Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [best ereader for comics txt] 📗

asleep."

"Yes, my lady, I suppose so."

"You are sure he was going to stay at the Castle to night?"

"Oh, yes, my lady. I helped the girl to get his room ready before I came away."

The wind, boisterous everywhere, was even shriller and more pitiless in the neighborhood of that bleak hill-top upon which the Castle Inn reared its rickety walls. The cruel blasts raved wildly round that frail erection. They disported themselves with the shattered pigeon-house, the broken weathercock, the loose tiles, and unshapely chimneys; they rattled at the window-panes, and whistled in the crevices; they mocked the feeble building from foundation to roof, and battered, and banged, and tormented it in their fierce gambols, until it trembled and rocked with the force of their rough play.

Mr. Luke Marks had not troubled himself to secure the door of his dwelling-house before sitting down to booze with the man who held provisional possession of his goods and chattels. The landlord of the Castle Inn was a lazy, sensual brute, who had no thought higher than a selfish concern for his own enjoyments, and a virulent hatred for anybody who stood in the way of his gratification.

Phoebe pushed open the door with her hand, and went into the house, followed by my lady. The gas was flaring in the bar, and smoking the low plastered ceiling. The door of the bar-parlor was half open, and Lady Audley heard the brutal laughter of Mr. Marks as she crossed the threshold of the inn.

"I'll tell him you're here, my lady," whispered Phoebe to her late mistress. "I know he'll be tipsy. You--you won't be offended, my lady, if he should say anything rude? You know it wasn't my wish that you should come."

"Yes, yes," answered Lady Audley, impatiently, "I know that. What should I care for his rudeness! Let him say what he likes."

Phoebe Marks pushed open the parlor door, leaving my lady in the bar close behind her.

Luke sat with his clumsy legs stretched out upon the hearth. He held a glass of gin-and-water in one hand and the poker in the other. He had just thrust the poker into a heap of black coals, and was scattering them to make a blaze, when his wife appeared upon the threshold of the room.

He snatched the poker from between the bars, and made a half drunken, half threatening motion with it as he saw her.

"So you've condescended to come home at last, ma'am," he said; "I thought you was never coming no more."

He spoke in a thick and drunken voice, and was by no means too intelligible. He was steeped to the very lips in alcohol. His eyes were dim and watery; his hands were unsteady; his voice was choked and muffled with drink. A brute, even when most sober; a brute, even on his best behavior, he was ten times more brutal in his drunkenness, when the few restraints which held his ignorant, every day brutality in check were flung aside in the indolent recklessness of intoxication.

"I--I've been longer than I intended to be, Luke," Phoebe answered, in her most conciliatory manner; "but I've seen my lady, and she's been very kind, and--and she'll settle this business for us."

"She's been very kind, has she?" muttered Mr. Marks, with a drunken laugh; "thank her for nothing. I know the vally of her kindness. She'd be oncommon kind, I dessay, if she warn't obligated to be it."

The man in possession, who had fallen into a maudlin and semi-unconscious state of intoxication upon about a third of the liquor that Mr. Marks had consumed, only stared in feeble wonderment at his host and hostess. He sat near the table. Indeed, he had hooked himself on to it with his elbows, as a safeguard against sliding under it, and he was making imbecile attempts to light his pipe at the flame of a guttering tallow candle near him.

"My lady has promised to settle the business for us, Luke," Phoebe repeated, without noticing Luke's remarks. She knew her husband's dogged nature well enough by this time to know that it was worse than useless to try to stop him from doing or saying anything which his own stubborn will led him to do or say. "My lady will settle it," she said, "and she's come down here to see about it to-night," she added.

The poker dropped from the landlord's hand, and fell clattering among the cinders on the hearth.

"My Lady Audley come here to-night!" he said.

"Yes, Luke."

My lady appeared upon the threshold of the door as Phoebe spoke.

"Yes, Luke Marks," she said, "I have come to pay this man, and to send him about his business."

Lady Audley said these words in a strange, semi-mechanical manner; very much as if she had learned the sentence by rote, and were repeating it without knowing what she said.

