‘Mr Audley will not take coffee, Wilson,’ said the master of the house. ‘You may go.’
The man bowed and retired, opening and shutting the door as cautiously as if he were taking a liberty in doing it at all, or as if the respect due to Mr Talboys demanded his walking straight through the oaken panel like a ghost in a German story.
Mr Harcourt Talboys sat with his grey eyes fixed severely on his visitor, his elbows on the red morocco arms of his chair, and his finger-tips joined. It was the attitude in which, had he been Junius Brutus, he would have sat at the trial of his son. Had Robert Audley been easily to be embarrassed, Mr Talboys might have succeeded in making him feel so: as he would have sat with perfect tranquillity upon an open gunpowder barrel lighting his cigar, he was not at all disturbed upon this occasion. The father’s dignity seemed a very small thing to him when he thought of the possible causes of the son’s disappearance.
‘I wrote to you some time since, Mr Talboys,’ he said quietly, when he saw that he was expected to open the conversation.
Harcourt Talboys bowed. He knew that it was of his lost son that Robert came to speak. Heaven grant that his icy stoicism was the paltry affectation of a vain man, rather than the utter heartlessness which Robert thought it. He bowed across his finger-tips at his visitor. The trial had begun, and Junius Brutus was enjoying himself.
‘I received your communication, Mr Audley,’ he said. ‘It is indorsed amongst other business letters: it was duly answered.’
‘That letter concerned your son.’
There was a little rustling noise at the window where the lady sat, as Robert said this: he looked at her almost instantaneously, but she did not seem to have stirred. She was not working, but she was perfectly quiet.
‘She’s as heartless as her father, I expect, though she is like George,’ thought Mr Audley.
‘Your letter concerned the person who was once my son, perhaps, sir,’ said Harcourt Talboys; ‘I must ask you to remember that I have no longer a son.’
‘You have no reason to remind me of that, Mr Talboys,’ answered Robert, gravely; ‘I remember it only too well. I have fatal reason to believe that you have no longer a son. I have bitter cause to think that he is dead.’
It may be that Mr Talboys’ complexion faded to a paler shade of buff as Robert said this; but he only elevated his bristling grey eyebrows and shook his head gently.
‘No,’ he said, ‘no, I assure you, no.’
‘I believe that George Talboys died in the month of September.’
The girl who had been addressed as Clara sat with her work primly folded upon her lap, and her hands lying clasped together on her work, and never stirred when Robert spoke of his friend’s death. He could not distinctly see her face, for she was seated at some distance from him, and with her back to the window.
‘No, no, I assure you,’ repeated Mr Talboys, ‘you labour under a sad mistake.’
‘You believe that I am mistaken in thinking your son dead?’ asked Robert.
‘Most certainly,’ replied Mr Talboys, with a smile, expressive of the serenity of wisdom. ‘Most certainly, my dear sir. The disappearance was a very clever trick, no doubt, but it was not sufficiently clever to deceive me. You must permit me to understand this matter a little better than you, Mr Audley, and you must also permit me to assure you of three things. In the first place, your friend is not dead. In the second place, he is keeping out of the way for the purpose of alarming me, of trifling with my feelings as a—as a man who was once his father, and of ultimately obtaining my forgiveness. In the third place, he will not obtain that forgiveness, however long he may please to keep out of the way; and he would therefore act wisely by returning to his ordinary residence and avocations without delay.’
‘Then you imagine him to purposely hide himself from all who know him, for the purpose of——?’
‘For the purpose of influencing me,’ exclaimed Mr Talboys, who, taking a stand upon his own vanity, traced every event in life from that one centre, and resolutely declined to look at it from any other point of view. ‘For the purpose of influencing me. He knew the inflexibility of my character; to a certain degree he was acquainted with me, and he knew that all ordinary attempts at softening my decision, or moving me from the fixed purpose of my life, would fail. He therefore tried extraordinary means; he has kept out of the way in order to alarm me; and when after due time he discovers that he has not alarmed me, he will return to his old haunts. When he does so,’ said Mr Talboys, rising to sublimity, ‘I will forgive him. Yes, sir, I will forgive him. I shall say to him: You have attempted to deceive me, and I have shown you that I am not to be deceived; you have tried to frighten me, and I have convinced you that I am not to be frightened; you did not believe in my generosity, I will show you that I can be generous.’
