Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics)

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘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 one 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 companion as firmly as an iron vice 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 the leafless hedges.

  A walk of three miles’ length upon a lonely country road, between the hours of one and two on a cold winter’s morning, is scarcely a pleasant task for a delicate woman—a woman whose inclinations lean towards 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 round 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 wretched 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 clamour and hubbub of the every-day 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 towards the place of her destination. Phœbe 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 which had given her so much uneasiness. As she did so, she uttered a shrill cry of horror, and clutched wildly at Lady Audley’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 Phœbe, 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 is the matter?’

  ‘It is a fire!—a fire, my lady.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is a fire. At Brentwood most likely. Let me go, Phœbe, it is 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 away from her shoulders, and had left her slender figure exposed to the blast.

  ‘It’s at Mount Stanning, my lady,’ cried Phœbe 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 —— ’

  Phœbe 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 isn’t 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 dreadful 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 to-night, 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 to-night 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 grovelling 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 that 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 Phœbe; ‘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 Phœbe Marks still kneeling upon the hard road, where she had cast herself in that agony of supplication. Sir Michael’s wife walked towards 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 II

  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, elaborate 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 step-mother, 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’s 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 every-day operation—when you know that he has vanished away from the face of this earth, and separated himself for ever from all living creatures and their common-place 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 hypersensitive 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 blanche
d 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 vapours 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 over the carpet, and he’ll sit on your Gobelin tapestry, my lady, in his wet overcoat; and he’ll abuse you if you remonstrate, and will ask why people have chairs that are not to be sat upon, and why you don’t live in Fig-tree Court, and—’

  Sir Michael Audley watched his daughter with a thoughtful countenance as she talked of her cousin. She very often talked of him, ridiculing him and inveighing against him in no very measured terms. But, perhaps, the baronet thought of a certain Signora Beatrice who very cruelly entreated a gentleman called Benedick,* but who was, it may be, heartily in love with him at the same time.

  ‘What do you think Major Melville told me when he called here yesterday, Alicia?’ Sir Michael asked, presently.

  ‘I haven’t the remotest idea,’ replied Alicia, rather disdainfully. ‘Perhaps he told you that we should have another war before long, by Ged, sir; or, perhaps, he told you that we should have a new ministry, by Ged, sir, for that those fellows are getting themselves into a mess, sir; or that those other fellows were reforming this, and cutting down that and altering the other in the army, until, by Ged, sir, we shall have no army at all, by-and-by—nothing but a pack of boys, sir, crammed up to the eyes with a lot of senseless schoolmasters’ rubbish, and dressed in shell-jackets and calico helmets.* Yes, sir, they’re fighting in Oudh* in calico helmets at this very day, sir.’

  ‘You’re an impertinent minx, miss,’ answered the baronet. ‘Major Melville told me nothing of the kind; but he told me that a very devoted admirer of yours, a certain Sir Harry Towers, has forsaken his place in Hertfordshire, and his hunting stable, and has gone on the Continent for a twelvemonth’s tour.’

  Miss Audley flushed up suddenly at the mention of her old adorer, but recovered herself very quickly.

  ‘He has gone on the Continent, has he?’ she said, indifferently. ‘He told me that he meant to do so—if—if he didn’t have everything his own way. Poor fellow! he’s a dear, good-hearted, stupid creature, and twenty times better than that peripatetic, patent refrigerator,* Mr Robert Audley.’

  ‘I wish, Alicia, you were not so fond of ridiculing Bob,’ Sir Michael said, gravely. ‘Bob is a very good fellow, and I’m as fond of him as if he’d been my own son; and—and—I’ve been very uncomfortable about him lately. He has changed very much within the last few days, and he has taken all sorts of absurd ideas into his head, and my lady has alarmed me about him. She thinks—’

  Lady Audley interrupted her husband with a grave shake of her head.

  ‘It is better not to say too much about it yet awhile,’ she said; ‘Alicia knows what I think.’

  ‘Yes,’ rejoined Miss Audley, ‘my lady thinks that Bob is going mad; but I know better than that. He’s not at all the sort of person to go mad. How should such a sluggish ditch-pond of an intellect as his ever work itself into a tempest? He may moon about for the rest of his life, perhaps, in a tranquil state of semi-idiotcy, imperfectly comprehending who he is, and where he’s going, and what he’s doing; but he’ll never go mad.’

  Sir Michael did not reply to this. He had been very much disturbed by his conversation with my lady on the previous evening, and had silently debated the painful question in his mind ever since.

