‘Her mother died when she was quite a child,’ said George. ‘To think that she should remember her and speak of her, but never once of me.’
The woman took him into the little bed-room in which his wife had died. He knelt down by the bed and kissed the pillow tenderly, the landlady crying as he did so.
While he was kneeling, praying perhaps, with his face buried in this humble snow-white pillow, the woman took something from a drawer. She gave it to him when he rose from his knees; it was a long tress of hair wrapped in silver paper.
‘I cut this off when she lay in her coffin,’ she said, ‘poor dear!’
He pressed the soft lock to his lips. ‘Yes,’ he murmured; ‘this is the dear hair that I have kissed so often when her head lay upon my shoulder. But it always had a rippling wave in it then, and now it seems smooth and straight.’
‘It changes in illness,’ said the landlady. ‘If you’d like to see where they have laid her, Mr Talboys, my little boy shall show you the way to the churchyard.’
So George Talboys and his faithful friend walked to the quiet spot, where beneath a mound of earth, to which the patches of fresh turf hardly adhered, lay that wife of whose welcoming smile George had dreamed so often in the far antipodes.
Robert left the young man by the side of this new-made grave, and returning in about a quarter of an hour, found that he had not once stirred.
He looked up presently, and said that if there was a stonemason’s anywhere near he should like to give an order.
They very easily found the stonemason, and sitting down amidst the fragmentary litter of the man’s yard, George Talboys wrote in pencil this brief inscription for the headstone of his dead wife’s grave: —
Sacred to the Memory of
HELEN,
THE BELOVED WIFE OF GEORGE TALBOYS,
Who departed this life
August 24th, 1857, aged 22,
Deeply regretted by her sorrowing Husband.
CHAPTER VI
ANYWHERE, ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD*
WHEN they returned to Landsdowne Cottage they found the old man had not yet come in, so they walked down to the beach to look for him. After a brief search they found him, sitting upon a heap of pebbles, reading a newspaper and eating filberts.* The little boy was at some distance from his grandfather, digging in the sand with a wooden spade. The crape round the old man’s shabby hat, and the child’s poor little black frock, went to George’s heart. Go where he would he met confirmation of this great grief of his life. His wife was dead.
‘Mr Maldon,’ he said, as he approached his father-in-law.
The old man looked up, and, dropping his newspaper, rose from the pebbles with a ceremonious bow. His faded, light hair was tinged with grey; he had a pinched hook nose, watery blue eyes, and an irresolute-looking mouth; he wore his shabby dress with an affectation of foppish gentility; an eye-glass dangled over his closely-buttoned-up waistcoat, and he carried a cane in his ungloved hand.
‘Good heavens!’ cried George, ‘don’t you know me?’
Mr Maldon started and coloured violently, with something of a frightened look, as he recognised his son-in-law.
‘My dear boy,’ he said, ‘I did not; for the first moment I did not; that beard makes such a difference. You find the beard makes a great difference, do you not, sir?’ he said, appealing to Robert.
‘Great Heaven!’ exclaimed George Talboys, ‘is this the way you welcome me? I come to England to find my wife dead within a week of my touching land, and you begin to chatter to me about my beard,—you, her father!’
‘True! true!’ muttered the old man, wiping his blood-shot eyes; ‘a sad shock, a sad shock, my dear George. If you’d only been here a week earlier!’
‘If I had,’ cried George, in an outburst of grief and passion, ‘I scarcely think that I would have let her die. I would have disputed for her with death. I would! I would! O God! why did not the Argus go down with every soul on board her before I came to see this day?’
He began to walk up and down the beach, his father-in-law looking helplessly at him, rubbing his feeble eyes with a handkerchief.
‘I’ve a strong notion that that old man didn’t treat his daughter too well,’ thought Robert, as he watched the half-pay lieutenant. ‘He seems, for some reason or other, to be half afraid of George.’
While the agitated young man walked up and down in a fever of regret and despair, the child ran to his grandfather and clung about the tails of his coat.
‘Come home, grandpa’, come home,’ he said. ‘I’m tired.’
