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

>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 something in that

sardonic smile that seemed to have a deeper meaning than any natural

contempt for Phoebe’s attempts at decoration. She went to the

dressing-table and, smoothed her wet hair before the looking-glass, and

then put on her bonnet. She was obliged to place the flaming tallow

candle very close to the lace furbelows about the glass; so close that

the starched muslin seemed to draw the flame toward it by some power of

attraction in its fragile tissue.

 

Phoebe waited anxiously by the inn door for my lady’s coming She watched

the minute hand of the little Dutch clock, wondering at the slowness of

its progress. It was only ten minutes past two when Lady Audley came

downstairs, with her bonnet on and her hair still wet, but without the

candle.

 

Phoebe was immediately anxious about this missing candle.

 

“The light, my lady,” she said, “you have left it up-stairs!”

 

“The wind blew it out as I was leaving your room,” Lady Audley answered,

quietly. “I left it there.”

 

“In my room, my lady?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“And it was quite out?”

 

“Yes, I tell you; why do you worry me about your candle? It is past two

o’clock. Come.”

 

She took the girl’s arm, and half led, half dragged her from the house.

The convulsive pressure of her slight hand held her firmly as an iron

vise could have held her. The fierce March wind banged to the door of

the house, and left the two women standing outside it. The long, black

road lay bleak and desolate before them, dimly visible between straight

lines of leafless hedges.

 

A walk of three miles’ length upon a lonely country road, between the

hours of two and four on a cold winter’s morning, is scarcely a pleasant

task for a delicate woman—a woman whose inclinations lean toward ease

and luxury. But my lady hurried along the hard, dry highway, dragging

her companion with her as if she had been impelled by some horrible

demoniac force which knew no abatement. With the black night above

them—with the fierce wind howling around them, sweeping across a broad

expanse of hidden country, blowing as if it had arisen simultaneously

from every point of the compass, and making those wanderers the focus of

its ferocity—the two women walked through the darkness down the hill

upon which Mount Stanning stood, along a mile and a half of flat road,

and then up another hill, on the western side of which Audley Court lay

in that sheltered valley, which seemed to shut in the old house from all

the clamor and hubbub of the everyday world.

 

My lady stopped upon the summit of this hill to draw breath and to clasp

her hands upon her heart, in the vain hope that she might still its

cruel beating. They were now within three-quarters of a mile of the

Court, and they had been walking for nearly an hour since they had left

the Castle Inn.

 

Lady Audley stopped to rest, with her face still turned toward the place

of her destination. Phoebe Marks, stopping also, and very glad of a

moment’s pause in that hurried journey, looked back into the far

darkness beneath which lay that dreary shelter that had given her so

much uneasiness. And she did so, she uttered a shrill cry of horror, and

clutched wildly at her companion’s cloak.

 

The night sky was no longer all dark. The thick blackness was broken by

one patch of lurid light.

 

“My lady, my lady!” cried Phoebe, pointing to this lurid patch; “do you

see?”

 

“Yes, child, I see,” answered Lady Audley, trying to shake the clinging

hands from her garments. “What’s the matter?”

 

“It’s a fire—a fire, my lady!”

 

“Yes, I am afraid it is a fire. At Brentwood, most likely. Let me go,

Phoebe; it’s nothing to us.”

 

“Yes, yes, my lady; it’s nearer than Brentwood—much nearer; it’s at

Mount Stanning.”

 

Lady Audley did not answer. She was trembling again, with the cold

perhaps, for the wind had torn her heavy cloak from her shoulders, and

had left her slender figure exposed to the blast.

 

“It’s at Mount Stanning, my lady!” cried Phoebe Marks. “It’s the Castle

that’s on fire—I know it is, I know it is! I thought of fire tonight,

and I was fidgety and uneasy, for I knew this would happen some day. I

wouldn’t mind if it was only the wretched place, but there’ll be life

lost, there’ll be life lost!” sobbed the girl, distractedly. “There’s

Luke, too tipsy to help himself, unless others help him; there’s Mr.

Audley asleep—”

 

Phoebe Marks stopped suddenly at the mention of Robert’s name, and fell

upon her knees, clasping her uplifted hands, and appealing wildly to

Lady Audley.

 

“Oh, my God!” she cried. “Say it’s not true, my lady, say it’s not true!

It’s too horrible, it’s too horrible, it’s too horrible!”

