The music still rolled on. The organist had wandered into a melody of Mendelssohn’s, a strain whose dreamy sadness went straight to Robert’s heart. He loitered in the nooks and corners of the church, examining the dilapidated memorials of the well-nigh forgotten dead, and listening to this music.
‘If my poor friend, George Talboys, had died in my arms, and I had buried him in this quiet church, in one of the vaults over which I tread to-day, how much anguish of mind, vacillation, and torment I might have escaped,’ thought Robert Audley, as he read the faded inscriptions upon tablets of discoloured marble: ‘I should have known his fate—I should have known his fate! Ah, how much there would have been in that. It is this miserable uncertainty, this horrible suspicion, which has poisoned my very life.’
He looked at his watch.
‘Half-past one,’ he muttered. ‘I shall have to wait four or five dreary hours before my lady comes home from her morning calls. Her morning calls—her pretty visits of ceremony or friendliness. Good heavens! what an actress this woman is. What an arch trickster—what an all-accomplished deceiver. But she shall play her pretty comedy no longer under my uncle’s roof. I have diplomatised long enough. She has refused to accept an indirect warning. To-night I will speak plainly.’
The music of the organ ceased, and Robert heard the closing of the instrument.
‘I’ll have a look at this new organist,’ he thought, ‘who can afford to bury his talents at Audley, and play Mendelssohn’s finest fugues for a stipend of sixteen pounds a-year.’ He lingered in the porch, waiting for the organist to descend the awkward little staircase. In the weary trouble of his mind, and with the prospect of getting through the five hours in the best way he could, Mr Audley was glad to cultivate any diversion of thought, however idle. He therefore freely indulged his curiosity about the new organist.
The first person who appeared upon the steep stone steps was a boy in corduroy trousers and a dark linen smock-frock, who shambled down the stairs with a good deal of unnecessary clatter of his hobnailed shoes, and who was red in the face from the exertion of blowing the bellows of the old organ. Close behind this boy came a young lady, very plainly dressed in a black silk gown and a large grey shawl, who started and turned pale at the sight of Mr Audley.
This young lady was Clara Talboys.
Of all people in the world she was the last whom Robert either expected or wished to see. She had told him that she was going to pay a visit to some friends who lived in Essex; but the county is a wide one, and the village of Audley one of the most obscure and least frequented spots in the whole of its extent. That the sister of his lost friend should be here—here where she could watch his every action, and from those actions deduce the secret workings of his mind, tracing his doubts home to their object—made a complication of his difficulties that he could never have anticipated. It brought him back to that consciousness of his own helplessness, in which he had exclaimed —
‘A hand that is stronger than my own is beckoning me onward on the dark road that leads to my lost friend’s unknown grave.’
Clara Talboys was the first to speak.
‘You are surprised to see me here, Mr Audley,’ she said.
‘Very much surprised.’
‘I told you that I was coming to Essex. I left home the day before yesterday. I was leaving home when I received your telegraphic message. The friend with whom I am staying is Mrs Martyn, the wife of the new rector of Mount Stanning. I came down this morning to see the village and church, and as Mrs Martyn had to pay a visit to the schools with the curate and his wife, I stopped here and amused myself by trying the old organ. I was not aware till I came here that there was a village called Audley. The place takes its name from your family, I suppose?’
‘I believe so,’ Robert answered, wondering at the lady’s calmness, in contradistinction to his own embarrassment. ‘I have a vague recollection of hearing the story of some ancestor who was called Audley of Audley in the reign of Edward the Fourth. The tomb inside the rails near the altar belongs to one of the knights of Audley, but I have never taken the trouble to remember his achievements. Are you going to wait here for your friends, Miss Talboys?’
‘Yes; they are to return here for me after they have finished their rounds.’
‘And you go back to Mount Stanning with them this afternoon?’
‘Yes.’
Robert stood with his hat in his hand looking absently out at the tombstones and the low wall of the churchyard. Clara Talboys watched his pale face, haggard under the deepening shadow that had rested upon it so long.
