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

avoided making any deductions from the

circumstances which he had submitted to George’s father. He had simply

told the story of the missing man’s life, from the hour of his arriving

in London to that of his disappearance; but he saw that Clara Talboys

had arrived at the same conclusion as himself, and that it was tacitly

understood between them.

 

“Have you any letters of your brother’s, Miss Talboys?” he asked.

 

“Two. One written soon after his marriage, the other written at

Liverpool, the night before he sailed for Australia.”

 

“Will you let me see them?”

 

“Yes, I will send them to you if you will give me your address You will

write to me from time to time, will you not, to tell me whether you are

approaching the truth. I shall be obliged to act secretly here, but I am

going to leave home in two or three months, and I shall be perfectly

free then to act as I please.”

 

“You are not going to leave England?” Robert asked.

 

“Oh no! I am only going to pay a long-promised visit to some friends in

Essex.”

 

Robert started so violently as Clara Talboys said this, that she looked

suddenly at his face. The agitation visible there, betrayed a part of

his secret.

 

“My brother George disappeared in Essex,” she said.

 

He could not contradict her.

 

“I am sorry you have discovered so much,” he replied. “My position

becomes every day more complicated, every day more painful. Good-bye.”

 

She gave him her hand mechanically, when he held out his; but it was

cold as marble, and lay listlessly in his own, and fell like a log at

her side when he released it.

 

“Pray lose no time in returning to the house,” he said earnestly. “I

fear you will suffer from this morning’s work.”

 

“Suffer!” she exclaimed, scornfully. “You talk to me of suffering, when

the only creature in this world who ever loved me has been taken from it

in the bloom of youth. What can there be for me henceforth but

suffering? What is the cold to me?” she said, flinging back her shawl

and baring her beautiful head to the bitter wind. “I would walk from

here to London barefoot through the snow, and never stop by the way, if

I could bring him back to life. What would I not do to bring him back?

What would I not do?”

 

The words broke from her in a wail of passionate sorrow; and clasping

her hands before her face, she wept for the first time that day. The

violence of her sobs shook her slender frame, and she was obliged to

lean against the trunk of a tree for support.

 

Robert looked at her with a tender compassion in his face; she was so

like the friend whom he had loved and lost, that it was impossible for

him to think of her as a stranger; impossible to remember that they had

met that morning for the first time.

 

“Pray, pray be calm,” he said: “hope even against hope. We may both be

deceived; your brother may still live.”

 

“Oh! if it were so,” she murmured, passionately; “if it could be so.”

 

“Let us try and hope that it may be so.”

 

“No,” she answered, looking at him through her tears, “let us hope for

nothing but revenge. Good-by, Mr. Audley. Stop; your address.”

 

He gave her a card, which she put into the pocket of her dress.

 

“I will send you George’s letters,” she said; “they may help you.

Good-by.”

 

She left him half bewildered by the passionate energy of her manner, and

the noble beauty of her face. He watched her as she disappeared among

the straight trunks of the fir-trees, and then walked slowly out of the

plantation.

 

“Heaven help those who stand between me and the secret,” he thought,

“for they will be sacrificed to the memory of George Talboys.”

 

CHAPTER XXIV.

 

GEORGE’S LETTERS.

 

Robert Audley did not return to Southampton, but took a ticket for the

first up town train that left Wareham, and reached Waterloo Bridge an

hour or two after dark. The snow, which had been hard and crisp in

Dorsetshire, was a black and greasy slush in the Waterloo Road, thawed

by the flaring lamps of the gin-palaces and the glaring gas in the

butchers’ shops.

 

Robert Audley shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the dingy streets

through which the Hansom carried him, the cab-man choosing—with that

delicious instinct which seems innate in the drivers of hackney

vehicles—all those dark and hideous thoroughfares utterly unknown to

the ordinary pedestrian.

 

“What a pleasant thing life is,” thought the barrister. “What an

unspeakable boon—what an overpowering blessing! Let any man make a

calculation of his existence, subtracting the hours in which he has been

thoroughly happy—really and entirely at his ease, without one

arriere pensee to mar his enjoyment—without the most infinitesimal

cloud to overshadow the brightness of his horizon. Let him do this, and

surely he will laugh in utter bitterness of soul when he sets down the

sum of his felicity, and discovers the pitiful smallness of the amount.

He will have enjoyed himself for a week or ten days in thirty years,

perhaps. In thirty years of dull December, and blustering March, and

showery April, and dark November weather, there may have been seven or

eight glorious August days, through which the sun has blazed in

cloudless radiance, and the summer breezes have breathed perpetual balm.

