It was by this outlet that Lady Audley meant to make her escape. She could easily remove the bar and unfasten the shutter, and she might safely venture to leave the window ajar while she was absent. There was little fear of Sir Michael’s awaking for some time, as he was a heavy sleeper in the earlier part of the night, and had slept more heavily than usual since his illness.
Lady Audley crossed the library, and opened the door of the breakfast-room which communicated with it. This latter apartment was one of the modern additions to the Court. It was a simple, cheerful chamber, with brightly-papered walls and pretty maple furniture, and was more occupied by Alicia than any one else. The paraphernalia of that young lady’s favourite pursuits were scattered about the room—drawing materials, unfinished scraps of work, tangled skeins of silk, and all the other tokens of a careless damsel’s presence; while Miss Audley’s picture—a pretty crayon sketch of a rosy-faced hoyden in a riding-habit and hat—hung over the quaint Wedgwood* ornaments on the chimney-piece. My lady looked upon these familiar objects with scornful hatred flaming in her blue eyes.
‘How glad she will be if any disgrace befalls me!’ she thought; ‘how she will rejoice if I am driven out of this house!’
Lady Audley set the lamp upon a table near the fireplace, and went to the window. She removed the iron bar and the light wooden shutter, and then opened the glass door. The March night was black and moonless, and a gust of wind blew in upon her as she opened this door, and filled the room with its chilly breath, extinguishing the lamp upon the table.
‘No matter,’ my lady muttered, ‘I could not have left it burning. I shall know how to find my way through the house when I come back. I have left all the doors ajar.’
She stepped quickly out upon the smooth gravel, and closed the glass-door behind her. She was afraid lest that treacherous wind should blow-to the door opening into the library, and thus betray her.
She was in the quadrangle now, with that chill wind sweeping against her, and swirling her silken garments round her with a shrill rustling noise, like the whistling of a sharp breeze against the sails of a yacht. She crossed the quadrangle and looked back—looked back for a moment at the fire-light gleaming through the rosy-tinted curtains in her boudoir, and the dim gleam of the lamp behind the mullioned windows in the room where Sir Michael Audley lay asleep.
‘I feel as if I was running away,’ she thought. ‘I feel as if I was running away secretly in the dead of the night, to lose myself and be forgotten. Perhaps it would be wiser in me to run away, to take this man’s warning, and escape out of his power for ever. If I were to run away and disappear—as George Talboys disappeared. But where could I go? What would become of me? I have no money: my jewels are not worth a couple of hundred pounds, now that I have got rid of the best part of them. What could I do? I must go back to the old life, the old, hard, cruel, wretched life—the life of poverty, and humiliation, and vexation, and discontent. I should have to go back and wear myself out in that long struggle, and die—as my mother died, perhaps.’
My lady stood still for a moment on the smooth lawn between the quadrangle and the archway, with her head drooping upon her breast and her hands locked together, debating this question in the unnatural activity of her mind. Her attitude reflected the state of that mind—it expressed irresolution and perplexity. But presently a sudden change came over her; she lifted her head—lifted it with an action of defiance and determination.
‘No, Mr Robert Audley,’ she said aloud, in a low, clear voice; ‘I will not go back—I will not go back. If the struggle between us is to be a duel to the death, you shall not find me drop my weapon.’
She walked with a firm and rapid step under the archway. As she passed under that massive arch, it seemed as if she disappeared into some black gulf that had waited open to receive her. The stupid clock struck twelve, and the solid masonry seemed to vibrate under its heavy strokes, as Lady Audley emerged upon the other side, and joined Phœbe Marks, who had waited for her late mistress very near the gateway of the Court.
‘Now, Phœbe,’ she said, ‘it is three miles from here to Mount Stanning, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, my lady.’
‘Then we can walk it in an hour.’
Lady Audley had not stopped to say this: she was walking quickly along the avenue with her humble companion by her side. Fragile and delicate as she was in appearance, she was a very good walker. She had been in the habit of taking long country rambles with Mr Dawson’s children in her old days of dependence, and she thought very little of a distance of three miles.
