Lady Audley’s Secret quotes

People who observed this, accounted for it by saying that it was a part of her amiable and gentle nature always to be lighthearted, 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.

… 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.

Everyone 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 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?

“But is there anyone else whom you love?”

She laughed aloud at his question. “I do not love anyone 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:

… 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.

Robert Audley was supposed to be a barrister.

As a barrister was his name inscribed in the law-list; as a barrister he had chambers in Figtree Court, Temple;

The sly old benchers laughed at the pleasant fiction; but they all agreed that Robert Audley was a good fellow; a generous-hearted fellow; rather a curious fellow, too, with a fund of sly wit and quiet humor, under his listless, dawdling, indifferent, irresolute manner.

A man who would never get on in the world; but who would not hurt a worm.

Indeed, his chambers were converted into a perfect dog-kennel, by his habit of bringing home stray and benighted curs, who were attracted by his looks in the street, and followed him with abject fondness.

“I always said the old buffer would marry,” he muttered, after about half an hour’s revery. “Alicia and my lady, the stepmother, will go at it hammer and tongs.

I hope they won’t quarrel in the hunting season, or say unpleasant things to each other at the dinner-table; rows always upset a man’s digestion.

”

The barrister received him with open arms; he gave him the room with the birds and flowers, and had a bed put up in his dressing-room for himself.

Grief is so selfish that George did not know the sacrifices his friend made for his comfort.

He only knew that for him the sun was darkened, and the business of life done. He sat all day long smoking cigars, and staring at the flowers and canaries, chafing for the time to pass that he might be far out at sea.

but every change in the weather, however slight, every variation of the atmosphere, however trifling, brought back the old agony of their wounds as sharp as ever they had felt it on the battlefield.

I’ve had my wound, Bob; I carry the bullet still, and I shall carry it into my coffin.

”

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do, George: there’s a glorious inn at Audley, and plenty of fishing in the neighborhood; we’ll go there and have a week’s sport.

Fishing is much better than shooting; you’ve only to lie on a bank and stare at your line; I don’t find that you often catch anything, but it’s very pleasant.

”

but if poor Alicia for a moment calculated upon arousing any latent spark of jealousy lurking in her cousin’s breast by this exhibition of interest, she was not so well acquainted with Robert Audley’s disposition as she might have been.

Indolent, handsome, and indifferent, the young barrister took life as altogether too absurd a mistake for any one event in its foolish course to be for a moment considered seriously by a sensible man.

His pretty, gipsy-faced cousin might have been over head and ears in love with him; and she might have told him so, in some charming, roundabout, womanly fashion, a hundred times a day for all the three hundred and sixty-five days in the year;

but unless she had waited for some privileged 29th of February, and walked straight up to him, saying, “Robert, please will you marry me?” I very much doubt if he would ever have discovered the state of her feelings.

Again, had he been in love with her himself, I fancy that the tender passion would, with him, have been so vague and feeble a sentiment that he might have gone down to his grave with a dim sense of some uneasy sensation which might be love or indigestion, and with, beyond this, no knowledge whatever of his state.

So it was not the least use, my poor Alicia, to ride about the lanes around Audley during those three days which the two young men spent in Essex;

Robert Audley stared at his friend in silent amazement; and, after a pause of profound deliberation, said solemnly, “George Talboys, I could understand this if you had been eating heavy suppers.

Cold pork, now, especially if underdone, might produce this sort of thing.

You want change of air, my dear boy; you want the refreshing breezes of Figtree Court, and the soothing air of Fleet street. Or, stay,” he added, suddenly, “I have it! You’ve been smoking our friend the landlord’s cigars; that accounts for everything.”

“Come out of this room, Alicia,” added the young man, nervously; “I believe it’s damp, or else haunted.

Indeed, I believe all ghosts to be the result of damp or dyspepsia.

You sleep in a damp bed—you awake suddenly in the dead of the night with a cold shiver, and see an old lady in the court costume of George the First’s time, sitting at the foot of the bed.

It was so like, and yet so unlike.

It was as if you had burned strange-colored fires before my lady’s face, and by their influence brought out new lines and new expressions never seen in it before.

