Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (popular books of all time .TXT) đź“–
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of having heard that ominous creaking of the rusty key in the rusty
lock.
Lady Audley hurried into the next room. She set the candle on the
dressing-table, flung off her bonnet and slung it loosely across her
arm; then she went to the wash-stand and filled the basin with water.
She plunged her golden hair into this water, and then stood for a few
moments in the center of the room looking about her, with a white,
earnest face, and an eager gaze that seemed to take in every object in
the poorly furnished chamber. Phoebe’s bedroom was certainly very
shabbily furnished; she had been compelled to select all the most decent
things for those best bedrooms which were set apart for any chance
traveler who might stop for a night’s lodging at the Castle Inn; but
Phoebe Marks had done her best to atone for the lack of substantial
furniture in her apartment by a superabundance of drapery. Crisp
curtains of cheap chintz hung from the tent-bedstead; festooned drapery
of the same material shrouded the narrow window shutting out the light
of day, and affording a pleasant harbor for tribes of flies and
predatory bands of spiders. Even the looking-glass, a miserably cheap
construction which distorted every face whose owner had the hardihood to
look into it, stood upon a draperied altar of starched muslin and pink
glazed calico, and was adorned with frills of lace and knitted work.
My lady smiled as she looked at the festoons and furbelows which met her
eyes upon every side. She had reason, perhaps, to smile, remembering the
costly elegance of her own apartments; but there was something in that
sardonic smile that seemed to have a deeper meaning than any natural
contempt for Phoebe’s attempts at decoration. She went to the
dressing-table and, smoothed her wet hair before the looking-glass, and
then put on her bonnet. She was obliged to place the flaming tallow
candle very close to the lace furbelows about the glass; so close that
the starched muslin seemed to draw the flame toward it by some power of
attraction in its fragile tissue.
Phoebe waited anxiously by the inn door for my lady’s coming She watched
the minute hand of the little Dutch clock, wondering at the slowness of
its progress. It was only ten minutes past two when Lady Audley came
downstairs, with her bonnet on and her hair still wet, but without the
candle.
Phoebe was immediately anxious about this missing candle.
“The light, my lady,” she said, “you have left it up-stairs!”
“The wind blew it out as I was leaving your room,” Lady Audley answered,
quietly. “I left it there.”
“In my room, my lady?”
“Yes.”
“And it was quite out?”
“Yes, I tell you; why do you worry me about your candle? It is past two
o’clock. Come.”
She took the girl’s arm, and half led, half dragged her from the house.
The convulsive pressure of her slight hand held her firmly as an iron
vise could have held her. The fierce March wind banged to the door of
the house, and left the two women standing outside it. The long, black
road lay bleak and desolate before them, dimly visible between straight
lines of leafless hedges.
A walk of three miles’ length upon a lonely country road, between the
hours of two and four on a cold winter’s morning, is scarcely a pleasant
task for a delicate woman—a woman whose inclinations lean toward ease
and luxury. But my lady hurried along the hard, dry highway, dragging
her companion with her as if she had been impelled by some horrible
demoniac force which knew no abatement. With the black night above
them—with the fierce wind howling around them, sweeping across a broad
expanse of hidden country, blowing as if it had arisen simultaneously
from every point of the compass, and making those wanderers the focus of
its ferocity—the two women walked through the darkness down the hill
upon which Mount Stanning stood, along a mile and a half of flat road,
and then up another hill, on the western side of which Audley Court lay
in that sheltered valley, which seemed to shut in the old house from all
the clamor and hubbub of the everyday world.
My lady stopped upon the summit of this hill to draw breath and to clasp
her hands upon her heart, in the vain hope that she might still its
cruel beating. They were now within three-quarters of a mile of the
Court, and they had been walking for nearly an hour since they had left
the Castle Inn.
Lady Audley stopped to rest, with her face still turned toward the place
of her destination. Phoebe Marks, stopping also, and very glad of a
moment’s pause in that hurried journey, looked back into the far
darkness beneath which lay that dreary shelter that had given her so
much uneasiness. And she did so, she uttered a shrill cry of horror, and
clutched wildly at her companion’s cloak.
The night sky was no longer all dark. The thick blackness was broken by
one patch of lurid light.
“My lady, my lady!” cried Phoebe, pointing to this lurid patch; “do you
see?”
“Yes, child, I see,” answered Lady Audley, trying to shake the clinging
hands from her garments. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s a fire—a fire, my lady!”
“Yes, I am afraid it is a fire. At Brentwood, most likely. Let me go,
Phoebe; it’s nothing to us.”
“Yes, yes, my lady; it’s nearer than Brentwood—much nearer; it’s at
Mount Stanning.”
Lady Audley did not answer. She was trembling again, with the cold
perhaps, for the wind had torn her heavy cloak from her shoulders, and
had left her slender figure exposed to the blast.
