‘Mrs Vincent was in a dying state, according to the telegraphic message,’ Robert thought. ‘If I do find her, I shall at least succeed in discovering whether that message was genuine.’
He found Crescent Villas after some difficulty. The houses were large, but they lay half embedded amongst the chaos of brick and mortar rising around them. New terraces, new streets, new squares led away into hopeless masses of stone and plaster on every side. The roads were sticky with damp clay, which clogged the wheels of the cab and buried the fetlocks of the horse. The desolation of desolations—that awful aspect of incompleteness and discomfort which pervades a new and unfinished neighbourhood*—had set its dismal seal upon the surrounding streets which had arisen about and entrenched Crescent Villas; and Robert wasted forty minutes by his own watch, and an hour and a quarter according to the cabman’s reckoning, in driving up and down uninhabited streets and terraces, trying to find the Villas: whose chimney-pots were frowning down upon him, black and venerable, amid groves of virgin plaster, undimmed by time or smoke.
But having at least succeeded in reaching his destination, Mr Audley alighted from the cab, directed the driver to wait for him at a certain corner, and set out upon his voyage of discovery.
‘If I were a distinguished QC, I could not do this sort of thing,’ he thought; ‘my time would be worth a guinea or so a minute, and I should be retained in the great case of Hoggs v. Boggs, going forward this very day before a special jury at Westminster Hall. As it is, I can afford to be patient.’
He inquired for Mrs Vincent at the number which Mr Dawson had given him. The maid who opened the door had never heard that lady’s name: but after going to inquire of her mistress, she returned to tell Robert that Mrs Vincent had lived there, but that she had left two months before the present occupants had entered the house, ‘and missus has been here fifteen months,’ the girl added, explanatorily.
‘But you cannot tell me where she went on leaving here?’ Robert asked, despondingly.
‘No, sir; missus says she believes the lady failed, and that she left sudden like, and didn’t want her address to be known in the neighbourhood.’
Mr Audley felt himself at a standstill once more. If Mrs Vincent had left the place in debt, she had no doubt scrupulously concealed her whereabouts. There was little hope, then, of learning her address from any of the tradespeople; and yet, on the other hand, it was just possible that some of her sharpest creditors might have made it their business to discover the defaulter’s retreat.
He looked about him for the nearest shops, and found a baker’s, a stationer’s, and a fruiterer’s, a few paces from the crescent. Three empty-looking, pretentious shops, with plate-glass windows, and a hopeless air of gentility.
He stopped at the baker’s, who called himself a pastrycook and confectioner, and exhibited some specimens of petrified sponge-cake in glass bottles, and some highly-glazed tarts, covered with green gauze.
‘She must have bought bread,’ Robert thought, as he deliberated before the baker’s shop; ‘and she is likely to have bought it at the handiest place. I’ll try the baker.’
The baker was standing behind his counter, disputing the items of a bill with a shabby-genteel young woman. He did not trouble himself to attend to Robert Audley till he had settled the dispute, but he looked up as he was receipting the bill, and asked the barrister what he pleased to want.
‘Can you tell me the address of a Mrs Vincent, who lived at No. 9, Crescent Villas, a year and a half ago?’ Mr Audley inquired, mildly.
‘No, I can’t,’ answered the baker, growing very red in the face, and speaking in an unnecessarily loud voice; ‘and what’s more, I wish I could. That lady owes me upwards of eleven pound for bread, and it’s rather more than I can afford to lose. If anybody can tell me where she lives, I shall be much obliged to ’em for so doing.’
Robert Audley shrugged his shoulders, and wished the man good morning. He felt that his discovery of the lady’s whereabouts would involve more trouble than he had expected. He might have looked for Mrs Vincent’s name in the Post Office Directory, but he thought it scarcely likely that a lady who was on such uncomfortable terms with her creditors would afford them so easy a means of ascertaining her residence.
‘If the baker can’t find her, how should I find her?’ he thought, despairingly. ‘If a resolute, sanguine, active, and energetic creature, such as the baker, fail to achieve this business, how can a lymphatic wretch like me hope to accomplish it? Where the baker has been defeated, what preposterous folly it would be for me to try to succeed.’
