Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [world of reading .txt] 📗

then began to write:

 

“1. I write to Alicia, proposing to take George down to the Court.”

 

“2. Alicia writes, objecting to the visit, on the part of Lady Audley.”

 

“3. We go to Essex in spite of that objection. I see my lady. My lady

refuses to be introduced to George on that particular evening on the

score of fatigue.”

 

“4. Sir Michael invites George and me to dinner for the following

evening.”

 

“5. My lady receives a telegraphic dispatch the next morning which

summons her to London.”

 

“6. Alicia shows me a letter from my lady, in which she requests to be

told when I and my friend, Mr. Talboys, mean to leave Essex. To this

letter is subjoined a postscript, reiterating the above request.”

 

“7. We call at the Court, and ask to see the house. My lady’s apartments

are locked.”

 

“8. We get at the aforesaid apartments by means of a secret passage, the

existence of which is unknown to my lady. In one of the rooms we find

her portrait.”

 

“9. George is frightened at the storm. His conduct is exceedingly

strange for the rest of the evening.”

 

“10. George quite himself again the following morning. I propose leaving

Audley Court immediately; he prefers remaining till the evening.”

 

“11. We go out fishing. George leaves me to go to the Court.”

 

“12. The last positive information I can obtain of him in Essex is at

the Court, where the servant says he thinks Mr. Talboys told him he

would go and look for my lady in the grounds.”

 

“13. I receive information about him at the station which may or may not

be correct.”

 

“14. I hear of him positively once more at Southampton, where, according

to his father-in-law, he had been for an hour on the previous night.”

 

“15. The telegraphic message.”

 

When Robert Audley had completed this brief record, which he drew up

with great deliberation, and with frequent pauses for reflection,

alterations and erasures, he sat for a long time contemplating the

written page.

 

At last he read it carefully over, stopping at some of the numbered

paragraphs, and marking some of them with a pencil cross; then he folded

the sheet of foolscap, went over to a cabinet on the opposite side of

the room, unlocked it, and placed the paper in that very pigeon-hole

into which he had thrust Alicia’s letter—the pigeon-hole marked

Important.

 

Having done this, he returned to his easy-chair by the fire, pushed away

his desk, and lighted a cigar. “It’s as dark as midnight from first to

last,” he said; “and the clew to the mystery must be found either at

Southampton or in Essex. Be it how it may, my mind is made up. I shall

first go to Audley Court, and look for George Talboys in a narrow

radius.”

 

CHAPTER XIV.

 

PHOEBE’S SUITOR.

 

“Mr. George Talboys.—Any person who has met this gentleman since the

7th inst., or who possesses any information respecting him subsequent to

that date, will be liberally rewarded on communicating with A.Z., 14

Chancery Lane.”

 

Sir Michael Audley read the above advertisement in the second column of

the Times, as he sat at breakfast with my lady and Alicia two or three

days after Robert’s return to town.

 

“Robert’s friend has not yet been heard of, then,” said the baronet,

after reading the advertisement to his wife and daughter.

 

“As for that,” replied my lady, “I cannot help wondering that any one

can be silly enough to advertise for him. The young man was evidently of

a restless, roving disposition—a sort of Bamfyld Moore Carew of modern

life, whom no attraction could ever keep in one spot.”

 

Though the advertisement appeared three successive times, the party at

the Court attached very little importance to Mr. Talboys disappearance;

and after this one occasion his name was never again mentioned by either

Sir Michael, my lady, or Alicia.

 

Alicia Audley and her pretty stepmother were by no means any better

friends after that quiet evening on which the young barrister had dined

at the Court.

 

“She is a vain, frivolous, heartless little coquette,” said Alicia,

addressing herself to her Newfoundland dog Caesar, who was the sole

recipient of the young lady’s confidences; “she is a practiced and

consummate flirt, Caesar; and not contented with setting her yellow

ringlets and her silly giggle at half the men in Essex, she must needs

make that stupid cousin of mine dance attendance upon her. I haven’t

common patience with her.”

 

In proof of which last assertion Miss Alice Audley treated her

stepmother with such very palpable impertinence that Sir Michael felt

himself called upon to remonstrate with his only daughter.

 

“The poor little woman is very sensitive, you know, Alicia,” the baronet

said, gravely, “and she feels your conduct most acutely.”

 

“I don’t believe it a bit, papa,” answered Alicia, stoutly. “You think

her sensitive because she has soft little white hands, and big blue eyes

with long lashes, and all manner of affected, fantastical ways, which

you stupid men call fascinating. Sensitive! Why, I’ve seen her do cruel

things with those slender white fingers, and laugh at the pain she

inflicted. I’m very sorry, papa,” she added, softened a little by her

father’s look of distress; “though she has come between us, and robbed

poor Alicia of the love of that dear, generous heart, I wish I could

like her for your sake; but I can’t, I can’t, and no more can Caesar.

