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

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Robert Audley shrank strangely from returning to Essex. How should he meet Clara Talboys now that he knew the secret of her brother’s fate? How many lies he should have to tell, or how much equivocation he must use in order to keep the truth from her? Yet would there be any mercy in telling her that horrible story, the knowledge of which must cast a blight upon her youth, and blot out every hope she had ever secretly cherished? He knew by his own experience how possible it was to hope against hope, and to hope unconsciously; and he could not bear that her heart should be crushed as his had been by the knowledge of the truth. ‘Better that she should hope vainly to the last,’ he thought; ‘better that she should go through life seeking the clue to her lost brother’s fate, than that I should give that clue into her hands and say, “Our worst fears are realised. The brother you loved has been foully murdered in the early promise of his youth.”’

  But Clara Talboys had written to him imploring him to return to Essex without delay. Could he refuse to do her bidding, however painful its accomplishment might be? And again, the man was dying, perhaps, and had implored to see him. Would it not be cruel to refuse to go, to delay an hour unnecessarily? He looked at his watch. It wanted only five minutes to nine. There was no train to Audley after the Ipswich mail, which left London at half-past eight; but there was a train that left Shoreditch at eleven, and stopped at Brentwood between twelve and one. Robert decided upon going by this train, and walking the distance between Brentwood and Audley, which was upwards of six miles.

  He had a long time to wait before it would be necessary to leave the Temple on his way to Shoreditch, and he sat brooding darkly over the fire and wondering at the strange events which had filled his life within the last year and a half, coming like angry shadows between his lazy inclinations and himself, and investing him with purposes that were not his own.

  ‘Good heavens!’ he thought, as he smoked his second pipe, ‘how can I believe that it was I who used to lounge all day in this easy chair reading Paul de Kock,* and smoking mild Turkish, who used to drop in at half-price to stand amongst the press men at the back of the boxes, and see a new burlesque, and finish the evening with the “Chough and Crow,”* and chops and pale ale at Evans’s? Was it I to whom life was such an easy merry-go-round? Was it I who was one of the boys who sit at ease upon the wooden horses, while other boys run barefoot in the mud, and work their hardest in the hope of a ride when their work is done? Heaven knows I have learnt the business of life since then; and now I must needs fall in love and swell the tragic chorus which is always being sung by the poor addition of my pitiful sighs and groans. Clara Talboys! Clara Talboys! Is there any merciful smile latent beneath the earnest light of your brown eyes? What would you say to me if I told you that I love you as earnestly and truly as I have mourned for your brother’s fate—that the new strength and purpose of my life which has grown out of my friendship for the murdered man grows even stronger as it turns to you, and changes me until I wonder at myself? What would she say to me? Ah! Heaven knows. If she happened to like the colour of my hair, or the tone of my voice, she might listen to me, perhaps. But would she hear me any more because I love her truly and purely; because I would be constant, and honest, and faithful to her? Not she! These things might move her, perhaps, to be a little pitiful to me; but they would move her no more! If a girl with freckles and white eyelashes adored me, I should only think her a nuisance; but if Clara Talboys had a fancy to trample upon my uncouth person I should think she did me a favour. I hope poor little Alicia may pick up with some fair-haired Saxon in the course of her travels. I hope—’ His thoughts wandered away wearily, and lost themselves. How could he hope for anything, or think of anything, while the memory of his dead friend’s unburied body haunted him like a horrible spectre? He remembered a story—a morbid, hideous, yet delicious story, which had once pleasantly congealed his blood on a social winter’s evening—the story of a man, a monomaniac, perhaps, who had been haunted at every turn by the image of an unburied kinsman who could not rest in his unhallowed hiding-place.* What if that dreadful story had its double in reality? What if he were henceforth to be haunted by the phantom of murdered George Talboys?

  He pushed his hair away from his face with both his hands, and looked rather nervously around the snug little apartment. There were lurking shadows in the corners of the room that he scarcely liked. The door opening into his little dressing-room was ajar; he got up to shut it, and turned the key in the lock with a sharp click.

