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

in August, 1854,” answered Miss Tonks; “I think it was the

eighteenth of August, but I’m not quite sure that it wasn’t the

seventeenth. I know it was on a Tuesday.”

 

“Thank you, Tonks; you are a most invaluable darling,” exclaimed Mrs.

Vincent, with her sweetest smile. It was, perhaps, because of the

invaluable nature of Miss Tonks’ services that she had received no

remuneration whatever from her employer for the last three or four

years. Mrs. Vincent might have hesitated to pay from very contempt for

the pitiful nature of the stipend as compared with the merits of the

teacher.

 

“Is there anything else that Tonks or I can tell you, Mr. Audley?” asked

the schoolmistress. “Tonks has a far better memory than I have.”

 

“Can you tell me where Miss Graham came from when she entered your

household?” Robert inquired.

 

“Not very precisely,” answered Mrs. Vincent. “I have a vague notion that

Miss Graham said something about coming from the seaside, but she didn’t

say where, or if she did I have forgotten it. Tonks, did Miss Graham

tell you where she came from?”

 

“Oh, no!” replied Miss Tonks, shaking her grim little head

significantly. “Miss Graham told me nothing; she was too clever for

that. She knows how to keep her own secrets, in spite of her innocent

ways and her curly hair,” Miss Tonks added, spitefully.

 

“You think she had secrets?” Robert asked, rather eagerly.

 

“I know she had,” replied Miss Tonks, with frosty decision; “all manner

of secrets. I wouldn’t have engaged such a person as junior teacher in a

respectable school, without so much as one word of recommendation from

any living creature.”

 

“You had no reference, then, from Miss Graham?” asked Robert, addressing

Mrs. Vincent.

 

“No,” the lady answered, with some little embarrassment; “I waived that.

Miss Graham waived the question of salary; I could not do less than

waive the question of reference. She quarreled with her papa, she told

me, and she wanted to find a home away from all the people she had ever

known. She wished to keep herself quite separate from these people. She

had endured so much, she said, young as she was, and she wanted to

escape from her troubles. How could I press her for a reference under

these circumstances, especially when I saw that she was a perfect lady.

You know that Lucy Graham was a perfect lady, Tonks, and it is very

unkind for you to say such cruel things about my taking her without a

reference.”

 

“When people make favorites, they are apt to be deceived in them,” Miss

Tonks answered, with icy sententiousness, and with no very perceptible

relevance to the point in discussion.

 

“I never made her a favorite, you jealous Tonks,” Mrs. Vincent answered,

reproachfully. “I never said she was as useful as you, dear. You know I

never did.”

 

“Oh, no!” replied Miss Tonks, with a chilling accent, “you never said

she was useful. She was only ornamental; a person to be shown off to

visitors, and to play fantasias on the drawing-room piano.”

 

“Then you can give me no clew to Miss Graham’s previous history?” Robert

asked, looking from the schoolmistress to her teacher. He saw very

clearly that Miss Tonks bore an envious grudge against Lucy Graham—a

grudge which even the lapse of time had not healed.

 

“If this woman knows anything to my lady’s detriment, she will tell it,”

he thought. “She will tell it only too willingly.”

 

But Miss Tonks appeared to know nothing whatever; except that Miss

Graham had sometimes declared herself an ill-used creature, deceived by

the baseness of mankind, and the victim of unmerited sufferings, in the

way of poverty and deprivation. Beyond this, Miss Tonks could tell

nothing; and although she made the most of what she did know, Robert

soon sounded the depth of her small stock of information.

 

“I have only one more question to ask,” he said at last. “It is this:

Did Miss Graham leave any books or knick-knacks, or any other kind of

property whatever, behind her, when she left your establishment?”

 

“Not to my knowledge,” Mrs. Vincent replied.

 

“Yes,” cried Miss Tonks, sharply. “She did leave something. She left a

box. It’s up-stairs in my room. I’ve got an old bonnet in it. Would you

like to see the box?” she asked, addressing Robert.

 

“If you will be so good as to allow me,” he answered, “I should very

much like to see it.”

 

“I’ll fetch it down,” said Miss Tonks. “It’s not very big.”

 

She ran out of the room before Mr. Audley had time to utter any polite

remonstrance.

 

“How pitiless these women are to each other,” he thought, while the

teacher was absent. “This one knows intuitively that there is some

danger to the other lurking beneath my questions. She sniffs the coming

trouble to her fellow female creature, and rejoices in it, and would

take any pains to help me. What a world it is, and how these women take

life out of her hands. Helen Maldon, Lady Audley, Clara Talboys, and now

Miss Tonks—all womankind from beginning to end.”

 

Miss Tonks re-entered while the young barrister was meditating upon the

infamy of her sex. She carried a dilapidated paper-covered bonnet-box,

which she submitted to Robert’s inspection.

 

Mr. Audley knelt down to examine the scraps of railway labels and

addresses which were pasted here and there upon the box. It had been

battered upon a great many different lines of railway, and had evidently

traveled considerably. Many of the labels had been torn off, but

fragments of some of them remained, and upon one yellow scrap of paper

Robert read the letters, TURI.

