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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
"Lady Audley's Secret" is a quintessential work of Victorian literature, melding mystery, social commentary, and psychological depth within its intricate narrative. Braddon employs a gripping first-person perspective that draws readers into the suspenseful world of Lady Audley, a character whose beauty and charm shroud darker secrets. The novel explores themes of identity, gender roles, and societal expectations in an era marked by rigid class structures and moral dilemmas. Braddon's deft use of literary devices, including dramatic irony and foreshadowing, further enhances the novel's thrilling plot, culminating in a tale that is both entertaining and intellectually stimulating. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a pioneering female author of her time, rose to prominence in the literary scene with her publications in the mid-19th century. Often labeled as a sensational novelist, her personal experiences and keen observations of Victorian society informed her writing. Braddon's work addresses the complexities of women's lives during a period of significant social change, making her a notable figure in the exploration of feminist themes within literature. "Lady Audley's Secret" is recommended for readers who appreciate rich, character-driven narratives that challenge societal norms. This classic mystery not only captivates with its plot twists but also provokes thoughtful reflection on the constraints of gender and class, making it an enduring masterpiece that resonates with modern audiences. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Lady Audley's Secret (Mystery Classic)
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a world where polished manners and gilded rooms conceal restless ambitions, Lady Audley’s Secret explores how a carefully curated identity can dazzle, disturb, and ultimately destabilize the domestic order it was meant to secure, probing the perilous bargain between desire, respectability, and the stories we tell about ourselves.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, first published in 1862, stands as a defining work of the Victorian sensation novel, a genre that fused domestic settings with high-stakes mystery and social unease. Set chiefly in rural England and London during the mid-nineteenth century, it places drawing-room elegance alongside shadows where anxiety gathers. Braddon became one of the most popular novelists of her day, and this book’s swift success helped consolidate the sensation mode for a wide readership. The novel’s blend of crime-adjacent intrigue, psychological tension, and commentary on class and gender expectations situates it at the crossroads of entertainment and social critique.
The premise is deceptively simple: a charming young woman becomes Lady Audley by marrying a kind, older baronet; a friend returns to England after years abroad; a sudden disappearance unsettles a circle of acquaintances; and an indolent barrister named Robert Audley finds himself drawn, almost against his will, into a patient search for answers. The country house known as Audley Court, with its sweet surfaces and quiet corridors, becomes the stage for such questions. Braddon invites the reader to feel a gathering pressure as polite encounters and chance discoveries accumulate into a network of suspicions that cannot be easily dismissed.
Braddon’s narrative voice is accessible and swift, favoring clear scene-setting, pointed description, and carefully placed revelations that move the story along with confidence. The pacing operates like a tightening spiral: calm domesticity narrows into edgier, investigative focus. Readers will notice how shifts between cozy interiors and the bustle of London heighten a mood that oscillates between comfort and disquiet. The prose frequently attends to small details—a gesture, a room’s decor, a casual remark—that later feel loaded with meaning. The result is a reading experience that balances curiosity and unease without relying on gratuitous shock.
Key themes emerge from the friction between appearance and truth. The novel interrogates how social mobility, marriage, and money can tempt individuals to revise or obscure their pasts, and how such revisions unsettle ideas of trust within the home. It considers the performance of femininity and masculinity under scrutiny, showing how reputation can be both armor and target. Domestic spaces, often assumed to be safe, become arenas where power is negotiated and identity put to the test. Objects—especially portraits and letters—serve as conduits of memory and evidence, reminding readers that what seems fixed can be reinterpreted by a new gaze.
For contemporary readers, Lady Audley’s Secret remains resonant for its exploration of self-invention and the price of maintaining a flawless surface. The book raises questions about privacy and exposure, about who gets to investigate whom, and about the ethical limits of curiosity when personal histories clash with social expectations. It also anticipates later developments in crime and psychological fiction, particularly the figure of the reluctant amateur sleuth who learns to read people as carefully as documents. Braddon’s story offers not only suspense but a way of thinking about how communities decide which stories count as credible—and who must prove their innocence.
Approached today, the novel offers an elegant mix of atmosphere and inquiry: polished prose, a steadily building mystery, and a cast whose motives often appear in shifting light. Readers can expect the satisfaction of connecting clues, the tension of uncertain alliances, and the intellectual pleasure of observing how a genteel world explains away its own alarms. Without revealing its central turns, it is fair to say that the book’s rewards lie in how it layers evidence, reweighs sympathies, and tests the comfort of certainty. Lady Audley’s Secret endures because it shows how a story well-kept can be as perilous as any crime.
Synopsis
Sir Michael Audley, a wealthy, kindly widower in rural Essex, surprises his circle by marrying Lucy Graham, a beautiful young governess with a quiet manner and an obscure past. The union elevates her to Lady Audley, mistress of the spacious Audley Court, whose romantic gardens and ancestral rooms suggest stability and gentility. Into this setting comes Robert Audley, Sir Michael's idle but observant barrister nephew, accustomed to tranquil routines and untroubled days. The new marriage appears idyllic, smoothing household frictions and attracting admiration. Yet small, almost imperceptible notes of mystery accompany the bride's reserve, hinting that beneath the placid domestic surface something remains carefully untold.
At the same time, George Talboys, a young man just returned from Australia with newly made wealth, reaches London hoping to reunite with the wife he left behind. News of her reported death shatters him, and he leans on his former school friend Robert for companionship. Seeking distraction and quiet, Robert invites George into the countryside, bringing him to Audley Court. There George encounters the family's refined world and meets Lady Audley in formal settings that reveal little and suggest much. An artist's striking portrait of the lady, vivid and unsettling in its effect, adds a faint undercurrent of unease to the prevailing charm.
