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

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 gray eyes as she spoke.

"Oh, Robert! Robert! could you think so badly of me as to think 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 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?"

"Alone? no! no! But I suppose my lady--"

"Lady Audley will not go with him," said Robert, gravely; "he is about to separate himself from her."

"For a time?"

"No, forever."

"Separate himself from her forever!" exclaimed Alicia. "Then this grief--"

"Is connected with Lady Audley. Lady Audley is the cause of your father's sorrow."

Alicia's face, which had been pale before, flushed crimson. Sorrow, of which my lady was the cause--a sorrow which was to separate Sir Michael forever from his wife! There had been no quarrel between them--there had never been anything but harmony and sunshine between Lady Audley and her generous husband. This sorrow must surely then have arisen from some sudden discovery; it was, no doubt, a sorrow associated with disgrace. Robert Audley understood the meaning of that vivid blush.

"You will offer to accompany your father wherever he may choose to go, Alicia," he said. "You are his natural comforter at such a time as this, but you will best befriend him in this hour of trial by avoiding all intrusion upon his grief. Your very ignorance of the particulars of that grief will be a security for your discretion. Say nothing to your father that you might not have said to him two years ago, before he married a second wife. Try and be to him what you were before the woman in yonder room came between you and your father's love."

"I will," murmured Alicia, "I will."

"You will naturally avoid all mention of Lady Audley's name. If your father is often silent, be patient; if it sometimes seems to you that the shadow of this great sorrow will never pass away from his life, be patient still; and remember that there can be no better hope of a cure of his grief than the hope that his daughter's devotion may lead him to remember there is one woman upon this earth who will love him truly and purely until the last."

"Yes--yes, Robert, dear cousin, I will remember."

Mr. Audley, for the first time since he had been a schoolboy, took his cousin in his arms and kissed her broad forehead.

"My dear Alicia," he said, "do this and you will make me happy. I have been in some measure the means of bringing this sorrow upon your father. Let me hope that it is not an enduring one. Try and restore my uncle to happiness, Alicia, and I will love you more dearly than brother ever loved a noble-hearted sister; and a brotherly affection may be worth having, perhaps, after all, my dear, though it is very different to poor Sir Harry's enthusiastic worship."

Alicia's head was bent and her face hidden from her cousin while he spoke, but she lifted her head when he had finished, and looked him full in the face with a smile that was only the brighter for her eyes being filled with tears.

"You are a good fellow, Bob," she said; "and I've been very foolish and wicked to feel angry with you because--"

The young lady stopped suddenly.

"Because what, my dear?" asked Mr. Audley.

"Because I'm silly, Cousin Robert," Alicia said, quickly; "never mind that, Bob, I'll do all you wish, and it shall not be my fault if my dearest father doesn't forget his troubles before long. I'd go to the end of the world with him, poor darling, if I thought there was any comfort to be found for him in the journey. I'll go and get ready directly. Do you think papa will go to-night?"

"Yes, my dear; I don't think Sir Michael will rest another night under this roof yet awhile."

"The mail goes at twenty minutes past nine," said Alicia; "we must leave the house in an hour if we are to travel by it. I shall see you again before we go, Robert?"

"Yes, dear."

Miss Audley ran off to her room to summon her maid, and make all necessary preparations for the sudden journey, of whose ultimate destination she was as yet quite ignorant.

She went heart and soul into the carrying out of the duty which Robert had dictated to her. She assisted in the packing of her portmanteaus, and hopelessly bewildered her maid by stuffing silk dresses into her bonnet-boxes and satin shoes into her dressing-case. She roamed about her rooms, gathering together drawing-materials, music-books, needle-work, hair-brushes, jewelry, and perfume-bottles, very much as she might have done had she been about to sail for some savage country, devoid of all civilized resources. She was thinking all the time of her father's unknown grief, and perhaps a little of the serious face and earnest voice which had that night revealed her Cousin Robert to her in a new character.

Mr. Audley went up-stairs after his cousin, and found his way to Sir Michael's dressing-room. He knocked at the door and listened, Heaven knows how anxiously, for the expected answer. There was a moment's pause, during which the young man's heart beat loud and fast, and then the door was opened by the baronet himself. Robert saw that his uncle's valet was already hard at work preparing for his master's hurried journey.

