Lady Audley’s Secret, M. E. Braddon [good books to read for young adults TXT] 📗

Robert immediately obeyed this summons. He crept softly up the stairs, and took off his hat before he bent his head to enter at the low doorway of the humble rustic chamber. He took off his hat in the presence of this common peasant man, because he knew that there was another and a more awful presence hovering about the room, and eager to be admitted.

Phoebe Marks was sitting at the foot of the bed, with her eyes fixed upon her husband’s face⁠—not with any very tender expression in the pale light, but with a sharp, terrified anxiety, which showed that it was the coming of death itself that she dreaded, rather than the loss of her husband. The old woman was busy at the fireplace, airing linen, and preparing some mess of broth which it was not likely the patient would ever eat. The sick man lay with his head propped up by pillows, his coarse face deadly pale, and his great hands wandering uneasily about the coverlet. Phoebe had been reading to him, for an open Testament lay among the medicine and lotion bottles upon the table near the bed. Every object in the room was neat and orderly, and bore witness of that delicate precision which had always been a distinguishing characteristic of Phoebe.

The young woman rose as Robert Audley crossed the threshold, and hurried toward him.

“Let me speak to you for a moment, sir, before you talk to Luke,” she said, in an eager whisper. “Pray let me speak to you first.”

“What’s the gal a-sayin’, there?” asked the invalid in a subdued roar, which died away hoarsely on his lips. He was feebly savage, even in his weakness. The dull glaze of death was gathering over his eyes, but they still watched Phoebe with a sharp glance of dissatisfaction. “What’s she up to there?” he said. “I won’t have no plottin’ and no hatchin’ agen me. I want to speak to Mr. Audley my own self; and whatever I done I’m goin’ to answer for. If I done any mischief, I’m a-goin’ to try and undo it. What’s she a-sayin’?”

“She ain’t a-sayin’ nothin’, lovey,” answered the old woman, going to the bedside of her son, who even when made more interesting than usual by illness, did not seem a very fit subject for this tender appellation.

“She’s only a-tellin’ the gentleman how bad you’ve been, my pretty.”

“What I’m a-goin’ to tell I’m only a-goin’ to tell to him, remember,” growled Mr. Mark; “and ketch me a-tellin’ of it to him if it warn’t for what he done for me the other night.”

“To be sure not, lovey,” answered the old woman soothingly.

Phoebe Marks had drawn Mr. Audley out of the room and onto the narrow landing at the top of the little staircase. This landing was a platform of about three feet square, and it was as much as the two could manage to stand upon it without pushing each other against the whitewashed wall, or backward down the stairs.

“Oh, sir, I wanted to speak to you so badly,” Phoebe answered, eagerly; “you know what I told you when I found you safe and well upon the night of the fire?”

“Yes, yes.”

“I told you what I suspected; what I think still.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“But I never breathed a word of it to anybody but you, sir, and I think that Luke has forgotten all about that night; I think that what went before the fire has gone clean out of his head altogether. He was tipsy, you know, when my la⁠—when she came to the Castle; and I think he was so dazed and scared like by the fire that it all went out of his memory. He doesn’t suspect what I suspect, at any rate, or he’d have spoken of it to anybody or everybody; but he’s dreadful spiteful against my lady, for he says if she’d have let him have a place at Brentwood or Chelmsford, this wouldn’t have happened. So what I wanted to beg of you, sir, is not to let a word drop before Luke.”

“Yes, yes, I understand; I will be careful.”

“My lady has left the Court, I hear, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Never to come back, sir?”

“Never to come back.”

“But she has not gone where she’ll be cruelly treated; where she’ll be ill-used?”

“No: she will be very kindly treated.”

“I’m glad of that, sir; I beg your pardon for troubling you with the question, sir, but my lady was a kind mistress to me.”

Luke’s voice, husky and feeble, was heard within the little chamber at this period of the conversation, demanding angrily when “that gal would have done jawing;” upon which Phoebe put her finger to her lips, and led Mr. Audley back into the sickroom.

“I don’t want you” said Mr. Marks, decisively, as his wife re-entered the chamber⁠—“I don’t want you; you’ve no call to hear what I’ve got to say⁠—I only want Mr. Audley, and I wants to speak to him all alone, with none o’ your sneakin’ listenin’ at doors, d’ye hear? so you may go downstairs and keep there till you’re wanted; and you may take mother⁠—no, mother may stay, I shall want her presently.”

The sick man’s feeble hand pointed to the door, through which his wife departed very submissively.

“I’ve no wish to hear anything, Luke,” she said, “but I hope you won’t say anything against those that have been good and generous to you.”

“I shall say what I like,” answered Mr. Marks, fiercely, “and I’m not a-goin’ to be ordered by you. You ain’t the parson, as I’ve ever heerd of; nor the lawyer neither.”

The landlord of the Castle Inn had undergone no moral transformation by his deathbed sufferings, fierce and rapid as they had been. Perhaps some faint glimmer of a light that had been far off from his life now struggled feebly through the black obscurities of ignorance that darkened his soul. Perhaps a half angry, half sullen penitence urged him to make some