Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics)

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Robert Audley stared aghast. How was he to deal with this epicure of five years old, who rejected bread and milk and asked for veal cutlets?

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you, little Georgey,’ he exclaimed, after a pause—‘I’ll give you a dinner.’

  The waiter nodded briskly.

  ‘Upon my word, sir,’ he said, approvingly, ‘I think the little gentleman will know how to eat it.’

  ‘I’ll give you a dinner, Georgey,’ repeated Robert—‘a little Julienne,* some stewed eels, a dish of cutlets, a bird, and a pudding. What do you say to that, Georgey?’

  ‘I don’t think the young gentleman will object to it when he sees it, sir,’ said the waiter. ‘Eels, Julienne, cutlets, bird, pudding—I’ll go and tell the cook, sir. What time, sir?’

  ‘Well, we’ll say six, and Master Georgey will get to his new school by bedtime. You can contrive to amuse the child for this afternoon, I dare say. I have some business to settle, and shan’t be able to take him out. I shall sleep here to-night. Good-by, Georgey; take care of yourself, and try and get your appetite in order against six o’clock.’

  Robert Audley left the boy in charge of the idle waiter, and strolled down to the water-side, choosing that lonely bank which leads away under the mouldering walls of the town towards the little villages beside the narrowing river.

  He had purposely avoided the society of the child, and he walked through the light drifting snow till the early darkness closed upon him.

  He went back to the town, and made inquiries at the station about the trains for Dorsetshire.

  ‘I shall start early to-morrow morning,’ he thought, ‘and see George’s father before nightfall. I will tell him all—all but the interest which I take in—in the suspected person, and he shall decide what is next to be done.’

  Master Georgey did very good justice to the dinner which Robert had ordered. He drank Bass’s pale ale to an extent which considerably alarmed his entertainer, and enjoyed himself amazingly, showing an appreciation of roast pheasant and bread-sauce which was beyond his years. At eight o’clock a fly was brought out for his accommodation, and he departed in the highest spirits, with a sovereign in his pocket, and a letter from Robert to Mr Marchmont, enclosing a cheque for the young gentleman’s outfit.

  ‘I’m glad I’m going to have new clothes,’ he said, as he bade Robert good-by; ‘for Mrs Plowson has mended the old ones ever so many times. She can have them now for Billy.’

  ‘Who’s Billy?’ Robert asked, laughing at the boy’s chatter.

  ‘Billy is poor Matilda’s little brother. He’s a common boy, you know. Matilda was common, but she——’

  But the flyman smacking his whip at this moment, the old horse jogged off, and Robert Audley heard no more of Matilda.

  CHAPTER IV

  COMING TO A STANDSTILL

  MR HARCOURT TALBOYS lived in a prim, square, redbrick mansion, within a mile of a little village called Grange Heath, in Dorsetshire. The prim, square, red-brick mansion stood in the centre of prim, square grounds, scarcely large enough to be called a park, too large to be called anything else—so neither the house nor the grounds had any name, and the estate was simply designated Squire Talboys’.

  Perhaps Mr Harcourt Talboys was the very last person in this world with whom it was possible to associate the homely, hearty, rural, old English title of squire. He neither hunted nor farmed. He had never worn crimson-pink, or top-boots in his life. A southerly wind and a cloudy sky were matters of supreme indifference to him so long as they did not in any way interfere with his own prim comforts; and he only cared for the state of the crops insomuch as it involved the hazard of certain rents which he received for the farms upon his estate. He was a man of about fifty years of age, tall, straight, bony, and angular, with a square, pale face, light grey eyes, and scanty dark hair, brushed from either ear across a bald crown, and thus imparting to his physiognomy some faint resemblance to that of a terrier—a sharp, uncompromising, hard-headed terrier—a terrier not to be taken in by the cleverest dog-stealer who ever distinguished himself in his profession.

