Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (books to read in your 20s female .TXT) 📗
- Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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low, wainscoted parlor, while their horses munched some suspicious
mixture of moldy hay and tolerable beans in the tumbledown stables.
Sometimes even the members of the Audley hunt stopped to drink and bait
their horses at the Castle Inn; while, on one grand and
never-to-be-forgotten occasion, a dinner had been ordered by the master
of the hounds for some thirty gentlemen, and the proprietor driven
nearly mad by the importance of the demand.
So Luke Marks, who was by no means troubled with an eye for the
beautiful, thought himself very fortunate in becoming the landlord of
the Castle Inn, Mount Stanning.
A chaise-cart was waiting in the fog to convey the bride and bridegroom
to their new home; and a few of the villagers, who had known Phoebe from
a child, were lingering around the churchyard gate to bid her good-by.
Her pale eyes were still paler from the tears she had shed, and the red
rims which surrounded them. The bridegroom was annoyed at this
exhibition of emotion.
“What are you blubbering for, lass?” he said, fiercely. “If you didn’t
want to marry me you should have told me so. I ain’t going to murder
you, am I?”
The lady’s maid shivered as he spoke to her, and dragged her little silk
mantle closely around her.
“You’re cold in all this here finery,” said Luke, staring at her costly
dress with no expression of good-will. “Why can’t women dress according
to their station? You won’t have no silk gownds out of my pocket, I can
tell you.”
He lifted the shivering girl into the chaise, wrapped a rough great-coat
about her, and drove off through the yellow fog, followed by a feeble
cheer from two or three urchins clustered around the gate.
A new maid was brought from London to replace Phoebe Marks about the
person of my lady—a very showy damsel, who wore a black satin gown, and
rose-colored ribbons in her cap, and complained bitterly of the dullness
of Audley Court.
But Christmas brought visitors to the rambling old mansion. A country
squire and his fat wife occupied the tapestried chamber; merry girls
scampered up and down the long passages, and young men stared out of the
latticed windows, watching for southerly winds and cloudy skies; there
was not an empty stall in the roomy old stables; an extempore forge had
been set up in the yard for the shoeing of hunters; yelping dogs made
the place noisy with their perpetual clamor; strange servants herded
together on the garret story; and every little casement hidden away
under some pointed gable, and every dormer window in the quaint old
roof, glimmered upon the winter’s night with its separate taper, till,
coming suddenly upon Audley Court, the benighted stranger, misled by the
light, and noise, and bustle of the place, might have easily fallen into
young Marlowe’s error, and have mistaken the hospitable mansion for a
good, old-fashioned inn, such as have faded from this earth since the
last mail coach and prancing tits took their last melancholy journey to
the knacker’s yard.
Among other visitors Mr. Robert Audley came down to Essex for the
hunting season, with half a dozen French novels, a case of cigars, and
three pounds of Turkish tobacco in his portmanteau.
The honest young country squires, who talked all breakfast time of
Flying Dutchman fillies and Voltigeur colts; of glorious runs of seven
hours’ hard riding over three counties, and a midnight homeward ride of
thirty miles upon their covert hacks; and who ran away from the
well-spread table with their mouths full of cold sirloin, to look at
that off pastern, or that sprained forearm, or the colt that had just
come back from the veterinary surgeon’s, set down Robert Audley,
dawdling over a slice of bread and marmalade, as a person utterly
unworthy of any remark whatsoever.
The young barrister had brought a couple of dogs with him; and the
country gentleman who gave fifty pounds for a pointer; and traveled a
couple of hundred miles to look at a leash of setters before be struck a
bargain, laughed aloud at the two miserable curs, one of which had
followed Robert Audley through Chancery Lane, and half the length of
Holborn; while his companion had been taken by the barrister _vi et
armis_ from a coster-monger who was ill-using him. And as Robert
furthermore insisted on having these two deplorable animals under his
easy-chair in the drawing-room, much to the annoyance of my lady, who,
as we know, hated all dogs, the visitors at Audley Court looked upon the
baronet’s nephew as an inoffensive species of maniac.
During other visits to the Court Robert Audley had made a feeble show of
joining in the sports of the merry assembly. He had jogged across half a
dozen ploughed fields on a quiet gray pony of Sir Michael’s, and drawing
up breathless and panting at door of some farm-house, had expressed his
intention of following the hounds no further that morning. He had even
gone so far as to put on, with great labor, a pair of skates, with a
view to taking a turn on the frozen surface of the fishpond, and had
fallen ignominously at the first attempt, lying placidly extended on the
flat of his back until such time as the bystanders should think fit to
pick him up. He had occupied the back seat in a dog-cart during a
pleasant morning drive, vehemently protesting against being taken up
hill, and requiring the vehicle to be stopped every ten minutes in order
to readjust the cushions. But this year he showed no inclination for any
of these outdoor amusements, and he spent his time entirely in lounging
in the drawing-room, and making himself agreeable, after his own lazy
fashion, to my lady and Alicia.
Lady Audley received her nephew’s attentions in that graceful
half-childish fashion which her admirers found so charming; but Alicia
was indignant at the change in her cousin’s conduct.