‘Your beautiful husband will sit up for you, I suppose, Phœbe?’ she said, as they struck across an open field that was used as a short cut from Audley Court to the high road.
‘Oh, yes, my lady; he’s sure to sit up. He’ll be drinking with the man, I dare say.’
‘The man! What man?’
‘The man that’s in possession, my lady.’
‘Ah, to be sure,’ said Lady Audley, indifferently.
It was strange that Phœbe’s domestic troubles should seem so very far away from her thoughts at the time she was taking such an extraordinary step towards setting things right at the Castle Inn.
The two women crossed the field and turned into the high road. The way to Mount Stanning was very hilly, and the long road looked black and dreary in the dark night; but my lady walked on with a desperate courage, which was no common constituent in her selfish, sensuous nature; but a strange faculty born out of her great despair. She did not speak again to her companion until they were close upon the glimmering lights at the top of the hill, one of which village lights, gleaming redly through a crimson curtain, marked out the particular window behind which it was likely that Luke Marks sat nodding drowsily over his liquor, and waiting for the coming of his wife.
‘He has not gone to bed, Phœbe,’ said my lady, eagerly. ‘But there is no other light burning at the inn. I suppose Mr Audley is in bed and asleep.’
‘Yes, my lady, I suppose so.’
‘You are sure he was going to stay at the Castle to-night?’
‘Oh, yes, my lady. I helped the girl to get his room ready before I came away.’
The wind, boisterous everywhere, was shriller and more pitiless in the neighbourhood of that bleak hill-top upon which the Castle Inn reared its rickety walls. The cruel blasts dancing wildly round that frail erection. They disported themselves with the shattered pigeon-house, the broken weathercock, the loose tiles, and unshapely chimneys; they rattled at the window-panes, and whistled in the crevices; they mocked the feeble building from foundation to roof, and battered and banged and tormented it in their fierce gambols, until it trembled and rocked with the force of their rough play.
Mr Luke Marks had not troubled himself to secure the door of his dwelling-house before sitting down to drink with the man who held provisional possession of his goods and chattels. The landlord of the Castle Inn, was a lazy, sensual brute, who had no thought higher than a selfish concern for his own enjoyments, and a virulent hatred of anybody who stood in the way of his gratification.
Phœbe pushed open the door with her hand, and went into the house, followed by my lady. The gas was flaring in the bar, and smoking the low, plastered ceiling. The door of the bar-parlour was half open, and Lady Audley heard the brutal laughter of Mr Marks as she crossed the threshold of the inn.
‘I’ll tell him you’re here, my lady,’ whispered Phœbe to her late mistress. ‘I know he’ll be tipsy. You—you won’t be offended, my lady, if he should say anything rude. You know it wasn’t my wish that you should come.’
‘Yes, yes,’ answered Lady Audley, impatiently, ‘I know that. What should I care for his rudeness? Let him say what he likes.’
Phœbe Marks pushed open the parlour door, leaving my lady in the bar close behind her.
Luke sat with his clumsy legs stretched out upon the hearth; with a glass of gin-and-water in one hand and the poker in the other. He had just thrust the poker in
to a great heap of black coals, and was shattering them to make a blaze, when his wife appeared upon the threshold of the room.
He snatched the poker from between the bars, and made a half-drunken, half-threatening motion with it as he saw her.
‘So you’ve condescended to come home at last, ma’am,’ he said; ‘I thought you was never coming no more.’
He spoke in a thick and drunken voice, and was by no means too intelligible. He was steeped to the very lips in alcohol. His eyes were dim and watery; his hands were unsteady; his voice was choked and muffled with drink. A brute, even when most sober; a brute, even when on his best behaviour; he was ten times more brutal in his drunkenness, when the few restraints which held his ignorant, every-day brutality in check were flung aside in the insolent recklessness of intoxication.