Life at the estate unfolds through dinners, visits, and drives, introducing Alicia Audley, Sir Michael's forthright daughter, and the servants who manage the house's routines. Among them, Lady Audley's maid, Phoebe Marks, and her rough-hewn fiance, Luke, observe their mistress closely, noting habits and guarded spaces that few others notice. Small incidents - a misplaced key, a locked drawer, a piece of jewelry appearing at an odd moment - do not yet form a pattern, but they foster conjecture. The household's convivial rhythm continues, while quiet bargains and whispered confidences hint at private leverage. The contrast between open hospitality and guarded privacy steadily sharpens.
On a summer visit to the estate's grounds, events take a darker turn. George Talboys disappears abruptly, leaving behind no convincing explanation and few traces of his movements after a particular afternoon. Rumors multiply, and the last sightings are ambiguous. Robert, whose indifference has long concealed a careful mind, becomes deeply concerned and quietly vows to discover what happened to his friend. Step by step, he abandons his idle habits, cultivating a deliberate method: collecting small facts, revisiting scenes, and weighing silences as heavily as words. The change in him marks a central shift, from companionable guest to persistent investigator.
Robert begins with what can be verified: letters, hotel registers, shipping lists, and testimony from servants and neighbors. He seeks out George's remaining family, meeting a resolute relative who insists the disappearance must be explained and presses him to act decisively. Their alliance supplies both moral pressure and practical aid. Inquiries draw Robert back to Audley Court, where carefully casual questions elicit guarded answers. He sees coherence emerging among previously isolated details - coincidences of date, travel, and acquaintance - yet the core of the matter remains withheld. Even so, the circle of possibilities narrows, and the family's calm begins to fray.
New incidents complicate the search. An anonymous or misdirecting letter alters a plan at a critical moment. A sudden fire at an isolated country inn injures those connected to the household, creating fresh witness accounts colored by fear and resentment. Robert, present by chance and prudence, extracts information while ensuring immediate safety. The episode suggests attempts to suppress or confuse the truth without conclusively revealing motive. Back at Audley Court, loyalty and anxiety divide the family: Sir Michael yearns to preserve peace, Alicia watches with wary clarity, and Lady Audley maintains a polished composure that seems, to some, exceptionally controlled.
Following the trail beyond Essex, Robert travels to London's lodging houses and a coastal town associated with a young governess who once left in haste. He interviews landladies, clergymen, and medical men, building a dossier of statements and copies of records. Certain recurring names, signatures, and descriptions point toward a concealed history involving a hurried marriage, a financial crisis, and a subsequent change of identity. These findings do not yet constitute proof, but they frame the mystery in practical terms: who knew what and when, and how earlier choices might explain present contradictions. The investigation advances from suspicion toward structured, testable claims.
The inquiry culminates in a private confrontation rather than a public scandal. Robert presents what he has assembled, reserving accusations while inviting explanation. The discussion forces difficult decisions intended to protect innocent parties while addressing possible wrongdoing. Family bonds, social expectations, and legal consequences intersect uneasily, and arrangements are considered that balance justice with discretion. The fate of the missing man is clarified through corroborated evidence, closing the central question of his disappearance without sensational disclosure. Outcomes follow that reconfigure relationships within the Audley household, altering roles and prospects, yet leaving the broader community only partially aware of what has transpired.
Lady Audley's Secret operates as a sensation novel, pairing domestic elegance with concealed histories to explore Victorian anxieties about identity, marriage, and respectability. Its central message emphasizes how fragile social stability can be when built on imperfect knowledge and how personal reinvention collides with legal and moral boundaries. The narrative charts a movement from charm to inquiry to resolution, foregrounding patient detection and the weight of circumstantial fact. It ultimately restores a measure of order without erasing the costs of revelation. Readers are left with a clear sense of the risks inherent in secrecy and the disciplined persistence required to uncover it.
Historical Context
Lady Audley’s Secret is set in mid-Victorian England, primarily in rural Essex at the fictional Audley Court and in London, with excursions that gesture to the global reach of the British Empire. The time-frame aligns with the late 1850s to early 1860s, when railway links between London and Essex (consolidated under the Great Eastern Railway in 1862) made swift travel possible, shrinking distances between country estates, inns, and the metropolis. The novel’s spaces—baronet’s halls, lodging houses, and coaching inns updated for the railway age—mirror a society balancing tradition and modernity. Legal and medical institutions were being reorganized, and opportunities for sudden wealth from empire (including Australia) complicated rigid class hierarchies and domestic respectability.
Marriage law reform and anxieties about bigamy underpin the story. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 removed divorce from ecclesiastical courts, creating the civil Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes (opened 1858) in London. It lowered costs and produced hundreds of petitions annually by the early 1860s, yet preserved gender asymmetry: men could divorce for adultery alone, women generally needed adultery plus cruelty, desertion, or incest. Bigamy was codified as a felony in the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, punishable by up to seven years’ penal servitude. The plot’s concealed first marriage, re-marriage, and fear of exposure engage these legal realities, dramatizing how Victorian law simultaneously enabled investigation while trapping women within unequal standards and inheritance expectations.
