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

and the pine-trees.

 

“Poor little girl!” he would think on coming back to Alicia. “How good

it is of her to love me, and how grateful ought I to be for her

tenderness. How many fellows would think such a generous, loving heart

the highest boon that earth could give them. There’s Sir Harry Towers

stricken with despair at his rejection. He would give me half his

estate, all his estate, twice his estate, if he had it, to be in the

shoes which I am anxious to shake off my ungrateful feet. Why don’t I

love her? Why is it that although I know her to be pretty, and pure, and

good, and truthful, I don’t love her? Her image never haunts me, except

reproachfully. I never see her in my dreams. I never wake up suddenly in

the dead of the night with her eyes shining upon me and her warm breath

upon my cheek, or with the fingers of her soft hand clinging to mine.

No, I’m not in love with her, I can’t fall in love with her.”

 

He raged and rebelled against his ingratitude. He tried to argue himself

into a passionate attachment for his cousin, but he failed

ignominiously, and the more he tried to think of Alicia the more he

thought of Clara Talboys. I am speaking now of his feelings in the

period that elapsed between his return from Dorsetshire and his visit to

Grange Heath.

 

Sir Michael sat by the library fire after breakfast upon this wretched

rainy morning, writing letters and reading the newspapers. Alicia shut

herself in her own apartment to read the third volume of a novel. Lady

Audley locked the door of the octagon antechamber, and roamed up and

down the suit of rooms from the bedroom to the boudoir all through that

weary morning.

 

She had locked the door to guard against the chance of any one coming in

suddenly and observing her before she was aware—before she had had

sufficient warning to enable her to face their scrutiny. Her pale face

seemed to grow paler as the morning advanced. A tiny medicine-chest was

open upon the dressing-table, and little stoppered bottles of red

lavender, sal-volatile, chloroform, chlorodyne, and ether were scattered

about. Once my lady paused before this medicine-chest, and took out the

remaining bottles, half-absently, perhaps, until she came to one which

was filled with a thick, dark liquid, and labeled “opium—poison.”

 

She trifled a long time with this last bottle; holding it up to the

light, and even removing the stopper and smelling the sickly liquid. But

she put it from her suddenly with a shudder. “If I could!” she muttered,

“if I could only do it! And yet why should I now?”

 

She clinched her small hands as she uttered the last words, and walked

to the window of the dressing-room, which looked straight toward that

ivied archway under which any one must come who came from Mount Stanning

to the Court.

 

There were smaller gates in the gardens which led into the meadows

behind the Court, but there was no other way of coming from Mount

Stanning or Brentwood than by the principal entrance.

 

The solitary hand of the clock over the archway was midway between one

and two when my lady looked at it.

 

“How slow the time is,” she said, wearily; “how slow, how slow! Shall I

grow old like this, I wonder, with every minute of my life seeming like

an hour?”

 

She stood for a few minutes watching the archway, but no one passed

under it while she looked, and she turned impatiently away from the

window to resume her weary wandering about the rooms.

 

Whatever fire that had been which had reflected itself vividly in the

black sky, no tidings of it had as yet come to Audley Court. The day was

miserably wet and windy, altogether the very last day upon which even

the most confirmed idler and gossip would care to venture out. It was

not a market-day, and there were therefore very few passengers upon the

road between Brentwood and Chelmsford, so that as yet no news of the

fire, which had occurred in the dead of the wintry night, had reached

the village of Audley, or traveled from the village to the Court.

 

The girl with the rose-colored ribbons came to the door of the anteroom

to summon her mistress to luncheon, but Lady Audley only opened the door

a little way, and intimated her intention of taking no luncheon.

 

“My head aches terribly, Martin,” she said; “I shall go and lie down

till dinner-time. You may come at five to dress me.”

 

Lady Audley said this with the predetermination of dressing at four, and

thus dispensing with the services of her attendant. Among all privileged

spies, a lady’s-maid has the highest privileges; it is she who bathes

Lady Theresa’s eyes with eau-de-cologne after her ladyship’s quarrel

with the colonel; it is she who administers sal-volatile to Miss Fanny

when Count Beaudesert, of the Blues, has jilted her. She has a hundred

methods for the finding out of her mistress’ secrets. She knows by the

manner in which her victim jerks her head from under the hair-brush, or

chafes at the gentlest administration of the comb, what hidden tortures

are racking her breast—what secret perplexities are bewildering her

brain. That well-bred attendant knows how to interpret the most obscure

diagnosis of all mental diseases that can afflict her mistress; she

knows when the ivory complexion is bought and paid for—when the pearly

teeth are foreign substances fashioned by the dentist—when the glossy

plaits are the relics of the dead, rather than the property of the

living; and she knows other and more sacred secrets than these; she

knows when the sweet smile is more false than Madame Levison’s enamel,

and far less enduring—when the words that issue from between gates of

borrowed pearl are more disguised and painted than the lips which help

to shape them—when the lovely fairy of the ball-room re-enters the

dressing-room after the night’s long revelry, and throws aside her

voluminous burnous and her faded bouquet, and drops her mask, and like

another Cinderella loses the glass-slipper, by whose glitter she has

been distinguished, and falls back into her rags and dirt, the lady’s

maid is by to see the transformation. The valet who took wages from the

prophet of Korazin must have seen his master sometimes unveiled, and

must have laughed in his sleeve at the folly of the monster’s

worshipers.

