Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (books to read in your 20s female .TXT) 📗
- Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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My lady burst into her pretty, gushing laugh.
“The dearest of good creatures,” she said. “He paid me five-and-twenty
pounds a year—only fancy, five-and-twenty pounds! That made six pounds
five a quarter. How well I remember receiving the money—six dingy old
sovereigns, and a little heap of untidy, dirty silver, that came
straight from the till in the surgery! And then how glad I was to get
it! While now—I can’t help laughing while I think of it—these colors
I am using cost a guinea each at Winsor & Newton’s—the carmine and
ultramarine thirty shillings. I gave Mrs. Dawson one of my silk dresses
the other day, and the poor thing kissed me, and the surgeon carried the
bundle home under his cloak.”
My lady laughed long and joyously at the thought. Her colors were mixed;
she was copying a water-colored sketch of an impossibly Turneresque
atmosphere. The sketch was nearly finished, and she had only to put in
some critical little touches with the most delicate of her sable
pencils. She prepared herself daintily for the work, looking sideways at
the painting.
All this time Mr. Robert Audley’s eyes were fixed intently on her pretty
face.
“It is a change,” he said, after so long a pause that my lady might
have forgotten what she had been talking of, “it is a change! Some
women would do a great deal to accomplish such a change as that.”
Lady Audley’s clear blue eyes dilated as she fixed them suddenly on the
young barrister. The wintry sunlight, gleaming full upon her face from a
side window, lit up the azure of those beautiful eyes, till their color
seemed to flicker and tremble betwixt blue and green, as the opal tints
of the sea change upon a summer’s day. The small brush fell from her
hand, and blotted out the peasant’s face under a widening circle of
crimson lake.
Robert Audley was tenderly coaxing the crumbled leaf of his cigar with
cautious fingers.
“My friend at the corner of Chancery Lane has not given me such good
Manillas as usual,” he murmured. “If ever you smoke, my dear aunt (and I
am told that many women take a quiet weed under the rose), be very
careful how you choose your cigars.”
My lady drew a long breath, picked up her brush, and laughed aloud at
Robert’s advice.
“What an eccentric creature you are, Mr. Audley I Do you know that you
sometimes puzzle me—”
“Not more than you puzzle me, dear aunt.”
My lady put away her colors and sketch book, and seating herself in the
deep recess of another window, at a considerable distance from Robert
Audley, settled to a large piece of Berlin-wool work—a piece of
embroidery which the Penelopes of ten or twelve years ago were very fond
of exercising their ingenuity upon—the Olden Time at Bolton Abbey.
Seated in the embrasure of this window, my lady was separated from
Robert Audley by the whole length of the room, and the young man could
only catch an occasional glimpse of her fair face, surrounded by its
bright aureole of hazy, golden hair.
Robert Audley had been a week at the Court, but as yet neither he nor my
lady had mentioned the name of George Talboys.
This morning, however, after exhausting the usual topics of
conversation, Lady Audley made an inquiry about her nephew’s friend;
“That Mr. George—George—” she said, hesitating.
“Talboys,” suggested Robert.
“Yes, to be sure—Mr. George Talboys. Rather a singular name, by-the-by,
and certainly, by all accounts, a very singular person. Have you seen
him lately?”
“I have not seen him since the 7th of September last—the day upon which
he left me asleep in the meadows on the other side of the village.”
“Dear me!” exclaimed my lady, “what a very strange young man this Mr.
George Talboys must be! Pray tell me all about it.”
Robert told, in a few words, of his visit to Southampton and his journey
to Liverpool, with their different results, my lady listening very
attentively.
In order to tell this story to better advantage, the young man left his
chair, and, crossing the room, took up his place opposite to Lady
Audley, in the embrasure of the window.
“And what do you infer from all this?” asked my lady, after a pause.
“It is so great a mystery to me,” he answered, “that I scarcely dare to
draw any conclusion whatever; but in the obscurity I think I can grope
my way to two suppositions, which to me seem almost certainties.”
“And they are—”
“First, that George Talboys never went beyond Southampton. Second, that
he never went to Southampton at all.”
“But you traced him there. His father-in-law had seen him.”
“I have reason to doubt his father-in-law’s integrity.”
“Good gracious me!” cried my lady, piteously. “What do you mean by all
this?”
“Lady Audley,” answered the young man, gravely, “I have never practiced
as a barrister. I have enrolled myself in the ranks of a profession, the
members of which hold solemn responsibilities and have sacred duties to
perform; and I have shrunk from those responsibilities and duties, as I
have from all the fatigues of this troublesome life. But we are
sometimes forced into the very position we have most avoided, and I have
found myself lately compelled to think of these things. Lady Audley, did
you ever study the theory of circumstantial evidence?”
“How can you ask a poor little woman about such horrid things?”
exclaimed my lady.