  ‘I haven’t read Alexandre Dumas and Wilkie Collins* for nothing,’ he muttered. ‘I’m up to their tricks, sneaking in at doors behind a fellow’s back, and flattening their white faces against window panes, and making themselves all eyes in the twilight. It’s a strange thing that your generous-hearted fellow, who never did a shabby thing in his life, is capable of any meanness the moment he becomes a ghost. I’ll have the gas laid on to-morrow, and engage Mrs Malony’s eldest son to sleep under the letter-box in the lobby. The youth plays popular melodies upon a piece of tissue paper and a small-tooth comb, and will be quite pleasant company.’

  Mr Audley walked wearily up and down the room, trying to get rid of the time. It was no use leaving the Temple until ten o’clock, and even then he would be sure to reach the station half an hour too early. He was tired of smoking. The soothing narcotic influence might be pleasant enough in itself, but the man must be of a singularly unsocial disposition who does not, after half a dozen lonely pipes, feel the need of some friendly companion, at whom he can stare dreamily athwart the pale grey mists, and who will stare kindly back at him in return. Do not think that Robert Audley was without friends, because he so often found himself alone in his quiet chambers. The solemn purpose which had taken so powerful a hold upon his careless life had separated him from old associations, and it was for this reason that he was alone. He had dropped away from his old friends. How could he sit amongst them, at social wine parties, perhaps, or at pleasant little dinners, that were washed down with Nonpareil and Chambertin, Pomard and Champagne?* How could he sit amongst them, listening to their careless talk of politics and opera, literature and racing, theatres and science, scandal, and theology, and yet carry in his mind the horrible burden of those dark terrors and suspicions that were with him by day and night? He could not do it! He had shrunk from these men as if he had, indeed, been a detective police officer, stained with vile associations, and unfit company for honest gentlemen. He had drawn himself away from all familiar haunts, and had shut himself in his lonely rooms with the perpetual trouble of his mind for his sole companion, until he had grown as nervous as habitual solitude will eventually make the strongest and the wisest man, however he may vaunt himself of his strength and wisdom.

  The clock of the Temple Church and the clocks of St Dunstan’s, St Clement Danes, and a crowd of other churches, whose steeples uprear themselves above the housetops by the river, struck ten at last, and Mr Audley, who had put on his hat and overcoat nearly half an hour before, let himself out of the little lobby, and locked his door behind him. He mentally re-iterated his determination to engage ‘Parthrick,’ as Mrs Maloney’s eldest son was called by his devoted mother. The youth should enter upon his functions the very next night after, and if the ghost of hapless George Talboys should invade these gloomy apartments, the phantom must make its way across Patrick’s body before it could reach the inner chamber in which the proprietor of the premises slept.

  Do not laugh at poor Robert because he grew hypochondriacal, after hearing the horrible story of his friend’s death. There is nothing so delicate, so fragile, as that invisible balance upon which the mind is always trembling. Mad to-day and sane to-morrow.

  Who can forget that almost terrible picture of Dr Samuel Johnson?* The awful disputant of the club-room, solemn, ponderous, severe, and merciless, the admiration and the terror of humble Bozzy,* the stern monitor of gentle Oliver,* the friend of Garrick* and Reynolds* to-night: and before sunset to-morrow a weak miserable old man, discove
red by good Mr and Mrs Thrale, kneeling upon the floor of his lonely chamber, in an agony of childish terror and confusion, and praying to a merciful God for the preservation of his wits.* I think the memory of that dreadful afternoon, and of the tender care he then received, should have taught the doctor to keep his hand steady at Streatham, when he took his bedroom candlestick, from which it was his habit to shower rivulets of molten wax upon the costly carpet of his beautiful protectress; and might have even had a more enduring effect, and taught him to be merciful, when the brewer’s widow went mad in her turn, and married that dreadful creature, the Italian singer.* Who has not been, or is not to be, mad in some lonely hour of life? Who is quite safe from the trembling of the balance?

