Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [world of reading .txt] 📗

The king who had worn her colors was dead and gone; the

court of which she had been a star had passed away; powerful

functionaries and great magistrates, who might perhaps have helped her,

were moldering in the graves; brave young cavaliers, who would have died

for her, had fallen upon distant battle-fields; she had lived to see the

age to which she had belonged fade like a dream; and she went to the

stake, followed by only a few ignorant country people, who forgot all

her bounties, and hooted at her for a wicked sorceress.”

 

“I don’t care for such dismal stories, my lady,” said Phoebe Marks with

a shudder. “One has no need to read books to give one the horrors in

this dull place.”

 

Lady Audley shrugged her shoulders and laughed at her maid’s candor.

 

“It is a dull place, Phoebe,” she said, “though it doesn’t do to say so

to my dear old husband. Though I am the wife of one of the most

influential men in the county, I don’t know that I wasn’t nearly as well

off at Mr. Dawson’s; and yet it’s something to wear sables that cost

sixty guineas, and have a thousand pounds spent on the decoration of

one’s apartments.”

 

Treated as a companion by her mistress, in the receipt of the most

liberal wages, and with perquisites such as perhaps lady’s maid never

had before, it was strange that Phoebe Marks should wish to leave her

situation; but it was not the less a fact that she was anxious to

exchange all the advantages of Audley Court for the very unpromising

prospect which awaited her as the wife of her Cousin Luke.

 

The young man had contrived in some manner to associate himself with the

improved fortunes of his sweetheart. He had never allowed Phoebe any

peace till she had obtained for him, by the aid of my lady’s

interference, a situation as undergroom of the Court.

 

He never rode out with either Alicia or Sir Michael; but on one of the

few occasions upon which my lady mounted the pretty little gray

thoroughbred reserved for her use, he contrived to attend her in her

ride. He saw enough, in the very first half hour they were out, to

discover that, graceful as Lucy Audley might look in her long blue cloth

habit, she was a timid horsewoman, and utterly unable to manage the

animal she rode.

 

Lady Audley remonstrated with her maid upon her folly in wishing to

marry the uncouth groom.

 

The two women were seated together over the fire in my lady’s

dressing-room, the gray sky closing in upon the October afternoon, and

the black tracery of ivy darkening the casement windows.

 

“You surely are not in love with the awkward, ugly creature are you,

Phoebe?” asked my lady sharply.

 

The girl was sitting on a low stool at her mistress feet. She did not

answer my lady’s question immediately, but sat for some time looking

vacantly into the red abyss in the hollow fire.

 

Presently she said, rather as if she had been thinking aloud than

answering Lucy’s question:

 

“I don’t think I can love him. We have been together from children, and

I promised, when I was little better than fifteen, that I’d be his wife.

I daren’t break that promise now. There have been times when I’ve made

up the very sentence I meant to say to him, telling him that I couldn’t

keep my faith with him; but the words have died upon my lips, and I’ve

sat looking at him, with a choking sensation, in my throat that wouldn’t

let me speak. I daren’t refuse to marry him. I’ve often watched and

watched him, as he has sat slicing away at a hedge-stake with his great

clasp-knife, till I have thought that it is just such men as he who have

decoyed their sweethearts into lonely places, and murdered them for

being false to their word. When he was a boy he was always violent and

revengeful. I saw him once take up that 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 sha’n’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 step-daughter 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!”

 

CHAPTER 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 semi-darkness, 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

life-long ambition—a public house. My lady had provided the

seventy-five pounds necessary for the purchase of the good-will 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 tumbledown, 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, and had a

blighted, forlorn look in consequence. The wind had had its own way with

the Castle Inn, and had sometimes made cruel use of its power. It was

the wind that battered and bent the low, thatched roofs of outhouses and

stables, till they hung over and lurched forward, as a slouched hat

hangs over the low forehead of some village ruffian; it was the wind

that shook and rattled the wooden shutters before the narrow casements,

till they hung broken and dilapidated upon their rusty hinges; it was

the wind that overthrew the pigeon house, and broke the vane that had

been imprudently set up to tell the movements of its mightiness; it, was

the wind that made light of any little bit of wooden trellis-work, or

creeping plant, or tiny balcony, or any modest decoration whatsoever,

and tore and scattered it in its scornful fury; it was the wind that

left mossy secretions on the discolored surface of the plaster walls; it

was the wind, in short, that shattered, and ruined, and rent, and

trampled upon the tottering pile of buildings, and then flew shrieking

off, to riot and glory in its destroying strength. The dispirited

proprietor grew tired of his long struggle with this mighty enemy; so

the wind was left to work its own will, and the Castle Inn fell slowly

to decay. But for all that it suffered without, it was not the less

prosperous within doors. Sturdy drovers stopped to drink at the little

bar; well-to-do farmers spent their evenings and talked politics in