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

isn’t he?” Robert asked, carelessly.

 

My lady burst into her pretty, gushing laugh.

 

“The dearest of good creatures,” she said. “He paid me five-and-twenty

pounds a year—only fancy, five-and-twenty pounds! That made six pounds

five a quarter. How well I remember receiving the money—six dingy old

sovereigns, and a little heap of untidy, dirty silver, that came

straight from the till in the surgery! And then how glad I was to get

it! While now—I can’t help laughing while I think of it—these colors

I am using cost a guinea each at Winsor & Newton’s—the carmine and

ultramarine thirty shillings. I gave Mrs. Dawson one of my silk dresses

the other day, and the poor thing kissed me, and the surgeon carried the

bundle home under his cloak.”

 

My lady laughed long and joyously at the thought. Her colors were mixed;

she was copying a water-colored sketch of an impossibly Turneresque

atmosphere. The sketch was nearly finished, and she had only to put in

some critical little touches with the most delicate of her sable

pencils. She prepared herself daintily for the work, looking sideways at

the painting.

 

All this time Mr. Robert Audley’s eyes were fixed intently on her pretty

face.

 

“It is a change,” he said, after so long a pause that my lady might

have forgotten what she had been talking of, “it is a change! Some

women would do a great deal to accomplish such a change as that.”

 

Lady Audley’s clear blue eyes dilated as she fixed them suddenly on the

young barrister. The wintry sunlight, gleaming full upon her face from a

side window, lit up the azure of those beautiful eyes, till their color

seemed to flicker and tremble betwixt blue and green, as the opal tints

of the sea change upon a summer’s day. The small brush fell from her

hand, and blotted out the peasant’s face under a widening circle of

crimson lake.

 

Robert Audley was tenderly coaxing the crumbled leaf of his cigar with

cautious fingers.

 

“My friend at the corner of Chancery Lane has not given me such good

Manillas as usual,” he murmured. “If ever you smoke, my dear aunt (and I

am told that many women take a quiet weed under the rose), be very

careful how you choose your cigars.”

 

My lady drew a long breath, picked up her brush, and laughed aloud at

Robert’s advice.

 

“What an eccentric creature you are, Mr. Audley I Do you know that you

sometimes puzzle me—”

 

“Not more than you puzzle me, dear aunt.”

 

My lady put away her colors and sketch book, and seating herself in the

deep recess of another window, at a considerable distance from Robert

Audley, settled to a large piece of Berlin-wool work—a piece of

embroidery which the Penelopes of ten or twelve years ago were very fond

of exercising their ingenuity upon—the Olden Time at Bolton Abbey.

 

Seated in the embrasure of this window, my lady was separated from

Robert Audley by the whole length of the room, and the young man could

only catch an occasional glimpse of her fair face, surrounded by its

bright aureole of hazy, golden hair.

 

Robert Audley had been a week at the Court, but as yet neither he nor my

lady had mentioned the name of George Talboys.

 

This morning, however, after exhausting the usual topics of

conversation, Lady Audley made an inquiry about her nephew’s friend;

“That Mr. George—George—” she said, hesitating.

 

“Talboys,” suggested Robert.

 

“Yes, to be sure—Mr. George Talboys. Rather a singular name, by-the-by,

and certainly, by all accounts, a very singular person. Have you seen

him lately?”

 

“I have not seen him since the 7th of September last—the day upon which

he left me asleep in the meadows on the other side of the village.”

 

“Dear me!” exclaimed my lady, “what a very strange young man this Mr.

George Talboys must be! Pray tell me all about it.”

 

Robert told, in a few words, of his visit to Southampton and his journey

to Liverpool, with their different results, my lady listening very

attentively.

 

In order to tell this story to better advantage, the young man left his

chair, and, crossing the room, took up his place opposite to Lady

Audley, in the embrasure of the window.

 

“And what do you infer from all this?” asked my lady, after a pause.

 

“It is so great a mystery to me,” he answered, “that I scarcely dare to

draw any conclusion whatever; but in the obscurity I think I can grope

my way to two suppositions, which to me seem almost certainties.”

 

“And they are—”

 

“First, that George Talboys never went beyond Southampton. Second, that

he never went to Southampton at all.”

 

“But you traced him there. His father-in-law had seen him.”

 

“I have reason to doubt his father-in-law’s integrity.”

 

“Good gracious me!” cried my lady, piteously. “What do you mean by all

this?”

 

“Lady Audley,” answered the young man, gravely, “I have never practiced

as a barrister. I have enrolled myself in the ranks of a profession, the

members of which hold solemn responsibilities and have sacred duties to

perform; and I have shrunk from those responsibilities and duties, as I

have from all the fatigues of this troublesome life. But we are

sometimes forced into the very position we have most avoided, and I have

found myself lately compelled to think of these things. Lady Audley, did

you ever study the theory of circumstantial evidence?”

 

“How can you ask a poor little woman about such horrid things?”

exclaimed my lady.

