Lady Audley’s Secret M. E. Braddon (best historical fiction books of all time TXT) 📖

very knife in a quarrel with his mother. I tell you, my lady, I must marry him.”

“You silly girl, you shall do nothing of the kind!” answered Lucy. “You think he’ll murder you, do you? Do you think, then, if murder is in him, you would be any safer as his wife? If you thwarted him, or made him jealous; if he wanted to marry another woman, or to get hold of some poor, pitiful bit of money of yours, couldn’t he murder you then? I tell you you shan’t marry him, Phoebe. In the first place I hate the man; and, in the next place I can’t afford to part with you. We’ll give him a few pounds and send him about his business.”

Phoebe Marks caught my lady’s hand in hers, and clasped them convulsively.

“My lady⁠—my good, kind mistress!” she cried, vehemently, “don’t try to thwart me in this⁠—don’t ask me to thwart him. I tell you I must marry him. You don’t know what he is. It will be my ruin, and the ruin of others, if I break my word. I must marry him!”

“Very well, then, Phoebe,” answered her mistress, “I can’t oppose you. There must be some secret at the bottom of all this.” “There is, my lady,” said the girl, with her face turned away from Lucy.

“I shall be very sorry to lose you; but I have promised to stand your friend in all things. What does your cousin mean to do for a living when you are married?”

“He would like to take a public house.”

“Then he shall take a public house, and the sooner he drinks himself to death the better. Sir Michael dines at a bachelor’s party at Major Margrave’s this evening, and my stepdaughter is away with her friends at the Grange. You can bring your cousin into the drawing-room after dinner, and I’ll tell him what I mean to do for him.”

“You are very good, my lady,” Phoebe answered with a sigh.

Lady Audley sat in the glow of firelight and wax candles in the luxurious drawing-room; the amber damask cushions of the sofa contrasting with her dark violet velvet dress, and her rippling hair falling about her neck in a golden haze. Everywhere around her were the evidences of wealth and splendor; while in strange contrast to all this, and to her own beauty; the awkward groom stood rubbing his bullet head as my lady explained to him what she intended to do for her confidential maid. Lucy’s promises were very liberal, and she had expected that, uncouth as the man was, he would, in his own rough manner, have expressed his gratitude.

To her surprise he stood staring at the floor without uttering a word in answer to her offer. Phoebe was standing close to his elbow, and seemed distressed at the man’s rudeness.

“Tell my lady how thankful you are, Luke,” she said.

“But I’m not so over and above thankful,” answered her lover, savagely. “Fifty pound ain’t much to start a public. You’ll make it a hundred, my lady?”

“I shall do nothing of the kind,” said Lady Audley, her clear blue eyes flashing with indignation, “and I wonder at your impertinence in asking it.”

“Oh, yes, you will, though,” answered Luke, with quiet insolence that had a hidden meaning. “You’ll make it a hundred, my lady.”

Lady Audley rose from her seat, looked the man steadfastly in the face till his determined gaze sunk under hers; then walking straight up to her maid, she said in a high, piercing voice, peculiar to her in moments of intense agitation:

“Phoebe Marks, you have told this man!”

The girl fell on her knees at my lady’s feet.

“Oh, forgive me, forgive me!” she cried. “He forced it from me, or I would never, never have told!”

XV On the Watch

Upon a lowering morning late in November, with the yellow fog low upon the flat meadows, and the blinded cattle groping their way through the dim obscurity, and blundering stupidly against black and leafless hedges, or stumbling into ditches, undistinguishable in the hazy atmosphere; with the village church looming brown and dingy through the uncertain light; with every winding path and cottage door, every gable end and gray old chimney, every village child and straggling cur seeming strange and weird of aspect in the semidarkness, Phoebe Marks and her Cousin Luke made their way through the churchyard of Audley, and presented themselves before a shivering curate, whose surplice hung in damp folds, soddened by the morning mist, and whose temper was not improved by his having waited five minutes for the bride and bridegroom.

Luke Marks, dressed in his ill-fitting Sunday clothes, looked by no means handsomer than in his everyday apparel; but Phoebe, arrayed in a rustling silk of delicate gray, that had been worn about half a dozen times by her mistress, looked, as the few spectators of the ceremony remarked, “quite the lady.”

A very dim and shadowy lady, vague of outline, and faint of coloring, with eyes, hair, complexion and dress all melting into such pale and uncertain shades that, in the obscure light of the foggy November morning a superstitious stranger might have mistaken the bride for the ghost of some other bride, dead and buried in the vault below the church.

Mr. Luke Marks, the hero of the occasion, thought very little of all this. He had secured the wife of his choice, and the object of his lifelong ambition⁠—a public house. My lady had provided the seventy-five pounds necessary for the purchase of the goodwill and fixtures, with the stock of ales and spirits, of a small inn in the center of a lonely little village, perched on the summit of a hill, and called Mount Stanning. It was not a very pretty house to look at; it had something of a tumble-down, weather-beaten appearance, standing, as it did, upon high ground, sheltered only by four or five bare and overgrown poplars, that had shot up too rapidly for their strength,