  His wife—the woman he best loved and most believed in—had told him with all appearance of regret and agitation, her conviction of his nephew’s insanity. He tried in vain to arrive at the conclusion he wished most ardently to attain; he tried in vain to think that my lady was misled by her own fancies, and had no foundation for what she said. But then, again, it suddenly flashed upon him, to think this was to arrive at a worse conclusion; it was to transfer the horrible suspicion from his nephew to his wife. She appeared to be possessed with an actual conviction of Robert’s insanity. To imagine her wrong was to imagine some weakness in her own mind. The longer he thought of the subject the more it harassed and perplexed him. It was most certain that the young man had always been eccentric. He was sensible, he was tolerably clever, he was honourable and gentlemanlike in feeling, though perhaps a little careless in the performance of certain minor social duties; but there were some slight differences, not easily to be defined, that separated him from other men of his age and position. Then, again, it was equally true that he had very much changed within the period that had succeeded the disappearance of George Talboys. He had grown moody and thoughtful, melancholy and absent-minded. He had held himself aloof from society; had sat for hours without speaking; had talked at other times by fits and starts; and had excited himself unusually in the discussion of subjects which apparently lay far out of the region of his own life and interests. Then there was even another point which seemed to strengthen my lady’s case against this unhappy young man. He had been brought up in the frequent society of his cousin, Alicia—his pretty, genial cousin—to whom interest, and one would have thought affection, naturally pointed as his most fitting bride. More than this, the girl had shown him, in the innocent guilelessness of a transparent nature, that on her side at least, affection was not wanting; and yet, in spite of all this, he had held himself aloof, and had allowed other men to propose for her hand, and to be rejected by her, and had still made no sign.

  Now love is so very subtle an essence, such an indefinable metaphysical marvel, that its due force, though very cruelly felt by the sufferer himself, is never clearly understood by those who look on at his torments and wonder why he takes the common fever so badly. Sir Michael argued that because Alicia was a pretty girl and an amiable girl it was therefore extraordinary and unnatural in Robert Audley not to have duly fallen in love with her. This baronet—who, close upon his sixtieth birthday, had for the first time encountered that one woman who out of all the women in the world had power to quicken the pulses of his heart—wondered why Robert failed to take the fever from the first breath of contagion that blew towards him. He forgot that there are men who go their ways unscathed amidst legions of lovely and generous women, to succumb at last before some harsh-featured virago, who knows the secret of that only philter which can intoxicate and bewitch him. He forgot that there are certain Jacks who go through life without meeting the fill appointed for them by Nemesis, and die old bachelors perhaps, with poor Jill pining an old maid upon the other side of the party-wall. He forgot that love, which is a madness, and a scourge, and a fever, and a delusion, and a snare, is also a mystery, and very imperfectly understood by every one except the individual sufferer who writhes under its tortures. Jones, who is wildly enamoured of Miss Brown, and who lies awake at night until he loathes his comfortable pillow and tumbles his sheets into two twisted rags of linen in his agonies, as if he were a prisoner and wanted to wind them into impromptu ropes; this same Jones, who thinks Russell Square a magic place because his divinity inhabits it; who thinks the trees in that enclosure and the sky above it greener and bluer than any other trees or sky; and who feels a pang, yes, an actual pang, of mingled hope, and joy, and expectation, and terror when he emerges from Guilford Street, descending from the heights of Islington, into those sacred precincts; this very Jones is hard and callous towards the torments of Smith, who adores Miss Robinson, and cannot imagine what the infatuated fellow can see in the girl. So it was with Sir Michael Audley. He looked at his nephew as a sample of a very large class of young men, and his daughter as a sample of an equally extensive class of feminine goods; and could not see why the two samples should not make a very respectable match. He ignored all those infinitesimal differences in nature which make the wholesome food of one man the deadly poison of another. How difficult it is to believe sometimes that a man doesn’t like such and such a favourite dish! If,
at a dinner-party, a meek-looking guest refuses early salmon and cucumber, or green peas in February, we set him down as a poor relation whose instincts warn him off those expensive plates. If an alderman were to declare that he didn’t like green fat, he would be looked upon as a social martyr, a Marcus Curtius* of the dinner-table, who immolated himself for the benefit of his kind. His fellow aldermen would believe in anything rather than an heretical distaste for the city ambrosia of the soup tureen. But there are people who dislike salmon, and whitebait, and spring ducklings, and all manner of old-established delicacies, and there are other people who affect eccentric and despicable dishes generally stigmatised as nasty.

  Alas, my pretty Alicia, your cousin did not love you! He admired your rosy English face, and had a tender affection for you which might perhaps have expanded by-and-by into something warm enough for matrimony; that every-day jogtrot species of union which demands no very passionate devotion; but for a sudden check which it had received in Dorsetshire. Yes, Robert Audley’s growing affection for his cousin, a plant of very slow growth, I am fain to confess, had been suddenly dwarfed and stunted upon that bitter February day on which he had stood beneath the pine-trees talking to Clara Talboys. Since that day the young man had experienced an unpleasant sensation in thinking of poor Alicia. He looked at her as being in some vague manner an incumbrance upon the freedom of his thoughts; he had a haunting fear that he was in some tacit way pledged to her; that she had a species of claim upon him, which forbade to him the right of even thinking of another woman. I believe it was the image of Miss Audley presented to him in this light that goaded the young barrister into those outbursts of splenetic rage against the female sex which he was liable to at certain times. He was strictly honourable, so honourable that he would rather have immolated himself upon the altar of truth and Alicia than have done her the remotest wrong, though by so doing he might have secured his own happiness.