She came up to him once with her red lips apart, and her little white

teeth glistening between them, and stroked his great head with her soft

hand; but if I had not had hold of his collar, he would have flown at

her throat and strangled her. She may bewitch every man in Essex, but

she’d never make friends with my dog.”

 

“Your dog shall be shot,” answered Sir Michael angrily, “if his vicious

temper ever endangers Lucy.”

 

The Newfoundland rolled his eyes slowly round in the direction of the

speaker, as if he understood every word that had been said. Lady Audley

happened to enter the room at this very moment, and the animal cowered

down by the side of his mistress with a suppressed growl. There was

something in the manner of the dog which was, if anything, more

indicative of terror than of fury; incredible as it appears that Caesar

should be frightened by so fragile a creature as Lucy Audley.

 

Amicable as was my lady’s nature, she could not live long at the Court

without discovering Alicia’s dislike to her. She never alluded to it but

once; then, shrugging her graceful white shoulders, she said, with a

sigh:

 

“It seems very hard that you cannot love me, Alicia, for I have never

been used to make enemies; but since it seems that it must be so, I

cannot help it. If we cannot be friends, let us be neutral. You won’t

try to injure me?”

 

“Injure you!” exclaimed Alicia; “how should I injure you?”

 

“You’ll not try to deprive me of your father’s affection?”

 

“I may not be as amiable as you are, my lady, and I may not have the

same sweet smiles and pretty words for every stranger I meet, but I am

not capable of a contemptible meanness; and even if I were, I think you

are so secure of my father’s love, that nothing but your own act will

ever deprive you of it.”

 

“What a severe creature you are, Alicia!” said my lady, making a little

grimace. “I suppose you mean to infer by all that, that I’m deceitful.

Why, I can’t help smiling at people, and speaking prettily to them. I

know I’m no better than the rest of the world; but I can’t help it if

I’m pleasanter. It’s constitutional.”

 

Alicia having thus entirely shut the door upon all intimacy between Lady

Audley and herself, and Sir Michael being chiefly occupied in

agricultural pursuits and manly sports, which kept him away from home,

it was perhaps natural that my lady, being of an eminently social

disposition, should find herself thrown a good deal upon her

white-eyelashed maid for society.

 

Phoebe Marks was exactly the sort of a girl who is generally promoted

from the post of lady’s maid to that of companion. She had just

sufficient education to enable her to understand her mistress when Lucy

chose to allow herself to run riot in a species of intellectual

tarantella, in which her tongue went mad to the sound of its own rattle,

as the Spanish dancer at the noise of his castanets. Phoebe knew enough

of the French language to be able to dip into the yellow-paper-covered

novels which my lady ordered from the Burlington Arcade, and to

discourse with her mistress upon the questionable subjects of these

romances. The likeness which the lady’s maid bore to Lucy Audley was,

perhaps, a point of sympathy between the two women. It was not to be

called a striking likeness; a stranger might have seen them both

together, and yet have failed to remark it. But there were certain dim

and shadowy lights in which, meeting Phoebe Marks gliding softly through

the dark oak passages of the Court, or under the shrouded avenues in the

garden, you might have easily mistaken her for my lady.

 

Sharp October winds were sweeping the leaves from the limes in the long

avenue, and driving them in withered heaps with a ghostly rustling noise

along the dry gravel walks. The old well must have been half choked up

with the leaves that drifted about it, and whirled in eddying circles

into its black, broken mouth. On the still bosom of the fishpond the

same withered leaves slowly rotted away, mixing themselves with the

tangled weeds that discolored the surface of the water. All the

gardeners Sir Michael could employ could not keep the impress of

autumn’s destroying hand from the grounds about the Court.

 

“How I hate this desolate month!” my lady said, as she walked about the

garden, shivering beneath her sable mantle. “Every thing dropping to

ruin and decay, and the cold flicker of the sun lighting up the ugliness

of the earth, as the glare of gas-lamps lights the wrinkles of an old

woman. Shall I ever grow old, Phoebe? Will my hair ever drop off as the

leaves are falling from those trees, and leave me wan and bare like

them? What is to become of me when I grow old?”

 

She shivered at the thought of this more than she had done at the cold,

wintry breeze, and muffling herself closely in her fur, walked so fast

that her maid had some difficulty in keeping up with her.

 

“Do you remember, Phoebe,” she said, presently, relaxing her pace, “do

you remember that French story we read—the story of a beautiful woman

who had committed some crime—I forget what—in the zenith of her power

and loveliness, when all Paris drank to her every night, and when the

people ran away from the carriage of the king to flock about hers, and

get a peep at her face? Do you remember how she kept the secret of what

she had done for nearly half a century, spending her old age in her

family chateau, beloved and honored by all the province as an

uncanonized saint and benefactress to the poor; and how, when her hair

was white, and her eyes almost blind with age, the secret was revealed

through one of those strange accidents by which such secrets always are

revealed in romances, and she was tried, found guilty, and condemned to

be burned alive?