The perfection of feature, the brilliancy of coloring, were there; but I suppose the painter had copied quaint medieval monstrosities until his brain had grown bewildered, for my lady, in his portrait of her, had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend.

“

Don’t be German, Alicia, if you love me.

The picture is—the picture: and my lady is—my lady. That’s my way of taking things, and I’m not metaphysical; don’t unsettle me.”

Sir Michael was mistaken in his prophecy upon the weather. The storm did not hold off until next day, but burst with terrible fury over the village of Audley about half an hour before midnight.

Robert Audley took the thunder and lightning with the same composure with which he accepted all the other ills of life.

He lay on a sofa in the sitting-room, ostensibly reading the five-days-old Chelmsford paper, and regaling himself occasionally with a few sips from a large tumbler of cold punch. But the storm had quite a different effect upon George Talboys.

She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and then was only tall enough to reach his white beard. She told him, laughing, that she had always been a silly, frightened creature—frightened of dogs, frightened of cattle, frightened of a thunderstorm, frightened of a rough sea.

“Frightened of everything and everybody but my dear, noble, handsome husband,” she said.

She had found the carpet in her dressing-room disarranged, and had inquired into the mystery of the secret passage. She chid Miss Alicia in a playful, laughing way, for her boldness in introducing two great men into my lady’s rooms.

“How sad!” murmured Lady Audley. “

It seems almost cruel of Mrs. Talboys to die, and grieve her poor husband so much.

”

“It’s gone to be cleaned, Georgey,” answered his grandfather.

“It’s always going to be cleaned,” said the boy.

“The watch is perfectly safe, I assure you, Mr. Audley,” murmured the old man, apologetically; and taking out a pawnbroker’s duplicate, he handed it to Robert.

“I don’t believe it a bit, papa,” answered Alicia, stoutly. “You think her sensitive because she has soft little white hands, and big blue eyes with long lashes, and all manner of affected, fantastical ways, which you stupid men call fascinating.

Sensitive! Why, I’ve seen her do cruel things with those slender white fingers, and laugh at the pain she inflicted.

I’m very sorry, papa,” she added, softened a little by her father’s look of distress; “though she has come between us, and robbed poor Alicia of the love of that dear, generous heart, I wish I could like her for your sake;

but if I had not had hold of his collar, he would have flown at her throat and strangled her.

She may bewitch every man in Essex, but she’d never make friends with my dog.

”

“What a severe creature you are, Alicia!” said my lady, making a little grimace. “I suppose you mean to infer by all that, that I’m deceitful. Why, I can’t help smiling at people, and speaking prettily to them.

I know I’m no better than the rest of the world; but I can’t help it if I’m pleasanter. It’s constitutional.

”

“My dear, hasty, impetuous Alicia, don’t be violent,” said the young man imploringly. “

A conclusion isn’t a five-barred gate; and you needn’t give your judgment its head, as you give your mare Atalanta hers, when you’re flying across country at the heels of an unfortunate fox.

Lady Audley interests me, and my uncle’s county friends do not. Is that a sufficient answer, Alicia?”

“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!)

“Circumstantial evidence,” continued the young man, as if he scarcely heard Lady Audley’s interruption—“that wonderful fabric which is built out of straws collected at every point of the compass, and which is yet strong enough to hang a man.

Upon what infinitesimal trifles may sometimes hang the whole secret of some wicked mystery, inexplicable heretofore to the wisest upon the earth!

A scrap of paper, a shred of some torn garment, the button off a coat, a word dropped incautiously from the overcautious lips of guilt, the fragment of a letter, the shutting or opening of a door, a shadow on a window-blind, the accuracy of …

… manner of well-meaning maniacs, by way of proving the vehemence of their passion—do you suppose because of this, Alicia Audley, that they may not be just as sensible of the merits of a dear little warmhearted and affectionate girl as ever their neighbors can be?

Life is such a very troublesome matter, when all is said and done, that it’s as well even to take its blessings quietly.

I don’t make a great howling because I can get good cigars one door from the corner of Chancery Lane, and have a dear, good girl for my cousin; but I am not the less grateful to Providence that it is so.”

