Lady Audley’s Secret by M. E. Braddon (top ebook reader TXT) 📕

of the Argus. An elderly wool-stapler returning to his native country with his wife and daughters, after having made a fortune in the colonies; a governess of three-and-thirty years of age, going home to marry a man to whom she had been engaged fifteen years; the sentimental daughter of a wealthy Australian wine-merchant, invoiced to England to finish her education, and George Talboys, were the only first-class passengers on board.

This George Talboys was the life and soul of the vessel; nobody knew who or what he was, or where he came from, but everybody liked him. He sat at the bottom of the dinner-table, and assisted the captain in doing the honors of the friendly meal. He opened the champagne bottles, and took wine with everyone present; he told funny stories, and led the life himself with such a joyous peal that the man must have been a churl who could not have laughed for pure sympathy. He was a capital hand at speculation and vingt-et-un, and all the merry games, which kept the little circle round the cabin-lamp so deep in innocent amusement, that a hurricane might have howled overhead without their hearing it; but he freely owned that he had no talent for whist, and that he didn’t know a knight from a castle upon the chessboard.

Indeed, Mr. Talboys was by no means too learned a gentleman. The pale governess had tried to talk to him about fashionable literature, but George had only pulled his beard and stared very hard at her, saying occasionally, “Ah, yes, by Jove!” and “To be sure, ah!”

The sentimental young lady, going home to finish her education, had tried him with Shelby and Byron, and he had fairly laughed in her face, as if poetry were a joke. The woolstapler sounded him on politics, but he did not seem very deeply versed in them; so they let him go his own way, smoke his cigars and talk to the sailors, lounge over the bulwarks and stare at the water, and make himself agreeable to everybody in his own fashion. But when the Argus came to be within about a fortnight’s sail of England everybody noticed a change in George Talboys. He grew restless and fidgety; sometimes so merry that the cabin rung with his laughter; sometimes moody and thoughtful. Favorite as he was among the sailors, they were tired at last of answering his perpetual questions about the probable time of touching land. Would it be in ten days, in eleven, in twelve, in thirteen? Was the wind favorable? How many knots an hour was the vessel doing? Then a sudden passion would seize him, and he would stamp upon the deck, crying out that she was a rickety old craft, and that her owners were swindlers to advertise her as the fast-sailing Argus. She was not fit for passenger traffic; she was not fit to carry impatient living creatures, with hearts and souls; she was fit for nothing but to be laden with bales of stupid wool, that might rot on the sea and be none the worse for it.

The sun was drooping down behind the waves as George Talboys lighted his cigar upon this August evening. Only ten days more, the sailors had told him that afternoon, and they would see the English coast. “I will go ashore in the first boat that hails us,” he cried; “I will go ashore in a cockleshell. By Jove, if it comes to that, I will swim to land.”

His friends in the aft-cabin, with the exception of the pale governess, laughed at his impatience; she sighed as she watched the young man, chafing at the slow hours, pushing away his untasted wine, flinging himself restlessly about upon the cabin sofa, rushing up and down the companion ladder, and staring at the waves.

As the red rim of the sun dropped into the water, the governess ascended the cabin stairs for a stroll on deck, while the passengers sat over their wine below. She stopped when she came up to George, and, standing by his side, watched the fading crimson in the western sky.

The lady was very quiet and reserved, seldom sharing in the after-cabin amusements, never laughing, and speaking very little; but she and George Talboys had been excellent friends throughout the passage.

“Does my cigar annoy you, Miss Morley?” he said, taking it out of his mouth.

“Not at all; pray do not leave off smoking. I only came up to look at the sunset. What a lovely evening!”

“Yes, yes, I dare say,” he answered, impatiently; “yet so long, so long! Ten more interminable days and ten more weary nights before we land.”

“Yes,” said Miss Morley, sighing. “Do you wish the time shorter?”

“Do I?” cried George. “Indeed I do. Don’t you?”

“Scarcely.”

“But is there no one you love in England? Is there no one you love looking out for your arrival?”

“I hope so,” she said gravely. They were silent for some time, he smoking his cigar with a furious impatience, as if he could hasten the course of the vessel by his own restlessness; she looking out at the waning light with melancholy blue eyes⁠—eyes that seemed to have faded with poring over closely-printed books and difficult needlework; eyes that had faded a little, perhaps, by reason of tears secretly shed in the lonely night.

“See!” said George, suddenly, pointing in another direction from that toward which Miss Morley was looking, “there’s the new moon!”

She looked up at the pale crescent, her own face almost as pale and wan.

“This is the first time we have seen it.”

“We must wish!” said George. “I know what I wish.”

“What?”

“That we may get home quickly.”

“My wish is that we may find no disappointment when we get there,” said the governess, sadly.

“Disappointment!”

He started as if he had been struck, and asked what she meant by talking of disappointment.

“I mean this,” she said, speaking rapidly, and with a restless motion of her thin hands; “I mean that as the end of the