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

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘How brave you were!’ she said.

  ‘Brave!’ he cried, with a joyous peal of laughter; ‘wasn’t I working for my darling? Through all the dreary time of that probation, wasn’t her pretty white hand beckoning me onwards to a happy future? Why, I have seen her under my wretched canvas tent, sitting by my side, with her boy in her arms, as plainly as I had ever seen her in the one happy year of our wedded life. At last, one dreary, foggy morning, just three months ago; with a drizzling rain wetting me to the skin; up to my neck in clay and mire; half-starved; enfeebled by fever; stiff with rheumatism; a monster nugget turned up under my spade, and I came upon a gold deposit of some magnitude. A fortnight afterwards I was the richest man in all the little colony about me. I travelled post-haste to Sydney, realised my gold findings which were worth upwards of £20,000, and a fortnight afterwards took my passage for England in this vessel; and in ten days—in ten days I shall see my darling.’

  ‘But in all that time did you never write to your wife?’

  ‘Never till a week before this vessel set sail. I could not write when everything looked so black. I could not write and tell her that I was fighting hard with despair and death. I waited for better fortune; and when that came, I wrote, telling her that I should be in England almost as soon as my letter, and giving her an address at a coffee-house in London, where she could write to me, telling me where to find her; though she is hardly likely to have left her father’s house.’

  He fell into a reverie after this, and puffed meditatively at his cigar. His companion did not disturb him. The last ray of the summer daylight had died out, and the pale light of the crescent moon only remained.

  Presently George Talboys flung away his cigar, and, turning to the governess, cried abruptly, ‘Miss Morley, if, when I get to England, I hear that anything has happened to my wife, I shall fall down dead.’

  ‘My dear Mr Talboys, why do you think of these things? God is very good to us; He will not afflict us beyond our power of endurance. I see all things, perhaps, in a melancholy light; for the long monotony of my life has given me too much time to think over my troubles.’

  ‘And my life has been all action, privation, toil, alternate hope and despair; I have had no time to think upon the chances of anything happening to my darling. What a blind, reckless fool I have been! Three years and a half, and not one line, one word from her, or from any mortal creature who knows her. Heaven above! what may not have happened?’

  In the agitation of his mind he began to walk rapidly up and down the lonely deck, the governess following, and trying to soothe him.

  ‘I swear to you, Miss Morley,’ he said, ‘that, till you spoke to me to-night, I never felt one shadow of fear; and now I have that sick, sinking dread at my heart, which you talked of an hour ago. Let me alone, please, to get over it my own way.’

  She drew silently away from him, and seated herself by the side of the vessel, looking over into the water.

  CHAPTER III

  HIDDEN RELICS

  THE same August sun which had gone down behind the waste of waters glimmered redly upon the broad face of the old clock over that ivy-covered archway which leads into the gardens of Audley Court.

  A fierce and crimson sunset. The mullioned windows and the twinkling lattices are all ablaze with the red glory; the fading light flickers upon the leaves of the limes in the long avenue, and changes the still fish-pond into a sheet of burnished copper; even into those dim recesses of briar and brushwood, amidst which the old well is hidden, the crimson brightness penetrates in fitful flashes, till the dank weeds and the rusty iron wheel and broken woodwork seem as if they were flecked with blood.

  The lowing of a cow in the quiet meadows, the splash of a trout in the fish-pond, the last notes of a tired bird, the creaking of waggon-wheels upon the distant road, every now and then breaking the evening silence, only made the stillness of the place seem more intense. It was almost oppressive, this twilight stillness. The very repose of the place grew painful from its intensity, and you felt as if a corpse must be lying somewhere within that grey and ivy-covered pile of building—so deathlike was the tranquillity of all around.

  As the clock over the archway struck eight, a door at the back of the house was softly opened, and a girl came out into the gardens.

  But even the presence of a human being scarcely broke the silence; for the girl crept slowly over the thick grass, and gliding into the avenue by the side of the fish-pond, disappeared under the rich shelter of the limes.

