Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (page 8)

She had been sitting by the fire reading the paper, and waiting for her seniors to join her at the dinner table.

“Oh, it’s you, Mr. Robert Audley.” she remarked, indifferently. “You dine with us of course. Pray go and find papa. It must be nearly eight o’clock, and we are supposed to dine at six.”

Mr. Audley answered his cousin rather sternly. Her frivolous manner jarred upon him, and he forgot in his irrational displeasure that Miss Audley had known nothing of the terrible drama which had been so long enacting under her very nose.

“Your papa has just endured a very great grief, Alicia,” the young man said, gravely.

The girl’s arch, laughing face changed in a moment to a tenderly earnest look of sorrow and anxiety. Alicia Audley loved her father very dearly.

“A grief?” she exclaimed; “papa grieved! Oh! Robert, what has happened?”

“I can tell you nothing yet, Alicia,” Robert answered in a low voice.

He took his cousin by the wrist, and drew her into the dining-room as he spoke. He closed the door carefully behind him before he continued:

“Alicia, can I trust you?” he asked, earnestly.

“Trust me to do what?”

“To be a comfort and a friend to your poor father under a very heavy affliction.”

“_Yes_!” cried Alicia, passionately. “How can you ask me such a question? Do you think there is anything I would not do to lighten any sorrow of my father’s? Do you think there is anything I would not suffer if my suffering could lighten his?”

The rushing tears rose to Miss Audley’s bright gray eyes as she spoke.

“Oh, Robert! Robert! could you think so badly of me as to think I would not try to be a comfort to my father in his grief?” she said, reproachfully.

“No, no, my dear,” answered the young man, quietly; “I never doubted your affection, I only doubted your discretion. May I rely upon that?”

“You may, Robert,” said Alicia, resolutely.

“Very well, then, my dear girl, I will trust you. Your father is going to leave the Court, for a time at least. The grief which he has just endured–a sudden and unlooked-for sorrow, remember–has no doubt made this place hateful to him. He is going away; but he must not go alone, must he, Alicia?”

“Alone? no! no! But I suppose my lady–”

“Lady Audley will not go with him,” said Robert, gravely; “he is about to separate himself from her.”

“For a time?”

“No, forever.”

“Separate himself from her forever!” exclaimed Alicia. “Then this grief–”

“Is connected with Lady Audley. Lady Audley is the cause of your father’s sorrow.”

Alicia’s face, which had been pale before, flushed crimson. Sorrow, of which my lady was the cause–a sorrow which was to separate Sir Michael forever from his wife! There had been no quarrel between them–there had never been anything but harmony and sunshine between Lady Audley and her generous husband. This sorrow must surely then have arisen from some sudden discovery; it was, no doubt, a sorrow associated with disgrace. Robert Audley understood the meaning of that vivid blush.

“You will offer to accompany your father wherever he may choose to go, Alicia,” he said. “You are his natural comforter at such a time as this, but you will best befriend him in this hour of trial by avoiding all intrusion upon his grief. Your very ignorance of the particulars of that grief will be a security for your discretion. Say nothing to your father that you might not have said to him two years ago, before he married a second wife. Try and be to him what you were before the woman in yonder room came between you and your father’s love.”

“I will,” murmured Alicia, “I will.”

“You will naturally avoid all mention of Lady Audley’s name. If your father is often silent, be patient; if it sometimes seems to you that the shadow of this great sorrow will never pass away from his life, be patient still; and remember that there can be no better hope of a cure of his grief than the hope that his daughter’s devotion may lead him to remember there is one woman upon this earth who will love him truly and purely until the last.”

“Yes–yes, Robert, dear cousin, I will remember.”

Mr. Audley, for the first time since he had been a schoolboy, took his cousin in his arms and kissed her broad forehead.

“My dear Alicia,” he said, “do this and you will make me happy. I have been in some measure the means of bringing this sorrow upon your father. Let me hope that it is not an enduring one. Try and restore my uncle to happiness, Alicia, and I will love you more dearly than brother ever loved a noble-hearted sister; and a brotherly affection may be worth having, perhaps, after all, my dear, though it is very different to poor Sir Harry’s enthusiastic worship.”

Alicia’s head was bent and her face hidden from her cousin while he spoke, but she lifted her head when he had finished, and looked him full in the face with a smile that was only the brighter for her eyes being filled with tears.

“You are a good fellow, Bob,” she said; “and I’ve been very foolish and wicked to feel angry with you because–”

The young lady stopped suddenly.

“Because what, my dear?” asked Mr. Audley.

“Because I’m silly, Cousin Robert,” Alicia said, quickly; “never mind that, Bob, I’ll do all you wish, and it shall not be my fault if my dearest father doesn’t forget his troubles before long. I’d go to the end of the world with him, poor darling, if I thought there was any comfort to be found for him in the journey. I’ll go and get ready directly. Do you think papa will go to-night?”

“Yes, my dear; I don’t think Sir Michael will rest another night under this roof yet awhile.”

“The mail goes at twenty minutes past nine,” said Alicia; “we must leave the house in an hour if we are to travel by it. I shall see you again before we go, Robert?”

“Yes, dear.”

Miss Audley ran off to her room to summon her maid, and make all necessary preparations for the sudden journey, of whose ultimate destination she was as yet quite ignorant.

She went heart and soul into the carrying out of the duty which Robert had dictated to her. She assisted in the packing of her portmanteaus, and hopelessly bewildered her maid by stuffing silk dresses into her bonnet-boxes and satin shoes into her dressing-case. She roamed about her rooms, gathering together drawing-materials, music-books, needle-work, hair-brushes, jewelry, and perfume-bottles, very much as she might have done had she been about to sail for some savage country, devoid of all civilized resources. She was thinking all the time of her father’s unknown grief, and perhaps a little of the serious face and earnest voice which had that night revealed her Cousin Robert to her in a new character.

Mr. Audley went up-stairs after his cousin, and found his way to Sir Michael’s dressing-room. He knocked at the door and listened, Heaven knows how anxiously, for the expected answer. There was a moment’s pause, during which the young man’s heart beat loud and fast, and then the door was opened by the baronet himself. Robert saw that his uncle’s valet was already hard at work preparing for his master’s hurried journey.

Sir Michael came out into the corridor.

“Have you anything more to say to me, Robert?” he asked, quietly.

“I only came to ascertain if I could assist in any of your arrangements. You go to London by the mail?”

“Yes.”

“Have you any idea of where you will stay.”

“Yes, I shall stop at the Clarendon; I am known there. Is that all you have to say?”

“Yes; except that Alicia will accompany you?”

“Alicia!”

“She could not very well stay here, you know, just now. It would be best for her to leave the Court until–”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” interrupted the baronet; “but is there nowhere else that she could go–must she be with me?”

“She could go nowhere else so immediately, and she would not be happy anywhere else.”

“Let her come, then,” said Sir Michael, “let her come.”

He spoke in a strange, subdued voice, and with an apparent effort, as if it were painful to him to have to speak at all; as if all this ordinary business of life were a cruel torture to him, and jarred so much upon his grief as to be almost worse to bear than that grief itself.

“Very well, my dear uncle, then all is arranged; Alicia will be ready to start at nine o’clock.”

“Very good, very good,” muttered the baronet; “let her come if she pleases, poor child, let her come.”

He sighed heavily as he spoke in that half pitying tone of his daughter. He was thinking how comparatively indifferent he had been toward that only child for the sake of the woman now shut in the fire-lit room below.

“I shall see you again before you go, sir,” said Robert; “I will leave you till then.”

“Stay!” said Sir Michael, suddenly; “have you told Alicia?”

“I have told her nothing, except that you are about to leave the Court for some time.”

“You are very good, my boy, you are very good,” the baronet murmured in a broken voice.

He stretched out his hand. His nephew took it in both his own, and pressed it to his lips.

“Oh, sir! how can I ever forgive myself?” he said; “how can I ever cease to hate myself for having brought this grief upon you?”

“No, no, Robert, you did right; I wish that God had been so merciful to me as to take my miserable life before this night; but you did right.”

Sir Michael re-entered his dressing-room, and Robert slowly returned to the vestibule. He paused upon the threshold of that chamber in which he had left Lucy–Lady Audley, otherwise Helen Talboys, the wife of his lost friend.

She was lying upon the floor, upon the very spot in which she had crouched at her husband’s feet telling her guilty story. Whether she was in a swoon, or whether she lay there in the utter helplessness of her misery, Robert scarcely cared to know. He went out into the vestibule, and sent one of the servants to look for her maid, the smart, be-ribboned damsel who was loud in wonder and consternation at the sight of her mistress.

“Lady Audley is very ill,” he said; “take her to her room and see that she does not leave it to-night. You will be good enough to remain near her, but do not either talk to her or suffer her to excite herself by talking.”

My lady had not fainted; she allowed the girl to assist her, and rose from the ground upon which she had groveled. Her golden hair fell in loose, disheveled masses about her ivory throat and shoulders, her face and lips were colorless, her eyes terrible in their unnatural light.

“Take me away,” she said, “and let me sleep! Let me sleep, for my brain is on fire!”

As she was leaving the room with her maid, she turned and looked at Robert. “Is Sir Michael gone?” she asked.

“He will leave in half an hour.”

“There were no lives lost in the fire at Mount Stanning?”

“None.”

“I am glad of that.”

“The landlord of the house, Marks, was very terribly burned, and lies in a precarious state at his mother’s cottage; but he may recover.”

“I am glad of that–I am glad no life was lost. Good-night, Mr. Audley.”

“I shall ask to see you for half an hour’s conversation in the course of to-morrow, my lady.”

“Whenever you please. Good night.”

“Good night.”

She went away quietly leaning upon her maid’s shoulder, and leaving Robert with a sense of strange bewilderment that was very painful to him.

He sat down by the broad hearth upon which the red embers were fading, and wondered at the change in that old house which, until the day of his friend’s disappearance, had been so pleasant a home for all who sheltered beneath its hospitable roof. He sat brooding over the desolate hearth, and trying to decide upon what must be done in this sudden crisis. He sat helpless and powerless to determine upon any course of action, lost in a dull revery, from which he was aroused by the sound of carriage-wheels driving up to the little turret entrance.

