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

two gray

hairs in my head the week before last, and an impertinent crow has

planted a delicate impression of his foot under my right eye. Yes, I’m

getting old upon the right side; and why—why should it be so?”

 

He pushed away his plate and lifted his eyebrows, staring at the crumbs

upon the glistening damask, as he pondered the question.

 

“What the devil am I doing in this galere?” he asked. “But I am in it,

and I can’t get out of it; so I better submit myself to the brown-eyed

girl, and do what she tells me patiently and faithfully. What a

wonderful solution to life’s enigma there is in petticoat government!

Man might lie in the sunshine, and eat lotuses, and fancy it ‘always

afternoon,’ if his wife would let him! But she won’t, bless her

impulsive heart and active mind! She knows better than that. Who ever

heard of a woman taking life as it ought to be taken? Instead of

supporting it as an unavoidable nuisance, only redeemable by its

brevity, she goes through it as if it were a pageant or a procession.

She dresses for it, and simpers and grins, and gesticulates for it. She

pushes her neighbors, and struggles for a good place in the dismal

march; she elbows, and writhes, and tramples, and prances to the one end

of making the most of the misery. She gets up early and sits up late,

and is loud, and restless, and noisy, and unpitying. She drags her

husband on to the woolsack, or pushes him into Parliament. She drives

him full butt at the dear, lazy machinery of government, and knocks and

buffets him about the wheels, and cranks, and screws, and pulleys; until

somebody, for quiet’s sake, makes him something that she wanted him to

be made. That’s why incompetent men sometimes sit in high places, and

interpose their poor, muddled intellects between the things to be done

and the people that can do them, making universal confusion in the

helpless innocence of well-placed incapacity. The square men in the

round holes are pushed into them by their wives. The Eastern potentate

who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have

gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are

never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet. They are

Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joans of Arc, Queen Elizabeths, and

Catharines the Second, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamor

and desperation. If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball

with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of

domestic molehills, and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them

to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and

they’ll quarrel with Mrs. Jones about the shape of a mantle or the

character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to

utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the noisier, the

more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. They want freedom of

opinion, variety of occupation, do they? Let them have it. Let them be

lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, soldiers, legislators—anything

they like—but let them be quiet—if they can.”

 

Mr. Audley pushed his hands through the thick luxuriance of his straight

brown hair, and uplifted the dark mass in his despair.

 

“I hate women,” he thought, savagely. “They’re bold, brazen, abominable

creatures, invented for the annoyance and destruction of their

superiors. Look at this business of poor George’s! It’s all woman’s work

from one end to the other. He marries a woman, and his father casts him

off penniless and professionless. He hears of the woman’s death and he

breaks his heart—his good honest, manly heart, worth a million of the

treacherous lumps of self-interest and mercenary calculation which beats

in women’s breasts. He goes to a woman’s house and he is never seen

alive again. And now I find myself driven into a corner by another

woman, of whose existence I had never thought until this day. And—and

then,” mused Mr. Audley, rather irrelevantly, “there’s Alicia, too;

she’s another nuisance. She’d like me to marry her I know; and she’ll

make me do it, I dare say, before she’s done with me. But I’d much

rather not; though she is a dear, bouncing, generous thing, bless her

poor little heart.”

 

Robert paid his bill and rewarded the waiter liberally. The young

barrister was very willing to distribute his comfortable little income

among the people who served him, for he carried his indifference to all

things in the universe, even to the matter of pounds, shillings and

pence. Perhaps he was rather exceptional in this, as you may frequently

find that the philosopher who calls life an empty delusion is pretty

sharp in the investment of his moneys, and recognizes the tangible

nature of India bonds, Spanish certificates, and Egyptian scrip—as

contrasted with the painful uncertainty of an Ego or a non-Ego in

metaphysics.

 

The snug rooms in Figtree Court seemed dreary in their orderly quiet to

Robert Audley upon this particular evening. He had no inclination for

his French novels, though there was a packet of uncut romances, comic

and sentimental, ordered a month before, waiting his pleasure upon one

of the tables. He took his favorite meerschaum and dropped into his

favorite chair with a sigh.

 

“It’s comfortable, but it seems so deuced lonely tonight. If poor

George were sitting opposite to me, or—or even George’s sister—she’s

very like him—existence might be a little more endurable. But when a

fellow’s lived by himself for eight or ten years he begins to be bad

company.”

 

He burst out laughing presently as he finished his first pipe.

 

“The idea of my thinking of George’s sister,” he thought; “what a

preposterous idiot I am!”

 

The next day’s post brought him a letter in a firm but feminine hand,

which was strange to him. He found the little packet lying on his

breakfast-table, beside the warm French roll wrapped in a napkin by Mrs.

