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

No; Robert had no wish to meet that generous kinsman. What could he say to him? How could he smooth the way to the trouble that was to come?⁠—how soften the cruel blow of the great grief that was preparing for that noble and trusting heart?

“If I could forgive her the wrong done to my friend,” Robert thought, “I should still abhor her for the misery her guilt must bring upon the man who has believed in her.”

He told his uncle’s servant that he would stroll into the village, and return before dinner. He walked slowly away from the Court, wandering across the meadows between his uncle’s house and the village, purposeless and indifferent, with the great trouble and perplexity of his life stamped upon his face and reflected in his manner.

“I will go into the churchyard,” he thought, “and stare at the tombstones. There is nothing I can do that will make me more gloomy than I am.”

He was in those very meadows through which he had hurried from Audley Court to the station upon the September day in which George Talboys had disappeared. He looked at the pathway by which he had gone upon that day, and remembered his unaccustomed hurry, and the vague feeling of terror which had taken possession of him immediately upon losing sight of his friend.

“Why did that unaccountable terror seize upon me,” he thought. “Why was it that I saw some strange mystery in my friend’s disappearance? Was it a monition, or a monomania? What if I am wrong after all? What if this chain of evidence which I have constructed link by link, is woven out of my own folly? What if this edifice of horror and suspicion is a mere collection of crotchets⁠—the nervous fancies of a hypochondriacal bachelor? Mr. Harcourt Talboys sees no meaning in the events out of which I have made myself a horrible mystery. I lay the separate links of the chain before him, and he cannot recognize their fitness. He is unable to put them together. Oh, my God, if it should be in myself all this time that the misery lies; if⁠—” he smiled bitterly, and shook his head. “I have the handwriting in my pocketbook which is the evidence of the conspiracy,” he thought. “It remains for me to discover the darker half of my lady’s secret.”

He avoided the village, still keeping to the meadows. The church lay a little way back from the straggling high street, and a rough wooden gate opened from the churchyard into a broad meadow, that was bordered by a running stream, and sloped down into a grassy valley dotted by groups of cattle.

Robert slowly ascended the narrow hillside pathway leading up to the gate in the churchyard. The quiet dullness of the lonely landscape harmonized with his own gloom. The solitary figure of an old man hobbling toward a stile at the further end of the wide meadow was the only human creature visible upon the area over which the young barrister looked. The smoke slowly ascending from the scattered houses in the long high street was the only evidence of human life. The slow progress of the hands of the old clock in the church steeple was the only token by which a traveler could perceive that a sluggish course of rustic life had not come to a full stop in the village of Audley.

Yes, there was one other sign. As Robert opened the gate of the churchyard, and strolled listessly into the little inclosure, he became aware of the solemn music of an organ, audible through a half-open window in the steeple.

He stopped and listened to the slow harmonies of a dreamy melody that sounded like an extempore composition of an accomplished player.

“Who would have believed that Audley church could boast such an organ?” thought Robert. “When last I was here, the national schoolmaster used to accompany his children by a primitive performance of common chords. I didn’t think the old organ had such music in it.”

He lingered at the gate, not caring to break the lazy spell woven about him by the monotonous melancholy of the organist’s performance. The tones of the instrument, now swelling to their fullest power, now sinking to a low, whispering softness, floated toward him upon the misty winter atmosphere, and had a soothing influence, that seemed to comfort him in his trouble.

He closed the gate softly, and crossed the little patch of gravel before the door of the church. The door had been left ajar⁠—by the organist, perhaps. Robert Audley pushed it open, and walked into the square porch, from which a flight of narrow stone steps wound upward to the organ-loft and the belfry. Mr. Audley took off his hat, and opened the door between the porch and the body of the church. He stepped softly into the holy edifice, which had a damp, moldy smell upon weekdays. He walked down the narrow aisle to the altar-rails, and from that point of observation took a survey of the church. The little gallery was exactly opposite to him, but the scanty green curtains before the organ were closely drawn, and he could not get a glimpse of the player.

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 the music.

“If my poor friend, George Talboys, had died in my arms, and I had buried him in this quiet church, in one corner of the vaults over which I tread today, how much anguish of mind, vacillation and torment I might have escaped,” thought Robert Audley, as he read the faded inscriptions upon tablets of discolored 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