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

and holy woman in

this Catholic country freely takes upon herself, and happily endures

until the end. The solitude of your existence in this place will be no

greater than that of a king’s daughter, who, flying from the evil of the

time, was glad to take shelter in a house as tranquil as this. Surely,

it is a small atonement which I ask you to render for your sins, a light

penance which I call upon you to perform. Live here and repent; nobody

will assail you, nobody will torment you. I only say to you, repent!”

 

“I cannot!” cried my lady, pushing her hair fiercely from her white

forehead, and fixing her dilated eyes upon Robert Audley, “I cannot!

Has my beauty brought me to this? Have I plotted and schemed to shield

myself and laid awake in the long deadly nights, trembling to think of

my dangers, for this? I had better have given up at once, since this

was to be the end. I had better have yielded to the curse that was upon

me, and given up when George Talboys first came back to England.”

 

She plucked at the feathery golden curls as if she would have torn them

from her head. It had served her so little after all, that gloriously

glittering hair, that beautiful nimbus of yellow light that had

contrasted so exquisitely with the melting azure of her eyes. She hated

herself and her beauty.

 

“I would laugh at you and defy you, if I dared,” she cried; “I would

kill myself and defy you, if I dared. But I am a poor, pitiful coward,

and have been so from the first. Afraid of my mother’s horrible

inheritance; afraid of poverty; afraid of George Talboys; afraid of

you.”

 

She was silent for a little while, but she held her place by the door,

as if determined to detain Robert as long as it was her pleasure to do

so.

 

“Do you know what I am thinking of?” she said, presently. “Do you know

what I am thinking of, as I look at you in the dim light of this room? I

am thinking of the day upon which George Talboys disappeared.”

 

Robert started as she mentioned the name of his lost friend; his face

turned pale in the dusky light, and his breathing grew quicker and

louder.

 

“He was standing opposite me, as you are standing now,” continued my

lady. “You said that you would raze the old house to the ground; that

you would root up every tree in the gardens to find your dead friend.

You would have had no need to do so much: the body of George Talboys

lies at the bottom of the old well, in the shrubbery beyond the

lime-walk.”

 

Robert Audley flung his hands and clasped them above his head, with one

loud cry of horror.

 

“Oh, my God!” he said, after a dreadful pause; “have all the ghastly

things that I have thought prepared me so little for the ghastly truth,

that it should come upon me like this at last?”

 

“He came to me in the lime-walk,” resumed my lady, in the same hard,

dogged tone as that in which she had confessed the wicked story of her

life. “I knew that he would come, and I had prepared myself, as well as

I could, to meet him. I was determined to bribe him, to cajole him, to

defy him; to do anything sooner than abandon the wealth and the position

I had won, and go back to my old life. He came, and he reproached me for

the conspiracy at Ventnor. He declared that so long as he lived he would

never forgive me for the lie that had broken his heart. He told me that

I had plucked his heart out of his breast and trampled upon it; and that

he had now no heart in which to feel one sentiment of mercy for me. That

he would have forgiven me any wrong upon earth, but that one deliberate

and passionless wrong that I had done him. He said this and a great deal

more, and he told me that no power on earth should turn him from his

purpose, which was to take me to the man I had deceived, and make me

tell my wicked story. He did not know the hidden taint that I had sucked

in with my mother’s milk. He did not know that it was possible to drive

me mad. He goaded me as you have goaded me; he was as merciless as you

have been merciless. We were in the shrubbery at the end of the

lime-walk. I was seated upon the broken masonry at the mouth of the

well. George Talboys was leaning upon the disused windlass, in which the

rusty iron spindle rattled loosely whenever he shifted his position. I

rose at last, and turned upon him to defy him, as I had determined to

defy him at the worst. I told him that if he denounced me to Sir

Michael, I would declare him to be a madman or a liar, and I defied him

to convince the man who loved me—blindly, as I told him—that he had

any claim to me. I was going to leave him after having told him this,

when he caught me by the wrist and detained me by force. You saw the

bruises that his fingers made upon my wrist, and noticed them, and did

not believe the account I gave of them. I could see that, Mr. Robert

Audley, and I saw that you were a person I should have to fear.”

 

She paused, as if she had expected Robert to speak; but he stood silent

and motionless, waiting for the end.