Maloney’s careful but rather dirty hands. He contemplated the envelope

for some minutes before opening it—not in any wonder as to his

correspondent, for the letter bore the postmark of Grange Heath, and he

knew that there was only one person who was likely to write to him from

that obscure village, but in that lazy dreaminess which was a part of

his character.

 

“From Clara Talboys,” he murmured slowly, as he looked critically at the

clearly-shaped letters of his name and address. “Yes, from Clara

Talboys, most decidedly; I recognized a feminine resemblance to poor

George’s hand; neater than his, and more decided than his, but very

like, very like.”

 

He turned the letter over and examined the seal, which bore his friend’s

familiar crest.

 

“I wonder what she says to me?” he thought. “It’s a long letter, I dare

say; she’s the kind of woman who would write a long letter—a letter

that will urge me on, drive me forward, wrench me out of myself, I’ve no

doubt. But that can’t be helped—so here goes!”

 

He tore open the envelope with a sigh of resignation. It contained

nothing but George’s two letters, and a few words written on the flap:

“I send the letters; please preserve and return them—C.T.”

 

The letter, written from Liverpool, told nothing of the writer’s life

except his sudden determination of starting for a new world, to redeem

the fortunes that had been ruined in the old. The letter written almost

immediately after George’s marriage, contained a full description of his

wife—such a description as a man could only write within three weeks of

a love match—a description in which every feature was minutely

catalogued, every grace of form or beauty of expression fondly dwelt

upon, every charm of manner lovingly depicted.

 

Robert Audley read the letter three times before he laid it down.

 

“If George could have known for what a purpose this description would

serve when he wrote it,” thought the young barrister, “surely his hand

would have fallen paralyzed by horror, and powerless to shape one

syllable of these tender words.”

 

CHAPTER XXV.

 

RETROGRADE INVESTIGATION.

 

The dreary London January dragged its dull length slowly out. The last

slender records of Christmas time were swept away, and Robert Audley

still lingered in town—still spent his lonely evenings in his quiet

sitting-room in Figtree Court—still wandered listlessly in the Temple

Gardens on sunny mornings, absently listening to the children’s babble,

idly watching their play. He had many friends among the inhabitants of

the quaint old buildings round him; he had other friends far away in

pleasant country places, whose spare bedrooms were always at Bob’s

service, whose cheerful firesides had snugly luxurious chairs specially

allotted to him. But he seemed to have lost all taste for companionship,

all sympathy with the pleasures and occupations of his class, since the

disappearance of George Talboys. Elderly benchers indulged in facetious

observations upon the young man’s pale face and moody manner. They

suggested the probability of some unhappy attachment, some feminine

ill-usage as the secret cause of the change. They told him to be of good

cheer, and invited him to supper-parties, at which “lovely woman, with

all her faults, God bless her,” was drunk by gentlemen who shed tears as

they proposed the toast, and were maudlin and unhappy in their cups

toward the close of the entertainment. Robert had no inclination for the

wine-bibbing and the punch-making. The one idea of his life had become

his master. He was the bonden slave of one gloomy thought—one horrible

presentiment. A dark cloud was brooding above his uncle’s house, and it

was his hand which was to give the signal for the thunder-clap, and the

tempest that was to ruin that noble life.

 

“If she would only take warning and run away,” he said to himself

sometimes. “Heaven knows, I have given her a fair chance. Why doesn’t

she take it and run away?”

 

He heard sometimes from Sir Michael, sometimes from Alicia. The young

lady’s letter rarely contained more than a few curt lines informing him

that her papa was well; and that Lady Audley was in very high spirits,

amusing herself in her usual frivolous manner, and with her usual

disregard for other people.

 

A letter from Mr. Marchmont, the Southampton schoolmaster, informed

Robert that little Georgey was going on very well, but that he was

behindhand in his education, and had not yet passed the intellectual

Rubicon of words of two syllables. Captain Maldon had called to see his

grandson, but that privilege had been withheld from him, in accordance

with Mr. Audley’s instructions. The old man had furthermore sent a

parcel of pastry and sweetmeats to the little boy, which had also been

rejected on the ground of indigestible and bilious tendencies in the

edibles.

 

Toward the close of February, Robert received a letter from his cousin

Alicia, which hurried him one step further forward toward his destiny,

by causing him to return to the house from which he had become in a

manner exiled at the instigation of his uncle’s wife,

 

“Papa is very ill,” Alicia wrote; “not dangerously ill, thank God; but

confined to his room by an attack of low fever which has succeeded a

violent cold. Come and see him, Robert, if you have any regard for your

nearest relations. He has spoken about you several times; and I know he

will be glad to have you with him. Come at once, but say nothing about

this letter.

 

“From your affectionate cousin, ALICIA.”

 

A sick and deadly terror chilled Robert Audley’s heart, as he read this

letter—a vague yet hideous fear, which he dared not shape into any

definite