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

done so,

he would have seen a yearning gaze which seemed as if it would have

pierced the far obscurity and looked away—away into another world.

 

“Lucy, you heard me?”

 

“Yes,” she said, gravely; not coldly, or in any way as if she were

offended at his words.

 

“And your answer?”

 

She did not remove her gaze from the darkening country side, but for

some moments was quite silent; then turning to him, with a sudden

passion in her manner, that lighted up her face with a new and wonderful

beauty which the baronet perceived even in the growing twilight, she

fell on her knees at his feet.

 

“No, Lucy; no, no!” he cried, vehemently, “not here, not here!”

 

“Yes, here, here,” she said, the strange passion which agitated her

making her voice sound shrill and piercing—not loud, but

preternaturally distinct; “here and nowhere else. How good you are—how

noble and how generous! Love you! Why, there are women a hundred times

my superiors in beauty and in goodness who might love you dearly; but

you ask too much of me! Remember what my life has been; only remember

that! From my very babyhood I have never seen anything but poverty. My

father was a gentleman: clever, accomplished, handsome—but poor—and

what a pitiful wretch poverty made of him! My mother—But do not let me

speak of her. Poverty—poverty, trials, vexations, humiliations,

deprivations. You cannot tell; you, who are among those for whom life is

so smooth and easy, you can never guess what is endured by such as we.

Do not ask too much of me, then. I cannot be disinterested; I cannot be

blind to the advantages of such an alliance. I cannot, I cannot!”

 

Beyond her agitation and her passionate vehemence, there is an undefined

something in her manner which fills the baronet with a vague alarm. She

is still on the ground at his feet, crouching rather than kneeling, her

thin white dress clinging about her, her pale hair streaming over her

shoulders, her great blue eyes glittering in the dusk, and her hands

clutching at the black ribbon about her throat, as if it had been

strangling her. “Don’t ask too much of me,” she kept repeating; “I have

been selfish from my babyhood.”

 

“Lucy—Lucy, speak plainly. Do you dislike me?”

 

“Dislike you? No—no!”

 

“But is there any one else whom you love?”

 

She laughed aloud at his question. “I do not love any one in the world,”

she answered.

 

He was glad of her reply; and yet that and the strange laugh jarred upon

his feelings. He was silent for some moments, and then said, with a kind

of effort:

 

“Well, Lucy, I will not ask too much of you. I dare say I am a romantic

old fool; but if you do not dislike me, and if you do not love any one

else, I see no reason why we should not make a very happy couple. Is it

a bargain, Lucy?”

 

“Yes.”

 

The baronet lifted her in his arms and kissed her once upon the

forehead, then quietly bidding her good-night, he walked straight out of

the house.

 

He walked straight out of the house, this foolish old man, because there

was some strong emotion at work in his breast—neither joy nor triumph,

but something almost akin to disappointment—some stifled and

unsatisfied longing which lay heavy and dull at his heart, as if he had

carried a corpse in his bosom. He carried the corpse of that hope which

had died at the sound of Lucy’s words. All the doubts and fears and

timid aspirations were ended now. He must be contented, like other men

of his age, to be married for his fortune and his position.

 

Lucy Graham went slowly up the stairs to her little room at the top of

the house. She placed her dim candle on the chest of drawers, and seated

herself on the edge of the white bed, still and white as the draperies

hanging around her.

 

“No more dependence, no more drudgery, no more humiliations,” she said;

“every trace of the old life melted away—every clew to identity buried

and forgotten—except these, except these.”

 

She had never taken her left hand from the black ribbon at her throat.

She drew it from her bosom, as she spoke, and looked at the object

attached to it.

 

It was neither a locket, a miniature, nor a cross; it was a ring wrapped

in an oblong piece of paper—the paper partly written, partly printed,

yellow with age, and crumpled with much folding.

 

CHAPTER II.

 

ON BOARD THE ARGUS.

 

He threw the end of his cigar into the water, and leaning his elbows

upon the bulwarks, stared meditatively at the waves.

 

“How wearisome they are,” he said; “blue and green, and opal; opal, and

blue, and green; all very well in their way, of course, but three months

of them are rather too much, especially—”

 

He did not attempt to finish his sentence; his thoughts seemed to wander

in the very midst of it, and carry him a thousand miles or so away.

 

“Poor little girl, how pleased she’ll be!” he muttered, opening his

cigar-case, lazily surveying its contents; “how pleased and how

surprised? Poor little girl. After three years and a half, too; she

will be surprised.”

 

He was a young man of about five-and-twenty, with dark face bronzed by

exposure to the sun; he had handsome brown eyes, with a lazy smile in

them that sparkled through the black lashes, and a bushy beard and

mustache that covered the whole lower part of his face. He was tall and

powerfully built; he wore a loose gray suit and a felt hat, thrown

carelessly upon his black hair. His name was George Talboys, and he was

aft-cabin passenger on board the good ship Argus, laden with

Australian wool and sailing from Sydney to Liverpool.

