The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mary Elizabeth Braddon
selfish and cruel, indifferent to the joys and sorrows of others, cold-hearted and capricious, greedy of admiration, exacting and tyrannical with that petty woman’s tyranny which is the worst of despotism? Did she trace every sin of her life back to its true source? and did she discover that poisoned fountain in her own exaggerated estimate of the value of a pretty face? Surely, if her thoughts wandered so far along the backward current of her life, she must have repented in bitterness and despair of that first day in which the master-passions of her life had become her rulers, and the three demons of Vanity, Selfishness, and Ambition, had joined hands and said, “This woman is our slave, let us see what she will become under our guidance.”
How small those first youthful errors seemed as my lady looked back upon them in that long revery by the lonely hearth! What small vanities, what petty cruelties! A triumph over a schoolfellow; a flirtation with the lover of a friend; an assertion of the right divine invested in blue eyes and shimmering golden-tinted hair. But how terribly that narrow pathway had widened out into the broad highroad of sin, and how swift the footsteps had become upon the now familiar way!
My lady twisted her fingers in her loose amber curls, and made as if she would have torn them from her head. But even in that moment of mute despair the unyielding dominion of beauty asserted itself, and she released the poor tangled glitter of ringlets, leaving them to make a halo round her head in the dim firelight.
“I was not wicked when I was young,” she thought, as she stared gloomingly at the fire, “I was only thoughtless. I never did any harm — at least, wilfully. Have I ever been really wicked, I wonder?” she mused. “My worst wickednesses have bean the result of wild impulses, and not of deeply-laid plots. I am not like the women I have read of, who have lain night after night in the horrible darkness and stillness, planning out treacherous deeds, and arranging every circumstance of an appointed crime. I wonder whether they suffered — those women — whether they ever suffered as —”
Her thoughts wandered away into a weary maze of confusion. Suddenly she drew herself up with a proud, defiant gesture, and her eyes glittered with a light that was not entirely reflected from the fire.
“You are mad, Mr. Robert Audley,” she said, “you are mad, and your fancies are a madman’s fancies. I know what madness is. I know its signs and tokens, and I say that you are mad.”
She put her hand to her head, as if thinking of something which confused and bewildered her, and which she found it difficult to contemplate with calmness.
“Dare I defy him?” she muttered. “Dare I? dare I? Will he stop, now that he has once gone so far? Will he stop for fear of me? Will he stop for fear of me, when the thought of what his uncle must suffer has not stopped him? Will anything stop him — but death?”
She pronounced the last words in an awful whisper; and with her head bent forward, her eyes dilated, and her lips still parted as they had been parted in her utterance of that final word “death,” she sat blankly staring at the fire.
“I can’t plot horrible things,” she muttered, presently; “my brain isn’t strong enough, or I’m not wicked enough, or brave enough. If I met Robert Audley in those lonely gardens, as I—”
The current of her thoughts was interrupted by a cautious knocking at her door. She rose suddenly, startled by any sound in the stillness of her room. She rose, and threw herself into a low chair near the fire. She flung her beautiful head back upon the soft cushions, and took a book from the table near her. Insignificant as this action was, it spoke very plainly. It spoke very plainly of ever-recurring fears — of fatal necessities for concealment — of a mind that in its silent agonies was ever alive to the importance of outward effect. It told more plainly than anything else could have told how complete an actress my lady had been made by the awful necessity of her life.
The modest rap at the door was repeated.
“Come in,” cried Lady Audley, in her liveliest tone.
The door was opened with that respectful noiselessness peculiar to a well-bred servant, and a young woman, plainly dressed, and carrying some of the cold March winds in the folds of her garments, crossed the threshold of the apartment and lingered near the door, waiting permission to approach the inner regions of my lady’s retreat.
It was Phoebe Marks, the pale-faced wife of the Mount Stanning innkeeper.
“I beg pardon, my lady, for intruding without leave,” she said; “but I thought I might venture to come straight up without waiting for permission.”
“Yes, yes, Phoebe, to be sure. Take off your bonnet, you wretched, cold-looking creature, and come sit down here.”
Lady Audley pointed to the low ottoman upon which she had herself been seated a few minutes before. The lady’s maid had often sat upon it listening to her mistress’ prattle in the old days, when she had been my lady’s chief companion and confidante,
“Sit down here, Phoebe,” Lady Audley repeated; “sit down here and talk to me; I’m very glad you came here to-night. I was horribly lonely in this dreary place.”
My lady shivered and looked round at the bright collection of bric-a-brac, as if the Sevres and bronze, the buhl and ormolu, had been the moldering adornments of some ruined castle. The dreary wretchedness of her thoughts had communicated itself to every object about her, and all outer things took their color from that weary inner life which held its slow course of secret anguish in her breast. She had spoken the entire truth in saying that she was glad of her lady’s maid’s visit. Her frivolous nature clung to this weak shelter in the hour of her fear and suffering. There were sympathies between her and this girl, who was like herself, inwardly as well as outwardly — like herself, selfish, and cold, and cruel, eager for her own advancement, and greedy of opulence and elegance; angry with the lot that had been cast her, and weary of dull dependence. My lady hated Alicia for her frank, passionate, generous, daring nature; she hated her step-daughter, and clung to this pale-faced, pale-haired girl, whom she thought neither better nor worse than herself.
Phoebe Marks obeyed her late mistress’ commands, and took off her bonnet before seating herself on the ottoman at Lady Audley’s feet. Her smooth bands of light hair were unruffled by the March winds; her trimly-made drab dress and linen collar were as neatly arranged as they could have been had she only that moment completed her toilet.
“Sir Michael is better, I hope, my lady,” she said.
“Yes, Phoebe, much better. He is asleep. You may close that door,” added Lady Audley, with a motion of her head toward the door of communication between the rooms, which had been left open.
Mrs. Marks obeyed submissively, and then returned to her seat.
“I am very, very unhappy, Phoebe,” my lady said, fretfully; “wretchedly miserable.”
“About the — secret?” asked Mrs. Marks, in a half whisper.
My lady did not notice that question. She resumed in the same complaining tone. She was glad to be able to complain even to this lady’s maid. She had brooded over her fears, and had suffered in secret so long, that it was an inexpressible relief to her to bemoan her fate aloud.
“I am cruelly persecuted and harassed, Phoebe Marks,” she said. “I am pursued and tormented by a man whom I never injured, whom I have never wished to injure. I am never suffered to rest by this relentless tormentor, and —”
She paused, staring at the fire again, as she had done in her loneliness. Lost again in the dark intricacies of thoughts which wandered hither and thither in a dreadful chaos of terrified bewilderments, she could not come to any fixed conclusion.
Phoebe Marks watched my lady’s face, looking upward at her late mistress with pale, anxious eyes, that only relaxed their watchfulness when Lady Audley’s glance met that of her companion.
“I think I know whom you mean, my lady,” said the innkeeper’s wife, after a pause; “I think I know who it is who is so cruel to you.”
“Oh, of course,” answered my lady, bitterly; “my secrets