The clock in the vestibule struck nine as Robert opened the library door. Alicia had just descended the stairs with her maid; a rosy-faced country girl.

“Good-by, Robert,” said Miss Audley, holding out her hand to her cousin; “good-by, and God bless you! You may trust me to take care of papa.”

“I am sure I may. God bless you, my dear.”

For the second time that night Robert Audley pressed his lips to his cousin’s candid forehead, and for the second time the embrace was of a brotherly or paternal character, rather than the rapturous proceeding which it would have been had Sir Harry Towers been the privileged performer.

It was five minutes past nine when Sir Michael came down-stairs, followed by his valet, grave and gray-haired like himself. The baronet was pale, but calm and self-possessed. The hand which he gave to his nephew was as cold as ice, but it was with a steady voice that he bade the young man good-by.

“I leave all in your hands, Robert,” he said, as he turned to leave the house in which he had lived so long. “I may not have heard the end, but I have heard enough. Heaven knows I have no need to hear more. I leave all to you, but you will not be cruel–you will remember how much I loved–”

His voice broke huskily before he could finish the sentence.

“I will remember you in everything, sir,” the young man answered. “I will do everything for the best.”

A treacherous mist of tears blinded him and shut out his uncle’s face, and in another minute the carriage had driven away, and Robert Audley sat alone in the dark library, where only one red spark glowed among the pale gray ashes. He sat alone, trying to think what he ought to do, and with the awful responsibility of a wicked woman’s fate upon his shoulders.

“Good Heaven!” he thought; “surely this must be God’s judgment upon the purposeless, vacillating life I led up to the seventh day of last September. Surely this awful responsibility has been forced upon me in order that I may humble myself to an offended Providence, and confess that a man cannot choose his own life. He cannot say, ‘I will take existence lightly, and keep out of the way of the wretched, mistaken, energetic creatures, who fight so heartily in the great battle.’ He cannot say, ‘I will stop in the tents while the strife is fought, and laugh at the fools who are trampled down in the useless struggle.’ He cannot do this. He can only do, humbly and fearfully, that which the Maker who created him has appointed for him to do. If he has a battle to fight, let him fight it faithfully; but woe betide him if he skulks when his name is called in the mighty muster-roll, woe betide him if he hides in the tents when the tocsin summons him to the scene of war!”

One of the servants brought candles into the library and relighted the fire, but Robert Audley did not stir from his seat by the hearth. He sat as he had often sat in his chambers in Figtree Court, with his elbows resting upon the arms of his chair, and his chin upon his hand.

But he lifted his head as the servant was about to leave the room.

“Can I send a message from here to London?” he asked.

“It can be sent from Brentwood, sir–not from here.”

Mr. Audley looked at his watch thoughtfully.

“One of the men can ride over to Brentwood, sir, if you wish any message to be sent.”

“I do wish to send a message; will you manage it for me, Richards?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“You can wait, then, while I write the message.”

“Yes, sir.”

The man brought writing materials from one of the side-tables, and placed them before Mr. Audley.

Robert dipped a pen in the ink, and stared thoughtfully at one of the candles for a few moments before he began to write.

The message ran thus:

“From Robert Audley, of Audley Court, Essex, to Francis Wilmington, of Paper-buildings, Temple.

“DEAR WILMINGTON–If you know any physician experienced in cases of mania, and to be trusted with a secret, be so good as to send me his address by telegraph.”

Mr. Audley sealed this document in a stout envelope, and handed it to the man, with a sovereign.

“You will see that this is given to a trustworthy person, Richards,” he said, “and let the man wait at the station for the return message. He ought to get it in an hour and a half.”

Mr. Richards, who had known Robert Audley in jackets and turn-down collars, departed to execute his commission. Heaven forbid that we should follow him into the comfortable servants’ hall at the Court, where the household sat round the blazing fire, discussing in utter bewilderment the events of the day.

Nothing could be wider from the truth than the speculations of these worthy people. What clew had they to the mystery of that firelit room in which a guilty woman had knelt at their master’s feet to tell the story of her sinful life? They only knew that which Sir Michael’s valet had told them of this sudden journey. How his master was as pale as a sheet, and spoke in a strange voice that didn’t sound like his own, somehow, and how you might have knocked him–Mr. Parsons, the valet–down with a feather, if you had been minded to prostrate him by the aid of so feeble a weapon.

The wiseheads of the servants’ hall decided that Sir Michael had received sudden intelligence through Mr. Robert–they were wise enough to connect the young man with the catastrophe–either of the death of some near and dear relation–the elder servants decimated the Audley family in their endeavors to find a likely relation–or of some alarming fall in the funds, or of the failure of some speculation or bank in which the greater part of the baronet’s money was invested. The general leaning was toward the failure of a bank, and every member of the assembly seemed to take a dismal and raven-like delight in the fancy, though such a supposition involved their own ruin in the general destruction of that liberal household.

Robert sat by the dreary hearth, which seemed dreary even now when the blaze of a great wood-fire roared in the wide chimney, and listened to the low wail of the March wind moaning round the house and lifting the shivering ivy from the walls it sheltered. He was tired and worn out, for remember that he had been awakened from his sleep at two o’clock that morning by the hot breath of blazing timber and the sharp crackling of burning woodwork. But for his presence of mind and cool decision, Mr. Luke Marks would have died a dreadful death. He still bore the traces of the night’s peril, for the dark hair had been singed upon one side of his forehead, and his left hand was red and inflamed, from the effect of the scorching atmosphere out of which he had dragged the landlord of the Castle Inn. He was thoroughly exhausted with fatigue and excitement, and he fell into a heavy sleep in his easy-chair before the bright fire, from which he was only awakened by the entrance of Mr. Richards with the return message.

This return message was very brief.

“DEAR AUDLEY–Always glad to oblige. Alwyn Mosgrave, M.D., 12 Saville Row. Safe.”

This with names and addresses, was all that it contained.

“I shall want another message taken to Brentwood to-morrow morning, Richards,” said Mr. Audley, as he folded the telegram. “I should be glad if the man would ride over with it before breakfast. He shall have half a sovereign for his trouble.”

Mr. Richards bowed.

“Thank you, sir–not necessary, sir; but as you please, of course, sir,” he murmured. “At what hour might you wish the man to go?”

Mr. Audley might wish the man to go as early as he could, so it was decided that he should go at six.

“My room is ready, I suppose, Richards?” said Robert.

“Yes, sir–your old room.”

“Very good. I shall go to bed at once. Bring me a glass of brandy and water as hot as you can make it, and wait for the telegram.”

This second message was only a very earnest request to Doctor Mosgrave to pay an immediate visit to Audley Court on a matter of serious moment.

Having written this message, Mr. Audley felt that he had done all that he could do. He drank his brandy and water. He had actual need of the diluted alcohol, for he had been chilled to the bone by his adventures during the fire. He slowly sipped the pale golden liquid and thought of Clara Talboys, of that earnest girl whose brother’s memory was now avenged, whose brother’s destroyer was humiliated in the dust. Had she heard of the fire at the Castle Inn? How could she have done otherwise than hear of it in such a place as Mount Stanning? But had she heard that _he_ had been in danger, and that he had distinguished himself by the rescue of a drunken boor? I fear that, even sitting by that desolate hearth, and beneath the roof whose noble was an exile from his own house, Robert Audley was weak enough to think of these things–weak enough to let his fancy wander away to the dismal fir-trees under the cold March sky, and the dark-brown eyes that were so like the eyes of his lost friend.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

DR. MOSGRAVE’S ADVICE.

My lady slept. Through that long winter night she slept soundly. Criminals have often so slept their last sleep upon earth; and have been found in the gray morning slumbering peacefully, by the jailer who came to wake them.

The game had been played and lost. I do not think that my lady had thrown away a card, or missed the making of a trick which she might by any possibility have made; but her opponent’s hand had been too powerful for her, and he had won.

She looked upon herself as a species of state prisoner, who would have to be taken good care of. A second Iron Mask, who must be provided for in some comfortable place of confinement. She abandoned herself to a dull indifference. She had lived a hundred lives within the space of the last few days of her existence, and she had worn out her capacity for suffering–for a time at least.

She ate her breakfast, and took her morning bath, and emerged, with perfumed hair and in the most exquisitely careless of morning toilets, from her luxurious dressing-room. She looked at herself in the cheval-glass before she left the room. A long night’s rest had brought back the delicate rose-tints of her complexion, and the natural luster of her blue eyes. That unnatural light which had burned so fearfully the day before had gone, and my lady smiled triumphantly as she contemplated the reflection of her beauty. The days were gone in which her enemies could have branded her with white-hot irons, and burned away the loveliness which had done such mischief. Whatever they did to her they must leave her her beauty, she thought. At the worst, they were powerless to rob her of that.

The March day was bright and sunny, with a cheerless sunshine certainly. My lady wrapped herself in an Indian shawl; a shawl that had cost Sir Michael a hundred guineas. I think she had an idea that it would be well to wear this costly garment; so that if hustled suddenly away, she might carry at least one of her possessions with her. Remember how much she had periled for a fine house and gorgeous furniture, for carriages and horses, jewels and laces; and do not wonder if she clings with a desperate tenacity to gauds and gew-gaws, in the hour of her despair. If she had been Judas, she would have held to her thirty pieces of silver to the last moment of her shameful life.

Mr. Robert Audley breakfasted in the library. He sat long over his solitary cup of tea, smoking his meerschaum pipe, and meditating darkly upon the task that lay before him.

“I will appeal to the experience of this Dr. Mosgrave,” he though; “physicians and lawyers are the confessors of this prosaic nineteenth century. Surely, he will be able to help me.”

The first fast train from London arrived at Audley at half-past ten o’clock, and at five minutes before eleven, Richards, the grave servant, announced Dr. Alwyn Mosgrave.

The physician from Saville Row was a tall man of about fifty years of age. He was thin and sallow, with lantern jaws, and eyes of a pale, feeble gray, that seemed as if they had once been blue, and had faded by the progress of time to their present neutral shade. However powerful the science of medicine as wielded by Dr. Alwyn Mosgrave, it had not been strong enough to put flesh upon his bones, or brightness into his face. He had a strangely expressionless, and yet strangely attentive countenance. He had the face of a man who had spent the greater part of his life in listening to other people, and who had parted with his own individuality and his own passions at the very outset of his career.

