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

infamy of her sex. She carried a dilapidated paper-covered bonnet-box, which she submitted to Robert’s inspection.

Mr. Audley knelt down to examine the scraps of railway labels and addresses which were pasted here and there upon the box. It had been battered upon a great many different lines of railway, and had evidently traveled considerably. Many of the labels had been torn off, but fragments of some of them remained, and upon one yellow scrap of paper Robert read the letters, Turi.

“The box has been to Italy,” he thought. “Those are the first four letters of the word Turin, and the label is a foreign one.”

The only direction which had not been either defaced or torn away was the last, which bore the name of Miss Graham, passenger to London. Looking very closely at this label, Mr. Audley discovered that it had been pasted over another.

“Will you be so good as to let me have a little water and a piece of sponge?” he said. “I want to get off this upper label. Believe me that I am justified in what I am doing.”

Miss Tonks ran out of the room and returned immediately with a basin of water and a sponge.

“Shall I take off the label?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” Robert answered, coldly. “I can do it very well myself.”

He damped the upper label several times before he could loosen the edges of the paper; but after two or three careful attempts the moistened surface peeled off, without injury to the underneath address.

Miss Tonks could not contrive to read this address across Robert’s shoulder, though she exhibited considerable dexterity in her endeavors to accomplish that object.

Mr. Audley repeated his operations upon the lower label, which he removed from the box, and placed very carefully between two blank leaves of his pocketbook.

“I need intrude upon you no longer, ladies,” he said, when he had done this. “I am extremely obliged to you for having afforded me all the information in your power. I wish you good morning.”

Mrs. Vincent smiled and bowed, murmuring some complacent conventionality about the delight she had felt in Mr. Audley’s visit. Miss Tonks, more observant, stared at the white change, which had come over the young man’s face since he had removed the upper label from the box.

Robert walked slowly away from Acacia Cottage. “If that which I have found today is no evidence for a jury,” he thought, “it is surely enough to convince my uncle that he has married a designing and infamous woman.”

XXVII Beginning at the Other End

Robert Audley walked slowly through the leafless grove, under the bare and shadowless trees in the gray February atmosphere, thinking as he went of the discovery he had just made.

“I have that in my pocketbook,” he pondered, “which forms the connecting link between the woman whose death George Talboys read of in the Times newspaper and the woman who rules in my uncle’s house. The history of Lucy Graham ends abruptly on the threshold of Mrs. Vincent’s school. She entered that establishment in August, 1854. The schoolmistress and her assistant can tell me this but they cannot tell me whence she came. They cannot give me one clue to the secrets of her life from the day of her birth until the day she entered that house. I can go no further in this backward investigation of my lady’s antecedents. What am I to do, then, if I mean to keep my promise to Clara Talboys?”

He walked on for a few paces revolving this question in his mind, with a darker shadow than the shadows of the gathering winter twilight on his face, and a heavy oppression of mingled sorrow and dread weighing down his heart.

“My duty is clear enough,” he thought⁠—“not the less clear because it leads me step by step, carrying ruin and desolation with me, to the home I love. I must begin at the other end⁠—I must begin at the other end, and discover the history of Helen Talboys from the hour of George’s departure until the day of the funeral in the churchyard at Ventnor.”

Mr. Audley hailed a passing hansom, and drove back to his chambers.

He reached Figtree Court in time to write a few lines to Miss Talboys, and to post his letter at St. Martin’s-le-Grand off before six o’clock.

“It will save me a day,” he thought, as he drove to the General Post Office with this brief epistle.

He had written to Clara Talboys to inquire the name of the little seaport town in which George had met Captain Maldon and his daughter; for in spite of the intimacy between the two young men, Robert Audley knew very few particulars of his friend’s brief married life.

From the hour in which George Talboys had read the announcement of his wife’s death in the columns of the Times, he had avoided all mention of the tender history which had been so cruelly broken, the familiar record which had been so darkly blotted out.

There was so much that was painful in that brief story! There was such bitter self-reproach involved in the recollection of that desertion which must have seemed so cruel to her who waited and watched at home! Robert Audley comprehended this, and he did not wonder at his friend’s silence. The sorrowful story had been tacitly avoided by both, and Robert was as ignorant of the unhappy history of this one year in his schoolfellow’s life as if they had never lived together in friendly companionship in those snug Temple chambers.

The letter, written to Miss Talboys by her brother George, within a month of his marriage, was dated Harrowgate. It was at Harrowgate, therefore, Robert concluded, the young couple spent their honeymoon.

Robert Audley had requested Clara Talboys to telegraph an answer to his question, in order to avoid the loss of a day in the accomplishment of the investigation he had promised to perform.

The telegraphic answer reached Figtree Court before twelve o’clock the next day.

The name of the seaport town was