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

form.

 

“Have I done right?” he thought, in the first agony of this new

horror—“have I done right to tamper with justice; and to keep the

secret of my doubts in the hope that I was shielding those I love from

sorrow and disgrace? What shall I do if I find him ill, very ill, dying

perhaps, dying upon her breast! What shall I do?”

 

One course lay clear before him; and the first step of that course was a

rapid journey to Audley Court. He packed his portmanteau, jumped into a

cab, and reached the railway station within an hour of his receipt of

Alicia’s letter, which had come by the afternoon post.

 

The dim village lights flickered faintly through the growing dusk when

Robert reached Audley. He left his portmanteau with the station-master,

and walked at a leisurely pace through the quiet lanes that led away to

the still loneliness of the Court. The overarching trees stretched

their leafless branches above his head, bare and weird in the dusky

light. A low moaning wind swept across the flat meadow land, and tossed

those rugged branches hither and thither against the dark gray sky. They

looked like the ghostly arms of shrunken and withered giants, beckoning

Robert to his uncle’s house. They looked like threatening phantoms in

the chill winter twilight, gesticulating to him to hasten upon his

journey. The long avenue so bright and pleasant when the perfumed limes

scattered their light bloom upon the pathway, and the dog-rose leaves

floated on the summer air, was terribly bleak and desolate in the

cheerless interregnum that divides the homely joys of Christmas from the

pale blush of coming spring—a dead pause in the year, in which Nature

seems to lie in a tranced sleep, awaiting the wondrous signal for the

budding of the flower.

 

A mournful presentiment crept into Robert Audley’s heart as he drew

nearer to his uncle’s house. Every changing outline in the landscape was

familiar to him; every bend of the trees; every caprice of the

untrammeled branches; every undulation in the bare hawthorn hedge,

broken by dwarf horse-chestnuts, stunted willows, blackberry and hazel

bushes.

 

Sir Michael had been a second father to the young man, a generous and

noble friend, a grave and earnest adviser; and perhaps the strongest

sentiment of Robert’s heart was his love for the gray-bearded baronet.

But the grateful affection was so much a part of himself, that it seldom

found an outlet in words, and a stranger would never have fathomed the

depth of feeling which lay, a deep and powerful current, beneath the

stagnant surface of the barrister’s character.

 

“What would become of this place if my uncle were to die?” he thought,

and he drew nearer to the ivied archway, and the still water-pools,

coldly gray in the twilight. “Would other people live in the old house,

and sit under the low oak ceilings in the homely familiar rooms?”

 

That wonderful faculty of association, so interwoven with the inmost

fibers of even the hardest nature, filled the young man’s breast with a

prophetic pain as he remembered that, however long or late, the day must

come on which the oaken shutters would be closed for awhile, and the

sunshine shut out of the house he loved. It was painful to him even to

remember this; as it must always be painful to think of the narrow lease

the greatest upon this earth can ever hold of its grandeurs. Is it so

wonderful that some wayfarers drop asleep under the hedges, scarcely

caring to toil onward on a journey that leads to no abiding habitation?

Is it wonderful that there have been quietists in the world ever since

Christ’s religion was first preached upon earth. Is it strange that

there is a patient endurance and tranquil resignation, calm expectation

of that which is to come on the further shore of the dark flowing river?

Is it not rather to be wondered that anybody should ever care to be

great for greatness’ sake; for any other reason than pure

conscientiousness; the simple fidelity of the servant who fears to lay

his talents by in a napkin, knowing that indifference is near akin to

dishonesty? If Robert Audley had lived in the time of Thomas a’Kempis,

he would very likely have built himself a narrow hermitage amid some

forest loneliness, and spent his life in tranquil imitation of the

reputed author of The Imitation. As it was, Figtree Court was a

pleasant hermitage in its way, and for breviaries and Books of Hours, I

am ashamed to say the young barrister substituted Paul de Kock and

Dumas, fils. But his sins were of so simply negative an order, that it

would have been very easy for him to have abandoned them for negative

virtues.

 

Only one solitary light was visible in the long irregular range of

windows facing the archway, as Robert passed under the gloomy shade of

the rustling ivy, restless in the chill moaning of the wind. He

recognized that lighted window as the large oriel in his uncle’s room.

When last he had looked at the old house it had been gay with visitors,

every window glittering like a low star in the dusk; now, dark and

silent, it faced the winter’s night like some dismal baronial

habitation, deep in a woodland solitude.

 

The man who opened the door to the unlooked-for visitor, brightened as

he recognized his master’s nephew.

 

“Sir Michael will be cheered up a bit, sir, by the sight of you,” he

said, as he ushered Robert Audley into the firelit library, which

seemed desolate by reason of the baronet’s easy-chair standing empty on

the broad hearthrug. “Shall I bring you some dinner here, sir, before

you go up-stairs?” the servant asked. “My lady and Miss Audley have

dined early during my master’s illness, but I can bring you anything you

would please to take, sir.”