‘I—I’ve been longer than I intended to be, Luke,’ Phœbe answered, in her most conciliatory manner; ‘but I’ve seen my lady, and she’s been very kind, and—and she’ll settle this business for us.’
‘She’s been very kind, has she?’ muttered Mr Marks, with a drunken laugh; ‘thank her for nothing. I know the vally of her kindness. She’d be on common kind, I dessay, if she warn’t obligated to be it.’
The man in possession, who had fallen into a maudlin and semi-unconscious state of intoxication upon about a third of the liquor that Mr Marks had consumed, only stared in feeble wonderment at his host and hostess. He sat near the table. Indeed, he had hooked himself on to it with his elbows, as a safeguard against sliding under it, and he was making inane attempts to light his pipe at the flame of a guttering tallow candle near him.
‘My lady has promised to settle the business for us,’ Phœbe repeated, without noticing Luke’s remarks; she knew her husband’s dogged nature well enough by this time to know that it was worse than useless to try to stop him from doing or saying anything which his own stubborn will led him to do or say; ‘and she’s come down here to see about it to-night, Luke,’ she added.
The poker dropped from the landlord’s hand, and fell clattering amongst the cinders on the hearth.
‘My Lady Audley come here to-night,’ he said.
‘Yes, Luke.’
My lady appeared upon the threshold of the door as Phœbe spoke.
‘Yes, Luke Marks,’ she said, ‘I have come to pay this man, and to send him about his business.’
Lady Audley said these words in a strange semi-mechanical manner, very much as if she had learned the sentence by rote, and were repeating it without knowing what she said.
Mr Marks gave a discontented growl, and set his empty glass down upon the table, with an impatient gesture.
‘You might have given the money to Phœbe,’ he said, ‘as well as have brought it yourself. We don’t want no fine ladies up here, pryin’ and pokin’ their precious noses into every-think.’
‘Luke, Luke,’ remonstrated Phœbe, ‘when my lady has been so kind!’
‘Oh, damn her kindness!’ cried Mr Marks; ‘it ain’t her kindness as we want, gal, it’s her money. She won’t get no snivellin’ gratitood from me. Whatever she does for us she does because she is obliged, and if she warn’t obliged she wouldn’t do it—’
Heaven knows how much more Luke Marks might have said, had not my lady turned upon him suddenly, and awed him into silence by the unearthly glitter of her beauty. Her hair had been blown away from her face, and, being of a light, feathery quality, had spread itself into a tangled mass that surrounded her forehead like a yellow flame. There was another flame in her eyes—a greenish light, such as might flash from the changing hued orbs of an angry mermaid.
‘Stop,’ she cried. ‘I didn’t come up here in the dead of the night to listen to your insolence. How much is this debt?’
‘Nine pound.’
Lady Audley produced her purse—a toy of ivory, silver, and turquoise—and took from it a bank-note and four sovereigns. She laid these upon the table.
‘Let that man give me a receipt for the money,’ she said, ‘before I go.’
It was some time before the man could be roused into sufficient consciousness for the performance of this simple duty, and it was only by dipping a pen into the ink and pushing it between his clumsy fingers, that he was at last made to comprehend that his autograph was wanted at the bottom of the receipt which had been made out by Phœbe Marks. Lady Audley took the document as soon as the ink was dry, and turned to leave the parlour. Phœbe followed her.
‘You musn’t go home alone, my lady,’ she said. ‘You’ll let me go with you?’
‘Yes, yes, you shall go home with me.’
The two women were standing near the door of the inn as my lady said this. Phœbe stared wonderingly at her patroness. She had expected that Lady Audley would be in a hurry to return home after settling this business which she had capriciously taken upon herself; but it was not so; my lady stood leaning against the inn door and staring into vacancy, and again Mrs Marks began to fear that trouble had driven her late mistress mad.
A little Dutch clock in the bar struck one while Lady Audley lingered in this irresolute, absent manner.
