The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mary Elizabeth Braddon

re-entered the bedchamber in which they had left her, with her ringed hands still clasped over her face.

      Robert bent over to whisper in her ear.

      “Your name is Madam Taylor here,” he said. “I do not think you would wish to be known by your real name.”

      She only shook her head in answer to him, and did not even remove her hands from over her face.

      “Madam will have an attendant entirely devoted to her service.” said Monsieur Val. “Madam will have all her wishes obeyed; her reasonable wishes, but that goes without saying,” monsieur adds, with a quaint shrug. “Every effort will be made to render madam’s sojourn at Villebrumeuse agreeable. The inmates dine together when it is wished. I dine with the inmates sometimes; my subordinate, a clever and a worthy man always. I reside with my wife and children in a little pavilion in the grounds; my subordinate resides in the establishment. Madam may rely upon our utmost efforts being exerted to insure her comfort.”

      Monsieur is saying a great deal more to the same effect, rubbing his hands and beaming radiantly upon Robert and his charge, when madam rises suddenly, erect and furious, and dropping her jeweled fingers from before her face, tells him to hold his tongue.

      “Leave me alone with the man who has brought me here.” she cried, between her set teeth. “Leave me!”

      She points to the door with a sharp, imperious gesture; so rapid that the silken drapery about her arm makes a swooping sound as she lifts her hand. The sibilant French syllables hiss through her teeth as she utters them, and seem better fitted to her mood and to herself than the familiar English she has spoken hitherto.

      The French doctor shrugs his shoulders as he goes out into the lobby, and mutters something about a “beautiful devil,” and a gesture worthy of “the Mars.” My lady walked with a rapid footstep to the door between the bed-chamber and the saloon; closed it, and with the handle of the door still in her hand, turned and looked at Robert Audley.

      “You have brought me to my grave, Mr. Audley,” she cried; “you have used your power basely and cruelly, and have brought me to a living grave.”

      “I have done that which I thought just to others and merciful to you,” Robert answered, quietly. “I should have been a traitor to society had I suffered you to remain at liberty after — the disappearance of George Talboys and the fire at Castle Inn. I have brought you to a place in which you will be kindly treated by people who have no knowledge of your story — no power to taunt or to reproach you. You will lead a quiet and peaceful life, my lady; such a life as many a good and holy woman in this Catholic country freely takes upon herself, and happily endures until the end. The solitude of your existence in this place will be no greater than that of a king’s daughter, who, flying from the evil of the time, was glad to take shelter in a house as tranquil as this. Surely, it is a small atonement which I ask you to render for your sins, a light penance which I call upon you to perform. Live here and repent; nobody will assail you, nobody will torment you. I only say to you, repent!”

      “I cannot!” cried my lady, pushing her hair fiercely from her white forehead, and fixing her dilated eyes upon Robert Audley, “I cannot! Has my beauty brought me to this? Have I plotted and schemed to shield myself and laid awake in the long deadly nights, trembling to think of my dangers, for this? I had better have given up at once, since this was to be the end. I had better have yielded to the curse that was upon me, and given up when George Talboys first came back to England.”

      She plucked at the feathery golden curls as if she would have torn them from her head. It had served her so little after all, that gloriously glittering hair, that beautiful nimbus of yellow light that had contrasted so exquisitely with the melting azure of her eyes. She hated herself and her beauty.

      “I would laugh at you and defy you, if I dared,” she cried; “I would kill myself and defy you, if I dared. But I am a poor, pitiful coward, and have been so from the first. Afraid of my mother’s horrible inheritance; afraid of poverty; afraid of George Talboys; afraid of you.”

      She was silent for a little while, but she held her place by the door, as if determined to detain Robert as long as it was her pleasure to do so.

      “Do you know what I am thinking of?” she said, presently. “Do you know what I am thinking of, as I look at you in the dim light of this room? I am thinking of the day upon which George Talboys disappeared.”

      Robert started as she mentioned the name of his lost friend; his face turned pale in the dusky light, and his breathing grew quicker and louder.

      “He was standing opposite me, as you are standing now,” continued my lady. “You said that you would raze the old house to the ground; that you would root up every tree in the gardens to find your dead friend. You would have had no need to do so much: the body of George Talboys lies at the bottom of the old well, in the shrubbery beyond the lime-walk.”

      Robert Audley flung his hands and clasped them above his head, with one loud cry of horror.

      “Oh, my God!” he said, after a dreadful pause; “have all the ghastly things that I have thought prepared me so little for the ghastly truth, that it should come upon me like this at last?”

      “He came to me in the lime-walk,” resumed my lady, in the same hard, dogged tone as that in which she had confessed the wicked story of her life. “I knew that he would come, and I had prepared myself, as well as I could, to meet him. I was determined to bribe him, to cajole him, to defy him; to do anything sooner than abandon the wealth and the position I had won, and go back to my old life. He came, and he reproached me for the conspiracy at Ventnor. He declared that so long as he lived he would never forgive me for the lie that had broken his heart. He told me that I had plucked his heart out of his breast and trampled upon it; and that he had now no heart in which to feel one sentiment of mercy for me. That he would have forgiven me any wrong upon earth, but that one deliberate and passionless wrong that I had done him. He said this and a great deal more, and he told me that no power on earth should turn him from his purpose, which was to take me to the man I had deceived, and make me tell my wicked story. He did not know the hidden taint that I had sucked in with my mother’s milk. He did not know that it was possible to drive me mad. He goaded me as you have goaded me; he was as merciless as you have been merciless. We were in the shrubbery at the end of the lime-walk. I was seated upon the broken masonry at the mouth of the well. George Talboys was leaning upon the disused windlass, in which the rusty iron spindle rattled loosely whenever he shifted his position. I rose at last, and turned upon him to defy him, as I had determined to defy him at the worst. I told him that if he denounced me to Sir Michael, I would declare him to be a madman or a liar, and I defied him to convince the man who loved me — blindly, as I told him — that he had any claim to me. I was going to leave him after having told him this, when he caught me by the wrist and detained me by force. You saw the bruises that his fingers made upon my wrist, and noticed them, and did not believe the account I gave of them. I could see that, Mr. Robert Audley, and I saw that you were a person I should have to fear.”

      She paused, as if she had expected Robert to speak; but he stood silent and motionless, waiting for the end.

      “George Talboys treated me as you treated me,” she said, petulantly. “He swore that if there was but one witness of my identity, and that witness was removed from Audley Court by the width of the whole earth, he would bring him there to swear to my identity, and to denounce me. It was then that I was mad, it was then that I drew the loose iron spindle from the shrunken wood, and saw my first husband sink with one horrible cry into the black mouth of the well. There is a legend of its enormous depth. I do not know how deep it is. It is dry, I suppose, for I heard no splash, only a dull thud. I looked down and I saw nothing but black emptiness. I knelt down and listened, but the cry was not repeated, though I waited for nearly a quarter of an hour — God knows how long it seemed to me! — by the mouth of the well.”

      Robert Audley uttered a word of horror when the story was finished. He moved a little nearer toward the door against which Helen Talboys stood. Had there been any other means of exit from the room, he would gladly have availed himself