Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (books to read in your 20s female .TXT) 📗
- Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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and trying to look steadily at his unexpected visitor.
“Whatever this man’s secrets are,” thought Robert, as Mrs. Plowson
hustled little George Talboys out of the room, “that woman has no
unimportant share of them. Whatever the mystery may be, it grows darker
and thicker at every step; but I try in vain to draw back or to stop
short upon the road, for a stronger hand than my own is pointing the way
to my lost friend’s unknown grave.”
CHAPTER XXI.
LITTLE GEORGEY LEAVES HIS OLD HOME.
“I am going to take your grandson away with me, Mr. Maldon,” Robert said
gravely, as Mrs. Plowson retired with her young charge.
The old man’s drunken imbecility was slowly clearing away like the heavy
mists of a London fog, through which the feeble sunshine struggles dimly
to appear. The very uncertain radiance of Lieutenant Maldon’s intellect
took a considerable time in piercing the hazy vapors of rum-and-water;
but the flickering light at last faintly glimmered athwart the clouds,
and the old man screwed his poor wits to the sticking-point.
“Yes, yes,” he said, feebly; “take the boy away from his poor old
grandfather; I always thought so.”
“You always thought that I should take him away?” scrutinizing the
half-drunken countenance with a searching glance. “Why did you think so,
Mr. Maldon?”
The fogs of intoxication got the better of the light of sobriety for a
moment, and the lieutenant answered vaguely:
“Thought so—‘cause I thought so.”
Meeting the young barrister’s impatient frown, he made another effort,
and the light glimmered again.
“Because I thought you or his father would fetch ‘m away.”
“When I was last in this house, Mr. Maldon, you told me that George
Talboys had sailed for Australia.”
“Yes, yes—I know, I know,” the old man answered, confusedly, shuffling
his scanty limp gray hairs with his two wandering hands—“I know; but he
might have come back—mightn’t he? He was restless, and—and—queer in
his mind, perhaps, sometimes. He might have come back.”
He repeated this two or three times in feeble, muttering tones; groping
about on the littered mantle-piece for a dirty-looking clay pipe, and
filling and lighting it with hands that trembled violently.
Robert Audley watched those poor, withered, tremulous fingers dropping
shreds of tobacco upon the hearth rug, and scarcely able to kindle a
lucifer for their unsteadiness. Then walking once or twice up and down
the little room, he left the old man to take a few puffs from the great
consoler.
Presently he turned suddenly upon the half-pay lieutenant with a dark
solemnity in his handsome face.
“Mr. Maldon,” he said, slowly watching the effect of every syllable as
he spoke, “George Talboys never sailed for Australia—that I know. More
than this, he never came to Southampton; and the lie you told me on the
8th of last September was dictated to you by the telegraphic message
which you received on that day.”
The dirty clay pipe dropped from the tremulous hand, and shivered
against the iron fender, but the old man made no effort to find a fresh
one; he sat trembling in every limb, and looking, Heaven knows how
piteously, at Robert Audley.
“The lie was dictated to you, and you repeated your lesson. But you no
more saw George Talboys here on the 7th of September than I see him in
this room now. You thought you had burnt the telegraphic message, but
you had only burnt a part of it—the remainder is in my possession.”
Lieutenant Maldon was quite sober now.
“What have I done?” he murmured, hopelessly. “Oh, my God! what have I
done?”
“At two o’clock on the 7th of September last,” continued the pitiless,
accusing voice, “George Talboys was seen alive and well at a house in
Essex.”
Robert paused to see the effect of these words. They had produced no
change in the old man. He still sat trembling from head to foot, and
staring with the fixed and solid gaze of some helpless wretch whose
every sense is gradually becoming numbed by terror.
“At two o’clock on that day,” remarked Robert Audley, “my poor friend
was seen alive and well at –-, at the house of which I speak. From
that hour to this I have never been able to hear that he has been seen
by any living creature. I have taken such steps as must have resulted
in procuring the information of his whereabouts, were he alive. I have
done this patiently and carefully—at first, even hopefully. Now I know
that he is dead.”
Robert Audley had been prepared to witness some considerable agitation
in the old man’s manner, but he was not prepared for the terrible
anguish, the ghastly terror, which convulsed Mr. Maldon’s haggard face
as he uttered the last word.
“No, no, no, no,” reiterated the lieutenant, in a shrill, half-screaming
voice; “no, no! For God’s sake, don’t say that! Don’t think it—don’t
let me think it—don’t let me dream of it! Not dead—anything but
dead! Hidden away, perhaps—bribed to keep out of the way, perhaps; but
not dead—not dead—not dead!”
He cried these words aloud, like one beside himself, beating his hands
upon his gray head, and rocking backward and forward in his chair. His
feeble hands trembled no longer—they were strengthened by some
convulsive force that gave them a new power.
