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

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СКАЧАТЬ young lady was walking up and down the room, slashing the skirt of her habit with her riding-whip. Her eyes sparkled with an angry flash, and a crimson glow burned under her clear brown skin. The young barrister knew very well, by these diagnostics, that his cousin was in a passion.

      “Yes,” she repeated, “your stupid, inanimate countenance. Do you know, Robert Audley, that with all your mock amiability, you are brimful of conceit and superciliousness. You look down upon our amusements; you lift up your eyebrows, and shrug your shoulders, and throw yourself back in your chair, and wash your hands of us and our pleasures. You are a selfish, cold-hearted Sybarite —”

      “Alicia! Good — gracious — me!”

      The morning paper dropped out of his hands, and he sat feebly staring at his assailant.

      “Yes, selfish, Robert Audley! You take home half-starved dogs, because you like half-starved dogs. You stoop down, and pat the head of every good-for-nothing cur in the village street, because you like good-for-nothing curs. You notice little children, and give them halfpence, because it amuses you to do so. But you lift your eyebrows a quarter of a yard when poor Sir Harry Towers tells a stupid story, and stare the poor fellow out of countenance with your lazy insolence. As to your amiability, you would let a man hit you, and say ‘Thank you’ for the blow, rather than take the trouble to hit him again; but you wouldn’t go half a mile out of your way to serve your dearest friend. Sir Harry is worth twenty of you, though he did write to ask if my m-a-i-r Atalanta had recovered from the sprain. He can’t spell, or lift his eyebrows to the roots of his hair; but he would go through fire and water for the girl he loves; while you—”

      At this very point, when Robert was most prepared to encounter his cousin’s violence, and when Miss Alicia seemed about to make her strongest attack, the young lady broke down altogether, and burst into tears.

      Robert sprang from his easy-chair, upsetting his dogs on the carpet.

      “Alicia, my darling, what is it?”

      “It’s — it’s — it’s the feather of my hat that got into my eyes,” sobbed his cousin; and before he could investigate the truth of this assertion Alicia had darted out of the room.

      Robert Audley was preparing to follow her, when he heard her voice in the court-yard below, amidst the tramping of horses and the clamor of visitors, dogs, and grooms. Sir Harry Towers, the most aristocratic young sportsman in the neighborhood, had just taken her little foot in his hand as she sprung into her saddle.

      “Good Heaven!” exclaimed Robert, as he watched the merry party of equestrians until they disappeared under the archway. “What does all this mean? How charmingly she sits her horse! What a pretty figure, too, and a fine, candid, brown, rosy face: but to fly at a fellow like that, without the least provocation! That’s the consequence of letting a girl follow the hounds. She learns to look at everything in life as she does at six feet of timber or a sunk fence; she goes through the world as she goes across country — straight ahead, and over everything. Such a nice girl as she might have been, too, if she’d been brought up in Figtree Court! If ever I marry, and have daughters (which remote contingency may Heaven forefend!) they shall be educated in Paper Buildings, take their sole exercise in the Temple Gardens, and they shall never go beyond the gates till they are marriageable, when I will walk them straight across Fleet street to St. Dunstan’s church, and deliver them into the hands of their husbands.”

      With such reflections as these did Mr. Robert Audley beguile the time until my lady re-entered the drawing-room, fresh and radiant in her elegant morning costume, her yellow curls glistening with the perfumed waters in which she had bathed, and her velvet-covered sketch-book in her arms. She planted a little easel upon a table by the window, seated herself before it, and began to mix the colors upon her palette, Robert watching her out of his half-closed eyes.

      “You are sure my cigar does not annoy you, Lady Audley?”

      “Oh, no indeed; I am quite used to the smell of tobacco. Mr. Dawson, the surgeon, smoked all the evening when I lived in his house.”

      “Dawson is a good fellow, isn’t he?” Robert asked, carelessly.

      My lady burst into her pretty, gushing laugh.

      “The dearest of good creatures,” she said. “He paid me five-and-twenty pounds a year — only fancy, five-and-twenty pounds! That made six pounds five a quarter. How well I remember receiving the money — six dingy old sovereigns, and a little heap of untidy, dirty silver, that came straight from the till in the surgery! And then how glad I was to get it! While now— I can’t help laughing while I think of it — these colors I am using cost a guinea each at Winsor & Newton’s — the carmine and ultramarine thirty shillings. I gave Mrs. Dawson one of my silk dresses the other day, and the poor thing kissed me, and the surgeon carried the bundle home under his cloak.”

      My lady laughed long and joyously at the thought. Her colors were mixed; she was copying a water-colored sketch of an impossibly Turneresque atmosphere. The sketch was nearly finished, and she had only to put in some critical little touches with the most delicate of her sable pencils. She prepared herself daintily for the work, looking sideways at the painting.

      All this time Mr. Robert Audley’s eyes were fixed intently on her pretty face.

      “It is a change,” he said, after so long a pause that my lady might have forgotten what she had been talking of, “it is a change! Some women would do a great deal to accomplish such a change as that.”

      Lady Audley’s clear blue eyes dilated as she fixed them suddenly on the young barrister. The wintry sunlight, gleaming full upon her face from a side window, lit up the azure of those beautiful eyes, till their color seemed to flicker and tremble betwixt blue and green, as the opal tints of the sea change upon a summer’s day. The small brush fell from her hand, and blotted out the peasant’s face under a widening circle of crimson lake.

      Robert Audley was tenderly coaxing the crumbled leaf of his cigar with cautious fingers.

      “My friend at the corner of Chancery Lane has not given me such good Manillas as usual,” he murmured. “If ever you smoke, my dear aunt (and I am told that many women take a quiet weed under the rose), be very careful how you choose your cigars.”

      My lady drew a long breath, picked up her brush, and laughed aloud at Robert’s advice.

      “What an eccentric creature you are, Mr. Audley I Do you know that you sometimes puzzle me —”

      “Not more than you puzzle me, dear aunt.”

      My lady put away her colors and sketch book, and seating herself in the deep recess of another window, at a considerable distance from Robert Audley, settled to a large piece of Berlin-wool work — a piece of embroidery which the Penelopes of ten or twelve years ago were very fond of exercising their ingenuity upon — the Olden Time at Bolton Abbey.

      Seated in the embrasure of this window, my lady was separated from Robert Audley by the whole length of the room, and the young man could only catch an occasional glimpse of her fair face, surrounded by its bright aureole of hazy, golden hair.

      Robert Audley had been a week at the Court, but as yet neither he nor my lady had mentioned the name of George Talboys.

      This morning, however, after exhausting the usual topics of conversation, Lady Audley made an inquiry about her nephew’s friend; “That Mr. George — George —” she said, hesitating.

      “Talboys,” СКАЧАТЬ