FullReads

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.