Victorian psychiatry and the expansion of asylums provide a crucial backdrop. The Lunacy Act 1845 and County Asylums Act 1845 established the Commissioners in Lunacy and compelled counties to provide asylums, tightening certification rules yet leaving broad scope for family-initiated confinement. By the early 1860s, tens of thousands of patients were housed in public and private institutions across England and Wales, while elite families sometimes used continental maisons de santé in Belgium or France to avoid scandal. Private asylums such as Ticehurst (Sussex) and Brislington (near Bristol) catered to gentry discretion. The novel’s use of a discreet foreign asylum to neutralize a socially inconvenient woman reflects contemporary practices, spotlighting how medical authority and class influence could police female behavior without public trial.
Global mobility and the Australian gold rush (commencing 1851) directly shape the narrative. Edward Hargraves announced gold near Bathurst, New South Wales, in 1851, and rich fields at Ballarat and Bendigo in Victoria drew a mass influx; Victoria’s population surged from roughly 77,000 in 1851 to over 500,000 by 1861. By 1852 Australia produced a significant share of the world’s gold, and clippers cut the voyage from Britain via the Cape of Good Hope to under 90 days. Newspapers tracked colonial fortunes, fueling return-migration. George Talboys’s emigration and sudden enrichment align with these dates and patterns, using the gold rush as a realistic mechanism for absence, presumed death, and disruptive wealth that destabilizes English domestic arrangements and inheritance plans.
The professionalization of policing and the cultural fascination with detection inform the book’s investigative thread. The Metropolitan Police was founded in 1829, and a Detective Branch at Scotland Yard followed in 1842, pioneering modern investigative practices. The sensational Road Hill House murder (Wiltshire, 1860), probed by Inspector Jonathan Whicher, riveted the public and raised doubts about secrecy inside respectable homes. Press coverage converted domestic crime into national spectacle. Robert Audley’s methodical, quasi-legal inquiries channel this climate: he operates like the era’s emerging detective, yet works privately within class networks, reflecting both the reach and the social limits of official policing when crimes implicated the gentry and the family sphere.
Mid-century changes in print and taxation created the mass readership that received the novel. The Advertisement Duty was repealed in 1853, the Newspaper Stamp Duty in 1855, and the Paper Duty in 1861, dismantling the “taxes on knowledge.” These measures, alongside growth in circulating libraries such as Mudie’s (founded 1842), enabled cheap serialization and rapid national circulation of domestic-crime narratives. John Maxwell’s publishing ventures and firms like Tinsley Brothers (which issued the three-volume edition in 1862) operated in this environment. The book’s pace, cliffhangers, and focus on topical issues—marriage law, detection, scandal—were calibrated for a readership formed by these reforms, which made private lives into public news.
The precarious status of middle-class women and the “governess question” were pressing social issues. Under coverture, a married woman in England before the Married Women’s Property Act 1870 had limited rights to earnings or property, shaping strategies for survival. Paid work options for respectable women were narrow; the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution (founded 1841, with royal patronage) acknowledged low pay, isolation, and vulnerability in private households. Wages often ranged from £20 to £50 per annum, with little security. Lucy Graham’s initial position as a governess and her leap into aristocratic marriage dramatize these pressures, showing how constrained legal and economic frameworks encouraged secrecy, self-fashioning, and risk-taking within the domestic labor market.
As a social critique, the novel exposes the fragility of Victorian respectability by tying domestic order to inequitable structures of law, medicine, and property. It interrogates a legal regime that polices women’s sexuality more harshly than men’s, reveals how private asylums could silence inconvenient truths, and depicts class privilege as a shield against scrutiny and prosecution. Mobility via railways and empire unsettles lineage and inheritance, while mass print turns private misdeeds into public judgment. By staging bigamy, concealment, and confinement within a baronet’s household, the book indicts the period’s collusion of patriarchal authority and institutional power, making the home a site where social injustice is both enacted and disguised.
Lady Audley's Secret (Mystery Classic)
Chapter 1
Lucy.
It lay down in a hollow, rich with fine old timber and luxuriant pastures; and you came upon it through an avenue of limes, bordered on either side by meadows, over the high hedges of which the cattle looked inquisitively at you as you passed, wondering, perhaps, what you wanted; for there was no thorough-fare, and unless you were going to the Court you had no business there at all.
At the end of this avenue there was an old arch and a clock tower, with a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand — and which jumped straight from one hour to the next — and was therefore always in extremes. Through this arch you walked straight into the gardens of Audley Court.
A smooth lawn lay before you, dotted with groups of rhododendrons, which grew in more perfection here than anywhere else in the county. To the right there were the kitchen gardens, the fish-pond, and an orchard bordered by a dry moat, and a broken ruin of a wall, in some places thicker than it was high, and everywhere overgrown with trailing ivy, yellow stonecrop, and dark moss. To the left there was a broad graveled walk, down which, years ago, when the place had been a convent, the quiet nuns had walked hand in hand; a wall bordered with espaliers, and shadowed on one side by goodly oaks, which shut out the flat landscape, and circled in the house and gardens with a darkening shelter.
The house faced the arch, and occupied three sides of a quadrangle. It was very old, and very irregular and rambling. The windows were uneven; some small, some large, some with heavy stone mullions and rich stained glass; others with frail lattices that rattled in every breeze; others so modern that they might have been added only yesterday. Great piles of chimneys rose up here and there behind the pointed gables, and seemed as if they were so broken down by age and long service that they must have fallen but for the straggling ivy which, crawling up the walls and trailing even over the roof, wound itself about them and supported them. The principal door was squeezed into a corner of a turret at one angle of the building, as if it were in hiding from dangerous visitors, and wished to keep itself a secret — a noble door for all that — old oak, and studded with great square-headed iron nails, and so thick that the sharp iron knocker struck upon it with a muffled sound, and the visitor rung a clanging bell that dangled in a corner among the ivy, lest the noise of the knocking should never penetrate the stronghold.
