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BY
LONDON: BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS,
WHITEFRIARS.
At the end of this avenue there was an old arch and a clock-tower, with
a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand; and which
jumped straight from one hour to the next, and was therefore always in extremes. Through this arch you walked straight into the gardens of Audley Court.
A smooth lawn lay before you, dotted with groups of rhododendrons, which
grew in more perfection here than anywhere else in the county. To the right
there were the kitchen gardens, the fish-pond, and an orchard bordered by a
dry moat, and a broken ruin of a wall, in some places thicker than it was
high, and everywhere overgrown with trailing ivy, yellow stonecrop, and
dark moss. To the left there was a broad gravelled walk, down which, years
ago, when the place had been a convent, the quiet nuns had walked hand in
hand; a wall bordered with espaliers, and shadowed on one side by goodly
oaks, which shut out the flat landscape, and circled in the house and
gardens with a darkening shelter.
The house faced the arch, and occupied three sides of a quadrangle. It
was very old, and very irregular and rambling. The windows were
uneven; some small, some large, some with heavy stone mullions and rich stained glass; others with frail lattices that rattled in every breeze; others so modern that they might have been added only yesterday. Great piles of chimneys rose up here and there behind the pointed gables, and seemed as if they were so broken down by age and long service, that they must have fallen but for the straggling ivy which, crawling up the walls and trailing even over the roof, wound itself about them and supported them. The principal door was squeezed into a corner of a turret at one angle of the building, as if it was in hiding from dangerous visitors, and wished to keep itself a secret--a noble door for all that--old oak, and studded with great square-headed iron nails, and so thick that the sharp iron knocker struck upon it with a muffled sound, and the visitor rang a clanging bell that dangled in a corner amongst the ivy, lest the noise of the knocking should never penetrate the stronghold.
A glorious old place--a place that visitors fell into raptures
with; feeling a yearning wish to
have done with life, and to stay there forever, staring into the cool fish-ponds, and counting the bubbles as the roach and carp rose to the surface of the water--a spot in which peace seemed to have taken up her abode, setting her soothing hand on every tree and flower; on the still ponds and quiet alleys; the shady corners of the old-fashioned rooms; the deep window-seats behind the painted glass; the low meadows and the stately avenues--ay, even upon the stagnant well, which, cool and sheltered as all else in the old place, hid itself away in a shrubbery behind the gardens, with an idle handle that was never turned, and a lazy rope so rotten that the pail had broken away from it, and had fallen into the water.
A noble place; inside as well as out, a noble place--a house in
which you incontinently lost yourself if ever you were so rash as to go
about it alone; a house in which no one room had any sympathy with another,
every chamber running off at a tangent into an inner chamber, and through
that down some narrow staircase
leading to a door which, in its turn, led back into that very part of the house from which you thought yourself the furthest; a house that could never have been planned by any mortal architect, but must have been the handiwork of that good old builder--Time, who, adding a room one year, and knocking down a room another year, toppling down a chimney coeval with the Plantagenets, and setting up one in the style of the Tudors; shaking down a bit of Saxon wall there,and allowing a Norman arch to stand here; throwing in a row of high narrow windows in the reign of Queen Anne, and joining on a dining-room after the fashion of the time of Hanoverian George I. to a refectory that had been standing since the Conquest, had contrived, in some eleven centuries, to run up such a mansion as was not elsewhere to be met with throughout the county of Essex. Of course, in such a house there were secret chambers: the little daughter of the present owner, Sir Michael Audley, had fallen by accident upon the discovery of one. A board had rattled under her
feet in the great nursery where she played, and on attention being drawn to it, it was found to be loose, and so removed, revealing a ladder leading to a hiding-place between the floor of the nursery and the ceiling of the room below--a hiding-place so small that he who hid there must have crouched on his hands and knees or lain at full length, and yet large enough to contain a quaint old carved oak chest half filled with priests' vestments which had been hidden away, no doubt, in those cruel days when the life of a man was in danger if he was discovered to have harboured a Roman Catholic priest, or to have had mass said in his house.
The broad outer moat was dry and grass-grown, and the laden trees of the
orchard hung over it with gnarled straggling branches that drew fantastical
patterns upon the green slope. Within this moat there was, as I have said,
the fish-pond--a sheet of water that extended the whole length of the
garden, and bordering which there was an avenue called the lime-tree walk;
an avenue so shaded from the sun and sky, so
screened from observation by the thick shelter of the over-arching trees, that it seemed a chosen place for secret meetings or for stolen interviews; a place in which a conspiracy might have been planned or a lover's vow registered with equal safety; and yet it was scarcely twenty paces from the house.
At the end of this dark arcade there was the shrubbery, where, half
buried among the tangled branches and the neglected weeds, stood the rusty
wheel of that old well of which I have spoken. It had been of good service
in its time, no doubt; and busy nuns have perhaps drawn the cool water with
their own fair hands; but it had fallen with disuse now, and scarcely any
one at Audley Court knew whether the spring had dried up or not. But
sheltered as was the solitude of this lime-tree walk, I doubt very much if
it was ever put to any romantic uses. Often in the cool of the evening Sir
Michael Audley would stroll up and down smoking his cigar, with his dog at
his heels, and his pretty young wife dawdling by his side; but in about ten
minutes the baronet
and his companion would grow tired of the rustling limes and the still water, hidden under the spreading leaves of the water-lilies, and the long green vista with the broken well at the end, and would stroll back to the white drawing-room, where my lady played dreamy melodies by Beethoven and Mendelssohn till her husband fell asleep in his easy-chair.
Sir Michael Audley was fifty-six years of age, and he had married a
second wife three months after his fifty-fifth birthday. He was a big man,
tall and stout, with a deep sonorous voice, handsome black eyes, and a
white beard--a white beard which made him look venerable against his
will, for he was as active as a boy, and one of the hardest riders in the
county. For seventeen years he had been a widower with an only child, a
daughter, Alicia Audley, now eighteen, and by no means too well pleased at
having a step-mother brought home to the Court; for Miss Alicia had reigned
supreme in her father's house since her earliest childhood, and had
carried the keys, and jingled them in the pockets of her silk aprons,
and lost them in the shrubbery, and dropped them into the pond, and given all manner of trouble about them from the hour in which she entered her teens, and had on that account deluded herself into the sincere belief that for the whole of that period she had been keeping house.
But Miss Alicia's day was over; and now, when she asked anything of
the housekeeper, the housekeeper would tell her that she would speak to my
lady, or she would consult my lady, and if my lady pleased it should be
done. So the baronet's daughter, who was an excellent horsewoman and a
very clever artist, spent most of her time out of doors, riding about the
green lanes, and sketching the cottage children, and the ploughboys, and
the cattle, and all manner of animal life that came in her way. She set her
face with a sulky determination against any intimacy between herself and
the baronet's young wife; and amiable as that lady was, she found it
quite impossible to overcome Miss Alicia's prejudices and dislike; or
to convince the spoilt girl that she had not done her a cruel injury by
marrying Sir Michael Audley.
The truth was that Lady Audley had, in becoming the wife of Sir Michael,
made one of those apparently advantageous matches which are apt to draw
upon a woman the envy and hatred of her sex. She had come into the
neighborhood as a governess in the family of a surgeon in the village near
Audley Court. No one knew anything of her except that she came in answer to
an advertisement which Mr. Dawson, the surgeon, had inserted in the
Times. She came from London; and the only reference she gave
was to a lady at a school at Brompton, where she had once been a teacher.
But this reference was so satisfactory that none other was needed, and Miss
Lucy Graham was received by the surgeon as the instructress of his
daughters. Her accomplishments were so brilliant and numerous, that it
seemed strange that she should have answered an advertisement offering such
very moderate terms of remuneration as those named by Mr. Dawson: but Miss
Graham seemed perfectly well satisfied with her situation, and she taught
the girls to play sonatas by Beethoven, and to paint from
Nature after Creswick, and walked through the dull, out-of-the-way village to the humble little church three times on Sunday, as contentedly as if she had no higher aspiration in the world than to do so all the rest of her life.
People who observed this accounted for it by saying that it was a part
of her amiable and gentle nature always to be lighthearted, happy, and
contented under any circumstances.
Wherever she went she seemed to take joy and brightness with her. In the
cottages of the poor her fair face shone like a sunbeam. She would sit for
a quarter of an hour talking to some old woman, and apparently as pleased
with the admiration of a toothless crone as if she had been listening to
the compliments of a marquis; and when she tripped away, leaving nothing
behind her (for her poor salary gave no scope to her benevolence), the old
woman would burst out into senile raptures with her grace, her beauty, and
her kindliness, such as she never bestowed upon the vicar's wife, who
half fed and clothed her. For you see Miss Lucy Graham was blessed
with that magic power of fascination by which a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a smile. Every one loved, admired, and praised her. The boy who opened the five-barred gate that stood in her pathway ran home to his mother to tell of her pretty looks, and the sweet voice in which she thanked him for the little service. The verger at the church who ushered her into the surgeon's pew; the vicar who saw the soft blue eyes uplifted to his face as he preached his simple sermon; the porter from the railway station who brought her sometimes a letter or a parcel, and who never looked for reward from her; her employer; his visitors; her pupils; the servants; everybody, high and low, united in declarng that Lucy Graham was the sweetest girl that ever lived.