“You were always a poor, spiritless fellow, Bob,” said the young lady,
contemptuously, as she bounced into the drawing-room in her
riding-habit, after a hunting breakfast, from which Robert had absented
himself, preferring a cup of tea in my lady’s boudoir; “but this year I
don’t know what has come to you. You are good for nothing but to hold a
skein of silk or read Tennyson to Lady Audley.”
“My dear, hasty, impetuous Alicia, don’t be violent,” said the young man
imploringly. “A conclusion isn’t a five-barred gate; and you needn’t
give your judgment its head, as you give your mare Atalanta hers, when
you’re flying across country at the heels of an unfortunate fox. Lady
Audley interests me, and my uncle’s county friends do not. Is that a
sufficient answer, Alicia?”
Miss Audley gave her head a little scornful toss.
“It’s as good an answer as I shall ever get from, you, Bob,” she said,
impatiently; “but pray amuse yourself in your own way; loll in an
easy-chair all day, with those two absurd dogs asleep on your knees;
spoil my lady’s window-curtains with your cigars and annoy everybody in
the house with your stupid, inanimate countenance.”
Mr. Robert Audley opened his handsome gray eyes to their widest extent
at this tirade, and looked helplessly at Miss Alicia.
The young lady was walking up and down the room, slashing the skirt of
her habit with her riding-whip. Her eyes sparkled with an angry flash,
and a crimson glow burned under her clear brown skin. The young
barrister knew very well, by these diagnostics, that his cousin was in a
passion.
“Yes,” she repeated, “your stupid, inanimate countenance. Do you know,
Robert Audley, that with all your mock amiability, you are brimful of
conceit and superciliousness. You look down upon our amusements; you
lift up your eyebrows, and shrug your shoulders, and throw yourself back
in your chair, and wash your hands of us and our pleasures. You are a
selfish, cold-hearted Sybarite—”
“Alicia! Good—gracious—me!”
The morning paper dropped out of his hands, and he sat feebly staring at
his assailant.
“Yes, selfish, Robert Audley! You take home half-starved dogs, because
you like half-starved dogs. You stoop down, and pat the head of every
good-for-nothing cur in the village street, because you like
good-for-nothing curs. You notice little children, and give them
halfpence, because it amuses you to do so. But you lift your eyebrows a
quarter of a yard when poor Sir Harry Towers tells a stupid story, and
stare the poor fellow out of countenance with your lazy insolence. As to
your amiability, you would let a man hit you, and say ‘Thank you’ for
the blow, rather than take the trouble to hit him again; but you
wouldn’t go half a mile out of your way to serve your dearest friend.
Sir Harry is worth twenty of you, though he did write to ask if my
m-a-i-r Atalanta had recovered from the sprain. He can’t spell, or lift
his eyebrows to the roots of his hair; but he would go through fire and
water for the girl he loves; while you—”
At this very point, when Robert was most prepared to encounter his
cousin’s violence, and when Miss Alicia seemed about to make her
strongest attack, the young lady broke down altogether, and burst into
tears.
Robert sprang from his easy-chair, upsetting his dogs on the carpet.
“Alicia, my darling, what is it?”
“It’s—it’s—it’s the feather of my hat that got into my eyes,” sobbed
his cousin; and before he could investigate the truth of this assertion
Alicia had darted out of the room.
Robert Audley was preparing to follow her, when he heard her voice in
the courtyard below, amidst the tramping of horses and the clamor of
visitors, dogs, and grooms. Sir Harry Towers, the most aristocratic
young sportsman in the neighborhood, had just taken her little foot in
his hand as she sprung into her saddle.
“Good Heaven!” exclaimed Robert, as he watched the merry party of
equestrians until they disappeared under the archway. “What does all
this mean? How charmingly she sits her horse! What a pretty figure, too,
and a fine, candid, brown, rosy face: but to fly at a fellow like that,
without the least provocation! That’s the consequence of letting a girl
follow the hounds. She learns to look at everything in life as she does
at six feet of timber or a sunk fence; she goes through the world as she
goes across country—straight ahead, and over everything. Such a nice
girl as she might have been, too, if she’d been brought up in Figtree
Court! If ever I marry, and have daughters (which remote contingency may
Heaven forefend!) they shall be educated in Paper Buildings, take their
sole exercise in the Temple Gardens, and they shall never go beyond the
gates till they are marriageable, when I will walk them straight across
Fleet street to St. Dunstan’s church, and deliver them into the hands of
their husbands.”
With such reflections as these did Mr. Robert Audley beguile the time
until my lady re-entered the drawing-room, fresh and radiant in her
elegant morning costume, her yellow curls glistening with the perfumed
waters in which she had bathed, and her velvet-covered sketch-book in
her arms. She planted a little easel upon a table by the window, seated
herself before it, and began to mix the colors upon her palette, Robert
watching her out of his half-closed eyes.
“You are sure my cigar does not annoy you, Lady Audley?”
“Oh, no indeed; I am quite used to the smell of tobacco. Mr. Dawson, the
surgeon, smoked all the evening when I lived in his house.”
“Dawson is a good fellow,
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