Sir Michael came out into the corridor.

"Have you anything more to say to me, Robert?" he asked, quietly.

"I only came to ascertain if I could assist in any of your arrangements. You go to London by the mail?"

"Yes."

"Have you any idea of where you will stay."

"Yes, I shall stop at the Clarendon; I am known there. Is that all you have to say?"

"Yes; except that Alicia will accompany you?"

"Alicia!"

"She could not very well stay here, you know, just now. It would be best for her to leave the Court until--"

"Yes, yes, I understand," interrupted the baronet; "but is there nowhere else that she could go--must she be with me?"

"She could go nowhere else so immediately, and she would not be happy anywhere else."

"Let her come, then," said Sir Michael, "let her come."

He spoke in a strange, subdued voice, and with an apparent effort, as if it were painful to him to have to speak at all; as if all this ordinary business of life were a cruel torture to him, and jarred so much upon his grief as to be almost worse to bear than that grief itself.

"Very well, my dear uncle, then all is arranged; Alicia will be ready to start at nine o'clock."

"Very good, very good," muttered the baronet; "let her come if she pleases, poor child, let her come."

He sighed heavily as he spoke in that half pitying tone of his daughter. He was thinking how comparatively indifferent he had been toward that only child for the sake of the woman now shut in the fire-lit room below.

"I shall see you again before you go, sir," said Robert; "I will leave you till then."

"Stay!" said Sir Michael, suddenly; "have you told Alicia?"

"I have told her nothing, except that you are about to leave the Court for some time."

"You are very good, my boy, you are very good," the baronet murmured in a broken voice.

He stretched out his hand. His nephew took it in both his own, and pressed it to his lips.

"Oh, sir! how can I ever forgive myself?" he said; "how can I ever cease to hate myself for having brought this grief upon you?"

"No, no, Robert, you did right; I wish that God had been so merciful to me as to take my miserable life before this night; but you did right."

Sir Michael re-entered his dressing-room, and Robert slowly returned to the vestibule. He paused upon the threshold of that chamber in which he had left Lucy--Lady Audley, otherwise Helen Talboys, the wife of his lost friend.

She was lying upon the floor, upon the very spot in which she had crouched at her husband's feet telling her guilty story. Whether she was in a swoon, or whether she lay there in the utter helplessness of her misery, Robert scarcely cared to know. He went out into the vestibule, and sent one of the servants to look for her maid, the smart, be-ribboned damsel who was loud in wonder and consternation at the sight of her mistress.

"Lady Audley is very ill," he said; "take her to her room and see that she does not leave it to-night. You will be good enough to remain near her, but do not either talk to her or suffer her to excite herself by talking."

My lady had not fainted; she allowed the girl to assist her, and rose from the ground upon which she had groveled. Her golden hair fell in loose, disheveled masses about her ivory throat and shoulders, her face and lips were colorless, her eyes terrible in their unnatural light.

"Take me away," she said, "and let me sleep! Let me sleep, for my brain is on fire!"

As she was leaving the room with her maid, she turned and looked at Robert. "Is Sir Michael gone?" she asked.

"He will leave in half an hour."

"There were no lives lost in the fire at Mount Stanning?"

"None."

"I am glad of that."

"The landlord of the house, Marks, was very terribly burned, and lies in a precarious state at his mother's cottage; but he may recover."

"I am glad of that--I am glad no life was lost. Good-night, Mr. Audley."

"I shall ask to see you for half an hour's conversation in the course of to-morrow, my lady."

"Whenever you please. Good night."

"Good night."

She went away quietly leaning upon her maid's shoulder, and leaving Robert with a sense of strange bewilderment that was very painful to him.

He sat down by the broad hearth upon which the red embers were fading, and wondered at the change in that old house which, until the day of his friend's disappearance, had been so pleasant a home for all who sheltered beneath its hospitable roof. He sat brooding over the desolate hearth, and trying to decide upon what must be done in this sudden crisis. He sat helpless and powerless to determine upon any course of action, lost in a dull revery, from which he was aroused by the sound of carriage-wheels driving up to the little turret entrance.

The clock in the vestibule struck nine as Robert opened the library door. Alicia had just descended the stairs with her maid; a rosy-faced country girl.

"Good-by, Robert,"