Mr Audley abandoned himself to these gloomy reflections as he walked slowly back towards the corner at which he had left the cab. About half-way between the baker’s shop and this corner, he was arrested by hearing a woman’s step close at his side, and a woman’s voice asking him to stop. He turned and found himself face to face with the shabbily-dressed woman whom he had left settling her account with the baker.
‘Eh, what?’ he asked, vaguely. ‘Can I do anything for you, ma’am? Does Mrs Vincent owe you money, too?’
‘Yes, sir,’ the woman answered, with a semi-genteel manner which corresponded with the shabby gentility of her dress; ‘Mrs Vincent is in my debt; but it isn’t that, sir. I—I want to know, please, what your business may be with her—because—because——’
‘You can give me her address if you choose, ma’am? That’s what you mean to say, isn’t it?’
The woman hesitated a little, looking rather suspiciously at Robert.
‘You’re not connected with—with the tally business,* are you, sir?’ she asked, after considering Mr Audley’s personal appearance for a few moments.
‘The what, ma’am?’ cried the young barrister, staring aghast at his questioner.
‘I’m sure I beg your pardon, sir,’ exclaimed the little woman, seeing that she had made some very awful mistake. ‘I thought you might have been, you know. Some of the gentlemen who collect for the tally-shops do dress so very handsome, and I know Mrs Vincent owes a good deal of money.’
Robert Audley laid his hand upon the speaker’s arm.
‘My dear madam,’ he said, ‘I want to know nothing of Mrs Vincent’s affairs. So far from being concerned in what you call the tally business, I have not the remotest idea of what you mean by that expression. You may mean a political conspiracy; you may mean some new species of taxes. Mrs Vincent does not owe me any money, however badly she may stand with that awful-looking baker. I never saw her in my life; but I wish to see her to-day for the simple purpose of asking her a few very plain questions about the young lady who once resided in her house. If you know where Mrs Vincent lives, and will give me her address, you will be doing me a great favour.’
He took out his card-case and handed a card to the woman, who examined the slip of pasteboard anxiously before she spoke again.
‘I’m sure you look and speak like a gentleman, sir,’ she said, after a brief pause, ‘and I hope you will excuse me if I’ve seemed mistrustful like; but poor Mrs Vincent has had dreadful difficulties, and I’m the only person hereabouts that she’s trusted with her addresses. I’m a dressmaker, sir, and I’ve worked for her for upwards of six years, and though she doesn’t pay me regular, you know, sir, she gives me a little money on account now and then, and I get on as well as I can. I may tell you where she lives, then, sir? You haven’t deceived me, have you?’
‘On my honour, no.’
‘Well, then, sir,’ said the dressmaker, dropping her voice as if she thought the pavement beneath her feet, or the iron railings before the houses by her side, might have ears to hear her, ‘it’s Acacia Cottage, Peckham Grove. I took a dress there yesterday for Mrs Vincent.’
‘Thank you,’ said Robert, writing the address in his pocket-book. ‘I am very much obliged to you, and you may rely upon it, Mrs Vincent shall not suffer any inconvenience through me.’
He lifted his hat, bowed to the little dressmaker, and turned back to the cab.
/> ‘I have beaten the baker at any rate,’ he thought. ‘Now for the second stage, travelling backwards, in my lady’s life.’
The drive from Brompton to the Peckham Road was a very long one, and between Crescent Villas and Acacia Cottage Robert Audley had ample leisure for reflection. He thought of his uncle, lying weak and ill in the oak-room at Audley Court. He thought of the beautiful blue eyes watching Sir Michael’s slumbers; the soft white hands, tending on his waking wants; the low, musical voice soothing his loneliness; cheering and consoling his declining years. What a pleasant picture it might have been, had he been able to look upon it ignorantly, seeing no more than others saw, looking no farther than a stranger could look. But with the black cloud which he saw, or fancied he saw, brooding over it, what an arch mockery, what a diabolical delusion it seemed!
Peckham Grove—pleasant enough in the summer-time—has rather a dismal aspect upon a dull February day, when the trees are bare and leafless, and the little gardens desolate. Acacia Cottage bore small token of the fitness of its nomenclature, and faced the road with its stuccoed walls, sheltered only by a couple of tall attenuated poplars. But it announced that it was Acacia Cottage by means of a small brass-plate upon one of the gate-posts, which was sufficient indication for the sharp-sighted cabman, who dropped Mr Audley upon the pavement before the little gate.