  Fleet Street was quiet and lonely at this late hour, and Robert Audley being in a ghost-seeing mood would have been scarcely astonished had he seen Johnson’s set come roystering westward in the lamp-light, or blind John Milton groping his way down the steps before Saint Bride’s church.

  Mr Audley hailed a Hansom at the corner of Farringdon Street, and was rattled rapidly away across tenantless Smithfield market, and into a labyrinth of dingy streets that brought him out upon the broad grandeur of Finsbury Pavement.

  ‘Nobody ever saw a ghost in a Hansom cab,’ Robert thought, ‘and even Dumas hasn’t done that as yet. Not but that he’s capable of doing it if the idea occurred to him. Un revenant en fiacre.* Upon my word, the title doesn’t sound bad. The story would be something about a dismal gentleman, in black, who took the vehicle by the hour, and was contumacious upon the subject of fares, and beguiled the driver into lonely neighbourhoods, beyond the barriers, and made himself otherwise unpleasant.’

  The Hansom rattled up the steep and stony approach to the Shoreditch station, and deposited Robert at the doors of that unlovely temple. There were very few people going to travel by this midnight train, and Robert walked up and down the long wooden platform, reading the huge advertisements whose gaunt lettering looked wan and ghastly in the dim lamplight.

  He had the carriage in which he sat all to himself. All to himself, did I say? Had he not lately summoned to his side that ghostly company which of all companionship is the most tenacious? The shadow of George Talboys pursued him, even in the comfortable first-class carriage, and was behind him when he looked out of the window, and was yet far away ahead of him and the rushing engine, in that thicket towards which the train was speeding, by the side of the unhallowed hiding-place in which the mortal remains of the dead man lay, neglected and uncared for.

  ‘I must give my lost friend decent burial,’ Robert thought, as a chill wind swept across the flat landscape, and struck him with such frozen breath as might have emanated from the lips of the dead. ‘I must do it; or I shall die of some panic like this which has seized upon me tonight. I must do it; at any peril; at any cost. Even at the price of that revelation which will bring the mad woman back from her safe hiding-place, and place her in a criminal dock.’ He was glad when the train stopped at Brentwood at a few minutes after twelve. Only one other person got out at the little station,—a burly grazier, who had been to one of the theatres to see a tragedy. Country people always go to see tragedies. None of your flimsy vaudevilles for them! None of your pretty drawing-room, moderator lamp* and French window pieces, with a confiding husband, a frivolous wife, and a smart lady’s-maid, who is always accommodating enough to dust the furniture and announce visitors; no such gauzy productions; but a good monumental five act tragedy, in which their ancestors have seen Garrick and Mrs Abington,* and in which they themselves can remember the O’Neil,* the beautiful creature whose lovely neck and shoulders became suffused with a crimson glow of shame and indignation, when the actress was Mrs Beverley, and insulted by Stukeley* in her poverty and sorrow. I think our modern O’Neils scarcely feel their stage wrongs so keenly; or, perhaps, those brightly indignant blushes of to-day struggle ineffectually against the new art of Madame Rachel,* and are lost to the public beneath the lily purity of priceless enamel.

  Robert Audley looked hopelessly about him as he left the pleasant town of Brentwood, and descended the lonely hill into the valley which lay between the town he had left behind him and that other hill, upon which that frail and dismal tenement—the Castle Inn—had so long struggled with its enemy, the wind, only to succumb at last, and to be shrivelled and consumed away like a withered leaf, by the alliance of that old adversary with a newer and a fiercer foe.

  ‘It’s a dreary walk,’ Mr Audley said, as he looked along the smooth high road that lay before him, lonely as the track across a desert. ‘It’s a dreary walk for a dismal wretch to take between twelve and one, upon a cheerless March night, with not so much moonlight in all the black sky as might serve to convince one of the existence of such a luminary. But I’m very glad I came,’ thought the barrister, ‘if this poor creature is dying, and really wishes to see me. I should have been a wretch had I held back. Besides, she wishes it; she wishes it; and what can I do but obey her, Heaven help me!’