  Nobody ever remembered getting upon what is popularly called the blind side of Harcourt Talboys. He was like his own square-built, northern-fronted, shelterless house. There were no shady nooks in his character into which one could creep for shelter from his hard daylight. He was all daylight. He looked at everything in the same broad glare of intellectual sunlight, and would see no softening shadows that might alter the sharp outlines of cruel facts, subduing them to beauty. I do not know if I express what I mean, when I say that there were no curves in his character—that his mind ran in straight lines, never diverging to the right or the left to round off their pitiless angles. With him right was right and wrong was wrong. He had never in his merciless, conscientious life admitted the idea that circumstance might mitigate the blackness of wrong or weaken the force of right. He had cast off his only son because his only son had disobeyed him, and he was ready to cast off his only daughter at five minutes’ notice for the same reason.

  If this square-built, hard-headed man could be possessed of such a weakness as vanity, he was certainly vain of his hardness. He was vain of that inflexible squareness of intellect which made him the disagreeable creature that he was. He was vain of that unwavering obstinacy which no influence of love or pity had been ever known to bend from its remorseless purpose. He was vain of the negative force of a nature which had never known the weakness of the affections, or the strength which may be born of that very weakness.

  If he had regretted his son’s marriage, and the breach, of his own making, between himself and George, his vanity had been more powerful than his regret, and had enabled him to conceal it. Indeed, unlikely as it appears at the first glance that such a man as this could have been vain, I have little doubt that vanity was the centre from which radiated all the disagreeable lines in the character of Mr Harcourt Talboys. I dare say Junius Brutus was vain, and enjoyed the approval of awe-stricken Rome when he ordered his son off for execution.* Harcourt Talboys would have sent poor George from his presence between the reversed fasces of the lictors,* and grimly relished his own agony. Heaven only knows how bitterly this hard man may have felt the separation between himself and his only son, or how much the more terrible the anguish might have been made by that unflinching self-conceit which concealed the torture.

  ‘My son did me an unpardonable wrong by marrying the daughter of a drunken pauper,’ Mr Talboys would answer to anyone who had the temerity to speak to him about George, ‘and from that hour I had no longer a son. I wish him no ill. He is simply dead to me. I am sorry for him, as I am sorry for his mother who died nineteen years ago. If you talk to me of him as you would talk of the dead, I shall be ready to hear you. If you speak of him as you would speak of the living, I must decline to listen.’

  I believe that Harcourt Talboys hugged himself upon the gloomy Roman grandeur of this speech, and that he would have liked to have worn a toga, and wrapped himself sternly in its folds, as he turned his back upon poor George’s intercessor. George never in his own person made any effort to soften his father’s verdict. He knew his father well enough to know that the case was hopeless.

  ‘If I write to him, he will fold my letter with the envelope inside, and indorse it with my name and the date of its arrival,’ the young man would say, ‘and call everybody in the house to witness that it has not moved him to one softening recollection or one pitiful thought. He will stick to his resolution to his dying day. I dare say, if the truth were known, he is glad that his only son has offended him and given him the opportunity of parading his Roman virtues.’*

  George had answered his wife thus when she and her father had urged him to ask assistance from Harcourt Talboys.

  ‘No, my darling,’ he would say conclusively. ‘It is very hard, perhaps, to be poor, but we will bear it. We won’t go with pitiful faces to the stern father, and ask him to give us food and shelter, only to be refused in lo
ng Johnsonian sentences,* and made a classical example of for the benefit of the neighbourhood. No, my pretty one; it is easy to starve, but it is difficult to stoop.’

  Perhaps poor Mrs George did not agree very heartily to the first of these two propositions. She had no great fancy for starving, and she whimpered pitifully when the pretty pint bottles of champagne, with Cliquot’s and Moet’s brands upon their corks, were exchanged for sixpenny ale, procured by a slipshod attendant from the nearest beer-shop. George had been obliged to carry his own burden and lend a helping hand with that of his wife, who had no idea of keeping her regrets or disappointments a secret.

  ‘I thought dragoons were always rich,’ she used to say, peevishly. ‘Girls always want to marry dragoons; and trades-people always want to serve dragoons; and hotel-keepers to entertain dragoons; and theatrical managers to be patronised by dragoons. Who could have ever expected that a dragoon would drink sixpenny ale, smoke horrid bird’s-eye tobacco,* and let his wife wear a shabby bonnet?’

