‘What a coward I am to think of myself or my own danger,’ he thought. ‘The more I see of this woman, the more reason I have to dread her influence upon others; the more reason to wish her far away from this house.’
He looked about him in the dusky obscurity. The lonely garden was as quiet as some solitary graveyard, walled in and hidden away from the world of the living.
‘It was somewhere in this garden that she met George Talboys upon the day of his disappearance,’ he thought. ‘I wonder where it was they met; I wonder where it was that he looked into her cruel face, and taxed her with her falsehood.’
My lady, with her little hand resting lightly upon the opposite post to that against which Robert leant, toyed with her pretty foot amongst the long weeds, but kept a furtive watch upon her enemy’s face.
‘It is to be a duel to the death, then, my lady,’ said Robert Audley, solemnly. ‘You refuse to accept my warning. You refuse to run away and repent of your wickedness in some foreign place, far from the generous gentleman you have deceived and fooled by your false witcheries. You choose to remain here and defy me.’
‘I do,’ answered Lady Audley, lifting her head, and looking full at the young barrister. ‘It is no fault of mine if my husband’s nephew goes mad, and chooses me for the victim of his monomania.’
‘So be it, then, my lady,’ answered Robert. ‘My friend George Talboys was last seen entering these gardens by the little iron gate at which we came in to-night. He was last heard inquiring for you. He was seen to enter these gardens, but he was never seen to leave them. I do not believe that he ever did leave them. I believe that he met with his death within the boundary of these grounds; and that his body lies hidden below some quiet water, or in some forgotten corner of this place. I will have such a search made as shall level that house to the earth, and root up every tree in these gardens, rather than I will fail in finding the grave of my murdered friend.’
Lucy Audley uttered a long, low, wailing cry, and threw up her arms above her head with a wild gesture of despair, but she made no answer to the ghastly charge of her accuser. Her arms slowly dropped, and she stood staring at Robert Audley, her white face gleaming through the dusk, her blue eyes glittering and dilated.
‘You shall never live to do this,’ she said. ‘I will kill you first. Why have you tormented me so? Why could you not let me alone? What harm had I ever done you that you should make yourself my persecutor, and dog my steps, and watch my looks, and play the spy upon me? Do you want to drive me mad? Do you know what it is to wrestle with a madwoman? No,’ cried my lady, with a laugh, ‘you do not, or you would never——’
She stopped abruptly, and drew herself suddenly to her fullest height. It was the same action which Robert had seen in the old half-drunken lieutenant; and it had that same dignity—the sublimity of extreme misery.
‘Go away, Mr Audley,’ she said. ‘You are mad, I tell you; you are mad.’
‘I am going, my lady,’ answered Robert, quietly. ‘I would have condoned your crimes out of pity to your wretchedness. You have refused to accept my mercy. I wished to have pity upon the living. I shall henceforth only remember my duty to the dead.’
He walked away from the lonely well under the shadow of the limes. My lady followed him slowly down that long, gloomy avenue, and across the rustic bridge to the iron gate. As he passed through the gate, Alicia came out of a little half-glass door that opened from an oak-panelled breakfast-room at one angle of the house, and met her cousin upon the threshold of the gateway.
‘I have been looking for you everywhere, Robert,’ she said. ‘Papa has come down to the library, and I am sure he will be glad to see you.’
The young man started at the sound of his cousin’s fresh young voice, ‘Good heavens!’ he thought, ‘can these two women be of the same clay? Can this frank, generous-hearted girl, who cannot conceal any impulse of her innocent nature, be of the same flesh and blood as that wretched creature whose shadow falls upon the path beside me?’
He looked from his cousin to Lady Audley, who stood near the gateway, waiting for him to stand aside and let her pass him.
‘I don’t know what has come to your cousin, my dear Alicia,’ said my lady. ‘He is so absent-minded and eccentric, as to be quite beyond my comprehension.’
