Lady Audley’s Secret, M. E. Braddon [good books to read for young adults TXT] 📗

“I’m often hard pressed for a few shillings, Mr. Audley,” said the old man. “My son-in-law has been very liberal to me; but there are others, there are others, Mr. Audley⁠—and⁠—and⁠—I’ve not been treated well.” He wiped away some genuine tears as he said this in a pitiful, crying voice. “Come, Georgey, it’s time the brave little man was in bed. Come along with grandpa. Excuse me for a quarter of an hour, Mr. Audley.”

The boy went very willingly. At the door of the room the old man looked back at his visitor, and said in the same peevish voice, “This is a poor place for me to pass my declining years in, Mr. Audley. I’ve made many sacrifices, and I make them still, but I’ve not been treated well.”

Left alone in the dusky little sitting-room, Robert Audley folded his arms, and sat absently staring at the floor.

George was gone, then; he might receive some letter of explanation perhaps, when he returned to London; but the chances were that he would never see his old friend again.

“And to think that I should care so much for the fellow!” he said, lifting his eyebrows to the center of his forehead.

“The place smells of stale tobacco like a taproom,” he muttered presently; “there can be no harm in my smoking a cigar here.”

He took one from the case in his pocket: there was a spark of fire in the little grate, and he looked about for something to light his cigar with.

A twisted piece of paper lay half burned upon the hearthrug; he picked it up, and unfolded it, in order to get a better pipe-light by folding it the other way of the paper. As he did so, absently glancing at the penciled writing upon the fragment of thin paper, a portion of a name caught his eye⁠—a portion of the name that was most in his thoughts. He took the scrap of paper to the window, and examined it by the declining light.

It was part of a telegraphic dispatch. The upper portion had been burnt away, but the more important part, the greater part of the message itself, remained.

“⁠—alboys came to ⸻ last night, and left by the mail for London, on his way to Liverpool, whence he was to sail for Sydney.”

The date and the name and address of the sender of the message had been burnt with the heading. Robert Audley’s face blanched to a deathly whiteness. He carefully folded the scrap of paper, and placed it between the leaves of his pocketbook.

“My God!” he said, “what is the meaning of this? I shall go to Liverpool tonight, and make inquiries there!”

Robert Audley left Southampton by the mail, and let himself into his chambers just as the dawn was creeping cold and gray into the solitary rooms, and the canaries were beginning to rustle their feathers feebly in the early morning.

There were several letters in the box behind the door, but there was none from George Talboys.

The young barrister was worn out by a long day spent in hurrying from place to place. The usual lazy monotony of his life had been broken as it had never been broken before in eight-and-twenty tranquil, easygoing years. His mind was beginning to grow confused upon the point of time. It seemed to him months since he had lost sight of George Talboys. It was so difficult to believe that it was less than forty-eight hours ago that the young man had left him asleep under the willows by the trout stream.

His eyes were painfully weary for want of sleep. He searched about the room for some time, looking in all sorts of impossible places for a letter from George Talboys, and then threw himself dressed upon his friend’s bed, in the room with the canaries and geraniums.

“I shall wait for tomorrow morning’s post,” he said; “and if that brings no letter from George, I shall start for Liverpool without a moment’s delay.”

He was thoroughly exhausted, and fell into a heavy sleep⁠—a sleep which was profound without being in any way refreshing, for he was tormented all the time by disagreeable dreams⁠—dreams which were painful, not from any horror in themselves, but from a vague and wearying sense of their confusion and absurdity.

At one time he was pursuing strange people and entering strange houses in the endeavor to unravel the mystery of the telegraphic dispatch; at another time he was in the churchyard at Ventnor, gazing at the headstone George had ordered for the grave of his dead wife. Once in the long, rambling mystery of these dreams he went to the grave, and found this headstone gone, and on remonstrating with the stonemason, was told that the man had a reason for removing the inscription; a reason that Robert would some day learn.

In another dream he saw the grave of Helen Talboys open, and while he waited, with the cold horror lifting up his hair, to see the dead woman rise and stand before him with her stiff, charnel-house drapery clinging about her rigid limbs, his uncle’s wife tripped gaily out of the open grave, dressed in the crimson velvet robes in which the artist had painted her, and with her ringlets flashing like red gold in the unearthly light that shone about her.

But into all these dreams the places he had last been in, and the people with whom he had last been concerned, were dimly interwoven⁠—sometimes his uncle; sometimes Alicia; oftenest of all my lady; the trout stream in Essex; the lime-walk at the Court. Once he was walking in the black shadows of this long avenue, with Lady Audley hanging on his arm, when suddenly they heard a great knocking in the distance, and his uncle’s wife wound her slender arms around him, crying out that it was the day of judgment, and that all wicked secrets must now be told. Looking at her as she shrieked this in