The door opened while he was thinking of this fondly-loved wife, and looking up, the baronet saw the slender form standing in the doorway.
"Why, my darling!" he exclaimed, as my lady closed the door behind her, and came toward his chair, "I have been thinking of you and waiting for you for an hour. Where have you been, and what have you been doing?"
My lady, standing in the shadow rather than the light, paused a few moments before replying to this question.
"I have been to Chelmsford," she said, "shopping; and--"
She hesitated--twisting her bonnet strings in her thin white fingers with an air of pretty embarra.s.sment.
"And what, my dear?" asked the baronet--"what have you been doing since you came from Chelmsford? I heard a carriage stop at the door an hour ago. It was yours, was it not?"
"Yes, I came home an hour ago," answered my lady, with the same air of embarra.s.sment.
"And what have you been doing since you came home?"
Sir Michael Audley asked this question with a slightly reproachful accent. His young wife"s presence made the sunshine of his life; and though he could not bear to chain her to his side, it grieved him to think that she could willingly remain unnecessarily absent from him, frittering away her time in some childish talk or frivolous occupation.
"What have you been doing since you came home, my dear?" he repeated.
"What has kept you so long away from me?"
"I have been--talking--to--Mr. Robert Audley."
She still twisted her bonnet-string round and round her fingers.
She still spoke with the same air of embarra.s.sment.
"Robert!" exclaimed the baronet; "is Robert here?"
"He was here a little while ago."
"And is here still, I suppose?"
"No, he has gone away."
"Gone away!" cried Sir Michael. "What do you mean, my darling?"
"I mean that your nephew came to the Court this afternoon. Alicia and I found him idling about the gardens. He stayed here till about a quarter of an hour ago talking to me, and then he hurried off without a word of explanation; except, indeed, some ridiculous excuse about business at Mount Stanning."
"Business at Mount Stanning! Why, what business can he possibly have in that out-of-the-way place? He has gone to sleep at Mount Stanning, then, I suppose?
"Yes; I think he said something to that effect."
"Upon my word," exclaimed the baronet, "I think that boy is half mad."
My lady"s face was so much in shadow, that Sir Michael Audley was unaware of the bright change that came over its sickly pallor as he made this very commonplace observation. A triumphant smile illuminated Lucy Audley"s countenance, a smile that plainly said, "It is coming--it is coming; I can twist him which way I like. I can put black before him, and if I say it is white, he will believe me."
But Sir Michael Audley in declaring that his nephew"s wits were disordered, merely uttered that commonplace e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n which is well-known to have very little meaning. The baronet had, it is true, no very great estimate of Robert"s faculty for the business of this everyday life. He was in the habit of looking upon his nephew as a good-natured nonent.i.ty--a man whose heart had been amply stocked by liberal Nature with all the best things the generous G.o.ddess had to bestow, but whose brain had been somewhat overlooked in the distribution of intellectual gifts. Sir Michael Audley made that mistake which is very commonly made by easy-going, well-to-do-observers, who have no occasion to look below the surface. He mistook laziness for incapacity.
He thought because his nephew was idle, he must necessarily be stupid.
He concluded that if Robert did not distinguish himself, it was because he could not.
He forgot the mute inglorious Miltons, who die voiceless and inarticulate for want of that dogged perseverance, that blind courage, which the poet must possess before he can find a publisher; he forgot the Cromwells, who see the n.o.ble vessels of the state floundering upon a sea of confusion, and going down in a tempest of noisy bewilderment, and who yet are powerless to get at the helm; forbidden even to send out a life-boat to the sinking ship. Surely it is a mistake to judge of what a man can do by that which he has done.
The world"s Valhalla is a close borough, and perhaps the greatest men may be those who perish silently far away from the sacred portal.
Perhaps the purest and brightest spirits are those who shrink from the turmoil of the race-course--the tumult and confusion of the struggle.
The game of life is something like the game of _ecarte_, and it may be that the very best cards are sometimes left in the pack.
My lady threw off her bonnet, and seated herself upon a velvet-covered footstool at Sir Michael"s feet. There was nothing studied or affected in this girlish action. It was so natural to Lucy Audley to be childish, that no one would have wished to see her otherwise. It would have seemed as foolish to expect dignified reserve or womanly gravity from this amber-haired siren, as to wish for rich ba.s.ses amid the clear treble of a sky-lark"s song.
