‘Yes, yes, if you please. But be cautious how you tell him, if you think the news likely to agitate him. I am in no hurry. I can wait. You can call me when you think I can safely come up-stairs.’
The surgeon nodded, and softly ascended the narrow wooden stairs leading to the upper chamber. Mr Dawson was a good man, and indeed a parish surgeon has need to be good, and tender, and kindly, and gentle, or the wretched patients who have no neatly folded fees or gold and silver to offer may suffer petty slights and insignificant cruelties, not easily to be proved before a board of well-to-do poor-law guardians,* but not the less bitter to bear in the fretful and feverish hours of sickness and pain.
Robert Audley seated himself in a Windsor chair, by the cold hearth-stone, and stared disconsolately about him. Small as the room was, the corners were dusky and shadowy in the dim light of the cauliflower-headed candle. The faded face of an eight-day clock,* which stood opposite Robert Audley, seemed to stare him out of countenance. The awful sounds which can emanate from eight-day clocks after midnight are too generally known to need description. The young man listened in awe-stricken silence to the heavy, monotonous ticking, which sounded as if the clock had been counting out the seconds which yet remained for the dying man, and checking them off with gloomy satisfaction. ‘Another minute gone! another minute gone! another minute gone!’ the clock seemed to say, until Mr Audley felt inclined to throw his hat at it, in the wild hope of stopping that melancholy and monotonous noise.
But he was relieved at last by the low voice of the surgeon, who looked down from the top of the little staircase to tell him that Luke Marks was awake and would be glad to see him.
Robert immediately obeyed this summons. He crept softly up the stairs and took off his hat before he bent his head to enter at the low doorway of the humble rustic chamber. He took off his hat in the presence of this common peasant-man because he knew that there was another and a more awful presence hovering about the room, and eager to be admitted.
Phœbe Marks was sitting at the foot of the bed, with her eyes fixed upon her husband’s face. Not with any very tender expression in their pale light, but with a sharp, terrified anxiety, which showed that it was the coming of death itself that she dreaded, rather than the loss of her husband. The old woman was busy at the fire-place, airing linen, and preparing some mess of broth which it was not likely the patient would ever eat. The sick man lay with his head propped up by pillows, his coarse face deadly pale, and his great hands wandering uneasily about the coverlet. Phœbe had been reading to him, for an open Testament lay amongst the medicine and lotion bottles upon the table near the bed. Every object in the room was neat and orderly, and bore witness of that delicate precision which had always been a distinguishing characteristic of Phœbe.
The young woman rose as Robert Audley crossed the threshold, and hurried towards him.
‘Let me speak to you for a moment, sir, before you talk to Luke,’ she said, in an eager whisper. ‘Pray let me speak to you first.’
‘What’s the gal a sayin’, there?’ asked the invalid in a subdued roar, which died away hoarsely on his lips. He was feebly savage, even in his weakness. The dull glaze of death was gathering over his eyes, but they still watched Phœbe with a sharp glance of dissatisfaction. ‘What’s she up to there?’ he said. ‘I won’t have no plottin’ and no hatchin’ agen me. I want to speak to Mr Audley my own self; and whatever I done I’m a goin’ to answer for. If I done any mischief, I’m a goin’ to try and undo it. What’s she a sayin’?’
‘She ain’t a sayin’ nothin’, lovey,’ answered the old woman, going to the bed-side of her son, who, even when made more interesting than usual by illness, did not seem a very fit subject for this tender appellation.
‘She’s only a tellin’ the gentleman how bad you’ve been, my pretty.’
‘What I’m a goin’ to tell I’m only a goin’ to tell to him, remember,’ growled Mr Marks; ‘and ketch me a tellin’ of it to him if it warn’t for what he done for me the other night.’
‘To be sure not, lovey,’ answered the old woman, soothingly.
Her intellect was rather limited in its scope, and she attached no more importance to her son’s eager words now, than she had attached to the wild ravings of delirium. That horrible delirium in which Luke had described himself as being dragged through miles of blazing brick and mortar; and flung down wells; and dragged out of deep pits by the hair of the head; and suspended in the air by giant hands that came out of the clouds to pluck him from off the solid earth and hurl him into chaos; with many other wild terrors and delusions which ran riot in his distempered brain.
