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

my friend met with his death. If

I have wondered sometimes, as it was only natural I should, whether I

was not the victim of some horrible hallucination, whether such an

alternative was not more probable than that a young and lovely woman

should be capable of so foul and treacherous a murder, all wonder is

past. After last night’s deed of horror, there is no crime you could

commit, however vast and unnatural, which could make me wonder.

Henceforth you must seem to me no longer a woman, a guilty woman with a

heart which in its worst wickedness has yet some latent power to suffer

and feel; I look upon you henceforth as the demoniac incarnation of some

evil principle. But you shall no longer pollute this place by your

presence. Unless you will confess what you are and who you are in the

presence of the man you have deceived so long, and accept from him and

from me such mercy as we may be inclined to extend to you, I will gather

together the witnesses who shall swear to your identity, and at peril of

any shame to myself and those I love, I will bring upon you the just and

awful punishment of your crime.”

 

The woman rose suddenly and stood before him erect and resolute, with

her hair dashed away from her face and her eyes glittering.

 

“Bring Sir Michael!” she cried; “bring him here, and I will confess

anything—everything. What do I care? God knows I have struggled hard

enough against you, and fought the battle patiently enough; but you have

conquered, Mr. Robert Audley. It is a great triumph, is it not—a

wonderful victory? You have used your cool, calculating, frigid,

luminous intellect to a noble purpose. You have conquered—a MAD WOMAN!”

 

“A mad woman!” cried Mr. Audley.

 

“Yes, a mad woman. When you say that I killed George Talboys, you say

the truth. When you say that I murdered him treacherously and foully,

you lie. I killed him because I AM MAD! because my intellect is a little

way upon the wrong side of that narrow boundary-line between sanity and

insanity; because, when George Talboys goaded me, as you have goaded me,

and reproached me, and threatened me, my mind, never properly balanced,

utterly lost its balance, and I was mad! Bring Sir Michael; and bring

him quickly. If he is to be told one thing let him be told everything;

let him hear the secret of my life!”

 

Robert Audley left the room to look for his uncle. He went in search of

that honored kinsman with God knows how heavy a weight of anguish at his

heart, for he knew he was about to shatter the day-dream of his uncle’s

life; and he knew that our dreams are none the less terrible to lose,

because they have never been the realities for which we have mistaken

them. But even in the midst of his sorrow for Sir Michael, he could not

help wondering at my lady’s last words—“the secret of my life.” He

remembered those lines in the letter written by Helen Talboys upon the

eve of her flight from Wildernsea, which had so puzzled him. He

remembered those appealing sentences—“You should forgive me, for you

know why I have been so. You know the secret of my life.”

 

He met Sir Michael in the hall. He made no attempt to prepare the way

for the terrible revelation which the baronet was to hear. He only drew

him into the firelit library, and there for the first time addressed

him quietly thus: “Lady Audley has a confession to make to you, sir—a

confession which I know will be a most cruel surprise, a most bitter

grief. But it is necessary for your present honor, and for your future

peace, that you should hear it. She has deceived you, I regret to say,

most basely; but it is only right that you should hear from her own lips

any excuses which she may have to offer for her wickedness. May God

soften this blow for you!” sobbed the young man, suddenly breaking down;

“I cannot!”

 

Sir Michael lifted his hand as if he would command his nephew to be

silent, but that imperious hand dropped feeble and impotent at his side.

He stood in the center of the firelit room rigid and immovable.

 

“Lucy!” he cried, in a voice whose anguish struck like a blow upon the

jarred nerves of those who heard it, as the cry of a wounded animal

pains the listener—“Lucy, tell me that this man is a madman! tell me

so, my love, or I shall kill him!”

 

There was a sudden fury in his voice as he turned upon Robert, as if he

could indeed have felled his wife’s accuser to the earth with the

strength of his uplifted arm.

 

But my lady fell upon her knees at his feet, interposing herself between

the baronet and his nephew, who stood leaning on the back of an

easy-chair, with his face hidden by his hand.

 

“He has told you the truth,” said my lady, “and he is not mad! I have

sent him for you that I may confess everything to you. I should be sorry

for you if I could, for you have been very, very good to me, much better

to me than I ever deserved; but I can’t, I can’t—I can feel nothing but

my own misery. I told you long ago that I was selfish; I am selfish

still—more selfish than ever in my misery. Happy, prosperous people may

feel for others. I laugh at other people’s sufferings; they seem so

small compared to my own.”

