Mr. Audley

“ 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." ”

“ The woman rose suddenly and stood before him erect and resolute, with her hair dashed away from her face and her eyes glittering.
"Bring Sir Michael!" she cried; "bring him here, and I will confess anything—everything. What do I care? God knows I have struggled hard enough against you, and fought the battle patiently enough; but you have conquered, Mr. Robert Audley. It is a great triumph, is it not—a wonderful victory? You have used your cool, calculating, frigid, luminous intellect to a noble purpose. You have conquered—a MAD WOMAN!" ”

“ My lady shrugged her graceful shoulders, and flashed bright defiance out of her blue eyes.
"She would be a very foolish woman if she suffered herself to be influenced by any such absurdity," she said. "You are hypochondriacal, Mr. Audley, and you must take camphor, or red lavender, or sal volatile. What can be more ridiculous than this idea which you have taken into your head? You lose your friend George Talboys in rather a mysterious manner—that is to say, that gentleman chooses to leave England without giving you due notice. ”

“ Shall we go as man and wife? Shall we go together, my dear love, and bring our brother back between us?"
Mr. Harcourt Talboys, coming into the lamplit room a quarter of an hour afterward, found Robert Audley alone, and had to listen to a revelation which very much surprised him. Like all self-sufficient people, he was tolerably blind to everything that happened under his nose, and he had fully believed that his own society, and the Spartan regularity of his household, had been the attractions which had made Dorsetshire delightful to his guest. ”

“ Dawson was silent for some minutes.
"I cannot express how much you have astonished and alarmed me, Mr. Audley." he said. "I can tell you so little about Lady Audley's antecedents, that it would be mere obstinacy to withhold the small amount of information I possess. I have always considered your uncle's wife one of the most amiable of women. I cannot bring myself to think her otherwise. It would be an uprooting of one of the strongest convictions of my life were I compelled to think her otherwise. You wish to follow her life backward from the present hour to the year fifty-three?" ”

“ He goes to a woman's house and he is never seen alive again. And now I find myself driven into a corner by another woman, of whose existence I had never thought until this day. And—and then," mused Mr. Audley, rather irrelevantly, "there's Alicia, too; she's another nuisance. She'd like me to marry her I know; and she'll make me do it, I dare say, before she's done with me. But I'd much rather not; though she is a dear, bouncing, generous thing, bless her poor little heart."
Robert paid his bill and rewarded the waiter liberally. ”

“ Alicia and her father's wife were taking tea in Lady Audley's boudoir, the room next to the antechamber in which Robert and Mr. Dawson had been seated.
Lucy Audley looked up from her occupation among the fragile china cups and watched Robert rather anxiously as he walked softly to his uncle's room and back again to the boudoir. She looked very pretty and innocent, seated behind the graceful group of delicate opal china and glittering silver. Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea. ”

“ Robert Audley. It had, however, very small effect upon the young barrister. He merely lifted his eyebrows in placid deprecation of himself and everybody else.
"I don't belong to Dorsetshire," he said. "Mr. Talboys might have known that, if he'd done me the honor to exercise his powers of ratiocination. Drive on, my friend."
The emotionless man looked at Robert Audley with a vacant stare of unmitigated horror, and opening one of the heavy oak doors, led the way into a large dining-room furnished with the severe simplicity of an apartment which is meant to be ate in, but never lived in ”

“ Robert may be a little eccentric—a little stupid, perhaps—he mayn't be overburdened with wits, but I don't think he has brains enough for madness. I believe it's generally your great intellects that get out of order."
"But madness is sometimes hereditary," said my lady. "Mr. Audley may have inherited—"
"He has inherited no madness from his father's family," interrupted Sir Michael. "The Audleys have never peopled private lunatic asylums or fed mad doctors." ”

“ Audley, and do you select me as the victim of your monomania? What is George Talboys to me that you should worry me about him?"
"He was a stranger to you, my lady, was he not?"
"Of course!" answered Lady Audley. "What should he be but a stranger?"
"Shall I tell you the story of my friend's disappearance as I read that story, my lady?" asked Robert.
"No," cried Lady Audley; "I wish to know nothing of your friend. If he is dead, I am sorry for him. If he lives, I have no wish either to see him or to hear of him. Let me go in to see my husband, if you please, Mr. ”

“ Dawson?" he said, pointing to that which opened upon the staircase. "I wish to have a few moments' private conversation with you."
"With much pleasure," replied the surgeon, complying with Robert's request; "but if you are at all alarmed about your uncle, Mr. Audley, I can set your mind at rest. There is no occasion for the least uneasiness. Had his illness been at all serious I should have telegraphed immediately for the family physician."
"I am sure that you would have done your duty, sir," answered Robert, gravely. "But I am not going to speak of my uncle. ”

“ The truth was that Lady Audley had, in becoming the wife of Sir Michael, made one of those apparently advantageous matches which are apt to draw upon a woman the envy and hatred of her sex. She had come into the neighborhood as a governess in the family of a surgeon in the village near Audley Court. No one knew anything of her, except that she came in answer to an advertisement which Mr. Dawson, the surgeon, had inserted in The Times. She came from London; and the only reference she gave was to a lady at a school at Brompton, where she had once been a teacher. ”