George Talboys turned at the sound of the babyish voice, and long and earnestly looked at the boy.
He had his father’s brown eyes and dark hair.
‘My darling! my darling!’ said George, taking the child in his arms, ‘I am your father, come across the sea to find you. Will you love me?’
The little fellow pushed him away. ‘I don’t know you,’ he said. ‘I love grandpa’ and Mrs Monks, at Southampton.’
‘Georgey has a temper of his own, sir,’ said the old man. ‘He has been spoiled.’
They walked slowly back to the cottage, and once more George Talboys told the history of that desertion which had seemed so cruel. He told, too, of the twenty thousand pounds banked by him the day before. He had not the heart to ask any questions about the past, and his father-in-law only told him that a few months after his departure they had gone from the place where George left them to live at Southampton, where Helen got a few pupils for the piano, and where they managed pretty well till her health failed, and she fell into the decline of which she died. Like most sad stories, it was a very brief one.
‘The boy seems fond of you, Mr Maldon,’ said George, after a pause.
‘Yes, yes,’ answered the old man, smoothing the child’s curling hair, ‘yes, Georgey is very fond of his grandfather.’
‘Then he had better stop with you. The interest of my money will be about six hundred a year. You can draw a hundred of that for Georgey’s education, leaving the rest to accumulate till he is of age. My friend here will be trustee, and if he will undertake the charge, I will appoint him guardian to the boy, allowing him for the present to remain under your care.’
‘But why not take care of him yourself, George?’ asked Robert Audley.
‘Because I shall sail in the very next vessel that leaves Liverpool for Australia. I shall be better in the diggings or the backwoods than ever I could be here. I’m broken for a civilised life from this hour, Bob.’
The old man’s weak eyes sparkled as George declared this determination.
‘My poor boy, I think you’re right,’ he said, ‘I really think you’re right. The change, the wild life, the—the ——’ He hesitated and broke down, as Robert looked earnestly at him.
‘You’re in a great hurry to get rid of your son-in-law, I think, Mr Maldon,’ he said gravely.
‘Get rid of him, dear boy! Oh, no, no! But for his own sake, my dear sir, for his own sake, you know.’
‘I think for his own sake he’d much better stay in England and look after his son,’ said Robert.
‘But I tell you I can’t,’ cried George; ‘every inch of this accursed ground is hateful to me—I want to run out of it as I would out of a graveyard. I’ll go back to town to-night, get that business about the money settled early to-morrow morning, and start for Liverpool without a moment’s delay. I shall be better when I’ve put half the world between me and her grave.’
Before he left the house he stole out to the landlady, and asked some more questions about his dead wife.
‘Were they poor?’ he asked; ‘were they pinched for money while she was ill?’
‘Oh, no!’ the woman answered; ‘though the captain dresses shabby, he has always plenty of sovereigns in his purse. The poor lady wanted for nothing.’
George was relieved at this, though it puzzled him to know where the drunken half-pay lieutenant could have contrived to find money for all the expense
s of his daughter’s illness.
But he was too thoroughly broken down by the calamity which had befallen him to be able to think much of anything, so he asked no further questions, but walked with his father-in-law and Robert Audley down to the boat by which they were to cross to Portsmouth.
The old man bade Robert a very ceremonious adieu.
‘You did not introduce me to your friend, by-the-bye, my dear boy,’ he said. George stared at him, muttered something indistinct, and ran down the ladder to the boat before Mr Maldon could repeat his request. The steamer sped away through the sunset, and the outlines of the island melted in the horizon as they neared the opposite shore.
‘To think,’ said George, ‘that two nights ago at this time I was steaming into Liverpool, full of the hope of clasping her to my heart, and to-night I am going away from her grave!’
The document which appointed Robert Audley as guardian to little George Talboys was drawn up in a solicitor’s office the next morning.
‘It’s a great responsibility,’ exclaimed Robert; ‘I, guardian to anybody or anything! I, who never in my life could take care of myself!’
