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

The door opening into

his little dressing-room was ajar; he got up to shut it, and turned the

key in the lock with a sharp click.

 

“I haven’t read Alexander Dumas and Wilkie Collins for nothing,” he

muttered. “I’m up to their tricks, sneaking in at doors behind a

fellow’s back, and flattening their white faces against window panes,

and making themselves all eyes in the twilight. It’s a strange thing

that your generous hearted fellow, who never did a shabby thing in his

life, is capable of any meanness the moment he becomes a ghost. I’ll

have the gas laid on tomorrow and I’ll engage Mrs. Maloney’s eldest son

to sleep under the letter-box in the lobby. The youth plays popular

melodies upon a piece of tissue paper and a small-tooth comb, and it

will be quite pleasant company.”

 

Mr. Audley walked wearily up and down the room, trying to get rid of the

time. It was no use leaving the Temple until ten o’clock, and even then

he would be sure to reach the station half an hour too early. He was

tired of smoking. The soothing narcotic influence might be pleasant

enough in itself, but the man must be of a singularly unsocial

disposition who does not, after a half dozen lonely pipes, feel the need

of some friendly companion, at whom he can stare dreamily athwart the

pale gray mists, and who will stare kindly back at him in return. Do not

think that Robert Audley was without friends, because he so often found

himself alone in his chambers. The solemn purpose which had taken so

powerful a hold upon his careless life had separated him from old

associations, and it was for this reason that he was alone.

 

He had dropped away from his old friends. How could he sit among them,

at social wine parties, perhaps, or at social little dinners, that were

washed down with nonpareil and chambertin, pomard and champagne? How

could he sit among them, listening to their careless talk of politics

and opera, literature and racing, theaters and science, scandal and

theology, and yet carry in his mind the horrible burden of those dark

terrors and suspicions that were with him by day and by night? He could

not do it! He had shrunk from those men as if he had, indeed, been a

detective police officer, stained with vile associations and unfit

company for honest gentlemen. He had drawn himself away from all

familiar haunts, and shut himself in his lonely rooms with the perpetual

trouble of his mind for his sole companion, until he had grown as

nervous as habitual solitude will eventually make the strongest and the

wisest man, however he may vaunt himself of his strength and wisdom.

 

The clock of the Temple Church, and the clocks of St. Dunstan’s, St.

Clement’s Danes, and a crowd of other churches, whose steeples uprear

themselves above the house tops by the river, struck ten at last, and

Mr. Audley, who had put on his hat and overcoat nearly half an hour

before, let himself out of the little lobby, and locked his door behind

him. He mentally reiterated his determination to engage “Parthrick,” as

Mrs. Maloney’s eldest son was called by his devoted mother. The youth

should enter upon his functions the very night after, and if the ghost

of the hapless George Talboys should invade these gloomy apartments, the

phantom must make its way across Patrick’s body before it could reach

the inner chamber in which the proprietor of the premises slept.

 

Do not laugh at poor George because he grew hypochondriacal after

hearing the horrible story of his friend’s death. There is nothing so

delicate, so fragile, as that invisible balance upon which the mind is

always trembling. “Mad to-day and sane tomorrow.”

 

Who can forget that almost terrible picture of Dr. Samuel Johnson? The

awful disputant of the club-room, solemn, ponderous, severe and

merciless, the admiration and the terror of humble Bozzy, the stern

monitor of gentle Oliver, the friend of Garrick and Reynolds tonight;

and before tomorrow sunset a weak, miserable old man, discovered by

good Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, kneeling upon the floor of his lonely chamber,

in an agony of childish terror and confusion, and praying to a merciful

God for the preservation of his wits. I think the memory of that

dreadful afternoon, and of the tender care he then received, should have

taught the doctor to keep his hand steady at Streatham, when he took his

bedroom candlestick, from which it was his habit to shower rivulets of

molten wax upon the costly carpet of his beautiful protectress; and

might have even had a more enduring effect, and taught him to be

merciful, when the brewer’s widow went mad in her turn, and married that

dreadful creature, the Italian singer. Who has not been, or in not to be

mad in some lonely hour of life? Who is quite safe from the trembling of

the balance?

 

Fleet street was quiet and lonely at this late hour, and Robert Audley

being in a ghost-seeing mood, would have been scarcely astonished had he

seen Johnson’s set come roystering westward in the lamplight, or blind

John Milton groping his way down the steps before Saint Bride’s Church.

 

Mr. Audley hailed a hansom at the corner of Farrington street, and was

rattled rapidly away across tenantless Smithfield market, and into a

labyrinth of dingy streets that brought him out upon the broad grandeur

of Finsbury Pavement.

 

The hansom rattled up the steep and stony approach to Shoreditch

Station, and deposited Robert at the doors of that unlovely temple.