“Circumstantial evidence,” continued the young man, as if he scarcely
heard Lady Audley’s interruption—“that wonderful fabric which is built
out of straws collected at every point of the compass, and which is yet
strong enough to hang a man. Upon what infinitesimal trifles may
sometimes hang the whole secret of some wicked mystery, inexplicable
heretofore to the wisest upon the earth! A scrap of paper, a shred of
some torn garment, the button off a coat, a word dropped incautiously
from the overcautious lips of guilt, the fragment of a letter, the
shutting or opening of a door, a shadow on a window-blind, the accuracy
of a moment tested by one of Benson’s watches—a thousand circumstances
so slight as to be forgotten by the criminal, but links of iron in the
wonderful chain forged by the science of the detective officer; and lo!
the gallows is built up; the solemn bell tolls through the dismal gray
of the early morning, the drop creaks under the guilty feet, and the
penalty of crime is paid.”
Faint shadows of green and crimson fell upon my lady’s face from the
painted escutcheons in the mullioned window by which she sat; but every
trace of the natural color of that face had faded out, leaving it a
ghastly ashen gray.
Sitting quietly in her chair, her head fallen back upon the amber damask
cushions, and her little hands lying powerless in her lap, Lady Audley
had fainted away.
“The radius grows narrower day by day,” said Robert Audley. “George
Talboys never reached Southampton.”
CHAPTER XVI.
ROBERT AUDLEY GETS HIS CONGE.
The Christmas week was over, and one by one the country visitors dropped
away from Audley Court. The fat squire and his wife abandoned the gray,
tapestried chamber, and left the black-browed warriors looming from the
wall to scowl upon and threaten new guests, or to glare vengefully upon
vacancy. The merry girls on the second story packed, or caused to be
packed, their trunks and imperials, and tumbled gauze ball-dresses were
taken home that had been brought fresh to Audley. Blundering old family
chariots, with horses whose untrimmed fetlocks told of rougher work than
even country roads, were brought round to the broad space before the
grim oak door, and laden with chaotic heaps of womanly luggage. Pretty
rosy faces peeped out of carriage windows to smile the last farewell
upon the group at the hall door, as the vehicle rattled and rumbled
under the ivied archway. Sir Michael was in request everywhere. Shaking
hands with the young sportsmen; kissing the rosy-cheeked girls;
sometimes even embracing portly matrons who came to thank him for their
pleasant visit; everywhere genial, hospitable, generous, happy, and
beloved, the baronet hurried from room to room, from the hall to the
stables, from the stables to the courtyard, from the courtyard to the
arched gateway to speed the parting guest.
My lady’s yellow curls flashed hither and thither like wandering gleams
of sunshine on these busy days of farewell. Her great blue eyes had a
pretty, mournful look, in charming unison with the soft pressure of her
little hand, and that friendly, though perhaps rather stereotyped
speech, in which she told her visitors how she was so sorry to lose
them, and how she didn’t know what she should do till they came once
more to enliven the court by their charming society.
But however sorry my lady might be to lose her visitors, there was at
least one guest whose society she was not deprived of. Robert Audley
showed no intention of leaving his uncle’s house. He had no professional
duties, he said; Figtree Court was delightfully shady in hot weather,
but there was a sharp corner round which the wind came in the summer
months, armed with avenging rheumatisms and influenzas. Everybody was so
good to him at the Court, that really he had no inclination to hurry
away.
Sir Michael had but one answer to this: “Stay, my dear boy; stay, my
dear Bob, as long as ever you like. I have no son, and you stand to me
in the place of one. Make yourself agreeable to Lucy, and make the Court
your home as long as you live.”
To which Robert would merely reply by grasping his uncle’s hand
vehemently, and muttering something about “a jolly old prince.”
It was to be observed that there was sometimes a certain vague sadness
in the young man’s tone when he called Sir Michael “a jolly old prince;”
some shadow of affectionate regret that brought a mist into Robert’s
eyes, as he sat in a corner of the room looking thoughtfully at the
white-bearded baronet.
Before the last of the young sportsmen departed, Sir Harry Towers
demanded and obtained an interview with Miss Alicia Audley in the oak
library—an interview in which considerable emotion was displayed by the
stalwart young fox-hunter; so much emotion, indeed, and of such a
genuine and honest character, that Alicia fairly broke down as she told
him she should forever esteem and respect him for his true and noble
heart, but that he must never, never, unless he wished to cause her the
most cruel distress, ask more from her than this esteem and respect.
Sir Harry left the library by the French window opening into the
pond-garden. He strolled into that very lime-walk which George Talboys
had compared to an avenue in a churchyard, and under the leafless trees
fought the battle of his brave young heart.
“What a fool I am to feel it like this!” he cried, stamping his foot
upon the frosty ground. “I always knew it would be so; I always knew
that she was a hundred times too good for me. God bless her! How nobly
and tenderly she spoke; how beautiful she looked with the crimson
blushes under her brown skin, and the tears in her big, gray
eyes—almost as handsome as the day she took the sunk fence, and let me
put the brush in her hat as we rode home! God bless her! I can get over
anything as long as she doesn’t care for that sneaking
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