Mr. Marks gave a discontented growl, and set his empty glass down upon the table with an impatient gesture.

"You might have given the money to Phoebe," he said, "as well as have brought it yourself. We don't want no fine ladies up here, pryin' and pokin' their precious noses into everythink."

"Luke, Luke!" remonstrated Phoebe, "when my lady has been so kind!"

"Oh, damn her kindness!" cried Mr. Marks; "it ain't her kindness as we want, gal, it's her money. She won't get no snivelin' gratitood from me. Whatever she does for us she does because she is obliged; and if she wasn't obliged she wouldn't do it--"

Heaven knows how much more Luke Marks might have said, had not my lady turned upon him suddenly and awed him into silence by the unearthly glitter of her beauty. Her hair had been blown away from her face, and being of a light, feathery quality, had spread itself into a tangled mass that surrounded her forehead like a yellow flame. There was another flame in her eyes--a greenish light, such as might flash from the changing-hued orbs of an angry mermaid.

"Stop," she cried. "I didn't come up here in the dead of night to listen to your insolence. How much is this debt?"

"Nine pound."

Lady Audley produced her purse--a toy of ivory, silver, and turquoise--she took from it a note and four sovereigns. She laid these upon the table.

"Let that man give me a receipt for the money," she said, "before I go."

It was some time before the man could be roused into sufficient consciousness for the performance of this simple duty, and it was only by dipping a pen into the ink and pushing it between his clumsy fingers, that he was at last made to comprehend that his autograph was wanted at the bottom of the receipt which had been made out by Phoebe Marks. Lady Audley took the document as soon as the ink was dry, and turned to leave the parlor. Phoebe followed her.

"You mustn't go home alone, my lady," she said. "You'll let me go with you?"

"Yes, yes; you shall go home with me."

The two women were standing near the door of the inn as my lady said this. Phoebe stared wonderingly at her patroness. She had expected that Lady Audley would be in a hurry to return home after settling this business which she had capriciously taken upon herself; but it was not so; my lady stood leaning against the inn door and staring into vacancy, and again Mrs. Marks began to fear that trouble had driven her late mistress mad.

A little Dutch clock in the bar struck two while Lady Audley lingered in this irresolute, absent manner. She started at the sound and began to tremble violently.

"I think I am going to faint, Phoebe," she said; "where can I get some cold water?"

"The pump is in the wash-house, my lady; I'll run and get you a glass of cold water."

"No, no, no," cried my lady, clutching Phoebe's arm as she was about to run away upon this errand; "I'll get it myself. I must dip my head in a basin of water if I want to save myself from fainting. In which room does Mr. Audley sleep?"

There was something so irrelevant in this question that Phoebe Marks stared aghast at her mistress before she answered it.

"It was number three that I got ready, my lady--the front room--the room next to ours," she replied, after that pause of astonishment.

"Give me a candle," said my lady. "I'll go into your room, and get some water for my head; stay where you are, and see that that brute of a husband of yours does not follow me!"

She snatched the candle which Phoebe had lighted from the girl's hand and ran up the rickety, winding staircase which led to the narrow corridor upon the upper floor. Five bed-rooms opened out of this low-ceilinged, close-smelling corridor; the numbers of these rooms were indicated by squat black figures painted upon the panels of the doors. Lady Audley had driven up to Mount Stanning to inspect the house when she bought the business for her servant's bridegroom, and she knew her way about the dilapidated old place; she knew where to find Phoebe's bedroom, but she stopped before the door of that other chamber which had been prepared for Mr. Robert Audley.

She stopped and looked at the number on the door. The key was in the lock, and her hand dropped upon it as if unconsciously. But presently she suddenly began to tremble again, as she had trembled a few minutes before at the striking of the clock. She stood for a few moments trembling thus, with her hand still upon the key; then a horrible expression came over her face, and she turned the key in the lock. She turned it twice, double locking the door.

There was no sound from within; the occupant of the chamber made no sign 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