A glorious old place. A place that visitors fell in raptures with; feeling a yearning wish to have done with life, and to stay there forever, staring into the cool fish-ponds and counting the bubbles as the roach and carp rose to the surface of the water. A spot in which peace seemed to have taken up her abode, setting her soothing hand on every tree and flower, on the still ponds and quiet alleys, the shady corners of the old-fashioned rooms, the deep window-seats behind the painted glass, the low meadows and the stately avenues — ay, even upon the stagnant well, which, cool and sheltered as all else in the old place, hid itself away in a shrubbery behind the gardens, with an idle handle that was never turned and a lazy rope so rotten that the pail had broken away from it, and had fallen into the water.
A noble place; inside as well as out, a noble place — a house in which you incontinently lost yourself if ever you were so rash as to attempt to penetrate its mysteries alone; a house in which no one room had any sympathy with another, every chamber running off at a tangent into an inner chamber, and through that down some narrow staircase leading to a door which, in its turn, led back into that very part of the house from which you thought yourself the furthest; a house that could never have been planned by any mortal architect, but must have been the handiwork of that good old builder, Time, who, adding a room one year, and knocking down a room another year, toppling down a chimney coeval with the Plantagenets, and setting up one in the style of the Tudors; shaking down a bit of Saxon wall, allowing a Norman arch to stand here; throwing in a row of high narrow windows in the reign of Queen Anne, and joining on a dining-room after the fashion of the time of Hanoverian George I, to a refectory that had been standing since the Conquest, had contrived, in some eleven centuries, to run up such a mansion as was not elsewhere to be met with throughout the county of Essex. Of course, in such a house there were secret chambers; the little daughter of the present owner, Sir Michael Audley, had fallen by accident upon the discovery of one. A board had rattled under her feet in the great nursery where she played, and on attention being drawn to it, it was found to be loose, and so removed, revealed a ladder, leading to a hiding-place between the floor of the nursery and the ceiling of the room below — a hiding-place so small that he who had hid there must have crouched on his hands and knees or lain at full length, and yet large enough to contain a quaint old carved oak chest, half filled with priests’ vestments, which had been hidden away, no doubt, in those cruel days when the life of a man was in danger if he was discovered to have harbored a Roman Catholic priest, or to have mass said in his house.
The broad outer moat was dry and grass-grown, and the laden trees of the orchard hung over it with gnarled, straggling branches that drew fantastical shadows upon the green slope. Within this moat there was, as I have said, the fish-pond — a sheet of water that extended the whole length of the garden and bordering which there was an avenue called the lime-tree walk[1]; an avenue so shaded from the sun and sky, so screened from observation by the thick shelter of the over-arching trees that it seemed a chosen place for secret meetings or for stolen interviews; a place in which a conspiracy might have been planned, or a lover’s vow registered with equal safety; and yet it was scarcely twenty paces from the house.
At the end of this dark arcade there was the shrubbery, where, half buried among the tangled branches and the neglected weeds, stood the rusty wheel of that old well of which I have spoken. It had been of good service in its time, no doubt; and busy nuns have perhaps drawn the cool water with their own fair hands; but it had fallen into disuse now, and scarcely any one at Audley Court knew whether the spring had dried up or not. But sheltered as was the solitude of this lime-tree walk, I doubt very much if it was ever put to any romantic uses. Often in the cool of the evening Sir Michael Audley would stroll up and down smoking his cigar, with his dogs at his heels, and his pretty young wife dawdling by his side; but in about ten minutes the baronet[2] and his companion would grow tired of the rustling limes and the still water, hidden under the spreading leaves of the water-lilies, and the long green vista with the broken well at the end, and would stroll back to the drawing-room, where my lady played dreamy melodies by Beethoven and Mendelssohn till her husband fell asleep in his easy-chair.
Sir Michael Audley was fifty-six years of age, and he had married a second wife three months after his fifty-fifth birthday. He was a big man, tall and stout, with a deep, sonorous voice, handsome black eyes, and a white beard — a white beard which made him look venerable against his will, for he was as active as a boy, and one of the hardest riders in the country. For seventeen years he had been a widower with an only child, a daughter, Alicia Audley, now eighteen, and by no means too well pleased at having a step-mother brought home to the Court; for Miss Alicia had reigned supreme in her father’s house since her earliest childhood, and had carried the keys, and jingled them in the pockets of her silk aprons, and lost them in the shrubbery, and dropped them into the pond, and given all manner of trouble about them from the hour in which she entered her teens, and had, on that account, deluded herself into the sincere belief, that for the whole of that period, she had been keeping the house.
But Miss Alicia’s day was over; and now, when she asked anything of the housekeeper, the housekeeper would tell her that she would speak to my lady, or she would consult my lady, and if my lady pleased it should be done. So the baronet’s daughter, who was an excellent horsewoman and a very clever artist, spent most of her time out of doors, riding about the green lanes, and sketching the cottage children, and the plow-boys, and the cattle, and all manner of animal life that came in her way. She set her face with a sulky determination against any intimacy between herself and the baronet’s young wife; and amiable as that lady was, she found it quite impossible to overcome Miss Alicia’s prejudices and dislike; or to convince the spoilt girl that she had not done her a cruel injury by marrying Sir Michael Audley. 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. But this reference was so satisfactory that none other was needed, and Miss Lucy Graham was received by the surgeon as the instructress of his daughters. Her accomplishments were so brilliant and numerous, that it seemed strange that she should have answered an advertisement offering such very moderate terms of remuneration as those named by Mr. Dawson; but Miss Graham seemed perfectly well satisfied with her situation, and she taught the girls to play sonatas by Beethoven, and to paint from nature after Creswick[3], and walked through a dull, out-of-the-way village to the humble little church, three times every Sunday, as contentedly as if she had no higher aspiration in the world than to do so all the rest of her life.