  She was not, perhaps, positively a pretty girl; but her appearance was of that order which is commonly called interesting. Interesting, it may be, because in the pale face and the light grey eyes, the small features and compressed lips, there was something which hinted at a power of repression and self-control not common in a woman of nineteen or twenty. She might have been pretty, I think, but for the one fault in her small oval face. This fault was an absence of colour. Not one tinge of crimson flushed the waxen whiteness of her cheeks; not one shadow of brown redeemed the pale insipidity of her eyebrows and eyelashes; not one glimmer of gold or auburn relieved the dull flaxen of her hair. Even her dress was spoiled by this same deficiency; the pale lavender muslin faded into a sickly grey, and the ribbon knotted round her throat melted into the same neutral hue.

  Her figure was slim and fragile, and in spite of her humble dress, she had something of the grace and carriage of a gentlewoman; but she was only a simple country girl, called Phœbe Marks, who had been nursemaid in Mr Dawson’s family, and whom Lady Audley had chosen for her maid after her marriage with Sir Michael.

  Of course this was a wonderful piece of good fortune for Phœbe, who found her wages trebled and her work light in the well-ordered household at the Court; and who was therefore quite as much the object of envy amongst her particular friends as my lady herself in higher circles.

  A man who was sitting on the broken woodwork of the well started as the lady’s-maid came out of the dim shade of the limes and stood before him amongst the weeds and brushwood.

  I have said before that this was a neglected spot: it lay in the midst of a low shrubbery, hidden away from the rest of the gardens, and only visible from the garret windows at the back of the west wing. ‘Why, Phœbe,’ said the man, shutting a clasp-knife with which he had been stripping the bark from a black-thorn stake, ‘you came upon me so still and sudden, that I thought you was an evil spirit. I’ve come across through the fields, and come in here at the gate agen the moat, and I was taking a rest before I came up to the house to ask if you was come back.’

  ‘I can see the well from my bed-room window, Luke,’ Phœbe answered, pointing to an open lattice in one of the gables. ‘I saw you sitting here, and came down to have a chat; it’s better talking out here than in the house where there’s always somebody listening.’

  The man was a big, broad-shouldered, stupid-looking clodhopper of about twenty-three years of age. His dark-red hair grew low upon his forehead, and his bushy brows met over a pair of greenish grey eyes; his nose was large and well shaped, but the mouth was coarse in form and animal in expression. Rosy-cheeked, red-haired, and bull-necked, he was not unlike one of the stout oxen grazing in the meadows round about the Court.

  The girl seated herself lightly upon the woodwork at his side, and put one of her hands, which had grown white in her new and easy service, about his thick neck.

  ‘Are you glad to see me, Luke?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course I’m glad, lass,’ he answered, boorishly, opening his knife again, and scraping away at the hedge-stake.

  They were first cousins, and had been play-fellows in childhood, and sweethearts in early youth.

  ‘You don’t seem much as if you were glad,’ said the girl; ‘you might look at me, Luke, and tell me if you think my journey has improved me.’

  ‘It ain’t put any colour into your cheeks, my girl,’ he said, glancing up at her from under his lowering eyebrows; ‘you’re every bit as white as you was whe
n you went away.’

  ‘But they say travelling makes people genteel, Luke. I’ve been on the Continent with my lady, through all manner of curious places; and you know when I was a child, Squire Horton’s daughters taught me to speak a little French, and I found it so nice to be able to talk to the people abroad.’

  ‘Genteel!’ cried Luke Marks, with a horse laugh; ‘who wants you to be genteel, I wonder? Not me for one; when you’re my wife you won’t have over-much time for gentility, my girl. French, too! Dang me, Phœbe, I suppose when we’ve saved money enough between us to buy a bit of a farm, you’ll be parlyvooing to the cows?’

  She bit her lip as her lover spoke, and looked away. He went on cutting and chopping at a rude handle he was fashioning to the stake, whistling softly to himself all the while, and not once looking at his cousin.

  For some time they were silent, but by-and-by she said, with her face still turned away from her companion, —

  ‘What a fine thing it is for Miss Graham, that was, to travel with her maid and her courier, and her chariot and four, and a husband that thinks there isn’t one spot upon all the earth that’s good enough for her to set her foot upon!’