Perhaps it was this cry which penetrated into the quiet chambers of
Audley Court; or perhaps it was the sight of her pretty face, looking over
the surgeon's high pew every Sunday morning. However it was, it was
certain that Sir Michael Audley suddenly experienced a strong desire
to be better acquainted with Mr. Dawson's governess.
He had only to hint this to the worthy doctor for a little party to be
got up, to which the vicar and his wife, and the baronet and his daughter,
were invited.
That one quiet evening sealed Sir Michael's fate. He could no more
resist the tender fascination of those soft and melting blue eyes; the
graceful beauty of that slender throat and drooping head, with its wealth
of showering flaxen curls; the low music of that gentle voice; the perfect
harmony which pervaded every charm, and made all doubly charming in this
woman; than he could resist his destiny! Destiny! Why, she was his destiny!
He had never loved before. What had been his marriage with Alicia's
mother but a dull, jog-trot bargain, made to keep some estate in the family
that would have been just as well out of it? What had been his love for his
first wife but a poor, pitiful, smouldering spark, too dull to be
extinguished, too feeble to burn? But this was love--this
fever, this longing, this
restless, uncertain, miserable hesitation; these cruel fears that his age was an insurmountable barrier to his happiness; this sick hatred of his white beard; this frenzied wish to be young again, with glistening raven hair, and a slim waist, such as he had had twenty years before; these wakeful nights and melancholy days, so gloriously brightened if he chanced to catch a glimpse of her sweet face behind the window curtains as he drove past the surgeon's house; all these signs gave token of the truth; and told only too plainly that, at the sober age of fifty-five, Sir Michael Audley had fallen ill of the terrible fever called love.
I do not think that throughout his courtship the baronet once calculated
upon his wealth or his position as a strong reason for his success. If he
ever remembered these things, he dismissed the thought of them with a
shudder. It pained him too much to believe for a moment that any one so
lovely and innocent could value herself against a splendid house or a good
old title. No; his hope was that as her life had been most likely
one of toil and dependence, and as she was very young (nobody exactly knew her age, but she looked little more than twenty), she might never have formed any attachment, and that he, being the first to woo her, might by tender attentions, by generous watchfulness, by a love which should recall to her the father she had lost, and by a protecting care that should make him necessary to her, win her young heart, and obtain from her fresh and earliest love alone the promise of her hand. It was a very romantic day-dream, no doubt; but, for all that, it seemed in a very fair way to be realised. Lucy Graham appeared by no means to dislike the baronet's attentions. There was nothing whatever in her manner of the shallow artifice employed by a woman who wishes to captivate a rich man. She was so used to admiration from every one, high and low, that Sir Michael's conduct made very little impression upon her. Again, he had been so many years a widower that people had given up the idea of his ever marrying again. At last, however, Mrs. Dawson spoke to the governess on the subject.
The surgeon's wife was sitting in the school-room busy at work, while Lucy was putting the finishing touches to some water-coloured sketches done by her pupils.
"Do you know, my dear Miss Graham," said Mrs. Dawson,
"I think you ought to consider yourself a remarkably lucky
girl."
The governess lifted her head from its stooping attitude, and stared
wonderingly at her employer, shaking back a shower of curls. They were the
most wonderful curls in the world--soft and feathery, always floating
away from her face, and making a pale halo round her head when the sunlight
shone through them.
"What do you mean, my dear Mrs. Dawson?" she asked, dipping
her camel's-hair brush into the wet aquamarine upon the palette, and
poising it carefully before putting in the delicate streak of purple which
was to brighten the horizon in her pupil's sketch.
"Why, I mean, my dear, that it only rests with yourself to become
Lady Audley, and the mistress of Audley Court."
Lucy Graham dropped the brush upon the picture, and flushed scarlet to
the roots of her fair hair; and then grew pale again, far paler than Mrs.
Dawson had ever seen her before.
"My dear, don't agitate yourself," said the
surgeon's wife, soothingly; "you know that nobody asks you to
marry Sir Michael unless you wish. Of course it would be a magnificent
match; he has a splendid income, and is one of the most generous of men.
Your position would be very high, and you would be enabled to do a great
deal of good; but, as I said before, you must be entirely guided by your
own feelings. Only one thing I must say, and that is, that if Sir
Michael's attentions are not agreeable to you, it is really scarcely
honorable to encourage him."
"His attentions--encourage him!" muttered Lucy, as if
the words bewildered her. "Pray, pray don't talk to me, Mrs.
Dawson. I had no idea of this. It is the last thing that would have
occurred to me." She leaned her elbows on the drawing-board before
her, and clasping her hands over her face, seemed for some minutes to be
thinking deeply. She wore a narrow black ribbon round her neck, with a locket or a cross, or a miniature, perhaps, attached to it; but whatever the trinket was, she always kept it hidden under her dress. Once or twice, while she sat silently thinking, she removed one of her hands from before her face, and fidgeted nervously with the ribbon, clutching at it with a half-angry gesture, and twisting it backwards and forwards between her fingers.
"I think some people are born to be unlucky, Mrs. Dawson,"
she said, by-and-by; "it would be a great deal too much good fortune
for me to become Lady Audley."
She said this with so much bitterness in her tone, that the
surgeon's wife looked up at her with surprise.
"You unlucky, my dear!" she exclaimed. "I think
you're the last person who ought to talk like that--you, such a
bright, happy creature, that it does every one good to see you. I'm
sure I don't know what we shall do if Sir Michael robs us of
you."
After this conversation they often spoke upon the subject, and Lucy
never again showed any emotion whatever when the baronet's admiration
for her was canvassed. It was a tacitly understood thing in the
surgeon's family that whenever Sir Michael proposed, the governess
would quietly accept him; and, indeed, the simple Dawsons would have
thought it something more than madness in a penniless girl to reject such
an offer.
So one misty June evening Sir Michael, sitting opposite to Lucy Graham
at a window in the surgeon's little drawing-room, took an opportunity,
while the family happened by some accident to be absent from the room, of
speaking upon the subject nearest to his heart. He made the governess in
few but solemn words an offer of his hand. There was something almost
touching in the manner and tone in which he spoke to her--half in
deprecation, knowing that he could hardly expect to be the choice of a
beautiful young girl, and praying rather that she would reject him, even
though she broke his heart by
doing so, than that she should accept his offer if she did not love him.
"I scarcely think there is a greater sin, Lucy," he said
solemnly, "than that of a woman who marries a man she does not love.
You are so precious to me, my beloved, that deeply as my heart is set on
this, and bitter as the mere thought of disappointment is to me, I would
not have you commit such a sin for any happiness of mine. If my happiness
could be achieved by such an act, which it could not--which it never
could," he repeated earnestly, "nothing but misery can result
from a marriage dictated by any motive but truth and love."
Lucy Graham was not looking at Sir Michael, but straight out into the
misty twilight and dim landscape far away beyond the little garden. The
baronet tried to see her face, but her profile was turned to him, and he
could not discover the expression of her eyes. If he could have done so, he
would have seen a yearning gaze which seemed as if it would have pierced
the far obscurity and looked away--away into another world.
"Lucy, you heard me?"
"Yes," she said gravely; not coldly, or in any way as if she
were offended at his words.
"And your answer?"
She did not remove her gaze from the darkening country side, but for
some moments was quite silent; then turning to him with a sudden passion in
her manner, that lighted up her face with a new and wonderful beauty which
the baronet perceived even in the growing twilight, she fell on her knees
at his feet.
"No, Lucy; no, no!" he cried, vehemently, "not here,
not here!"
"Yes, here, here," she said, the strange passion which
agitated her making her voice sound shrill and piercing--not loud, but
preternaturally distinct; "here and nowhere else. How good you
are--how noble and how generous! Love you! Why, there are women a
hundred times my superiors in beauty and in goodness who might love you
dearly; but you ask too much of me. You ask too much of me!
Remember what my life has been; only remember that. From my
very babyhood I have never seen anything but poverty. My father was a gentleman; clever, accomplished, generous, handsome--but poor. My mother--But do not let me speak of her. Poverty, poverty, trials, vexations, humiliations, deprivations! You cannot tell; you, who are amongst those for whom life is so smooth and easy; you can never guess what is endured by such as we. Do not ask too much of me, then. I cannot be disinterested; I cannot be blind to the advantages of such an alliance. I cannot, I cannot!"
Beyond her agitation and her passionate vehemence, there was an
undefined something in her manner which filled the baronet with a vague
alarm. She was still on the ground at his feet, crouching rather than
kneeling, her thin white dress clinging about her, her pale hair streaming
over her shoulders, her great blue eyes glittering in the dusk, and her
hands clutching at the black ribbon about her throat, as if it had been
strangling her.
"Don't ask too much of me," she kept
repeating; "I have been selfish from my babyhood."
"Lucy, Lucy, speak plainly. Do you dislike me?"
"Dislike you! No-no!"
"But is there any one else whom you love?"
She laughed aloud at his question. "I do not love any one in the
world," she answered.
He was glad of her reply; and yet that and the strange laugh jarred upon
his feelings. He was silent for some moments, and then said with a kind of
effort,--
"Well, Lucy, I will not ask too much of you. I dare say I am a
romantic old fool; but if you do not dislike me, and if you do not love any
one else, I see no reason why we should not make a very happy couple. Is it
a bargain, Lucy?"
