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

I have been ill. You and Lucy must be

good friends, you know, Bob; and you must learn to think of her as your

aunt, sir; though she is young and beautiful; and—and—you understand,

eh?”

 

Robert grasped his uncle’s hand, but he looked down as he answered: “I

do understand you, sir,” he said, quietly; “and I give you my word of

honor that I am steeled against my lady’s fascinations. She knows that

as well as I do.”

 

Lucy Audley made a little grimace with her pretty little lips. “Bah, you

silly Robert,” she exclaimed; “you take everything au serieux. If I

thought you were rather too young for a nephew, it was only in my fear

of other people’s foolish gossip; not from any—”

 

She hesitated for a moment, and escaped any conclusion to her sentence

by the timely intervention of Mr. Dawson, her late employer, who entered

the room upon his evening visit while she was speaking.

 

He felt the patient’s pulse; asked two or three questions; pronounced

the baronet to be steadily improving; exchanged a few commonplace

remarks with Alicia and Lady Audley, and prepared to leave the room.

Robert rose and accompanied him to the door.

 

“I will light you to the staircase,” he said, taking a candle from one

of the tables, and lighting it at the lamp.

 

“No, no, Mr. Audley, pray do not trouble yourself,” expostulated the

surgeon; “I know my way very well indeed.”

 

Robert insisted, and the two men left the room together. As they entered

the octagon antechamber the barrister paused and shut the door behind

him.

 

“Will you see that the door is closed, Mr. Dawson?” he said, pointing to

that which opened upon the staircase. “I wish to have a few moments’

private conversation with you.”

 

“With much pleasure,” replied the surgeon, complying with Robert’s

request; “but if you are at all alarmed about your uncle, Mr. Audley, I

can set your mind at rest. There is no occasion for the least

uneasiness. Had his illness been at all serious I should have

telegraphed immediately for the family physician.”

 

“I am sure that you would have done your duty, sir,” answered Robert,

gravely. “But I am not going to speak of my uncle. I wish to ask you two

or three questions about another person.”

 

“Indeed.”

 

“The person who once lived in your family as Miss Lucy Graham; the

person who is now Lady Audley.”

 

Mr. Dawson looked up with an expression of surprise upon his quiet face.

 

“Pardon me, Mr. Audley,” he answered; “you can scarcely expect me to

answer any questions about your uncle’s wife without Sir Michael’s

express permission. I can understand no motive which can prompt you to

ask such questions—no worthy motive, at least.” He looked severely at

the young man, as much as to say: “You have been falling in love with

your uncle’s pretty wife, sir, and you want to make me a go-between in

some treacherous flirtation; but it won’t do, sir, it won’t do.”

 

“I always respected the lady as Miss Graham, sir,” he said, “and I

esteem her doubly as Lady Audley—not on account of her altered

position, but because she is the wife of one of the noblest men in

Christendom.”

 

“You cannot respect my uncle or my uncle’s honor more sincerely than I

do,” answered Robert. “I have no unworthy motive for the questions I am

about to ask; and you must answer them.”

 

“Must!” echoed Mr. Dawson, indignantly.

 

“Yes, you are my uncle’s friend. It was at your house he met the woman

who is now his wife. She called herself an orphan, I believe, and

enlisted his pity as well as his admiration in her behalf. She told him

that she stood alone in the world, did she not?—without a friend or

relative. This was all I could ever learn of her antecedents.”

 

“What reason have you to wish to know more?” asked the surgeon.

 

“A very terrible reason,” answered Robert Audley. “For some months past

I have struggled with doubts and suspicions which have embittered my

life. They have grown stronger every day; and they will not be set at

rest by the commonplace sophistries and the shallow arguments with which

men try to deceive themselves rather than believe that which of all

things upon earth they most fear to believe. I do not think that the

woman who bears my uncle’s name, is worthy to be his wife. I may wrong

her. Heaven grant that it is so. But if I do, the fatal chain of

circumstantial evidence never yet linked itself so closely about an

innocent person. I wish to set my doubts at rest or—or to confirm my

fears. There is but one manner in which I can do this. I must trace the

life of my uncle’s wife backward, minutely and carefully, from this

night to a period of six years ago. This is the twenty-fourth of

February, fifty-nine. I want to know every record of her life between

tonight and the February of the year fifty-three.”

 

“And your motive is a worthy one?”

 

“Yes, I wish to clear her from a very dreadful suspicion.”

 

“Which exists only in your mind?”

 

“And in the mind of one other person.”

 

“May I ask who that person is?”

 

“No, Mr. Dawson,” answered Robert, decisively; “I cannot reveal anything

more than what I have already told you. I am a very irresolute,

vacillating man in most things. In this matter I am compelled to be

decided. I repeat once more that I must know the history of Lucy

Graham’s life. If you refuse to help me to the small extent in your

power, I will find others who will help me. Painful as it would become,

I will ask my uncle for the information which you would withhold, rather

than be baffled in the first step of my investigation.”

 

Mr. Dawson was silent for some minutes.