Acacia Cottage was much lower in the social scale than Crescent Villas, and the small maid-servant who came to the low wooden gate and parleyed with Mr Audley, was evidently well used to the encounter of relentless creditors across the same feeble barricade.
She murmured the familiar domestic fiction of uncertainty regarding her mistress’s whereabouts; and told Robert that if he would please to state his name and business, she would go and see if Mrs Vincent was at home.
Mr Audley produced a card, and wrote in pencil under his own name—‘A connection of the late Miss Graham.’
He directed the small servant to carry this card to her mistress, and quietly awaited the result.
The servant returned in about five minutes with the key of the gate. Her mistress was at home, she told Robert as she admitted him, and would be happy to see the gentleman.
The square parlour into which Robert was ushered bore in every scrap of ornament, in every article of furniture, the unmistakable stamp of that species of poverty which is most comfortless, because it is never stationary. The mechanic who furnishes his tiny sitting-room with half-a-dozen cane chairs, a Pembroke table,* a Dutch clock,* a tiny looking-glass, a crockery shepherd and shepherdess, and a set of gaudily-japanned* iron tea trays, makes the most of his limited possessions, and generally contrives to get some degree of comfort out of them; but the lady who loses the handsome furniture of the house she is compelled to abandon and encamps in some smaller habitation with the shabby remainder—bought in by some merciful friend at the sale of her effects—carries with her an aspect of genteel desolation and tawdry misery not easily to be paralleled in wretchedness by any other phase which poverty can assume.
The room which Robert Audley surveyed was furnished with the shabbier scraps snatched from the ruin which had overtaken the imprudent schoolmistress in Crescent Villas. A cottage piano, a chiffonier,* six sizes too large for the room, and dismally gorgeous in gilded mouldings that were chipped and broken; and a slim-legged card-table, placed in the post of honour, formed the principal pieces of furniture. A threadbare patch of Brussels carpet covered the centre of the room, and formed an oasis of roses and lilies upon a desert of faded green drugget.* Knitted curtains shaded the windows, in which hung wire baskets of horrible-looking plants of the cactus species, that grew downwards like some demented class of vegetation, whose prickly and spider-like members had a fancy for standing on their heads.
The green-baize-covered card-table was adorned with gaudily-bound annuals or books of beauty, placed at right angles; but Robert Audley did not avail himself of these literary distractions. He seated himself upon one of the rickety chairs, and waited patiently for the advent of the school-mistress. He could hear the hum of half-a-dozen voices in a room near him, and the jingling harmonies of a set of variations to Deh Conte,* upon a piano whose every wire was evidently in the last stage of attenuation.
He had waited for about a quarter of an hour, when the door was opened, and a lady, very much dressed, and with the setting sunlight of faded beauty upon her face, entered the room.
‘Mr Audley, I presume,’ she said, motioning to Robert to reseat himself, and placing herself in an easy-chair opposite to him. ‘You will pardon me, I hope, for detaining you so long; my duties——’
‘It is I who should apologise for intruding upon you,’ Robert answered, politely, ‘but my motive for calling upon you is a very serious one, and must plead my excuse. You remember the lady whose name I wrote upon my card?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘May I ask how much you know of that lady’s history since her departure from your house?’
‘Very little. In point of fact, scarcely anything at all. Miss Graham, I believe, obtained a situation in the family of a surgeon resident in Essex. Indeed, it was I who recommended her to that gentleman. I have never heard from her since she left me.’
‘But you have communicated with her?’ Robert asked, eagerly.
‘No, indeed.’
Mr Audley was silent for a few moments, the shadow of gloomy thoughts gathering darkly on his face.
‘May I ask if you sent a telegraphic despatch to Miss Graham early in last September, stating that you were dangerously ill, and that you wished to see her?’
Mrs Vincent smiled at her visitor’s question.
‘I had no occasion to send such a message,’ she said. ‘I have never been seriously ill in my life.’