“ Poor fellow! he's a dear, good-hearted, stupid creature, and twenty times better than that peripatetic, patent refrigerator, Mr. Robert Audley."
"I wish, Alicia, you were not so fond of ridiculing Bob," Sir Michael said, gravely. "Bob is a good fellow, and I'm as fond of him as if he'd been my own son; and—and—I've been very uncomfortable about him lately. He has changed very much within the last few days, and he has taken all sorts of absurd ideas into his head, and my lady has alarmed me about him. She thinks—"
Lady Audley interrupted her husband with a grave shake of her head. ”

“ Bob—otherwise Robert Audley—this sort of thing will never do; you are falling over head and ears in love with your aunt."
CHAPTER XI. THE MARK UPON MY LADY'S WRIST.
Robert found Sir Michael and Lady Audley in the drawing-room. My lady was sitting on a music-stool before the grand piano, turning over the leaves of some new music. She twirled upon the revolving seat, making a rustling with her silk flounces, as Mr. Robert Audley's name was announced; then, leaving the piano, she made her nephew a pretty, mock ceremonious courtesy. ”

“ Audley, as ever you clapped eyes on, but burnt up to a cinder, along of being kep' hot."
"Never mind the ducks," Robert said impatiently; "where's Mr. Talboys?"
"He ain't been in, sir, since you went out together this morning."
"What!" cried Robert. "Why, in heaven's name, what has the man done with himself?"
He walked to the window and looked out upon the broad, white high road. There was a wagon laden with trusses of hay crawling slowly past, the lazy horses and the lazy wagoner drooping their heads with a weary stoop under the afternoon's sunshine. ”

“ Who cares whether I am well or ill?"
"What a spitfire she is," thought the barrister. He always knew his cousin was angry with him when she addressed him as "Robert Audley."
"You needn't pitch into a fellow because he asks you a civil question, Alicia," he said, reproachfully. "As to nobody caring about your health, that's nonsense. I care." Miss Audley looked up with a bright smile. "Sir Harry Towers cares." Miss Audley returned to her book with a frown.
"What are you reading there, Alicia?" Robert asked, after a pause, during which he had sat thoughtfully stirring his tea. ”

“ The cold gray of his dressing gown was almost the same as the cold gray of his eyes, and the pale buff of his waistcoat was the pale buff of his complexion.
Robert Audley had not expected to find Harcourt Talboys at all like George in his manners or disposition, but he had expected to see some family likeness between the father and the son. There was none. It would have been impossible to imagine any one more unlike George than the author of his existence. Robert scarcely wondered at the cruel letter he received from Mr. ”

“ The sly old benchers laughed at the pleasant fiction; but they all agreed that Robert Audley was a good fellow; a generous-hearted fellow; rather a curious fellow, too, with a fund of sly wit and quiet humor, under his listless, dawdling, indifferent, irresolute manner. A man who would never get on in the world; but who would not hurt a worm. Indeed, his chambers were converted into a perfect dog-kennel, by his habit of bringing home stray and benighted curs, who were attracted by his looks in the street, and followed him with abject fondness. ”

“ I have to dress for dinner, and I want to see Sir Michael; I have not seen him since ten o'clock this morning. Please let it be to-morrow."
There was a painful piteousness in her tone. Heaven knows how painful to Robert's heart. Heaven knows what horrible images arose in his mind as he looked down at that fair young face and thought of the task that lay before him.
"I must speak to you, Lady Audley," he said. "If I am cruel, it is you who have made me cruel. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She was a chilly creature, and loved to bury herself in soft wrappings of satin and fur.
"Kiss me, Phoebe," she said, as the girl arranged the curtains. "I hear Sir Michael's step in the anteroom; you will meet him as you go out, and you may as well tell him that you are going up by the first train to-morrow morning to get my dress from Madam Frederick for the dinner at Morton Abbey."
It was late the next morning when Lady Audley went down to breakfast—past ten o'clock. While she was sipping her coffee a servant brought her a sealed packet, and a book for her to sign. ”

“ She dressed herself in her most gorgeous silk, a voluminous robe of silvery, shimmering blue, that made her look as if she had been arrayed in moonbeams. She shook out her hair into feathery showers of glittering gold, and, with a cloak of white cashmere about her shoulders, went down-stairs into the vestibule.
She opened the door of the library and looked in. Sir Michael Audley was asleep in his easy-chair. As my lady softly closed this door Alicia descended the stairs from her own room. The turret door was open, and the sun was shining upon the wet grass-plat in the quadrangle. ”

“ Perhaps the most animated of men would have been scarcely so wise a comforter as Robert Audley. He did not utter a word to the stricken widower, but quietly seated himself with his back to George, looking out of the open window. ”

“ 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." ”

“ He lifted his hat, bowed to the little dressmaker, and turned back to the cab.
"I have beaten the baker, at any rate," he thought. "Now for the second stage, traveling backward, in my lady's life."
The drive from Brompton to the Peckham Road was a very long one, and between Crescent Villas and Acacia Cottage, Robert Audley had ample leisure for reflection. He thought of his uncle lying weak and ill in the oak-room at Audley Court. He thought of the beautiful blue eyes watching Sir Michael's slumbers; the soft, white hands tending on his waking moments ”