She sat with her pale face turned away from the firelight, and with her hands locked together upon the arm of her husband"s easy-chair. They were very restless, these slender white hands. My lady twisted the jeweled fingers in and out of each other as she talked to her husband.
"I wanted to come to you, you know, dear," said she--"I wanted to come to you directly I got home, but Mr. Audley insisted upon my stopping to talk to him."
"But what about, my love?" asked the baronet. "What could Robert have to say to you?"
My lady did not answer this question. Her fair head dropped upon her husband"s knee, her rippling, yellow curls fell over her face.
Sir Michael lifted that beautiful head with his strong hands, and raised my lady"s face. The firelight shining on that pale face lit up the large, soft blue eyes and showed them drowned in tears.
"Lucy, Lucy!" cried the baronet, "what is the meaning of this? My love, my love! what has happened to distress you in this manner?"
Lady Audley tried to speak, but the words died inarticulately upon her trembling lips. A choking sensation in her throat seemed to strangle those false and plausible words, her only armor against her enemies. She could not speak. The agony she had endured silently in the dismal lime-walk had grown too strong for her, and she broke into a tempest of hysterical sobbing. It was no simulated grief that shook her slender frame and tore at her like some ravenous beast that would have rent her piecemeal with its horrible strength. It was a storm of real anguish and terror, of remorse and misery. It was the one wild outcry, in which the woman"s feebler nature got the better of the siren"s art.
It was not thus that she had meant to fight her terrible duel with Robert Audley. Those were not the weapons which she had intended to use; but perhaps no artifice which she could have devised would have served her so well as this one outburst of natural grief. It shook her husband to the very soul. It bewildered and terrified him. It reduced the strong intellect of the man to helpless confusion and perplexity. It struck at the one weak point in a good man"s nature. It appealed straight to Sir Michael Audley"s affection for his wife.
Ah, Heaven help a strong man"s tender weakness for the woman he loves!
Heaven pity him when the guilty creature has deceived him and comes with her tears and lamentations to throw herself at his feet in self-abandonment and remorse; torturing him with the sight of her agony; rending _his_ heart with her sobs, lacerating _his_ breast with her groans--multiplying her sufferings into a great anguish for him to bear!
multiplying them by twenty-fold; multiplying them in a ratio of a brave man"s capacity for endurance. Heaven forgive him, if maddened by that cruel agony, the balance wavers for a moment, and he is ready to forgive _anything_; ready to take this wretched one to the shelter of his breast, and to pardon that which the stern voice of manly honor urges must not be pardoned. Pity him, pity him! The wife"s worst remorse when she stands without the threshold of the home she may never enter more is not equal to the agony of the husband who closes the portal on that familiar and entreating face. The anguish of the mother who may never look again upon her children is less than the torment of the father who has to say to those little ones, "My darlings, you are henceforth motherless."
Sir Michael Audley rose from his chair, trembling with indignation, and ready to do immediate battle with the person who had caused his wife"s grief.
"Lucy," he said, "Lucy, I insist upon your telling me what and who has distressed you. I insist upon it. Whoever has annoyed you shall answer to me for your grief. Come, my love, tell me directly what it is."
He seated himself and bent over the drooping figure at his feet, calming his own agitation in his desire to soothe his wife"s distress.
"Tell me what it is, my dear," he whispered, tenderly.
The sharp paroxysm had pa.s.sed away, and my lady looked up. A glittering light shone through the tears in her eyes, and the lines about her pretty rosy mouth, those hard and cruel lines which Robert Audley had observed in the pre-Raphaelite portrait, were plainly visible in the firelight.
"I am very silly," she said; "but really he has made me quite hysterical."
"Who--who has made you hysterical?"
"Your nephew--Mr. Robert Audley."
"Robert," cried the baronet. "Lucy, what do you mean?"
"I told you that Mr. Audley insisted upon my going into the lime-walk, dear," said my lady. "He wanted to talk to me, he said, and I went, and he said such horrible things that--"
"What horrible things, Lucy?"