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

of discovering the truth. Shall I go to that miserable old man,

and charge him with his share in the shameful trick which I believe to

have been played upon my poor friend? No; I will not torture that

terror-stricken wretch as I tortured him a few weeks ago. I will go

straight to that arch-conspirator, and will tear away the beautiful veil

under which she hides her wickedness, and will wring from her the secret

of my friend’s fate, and banish her forever from the house which her

presence has polluted.”

 

He started early the next morning for Essex, and reached Audley before

eleven o’clock.

 

Early as it was, my lady was out. She had driven to Chelmsford upon a

shopping expedition with her step-daughter. She had several calls to

make in the neighborhood of the town, and was not likely to return until

dinner-time. Sir Michael’s health was very much improved, and he would

come down stairs in the afternoon. Would Mr. Audley go to his uncle’s

room?

 

No; Robert had no wish to meet that generous kinsman. What could he say

to him? How could he smooth the way to the trouble that was to

come?—how soften the cruel blow of the great grief that was preparing

for that noble and trusting heart?

 

“If I could forgive her the wrong done to my friend,” Robert thought, “I

should still abhor her for the misery her guilt must bring upon the man

who has believed in her.”

 

He told his uncle’s servant that he would stroll into the village, and

return before dinner. He walked slowly away from the Court, wandering

across the meadows between his uncle’s house and the village,

purposeless and indifferent, with the great trouble and perplexity of

his life stamped upon his face and reflected in his manner.

 

“I will go into the churchyard,” he thought, “and stare at the

tombstones. There is nothing I can do that will make me more gloomy than

I am.”

 

He was in those very meadows through which he had hurried from Audley

Court to the station upon the September day in which George Talboys had

disappeared. He looked at the pathway by which he had gone upon that

day, and remembered his unaccustomed hurry, and the vague feeling of

terror which had taken possession of him immediately upon losing sight

of his friend.

 

“Why did that unaccountable terror seize upon me,” he thought. “Why was

it that I saw some strange mystery in my friend’s disappearance? Was it

a monition, or a monomania? What if I am wrong after all? What if this

chain of evidence which I have constructed link by link, is woven out of

my own folly? What if this edifice of horror and suspicion is a mere

collection of crotchets—the nervous fancies of a hypochondriacal

bachelor? Mr. Harcourt Talboys sees no meaning in the events out of

which I have made myself a horrible mystery. I lay the separate links of

the chain before him, and he cannot recognize their fitness. He is

unable to put them together. Oh, my God, if it should be in myself all

this time that the misery lies; if—” he smiled bitterly, and shook his

head. “I have the handwriting in my pocketbook which is the evidence of

the conspiracy,” he thought. “It remains for me to discover the darker

half of my lady’s secret.”

 

He avoided the village, still keeping to the meadows. The church lay a

little way back from the straggling High street, and a rough wooden gate

opened from the churchyard into a broad meadow, that was bordered by a

running stream, and sloped down into a grassy valley dotted by groups of

cattle.

 

Robert slowly ascended the narrow hillside pathway leading up to the

gate in the churchyard. The quiet dullness of the lonely landscape

harmonized with his own gloom. The solitary figure of an old man

hobbling toward a stile at the further end of the wide meadow was the

only human creature visible upon the area over which the young barrister

looked. The smoke slowly ascending from the scattered houses in the long

High street was the only evidence of human life. The slow progress of

the hands of the old clock in the church steeple was the only token by

which a traveler could perceive that a sluggish course of rustic life

had not come to a full stop in the village of Audley.

 

Yes, there was one other sign. As Robert opened the gate of the

churchyard, and strolled listessly into the little inclosure, he became

aware of the solemn music of an organ, audible through a half-open

window in the steeple.

 

He stopped and listened to the slow harmonies of a dreamy melody that

sounded like an extempore composition of an accomplished player.

 

“Who would have believed that Audley church could boast such an organ?”

thought Robert. “When last I was here, the national schoolmaster used to

accompany his children by a primitive performance of common chords. I

didn’t think the old organ had such music in it.”

 

He lingered at the gate, not caring to break the lazy spell woven about

him by the monotonous melancholy of the organist’s performance. The

tones of the instrument, now swelling to their fullest power, now

sinking to a low, whispering softness, floated toward him upon the misty

winter atmosphere, and had a soothing influence, that seemed to comfort

him in his trouble.

 

He closed the gate softly, and crossed the little patch of gravel before

the door of the church. The door had been left ajar—by the organist,

perhaps. Robert Audley pushed it open, and walked into the square porch,

from which a flight of narrow stone steps wound upward to the organ-loft

and the belfry. Mr. Audley took off his hat, and opened the door between

the porch and the body of the church. He stepped softly into the holy

edifice, which had a damp, moldy smell upon week-days. He walked down

the narrow aisle to the altar-rails, and from that point of observation

took a survey of the church. The little gallery was exactly opposite to

him, but the scanty green curtains before the organ were closely drawn,

and he could not get a glimpse of the player.