 

“What’s too horrible?”

 

“The thought that’s in my mind; the terrible thought that’s in my mind.”

 

“What do you mean, girl?” cried my lady, fiercely.

 

“Oh, God forgive me if I’m wrong!” the kneeling woman gasped in detached

sentences, “and God grant I may be. Why did you go up to the Castle, my

lady? Why were you so set on going against all I could say—you who are

so bitter against Mr. Audley and against Luke, and who knew they were

both under that roof? Oh, tell me that I do you a cruel wrong, my lady;

tell me so—tell me! for as there is a Heaven above me I think that you

went to that place tonight on purpose to set fire to it. Tell me that

I’m wrong, my lady; tell me that I’m doing you a wicked wrong.”

 

“I will tell you nothing, except that you are a mad woman,” answered

Lady Audley; in a cold, hard voice. “Get up; fool, idiot, coward! Is

your husband such a precious bargain that you should be groveling there,

lamenting and groaning for him? What is Robert Audley to you, that you

behave like a maniac, because you think he is in danger? How do you know

the fire is at Mount Stanning? You see a red patch in the sky, and you

cry out directly that your own paltry hovel is in flames, as if there

were no place in the world that could burn except that. The fire may be

at Brentwood, or further away—at Romford, or still further away, on the

eastern side of London, perhaps. Get up, mad woman, and go back and look

after your goods and chattels, and your husband and your lodger. Get up

and go: I don’t want you.”

 

“Oh! my lady, my lady, forgive me,” sobbed Phoebe; “there’s nothing you

can say to me that’s hard enough for having done you such a wrong, even

in my thoughts. I don’t mind your cruel words—I don’t mind anything if

I’m wrong.”

 

“Go back and see for yourself,” answered Lady Audley, sternly. “I tell

you again, I don’t want you.”

 

She walked away in the darkness, leaving Phoebe Marks still kneeling

upon the hard road, where she had cast herself in that agony of

supplication. Sir Michael’s wife walked toward the house in which her

husband slept with the red blaze lighting up the skies behind her, and

with nothing but the blackness of the night before.

 

CHAPTER XXXIII.

 

THE BEARER OF THE TIDINGS.

 

It was very late the next morning when Lady Audley emerged from her

dressing-room, exquisitely dressed in a morning costume of delicate

muslin, delicate laces, and embroideries; but with a very pale face, and

with half-circles of purple shadow under her eyes. She accounted for

this pale face and these hollow eyes by declaring that she had sat up

reading until a very late hour on the previous night.

 

Sir Michael and his young wife breakfasted in the library at a

comfortable round table, wheeled close to the blazing fire; and Alicia

was compelled to share this meal with her stepmother, however she might

avoid that lady in the long interval between breakfast and dinner.

 

The March morning was bleak and dull, and a drizzling rain fell

incessantly, obscuring the landscape and blotting out the distance.

There were very few letters by the morning post; the daily newspapers

did not arrive until noon; and such aids to conversation being missing,

there was very little talk at the breakfast table.

 

Alicia looked out at the drizzling rain drifting against the broad

window-panes.

 

“No riding to-day,” she said; “and no chance of any callers to enliven

us, unless that ridiculous Bob comes crawling through the wet from Mount

Stanning.”

 

Have you ever heard anybody, whom you knew to be dead, alluded to in a

light, easy going manner by another person who did not know of his

death—alluded to as doing that or this, as performing some trivial

everyday operation—when you know that he has vanished away from the

face of this earth, and separated himself forever from all living

creatures and their commonplace pursuits in the awful solemnity of

death? Such a chance allusion, insignificant though it may be, is apt to

send a strange thrill of pain through the mind. The ignorant remark jars

discordantly upon the hyper-sensitive brain; the King of Terrors is

desecrated by that unwitting disrespect. Heaven knows what hidden reason

my lady may have had for experiencing some such revulsion of feeling on

the sudden mention of Mr. Audley’s name, but her pale face blanched to a

sickly white as Alicia Audley spoke of her cousin.

 

“Yes, he will come down here in the wet, perhaps,” the young lady

continued, “with his hat sleek and shining as if it had been brushed

with a pat of fresh butter, and with white vapors steaming out of his

clothes, and making him look like an awkward genie just let out of his

bottle. He will come down here and print impressions of his muddy boots

all