People who observed this, accounted for it by saying that it was a part of her amiable and gentle nature always to be light-hearted, happy and contented under any circumstances.
Wherever she went she seemed to take joy and brightness with her. In the cottages of the poor her fair face shone like a sunbeam. She would sit for a quarter of an hour talking to some old woman, and apparently as pleased with the admiration of a toothless crone as if she had been listening to the compliments of a marquis; and when she tripped away, leaving nothing behind her (for her poor salary gave no scope to her benevolence), the old woman would burst out into senile raptures with her grace, beauty, and her kindliness, such as she never bestowed upon the vicar’s wife, who half fed and clothed her. For you see, Miss Lucy Graham was blessed with that magic power of fascination, by which a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a smile. Every one loved, admired, and praised her. The boy who opened the five-barred gate that stood in her pathway, ran home to his mother to tell of her pretty looks, and the sweet voice in which she thanked him for the little service. The verger at the church, who ushered her into the surgeon’s pew; the vicar, who saw the soft blue eyes uplifted to his face as he preached his simple sermon; the porter from the railway station, who brought her sometimes a letter or a parcel, and who never looked for reward from her; her employer; his visitors; her pupils; the servants; everybody, high and low, united in declaring that Lucy Graham was the sweetest girl that ever lived.
Perhaps it was the rumor of this which penetrated into the quiet chamber of Audley Court; or, perhaps, it was the sight of her pretty face, looking over the surgeon’s high pew every Sunday morning; however it was, it was certain that Sir Michael Audley suddenly experienced a strong desire to be better acquainted with Mr. Dawson’s governess.
He had only to hint his wish to the worthy doctor for a little party to be got up, to which the vicar and his wife, and the baronet and his daughter, were invited.
That one quiet evening sealed Sir Michael’s fate. He could no more resist the tender fascination of those soft and melting blue eyes; the graceful beauty of that slender throat and drooping head, with its wealth of showering flaxen curls; the low music of that gentle voice; the perfect harmony which pervaded every charm, and made all doubly charming in this woman; than he could resist his destiny! Destiny! Why, she was his destiny! He had never loved before. What had been his marriage with Alicia’s mother but a dull, jog-trot bargain made to keep some estate in the family that would have been just as well out of it? What had been his love for his first wife but a poor, pitiful, smoldering spark, too dull to be extinguished, too feeble to burn? But this was love — this fever, this longing, this restless, uncertain, miserable hesitation; these cruel fears that his age was an insurmountable barrier to his happiness; this sick hatred of his white beard; this frenzied wish to be young again, with glistening raven hair, and a slim waist, such as he had twenty years before; these, wakeful nights and melancholy days, so gloriously brightened if he chanced to catch a glimpse of her sweet face behind the window curtains, as he drove past the surgeon’s house; all these signs gave token of the truth, and told only too plainly that, at the sober age of fifty-five, Sir Michael Audley had fallen ill of the terrible fever called love.
I do not think that, throughout his courtship, the baronet once calculated upon his wealth or his position as reasons for his success. If he ever remembered these things, he dismissed the thought of them with a shudder. It pained him too much to believe for a moment that any one so lovely and innocent could value herself against a splendid house or a good old title. No; his hope was that, as her life had been most likely one of toil and dependence, and as she was very young nobody exactly knew her age, but she looked little more than twenty, she might never have formed any attachment, and that he, being the first to woo her, might, by tender attentions, by generous watchfulness, by a love which should recall to her the father she had lost, and by a protecting care that should make him necessary to her, win her young heart, and obtain from her fresh and earliest love, the promise or her hand. It was a very romantic day-dream, no doubt; but, for all that, it seemed in a very fair way to be realized. Lucy Graham appeared by no means to dislike the baronet’s attentions. There was nothing whatever in her manner that betrayed the shallow artifices employed by a woman who wishes to captivate a rich man. She was so accustomed to admiration from every one, high and low, that Sir Michael’s conduct made very little impression upon her. Again, he had been so many years a widower that people had given up the idea of his ever marrying again. At last, however, Mrs. Dawson spoke to the governess on the subject. The surgeon’s wife was sitting in the school-room busy at work, while Lucy was putting the finishing touches on some water-color sketches done by her pupils.
“Do you know, my dear Miss Graham,” said Mrs. Dawson, “I think you ought to consider yourself a remarkably lucky girl?”
The governess lifted her head from its stooping attitude, and stared wonderingly at her employer, shaking back a shower of curls. They were the most wonderful curls in the world — soft and feathery, always floating away from her face, and making a pale halo round her head when the sunlight shone through them.
“What do you mean, my dear Mrs. Dawson?” she asked, dipping her camel’s-hair brush into the wet aquamarine upon the palette, and poising it carefully before putting in the delicate streak of purple which was to brighten the horizon in her pupil’s sketch.
“Why, I mean, my dear, that it only rests with yourself to become Lady Audley, and the mistress of Audley Court.”
Lucy Graham dropped the brush upon the picture, and flushed scarlet to the roots of her fair hair; and then grew pale again, far paler than Mrs. Dawson had ever seen her before.
