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

glass

and silver.

 

“Is papa coming to dinner?” asked Miss Audley. “I’m so hungry; and poor

Tomlins has sent up three times to say the fish will be spoiled. It must

be reduced to a species of isinglass soup, by this time, I should

think,” added the young lady, as she came out into the vestibule with

the Times newspaper in her hand.

 

She had been sitting by the fire reading the paper, and waiting for her

seniors to join her at the dinner table.

 

“Oh, it’s you, Mr. Robert Audley.” she remarked, indifferently. “You

dine with us of course. Pray go and find papa. It must be nearly eight

o’clock, and we are supposed to dine at six.”

 

Mr. Audley answered his cousin rather sternly. Her frivolous manner

jarred upon him, and he forgot in his irrational displeasure that Miss

Audley had known nothing of the terrible drama which had been so long

enacting under her very nose.

 

“Your papa has just endured a very great grief, Alicia,” the young man

said, gravely.

 

The girl’s arch, laughing face changed in a moment to a tenderly earnest

look of sorrow and anxiety. Alicia Audley loved her father very dearly.

 

“A grief?” she exclaimed; “papa grieved! Oh! Robert, what has happened?”

 

“I can tell you nothing yet, Alicia,” Robert answered in a low voice.

 

He took his cousin by the wrist, and drew her into the dining-room as he

spoke. He closed the door carefully behind him before he continued:

 

“Alicia, can I trust you?” he asked, earnestly.

 

“Trust me to do what?”

 

“To be a comfort and a friend to your poor father under a very heavy

affliction.”

 

“Yes!” cried Alicia, passionately. “How can you ask me such a

question? Do you think there is anything I would not do to lighten any

sorrow of my father’s? Do you think there is anything I would not suffer

if my suffering could lighten his?”

 

The rushing tears rose to Miss Audley’s bright gray eyes as she spoke.

 

“Oh, Robert! Robert! could you think so badly of me as to think I would

not try to be a comfort to my father in his grief?” she said,

reproachfully.

 

“No, no, my dear,” answered the young man, quietly; “I never doubted

your affection, I only doubted your discretion. May I rely upon that?”

 

“You may, Robert,” said Alicia, resolutely.

 

“Very well, then, my dear girl, I will trust you. Your father is going

to leave the Court, for a time at least. The grief which he has just

endured—a sudden and unlooked-for sorrow, remember—has no doubt made

this place hateful to him. He is going away; but he must not go alone,

must he, Alicia?”

 

“Alone? no! no! But I suppose my lady—”

 

“Lady Audley will not go with him,” said Robert, gravely; “he is about

to separate himself from her.”

 

“For a time?”

 

“No, forever.”

 

“Separate himself from her forever!” exclaimed Alicia. “Then this

grief—”

 

“Is connected with Lady Audley. Lady Audley is the cause of your

father’s sorrow.”

 

Alicia’s face, which had been pale before, flushed crimson. Sorrow, of

which my lady was the cause—a sorrow which was to separate Sir Michael

forever from his wife! There had been no quarrel between them—there had

never been anything but harmony and sunshine between Lady Audley and her

generous husband. This sorrow must surely then have arisen from some

sudden discovery; it was, no doubt, a sorrow associated with disgrace.

Robert Audley understood the meaning of that vivid blush.

 

“You will offer to accompany your father wherever he may choose to go,

Alicia,” he said. “You are his natural comforter at such a time as this,

but you will best befriend him in this hour of trial by avoiding all

intrusion upon his grief. Your very ignorance of the particulars of that

grief will be a security for your discretion. Say nothing to your father

that you might not have said to him two years ago, before he married a

second wife. Try and be to him what you were before the woman in yonder

room came between you and your father’s love.”

 

“I will,” murmured Alicia, “I will.”

 

“You will naturally avoid all mention of Lady Audley’s name. If your

father is often silent, be patient; if it sometimes seems to you that

the shadow of this great sorrow will never pass away from his life, be

patient still; and remember that there can be no better hope of a cure

of his grief than the hope that his daughter’s devotion may lead him to

remember there is one woman upon this earth who will love him truly and

purely until the last.”

 

“Yes—yes, Robert, dear cousin, I will remember.”

 

Mr. Audley, for the first time since he had been a schoolboy, took his

cousin in his arms and kissed her broad forehead.

 

“My dear Alicia,” he said, “do this and you will make me happy. I have

been in some measure the means of bringing this sorrow upon your father.

Let me hope that it is not an enduring one. Try and restore my uncle to

happiness, Alicia, and I will love you more dearly than brother ever

loved a noble-hearted sister; and a brotherly affection may be worth

having, perhaps, after all, my dear, though it is very different to poor

Sir Harry’s enthusiastic worship.”

 

Alicia’s head was bent and her face hidden from her cousin while he

spoke, but she lifted her head when he had finished, and looked him full

in the face with a smile that was only the brighter for her eyes being

filled with tears.

 

“You are a good fellow, Bob,” she said; “and I’ve been very foolish and

wicked to feel angry with you because—”

 

The young lady stopped suddenly.

