Lady Audley's Secret Part 52

She put her hands to her forehead, clasping her slender fingers across her brow, as if she would have controlled the action of her brain by their convulsive pressure.

"Robert Audley is with your husband," she said, slowly, speaking to herself rather than to her companion. "These two men are together, and there are bailiffs in the house, and your brutal husband is no doubt brutally drunk by this time, and brutally obstinate and ferocious in his drunkenness. If I refuse to pay this money his ferocity will be multiplied by a hundredfold. There's little use in discussing that matter. The money must be paid."

"But if you do pay it," said Phoebe, earnestly, "I hope you will impress upon Luke that it is the last money you will ever give him while he stops in that house."

"Why?" asked Lady Audley, letting her hands fall on her lap, and looking inquiringly at Mrs. Marks.

"Because I want Luke to leave the Castle."

"But why do you want him to leave?"

"Oh, for ever so many reasons, my lady," answered Phoebe. "He's not fit to be the landlord of a public-house. I didn't know that when I married him, or I would have gone against the business, and tried to persuade him to take to the farming line. Not that I suppose he'd have given up his own fancy, either; for he's obstinate enough, as you know, my lady.

He's not fit for his present business. He's scarcely ever sober after dark; and when he's drunk he gets almost wild, and doesn't seem to know what he does. We've had two or three narrow escapes with him already."

"Narrow escapes!" repeated Lady Audley. "What do you mean?"

"Why, we've run the risk of being burnt in our beds through his carelessness."

"Burnt in your beds through his carelessness! Why, how was that?" asked my lady, rather listlessly. She was too selfish, and too deeply absorbed in her own troubles to take much interest in any danger which had befallen her some-time lady's-maid.

"You know what a queer old place the Castle is, my lady; all tumble-down wood-work, and rotten rafters, and such like. The Chelmsford Insurance Company won't insure it; for they say if the place did happen to catch fire of a windy night it would blaze away like so much tinder, and nothing in the world could save it. Well, Luke knows this; and the landlord has warned him of it times and often, for he lives close against us, and he keeps a pretty sharp eye upon all my husband's goings on; but when Luke's tipsy he doesn't know what he's about, and only a week ago he left a candle burning in one of the out-houses, and the flame caught one of the rafters of the sloping roof, and if it hadn't been for me finding it out when I went round the house the last thing, we should have all been burnt to death, perhaps. And that's the third time the same kind of thing has happened in the six months we've had the place, and you can't wonder that I'm frightened, can you, my lady?"

My lady had not wondered, she had not thought about the business at all.

She had scarcely listened to these commonplace details; why should she care for this low-born waiting-woman's perils and troubles? Had she not her own terrors, her own soul-absorbing perplexities to usurp every thought of which her brain was capable?

She did not make any remark upon that which poor Phoebe just told her; she scarcely comprehended what had been said, until some moments after the girl had finished speaking, when the words a.s.sumed their full meaning, as some words do after they have been heard without being heeded.

"Burnt in your beds," said the young lady, at last. "It would have been a good thing for me if that precious creature, your husband, had been burnt in his bed before to-night."

A vivid picture had flashed upon her as she spoke. The picture of that frail wooden tenement, the Castle Inn, reduced to a roofless chaos of lath and plaster, vomiting flames from its black mouth, and spitting blazing sparks upward toward the cold night sky.

She gave a weary sigh as she dismissed this image from her restless brain. She would be no better off even if this enemy should be for ever silenced. She had another and far more dangerous foe--a foe who was not to be bribed or bought off, though she had been as rich as an empress.

"I'll give you the money to send this bailiff away," my lady said, after a pause. "I must give you the last sovereign in my purse, but what of that? you know as well as I do that I dare not refuse you."

Lady Audley rose and took the lighted lamp from her writing-table. "The money is in my dressing-room," she said; "I will go and fetch it."

"Oh, my lady," exclaimed Phoebe, suddenly, "I forgot something; I was in such a way about this business that I quite forgot it."

"Quite forgot what?"

"A letter that was given me to bring to you, my lady, just before I left home."

"What letter?"

"A letter from Mr. Audley. He heard my husband mention that I was coming down here, and he asked me to carry this letter."

Lady Audley set the lamp down upon the table nearest to her, and held out her hand to receive the letter. Phoebe Marks could scarcely fail to observe that the little jeweled hand shook like a leaf.

"Give it me--give it me," she cried; "let me see what more he has to say."

Lady Audley almost s.n.a.t.c.hed the letter from Phoebe's hand in her wild impatience. She tore open the envelope and flung it from her; she could scarcely unfold the sheet of note-paper in her eager excitement.

The letter was very brief. It contained only these words:

"Should Mrs. George Talboys really have survived the date of her supposed death, as recorded in the public prints, and upon the tombstone in Ventnor churchyard, and should she exist in the person of the lady suspected and accused by the writer of this, there can be no great difficulty in finding some one able and willing to identify her. Mrs.

Barkamb, the owner of North Cottages, Wildernsea, would no doubt consent to throw some light upon this matter; either to dispel a delusion or to confirm a suspicion.

