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

the return of a certain Mr. Talboys, a fortunate gold-seeker, from

Australia. The ship had sailed at the time I read the paragraph. What

was to be done?

 

“I said just now that I knew the energy of George’s character. I knew

that the man who had gone to the antipodes and won a fortune for his

wife would leave no stone unturned in his efforts to find her. It was

hopeless to think of hiding myself from him.

 

“Unless he could be induced to believe that I was dead, he would never

cease in his search for me.

 

“My brain was dazed as I thought of my peril. Again the balance

trembled, again the invisible boundary was passed, again I was mad.

 

“I went down to Southampton and found my father, who was living there

with my child. You remember how Mrs. Vincent’s name was used as an

excuse for this hurried journey, and how it was contrived I should go

with no other escort than Phoebe Marks, whom I left at the hotel while I

went to my father’s house.

 

“I confided to my father the whole secret of my peril. He was not very

much shocked at what I had done, for poverty had perhaps blunted his

sense of honor and principle. He was not very much shocked, but he was

frightened, and he promised to do all in his power to assist me in my

horrible emergency.

 

“He had received a letter addressed to me at Wildernsea, by George, and

forwarded from there to my father. This letter had been written within a

few days of the sailing of the Argus, and it announced the probable

date of the ship’s arrival at Liverpool. This letter gave us, therefore,

data upon which to act.

 

“We decided at once upon the first step. This was that on the date of

the probable arrival of the Argus, or a few days later, an

advertisement of my death should be inserted in the Times.

 

“But almost immediately after deciding upon this, we saw that there were

fearful difficulties in the carrying out of such a simple plan. The date

of the death, and the place in which I died, must be announced, as well

as the death itself. George would immediately hurry to that place,

however distant it might be, however comparatively inaccessible, and the

shallow falsehood would be discovered.

 

“I knew enough of his sanguine temperament, his courage and

determination, his readiness to hope against hope, to know that unless

he saw the grave in which I was buried, and the register of my death, he

would never believe that I was lost to him.

 

“My father was utterly dumfounded and helpless. He could only shed

childish tears of despair and terror. He was of no use to me in this

crisis.

 

“I was hopeless of any issue out of my difficulties. I began to think

that I must trust to the chapter of accidents, and hope that among other

obscure corners of the earth, Audley Court might be undreamt of by my

husband.

 

“I sat with my father, drinking tea with him in his miserable hovel, and

playing with the child, who was pleased with my dress and jewels, but

quite unconscious that I was anything but a stranger to him. I had the

boy in my arms, when a woman who attended him came to fetch him that she

might make him more fit to be seen by the lady, as she said.

 

“I was anxious to know how the boy was treated, and I detained this

woman in conversation with me while my father dozed over the tea-table.

 

“She was a pale-faced, sandy-haired woman of about five-and-forty and

she seemed very glad to get the chance of talking to me as long as I

pleased to allow her. She soon left off talking of the boy, however, to

tell me of her own troubles. She was in very great trouble, she told me.

Her eldest daughter had been obliged to leave her situation from

ill-health; in fact, the doctor said the girl was in a decline; and it

was a hard thing for a poor widow who had seen better days to have a

sick daughter to support, as well as a family of young children.

 

“I let the woman run on for a long time in this manner, telling me the

girl’s ailments, and the girl’s age, and the girl’s doctor’s stuff, and

piety, and sufferings, and a great deal more. But I neither listened to

her nor heeded her. I heard her, but only in a far-away manner, as I

heard the traffic in the street, or the ripple of the stream at the

bottom of it. What were this woman’s troubles to me? I had miseries of

my own, and worse miseries than her coarse nature could ever have to

endure. These sort of people always had sick husbands or sick children,

and expected to be helped in their illness by the rich. It was nothing

out of the common. I was thinking this, and I was just going to dismiss

the woman with a sovereign for her sick daughter, when an idea flashed

upon me with such painful suddenness that it sent the blood surging up

to my brain, and set my heart beating, as it only beats when I am mad.

 

“I asked the woman her name. She was a Mrs. Plowson, and she kept a

small general shop, she said, and only ran in now and then to look after

Georgey, and to see that the little maid-of-all-work took care of him.

Her daughter’s name was Matilda. I asked her several questions about

this girl Matilda, and I ascertained that she was four-and-twenty, that

she had always been consumptive, and that she was now, as the doctor

said, going off in a rapid decline. He had declared that she could not

last much more than a fortnight.

 

“It was in three weeks that the ship that carried George Talboys was

expected to anchor in the Mersey.

