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

>old man added with tipsy politeness, dropping into a chair as he spoke,

and trying to look steadily at his unexpected visitor.

 

“Whatever this man’s secrets are,” thought Robert, as Mrs. Plowson

hustled little George Talboys out of the room, “that woman has no

unimportant share of them. Whatever the mystery may be, it grows darker

and thicker at every step; but I try in vain to draw back or to stop

short upon the road, for a stronger hand than my own is pointing the way

to my lost friend’s unknown grave.”

 

CHAPTER XXI.

 

LITTLE GEORGEY LEAVES HIS OLD HOME.

 

“I am going to take your grandson away with me, Mr. Maldon,” Robert said

gravely, as Mrs. Plowson retired with her young charge.

 

The old man’s drunken imbecility was slowly clearing away like the heavy

mists of a London fog, through which the feeble sunshine struggles dimly

to appear. The very uncertain radiance of Lieutenant Maldon’s intellect

took a considerable time in piercing the hazy vapors of rum-and-water;

but the flickering light at last faintly glimmered athwart the clouds,

and the old man screwed his poor wits to the sticking-point.

 

“Yes, yes,” he said, feebly; “take the boy away from his poor old

grandfather; I always thought so.”

 

“You always thought that I should take him away?” scrutinizing the

half-drunken countenance with a searching glance. “Why did you think so,

Mr. Maldon?”

 

The fogs of intoxication got the better of the light of sobriety for a

moment, and the lieutenant answered vaguely:

 

“Thought so—‘cause 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. Tomorrow, 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