“I only said I thought I knew him,” Robert called after her; and, then, as he sunk into an easy-chair, he murmured thoughtfully: “

Such a nice girl, too, if she didn’t bounce.

”

“

What’s the good of being rich if one has no one to help spend one’s money?

” said the young baronet. “One only grows a selfish beggar, and takes to drinking too much port. It’s a hard thing that a girl can refuse a true heart and such stables as we’ve got at the park. It unsettles a man somehow.”

Robert looked at her thoughtfully as she spread the cloth, and drew the table nearer to the fireplace.

“That,” he thought, “is a woman who could keep a secret.”

The dogs looked rather suspiciously at the quiet figure of Mrs. Marks gliding softly about the room, from the teapot to the caddy, and from the caddy to the kettle singing on the hob.

The long, lonely road leading toward Audley seemed untrodden by a footstep, as Robert Audley looked out at the wintry landscape.

“Lively,” he said, “for a man used to the fascinations of Temple Bar.”

As he watched the snowflakes falling every moment thicker and faster upon the lonely road, he was surprised by seeing a brougham driving slowly up the hill.

If I were to go tomorrow into that commonplace, plebeian, eight-roomed house in which Maria Manning and her husband murdered their guest, I should have no awful prescience of that bygone horror.

Foul deeds have been done under the most hospitable roofs; terrible crimes have been committed amid the fairest scenes, and have left no trace upon the spot where they were done.

I do not believe in mandrake, or in bloodstains that no time can efface. I believe rather that we may walk unconsciously in an atmosphere of crime, and breathe none the less freely.

I do not believe in mandrake, or in bloodstains that no time can efface. I believe rather that we may walk unconsciously in an atmosphere of crime, and breathe none the less freely.

I believe that we may look into the smiling face of a murderer, and admire its tranquil beauty.

”

“Perhaps, when that gentleman who is making such a noise about a pointer with liver-colored spots, has discovered the particular pointer and spots that he wants—which happy combination of events scarcely seems likely to arrive—they’ll give me my luggage and let me go.

The designing wretches knew at a glance that I was born to be imposed upon; and that if they were to trample the life out of me upon this very platform, I should never have the spirit to bring an action against the company.

”

When he raised his head from that long and silent revery, his eyes had a bright, determined glance, and every feature in his face seemed to wear a new expression.

“Justice to the dead first,” he said; “mercy to the living afterward.”

He wheeled his easy-chair to the table, trimmed the lamp, and settled himself to the examination of the books.

“There are wolves at Southampton,” he said, with rather a triumphant nod to Robert Audley. “

My gran’pa says when he takes my watch that he does it to keep the wolf from the door.

Are there wolves where you live?”

He found the little man on intimate terms with the idle waiter, who had been directing Master Georgey’s attention to the different objects of interest in the High street.

Poor Robert had about as much notion of the requirements of a child as he had of those of a white elephant.

He had catered for silkworms, guinea-pigs, dormice, canary-birds, and dogs, without number, during his boyhood, but he had never been called upon to provide for a young person of five years old.

Nobody ever remembered getting upon what is popularly called the blind side of Harcourt Talboys. He was like his own square-built, northern-fronted, shelterless house.

There were no shady nooks in his character into which one could creep for shelter from his hard daylight. He was all daylight.

He looked at everything in the same broad glare of intellectual sunlight, and would see no softening shadows that might alter the sharp outlines of cruel facts, subduing them to beauty.

We won’t go with pitiful faces to the stern father, and ask him to give us food and shelter, only to be refused in long, Johnsonian sentences, and made a classical example for the benefit of the neighborhood.

No, my pretty one; it is easy to starve, but it is difficult to stoop.

”

“I thought dragoons were always rich,” she used to say, peevishly. “Girls always want to marry dragoons; and tradespeople always want to serve dragoons; and hotelkeepers to entertain dragoons; and theatrical managers to be patronized by dragoons.

Who could have ever expected that a dragoon would drink sixpenny ale, smoke horrid bird’s-eye tobacco, and let his wife wear a shabby bonnet?

”

If there were any selfish feelings displayed in such speeches as these, George Talboys had never discovered it. He had loved and believed in his wife from the first to the last hour of his brief married life.