 

“I need not dwell upon this business. I visited the sick girl. She was

fair and slender. Her description, carelessly given, might tally nearly

enough with my own, though she bore no shadow of resemblance to me,

except in these two particulars. I was received by the girl as a rich

lady who wished to do her a service. I bought the mother, who was poor

and greedy, and who for a gift of money, more money than she had ever

before received, consented to submit to anything I wished. Upon the

second day after my introduction to this Mrs. Plowson, my father went

over to Ventnor, and hired lodgings for his invalid daughter and her

little boy. Early the next morning he carried over the dying girl and

Georgey, who had been bribed to call her ‘mamma.’ She entered the house

as Mrs. Talboys; she was attended by a Ventnor medical man as Mrs.

Talboys; she died, and her death and burial were registered in that

name.

 

“The advertisement was inserted in the Times, and upon the second day

after its insertion George Talboys visited Ventnor, and ordered the

tombstone which at this hour records the death of his wife, Helen

Talboys.”

 

Sir Michael Audley rose slowly, and with a stiff, constrained action, as

if every physical sense had been benumbed by that one sense of misery.

 

“I cannot hear any more,” he said, in a hoarse whisper; “if there is

anything more to be told I cannot hear it. Robert, it is you who have

brought about this discovery, as I understand. I want to know nothing

more. Will you take upon yourself the duty of providing for the safety

and comfort of this lady whom I have thought my wife? I need not ask you

to remember in all you do, that I have loved her very dearly and truly.

I cannot say farewell to her. I will not say it until I can think of her

without bitterness—until I can pity her, as I now pray that God may

pity her this night.”

 

Sir Michael walked slowly from the room. He did not trust himself to

look at that crouching figure. He did not wish to see the creature whom

he had cherished. He went straight to his dressing-room, rung for his

valet, and ordered him to pack a portmanteau, and make all necessary

arrangements for accompanying his master by the last up-train.

 

CHAPTER XXXV.

 

THE HUSH THAT SUCCEEDS THE TEMPEST.

 

Robert Audley followed his uncle into the vestibule after Sir Michael

had spoken those few quiet words which sounded the death-knell of his

hope and love. Heaven knows how much the young man had feared the coming

of this day. It had come; and though there had been no great outburst of

despair, no whirlwind of stormy grief, no loud tempest of anguish and

tears, Robert took no comforting thought from the unnatural stillness.

He knew enough to know that Sir Michael Audley went away with the barbed

arrow, which his nephew’s hand had sent home to its aim, rankling in his

tortured heart; he knew that this strange and icy calm was the first

numbness of a heart stricken by grief so unexpected as for a time to be

rendered almost incomprehensible by a blank stupor of astonishment; he

knew that when this dull quiet had passed away, when little by little,

and one by one, each horrible feature of the sufferer’s sorrow became

first dimly apparent and then terribly familiar to him, the storm would

burst in fatal fury, and tempests of tears and cruel thunder-claps of

agony would rend that generous heart.

 

Robert had heard of cases in which men of his uncle’s age had borne some

great grief, as Sir Michael had borne this, with a strange quiet; and

had gone away from those who would have comforted them, and whose

anxieties have been relieved by this patient stillness, to fall down

upon the ground and die under the blow which at first had only stunned

him. He remembered cases in which paralysis and apoplexy had stricken

men as strong as his uncle in the first hour of the horrible affliction;

and he lingered in the lamplit vestibule, wondering whether it was not

his duty to be with Sir Michael—to be near him, in case of any

emergency, and to accompany him wherever he went.

 

Yet would it be wise to force himself upon that gray-headed sufferer in

this cruel hour, in which he had been awakened from the one delusion of

a blameless life to discover that he had been the dupe of a false face,

and the fool of a nature which was too coldly mercenary, too cruelly

heartless, to be sensible of its own infamy?

 

“No,” thought Robert Audley, “I will not intrude upon the anguish of

this wounded heart. There is humiliation mingled with this bitter grief.

It is better he should fight the battle alone. I have done what I

believe to have been my solemn duty, yet I should scarcely wonder if I

had rendered myself forever hateful to him. It is better he should fight

the battle alone. I can do nothing to make the strife less terrible.

Better that it should be fought alone.”

 

While the young man stood with his hand upon the library door, still

half-doubtful whether he should follow his uncle or re-enter the room in

which he had left that more wretched creature whom it had been his

business to unmask, Alicia Audley opened the dining-room door, and

revealed to him the old-fashioned oak-paneled apartment, the long table

covered with showy damask, and bright with a cheerful glitter of