‘I trust in your noble heart, Bob,’ said George. ‘I know you will take care of my poor orphan boy, and see that he is well used by his grandfather. I shall only draw enough from Georgey’s fortune to take me back to Sydney, and then begin my old work again.’
But it seemed as if George was destined to be himself the guardian of his son; for when he reached Liverpool, he found that a vessel had just sailed, and that there would not be another for a month; so he returned to London, and once more threw himself upon Robert Audley’s hospitality.
The barrister received him with open arms; he gave him the room with the birds and flowers, and had a bed put up in his dressing-room for himself. Grief is so selfish that George did not know the sacrifices his friend made for his comfort. He only knew that for him the sun was darkened, and the business of life done. He sat all day long smoking cigars, and staring at the flowers and canaries, chafing for the time to pass that he might be far out at sea.
But, just as the hour was drawing near for the sailing of the vessel, Robert Audley came in one day full of a great scheme. A friend of his, another of those barristers whose last thought is of a brief, was going to St Petersburg to spend the winter, and wanted Robert to accompany him. Robert would only go on condition that George went too.
For a long time the young man resisted, but when he found that Robert was, in a quiet way, thoroughly determined upon not going without him, he gave in, and consented to join the party. ‘What did it matter?’ he said. ‘One place was the same to him as another, anywhere out of England; what did he care where?’
This was not a very cheerful way of looking at things, but Robert Audley was quite satisfied with having won his consent.
The three young men started under very favourable circumstances, carrying letters of introduction to the most influential inhabitants of the Russian capital.
Before leaving England Robert wrote to his cousin Alicia, telling her of his intended departure with his old friend George Talboys, whom he had lately met for the first time after a lapse of years, and who had just lost his wife.
Alicia’s reply came by return of post, and ran thus:—
‘MY DEAR ROBERT,—How cruel of you to run away to that horrid St Petersburg before the hunting season! I have heard that people lose their noses in that disagreeable climate, and as yours is rather a long one, I should advise you to return before the very severe weather sets in. What sort of person is this young Mr Talboys? If he is very agreeable you may bring him to the Court as soon as you return from your travels. Lady Audley tells me to request you to secure her a set of sables.* You are not to consider the price, but to be sure that they are the handsomest that can be obtained. Papa is perfectly absurd about his new wife, and she and I cannot get on together at all; not that she is disagreeable to me, for, as far as that goes, she makes herself agreeable to every one; but she is so irretrievably childish and silly.
‘Believe me to be, my dear Robert,
‘Your affectionate Cousin,
‘ALICIA AUDLEY.’
CHAPTER VII
AFTER A YEAR
THE first year of George Talboys’ widowhood passed away; the deep band of crape about his hat grew brown and rusty, and as the last burning day of another August faded out, he sat smoking cigars in the quiet chambers in Fig-tree Court, much as he had done the year before, when the horror of his grief was new to him, and every object in life, however trifling or however important, seemed saturated with his one great sorrow.
But the big ex-dragoon had survived his affliction by a twelvemonth, and hard as it may be to have to tell it, he did not look much the worse for it. Heaven knows what inner change may have been worked by that bitter disappointment! Heaven knows what wasted agonies of remorse and self-reproach may not have racked George’s honest heart as he lay awake at nights thinking of the wife he had abandoned in the pursuit of a fortune which she never lived to share.
Once, while they were abroad, Robert Audley ventured to congratulate him upon his recovered spirits. He burst into a bitter laugh.
‘Do you know, Bob,’ he said, ‘that when some of our fellows were wounded in India, they came home bringing bullets inside them. They did not talk of them, and they were stout and hearty, and looked as well, perhaps, as you or I; but every change in the weather, however slight, every variation of the atmosphere, however trifling, brought back the old agony of their wounds as sharp as ever they had felt it on the battle-field. I’ve had my wound, Bob; I carry the bullet still, and I shall carry it into my coffin.’
The travellers returned from St Petersburg in the spring, and George again took up his quarters in his old friend’s chambers, only leaving them now and then to run down to Southampton and take a look at his little boy. He always went loaded with toys and sweetmeats to give to the child; but, for all this, Georgey would not become very familiar with his papa, and the young man’s heart sickened as he began to fancy that even his child was lost to him.
