She only shook her head in answer to him, and did not even remove her hands from over her face.
‘Madame will have an attendant entirely devoted to her service,’ said Monsieur Val. ‘Madame will have all her wishes obeyed; her reasonable wishes, but that goes without saying,’ Monsieur adds, with a quaint shrug. ‘Every effort will be made to render Madame’s sojourn at Villebrumeuse agreeable, and as much profitable as agreeable. The inmates dine together when it is wished. I dine with the inmates, sometimes; my subordinate, a clever and a worthy man, always. I reside with my wife and children in a little pavilion in the grounds; my subordinate resides in the establishment. Madame may rely upon our utmost efforts being exerted to ensure her comfort.’
Monsieur is saying a great deal more to the same effect, rubbing his hands and beaming radiantly upon Robert and his charge, when Madame rises suddenly, erect and furious, and dropping her jewelled fingers from before her face, tells him to hold his tongue.
‘Leave me alone with the man who has brought me here,’ she cried between her set teeth. ‘Leave me!’
She points to the door with a sharp imperious gesture; so rapid that the silken drapery about her arm makes a swooping sound as she lifts her hand. The sibillant French syllables hiss through her teeth as she utters them, and seem better fitted to her mood and to herself than the familiar English she has spoken hitherto.
The French doctor shrugs his shoulders as he goes out into the dark lobby, and mutters something about a ‘beautiful devil,’ and a gesture worthy of ‘the Mars.’* My lady walked with a rapid footstep to the door between the bed-chamber and the saloon; closed it, and with the handle of the door still in her hand, turned and looked at Robert Audley.
‘You have brought me to my grave, Mr Audley,’ she cried; ‘you have used your power basely and cruelly, and have brought me to a living grave.’
‘I have done that which I thought just to others and merciful to you,’ Robert answered, quietly; ‘I should have been a traitor to society had I suffered you to remain at liberty after—after the disappearance of George Talboys and the fire at the Castle Inn. I have brought you to a place in which you will be kindly treated by people who have no knowledge of your story—no power to taunt or to reproach you. You will lead a quiet and peaceful life, my lady, such a life as many a good and holy woman in this Catholic country freely takes upon herself, and happily endures unto the end. The solitude of your existence in this place will be no greater than that of a king’s daughter, who, flying from the evil of the time, was glad to take shelter in a house as tranquil as this. Surely it is a small atonement which I ask you to render for your sins, a light penance which I call upon you to perform. Live here and repent; nobody will assail you, nobody will torment you. I only say to you, repent!’
‘I cannot!’ cried my lady, pushing her hair fiercely from her white forehead, and fixing her dilated eyes upon Robert Audley, ‘I cannot! Has my beauty brought me to this? Have I plotted and schemed to shield myself, and lain awake in the long deadly nights trembling to think of my dangers, for this? I had better have given up at once, since this was to be the end. I had better have yielded to the curse that was upon me, and given up when George Talboys first came back to England.’
She plucked at the feathery golden curls as if she would have torn them from her head. It had served her so little after all, that gloriously glittering hair; that beautiful nimbus of yellow light that had contrasted so exquisitely with the melting azure of her eyes. She hated herself and her beauty.
‘I would laugh at you and defy you if I dared,’ she cried; ‘I would kill myself and defy you if I dared. But I am a poor, pitiful coward, and have been so from the first. Afraid of my mother’s horrible inheritance; afraid of poverty; afraid of George Talboys; afraid of you.’
She was silent for a little while, but she still held her place by the door, as if determined to detain Robert as long as it was her pleasure to do so.
‘Do you know what I am thinking of?’ she said presently. ‘Do you know what I am thinking of, as I look at you in the dim light of this room? I am thinking of the day upon which George Talboys—disappeared.’
Robert started as she mentioned the name of his lost friend; his face turned pale in the dusky light, and his breathing grew quicker and louder.
‘He was standing opposite me as you are standing now,’ continued my lady. ‘You said that you would raze the old house to the ground; that you would root up every tree in the gardens to find your dead friend. You would have had no need to do so much; the body of George Talboys lies at the bottom of the old well, in the shrubbery beyond the lime-walk.’