"Yes."
The baronet lifted her in his arms, and kissed her once upon the
forehead; then, after quietly bidding her good-night, he walked straight
out of the house.
He walked straight out of the house, this
foolish old man, because there was some strong emotion at work in his heart--neither joy, nor triumph, but something almost akin to disappointment; some stifled and unsatisfied longing which lay heavy and dull at his heart, as if he had carried a corpse in his bosom. He carried the corpse of that hope which had died at the sound of Lucy's words. All the doubts and fears and timid aspirations were ended now. He must be contented, like other men of his age, to be married for his fortune and his position.
Lucy Graham went slowly up the stairs to her little room at the top of
the house. She placed her dim candle on the chest of drawers, and seated
herself on the edge of the white bed; still and white as the draperies
hanging around her.
"No more dependence, no more drudgery, no more
humiliations," she said; "every trace of the old life melted
away--every clue to identity buried and forgotten--except these,
except these."
She had never taken her left hand from the black ribbon at her throat.
She drew it from
her bosom as she spoke, and looked at the object attached to it.
It was neither a locket, a miniature, nor a cross: it was a ring wrapped
in an oblong piece of paper--the paper partly printed, partly written,
yellow with age, and crumpled with much folding.
"How wearisome they are," he said; "blue, and green,
and opal; opal, and blue, and green; all very well in their way, of course,
but three months of them are rather too much, especially--"
He did not attempt to finish his sentence; his thoughts seemed to wander
in the very midst of it, and carry him a thousand miles or so away.
"Poor little girl, how pleased she'll be!" he muttered,
opening his cigar case, and lazily surveying its contents; "how
pleased and how surprised! Poor little girl! After three years and a half,
too; she will be surprised."
He was a young man of about five-and-twenty, with a dark face, bronzed
by exposure to the
sun; he had handsome brown eyes, with a feminine smile in them, that sparkled through his black lashes, and a bushy beard and moustache that covered the whole lower part of his face. He was tall, and powerfully built; he wore a loose gray suit, and a felt hat, thrown carelessly upon his black hair. His name was George Talboys, and he was aft-cabin passenger on board the good ship Argus, laden with Australian wool, and sailing from Sydney to Liverpool.
There were very few passengers in the aft-cabin of the Argus. An elderly
wool-stapler, returning to his native country with his wife and daughters,
after having made a fortune in the colonies; a governess of five-and-thirty
years of age going home to marry a man to whom she had been engaged fifteen
years; the sentimental daughter of a wealthy Australian wine-merchant,
invoiced to England to finish her education, and George Talboys, were the
only first-class passengers on board.
This George Talboys was the life and soul of the vessel; nobody knew who
or what he was, or where he came from, but everybody liked him.
He sat at the bottom of the dinner-table, and assisted the captain in doing the honours of the friendly meal. He opened the champagne bottles, and took wine with every one present; he told funny stories, and led the laugh himself with such a joyous peal, that the man must have been a churl who could not have laughed for pure sympathy. He was a capital hand at speculation and vingt-et-un, and all the merry round games, which kept the little circle round the cabin-lamp so deep in innocent amusement, that a hurricane might have howled overhead without their hearing it; but he freely owned that he had no talet for whist, and that he didn't know a knight from a castle upon the chess-board.
Indeed, Mr. Talboys was by no means too learned a gentleman. The pale
governess had tried to talk to him about fashionable literature, but George
had only pulled his beard, and stared very hard at her, saying
occasionally, "Ah, yes!" and, "To be sure, ha!"
The sentimental young lady, going home to finish her education, had
tried him with Shelley
and Byron, and he had fairly laughed in her face, as if poetry where a joke. The wool-stapler sounded him upon politics, but he did not seem very deeply versed in them; so they let him go his own way, smoke his cigars and talk to the sailors, lounge over the bulwarks and stare at the water, and make himself agreeable to everybody in his own fashion. But when the Argus came to be within about a fortnight's sail of England everybody noticed a change in George Talboys. He grew restless and fidgety; sometimes so merry that the cabin rang with his laughter; sometimes moody and thoughtful. Favourite as he was amongst the sailors, they grew tired at last of answering his perpetual questions about the probable time of touching land. Would it be in ten days, in eleven, in twelve, in thirteen? Was the wind favorable? How many knots an hour was the vessel doing? Then a sudden passion would seize him, and he would stamp upon the deck, crying out that she was a rickety old craft, and that her owners were swindlers to advertise her as the fast-sailing Argus. She was
not fit for passenger traffic; she was not fit to carry impatient living creatures, with hearts and souls; she was fit for nothing but to be laden with bales of stupid wool, that might rot on the sea and be none the worse for it.
The sun was dropping down behind the waves as George Talboys lighted his
cigar upon this August evening. Only ten days more, the sailors had told
him that afternoon, and they would see the English coast. "I will go
ashore in the first boat that hails us," he cried; "I will go
ashore in a cockle-shell. By Jove, if it comes to that, I will swim to
land."
His friends in the aft-cabin, with the exception of the pale governess,
laughed at his impatience: she sighed as she watched the young man, chafing
at the slow hours, pushing away his untasted wine, flinging himself
restlessly about upon the cabin sofa, rushing up and down the companion
ladder, and staring at the waves.
As the red rim of the sun dropped into the water, the governess ascended
the cabin stairs for a stroll on deck, while the passengers sat over
their wine below. She stopped when she came up to George, and standing by his side, watched the fading crimson in the western sky.
The lady was very quiet and reserved, seldom sharing in the after-cabin
amusements, never laughing, and speaking very little; but she and George
Talboys had been excellent friends throughout the passage.
"Does my cigar annoy you, Miss Morley?" he said, taking it
out of his mouth.
"Not at all; pray do not leave off smoking. I only came up to look
at the sunset. What a lovely evening!"
"Yes, yes, I dare say," he answered, impatiently; "yet
so long, so long! Ten more interminable days and ten more weary nights
before we land."
"Yes," said Miss Morley, sighing. "Do you wish the
time shorter?"
"Do I?" cried George; "Indeed I do. Don't
you?"
"Scarcely."
"But is there no one you love in England?
Is there no one you love looking out for your arrival?"
"I hope so," she said gravely. They were silent for some
time, he smoking his cigar with a furious impatience, as if he could hasten
the course of the vessel by his own restlessness; she looking out at the
waning light with melancholy blue eyes: eyes that seemed to have faded with
poring over closely-printed books and difficult needlework; eyes that had
faded a little, perhaps, by reason of tears secretly shed in the dead hours
of the lonely night.
"See!" said George, suddenly pointing in another direction
from that toward which Miss Morley was looking, "there's the new
moon."
She looked up at the pale crescent, her own face almost as pale and
wan.
"This is the first time we have seen it. We must wish!" said
George. "I know what I wish."
"What?"
"That we may get home quickly."
"My wish is that we may find no disappointment when we get
there," said the governess, sadly.
"Disappointment!"
He started as if he had been struck, and asked what she meant by talking
of disappointment.
"I mean this," she said, speaking rapidly, and with a
restless motion of her thin hands; "I mean that as the end of this
long voyage draws near, hope sinks in my heart: and a sick fear comes over
me that at the last all may not be well. The person I go to meet may be
changed in his feelings towards me; or he may retain all the old feeling
until the moment of seeing me, and then lose it in a breath at sight of my
poor wan face, for I was called a pretty girl, Mr. Talboys, when I sailed
for Sydney, fifteen years ago; or he may be so changed by the world as to
have grown selfish and mercenary, and he may welcome me for the sake of my
fifteen years' savings. Again, he may be dead. He may have been well,
perhaps, up to within a week of our landing, and in that last week may have
taken a fever, and died an hour before our vessel anchors in the Mersey. I
think of all these things, Mr. Talboys, and act the scenes over in my mind,
and
feel the anguish of them twenty times a day. Twenty times a day!" she repeated; "why, I do it a thousand times a day."
George Talboys had stood motionless, with his cigar in his hand,
listening to her so intently that as she said the last words, his hold
relaxed, and the cigar dropped in the water.
"I wonder," she continued, more to herself than to
him--"I wonder, looking back, to think how hopeful I was when
the vessel sailed; I never thought then of disappointment, but I pictured
the joy of meeting, imagining the very words that would be said, the very
tones, the very looks; but for this last month of the voyage, day by day,
and hour by hour, my heart sinks, and my hopeful fancies fade away, and I
dread the end as much as if I knew that I was going to England
to attend a funeral."
The young man suddenly changed his attitude, and turned his face full
upon his companion, with a look of alarm. She saw in the pale light that
the color had faded from his cheek.
"What a fool!" he cried, striking his clinched
fist upon the side of the vessel, "what a fool I am to be frightened at this! Why do you come and say these things to me? Why do you come and terrify me out of my senses, when I am going straight home to the woman I love; to a girl whose heart is as true as the light of heaven; and in whom I no more expect to find any change than I do to see anotber sun rise in to-morrow's sky? Why do you come and try to put such fancies in my head, when I am going home to my darling wife?"
