Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (books to read in your 20s female .TXT) 📗
- Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
- Performer: -
Book online «Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (books to read in your 20s female .TXT) 📗». Author Mary Elizabeth Braddon
court of which she had been a star had passed away; powerful
functionaries and great magistrates, who might perhaps have helped her,
were moldering in the graves; brave young cavaliers, who would have died
for her, had fallen upon distant battle-fields; she had lived to see the
age to which she had belonged fade like a dream; and she went to the
stake, followed by only a few ignorant country people, who forgot all
her bounties, and hooted at her for a wicked sorceress.”
“I don’t care for such dismal stories, my lady,” said Phoebe Marks with
a shudder. “One has no need to read books to give one the horrors in
this dull place.”
Lady Audley shrugged her shoulders and laughed at her maid’s candor.
“It is a dull place, Phoebe,” she said, “though it doesn’t do to say so
to my dear old husband. Though I am the wife of one of the most
influential men in the county, I don’t know that I wasn’t nearly as well
off at Mr. Dawson’s; and yet it’s something to wear sables that cost
sixty guineas, and have a thousand pounds spent on the decoration of
one’s apartments.”
Treated as a companion by her mistress, in the receipt of the most
liberal wages, and with perquisites such as perhaps lady’s maid never
had before, it was strange that Phoebe Marks should wish to leave her
situation; but it was not the less a fact that she was anxious to
exchange all the advantages of Audley Court for the very unpromising
prospect which awaited her as the wife of her Cousin Luke.
The young man had contrived in some manner to associate himself with the
improved fortunes of his sweetheart. He had never allowed Phoebe any
peace till she had obtained for him, by the aid of my lady’s
interference, a situation as undergroom of the Court.
He never rode out with either Alicia or Sir Michael; but on one of the
few occasions upon which my lady mounted the pretty little gray
thoroughbred reserved for her use, he contrived to attend her in her
ride. He saw enough, in the very first half hour they were out, to
discover that, graceful as Lucy Audley might look in her long blue cloth
habit, she was a timid horsewoman, and utterly unable to manage the
animal she rode.
Lady Audley remonstrated with her maid upon her folly in wishing to
marry the uncouth groom.
The two women were seated together over the fire in my lady’s
dressing-room, the gray sky closing in upon the October afternoon, and
the black tracery of ivy darkening the casement windows.
“You surely are not in love with the awkward, ugly creature are you,
Phoebe?” asked my lady sharply.
The girl was sitting on a low stool at her mistress feet. She did not
answer my lady’s question immediately, but sat for some time looking
vacantly into the red abyss in the hollow fire.
Presently she said, rather as if she had been thinking aloud than
answering Lucy’s question:
“I don’t think I can love him. We have been together from children, and
I promised, when I was little better than fifteen, that I’d be his wife.
I daren’t break that promise now. There have been times when I’ve made
up the very sentence I meant to say to him, telling him that I couldn’t
keep my faith with him; but the words have died upon my lips, and I’ve
sat looking at him, with a choking sensation, in my throat that wouldn’t
let me speak. I daren’t refuse to marry him. I’ve often watched and
watched him, as he has sat slicing away at a hedge-stake with his great
clasp-knife, till I have thought that it is just such men as he who have
decoyed their sweethearts into lonely places, and murdered them for
being false to their word. When he was a boy he was always violent and
revengeful. I saw him once take up that very knife in a quarrel with his
mother. I tell you, my lady, I must marry him.”
“You silly girl, you shall do nothing of the kind!” answered Lucy. “You
think he’ll murder you, do you? Do you think, then, if murder is in him,
you would be any safer as his wife? If you thwarted him, or made him
jealous; if he wanted to marry another woman, or to get hold of some
poor, pitiful bit of money of yours, couldn’t he murder you then? I tell
you you sha’n’t marry him, Phoebe. In the first place I hate the man;
and, in the next place I can’t afford to part with you. We’ll give him a
few pounds and send him about his business.”
Phoebe Marks caught my lady’s hand in hers, and clasped them
convulsively.
“My lady—my good, kind mistress!” she cried, vehemently, “don’t try to
thwart me in this—don’t ask me to thwart him. I tell you I must marry
him. You don’t know what he is. It will be my ruin, and the ruin of
others, if I break my word. I must marry him!”
“Very well, then, Phoebe,” answered her mistress, “I can’t oppose you.
There must be some secret at the bottom of all this.” “There is, my
lady,” said the girl, with her face turned away from Lucy.
“I shall be very sorry to lose you; but I have promised to stand your
friend in all things. What does your cousin mean to do for a living
when, you are married?”
“He would like to take a public house.”
“Then he shall take a public house, and the sooner he drinks himself to
death the better. Sir Michael dines at a bachelor’s party at Major
Margrave’s this evening, and my step-daughter is away with her friends
at the Grange. You can bring your cousin into the drawing-room after
dinner, and I’ll tell him what I mean to do for him.”