 

“Circumstantial evidence,” continued the young man, as if he scarcely

heard Lady Audley’s interruption—“that wonderful fabric which is built

out of straws collected at every point of the compass, and which is yet

strong enough to hang a man. Upon what infinitesimal trifles may

sometimes hang the whole secret of some wicked mystery, inexplicable

heretofore to the wisest upon the earth! A scrap of paper, a shred of

some torn garment, the button off a coat, a word dropped incautiously

from the overcautious lips of guilt, the fragment of a letter, the

shutting or opening of a door, a shadow on a window-blind, the accuracy

of a moment tested by one of Benson’s watches—a thousand circumstances

so slight as to be forgotten by the criminal, but links of iron in the

wonderful chain forged by the science of the detective officer; and lo!

the gallows is built up; the solemn bell tolls through the dismal gray

of the early morning, the drop creaks under the guilty feet, and the

penalty of crime is paid.”

 

Faint shadows of green and crimson fell upon my lady’s face from the

painted escutcheons in the mullioned window by which she sat; but every

trace of the natural color of that face had faded out, leaving it a

ghastly ashen gray.

 

Sitting quietly in her chair, her head fallen back upon the amber damask

cushions, and her little hands lying powerless in her lap, Lady Audley

had fainted away.

 

“The radius grows narrower day by day,” said Robert Audley. “George

Talboys never reached Southampton.”

 

CHAPTER XVI.

 

ROBERT AUDLEY GETS HIS CONGE.

 

The Christmas week was over, and one by one the country visitors dropped

away from Audley Court. The fat squire and his wife abandoned the gray,

tapestried chamber, and left the black-browed warriors looming from the

wall to scowl upon and threaten new guests, or to glare vengefully upon

vacancy. The merry girls on the second story packed, or caused to be

packed, their trunks and imperials, and tumbled gauze ball-dresses were

taken home that had been brought fresh to Audley. Blundering old family

chariots, with horses whose untrimmed fetlocks told of rougher work than

even country roads, were brought round to the broad space before the

grim oak door, and laden with chaotic heaps of womanly luggage. Pretty

rosy faces peeped out of carriage windows to smile the last farewell

upon the group at the hall door, as the vehicle rattled and rumbled

under the ivied archway. Sir Michael was in request everywhere. Shaking

hands with the young sportsmen; kissing the rosy-cheeked girls;

sometimes even embracing portly matrons who came to thank him for their

pleasant visit; everywhere genial, hospitable, generous, happy, and

beloved, the baronet hurried from room to room, from the hall to the

stables, from the stables to the courtyard, from the courtyard to the

arched gateway to speed the parting guest.

 

My lady’s yellow curls flashed hither and thither like wandering gleams

of sunshine on these busy days of farewell. Her great blue eyes had a

pretty, mournful look, in charming unison with the soft pressure of her

little hand, and that friendly, though perhaps rather stereotyped

speech, in which she told her visitors how she was so sorry to lose

them, and how she didn’t know what she should do till they came once

more to enliven the court by their charming society.

 

But however sorry my lady might be to lose her visitors, there was at

least one guest whose society she was not deprived of. Robert Audley

showed no intention of leaving his uncle’s house. He had no professional

duties, he said; Figtree Court was delightfully shady in hot weather,

but there was a sharp corner round which the wind came in the summer

months, armed with avenging rheumatisms and influenzas. Everybody was so

good to him at the Court, that really he had no inclination to hurry

away.

 

Sir Michael had but one answer to this: “Stay, my dear boy; stay, my

dear Bob, as long as ever you like. I have no son, and you stand to me

in the place of one. Make yourself agreeable to Lucy, and make the Court

your home as long as you live.”

 

To which Robert would merely reply by grasping his uncle’s hand

vehemently, and muttering something about “a jolly old prince.”

 

It was to be observed that there was sometimes a certain vague sadness

in the young man’s tone when he called Sir Michael “a jolly old prince;”

some shadow of affectionate regret that brought a mist into Robert’s

eyes, as he sat in a corner of the room looking thoughtfully at the

white-bearded baronet.

 

Before the last of the young sportsmen departed, Sir Harry Towers

demanded and obtained an interview with Miss Alicia Audley in the oak

library—an interview in which considerable emotion was displayed by the

stalwart young fox-hunter; so much emotion, indeed, and of such a

genuine and honest character, that Alicia fairly broke down as she told

him she should forever esteem and respect him for his true and noble

heart, but that he must never, never, unless he wished to cause her the

most cruel distress, ask more from her than this esteem and respect.

 

Sir Harry left the library by the French window opening into the

pond-garden. He strolled into that very lime-walk which George Talboys

had compared to an avenue in a churchyard, and under the leafless trees

fought the battle of his brave young heart.

 

“What a fool I am to feel it like this!” he cried, stamping his foot

upon the frosty ground. “I always knew it would be so; I always knew

that she was a hundred times too good for me. God bless her! How nobly

and tenderly she spoke; how beautiful she looked with the crimson

blushes under her brown skin, and the tears in her big, gray

eyes—almost as handsome as the day she took the sunk fence, and let me

put the brush in her hat as we rode home! God bless her! I can get over

anything as long as she doesn’t care for that sneaking