"Your wife," she said; "that is different. There is no
reason that my terrors should terrify you. I am going to England to rejoin
a man to whom I was engaged to be married fifteen years ago. He was too
poor to marry then, and when I was offered a situation as governess in a
rich Australian family, I persuaded him to let me accept it, so that I
might leave him free and unfettered to win his way in the world, while I
saved a little money to help us when we began life together. I never meant
to stay away so long, but things have gone badly with him in
England. That is my story, and you can understand my fears. They need not influence you. Mine is an exceptional case."
"So is mine," said George, impatiently. "I tell you
that mine is an exceptional case, although I swear to you that, until this
moment, I have never known a fear as to the result of my voyage home. But
you are right; your terrors have nothing to do with me. You have been away
fifteen years; all kinds of things may happen in fifteen years. Now, it is
only three years and a-half this very month since I left England. What can
have happened in such a short time as that?"
Miss Morley looked at him with a mournful smile, but did not speak. His
feverish ardour, the freshness and impatience of his nature were so strange
and new to her, that she looked at him half in admiration, half in
pity.
"My pretty little wife! My gentle, innocent, loving, little wife!
Do you know, Miss Morley," he said, with all his old hopefulness of
manner, "that I left my little girl asleep, with her baby
in her arms, and with nothing but a few blotted lines to tell her why her faithful husband had deserted her?"
"Deserted her!" exclaimed the governess.
"Yes. I was a cornet in a cavalry regiment when I first met my
little darling. We were quartered at a stupid sea-port town, where my pet
lived with her shabby old father, a half-pay naval officer; a regular old
humbug, as poor as Job, and with an eye for nothing but the main chance. I
saw through all his shallow tricks to catch one of us for his pretty
daughter. I saw all the pitiful, contemptible, palpable traps he set for
big dragoons to walk into. I saw through his shabby-genteel dinners and
public-house port; his fine talk of the grandeur of his family; his sham
pride and independence, and the sham tears in his bleared old eyes when he
talkled of his only child. He was a drunken old hypocrite, and he was ready
to sell my poor little girl to the highest bidder. Luckily for me, I
happened just then to be the highest bidder; for my father is a rich man,
Miss Morley, and as it was love
at first sight on both sides, my darling and I made a match of it. No sooner, however, did my father hear that I had married a penniless little girl, the daughter of a tipsy old half-pay lieutenant, than he wrote me a furious letter, telling me he would never again hold any communication with me, and that my yearly allowance would stop from my wedding-day. As there was no remaining in such a regiment as mine, with nothing but my pay to live on, and a pretty little wife to keep, I sold out, thinking that before the money that I got for my commision was exhausted, I should be sure to drop into something. I took my darling to Italy, and we lived there in splendid style as long as my two thousand pounds lasted; but when that began to dwindle down to a couple of hundred or so, we came back to England, and as my darling had a fancy for being near that tiresome old father of hers, we settled at the watering-place where he lived. Well, as soon as the old man heard that I had a couple of hundred pounds left, he expressed a wonderful degree of affection for us,
and insisted on our boarding in his house. We consented, still to please my darling, who had just then a peculiar right to have every whim and fancy of her innocent heart indulged. We did board with him, and finally he fleeced us; but when I spoke of it to my little wife, she only shrugged her shoulders, and said she did not like to be unkind to 'poor papa.' So poor papa made away with our little stock of money in no time; and as I felt that it was now becoming necessary to look about for something, I ran up to London, and tried to get a situation as a clerk in a merchant's office, or as accountant, or book-keeper, or something of that kind. But I suppose there was the stamp of a heavy dragoon upon me, for do what I would I couldn't get anybody to believe in my capacity; and tired out, and down-hearted, I returned to my darling, to find her nursing a son and heir to his father's poverty. Poor little girl, she was very low-spirited; and when I told her that my London expedition had failed, she fairly broke down, and burst into a storm of sobs and lamentations, telling me that I ought not to
have married her if I could give her nothing but poverty and misery; and that I had done her a cruel wrong in making her my wife. By heaven! Miss Morley, her tears and reproaches drove me almost mad; and I flew into a rage with her, myself, her father, the world, and everybody in it, and then ran out of the house, declaring that I would never enter it again. I walked about the streets all that day half out of my mind, and with a strong inclination to throw myself into the sea, so as to leave my poor girl free to make a better match. 'If I drown myself, her father must support her,' I thought; 'the old hypocrite could never refuse her a shelter, but while I live she has no claim on him.' I went down to a rickety old wooden pier, meaning to wait there till it was dark, and then drop quietly over the end of it into the water; but while I sat there smoking my pipe, and staring vacantly at the sea-gulls, two men came down, and one of them began to talk of the Australian gold-diggings, and the great things that were to be done there. It appeared that he was going to sail in a day or
two, and he was trying to persuade his companion to join him in the expedition.
"I listened to these men for upwards of an hour, following them up
and down the pier with my pipe in my mouth, and hearing all their talk.
After this I fell into conversation with them myself, and ascertained that
there was a vessel going to leave Liverpool in three days, by which vessel
one of the men was going out. This man gave me all the information I
required, and told me, moreover, that a stalwart young fellow such as I was
could hardly fail to do well in the diggings. The thought flashed upon me
so suddenly, that I grew hot and red in the face, and trembled in every
limb with excitement. This was better than the water at any rate. Suppose I
stole away from my darling, leaving her safe under her father's roof,
and went and made a fortune in the new world, and came back in a
twelvemonth to throw it into her lap; for I was so sanguine in those days
that I counted on making my fortune in a year or so. I thanked the man for
his information, and late at night
strolled homewards. It was bitter winter weather, but I had been too full of passion to feel cold, and I walked through the quiet streets, with the snow drifting in my face, and a desperate hopefulness in my heart. The old man was sitting drinking brandy-and-water in his little dining-room; and my wife was up-stairs, sleeping peacefully with the baby on her breast. I sat down and wrote a few brief lines, which told her that I never had loved her better than now when I seemed to desert her; that I was going to try my fortune in the new world; and that if I succeeded I should come back to bring her plenty and happiness, but that if I failed I should never look upon her face again. I divided the remainder of our money--something over forty pounds--into two equal portions, leaving one for her, and putting the other in my pocket. I knelt down and prayed for my wife and child, with my head upon the white counterpane that covered them. I wasn't much of a praying man at ordinary times, but God knows that was a heartfelt prayer. I kissed her once and the baby once, and then crept
out of the room. The dining-room door was open, and the old man was nodding over his paper. He looked up as he heard my step in the passage, and asked me where I was going. 'To have a smoke in the street,' I answered; and as this was a common habit of mine, he believed me. Three nights after this I was out at sea, bound for Melbourne--a steerage passenger, with a digger's tools for my baggage, and about seven shillings in my pocket."
"And you succeeded?" asked Miss Morley.
"Not till I had long despaired of success; not until poverty and I
had become such old companions and bed-fellows, that, looking back at my
past life, I wondered whether that dashing, reckless, extravagant,
luxurious, champagne-drinking dragoon could have really been the same man
who sat on the damp ground gnawing a moldy crust in the wilds of the new
world. I clung to the memory of my darling, and the trust that I had in her
love and truth, as the one keystone that kept the fabric of my past life
together--the one star that lit the thick black darkness of the
future. I was hail fellow well met with bad men; I was in the centre of riot, drunkenness, and debauchery; but the purifying influence of my love kept me safe from all. Thin and gaunt, the half-starved shadow of what I once had been, I saw myself one day in a broken bit of looking-glass, and was frightened of my own face. But I toiled on through all; through disappointment and despair, rheumatism, fever, starvation, at the very gates of death, I toiled on steadily to the end; and in the end I conquered."
He was so brave in his energy and determination, in his proud triumph of
success, and in the knowledge of the difficulties he had vanquished, that
the pale governess could only look at him in wondering admiration.
"How brave you were!" she said.
"Brave!" he cried, with a joyous peal of laughter;
"wasn't I working for my darling? Through all the dreary time of
that probation, her pretty white hand beckoning me onwards to a happy
future? Why, I have seen her under my wretched canvas tent, sitting by my
side, with
her boy in her arms, as plainly as I had ever seen her in the one happy year of our wedded life. At last, one dreary, foggy morning, just three months ago; with a drizzling rain wetting me to the skin; up to my neck in clay and mire; half-starved; enfeebled by fever; stiff with rheumatism; a monster nugget turned up under my spade, and I came upon a gold deposit of some magnitude. A fortnight afterwards I was the richest man in all the little colony about me. I travalled post-haste to Sydney, realised my gold findings which were worth upwards of £20,000, and a fortnight afterwards took my passage for England in this vessel; and in ten days--in ten days I shall see my darling."
"But in all that time did you never write to your wife?"
"Never till a week before this vessel set sail. I could not write
when everything looked so black. I could not write and tell her that I was
fighting hard with despair and death. I waited for better fortune; and when
that came, I wrote, telling her that I should be in England almost as
soon as my letter, and giving her an address at a coffee-house in London, where she could write to me, telling me where to find her; though she is hardly likely to have left her father's house."
He fell into a reverie after this, and puffed meditatively at his cigar.
His companion did not disturb him. The last ray of the summer daylight had
died out, and the pale light of the crescent moon only remained.