 

When first my lady had fallen on her knees, Sir Michael had attempted to

raise her, and had remonstrated with her; but as she spoke he dropped

into a chair close to the spot upon which she knelt, and with his hands

clasped together, and with his head bent to catch every syllable of

those horrible words, he listened as if his whole being had been

resolved into that one sense of hearing.

 

“I must tell you the story of my life, in order to tell you why I have

become the miserable wretch who has no better hope than to be allowed to

run away and hide in some desolate corner of the earth. I must tell you

the story of my life,” repeated my lady, “but you need not fear that I

shall dwell long upon it. It has not been so pleasant to me that I

should wish to remember it. When I was a very little child I remember

asking a question which it was natural enough that I should ask, God

help me! I asked where my mother was. I had a faint remembrance of a

face, like what my own is now, looking at me when I was very little

better than a baby; but I had missed the face suddenly, and had never

seen it since. They told me that mother was away. I was not happy, for

the woman who had charge of me was a disagreeable woman and the place in

which we lived was a lonely place, a village upon the Hampshire coast,

about seven miles from Portsmouth. My father, who was in the navy, only

came now and then to see me; and I was left almost entirely to the

charge of this woman, who was irregularly paid, and who vented her rage

upon me when my father was behindhand in remitting her money. So you see

that at a very early age I found out what it was to be poor.

 

“Perhaps it was more from being discontented with my dreary life than

from any wonderful impulse of affection, that I asked very often the

same question about my mother. I always received the same answer—she

was away. When I asked where, I was told that that was a secret. When I

grew old enough to understand the meaning of the word death, I asked if

my mother was dead, and I was told—‘No, she was not dead; she was ill,

and she was away.’ I asked how long she had been ill, and I was told

that she had been so some years, ever since I was a baby.

 

“At last the secret came out. I worried my foster-mother with the old

question one day when the remittances had fallen very much in arrear,

and her temper had been unusually tried. She flew into a passion, and

told me that my mother was a mad woman, and that she was in a madhouse

forty miles away. She had scarcely said this when she repented, and told

me that it was not the truth, and that I was not to believe it, or to

say that she had told me such a thing. I discovered afterward that my

father had made her promise most solemnly never to tell me the secret of

my mother’s fate.

 

“I brooded horribly upon the thought of my mother’s madness. It haunted

me by day and night. I was always picturing to myself this mad woman

pacing up and down some prison cell, in a hideous garment that bound her

tortured limbs. I had exaggerated ideas of the horror of her situation.

I had no knowledge of the different degrees of madness, and the image

that haunted me was that of a distraught and violent creature, who would

fall upon me and kill me if I came within her reach. This idea grew upon

me until I used to awake in the dead of night, screaming aloud in an

agony of terror, from a dream in which I had felt my mother’s icy grasp

upon my throat, and heard her ravings in my ear.

 

“When I was ten years old my father came to pay up the arrears due to my

protectress, and to take me to school. He had left me in Hampshire

longer than he had intended, from his inability to pay this money; so

there again I felt the bitterness of poverty, and ran the risk of

growing up an ignorant creature among coarse rustic children, because my

father was poor.”

 

My lady paused for a moment, but only to take breath, for she had spoken

rapidly, as if eager to tell this hated story, and to have done with it.

She was still on her knees, but Sir Michael made no effort to raise her.

 

He sat silent and immovable. What was this story that he was listening

to? Whose was it, and to what was it to lead? It could not be his

wife’s; he had heard her simple account of her youth, and had believed

it as he had believed in the Gospel. She had told him a very brief story

of an early orphanage, and a long, quiet, colorless youth spent in the

conventional seclusion of an English boarding-school.

 

“My father came at last, and I told him what I had discovered. He was

very much affected when I spoke of my mother. He was not what the world

generally calls a good man, but I learned afterward that he had loved

his wife very dearly, and that he would have willingly sacrificed his

life to her, and constituted himself her guardian, had he not been

compelled to earn the daily bread of the mad woman and her child by the

exercise of his profession. So here again I beheld what a bitter thing

it is to be poor. My mother, who might have been tended by a devoted

husband, was given over to the care of hired nurses.

 

“Before my father sent me to school at Torquay, he took me to see my

mother. This visit served