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

lifted his head, which had been bent in an attitude of

earnest thought, and addressed the physician.

 

“I will trust you, Dr. Mosgrave,” he said. “I will confide entirely in

your honor and goodness. I do not ask you to do any wrong to society;

but I ask you to save our stainless name from degradation and shame, if

you can do so conscientiously.”

 

He told the story of George’s disappearance, and of his own doubts and

fears, Heaven knows how reluctantly.

 

Dr. Mosgrave listened as quietly as he had listened before. Robert

concluded with an earnest appeal to the physician’s best feelings. He

implored him to spare the generous old man whose fatal confidence in a

wicked woman had brought much misery upon his declining years.

 

It was impossible to draw any conclusion, either favorable or otherwise,

from Dr. Mosgrave’s attentive face. He rose, when Robert had finished

speaking, and looked at his watch once more.

 

“I can only spare you twenty minutes,” he said. “I will see the lady, if

you please. You say her mother died in a madhouse?”

 

“She did. Will you see Lady Audley alone?”

 

“Yes, alone, if you please.”

 

Robert rung for my lady’s maid, and under convoy of that smart young

damsel the physician found his way to the octagon antechamber, and the

fairy boudoir with which it communicated.

 

Ten minutes afterward, he returned to the library, in which Robert sat

waiting for him.

 

“I have talked to the lady,” he said, quietly, “and we understand each

other very well. There is latent insanity! Insanity which might never

appear; or which might appear only once or twice in a lifetime. It would

be a dementia in its worst phase, perhaps; acute mania; but its

duration would be very brief, and it would only arise under extreme

mental pressure. The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint

in her blood. She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of

intelligence. I will tell you what she is, Mr. Audley. She is

dangerous!”

 

Dr. Mosgrave walked up and down the room once or twice before he spoke

again.

 

“I will not discuss the probabilities of the suspicion which distresses

you, Mr. Audley,” he said, presently, “but I will tell you this much, I

do not advise any esclandre. This Mr. George Talboys has disappeared,

but you have no evidence of his death. If you could produce evidence of

his death, you could produce no evidence against this lady, beyond the

one fact that she had a powerful motive for getting rid of him. No jury

in the United Kingdom would condemn her upon such evidence as that.”

 

Robert Audley interrupted Dr. Mosgrave, hastily.

 

“I assure you, my dear sir,” he said, “that my greatest fear is the

necessity of any exposure—any disgrace.”

 

“Certainly, Mr. Audley,” answered the physician, coolly, “but you cannot

expect me to assist you to condone one of the worst offenses against

society. If I saw adequate reason for believing that a murder had been

committed by this woman, I should refuse to assist you in smuggling her

away out of the reach of justice, although the honor of a hundred noble

families might be saved by my doing so. But I do not see adequate reason

for your suspicions; and I will do my best to help you.”

 

Robert Audley grasped the physician’s hands in both his own.

 

“I will thank you when I am better able to do so,” he said, with

emotion; “I will thank you in my uncle’s name as well as in my own.”

 

“I have only five minutes more, and I have a letter to write,” said Dr.

Mosgrave, smiling at the young man’s energy.

 

He seated himself at a writing-table in the window, dipped his pen in

the ink, and wrote rapidly for about seven minutes. He had filled three

sides of a sheet of note-paper, when he threw down his pen and folded

his letter.

 

He put this letter into an envelope, and delivered it, unsealed, to

Robert Audley.

 

The address which it bore was:

 

“Monsieur Val,

 

“Villebrumeuse,

 

“Belgium.”

 

Mr. Audley looked rather doubtfully from this address to the doctor, who

was putting on his gloves as deliberately as if his life had never known

a more solemn purpose than the proper adjustment of them.

 

“That letter,” he said, in answer to Robert Audley’s inquiring look, “is

written to my friend Monsieur Val, the proprietor and medical

superintendent of a very excellent maison de sante in the town of

Villebrumeuse. We have known each other for many years, and he will no

doubt willingly receive Lady Audley into his establishment, and charge

himself with the full responsibility of her future life; it will not be

a very eventful one!”

 

Robert Audley would have spoken, he would have once more expressed his

gratitude for the help which had been given to him, but Dr. Mosgrave

checked him with an authoritative gesture.

 

“From the moment in which Lady Audley enters that house,” he said, “her

life, so far as life is made up of action and variety, will be finished.

Whatever secrets she may have will be secrets forever! Whatever crimes

she may have committed she will be able to commit no more. If you were

to dig a grave for her in the nearest churchyard and bury her alive in

it, you could not more safely shut her from the world and all worldly

associations. But as a physiologist and as an honest man, I believe you

could do no better service to society than by doing this; for physiology

is a lie if the woman I saw ten minutes ago is a woman to be trusted at

large. If she could have sprung at my throat and strangled me with her

little hands, as I sat talking to her just now, she would have done it.”