Presently George Talboys flung away his cigar, and, turning to the
governes, cried abruptly, "Miss Morley, if, when I get to England, I
hear that anything has happened to my wife, I shall fall down
dead."
"My dear Mr. Talboys, why do you think of these things? God is
very good to us; He will not afflict us beyond our power of endurance. I
see all things, perhaps, in a melancholy light; for the long monotony of my
life has given me too much time to think over my troubles."
"And my life has been all action, priva-
tion, toil, alternate hope and despair; I have had no time to think upon the chances of anything happening to my darling. What a blind, reckless fool I have been! Three years and a half, and not one line, one word from her, or from any mortal creature who knows her. Heaven above! what may not have happened?"
In the agitation of his mind he began to walk rapidly up and down the
lonely deck, the governess following, and trying to soothe him.
"I swear to you, Miss Morley," he said, "that, till
you spoke to me to-night, I never felt one shadow of fear; and now I have
that sick, sinking dread at my heart, which you talked of an hour ago. Let
me alone, please, to get over it my own way."
She drew silently away from him, and seated herself by the side of the
vessel, looking over into the water.
A fierce and crimson sunset. The mullioned windows and the twinkling
lattices are all ablaze with the red glory; the fading light flickers upon
the leaves of the limes in the long avenue, and changes the still fish-pond
into a sheet of burnished copper; even into those dim recesses of briar and
brushwood, amidst which the old well is hidden, the crimson brightness
penetrates in fitful flashes, till the dank weeds and the rusty iron wheel
and broken woodwork seem as if they were flecked with blood.
The lowing of a cow in the quiet meadows, the
splash of a trout in the fish-pond, the last notes of a tired bird, the creaking of waggon-wheels upon the distant road, every now and then breaking the evening silence, only made the stillness of the place seem more intense. It was almost oppressive, this twilight stillness. The very repose of the place grew painful from its intensity, and you felt as if a corpse must be lying somewhere within that gray and ivy-covered pile of building--so deathlike was the tranqullity of all around.
As the clock over the archway struck eight, a door at the back of the
house was softly opened, and a girl came out into the gardens.
But even the presence of a human being scarcely broke the silence; for
the girl crept slowly over the thick grass, and gliding into the avenue by
the side of the fish-pond, disappeared under the rich shelter of the
limes.
She was not, perhaps, positively a pretty girl; but her appearance was
of that order which is commonly called interesting. Interesting, it may be,
because in the pale face and the light grey eyes, the small features and
compressed lips,
there was something which hinted at a power of repression and self-control not common in a woman of nineteen or twenty. She might have been pretty, I think, but for the one fault in her small oval face. This fault was an absence of colour. Not one tinge of crimson flushed the waxen whiteness of her cheeks; not one shadow of brown redeemed the pale insipidity of her eyebrows and eyelashes; not one glimmer of gold or auburn relieved the dull flaxen of her hair. Even her dress was spoiled by this same deficiency; the pale lavender muslin faded into a sickly grey, and the ribbon knotted round her throat melted into the same neutral hue.
Her figure was slim and fragile, and in spite of her humble dress, she
had something of the grace and carriage of a gentlewoman; but she was only
a simple country girl, called Phoebe Marks, who had been nursemaid in
Mr. Dawson's family, and whom Lady Audley had chosen for her maid
after her marriage with Sir Michael.
Of course this was a wonderful piece of good fortune for Phoebe,
who found her wages trebled
and her work light in the well-ordered household at the Court; and who was therefore quite as much the object of envy amongst her particular friends as my lady herself in higher circles.
A man who was sitting on the broken wood-work of the well started as the
lady's-maid came out of the dim shade of the limes and stood before
him amongst the weeds and brushwood.
I have said before that this was a neglected spot: it lay in the midst
of a low shrubbery, hidden away from the rest of the gardens, and only
visible from the garret windows at the back of the west wing. "Why,
Phoebe," said the man, shutting a clasp-knife with which he had
been stripping the bark from a black-thorn stake, "you came upon me
so still and sudden, that I thought you was an evil spirit. I've come
across through the fields, and come in here at the gate agen the moat, and
I was taking a rest before I came up to the house to ask if you was come
back."
"I can see the well from my bedroom window, Luke,"
Phoebe answered, pointing to an open
lattice in one of the gables. "I saw you sitting here, and came down to have a chat; it's better talking out here than in the house where there's always somebody listening."
The man was a big, broad-shouldered, stupid-looking clodhopper of about
twenty-three years of age. His dark-red hair grew low upon his forehead,
and his bushy brows met over a pair of greenish grey eyes; his nose was
large and well shaped, but the mouth was coarse in form and animal in
expression. Rosy-cheeked, red-haired, and bull-necked, he was not unlike
one of the stout oxen grazing in the meadows round about the Court.
The girl seated herself lightly upon the wood-work at his side, and put
one of her hands, which had grown white in her new and easy service, about
his thick neck.
"Are you glad to see me, Luke?" she asked.
"Of course I'm glad, lass," he answered, boorishly,
opening his knife again, and scraping away at the hedge-stake.
They were first cousins, and had been play-
fellows in childhood, and sweethearts in early youth.
"You don't seem much as if you were glad,"
said the girl; "you might look at me, Luke, and tell me if you think
my journey has improved me."
"It ain't put any colour into your cheeks, my girl," he
said, glancing up at her from under his lowering eyebrows;
"you're every bit as white as you was when you went
away."
"But they say traveling makes people genteel, Luke. I've been
on the Continent with my lady, through all manner of curious places; and
you know when I was a child, Squire Horton's daughters taught me to
speak a little French, and I found it so nice to be able to talk to the
people abroad."
"Genteel!" cried Luke Marks, with a hoarse laugh; "who
wants you to be genteel, I wonder? Not me for one; when you're my wife
you won't have over-much time for gentility, my girl. French, too!
Dang me, Phoebe, I suppose when we've saved money enough between
us to buy a bit of a farm, you'll be parlyvooing to the
cows?"
She bit her lip as her lover spoke, and looked away. He went on cutting
and chopping at a rude handle he was fashioning to the stake, whistling
softly to himself all the while, and not once looking at his cousin.
For some time they were silent, but by-and-by she said, with her face
still turned away from her companion,--
"What a fine thing it is for Miss Graham, that was, to travel with
her maid and her courier, and her chariot and four, and a husband that
thinks there isn't one spot upon all the earth that's good enough
for her to set her foot upon!"
"Ay, it is a fine thing, Phoebe, to have lots of
money," answered Luke, "and I hope you'll be warned by
that, my lass, to save up your wages agen we get married."
"Why, what was she in Mr. Dawnson's house only three months
ago?" continued the girl, as if she had not heard her cousin's
speech. "What was she but a servant like me? Taking wages and working
for them as hard, or harder than I did. You should have seen her shabby
clothes,
Luke--worn and patched, and darned, and turned and twisted, yet always looking nice upon her, somehow. She gives me more as lady's-maid here than ever she got from Mr. Dawson then. Why, I've seen her come out of the parlor with a few sovereigns and a little silver in her hand, that master had just given her for her quarter's salary; and now look at her!"
"Never you mind her," said Luke; "take care of
yourself, Phoebe; that's all you've got to do. What should
you say to a public-house for you and me, by-and-by, my girl? There's
a deal of money to be made out of a public-house."
The girl still sat with her face averted from her lover, her hands
hanging listlessly in her lap, and her pale gray eyes fixed upon the last
low streak of crimson dying out behind the trunks of the trees.
"You should see the inside of the house, Luke," she said;
"it's a tumble-down looking place enough outside; but you should
see my lady's rooms,--all pictures and gilding, and great
looking-glasses that stretch from the ceiling
to the floor. Painted ceilings, too, that cost hundreds of pounds, the housekeeper told me, and all done for her."
"She's a lucky one," muttered Luke, with lazy
indifference.
"You should have seen her while we were abroad, with a crowd of
gentlemen always hanging about her; Sir Michael not jealous of them, only
proud to see her so much admired. You should have heard her laugh and talk
with them; throwing all their compliments and fine speeches back at them,
as it were, as if they had been pelting her with roses. She set every body
mad about her wherever she went. Her singing, her playing, her painting,
her dancing, her beautiful smile, and sunshiny ringlets! She was always the
talk of a place, as long as we stayed in it."
"Is she at home to-night?"
"No, she has gone out with Sir Michael to a dinner party, at the
Beeches. They've seven or eight miles to drive, and they won't be
back till after eleven."
"Then I'll tell you what, Phoebe, if the inside
of the house is so mighty fine, I should like to have a look at it."
"You shall, then. Mrs. Barton, the housekeeper, knows you by
sight, and she can't object to my showing you some of the best
rooms."
It was almost dark when the cousins left the shrubbery and walked slowly
to the house. The door by which they entered led into the servants'
hall, on one side of which was the housekeeper's room. Phoebe
Marks stopped for a moment to ask the housekeeper if she might take her
cousin through some of the rooms, and having received permission to do so,
lighted a candle at the lamp in the hall, and beckoned to Luke to follow
her into the other part of the house.
The long, black oak corridors were dim in the ghostly twilight--the
light carried by Phoebe looking only a poor speck of flame in the
broad passages through which the girl led her cousin. Luke looked
suspiciously over his shoulder now and then, half frightened of the
creaking of his own hob-nailed boots.