He bowed to Robert Audley, took the opposite seat indicated by him, and addressed his attentive face to the young barrister. Robert saw that the physician’s glance for a moment lost its quiet look of attention, and became earnest and searching.

“He is wondering whether I am the patient,” thought Mr. Audley, “and is looking for the diagnoses of madness in my face.”

Dr. Mosgrave spoke as if in answer to this thought.

“Is it not about your own–health–that you wish to consult me?” he said, interrogatively.

“Oh, no!”

Dr. Mosgrave looked at his watch, a fifty-guinea Benson-made chronometer, which he carried loose in his waistcoat pocket as carelessly as if it had been a potato.

“I need not remind you that my time is precious,” he said; “your telegram informed me that my services were required in a case of–danger–as I apprehend, or I should not be here this morning.”

Robert Audley had sat looking gloomily at the fire, wondering how he should begin the conversation, and had needed this reminder of the physician’s presence.

“You are very good, Dr. Mosgrave,” he said, rousing himself by an effort, “and I thank you very much for having responded to my summons. I am about to appeal to you upon a subject which is more painful to me than words can describe. I am about to implore your advice in a most difficult case, and I trust almost blindly to your experience to rescue me, and others who are very dear to me, from a cruel and complicated position.”

The business-like attention in Dr. Mosgrave’s face grew into a look of interest as he listened to Robert Audley.

“The revelation made by the patient to the physician is, I believe, as sacred as the confession of a penitent to his priest?” Robert asked, gravely.

“Quite as sacred.”

“A solemn confidence, to be violated under no circumstances?”

“Most certainly.”

Robert Audley looked at the fire again. How much should he tell, or how little, of the dark history of his uncle’s second wife?

“I have been given to understand, Dr. Mosgrave, that you have devoted much of your attention to the treatment of insanity.”

“Yes, my practice is almost confined to the treatment of mental diseases.”

“Such being the case, I think I may venture to conclude that you sometimes receive strange, and even terrible, revelations.”

Dr. Mosgrave bowed.

He looked like a man who could have carried, safely locked in his passionless breast, the secrets of a nation, and who would have suffered no inconvenience from the weight of such a burden.

“The story which I am about to tell you is not my own story,” said Robert, after a pause; “you will forgive me, therefore, if I once more remind you that I can only reveal it upon the understanding that under no circumstances, or upon no apparent justification, is that confidence to be betrayed.”

Dr. Mosgrave bowed again. A little sternly, perhaps, this time.

“I am all attention, Mr. Audley,” he said coldly.

Robert Audley drew his chair nearer to that of the physician, and in a low voice began the story which my lady had told upon her knees in that same chamber upon the previous night. Dr. Mosgrave’s listening face, turned always toward the speaker, betrayed no surprise at that strange revelation. He smiled once, a grave, quiet smile, when Mr. Audley came to that part of the story which told of the conspiracy at Ventnor; but he was not surprised. Robert Audley ended his story at the point at which Sir Michael Audley had interrupted my lady’s confession. He told nothing of the disappearance of George Talboys, nor of the horrible suspicions that had grown out of that disappearance. He told nothing of the fire at the Castle Inn.

Dr. Mosgrave shook his head, gravely, when Mr. Audley came to the end of his story.

“You have nothing further to tell me?” he said.

“No. I do not think there is anything more that need be told,” Robert answered, rather evasively.

“You would wish to prove that this lady is mad, and therefore irresponsible for her actions, Mr. Audley?” said the physician.

Robert Audley stared, wondering at the mad doctor. By what process had he so rapidly arrived at the young man’s secret desire?

“Yes, I would rather, if possible, think her mad; I should be glad to find that excuse for her.”

“And to save the _esclandre_ of a Chancery suit, I suppose, Mr, Audley,” said Dr. Mosgrave.

Robert shuddered as he bowed an assent to this remark. It was something worse than a Chancery suit that he dreaded with a horrible fear. It was a trial for murder that had so long haunted his dreams. How often he had awoke, in an agony of shame, from a vision of a crowded court-house, and his uncle’s wife in a criminal dock, hemmed in on every side by a sea of eager faces.

“I fear that I shall not be of any use to you,” the physician said, quietly; “I will see the lady, if you please, but I do not believe that she is mad.”

“Why not?”

“Because there is no evidence of madness in anything she has done. She ran away from her home, because her home was not a pleasant one, and she left in the hope of finding a better. There is no madness in that. She committed the crime of bigamy, because by that crime she obtained fortune and position. There is no madness there. When she found herself in a desperate position, she did not grow desperate. She employed intelligent means, and she carried out a conspiracy which required coolness and deliberation in its execution. There is no madness in that.”

“But the traits of hereditary insanity–”

“May descend to the third generation, and appear in the lady’s children, if she have any. Madness is not necessarily transmitted from mother to daughter. I should be glad to help you, if I could, Mr. Audley, but I do not think there is any proof of insanity in the story you have told me. I do not think any jury in England would accept the plea of insanity in such a case as this. The best thing you can do with this lady is to send her back to her first husband; if he will have her.”

Robert started at this sudden mention of his friend.

“Her first husband is dead,” he answered, “at least, he has been missing for some time–and I have reason to believe that he is dead.”

Dr. Mosgrave saw the startled movement, and heard the embarrassment in Robert Audley’s voice as he spoke of George Talboys.

“The lady’s first husband is missing,” he said, with a strange emphasis on the word–“you think that he is dead?”

He paused for a few moments and looked at the fire, as Robert had looked before.

“Mr. Audley,” he said, presently, “there must be no half-confidences between us. You have not told me all.”

Robert, looking up suddenly, plainly expressed in his face the surprise he felt at these words.

“I should be very poorly able to meet the contingencies of my professional experience,” said Dr. Mosgrave, “if I could not perceive where confidence ends and reservation begins. You have only told me half this lady’s story, Mr. Audley. You must tell me more before I can offer you any advice. What has become of the first husband?”

He asked this question in a decisive tone, as if he knew it to be the key-stone of an arch.

“I have already told you, Dr. Mosgrave, that I do not know.”

“Yes,” answered the physician, “but your face has told me what you have withheld from me; it has told me that you _suspect_.”

Robert Audley was silent.

“If I am to be of use to you, you must trust me, Mr. Audley,” said the physician. “The first husband disappeared–how and when? I want to know the history of his disappearance.”

Robert paused for some time before he replied to this speech; but, by and by, he lifted his head, which had been bent in an attitude of earnest thought, and addressed the physician.

“I will trust you, Dr. Mosgrave,” he said. “I will confide entirely in your honor and goodness. I do not ask you to do any wrong to society; but I ask you to save our stainless name from degradation and shame, if you can do so conscientiously.”

He told the story of George’s disappearance, and of his own doubts and fears, Heaven knows how reluctantly.

Dr. Mosgrave listened as quietly as he had listened before. Robert concluded with an earnest appeal to the physician’s best feelings. He implored him to spare the generous old man whose fatal confidence in a wicked woman had brought much misery upon his declining years.

It was impossible to draw any conclusion, either favorable or otherwise, from Dr. Mosgrave’s attentive face. He rose, when Robert had finished speaking, and looked at his watch once more.

“I can only spare you twenty minutes,” he said. “I will see the lady, if you please. You say her mother died in a madhouse?”

“She did. Will you see Lady Audley alone?”

“Yes, alone, if you please.”

Robert rung for my lady’s maid, and under convoy of that smart young damsel the physician found his way to the octagon antechamber, and the fairy boudoir with which it communicated.

Ten minutes afterward, he returned to the library, in which Robert sat waiting for him.

“I have talked to the lady,” he said, quietly, “and we understand each other very well. There is latent insanity! Insanity which might never appear; or which might appear only once or twice in a lifetime. It would be a _dementia_ in its worst phase, perhaps; acute mania; but its duration would be very brief, and it would only arise under extreme mental pressure. The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence. I will tell you what she is, Mr. Audley. She is dangerous!”

Dr. Mosgrave walked up and down the room once or twice before he spoke again.

“I will not discuss the probabilities of the suspicion which distresses you, Mr. Audley,” he said, presently, “but I will tell you this much, I do not advise any _esclandre_. This Mr. George Talboys has disappeared, but you have no evidence of his death. If you could produce evidence of his death, you could produce no evidence against this lady, beyond the one fact that she had a powerful motive for getting rid of him. No jury in the United Kingdom would condemn her upon such evidence as that.”

Robert Audley interrupted Dr. Mosgrave, hastily.

“I assure you, my dear sir,” he said, “that my greatest fear is the necessity of any exposure–any disgrace.”

“Certainly, Mr. Audley,” answered the physician, coolly, “but you cannot expect me to assist you to condone one of the worst offenses against society. If I saw adequate reason for believing that a murder had been committed by this woman, I should refuse to assist you in smuggling her away out of the reach of justice, although the honor of a hundred noble families might be saved by my doing so. But I do not see adequate reason for your suspicions; and I will do my best to help you.”

Robert Audley grasped the physician’s hands in both his own.

“I will thank you when I am better able to do so,” he said, with emotion; “I will thank you in my uncle’s name as well as in my own.”

“I have only five minutes more, and I have a letter to write,” said Dr. Mosgrave, smiling at the young man’s energy.

He seated himself at a writing-table in the window, dipped his pen in the ink, and wrote rapidly for about seven minutes. He had filled three sides of a sheet of note-paper, when he threw down his pen and folded his letter.

He put this letter into an envelope, and delivered it, unsealed, to Robert Audley.

The address which it bore was:

“Monsieur Val,

“Villebrumeuse,

“Belgium.”

Mr. Audley looked rather doubtfully from this address to the doctor, who was putting on his gloves as deliberately as if his life had never known a more solemn purpose than the proper adjustment of them.

