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

He looked at his watch.

“Half-past one,” he muttered. “I shall have to wait four or five dreary hours before my lady comes home from her morning calls⁠—her pretty visits of ceremony or friendliness. Good Heaven! what an actress this woman is. What an arch trickster⁠—what an all-accomplished deceiver. But she shall play her pretty comedy no longer under my uncle’s roof. I have diplomatized long enough. She has refused to accept an indirect warning. Tonight I will speak plainly.”

The music of the organ ceased, and Robert heard the closing of the instrument.

“I’ll have a look at this new organist,” he thought, “who can afford to bury his talents at Audley, and play Mendelssohn’s finest fugues for a stipend of sixteen pounds a year.” He lingered in the porch, waiting for the organist to descend the awkward little staircase. In the weary trouble of his mind, and with the prospect of getting through the five hours in the best way he could, Mr. Audley was glad to cultivate any diversion of thought, however idle. He therefore freely indulged his curiosity about the new organist.

The first person who appeared upon the steep stone steps was a boy in corduroy trousers and a dark linen smock-frock, who shambled down the stairs with a good deal of unnecessary clatter of his hobnailed shoes, and who was red in the face from the exertion of blowing the bellows of the old organ. Close behind this boy came a young lady, very plainly dressed in a black silk gown and a large gray shawl, who started and turned pale at sight of Mr. Audley.

This young lady was Clara Talboys.

Of all people in the world she was the last whom Robert either expected or wished to see. She had told him that she was going to pay a visit to some friends who lived in Essex; but the county is a wide one, and the village of Audley one of the most obscure and least frequented spots in the whole of its extent. That the sister of his lost friend should be here⁠—here where she could watch his every action, and from those actions deduce the secret workings of his mind, tracing his doubts home to their object, made a complication of his difficulties that he could never have anticipated. It brought him back to that consciousness of his own helplessness, in which he had exclaimed:

“A hand that is stronger than my own is beckoning me onward on the dark road that leads to my lost friend’s unknown grave.”

Clara Talboys was the first to speak.

“You are surprised to see me here, Mr. Audley,” she said.

“Very much surprised.”

“I told you that I was coming to Essex. I left home day before yesterday. I was leaving home when I received your telegraphic message. The friend with whom I am staying is Mrs. Martyn, the wife of the new rector of Mount Stanning. I came down this morning to see the village and church, and as Mrs. Martyn had to pay a visit to the school with the curate and his wife, I stopped here and amused myself by trying the old organ. I was not aware till I came here that there was a village called Audley. The place takes its name from your family, I suppose?”

“I believe so,” Robert answered, wondering at the lady’s calmness, in contradistinction to his own embarrassment. “I have a vague recollection of hearing the story of some ancestor who was called Audley of Audley in the reign of Edward the Fourth. The tomb inside the rails near the altar belongs to one of the knights of Audley, but I have never taken the trouble to remember his achievements. Are you going to wait here for your friends, Miss Talboys?”

“Yes; they are to return here for me after they have finished their rounds.”

“And you go back to Mount Stanning with them this afternoon?”

“Yes.”

Robert stood with his hat in his hand, looking absently out at the tombstones and the low wall of the church yard. Clara Talboys watched his pale face, haggard under the deepening shadow that had rested upon it so long.

“You have been ill since I saw you last, Mr. Audley,” she said, in a low voice, that had the same melodious sadness as the notes of the old organ under her touch.

“No, I have not been ill; I have been only harassed, wearied by a hundred doubts and perplexities.”

He was thinking as he spoke to her:

“How much does she guess? How much does she suspect?”

He had told the story of George’s disappearance and of his own suspicions, suppressing only the names of those concerned in the mystery; but what if this girl should fathom this slender disguise, and discover for herself that which he had chosen to withhold.

Her grave eyes were fixed upon his face, and he knew that she was trying to read the innermost secrets of his mind.

“What am I in her hands?” he thought. “What am I in the hands of this woman, who has my lost friend’s face and the manner of Pallas Athene. She reads my pitiful, vacillating soul, and plucks the thoughts out of my heart with the magic of her solemn brown eyes. How unequal the fight must be between us, and how can I ever hope to conquer against the strength of her beauty and her wisdom?”

Mr. Audley was clearing his throat preparatory to bidding his beautiful companion good morning, and making his escape from the thraldom of her presence into the lonely meadow outside the churchyard, when Clara Talboys arrested him by speaking upon that very subject which he was most anxious to avoid.

“You promised to write to me, Mr. Audley,” she said, “if you made any discovery which carried you nearer to the mystery of my brother’s disappearance. You have not written to me, and I imagine, therefore, that you have discovered nothing.”

Robert Audley was silent for some moments. How could he answer this direct question?

“The chain of circumstantial evidence which unites the mystery of