‘You have been ill since I saw you last, Mr Audley,’ she said, in a low voice, that had the same melodious sadness as the notes of the old organ under her touch.
‘No, I have not been ill; I have been only harassed, wearied by a hundred doubts and perplexities.’
He was thinking as he spoke to her—‘How much does she guess? how much does she suspect?’
He had told the story of George’s disappearance and of his own suspicions, suppressing only the names of those concerned in the mystery; but what if this girl should fathom the slender disguise, and discover for herself that which he had chosen to withhold?
Her grave eyes were fixed upon his face, and he knew that she was trying to read the innermost secrets of his mind.
‘What am I in her hands?’ he thought. ‘What am I in the hands of this woman, who has my lost friend’s face and the manner of Pallas Athene?* She reads my pitiful, vacillating soul, and plucks the thoughts out of my heart with the magic of her solemn brown eyes. How unequal the fight must be between us, and how can I ever hope to conquer against the strength of her beauty and her wisdom?’
Mr Audley was clearing his throat preparatory to bidding his beautiful companion good morning, and making his escape from the thraldom of her presence into the lonely meadow outside the churchyard, when Clara Talboys arrested him by speaking upon that very subject which he was most anxious to avoid.
‘You promised to write to me, Mr Audley,’ she said, ‘if you made any discovery which carried you nearer to the mystery of my brother’s disappearance. You have not written to me, and I imagine, therefore, that you have discovered nothing.’
Robert Audley was silent for some moments. How could he answer this direct question?
‘The chain of circumstantial evidence which unites the mystery of your brother’s fate with the person whom I suspect,’ he said, after a pause, ‘is formed of very slight links. I think that I have added another link to that chain since I saw you in Dorsetshire.’
‘And you refuse to tell me what it is that you have discovered.’
‘Only until I have discovered more.’
‘I thought from your message that you were going to Wildernsea.’
‘I have been there.’
‘Indeed! It was there that you made some discovery, then?’
‘It was,’ answered Robert. ‘You must remember, Miss Talboys, that the sole ground upon which my suspicions rest is the identity of two individuals who have no apparent connection—the identity of a person who is supposed to be dead with one who is living. The conspiracy of which I believe your brother to have been the victim hinges upon this. If his wife, Helen Talboys, died when the papers recorded her death—if the woman who lies buried in Ventnor churchyard was indeed the woman whose name is inscribed on the headstone of the grave—I have no case, I have no clue to the mystery of your brother’s fate. I am about to put this to the test. I believe that I am now in a position to play a bold game, and I believe that I shall soon arrive at the truth.’
He spoke in a low voice, and with a solemn emphasis that betrayed the intensity of his feeling. Miss Talboys stretched out her ungloved hand, and laid it in his own. The cold touch of that slender hand sent a shivering thrill through his frame.
‘You will not suffer my brother’s fate to remain a mystery, Mr Audley,’ she said quietly. ‘I know that you will do your duty to your friend.’
The rector’s wife and her two companions entered the churchyard as Clara Talboys said this. Robert Audley pressed the hand that rested in his own, and raised it to his lips.
‘I am a lazy, good-for-nothing fellow, Miss Talboys,’ he said; ‘but if I could restore your brother George to life and happiness, I should care very little for any sacrifice of my own feeling. I fear that the most I can do is to fathom the secret of his fate; and in doing that I must sacrifice those who are dearer to me than myself.’
He put on his hat and hurried away through the gateway leading into the field as Mrs Martyn came up to the porch.
‘Who is that handsome young man I caught tête-à-tête with you, Clara?’ she asked, laughing.
‘He is a Mr Audley, a friend of my poor brother’s.’
‘Indeed! He is some relation of Sir Michael Audley, I suppose?’
‘Sir Michael Audley!’
‘Yes, my dear; the most important personage in the parish of Audley. But we’ll call at the Court in a day or two, and you shall see the baronet and his pretty young wife.’
‘His young wife!’ repeated Clara Talboys, looking earnestly at her friend. ‘Has Sir Michael Audley lately married?’