The love that is not blind is perhaps only a spurious divinity after all; for when Cupid takes the fillet from his eyes it is a fatally certain indication that he is preparing to spread his wings for a flight.

George never forgot the hour in which he had first become bewitched by Lieutenant Maldon’s pretty daughter, and however she might have changed, the image which had charmed him then, unchanged and unchanging, represented her in his heart.

The windows winked and the flight of stone steps glared in the sunlight, the prim garden walks were so freshly graveled that they gave a sandy, gingery aspect to the place, reminding one unpleasantly of red hair.

The lawn was chiefly ornamented with dark, wintry shrubs of a funereal aspect which grew in beds that looked like problems in algebra;

and the flight of stone steps leading to the square half-glass door of the hall was adorned with dark-green wooden tubs containing the same sturdy evergreens.

Some people are so weak-minded as to affect pictures and statues. Mr. Harcourt Talboys was far too practical to indulge in any foolish fancies.

A barometer and an umbrella-stand were the only adornments of his entrance-hall.

Robert Audley looked at these while his name was being submitted to George’s father.

Look at marriages, for instance,” mused Robert, who was as meditative in the jolting vehicle, for whose occupation he was to pay sixpence a mile, as if he had been riding a mustang on the wild loneliness of the prairies. “

Look at marriage! Who is to say which shall be the one judicious selection out of nine hundred and ninety-nine mistakes!

Who shall decide from the first aspect of the slimy creature, which is to be the one eel out of the colossal bag of snakes?

… be angry with this cruel hardness in our life—this unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be forever hollow, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures on a shattered dial.

Who has not felt, in the first madness of sorrow, an unreasoning rage against the mute propriety of chairs and tables, the stiff squareness of Turkey carpets, the unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of existence?

We want to root up gigantic trees in a primeval forest, and to tear their huge branches asunder in our convulsive grasp;

I’ve been acting for myself, and thinking for myself, for the last few months, and I’m tired of the unnatural business. I’ve been false to the leading principle of my life, and I’ve suffered for the folly.

I found two gray hairs in my head the week before last, and an impertinent crow has planted a delicate impression of his foot under my right eye.

Yes, I’m getting old upon the right side; and why—why should it be so?”

That’s why incompetent men sometimes sit in high places, and interpose their poor, muddled intellects between the things to be done and the people that can do them, making universal confusion in the helpless innocence of well-placed incapacity.

The square men in the round holes are pushed into them by their wives.

The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet.

The square men in the round holes are pushed into them by their wives. The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so.

It is because women are never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet.

They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joans of Arc, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharines the Second, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamor and desperation.

“What the devil am I doing in this galère?” he asked. “But I am in it, and I can’t get out of it; so I better submit myself to the brown-eyed girl, and do what she tells me patiently and faithfully.

What a wonderful solution to life’s enigma there is in petticoat government!

Man might lie in the sunshine, and eat lotuses, and fancy it ‘always afternoon,’ if his wife would let him! But she won’t, bless her impulsive heart and active mind! She knows better than that.

Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they’ll quarrel with Mrs. Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maidservant.

To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the noisier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex.

They want freedom of opinion, variety of occupation, do they? Let them have it. Let them be lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, soldiers, legislators—anything they like—but let them be quiet—if they can.”

“I know that,” she said. “

Those who strike me must strike through him.

”

She looked very pretty and innocent, seated behind the graceful group of delicate opal china and glittering silver.

Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea.

The most feminine and most domestic of all occupations imparts a magic harmony to her every movement, a witchery to her every glance.

“Upon my word, Robert Audley, you are a very agreeable companion,” exclaimed Alicia at length, her rather limited stock of patience quite exhausted by two or three of these abortive attempts at conversation. “

Perhaps the next time you come to the Court you will be good enough to bring your mind with you.

By your present inanimate appearance, I should imagine that you had left your intellect, such as it is, somewhere in the Temple. You were never one of the liveliest of people, but latterly you have really grown almost unendurable.

“If the baker can’t find her, how should I find her?” he thought, despairingly. “

If a resolute, sanguine, active and energetic creature, such as the baker, fail to achieve this business, how can a lymphatic wretch like me hope to accomplish it?