She started at the sound and began to tremble violently.
‘I think I am going to faint, Phœbe,’ she said; ‘where can I get some cold water?’
‘The pump is in the washhouse, my lady, I’ll run and get you a glass of water.’
‘No, no, no,’ cried my lady, clutching Phœbe’s arm as she was about to run away upon this errand, ‘I’ll get it myself. I must dip my head in a basin of water if I want to save myself from fainting. In which room does Mr Audley sleep?’
There was something so irrelevant in this question that Phœbe Marks stared aghast at her mistress before she answered it.
‘It was number three that I got ready, my lady—the front room—the room next to ours,’ she replied, after that pause of astonishment.
‘Give me a candle,’ said my lady; ‘I’ll go into your room, and get some water for my head. Stay where you are,’ she added authoritatively, as Phœbe Marks was about to show the way—‘stay where you are, and see that that brute of a husband of yours doesn’t follow me!’
She snatched the candle which Phœbe had lighted, from the girl’s hand; and ran up the rickety, winding staircase which led to the narrow corridor upon the upper floor. Five bed-rooms opened out of this low-ceilinged, close-smelling corridor: the numbers of these rooms were indicated by squat black figures painted upon the upper panels of the doors. Lady Audley had driven to Mount Stanning to inspect the house, when she had bought the business for her servant’s bridegroom, and she knew her way about the dilapidated old place; she knew where to find Phœbe’s bed-room; but she stopped before the door of that other chamber which had been prepared for Mr Robert Audley.
She stopped and looked at the number on the door. The key was in the lock, and her hand dropped upon it as if unconsciously. Then she suddenly began to tremble again, as she had trembled a few minutes before at the striking of the clock. She stood for a few moments trembling thus, with her hand still upon the key; then a horrible expression came over her face, and she turned the key in the lock; she turned it twice, double locking the door.
There was no sound from within; the occupant of the chamber made no sign of having heard that ominous creaking of the rusty key in the rusty lock.
Lady Audley hurried into the next room. She set the candle on the dressing-table, flung off her bonnet and slung it loosely across her arm; she went to the wash-hand-stand and filled the basin with water. She plunged her golden hair into this water, and then stood for a few moments in the centre of the room looking about her, with a white earnest face, and an eager gaze that seemed to take in every object in the poorly-furnished chamber. Phœbe’s bed-room was certainly very shabbily furnished; she had been compelled to select all the most decent things for those best bed-rooms which were set apart for any chance traveller who might stop for a night’s lodging at the Castle Inn. But Mrs Marks had done her best to atone f
or the lack of substantial furniture in her apartment by a superabundance of drapery. Crisp curtains of cheap chintz hung from the tent-bedstead; festooned draperies of the same material shrouded the narrow window, shutting out the light of day, and affording a pleasant harbour for tribes of flies and predatory bands of spiders. Even the looking-glass, a miserably cheap construction which distorted every face whose owner had the hardihood to look into it, stood upon a draperied altar of starched muslin and pink glazed calico, and was adorned with frills of lace and knitted work.
My lady smiled as she looked at the festoons and furbelows which met her eye upon every side. She had reason, perhaps, to smile, remembering the costly elegance of her own apartments; but there was something in that sardonic smile that seemed to have a deeper meaning than any natural contempt for Phœbe’s poor attempts at decoration. She went to the dressing-table and smoothed her wet hair before the looking-glass, and then put on her bonnet. She was obliged to place the flaming tallow candle very close to the lace furbelows about the glass, so close that the starched muslin seemed to draw the flame towards it by some power of attraction in its fragile tissue.
Phœbe waited anxiously by the inn door for my lady’s coming. She watched the minute hand of the little Dutch clock, wondering at the slowness of its progress. It was only ten minutes past one when Lady Audley came down-stairs, with her bonnet on and hair still wet, but without the candle.
Phœbe was immediately anxious about this missing candle.
Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics) Page 38