“My dear, don’t agitate yourself,” said the surgeon’s wife, soothingly; “you know that nobody asks you to marry Sir Michael unless you wish. Of course it would be a magnificent match; he has a splendid income, and is one of the most generous of men. Your position would be very high, and you would be enabled to do a great deal of good; but, as I said before, you must be entirely guided by your own feelings. Only one thing I must say, and that is that if Sir Michael’s attentions are not agreeable to you, it is really scarcely honorable to encourage him.”
“His attentions — encourage him!” muttered Lucy, as if the words bewildered her. “Pray, pray don’t talk to me, Mrs. Dawson. I had no idea of this. It is the last thing that would have occurred to me.” She leaned her elbows on the drawing-board before her, and clasping her hands over her face, seemed for some minutes to be thinking deeply. She wore a narrow black ribbon round her neck, with a locket, or a cross, or a miniature, perhaps, attached to it; but whatever the trinket was, she always kept it hidden under her dress. Once or twice, while she sat silently thinking, she removed one of her hands from before her face, and fidgeted nervously with the ribbon, clutching at it with a half-angry gesture, and twisting it backward and forward between her fingers.
“I think some people are born to be unlucky, Mrs. Dawson,” she said, by-and-by; “it would be a great deal too much good fortune for me to become Lady Audley.”
She said this with so much bitterness in her tone, that the surgeon’s wife looked up at her with surprise.
“You unlucky, my dear!” she exclaimed. “I think you are the last person who ought to talk like that — you, such a bright, happy creature, that it does every one good to see you. I’m sure I don’t know what we shall do if Sir Michael robs us of you.”
After this conversation they often spoke upon the subject, and Lucy never again showed any emotion whatever when the baronet’s admiration for her was canvassed. It was a tacitly understood thing in the surgeon’s family that whenever Sir Michael proposed, the governess would quietly accept him; and, indeed, the simple Dawsons would have thought it something more than madness in a penniless girl to reject such an offer.
So, one misty August evening, Sir Michael, sitting opposite to Lucy Graham, at a window in the surgeon’s little drawing-room, took an opportunity while the family happened by some accident to be absent from the room, of speaking upon the subject nearest to his heart. He made the governess, in a few but solemn words, an offer of his hand. There was something almost touching in the manner and tone in which he spoke to her — half in deprecation, knowing that he could hardly expect to be the choice of a beautiful young girl, and praying rather that she would reject him, even though she broke his heart by doing so, than that she should accept his offer if she did not love him.
“I scarcely think there is a greater sin, Lucy,” he said, solemnly, “than that of a woman who marries a man she does not love. You are so precious to me, my beloved, that deeply as my heart is set on this, and bitter as the mere thought of disappointment is to me, I would not have you commit such a sin for any happiness of mine. If my happiness could be achieved by such an act, which it could not — which it never could,” he repeated, earnestly —“nothing but misery can result from a marriage dictated by any motive but truth and love.”
Lucy Graham was not looking at Sir Michael, but straight out into the misty twilight and dim landscape far away beyond the little garden. The baronet tried to see her face, but her profile was turned to him, and he could not discover the expression of her eyes. If he could have done so, he would have seen a yearning gaze which seemed as if it would have pierced the far obscurity and looked away — away into another world.
“Lucy, you heard me?”
“Yes,” she said, gravely; not coldly, or in any way as if she were offended at his words.
“And your answer?”
She did not remove her gaze from the darkening country side, but for some moments was quite silent; then turning to him, with a sudden passion in her manner, that lighted up her face with a new and wonderful beauty which the baronet perceived even in the growing twilight, she fell on her knees at his feet.
“No, Lucy; no, no!” he cried, vehemently, “not here, not here!”
“Yes, here, here,” she said, the strange passion which agitated her making her voice sound shrill and piercing — not loud, but preternaturally distinct; “here and nowhere else. How good you are — how noble and how generous! Love you! Why, there are women a hundred times my superiors in beauty and in goodness who might love you dearly; but you ask too much of me! Remember what my life has been; only remember that! From my very babyhood I have never seen anything but poverty. My father was a gentleman: clever, accomplished, handsome — but poor — and what a pitiful wretch poverty made of him! My mother — But do not let me speak of her. Poverty — poverty, trials, vexations, humiliations, deprivations. You cannot tell; you, who are among those for whom life is so smooth and easy, you can never guess what is endured by such as we. Do not ask too much of me, then. I cannot be disinterested; I cannot be blind to the advantages of such an alliance. I cannot, I cannot!”
Beyond her agitation and her passionate vehemence, there is an undefined something in her manner which fills the baronet with a vague alarm. She is still on the ground at his feet, crouching rather than kneeling, her thin white dress clinging about her, her pale hair streaming over her shoulders, her great blue eyes glittering in the dusk, and her hands clutching at the black ribbon about her throat, as if it had been strangling her. “Don’t ask too much of me,” she kept repeating; “I have been selfish from my babyhood.”
“Lucy — Lucy, speak plainly. Do you dislike me?”
“Dislike you? No — no!”
“But is there any one else whom you love?”
She laughed aloud at his question. “I do not love any one in the world,” she answered.
He was glad of her reply; and yet that and the strange laugh jarred upon his feelings. He was silent for some moments, and then said, with a kind of effort:
“Well, Lucy, I will not ask too much of you. I dare say I am a romantic old fool; but if you do not dislike me, and if you do not love any one else, I see no reason why we should not make a very happy couple. Is it a bargain, Lucy?”
“Yes.”
The baronet lifted her in his arms and kissed her once upon the forehead, then quietly bidding her good-night, he walked straight out of the house.