Robert Audley flung up his hands and clasped them above his head, with one loud cry of horror.
‘Oh, my God!’ he said, after a dreadful pause, ‘have all the ghastly things that I have thought prepared me so little for the ghastly truth, that it should come upon me like this at last?’
‘He came to me in the lime-walk,’ resumed my lady, in the same hard, dogged tone as that in which she had confessed the wicked story of her life. ‘I knew that he would come, and I had prepared myself, as well as I could, to meet him. I was determined to bribe him, to cajole him, to defy him; to do anything sooner than abandon the wealth and the position I had won, and go back to my old life. He came, and he reproached me for the conspiracy at Ventnor. He declared that so long as he lived he would never forgive me for the lie that had broken his heart. He told me that I had plucked his heart out of his breast and trampled upon it; and that he had now no heart in which to feel one sentiment of mercy for me. That he would have forgiven me any wrong upon earth, but that one deliberate and passionless wrong that I had done him. He said this and a great deal more, and he told me that no power on earth should turn him from his purpose, which was to take me to the man I had deceived, and make me tell my wicked story. He did not know the hidden taint that I had sucked in with my mother’s milk. He did not know that it was possible to drive me mad. He goaded me as you have goaded me; he was as merciless as you have been merciless. We were in the shrubbery at the end of the lime-walk. I was seated upon the broken masonry at the mouth of the well. George Talboys was leaning upon the disused windlass, in which the rusty iron spindle rattled loosely whenever he shifted his position. I rose at last, and turned upon him to defy him, as I had determined to defy him at the worst. I told him that if he denounced me to Sir Michael, I would declare him to be a madman or a liar, and I defied him to convince the man who loved me—blindly as I told him—that he had any claim to me. I was going to leave him after having told him this, when he caught me by the wrist and detained me by force. You saw the bruises that his fingers made upon my wrist and noticed them, and did not believe the account I gave of them. I could see that, Mr Robert Audley, and I saw that you were a person I should have to fear.’
She paused, as if she had expected Robert to speak; but he stood silent and motionless waiting for the end.
‘George Talboys treated me as you treated me,’ she said presently. ‘He swore that if there was but one witness of my identity, and that witness was removed from Audley Court by the width of the whole earth, he would bring him there to swear to my identity, and to denounce me. It was then that I was mad. It was then that I drew the loose iron spindle from the shrunken wood, and saw my first husband sink with one horrible cry into the black mouth of the well. There is a legend of its enormous depth. I do not know how deep it is. It is dry, I suppose; for I heard no splash; only a dull thud. I looked down and I saw nothing but black emptiness. I knelt down and listened, but the cry was not repeated, though I waited for nearly a quarter of an hour—God knows how long it seemed to me—by the mouth of the well.’
Robert Audley uttered no word of horror when the story was finished. He moved a little nearer towards the door against which Helen Talboys stood. Had there been any other means of exit from the room, he would gladly have availed himself of it. He shrank from even a momentary contact with this creature.
‘You see I do not fear to make my confession to you,’ said Helen Talboys, ‘for two reasons. The first is that you dare not use it against me, because you know it would kill your uncle to see me in a criminal dock; the second is, that law could pronounce no worse sentence than this, a life-long imprisonment in a mad-house. You see I do not thank you for your mercy, Mr Robert Audley, for I know exactly what it is worth.’
She moved away from the door, and Robert passed her, without a word, without a look.
Half an hour afterwards he was in one of the principal hotels at Villebrumeuse, sitting at a neatly-ordered supper-table, with no power to eat; with no power to distract his mind, even for a moment, from the image of that lost friend who had been treacherously murdered in the thicket at Audley Court.
CHAPTER VII
GHOST-HAUNTED
NO feverish sleeper travelling in a strange dream ever looked out more wonderingly upon a world that seemed unreal than Robert Audley, as he stared absently at the flat swamps and dismal poplars between Villebrumeuse and Brussels. Could it be that he was returning to his uncle’s house without the woman who had reigned in it for nearly two years as queen and mistress? He felt as if he had carried off my lady, and had made away with her secretly and darkly, and must now render up an account to Sir Michael of the fate of that woman, whom the baronet had so dearly loved.