  If there were any selfish feeling displayed in such speeches as these, George Talboys had never discovered it. He had loved and believed in his wife from the first to the last hour of his brief married life. The love that is not blind is perhaps only a spurious divinity after all; for when Cupid takes the fillet from his eyes* it is a fatally certain indication that he is preparing to spread his wings for a flight. George never forgot the hour in which he had first been bewitched by Lieutenant Maldon’s pretty daughter, and however she might have changed, the image which had charmed him then unchanged and unchanging represented her in his heart.

  Robert Audley left Southampton by a train which started before daybreak, and reached Wareham station early in the day. He hired a vehicle at Wareham to take him over to Grange Heath.

  The snow had hardened upon the ground, and the day was clear and frosty, every object in the landscape standing in sharp outline against the cold blue sky. The horses’ hoofs clattered upon the icebound road, the iron shoes striking on ground that was almost as iron as themselves. The wintry day bore some resemblance to the man to whom Robert was going. Like him, it was sharp, frigid, and uncompromising; like him, it was merciless to distress, and impregnable to the softening power of sunshine. It would accept no sunshine but such January radiance as would light up the bleak, bare country without brightening it; and thus resembled Harcourt Talboys, who took the sternest side of every truth, and declared loudly to the disbelieving world that there never had been, and never could be, any other side.

  Robert Audley’s heart sank within him as the shabby hired vehicle stopped at a stern-looking barred fence, and the driver dismounted to open a broad iron gate, which swung back with a clanking noise and was caught by a great iron tooth planted in the ground, which snapped at the lowest bar of the gate, as if it wanted to bite.

  This iron gate opened into a scanty plantation of straight-limbed fir-trees that grew in rows and shook their sturdy winter foliage defiantly in the very teeth of the frosty breeze. A straight, gravelled carriage-drive ran between these straight trees across a smoothly-kept lawn to a square red-brick mansion, every window of which winked and glittered in the January sunlight, as if it had been that moment cleaned by some indefatigable house-maid.

  I don’t know whether Junius Brutus was a nuisance in his own house, but amongst other of his Roman virtues, Mr Talboys owned an extreme aversion to disorder, and was the terror of every domestic in his establishment.

  The windows winked and the flight of stone steps glared in the sunlight, and the prim garden walks were so freshly gravelled that they gave a sandy, gingery aspect to the place, reminding one unpleasantly of red hair. The lawn was chiefly ornamented with dark, wintry shrubs of a funereal aspect, which grew in beds that looked like problems in algebra; and the flight of stone steps leading to the square half-glass door of the hall was adorned with dark-green wooden tubs containing the same sturdy evergreens.

  ‘If the man is anything like his house,’ Robert thought, ‘I don’t wonder that poor George and he parted.’

  At the end of a scanty avenue the carriage-drive turned a sharp corner (it would have been made to describe a curve in any other man’s grounds) and ran before the lower windows of the house. The flyman dismounted at the steps, ascended them, and rang a brass-handled bell, which flew back to its socket with an angry metallic snap, as if it had been insulted by the plebeian touch of the man’s hand.

  A man in black trousers and a striped linen jacket, which was evidently fresh from the hands of the laundress, opened the door. Mr Talboys was at home. Would the gentleman send in his card?

  Robert waited in the hall while his card was taken to the master of the house.

  The hall was large, lofty, and paved with stone. The panels of the oaken wainscot shone with the same uncompromising polish which was on every object within and without the redbrick mansion.

  Some people are so weak-minded as to affect pictures and statues. Mr Harcourt Talboys was far too practical to indulge in any such foolish fancies. A barometer and an umbrella-stand were the only adornments of his entrance-hall.

  Robert Audley looked at these while his name was being submitted to George’s father.

  The linen-jacketed servant returned presently. He was a spare, pale-faced man of almost forty, and had the appearance of having outlived every emotion to which humanity is subject.