 

“I cannot express how much you have astonished and alarmed me, Mr.

Audley.” he said. “I can tell you so little about Lady Audley’s

antecedents, that it would be mere obstinacy to withhold the small

amount of information I possess. I have always considered your uncle’s

wife one of the most amiable of women. I cannot bring myself to think

her otherwise. It would be an uprooting of one of the strongest

convictions of my life were I compelled to think her otherwise. You wish

to follow her life backward from the present hour to the year

fifty-three?”

 

“I do.”

 

“She was married to your uncle last June twelvemonth, in the midsummer

of fifty-seven. She had lived in my house a little more than thirteen

months. She became a member of my household upon the fourteenth of May,

in the year fifty-six.”

 

“And she came to you—”

 

“From a school at Brompton, a school kept by a lady of the name of

Vincent. It was Mrs. Vincent’s strong recommendation that induced me to

receive Miss Graham into my family without any more special knowledge of

her antecedents.”

 

“Did you see this Mrs. Vincent?”

 

“I did not. I advertised for a governess, and Miss Graham answered my

advertisement. In her letter she referred me to Mrs. Vincent, the

proprietress of a school in which she was then residing as junior

teacher. My time is always so fully occupied, that I was glad to escape

the necessity of a day’s loss in going from Audley to London to inquire

about the young lady’s qualifications. I looked for Mrs. Vincent’s name

in the directory, found it, and concluded that she was a responsible

person, and wrote to her. Her reply was perfectly satisfactory;—Miss

Lucy Graham was assiduous and conscientious; as well as fully qualified

for the situation I offered. I accepted this reference, and I had no

cause to regret what may have been an indiscretion. And now, Mr. Audley,

I have told you all that I have the power to tell.”

 

“Will you be so kind as to give me the address of this Mrs. Vincent?”

asked Robert, taking out his pocketbook.

 

“Certainly; she was then living at No. 9 Crescent Villas, Brompton.”

 

“Ah, to be sure,” muttered Mr. Audley, a recollection of last September

flashing suddenly back upon him as the surgeon spoke.

 

“Crescent Villas—yes, I have heard the address before from Lady Audley

herself. This Mrs. Vincent telegraphed to my uncle’s wife early in last

September. She was ill—dying, I believe—and sent for my lady; but had

removed from her old house and was not to be found.”

 

“Indeed! I never heard Lady Audley mention the circumstance.”

 

“Perhaps not. It occurred while I was down here. Thank you, Mr. Dawson,

for the information you have so kindly and honestly given me. It takes

me back two and a-half years in the history of my lady’s life; but I

have still a blank of three years to fill up before I can exonerate her

from my terrible suspicion. Good evening.”

 

Robert shook hands with the surgeon and returned to his uncle’s room. He

had been away about a quarter of an hour. Sir Michael had fallen asleep

once more, and my lady’s loving hands had lowered the heavy curtains and

shaded the lamp by the bedside. Alicia and her father’s wife were taking

tea in Lady Audley’s boudoir, the room next to the antechamber in which

Robert and Mr. Dawson had been seated.

 

Lucy Audley looked up from her occupation among the fragile china cups

and watched Robert rather anxiously as he walked softly to his uncle’s

room and back again to the boudoir. She looked very pretty and innocent,

seated behind the graceful group of delicate opal china and glittering

silver. Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea.

The most feminine and most domestic of all occupations imparts a magic

harmony to her every movement, a witchery to her every glance. The

floating mists from the boiling liquid in which she infuses the soothing

herbs; whose secrets are known to her alone, envelope her in a cloud of

scented vapor, through which she seems a social fairy, weaving potent

spells with Gunpowder and Bohea. At the tea-table she reigns omnipotent,

unapproachable. What do men know of the mysterious beverage? Read how

poor Hazlitt made his tea, and shudder at the dreadful barbarism. How

clumsily the wretched creatures attempt to assist the witch president of

the tea-tray; how hopelessly they hold the kettle, how continually they

imperil the frail cups and saucers, or the taper hands of the priestess.

To do away with the tea-table is to rob woman of her legitimate empire.

To send a couple of hulking men about among your visitors, distributing

a mixture made in the housekeeper’s room, is to reduce the most social

and friendly of ceremonies to a formal giving out of rations. Better the

pretty influence of the tea cups and saucers gracefully wielded in a

woman’s hand than all the inappropriate power snatched at the point of

the pen from the unwilling sterner sex. Imagine all the women of England

elevated to the high level of masculine intellectuality, superior to

crinoline; above pearl powder and Mrs. Rachael Levison; above taking the

pains to be pretty; above tea-tables and that cruelly scandalous and

rather satirical gossip which even strong men delight in; and what a

drear, utilitarian, ugly life the sterner sex must lead.

 

My lady was by no means strong-minded. The starry diamonds upon her

white fingers flashed hither and thither among the tea-things, and she

bent her pretty head over the marvelous Indian tea-caddy of sandal-wood

and silver, with as much earnestness as if life held