How pleasant it was to be lectured by the woman he loved! How pleasant it was to humiliate himself and depreciate himself before her! How delightful it was to get such splendid opportunities of hinting that if his life had been sanctified by an object, he might indeed have striven to be something better than an idle flâneur* upon the smooth pathways that have no particular goal; that, blessed by the ties which would have given a solemn purpose to every hour of his existence, he might indeed have fought the battle earnestly and unflinchingly. He generally wound up with a gloomy insinuation to the effect that it was only likely he would drop quietly over the edge of the Temple Gardens some afternoon, when the river was bright and placid in the low sunlight, and the little children had gone home to their tea.
‘Do you think I can read French novels and smoke mild Turkish until I am three-score-and-ten, Miss Talboys?’ he asked. ‘Do you think that there will not come a day in which my meerschaums will be foul, and the French novels more than usually stupid, and life altogether such a dismal monotony that I shall want to get rid of it somehow or other?’
I am sorry to say that while this hypocritical young barrister was holding forth in this despondent way, he had mentally sold up his bachelor possessions, including all Michel Lévy’s publications* and half a dozen solid silver-mounted meerschaums, pensioned off Mrs Maloney, and laid out two or three thousand pounds in the purchase of a few acres of verdant shrubbery and sloping lawn, embosomed amid which there should be a fairy cottage ornée,* whose rustic casements should glimmer to see themselves reflected in the purple bosom of a lake.
Of course Clara Talboys was far from discovering the drift of these melancholy lamentations. She recommended Mr Audley to read hard and think seriously of his profession, and begin life in real earnest. It was a hard, dry sort of existence perhaps which she recommended; a life of serious work and application, in which he should strive to be useful to his fellow-creatures, and win a reputation for himself. Mr Audley almost made a wry face at the thought of such a barren prospect.
‘I’d do all that,’ he thought, ‘and do it earnestly, if I could be sure of a reward for my labour. If she would accept my reputation when it was won, and support me in the struggle by her beloved companionship. But what if she sends me away to fight the battle, and marries some hulking country squire while my back is turned?’
Being naturally of a vacillating and dilatory disposition, there is no saying how long Mr Audley might have kept his secret, fearful to speak and break the charm of that uncertainty which, though not always hopeful, was very seldom quite despairing, had not he been hurried by the impulse of an unguarded moment into a full confession of the truth.
He had stayed five weeks at Grange Heath, and felt that he could not, in common decency, stay any longer; so he had packed his portmanteau one pleasant May morning, and had announced his departure.
Mr Talboys was not the sort of man to utter any passionate lamentations at the prospect of losing his guest, but he expressed himself with a cool cordiality which served with him as the strongest demonstration of friendship.
‘We have got on very well together, Mr Audley,’ he said, ‘and you have been pleased to appear sufficiently happy in the quiet routine of our orderly household; nay, more, you have conformed to our little domestic regulations in a manner which I cannot refrain from saying I take as an especial compliment to myself.’
Robert bowed. How thankful he was to the good fortune which had never suffered him to oversleep the signal of the clanging bell, or led him away beyond the ken of clocks at Mr Talboys’s luncheon hour!
‘I trust as we have got on so remarkably well together,’ Mr Talboys resumed, ‘you will do me the honour of repeating your visit to Dorsetshire whenever you feel inclined. You will find plenty of sport amongst my farms, and you will meet with every politeness and attention from my tenants, if you like to bring your gun with you.’
Robert responded most heartily to these friendly overtures. He declared that there was no earthly occupation that was more agreeable to him than partridge shooting, and that he should be only too delighted to avail himself of the privilege so kindly offered to him. He could not help glancing towards Clara as he said this. The perfect lids drooped a little over the brown eyes, and the faintest shadow of a blush illuminated the beautiful face.
But this was the young barrister’s last day in Elysium, and there must be a dreary interval of days and nights and weeks and months before the first of September would give him an excuse for returning to Dorsetshire. A dreary interval which fresh-coloured young squires or fat widowers of eight-and-forty might use to his disadvantage. It was no wonder, therefore, that he contemplated this dismal prospect with moody despair, and was bad company for Miss Talboys that morning.