“That letter,” he said, in answer to Robert Audley’s inquiring look, “is written to my friend Monsieur Val, the proprietor and medical superintendent of a very excellent _maison de sante_ in the town of Villebrumeuse. We have known each other for many years, and he will no doubt willingly receive Lady Audley into his establishment, and charge himself with the full responsibility of her future life; it will not be a very eventful one!”

Robert Audley would have spoken, he would have once more expressed his gratitude for the help which had been given to him, but Dr. Mosgrave checked him with an authoritative gesture.

“From the moment in which Lady Audley enters that house,” he said, “her life, so far as life is made up of action and variety, will be finished. Whatever secrets she may have will be secrets forever! Whatever crimes she may have committed she will be able to commit no more. If you were to dig a grave for her in the nearest churchyard and bury her alive in it, you could not more safely shut her from the world and all worldly associations. But as a physiologist and as an honest man, I believe you could do no better service to society than by doing this; for physiology is a lie if the woman I saw ten minutes ago is a woman to be trusted at large. If she could have sprung at my throat and strangled me with her little hands, as I sat talking to her just now, she would have done it.”

“She suspected your purpose, then!”

“She knew it. ‘You think I am mad like my mother, and you have come to question me,’ she said. ‘You are watching for some sign of the dreadful taint in my blood.’ Good-day to you, Mr. Audley,” the physician added hurriedly, “my time was up ten minutes ago; it is as much as I shall do to catch the train.”

CHAPTER XXXVII.

BURIED ALIVE.

Robert Audley sat alone in the library with the physician’s letter upon the table before him, thinking of the work which was still to be done.

The young barrister had constituted himself the denouncer of this wretched woman. He had been her judge; and he was now her jailer. Not until he had delivered the letter which lay before him to its proper address, not until he had given up his charge into the safe-keeping of the foreign mad-house doctor, not until then would the dreadful burden be removed from him and his duty done.

He wrote a few lines to my lady, telling her that he was going to carry her away from Audley Court to a place from which she was not likely to return, and requesting her to lose no time in preparing for the journey. He wished to start that evening, if possible, he told her.

Miss Susan Martin, the lady’s maid, thought it a very hard thing to have to pack her mistress’ trunks in such a hurry, but my lady assisted in the task. She toiled resolutely in directing and assisting her servant, who scented bankruptcy and ruin in all this packing up and hurrying away, and was therefore rather languid and indifferent in the discharge of her duties; and at six o’clock in the evening she sent her attendant to tell Mr. Audley that she was ready to depart as soon as he pleased.

Robert had consulted a volume of Bradshaw, and had discovered that Villebrumeuse lay out of the track of all railway traffic, and was only approachable by diligence from Brussels. The mail for Dover left London Bridge at nine o’clock, and could be easily caught by Robert and his charge, as the seven o’clock up-train from Audley reached Shoreditch at a quarter past eight. Traveling by the Dover and Calais route, they would reach Villebrumeuse by the following afternoon or evening.

It was late in the afternoon of the next day when the diligence bumped and rattled over the uneven paving of the principal street in Villebrumeuse.

Robert Audley and my lady had had the _coupe_ of the diligence to themselves for the whole of the journey, for there were not many travelers between Brussels and Villebrumeuse, and the public conveyance was supported by the force of tradition rather than any great profit attaching to it as a speculation.

My lady had not spoken during the journey, except to decline some refreshments which Robert had offered her at a halting place upon the road. Her heart sunk when they left Brussels behind, for she had hoped that city might have been the end of her journey, and she had turned with a feeling of sickness and despair from the dull Belgian landscape.

She looked up at last as the vehicle jolted into a great stony quadrangle, which had been the approach to a monastery once, but which was now the court yard of a dismal hotel, in whose cellars legions of rats skirmished and squeaked even while the broad sunshine was bright in the chambers above.

Lady Audley shuddered as she alighted from the diligence, and found herself in that dreary court yard. Robert was surrounded by chattering porters, who clamored for his “baggages,” and disputed among themselves as to the hotel at which he was to rest. One of these men ran away to fetch a hackney-coach at Mr. Audley’s behest, and reappeared presently, urging on a pair of horses–which were so small as to suggest the idea that they had been made out of one ordinary-sized animal–with wild shrieks and whoops that had a demoniac sound in the darkness.

Mr. Audley left my lady in a dreary coffee-room in the care of a drowsy attendant while he drove away to some distant part of the quiet city. There was official business to be gone through before Sir Michael’s wife could be quietly put away in the place suggested by Dr. Mosgrave. Robert had to see all manner of important personages; and to take numerous oaths; and to exhibit the English physician’s letter; and to go through much ceremony of signing and countersigning before he could take his lost friend’s cruel wife to the home which was to be her last upon earth. Upward of two hours elapsed before all this was arranged, and the young man was free to return to the hotel, where he found his charge staring absently at a pair of wax-candles, with a cup of untasted coffee standing cold and stagnant before her.

Robert handed my lady into the hired vehicle, and took his seat opposite to her once more.

“Where are you going to take me?” she asked, at last. “I am tired of being treated like some naughty child, who is put into a dark cellar as a punishment for its offenses. Where are you taking me?”

“To a place in which you will have ample leisure to repent the past, Mrs. Talboys,” Robert answered, gravely.

They had left the paved streets behind them, and had emerged out of a great gaunt square, in which there appeared to be about half a dozen cathedrals, into a small boulevard, a broad lamp-lit road, on which the shadows of the leafless branches went and came tremblingly, like the shadows of a paralytic skeleton. There were houses here and there upon this boulevard; stately houses, _entre cour et jardin_, and with plaster vases of geraniums on the stone pillars of the ponderous gateways. The rumbling hackney-carriage drove upward of three-quarters of a mile along this smooth roadway before it drew up against a gateway, older and more ponderous than any of those they had passed.

My lady gave a little scream as she looked out of the coach-window. The gaunt gateway was lighted by an enormous lamp; a great structure of iron and glass, in which one poor little shivering flame struggled with the March wind.

The coachman rang the bell, and a little wooden door at the side of the gate was opened by a gray-haired man, who looked out at the carriage, and then retired. He reappeared three minutes afterward behind the folding iron gates, which he unlocked and threw back to their full extent, revealing a dreary desert of stone-paved courtyard.

The coachman led his wretched horses into the courtyard, and piloted the vehicle to the principal doorway of the house, a great mansion of gray stone, with several long ranges of windows, many of which were dimly lighted, and looked out like the pale eyes of weary watchers upon the darkness of the night.

My lady, watchful and quiet as the cold stars in the wintry sky, looked up at these casements with an earnest and scrutinizing gaze. One of the windows was shrouded by a scanty curtain of faded red; and upon this curtain there went and came a dark shadow, the shadow of a woman with a fantastic head dress, the shadow of a restless creature, who paced perpetually backward and forward before the window.

Sir Michael Audley’s wicked wife laid her hand suddenly upon Robert’s arm, and pointed with the other hand to this curtained window.

“I know where you have brought me,” she said. “This is a MAD-HOUSE.”

Mr. Audley did not answer her. He had been standing at the door of the coach when she addressed him, and he quietly assisted her to alight, and led her up a couple of shallow stone steps, and into the entrance-hall of the mansion. He handed Dr. Mosgrave’s letter to a neatly-dressed, cheerful-looking, middle-aged woman, who came tripping out of a little chamber which opened out of the hall, and was very much like the bureau of an hotel. This person smilingly welcome Robert and his charge: and after dispatching a servant with the letter, invited them into her pleasant little apartment, which was gayly furnished with bright amber curtains and heated by a tiny stove.

“Madam finds herself very much fatigued?” the Frenchwoman said, interrogatively, with a look of intense sympathy, as she placed an arm-chair for my lady.

“Madam” shrugged her shoulders wearily, and looked round the little chamber with a sharp glance of scrutiny that betokened no very great favor.

“WHAT is this place, Robert Audley?” she cried fiercely. “Do you think I am a baby, that you may juggle with and deceive me–what is it? It is what I said just now, is it not?”

“It is a _maison de sante_, my lady,” the young man answered, gravely. “I have no wish to juggle with or to deceive you.”

My lady paused for a few moments, looking reflectively at Robert.

“A _maison de sante_,” she repeated. “Yes, they manage these things better in France. In England we should call it a madhouse. This a house for mad people, this, is it not, madam?” she said in French, turning upon the woman, and tapping the polished floor with her foot.

“Ah, but no, madam,” the woman answered with a shrill scream of protest. “It is an establishment of the most agreeable, where one amuses one’s self–”

She was interrupted by the entrance of the principal of this agreeable establishment, who came beaming into the room with a radiant smile illuminating his countenance, and with Dr. Mosgrave’s letter open in his hand.

It was impossible to say _how_ enchanted he was to make the acquaintance of M’sieu. There was nothing upon earth which he was not ready to do for M’sieu in his own person, and nothing under heaven which he would not strive to accomplish for him, as the friend of his acquaintance, so very much distinguished, the English doctor. Dr. Mosgrave’s letter had given him a brief synopsis of the case, he informed Robert, in an undertone, and he was quite prepared to undertake the care of the charming and very interesting “Madam–Madam–”

He rubbed his hands politely, and looked at Robert. Mr. Audley remembered, for the first time, that he had been recommended to introduce his wretched charge under a feigned name.

He affected not to hear the proprietor’s question. It might seem a very easy matter to have hit upon a heap of names, any one of which would have answered his purpose; but Mr. Audley appeared suddenly to have forgotten that he had ever heard any mortal appellation except that of himself and of his lost friend.

Perhaps the proprietor perceived and understood his embarrassment. He at any rate relieved it by turning to the woman who had received them, and muttering something about No. 14, Bis. The woman took a key from a long range of others, that hung over the mantel-piece, and a wax candle from a bracket in a corner of the room, and having lighted the candle, led the way across the stone-paved hall, and up a broad, slippery staircase of polished wood.

The English physician had informed his Belgian colleague that money would be of minor consequence in any arrangements made for the comfort of the English lady who was to be committed to his care. Acting upon this hint, Monsieur Val opened the outer doer of a stately suite of apartments, which included a lobby, paved with alternate diamonds of black and white marble, but of a dismal and cellar-like darkness; a saloon furnished with gloomy velvet draperies, and with a certain funereal splendor which is not peculiarly conducive to the elevation of the spirits; and a bed-chamber, containing a bed so wondrously made, as to appear to have no opening whatever in its coverings, unless the counterpane had been split asunder with a pen-knife.