 

There were very few passengers in the aft-cabin of the Argus. An

elderly woolstapler returning to his native country with his wife and

daughters, after having made a fortune in the colonies; a governess of

three-and-thirty years of age, going home to marry a man to whom she had

been engaged fifteen years; the sentimental daughter of a wealthy

Australian wine-merchant, invoiced to England to finish her education,

and George Talboys, were the only first-class passengers on board.

 

This George Talboys was the life and soul of the vessel; nobody knew who

or what he was, or where he came from, but everybody liked him. He sat

at the bottom of the dinner-table, and assisted the captain in doing the

honors of the friendly meal. He opened the champagne bottles, and took

wine with every one present; be told funny stories, and led the life

himself with such a joyous peal that the man must have been a churl who

could not have laughed for pure sympathy. He was a capital hand at

speculation and vingt-et-un, and all the merry games, which kept the

little circle round the cabin-lamp so deep in innocent amusement, that a

hurricane might have howled overhead without their hearing it; but he

freely owned that he had no talent for whist, and that he didn’t know a

knight from a castle upon the chess-board.

 

Indeed, Mr. Talboys was by no means too learned a gentleman. The pale

governess had tried to talk to him about fashionable literature, but

George had only pulled his beard and stared very hard at her, saying

occasionally, “Ah, yes, by Jove!” and “To be sure, ah!”

 

The sentimental young lady, going home to finish her education, had

tried him with Shelby and Byron, and he had fairly laughed in her face,

as if poetry where a joke. The woolstapler sounded him on politics, but

he did not seem very deeply versed in them; so they let him go his own

way, smoke his cigars and talk to the sailors, lounge over the bulwarks

and stare at the water, and make himself agreeable to everybody in his

own fashion. But when the Argus came to be within about a fortnight’s

sail of England everybody noticed a change in George Talboys. He grew

restless and fidgety; sometimes so merry that the cabin rung with his

laughter; sometimes moody and thoughtful. Favorite as he was among the

sailors, they were tired at last of answering his perpetual questions

about the probable time of touching land. Would it be in ten days, in

eleven, in twelve, in thirteen? Was the wind favorable? How many knots

an hour was the vessel doing? Then a sudden passion would sieze him, and

he would stamp upon the deck, crying out that she was a rickety old

craft, and that her owners were swindlers to advertise her as the

fast-sailing Argus. She was not fit for passenger traffic; she was not

fit to carry impatient living creatures, with hearts and souls; she was

fit for nothing but to be laden with bales of stupid wool, that might

rot on the sea and be none the worse for it.

 

The sun was drooping down behind the waves as George Talboys lighted his

cigar upon this August evening. Only ten days more, the sailors had told

him that afternoon, and they would see the English coast. “I will go

ashore in the first boat that hails us,” he cried; “I will go ashore in

a cockle-shell. By Jove, if it comes to that, I will swim to land.”

 

His friends in the aft-cabin, with the exception of the pale governess,

laughed at his impatience; she sighed as she watched the young man,

chafing at the slow hours, pushing away his untasted wine, flinging

himself restlessly about upon the cabin sofa, rushing up and down the

companion ladder, and staring at the waves.

 

As the red rim of the sun dropped into the water, the governess ascended

the cabin stairs for a stroll on deck, while the passengers sat over

their wine below. She stopped when she came up to George, and, standing

by his side, watched the fading crimson in the western sky.

 

The lady was very quiet and reserved, seldom sharing in the after-cabin

amusements, never laughing, and speaking very little; but she and George

Talboys had been excellent friends throughout the passage.

 

“Does my cigar annoy you, Miss Morley?” he said, taking it out of his

mouth.

 

“Not at all; pray do not leave off smoking. I only came up to look at

the sunset. What a lovely evening!”

 

“Yes, yes, I dare say,” he answered, impatiently; “yet so long, so long!

Ten more interminable days and ten more weary nights before we land.”

 

“Yes,” said Miss Morley, sighing. “Do you wish the time shorter?”

 

“Do I?” cried George. “Indeed I do. Don’t you?”

 

“Scarcely.”

 

“But is there no one you love in England? Is there no one you love

looking out for your arrival?”

 

“I hope so,” she said gravely. They were silent for some time, he

smoking his cigar with a furious impatience, as if he could hasten the

course of the vessel by his own restlessness; she looking out at the

waning light with melancholy blue eyes—eyes that seemed to have faded

with poring over closely-printed books and difficult needlework; eyes

that had faded a little, perhaps, by reason of tears secretly shed in

the lonely night.

 

“See!” said George, suddenly, pointing in another direction from that

toward which Miss Morley was looking, “there’s the new moon!”

 

She looked up at the pale crescent, her own face almost as pale and wan.

 

“This is the first time we have seen it.”

 

“We must wish!” said George. “I know