He walked straight out of the house, this foolish old man, because there was some strong emotion at work in his breast — neither joy nor triumph, but something almost akin to disappointment — some stifled and unsatisfied longing which lay heavy and dull at his heart, as if he had carried a corpse in his bosom. He carried the corpse of that hope which had died at the sound of Lucy’s words. All the doubts and fears and timid aspirations were ended now. He must be contented, like other men of his age, to be married for his fortune and his position.
Lucy Graham went slowly up the stairs to her little room at the top of the house. She placed her dim candle on the chest of drawers, and seated herself on the edge of the white bed, still and white as the draperies hanging around her.
“No more dependence, no more drudgery, no more humiliations,[1q]” she said; “every trace of the old life melted away — every clew to identity buried and forgotten — except these, except these.”
She had never taken her left hand from the black ribbon at her throat. She drew it from her bosom, as she spoke, and looked at the object attached to it.
It was neither a locket, a miniature, nor a cross; it was a ring wrapped in an oblong piece of paper — the paper partly written, partly printed, yellow with age, and crumpled with much folding.
Chapter 2
On Board the Argus.
He threw the end of his cigar into the water, and leaning his elbows upon the bulwarks, stared meditatively at the waves.
“How wearisome they are,” he said; “blue and green, and opal; opal, and blue, and green; all very well in their way, of course, but three months of them are rather too much, especially —”
He did not attempt to finish his sentence; his thoughts seemed to wander in the very midst of it, and carry him a thousand miles or so away.
“Poor little girl, how pleased she’ll be!” he muttered, opening his cigar-case, lazily surveying its contents; “how pleased and how surprised? Poor little girl. After three years and a half, too; she will be surprised.”
He was a young man of about five-and-twenty, with dark face bronzed by exposure to the sun; he had handsome brown eyes, with a lazy smile in them that sparkled through the black lashes, and a bushy beard and mustache that covered the whole lower part of his face. He was tall and powerfully built; he wore a loose gray suit and a felt hat, thrown carelessly upon his black hair. His name was George Talboys, and he was aft-cabin[4] passenger on board the good ship Argus, laden with Australian wool and sailing from Sydney to Liverpool.
There were very few passengers in the aft-cabin of the Argus. An elderly wool-stapler returning to his native country with his wife and daughters, after having made a fortune in the colonies; a governess of three-and-thirty years of age, going home to marry a man to whom she had been engaged fifteen years; the sentimental daughter of a wealthy Australian wine-merchant, invoiced to England to finish her education, and George Talboys, were the only first-class passengers on board.
This George Talboys was the life and soul of the vessel; nobody knew who or what he was, or where he came from, but everybody liked him. He sat at the bottom of the dinner-table, and assisted the captain in doing the honors of the friendly meal. He opened the champagne[5] bottles, and took wine with every one present; be told funny stories, and led the life himself with such a joyous peal that the man must have been a churl who could not have laughed for pure sympathy. He was a capital hand at speculation and vingt-et-un, and all the merry games, which kept the little circle round the cabin-lamp so deep in innocent amusement, that a hurricane might have howled overhead without their hearing it; but he freely owned that he had no talent for whist, and that he didn’t know a knight from a castle upon the chess-board.
Indeed, Mr. Talboys was by no means too learned a gentleman. The pale governess had tried to talk to him about fashionable literature, but George had only pulled his beard and stared very hard at her, saying occasionally, “Ah, yes, by Jove!” and “To be sure, ah!”
The sentimental young lady, going home to finish her education, had tried him with Shelby and Byron, and he had fairly laughed in her face, as if poetry where a joke. The woolstapler sounded him on politics, but he did not seem very deeply versed in them; so they let him go his own way, smoke his cigars and talk to the sailors, lounge over the bulwarks and stare at the water, and make himself agreeable to everybody in his own fashion. But when the Argus came to be within about a fortnight’s sail of England everybody noticed a change in George Talboys. He grew restless and fidgety; sometimes so merry that the cabin rung with his laughter; sometimes moody and thoughtful. Favorite as he was among the sailors, they were tired at last of answering his perpetual questions about the probable time of touching land. Would it be in ten days, in eleven, in twelve, in thirteen? Was the wind favorable? How many knots an hour was the vessel doing? Then a sudden passion would sieze him, and he would stamp upon the deck, crying out that she was a rickety old craft, and that her owners were swindlers to advertise her as the fast-sailing Argus. She was not fit for passenger traffic; she was not fit to carry impatient living creatures, with hearts and souls; she was fit for nothing but to be laden with bales of stupid wool, that might rot on the sea and be none the worse for it.
The sun was drooping down behind the waves as George Talboys lighted his cigar upon this August evening. Only ten days more, the sailors had told him that afternoon, and they would see the English coast. “I will go ashore in the first boat that hails us,” he cried; “I will go ashore in a cockle-shell. By Jove, if it comes to that, I will swim to land.”
His friends in the aft-cabin, with the exception of the pale governess, laughed at his impatience; she sighed as she watched the young man, chafing at the slow hours, pushing away his untasted wine, flinging himself restlessly about upon the cabin sofa, rushing up and down the companion ladder, and staring at the waves.
As the red rim of the sun dropped into the water, the governess ascended the cabin stairs for a stroll on deck, while the passengers sat over their wine below. She stopped when she came up to George, and, standing by his side, watched the fading crimson in the western sky.
The lady was very quiet and reserved, seldom sharing in the after-cabin amusements, never laughing, and speaking very little; but she and George Talboys had been excellent friends throughout the passage.
“Does my cigar annoy you, Miss Morley?” he said, taking it out of his mouth.
“Not at all; pray do not leave off smoking. I only came up to look at the sunset. What a lovely evening!”