 

“George Talboys treated me as you treated me,” she said, petulantly. “He

swore that if there was but one witness of my identity, and that witness

was removed from Audley Court by the width of the whole earth, he would

bring him there to swear to my identity, and to denounce me. It was then

that I was mad, it was then that I drew the loose iron spindle from the

shrunken wood, and saw my first husband sink with one horrible cry into

the black mouth of the well. There is a legend of its enormous depth. I

do not know how deep it is. It is dry, I suppose, for I heard no splash,

only a dull thud. I looked down and I saw nothing but black emptiness. I

knelt down and listened, but the cry was not repeated, though I waited

for nearly a quarter of an hour—God knows how long it seemed to me!—by

the mouth of the well.”

 

Robert Audley uttered a word of horror when the story was finished. He

moved a little nearer toward the door against which Helen Talboys stood.

Had there been any other means of exit from the room, he would gladly

have availed himself of it. He shrank from even a momentary contact with

this creature.

 

“Let me pass you, if you please,” he said, in an icy voice.

 

“You see I do not fear to make my confession to you,” said Helen

Talboys; “for two reasons. The first is, that you dare not use it

against me, because you know it would kill your uncle to see me in a

criminal dock; the second is, that the law could pronounce no worse

sentence than this—a life-long imprisonment in a madhouse. You see I

do not thank you for your mercy, Mr. Robert Audley, for I know exactly

what it is worth.”

 

She moved away from the door, and Robert passed her without a word,

without a look.

 

Half an hour afterward he was in one of the principal hotels at

Villebrumeuse, sitting at a neatly-ordered supper-table, with no power

to eat; with no power to distract his mind, even for a moment, from the

image of that lost friend who had been treacherously murdered in the

thicket at Audley Court.

 

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

 

GHOST-HAUNTED.

 

No feverish sleeper traveling in a strange dream ever looked out more

wonderingly upon a world that seemed unreal than Robert Audley, as he

stared absently at the flat swamps and dismal poplars between

Villebrumeuse and Brussels. Could it be that he was returning to his

uncle’s house without the woman who had reigned in it for nearly two

years as queen and mistress? He felt as if he had carried off my lady,

and had made away with her secretly and darkly, and must now render up

an account to Sir Michael of the fate of that woman, whom the baronet

had so dearly loved.

 

“What shall I tell him?” he thought. “Shall I tell the truth—the

horrible, ghastly truth? No; that would be too cruel. His generous

spirit would sink under the hideous revelation. Yet, in his ignorance of

the extent of this wretched woman’s wickedness, he may think, perhaps,

that I have been hard with her.”

 

Brooding thus, Mr. Robert Audley absently watched the cheerless

landscape from the seat in the shabby coupe of the diligence, and

thought how great a leaf had been torn out of his life, now that the

dark story of George Talboys was finished.

 

What had he to do next? A crowd of horrible thoughts rushed into his

mind as he remembered the story that he had heard from the white lips of

Helen Talboys. His friend—his murdered friend—lay hidden among the

moldering ruins of the old well at Audley Court. He had lain there for

six long months, unburied, unknown; hidden in the darkness of the old

convent well. What was to be done?

 

To institute a search for the remains of the murdered man was to

inevitably bring about a coroner’s inquest. Should such an inquest be

held, it was next to impossible that the history of my lady’s crime

could fail to be brought to light. To prove that George Talboys met with

his death at Audley Court, was to prove almost as surely that my lady

had been the instrument of that mysterious death; for the young man had

been known to follow her into the lime-walk upon the day of his

disappearance.

 

“My God!” Robert exclaimed, as the full horror of his position became

evident to him; “is my friend to rest in this unhallowed burial-place

because I have condoned the offenses of the woman who murdered him?”

 

He felt that there was no way out of this difficulty. Sometimes he

thought that it little mattered to his dead friend whether he lay

entombed beneath a marble monument, whose workmanship should be the

wonder of the universe, or in that obscure hiding-place in the thicket

at Audley Court. At another time he would be seized with a sudden horror

at the wrong that had been done to the murdered man, and would fain have

traveled even more rapidly than the express between Brussels and Paris

could carry him in his eagerness to reach the end of his journey, that

he might set right this cruel wrong.

 

He was in London at dusk on the second day after that on which he had

left Audley Court, and he drove straight to the Clarendon, to inquire

after his uncle. He had no intention of seeing Sir Michael, as he had

not yet determined how much or how little he should tell him, but he was

very anxious to ascertain how the old man had sustained the cruel shock

he had so lately endured.

 

“I will see Alicia,” he thought, “she will tell me all about her father.

It is only two days since he left Audley. I can scarcely expect to