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

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘We were married,’ my lady continued, ‘and I loved him very well, quite well enough to be happy with him as long as his money lasted, and while we were on the Continent, travelling in the best style and always staying at the best hotels. But when we came back to Wildernsea and lived with papa, and all the money was gone, and George grew gloomy and wretched, and was always thinking of his troubles, and appeared to neglect me, I was very unhappy; and it seemed as if this fine marriage had only given me a twelve-month’s gaiety and extravagance after all. I begged George to appeal to his father; but he refused. I persuaded him to try and get employment; and he failed. My baby was born, and the crisis which had been fatal to my mother arose for me. I escaped; but I was more irritable perhaps after my recovery; less inclined to fight the hard battle of the world; more disposed to complain of poverty and neglect. I did complain one day, loudly and bitterly. I upbraided George Talboys for his cruelty in having allied a helpless girl to poverty and misery; and he flew into a passion with me and ran out of the house. When I awoke the next morning I found a letter lying on the table by my bed, telling me that he was going to the Antipodes to seek his fortune, and that he would never see me again until he was a rich man.

  ‘I looked upon this as a desertion, and I resented it bitterly—I resented it by hating the man who had left me with no protector but a weak, tipsy father, and with a child to support. I had to work hard for my living, and in every hour of labour—and what labour is more wearisome than the dull slavery of a governess?—I recognised a separate wrong done me by George Talboys. His father was rich; his sister was living in luxury and respectability; and I, his wife, and the mother of his son, was a slave allied for ever to beggary and obscurity. People pitied me; and I hated them for their pity. I did not love the child; for he had been left a burden upon my hands. The hereditary taint that was in my blood had never until this time showed itself by any one sign or token; but at this time I became subject to fits of violence and despair. At this time I think my mind first lost its balance, and for the first time I crossed that invisible line which separates reason from madness. I have seen my father’s eyes fixed upon me in horror and alarm. I have known him soothe me as only mad people and children are soothed, and I have chafed against his petty devices, I have resented even his indulgence.

  ‘At last these fits of desperation resolved themselves into a desperate purpose. I determined to run away from this wretched home which my slavery supported. I determined to desert this father who had more fear of me than love for me. I determined to go to London, and lose myself in that great chaos of humanity.

  ‘I had seen an advertisement in the Times while I was at Wildernsea, and I presented myself to Mrs Vincent, the advertiser, under a feigned name. She accepted me, waiving all question as to my antecedents. You know the rest. I came here, and you made me an offer, the acceptance of which would lift me at once into the sphere to which my ambition had pointed ever since I was a school-girl, and heard for the first time that I was pretty.

  ‘Three years had passed, and I had received no token of my husband’s existence; for I argued that if he had returned to England, he would have succeeded in finding me under any name and in any place. I knew the energy of his character well enough to know this.

  ‘I said, “I have a right to think that he is dead, or that he wishes me to believe him dead, and his shadow shall not stand between me and prosperity.” I said this, and I became your wife, Sir Michael, with every resolution to be as good a wife as it was in my nature to be. The common temptations that assail and shipwreck some women had no terror for me. I would have been your true and pure wife to the end of time, though I had been surrounded by a legion of tempters. The mad folly that the world calls love had never had any part in my madness; and here at least extremes met, and the vice of heartlessness became the virtue of constancy.

  ‘I was very happy in the first triumph and grandeur of my new position, very grateful to the hand that had lifted me to it. In the sunshine of my own happiness I felt, for the first time, in my life, for the miseries of others. I had been poor myself, and I was now rich, and could afford to pity and relieve the poverty of my neighbours. I took pleasure in acts of kindness and benevolence. I found out my father’s address and sent him large sums of money, anonymously, for I did not wish him to discover what had become of me. I availed myself to the full of the privilege your generosity afforded me. I dispensed happiness on every side. I saw myself loved as well as admired; and I think I might have been a good woman for the rest of my life, if fate would have allowed me to be so.