“You are very good, my lady,” Phoebe answered with a sigh.
Lady Audley sat in the glow of firelight and wax candles in the
luxurious drawing-room; the amber damask cushions of the sofa
contrasting with her dark violet velvet dress, and her rippling hair
falling about her neck in a golden haze. Everywhere around her were the
evidences of wealth and splendor; while in strange contrast to all this,
and to her own beauty; the awkward groom stood rubbing his bullet head
as my lady explained to him what she intended to do for her confidential
maid. Lucy’s promises were very liberal, and she had expected that,
uncouth as the man was, he would, in his own rough manner, have
expressed his gratitude.
To her surprise he stood staring at the floor without uttering a word in
answer to her offer. Phoebe was standing close to his elbow, and seemed
distressed at the man’s rudeness.
“Tell my lady how thankful you are, Luke,” she said.
“But I’m not so over and above thankful,” answered her lover, savagely.
“Fifty pound ain’t much to start a public. You’ll make it a hundred, my
lady?”
“I shall do nothing of the kind,” said Lady Audley, her clear blue eyes
flashing with indignation, “and I wonder at your impertinence in asking
it.”
“Oh, yes, you will, though,” answered Luke, with quiet insolence that
had a hidden meaning. “You’ll make it a hundred, my lady.”
Lady Audley rose from her seat, looked the man steadfastly in the face
till his determined gaze sunk under hers; then walking straight up to
her maid, she said in a high, piercing voice, peculiar to her in moments
of intense agitation:
“Phoebe Marks, you have told this man!”
The girl fell on her knees at my lady’s feet.
“Oh, forgive me, forgive me!” she cried. “He forced it from me, or I
would never, never have told!”
CHAPTER XV.
ON THE WATCH.
Upon a lowering morning late in November, with the yellow fog low upon
the flat meadows, and the blinded cattle groping their way through the
dim obscurity, and blundering stupidly against black and leafless
hedges, or stumbling into ditches, undistinguishable in the hazy
atmosphere; with the village church looming brown and dingy through the
uncertain light; with every winding path and cottage door, every gable
end and gray old chimney, every village child and straggling cur seeming
strange and weird of aspect in the semi-darkness, Phoebe Marks and her
Cousin Luke made their way through the churchyard of Audley, and
presented themselves before a shivering curate, whose surplice hung in
damp folds, soddened by the morning mist, and whose temper was not
improved by his having waited five minutes for the bride and bridegroom.
Luke Marks, dressed in his ill-fitting Sunday clothes, looked by no
means handsomer than in his everyday apparel; but Phoebe, arrayed in a
rustling silk of delicate gray, that had been worn about half a dozen
times by her mistress, looked, as the few spectators of the ceremony
remarked, “quite the lady.”
A very dim and shadowy lady, vague of outline, and faint of coloring,
with eyes, hair, complexion and dress all melting into such pale and
uncertain shades that, in the obscure light of the foggy November
morning a superstitious stranger might have mistaken the bride for the
ghost of some other bride, dead and buried in the vault below the
church.
Mr. Luke Marks, the hero of the occasion, thought very little of all
this. He had secured the wife of his choice, and the object of his
life-long ambition—a public house. My lady had provided the
seventy-five pounds necessary for the purchase of the good-will and
fixtures, with the stock of ales and spirits, of a small inn in the
center of a lonely little village, perched on the summit of a hill, and
called Mount Stanning. It was not a very pretty house to look at; it had
something of a tumbledown, weather-beaten appearance, standing, as it
did, upon high ground, sheltered only by four or five bare and overgrown
poplars, that had shot up too rapidly for their strength, and had a
blighted, forlorn look in consequence. The wind had had its own way with
the Castle Inn, and had sometimes made cruel use of its power. It was
the wind that battered and bent the low, thatched roofs of outhouses and
stables, till they hung over and lurched forward, as a slouched hat
hangs over the low forehead of some village ruffian; it was the wind
that shook and rattled the wooden shutters before the narrow casements,
till they hung broken and dilapidated upon their rusty hinges; it was
the wind that overthrew the pigeon house, and broke the vane that had
been imprudently set up to tell the movements of its mightiness; it, was
the wind that made light of any little bit of wooden trellis-work, or
creeping plant, or tiny balcony, or any modest decoration whatsoever,
and tore and scattered it in its scornful fury; it was the wind that
left mossy secretions on the discolored surface of the plaster walls; it
was the wind, in short, that shattered, and ruined, and rent, and
trampled upon the tottering pile of buildings, and then flew shrieking
off, to riot and glory in its destroying strength. The dispirited
proprietor grew tired of his long struggle with this mighty enemy; so
the wind was left to work its own will, and the Castle Inn fell slowly
to decay. But for all that it suffered without, it was not the less
prosperous within doors. Sturdy drovers stopped to drink at the little
bar; well-to-do farmers spent their evenings and talked politics in
Comments (0)