Robert Audley would have spoken, and would have once more expressed his gratitude for the help which had been given to him, but Dr Mosgrave checked him with an authoritative gesture.
‘From the moment in which Lady Audley enters that house,’ he said, ‘her life, so far as life is made up of action and variety, will be finished. Whatever secrets she may have will be secrets for ever! Whatever crimes she may have committed she will be able to commit no more. If you were to dig a grave for her in the nearest churchyard and bury her alive in it, you could not more safely shut her from the world and all worldly associations. But as a physiologist and as an honest man I believe you could do no better service to society than by doing this; for physiology is a lie if the woman I saw ten minutes again is a woman to be trusted at large. If she could have sprung at my throat and strangled me with her little hands, as I sat talking to her just now, she would have done it.’
‘She suspected your purpose, then!’
‘She knew it. “You think I am mad like my mother, and you have come to question me,” she said. “You are watching for some sign of the dreadful taint in my blood.” Good day to you, Mr Audley,’ the physician added hurriedly. ‘My time was up ten minutes ago; it is as much as I shall do to catch the train.’
CHAPTER VI
BURIED ALIVE
ROBERT AUDLEY sat alone in the library with the physician’s letter upon the table before him, thinking of the work which was still to be done.
The young barrister had constituted himself the denouncer of this wretched woman. He had been her judge; and he was now her gaoler. Not until he had delivered the letter which lay before him to its proper address, not until he had given up his charge into the safe keeping of the foreign mad-house doctor, not until then would the dreadful burden be removed from him and his duty done.
He wrote a few lines to my lady, telling her that he was going to carry her away from Audley Court to a place from which she was not likely to return, and requesting her to lose no time in preparing for the journey. He wished to start that evening, if possible, he told her.
Miss Susan Martin, the lady’s-maid, thought it a very hard thing to have to pack her mistress’s trunks in such a hurry, but my lady assisted in the task. It seemed a pleasant excitement to her, this folding and re-folding of silks and velvets, this gathering together of jewels and millinery. They were not going to rob her of her possessions, she thought. They were going to send her away to some place of exile; but even exile was not hopeless, for there was scarcely any spot upon this wide earth in which her beauty would not constitute a little royalty, and win her liege knights and willing subjects. She toiled resolutely in directing and assisting her servant, who scented bankruptcy and ruin in all this packing up and hurrying away, and was therefore rather languid and indifferent in the discharge of her duties; and at six o’clock in the evening she sent her attendant to tell Mr Audley that she was ready to depart as soon as he pleased.
Robert had consulted a volume of Bradshaw,* and had discovered that Villebrumeuse lay out of the track of all railway traffic, and was only approachable by diligence* from Brussels. The mail for Dover left London Bridge at nine o’clock, and could be easily caught by Robert and his charge, as the seven o’clock up-train from Audley reached Shoreditch at a quarter past eight. Travelling by the Dover and Calais route, they would reach Villebrumeuse by the following afternoon or evening.
What need have we to follow them upon that dismal night journey? My lady lay on one of the narrow cabin couches, comfortably wrapped in her furs; she had not forgotten her favourite Russian sables even in this last hour of shame and misery. Her mercenary soul hankered greedily after the costly and beautiful things of which she had been mistress. She had hidden away fragile tea cups and covered vases of Sèvres and Dresden among the folds of her silken dinner dresses. She had secreted jewelled and golden drinking cups amongst her delicate linen. She would have taken the pictures from the walls, and the Gobelin tapestry from the chairs, had it been possible for her to do so. She had taken all she could, and she accompanied Mr Audley with a sulky submission that was the despondent obedience of despair.
Robert Audley paced the deck of the steamer as the Dover clocks were striking twelve, and the town glimmered like a luminous crescent across the widening darkness of the sea. The vessel flew swiftly through the rolling waters towards the friendly Gallic shore, and Mr Audley sighed a long sigh of relief as he remembered how soon his work would be done. He thought of the wretched creature lying forlorn and friendless in the cabin below. But when he pitied her most, and he could not but sometimes pity her for her womanhood and her helplessness, his friend’s face came back upon him, bright and hopeful as he had seen it only on that first day of George’s return from the Antipodes, and with that memory there returned his horror of the shameful lie that had broken the husband’s heart.
