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

upon which Eve was created to be Adam’s companion and helpmeet in the garden of Eden. “What if this woman’s hellish power of dissimulation should be stronger than the truth, and crush him? She had not spared George Talboys when he stood in her way and menaced her with a certain peril; would she spare him who threatened her with a far greater danger? Are women merciful, or loving, or kind in proportion to their beauty and grace? Was there not a certain Monsieur Mazers de Latude, who had the bad fortune to offend the all-accomplished Madam de Pompadour, who expiated his youthful indiscretion by a lifelong imprisonment; who twice escaped from prison, to be twice cast back into captivity; who, trusting in the tardy generosity of his beautiful foe, betrayed himself to an implacable fiend? Robert Audley looked at the pale face of the woman standing by his side; that fair and beautiful face, illumined by starry-blue eyes, that had a strange and surely a dangerous light in them; and remembering a hundred stories of womanly perfidy, shuddered as he thought how unequal the struggle might be between himself and his uncle’s wife.

“I have shown her my cards,” he thought, “but she has kept hers hidden from me. The mask that she wears is not to be plucked away. My uncle would rather think me mad than believe her guilty.”

The pale face of Clara Talboys⁠—that grave and earnest face, so different in its character to my lady’s fragile beauty⁠—arose before him.

“What a coward I am to think of myself or my own danger,” he thought. “The more I see of this woman the more reason I have to dread her influence upon others; the more reason to wish her far away from this house.”

He looked about him in the dusky obscurity. The lonely garden was as quiet as some solitary graveyard, walled in and hidden away from the world of the living.

“It was somewhere in this garden that she met George Talboys upon the day of his disappearance,” he thought. “I wonder where it was they met; I wonder where it was that he looked into her cruel face and taxed her with her falsehood?”

My lady, with her little hand resting lightly upon the opposite post to that against which Robert leaned, toyed with her pretty foot among the long weeds, but kept a furtive watch upon her enemy’s face.

“It is to be a duel to the death, then, my lady,” said Robert Audley, solemnly. “You refuse to accept my warning. You refuse to run away and repent of your wickedness in some foreign place, far from the generous gentleman you have deceived and fooled by your false witcheries. You choose to remain here and defy me.”

“I do,” answered Lady Audley, lifting her head and looking full at the young barrister. “It is no fault of mine if my husband’s nephew goes mad, and chooses me for the victim of his monomania.”

“So be it, then, my lady,” answered Robert. “My friend George Talboys was last seen entering these gardens by the little iron gate by which we came in tonight. He was last heard inquiring for you. He was seen to enter these gardens, but he was never seen to leave them. I believe that he met his death within the boundary of these grounds; and that his body lies hidden below some quiet water, or in some forgotten corner of this place. I will have such a search made as shall level that house to the earth and root up every tree in these gardens, rather than I will fail in finding the grave of my murdered friend.”

Lucy Audley uttered a long, low, wailing cry, and threw up her arms above her head with a wild gesture of despair, but she made no answer to the ghastly charge of her accuser. Her arms slowly dropped, and she stood staring at Robert Audley, her white face gleaming through the dusk, her blue eyes glittering and dilated.

“You shall never live to do this,” she said. “I will kill you first. Why have you tormented me so? Why could you not let me alone? What harm had I ever done you that you should make yourself my persecutor, and dog my steps, and watch my looks, and play the spy upon me? Do you want to drive me mad? Do you know what it is to wrestle with a madwoman? No,” cried my lady, with a laugh, “you do not, or you would never⁠—”

She stopped abruptly and drew herself suddenly to her fullest hight. It was the same action which Robert had seen in the old half-drunken lieutenant; and it had that same dignity⁠—the sublimity of extreme misery.

“Go away, Mr. Audley,” she said. “You are mad, I tell you, you are mad.”

“I am going, my lady,” answered Robert, quietly. “I would have condoned your crimes out of pity to your wretcheness. You have refused to accept my mercy. I wished to have pity upon the living. I shall henceforth only remember my duty to the dead.”

He walked away from the lonely well under the shadow of the limes. My lady followed him slowly down that long, gloomy avenue, and across the rustic bridge to the iron gate. As he passed through the gate, Alicia came out of a little half-glass door that opened from an oak-paneled breakfast-room at one angle of the house, and met her cousin upon the threshold of the gateway.

“I have been looking for you everywhere, Robert,” she said. “Papa has come down to the library, and will be glad to see you.”

The young man started at the sound of his cousin’s fresh young voice. “Good Heaven!” he thought, “can these two women be of the same clay? Can this frank, generous-hearted girl, who cannot conceal any impulse of her innocent nature, be of the same flesh and blood as that wretched creature whose shadow falls upon the path beside me!”

He looked from his cousin to Lady Audley, who