the Crown and Sceptre, or the Castle, Richmond, where they could have a bit of dinner, and talk over those good old times when they were together at Eton. But George told his friend that before he went anywhere, before he shaved, or broke his fast, or in any way refreshed himself after a night journey from Liverpool by express train, he must call at a certain coffee-house in Bridge Street, Westminster, where he expected to find a letter from his wife.

  ‘Then I’ll go there with you,’ said Robert. ‘The idea of your having a wife, George; what a preposterous joke.’

  As they dashed through Ludgate Hill, Fleet Street and the Strand in a fast Hansom, George Talboys poured into his friend’s ear all those wild hopes and dreams which had usurped such a dominion over his sanguine nature.

  ‘I shall take a villa on the banks of the Thames, Bob,’ he said, ‘for the little wife and myself; and we’ll have a yacht, Bob, old boy, and you shall lie on the deck and smoke while my pretty one plays her guitar and sings songs to us. She’s for all the world like one of those what’s-its-names, who got poor old Ulysses into trouble,’* added the young man, whose classic lore was not very great.

  The waiters at the Westminster coffee-house stared at the hollow-eyed, unshaven stranger, with his clothes of colonial cut, and his boisterous, excited manner; but he had been an old frequenter of the place in his military days, and when they heard who he was they flew to do his bidding.

  He did not want much—only a bottle of soda water, and to know if there was a letter at the bar directed to George Talboys.

  The waiter brought the soda water before the young men had seated themselves in a shady box near the disused fireplace. No; there was no letter for that name.

  The waiter said it with consummate indifference, while he mechanically dusted the little mahogany table.

  George’s face blanched to a deadly whiteness.

  ‘Talboys,’ he said, ‘perhaps you didn’t hear the name distinctly—T, A, L, B, O, Y, S. Go and look again; there must be a letter.’

  The waiter shrugged his shoulders as he left the room, and returned in three minutes to say that there was no name at all resembling Talboys in the lette
r rack. There was Brown, and Saunderson, and Pinchbeck; only three letters altogether.

  The young man drank his soda water in silence, and then leaning his elbows upon the table, covered his face with his hands. There was something in his manner which told Robert Audley that this disappointment, trifling as it might appear, was in reality a very bitter one. He seated himself opposite to his friend, but did not attempt to address him.

  By-and-by George looked up, and mechanically taking a greasy Times newspaper of the day before from a heap of journals on the table, stared vacantly at the first page.

  I cannot tell how long he sat blankly staring at one paragraph amongst the list of deaths, before his dazed brain took in its full meaning; but after a considerable pause he pushed the newspaper over to Robert Audley, and with a face that had changed from its dark bronze to a sickly, chalky, greyish white, and with an awful calmness in his manner, he pointed with his finger to a line which ran thus: —

  ‘On the 24th inst., at Ventnor, Isle of Wight, Helen Talboys, aged twenty-two.’

  CHAPTER V

  THE HEADSTONE AT VENTNOR

  YES: there it was, in black and white—‘Helen Talboys, aged twenty-two.’

  When George told the governess on board the Argus that if he heard any evil tidings of his wife he should drop down dead, he spoke in perfect good faith; and yet here were the worst tidings that could come to him, and he sat rigid, white, and helpless, staring stupidly at the shocked face of his friend.

  The suddenness of the blow had stunned him. In his strange and bewildered state of mind he began to wonder what had happened, and why it was that one line in the Times newspaper could have so horrible an effect upon him.

  Then by degrees even this vague consciousness of his misfortune faded slowly out of his mind, succeeded by a painful consciousness of external things.

  The hot August sunshine; the dusty window panes and shabby painted blinds; a file of fly-blown play-bills fastened to the wall; the blank and empty fire-place; a bald-headed old man nodding over the Morning Advertiser; the slipshod waiter folding a tumbled table-cloth, and Robert Audley’s handsome face looking at him full of compassionate alarm. He knew that all these things took gigantic proportions, and then, one by one, melted into dark blots that swam before his eyes. He knew that there was a great noise as of half a dozen furious steam-engines tearing and grinding in his ears, and he knew nothing more, except that somebody or something fell heavily to the ground.

  He opened his eyes upon the dusky evening in a cool and shaded room, the silence only broken by the rumbling of wheels at a distance.

  He looked about him wonderingly, but half indifferently. His old friend, Robert Audley, was seated by his side smoking. George was lying on a low iron bedstead opposite to an open window, in which there was a stand of flowers and two or three birds in cages.

  ‘You don’t mind the pipe, do you, George?’ his friend asked quietly.

  ‘No.’

  He lay for some time looking at the flowers and the birds: one canary was singing a shrill hymn to the setting sun.

  ‘Do the birds annoy you, George? Shall I take them out of the room?’

  ‘No; I like to hear them sing.’

  Robert Audley knocked the ashes out of his pipe, laid the precious meerschaum* tenderly upon the mantel-piece, and going into the next room, returned presently with a cup of strong tea.

  ‘Take this, George,’ he said, as he placed the cup on a little table close to George’s pillow; ‘it will do your head good.’

  The young man did not answer, but looked slowly round the room, and then at his friend’s grave face.

  ‘Bob,’ he said, ‘where are we?’

  ‘In my chambers, my dear boy, in the Temple. You have no lodgings of your own, so you may as well stay with me while you’re in town.’

