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

rising to that shrill and piercing tone

peculiar to her when affected by any intense agitation—“by what right,

Mr. Audley, do you come to me, and torment me about George Talboys—by

what right do you dare to say that his wife is still alive?”

 

“By the right of circumstantial evidence, Lady Audley,” answered

Robert—“by the right of that circumstantial evidence which will

sometimes fix the guilt of a man’s murder upon that person who, on the

first hearing of the case, seems of all other men the most unlikely to

be guilty.”

 

“What circumstantial evidence?”

 

“The evidence of time and place. The evidence of handwriting. When Helen

Talboys left her father’s at Wildernsea, she left a letter behind her—a

letter in which she declared that she was weary of her old life, and

that she wished to seek a new home and a new fortune. That letter is in

my possession.”

 

“Indeed.”

 

“Shall I tell you whose handwriting resembles that of Helen Talboys so

closely, that the most dexterous expert could perceive no distinction

between the two?”

 

“A resemblance between the handwriting of two women is no very uncommon

circumstance now-a-days,” replied my lady carelessly. “I could show you

the caligraphies of half-a-dozen female correspondents, and defy you to

discover any great difference in them.”

 

“But what if the handwriting is a very uncommon one, presenting marked

peculiarities by which it may be recognized among a hundred?”

 

“Why, in that case the coincidence is rather curious,” answered my lady;

“but it is nothing more than a coincidence. You cannot deny the fact of

Helen Talboys death on the ground that her handwriting resembles that of

some surviving person.”

 

“But if a series of such coincidences lead up to the same point,” said

Robert. “Helen Talboys left her father’s house, according to the

declaration in her own handwriting, because she was weary of her old

life, and wished to begin a new one. Do you know what I infer from

this?”

 

My lady shrugged her shoulders.

 

“I have not the least idea,” she said; “and as you have detained me in

this gloomy place nearly half-an-hour, I must beg that you will release

me, and let me go and dress for dinner.”

 

“No, Lady Audley,” answered Robert, with a cold sternness that was so

strange to him as to transform him into another creature—a pitiless

embodiment of justice, a cruel instrument of retribution—“no, Lady

Audley,” he repeated, “I have told you that womanly prevarication will

not help you; I tell you now that defiance will not serve you. I have

dealt fairly with you, and have given you fair warning. I gave you

indirect notice of your danger two months ago.”

 

“What do you mean?” asked my lady, suddenly.

 

“You did not choose to take that warning, Lady Audley,” pursued Robert,

“and the time has come in which I must speak very plainly to you. Do you

think the gifts which you have played against fortune are to hold you

exempt from retribution? No, my lady, your youth and beauty, your grace

and refinement, only make the horrible secret of your life more

horrible. I tell you that the evidence against you wants only one link

to be strong enough for your condemnation, and that link shall be added.

Helen Talboys never returned to her father’s house. When she deserted

that poor old father, she went away from his humble shelter with the

declared intention of washing her hands of that old life. What do people

generally do when they wish to begin a new existence—to start for a

second time in the race of life, free from the incumbrances that had

fettered their first journey. They change their names, Lady Audley.

Helen Talboys deserted her infant son—she went away from Wildernsea

with the predetermination of sinking her identity. She disappeared as

Helen Talboys upon the 16th of August, 1854, and upon the 17th of that

month she reappeared as Lucy Graham, the friendless girl who undertook a

profitless duty in consideration of a home in which she was asked no

questions.”

 

“You are mad, Mr. Audley!” cried my lady. “You are mad, and my husband

shall protect me from your insolence. What if this Helen Talboys ran

away from her home upon one day, and I entered my employer’s house upon

the next, what does that prove?”

 

“By itself, very little,” replied Robert Audley; “but with the help of

other evidence—”

 

“What evidence?”

 

“The evidence of two labels, pasted one over the other, upon a box left

by you in possession of Mrs. Vincent, the upper label bearing the name

of Miss Graham, the lower that of Mrs. George Talboys.”

 

My lady was silent. Robert Audley could not see her face in the dusk,

but he could see that her two small hands were clasped convulsively over

her heart, and he knew that the shot had gone home to its mark.

 

“God help her, poor, wretched creature,” he thought. “She knows now that

she is lost. I wonder if the judges of the land feel as I do now when

they put on the black cap and pass sentence of death upon some poor,

shivering wretch, who has never done them any wrong. Do they feel a

heroic fervor of virtuous indignation, or do they suffer this dull

anguish which gnaws my vitals as I talk to this helpless woman?”

 

He walked by my lady’s side, silently, for some minutes. They had been

pacing up and down the dim avenue, and they were now drawing near the

leafless shrubbery at one end of the lime-walk—the shrubbery in which

the ruined well sheltered its unheeded decay among the tangled masses of

briery underwood.