But in the evening after dinner, when the sun was low in the west, and Harcourt Talboys closeted in his library upon some judicial business with his lawyer and a tenant farmer, Mr Audley grew a little more agreeable. He stood by Clara’s side in one of the long windows of the drawing-room watching the shadows deepening in the sky and the rosy light growing every moment rosier as the day died out. He could not help enjoying that quiet tête-à-tête, though the shadow of the next morning’s express which was to carry him away to London loomed darkly across the pathway of his joy. He could not help being happy in her presence; forgetful of the past, reckless of the future.
They talked of the one subject which was always a bond of union between them. They talked of her lost brother George. She spoke of him in a very melancholy tone this evening. How could she be otherwise than sad, remembering that if he lived—and she was not even sure of that—he was a lonely wanderer far away from all who loved him, and carrying the memory of a blighted life wherever he went? In the sombre twilight stillness she spoke of him thus, with her hands clasped and the tears trembling in her eyes.
‘I cannot think how papa can be so resigned to my poor brother’s absence,’ she said, ‘for he does love him, Mr Audley; even you must have seen lately that he does love him. But I cannot think how he can so quietly submit to his absence. If I were a man, I would go to Australia, and find him, and bring him back; if he was still to be found among the living,’ she added in a lower voice.
She turned her face away from Robert, and looked out at the darkening sky. He laid his hand upon her arm. It trembled in spite of him, and his voice trembled, too, as he spoke to her.
‘Shall I go to look for your brother?’ he said.
‘You!’ She turned her head, and looked at him earnestly through her tears. ‘You, Mr Audley! Do you think that I could ask you to make such a sacrifice for me, or for those I love?’
‘And do you think, Clara, that I should think any sacrifice too great an one if it were made for you? Do you think there is any voyage I would refuse to take, if I knew that you would welcome me when I came home, and thank me for having served you faithfully? I will go from one end of the Continent of Australia to the other to look for your brother, if you please, Clara; and will never return alive unless I bring him with me, and will take my chance of what reward you shall give me for my labour.’
Her head was bent, and it was some moments before she answered him.
‘You are very good and generous, Mr Audley,’ she said, at last, ‘and I feel this offer too much to be able to thank you for it. But—what you speak of could never be. By what right could I accept such a sacrifice?’
‘By the right which makes me your bounden slave for ever and ever, whether you will or no. By the right of the love I bear you, Clara,’ cried Mr Audley, dropping on his knees,—rather awkwardly, it must be confessed—and covering a soft little hand, that he had found half-hidden among the folds of a silken dress, with passionate kisses.
‘I love you, Clara,’ he said, ‘I love you. You may call for your father, and have me turned out of the house this moment, if you like; but I shall go on loving you all the same; and I shall love you for ever and ever, whether you will or no.’
The little hand was drawn away from his, but not with a sudden or angry gesture, and it rested for one moment lightly and tremulously upon his dark hair.
‘Clara, Clara!’ he murmured, in a low pleading voice, ‘shall I go to Australia to look for your brother?’
There was no answer. I don’t know how it is, but there is scarcely anything more delicious than silence in such cases. Every moment of hesitation is a tacit avowal; every pause is a tender confession.
‘Shall we both go, dearest? Shall we go as man and wife? Shall we go together, my dear love, and bring our brother back between us?’
Mr Harcourt Talboys, coming into the lamp-lit room a quarter of an hour afterwards, found Robert Audley alone, and had to listen to a revelation which very much surprised him. Like all self-sufficient people, he was tolerably blind to everything that happened under his nose, and he had fully believed that his own society, and the Spartan regularity of his household, had been the attractions which had made Dorsetshire delightful to his guest.
He was rather disappointed, therefore; but he bore his disappointment pretty well, and expressed a placid and rather stoical satisfaction at the turn which affairs had taken.
