Lady Audley’s Secret by M. E. Braddon

Author:M. E. Braddon
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Married women -- Fiction, Bigamy -- Fiction, Deception -- Fiction, England -- Fiction, Psychological fiction, Domestic fiction
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2019-12-05T18:00:46+00:00

XXVI So Far and No Farther

Robert left Aud­ley the next morn­ing by an early train, and reached Shored­itch a lit­tle af­ter nine o’clock. He did not re­turn to his cham­bers, but called a cab and drove straight to Cres­cent Vil­las, West Bromp­ton. He knew that he should fail in find­ing the lady he went to seek at this ad­dress, as his un­cle had failed a few months be­fore, but he thought it pos­si­ble to ob­tain some clue to the schoolmistress’ new res­i­dence, in spite of Sir Michael’s ill-suc­cess.

“Mrs. Vin­cent was in a dy­ing state, ac­cord­ing to the tele­graphic mes­sage,” Robert thought. “If I do find her, I shall at least suc­ceed in dis­cov­er­ing whether that mes­sage was gen­uine.”

He found Cres­cent Vil­las af­ter some dif­fi­culty. The houses were large, but they lay half imbed­ded among the chaos of brick and ris­ing mor­tar around them. New ter­races, new streets, new squares led away into hope­less masses of stone and plas­ter on ev­ery side. The roads were sticky with damp clay, which clogged the wheels of the cab and buried the fet­locks of the horse. The des­o­la­tions—that aw­ful as­pect of in­com­plete­ness and dis­com­fort which per­vades a new and un­fin­ished neigh­bor­hood—had set its dis­mal seal upon the sur­round­ing streets which had arisen about and in­trenched Cres­cent Vil­las; and Robert wasted forty min­utes by his watch, and an hour and a quar­ter by the cab­man’s reck­on­ing, in driv­ing up and down un­in­hab­ited streets and ter­races, try­ing to find the Vil­las; whose chim­ney-tops were frown­ing down upon him black and ven­er­a­ble, amid groves of vir­gin plas­ter, undimmed by time or smoke.

But hav­ing at last suc­ceeded in reach­ing his des­ti­na­tion, Mr. Aud­ley alighted from the cab, di­rected the driver to wait for him at a cer­tain cor­ner, and set out upon his voy­age of dis­cov­ery.

“If I were a dis­tin­guished Q.C., I could not do this sort of thing,” he thought; “my time would be worth a guinea or so a minute, and I should be re­tained in the great case of Hoggs vs. Boggs, go­ing for­ward this very day be­fore a spe­cial jury at West­min­ster Hall. As it is, I can af­ford to be pa­tient.”

He in­quired for Mrs. Vin­cent at the num­ber which Mr. Daw­son had given him. The maid who opened the door had never heard that lady’s name; but af­ter go­ing to in­quire of her mis­tress, she re­turned to tell Robert that Mrs. Vin­cent had lived there, but that she had left two months be­fore the present oc­cu­pants had en­tered the house, “and mis­sus has been here fif­teen months,” the girl added em­phat­i­cally.

“But you can­not tell where she went on leav­ing here?” Robert asked, de­spond­ingly.

“No, sir; mis­sus says she be­lieves the lady failed, and that she left sud­den like, and didn’t want her ad­dress to be known in the neigh­bor­hood.”

Mr. Aud­ley felt him­self at a stand­still once more. If Mrs. Vin­cent had left the place in debt, she had no doubt scrupu­lously con­cealed her where­abouts. There was lit­tle hope, then, of learn­ing her ad­dress from

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