  ‘Ay, it is a fine thing, Phœbe, to have lots of money,’ answered Luke, ‘and I hope you’ll be warned by that, my lass, to save up your wages agen we get married.’

  ‘Why, what was she in Mr Dawson’s house only three months ago?’ continued the girl, as if she had not heard her cousin’s speech. ‘What was she but a servant like me? Taking wages and working for them as hard, or harder than I did. You should have seen her shabby clothes, Luke—worn and patched, and darned, and turned and twisted, yet always looking nice upon her, somehow. She gives me more as lady’s-maid here than ever she got from Mr Dawson then. Why, I’ve seen her come out of the parlour with a few sovereigns and a little silver in her hand, that master had just given her for her quarter’s salary; and now look at her!’

  ‘Never you mind her,’ said Luke; ‘take care of yourself, Phœbe; that’s all you’ve got to do. What should you say to a public-house for you and me, by-and-by, my girl? There’s a deal of money to be made out of a public-house.’

  The girl still sat with her face averted from her lover, her hands hanging listlessly in her lap, and her pale grey eyes fixed upon the last low streak of crimson dying out behind the trunks of the trees.

  ‘You should see the inside of the house, Luke,’ she said; ‘it’s a tumble-down looking place enough outside; but you should see my lady’s rooms,—all pictures and gilding, and great looking-glasses that stretch from the ceiling to the floor. Painted ceilings, too, that cost hundreds of pounds, the housekeeper told me, and all done for her.’

  ‘She’s a lucky one,’ muttered Luke, with lazy indifference.

  ‘You should have seen her while we were abroad, with a crowd of gentlemen always hanging about her; Sir Michael not jealous of them, only proud to see her so much admired. You should have heard her laugh and talk with them; throwing all their compliments and fine speeches back at them, as it were, as if they had been pelting her with roses. She set every body mad about her wherever she went. Her singing, her playing, her painting, her dancing, her beautiful smile, and sunshiny ringlets! She was always the talk of a place, as long as we stayed in it.’

  ‘Is she at home to-night?’

  ‘No, she has gone out with Sir Michael to a dinner party, at the Beeches. They’ve seven or eight miles to drive, and they won’t be back till after eleven.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you what, Phœbe, if the inside of the house is so mighty fine, I should like to have a look at it.’

  ‘You shall, then. Mrs Barton, the housekeeper, knows you by sight, and she can’t object to my showing you some of the best rooms.’

  It was almost dark when the cousins left the shrubbery and walked slowly to the house. The door by which they entered led into the servants’ hall, on one side of which was the housekeeper’s room. Phœbe Marks stopped for a moment to ask the housekeeper if she might take her cousin through some of the rooms, and having received permission to do so, lighted a candle at the lamp in the hall, and beckoned to Luke to follow her into the other part of the house.

  The long, black oak corridors were dim in the ghostly twilight—the light carried by Phœbe looking only a poor speck of flame in the broad passages through which the girl led her cousin. Luke looked suspiciously over his shoulder now and then, half frightened of the creaking of his own hobnailed boots.

  ‘It’s a mortal dull place, Phœbe,’ he said, as they emerged from a passage into the principal hall, which was not yet lighted; ‘I’ve heard tell of a murder that was done here in old times.’

  ‘There are murders enough in these times, as to that, Luke,’ answered the girl, ascending the staircase, followed by the young man.

  She led the way through a great drawing-room, rich in satin and ormolu, buhl* and inlaid cabinets, bronzes, cameos, statuettes, and trinkets, that glistened in the dusky light; then through a morning-room hung with proof engravings of valuable pictures; through this into an ante-chamber, where she stopped, holding the light above her head.

  The young man stared about him, open-mouthed and open-eyed.

  ‘It’s a rare fine place,’ he said, ‘and must have cost a power of money.’

  ‘Look at the pictures on the walls,’ said Phœbe, glancing at the panels of the octagonal chamber, which were hung with Claudes and Poussins, Wouvermans and Cuyps.* ‘I’ve heard that those alone are worth a fortune. This is the entrance to my lady’s apartments, Miss Graham that was.’ She lifted a heavy green cloth curtain which hung across a doorway, and led the astonished countryman into a fairy-like boudoir, and thence to a dressing-room, in which the open doors of a wardrobe and a heap of dresses flung about a sofa showed that it still remained exactly as its occupant had left it.