  George passed his hand once or twice across his forehead, and then, in a hesitating manner, said quietly —

  ‘That newspaper this morning, Bob; what was it?’

  ‘Never mind just now, old boy; drink some tea.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ cried George, impatiently, raising himself upon the bed, and staring about him with hollow eyes, ‘I remember all about it. Helen, my Helen! my wife, my darling, my only love! Dead! dead!’

  ‘George,’ said Robert Audley, laying his hand gently upon the young man’s arm, ‘you must remember that the person whose name you saw in the paper may not be your wife. There may have been some other Helen Talboys.’

  ‘No, no,’ he cried, ‘the age corresponds with hers, and Talboys is such an uncommon name.’

  ‘It may be a misprint for Talbot.’

  ‘No, no, no; my wife is dead!’

  He shook off Robert’s restraining hand, and rising from the bed, walked straight to the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ exclaimed his friend.

  ‘To Ventnor, to see her grave.’

  ‘Not to-night, George, not to-night. I will go with you myself by the first train to-morrow.’

  Robert led him back to the bed, and gently forced him to lie down again. He then gave him an opiate which had been left for him by the medical man whom they had called in at the coffee-house in Bridge Street, when George fainted.

  So George Talboys fell into a heavy slumber, and dreamed that he went to Ventnor, to find his wife alive and happy, but wrinkled, old, and grey, and to find his son grown into a young man.

  Early the next morning he was seated opposite to Robert Audley in the first-class carriage of an express, whirling through the pretty open country towards Portsmouth.

  They rode from Ryde to Ventnor under the burning heat of the mid-day sun. As the two young men alighted from the coach, the people standing about stared at George’s white face and untrimmed beard.

  ‘What are we to do, George?’ Robert Audley asked. ‘We have no clue to finding the people you want to see.’

  The young man looked at him with a pitiful, bewildered expression. The big dragoon was as helpless as a baby; and Robert Audley, the most vacillating and unenergetic of men, found himself called upon to act for another. He rose superior to himself and equal to the occasion.

  ‘Had we better ask at one of the hotels about a Mrs Talboys, George?’ he said.

  ‘Her father’s name was Maldon,’ George muttered; ‘he could never have sent her here to die alone.’

  They said nothing more, but Robert walked straight to an hotel, where he inquired for a Mr Maldon.

  ‘Yes,’ they told him, ‘there was a gentleman of that name stopping at Ventnor, a Captain Maldon; his daughter was lately dead. The waiter would go and inquire for the address.’

  The hotel was a busy place at this season; people hurrying in and out, and a great bustle of grooms and waiters about the hall.

  George Talboys leaned against the door-post with much the same look in his face as that which had frightened his friend in the Westminster coffee-house.

  The worst was confirmed now. His wife, Captain Maldon’s daughter, was dead.

  The waiter returned in about five minutes to say that Captain Maldon was lodging at Lansdowne Cottages, No. 4.

  They easily found the house, a shabby bow-windowed cottage, looking towards the water.

  Was Captain Maldon at home? No, the landlady said; he had gone out to the beach with his little grandson. Would the gentlemen walk in and sit down a bit?

  George mechanically followed his friend into the little front parlour—dusty, shabbily furnished, and disorderly, with a child’s broken toys scattered on the floor, and the scent of stale tobacco hanging about the muslin window curtains.

  ‘Look!’ said George, pointing to a picture over the mantel-piece.

  It was his own portrait, painted in the old dragooning days. A pretty good likeness, representing him in uniform, with his charger in the background.

  Perhaps the most animated of men would have been scarcely so wise a comforter as Robert Audley. He did not utter a word to the stricken widower, but quietly seate
d himself with his back to George, looking out of the open window.

  For some time the young man wandered restlessly about the room, looking at and sometimes touching the knicknacks lying here and there.

  Her work box, with an unfinished piece of work; her album, full of extracts from Byron and Moore,* written in his own scrawling hand; some books which he had given her, and a bunch of withered flowers in a vase they had bought in Italy.

  ‘Her portrait used to hang by the side of mine,’ he muttered; ‘I wonder what they have done with it?’

  By-and-by he said, after about half an hour’s silence—

  ‘I should like to see the woman of the house; I should like to ask her about——’

  He broke down, and buried his face in his hands.

  Robert summoned the landlady. She was a goodnatured, garrulous creature, used to sickness and death, for many of her lodgers came to her to die. She told all the particulars of Mrs Talboys’ last hours; how she had come to Ventnor only a week before her death in the last stage of decline; and how day by day she had gradually but surely sunk under the fatal malady. ‘Was the gentleman any relative?’ she asked of Robert Audley, as George sobbed aloud.

  ‘Yes, he is the lady’s husband.’

  ‘What!’ the woman cried; ‘him as deserted her so cruel, and left her with her pretty boy upon her poor old father’s hands, which Captain Maldon has told me often, with the tears in his poor eyes?’

  ‘I did not desert her,’ George cried out; and then he told the history of his three years’ struggle.

  ‘Did she speak of me?’ he asked; ‘did she speak of me at—at—the last?’

  ‘No, she went off as quiet as a lamb. She said very little from the first; but the last day she knew nobody, not even her little boy nor her poor old father, who took on awful. Once she went off wild like, talking about her mother, and about the cruel shame it was to have to die in a strange place, till it was quite pitiful to hear her.’