‘Can I ever forget it?’ he thought; ‘can I ever forget his blank white face as he sat opposite to me at the coffee-house, with the Times newspaper in his hand? There are some crimes that can never be atoned for, and this is one of them. If I could bring George Talboys to life to-morrow, I could never heal that horrible heart wound; I could never make him the man he was before he read that printed lie.’
It was late in the afternoon of the next day when the diligence bumped and rattled over the uneven paving of the principal street in Villebrumeuse. The old ecclesiastical town, always dull and dreary, seemed more than ordinarily dreary under the grey evening sky. The twinkling lamps, lighted early, and glimmering feebly, long distances apart, made the place seem darker rather than lighter, as glow-worms intensify the blackness of a hedge by their shining presence. The remote Belgian city was a forgotten, old world place, and bore the dreary evidence of decay upon every façade in the narrow streets, on every dilapidated roof, and feeble pile of chimneys. It was difficult to imagine for what reason the opposite rows of houses had been built so close together as to cause the lumbering diligence to brush the foot passengers off the wretched trottoir;* unless they took good care to scrape the shop windows with their garments, for there was building room enough and to spare upon the broad expanse of flat country that lay behind the old city. Hyper-critical travellers might have wondered why the narrowest and most uncomfortable streets were the busiest and most prosperous, while the nobler and broader thoroughfares were empty and deserted. But Robert Audley thought of none of these things. He sat in a corner of the mouldy carriage, watching my lady in the opposite corner, and wondering what the face was like that was so carefully hidden beneath her veil.
They had had the coupé* of the diligence to themselves for the whole of the journey, for there were not many travellers between Brussels and Villebrumeuse, and the public conveyance was supported by the force of tradition rather than by any great profit attaching to it as a speculation.
My lady had not spoken during the journey, except to decline some refreshments which Robert had offered her at a halting-place upon the road. Her heart sank when they left Brussels behind, for she had hoped that city might have been the end of her journey, and she had turned with a feeling of sickness and despair from the dull Belgian landscape.
She looked up at last as the vehicle jolted into a great stony quadrangle, which had been the approach to a monastery once, but which was now the courtyard of a dismal hotel, in whose cellars legions of rats skirmished and squeaked even while the broad sunshine was bright in the chambers above.
Lady Audley shuddered as she alighted from the diligence, and found herself in that dreary courtyard. Robert was surrounded by chattering porters, who clamoured for his ‘baggages,’ and disputed amongst themselves as to the hotel at which he was to rest. One of these men ran away to fetch a hackney-coach at Mr Audley’s behest, and reappeared presently, urging on a pair of horses—which were so small as to suggest the idea that they had been made out of one ordinary-sized animal—with wild shrieks and whoops that had a demoniac sound in the darkness.
Mr Audle
y left my lady in a dreary coffee-room in the care of a drowsy attendant while he drove away to some distant part of the quiet city. There was official business to be gone through before Sir Michael’s wife could be quietly put away in the place suggested by Dr Mosgrave. Robert had to see all manner of important personages; and to take numerous oaths; and to exhibit the English physician’s letter; and to go through much ceremony of signing and countersigning, before he could take his lost friend’s cruel wife to the home which was to be her last upon earth. Upwards of two hours elapsed before all this was arranged and the young man was free to return to the hotel, where he found his charge staring absently at a pair of wax candles, with a cup of untasted coffee standing cold and stagnant before her.
Robert handed my lady into the hired vehicle, and took his seat opposite to her once more.
‘Where are you going to take me?’ she asked, at last. ‘I am tired of being treated like some naughty child, who is put into a dark cellar as a punishment for its offences. Where are you taking me?’