‘Indeed,’ exclaimed Miss Audley; ‘and yet I should imagine, from the length of your tête-à-tête, that you had made some effort to understand him.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Robert, quietly, ‘my lady and I understand each other very well; but as it is growing late I will wish you good evening, ladies. I shall sleep to-night at Mount Stanning, as I have some business to attend to up there, and I will come down and see my uncle to-morrow.’
‘What, Robert!’ cried Alicia, ‘you surely won’t go away without seeing papa?’
‘Yes, my dear,’ answered the young man. ‘I am a little disturbed by some disagreeable business in which I am very much concerned, and I would rather not see my uncle. Good night, Alicia. I will come or write to-morrow.’
He pressed his cousin’s hand, bowed to Lady Audley, and walked away under the black shadows of the archway, and out into the quiet avenue beyond the Court.
My lady and Alicia stood watching him until he was out of sight.
‘What in goodness’ name is the matter with my cousin Robert?’ exclaimed Miss Audley, impatiently, as the barrister disappeared. ‘What does he mean by these absurd goings-on? Some disagreeable business that disturbs him, indeed! I suppose the unhappy creature has had a brief forced upon him by some evil-starred attorney, and is sinking into a state of imbecility from a dim consciousness of his own incompetence.’
‘Have you ever studied your cousin’s character, Alicia?’ asked my lady, very seriously, after a pause.
‘Studied his character! No, Lady Audley. Why should I study his character?’ said Alicia. ‘There is very little study required to convince anybody that he is a lazy, selfish Sybarite, who cares for nothing in the world except his own ease and comfort.’
‘But have you never thought him eccentric?’
‘Eccentric!’ repeated Alicia, pursing up her red lips and shrugging her shoulders. ‘Well, yes—I believe that is the excuse generally made for such people. I suppose Bob is eccentric.’
‘I have never heard you speak of his father and mother,’ said my lady, thoughtfully. ‘Do you remember them?’
‘I never saw his mother. She was a Miss Dalrymple, a very dashing girl, who ran away with my uncle, and lost a very handsome fortune in consequence. She died at Nice when poor Bob was five years old.’
‘Did you ever hear anything particular about her?’
‘How do you mean, “particular”?’ asked Alicia.
‘Did you ever hear that she was eccentric—what people call “odd”?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Alicia, laughing. ‘My aunt was a very reasonable woman, I believe, though she did marry for love. But you must remember that she died before I was born, and I have not, therefore, felt very much curiosity about her.’
‘But you recollect your uncle, I suppose?’
‘My uncle Robert?’ said Alicia. ‘Oh, yes, I remember him very well indeed.’
‘Was he eccentric—I mean to say, peculiar in his habits, like your cousin?’
‘Yes, I believe Robert inherits all his absurdities from his father. My uncle expressed the same indifference for his fellow-creatures as my cousin; but as he was a good husband, an affectionate father, and a kind master, nobody ever challenged his opinions.’
‘But he was eccentric?’
‘Yes; I suppose he was generally thought a little eccentric.’
‘Ah,’ said my lady gravely, ‘I thought as much. Do you know, Alicia, that madness is more often transmitted from father to son than from father to daughter, and from mother to daughter than from mother to son?* Your cousin Robert Audley is a very handsome young man, and I believe a very good-hearted young man; but he must be watched, Alicia, for he is mad!’
‘Mad!’ cried Miss Audley, indignantly; ‘you are dreaming, my lady, or—or—you are trying to frighten me,’ added the young lady, with considerable alarm.
‘I only wish to put you on your guard, Alicia,’ answered my lady. ‘Mr Audley may be as you say, merely eccentric; but he has talked to me this evening in a manner that has filled me with absolute terror, and I believe that he is going mad. I shall speak very seriously to Sir Michael this very night.’
‘Speak to papa!’ exclaimed Alicia; ‘you surely won’t distress papa by suggesting such a possibility!’
‘I shall only put him on his guard, my dear Alicia.’
‘But he’ll never believe you,’ said Miss Audley; ‘he will laugh at such an idea.’
‘No, Alicia; he will believe anything that I tell him,’ answered my lady, with a quiet smile.
