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

in

the habit of taking long country rambles with Mr. Dawson’s children in

her old days of dependence, and she thought very little of a distance of

three miles.

 

“Your beautiful husband will sit up for you, I suppose, Phoebe?” she

said, as they struck across an open field that was used as a short cut

from Audley Court to the highroad.

 

“Oh, yes, my lady; he’s sure to sit up. He’ll be drinking with the man,

I dare say.”

 

“The man! What man?”

 

“The man that’s in possession, my lady.”

 

“Ah, to be sure,” said Lady Audley, indifferently.

 

It was strange that Phoebe’s domestic troubles should seem so very far

away from her thoughts at the time she was taking such an extraordinary

step toward setting things right at the Castle Inn.

 

The two women crossed the field and turned into the high road. The way

to Mount Stanning was all up hill, and the long road looked black and

dreary in the dark night; but my lady walked on with a desperate

courage, which was no common constituent in her selfish sensuous nature,

but a strange faculty born out of her great despair. She did not speak

again to her companion until they were close upon the glimmering lights

at the top of the hill. One of these village lights, glaring redly

through a crimson curtain, marked out the particular window behind which

it was likely that Luke Marks sat nodding drowsily over his liquor, and

waiting for the coming of his wife.

 

“He has not gone to bed, Phoebe,” said my lady, eagerly. “But there is

no other light burning at the inn. I suppose Mr. Audley is in bed and

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 tonight,” she added.

 

The poker dropped from the landlord’s hand, and fell clattering among

the cinders on the hearth.

 

“My Lady Audley come here tonight!” 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 bedrooms 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.