Robert Audley paused before he asked any further questions, and scrawled a few pencilled words in his note-book.
‘If I ask you a few straightforward questions about Miss Lucy Graham, madam,’ he said, ‘will you do me the favour to answer them without asking my motive for making such inquiries?’
‘Most certainly,’ replied Mrs Vincent. ‘I know nothing to Miss Graham’s disadvantage, and have no justification for making a mystery of the little I do know.’
‘Then will you tell me at what date the young lady first came to you?’
Mrs Vincent smiled and shook her head. She had a pretty smile—the frank smile of a woman who has been admired, and who has too long felt the certainty of being able to please, to be utterly subjugated by any worldly misfortune.
‘It’s not the least use to ask me, Mr Audley,’ she said. ‘I’m the most careless creature in the world; I never did, and never could remember dates, though I do all in my power to impress upon my girls how important it is for their future welfare that they should know when William the Conqueror began to reign, and all that kind of thing. But I haven’t the remotest idea when Miss Graham came to see me, although I know it was ages ago, for it was the very summer I had my peach-coloured silk. But we must consult Tonks—Tonks is sure to be right.’
Robert Audley wondered who or what Tonks could be; a diary, perhaps, or a memorandum-book—some obscure rival of Letsome.*
Mrs Vincent rang the bell, which was answered by the maidservant who had admitted Robert.
‘Ask Miss Tonks to come to me,’ she said, ‘I want to see her particularly.’
In less than five minutes Miss Tonks made her appearance. She was wintry and rather frost-bitten in aspect, and seemed to bring cold air in the scanty folds of her sombre merino dress. She was no age in particular, and looked as if she had never been younger, and would never grow older, but would remain for ever working backwards and forwards in her narrow groove, like some self-feeding machine for the instruction of young ladies.
‘Tonks, my dear,’ said Mrs Vincent, without ceremony, ‘this gentleman is a relative of Miss Graham’s. Do you remember how long it is since she came to us at Crescent Villas?’
‘She came in August, 185
4,’ answered Miss Tonks; ‘I think it was the eighteenth of August, but I’m not quite sure that it wasn’t the seventeenth. I know it was on a Tuesday.’
‘Thank you, Tonks; you are a most invaluable darling,’ exclaimed Mrs Vincent, with her sweetest smile. It was, perhaps, because of the invaluable nature of Miss Tonks’s services that she had received no remuneration whatever from her employer for the last three or four years. Mrs Vincent might have hesitated to pay her from very contempt for the pitiful nature of the stipend as compared with the merits of the teacher.
‘Is there anything else that Tonks or I can tell you, Mr Audley?’ asked the schoolmistress. ‘Tonks has a far better memory than I have.’
‘Can you tell me where Miss Graham came from when she entered your household?’ Robert inquired.
‘Not very precisely,’ answered Mrs Vincent. ‘I have a vague notion that Miss Graham said something about coming from the sea-side, but she didn’t say where, or if she did I have forgotten it. Tonks, did Miss Graham tell you where she came from?’
‘Oh, no!’ replied Miss Tonks, shaking her grim little head significantly. ‘Miss Graham told me nothing; she was too clever for that. She knew how to keep her own secrets, in spite of her innocent ways and her curly hair,’ Miss Tonks added, spitefully.
‘You think she had secrets, then?’ Robert asked, rather eagerly.
‘I know she had,’ replied Miss Tonks with frosty decision; ‘all manner of secrets. I wouldn’t have engaged such a person as junior teacher in a respectable school, without so much as one word of recommendation from any living creature.’
‘You had no reference, then, from Miss Graham?’ asked Robert, addressing Mrs Vincent.
‘No,’ the lady answered with some little embarrassment; ‘I waived that. Miss Graham waived the question of salary; I could not do less than waive the question of reference. She had quarrelled with her papa, she told me, and she wanted to find a home away from all the people she had ever known. She wished to keep herself quite separate from these people. She had endured so much, she said, young as she was, and she wanted to escape from her troubles. How could I press her for a reference under these circumstances? especially when I saw that she was a perfect lady? You know that Lucy Graham was a perfect lady, Tonks, and it is very unkind of you to say such cruel things about my taking her without a reference.’
Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics) Page 29