‘What can I do?’ he thought. ‘If I take him away from his grandfather I shall break his heart; if I let him remain he will grow up a stranger to me, and care more for that drunken old hypocrite than for his own father. But then what could an ignorant heavy dragoon like me do with such a child? What could I teach him except to smoke cigars, and idle about all day with his hands in his pockets?’
So the anniversary of that 30th of August, upon which George had seen the advertisement of his wife’s death in the Times newspaper, came round for the first time, and the young man put off his black clothes and the shabby crape from his hat, and laid his mourning garments in a trunk in which he kept a packet of his wife’s letters, and that lock of hair which had been cut from her head after death. Robert Audley had never seen either the letters or the long tress of silky hair; nor, indeed, had George ever mentioned the name of his dead wife after that one day at Ventnor on which he learned the full particulars of her decease.
‘I shall write to my cousin Alicia to-day, George,’ the young barrister said, upon this very 30th of August. ‘Do you know that the day after to-morrow is the 1st of September? I shall write and tell her that we will both run down to the Court for a week’s shooting.’
‘No, no, Bob; go by yourself; they don’t want me, and I’d rather——’
‘Bury yourself in Fig-tree Court, with no company but my dogs and canaries! No, George, you shall do nothing of the kind.’
‘But I don’t care for shooting.’
‘And do you suppose I care for it?’ cried Robert, with charming naïveté. ‘Why, man, I don’t know a partridge from a pigeon, and it might be the 1st of April instead of the 1st of September for aught I care. I never hit a bird in my life, but I have hurt my own shoulder with the weight of my gun. I only go down to Essex for the change of air, the good dinners, and the sight of my uncle’s honest, handsome face. Besides, this time I�
�ve another inducement, as I want to see this fair-haired paragon, my new aunt. You’ll go with me, George?’
‘Yes, if you really wish it.’
The quiet form which his grief had taken after its first brief violence left him as submissive as a child to the will of his friend; ready to go anywhere or do anything, never enjoying himself, or originating any enjoyment, but joining in the pleasures of others with a hopeless, quiet, uncomplaining, unobtrusive resignation peculiar to his simple nature. But the return of post brought a letter from Alicia Audley, to say that the two young men could not be received at the Court.
‘There are seventeen spare bed-rooms,’ wrote the young lady, in an indignant running hand, ‘but for all that, my dear Robert, you can’t come: for my lady has taken it into her silly head that she is too ill to entertain visitors (there is no more the matter with her than there is with me), and she cannot have gentlemen (great rough men, she says) in the house. Please apologise to your friend Mr Talboys, and tell him that papa hopes to see you both in the hunting season.’
‘My lady’s airs and graces shan’t keep us out of Essex for all that,’ said Robert, as he twisted the letter into a pipe-light for his big meerschaum. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do, George; there’s a glorious inn at Audley, and plenty of fishing in the neighbourhood: we’ll go there and have a week’s sport. Fishing is much better than shooting; you’ve only to lie on a bank and stare at your line; I don’t find that you often catch anything, but it’s very pleasant.’
He held the twisted letter to the feeble spark of fire glimmering in the grate as he spoke, and then changing his mind, deliberately unfolded it and smoothed the crumpled paper with his hand.
‘Poor little Alicia!’ he said thoughtfully; ‘it’s rather hard to treat her letters so cavalierly—I’ll keep it;’ upon which Mr Robert Audley put the note back into its envelope, and afterwards thrust it into a pigeon-hole in his office desk marked Important. Heaven knows what wonderful documents there were in this particular pigeon-hole, but I do not think it likely to have contained anything of great judicial value. If any one could at that moment have told the young barrister that so simple a thing as his cousin’s brief letter would one day come to be a link in that terrible chain of evidence afterwards to be slowly forged into the one and only criminal case in which he was ever to be concerned, perhaps Mr Robert Audley would have lifted his eyebrows a little higher than usual.
Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics) Page 10