My lady stared dismally round at the range of rooms, which looked dreary enough in the wan light of a single wax-candle. This solitary flame, pale and ghost-like in itself, was multiplied by paler phantoms of its ghostliness, which glimmered everywhere about the rooms; in the shadowy depths of the polished floors and wainscot, or the window-panes, in the looking-glasses, or in those great expanses of glimmering something which adorned the rooms, and which my lady mistook for costly mirrors, but which were in reality wretched mockeries of burnished tin.

Amid all the faded splendor of shabby velvet, and tarnished gilding, and polished wood, the woman dropped into an arm-chair, and covered her face with her hands. The whiteness of them, and the starry light of diamonds trembling about them, glittered in the dimly-lighted chamber. She sat silent, motionless, despairing, sullen, and angry, while Robert and the French doctor retired to an outer chamber, and talked together in undertones. Mr. Audley had very little to say that had not been already said for him, with a far better grace than he himself could have expressed it, by the English physician. He had, after great trouble of mind, hit upon the name of Taylor, as a safe and simple substitute for that other name, to which alone my lady had a right. He told the Frenchman that this Mrs. Taylor was distantly related to him–that she had inherited the seeds of madness from her mother, as indeed Dr. Mosgrave had informed Monsieur Val; and that she had shown some fearful tokens of the lurking taint that was latent in her mind; but that she was not to be called “mad.” He begged that she might be treated with all tenderness and compassion; that she might receive all reasonable indulgences; but he impressed upon Monsieur Val, that under no circumstances was she to be permitted to leave the house and grounds without the protection of some reliable person, who should be answerable for her safe-keeping. He had only one other point to urge, and that was, that Monsieur Val, who, as he had understood, was himself a Protestant–the doctor bowed–would make arrangements with some kind and benevolent Protestant clergyman, through whom spiritual advice and consolation might be secured for the invalid lady; who had especial need, Robert added, gravely, of such advantages.

This–with all necessary arrangements as to pecuniary matters, which were to be settled from time to time between Mr. Audley and the doctor, unassisted by any agents whatever–was the extent of the conversation between the two men, and occupied about a quarter of an hour.

My lady sat in the same attitude when they re-entered the bedchamber in which they had left her, with her ringed hands still clasped over her face.

Robert bent over to whisper in her ear.

“Your name is Madam Taylor here,” he said. “I do not think you would wish to be known by your real name.”

She only shook her head in answer to him, and did not even remove her hands from over her face.

“Madam will have an attendant entirely devoted to her service.” said Monsieur Val. “Madam will have all her wishes obeyed; her _reasonable_ wishes, but that goes without saying,” monsieur adds, with a quaint shrug. “Every effort will be made to render madam’s sojourn at Villebrumeuse agreeable. The inmates dine together when it is wished. I dine with the inmates sometimes; my subordinate, a clever and a worthy man always. I reside with my wife and children in a little pavilion in the grounds; my subordinate resides in the establishment. Madam may rely upon our utmost efforts being exerted to insure her comfort.”

Monsieur is saying a great deal more to the same effect, rubbing his hands and beaming radiantly upon Robert and his charge, when madam rises suddenly, erect and furious, and dropping her jeweled fingers from before her face, tells him to hold his tongue.

“Leave me alone with the man who has brought me here.” she cried, between her set teeth. “Leave me!”

She points to the door with a sharp, imperious gesture; so rapid that the silken drapery about her arm makes a swooping sound as she lifts her hand. The sibilant French syllables hiss through her teeth as she utters them, and seem better fitted to her mood and to herself than the familiar English she has spoken hitherto.

The French doctor shrugs his shoulders as he goes out into the lobby, and mutters something about a “beautiful devil,” and a gesture worthy of “the Mars.” My lady walked with a rapid footstep to the door between the bed-chamber and the saloon; closed it, and with the handle of the door still in her hand, turned and looked at Robert Audley.

“You have brought me to my grave, Mr. Audley,” she cried; “you have used your power basely and cruelly, and have brought me to a living grave.”

“I have done that which I thought just to others and merciful to you,” Robert answered, quietly. “I should have been a traitor to society had I suffered you to remain at liberty after–the disappearance of George Talboys and the fire at Castle Inn. I have brought you to a place in which you will be kindly treated by people who have no knowledge of your story–no power to taunt or to reproach you. You will lead a quiet and peaceful life, my lady; such a life as many a good and holy woman in this Catholic country freely takes upon herself, and happily endures until the end. The solitude of your existence in this place will be no greater than that of a king’s daughter, who, flying from the evil of the time, was glad to take shelter in a house as tranquil as this. Surely, it is a small atonement which I ask you to render for your sins, a light penance which I call upon you to perform. Live here and repent; nobody will assail you, nobody will torment you. I only say to you, repent!”

“I _cannot!_” cried my lady, pushing her hair fiercely from her white forehead, and fixing her dilated eyes upon Robert Audley, “I _cannot!_ Has my beauty brought me to _this_? Have I plotted and schemed to shield myself and laid awake in the long deadly nights, trembling to think of my dangers, for _this_? I had better have given up at once, since _this_ was to be the end. I had better have yielded to the curse that was upon me, and given up when George Talboys first came back to England.”

She plucked at the feathery golden curls as if she would have torn them from her head. It had served her so little after all, that gloriously glittering hair, that beautiful nimbus of yellow light that had contrasted so exquisitely with the melting azure of her eyes. She hated herself and her beauty.

“I would laugh at you and defy you, if I dared,” she cried; “I would kill myself and defy you, if I dared. But I am a poor, pitiful coward, and have been so from the first. Afraid of my mother’s horrible inheritance; afraid of poverty; afraid of George Talboys; afraid of _you_.”

She was silent for a little while, but she held her place by the door, as if determined to detain Robert as long as it was her pleasure to do so.

“Do you know what I am thinking of?” she said, presently. “Do you know what I am thinking of, as I look at you in the dim light of this room? I am thinking of the day upon which George Talboys disappeared.”

Robert started as she mentioned the name of his lost friend; his face turned pale in the dusky light, and his breathing grew quicker and louder.

“He was standing opposite me, as you are standing now,” continued my lady. “You said that you would raze the old house to the ground; that you would root up every tree in the gardens to find your dead friend. You would have had no need to do so much: the body of George Talboys lies at the bottom of the old well, in the shrubbery beyond the lime-walk.”

Robert Audley flung his hands and clasped them above his head, with one loud cry of horror.

“Oh, my God!” he said, after a dreadful pause; “have all the ghastly things that I have thought prepared me so little for the ghastly truth, that it should come upon me like this at last?”

“He came to me in the lime-walk,” resumed my lady, in the same hard, dogged tone as that in which she had confessed the wicked story of her life. “I knew that he would come, and I had prepared myself, as well as I could, to meet him. I was determined to bribe him, to cajole him, to defy him; to do anything sooner than abandon the wealth and the position I had won, and go back to my old life. He came, and he reproached me for the conspiracy at Ventnor. He declared that so long as he lived he would never forgive me for the lie that had broken his heart. He told me that I had plucked his heart out of his breast and trampled upon it; and that he had now no heart in which to feel one sentiment of mercy for me. That he would have forgiven me any wrong upon earth, but that one deliberate and passionless wrong that I had done him. He said this and a great deal more, and he told me that no power on earth should turn him from his purpose, which was to take me to the man I had deceived, and make me tell my wicked story. He did not know the hidden taint that I had sucked in with my mother’s milk. He did not know that it was possible to drive me mad. He goaded me as you have goaded me; he was as merciless as you have been merciless. We were in the shrubbery at the end of the lime-walk. I was seated upon the broken masonry at the mouth of the well. George Talboys was leaning upon the disused windlass, in which the rusty iron spindle rattled loosely whenever he shifted his position. I rose at last, and turned upon him to defy him, as I had determined to defy him at the worst. I told him that if he denounced me to Sir Michael, I would declare him to be a madman or a liar, and I defied him to convince the man who loved me–blindly, as I told him–that he had any claim to me. I was going to leave him after having told him this, when he caught me by the wrist and detained me by force. You saw the bruises that his fingers made upon my wrist, and noticed them, and did not believe the account I gave of them. I could see that, Mr. Robert Audley, and I saw that you were a person I should have to fear.”

She paused, as if she had expected Robert to speak; but he stood silent and motionless, waiting for the end.

“George Talboys treated me as you treated me,” she said, petulantly. “He swore that if there was but one witness of my identity, and that witness was removed from Audley Court by the width of the whole earth, he would bring him there to swear to my identity, and to denounce me. It was then that I was mad, it was then that I drew the loose iron spindle from the shrunken wood, and saw my first husband sink with one horrible cry into the black mouth of the well. There is a legend of its enormous depth. I do not know how deep it is. It is dry, I suppose, for I heard no splash, only a dull thud. I looked down and I saw nothing but black emptiness. I knelt down and listened, but the cry was not repeated, though I waited for nearly a quarter of an hour–God knows how long it seemed to me!–by the mouth of the well.”

Robert Audley uttered a word of horror when the story was finished. He moved a little nearer toward the door against which Helen Talboys stood. Had there been any other means of exit from the room, he would gladly have availed himself of it. He shrank from even a momentary contact with this creature.

“Let me pass you, if you please,” he said, in an icy voice.

“You see I do not fear to make my confession to you,” said Helen Talboys; “for two reasons. The first is, that you dare not use it against me, because you know it would kill your uncle to see me in a criminal dock; the second is, that the law could pronounce no worse sentence than this–a life-long imprisonment in a mad-house. You see I do not thank you for your mercy, Mr. Robert Audley, for I know exactly what it is worth.”

She moved away from the door, and Robert passed her without a word, without a look.

Half an hour afterward he was in one of the principal hotels at Villebrumeuse, sitting at a neatly-ordered supper-table, with no power to eat; with no power to distract his mind, even for a moment, from the image of that lost friend who had been treacherously murdered in the thicket at Audley Court.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

GHOST-HAUNTED.

