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

don’t mind the pipe, do you, George?” his friend asked, quietly.

 

“No.”

 

He lay for some time looking at the flowers and the birds; one canary

was singing a shrill hymn to the setting sun.

 

“Do the birds annoy you, George? Shall I take them out of the room?”

 

“No; I like to hear them sing.”

 

Robert Audley knocked the ashes out of his pipe, laid the precious

meerschaum tenderly upon the mantelpiece, and going into the next room,

returned presently with a cup of strong tea.

 

“Take this, George,” he said, as he placed the cup on a little table

close to George’s pillow; “it will do your head good.”

 

The young man did not answer, but looked slowly round the room, and then

at his friend’s grave face.

 

“Bob,” he said, “where are we?”

 

“In my chambers, dear boy, in the Temple. You have no lodgings of your

own, so you may as well stay with me while you’re in town.”

 

George passed his hand once or twice across his forehead, and then, in a

hesitating manner, said, quietly:

 

“That newspaper this morning, Bob; what was it?”

 

“Never mind just now, old boy; drink some tea.”

 

“Yes, yes,” cried George, impatiently, raising himself upon the bed, and

staring about him with hollow eyes. “I remember all about it. Helen! my

Helen! my wife, my darling, my only love! Dead, dead!”

 

“George,” said Robert Audley, laying his hand gently upon the young

man’s arm, “you must remember that the person whose name you saw in the

paper may not be your wife. There may have been some other Helen

Talboys.”

 

“No, no!” he cried; “the age corresponds with hers, and Talboys is such

an uncommon name.”

 

“It may be a misprint for Talbot.”

 

“No, no, no; my wife is dead!”

 

He shook off Robert’s restraining hand, and rising from the bed, walked

straight to the door.

 

“Where are you going?” exclaimed his friend.

 

“To Ventnor, to see her grave.”

 

“Not tonight, George, not tonight. I will go with you myself by the

first train tomorrow.”

 

Robert led him back to the bed, and gently forced him to lie down again.

He then gave him an opiate, which had been left for him by the medical

man whom they had called in at the coffee-house in Bridge street, when

George fainted.

 

So George Talboys fell into a heavy slumber, and dreamed that he went to

Ventnor, to find his wife alive and happy, but wrinkled, old, and gray,

and to find his son grown into a young man.

 

Early the next morning he was seated opposite to Robert Audley in the

first-class carriage of an express, whirling through the pretty open

country toward Portsmouth.

 

They landed at Ventnor under the burning heat of the midday sun. As the

two young men came from the steamer, the people on the pier stared at

George’s white face and untrimmed beard.

 

“What are we to do, George?” Robert Audley asked. “We have no clew to

finding the people you want to see.”

 

The young man looked at him with a pitiful, bewildered expression. The

big dragoon was as helpless as a baby; and Robert Audley, the most

vacillating and unenergetic of men, found himself called upon to act for

another. He rose superior to himself, and equal to the occasion.

 

“Had we not better ask at one of the hotels about a Mrs. Talboys,

George?” he said.

 

“Her father’s name was Maldon,” George muttered; “he could never have

sent her here to die alone.”

 

They said nothing more; but Robert walked straight to a hotel where he

inquired for a Mr. Maldon.

 

Yes, they told him, there was a gentleman of that name stopping at

Ventnor, a Captain Maldon; his daughter was lately dead. The waiter

would go and inquire for the address.

 

The hotel was a busy place at this season; people hurrying in and out,

and a great bustle of grooms and waiters about the halls.

 

George Talboys leaned against the doorpost, with much the same look in

his face, as that which had frightened his friend in the Westminister

coffee-house.

 

The worst was confirmed now. His wife, Captain Maldon’s daughter was

dead.

 

The waiter returned in about five minutes to say that Captain Maldon was

lodging at Lansdowne Cottage, No. 4.

 

They easily found the house, a shabby, low-windowed cottage, looking

toward the water.

 

Was Captain Maldon at home? No, the landlady said; he had gone out on

the beach with his little grandson. Would the gentleman walk in and sit

down a bit?

 

George mechanically followed his friend into the little front

parlor—dusty, shabbily furnished, and disorderly, with a child’s broken

toys scattered on the floor, and the scent of stale tobacco hanging

about the muslin window-curtains.

 

“Look!” said George, pointing to a picture over the mantelpiece.

 

It was his own portrait, painted in the old dragooning days. A pretty

good likeness, representing him in uniform, with his charger in the

background.

 

Perhaps the most animated of men would have been scarcely so wise a

comforter as Robert Audley. He did not utter a word to the stricken

widower, but quietly seated himself with his back to George, looking out

of the open window.

 

For some time the young man wandered restlessly about the room, looking

at and sometimes touching the nick-nacks lying here and there.

 

Her workbox, with an unfinished piece of work; her album full of

extracts from Byron and Moore, written in his own scrawling hand; some

books which he had given her, and a bunch of withered flowers in a vase

they had bought in Italy.