Phœbe Marks had drawn Mr Audley out of the room and on to the narrow landing at the top of the little staircase. This landing was a platform of about three feet square, and it was as much as the two could manage to stand upon it without pushing each other against the white-washed wall, or backwards down the stairs.
‘Oh, sir, I wanted to speak to you so badly,’ Phœbe whispered eagerly; ‘you know what I told you when I found you safe and well upon the night of the fire?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘I told you what I suspected; what I think still.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘But I never breathed a word of it to anybody but you, sir; and I think that Luke has forgotten all about that night; I think that what went before the fire has gone clean out of his head altogether. He was tipsy you know when my la—when she came to the Castle; and I think he was so dazed and scared like by the fire that it all went out of his memory. He doesn’t suspect what I suspect at any rate, or he’d have spoken of it to anybody and everybody; but he’s dreadful spiteful against my lady, for he says if she’d have let him have a place at Brentwood or Chelmsford, this wouldn’t have happened. So what I wanted to beg of you, sir, is not to let a word drop before Luke.’
‘Yes, yes, I understand; I will be careful.’
‘My lady has left the Court, I hear, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘Never to come back, sir?’
‘Never to come back.’
‘But she has not gone where she’ll be cruelly treated; where she’ll be ill-used?’
‘No, she will be very kindly treated.’
‘I’m glad of that, sir; I beg your pardon for troubling you with the question, sir, but my lady was a kind mistress to me.’
Luke’s voice, husky and feeble, was heard within the little chamber at this period of the conversation, demanding angrily when ‘that gal would have done jawing,’ upon which Phœbe put her finger to her lips, and led Mr Audley back into the sick room.
‘I don’t want you,’ said Mr Marks, decisively, as his wife re-entered the chamber, ‘I don’t want you, you’ve no call to hear what I’ve got to say; I only want Mr Audley, and I wants to speak to him all alone, with none o’ your sneakin’ listenin’ at doors, d’ye hear, so you may go down stairs and keep there till you’re wanted; and you may take mother—no, mother may stay, I shall want her presently.’
The sick man’s feeble hand pointed to the door, through which his wife departed very submissively.
‘I’ve no wish to hear anything, Luke,’ she said, ‘but I hope you won’t say anything against those that have been good and generous to you.’
‘I shall say what I like,’ answered Mr Marks, fiercely, ‘and I’m not agoin’ to be ordered by you. You ain’t the parson, as I’ve ever heerd of; nor the lawyer neither.’
The landlord of the Castle Inn had undergone no moral transformation by his death-bed sufferings, fierce and rapid as they had been. Perhaps some faint glimmer of a light that had been far off from his life, now struggled feebly through the black obscurities of ignorance that darkened his soul. Perhaps a half angry, half sullen penitence urged him to make some rugged effort to atone for a life that had been selfish and drunken and wicked. Be it how it might, he wiped his white lips, and turning his haggard eyes earnestly upon Robert Audley, pointed to a chair by the bedside.
‘You�
��ve made game of me in a general way, Mr Audley,’ he said, presently, ‘and you’ve drawed me out, and you’ve tumbled and tossed me about like in a gentlemanly way, till I was nothink or anythink in your hands; and you’ve looked me through and through, and turned me inside out till you thought you knowed as much as I knowed. I’d no particular call to be grateful to you, not before the fire at the Castle t’other night. But I am grateful to you for that. I’m not grateful to folks in a general way, p’raps, because the things as gentlefolks have give me have a’most allus been the very things I didn’t want. They’ve give me soup, and tracks,* and flannel, and coals; but, Lord, they’ve made such a precious noise about it that I’d have been glad to send ’em all back to ’em. But when a gentleman goes and puts his own life in danger to save a drunken brute like me, the drunkenest brute as ever was feels grateful like to that gentleman, and wishes to say before he dies—which he sees in the doctor’s face as he ain’t got long to live—“Thank ye, sir, I’m obliged to you.”’
