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

over the carpet, and he’ll sit on your Gobelin tapestry, my lady, in

his wet overcoat; and he’ll abuse you if you remonstrate, and will ask

why people have chairs that are not to be sat upon, and why you don’t

live in Figtree Court, and—”

 

Sir Michael Audley watched his daughter with a thoughtful countenance as

she talked of her cousin. She very often talked of him, ridiculing him

and inveighing against him in no very measured terms. But perhaps the

baronet thought of a certain Signora Beatrice who very cruelly entreated

a gentleman called Benedick, but who was, it may be, heartily in love

with him at the same time.

 

“What do you think Major Melville told me when he called here yesterday,

Alicia?” Sir Michael asked, presently.

 

“I haven’t the remotest idea,” replied Alicia, rather disdainfully.

“Perhaps he told you that we should have another war before long, by

Ged, sir; or perhaps he told you that we should have a new ministry, by

Ged, sir, for that those fellows are getting themselves into a mess,

sir; or that those other fellows were reforming this, and cutting down

that, and altering the other in the army, until, by Ged, sir, we shall

have no army at all, by-and-by—nothing but a pack of boys, sir, crammed

up to the eyes with a lot of senseless schoolmasters’ rubbish, and

dressed in shell-jackets and calico helmets. Yes, sir, they’re fighting

in Oudh in calico helmets at this very day, sir.”

 

“You’re an impertinent minx, miss,” answered the baronet. “Major

Melville told me nothing of the kind; but he told me that a very devoted

admirer of you, a certain Sir Harry Towers, has forsaken his place in

Hertfordshire, and his hunting stable, and has gone on the continent for

a twelvemonths’ tour.”

 

Miss Audley flushed up suddenly at the mention of her old adorer, but

recovered herself very quickly.

 

“He has gone on the continent, has he?” she said indifferently. “He told

me that he meant to do so—if—if he didn’t have everything his own way.

Poor fellow! he’s a, dear, good-hearted, stupid creature, and twenty

times better than that peripatetic, patent refrigerator, Mr. Robert

Audley.”

 

“I wish, Alicia, you were not so fond of ridiculing Bob,” Sir Michael

said, gravely. “Bob is a good fellow, and I’m as fond of him as if he’d

been my own son; and—and—I’ve been very uncomfortable about him

lately. He has changed very much within the last few days, and he has

taken all sorts of absurd ideas into his head, and my lady has alarmed

me about him. She thinks—”

 

Lady Audley interrupted her husband with a grave shake of her head.

 

“It is better not to say too much about it as yet awhile,” she said;

“Alicia knows what I think.”

 

“Yes,” replied Miss Audley, “my lady thinks that Bob is going mad, but I

know better than that. He’s not at all the sort of person to go mad. How

should such a sluggish ditch-pond of an intellect as his ever work

itself into a tempest? He may move about for the rest of his life,

perhaps, in a tranquil state of semi-idiotcy, imperfectly comprehending

who he is, and where he’s going, and what he’s doing—but he’ll never go

mad.”

 

Sir Michael did not reply to this. He had been very much disturbed by

his conversation with my lady on the previous evening, and had silently

debated the painful question, in his mind ever since.

 

His wife—the woman he best loved and most believed in—had told him,

with all appearance of regret and agitation, her conviction of his

nephew’s insanity. He tried in vain to arrive at the conclusion he

wished most ardently to attain; he tried in vain to think that my lady

was misled by her own fancies, and had no foundation for what she said.

But then, again, it suddenly flashed upon him, that to think this was to

arrive at a worse conclusion; it was to transfer the horrible suspicion

from his nephew to his wife. She appeared to be possessed with an actual

conviction of Robert’s insanity. To imagine her wrong was to imagine

some weakness in her own mind. The longer he thought of the subject the

more it harassed and perplexed him. It was most certain that the young

man had always been eccentric. He was sensible, he was tolerably clever,

he was honorable and gentlemanlike in feeling, though perhaps a little

careless in the performance of certain minor social duties; but there

were some slight differences, not easily to be defined, that separated

him from other men of his age and position. Then, again, it was equally

true that he had very much changed within the period that had succeeded

the disappearance of George Talboys. He had grown moody and thoughtful,

melancholy and absent-minded. He had held himself aloof from society,

had sat for hours without speaking; had talked at other points by fits

and starts; and had excited himself unusually in the discussion of

subjects which apparently lay far out of the region of his own life and

interests. Then there was even another region which seemed to strengthen

my lady’s case against this unhappy young man. He had been brought up in

the frequent society of his cousin, Alicia—his pretty, genial

cousin—to whom interest, and one would have thought affection,

naturally pointed as his most fitting bride. More than this, the girl

had shown him, in the innocent guilelessness of a transparent nature,

that on her side at least, affection was not wanting; and yet, in spite

of all this, he had held himself aloof, and had allowed others to

propose for her hand, and to be rejected by her, and had still made no

sign.