 

“Her portrait used to hang by the side of mine,” he muttered; “I wonder

what they have done with it.”

 

By-and-by he said, after about an hour’s silence:

 

“I should like to see the woman of the house; I should like to ask her

about—”

 

He broke down, and buried his face in his hands.

 

Robert summoned the landlady. She was a good-natured garrulous creature,

accustomed to sickness and death, for many of her lodgers came to her to

die.

 

She told all the particulars of Mrs. Talboys’ last hours; how she had

come to Ventnor only ten days before her death, in the last stage of

decline; and how, day by day, she had gradually, but surely, sunk under

the fatal malady. Was the gentleman any relative? she asked of Robert

Audley, as George sobbed aloud.

 

“Yes, he is the lady’s husband.”

 

“What!” the woman cried; “him as deserted her so cruel, and left her

with her pretty boy upon her poor old father’s hands, which Captain

Maldon has told me often, with the tears in his poor eyes?”

 

“I did not desert her,” George cried out; and then he told the history

of his three years’ struggle.

 

“Did she speak of me?” he asked; “did she speak of me—at—at the last?”

 

“No, she went off as quiet as a lamb. She said very little from the

first; but the last day she knew nobody, not even her little boy, nor

her poor old father, who took on awful. Once she went off wild-like,

talking about her mother, and about the cruel shame it was to leave her

to die in a strange place, till it was quite pitiful to hear her.”

 

“Her mother died when she was quite a child,” said George. “To think

that she should remember her and speak of her, but never once of me.”

 

The woman took him into the little bedroom in which his wife had died.

He knelt down by the bed and kissed the pillow tenderly, the landlady

crying as he did so.

 

While he was kneeling, praying, perhaps, with his face buried in this

humble, snow-white pillow, the woman took something from a drawer. She

gave it to him when he rose from his knees; it was a long tress of hair

wrapped in silver paper.

 

“I cut this off when she lay in her coffin,” she said, “poor dear?”

 

He pressed the soft lock to his lips. “Yes,” he murmured; “this is the

dear hair that I have kissed so often when her head lay upon my

shoulder. But it always had a rippling wave in it then, and now it seems

smooth and straight.”

 

“It changes in illness,” said the landlady. “If you’d like to see where

they have laid her, Mr. Talboys, my little boy shall show you the way to

the churchyard.”

 

So George Talboys and his faithful friend walked to the quiet spot,

where, beneath a mound of earth, to which the patches of fresh turf

hardly adhered, lay that wife of whose welcoming smile George had

dreamed so often in the far antipodes.

 

Robert left the young man by the side of this newly-made grave, and

returning in about a quarter of an hour, found that he had not once

stirred.

 

He looked up presently, and said that if there was a stonemason’s

anywhere near he should like to give an order.

 

They very easily found the stonemason, and sitting down amidst the

fragmentary litter of the man’s yard, George Talboys wrote in pencil

this brief inscription for the headstone of his dead wife’s grave:

 

Sacred to the Memory of

HELEN,

THE BELOVED WIFE OF GEORGE TALBOYS,

“Who departed this life

August 24th, 18—, aged 22,

Deeply regretted by her sorrowing Husband.

 

CHAPTER VI.

 

ANYWHERE, ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD.

 

When they returned to Lansdowne Cottage they found the old man had not

yet come in, so they walked down to the beach to look for him. After a

brief search they found him, sitting upon a heap of pebbles, reading a

newspaper and eating filberts. The little boy was at some distance from

his grandfather, digging in the sand with a wooden spade. The crape

round the old man’s shabby hat, and the child’s poor little black frock,

went to George’s heart. Go where he would he met fresh confirmation of

this great grief of his life. His wife was dead.

 

“Mr. Maldon,” he said, as he approached his father-in-law.

 

The old man looked up, and, dropping his newspaper, rose from the

pebbles with a ceremonious bow. His faded light hair was tinged with

gray; he had a pinched hook nose; watery blue eyes, and an

irresolute-looking mouth; he wore his shabby dress with an affectation

of foppish gentility; an eye-glass dangled over his closely buttoned-up

waistcoat, and he carried a cane in his ungloved hand.

 

“Great Heaven!” cried George, “don’t you know me?”

 

Mr. Maldon started and colored violently, with something of a frightened

look, as he recognized his son-in-law.

 

“My dear boy,” he said, “I did not; for the first moment I did not. That

beard makes such a difference. You find the beard makes a great

difference, do you not, sir?” he said, appealing to Robert.

 

“Great heavens!” exclaimed George Talboys, “is this the way you welcome

me? I come to England to find my wife dead within a week of my touching

land, and you begin to chatter to me about my beard—you, her father!”

 

“True! true!” muttered the old man, wiping his bloodshot eyes; “a sad

shock, a sad shock, my dear George. If you’d only been here a week

earlier.”

 

“If I had,” cried George, in an outburst of grief and passion, “I

scarcely think that I would have let her die. I would have disputed for

her with death. I would! I would! Oh God! why did not the