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

of a windy night it would blaze away like so much tinder, and

nothing in the world could save it. Well, Luke knows this; and the

landlord has warned him of it times and often, for he lives close

against us, and he keeps a pretty sharp eye upon all my husband’s goings

on; but when Luke’s tipsy he doesn’t know what he’s about, and only a

week ago he left a candle burning in one of the outhouses, and the

flame caught one of the rafters of the sloping roof, and if it hadn’t

been for me finding it out when I went round the house the last thing,

we should have all been burnt to death, perhaps. And that’s the third

time the same kind of thing has happened in the six months we’ve had the

place, and you can’t wonder that I’m frightened, can you, my lady?”

 

My lady had not wondered, she had not thought about the business at all.

She had scarcely listened to these commonplace details; why should she

care for this low-born waiting-woman’s perils and troubles? Had she not

her own terrors, her own soul-absorbing perplexities to usurp every

thought of which her brain was capable?

 

She did not make any remark upon that which poor Phoebe just told her;

she scarcely comprehended what had been said, until some moments after

the girl had finished speaking, when the words assumed their full

meaning, as some words do after they have been heard without being

heeded.

 

“Burnt in your beds,” said the young lady, at last. “It would have been

a good thing for me if that precious creature, your husband, had been

burnt in his bed before tonight.”

 

A vivid picture had flashed upon her as she spoke. The picture of that

frail wooden tenement, the Castle Inn, reduced to a roofless chaos of

lath and plaster, vomiting flames from its black mouth, and spitting

blazing sparks upward toward the cold night sky.

 

She gave a weary sigh as she dismissed this image from her restless

brain. She would be no better off even if this enemy should be for ever

silenced. She had another and far more dangerous foe—a foe who was not

to be bribed or bought off, though she had been as rich as an empress.

 

“I’ll give you the money to send this bailiff away,” my lady said, after

a pause. “I must give you the last sovereign in my purse, but what of

that? you know as well as I do that I dare not refuse you.”

 

Lady Audley rose and took the lighted lamp from her writing-table. “The

money is in my dressing-room,” she said; “I will go and fetch it.”

 

“Oh, my lady,” exclaimed Phoebe, suddenly, “I forgot something; I was in

such a way about this business that I quite forgot it.”

 

“Quite forgot what?”

 

“A letter that was given me to bring to you, my lady, just before I left

home.”

 

“What letter?”

 

“A letter from Mr. Audley. He heard my husband mention that I was coming

down here, and he asked me to carry this letter.”

 

Lady Audley set the lamp down upon the table nearest to her, and held

out her hand to receive the letter. Phoebe Marks could scarcely fail to

observe that the little jeweled hand shook like a leaf.

 

“Give it me—give it me,” she cried; “let me see what more he has to

say.”

 

Lady Audley almost snatched the letter from Phoebe’s hand in her wild

impatience. She tore open the envelope and flung it from her; she could

scarcely unfold the sheet of note-paper in her eager excitement.

 

The letter was very brief. It contained only these words:

 

“Should Mrs. George Talboys really have survived the date of her

supposed death, as recorded in the public prints, and upon the tombstone

in Ventnor churchyard, and should she exist in the person of the lady

suspected and accused by the writer of this, there can be no great

difficulty in finding some one able and willing to identify her. Mrs.

Barkamb, the owner of North Cottages, Wildernsea, would no doubt consent

to throw some light upon this matter; either to dispel a delusion or to

confirm a suspicion.

 

“ROBERT AUDLEY.

 

“March 3, 1859.

 

“The Castle Inn, Mount Stanning.”

 

CHAPTER XXXII.

 

THE RED LIGHT IN THE SKY.

 

My lady crushed the letter fiercely in her hand, and flung it from her

into the flames.

 

“If he stood before me now, and I could kill him,” she muttered in a

strange, inward whisper, “I would do it—I would do it!” She snatched up

the lamp and rushed into the adjoining room. She shut the door behind

her. She could not endure any witness of her horrible despair—she could

endure nothing, neither herself nor her surroundings.

 

The door between my lady’s dressing-room and the bedchamber in which

Sir Michael lay, had been left open. The baronet slept peacefully, his

noble face plainly visible in the subdued lamplight. His breathing was

low and regular, his lips curved into a half smile—a smile of tender

happiness which he often wore when he looked at his beautiful wife, the

smile of an all-indulgent father, who looks admiringly at his favorite

child.

 

Some touch of womanly feeling, some sentiment of compassion softened

Lady Audley’s glance as it fell upon that noble, reposing figure. For a

moment the horrible egotism of her own misery yielded to her pitying

tenderness for another. It was perhaps only a semi-selfish tenderness

after all, in which pity for herself was as powerful as pity for her

husband; but for once in a way, her thoughts ran out of the narrow

groove of her own terrors and her own troubles to dwell with prophetic

grief upon the coming sorrows of another.