How fondly we recollect these solitary days of pleasure, and hope for

their recurrence, and try to plan the circumstances that made them

bright; and arrange, and predestinate, and diplomatize with fate for a

renewal of the remembered joy. As if any joy could ever be built up out

of such and such constituent parts! As if happiness were not essentially

accidental—a bright and wandering bird, utterly irregular in its

migrations; with us one summer’s day, and forever gone from us on the

next! Look at marriages, for instance,” mused Robert, who was as

meditative in the jolting vehicle, for whose occupation he was to pay

sixpence a mile, as if he had been riding a mustang on the wild

loneliness of the prairies. “Look at marriage! Who is to say which shall

be the one judicious selection out of nine hundred and ninety-nine

mistakes! Who shall decide from the first aspect of the slimy creature,

which is to be the one eel out of the colossal bag of snakes? That girl

on the curbstone yonder, waiting to cross the street when my chariot

shall have passed, may be the one woman out of every female creature in

this vast universe who could make me a happy man. Yet I pass her

by—bespatter her with the mud from my wheels, in my helpless ignorance,

in my blind submission to the awful hand of fatality. If that girl,

Clara Talboys, had been five minutes later, I should have left

Dorsetshire thinking her cold, hard, and unwomanly, and should have gone

to my grave with that mistake part and parcel of my mind. I took her for

a stately and heartless automaton; I know her now to be a noble and

beautiful woman. What an incalculable difference this may make in my

life. When I left that house, I went out into the winter day with the

determination of abandoning all further thought of the secret of

George’s death. I see her, and she forces me onward upon the loathsome

path—the crooked by-way of watchfulness and suspicion. How can I say to

this sister of my dead friend, ‘I believe that your brother has been

murdered! I believe that I know by whom, but I will take no step to set

my doubts at rest, or to confirm my fears’? I cannot say this. This

woman knows half my secret; she will soon possess herself of the rest,

and then—and then—”

 

The cab stopped in the midst of Robert Audley’s meditation, and he had

to pay the cabman, and submit to all the dreary mechanism of life, which

is the same whether we are glad or sorry—whether we are to be married

or hung, elevated to the woolsack, or disbarred by our brother benchers

on some mysterious technical tangle of wrong-doing, which is a social

enigma to those outside the forum domesticum of the Middle Temple.

 

We are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our life—this

unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the

human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the

mainspring be forever hollow, and the hands pointing to purposeless

figures on a shattered dial.

 

Who has not felt, in the first madness of sorrow, an unreasoning rage

against the mute propriety of chairs and tables, the stiff squareness of

Turkey carpets, the unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of

existence? We want to root up gigantic trees in a primeval forest, and

to tear their huge branches asunder in our convulsive grasp; and the

utmost that we can do for the relief of our passion is to knock over an

easy-chair, or smash a few shillings’ worth of Mr. Copeland’s

manufacture.

 

Madhouses are large and only too numerous; yet surely it is strange they

are not larger, when we think of how many helpless wretches must beat

their brains against this hopeless persistency of the orderly outward

world, as compared with the storm and tempest, the riot and confusion

within—when we remember how many minds must tremble upon the narrow

boundary between reason and unreason, mad to-day and sane tomorrow, mad

yesterday and sane to-day.

 

Robert Audley had directed the cabman to drop him at the corner of

Chancery Lane, and he ascended the brilliantly-lighted staircase leading

to the dining-saloon of The London, and seated himself at one of the

snug tables with a confused sense of emptiness and weariness, rather

than any agreeable sensation of healthy hunger. He had come to the

luxurious eating-house to dine, because it was absolutely necessary to

eat something somewhere, and a great deal easier to get a very good

dinner from Mr. Sawyer than a very bad one from Mrs. Maloney, whose mind

ran in one narrow channel of chops and steaks, only variable by small

creeks and outlets in the way of “broiled sole” or “boiled

mack’-_rill_.” The solicitous waiter tried in vain to rouse poor Robert

to a proper sense of the solemnity of the dinner question. He muttered

something to the effect that the man might bring him anything he liked,

and the friendly waiter, who knew Robert as a frequent guest at the

little tables, went back to his master with a doleful face, to say that

Mr. Audley, from Figtree Court, was evidently out of spirits. Robert ate

his dinner, and drank a pint of Moselle; but he had poor appreciation of

the excellence of the viands or the delicate fragrance of the wine. The

mental monologue still went on, and the young philosopher of the modern

school was arguing the favorite modern question of the nothingness of

everything, and the folly of taking too much trouble to walk upon a road

that went nowhere, or to compass a work that meant nothing.

 

“I accept the dominion of that pale girl, with the statuesque features

and the calm brown eyes,” he thought. “I recognize the power of a mind

superior to my own, and I yield to it, and bow down to it. I’ve been

acting for myself, and thinking for myself, for the last few months, and

I’m tired of the unnatural business. I’ve been false to the leading

principle of my life, and I’ve suffered for the folly. I found