CHAPTER XII
PREPARING THE GROUND
LADY AUDLEY went from the garden to the library, a pleasant oak-panelled homely apartment in which Sir Michael liked to sit reading or writing, or arranging the business of his estate with his steward, a stalwart countryman, half agriculturist, half lawyer, who rented a small farm a few miles from the Court.
The baronet was seated in a capacious easy-chair near the hearth. The bright blaze of the fire rose and fell, flashing now upon the polished prominences of the black-oak bookcase, now upon the gold and scarlet bindings of the books; sometimes glimmering upon the Athenian helmet of a marble Pallas, sometimes lighting up the forehead of Sir Robert Peel.*
The lamp upon the reading-table had not yet been lighted, and Sir Michael sat in the firelight waiting for the coming of his young wife.
It is impossible for me ever to tell the purity of his generous love—it is impossible to describe that affection which was as tender as the love of a young mother for her first-born, as brave and chivalrous as the heroic passion of a Bayard* for his liege mistress.
The door opened while he was thinking of this fondly-loved wife, and looking up, the baronet saw the slender form standing in the doorway.
‘Why, my darling!’ he exclaimed, as my lady closed the door behind her, and came towards his chair, ‘I have been thinking of you, and waiting for you for an hour. Where have you been, and what have you been doing?’
My lady, standing in the shadow rather than in the light, paused a few moments before replying to this question.
‘I have been to Chelmsford,’ she said, ‘shopping; and—’
She hesitated—twisting her bonnet-strings in her thin white fingers with an air of pretty embarrassment.
‘And what, my dear,’ asked the baronet—‘what have you been doing since you came from Chelmsford? I heard a carriage stop at the door an hour ago. It was yours, was it not?’
‘Yes, I came home an hour ago,’ answered my lady, with the same air of embarrassment.
‘And what have you been doing since you came home?’
Sir Michael Audley asked this question with a slightly reproachful accent. His young wife’s presence made the sunshine of his life, and though he could not bear to chain her to his side, it grieved him to think that she could willingly remain unnecessarily absent from him frittering away her time in some childish talk or frivolous occupation.
‘What have you been doing since you came home, my dear?’ he repeated. ‘What has kept you so long away from me?’
‘I have been talking—to—Mr Robert Audley.’
She still twisted her bonnet-string round and round her fingers. She still spoke with the same air of embarrassment.
‘Robert!’ exclaimed the baronet; ‘is Robert here?’
‘He was here a little while ago.’
‘And is here still, I suppose?’
‘No, he has gone away.’
‘Gone away!’ cried Sir Michael. ‘What do you mean, my darling?’
‘I mean that your nephew came to the Court this afternoon. Alicia and I found him idling about the gardens. He stayed here till about a quarter of an hour ago talking to me, and then he hurried off, without a word of explanation, except, indeed, some ridiculous excuse about business at Mount Stanning.’
‘Business at Mount Stanning! Why, what business can he possibly have in that out-of-the-way place? He has gone to sleep at Mount Stanning, then, I suppose?’
‘Yes, I think he said something to that effect.’
‘Upon my word,’ exclaimed the baronet, ‘I think that boy is half mad.’
My lady’s face was so much in shadow, that Sir Michael Audley was unaware of the bright change that came over its sickly pallor as he made this very common-place observation. A triumphant smile illumined Lucy Audley’s countenance, a smile that plainly said, ‘It is coming—it is coming; I can twist him which way I like. I can put black before him, and if I say it is white, he will believe me.’
But Sir Michael Audley, in declaring that his nephew’s wits were disordered, merely uttered that common-place ejaculation which is well known to have very little meaning. The baronet had, it is true, no very great estimate of Robert’s faculty for the business of this everyday life. He was in the habit of looking upon his nephew as a good-natured nonentity—a man whose heart had been amply stocked by liberal nature with all the best things the generous goddess had to bestow, but whose brain had been somewhat overlooked in the distribution of intellectual gifts. Sir Michael Audley made that mistake which is very commonly made by easygoing, well-to-do observers, who have no occasion to look below the surface. He mistook laziness for incapacity. He thought because his nephew was idle, he must necessarily be stupid. He concluded that if Robert did not distinguish himself it was because he could not.
