Essential Novelists - Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Мэри Элизабет Брэддон
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dirt, the confusion, the figure of the old man, with his gray head upon the soiled tablecloth, amid the muddled débris of a wretched dinner, grew blurred before the sight of Robert Audley as he thought of another man, as old as this one, but, ah! how widely different in every other quality! who might come by and by to feel the same, or even a worse anguish, and to shed, perhaps, yet bitterer tears. The moment in which the tears rose to his eyes and dimmed the piteous scene before him, was long enough to take him back to Essex, and to show him the image of his uncle, stricken by agony and shame.
"Why do I go on with this?" he thought; "how pitiless I am, and how relentlessly I am carried on. It is not myself; it is the hand which is beckoning me further and further upon the dark road, whose end I dare not dream of."
He thought this, and a hundred times more than this, while the old man sat with his face still hidden, wrestling with his anguish, but without power to keep it down.
"Mr. Maldon," Robert Audley said, after a pause, "I do not ask you to forgive me for what I have brought upon you, for the feeling is strong within me that it must have come to you sooner or later—if not through me, through some one else. There are—" he stopped for a moment hesitating. The sobbing did not cease; it was sometimes low, sometimes loud, bursting out with fresh violence, or dying away for an instant, but never ceasing. "There are some things which, as people say, cannot be hidden. I think there is truth in that common saying which had its origin in that old worldly wisdom which people gathered from experience and not from books. If—if I were content to let my friend rest in his hidden grave, it is but likely that some stranger who had never heard the name of George Talboys, might fall by the remotest accident upon the secret of his death. To-morrow, perhaps; or ten years hence, or in another generation, when the—the hand that wronged him is as cold as his own. If I could let the matter rest; if—if I could leave England forever, and purposely fly from the possibility of ever coming across another clew to the secret, I would do it—I would gladly, thankfully do it—but I cannot! A hand which is stronger than my own beckons me on. I wish to take no base advantage of you, less than of all other people; but I must go on; I must go on. If there is any warning you would give to any one, give it. If the secret toward which I am traveling day by day, hour by hour, involves any one in whom you have an interest, let that person fly before I come to the end. Let them leave this country; let them leave all who know them—all whose peace their wickedness has endangered; let them go away—they shall not be pursued. But if they slight your warning—if they try to hold their present position in defiance of what it will be in your power to tell them—let them beware of me, for, when the hour comes, I swear that I will not spare them."
The old man looked up for the first time, and wiped his wrinkled face upon a ragged silk handkerchief.
"I declare to you that I do not understand you," he said. "I solemnly declare to you that I cannot understand; and I do not believe that George Talboys is dead."
"I would give ten years of my own life if I could see him alive," answered Robert, sadly. "I am sorry for you, Mr. Maldon—I am sorry for all of us."
"I do not believe that my son-in-law is dead," said the lieutenant; "I do not believe that the poor lad is dead."
He endeavored in a feeble manner to show to Robert Audley that his wild outburst of anguish had been caused by his grief for the loss of George; but the pretense was miserably shallow.
Mrs. Plowson re-entered the room, leading little Georgey, whose face shone with that brilliant polish which yellow soap and friction can produce upon the human countenance.
"Dear heart alive!" exclaimed Mrs. Plowson, "what has the poor old gentleman been taking on about? We could hear him in the passage, sobbin' awful."
Little George crept up to his grandfather, and smoothed the wet and wrinkled face with his pudgy hand.
"Don't cry, gran'pa," he said, "don't cry. You shall have my watch to be cleaned, and the kind jeweler shall lend you the money to pay the taxman while he cleans the watch—I don't mind, gran'pa. Let's go to the jeweler, the jeweler in High street, you know, with golden balls painted upon his door, to show that he comes from Lombar—Lombardshire," said the boy, making a dash at the name. "Come, gran'pa."
The little fellow took the jeweled toy from his bosom and made for the door, proud of being possessed of a talisman, which he had seen so often made useful.
"There are wolves at Southampton," he said, with rather a triumphant nod to Robert Audley. "My gran'pa says when he takes my watch that he does it to keep the wolf from the door. Are there wolves where you live?"
The young barrister did not answer the child's question, but stopped him as he was dragging his grandfather toward the door.
"Your grandpapa does not want the watch to-day, Georgey," he said, gravely.
"Why is he sorry, then?" asked Georgey, naively; "when he wants the watch he is always sorry, and beats his poor forehead so"—the boy stopped to pantomime with his small fists—"and says that she—the pretty lady, I think he means—uses him very hard, and that he can't keep the wolf from the door; and then I say, 'Gran'pa, have the watch;' and then he takes me in his arms, and says, 'Oh, my blessed angel! how can I rob my blessed angel?' and then he cries, but not like to-day—not loud, you know; only tears running down his poor cheeks, not so that you could hear him in the passage."
Painful as the child's prattle was to Robert Audley, it seemed a relief to the old man. He did not hear the boy's talk, but walked two or three times up and down the little room and smoothed his rumpled hair and suffered his cravat to be arranged by Mrs. Plowson, who seemed very anxious to find out the cause of his agitation.
"Poor dear old gentleman," she said, looking at Robert.
"What has happened to upset him so?"
"His son-in-law is dead," answered Mr. Audley, fixing his eyes upon Mrs. Plowson's sympathetic face. "He died, within a year and a half after the death of Helen Talboys, who lies buried in Ventnor churchyard."
The face into which he was looking changed very slightly, but the eyes that had been looking at him shifted away as he spoke, and Mrs. Plowson was obliged to moisten her white lips with her tongue before she answered him.
"Poor Mr. Talboys dead!" she said; "that is bad news indeed, sir."
Little George looked wistfully up at his guardian's face as this was said.
"Who's dead?" he said. "George Talboys is my name. Who's dead?"
"Another person whose name is Talboys, Georgey."
"Poor person! Will he go to the pit-hole?"
The boy had that notion of death which is generally imparted to children by their wise elders, and which always leads the infant mind to the open grave and rarely carries it any higher.
"I should like to see him put in the pit-hole," Georgey remarked, after a pause. He had attended several infant funerals in the neighborhood, and was considered valuable as a mourner on account of his interesting appearance. He had come, therefore, to look upon the ceremony of interment as a solemn festivity; in which cake and wine, and a carriage drive were the leading features.
"You have no objection to my taking Georgey away with me, Mr. Maldon?" asked Robert Audley.
The old man's agitation had very much subsided by this time. He had found another pipe stuck behind the tawdry frame of the looking-glass, and was trying to light it with a bit of twisted newspaper.
"You do not object, Mr. Maldon?"
"No, sir—no, sir; you are his guardian, and you have a right to take him where you please. He has been a very great comfort to me in my lonely old age, but I have been prepared to lose him. I—I may not have always done my duty to him, sir, in—in the way of schooling, and—and boots. The number of boots which boys of his age wear out, sir, is not easily realized by the mind of a young man like yourself; he has been kept away from school, perhaps, sometimes, and occasionally worn shabby boots when our funds have got low; but he has not been unkindly treated. No, sir; if you were to question