Robert Audley followed his uncle into the vestibule after Sir Michael had spoken those few quiet words which sounded the death-knell of his hope and love. Heaven knows how much the young man had feared the coming of this day. It had come; and though there had been no great outburst of despair, no whirlwind of stormy grief, no loud tempest of anguish and tears, Robert took no comforting thought from the unnatural stillness. He knew enough to know that Sir Michael Audley went away with the barbed arrow, which his nephew's hand had sent home to its aim, rankling in his tortured heart; he knew that this strange and icy calm was the first numbness of a heart stricken by grief so unexpected as for a time to be rendered almost incomprehensible by a blank stupor of astonishment; he knew that when this dull quiet had passed away, when little by little, and one by one, each horrible feature of the sufferer's sorrow became first dimly apparent and then terribly familiar to him, the storm would burst in fatal fury, and tempests of tears and cruel thunder-claps of agony would rend that generous heart. Robert had heard of cases in which men of his uncle's age had borne some great grief, as Sir Michael had borne this, with a strange quiet; and had gone away from those who would have comforted them, and whose anxieties have been relieved by this patient stillness, to fall down upon the ground and die under the blow which at first had only stunned him. He remembered cases in which paralysis and apoplexy had stricken men as strong as his uncle in the first hour of the horrible affliction; and he lingered in the lamp-lit vestibule, wondering whether it was not his duty to be with Sir Michael—to be near him, in case of any emergency, and to accompany him wherever he went.
Yet would it be wise to force himself upon that gray-headed sufferer in this cruel hour, in which he had been awakened from the one delusion of a blameless life to discover that he had been the dupe of a false face, and the fool of a nature which was too coldly mercenary, too cruelly heartless, to be sensible of its own infamy?
"No," thought Robert Audley, "I will not intrude upon the anguish of this wounded heart. There is humiliation mingled with this bitter grief. It is better he should fight the battle alone. I have done what I believe to have been my solemn duty, yet I should scarcely wonder if I had rendered myself forever hateful to him. It is better he should fight the battle alone. I can do nothing to make the strife less terrible. Better that it should be fought alone."
While the young man stood with his hand upon the library door, still half-doubtful whether he should follow his uncle or re-enter the room in which he had left that more wretched creature whom it had been his business to unmask, Alicia Audley opened the dining-room door, and revealed to him the old-fashioned oak-paneled apartment, the long table covered with showy damask, and bright with a cheerful glitter of glass and silver.
"Is papa coming to dinner?" asked Miss Audley. "I'm so hungry; and poor Tomlins has sent up three times to say the fish will be spoiled. It must be reduced to a species of isinglass soup, by this time, I should think," added the young lady, as she came out into the vestibule with the Times newspaper in her hand.
She had been sitting by the fire reading the paper, and waiting for her seniors to join her at the dinner table.
"Oh, it's you, Mr. Robert Audley." she remarked, indifferently. "You dine with us of course. Pray go and find papa. It must be nearly eight o'clock, and we are supposed to dine at six."
Mr. Audley answered his cousin rather sternly. Her frivolous manner jarred upon him, and he forgot in his irrational displeasure that Miss Audley had known nothing of the terrible drama which had been so long enacting under her very nose.
"Your papa has just endured a very great grief, Alicia," the young man said, gravely.
The girl's arch, laughing face changed in a moment to a tenderly earnest look of sorrow and anxiety. Alicia Audley loved her father very dearly.
"A grief?" she exclaimed; "papa grieved! Oh! Robert, what has happened?"
"I can tell you nothing yet, Alicia," Robert answered in a low voice.
He took his cousin by the wrist, and drew her into the dining-room as he spoke. He closed the door carefully behind him before he continued:
"Alicia, can I trust you?" he asked, earnestly.
"Trust me to do what?"
"To be a comfort and a friend to your poor father under a very heavy affliction."
"Yes!" cried Alicia, passionately. "How can you ask me such a question? Do you think there is anything I would not do to lighten any sorrow of my father's? Do you think there is anything I would not suffer if my suffering could lighten his?"
The rushing tears rose to Miss Audley's bright gray eyes as she spoke.
"Oh, Robert! Robert! could you think so badly of me as to think I would not try to be a comfort to my father in his grief?" she said, reproachfully.