No feverish sleeper traveling in a strange dream ever looked out more wonderingly upon a world that seemed unreal than Robert Audley, as he stared absently at the flat swamps and dismal poplars between Villebrumeuse and Brussels. Could it be that he was returning to his uncle’s house without the woman who had reigned in it for nearly two years as queen and mistress? He felt as if he had carried off my lady, and had made away with her secretly and darkly, and must now render up an account to Sir Michael of the fate of that woman, whom the baronet had so dearly loved.

“What shall I tell him?” he thought. “Shall I tell the truth–the horrible, ghastly truth? No; that would be too cruel. His generous spirit would sink under the hideous revelation. Yet, in his ignorance of the extent of this wretched woman’s wickedness, he may think, perhaps, that I have been hard with her.”

Brooding thus, Mr. Robert Audley absently watched the cheerless landscape from the seat in the shabby _coupe_ of the diligence, and thought how great a leaf had been torn out of his life, now that the dark story of George Talboys was finished.

What had he to do next? A crowd of horrible thoughts rushed into his mind as he remembered the story that he had heard from the white lips of Helen Talboys. His friend–his murdered friend–lay hidden among the moldering ruins of the old well at Audley Court. He had lain there for six long months, unburied, unknown; hidden in the darkness of the old convent well. What was to be done?

To institute a search for the remains of the murdered man was to inevitably bring about a coroner’s inquest. Should such an inquest be held, it was next to impossible that the history of my lady’s crime could fail to be brought to light. To prove that George Talboys met with his death at Audley Court, was to prove almost as surely that my lady had been the instrument of that mysterious death; for the young man had been known to follow her into the lime-walk upon the day of his disappearance.

“My God!” Robert exclaimed, as the full horror of his position became evident to him; “is my friend to rest in this unhallowed burial-place because I have condoned the offenses of the woman who murdered him?”

He felt that there was no way out of this difficulty. Sometimes he thought that it little mattered to his dead friend whether he lay entombed beneath a marble monument, whose workmanship should be the wonder of the universe, or in that obscure hiding-place in the thicket at Audley Court. At another time he would be seized with a sudden horror at the wrong that had been done to the murdered man, and would fain have traveled even more rapidly than the express between Brussels and Paris could carry him in his eagerness to reach the end of his journey, that he might set right this cruel wrong.

He was in London at dusk on the second day after that on which he had left Audley Court, and he drove straight to the Clarendon, to inquire after his uncle. He had no intention of seeing Sir Michael, as he had not yet determined how much or how little he should tell him, but he was very anxious to ascertain how the old man had sustained the cruel shock he had so lately endured.

“I will see Alicia,” he thought, “she will tell me all about her father. It is only two days since he left Audley. I can scarcely expect to hear of any favorable change.”

But Mr. Audley was not destined to see his cousin that evening, for the servants at the Clarendon told him that Sir Michael and his daughter had left by the morning mail for Paris, on their way to Vienna.

Robert was very well pleased to receive this intelligence; it afforded him a welcome respite, for it would be decidedly better to tell the baronet nothing of his guilty wife until he returned to England, with health unimpaired and spirits re-established, it was to be hoped.

Mr. Audley drove to the Temple. The chambers which had seemed dreary to him ever since the disappearance of George Talboys, were doubly so to-night. For that which had been only a dark suspicion had now become a horrible certainty. There was no longer room for the palest ray, the most transitory glimmer of hope. His worst terrors had been too well founded.

George Talboys had been cruelly and treacherously murdered by the wife he had loved and mourned.

There were three letters waiting for Mr. Audley at his chambers. One was from Sir Michael, and another from Alicia. The third was addressed in a hand the young barrister knew only too well, though he had seen it but once before. His face flushed redly at the sight of the superscription, and he took the letter in his hand, carefully and tenderly, as if it had been a living thing, and sentient to his touch. He turned it over and over in his hands, looking at the crest upon the envelope, at the post-mark, at the color of the paper, and then put it into the bosom of his waistcoat with a strange smile upon his face.

“What a wretched and unconscionable fool I am!” he thought. “Have I laughed at the follies of weak men all my life, and am I to be more foolish than the weakest of them at last? The beautiful brown-eyed creature! Why did I ever see her? Why did my relentless Nemesis ever point the way to that dreary house in Dorsetshire?”

He opened the first two letters. He was foolish enough to keep the last for a delicious morsel–a fairy-like dessert after the commonplace substantialities of a dinner.

Alicia’s letter told him that Sir Michael had borne his agony with such a persevering tranquility that she had become at last far more alarmed by his patient calmness than by any stormy manifestation of despair. In this difficulty she had secretly called upon the physician who attended the Audley household in any cases of serious illness, and had requested this gentleman to pay Sir Michael an apparently accidental visit. He had done so, and after stopping half an hour with the baronet, had told Alicia that there was no present danger of any serious consequence from this great grief, but that it was necessary that every effort should be made to arouse Sir Michael, and to force him, however unwillingly, into action.

Alicia had immediately acted upon this advice, had resumed her old empire as a spoiled child, and reminded her father of a promise he had made of taking her through Germany. With considerable difficulty she had induced him to consent to fulfilling this old promise, and having once gained her point, she had contrived that they should leave England as soon as it was possible to do so, and she told Robert, in conclusion, that she would not bring her father back to his old house until she had taught him to forget the sorrows associated with it.

The baronet’s letter was very brief. It contained half a dozen blank checks on Sir Michael Audley’s London bankers.

“You will require money, my dear Robert,” he wrote, “for such arrangements as you may think fit to make for the future comfort of the person I committed to your care. I need scarcely tell you that those arrangements cannot be too liberal. But perhaps it is as well that I should tell you now, for the first and only time, that it is my earnest wish never again to hear that person’s name. I have no wish to be told the nature of the arrangements you may make for her. I am sure that you will act conscientiously and mercifully. I seek to know no more. Whenever you want money, you will draw upon me for any sums that you may require; but you will have no occasion to tell me for whose use you want that money.”

Robert Audley breathed a long sigh of relief as he folded this letter. It released him from a duty which it would have been most painful for him to perform, and it forever decided his course of action with regard to the murdered man.

George Talboys must lie at peace in his unknown grave, and Sir Michael Audley must never learn that the woman he had loved bore the red brand of murder on her soul.

Robert had only the third letter to open–the letter which he had placed in his bosom while he read the others; he tore open the envelope, handling it carefully and tenderly as he had done before.

The letter was as brief as Sir Michael’s. It contained only these few lines:

“DEAR MR. AUDLEY–The rector of this place has been twice to see Marks, the man you saved in the fire at the Castle Inn. He lies in a very precarious state at his mother’s cottage, near Audley Court, and is not expected to live many days. His wife is attending him, and both he and she have expressed a most earnest desire that you should see him before he dies. Pray come without delay.

“Yours very sincerely,

“CLARA TALBOYS.

“Mount Stanning Rectory, March 6.”

Robert Audley folded this letter very reverently, and placed it underneath that part of his waistcoat which might be supposed to cover the region of his heart. Having done this, he seated himself in his favorite arm-chair, filled and lighted a pipe and smoked it out, staring reflectingly at the fire as long as his tobacco lasted. “What can that man Marks want with me,” thought the barrister. “He is afraid to die until he has made confession, perhaps. He wishes to tell me that which I know already–the story of my lady’s crime. I knew that he was in the secret. I was sure of it even upon the night on which I first saw him. He knew the secret, and he traded on it.”

Robert Audley shrank strangely from returning to Essex. How should he meet Clara Talboys now that he knew the secret of her brother’s fate? How many lies he should have to tell, or how much equivocation he must use in order to keep the truth from her? Yet would there be any mercy in telling that horrible story, the knowledge of which must cast a blight upon her youth, and blot out every hope she had even secretly cherished? He knew by his own experience how possible it was to hope against hope, and to hope unconsciously; and he could not bear that her heart should be crushed as his had been by the knowledge of the truth. “Better that she should hope vainly to the last,” he thought; “better that she should go through life seeking the clew to her lost brother’s fate, than that I should give that clew into her hands, and say, ‘Our worst fears are realized. The brother you loved has been foully murdered in the early promise of his youth.'”

But Clara Talboys had written to him, imploring him to return to Essex without delay. Could he refuse to do her bidding, however painful its accomplishment might be? And again, the man was dying, perhaps, and had implored to see him. Would it not be cruel to refuse to go–to delay an hour unnecessarily? He looked at his watch. It wanted only five minutes to nine. There was no train to Audley after the Ipswich mail, which left London at half-past eight; but there was a train that left Shoreditch at eleven, and stopped at Brentwood between twelve and one. Robert decided upon going by this train, and walking the distance between Brentwood and Audley, which was upwards of six miles.

He had a long time to wait before it would be necessary to leave the Temple on his way to Shoreditch, and he sat brooding darkly over the fire and wondering at the strange events which had filled his life within the last year and a half, coming like angry shadows between his lazy inclinations and himself, and investing him with purposes that were not his own.

“Good Heaven!” he thought, as he smoked his second pipe; “how can I believe that it was I who used to lounge all day in this easy-chair reading Paul de Kock, and smoking mild Turkish; who used to drop in at half price to stand among the pressmen at the back of the boxes and see a new burlesque and finish the evening with the ‘Chough and Crow,’ and chops and pale ale at ‘Evans’. Was it I to whom life was such an easy merry-go-round? Was it I who was one of the boys who sit at ease upon the wooden horses, while other boys run barefoot in the mud and work their hardest in the hope of a ride when their work is done? Heaven knows I have learned the business of life since then: and now I must needs fall in love and swell the tragic chorus which is always being sung by the poor addition of my pitiful sighs and, groans. Clara Talboys! Clara Talboys! Is there any merciful smile latent beneath the earnest light of your brown eyes? What would you say to me if I told you that I love you as earnestly and truly as I have mourned for your brother’s fate–that the new strength and purpose of my life, which has grown out of my friendship for the murdered man, grows even stronger as it turns to you, and changes me until I wonder at myself? What would she say to me? Ah! Heaven knows. If she happened to like the color of my hair or the tone of my voice, she might listen to me, perhaps. But would she hear me any more because I love her truly, and purely; because I would be constant and honest and faithful to her? Not she! These things might move her, perhaps to be a little pitiful to me; but they would move her no more! If a girl with freckles and white eylashes adored me, I should only think her a nuisance; but if Clara Talboys had a fancy to trample upon my uncouth person, I should think she did me a favor. I hope poor little Alicia may pick up with some fair-haired Saxon in the course of her travels. I hope–” His thoughts wandered away wearily and lost themselves. How could he hope for anything or think of anything, while the memory of his dead friend’s unburied body haunted him like a horrible specter? He remembered a story–a morbid, hideous, yet delicious story, which had once pleasantly congealed his blood on a social winter’s evening–the story of a man, monomaniac, perhaps, who had been haunted at every turn by the image of an unburied kinsman who could not rest in his unhallowed hiding-place. What if that dreadful story had its double in reality? What if he were henceforth to be haunted by the phantom of murdered George Talboys?