 

A winding pathway, neglected and half-choked with weeds, led toward this

well. Robert left the lime-walk, and struck into this pathway. There was

more light in the shrubbery than in the avenue, and Mr. Audley wished to

see my lady’s face.

 

He did not speak until they reached the patch of rank grass beside the

well. The massive brickwork had fallen away here and there, and loose

fragments of masonry lay buried amidst weeds and briars. The heavy posts

which had supported the wooden roller still remained, but the iron

spindle had been dragged from its socket and lay a few paces from the

well, rusty, discolored, and forgotten.

 

Robert Audley leaned against one of the moss-grown posts and looked down

at my lady’s face, very pale in the chill winter twilight. The moon had

newly risen, a feebly luminous crescent in the gray heavens, and a

faint, ghostly light mingled with the misty shadows of the declining

day. My lady’s face seemed like that face which Robert Audley had seen

in his dreams looking out of the white foam-flakes on the green sea

waves and luring his uncle to destruction.

 

“Those two labels are in my possession, Lady Audley,” he resumed. “I

took them from the box left by you at Crescent Villas. I took them in

the presence of Mrs. Vincent and Miss Tonks. Have you any proofs to

offer against this evidence? You say to me, ‘I am Lucy Graham and I have

nothing whatever to do with Helen Talboys.’ In that case you will

produce witnesses who will declare your antecedents. Where had you been

living prior to your appearance at Crescent Villas? You must have

friends, relations, connections, who can come forward to prove as much

as this for you? If you were the most desolate creature upon this earth,

you would be able to point to someone who could identify you with the

past.”

 

“Yes,” cried my lady, “if I were placed in a criminal dock I could, no

doubt, bring forward witnesses to refute your absurd accusation. But I

am not in a criminal dock, Mr. Audley, and I do not choose to do

anything but laugh at your ridiculous folly. I tell you that you are

mad! If you please to say that Helen Talboys is not dead, and that I am

Helen Talboys, you may do so. If you choose to go wandering about in the

places in which I have lived, and to the places in which this Mrs.

Talboys has lived, you must follow the bent of your own inclination, but

I would warn you that such fancies have sometimes conducted people, as

apparently sane as yourself, to the life-long imprisonment of a private

lunatic-asylum.”

 

Robert Audley started and recoiled a few paces among the weeds and

brushwood as my lady said this.

 

“She would be capable of any new crime to shield her from the

consequences of the old one,” he thought. “She would be capable of using

her influence with my uncle to place me in a madhouse.”

 

I do not say that Robert Audley was a coward, but I will admit that a

shiver of horror, something akin to fear, chilled him to the heart as he

remembered the horrible things that have been done by women since that

day upon which Eve was created to be Adam’s companion and help-meet in

the garden of Eden. “What if this woman’s hellish power of dissimulation

should be stronger than the truth, and crush him? She had not spared

George Talboys when he stood in her way and menaced her with a certain

peril; would she spare him who threatened her with a far greater danger?

Are women merciful, or loving, or kind in proportion to their beauty and

grace? Was there not a certain Monsieur Mazers de Latude, who had the

bad fortune to offend the all-accomplished Madam de Pompadour, who

expiated his youthful indiscretion by a life-long imprisonment; who

twice escaped from prison, to be twice cast back into captivity; who,

trusting in the tardy generosity of his beautiful foe, betrayed himself

to an implacable fiend? Robert Audley looked at the pale face of the

woman standing by his side; that fair and beautiful face, illumined by

starry-blue eyes, that had a strange and surely a dangerous light in

them; and remembering a hundred stories of womanly perfidy, shuddered as

he thought how unequal the struggle might be between himself and his

uncle’s wife.

 

“I have shown her my cards,” he thought, “but she has kept hers hidden

from me. The mask that she wears is not to be plucked away. My uncle

would rather think me mad than believe her guilty.”

 

The pale face of Clara Talboys—that grave and earnest face, so

different in its character to my lady’s fragile beauty—arose before

him.

 

“What a coward I am to think of myself or my own danger,” he thought.

“The more I see of this woman the more reason I have to dread her

influence upon others; the more reason to wish her far away from this

house.”

 

He looked about him in the dusky obscurity. The lonely garden was as

quiet as some solitary graveyard, walled in and hidden away from the

world of the living.

 

“It was somewhere in this garden that she met George Talboys upon the

day of his disappearance,” he thought. “I wonder where it was they met;

I wonder where it was that he looked into her cruel face and taxed her

with her falsehood?”

 

My lady, with her little hand resting lightly upon the opposite post to

that against which Robert leaned, toyed with her pretty foot among the

long weeds, but kept a furtive watch upon her enemy’s face.

 

“It is to be a duel to the death, then, my lady,” said Robert Audley,

solemnly. “You refuse to accept my warning. You refuse to run away and

repent of your wickedness in some foreign place, far from the generous

gentleman you have deceived and fooled by your false witcheries.