"It's a mortal dull place, Phoebe," he said, as
they emerged from a passage into the principal hall, which was not yet lighted; "I've heard tell of a murder that was done here in old times."
"There are murders enough in these times, as to that, Luke,"
answered the girl, ascending the staircase, followed by the young man.
She led the way through a great drawing-room, rich in satin and ormolu,
buhl and inlaid cabinets, bronzes, cameos, statuettes, and trinkets, that
glistened in the dusky light; then through a morning-room hung with proof
engravings of valuable pictures; through this into an ante-chamber,where
she stopped, holding the light above her head.
The young man stared about him, open-mouthed and open-eyed.
"It's a rare fine place," he said, "and must have
cost a power of money."
"Look at the pictures on the walls," said Phoebe,
glancing at the panels of the octagonal chamber, which were hung with
Claudes and Poussins, Wouvermans and Cuyps, "I've heard
that those alone are worth a fortune. This is the entrance to my lady's apartments, Miss Graham that was." She lifted a heavy green cloth curtain which hung across a doorway, and led the astonished countryman into a fairy-like boudoir, and thence to a dressing-room, in which the open doors of a wardrobe and a heap of dresses flung about a sofa showed that it still remained exactly as its occupant had left it.
"I've all these things to put away before my lady comes home,
Luke; you might sit down here while I do it, I shan't be
long."
Her cousin looked round in gawky embarrassment, bewildered by the
splendor of the room; and after some deliberation selected the most
substantial of the chairs, on the extreme edge of which he carefully seated
himself.
"I wish I could show you the jewels, Luke," said the girl;
"but I can't, for she always keeps the keys herself; that's
the case on the dressing-table there."
"What, that?" cried Luke, staring at the
massive walnutwood and brass inlaid casket.
"Why, that's big enough to hold every bit of clothes I've got!"
"And it's as full as it can be of diamonds, rubies, pearls,
and emeralds," answered Phoebe, busy as she spoke in folding the
rustling silk dresses, and laying them one by one upon the shelves of the
wardrobe. As she was shaking out the flounces of the last, a jingling sound
caught her ear, and she put her hand into the pocket.
"I declare!" she exclaimed, "my lady has left her keys
in her pocket for once in a way. I can show you the jewelry if you like,
Luke."
"Well, I may as well have a look at it, my girl," he said,
rising from his chair, and holding the light while his cousin unlocked the
casket. He uttered a cry of wonder when he saw the ornaments glittering on
white satin cushions. He wanted to handle the delicate jewels; to pull them
about, and find out their mercantile value. Perhaps a pang of longing and
envy shot through his heart as he thought how he would have liked to have
taken one of them.
"Why, one of those diamond things would set us up in life,
Phoebe," he said, turning a bracelet over and over in his big
red hands.
"Put it down, Luke! Put it down directly!" cried the girl,
with a look of terror; "how can you speak about such
things?"
He laid the bracelet in its place with a reluctant sigh, and then
continued his examination of the casket.
"What's this?" he asked presently, pointing to a brass
knob in the framework of the box.
He pushed it as he spoke, and a secret drawer, lined with purple velvet,
flew out of the casket.
"Look ye, here!" cried Luke, pleased at his discovery.
Phoebe Marks threw down the dress she had been folding, and went
over to the toilette table.
"Why, I never saw this before," she said, "I wonder
what there is in it?"
There was not much in it; neither gold nor gems; only a baby's
little worsted shoe rolled up in a piece of paper, and a tiny lock of pale
and
silky yellow hair, evidently taken from a baby's head. Phoebe's grey eyes dilated as she examined the little packet.
"So this is what my lady hides in the secret drawer," she
muttered.
"It's queer rubbish to keep in such a place," said
Luke, carelessly.
The girl's thin lips curved into a curious smile.
"You will bear me witness where I found this," she said,
putting the little parcel into her pocket.
"Why, Phoebe, you're never going to be such a fool as to
take that," cried the young man.
"I'd rather have this than the diamond bracelet you would
have liked to take," she answered; "you shall have the
public-house, Luke."
called to the bar; and as he found it, after due consideration, more trouble to oppose the wishes of these friends, than to eat so many dinners, and to take a set of chambers in the Temple; he adopted the latter course, and unblushingly called himself a barrister.
Sometimes, when the weather was very hot, and he had exhausted himself
with the exertion of smoking his German pipe, and reading French novels, he
would stroll into the Temple Gardens, and lying in some shady spot, pale
and cool, with his shirt collar turned down and a blue silk handkerchief
tied loosely about his neck, would tell grave benchers that he had knocked
himself up with over work.
The sly old benchers laughed at the pleasing fiction; but they all
agreed that Robert Audley was a good fellow; a generous-hearted fellow;
rather a curious fellow too, with a fund of sly wit and quiet humor, under
his listless, dawdling, indifferent, irresolute manner. A man who would
never get on in the world; but who would not hurt a worm. Indeed, his
chambers were con-
verted into a perfect dog-kennel, by his habit of bringing home stray and benighted curs, who were attracted by his looks in the street, and followed him with abject fondness.
Robert always spent the hunting season at Audley Court; not that he was
distinguished as a Nimrod, for he would quietly trot to covert upon a
mild-tempered, stout-limbed, bay hack, and keep at a very respectful
distance from the hard riders; his horse knowing quite as well as he did,
that nothing was further from his thoughts than any desire to be in at the
death.
The young man was a great favourite with his uncle, and by no means
despised by his pretty, gipsy-faced, light-hearted, hoydenish cousin, Miss
Alicia Audley. It might have seemed to other men that the partiality of a
young lady, who was sole heiress to a very fine estate, was rather well
worth cultivating, but it did not so occur to Robert Audley. Alicia was a
very nice girl, he said, a jolly girl, with no nonsense about her--a
girl of a thousand; but this was the highest point to which enthusiasm
could carry him. The idea of turning
his cousin's girlish liking for him to some good account never entered his idle brain. I doubt if he even had any correct notion of the amount of his uncle's fortune, and I am certain that he never for one moment calculated upon the chances of any part of that fortune ultimately coming to himself. So that when one fine spring morning, about three months before the time of which I am writing, the postman brought him the wedding cards of Sir Michael and Lady Audley, together with a very indignant letter from his cousin, setting forth how her father had just married a wax-dollish young person, no older than Alicia herself, with flaxen ringlets and a perpetual giggle; for, I am sorry to say, that Miss Audley's animus caused her so to describe that pretty musical laugh which had been so much admired in the late Miss Lucy Graham--when, I say, these documents reached Robert Audley--they elicited neither vexation nor astonishment in the lymphatic nature of that gentleman. He read Alicia's angry crossed and recrossed letter without so much as removing the amber mouthpiece of his German pipe from his
moustachioed lips. When he had finished the perusal of the epistle, which he read with his dark eyebrows elevated to the center of his forehead (his only manner of expressing surprise, by the way), he deliberately threw that and the wedding cards into the waste-paper basket, and putting down his pipe, prepared himself for the exertion of thinking out the subject.
"I always said the old buffer would marry," he muttered,
after about half an hour's reverie. "Alicia and my lady, the
stepmother, will go at it hammer and tongs. I hope they won't quarrel
in the hunting season, or say unpleasant things to each other at the
dinner-table: rows always upset a man's digestion."
At about twelve o'clock on the morning following that night upon
which the events recorded in my last chapter had taken place, the
Baronet's nephew strolled out of the Temple, Blackfriars-ward, on his
way to the City. He had in an evil hour obliged some necessitous friend by
putting the ancient name of Audley across a bill of accommodation, which
bill not having been met by the
drawer, Robert was called upon to pay. For this purpose he sauntered up Ludgate Hill, with his blue necktie fluttering in the hot August air, and thence to a refreshingly cool banking-house in a shady court out of St. Paul's Churchyard, where he made arrangements for selling out a couple of hundred pounds worth of consols.
He had transacted this business, and was loitering at the corner of the
court, waiting for a chance Hansom, to convey him back to the Temple, when
he was almost knocked down by a man of about his own age, who dashed
headlong into the narrow opening.
"Be so good as to look where you're going, my friend!"
Robert remonstrated, mildly, to the impetuous passenger; "you might
give a man warning before you throw him down and trample upon
him."
The stranger stopped suddenly, looked very hard at the speaker, and then
gasped for breath.
"Bob!" he cried, in a tone expressive of the most intense
astonishment; "I only touched
British ground after dark last night, and to think that I should meet you this morning!"
"I've seen you somewhere before, my bearded friend,"
said Mr. Audley, calmly scrutinizing the animated face of the other,
"but I'll be hanged if I can remember when or where."
"What!" exclaimed the stranger, reproachfully, "you
don't mean to say that you've forgotten George
Talboys?"
"No, I have not!" said Robert, with an emphasis
by no means usual to him; and then hooking his arm into that of his friend,
he led him into the shady court, saying with his old indifference,
"and now, George, tell us all about it."
George Talboys did tell him all about it. He told that very story which
he had related ten days before to the pale governess on board the Argus;
and then, hot and breathless, he said that he had a bundle of Australian
notes in his pocket, and that he wanted to bank it at Messrs.--, who
had been his bankers many years before.
