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

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  She joined him presently, with her shawl still over her head, and her eyes still bright and tearless.

  ‘Will you walk with me inside the plantation?’ she said. ‘We might be observed on the high road.’

  He bowed, passed through the gate, and shut it behind him.

  When she took his offered arm he found that she was still trembling—trembling very violently.

  ‘Pray, pray calm yourself, Miss Talboys,’ he said: ‘I may have been deceived in the opinion which I have formed; I may——’

  ‘No, no, no,’ she exclaimed, ‘you are not deceived. My brother has been murdered. Tell me the name of that woman—the woman whom you suspect of being concerned in his disappearance—in his murder.’

  ‘That I cannot do until——’

  ‘Until when?’

  ‘Until I know that she is guilty.’

  ‘You told my father that you would abandon all idea of discovering the truth—that you would rest satisfied to leave my brother’s fate a horrible mystery never to be solved upon this earth; but you will 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 towards 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 further.’

  ‘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—yes, 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 to-day. I have had no one but my brother. All the love that my heart can hold has been centred 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 awe-stricken 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 grey 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. Good-by.’

  She gave him her hand mechanically when he held out his, but it was colder than marble, and it 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 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. Good-by, Mr Audley. Stop; your address.’

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

&
nbsp; ‘I will send you George’s letters,’ she said; ‘they may help you. Good-by.’

  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 amongst 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.’

  CHAPTER VI

  GEORGE’S LETTERS

  ROBERT AUDLEY did not return to Southampton, but took a ticket for the first up-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 lamps of the gin-palaces and the flaring 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 arrière 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 diplomatise 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 migration; with us one summer’s day, and for ever 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 wide loneliness of the prairies. ‘Look at marriages! Who is to say which shall be the one judicious selection out of the 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 kerbstone 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——’

  The cab stopped in the midst of Robert Audley’s meditation, and he had to pay the cabman, and submit to all the dreary mechanism of life, which is the same whether we are glad or sorry—whether we are to be married or hung, elevated to the woolsack or disbarred by our brother benchers* on some mysterious technical tangle of wrongdoing, which is a social enigma to those outside the Middle Temple.

  We are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our life—this unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be for ever broken, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures upon a shattered dial.

  Who has not felt, in the first madness of sorrow, an unreasoning rage against the mute propriety of chairs and tables, the stiff squareness of Turkey carpets, the unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of existence? We want to root up gigantic trees in a primeval forest, and to tear their huge branches asunder in our convulsive grasp; and the utmost that we can do for the relief of our passion is to knock over an easy chair, or smash a few shillings’-worth of Mr Copeland’s manufacture.*

  Mad-houses are large and only too numerous; yet surely it is strange they are not larger, when we think of how many helpless wretches must beat their brains against this hopeless persistency of the orderly outward world, as compared with the storm and tempest, the riot and confusion within:—when we remember how many minds must tremble upon the narrow boundary between reason and unreason, mad to-day and sane to-morrow, mad yesterday and sane to-day.

  Robert had directed the cabman to drop him at the corner of Chancery Lane, and he ascended the brilliantly-lighted staircase leading to the dining saloon of The London, and seated himself at one of the snug tables with a confused sense of emptiness and weariness, rather than any agreeable sensation of healthy hunger. He had come to the luxurious eating-house to dine, because it was absolutely necessary to eat something somewhere, and a great deal easier to get a very good dinner from Mr Sawyer, than a very bad one from Mrs Maloney, whose mind ran in one narrow channel of chops and steaks, only variable by small creeks and outlets in the way of ‘briled sole’ or ‘biled mack’rill.’ The solicitous waiter tried in vain to rouse poor Robert to a proper sense of the solemnity of the dinner question. He muttered something to the effect that the man might bring him anything he liked, and the friendly waiter, who knew Robert as a frequent guest at the little tables, went back to his master with a doleful face to say that Mr Audley from Fig-tree Court was evidently out of spirits. Robert ate his dinner, and drank a pint of Moselle; but he had poor appreciation for the excellence of the viands or the delicate fragrance of the wine. The mental monologue still went on, and the young philosopher of the modern school was arguing the favourite modern question of the nothingness of everything and the folly of taking too much trouble to walk upon a road that led nowhere, or to compass a work that meant nothing.

  ‘I accept the dominion of that pale girl, with the statuesque features and the calm brown eyes,’ he thought. ‘I recognise the power of a mind superior to my own, and I yield to it, and bow down to it. I’ve been acting for myself, and thinking for myself, for the last few months, and I’m tired of the unnatural business. I’ve been false to the leading principle of my life, and I’ve suffered for my folly. I found two grey hairs in my head the week before last, and an impertinent crow has planted a delicate impression of his foot under my right eye. Yes, I’m getting old upon the right side; and why—why should it be so?’

  He pushed away his plate, and lifted his eyebrows, staring at the crumbs upon the glistening damask, as he pondered the question —

  ‘What the devil am I doing in this galère?’* he asked. ‘But I am in it, and I can’t get out of it; so I’d better submit myself to the brown-eyed girl, and do what she tells me, patiently and faithfully. What a wonderful solution to life’s enigma there is in petticoat government! A man might lie in the sunshine and eat lotuses, and fancy it “always afternoon,”* if his wife would let him! But she won’t,
bless her impulsive heart and active mind! She knows better than that. Whoever heard of a woman taking life as it ought to be taken? Instead of supporting it as an unavoidable nuisance, only redeemable by its brevity, she goes through it as if it were a pageant or a procession. She dresses for it, and simpers, and grins, and gesticulates for it. She pushes her neighbours, and struggles for a good place in the dismal march; she elbows, and writhes, and tramples, and prances, to the one end of making the most of the misery. She gets up early and sits up late, and is loud, and restless, and noisy, and unpitying. She drags her husband on to the woolsack, or pushes him into Parliament. She drives him full butt at the dear, lazy machinery of government; and knocks and buffets him about the wheels, and cranks, and screws, and pulleys; until somebody, for quiet’s sake, makes him something that she wanted him to be made. That’s why incompetent men sometimes sit in high places, and interpose their poor muddled intellects between the things to be done and the people that can do them, making universal confusion in the helpless innocence of well-placed incapacity. The square men in the round holes are pushed into them by their wives. The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief* should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds,* and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they’ll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the noisier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. They want freedom of opinion, variety of occupation, do they? Let them have it. Let them be lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, soldiers, legislators—anything they like—but let them be quiet—if they can.’