 

“If they make him believe, how wretched he will be,” she thought. But

intermingled with that thought there was another—there was the thought

of her lovely face, her bewitching manner, her arch smile, her low,

musical laugh, which was like a peal of silvery bells ringing across a

broad expanse of flat meadow-land and a rippling river in the misty

summer evening. She thought of all these things with a transient thrill

of triumph, which was stronger even than her terror.

 

If Sir Michael Audley lived to be a hundred years old, whatever he might

learn to believe of her, however he might grow to despise her, would he

ever be able to disassociate her from these attributes? No; a thousand

times no. To the last hour of his life his memory would present her to

him invested with the loveliness that had first won his enthusiastic

admiration, his devoted affection. Her worst enemies could not rob her

of that fairy dower which had been so fatal in its influence upon her

frivolous mind.

 

She paced up and down the dressing-room in the silvery lamplight,

pondering upon the strange letter which she had received from Robert

Audley. She walked backward and forward in that monotonous wandering for

some time before she was able to steady her thoughts—before she was

able to bring the scattered forces of her narrow intellect to bear upon

the one all-important subject of the threat contained in the barrister’s

letter.

 

“He will do it,” she said, between her set teeth—“he will do it, unless

I get him into a lunatic-asylum first; or unless—”

 

She did not finish the thought in words. She did not even think out the

sentence; but some new and unnatural impulse in her heart seemed to beat

each syllable against her breast.

 

The thought was this: “He will do it, unless some strange calamity

befalls him, and silences him for ever.” The red blood flashed up into

my lady’s face with as sudden and transient a blaze as the flickering

flame of a fire, and died as suddenly away, leaving her more pale than

winter snow. Her hands, which had before been locked convulsively

together, fell apart and dropped heavily at her sides. She stopped in

her rapid pacing to and fro—stopped as Lot’s wife may have stopped,

after that fatal backward glance at the perishing city—with every pulse

slackening, with every drop of blood congealing in her veins, in the

terrible process that was to transform her from a woman into a statue.

 

Lady Audley stood still for about five minutes in that strangely

statuesque attitude, her head erect, her eyes staring straight before

her—staring far beyond the narrow boundary of her chamber wall, into

dark distances of peril and horror.

 

But by-and-by she started from that rigid attitude almost as abruptly as

she had fallen into it. She roused herself from that semi-lethargy. She

walked rapidly to her dressing-table, and, seating herself before it,

pushed away the litter of golden-stoppered bottles and delicate china

essence-boxes, and looked at her reflection in the large, oval glass.

She was very pale; but there was no other trace of agitation visible in

her girlish face. The lines of her exquisitely molded lips were so

beautiful, that it was only a very close observer who could have

perceived a certain rigidity that was unusual to them. She saw this

herself, and tried to smile away that statue-like immobility: but

tonight the rosy lips refused to obey her; they were firmly locked, and

were no longer the slaves of her will and pleasure. All the latent

forces of her character concentrated themselves in this one feature. She

might command her eyes, but she could not control the muscles of her

mouth. She rose from before her dressing-table, and took a dark velvet

cloak and bonnet from the recesses of her wardrobe, and dressed herself

for walking. The little ormolu clock on the chimneypiece struck the

quarter after eleven while Lady Audley was employed in this manner; five

minutes afterward she re-entered the room in which she had left Phoebe

Marks.

 

The innkeeper’s wife was sitting before the low fender very much in the

same attitude as that in which her late mistress had brooded over that

lonely hearth earlier in the evening. Phoebe had replenished the fire,

and had reassumed her bonnet and shawl. She was anxious to get home to

that brutal husband, who was only too apt to fall into some mischief in

her absence. She looked up as Lady Audley entered the room, and uttered

an exclamation of surprise at seeing her late mistress in a

walking-costume.

 

“My lady,” she cried, “you are not going out tonight?”

 

“Yes, I am, Phoebe,” Lady Audley answered, very quietly. “I am going to

Mount Stanning with you to see this bailiff, and to pay and dismiss him

myself.”

 

“But, my lady, you forget what the time is; you can’t go out at such an

hour.”

 

Lady Audley did not answer. She stood with her finger resting lightly

upon the handle of the bell, meditating quietly.

 

“The stables are always locked, and the men in bed by ten o’clock,” she

murmured, “when we are at home. It will make a terrible hubbub to get a

carriage ready; but yet I dare say one of the servants could manage the

matter quietly for me.”

 

“But why should you go tonight, my lady?” cried Phoebe Marks.

“Tomorrow will do quite as well. A week hence will do as well. Our

landlord would take the man away if he had your promise to settle the

debt.”

 

Lady Audley took no notice of this interruption. She went hastily into

the dressing-room, and flung off her bonnet and cloak, and then returned

to the boudoir, in her simple dinner-costume, with her curls brushed

carelessly away from her face.

 

“Now, Phoebe Marks, listen to me,” she said, grasping her