"If you'll believe me, I've only just left their
counting-house," said Robert. "I'll go back with you, and we'll settle that matter in five minutes."
They did contrive to settle it in about a quarter of an hour; and then
Robert Audley was for starting off immediately for the Crown and Sceptre,
or the Castle, Richmond, where they could have a bit of dinner, and talk
over those good old times when they were together at Eton. But George told
his friend that before he went anywhere, before he shaved, or broke his
fast, or in any way refreshed himself after a night journey from Liverpool
by express train, he must call at a certain coffee-house in Bridge Street,
Westminster, where he expected to find a letter from his wife.
"Then I'll go there with you," said Robert. "The
idea of your having a wife, George; what a preposterous joke."
As they dashed through Ludgate Hill, Fleet Street and the Strand in a
fast Hansom, George Talboys poured into his friend's ear all those
wild hopes and dreams which had usurped such a dominion over his sanguine
nature.
"I shall take a villa on the banks of the Thames, Bob," he
said, "for the little wife and myself; and we'll have a yacht,
Bob, old boy, and you shall lie on the deck and smoke while my pretty one
plays her guitar and sings songs to us. She's for all the world like
one of those what's-its-names, who got poor old Ulysses into
trouble," added the young man, whose classic lore was not very
great.
The waiters at the Westminster coffee-house stared at the hollow-eyed,
unshaven stranger, with his clothes of colonial cut, and his boisterous,
excited manner; but he had been an old frequenter of the place in his
military days, and when they heard who he was they flew to do his
bidding.
He did not want much--only a bottle of soda water, and to know if
there was a letter at the bar directed to George Talboys.
The waiter brought the soda water before the young men had seated
themselves in a shady box near the disused fireplace. No; there was no
letter for that name.
The waiter said it with consummate indifference, while he mechanically
dusted the little mahogany table.
George's face blanched to a deadly whiteness.
"Talboys," he said; "perhaps you didn't hear the
name distinctly--T, A, L, B, 0, Y, S. Go and look again, there
must be a letter."
The waiter shrugged his shoulders as he left the room, and returned in
three minutes to say that there was no name at all resembling Talboys in
the letter rack. There was Brown, and Saunderson, and Pinchbeck; only three
letters altogether.
The young man drank his soda water in silence, and then leaning his
elbows upon the table, covered his face with his hands. There was something
in his manner which told Robert Audley that his disappointment, trifling as
it might appear, was in reality a very bitter one. He seated himself
opposite to his friend, but did not attempt to address him.
By-and-by George looked up, and mechanically taking a greasy
Times newspaper of the day
before from a heap of journals on the table, stared vacantly at the first page.
I cannot tell how long he sat blankly staring at one paragraph among the
list of deaths, before his dazed brain took in its full meaning; but after
a considerable pause he pushed the newspaper over to Robert Audley, and
with a face that had changed from its dark bronze to a sickly, chalky,
greyish white, and with an awful calmness in his manner, he pointed with
his finger to a line which ran thus:--
"On the 24th inst., at Ventnor, Isle of Wight, Helen Talboys, aged
twenty-two."
When George told the governess on board the Argus that if he heard any
evil tidings of his wife he should drop down dead, he spoke in perfect good
faith; and yet here were the worst tidings that could come to him, and he
sat rigid, white, and helpless, staring stupidly at the shocked face of his
friend.
The suddenness of the blow had stunned him. In this strange and
bewildered state of mind he began to wonder what had happened, and why it
was that one line in the Times newspaper could have so
horrible an effect upon him.
Then by degrees even this vague consciousness of his misfortune faded
slowly out of his
mind, succeeded by a painful consciousness of external things.
The hot August sunshine; the dusty window panes and shabby painted
blinds; a file of fly-blown play-bills fastened to the wall; the black and
empty fire-place; a bald-headed old man nodding over the Morning
Advertiser; the slip-shod waiter folding a tumbled table-cloth, and
Robert Audley's handsome face looking at him full of compassionate
alarm. He knew that all these things took gigantic proportions, and then,
one by one, melted into dark blots that swam before his eyes. He knew that
there was a great noise as of half-a-dozen furious steam-engines tearing
and grinding in his ears, and he knew nothing more, except that somebody or
something fell heavily to the ground.
He opened his eyes upon the dusky evening in a cool and shaded room, the
silence only broken by the rumbling of wheels at a distance.
He looked about him wonderingly, but half indifferently. His old friend,
Robert Audley, was seated by his side smoking. George was lying
on a low iron bedstead opposite to an open window, in which there was a stand of flowers and two or three birds in cages.
"You 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 mantel-piece, 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, my 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 to-night, George, not to-night. I will go with you myself by
the first train to-morrow."
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 towards Portsmouth.
They rode from Ryde to Ventnor under the burning heat of the mid-day
sun. As the two young men alighted from the coach, the people standing
about stared at George's white face and untrimmed beard.
"What are we to do, George?" Robert Audley asked. "We
have no clue 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 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 an hotel, where he
inquired for a Mr. Maldon.
"Yes," they told him, "there was a gentleman of that
name stoping 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 hall.
George Talboys leaned against the door-post 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 Cottages, No. 4.
They easily found the house, a shabby bow-windowed cottage, looking
towards 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 parlour--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
mantel-piece.
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 knicknacks lying here and there.
Her work-box, 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 half-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 goodnatured, garrulous creature,
used 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 a week 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 have 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 bed-room 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 new-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, 1857, aged 22,
Deeply regretted by her sorrowing Husband.
"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 grey;
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.
"Good heavens!" cried George, "don't you know
me?"
Mr. Maldon started and coloured violently, with something of a
frightened look, as he recognised 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 heaven!" 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 blood-shot
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 Argus go down with every soul on board her before I came to
see this day?"
He began to walk up and down the beach, his father-in-law looking
helplessly at him, rubbing his feeble eyes with a handkerchief.
"I've a strong notion that that old man didn't treat his
daughter too well," thought Robert, as he watched the half-pay
lieutenant. "He seems, for some reason or other, to be half afraid of
George."
While the agitated young man walked up and down in a fever of regret and
despair, the child ran to his grandfather and clung about the tails of his
coat.
"Come home, grandpa', come home," he said.
"I'm tired."
George Talboys turned at the sound of the
babyish voice, and long and earnestly looked at the boy.
He had his father's brown eyes and dark hair.
"My darling! my darling!" said George, taking the child in
his arms, "I am your father, come across the sea to find you. Will
you love me?"
The little fellow pushed him away. "I don't know you,"
he said. "I love grandpa' and Mrs. Monks, at
Southampton."
"Georgey has a temper of his own, sir," said the old man.
"He has been spoiled."
They walked slowly back to the cottage, and once more George Talboys
told the history of that desertion which had seemed so cruel. He told, too,
of the twenty thousand pounds banked by him the day before. He had not the
heart to ask any questions about the past, and his father-in-law only told
him that a few months after his departure they had gone from the place
where George left them to live at Southampton, where Helen got a few pupils
for the piano, and where they managed pretty well till her health failed,
and she fell into the decline of which she died. Like most sad stories, it was a very brief one.
"The boy seems fond of you, Mr. Maldon," said George, after
a pause.
"Yes, yes," answered the old man, smoothing the child's
curling hair, "yes, Georgey is very fond of his
grandfather."
"Then he had better stop with you. The interest of my money will
be about six hundred a year. You can draw a hundred of that for
Georgey's education, leaving the rest to accumulate till he is of age.
My friend here will be trustee, and if he will undertake the charge, I will
appoint him guardian to the boy, allowing him for the present to remain
under your care."
"But why not take care of him yourself, George?" asked
Robert Audley.
"Because I shall sail in the very next vessel that leaves
Liverpool for Australia. I shall be better in the diggings or the backwoods
than ever I could be here. I'm broken for a civilized life from this
hour, Bob."
The old man's weak eyes sparkled as George declared this
determination.
"My poor boy, I think you're right," he said, "I
really think you're right. The change, the wild life,
the--the--" He hesitated and broke down, as Robert looked
earnestly at him.
"You're in a great hurry to get rid of your son-in-law, I
think, Mr. Maldon," he said gravely.
"Get rid of him, dear boy! Oh, no, no! But for his own sake, my
dear sir, for his own sake, you know."
"I think for his own sake he'd much better stay in England
and look after his son," said Robert.
"But I tell you I can't," cried George; "every
inch of this accursed ground is hateful to me--I want to run out of it
as I would out of a graveyard. I'll go back to town to-night, get that
business about the money settled early to-morrow morning, and start for
Liverpool without a moment's delay. I shall be better when I've
put half the world between me and her grave."
Before he left the house he stole out to the
landlady, and asked some more questions about his dead wife.
"Were they poor?" he asked; "were they pinched for
money while she was ill?"
"Oh, no!" the woman answered; "though the captain
dresses shabby, he has always plenty of sovereigns in his purse. The poor
lady wanted for nothing."
George was relieved at this, though it puzzled him to know where the
drunken half-pay lieutenant could have contrived to find money for all the
expenses of his daughter's illness.
But he was too thoroughly broken down by the calamity which had befallen
him to be able to think much of anything, so he asked no further questions,
but walked with his father-in-law and Robert Audley down to the boat by
which they were to cross to Portsmouth.