"No, no, my dear," answered the young man, quietly; "I never doubted your affection, I only doubted your discretion. May I rely upon that?"
"You may, Robert," said Alicia, resolutely.
"Very well, then, my dear girl, I will trust you. Your father is going to leave the Court, for a time at least. The grief which he has just endured—a sudden and unlooked-for sorrow, remember—has no doubt made this place hateful to him. He is going away; but he must not go alone, must he, Alicia?"
"Alone? no! no! But I suppose my lady—"
"Lady Audley will not go with him," said Robert, gravely; "he is about to separate himself from her."
"For a time?"
"No, forever."
"Separate himself from her forever!" exclaimed Alicia. "Then this grief—"
"Is connected with Lady Audley. Lady Audley is the cause of your father's sorrow."
Alicia's face, which had been pale before, flushed crimson. Sorrow, of which my lady was the cause—a sorrow which was to separate Sir Michael forever from his wife! There had been no quarrel between them—there had never been anything but harmony and sunshine between Lady Audley and her generous husband. This sorrow must surely then have arisen from some sudden discovery; it was, no doubt, a sorrow associated with disgrace. Robert Audley understood the meaning of that vivid blush.
"You will offer to accompany your father wherever he may choose to go, Alicia," he said. "You are his natural comforter at such a time as this, but you will best befriend him in this hour of trial by avoiding all intrusion upon his grief. Your very ignorance of the particulars of that grief will be a security for your discretion. Say nothing to your father that you might not have said to him two years ago, before he married a second wife. Try and be to him what you were before the woman in yonder room came between you and your father's love."
"I will," murmured Alicia, "I will."
"You will naturally avoid all mention of Lady Audley's name. If your father is often silent, be patient; if it sometimes seems to you that the shadow of this great sorrow will never pass away from his life, be patient still; and remember that there can be no better hope of a cure of his grief than the hope that his daughter's devotion may lead him to remember there is one woman upon this earth who will love him truly and purely until the last."
"Yes—yes, Robert, dear cousin, I will remember."
Mr. Audley, for the first time since he had been a schoolboy, took his cousin in his arms and kissed her broad forehead.
"My dear Alicia," he said, "do this and you will make me happy. I have been in some measure the means of bringing this sorrow upon your father. Let me hope that it is not an enduring one. Try and restore my uncle to happiness, Alicia, and I will love you more dearly than brother ever loved a noble-hearted sister; and a brotherly affection may be worth having, perhaps, after all, my dear, though it is very different to poor Sir Harry's enthusiastic worship."
Alicia's head was bent and her face hidden from her cousin while he spoke, but she lifted her head when he had finished, and looked him full in the face with a smile that was only the brighter for her eyes being filled with tears.
"You are a good fellow, Bob," she said; "and I've been very foolish and wicked to feel angry with you because—"
The young lady stopped suddenly.
"Because what, my dear?" asked Mr. Audley.
"Because I'm silly, Cousin Robert," Alicia said, quickly; "never mind that, Bob, I'll do all you wish, and it shall not be my fault if my dearest father doesn't forget his troubles before long. I'd go to the end of the world with him, poor darling, if I thought there was any comfort to be found for him in the journey. I'll go and get ready directly. Do you think papa will go to-night?"
"Yes, my dear; I don't think Sir Michael will rest another night under this roof yet awhile."
"The mail goes at twenty minutes past nine," said Alicia; "we must leave the house in an hour if we are to travel by it. I shall see you again before we go, Robert?"
"Yes, dear."
Miss Audley ran off to her room to summon her maid, and make all necessary preparations for the sudden journey, of whose ultimate destination she was as yet quite ignorant.
She went heart and soul into the carrying out of the duty which Robert had dictated to her. She assisted in the packing of her portmanteaus, and hopelessly bewildered her maid by stuffing silk dresses into her bonnet-boxes and satin shoes into her dressing-case. She roamed about her rooms, gathering together drawing-materials, music-books, needle-work, hair-brushes, jewelry, and perfume-bottles, very much as she might have done had she been about to sail for some savage country, devoid of all civilized resources. She was thinking all the time of her father's unknown grief, and perhaps a little of the serious face and earnest voice which had that night revealed her Cousin Robert to her in a new character.
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."<............