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

and reading French novels,

he would stroll into the Temple Gardens, and lying in some shady spot,

pale and cool, with his shirt collar turned down and a blue silk

handkerchief tied loosely about his neck, would tell grave benchers that

he had knocked himself up with over work.

 

The sly old benchers laughed at the pleasant fiction; but they all

agreed that Robert Audley was a good fellow; a generous-hearted fellow;

rather a curious fellow, too, with a fund of sly wit and quiet humor,

under his listless, dawdling, indifferent, irresolute manner. A man who

would never get on in the world; but who would not hurt a worm. Indeed,

his chambers were converted into a perfect dog-kennel, by his habit of

bringing home stray and benighted curs, who were attracted by his looks

in the street, and followed him with abject fondness.

 

Robert always spent the hunting season at Audley Court; not that he was

distinguished as a Nimrod, for he would quietly trot to covert upon a

mild-tempered, stout-limbed bay hack, and keep at a very respectful

distance from the hard riders; his horse knowing quite as well as he

did, that nothing was further from his thoughts than any desire to be in

at the death.

 

The young man was a great favorite with his uncle, and by no means

despised by his pretty, gipsy-faced, light-hearted, hoydenish cousin,

Miss Alice Audley. It might have seemed to other men, that the

partiality of a young lady who was sole heiress to a very fine estate,

was rather well worth cultivating, but it did not so occur to Robert

Audley. Alicia was a very nice girl, he said, a jolly girl, with no

nonsense about her—a girl of a thousand; but this was the highest point

to which enthusiasm could carry him. The idea of turning his cousin’s

girlish liking for him to some good account never entered his idle

brain. I doubt if he even had any correct notion of the amount of his

uncle’s fortune, and I am certain that he never for one moment

calculated upon the chances of any part of that fortune ultimately

coming to himself. So that when, one fine spring morning, about three

months before the time of which I am writing, the postman brought him

the wedding cards of Sir Michael and Lady Audley, together with a very

indignant letter from his cousin, setting forth how her father had just

married a wax-dollish young person, no older than Alicia herself, with

flaxen ringlets, and a perpetual giggle; for I am sorry to say that Miss

Audley’s animus caused her thus to describe that pretty musical laugh

which had been so much admired in the late Miss Lucy Graham—when, I

say, these documents reached Robert Audley—they elicited neither

vexation nor astonishment in the lymphatic nature of that gentleman. He

read Alicia’s angry crossed and recrossed letter without so much as

removing the amber mouth-piece of his German pipe from his mustached

lips. When he had finished the perusal of the epistle, which he read

with his dark eyebrows elevated to the center of his forehead (his only

manner of expressing surprise, by the way) he deliberately threw that

and the wedding cards into the waste-paper basket, and putting down his

pipe, prepared himself for the exertion of thinking out the subject.

 

“I always said the old buffer would marry,” he muttered, after about

half an hour’s revery. Alicia and my lady, the stepmother, will go at it

hammer and tongs. I hope they won’t quarrel in the hunting season, or

say unpleasant things to each other at the dinner-table; rows always

upset a man’s digestion.

 

At about twelve o’clock on the morning following that night upon which

the events recorded in my last chapter had taken place, the baronet’s

nephew strolled out of the Temple, Blackfriarsward, on his way to the

city. He had in an evil hour obliged some necessitous friend by putting

the ancient name of Audley across a bill of accommodation, which bill

not having been provided for by the drawer, Robert was called upon to

pay. For this purpose he sauntered up Ludgate Hill, with his blue

necktie fluttering in the hot August air, and thence to a refreshingly

cool banking-house in a shady court out of St. Paul’s churchyard, where

be made arrangements for selling out a couple of hundred pounds’ worth

of consols.

 

He had transacted this business, and was loitering at the corner of the

court, waiting for a chance hansom to convey him back to the Temple,

when he was almost knocked down by a man of about his own age, who

dashed headlong into the narrow opening.

 

“Be so good as to look where you’re going, my friend!” Robert

remonstrated, mildly, to the impetuous passenger; “you might give a man

warning before you throw him down and trample upon him.”

 

The stranger stopped suddenly, looked very hard at the speaker, and then

gasped for breath.

 

“Bob!” he cried, in a tone expressive of the most intense astonishment;

“I only touched British ground after dark last night, and to think that

I should meet you this morning.”

 

“I’ve seen you somewhere before, my bearded friend,” said Mr. Audley,

calmly scrutinizing the animated face of the other, “but I’ll be hanged

if I can remember when or where.”

 

“What!” exclaimed the stranger, reproachfully. “You don’t mean to say

that you’ve forgotten George Talboys?”

 

“No I have not!” said Robert, with an emphasis by no means usual to

him; and then hooking his arm into that of his friend, he led him into

the shady court, saying, with his old indifference, “and now, George

tell us all about it.”