 

The music, still rolled on. The organist had wandered into a melody of

Mendelssohn’s, a strain whose dreamy sadness went straight to Robert’s

heart. He loitered in the nooks and corners of the church, examining the

dilapidated memorials of the well-nigh forgotten dead, and listening to

the music.

 

“If my poor friend, George Talboys, had died in my arms, and I had

buried him in this quiet church, in one corner of the vaults over which

I tread to-day, how much anguish of mind, vacillation and torment I

might have escaped,” thought Robert Audley, as he read the faded

inscriptions upon tablets of discolored marble; “I should have known his

fate—I should have known his fate! Ah, how much there would have been

in that. It is this miserable uncertainty, this horrible suspicion which

has poisoned my very life.”

 

He looked at his watch.

 

“Half-past one,” he muttered. “I shall have to wait four or five dreary

hours before my lady comes home from her morning calls—her pretty

visits of ceremony or friendliness. Good Heaven! what an actress this

woman is. What an arch trickster—what an all-accomplished deceiver. But

she shall play her pretty comedy no longer under my uncle’s roof. I have

diplomatized long enough. She has refused to accept an indirect warning.

Tonight I will speak plainly.”

 

The music of the organ ceased, and Robert heard the closing of the

instrument.

 

“I’ll have a look at this new organist,” he thought, “who can afford to

bury his talents at Audley, and play Mendelssohn’s finest fugues for a

stipend of sixteen pounds a year.” He lingered in the porch, waiting for

the organist to descend the awkward little staircase. In the weary

trouble of his mind, and with the prospect of getting through the five

hours in the best way he could, Mr. Audley was glad to cultivate any

diversion of thought, however idle. He therefore freely indulged his

curiosity about the new organist.

 

The first person who appeared upon the steep stone steps was a boy in

corduroy trousers and a dark linen smock-frock, who shambled down the

stairs with a good deal of unnecessary clatter of his hobnailed shoes,

and who was red in the face from the exertion of blowing the bellows of

the old organ. Close behind this boy came a young lady, very plainly

dressed in a black silk gown and a large gray shawl, who started and

turned pale at sight of Mr. Audley.

 

This young lady was Clara Talboys.

 

Of all people in the world she was the last whom Robert either expected

or wished to see. She had told him that she was going to pay a visit to

some friends who lived in Essex; but the county is a wide one, and the

village of Audley one of the most obscure and least frequented spots in

the whole of its extent. That the sister of his lost friend should be

here—here where she could watch his every action, and from those

actions deduce the secret workings of his mind, tracing his doubts home

to their object, made a complication of his difficulties that he could

never have anticipated. It brought him back to that consciousness of his

own helplessness, in which he had exclaimed:

 

“A hand that is stronger than my own is beckoning me onward on the dark

road that leads to my lost friend’s unknown grave.”

 

Clara Talboys was the first to speak.

 

“You are surprised to see me here, Mr. Audley,” she said.

 

“Very much surprised.”

 

“I told you that I was coming to Essex. I left home day before

yesterday. I was leaving home when I received your telegraphic message.

The friend with whom I am staying is Mrs. Martyn, the wife of the new

rector of Mount Stanning. I came down this morning to see the village

and church, and as Mrs. Martyn had to pay a visit to the school with the

curate and his wife, I stopped here and amused myself by trying the old

organ. I was not aware till I came here that there was a village called

Audley. The place takes its name from your family, I suppose?”

 

“I believe so,” Robert answered, wondering at the lady’s calmness, in

contradistinction to his own embarrassment. “I have a vague recollection

of hearing the story of some ancestor who was called Audley of Audley in

the reign of Edward the Fourth. The tomb inside the rails near the altar

belongs to one of the knights of Audley, but I have never taken the

trouble to remember his achievements. Are you going to wait here for

your friends, Miss Talboys?”

 

“Yes; they are to return here for me after they have finished their

rounds.”

 

“And you go back to Mount Stanning with them this afternoon?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Robert stood with his hat in his hand, looking absently out at the

tombstones and the low wall of the church yard. Clara Talboys watched

his pale face, haggard under the deepening shadow that had rested upon

it so long.

 

“You have been ill since I saw you last, Mr. Audley,” she said, in a low

voice, that had the same melodious sadness as the notes of the old organ

under her touch.

 

“No, I have not been ill; I have been only harassed, wearied by a

hundred doubts and perplexities.”

 

He was thinking as he spoke to her:

 

“How much does she guess? How much does she