‘To a place in which you will have ample leisure to repent the past, Mrs Talboys,’ Robert answered, gravely.
They had left the paved streets behind them, and had emerged out of a great gaunt square, in which there appeared to be about half a dozen cathedrals, into a smooth boulevard, a broad lamp-lit road, on which the shadows of the leafless branches went and came tremblingly, like the shadows of paralytic skeletons. There were houses here and there upon this boulevard; stately houses, entre cour et jardin,* and with plaster vases of geraniums on the stone pillars of the ponderous gateways. The rumbling hackney-carriage drove upwards of three-quarters of a mile along this smooth roadway before it drew up against a gateway, older and more ponderous than any of those they had passed.
My lady gave a little scream as she looked out of the coach window. The gaunt gateway was lighted by an enormous lamp; a great structure of iron and glass, in which one poor little shivering flame struggled with the March wind.
The coachman rang the bell, and a little wooden door at the side of the gate was opened by a grey-haired man, who looked out at the carnage, and then retired. He reappeared three minutes afterwards behind the folding iron gates which he unlocked and threw back to their full extent, revealing a dreary desert of stone-paved courtyard.
The coachman led his wretched horses into this courtyard, and piloted the vehicle to the principal doorway of the house, a great mansion of grey stone, with several long ranges of windows, many of which were dimly lighted, and looked out like the pale eyes of weary watchers upon the darkness of the night.
My lady, watchful and quiet as the cold stars in the wintry sky, looked up at these casements with an earnest and scrutinising gaze. One of the windows was shrouded by a scanty curtain of faded red; and upon this curtain there went and came a dark shadow, the shadow of a woman with a fantastic head-dress, the shadow of a restless creature, who paced perpetually backwards and forwards before the window.
Sir Michael Audley’s wicked wife laid her hand suddenly upon Robert’s arm, and pointed with the other hand to this curtained window.
‘I know where you have brought me,’ she said. ‘This is a MAD HOUSE.’
Mr Audley did not answer her. He had been standing at the door of the coach when she addressed him, and he quietly assisted her to alight, and led her up a couple of shallow stone-steps, and into the entrance-hall of the mansion. He handed Doctor Mosgrave’s letter to a neatly-dressed, cheerful-looking, middle-aged woman, who came tripping out of a little chamber which opened out of the hall, and was very much like the bureau of an hotel. This person smilingly welcomed Robert and his charge; and after dispatching a servant with the letter, invited them into her pleasant little apartment, which was gaily furnished with bright amber curtains and heated by a tiny stove.
‘Madame finds herself very much fatigued,’ the Frenchwoman said, interrogatively, with a look of intense sympathy, as she placed an arm-chair for my lady.
‘Madame,’ shrugged her shoulders wearily, and looked round the little chamber with a sharp glance of scrutiny that betokened no very great favour.
‘WHAT is this place, Robert Audley?’ she cried fiercely. ‘Do you think I am a baby, that you may juggle with and deceive me—what is it? It is what I said just now, is it not?’
‘It is a maison de santé, my lady,’ the young man answered gravely. ‘I have no wish to juggle with or to deceive you.’
My lady paused for a few moments, looking reflectively at Robert.
‘A maison de santé,’ she repeated. ‘Yes, they manage these things better in France.* In England we should call it a mad-house. This is a house for mad people, this, is it not, Madame?’ she said, in French, turning upon the woman, and tapping the polished floor with her foot.
‘Ah, but no, Madame,’ the woman answered, with a shrill scream of protest. ‘It is an establishment of the most agreeable, where one amuses oneself—’
She was interrupted by the entrance of the principal of this agreeable establishment, who came beaming into the room with a radiant smile illuminating his countenance, and with Dr Mosgrave’s letter open in his hand.