  ‘I believe that at this time my mind regained its just balance. I had watched myself very closely since leaving Wildernsea; I had held a check upon myself. I had often wondered, while sitting in the surgeon’s quiet family circle, whether any suspicion of that invisible hereditary taint had ever occurred to Mr Dawson.

  ‘Fate would not suffer me to be good. My destiny compelled me to be a wretch. Within a month of my marriage, I read in one of the Essex papers of the return of a certain Mr Talboys, a fortunate gold-seeker, from Australia. The ship had sailed at the time I read the paragraph. What was to be done?

  ‘I said just now that I knew the energy of George’s character. I knew that the man who had gone to the antipodes, and won a fortune for his wife, would leave no stone unturned in his efforts to find her. It was hopeless to think of hiding myself from him.

  ‘Unless he could be induced to believe that I was dead, he would never cease in his search for me.

  ‘My brain was dazed as I thought of my peril. Again the balance trembled; again the invisible boundary was passed; again I was mad.

  ‘I went down to Southampton and found my father, who was living there with my child. You remember how Mrs Vincent’s name was used as an excuse for this hurried journey, and how it was contrived that I should go with no other escort than Phœbe Marks, whom I left at the hotel while I went to my father’s house.

  ‘I confided to my father the whole secret of my peril. He was not very much shocked at what I had done, for poverty had perhaps blunted his sense of honour and principle. He was not very much shocked; but he was frightened; and he promised to do all in his power to assist me in my horrible emergency.

  ‘He had received a letter addressed to me at Wildernsea, by George, and forwarded from there to my father. This letter had been written within a few days of the sailing of the Argus, and it announced the probable date of the ship’s arrival at Liverpool. This letter gave us, therefore, data upon which to act.

  ‘We decided at once upon the first step. This was that on the date of the probable arrival of the Argus, or a few days later, an advertisement of my death should be inserted in the Times.

  ‘But almost immediately after deciding upon this, we saw that there were fearful difficulties in the carrying out of such a simple plan. The date of the death, and the place in which I died, must be announced, as well as the death itself. George would immediately hurry to that place, however distant it might be, however comparatively inaccessible, and the shallow falsehood would be discovered.

  ‘I knew enough of his sanguine temperament, his courage and determination, his readiness to hope against hope, to know that unless he saw the grave in which I was buried, and the register of my death, he would never believe that I was lost to him.

  ‘My father was utterly dumbfounded and helpless. He could only shed childish tears of despair and terror. He was of no use to me in this crisis.

  ‘I was hopeless of any issue out of my difficulty. I began to think that I must trust to the chapter of accidents; and hope that amongst other obscure corners of the earth, Audley Court might remain undreamt-of by my husband.

  ‘I sat with my father, drinking tea with him in his miserable hovel, and playing with the child, who was pleased with my dress and jewels, but quite unconscious that I was anything but a stranger to him. I had the boy in my arms, when a woman who attended him came to fetch him that she might make him more fit to
be seen by the lady, as she said.

  ‘I was anxious to know how the boy was treated, and I detained this woman in conversation with me, while my father dozed over the tea-table.

  ‘She was a pale-faced, sandy-haired woman, of about five-and-forty; and she seemed very glad to get the chance of talking to me as long as I pleased to allow her. She soon left off talking of the boy, however, to tell me her own troubles. She was in very great trouble, she told me. Her eldest daughter had been obliged to leave her situation from ill-health; in fact, the doctor said the girl was in a decline; and it was a hard thing for a poor widow who had seen better days to have a sick daughter to support, as well as a family of young children.