 

Lady Audley had made no confidante of her new maid, and on this day of

all others she wished to be alone.

 

She did lie down; she cast herself wearily upon the luxurious sofa in

the dressing-room, and buried her face in the down pillows and tried to

sleep. Sleep!—she had almost forgotten what it was, that tender

restorer of tired nature, it seemed so long now since she had slept. It

was only about eight-and-forty hours perhaps, but it appeared an

intolerable time. Her fatigue of the night before, and her unnatural

excitement, had worn her out at last. She did fall asleep; she fell into

a heavy slumber that was almost like stupor. She had taken a few drops

out of the opium bottle in a glass of water before lying down.

 

The clock over the mantelpiece chimed the quarter before four as she

woke suddenly and started up, with the cold perspiration breaking out in

icy drops upon her forehead. She had dreamt that every member of the

household was clamoring at the door, eager to tell her of a dreadful

fire that had happened in the night.

 

There was no sound but the flapping of the ivy-leaves against the glass,

the occasional falling of a cinder, and the steady ticking of the clock.

 

“Perhaps I shall be always dreaming these sort of dreams,” my lady

thought, “until the terror of them kills me!”

 

The rain had ceased, and the cold spring sunshine was glittering upon

the windows. Lady Audley dressed herself rapidly but carefully. I do not

say that even in her supremest hour of misery she still retained her

pride in her beauty. It was not so; she looked upon that beauty as a

weapon, and she felt that she had now double need to be well armed. She

dressed herself in her most gorgeous silk, a voluminous robe of silvery,

shimmering blue, that made her look as if she had been arrayed in

moonbeams. She shook out her hair into feathery showers of glittering

gold, and, with a cloak of white cashmere about her shoulders, went

downstairs into the vestibule.

 

She opened the door of the library and looked in. Sir Michael Audley was

asleep in his easy-chair. As my lady softly closed this door Alicia

descended the stairs from her own room. The turret door was open, and

the sun was shining upon the wet grass-plat in the quadrangle. The firm

gravel-walks were already very nearly dry, for the rain had ceased for

upward of two hours.

 

“Will you take a walk with me in the quadrangle?” Lady Audley asked as

her step-daughter approached. The armed neutrality between the two women

admitted of any chance civility such as this.

 

“Yes, if you please, my lady,” Alicia answered, rather listlessly. “I

have been yawning over a stupid novel all the morning, and shall be very

glad of a little fresh air.”

 

Heaven help the novelist whose fiction Miss Audley had been perusing, if

he had no better critics than that young lady. She had read page after

page without knowing what she had been reading, and had flung aside the

volume half a dozen times to go to the window and watch for that visitor

whom she had so confidently expected.

 

Lady Audley led the way through the low doorway and on to the smooth

gravel drive, by which carriages approached the house. She was still

very pale, but the brightness of her dress and of her feathery golden

ringlets, distracted an observer’s eyes from her pallid face. All mental

distress is, with some show of reason, associated in our minds with

loose, disordered garments and dishabilled hair, and an appearance in

every way the reverse of my lady’s. Why had she come out into the chill

sunshine of that March afternoon to wander up and down that monotonous

pathway with the step-daughter she hated? She came because she was under

the dominion of a horrible restlessness, which, would not suffer her to

remain within the house waiting for certain tidings which she knew must

too surely come. At first she had wished to ward them off—at first she

had wished that strange convulsions of nature might arise to hinder

their coming—that abnormal winter lightnings might wither and destroy

the messenger who carried them—that the ground might tremble and yawn

beneath his hastening feet, and that impassable gulfs might separate the

spot from which the tidings were to come and the place to which they

were to be carried. She wished that the earth might stand still, and the

paralyzed elements cease from their natural functions, that the progress

of time might stop, that the Day of Judgment might come, and that she

might thus be brought before an unearthly tribunal, and so escape the

intervening shame and misery of any earthly judgment. In the wild chaos

of her brain, every one of these thoughts had held its place, and in her

short slumber on the sofa in her dressing-room she had dreamed all these

things and a hundred other things, all bearing upon the same subject.

She had dreamed that a brook, a tiny streamlet when she first saw it,

flowed across the road between Mount Stanning and Audley, and gradually

swelled