Luke Marks stretched out his left hand—the right hand had been injured by the fire, and was wrapped in linen—and groped feebly for that of Mr Robert Audley.
The young man took the coarse but shrunken hand in both his own, and pressed it cordially.
‘I need no thanks, Luke Marks,’ he said. ‘I was very glad to be of service to you.’
Mr Marks did not speak immediately. He was lying quietly upon his side, staring reflectively at Robert Audley.
‘You was oncommon fond of that gent as disappeared at the Court, warn’t you, sir,’ he said at last.
Robert started at the mention of his dead friend.
‘You was oncommon fond of this Mr Talboys, I’ve heerd say, sir,’ repeated Luke.
‘Yes, yes,’ answered Robert, rather impatiently: ‘he was my very dear friend.’
‘I’ve heerd the servants at the Court say how you took on when you couldn’t find him. I’ve heerd the landlord of the Sun Inn say how cut up you was when you first missed him. “If the two gents had been brothers,” the landlord said, “our gent,” meanin’ you, sir, “couldn’t have been more cut up when he missed the other.”’
‘Yes, yes, I know, I know,’ said Robert; ‘pray do not speak any more of this subject; I cannot tell you how much it distresses me.’
Was he to be haunted for ever by the ghost of his unburied friend? He came here to comfort this sick man, and even here he was pursued by that relentless shadow; even here he was reminded of the secret crime which had darkened his life.
‘Listen to me, Marks,’ he said, earnestly; ‘believe me, that I appreciate your grateful words, and that I am very glad to have been of service to you. But before you say anything more, let me make one most solemn request. If you have sent for me that you may tell me anything of the fate of my lost friend, I entreat you to spare yourself and to spare me that horrible story. You can tell me nothing which I do not already know. The worst you can tell me of the woman who was once in your power has already been revealed to me by her own lips. Pray then be silent upon this subject; I say again, you can tell me nothing which I do not know.’
Luke Marks looked musingly at the earnest face of his visitor, and some shadowy expression which was almost like a smile flitted feebly across the sick man’s haggard features.
‘I can’t tell you nothin’ you don’t know?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Then it ain’t no good for me to try,’ said the invalid, thoughtfully. ‘Did she tell you?’ he asked after a pause.
‘I must beg, Marks, that you will drop the subject,’ Robert answered, almost sternly. ‘I have already told you that I do not wish to hear it spoken of. Whatever discoveries you made, you made your market out of them. Whatever guilty secrets you got possession of, you were paid for keeping silence. You had better keep silence to the end.’
‘Had I?’ cried Luke Marks in an eager whisper. ‘Had I really now better hold my tongue to the last?’
‘I think so, most decidedly. You traded on your secret, and you were paid to keep it. It would be more honest to hold to your bargain, and keep it still.’
‘Would it now?’ said Mr Marks with a ghastly grin; ‘but suppose my lady had one secret and I another. How then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Suppose I could have told something all along; and would have told it, perhaps, if I’d been a little better treated; if what was give to me had been give a little more liberal like, and not flung at me as if I was a dog, and was only give it to be kep’ from bitin’. Suppose I could have told somethin’, and would have told it but for that? How then?’
It is impossible to describe the ghastliness of the triumphant grin that lighted up the sick man’s haggard face.
‘His mind is wandering,’ Robert thought; ‘I had need be patient with him, poor fellow. It would be strange if I could not be patient with a dying man.’
Luke Marks lay staring at Mr Audley for some moments with that triumphant grin upon his face. The old woman, wearied out with watching her dying son, had dropped into a doze, and sat nodding her sharp chin over the handful of fire, upon which the broth that was never to be eaten, still bubbled and simmered.
Mr Audley waited very patiently until it should be the sick man’s pleasure to speak. Every sound was painfully distinct in that dead hour of the night. The dropping of the ashes on the hearth, the ominous crackling of the burning coals, the slow and ponderous ticking of the sulky clock in the room below, the low moaning of the March wind (which might have been the voice of an English Banshee,* screaming her dismal warning to the watchers of the dying), the hoarse breathing of the sick man—every sound held itself apart from all other sounds, and made itself into a separate voice, loud with a gloomy portent in the solemn stillness of the house.