‘I have only one more point upon which I wish to obtain your consent, my dear sir,’ Robert said, when almost everything had been pleasantly settled. ‘Our honeymoon trip, with your permission, will be to Australia.’
Mr Talboys was taken aback by this. He brushed something like a tearful mist away from his hard grey eyes as he offered Robert his hand.
‘You are going to look for my son,’ he said. ‘Bring me back my boy, and I will freely forgive you for having robbed me of my daughter.’
So Robert Audley went back to London, to surrender his chambers in Fig-tree Court, and to make all due inquiries about such ships as sailed from Liverpool for Sydney in the month of June.
He went back a new man, with new hopes, new cares, new prospects, new purposes; with a life that was so entirely changed that he looked out upon a world in which everything wore a radiant and rosy aspect, and wondered how it could ever have seemed such a dull, neutral tinted universe.
He had lingered until after luncheon at Grange Heath, and it was in the dusky twilight that he entered the shady Temple courts and found his way to his chambers. He found Mrs Malony scrubbing the stairs, as was her wont upon a Saturday evening, and he had to make his way upward amidst an atmosphere of soapy steam, that made the banisters greasy under his touch.
‘There’s lots of letthers, yer honour,’ the laundress said, as she rose from her knees and flattened herself against the wall to enable Robert to pass her, ‘and there’s some parrcels. and there’s a gentleman which has called ever so many times, and is waitin’ to-night, for I towld him you’d written to me to say your rooms were to be airred.’
‘Very good, Mrs M.; you may get me some dinner and a pint of sherry as soon as you like, and see that my luggage is all right if you please.’
He walked quietly up to his room to see who his visitor was. He was not likely to be anybody of consequence. A dun,* perhaps; for he had left his affairs in the wildest confusion when he ran off in answer to Mr Talboys’ invitation, and had been much too high up in the sublime Heaven of love, to remember any such sublunary matters as unsettled tailors’ bills.
He opened the door of his sitting-room, and walked in. The canaries were singing their farewell to the setting sun, and the faint, yellow light was flickering upon the geranium leaves. The vistor, whoever he was, sat with his back to the window and his head bent upon his breast. But he started up as Robert Audley entered the room, and the young man uttered a great cry of delight and surprise, and opened his arms to his lost friend, George Talboys.
Mrs Malony had to fetch more wine and more dinner from the tavern which she honoured with her patronage, and the two young men sat deep into the night by the hearth which had so long been lonely.
We know how much Robert had to tell. He touched lightly and tenderly upon that subject which he knew was cruelly painful to his friend; he said very little of the wretched woman who was wearing out the remnant of her wicked life in the quiet suburb of the forgotten Belgian city.
George Talboys spoke very briefly of that sunny seventh of September, upon which he had left his friend sleeping by the trout stream while he went to accuse his false wife of that conspiracy which had well nigh broken his heart.
‘God knows that from the moment in which I sank into the black pit, knowing the treacherous hand that had sent me to what might have been my death, my chief thought was of the safety of the woman who had betrayed me. I fell upon my feet upon a mass of slush and mire, but my shoulder was bruised, and my arm broken against the side of the well. I was stunned and dazed for a few minutes, but I roused myself by an effort, for I felt that the atmosphere I breathed was deadly. I had my Australian experiences to help me in my peril, and I could climb like a cat. The stones of which the well was built were rugged and irregular, and I was able to work my way upwards by planting my feet in the interstices of the stones, and resting my back at times against the opposite side of the well, helping myself as well as I could with my hands, though one arm was crippled. It was hard work, Bob, and it seems strange enough that a man who had long professed himself weary of his life should take so much trouble to preserve it. I think I must have been working upwards of half an hour before I got to the top; I know the time seemed an eternity of pain and peril. It was impossible for me to leave the place until after dark without being observed, so I hid myself behind a clump of laurel bushes and laid down on the grass faint and exhausted to wait for nightfall. The man who found me there told you the rest, Robert.’
