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

at least to dispel the idea which had so often

terrified me. I saw no raving, straight-waist-coated maniac, guarded by

zealous jailers, but a golden-haired, blue-eyed, girlish creature, who

seemed as frivolous as a butterfly, and who skipped toward us with her

yellow curls decorated with natural flowers, and saluted us with radiant

smiles, and gay, ceaseless chatter.

 

“But she didn’t know us. She would have spoken in the same manner to any

stranger who had entered the gates of the garden about her prison-house.

Her madness was an hereditary disease transmitted to her from her

mother, who had died mad. She, my mother, had been, or had appeared sane

up to the hour of my birth, but from that hour her intellect had

decayed, and she had become what I saw her.

 

“I went away with the knowledge of this, and with the knowledge that the

only inheritance I had to expect from my mother was—insanity!

 

“I went away with this knowledge in my mind, and with something more—a

secret to keep. I was a child of ten years only, but I felt all the

weight of that burden. I was to keep the secret of my mother’s madness;

for it was a secret that might affect me injuriously in after-life. I

was to remember this.

 

“I did remember this; and it was, perhaps, this that made me selfish and

heartless, for I suppose I am heartless. As I grew older I was told that

I was pretty—beautiful—lovely—bewitching. I heard all these things at

first indifferently, but by-and-by I listened to them greedily, and

began to think that in spite of the secret of my life I might be more

successful in the world’s great lottery than my companions. I had learnt

that which in some indefinite manner or other every school-girl learns

sooner or later—I learned that my ultimate fate in life depended upon

my marriage, and I concluded that if I was indeed prettier than my

schoolfellows, I ought to marry better than any one of them.

 

“I left school before I was seventeen years of age, with this thought in

my mind, and I went to live at the other extremity of England with my

father, who had retired upon his half-pay, and had established himself

at Wildernsea, with the idea that the place was cheap and select.

 

“The place was indeed select. I had not been there a month before I

discovered that even the prettiest girl might wait a long time for a

rich husband. I wish to hurry over this part of my life. I dare say I

was very despicable. You and your nephew, Sir Michael, have been rich

all your lives, and can very well afford to despise me; but I knew how

far poverty can affect a life, and I looked forward with a sickening

dread to a life so affected. At last the rich suitor, the wandering

prince came.”

 

She paused for a moment, and shuddered convulsively. It was impossible

to see any of the changes in her countenance, for her face was

obstinately bent toward the floor. Throughout her long confession she

never lifted it; throughout her long confession her voice was never

broken by a tear. What she had to tell she told in a cold, hard tone,

very much the tone in which some criminal, dogged and sullen to the

last, might have confessed to a jail chaplain.

 

“The wandering prince came,” she repeated; “he was called George

Talboys.”

 

For the first time since his wife’s confession had begun, Sir Michael

Audley started. He began to understand it all now. A crowd of unheeded

words and forgotten circumstances that had seemed too insignificant for

remark or recollection, flashed back upon him as vividly as if they had

been the leading incidents of his past life.

 

“Mr. George Talboys was a cornet in a dragoon regiment. He was the only

son of a rich country gentleman. He fell in love with me, and married me

three months after my seventeenth birthday. I think I loved him as much

as it was in my power to love anybody; not more than I have loved you,

Sir Michael—not so much, for when you married me you elevated me to a

position that he could never have given me.”

 

The dream was broken. Sir Michael Audley remembered that summer’s

evening, nearly two years ago, when he had first declared his love for

Mr. Dawson’s governess; he remembered the sick, half-shuddering

sensation of regret and disappointment that had come over him then, and

he felt as if it had in some manner dimly foreshadowed the agony of

tonight.

 

But I do not believe that even in his misery he felt that entire and

unmitigated surprise, that utter revulsion of feeling that is felt when

a good woman wanders away from herself and becomes the lost creature

whom her husband is bound in honor to abjure. I do not believe that Sir

Michael Audley had ever really believed in his wife. He had loved her

and admired her; he had been bewitched by her beauty and bewildered by

her charms; but that sense of something wanting, that vague feeling of

loss and disappointment which had come upon him on the summer’s night of

his betrothal had been with him more or less distinctly ever since. I

cannot believe that an honest man, however pure and single may be his

mind, however simply trustful his nature, is ever really deceived by

falsehood. There is beneath the voluntary confidence an involuntary

distrust, not to be conquered by any effort of the will.

