Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [best ereader for comics txt] 📗

I thought so."

Meeting the young barrister's impatient frown, he made another effort, and the light glimmered again.

"Because I thought you or his father would fetch 'm away."

"When I was last in this house, Mr. Maldon, you told me that George Talboys had sailed for Australia."

"Yes, yes--I know, I know," the old man answered, confusedly, shuffling his scanty limp gray hairs with his two wandering hands--"I know; but he might have come back--mightn't he? He was restless, and--and--queer in his mind, perhaps, sometimes. He might have come back."

He repeated this two or three times in feeble, muttering tones; groping about on the littered mantle-piece for a dirty-looking clay pipe, and filling and lighting it with hands that trembled violently.

Robert Audley watched those poor, withered, tremulous fingers dropping shreds of tobacco upon the hearth rug, and scarcely able to kindle a lucifer for their unsteadiness. Then walking once or twice up and down the little room, he left the old man to take a few puffs from the great consoler.

Presently he turned suddenly upon the half-pay lieutenant with a dark solemnity in his handsome face.

"Mr. Maldon," he said, slowly watching the effect of every syllable as he spoke, "George Talboys never sailed for Australia--that I know. More than this, he never came to Southampton; and the lie you told me on the 8th of last September was dictated to you by the telegraphic message which you received on that day."

The dirty clay pipe dropped from the tremulous hand, and shivered against the iron fender, but the old man made no effort to find a fresh one; he sat trembling in every limb, and looking, Heaven knows how piteously, at Robert Audley.

"The lie was dictated to you, and you repeated your lesson. But you no more saw George Talboys here on the 7th of September than I see him in this room now. You thought you had burnt the telegraphic message, but you had only burnt a part of it--the remainder is in my possession."

Lieutenant Maldon was quite sober now.

"What have I done?" he murmured, hopelessly. "Oh, my God! what have I done?"

"At two o'clock on the 7th of September last," continued the pitiless, accusing voice, "George Talboys was seen alive and well at a house in Essex."

Robert paused to see the effect of these words. They had produced no change in the old man. He still sat trembling from head to foot, and staring with the fixed and solid gaze of some helpless wretch whose every sense is gradually becoming numbed by terror.

"At two o'clock on that day," remarked Robert Audley, "my poor friend was seen alive and well at ----, at the house of which I speak. From that hour to this I have never been able to hear that he has been seen by any living creature. I have taken such steps as _must_ have resulted in procuring the information of his whereabouts, were he alive. I have done this patiently and carefully--at first, even hopefully. Now I know that he is dead."

Robert Audley had been prepared to witness some considerable agitation in the old man's manner, but he was not prepared for the terrible anguish, the ghastly terror, which convulsed Mr. Maldon's haggard face as he uttered the last word.

"No, no, no, no," reiterated the lieutenant, in a shrill, half-screaming voice; "no, no! For God's sake, don't say that! Don't think it--don't let _me_ think it--don't let me dream of it! Not dead--anything but dead! Hidden away, perhaps--bribed to keep out of the way, perhaps; but not dead--not dead--not dead!"

He cried these words aloud, like one beside himself, beating his hands upon his gray head, and rocking backward and forward in his chair. His feeble hands trembled no longer--they were strengthened by some convulsive force that gave them a new power.

"I believe," said Robert, in the same solemn, relentless voice, "that my friend left Essex; and I believe he died on the 7th of September last."

The wretched old man, still beating his hands among his thin gray hair, slid from his chair to the ground, and groveled at Robert's feet.

"Oh! no, no--for God's, no!" he shrieked hoarsely. "No! you don't know what you say--you don't know what your words mean!"

"I know their weight and value only too well--as well as I see you do, Mr. Maldon. God help us!"

"Oh, what am I doing? what am I doing?" muttered the old man, feebly; then raising himself from the ground with an effort, he drew himself to his full hight, and said, in a manner which was new to him, and which was not without a certain dignity of his own--that dignity which must be always attached to unutterable misery, in whatever form it may appear--he said, gravely:

"You have no right to come here and terrify a man who has been drinking, and who is not quite himself. You have no right to do it, Mr. Audley. Even the--the officer, sir, who--who--." He did not stammer, but his lips trembled so violently that his words seemed to be shaken into pieces by their motion. "The officer, I repeat, sir, who arrests a--thief, or a--." He stopped to wipe his lips, and to still them if he could by doing so, which he could not. "A thief or a murderer--" His voice died suddenly away upon the last word, and it was only by the motion of those trembling lips that Robert knew what he meant. "Gives him warning, sir, fair warning, that he may say nothing which shall commit himself--or--or--other people. The--the--law, sir, has that amount of mercy for a--a--suspected criminal. But you, sir,--you come to my house, and you come at a time when--when--contrary to my usual habits--which, as people will tell you, are sober--you take the opportunity to--terrify me--and it is not right, sir--it is--"