Where the baker has been defeated, what preposterous folly it would be for me to try to succeed.”

a slim-legged card-table, placed in the post of honor, formed the principal pieces of furniture. A threadbare patch of Brussels carpet covered the center of the room, and formed an oasis of roses and lilies upon a desert of shabby green drugget.

Knitted curtains shaded the windows, in which hung wire baskets of horrible-looking plants of the cactus species, that grew downward, like some demented class of vegetation, whose prickly and spider-like members had a fancy for standing on their heads.

The green-baize covered card-table was adorned with gaudily-bound annuals or books of beauty, placed at right angles; but Robert Audley did not avail himself of these literary distractions.

In less than five minutes Miss Tonks made her appearance. She was wintry and rather frostbitten in aspect, and seemed to bring cold air in the scanty folds of her somber merino dress.

She was no age in particular, and looked as if she had never been younger, and would never grow older, but would remain forever working backward and forward in her narrow groove, like some self-feeding machine for the instruction of young ladies.

“Tonks, my dear,” said Mrs. Vincent, without ceremony, “this gentleman is a relative of Miss Graham’s. Do you remember how long it is since she came to us at Crescent Villas?”

The scarlet coat of the sentinel who walked backward and forward between two cannons, placed at remote angles before the barrack wall, was the only scrap of color that relieved the neutral-tinted picture of the gray stone houses and the leaden sea.

On one side of the harbor a long stone pier stretched out far away into the cruel loneliness of the sea, as if built for the especial accommodation of some modern Timon, too misanthropical to be satisfied even with the solitude of Wildernsea, and anxious to get still further away from his fellow-creatures.

It was on that pier George Talboys had first met his wife, under the blazing glory of a midsummer sky, and to the music of a braying band.

with no more familiar knowledge of the creature than he has of the faraway satellites or the remoter planets; with a vague notion that she is a whirling teetotum in pink or blue gauze, or a graceful automaton for the display of milliners’ manufacture.

He comes to some place of this kind, and the universe is suddenly narrowed into about half a dozen acres; the mighty scheme of creation is crushed into a bandbox.

The faraway creatures whom he had seen floating about him, beautiful and indistinct, are brought under his very nose; and before he has time to recover his bewilderment, hey presto, the witchcraft has begun; the magic circle is drawn around him!

An elderly terrier, whose black-and-tan coat was thickly sprinkled with gray, reposed in Mrs. Barkamb’s lap. Every object in the quiet sitting-room had an elderly aspect of simple comfort and precision, which is the evidence of outward repose.

“I should like to live here,” Robert thought, “and watch the gray sea slowly rolling over the gray sand under the still, gray sky. I should like to live here, and tell the beads upon my rosary, and repent and rest.”

He seated himself in the armchair opposite Mrs. Barkamb, at that lady’s invitation, and placed his hat upon the ground. The elderly terrier descended from his mistress’ lap to bark at and otherwise take objection to this hat.

“I have nothing to do with the movements of so erratic an individual,” she said. “

Since Robert Audley has taken it into his head to conduct himself like some ghost-haunted hero in a German story, I have given up attempting to understand him.

”

Sir Michael Audley made that mistake which is very commonly made by easygoing, 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.

forbidden even to send out a lifeboat 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.

forbidden even to send out a lifeboat 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 racecourse—the tumult and confusion of the struggle.

Perhaps the purest and brightest spirits are those who shrink from the turmoil of the racecourse—the tumult and confusion of the struggle.

The game of life is something like the game of écarté, 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.

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 basses amid the clear treble of a skylark’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.

Robert Audley is a monomaniac. The disappearance of his friend, George Talboys, grieved and bewildered him. He dwelt upon this one idea until he lost the power of thinking of anything else. The one idea looked at perpetually became distorted to his mental vision.

Repeat the commonest word in the English language twenty times, and before the twentieth repetition you will have begun to wonder whether the word which you repeat is really the word you mean to utter.

Robert Audley has thought of his friend’s disappearance until the one idea has done its fatal and unhealthy work. He looks at a common event with a vision that is diseased, and he distorts it into a gloomy horror engendered of his own monomania.

She paused for a moment as she closed the library door—she paused, and laid her hand upon her breast to check the rapid throbbing of her heart.