  ‘I let the woman run on for a long time in this manner, telling me the girl’s ailments, and the girl’s age, and the girl’s doctor’s stuff, and piety, and sufferings, and a great deal more. But I neither listened to her nor heeded her. I heard her, but only in a far-away manner, as I heard the traffic in the street, or the ripple of the stream at the bottom of it. What were this woman’s troubles to me? I had miseries of my own; and worse miseries than her coarse nature could ever have to endure. These sort of people always had sick husbands or sick children, and expected to be helped in their illnesses by the rich, It was nothing out of the common. I was thinking this; and I was just going to dismiss the woman with a sovereign for her sick daughter; when an idea flashed upon me with such painful suddenness that it sent the blood surging up to my brain, and set my heart beating, as it only beats when I am mad.

  ‘I asked the woman her name. She was a Mrs Plowson, and she kept a small general shop, she said, and only ran in now and then to look after Georgey, and to see that the little maid-of-all-work took care of him. Her daughter’s name was Matilda. I asked her several questions about this girl Matilda, and I ascertained that she was four-and-twenty, that she had always been consumptive, and that she was now, as the doctor said, going off in a rapid decline. He had declared that she could not last much more than a fortnight.

  ‘It was in three weeks that the ship that carried George Talboys was expected to anchor in the Mersey.

  ‘I need not dwell much upon this business. I visited the sick girl. She was fair and slender. Her description, carelessly given, might tally nearly enough with my own; though she bore no shadow of resemblance to me, except in these two particulars. I was received by the girl as a rich lady who wished to do her service. I bought the mother, who was poor and greedy, and who for a gift of money, more money than she had ever before received, consented to submit to anything I wished. Upon the second day after my introduction to this Mrs Plowson, my father went over to Ventnor, and hired lodgings for his invalid daughter and her little boy. Early the next morning he carried over the dying girl and Georgey, who had been bribed to call her “mamma.” She entered the house as Mrs Talboys; she was attended by a Ventnor medical man as Mrs Talboys; she died, and her death and burial were registered in that name. The advertisement was inserted in the Times, and upon the second day after its insertion George Talboys visited Ventnor, and ordered the tombstone which at this hour records the death of his wife, Helen Talboys.’

  Sir Michael Audley rose slowly, and with a stiff, constrained action, as if every physical sense had been benumbed by that one sense of misery.

  ‘I cannot hear any more,’ he said, in a hoarse whisper; ‘if there is anything more to be told, I cannot hear it. Robert, it is you who have brought about this discovery, as I understand. I want to know nothing more. Will you take upon yourself the duty of providing for the safety and comfort of this lady, whom I have thought my wife? I need not ask you to remember in all you do, that I have loved her very dearly and truly. I cannot say farewell to her. I will not say it until I can think of her without bitterness—until I can pity her; as I now pray that God may pity her this night.’

  Sir Michael walked slowly from the room. He did not trust himself to look at that crouching figure. He did not wish to see the creature whom he had cherished. He went straight to his dressing-room, rang for his valet, and ordered him to pack a portmanteau, and make all necessary arrangements for accompanying his master by the last up-train.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE HUSH THAT SUCCEEDS THE TEMPEST

  ROBERT AUDLEY followed his uncle into the vestibule after Sir Michael had spoken those few quiet words which sounded the death-knell of his hope and love. Heaven knows how much the young man had feared the coming of this day. It had come; and though there had been no great outburst of despair, no whirlwind of stormy grief, no loud tempest of anguish and tears, Robert took no comforting thought from the unnatural stillness. He knew enough to know that Sir Michael Audley went away with the barbed arrow, which his nephew’s hand had sent home to its aim, rankling in his tortured heart; he knew that this strange and icy calm was the first numbness of a heart stricken by a grief so unexpected as for a time to be rendered almost incomprehensible by a blank stupor of astonishment. He knew that when this dull quiet had passed away, when little by little, and one by one, each horrible feature of the sufferer’s sorrow became first dimly apparent and then terribly familiar to him, the storm would burst in fatal fury, and tempests of tears and cruel thunder-claps of agony would rend that generous heart.