Whatever he would have said died away into inarticulate gasps, which seemed to choke him, and sinking into a chair, he dropped his face upon the table, and wept aloud. Perhaps in all the dismal scenes of domestic misery which had been acted in those spare and dreary houses--in all the petty miseries, the burning shames, the cruel sorrows, the bitter disgraces which own poverty for their father--there had never been such a scene as this. An old man hiding his face from the light of day, and sobbing aloud in his wretchedness. Robert Audley contemplated the painful picture with a hopeless and pitying face.

"If I had known this," he thought, "I might have spared him. It would have been better, perhaps, to have spared him."

The shabby room, the dirt, the confusion, the figure of the old man, with his gray head upon the soiled tablecloth, amid the muddled _debris_ of a wretched dinner, grew blurred before the sight of Robert Audley as he thought of another man, as old as this one, but, ah! how widely different in every other quality! who might come by and by to feel the same, or even a worse anguish, and to shed, perhaps, yet bitterer tears. The moment in which the tears rose to his eyes and dimmed the piteous scene before him, was long enough to take him back to Essex, and to show him the image of his uncle, stricken by agony and shame.

"Why do I go on with this?" he thought; "how pitiless I am, and how relentlessly I am carried on. It is not myself; it is the hand which is beckoning me further and further upon the dark road, whose end I dare not dream of."

He thought this, and a hundred times more than this, while the old man sat with his face still hidden, wrestling with his anguish, but without power to keep it down.

"Mr. Maldon," Robert Audley said, after a pause, "I do not ask you to forgive me for what I have brought upon you, for the feeling is strong within me that it must have come to you sooner or later--if not through me, through some one else. There are--" he stopped for a moment hesitating. The sobbing did not cease; it was sometimes low, sometimes loud, bursting out with fresh violence, or dying away for an instant, but never ceasing. "There are some things which, as people say, cannot be hidden. I think there is truth in that common saying which had its origin in that old worldly wisdom which people gathered from experience and not from books. If--if I were content to let my friend rest in his hidden grave, it is but likely that some stranger who had never heard the name of George Talboys, might fall by the remotest accident upon the secret of his death. To-morrow, perhaps; or ten years hence, or in another generation, when the--the hand that wronged him is as cold as his own. If I _could_ let the matter rest; if--if I could leave England forever, and purposely fly from the possibility of ever coming across another clew to the secret, I would do it--I would gladly, thankfully do it--but I _cannot_! A hand which is stronger than my own beckons me on. I wish to take no base advantage of you, less than of all other people; but I must go on; I must go on. If there is any warning you would give to any one, give it. If the secret toward which I am traveling day by day, hour by hour, involves any one in whom you have an interest, let that person fly before I come to the end. Let them leave this country; let them leave all who know them--all whose peace their wickedness has endangered; let them go away--they shall not be pursued. But if they slight your warning--if they try to hold their present position in defiance of what it will be in your power to tell them--let them beware of me, for, when the hour comes, I swear that I will not spare them."

The old man looked up for the first time, and wiped his wrinkled face upon a ragged silk handkerchief.

"I declare to you that I do not understand you," he said. "I solemnly declare to you that I cannot understand; and I do not believe that George Talboys is dead."

"I would give ten years of my own life if I could see him alive," answered Robert, sadly. "I am sorry for you, Mr. Malden--I am sorry for all of us."

"I do not believe that my son-in-law is dead," said the lieutenant; "I do not believe that the poor lad is dead."

He endeavored in a feeble manner to show to Robert Audley that his wild outburst of anguish had been caused by his grief for the loss of George; but the pretense was miserably shallow.

Mrs. Plowson re-entered the room, leading little Georgey, whose face shone with that brilliant polish which yellow soap and friction can produce upon the human countenance.

"Dear heart alive!" exclaimed Mrs. Plowson, "what has the poor old gentleman been taking on about? We could hear him in the passage, sobbin' awful."

Little George crept up to his grandfather, and smoothed the wet and wrinkled face with his pudgy hand.

"Don't cry, gran'pa," he said, "don't cry. You shall have my watch to be cleaned, and the kind jeweler shall lend you the money to pay the taxman while he cleans the watch--I don't mind, gran'pa. Let's go to the jeweler, the jeweler in High street, you know, with golden balls painted upon his door, to show that he comes from Lombar--Lombardshire," said the boy, making a dash at the name. "Come,