“I have been afraid of you, Mr. Robert Audley,” she thought; “but perhaps the time may come in which you will have cause to be afraid of me.”

… carried forward the sum of her dislike, and put it out at a steady rate of interest, until the breach between her stepdaughter and herself, widening a little every day, became a great gulf, utterly impassable by olive-branch-bearing doves from either side of the abyss.

There can be no reconciliation where there is no open warfare.

There must be a battle, a brave, boisterous battle, with pennants waving and cannon roaring, before there can be peaceful treaties and enthusiastic shaking of hands.

The Benvenuto Cellini carvings and the Sèvres porcelain could not give her happiness, because she had passed out of their region.

She was no longer innocent; and the pleasure we take in art and loveliness being an innocent pleasure, had passed beyond her reach.

Six or seven years before, she would have been happy in the possession of this little Aladdin’s palace;

… day in which that fairy dower of beauty had first taught her to be selfish and cruel, indifferent to the joys and sorrows of others, cold-hearted and capricious, greedy of admiration, exacting and tyrannical with that petty woman’s tyranny which is the worst of despotism?

Did she trace every sin of her life back to its true source? and did she discover that poisoned fountain in her own exaggerated estimate of the value of a pretty face?

Surely, if her thoughts wandered so far along the backward current of her life, she must have repented in bitterness and despair of that first day in which the master-passions of her life had become her rulers, and the three demons of Vanity, Selfishness, and …

Insignificant as this action was, it spoke very plainly. It spoke very plainly of ever-recurring fears—of fatal necessities for concealment—of a mind that in its silent agonies was ever alive to the importance of outward effect.

It told more plainly than anything else could have told how complete an actress my lady had been made by the awful necessity of her life.

The modest rap at the door was repeated.

“Yes,” replied Miss Audley, “my lady thinks that Bob is going mad, but I know better than that. He’s not at all the sort of person to go mad.

How should such a sluggish ditch-pond of an intellect as his ever work itself into a tempest?

He may move about for the rest of his life, perhaps, in a tranquil state of semi-idiocy, imperfectly comprehending who he is, and where he’s going, and what he’s doing—but he’ll never go mad.”

He had forgot that there are certain Jacks who go through life without meeting the Jill appointed for them by Nemesis, and die old bachelors, perhaps, with poor Jill pining an old maid upon the other side of the party-wall.

He forgot that love, which is a madness, and a scourge, and a fever, and a delusion, and a snare, is also a mystery, and very imperfectly understood by everyone except the individual sufferer who writhes under its tortures.

Jones, who is wildly enamored of Miss Brown, and who lies awake at night until he loathes his comfortable pillow and tumbles his sheets into two twisted rags of linen in his agonies, as if he were a prisoner and wanted to wind them into …

… had for the first time encountered that one woman who out of all the women in the world had power to quicken the pulses of his heart, wondered why Robert failed to take the fever from the first breath of contagion that blew toward him.

He forgot that there are men who go their ways unscathed amidst legions of lovely and generous women, to succumb at last before some harsh-featured virago, who knows the secret of that only philter which can intoxicate and bewitch him.

He had forgot that there are certain Jacks who go through life without meeting the Jill appointed for them by Nemesis, and die old bachelors, perhaps, with poor Jill pining an old maid upon the other side of the party-wall.

Lady Audley said this with the predetermination of dressing at four, and thus dispensing with the services of her attendant.

Among all privileged spies, a lady’s-maid has the highest privileges;

it is she who bathes Lady Theresa’s eyes with eau-de-cologne after her ladyship’s quarrel with the colonel; it is she who administers sal-volatile to Miss Fanny when Count Beaudesert, of the Blues, has jilted her.

“Perhaps Robert might care for me, if I had inflammation of the lungs,” she thought.

“He couldn’t insult me by calling me a bouncer then. Bouncers don’t have inflammation of the lungs.”

I believe she drew a picture of herself in the last stage of consumption, propped up by pillows in a great easy-chair, looking out of a window in the afternoon sunshine, with medicine bottles, a bunch of grapes and a Bible upon a table by …

but I can’t, I can’t—I can feel nothing but my own misery. I told you long ago that I was selfish; I am selfish still—more selfish than ever in my misery.