 

“I’ll take nothing until I have seen my uncle,” Robert answered,

hurriedly; “that is to say, if I can see him at once. He is not too ill

to receive me, I suppose?” he added, anxiously.

 

“Oh, no, sir—not too ill; only a little low, sir. This way, if you

please.”

 

He conducted Robert up the short flight of shallow oaken stairs to the

octagon chamber in which George Talboys had sat long five months before,

staring absently at my lady’s portrait. The picture was finished now,

and hung in the post of honor opposite the window, amidst Claudes,

Poussins and Wouvermans, whose less brilliant hues were killed by the

vivid coloring of the modern artist. The bright face looked out of that

tangled glitter of golden hair, in which the Pre-Raphaelites delight,

with a mocking smile, as Robert paused for a moment to glance at the

well-remembered picture. Two or three moments afterward he had passed

through my lady’s boudoir and dressing-room and stood upon the threshold

of Sir Michael’s room. The baronet lay in a quiet sleep, his arm laying

outside the bed, and his strong hand clasped in his young wife’s

delicate fingers. Alicia sat in a low chair beside the broad open

hearth, on which the huge logs burned fiercely in the frosty atmosphere.

The interior of this luxurious bedchamber might have made a striking

picture for an artist’s pencil. The massive furniture, dark and somber,

yet broken up and relieved here and there by scraps of gilding, and

masses of glowing color; the elegance of every detail, in which wealth

was subservient to purity of taste; and last, but greatest in

importance, the graceful figures of the two women, and the noble form of

the old man would have formed a worthy study for any painter.

 

Lucy Audley, with her disordered hair in a pale haze of yellow gold

about her thoughtful face, the flowing lines of her soft muslin

dressing-gown falling in straight folds to her feet, and clasped at the

waist by a narrow circlet of agate links might have served as a model

for a mediaeval saint, in one of the tiny chapels hidden away in the

nooks and corners of a gray old cathedral, unchanged by Reformation or

Cromwell; and what saintly martyr of the Middle Ages could have borne a

holier aspect than the man whose gray beard lay upon the dark silken

coverlet of the stately bed?

 

Robert paused upon the threshold, fearful of awaking his uncle. The two

ladies had heard his step, cautious though he had been, and lifted their

heads to look at him. My lady’s face, quietly watching the sick man, had

worn an anxious earnestness which made it only more beautiful; but the

same face recognizing Robert Audley, faded from its delicate brightness,

and looked scared and wan in the lamplight.

 

“Mr. Audley!” she cried, in a faint, tremulous voice.

 

“Hush!” whispered Alicia, with a warning gesture; “you will wake papa.

How good of you to come, Robert,” she added, in the same whispered

tones, beckoning to her cousin to take an empty chair near the bed.

 

The young man seated himself in the indicated seat at the bottom of the

bed, and opposite to my lady, who sat close beside the pillows. He

looked long and earnestly at the face of the sleeper; still longer,

still more earnestly at the face of Lady Audley, which was slowly

recovering its natural hues.

 

“He has not been very ill, has he?” Robert asked, in the same key as

that in which Alicia had spoken.

 

My lady answered the question.

 

“Oh, no, not dangerously ill,” she said, without taking her eyes from

her husband’s face; “but still we have been anxious, very, very

anxious.”

 

Robert never relaxed his scrutiny of that pale face.

 

“She shall look at me,” he thought; “I will make her meet my eyes, and I

will read her as I have read her before. She shall know how useless her

artifices are with me.”

 

He paused for a few minutes before he spoke again. The regular breathing

of the sleeper the ticking of a gold hunting-watch at the head of the

bed, and the crackling of the burning logs, were the only sounds that

broke the stillness.

 

“I have no doubt you have been anxious, Lady Audley,” Robert said, after

a pause, fixing my lady’s eyes as they wandered furtively to his face.

“There is no one to whom my uncle’s life I can be of more value than to

you. Your happiness, your prosperity, your safety depend alike upon

his existence.”

 

The whisper in which he uttered these words was too low to reach the

other side of the room, where Alicia sat.

 

Lucy Audley’s eyes met those of the speaker with some gleam of triumph

in their light.

 

“I know that,” she said. “Those who strike me must strike through him.”

 

She pointed to the sleeper as she spoke, still looking at Robert Audley.

She defied him with her blue eyes, their brightness intensified by the

triumph in their glance. She defied him with her quiet smile—a smile of

fatal beauty, full of lurking significance and mysterious meaning—the

smile which the artist had exaggerated in his portrait of Sir Michael’s

wife.

 

Robert turned away from the lovely face, and shaded his eyes with his

hand; putting a barrier between my lady and himself; a screen which

baffled her penetration and provoked her curiosity. Was he still

watching her or was he thinking? and of what was he thinking?

 

Robert had been seated at the bedside for upward of an hour before his

uncle awoke. The baronet was delighted at his nephew’s coming.

 

“It was very good of you to come to me, Bob,” he said. “I have been

thinking of you a good deal since