  ‘If you will step this way, sir,’ he said, ‘Mr Talboys will see you, although he is at breakfast. He begged me to state that he had imagined that everybody in Dorsetshire was acquainted with his breakfast-hour.’

  This was intended as a stately reproof to Mr Robert Audley. It had, however, very small effect upon the young barrister. He merely lifted his eyebrows in placid deprecation of himself and every body else.

  ‘I don’t belong to Dorsetshire,’ he said. ‘Mr Talboys might have known that, if he’d done me the honour to exercise his powers of ratiocination. Drive on, my friend.’

  The emotionless man looked at Robert Audley with the vacant stare of unmitigated horror, and opening one of the heavy oak doors, led the way into a large dining-room furnished with the severe simplicity of an apartment which is meant to be ate in, but never lived in; and at the top of a table which would have accommodated eighteen persons, Robert beheld Mr Harcourt Talboys.

  Mr Talboys was robed in a dressing-gown of grey cloth, fastened about his waist with a girdle. It was a severe-looking garment, and was perhaps the nearest approach to a toga to be obtained within the range of modern costume. He wore a buff waistcoat, stiffly starched cambric cravat, and a faultless shirt collar. The cold grey of his dressing-gown was almost the same as the cold grey of his eyes, and the pale buff of his waistcoat was the pale buff of his complexion.

  Robert Audley had not expected to find Harcourt Talboys at all like George in manners or disposition, but he had expected to see some family likeness between the father and the son. There was none. It would have been impossible to imagine any one more unlike George than the author of his existence. Robert scarcely wondered at the cruel letter he had received from Mr Talboys when he saw the writer of it. Such a man could scarcely have written otherwise.

  There was a second person in the large room, towards whom Robert glanced after saluting Harcourt Talboys, doubtful how to proceed. This second person was a lady, who sat at the last of a range of four windows, employed with some needlework, the kind which is generally called plain work, and with a large wicker basket, filled with calicoes and flannels standing by her.

  The whole length of the room divided this lady from Robert, but he could see that she was young, and that she was like George Talboys.

  ‘His sister!’ he thought in that one moment during which he ventured to glance away from the master of the house towards the female figure at the window. ‘His sister, no doubt. He was fond of her, I know. Surely, she is not utterly indifferent as to his fate?’

  The lady half rose from her seat, letting her work, which was large and awkwar
d, fall from her lap as she did so, and dropping a reel of cotton, which rolled away upon the polished oaken flooring beyond the margin of the Turkey carpet.

  ‘Sit down, Clara,’ said the hard voice of Mr Talboys.

  That gentleman did not appear to address his daughter, nor had his face been turned towards her when she rose. It seemed as if he had known it by some social magnetism peculiar to himself; it seemed, as his servants were apt disrespectfully to observe, as if he had eyes in the back of his head.

  ‘Sit down, Clara,’ he repeated, ‘and keep your cotton in your work-box.’

  The lady blushed at this reproof, and stooped to look for the cotton. Mr Robert Audley, who was unabashed by the stern presence of the master of the house, knelt on the carpet, found the reel, and restored it to its owner; Harcourt Talboys staring at the proceeding with an expression of supreme astonishment.

  ‘Perhaps, Mr——, Mr Robert Audley!’ he said, looking at the card which he held between his finger and thumb, ‘perhaps when you have finished looking for reels of cotton, you will be good enough to tell me to what I owe the honour of this visit?’

  He waved his well-shaped hand with a gesture which might have been admired in the stately John Kemble;* and the servant understanding the gesture, brought forward a ponderous red morocco chair.

  The proceeding was so slow and solemn that Robert had at first thought that something extraordinary was about to be done; but the truth dawned upon him at last, and he dropped into the massive chair.

  ‘You may remain, Wilson,’ said Mr Talboys, as the servant was about to withdraw; ‘Mr Audley would perhaps like coffee.’

  Robert had eaten nothing that morning, but he glanced at the long expanse of dreary table-cloth, the silver tea and coffee equipage, the stiff splendour, and the very little appearance of any substantial entertainment, and he declined Mr Talboys’ invitation.