The old man bade Robert a very ceremonious adieu.
"You did not introduce me to your friend, by-the-bye, my dear
boy," he said. George stared at him, muttered something indistinct,
and ran down the ladder to the boat before Mr. Maldon could repeat his request. The steamer sped away through the sunset, and the outlines of the island melted in the horizon as they neared the opposite shore.
"To think," said George, "that two nights ago at this
time I was steaming into Liverpool, full of the hope of clasping her to my
heart, and to-night I am going away from her grave!"
The document which appointed Robert Audley as guardian to little George
Talboys was drawn up in a solicitor's office the next morning.
"It's a great responsibility," exclaimed Robert;
"I, guardian to anybody or anything! I, who never in my life could
take care of myself!"
"I trust in your noble heart, Bob," said George, "I
know you will take care of my poor orphan boy, and see that he is well used
by his grandfather. I shall only draw enough from George's fortune to
take me back to Sydney, and then begin my old work again."
But it seemed as if George was destined to be himself the guardian of
his son; for when
he reached Liverpool, he found that a vessel had just sailed, and that there would not be another for a month; so he returned to London, and once more threw himself upon Robert Audley's hospitality.
The barrister received him with open arms; he gave him the room with the
birds and flowers, and had a bed put up in his dressing-room for himself.
Grief is so selfish that George did not know the sacrifices his friend made
for his comfort. He only knew that for him the sun was darkened, and the
business of life done. He sat all day long smoking cigars, and staring at
the flowers and canaries, chafing for the time to pass that he might be far
out at sea.
But, just as the hour was drawing near for the sailing of the vessel,
Robert Audley came in one day full of a great scheme. A friend of his,
another of those barristers whose last thought is of a brief, was going to
St. Petersburg to spend the winter, and wanted Robert to accompany him.
Robert would only go on condition that George went too.
For a long time the young man resisted, but when he found that Robert
was, in a quiet way, thoroughly determined upon not going without him, he
gave in, and consented to join the party. "What did it matter?"
he said. "One place was the same to him as another, anywhere out of
England, what did he care where?"
This was not a very cheerful way of looking at things, but Robert Audley
was quite satisfied with having won his consent.
The three young men started under very favourable circumstances,
carrying letters of introduction to the most influential inhabitants of the
Russian capital.
Before leaving England Robert wrote to his cousin Alicia, telling her of
his intended departure with his old friend George Talboys, whom he had
lately met for the first time after a lapse of years, and who had just lost
his wife.
Alicia's reply came by return of post, and ran thus:--
"MY DEAR ROBERT,--How cruel of you to
run away to that horrid St. Petersburg before the hunting season! I have heard that people lose their noses in that disagreeable climate, and as yours is rather a long one, I should advise you to return before the very severe weather sets in. What sort of person is this young Mr. Talboys? If he is very agreeable you may bring him to the Court as soon as you return from your travel. Lady Audley tells me to request you to secure her a set of sables. You are not to consider the price, but to be sure that they are the handsomest that can be obtained. Papa is perfectly absurd about his new wife, and she and I cannot get on together at all; not that she is disagreeable to me, for, as far as that goes, she makes herself agreeable to every one; but she is so irretrievably childish and silly.
"Believe me to be, my dear Robert,
"Your affectionate Cousin,
"ALICIA AUDLEY."
But the big ex-dragoon had survived his affliction by a twelvemonth, and
hard as it may be to have to tell it, he did not look much the worse for
it. Heaven knows what inner change may have been worked by that bitter
disappointment! Heaven knows what wasted agonies of remorse and
self-reproach may not have racked
George's honest heart as he lay awake at nights thinking of the wife he had abandoned in the pursuit of a fortune which she never lived to share.
Once, while they were abroad, Robert Audley ventured to congratulate him
upon his recovered spirits. He burst into a bitter laugh.
"Do you know, Bob," he said, "that when some of our
fellows were wounded in India, they came home bringing bullets inside them.
They did not talk of them, and they were stout and hearty, and looked as
well, perhaps, as you or I; but every change in the weather, however
slight, every variation of the atmosphere, however trifling, brought back
the old agony of their wounds as sharp as ever they had felt it on the
battle-field. I've had my wound, Bob; I carry the bullet still, and I
shall carry it into my coffin."
The travellers returned from St. Petersburg in the spring, and George
again took up his quarters in his old friend's chambers, only leaving
them now and then to run down to South-
ampton and take a look at his little boy. He always went loaded with toys and sweetmeats to give to the child; but, for all this, Georgey would not become very familiar with his papa, and the young man's heart sickened as he began to fancy that even his child was lost to him.
"What can I do?" he thought. "If I take him away from
his grandfather I shall break his heart; if I let him remain he will grow
up a stranger to me, and care more for that drunken old hypocrite than for
his own father. But then what could an ignorant heavy dragoon like me do
with such a child? What could I teach him except to smoke cigars, and idle
about all day with his hands in his pockets?"
So the anniversary of that 30th of August, upon which George had seen
the advertisement of his wife's death in the Times
newspaper, came round for the first time, and the young man put off his
black clothes and the shabby crape from his hat, and laid his mourning
garments in a trunk in which he kept a packet of his wife's letters,
and that lock of hair which had been cut
from her head after death. Robert Audley had never seen either the letters or the long tress of silky hair; nor, indeed, had George ever mentioned the name of his dead wife after that one day at Ventnor on which he learned the full particulars of her decease.
"I shall write to my cousin Alicia to-day, George," the
young barrister said, upon this very 30th of August. "Do you know
that the day after to-morrow is the 1st of September? I shall write and
tell her that we will both run down to the Court for a week's
shooting."
"No, no, Bob: go by yourself; they don't want me, and
I'd rather--"
"Bury yourself in Fig Tree Court, with no company but my dogs and
canaries! No, George, you shall do nothing of the kind."
"But I don't care for shooting."
"And do you suppose I care for it?" cried Robert, with
charming naïveté. "Why, man,
I don't know a partridge from a pigeon, and it might be the 1st of
April instead of the 1st of September for aught I care. I never hit a bird
in my life, but I have hurt my own shoulder with the weight of my gun. I only go down to Essex for the change of air, the good dinners, and the sight of my uncle's honest, handsome face. Besides, this time I've another inducement, as I want to see this fair-haired paragon, my new aunt. You'll go with me, George?"
"Yes, if you really wish it."
The quiet form which his grief had taken after its first brief violence
left him as submissive as a child to the will of his friend; ready to go
anywhere or do anything; never enjoying himself, or originating any
enjoyment, but joining in the pleasures of others with a hopeless, quiet,
uncomplaining, unobtrusive resignation peculiar to his simple nature. But
the return of post brought a letter from Alicia Audley, to say that the two
young men could not be received at the Court.
"There are seventeen spare bed-rooms," wrote the young lady,
in an indignant running hand, "but for all that, my dear Robert, you
can't come; for my lady has taken it into her silly head that
she is too ill to entertain visitors (there is no more the matter with her than there is with me), and she cannot have gentlemen (great rough men, she says) in the house. Please apologise to your friend Mr. Talboys, and tell him that papa hopes to see you both in the hunting season."
"My lady's airs and graces shan't keep us out of Essex
for all that," said Robert, as he twisted the letter into a
pipe-light for his big meerschaum. "I'll tell you what
we'll do, George; there's a glorious inn at Audley, and plenty of
fishing in the neighbourhood: we'll go there and have a week's
sport. Fishing is much better than shooting; you've only to lie on a
bank and stare at your line; I don't find that you often catch
anything, but it's very pleasant."
He held the twisted letter to the feeble spark of fire glimmering in the
grate as he spoke, and then changing his mind, deliberately unfolded it and
smoothed the crumpled paper with his hand.
"Poor little Alicia!" he said thoughtfully; "it's
rather hard to treat her letters so cavalierly--I'll keep
it;" upon which Mr. Robert Audley
put the note back into its envelope, and afterwards thrust it into a pigeon-hole in his office desk marked important. Heaven knows what wonderful documents there were in this particular pigeon-hole, but I do not think it likely to have contained anything of great judicial value. If any one could at that moment have told the young barrister that so simple a thing as his cousin's brief letter would one day come to be a link in that terrible chain of evidence afterwards to be slowly forged in the one only criminal case in which he was ever to be concerned, perhaps Mr. Robert Audley would have lifted his eyebrows a little higher than usual.
So the two young men left London the next day with one portmanteau and a
rod and tackle between them, and reached the straggling, old-fashioned,
fast-decaying village of Audley in time to order a good dinner at the Sun
Inn.
Audley Court was about three-quarters of a mile from the village, lying,
as I have said, deep down in a hollow, shut in by luxuriant timber. You
could only reach it by a cross-road,
bor-
dered by trees, and as trimly kept as the avenues in a gentleman's park. It was a dreary place enough, even in all its rustic beauty, for so bright a creature as the late Miss Lucy Graham, but the generous baronet had transformed the interior of the gray old mansion into a little palace for his young wife, and Lady Audley seemed as happy as a child surrounded by new and costly toys.
In her better fortunes, as in her old days of dependence, wherever she
went she seemed to take sunshine and gladness with her. In spite of Miss
Alic