 

“The box has been to Italy,” he thought. “Those are the first four

letters of the word Turin, and the label is a foreign one.”

 

The only direction which had not been either defaced or torn away was

the last, which bore the name of Miss Graham, passenger to London.

Looking very closely at this label, Mr. Audley discovered that it had

been pasted over another.

 

“Will you be so good as to let me have a little water and a piece of

sponge?” he said. “I want to get off this upper label. Believe me that I

am justified in what I am doing.”

 

Miss Tonks ran out of the room and returned immediately with a basin of

water and a sponge.

 

“Shall I take off the label?” she asked.

 

“No, thank you,” Robert answered, coldly. “I can do it very well

myself.”

 

He damped the upper label several times before he could loosen the edges

of the paper; but after two or three careful attempts the moistened

surface peeled off, without injury to the underneath address.

 

Miss Tonks could not contrive to read this address across Robert’s

shoulder, though she exhibited considerable dexterity in her endeavors

to accomplish that object.

 

Mr. Audley repeated his operations upon the lower label, which he

removed from the box, and placed very carefully between two blank leaves

of his pocketbook.

 

“I need intrude upon you no longer, ladies,” he said, when he had done

this. “I am extremely obliged to you for having afforded me all the

information in your power. I wish you good-morning.”

 

Mrs. Vincent smiled and bowed, murmuring some complacent conventionality

about the delight she had felt in Mr. Audley’s visit. Miss Tonks, more

observant, stared at the white change, which had come over the young

man’s face since he had removed the upper label from the box.

 

Robert walked slowly away from Acacia Cottage. “If that which I have

found to-day is no evidence for a jury,” he thought, “it is surely

enough to convince my uncle that he has married a designing and infamous

woman.”

 

CHAPTER XXVII.

 

BEGINNING AT THE OTHER END.

 

Robert Audley walked slowly through the leafless grove, under the bare

and shadowless trees in the gray February atmosphere, thinking as he

went of the discovery he had just made.

 

“I have that in my pocketbook,” he pondered, “which forms the

connecting link between the woman whose death George Talboys read of in

the Times newspaper and the woman who rules in my uncle’s house. The

history of Lucy Graham ends abruptly on the threshold of Mrs. Vincent’s

school. She entered that establishment in August, 1854. The

schoolmistress and her assistant can tell me this but they cannot tell

me whence she came. They cannot give me one clew to the secrets of her

life from the day of her birth until the day she entered that house. I

can go no further in this backward investigation of my lady’s

antecedents. What am I to do, then, if I mean to keep my promise to

Clara Talboys?”

 

He walked on for a few paces revolving this question in his mind, with a

darker shadow than the shadows of the gathering winter twilight on his

face, and a heavy oppression of mingled sorrow and dread weighing down

his heart.

 

“My duty is clear enough,” he thought—“not the less clear because it

leads me step by step, carrying ruin and desolation with me, to the home

I love. I must begin at the other end—I must begin at the other end,

and discover the history of Helen Talboys from the hour of George’s

departure until the day of the funeral in the churchyard at Ventnor.”

 

Mr. Audley hailed a passing hansom, and drove back to his chambers.

 

He reached Figtree Court in time to write a few lines to Miss Talboys,

and to post his letter at St. Martin’s-le-Grand off before six o’clock.

 

“It will save me a day,” he thought, as he drove to the General Post

Office with this brief epistle.

 

He had written to Clara Talboys to inquire the name of the little

seaport town in which George had met Captain Maldon and his daughter:

for in spite of the intimacy between the two young men, Robert Audley

knew very few particulars of his friend’s brief married life.

 

From the hour in which George Talboys had read the announcement of his

wife’s death in the columns of the Times, he had avoided all mention

of the tender history which had been so cruelly broken, the familiar

record which had been so darkly blotted out.

 

There was so much that was painful in that brief story! There was such

bitter self-reproach involved in the recollection of that desertion

which must have seemed so cruel to her who waited and watched at home!

Robert Audley comprehended this, and he did not wonder at his friend’s

silence. The sorrowful story had been tacitly avoided by both, and

Robert was as ignorant of the unhappy history of this one year in his

schoolfellow’s life as if they had never lived together in friendly

companionship in those snug Temple chambers.

 

The letter, written to Miss Talboys by her brother George, within a

month of his marriage, was dated Harrowgate. It was at Harrowgate,

therefore, Robert concluded, the young couple spent their honeymoon.

 

Robert Audley had requested Clara Talboys to telegraph an answer to his

question, in order to avoid the loss of a day in the accomplishment of

the investigation he had promised to perform.

 

The telegraphic answer reached Figtree Court before twelve o’clock the

next day.

 

The name of the seaport town was Wildernsea, Yorkshire.

 

Within an hour of the receipt of this message, Mr. Audley arrived at the

King’s-cross station, and took his ticket for Wildernsea by an express

train that started at a quarter before two.

 

The shrieking engine bore him on the dreary northward journey, whirling