Robert sat with his face shaded by his hands, thinking what was to become of him now that the secret of his friend’s fate had been told, and the dark story of George Talboys and his wicked wife had been finished in the Belgian mad-house. What was to become of him?
He had no claim upon Clara Talboys; for he had resolved to keep the horrible secret that had been told to him. How then could he dare to meet her with that secret held back from her? How could he ever look into her earnest eyes, and yet withhold the truth? He felt that all power of reservation would fail before the searching glance of those calm brown eyes. If he was indeed to keep this secret he must never see her again. To reveal it would be to embitter her life. Could he, for any selfish motive of his own, tell her this terrible story?—or could he think that if he told her she would suffer her murdered brother to lie unavenged and forgotten in his unhallowed grave?
Hemmed in on every side by difficulties which seemed utterly insurmountable; with the easy temperament which was natural to him embittered by the gloomy burden he had borne so long, Robert Audley looked hopelessly forward to the life which lay before him, and thought that it would have been better for him had he perished among the burning ruins of the Castle Inn.
‘Who would have been sorry for me? No one but my poor little Alicia,’ he thought, ‘and hers would have only been an April sorrow. Would Clara Talboys have been sorry? No! She would have only regretted me as a lost link in the mystery of her brother’s death. She would only—’
CHAPTER VIII
THAT WHICH THE DYING MAN HAD TO TELL
HEAVEN knows whither Mr Audley’s thoughts might have wandered had he not been startled by a sudden movement of the sick man, who raised himself up in his bed, and called to his mother.
The old woman woke up with a jerk, and turned sleepily enough to look at her son.
‘What is it, Luke, deary?’ she asked soothingly. ‘It ain’t time for the doctor’s stuff yet. Mr Dawson said as you weren’t to have it till two hours after he went away, and he ain’t been gone an hour yet.’
‘Who said it was the doctor’s stuff I wanted?’ cried Mr Marks, impatiently. ‘I want to ask you something, mother. Do you remember the seventh o
f last September?’
Robert started, and looked eagerly at the sick man. Why did he harp upon this forbidden subject. Why did he insist upon recalling the date of George’s murder? The old woman shook her head in feeble confusion of mind.
‘Lord, Luke,’ she said, ‘how can’ee ask me such questions? My memory’s been a failin’ me this eight or nine year; and I never was one to remember the days of the month, or aught o’ that sort. How should a poor workin’ woman remember such things?’
Luke Marks shrugged his shoulders impatiently.
‘You’re a good un to do what’s asked you, mother,’ he said, peevishly. ‘Didn’t I tell you to remember that day? Didn’t I tell you as the time might come when you’d be called upon to bear witness about it, and put upon your Bible oath about it? Didn’t I tell you that, mother?’
The old woman shook her head hopelessly.
‘If you say so, I make no doubt you did, Luke,’ she said, with a conciliatory smile; ‘but I can’t call it to mind, lovey. My memory’s been failin’ me this nine year, sir,’ she added, turning to Robert Audley, ‘and I’m but a poor crittur.’
Mr Audley laid his hand upon the sick man’s arm.
‘Marks,’ he said, ‘I tell you again, you have no cause to worry yourself about this matter. I ask you no questions; I have no wish to hear anything.’
‘But suppose I want to tell somethin’,’ cried Luke, with feverish energy, ‘suppose I feel that I can’t die with a secret on my mind, and have asked to see you on purpose that I might tell you; suppose that, and you’ll suppose nothing but the truth. I’d have been burnt alive before I’d have told her.’ He spoke these words between his set teeth, and scowled savagely as he uttered them. ‘I’d have been burnt alive first. I made her pay for her pretty insolent ways; I made her pay for her airs and graces; I’d never have told her—never, never! I had my power over her, and I kept it; I had my secret, and I was paid for it; and there wasn’t a petty slight as she ever put upon me or mine that I didn’t pay her out for twenty times over!’
Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics) Page 48