It was impossible for him to say how enchanted he was to make the acquaintance of M’sieu. There was nothing upon earth which he was not ready to do for M’sieu in his own person, and nothing under Heaven which he would not strive to accomplish for him, as the friend of his acquaintance, so very much distinguished, the English doctor. Dr Mosgrave’s letter had given him a brief synopsis of the case, he informed Robert, in an undertone, and he was quite prepared to undertake the care of the charming and very interesting Madame—Madame —
He rubbed his hands politely, and looked at Robert. Mr Audley remembered, for the first time, that he had been recommended to introduce his wretched charge under a feigned name.
He affected not to hear the proprietor’s question. It might seem a very easy matter to have hit upon a heap of names, any one of which would have answered his purpose; but Mr Audley appeared suddenly to have forgotten that he had ever heard any mortal appellation except that of himself and his lost friend.
Perhaps the proprietor perceived and understood his embarrassment. He at any rate relieved it by turning to the woman who had received them, and muttering something about No. 14, Bis.* The woman took a key from a long range of others that hung over the mantel-piece, and a wax candle from a bracket in a corner of the room, and having lighted the candle, led the way across the stone-paved hall, and up a broad slippery staircase of polished wood.
The English physician had informed his Belgian colleague that money would be of minor consequence in any arrangements made for the comfort of the English lady who was to be committed to his care. Acting upon this hint, Monsieur Val opened the outer door of a stately suite of apartments, which included a lobby, paved with alternate diamonds of black and white marble, but of a dismal and cellarlike darkness; a saloon furnished with gloomy velvet draperies, and with a certain funereal splendour which is not peculiarly conducive to the elevation of the spirits; and a bed-chamber, containing a bed so wondrously made, as to appear to have no opening whatever in its coverings, unless the counterpane had been split asunder with a penknife.
My lady stared dismally round at the range of rooms, which looked dreary enough in the wan light of a single wax candle. This solitary flame, pale and ghostlike in itself, was multiplied by paler phantoms of its ghostliness, which glimmered everywhere about the rooms; in the shadowy depths of the polished floors and wainscot, or the window panes, in the looking-glasses, or in those great expanses of glimmering something which adorned the rooms, and which my lady mistook for costly mirrors, but which were in reality wretched mockeries of burnished tin.
Amid all the faded splendour of shabby velvet, and tarnished gilding, and polished wood, the woman dropped into an arm-chair, and covered her face with her hands. The whiteness of them, and the starry light of diamonds, trembling about them, glittered in the dimly-lighted chamber. She sat sil
ent, motionless, despairing, sullen, and angry, while Robert and the French doctor retired into an outer chamber, and talked together in undertones. Mr Audley had very little to say that had not been already said for him, with a far better grace than he himself could have expressed it, by the English physician. He had, after great trouble of mind, hit upon the name of Taylor, as a safe and simple substitute for that other name to which alone my lady had a right. He told the Frenchman that this Mrs Taylor was distantly related to him—that she had inherited the seeds of madness from her mother, as indeed Dr Mosgrave had informed Monsieur Val, and that she had shown some fearful tokens of the lurking taint that was latent in her mind; but that she was not to be called ‘mad.’ He begged that she might be treated with all tenderness and compassion; that she might receive all reasonable indulgences; but he impressed upon Monsieur Val, that under no circumstances was she to be permitted to leave the house and grounds without the protection of some reliable person, who should be answerable for her safe keeping. He had only one other point to urge, and that was that Monsieur Val, who, as he had understood, was himself a Protestant—the doctor bowed—would make arrangements with some kind and benevolent Protestant clergyman, through whom spiritual advice and consolation might be secured for the invalid lady; who had especial need, Robert added, gravely, of such advantages.
This—with all necessary arrangements as to pecuniary matters, which were to be settled from time to time between Mr Audley and the doctor, unassisted by any agents whatever—was the extent of the conversation between the two men, and occupied about a quarter of an hour. My lady sat in the same attitude when they re-entered the bed-chamber in which they had left her, with her ringed hands still clasped over her face.
Robert bent over her to whisper in her ear.
‘Your name is Madame Taylor here,’ he said. ‘I do not think you would wish to be known by your real name.’
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