‘What shall I tell him,’ he thought; ‘shall I tell the truth—the horrible ghastly truth? No; that would be too cruel. His generous spirit would sink under the hideous revelation. Yet, in his ignorance of the extent of this wretched woman’s wickedness, he may think perhaps that I have been hard with her.’
Brooding thus, Mr Robert Audley absently watched the cheerless landscape from his seat in the shabby coupé of the diligence, and thought how great a leaf had been torn out of his life, now that the dark story of George Talboys was finished.
What had he to do next? A crowd of horrible thoughts rushed into his mind as he remembered the story that he had heard from the white lips of Helen Talboys. His friend—his murdered friend—lay hidden amongst the mouldering ruins of the old well at Audley Court. He had lain there for six long months, unburied, unknown; hidden in the darkness of the old convent well. What was to be done?
To institute a search for the remains of the murdered man was to inevitably bring about a coroner’s inquest. Should such an inquest be held, it was next to impossible that the history of my lady’s crime could fail to be brought to light. To prove that George Talboys met with his death at Audley Court was to prove almost as surely that my lady had been the instrument of that mysterious death; for the young man had been known to follow her into the lime-walk upon the day of his disappearance.
‘My God!’ Robert exclaimed, as the full horror of this position became evident to him, ‘is my friend to rest in his unhallowed burial-place because I have condoned the offences of the woman who murdered him?’
He felt that there was no way out of this difficulty. Sometimes he thought that it little mattered to his dead friend whether he lay entombed beneath a marble monument, whose workmanship should be the wonder of the universe, or in that obscure hiding-place in the thicket at Audley Court. At another time he would be seized with a sudden horror at the wrong that had been done to the murdered man, and would fain have travelled even more rapidly than the express between Brussels and Paris could carry him, in his eagerness to reach the end of his journey, that he might set right this cruel wrong.
He was in London at dusk on the second day after that on which he had left Audley Court, and he drove straight to the Clarendon, to inquire after his uncle. He had no intention of seeing Sir Michael, as he had not yet determined how much or how little he should tell him, but he was very anxious to ascertain how the old man had sustained the cruel shock he had so lately endured.
‘I will see Alicia,’ he thought; ‘she will tell me all about her father. It is only two days since he left Audley. I can scarcely expect to hear of any favourable change.’
But Mr Audley was not destined to see his cousin that evening, for the servants at the Clarendon told him that Sir Michael and his daughter had left by the morning mail for Paris, on their way to Vienna.
Robert was very well pleased to receive this intelligence; it afforded him a welcome respite, for it would be decidedly better to tell the baronet nothing of his guilty wife until he returned to England, with his health unimpaired, and his spirits re-established, it was to be hoped.
Mr Audley drove to the Temple. The chambers which had seemed dreary to him ever since the disappearance of George Talboys were doubly so to-night. For that which had been only a dark suspicion had now become a horrible certainty. There was no longer room for the palest ray, the most transitory glimmer of hope. His worst terrors had been too well founded.
George Talboys had been cruelly and treacherously murdered by the wife he had loved and mourned.
There were three letters waiting for Mr Audley at his chambers. One was from Sir Michael, and another from Alicia. The third was addressed in a hand the young barrister knew only too well, though he had seen it but once before. His face flushed redly at the sight of the superscription, and he took the letter in his hand, carefully and tenderly, as if it had been a living thing, and sentient to his touch. He turned it over and over in his hands, looking at the crest upon the envelope, at the post-mark, at the colour of the paper, and then put it into the bosom of his waistcoat with a strange smile upon his face.
‘What a wretched and unconscionable fool I am,’ he thought. ‘Have I laughed at the follies of weak men all my life, and am I to be more foolish than the weakest of them at last? The beautiful brown-eyed creature! Why did I ever see her? Why did my relentless Nemesis ever point the way to that dreary house in Dorsetshire?’