 

“Because what, my dear?” asked Mr. Audley.

 

“Because I’m silly, Cousin Robert,” Alicia said, quickly; “never mind

that, Bob, I’ll do all you wish, and it shall not be my fault if my

dearest father doesn’t forget his troubles before long. I’d go to the

end of the world with him, poor darling, if I thought there was any

comfort to be found for him in the journey. I’ll go and get ready

directly. Do you think papa will go tonight?”

 

“Yes, my dear; I don’t think Sir Michael will rest another night under

this roof yet awhile.”

 

“The mail goes at twenty minutes past nine,” said Alicia; “we must leave

the house in an hour if we are to travel by it. I shall see you again

before we go, Robert?”

 

“Yes, dear.”

 

Miss Audley ran off to her room to summon her maid, and make all

necessary preparations for the sudden journey, of whose ultimate

destination she was as yet quite ignorant.

 

She went heart and soul into the carrying out of the duty which Robert

had dictated to her. She assisted in the packing of her portmanteaus,

and hopelessly bewildered her maid by stuffing silk dresses into her

bonnet-boxes and satin shoes into her dressing-case. She roamed about

her rooms, gathering together drawing-materials, music-books,

needlework, hair-brushes, jewelry, and perfume-bottles, very much as

she might have done had she been about to sail for some savage country,

devoid of all civilized resources. She was thinking all the time of her

father’s unknown grief, and perhaps a little of the serious face and

earnest voice which had that night revealed her Cousin Robert to her in

a new character.

 

Mr. Audley went up-stairs after his cousin, and found his way to Sir

Michael’s dressing-room. He knocked at the door and listened, Heaven

knows how anxiously, for the expected answer. There was a moment’s

pause, during which the young man’s heart beat loud and fast, and then

the door was opened by the baronet himself. Robert saw that his uncle’s

valet was already hard at work preparing for his master’s hurried

journey.

 

Sir Michael came out into the corridor.

 

“Have you anything more to say to me, Robert?” he asked, quietly.

 

“I only came to ascertain if I could assist in any of your arrangements.

You go to London by the mail?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Have you any idea of where you will stay.”

 

“Yes, I shall stop at the Clarendon; I am known there. Is that all you

have to say?”

 

“Yes; except that Alicia will accompany you?”

 

“Alicia!”

 

“She could not very well stay here, you know, just now. It would be best

for her to leave the Court until—”

 

“Yes, yes, I understand,” interrupted the baronet; “but is there nowhere

else that she could go—must she be with me?”

 

“She could go nowhere else so immediately, and she would not be happy

anywhere else.”

 

“Let her come, then,” said Sir Michael, “let her come.”

 

He spoke in a strange, subdued voice, and with an apparent effort, as if

it were painful to him to have to speak at all; as if all this ordinary

business of life were a cruel torture to him, and jarred so much upon

his grief as to be almost worse to bear than that grief itself.

 

“Very well, my dear uncle, then all is arranged; Alicia will be ready to

start at nine o’clock.”

 

“Very good, very good,” muttered the baronet; “let her come if she

pleases, poor child, let her come.”

 

He sighed heavily as he spoke in that half pitying tone of his daughter.

He was thinking how comparatively indifferent he had been toward that

only child for the sake of the woman now shut in the firelit room

below.

 

“I shall see you again before you go, sir,” said Robert; “I will leave

you till then.”

 

“Stay!” said Sir Michael, suddenly; “have you told Alicia?”

 

“I have told her nothing, except that you are about to leave the Court

for some time.”

 

“You are very good, my boy, you are very good,” the baronet murmured in

a broken voice.

 

He stretched out his hand. His nephew took it in both his own, and

pressed it to his lips.

 

“Oh, sir! how can I ever forgive myself?” he said; “how can I ever cease

to hate myself for having brought this grief upon you?”

 

“No, no, Robert, you did right; I wish that God had been so merciful to

me as to take my miserable life before this night; but you did right.”

 

Sir Michael re-entered his dressing-room, and Robert slowly returned to

the vestibule. He paused upon the threshold of that chamber in which he

had left Lucy—Lady Audley, otherwise Helen Talboys, the wife of his

lost friend.

 

She was lying upon the floor, upon the very spot in which she had

crouched at her husband’s feet telling her guilty story. Whether she was

in a swoon, or whether she lay there in the utter helplessness of her

misery, Robert scarcely cared to know. He went out into the vestibule,

and sent one of the servants to look for her maid, the smart,

be-ribboned damsel who was loud in wonder and consternation at the sight

of her mistress.

 

“Lady Audley is very ill,” he said; “take her to her room and see that

she does not leave it tonight. You will be good enough to remain near

her, but do not either talk to her or suffer her to excite herself by

talking.”

 

My lady had not fainted; she allowed the girl to assist her, and rose

from the ground upon which she had groveled. Her golden hair fell in

loose, disheveled masses about her ivory throat and shoulders, her face

and lips were