He forgot the mute inglorious Miltons who die voiceless and inarticulate for want of that dogged perseverance, that blind courage, which the poet must possess before he can find a publisher; he forgot the Cromwells,* who see the noble vessel—political economy—floundering upon a sea of confusion, and going down in a tempest of noisy bewilderment, and who yet are powerless to get at the helm, forbidden even to send out a life-boat to the sinking ship. Surely it is a mistake to judge of what a man can do by that which he has done.
The world’s Valhalla* is a close borough, and perhaps the greatest men may be those who perish silently far away from the sacred portal. Perhaps the purest and brightest spirits are those who shrink from the turmoil of the race-course—the tumult and confusion of the struggle. The game of life is something like the game of écarté,* and it may be that the best cards are sometimes left in the pack.
My lady threw off her bonnet, and seated herself upon a velvet-covered footstool at Sir Michael’s feet. There was nothing studied or affected in this girlish action. It was so natural to Lucy Audley to be childish, that no one would have wished to see her otherwise. It would have seemed as foolish to expect dignified reserve or womanly gravity from this amber-haired syren, as to wish for rich basses in the clear treble of a skylark’s song.
She sat with her pale face turned away from the firelight, and with her hands locked together upon the arm of her husband’s easy-chair. They were very restless, these slender white hands. My lady twisted the jewelled fingers in and out of each other, as she talked to her husband.
‘I wanted to come to you, you know, dear,’ she said—‘I wanted to come to you directly I got home, but Mr Audley insisted upon my stopping to talk to him.’
‘But what about, my love?’ asked the baronet. ‘What could Robert have to say to you?’
My lady did not answer this question. Her fair head dropped upon her husband’s knee, her rippling yellow curls fell over her face.
Sir Michael lifted that beautiful head with his strong hands, and raised my lady’s face. The firelight shining on that pale face lit up the large, soft blue eyes which were drowned in tears.
‘Lucy, Lucy!’ cried the baronet, ‘what is the meaning of this? My love, my love, what has happened to distress you in this manner?’
Lady Audley tried to speak, but the words died
away inarticulately upon her trembling lips. A choking sensation in her throat seemed to strangle those false and plausible words, her only armour against her enemies. She could not speak. The agony she had endured silently in the dismal lime-walk had grown too strong for her, and she broke into a tempest of hysterical sobbing. It was no simulated grief that shook her slender frame, and tore at her like some ravenous beast that would have rent her piece-meal with its horrible strength. It was a storm of real anguish and terror, of remorse and misery. It was the one wild outcry, in which the woman’s feebler nature got the better of the syren’s art.
It was not thus that she had meant to fight her terrible duel with Robert Audley. These were not the weapons which she had intended to use; but perhaps no artifice which she could have devised would have served her so well as this one outburst of natural grief. It shook her husband to the very soul. It bewildered and terrified him. It reduced the strong intellect of the man to helpless confusion and perplexity. It struck at the one weak point in a good man’s nature. It appealed straight to Sir Michael Audley’s affection for his wife.
Ah, Heaven help a strong man’s tender weakness for the woman he loves. Heaven pity him when the guilty creature has deceived him and comes with her tears and lamentations to throw herself at his feet in self-abandonment and remorse, torturing him with the sight of her agony, rending his heart with her sobs, lacerating his breast with her groans. Multiplying her own sufferings into a great anguish for him to bear, multiplying them by twenty-fold, multiplying them in the ratio of a brave man’s capacity for endurance. Heaven forgive him if, maddened by that cruel agony, the balance wavers for a moment, and he is ready to forgive anything, ready to take this wretched one to the shelter of his breast, and to pardon that which the stern voice of manly honour urges must not be pardoned. Pity him, pity him. The wife’s worst remorse when she stands without the threshold of the home she may never enter more is not equal to the agony of the husband who closes the portal on that familiar and entreating face. The anguish of the mother who may never look again upon her children is less than the torment of the father who has to say to those children, ‘My little ones, you are henceforth motherless.’
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