 

Now love is so very subtle an essence, such an indefinable metaphysical

marvel, that its due force, though very cruelly felt by the sufferer

himself, is never clearly understood by those who look on at its

torments and wonder why he takes the common fever so badly. Sir Michael

argued that because Alicia was a pretty girl and an amiable girl it was

therefore extraordinary and unnatural in Robert Audley not to have duly

fallen in love with her. This baronet, who close upon his sixtieth

birthday, had for the first time encountered that one woman who out of

all the women in the world had power to quicken the pulses of his heart,

wondered why Robert failed to take the fever from the first breath of

contagion that blew toward him. He forgot that there are men who go

their ways unscathed amidst legions of lovely and generous women, to

succumb at last before some harsh-featured virago, who knows the secret

of that only philter which can intoxicate and bewitch him. He had forgot

that there are certain Jacks who go through life without meeting the

Jill appointed for them by Nemesis, and die old bachelors, perhaps, with

poor Jill pining an old maid upon the other side of the party-wall. He

forgot that love, which is a madness, and a scourge, and a fever, and a

delusion, and a snare, is also a mystery, and very imperfectly

understood by everyone except the individual sufferer who writhes under

its tortures. Jones, who is wildly enamored of Miss Brown, and who lies

awake at night until he loathes his comfortable pillow and tumbles his

sheets into two twisted rags of linen in his agonies, as if he were a

prisoner and wanted to wind them into impromptu ropes; this same Jones

who thinks Russell Square a magic place because his divinity inhabits

it, who thinks the trees in that inclosure and the sky above it greener

and bluer than other trees or sky, and who feels a pang, yes, an actual

pang, of mingled hope, and joy, and expectation, and terror, when he

emerges from Guilford street, descending from the hights of Islington,

into those sacred precincts; this very Jones is hard and callous toward

the torments of Smith, who adores Miss Robinson, and cannot imagine what

the infatuated fellow can see in the girl. So it was with Sir Michael

Audley. He looked at his nephew as a sample of a very large class of

young men, and his daughter as a sample of an equally extensive class of

feminine goods, and could not see why the two samples should not make a

very respectable match. He ignored all those infinitesimal differences

in nature which make the wholesome food of one man the deadly poison of

another. How difficult it is to believe sometimes that a man doesn’t

like such and such a favorite dish. If at a dinner-party, a meek looking

guest refuses early salmon and cucumbers, or green peas in February, we

set him down as a poor relation whose instincts warn him off those

expensive plates. If an alderman were to declare that he didn’t like

green fat, he would be looked upon as a social martyr, a Marcus Curtius

of the dinner-table, who immolated himself for the benefit of his kind.

His fellow-aldermen would believe in anything rather than an heretical

distaste for the city ambrosia of the soup tureen. But there are people

who dislike salmon, and white-bait, and spring ducklings, and all manner

of old-established delicacies, and there are other people who affect

eccentric and despicable dishes, generally stigmatized as nasty.

 

Alas, my pretty Alicia, your cousin did not love you! He admired your

rosy English face, and had a tender affection for you which might

perhaps have expanded by-and-by into something warm enough for

matrimony, that everyday jog-trot species of union which demands no

very passionate devotion, but for a sudden check which it had received

in Dorsetshire. Yes, Robert Audley’s growing affection for his cousin, a

plant of very slow growth, I am fain to confess, had been suddenly

dwarfed and stunted upon that bitter February day on which he had stood

beneath the pine-trees talking to Clara Talboys. Since that day the

young man had experienced an unpleasant sensation in thinking of poor

Alicia. He looked at her as being in some vague manner an incumbrance

upon the freedom of his thoughts; he had a haunting fear that he was in

some tacit way pledged to her; that she had a species of claim upon him,

which forbade to him the right of thinking of another woman. I believe

it was the image of Miss Audley presented to him in this light that

goaded the young barrister into those outbursts of splenetic rage

against the female sex which he was liable to at certain times. He was

strictly honorable, so honorable that he would rather have immolated

himself upon the altar of truth and Alicia than have done her the

remotest wrong, though by so doing he might have secured his own comfort

and happiness.

 

“If the poor little girl loves me,” he thought, “and if she thinks that

I love her, and has been led to think so by any word or act of mine, I’m

in duty bound to let her think so to the end of time, and to fulfill any

tacit promise which I may have unconsciously made. I thought once—I

meant once to—to make her an offer by-and-by when this horrible mystery

about George Talboys should have been cleared up and everything

peacefully settled—but now—”

 

His thoughts would ordinarily wander away at this point of his

reflections, carrying him where he never had intended to go; carrying

him back under the pine-trees in Dorsetshire, and setting him once more

face to face with the sister of his missing friend, and it was generally

a very laborious journey by which he traveled back to the point from

which he strayed. It was so difficult for him to tear himself away from

the stunted turf