Lady Audley’s Secret by M. E. Braddon (top ebook reader TXT) 📕

to this here gent, that’s about it. Oh, you needn’t frown at me to stop my speaking! You’re always putting in your tongue and clipping off my words before I’ve half said ’em; but I won’t stand it. Do you hear? I won’t stand it!”

Phoebe Marks shrugged her shoulders, folded her work, shut her work-box, and crossing her hands in her lap, sat with her gray eyes fixed upon her husband’s bull-like face.

“Then you don’t particularly care to live at Mount Stanning?” said Robert, politely, as if anxious to change the conversation.

“No, I don’t,” answered Luke; “and I don’t care who knows it; and, as I said before, if folks hadn’t been so precious stingy, I might have had a public in a thrivin’ market town, instead of this tumble-down old place, where a man has his hair blowed off his head on a windy day. What’s fifty pound, or what’s a hundred pound⁠—”

“Luke! Luke!”

“No, you’re not goin’ to stop my mouth with all your ‘Luke, Lukes!’ ” answered Mr. Marks to his wife’s remonstrance. “I say again, what’s a hundred pound?”

“No,” answered Robert Audley, with wonderful distinctness, and addressing his words to Luke Marks, but fixing his eyes upon Phoebe’s anxious face. “What, indeed, is a hundred pounds to a man possessed of the power which you hold, or rather which your wife holds, over the person in question.”

Phoebe’s face, at all times almost colorless, seemed scarcely capable of growing paler; but as her eyelids drooped under Robert Audley’s searching glance, a visible change came over the pallid hues of her complexion.

“A quarter to twelve,” said Robert, looking at his watch.

“Late hours for such a quiet village as Mount Stanning. Good night, my worthy host. Good night, Mrs. Marks. You needn’t send me my shaving water till nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

XVIII Robert Receives a Visitor Whom He Had Scarcely Expected

Eleven o’clock struck the next morning, and found Mr. Robert Audley still lounging over the well ordered little breakfast table, with one of his dogs at each side of his armchair, regarding him with watchful eyes and opened mouths, awaiting the expected morsel of ham or toast. Robert had a county paper on his knees, and made a feeble effort now and then to read the first page, which was filled with advertisements of farming stock, quack medicines, and other interesting matter.

The weather had changed, and the snow, which had for the last few days been looming blackly in the frosty sky, fell in great feathery flakes against the windows, and lay piled in the little bit of garden-ground without.

The long, lonely road leading toward Audley seemed untrodden by a footstep, as Robert Audley looked out at the wintry landscape.

“Lively,” he said, “for a man used to the fascinations of Temple Bar.”

As he watched the snowflakes falling every moment thicker and faster upon the lonely road, he was surprised by seeing a brougham driving slowly up the hill.

“I wonder what unhappy wretch has too restless a spirit to stop at home on such a morning as this,” he muttered, as he returned to the armchair by the fire.

He had only reseated himself a few moments when Phoebe Marks entered the room to announce Lady Audley.

“Lady Audley! Pray beg her to come in,” said Robert; and then, as Phoebe left the room to usher in this unexpected visitor, he muttered between his teeth⁠—“A false move, my lady, and one I never looked for from you.”

Lucy Audley was radiant on this cold and snowy January morning. Other people’s noses are rudely assailed by the sharp fingers of the grim ice-king, but not my lady’s; other people’s lips turn pale and blue with the chilling influence of the bitter weather, but my lady’s pretty little rosebud of a mouth retained its brightest coloring and cheeriest freshness.

She was wrapped in the very sables which Robert Audley had brought from Russia, and carried a muff that the young man thought seemed almost as big as herself.

She looked a childish, helpless, babyfied little creature; and Robert looked down upon her with some touch of pity in his eyes, as she came up to the hearth by which he was standing, and warmed her tiny gloved hands at the blaze.

“What a morning, Mr. Audley!” she said, “what a morning!”

“Yes, indeed! Why did you come out in such weather?”

“Because I wished to see you⁠—particularly.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes,” said my lady, with an air of considerable embarrassment, playing with the button of her glove, and almost wrenching it off in her restlessness⁠—“yes, Mr. Audley, I felt that you had not been well treated; that⁠—that you had, in short, reason to complain; and that an apology was due to you.”

“I do not wish for any apology, Lady Audley.”

“But you are entitled to one,” answered my lady, quietly. “Why, my dear Robert, should we be so ceremonious toward each other? You were very comfortable at Audley; we were very glad to have you there; but, my dear, silly husband must needs take it into his foolish head that it is dangerous for his poor little wife’s peace of mind to have a nephew of eight or nine and twenty smoking his cigars in her boudoir, and, behold! our pleasant little family circle is broken up.”

Lucy Audley spoke with that peculiar childish vivacity which seemed so natural to her, Robert looking down almost sadly at her bright, animated face.

“Lady Audley,” he said, “Heaven forbid that either you or I should ever bring grief or dishonor upon my uncle’s generous heart! Better, perhaps, that I should be out of the house⁠—better, perhaps, that I had never entered it!”

My lady had been looking at the fire while her nephew spoke, but at his last words she lifted her head suddenly, and looked him full in the face with a wondering expression⁠—an earnest, questioning gaze, whose full meaning the young barrister understood.

“Oh, pray do not be alarmed, Lady Audley,” he said, gravely. “You have no sentimental nonsense, no silly infatuation, borrowed from Balzac or Dumas fils,