 

“We were married,” my lady continued, “and I loved him very well, quite

well enough to be happy with him as long as his money lasted, and while

we were on the Continent, traveling in the best style and always staying

at the best hotels. But when we came back to Wildernsea and lived with

papa, and all the money was gone, and George grew gloomy and wretched,

and was always thinking of his troubles, and appeared to neglect me, I

was very unhappy, and it seemed as if this fine marriage had only given

me a twelvemonth’s gayety and extravagance after all. I begged George to

appeal to his father, but he refused. I persuaded him to try and get

employment, and he failed. My baby was born, and the crisis which had

been fatal to my mother arose for me. I escaped, but I was more

irritable perhaps after my recovery, less inclined to fight the hard

battle of the world, more disposed to complain of poverty and neglect. I

did complain one day, loudly and bitterly; I upbraided George Talboys

for his cruelty in having allied a helpless girl to poverty and misery,

and he flew into a passion with me and ran out of the house. When I

awoke the next morning, I found a letter lying on the table by my bed,

telling me that he was going to the antipodes to seek his fortune, and

that he would never see me again until he was a rich man.

 

“I looked upon this as a desertion, and I resented it bitterly—resented

it by hating the man who had left me with no protector but a weak, tipsy

father, and with a child to support. I had to work hard for my living,

and in every hour of labor—and what labor is more wearisome than the

dull slavery of a governess?—I recognized a separate wrong done me by

George Talboys. His father was rich, his sister was living in luxury and

respectability, and I, his wife, and the mother of his son, was a slave

allied to beggary and obscurity. People pitied me, and I hated them for

their pity. I did not love the child, for he had been left a burden upon

my hands. The hereditary taint that was in my blood had never until this

time showed itself by any one sign or token; but at this time I became

subject to fits of violence and despair. At this time I think my mind

first lost its balance, and for the first time I crossed that invisible

line which separates reason from madness. I have seen my father’s eyes

fixed upon me in horror and alarm. I have known him soothe me as only

mad people and children are soothed, and I have chafed against his petty

devices, I have resented even his indulgence.

 

“At last these fits of desperation resolved themselves into a desperate

purpose. I determined to run away from this wretched home which my

slavery supported. I determined to desert this father who had more fear

of me than love for me. I determined to go to London and lose myself in

that great chaos of humanity.

 

“I had seen an advertisement in the Times while I was at Wildernsea,

and I presented myself to Mrs. Vincent, the advertiser, under a feigned

name. She accepted me, waiving all questions as to my antecedents. You

know the rest. I came here, and you made me an offer, the acceptance of

which would lift me at once into the sphere to which my ambition had

pointed ever since I was a school-girl, and heard for the first time

that I was pretty.

 

“Three years had passed, and I had received no token of my husband’s

existence; for, I argued, that if he had returned to England, he would

have succeeded in finding me under any name and in any place. I knew the

energy of his character well enough to know this.

 

“I said ‘I have a right to think that he is dead, or that he wishes me

to believe him dead, and his shadow shall not stand between me and

prosperity.’ I said this, and I became your wife, Sir Michael, with

every resolution to be as good a wife as it was in my nature to be. The

common temptations that assail and shipwreck some women had no terror

for me. I would have been your true and pure wife to the end of time,

though I had been surrounded by a legion of tempters. The mad folly that

the world calls love had never had any part in my madness, and here at

least extremes met, and the vice of heartlessness became the virtue of

constancy.

 

“I was very happy in the first triumph and grandeur of my new position,

very grateful to the hand that had lifted me to it. In the sunshine of

my own happiness I felt, for the first time in my life, for the miseries

of others. I had been poor myself, and I was now rich, and could afford

to pity and relieve the poverty of my neighbors. I took pleasure in acts

of kindness and benevolence. I found out my father’s address and sent

him large sums of money, anonymously, for I did not wish him to discover

what had become of me. I availed myself to the full of the privilege

your generosity afforded me. I dispensed happiness on every side. I saw

myself loved as well as admired, and I think I might have been a good

woman for the rest of my life, if fate would have allowed me to be so.

 

“I believe that at this time my mind regained its just balance. I had

watched myself very closely since leaving Wildernsea; I had held a check

upon myself. I had often wondered while sitting in the surgeon’s quiet

family circle whether any suspicion of that invisible, hereditary taint

had ever occurred to Mr. Dawson.

 

“Fate would not suffer me to be good. My destiny compelled me to be a

wretch. Within a month of my marriage, I read in one of the Essex papers

of