  He stopped by the wooden fence which surrounded the gardens of Mount Stanning rectory, and looked across a laurel hedge towards the lattice windows of that simple habitation. There was no glimmer of light in any one of these windows, and Mr Audley was fain to go away, after having had no better satisfaction than such cold comfort as was to be obtained from a long lingering contemplation of the house that sheltered the one woman before whose invincible power the impregnable fortress of his heart had surrendered. Only a heap of blackened ruins stood upon the spot on which the Castle Inn had once done battle with the winds of Heaven. The cold night breezes had their way with the few fragments that the fire had left, and whirled them hither and thither as they would, scattering a shower of dust and cinders and crumbling morsels of charred wood upon Robert Audley as he passed.

  It was half-past one o’clock when the night wanderer entered the village of Audley, and it was only there that he remembered that Clara Talboys had omitted to give him any direction by which he might find the cottage in which Luke Marks lay.

  ‘It was Dawson who recommended that the poor creature should be taken to his mother’s cottage,’ Robert thought, by-and-by, ‘and I dare say Dawson has attended him ever since the fire. He’ll be able to tell me the way to the cottage.’

  Acting upon this idea, Mr Audley stopped at the house in which Helen Talboys had lived before her second marriage. The door of the little surgery was ajar, and there was a light burning within. Robert pushed the door open and peeped in. The surgeon was standing at the mahogany counter, mixing a draught in a glass measure, with his hat close beside him. Late as it was, he had evidently only just come in. The harmonious snoring of his assistant sounded from a little room within the surgery.

  ‘I am sorry to disturb you, Mr Dawson,’ Robert said, apologetically, as the surgeon looked up and recognised him, ‘but I have come down to see Marks, who, I hear, is in a very bad way, and I want you to tell me the way to his mother’s cottage.’

  ‘I’ll show you the way, Mr Audley,’ answered the surgeon. ‘I am going there this minute.’

  ‘The man is very bad then?’

  ‘So bad that he can be no worse. The only change that can happen is that change which will take him beyond the reach of any earthly suffering.’

  ‘Strange!’ exclaimed Robert. ‘He did not appear to be much burnt.’

  ‘He was not much burnt. Had he been, I should never have recommended his being removed from Mount Stanning. It is the shock that has done the business. His health had been long undermined by habits of intoxication, and has completely given way under the sudden terror of that night. He has been in a raging fever for the last two days; but to-night he is much calmer, and I’m afraid, before tomorrow night, we shall have seen the last of him.’

  ‘He has asked to see me, I am told,’ said Mr Audley.

  ‘Yes,’ answered the surgeon, carelessly. ‘A sick man’s fancy, no doubt. You dragged him out of the house, and did your best to save his life. I da
re say, rough and boorish as the poor fellow is, he thinks a good deal of that.’

  They had left the surgery, the door of which Mr Dawson had locked behind him. There was money in the till, perhaps, for surely the village apothecary could not have feared that the most daring housebreaker would imperil his liberty in the pursuit of blue pill and colocynth, or salts and senna.*

  The surgeon led the way along the silent street, and presently turned into a lane at the end of which Robert Audley saw the wan glimmer of a light. A light which told of the watch that is kept by the sick and dying; a pale, melancholy light, which always has a dismal aspect when looked upon in this silent hour betwixt night and morning. It shone from the window of the cottage in which Luke Marks lay, watched by his wife and mother.

  Mr Dawson lifted the latch, and walked into the common room of the little tenement, followed by Robert Audley. It was empty, but a feeble tallow candle, with a broken back and a long, cauliflower-headed wick sputtered upon the table. The sick man lay in the room above.

  ‘Shall I tell him you are here?’ asked Mr Dawson.