  ‘I’ve all these things to put away before my lady comes home, Luke; you might sit down here while I do it, I shan’t be long.’

  Her cousin looked round in gawky embarrassment, bewildered by the splendour of the room; and after some deliberation selected the most substantial of the chairs, on the extreme edge of which he carefully seated himself.

  ‘I wish I could show you the jewels, Luke,’ said the girl; ‘but I can’t, for she always keeps the keys herself; that’s the case on the dressing-table there.’

  ‘What, that?’ cried Luke, staring at the massive walnut-wood and brass inlaid casket. ‘Why, that’s big enough to hold every bit of clothes I’ve got!’

  ‘And it’s as full as it can be of diamonds, rubies, pearls, and emeralds,’ answered Phœbe, busy as she spoke in folding the rustling silk dresses, and laying them one by one upon the shelves of the wardrobe. As she was shaking out the flounces of the last, a jingling sound caught her ear, and she put her hand into the pocket.

  ‘I declare!’ she exclaimed, ‘my lady has left her keys in her pocket for once in a way. I can show you the jewellery if you like, Luke.’

  ‘Well, I may as well have a look at it, my girl,’ he said, rising from his chair, and holding the light while his cousin unlocked the casket. He uttered a cry of wonder when he saw the ornaments glittering on white satin cushions. He wanted to handle the delicate jewels; to pull them about, and find out their mercantile value. Perhaps a pang of longing and envy shot through his heart as he thought how he would have liked to have taken one of them.

  ‘Why, one of those diamond things would set us up in life, Phœbe,’ he said, turning a bracelet over and over in his big red hands.

  ‘Put it down, Luke! Put it down directly!’ cried the girl, with a look of terror; ‘how can you speak about such things?’

  He laid the bracelet in its place with a reluctant sigh, and then continued his examination of the casket.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked presently, pointing to a brass knob in the framework of the box.

  He pushed it as he spoke, and a secret drawer, lined with purple velvet, flew out of the casket.
>
  ‘Look ye, here!’ cried Luke, pleased at his discovery.

  Phœbe Marks threw down the dress she had been folding, and went over to the toilette table.

  ‘Why, I never saw this before,’ she said. ‘I wonder what there is in it?’

  There was not much in it; neither gold nor gems; only a baby’s little worsted shoe rolled up in a piece of paper, and a tiny lock of pale and silky yellow hair, evidently taken from a baby’s head. Phœbe’s grey eyes dilated as she examined the little packet.

  ‘So this is what my lady hides in the secret drawer,’ she muttered.

  ‘It’s queer rubbish to keep in such a place,’ said Luke, carelessly.

  The girl’s thin lips curved into a curious smile.

  ‘You will bear me witness where I found this,’ she said, putting the little parcel into her pocket.

  ‘Why, Phœbe, you’re never going to be such a fool as to take that,’ cried the young man.

  ‘I’d rather have this than the diamond bracelet you would have liked to take,’ she answered; ‘you shall have the public-house, Luke.’

  CHAPTER IV

  IN THE FIRST PAGE OF THE ‘TIMES’

  ROBERT AUDLEY was supposed to be a barrister. As a barrister was his name inscribed in the Law List;* as a barrister, he had chambers in Fig-tree Court, Temple; as a barrister he had eaten the allotted numbers of dinners, which form the sublime ordeal through which the forensic aspirant wades on to fame and fortune. If these things can make a man a barrister, Robert Audley decidedly was one. But he had never either had a brief, or tried to get a brief, or even wished to have a brief in all those five years, during which his name had been painted upon one of the doors in Fig-tree Court. He was a handsome, lazy, care-for-nothing fellow, of about seven and-twenty; the only son of a younger brother of Sir Michael Audley. His father had left him £400 a year, which his friends had advised him to increase by being called to the bar; and as he found it, after due consideration, more trouble to oppose the wishes of these friends, than to eat so many dinners, and to take a set of chambers in the Temple, he adopted the latter course, and unblushingly called himself a barrister.