Harcourt Talboys delivered himself of these superb periods with a studied manner, that showed they had been carefully composed long ago.
Robert Audley sighed as he heard them.
‘Heaven grant that you may have an opportunity of saying this to your son, sir,’ he answered sadly. ‘I am very glad to find that you are willing to forgive him, but I fear that you will never see him again upon this earth. I have a great deal to say to you upon this—this sad subject, Mr Talboys; but I would rather say it to you alone,’ he added, glancing at the lady in the window.
‘My daughter knows my ideas upon this subject, Mr Audley,’ said Harcourt Talboys; ‘there is no reason why she should not hear all you have to say. Miss Clara Talboys, Mr Robert Audley,’ he added, waving his hand majestically.
The young lady bent her head in recognition of Robert’s bow.
‘Let her hear it,’ he thought. ‘If she has so little feeling as to show no emotion upon such a subject, let her hear the worst I have to tell.’
There was a few minutes’ pause, during which Robert took some papers from his pocket; amongst them the document which he had written immediately after George’s disappearance.
‘I shall require all your attention, Mr Talboys,’ he said, ‘for that which I have to disclose to you is of a very painful nature. Your son was my very dear friend—dear to me for many reasons. Perhaps most of all dear, because I had known him and been with him through the great trouble of his life; and because he stood comparatively alone in the world—cast off by you, who should have been his best friend, bereft of the only woman he had ever loved.’
‘The daughter of a drunken pauper,’ Mr Talboys remarked, parenthetically.
‘Had he died in his bed, as I sometimes thought he would,’ continued Robert Audley, ‘of a broken heart, I should have mourned for him very sincerely, even though I had closed his eyes with my own hands, and had seen him laid in his quiet resting-place. I should have grieved for my old school-fellow, and for the companion who had been dear to me. But the grief would have been a very small one compared to that which I feel now, believing, as I do only too firmly, that my poor friend has been murdered.’
‘Murdered!’
The father and daughter simultaneously repeated the horrible word. The father’s face changed to a ghastly duskiness of hue; the daughter’s face dropped upon her clasped hands, and was never lifted again throughout the interview.
‘Mr Audley, you are mad!’ exclaimed Harcourt Talboys; ‘you are mad, or else you are commissioned by your friend to play upon my feelings. I protest against this proceeding as a conspiracy, and I—I revoke my intended forgiveness of the person who was once my son.’
He was himself again as he said this. The blow had been a sharp one, but its effect had been momentary.
‘It is far from my wish to alarm you unnecessarily, sir,’ answered Robert. ‘Heaven grant that you may be right and I wrong. I pray for it, but I cannot think it—I cannot even hope it. I come to you for advice. I will state to you plainly and dispassionately the circumstances which have aroused my suspicions. If you say those suspicions are foolish and unfounded, I am ready to submit to your better judgmen
t. I will leave England; and I will abandon my search for the evidence wanting to—to confirm my fears. If you say go on, I will go on.’
Nothing could be more gratifying to the vanity of Mr Harcourt Talboys than this appeal. He declared himself ready to listen to all that Robert might have to say, and ready to assist him to the uttermost of his power.
He laid some stress upon this last assurance, deprecating the value of his advice with an affectation that was as transparent as his vanity itself.
Robert Audley drew his chair nearer to that of Mr Talboys, and commenced a minutely-detailed account of all that had happened to George from the time of his arrival in England to the hour of his disappearance, as well as all that had occurred since his disappearance in any way touching upon that particular subject. Harcourt Talboys listened with demonstrative attention, now and then interrupting the speaker to ask some magisterial kind of question. Clara Talboys never once lifted her face from her clasped hands.
The hands of the clock pointed to a quarter past eleven when Robert began his story. The clock struck twelve as he finished.