‘Yes. He was a widower for sixteen years, and married a penniless young governess about a year and a half ago. The story is quite romantic, and Lady Audley is considered the belle of the county. But come, my dear Clara, the pony is tired of waiting for us, and we’ve a long drive before dinner.’
Clara Talboys took her seat in the little basket-carriage which was waiting at the principal gate of the churchyard in the care of the boy who had blown the organ-bellows. Mrs Martyn shook the reins, and the sturdy chestnut cob trotted off in the direction of Mount Stanning.
‘Will you tell me more about this Lady Audley, Fanny?’ Miss Talboys said, after a long pause. ‘I want to know all about her. Have you heard her maiden name?’
‘Yes; she was a Miss Graham.’
‘And she is very pretty?’
‘Yes, very, very pretty. Rather a childish beauty though, with large clear blue eyes, and pale golden ringlets, that fall in a feathery shower over her throat and shoulders.’
Clara Talboys was silent. She did not ask any further questions about my lady.
She was thinking of a passage in that letter which George had written to her during his honeymoon—a passage in which he said:—‘My childish little wife is watching me as I write this. Ah! how I wish you could see her, Clara! Her eyes are as blue and as clear as the skies on a bright summer’s day, and her hair falls about her face like the pale golden halo you see round the head of a Madonna in an Italian picture.’
CHAPTER XI
IN THE LIME-WALK
ROBERT AUDLEY was loitering upon the broad grass-plat in front of the Court as the carriage containing my lady and Alicia drove under the archway, and drew up at the low turret-door. Mr Audley presented himself in time to hand the ladies out of the vehicle.
My lady looked very pretty in a delicate blue bonnet and the sables which her nephew had bought for her at St Petersburg. She seemed very well pleased to see Robert, and smiled most bewitchingly as she gave him her exquisitely gloved little hand.
‘So you have come back to us, truant?’ she said, laughing. ‘And now that you have returned, we shall keep you prisoner. We won’t let him run away again, will we, Alicia?’
Miss Audley gave her head a scornful toss, that shook the heavy curls under her cavalier hat.
‘I have nothing to do with the movements of so erratic an individual,’ she said. ‘Since Robert Audley has taken it into his head to conduct himself like some ghost-haunted hero in a German story, I have given up attempting to understand him.’
Mr Audley looked at his cousin with an expression of seriocomic perplexity. ‘She’s a nice girl,’ he thought, ‘but she’s a nuisance. I don’t know how it is, but she seems more a nuisance than she used to be.’
He pulled his mustachios reflectively as he considered this question. His mind wandered away for a few moments from the great trouble of his life to dwell upon this minor perplexity.
‘She’s a dear girl,’ he thought; ‘a generous-hearted, bouncing, noble English lassie, and yet——’ He lost himself in a quagmire of doubt and difficulty. There was some hitch in his mind which he could not understand; some change in himself, beyond the change made in him by his anxiety about George Talboys, which mystified and bewildered him.
‘And pray where have you been wandering during the last day or two, Mr Audley?’ asked my lady, as she lingered with her step-daughter upon the threshold of the turret-door, waiting until Robert should be pleased to stand aside and allow them to pass. The young man started as she asked this question and looked up at her suddenly. Something in the aspect of her bright young beauty, something in the childish innocence of her expression, seemed to smite him to the heart, and his face grew pale as he looked at her.
‘I have been——in Yorkshire,’ he said; ‘at the little watering place where my poor friend George Talboys lived at the time of his marriage.’
The white change in my lady’s face was the only sign of her having heard these words. She smiled, a faint, sickly smile, and tried to pass her husband’s nephew.
‘I must dress for dinner,’ she said. ‘I am going to a dinner-party, Mr Audley; please let me go in.’
‘I must ask you to spare me half an hour, Lady Audley,’ Robert answered, in a low voice. ‘I came down to Essex on purpose to speak to you.’
‘What about?’ asked my lady.