“Yes, yes, I dare say,” he answered, impatiently; “yet so long, so long! Ten more interminable days and ten more weary nights before we land.”
“Yes,” said Miss Morley, sighing. “Do you wish the time shorter?”
“Do I?” cried George. “Indeed I do. Don’t you?”
“Scarcely.”
“But is there no one you love in England? Is there no one you love looking out for your arrival?”
“I hope so,” she said gravely. They were silent for some time, he smoking his cigar with a furious impatience, as if he could hasten the course of the vessel by his own restlessness; she looking out at the waning light with melancholy blue eyes — eyes that seemed to have faded with poring over closely-printed books and difficult needlework; eyes that had faded a little, perhaps, by reason of tears secretly shed in the lonely night.
“See!” said George, suddenly, pointing in another direction from that toward which Miss Morley was looking, “there’s the new moon!”
She looked up at the pale crescent, her own face almost as pale and wan.
“This is the first time we have seen it.”
“We must wish!” said George. “I know what I wish.”
“What?”
“That we may get home quickly.”
“My wish is that we may find no disappointment when we get there,” said the governess, sadly.
“Disappointment!”
He started as if he had been struck, and asked what she meant by talking of disappointment.
“I mean this,” she said, speaking rapidly, and with a restless motion of her thin hands; “I mean that as the end of the voyage draws near, hope sinks in my heart; and a sick fear comes over me that at the last all may not be well. The person I go to meet may be changed in his feelings toward me; or he may retain all the old feeling until the moment of seeing me, and then lose it in a breath at sight of my poor wan face, for I was called a pretty girl, Mr. Talboys, when I sailed for Sydney, fifteen years ago; or he may be so changed by the world as to have grown selfish and mercenary, and he may welcome me for the sake of my fifteen years’ savings. Again, he may be dead. He may have been well, perhaps, up to within a week of our landing, and in that last week may have taken a fever, and died an hour before our vessel anchors in the Mersey. I think of all these things, Mr. Talboys, and act the scenes over in my mind, and feel the anguish of them twenty times a day. Twenty times a day,” she repeated; “why I do it a thousand times a day.”
George Talboys had stood motionless, with his cigar in his hand, listening to her so intently that, as she said the last words, his hold relaxed, and the cigar dropped in the water.
“I wonder,” she continued, more to herself than to him, “I wonder, looking back, to think how hopeful I was[2q] when the vessel sailed; I never thought then of disappointment, but I pictured the joy of meeting, imagining the very words that would be said, the very tones, the very looks; but for this last month of the voyage, day by day, and hour by hour my heart sinks and my hopeful fancies fade away, and I dread the end as much as if I knew that I was going to England to attend a funeral.”
The young man suddenly changed his attitude, and turned his face full upon his companion, with a look of alarm. She saw in the pale light that the color had faded from his cheek.
“What a fool!” he cried, striking his clinched fist upon the side of the vessel, “what a fool I am to be frightened at this? Why do you come and say these things to me? Why do you come and terrify me out of my senses, when I am going straight home to the woman I love; to a girl whose heart is as true as the light of Heaven; and in whom I no more expect to find any change than I do to see another sun rise in to-morrow’s sky? Why do you come and try to put such fancies in my head when I am going home to my darling wife?”
“Your wife,” she said; “that is different. There is no reason that my terrors should terrify you. I am going to England to rejoin a man to whom I was engaged to be married fifteen years ago. He was too poor to marry then, and when I was offered a situation as governess in a rich Australian family, I persuaded him to let me accept it, so that I might leave him free and unfettered to win his way in the world, while I saved a little money to help us when we began life together. I never meant to stay away so long, but things have gone badly with him in England. That is my story, and you can understand my fears. They need not influence you. Mine is an exceptional case.”
“So is mine,” said George, impatiently. “I tell you that mine is an exceptional case: although I swear to you that until this moment, I have never known a fear as to the result of my voyage home. But you are right; your terrors have nothing to do with me. You have been away fifteen years; all kinds of things may happen in fifteen years. Now it is only three years and a half this very month since I left England. What can have happened in such a short time as that?”
Miss Morley looked at him with a mournful smile, but did not speak. His feverish ardor, the freshness and impatience of his nature were so strange and new to her, that she looked at him half in admiration, half in pity.
“My pretty little wife! My gentle, innocent, loving little wife! Do you know, Miss Morley,” he said, with all his old hopefulness of manner, “that I left my little girl asleep, with her baby in her arms, and with nothing but a few blotted lines to tell her why her faithful husband had deserted her?”
“Deserted her!” exclaimed the governess.
“Yes. I was an ensign in a cavalry regiment when I first met my little darling. We were quartered at a stupid seaport town, where my pet lived with her shabby old father, a half-pay naval officer; a regular old humbug, as poor as Job, and with an eye for nothing but the main chance. I saw through all his shallow tricks to catch one of us for his pretty daughter. I saw all the pitiable, contemptible, palpable traps he set for us big dragoons to walk into. I saw through his shabby-genteel dinners and public-house port; his fine talk of the grandeur of his family; his sham pride and independence, and the sham tears of his bleared old eyes when he talked of his only child. He was a drunken old hypocrite, and he was ready to sell my poor, little girl to the highest bidder. Luckily for me, I happened just then to be the highest bidder; for my father, is a rich man, Miss Morley, and as it was love at first sight on both sides, my darling and I made a match of it. No sooner, however, did my father hear that I had married a penniless little girl, the daughter of a tipsy old half-pay lieutenant, than he wrote me a furious letter, telling me he would never again hold any communication with me, and that my yearly allowance would stop from my wedding-day.