"ROBERT AUDLEY.

"March 3, 1859.

"The Castle Inn, Mount Stanning."

CHAPTER x.x.xII.

THE RED LIGHT IN THE SKY.

My lady crushed the letter fiercely in her hand, and flung it from her into the flames.

"If he stood before me now, and I could kill him," she muttered in a strange, inward whisper, "I would do it--I would do it!" She s.n.a.t.c.hed up the lamp and rushed into the adjoining room. She shut the door behind her. She could not endure any witness of her horrible despair--she could endure nothing, neither herself nor her surroundings.

The door between my lady's dressing-room and the bed-chamber in which Sir Michael lay, had been left open. The baronet slept peacefully, his n.o.ble face plainly visible in the subdued lamplight. His breathing was low and regular, his lips curved into a half smile--a smile of tender happiness which he often wore when he looked at his beautiful wife, the smile of an all-indulgent father, who looks admiringly at his favorite child.

Some touch of womanly feeling, some sentiment of compa.s.sion softened Lady Audley's glance as it fell upon that n.o.ble, reposing figure. For a moment the horrible egotism of her own misery yielded to her pitying tenderness for another. It was perhaps only a semi-selfish tenderness after all, in which pity for herself was as powerful as pity for her husband; but for once in a way, her thoughts ran out of the narrow groove of her own terrors and her own troubles to dwell with prophetic grief upon the coming sorrows of another.

"If they make him believe, how wretched he will be," she thought. But intermingled with that thought there was another--there was the thought of her lovely face, her bewitching manner, her arch smile, her low, musical laugh, which was like a peal of silvery bells ringing across a broad expanse of flat meadow-land and a rippling river in the misty summer evening. She thought of all these things with a transient thrill of triumph, which was stronger even than her terror.

If Sir Michael Audley lived to be a hundred years old, whatever he might learn to believe of her, however he might grow to despise her, would he ever be able to disa.s.sociate her from these attributes? No; a thousand times no. To the last hour of his life his memory would present her to him invested with the loveliness that had first won his enthusiastic admiration, his devoted affection. Her worst enemies could not rob her of that fairy dower which had been so fatal in its influence upon her frivolous mind.

She paced up and down the dressing-room in the silvery lamplight, pondering upon the strange letter which she had received from Robert Audley. She walked backward and forward in that monotonous wandering for some time before she was able to steady her thoughts--before she was able to bring the scattered forces of her narrow intellect to bear upon the one all-important subject of the threat contained in the barrister's letter.

"He will do it," she said, between her set teeth--"he will do it, unless I get him into a lunatic-asylum first; or unless--"

She did not finish the thought in words. She did not even think out the sentence; but some new and unnatural impulse in her heart seemed to beat each syllable against her breast.

The thought was this: "He will do it, unless some strange calamity befalls him, and silences him for ever." The red blood flashed up into my lady's face with as sudden and transient a blaze as the flickering flame of a fire, and died as suddenly away, leaving her more pale than winter snow. Her hands, which had before been locked convulsively together, fell apart and dropped heavily at her sides. She stopped in her rapid pacing to and fro--stopped as Lot's wife may have stopped, after that fatal backward glance at the perishing city--with every pulse slackening, with every drop of blood congealing in her veins, in the terrible process that was to transform her from a woman into a statue.

Lady Audley stood still for about five minutes in that strangely statuesque att.i.tude, her head erect, her eyes staring straight before her--staring far beyond the narrow boundary of her chamber wall, into dark distances of peril and horror.

But by-and-by she started from that rigid att.i.tude almost as abruptly as she had fallen into it. She roused herself from that semi-lethargy. She walked rapidly to her dressing-table, and, seating herself before it, pushed away the litter of golden-stoppered bottles and delicate china essence-boxes, and looked at her reflection in the large, oval gla.s.s.

She was very pale; but there was no other trace of agitation visible in her girlish face. The lines of her exquisitely molded lips were so beautiful, that it was only a very close observer who could have perceived a certain rigidity that was unusual to them. She saw this herself, and tried to smile away that statue-like immobility: but to-night the rosy lips refused to obey her; they were firmly locked, and were no longer the slaves of her will and pleasure. All the latent forces of her character concentrated themselves in this one feature. She might command her eyes, but she could not control the muscles of her mouth. She rose from before her dressing-table, and took a dark velvet cloak and bonnet from the recesses of her wardrobe, and dressed herself for walking. The little ormolu clock on the chimney-piece struck the quarter after eleven while Lady Audley was employed in this manner; five minutes afterward she re-entered the room in which she had left Phoebe Marks.

The innkeeper's wife was sitting before the low fender very much in the same att.i.tude as that in which her late mistress had brooded over that lonely hearth earlier in the evening. Phoebe had replenished the fire, and had rea.s.sumed her bonnet and shawl. She was anxious to get home to that brutal husband, who was only too apt to fall into some mischief in her absence. She looked up as Lady Audley entered the room, and uttered an exclamation of surprise at seeing her late mistress in a walking-costume.