He pushed his hair away from his face with both hands, and looked rather nervously around the snug little apartment. There were lurking shadows in the corners of the room that he scarcely liked. The door opening into his little dressing-room was ajar; he got up to shut it, and turned the key in the lock with a sharp click.

“I haven’t read Alexander Dumas and Wilkie Collins for nothing,” he muttered. “I’m up to their tricks, sneaking in at doors behind a fellow’s back, and flattening their white faces against window panes, and making themselves all eyes in the twilight. It’s a strange thing that your generous hearted fellow, who never did a shabby thing in his life, is capable of any meanness the moment he becomes a ghost. I’ll have the gas laid on to-morrow and I’ll engage Mrs. Maloney’s eldest son to sleep under the letter-box in the lobby. The youth plays popular melodies upon a piece of tissue paper and a small-tooth comb, and it will be quite pleasant company.”

Mr. Audley walked wearily up and down the room, trying to get rid of the time. It was no use leaving the Temple until ten o’clock, and even then he would be sure to reach the station half an hour too early. He was tired of smoking. The soothing narcotic influence might be pleasant enough in itself, but the man must be of a singularly unsocial disposition who does not, after a half dozen lonely pipes, feel the need of some friendly companion, at whom he can stare dreamily athwart the pale gray mists, and who will stare kindly back at him in return. Do not think that Robert Audley was without friends, because he so often found himself alone in his chambers. The solemn purpose which had taken so powerful a hold upon his careless life had separated him from old associations, and it was for this reason that he was alone.

He had dropped away from his old friends. How could he sit among them, at social wine parties, perhaps, or at social little dinners, that were washed down with nonpareil and chambertin, pomard and champagne? How could he sit among them, listening to their careless talk of politics and opera, literature and racing, theaters and science, scandal and theology, and yet carry in his mind the horrible burden of those dark terrors and suspicions that were with him by day and by night? He could not do it! He had shrunk from those men as if he had, indeed, been a detective police officer, stained with vile associations and unfit company for honest gentlemen. He had drawn himself away from all familiar haunts, and shut himself in his lonely rooms with the perpetual trouble of his mind for his sole companion, until he had grown as nervous as habitual solitude will eventually make the strongest and the wisest man, however he may vaunt himself of his strength and wisdom.

The clock of the Temple Church, and the clocks of St. Dunstan’s, St. Clement’s Danes, and a crowd of other churches, whose steeples uprear themselves above the house tops by the river, struck ten at last, and Mr. Audley, who had put on his hat and overcoat nearly half an hour before, let himself out of the little lobby, and locked his door behind him. He mentally reiterated his determination to engage “Parthrick,” as Mrs. Maloney’s eldest son was called by his devoted mother. The youth should enter upon his functions the very night after, and if the ghost of the hapless George Talboys should invade these gloomy apartments, the phantom must make its way across Patrick’s body before it could reach the inner chamber in which the proprietor of the premises slept.

Do not laugh at poor George because he grew hypochondriacal after hearing the horrible story of his friend’s death. There is nothing so delicate, so fragile, as that invisible balance upon which the mind is always trembling. “Mad to-day and sane to-morrow.”

Who can forget that almost terrible picture of Dr. Samuel Johnson? The awful disputant of the club-room, solemn, ponderous, severe and merciless, the admiration and the terror of humble Bozzy, the stern monitor of gentle Oliver, the friend of Garrick and Reynolds to-night; and before to-morrow sunset a weak, miserable old man, discovered by good Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, kneeling upon the floor of his lonely chamber, in an agony of childish terror and confusion, and praying to a merciful God for the preservation of his wits. I think the memory of that dreadful afternoon, and of the tender care he then received, should have taught the doctor to keep his hand steady at Streatham, when he took his bedroom candlestick, from which it was his habit to shower rivulets of molten wax upon the costly carpet of his beautiful protectress; and might have even had a more enduring effect, and taught him to be merciful, when the brewer’s widow went mad in her turn, and married that dreadful creature, the Italian singer. Who has not been, or in not to be mad in some lonely hour of life? Who is quite safe from the trembling of the balance?

Fleet street was quiet and lonely at this late hour, and Robert Audley being in a ghost-seeing mood, would have been scarcely astonished had he seen Johnson’s set come roystering westward in the lamp-light, or blind John Milton groping his way down the steps before Saint Bride’s Church.

Mr. Audley hailed a hansom at the corner of Farrington street, and was rattled rapidly away across tenantless Smithfield market, and into a labyrinth of dingy streets that brought him out upon the broad grandeur of Finsbury Pavement.

The hansom rattled up the steep and stony approach to Shoreditch Station, and deposited Robert at the doors of that unlovely temple. There were very few people going to travel by this midnight train, and Robert walked up and down the long wooden platform, reading the huge advertisements whose gaunt lettering looked wan and ghastly in the dim lamplight.

He had the carriage in which he sat all to himself. All to himself did I say? Had he not lately summoned to his side that ghostly company which of all companionship is the most tenacious? The shadow of George Talboys pursued him, even in the comfortable first-class carriage, and was behind him when he looked out of the window, and was yet far ahead of him and the rushing engine, in that thicket toward which the train was speeding, by the side of the unhallowed hiding-place in which the mortal remains of the dead man lay, neglected and uncared for.

“I must give my lost friend decent burial,” Robert thought, as the chill wind swept across the flat landscape, and struck him with such frozen breath as might have emanated from the lips of the dead. “I must do it; or I shall die of some panic like this which has seized upon me to-night. I must do it; at any peril; at any cost. Even at the price of that revelation which will bring the mad woman back from her safe hiding-place, and place her in a criminal dock.” He was glad when the train stopped at Brentwood at a few minutes after twelve.

It was half-past one o’clock when the night wanderer entered the village of Audley, and it was only there that he remembered that Clara Talboys had omitted to give him any direction by which he might find the cottage in which Luke Marks lay.

“It was Dawson who recommended that the poor creature should be taken to his mother’s cottage,” Robert thought, by-and-by, “and, I dare say. Dawson has attended him ever since the fire. He’ll be able to tell me the way to the cottage.”

Acting upon this idea, Mr. Audley stopped at the house in which Helen Talboys had lived before her second marriage. The door of the little surgery was ajar, and there was a light burning within. Robert pushed the door open and peeped in. The surgeon was standing at the mahogany counter, mixing a draught in a glass measure, with his hat close beside him. Late as it was, he had evidently only just come in. The harmonious snoring of his assistant sounded from a little room within the surgery.

“I am sorry to disturb you, Mr. Dawson,” Robert said, apologetically, as the surgeon looked up and recognized him, “but I have come down to see Marks, who, I hear, is in a very bad way, and I want you to tell me the way to his mother’s cottage.”

“I’ll show you the way, Mr. Audley,” answered the surgeon, “I am going there this minute.”

“The man is very bad, then?”

“So bad that he can be no worse. The change that can happen is that change which will take him beyond the reach of any earthly suffering.”

“Strange!” exclaimed Robert. “He did not appear to be much burned.”

“He was not much burnt. Had he been, I should never have recommended his being removed from Mount Stanning. It is the shock that has done the business. He has been in a raging fever for the last two days; but to-night he is much calmer, and I’m afraid, before to-morrow night, we shall have seen the last of him.”

“He has asked to see me, I am told,” said Mr. Audley.

“Yes,” answered the surgeon, carelessly. “A sick man’s fancy, no doubt. You dragged him out of the house, and did your best to save his life. I dare say, rough and boorish as the poor fellow is, he thinks a good deal of that.”

They had left the surgery, the door of which Mr. Dawson had locked behind him. There was money in the till, perhaps, for surely the village apothecary could not have feared that the most daring housebreaker would imperil his liberty in the pursuit of blue pill and colocynth, of salts and senna.

The surgeon led the way along the silent street, and presently turned into a lane at the end of which Robert Audley saw the wan glimmer of a light; a light which told of the watch that is kept by the sick and dying; a pale, melancholy light, which always has a dismal aspect when looked upon in this silent hour betwixt night and morning. It shone from the window of the cottage in which Luke Marks lay, watched by his wife and mother.

Mr. Dawson lifted the latch, and walked into the common room of the little tenement, followed by Robert Audley. It was empty, but a feeble tallow candle, with a broken back, and a long, cauliflower-headed wick, sputtered upon the table. The sick man lay in the room above.

“Shall I tell him you are here?” asked Mr. Dawson.

“Yes, yes, if you please. But be cautious how you tell him, if you think the news likely to agitate him. I am in no hurry. I can wait. You can call me when you think I can safely come up-stairs.”

The surgeon nodded, and softly ascended the narrow wooden stairs leading to the upper chamber.

Robert Audley seated himself in a Windsor chair by the cold hearth-stone, and stared disconsolately about him. But he was relieved at last by the low voice of the surgeon, who looked down from the top of the little staircase to tell him that Luke Marks was awake, and would be glad to see him.

Robert immediately obeyed this summons. He crept softly up the stairs, and took off his hat before he bent his head to enter at the low doorway of the humble rustic chamber. He took off his hat in the presence of this common peasant man, because he knew that there was another and a more awful presence hovering about the room, and eager to be admitted.