“I believe,” said Robert, in the same solemn, relentless voice, “that my
friend left Essex; and I believe he died on the 7th of September last.”
The wretched old man, still beating his hands among his thin gray hair,
slid from his chair to the ground, and groveled at Robert’s feet.
“Oh! no, no—for God’s, no!” he shrieked hoarsely. “No! you don’t know
what you say—you don’t know what your words mean!”
“I know their weight and value only too well—as well as I see you do,
Mr. Maldon. God help us!”
“Oh, what am I doing? what am I doing?” muttered the old man, feebly;
then raising himself from the ground with an effort, he drew himself to
his full hight, and said, in a manner which was new to him, and which
was not without a certain dignity of his own—that dignity which must be
always attached to unutterable misery, in whatever form it may
appear—he said, gravely:
“You have no right to come here and terrify a man who has been drinking,
and who is not quite himself. You have no right to do it, Mr. Audley.
Even the—the officer, sir, who—who—.” He did not stammer, but his
lips trembled so violently that his words seemed to be shaken into
pieces by their motion. “The officer, I repeat, sir, who arrests
a—thief, or a—.” He stopped to wipe his lips, and to still them if he
could by doing so, which he could not. “A thief or a murderer—” His
voice died suddenly away upon the last word, and it was only by the
motion of those trembling lips that Robert knew what he meant. “Gives
him warning, sir, fair warning, that he may say nothing which shall
commit himself—or—or—other people. The—the—law, sir, has that
amount of mercy for a—a—suspected criminal. But you, sir,—you come to
my house, and you come at a time when—when—contrary to my usual
habits—which, as people will tell you, are sober—you take the
opportunity to—terrify me—and it is not right, sir—it is—”
Whatever he would have said died away into inarticulate gasps, which
seemed to choke him, and sinking into a chair, he dropped his face upon
the table, and wept aloud. Perhaps in all the dismal scenes of domestic
misery which had been acted in those spare and dreary houses—in all the
petty miseries, the burning shames, the cruel sorrows, the bitter
disgraces which own poverty for their father—there had never been such
a scene as this. An old man hiding his face from the light of day, and
sobbing aloud in his wretchedness. Robert Audley contemplated the
painful picture with a hopeless and pitying face.
“If I had known this,” he thought, “I might have spared him. It would
have been better, perhaps, to have spared him.”
The shabby room, the dirt, the confusion, the figure of the old man,
with his gray head upon the soiled tablecloth, amid the muddled debris
of a wretched dinner, grew blurred before the sight of Robert Audley as
he thought of another man, as old as this one, but, ah! how widely
different in every other quality! who might come by and by to feel the
same, or even a worse anguish, and to shed, perhaps, yet bitterer tears.
The moment in which the tears rose to his eyes and dimmed the piteous
scene before him, was long enough to take him back to Essex, and to show
him the image of his uncle, stricken by agony and shame.
“Why do I go on with this?” he thought; “how pitiless I am, and how
relentlessly I am carried on. It is not myself; it is the hand which is
beckoning me further and further upon the dark road, whose end I dare
not dream of.”
He thought this, and a hundred times more than this, while the old man
sat with his face still hidden, wrestling with his anguish, but without
power to keep it down.
“Mr. Maldon,” Robert Audley said, after a pause, “I do not ask you to
forgive me for what I have brought upon you, for the feeling is strong
within me that it must have come to you sooner or later—if not through
me, through some one else. There are—” he stopped for a moment
hesitating. The sobbing did not cease; it was sometimes low, sometimes
loud, bursting out with fresh violence, or dying away for an instant,
but never ceasing. “There are some things which, as people say, cannot
be hidden. I think there is truth in that common saying which had its
origin in that old worldly wisdom which people gathered from experience
and not from books. If—if I were content to let my friend rest in his
hidden grave, it is but likely that some stranger who had never heard
the name of George Talboys, might fall by the remotest accident upon the
secret of his death. Tomorrow, perhaps; or ten years hence, or in
another generation, when the—the hand that wronged him is as cold as
his own. If I could let the matter rest; if—if I could leave England
forever, and purposely fly from the possibility of ever coming across
another clew to the secret, I would do it—I would gladly, thankfully do
it—but I cannot! A hand which is stronger than my own beckons me on.
I wish to take no base advantage of you, less than of all other people;
but I must go on; I must go on. If there is any warning you would give
to any one, give it. If the secret toward which I am traveling day by
day, hour by hour, involves any one in whom you have an interest, let
that person fly before I come to the end. Let them leave this country;
let them leave all who know them—all whose peace their wickedness has
endangered; let them go away—they shall not be pursued. But if they
slight your warning—if they try to hold their present position in
defiance of what it will be in your power to tell them—let them beware
of me, for, when the hour comes, I swear that I will not spare them.”
The old man looked up for the first time, and wiped his wrinkled face
upon a ragged
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