She had recovered herself from any shock which she might have sustained a few minutes before, and it was in her usual manner that she asked this question. Her face expressed the mingled bewilderment and curiosity of a puzzled child, rather than the serious surprise of a woman.
‘What can you want to talk to me about, Mr Audley?’ she repeated.
‘I will tell you when we are alone,’ Robert said, glancing at his cousin, who stood a little way behind my lady, watching this confidential little dialogue.
‘He is in love with my step-mother’s wax-doll beauty,’ thought Alicia, ‘and it is for her sake he has become such a disconsolate object. He’s just the sort of person to fall in love with his aunt.’
Miss Audley walked away to the glass-plat, turning her back upon Robert and my lady.
‘The absurd creature turned as white as a sheet when he saw her,’ she thought. ‘So he can be in love, after all. That slow lump of torpidity he calls his heart can beat, I suppose, once in a quarter of a century: but it seems that nothing but a blue-eyed wax-doll can set it going. I should have given him up long ago if I’d known that his ideal of beauty was to be found in a toy-shop.’
Poor Alicia crossed the grass-plat and disappeared upon the opposite side of the quadrangle, where there was a Gothic gate that communicated with the stables. I am sorry to say that Sir Michael Audley’s daughter went to seek consolation from her dog Cæsar and her chestnut mare Atalanta, whose loose box the young lady was in the habit of visiting every day.
‘Will you come into the lime-walk, Lady Audley?’ said Robert, as his cousin left the garden. ‘I wish to talk to you without fear of interruption or observation. I think we could choose no safer place than that. Will you come there with me?’
‘If you please,’ answered my lady. Mr Audley could see that she was trembling, and that she glanced from side to side, as if looking for some outlet by which she might escape him.
‘You are shivering, Lady Audley,’ he said.
‘Yes, I am very cold. I would rather speak to you some other day, please. Let it be to-morrow, if you will. I have to dress for dinner, and I want to see Sir Michael; I have not seen him since ten o’clock this morning. Please let it be to-morrow.’
There was a painful piteousness in her tone: Heaven knows how painful to Robert’s heart. Heaven knows what horrible images arose in his mind as he looked down at that fair young face and thought of the task that lay before him.<
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‘I must speak to you, Lady Audley,’ he said. ‘If I am cruel, it is you who have made me cruel. You might have escaped this ordeal. You might have avoided me. I gave you fair warning. But you have chosen to defy me, and it is your own folly which is to blame if I no longer spare you. Come with me. I tell you again I must speak to you.’
There was a cold determination in his tone which silenced my lady’s objections. She followed him submissively to the little iron gate which communicated with the long garden behind the house—the garden in which a little rustic wooden bridge led across the quiet fish-pond into the lime-walk.
The early winter twilight was closing in, and the intricate tracery of the leafless branches that overarched the lonely pathway looked black against the cold grey of the evening sky. The lime-walk seemed like some cloister in this uncertain light.
‘Why do you bring me to this horrible place to frighten me out of my poor wits?’ cried my lady, peevishly. ‘You ought to know how nervous I am.’
‘You are nervous, my lady?’
‘Yes, dreadfully nervous. I am worth a fortune to poor Mr Dawson. He is always sending me camphor, and sal volatile, and red lavender,* and all kinds of abominable mixtures, but he can’t cure me.’
‘Do you remember what Macbeth tells his physician,* my lady?’ asked Robert, gravely. ‘Mr Dawson may be very much more clever than the Scottish leech; but I doubt if even he can minister to the mind that is diseased.’
‘Who said that my mind was diseased?’ exclaimed Lady Audley.
‘I say so, my lady,’ answered Robert. ‘You tell me that you are nervous, and that all the medicines your doctor can prescribe are only so much physic that might as well be thrown to the dogs. Let me be the physician to strike to the root of your malady, Lady Audley. Heaven knows that I wish to be merciful—that I would spare you as far as it is in my power to spare you in doing justice to others—but justice must be done. Shall I tell you why you are nervous in this house, my lady?’
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