 

“She suspected your purpose, then!”

 

“She knew it. ‘You think I am mad like my mother, and you have come to

question me,’ she said. ‘You are watching for some sign of the dreadful

taint in my blood.’ Good-day to you, Mr. Audley,” the physician added

hurriedly, “my time was up ten minutes ago; it is as much as I shall do

to catch the train.”

 

CHAPTER XXXVII.

 

BURIED ALIVE.

 

Robert Audley sat alone in the library with the physician’s letter upon

the table before him, thinking of the work which was still to be done.

 

The young barrister had constituted himself the denouncer of this

wretched woman. He had been her judge; and he was now her jailer. Not

until he had delivered the letter which lay before him to its proper

address, not until he had given up his charge into the safe-keeping of

the foreign madhouse doctor, not until then would the dreadful burden

be removed from him and his duty done.

 

He wrote a few lines to my lady, telling her that he was going to carry

her away from Audley Court to a place from which she was not likely to

return, and requesting her to lose no time in preparing for the journey.

He wished to start that evening, if possible, he told her.

 

Miss Susan Martin, the lady’s maid, thought it a very hard thing to have

to pack her mistress’ trunks in such a hurry, but my lady assisted in

the task. She toiled resolutely in directing and assisting her servant,

who scented bankruptcy and ruin in all this packing up and hurrying

away, and was therefore rather languid and indifferent in the discharge

of her duties; and at six o’clock in the evening she sent her attendant

to tell Mr. Audley that she was ready to depart as soon as he pleased.

 

Robert had consulted a volume of Bradshaw, and had discovered that

Villebrumeuse lay out of the track of all railway traffic, and was only

approachable by diligence from Brussels. The mail for Dover left London

Bridge at nine o’clock, and could be easily caught by Robert and his

charge, as the seven o’clock up-train from Audley reached Shoreditch at

a quarter past eight. Traveling by the Dover and Calais route, they

would reach Villebrumeuse by the following afternoon or evening.

 

It was late in the afternoon of the next day when the diligence bumped

and rattled over the uneven paving of the principal street in

Villebrumeuse.

 

Robert Audley and my lady had had the coupe of the diligence to

themselves for the whole of the journey, for there were not many

travelers between Brussels and Villebrumeuse, and the public conveyance

was supported by the force of tradition rather than any great profit

attaching to it as a speculation.

 

My lady had not spoken during the journey, except to decline some

refreshments which Robert had offered her at a halting place upon the

road. Her heart sunk when they left Brussels behind, for she had hoped

that city might have been the end of her journey, and she had turned

with a feeling of sickness and despair from the dull Belgian landscape.

 

She looked up at last as the vehicle jolted into a great stony

quadrangle, which had been the approach to a monastery once, but which

was now the court yard of a dismal hotel, in whose cellars legions of

rats skirmished and squeaked even while the broad sunshine was bright in

the chambers above.

 

Lady Audley shuddered as she alighted from the diligence, and found

herself in that dreary court yard. Robert was surrounded by chattering

porters, who clamored for his “baggages,” and disputed among themselves

as to the hotel at which he was to rest. One of these men ran away to

fetch a hackney-coach at Mr. Audley’s behest, and reappeared presently,

urging on a pair of horses—which were so small as to suggest the idea

that they had been made out of one ordinary-sized animal—with wild

shrieks and whoops that had a demoniac sound in the darkness.

 

Mr. Audley left my lady in a dreary coffee-room in the care of a drowsy

attendant while he drove away to some distant part of the quiet city.

There was official business to be gone through before Sir Michael’s wife

could be quietly put away in the place suggested by Dr. Mosgrave. Robert

had to see all manner of important personages; and to take numerous

oaths; and to exhibit the English physician’s letter; and to go through

much ceremony of signing and countersigning before he could take his

lost friend’s cruel wife to the home which was to be her last upon

earth. Upward of two hours elapsed before all this was arranged, and the

young man was free to return to the hotel, where he found his charge

staring absently at a pair of wax-candles, with a cup of untasted coffee

standing cold and stagnant before her.

 

Robert handed my lady into the hired vehicle, and took his seat opposite

to her once more.

 

“Where are you going to take me?” she asked, at last. “I am tired of

being treated like some naughty child, who is put into a dark cellar as

a punishment for its offenses. Where are you taking me?”

 

“To a place in which you will have ample leisure to repent the past,

Mrs. Talboys,” Robert answered, gravely.

 

They had left the paved streets behind them, and had emerged out of a

great gaunt square, in which there appeared to be about half a dozen

cathedrals, into a small boulevard, a broad lamplit road, on which the

shadows of the leafless branches went and came tremblingly, like the

shadows of a paralytic skeleton. There were houses here