  Robert had heard of cases in which men of his uncle’s age had borne some great grief, as Sir Michael had borne this, with a strange quiet; and had gone away from those who would have comforted them, and whose anxieties have been relieved by this patient stillness, to fall down upon the ground and die under the blow which at first had only stunned them. He remembered cases in which paralysis and apoplexy had stricken men as strong as his uncle in the first hour of the horrible affliction; and he lingered in the lamp-lit vestibule, wondering whether it was not his duty to be with Sir Michael—to be near him, in case of any emergency, and to accompany him wherever he went.

  Yet, would it be wise to force himself upon that grey-headed sufferer in this cruel hour, in which he had been awakened from the one delusion of a blameless life to discover that he had been the dupe of a false face, and the fool of a nature which was too coldly mercenary, too cruelly heartless, to be sensible of its own infamy?

  ‘No,’ thought Robert Audley, ‘I will not intrude upon the anguish of this wounded heart. There is humiliation mingled with this bitter grief. It is better he should fight the battle alone. I have done what I believe to have been my solemn duty, yet I should scarcely wonder if I had rendered myself for ever hateful to him. It is better he should fight the battle alone. I can do nothing to make the strife less terrible. Better that it should be fought alone.’

  While the young man stood with his hand upon the library door, still half doubtful whether he should follow his uncle or re-enter the room in which he had left that more wretched creature whom it had been his business to unmask, Alicia Audley opened the dining-room door, and revealed to him the old-fashioned oak-panelled apartment, the long table covered with snowy damask, and bright with a cheerful glitter of glass and silver.

  ‘Is papa coming to dinner?’ asked Miss Audley. ‘I’m so hungry; and poor Tomlins has sent up three times to say the fish will be spoiled. It must be reduced to a species of isinglass* soup by this time, I should think,’ added the young lady, as she came out into the vestibule with the Times newspaper in her hand.

  She had been sitting by the fire reading the paper, and waiting for her seniors to join her at the dinner-table.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Mr Robert Audley,’ she remarked, indifferently. ‘You dine with us, of course. Pray go and find papa. It must be nearly eight o’clock, and we are supposed to dine at six.’

  Mr Audley answered his cousin rather sternly. Her frivolous manner jarred upon him, and he forgot in his irrational displeasure that Miss Audley had known nothing of the terrible drama which had been so long enacting under her very nose.

  ‘Your papa has just endured a very great grief, Alicia,’ the young man said, gravely.

  The girl’s arch, laughi
ng face changed in a moment to a tenderly earnest look of sorrow and anxiety. Alicia Audley loved her father very dearly.

  ‘A grief!’ she exclaimed; ‘papa grieved? Oh! Robert, what has happened?’

  ‘I can tell you nothing yet, Alicia,’ Robert answered, in a low voice.

  He took his cousin by the wrist, and drew her into the dining-room as he spoke. He closed the door carefully behind him before he continued: —

  ‘Alicia, can I trust you?’ he asked, earnestly.

  ‘Trust me to do what?’

  ‘To be a comfort and a friend to your poor father under a very heavy affliction.’

  ‘YES!’ cried Alicia, passionately. ‘How can you ask me such a question? Do you think there is anything I would not do to lighten any sorrow of my father’s? Do you think there is anything I would not suffer if my suffering could lighten his?’

  The rushing tears rose to Miss Audley’s bright grey eyes as she spoke.

  ‘Oh, Robert! Robert! could you think so badly of me as to think that I would not try to be a comfort to my father in his grief?’ she said, reproachfully.

  ‘No, no, my dear,’ answered the young man, quietly, ‘I never doubted your affection, I only doubted your discretion. May I rely upon that?’

  ‘You may, Robert,’ said Alicia, resolutely.

  ‘Very well, then, my dear girl, I will trust you. Your father is going to leave the Court, for a time at least. The grief which he has just endured—a sudden and an unlooked-for sorrow, remember—has no doubt made this place hateful to him. He is going away; but he must not go alone, must he, Alicia?’