There were very few people going to travel by this midnight train, and

Robert walked up and down the long wooden platform, reading the huge

advertisements whose gaunt lettering looked wan and ghastly in the dim

lamplight.

 

He had the carriage in which he sat all to himself. All to himself did I

say? Had he not lately summoned to his side that ghostly company which

of all companionship is the most tenacious? The shadow of George Talboys

pursued him, even in the comfortable first-class carriage, and was

behind him when he looked out of the window, and was yet far ahead of

him and the rushing engine, in that thicket toward which the train was

speeding, by the side of the unhallowed hiding-place in which the mortal

remains of the dead man lay, neglected and uncared for.

 

“I must give my lost friend decent burial,” Robert thought, as the chill

wind swept across the flat landscape, and struck him with such frozen

breath as might have emanated from the lips of the dead. “I must do it;

or I shall die of some panic like this which has seized upon me

tonight. I must do it; at any peril; at any cost. Even at the price of

that revelation which will bring the mad woman back from her safe

hiding-place, and place her in a criminal dock.” He was glad when the

train stopped at Brentwood at a few minutes after twelve.

 

It was half-past one o’clock when the night wanderer entered the village

of Audley, and it was only there that he remembered that Clara Talboys

had omitted to give him any direction by which he might find the cottage

in which Luke Marks lay.

 

“It was Dawson who recommended that the poor creature should be taken to

his mother’s cottage,” Robert thought, by-and-by, “and, I dare say.

Dawson has attended him ever since the fire. He’ll be able to tell me

the way to the cottage.”

 

Acting upon this idea, Mr. Audley stopped at the house in which Helen

Talboys had lived before her second marriage. The door of the little

surgery was ajar, and there was a light burning within. Robert pushed

the door open and peeped in. The surgeon was standing at the mahogany

counter, mixing a draught in a glass measure, with his hat close beside

him. Late as it was, he had evidently only just come in. The harmonious

snoring of his assistant sounded from a little room within the surgery.

 

“I am sorry to disturb you, Mr. Dawson,” Robert said, apologetically, as

the surgeon looked up and recognized him, “but I have come down to see

Marks, who, I hear, is in a very bad way, and I want you to tell me the

way to his mother’s cottage.”

 

“I’ll show you the way, Mr. Audley,” answered the surgeon, “I am going

there this minute.”

 

“The man is very bad, then?”

 

“So bad that he can be no worse. The change that can happen is that

change which will take him beyond the reach of any earthly suffering.”

 

“Strange!” exclaimed Robert. “He did not appear to be much burned.”

 

“He was not much burnt. Had he been, I should never have recommended his

being removed from Mount Stanning. It is the shock that has done the

business. He has been in a raging fever for the last two days; but

tonight he is much calmer, and I’m afraid, before tomorrow night, we

shall have seen the last of him.”

 

“He has asked to see me, I am told,” said Mr. Audley.

 

“Yes,” answered the surgeon, carelessly. “A sick man’s fancy, no doubt.

You dragged him out of the house, and did your best to save his life. I

dare say, rough and boorish as the poor fellow is, he thinks a good deal

of that.”

 

They had left the surgery, the door of which Mr. Dawson had locked

behind him. There was money in the till, perhaps, for surely the village

apothecary could not have feared that the most daring housebreaker would

imperil his liberty in the pursuit of blue pill and colocynth, of salts

and senna.

 

The surgeon led the way along the silent street, and presently turned

into a lane at the end of which Robert Audley saw the wan glimmer of a

light; a light which told of the watch that is kept by the sick and

dying; a pale, melancholy light, which always has a dismal aspect when

looked upon in this silent hour betwixt night and morning. It shone from

the window of the cottage in which Luke Marks lay, watched by his wife

and mother.

 

Mr. Dawson lifted the latch, and walked into the common room of the

little tenement, followed by Robert Audley. It was empty, but a feeble

tallow candle, with a broken back, and a long, cauliflower-headed wick,

sputtered upon the table. The sick man lay in the room above.

 

“Shall I tell him you are here?” asked Mr. Dawson.

 

“Yes, yes, if you please. But be cautious how you tell him, if you think

the news likely to agitate him. I am in no hurry. I can wait. You can

call me when you think I can safely come up-stairs.”

 

The surgeon nodded, and softly ascended the narrow wooden stairs leading

to the upper chamber.

 

Robert Audley seated himself in a Windsor chair by the cold

hearth-stone, and stared disconsolately about him. But he was relieved

at last by the low voice of the surgeon, who looked down from the top of

the little staircase to tell him that Luke Marks was awake, and would be

glad to see him.

 

Robert immediately obeyed this summons. He crept softly up the stairs,

and took off his hat before he bent his head to enter at the low doorway

of the humble rustic chamber. He took off his hat in the presence of

this common peasant man, because he knew that there was another and a

more awful presence hovering about the room, and eager to be admitted.

 

Phoebe Marks was sitting at the foot of the bed, with