‘Yes, my poor old friend—yes, he told me all.’
George had never returned to Australia after all. He had gone on board the Victoria Regia, but had afterwards exchanged his berth for one in another vessel belonging to the same owners, and had gone to New York, where he had stayed as long as he could support the weariness of the exile; as long as he could endure the loneliness of an existence which separated him from every friend he had ever known.
‘Jonathan was very kind to me, Bob,’ he said; ‘I had enough money to enable me to get on pretty well in my own quiet way, and I meant to have started on the Californian gold-fields to get more when that was gone. I might have made plenty of friends had I pleased, but I carried the old bullet in my breast; and what sympathy could I have with men who knew nothing of my grief? I yearned for the strong grasp of your hand, Bob; the friendly touch of the hand which had guided me through the darkest passage of my life.’
CHAPTER X
AT PEACE
TWO years have passed since the May twilight in which Robert found his old friend; and Mr Audley’s dream of a fairy cottage had been realised between Teddington Lock and Hampton Bridge, where, amid a little forest of foliage, there is a fantastical dwelling-place of rustic woodwork, whose latticed windows look out upon the river. Here amongst the lilies and the rushes on the sloping bank, a brave boy of eight years old plays with a toddling baby who peeps wonderingly from its nurse’s arms at that other baby in the purple depth of the quiet water.
Mr Audley is a rising man upon the home circuit by this time, and has distinguished himself in the great breach of promise case of Hobbs v. Nobbs, and has convulsed the Court by his deliciously comic rendering of the faithless Nobbs’s amatory correspondence. The handsome dark-eyed boy is Master George Talboys, who declines musa at Eton, and fishes for tadpoles in the clear water under the spreading umbrage beyond the ivied walls of his academy. But he comes very often to the fairy cottage to see his father, who lives there with his sister and his sister’s husband; and he is very happy with his uncle Robert, his aunt Clara, and the pretty baby who has just begun to toddle on the smooth lawn that slopes down to the water’s brink, upon which there is a little Swiss boat-house and landing stage where Robert and George moor their slender wherries.*
Other people come to the cottage near Teddingt
on. A bright, merry-hearted girl, and a grey-bearded gentleman, who has survived the trouble of his life, and battled with it as a Christian should.
It is more than a year since a black-edged letter, written upon foreign paper, came to Robert Audley, to announce the death of a certain Madame Taylor, who had expired peacefully at Villebrumeuse, dying after a long illness, which Monsieur Val describes as a maladie de langueur.*
Another visitor comes to the cottage in this bright summer of 1861,—a frank, generous hearted young man, who tosses the baby, and plays with Georgey, and is especially great in the management of the boats, which are never idle when Sir Harry Towers is at Teddington.
There is a pretty rustic smoking-room over the Swiss boat-house, in which the gentlemen sit and smoke in the summer evenings, and whence they are summoned by Clara and Alicia to drink tea, and eat strawberries and cream upon the lawn.
Audley Court is shut up, and a grim old housekeeper reigns paramount in the mansion which my lady’s ringing laughter once made musical. A curtain hangs before the pre-Raphaelite portrait: and the blue mould which artists dread gathers upon the Wouvermans and Poussins, the Cuyps and Tintorettis. The house is often shown to inquisitive visitors, though the baronet is not informed of that fact, and people admire my lady’s rooms, and ask many questions about the pretty, fair-haired woman, who died abroad.
Sir Michael has no fancy to return to the familiar dwelling-place in which he once dreamed a brief dream of impossible happiness. He remains in London until Alicia shall be Lady Towers, when he is to remove to a house he has lately bought in Hertfordshire, on the borders of his son-in-law’s estate. George Talboys is very happy with his sister and his old friend. He is a young man yet, remember, and it is not quite impossible that he may by-and-by find some one who will be able to console him for the past. That dark story of the past fades little by little every day, and there may come a time in which the shadow my lady’s wickedness has cast upon the young man’s life, will utterly vanish away.
Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics) Page 51