Phoebe Marks was sitting at the foot of the bed, with her eyes fixed upon her husband’s face–not with any very tender expression in the pale light, but with a sharp, terrified anxiety, which showed that it was the coming of death itself that she dreaded, rather than the loss of her husband. The old woman was busy at the fire-place, airing linen, and preparing some mess of broth which it was not likely the patient would ever eat. The sick man lay with his head propped up by pillows, his coarse face deadly pale, and his great hands wandering uneasily about the coverlet. Phoebe had been reading to him, for an open Testament lay among the medicine and lotion bottles upon the table near the bed. Every object in the room was neat and orderly, and bore witness of that delicate precision which had always been a distinguishing characteristic of Phoebe.

The young woman rose as Robert Audley crossed the threshold, and hurried toward him.

“Let me speak to you for a moment, sir, before you talk to Luke,” she said, in an eager whisper. “Pray let me speak to you first.”

“What’s the gal a-sayin’, there?” asked the invalid in a subdued roar, which died away hoarsely on his lips. He was feebly savage, even in his weakness. The dull glaze of death was gathering over his eyes, but they still watched Phoebe with a sharp glance of dissatisfaction. “What’s she up to there?” he said. “I won’t have no plottin’ and no hatchin’ agen me. I want to speak to Mr. Audley my own self; and whatever I done I’m goin’ to answer for. If I done any mischief, I’m a-goin’ to try and undo it. What’s she a-sayin’?”

“She ain’t a-sayin’ nothin’, lovey,” answered the old woman, going to the bedside of her son, who even when made more interesting than usual by illness, did not seem a very fit subject for this tender appellation.

“She’s only a-tellin’ the gentleman how bad you’ve been, my pretty.”

“What I’m a-goin’ to tell I’m only a-goin’ to tell to him, remember,” growled Mr. Mark; “and ketch me a-tellin’ of it to him if it warn’t for what he done for me the other night.”

“To be sure not, lovey,” answered the old woman soothingly.

Phoebe Marks had drawn Mr. Audley out of the room and onto the narrow landing at the top of the little staircase. This landing was a platform of about three feet square, and it was as much as the two could manage to stand upon it without pushing each other against the whitewashed wall, or backward down the stairs.

“Oh, sir, I wanted to speak to you so badly,” Phoebe answered, eagerly; “you know what I told you when I found you safe and well upon the night of the fire?”

“Yes, yes.”

“I told you what I suspected; what I think still.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“But I never breathed a word of it to anybody but you, sir, and I think that Luke has forgotten all about that night; I think that what went before the fire has gone clean out of his head altogether. He was tipsy, you know, when my la–when she came to the Castle; and I think he was so dazed and scared like by the fire that it all went out of his memory. He doesn’t suspect what I suspect, at any rate, or he’d have spoken of it to anybody or everybody; but he’s dreadful spiteful against my lady, for he says if she’d have let him have a place at Brentwood or Chelmsford, this wouldn’t have happened. So what I wanted to beg of you, sir, is not to let a word drop before Luke.”

“Yes, yes, I understand; I will be careful.”

“My lady has left the Court, I hear, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Never to come back, sir?”

“Never to come back.”

“But she has not gone where she’ll be cruelly treated; where she’ll be ill-used?”

“No: she will be very kindly treated.”

“I’m glad of that, sir; I beg your pardon for troubling you with the question, sir, but my lady was a kind mistress to me.”

Luke’s voice, husky and feeble, was heard within the little chamber at this period of the conversation, demanding angrily when “that gal would have done jawing;” upon which Phoebe put her finger to her lips, and led Mr. Audley back into the sick-room.

“I don’t want _you_” said Mr. Marks, decisively, as his wife re-entered the chamber–“I don’t want _you_; you’ve no call to hear what I’ve got to say–I only want Mr. Audley, and I wants to speak to him all alone, with none o’ your sneakin’ listenin’ at doors, d’ye hear? so you may go down-stairs and keep there till you’re wanted; and you may take mother–no, mother may stay, I shall want her presently.”

The sick man’s feeble hand pointed to the door, through which his wife departed very submissively.

“I’ve no wish to hear anything, Luke,” she said, “but I hope you won’t say anything against those that have been good and generous to you.”

“I shall say what I like,” answered Mr. Marks, fiercely, “and I’m not a-goin’ to be ordered by you. You ain’t the parson, as I’ve ever heerd of; nor the lawyer neither.”

The landlord of the Castle Inn had undergone no moral transformation by his death-bed sufferings, fierce and rapid as they had been. Perhaps some faint glimmer of a light that had been far off from his life now struggled feebly through the black obscurities of ignorance that darkened his soul. Perhaps a half angry, half sullen penitence urged him to make some rugged effort to atone for a life that had been selfish and drunken and wicked. Be it how it might he wiped his white lips, and turning his haggard eyes earnestly upon Robert Audley, pointed to a chair by the bedside.

“You made game of me in a general way, Mr. Audley,” he said, presently, “and you’ve drawed me out, and you’ve tumbled and tossed me about like in a gentlemanly way, till I was nothink or anythink in your hands; and you’ve looked me through and through, and turned me inside out till you thought you knowed as much as I knowed. I’d no particular call to be grateful to you, not before the fire at the Castle t’other night. But I am grateful to you for that. I’m not grateful to folks in a general way, p’r’aps, because the things as gentlefolks have give have a’most allus been the very things I didn’t want. They’ve give me soup, and tracks, and flannel, and coals; but, Lord, they’ve made such a precious noise about it that I’d have been to send ’em all back to ’em. But when a gentleman goes and puts his own life in danger to save a drunken brute like me, the drunkenest brute as ever was feels grateful like to that gentleman, and wishes to say before he dies–which he sees in the doctor’s face as he ain’t got long to live–‘Thank ye, sir, I’m obliged to you.”

Luke Marks stretched out his left hand–the right hand had been injured by the fire, and was wrapped in linen–and groped feebly for that of Mr. Robert Audley.

The young man took the coarse but shrunken hand in both his own, and pressed it cordially.

“I need no thanks, Luke Marks,” he said; “I was very glad to be of service to you.”

Mr. Marks did not speak immediately. He was lying quietly upon his side, staring reflectingly at Robert Audley.

“You was oncommon fond of that gent as disappeared at the Court, warn’t you, sir?” he said at last.

Robert started at the mention of his dead friend.

“You was oncommon fond of that Mr. Talboys, I’ve heard say, sir,” repeated Luke.

“Yes, yes,” answered Robert, rather impatiently, “he was my very dear friend.”

“I’ve heard the servants at the Court say how you took on when you couldn’t find him. I’ve heered the landlord of the Sun Inn say how cut up you was when you first missed him. ‘If the two gents had been brothers,’ the landlord said, ‘our gent,’ meanin’ you, sir, ‘couldn’t have been more cut up when he missed the other.'”

“Yes, yes, I know, I know,” said Robert; “pray do not speak any more of this subject. I cannot tell you now much it distresses me.”

Was he to be haunted forever by the ghost of his unburied friend? He came here to comfort the sick man, and even here he was pursued by this relentless shadow; even here he was reminded of the secret crime which had darkened his life.

“Listen to me, Marks,” he said, earnestly; “believe me that I appreciate your grateful words, and that I am very glad to have been of service to you. But before you say anything more, let me make one most solemn request. If you have sent for me that you may tell me anything of the fate of my lost friend, I entreat you to spare yourself and to spare me that horrible story. You can tell me nothing which I do not already know. The worst you can tell me of the woman who was once in your power, has already been revealed to me by her own lips. Pray, then, be silent upon this subject; I say again, you can tell me nothing which I do not know.”

Luke Marks looked musingly at the earnest face of his visitor, and some shadowy expression, which was almost like a smile, flitted feebly across the sick man’s haggard features.

“I can’t tell you nothin’ you don’t know?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then it ain’t no good for me to try,” said the invalid, thoughtfully. “Did _she_ tell you?” he asked, after a pause.

“I must beg, Marks, that you will drop the subject,” Robert answered, almost sternly. “I have already told you that I do not wish to hear it spoken of. Whatever discoveries you made, you made your market out of them. Whatever guilty secrets you got possession of, you were paid for keeping silence. You had better keep silence to the end.”

“Had I?” cried Luke Marks, in an eager whisper. “Had I really now better hold my tongue to the last?”

“I think so, most decidedly. You traded on your secret, and you were paid to keep it. It would be more honest to hold to your bargain, and keep it still.”

“But, suppose I want to tell something,” cried Luke, with feverish energy, “suppose I feel I can’t die with a secret on my mind, and have asked to see you on purpose that I might tell you; suppose that, and you’ll suppose nothing but the truth. I’d have been burnt alive before I’d have told _her_.” He spoke these words between his set teeth, and scowled savagely as he uttered them. “I’d have been burnt alive first. I made her pay for her pretty insolent ways; I made her pay for her airs and graces; I’d never have told her–never, never! I had my power over her, and I kept it; I had my secret and was paid for it; and there wasn’t a petty slight as she ever put upon me or mine that I didn’t pay her out for twenty times over!”

“Marks, Marks, for Heaven’s sake be calm” said Robert, earnestly. “What are you talking of? What is it that you could have told?”

“I’m a-goin to tell you,” answered Luke, wiping his lips. “Give us a drink, mother.”

The old woman poured out some cooling drink into a mug, and carried it to her son.

He drank it in an eager hurry, as if he felt that the brief remainder of his life must be a race with the pitiless pedestrian, Time.

“Stop where you are,” he said to his mother, pointing to a chair at the foot of the bed.

The old woman obeyed, and seated herself meekly opposite to Mr. Audley.

“I’ll ask you another question, mother,” said Luke, “and I think it’ll be strange if you can’t answer it. Do you remember when I was at work upon Atkinson’s farm; before I was married you know, and when I was livin’ down here along of you?”

“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Marks answered, nodding triumphantly, “I remember that, my dear. It were last fall, just about as the apples was bein’ gathered in the orchard across our lane, and about the time as you had your new sprigged wesket. I remember, Luke, I remember.”

Mr. Audley wondered where all this was to lead to, and how long he would have to sit by the sick man’s bed, hearing a conversation that had no