Happy, prosperous people may feel for others. I laugh at other people’s sufferings; they seem so small compared to my own.

”

but that sense of something wanting, that vague feeling of loss and disappointment which had come upon him on the summer’s night of his betrothal had been with him more or less distinctly ever since.

I cannot believe that an honest man, however pure and single may be his mind, however simply trustful his nature, is ever really deceived by falsehood.

There is beneath the voluntary confidence an involuntary distrust, not to be conquered by any effort of the will.

I cannot believe that an honest man, however pure and single may be his mind, however simply trustful his nature, is ever really deceived by falsehood.

There is beneath the voluntary confidence an involuntary distrust, not to be conquered by any effort of the will.

“We were married,” my lady continued, “and I loved him very well, quite well enough to be happy with him as long as his money lasted, and while we were on the Continent, traveling in the best style and always staying at the best hotels.

His father was rich, his sister was living in luxury and respectability, and I, his wife, and the mother of his son, was a slave allied to beggary and obscurity.

People pitied me, and I hated them for their pity.

I did not love the child, for he had been left a burden upon my hands. The hereditary taint that was in my blood had never until this time showed itself by any one sign or token;

The common temptations that assail and shipwreck some women had no terror for me. I would have been your true and pure wife to the end of time, though I had been surrounded by a legion of tempters.

The mad folly that the world calls love had never had any part in my madness, and here at least extremes met, and the vice of heartlessness became the virtue of constancy.

“I was very happy in the first triumph and grandeur of my new position, very grateful to the hand that had lifted me to it.

“

Fate would not suffer me to be good. My destiny compelled me to be a wretch.

Within a month of my marriage, I read in one of the Essex papers of the return of a certain Mr. Talboys, a fortunate gold-seeker, from Australia. The ship had sailed at the time I read the paragraph. What was to be done?

He cannot say, ‘I will stop in the tents while the strife is fought, and laugh at the fools who are trampled down in the useless struggle.’ He cannot do this.

He can only do, humbly and fearfully, that which the Maker who created him has appointed for him to do.

If he has a battle to fight, let him fight it faithfully;

My lady slept. Through that long winter night she slept soundly.

Criminals have often so slept their last sleep upon earth; and have been found in the gray morning slumbering peacefully, by the jailer who came to wake them.

The game had been played and lost. I do not think that my lady had thrown away a card, or missed the making of a trick which she might by any possibility have made;

Remember how much she had periled for a fine house and gorgeous furniture, for carriages and horses, jewels and laces; and do not wonder if she clings with a desperate tenacity to gauds and gewgaws, in the hour of her despair.

If she had been Judas, she would have held to her thirty pieces of silver to the last moment of her shameful life.

Mr. Robert Audley breakfasted in the library. He sat long over his solitary cup of tea, smoking his meerschaum pipe, and meditating darkly upon the task that lay before him.

However powerful the science of medicine as wielded by Dr. Alwyn Mosgrave, it had not been strong enough to put flesh upon his bones, or brightness into his face. He had a strangely expressionless, and yet strangely attentive countenance.

He had the face of a man who had spent the greater part of his life in listening to other people, and who had parted with his own individuality and his own passions at the very outset of his career.

He bowed to Robert Audley, took the opposite seat indicated by him, and addressed his attentive face to the young barrister. Robert saw that the physician’s glance for a moment lost its quiet look of attention, and became earnest and searching.

“Is it not about your own—health—that you wish to consult me?” he said, interrogatively.

Dr. Mosgrave looked at his watch, a fifty-guinea Benson-made chronometer, which he carried loose in his waistcoat pocket as carelessly as if it had been a potato.

“I need not remind you that my time is precious,” he said; “your telegram informed me that my services were required in a case of—danger—as I apprehend, or I should not be here this morning.”

Insanity which might never appear; or which might appear only once or twice in a lifetime. It would be a dementia in its worst phase, perhaps; acute mania; but its duration would be very brief, and it would only arise under extreme mental pressure.

The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence.

I will tell you what she is, Mr. Audley. She is dangerous!”

“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.”