 

George Talboys did tell him all about it. He told that very story which

he had related ten days before to the pale governess on board the

Argus; and then, hot and breathless, he said that he had twenty

thousand pounds or so in his pocket, and that he wanted to bank it at

Messrs. –-, who had been his bankers many years before.

 

“If you’ll believe me, I’ve only just left their counting-house,” said

Robert. “I’ll go back with you, and we’ll settle that matter in five

minutes.”

 

They did contrive to settle it in about a quarter of an hour; and then

Robert Audley was for starting off immediately for the Crown and

Scepter, at Greenwich, or the Castle, at Richmond, where they could have

a bit of dinner, and talk over those good old times when they were

together at Eton. But George told his friend that before he went

anywhere, before he shaved or broke his fast, or in any way refreshed

himself after a night journey from Liverpool by express train, he must

call at a certain coffee-house in Bridge street, Westminster, where he

expected to find a letter from his wife.

 

As they dashed through Ludgate Hill, Fleet street, and the Strand, in a

fast hansom, George Talboys poured into his friend’s ear all those wild

hopes and dreams which had usurped such a dominion over his sanguine

nature.

 

“I shall take a villa on the banks of the Thames, Bob,” he said, “for

the little wife and myself; and we’ll have a yacht, Bob, old boy, and

you shall lie on the deck and smoke, while my pretty one plays her

guitar and sings songs to us. She’s for all the world like one of those

what’s-its-names, who got poor old Ulysses into trouble,” added the

young man, whose classic lore was not very great.

 

The waiters at the Westminster coffee-house stared at the hollow-eyed,

unshaven stranger, with his clothes of colonial cut, and his boisterous,

excited manner; but he had been an old frequenter of the place in his

military days, and when they heard who he was they flew to do his

bidding.

 

He did not want much—only a bottle of soda-water, and to know if there

was a letter at the bar directed to George Talboys.

 

The waiter brought the soda-water before the young men had seated

themselves in a shady box near the disused fireplace. No; there was no

letter for that name.

 

The waiter said it with consummate indifference, while he mechanically

dusted the little mahogany table.

 

George’s face blanched to a deadly whiteness. “Talboys,” he said;

“perhaps you didn’t hear the name distinctly—T, A, L, B, O, Y, S. Go

and look again, there must be a letter.”

 

The waiter shrugged his shoulders as he left the room, and returned in

three minutes to say that there was no name at all resembling Talboys in

the letter rack. There was Brown, and Sanderson, and Pinchbeck; only

three letters altogether.

 

The young man drank his soda-water in silence, and then, leaning his

elbows on the table, covered his face with his hands. There was

something in his manner which told Robert Audley that his

disappointment, trifling as it may appear, was in reality a very bitter

one. He seated himself opposite to his friend, but did not attempt to

address him.

 

By-and-by George looked up, and mechanically taking a greasy Times

newspaper of the day before from a heap of journals on the table, stared

vacantly at the first page.

 

I cannot tell how long he sat blankly staring at one paragraph among the

list of deaths, before his dazed brain took in its full meaning; but

after considerable pause he pushed the newspaper over to Robert Audley,

and with a face that had changed from its dark bronze to a sickly,

chalky grayish white, and with an awful calmness in his manner, he

pointed with his finger to a line which ran thus:

 

“On the 24th inst., at Ventnor, Isle of Wight, Helen Talboys, aged 22.”

 

CHAPTER V.

 

THE HEADSTONE AT VENTNOR.

 

Yes, there it was in black and white—“Helen Talboys, aged 22.”

 

When George told the governess on board the Argus that if he heard any

evil tidings of his wife he should drop down dead, he spoke in perfect

good faith; and yet, here were the worst tidings that could come to him,

and he sat rigid, white and helpless, staring stupidly at the shocked

face of his friend.

 

The suddenness of the blow had stunned him. In this strange and

bewildered state of mind he began to wonder what had happened, and why

it was that one line in the Times newspaper could have so horrible an

effect upon him.

 

Then by degrees even this vague consciousness of his misfortune faded

slowly out of his mind, succeeded by a painful consciousness of external

things.

 

The hot August sunshine, the dusty window-panes and shabby-painted

blinds, a file of fly-blown play-bills fastened to the wall, the black

and empty fireplaces, a bald-headed old man nodding over the _Morning

Advertizer_, the slipshod waiter folding a tumbled tablecloth, and

Robert Audley’s handsome face looking at him full of compassionate

alarm—he knew that all these things took gigantic proportions, and

then, one by one, melted into dark blots and swam before his eyes, He

knew that there was a great noise, as of half a dozen furious

steam-engines tearing and grinding in his ears, and he knew nothing

more—except that somebody or something fell heavily to the ground.

 

He opened his eyes upon the dusky evening in a cool and shaded room, the

silence only broken by the rumbling of wheels at a distance.

 

He looked about him wonderingly, but half indifferently. His old friend,

Robert Audley, was seated by his side smoking. George was lying on a low

iron bedstead opposite to an open window, in which there was a stand of

flowers and two or three birds in cages.

 

“You