“It’s at Mount Stanning, my lady!” cried Phoebe Marks. “It’s the Castle
that’s on fire—I know it is, I know it is! I thought of fire tonight,
and I was fidgety and uneasy, for I knew this would happen some day. I
wouldn’t mind if it was only the wretched place, but there’ll be life
lost, there’ll be life lost!” sobbed the girl, distractedly. “There’s
Luke, too tipsy to help himself, unless others help him; there’s Mr.
Audley asleep—”
Phoebe Marks stopped suddenly at the mention of Robert’s name, and fell
upon her knees, clasping her uplifted hands, and appealing wildly to
Lady Audley.
“Oh, my God!” she cried. “Say it’s not true, my lady, say it’s not true!
It’s too horrible, it’s too horrible, it’s too horrible!”
“What’s too horrible?”
“The thought that’s in my mind; the terrible thought that’s in my mind.”
“What do you mean, girl?” cried my lady, fiercely.
“Oh, God forgive me if I’m wrong!” the kneeling woman gasped in detached
sentences, “and God grant I may be. Why did you go up to the Castle, my
lady? Why were you so set on going against all I could say—you who are
so bitter against Mr. Audley and against Luke, and who knew they were
both under that roof? Oh, tell me that I do you a cruel wrong, my lady;
tell me so—tell me! for as there is a Heaven above me I think that you
went to that place tonight on purpose to set fire to it. Tell me that
I’m wrong, my lady; tell me that I’m doing you a wicked wrong.”
“I will tell you nothing, except that you are a mad woman,” answered
Lady Audley; in a cold, hard voice. “Get up; fool, idiot, coward! Is
your husband such a precious bargain that you should be groveling there,
lamenting and groaning for him? What is Robert Audley to you, that you
behave like a maniac, because you think he is in danger? How do you know
the fire is at Mount Stanning? You see a red patch in the sky, and you
cry out directly that your own paltry hovel is in flames, as if there
were no place in the world that could burn except that. The fire may be
at Brentwood, or further away—at Romford, or still further away, on the
eastern side of London, perhaps. Get up, mad woman, and go back and look
after your goods and chattels, and your husband and your lodger. Get up
and go: I don’t want you.”
“Oh! my lady, my lady, forgive me,” sobbed Phoebe; “there’s nothing you
can say to me that’s hard enough for having done you such a wrong, even
in my thoughts. I don’t mind your cruel words—I don’t mind anything if
I’m wrong.”
“Go back and see for yourself,” answered Lady Audley, sternly. “I tell
you again, I don’t want you.”
She walked away in the darkness, leaving Phoebe Marks still kneeling
upon the hard road, where she had cast herself in that agony of
supplication. Sir Michael’s wife walked toward the house in which her
husband slept with the red blaze lighting up the skies behind her, and
with nothing but the blackness of the night before.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE BEARER OF THE TIDINGS.
It was very late the next morning when Lady Audley emerged from her
dressing-room, exquisitely dressed in a morning costume of delicate
muslin, delicate laces, and embroideries; but with a very pale face, and
with half-circles of purple shadow under her eyes. She accounted for
this pale face and these hollow eyes by declaring that she had sat up
reading until a very late hour on the previous night.
Sir Michael and his young wife breakfasted in the library at a
comfortable round table, wheeled close to the blazing fire; and Alicia
was compelled to share this meal with her stepmother, however she might
avoid that lady in the long interval between breakfast and dinner.
The March morning was bleak and dull, and a drizzling rain fell
incessantly, obscuring the landscape and blotting out the distance.
There were very few letters by the morning post; the daily newspapers
did not arrive until noon; and such aids to conversation being missing,
there was very little talk at the breakfast table.
Alicia looked out at the drizzling rain drifting against the broad
window-panes.
“No riding to-day,” she said; “and no chance of any callers to enliven
us, unless that ridiculous Bob comes crawling through the wet from Mount
Stanning.”
Have you ever heard anybody, whom you knew to be dead, alluded to in a
light, easy going manner by another person who did not know of his
death—alluded to as doing that or this, as performing some trivial
everyday operation—when you know that he has vanished away from the
face of this earth, and separated himself forever from all living
creatures and their commonplace pursuits in the awful solemnity of
death? Such a chance allusion, insignificant though it may be, is apt to
send a strange thrill of pain through the mind. The ignorant remark jars
discordantly upon the hyper-sensitive brain; the King of Terrors is
desecrated by that unwitting disrespect. Heaven knows what hidden reason
my lady may have had for experiencing some such revulsion of feeling on
the sudden mention of Mr. Audley’s name, but her pale face blanched to a
sickly white as Alicia Audley spoke of her cousin.
“Yes, he will come down here in the wet, perhaps,” the young lady
continued, “with his hat sleek and shining as if it had been brushed
with a pat of fresh butter, and with white vapors steaming out of his
clothes, and making him look like an awkward genie just let out of his
bottle. He will come down here and print impressions of his muddy boots
all
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