He opened the two first letters. He was foolish enough to keep the last for a delicious morsel—a fairy-like dessert after the commonplace substantialities of a dinner.
Alicia’s letter told him that Sir Michael had borne his agony with such a persevering tranquillity that she had become at last far more alarmed by his patient calmness than by any stormy manifestation of despair. In this difficulty she had secretly called upon the physician who attended the Audley household in any cases of serious illness, and had requested this gentleman to pay Sir Michael an apparently accidental visit. He had done so, and after stopping half an hour with the baronet, had told Alicia that there was no present danger of any serious consequence from this quiet grief, but that it was necessary that every effort should be made to arouse Sir Michael, and to force him, however unwillingly, into action.
Alicia had immediately acted upon this advice, had resumed her old empire as a spoiled child, and reminded her father of a promise he had made of taking her through Germany. With considerable difficulty she had induced him to consent to fulfilling this old promise, and having once gained her point, she had contrived that they should leave England as soon as it was possible to do so, and she told Robert, in conclusion, that she would not bring her father back to his old house until she had taught him to forget the sorrows associated with it.
The baronet’s letter was very brief. It contained half a dozen blank cheques on Sir Michael Audley’s London bankers.
‘You will require money, my dear Robert,’ he wrote, ‘for such arrangements as you may think fit to make for the future comfort of the person I committed to your care. I need scarcely tell you that those arrangements cannot be too liberal. But perhaps it is as well that I should tell you now, for the first and only time, that it is my earnest wish never again to hear that person’s name. I have no wish to be told the nature of the arrangements you may make for her. I am sure that you will act conscientiously and mercifully. I seek to know no more. Whenever you want money, you will draw upon me for any sums that you may require; but you will have no occasion to tell me for whose use you want that money.’
Ro
bert Audley breathed a long sigh of relief as he folded this letter. It released him from a duty which it would have been most painful for him to perform, and it for ever decided his course of action with regard to the murdered man.
George Talboys must lie at peace in his unknown grave, and Sir Michael Audley must never learn that the woman he had loved bore the red brand of murder on her soul.
Robert had only the third letter to open—the letter which he had placed in his bosom while he read the others; he tore open the envelope, handling it carefully and tenderly as he had done before.
The letter was as brief as Sir Michael’s. It contained only these few lines:—
‘Dear Mr Audley,—
‘The rector of this place has been twice to see Marks, the man you saved in the fire at the Castle Inn. He lies in a very precarious state at his mother’s cottage, near Audley Court, and is not expected to live many days. His wife is attending him, and both he and she have expressed a most earnest desire that you should see him before he dies. Pray come without delay.
‘Yours very sincerely,
‘CLARA TALBOYS.
‘Mount Stanning Rectory, March 6.’
Robert Audley folded this letter very reverently, and replaced it underneath that part of his waistcoat which might be supposed to cover the region of his heart. Having done this, he seated himself in his favourite arm-chair, filled and lighted a pipe, and smoked it out, staring reflectively at the fire as long as his tobacco lasted. The lazy light that glimmered in his handsome grey eyes told of a dreamy reverie that could have scarcely been either gloomy or unpleasant. His thoughts wandered away upon the blue clouds of hazy tobacco smoke, and carried him into a bright region of unrealities, in which there was neither death nor trouble, grief nor shame; only himself and Clara Talboys in a world that was made all their own by the great omnipotence of their loves.
It was not till the last shred of pale Turkish tobacco had been consumed, and the grey ashes knocked out upon the topmost bar of the grate, that this pleasant dream floated off into the great storehouse in which the visions of things that never have been and never are to be, are kept locked and guarded by some stern enchanter, who only turns the keys now and then and opens the door of his treasure-house a little way for the brief delight of mankind. But the dream fled, and the heavy burden of dismal realities fell again upon Robert’s shoulders, more tenacious than any old man of the sea. ‘What can that man Marks want with me?’ thought the barrister. ‘He is afraid to die until he has made a confession, perhaps. He wishes to tell me that which I know already,—the story of my lady’s crime. I knew that he was in the secret. I was sure of it even upon the night on which I first saw him. He knew the secret, and he traded on it.’
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