He had carefully suppressed the names of his uncle and his uncle’s wife, in relating the circumstances in which they had been concerned.
‘Now, sir,’ he said, when the story had been told, ‘I await your decision. You have heard my reasons for coming to this terrible conclusion. In what manner do those reasons influence you?’
‘They do not in any way turn me from my previous opinion,’ answered Mr Harcourt Talboys, with the unreasoning pride of an obstinate man. ‘I still think, as I thought before, that my son is alive, and that his disappearance is a conspiracy against myself. I decline to become the victim of that conspiracy.’
‘And you tell me to stop?’ asked Robert solemnly.
‘I tell you only this:—If you go on, you go on for your own satisfaction, not for mine. I see nothing in what you have told me to alarm me for the safety of——your friend.’
‘So be it, then!’ exclaimed Robert, suddenly; ‘from this moment I wash my hands of this business. From this moment the purpose of my life shall be to forget it.’
He rose as he spoke, and took his hat from the table on which he had placed it. He looked at Clara Talboys. Her attitude had never changed since she had dropped her face upon her hands. ‘Good morning, Mr Talboys,’ he said gravely. ‘God grant that you are right. God grant that I am wrong. But I fear a day will come when you will have reason to regret your apathy respecting the untimely fate of your only son.’
He bowed gravely to Mr Harcourt Talboys and to the lady, whose face was hidden by her hands.
He lingered for a moment looking at Miss Talboys, thinking that she would look up, that she would make some sign, or show some desire to detain him.
Mr Talboys rang for the emotionless servant, who led Robert off to the hall door with the solemnity of manner which would have been in perfect keeping had he been leading him to execution.
‘She is like her father,’ thought Mr Audley, as he glanced for the last time at the drooping head. ‘Poor George, you had need of one friend in this world, for you have had very few to love you.’
CHAPTER V
CLARA
ROBERT AUDLEY found the driver asleep upon the box of his lumbering vehicle. He had been entertained with beer of so hard a nature, as to induce temporary strangulation in the daring imbiber thereof, and he was very glad to welcome the return of his fare. The old white horse, who looked as if he had been foaled in the year in which the carriage had been built, and seemed, like the carriage, to have outlived the fashion, was as fast asleep as his master, and woke up with a jerk as Robert came down the stony flight of steps, attended by his executioner, who waited respectfully till Mr Audley had entered the vehicle and been turned off.
The horse, roused by a smack of his driver’s whip, and a shake of the shabby reins, crawled off in a semi-somnambulent state, and Robert, with his hat very much over his eyes, thought of his missing friend.
He had played in these stiff gardens, and under these dreary firs, years ago, perhaps—if it were possible for the most frolicsome youth to be playful within the range of Mr Harcourt Talboys’ hard grey eyes. He had played beneath these dark trees, perhaps, with the sister who had heard of his fate to-day without a tear. Robert Audley looked at the rigid primness of the orderly grounds, wondering how George could have grown up in such a place to be the frank, generous, careless friend whom he had known. How was it that with his father perpetually before his eyes, he had not grown up after the father’s disagreeable model, to be a nuisance to his fellow-men? How was it? Because we have Some One higher than our parents to thank for the souls which make us great or small; and because, while family noses and family chins may descend in orderly sequence from father to son, from grandsire to grandchild, as the fashion of the fading flowers of one year are reproduced in the budding blossoms of the next, the spirit, more subtle than the wind which blows among those flowers, independent of all earthly rule, owns no order but the harmonious Law of God.
‘Thank God!’ thought Robert Audley—‘thank God! it is over. My poor friend must rest in his unknown grave; and I shall not be the means of bringing disgrace upon those I love. It will come, perhaps, sooner or later, but it will not come through me. The crisis is past, and I am free.’
He felt an unutterable relief in this thought. His generous nature revolted at the office into which he had found himself drawn—the office of spy, the collector of damning facts that led on to horrible deductions.
He drew a long breath—a sigh of relief at his release. It was all over now.
The fly was crawling out of the gate of the plantation as he thought this, and he stood up in the vehicle to look back at the dreary fir-trees, the gravel paths, the smooth grass, and the great desolate-looking, red-brick mansion.
