Robert Audley had been prepared to witness some considerable agitation in the old man’s manner, but he was not prepared for the terrible anguish, the ghastly terror, which convulsed Mr. Maldon’s haggard face as he uttered the last word.
“No, no, no, no,” reiterated the lieutenant, in a shrill, half-screaming voice; “no, no! For God’s sake, don’t say that! Don’t think it—don’t let me think it—don’t let me dream of it! Not dead—anything but dead! Hidden away, perhaps—bribed to keep out of the way, perhaps; but not dead—not dead—not dead!”
He cried these words aloud, like one beside himself, beating his hands upon his gray head, and rocking backward and forward in his chair. His feeble hands trembled no longer—they were strengthened by some convulsive force that gave them a new power.
“I believe,” said Robert, in the same solemn, relentless voice, “that my friend left Essex; and I believe he died on the last.”
The wretched old man, still beating his hands among his thin gray hair, slid from his chair to the ground, and groveled at Robert’s feet.
“Oh! no, no—for God’s, no!” he shrieked hoarsely. “No! you don’t know what you say—you don’t know what your words mean!”
“I know their weight and value only too well—as well as I see you do, Mr. Maldon. God help us!”
“Oh, what am I doing? what am I doing?” muttered the old man, feebly; then raising himself from the ground with an effort, he drew himself to his full height, and said, in a manner which was new to him, and which was not without a certain dignity of his own—that dignity which must be always attached to unutterable misery, in whatever form it may appear—he said, gravely:
“You have no right to come here and terrify a man who has been drinking, and who is not quite himself. You have no right to do it, Mr. Audley. Even the—the officer, sir, who—who—.” He did not stammer, but his lips trembled so violently that his words seemed to be shaken into pieces by their motion. “The officer, I repeat, sir, who arrests a—thief, or a—.” He stopped to wipe his lips, and to still them if he could by doing so, which he could not. “A thief or a murderer—” His voice died suddenly away upon the last word, and it was only by the motion of those trembling lips that Robert knew what he meant. “Gives him warning, sir, fair warning, that he may say nothing which shall commit himself—or—or—other people. The—the—law, sir, has that amount of mercy for a—a—suspected criminal. But you, sir—you come to my house, and you come at a time when—when—contrary to my usual habits—which, as people will tell you, are sober—you take the opportunity to—terrify me—and it is not right, sir—it is—”
Whatever he would have said died away into inarticulate gasps, which seemed to choke him, and sinking into a chair, he dropped his face upon the table, and wept aloud. Perhaps in all the dismal scenes of domestic misery which had been acted in those spare and dreary houses—in all the petty miseries, the burning shames, the cruel sorrows, the bitter disgraces which own poverty for their father—there had never been such a scene as this. An old man hiding his face from the light of day, and sobbing aloud in his wretchedness. Robert Audley contemplated the painful picture with a hopeless and pitying face.
“If I had known this,” he thought, “I might have spared him. It would have been better, perhaps, to have spared him.”
The shabby room, the dirt, the confusion, the figure of the old man, with his gray head upon the soiled tablecloth, amid the muddled debris of a wretched dinner, grew blurred before the sight of Robert Audley as he thought of another man, as old as this one, but, ah! how widely different in every other quality! who might come by and by to feel the same, or even a worse anguish, and to shed, perhaps, yet bitterer tears. The moment in which the tears rose to his eyes and dimmed the piteous scene before him, was long enough to take him back to Essex, and to show him the image of his uncle, stricken by agony and shame.
“Why do I go on with this?” he thought; “how pitiless I am, and how relentlessly I am carried on. It is not myself; it is the hand which is beckoning me further and further upon the dark road, whose end I dare not dream of.”
He thought this, and a hundred times more than this, while the old man sat with his face still hidden, wrestling with his anguish, but without power to keep it down.
“Mr. Maldon,” Robert Audley said, after a pause, “I do not ask you to forgive me for what I have brought upon you, for the feeling is strong within me that it must have come to you sooner or later—if not through me, through someone else. There are—” he stopped for a moment hesitating. The sobbing did not cease; it was sometimes low, sometimes loud, bursting out with fresh violence, or dying away for an instant, but never ceasing. “There are some things which, as people say, cannot be hidden. I think there is truth in that common saying which had its origin in that old worldly wisdom which people gathered from experience and not from books. If—if I were content to let my friend rest in his hidden grave, it is but likely that some stranger who had never heard the name of George Talboys, might fall by the remotest accident upon the secret