He was startled by the appearance of a woman running, almost flying, along the carriage-drive by which he had come, and waving a handkerchief in her uplifted hand.
He stared at this singular apparition for some moments in silent wonder, before he was able to reduce his stupefaction into words.
‘Is it me the flying female wants?’ he exclaimed at last. ‘You’d better stop, perhaps,’ he added to the flyman. ‘It is an age of eccentricity, an abnormal era of the world’s history. She may want me. Very likely I left my pocket-handkerchief behind me, and Mr Talboys has sent this person with it. Perhaps I’d better get out and go and meet her. It’s civil to send my handkerchief.’
Mr Robert Audley deliberately descended from the fly, and walked slowly towards the hurrying female figure, which gained upon him rapidly.
He was rather short-sighted, and it was not until she came very near to him that he saw who she was.
‘Good heavens!’ he exclaimed, ‘it’s Miss Talboys.’
It was Miss Talboys, flushed and breathless, with a woollen shawl over her head.
Robert Audley now saw her face clearly for the first time, and he saw that she was very handsome. She had brown eyes, like George’s, a pale complexion (she had been flushed when she approached him, but the colour faded away as she recovered her breath), regular features, and a mobility of expression which bore record of every change of feeling. He saw all this in a few moments, and he wondered only the more at the stoicism of her manner during his interview with Mr Talboys. There were no tears in her eyes, but they were bright with a feverish lustre—terribly bright and dry—and he could see that her lips trembled as she spoke to him.
‘Miss Talboys,’ he said, ‘what can I?—why——’
She interrupted him suddenly, catching at his wrist with her disengaged hand—she was holding her shawl in the other.
‘Oh, let me speak to you,’ she cried—‘let me speak to you, or I shall go mad. I heard it all. I believe what you believe; and I shall go mad unless I can do something—something towards avenging his death.’
For a few moments Robert Audley was too much bewildered to answer her. Of all things
possible upon earth he had least expected to behold her thus.
‘Take my arm, Miss Talboys,’ he said. ‘Pray calm yourself. Let us walk a little way back towards the house, and talk quietly. I would not have spoken as I did before you, had I known——’
‘Had you known that I loved my brother,’ she said quickly. ‘How should you know that I loved him! How should any one think that I loved him, when I have never had power to win him a welcome beneath that roof, or a kindly word from his father? How should I dare to betray my love for him in that house, when I knew that even a sister’s affection would be turned to his disadvantage? You do not know my father, Mr Audley. I do. I knew that to intercede for George would have been to ruin his cause. I knew that to leave matters in my father’s hands, and to trust to time, was my only chance of ever seeing that dear brother again. And I waited—waited patiently, always hoping for the best; for I knew that my father loved his only son. I see your contemptuous smile, Mr Audley, and I dare say it is difficult for a stranger to believe that underneath his affected Stoicism, my father conceals some degree of affection for his children—no very warm attachment perhaps, for he has always ruled his life by the strict law of duty. Stop,’ she said, suddenly, laying her hand upon his arm, and looking back through the straight avenue of pines; ‘I ran out of the house by the back-way. Papa must not see me talking to you, Mr Audley, and he must not see the fly standing at the gate. Will you go into the high road and tell the man to drive on a little way? I will come out of the plantation by a little gate further on, and meet you in the road.’
‘But you will catch cold, Miss Talboys,’ remonstrated Robert, looking at her anxiously, for he saw that she was trembling. ‘You are shivering now.’
‘Not with cold,’ she answered. ‘I am thinking of my brother George. If you have any pity for the only sister of your lost friend, do what I ask you, Mr Audley. I must speak to you—I must speak to you—calmly, if I can.’
She put her hand to her head as if trying to collect her thoughts, and then pointed to the gate. Robert bowed and left her. He told the man to drive slowly towards the station, and walked on by the side of the tarred fence surrounding Mr Talboys’ grounds. About a hundred yards beyond the principal entrance he came to a little wooden gate in the fence, and waited at it for Miss Talboys.
Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics) Page 25