Lady Audley's Secret eBook

“I will tell you nothing, except that you are a mad woman,” answered Lady Audley; in a cold, hard voice.  “Get up; fool, idiot, coward!  Is your husband such a precious bargain that you should be groveling there, lamenting and groaning for him?  What is Robert Audley to you, that you behave like a maniac, because you think he is in danger?  How do you know the fire is at Mount Stanning?  You see a red patch in the sky, and you cry out directly that your own paltry hovel is in flames, as if there were no place in the world that could burn except that.  The fire may be at Brentwood, or further away—­at Romford, or still further away, on the eastern side of London, perhaps.  Get up, mad woman, and go back and look after your goods and chattels, and your husband and your lodger.  Get up and go:  I don’t want you.”

“Oh! my lady, my lady, forgive me,” sobbed Phoebe; “there’s nothing you can say to me that’s hard enough for having done you such a wrong, even in my thoughts.  I don’t mind your cruel words—­I don’t mind anything if I’m wrong.”

“Go back and see for yourself,” answered Lady Audley, sternly.  “I tell you again, I don’t want you.”

She walked away in the darkness, leaving Phoebe Marks still kneeling upon the hard road, where she had cast herself in that agony of supplication.  Sir Michael’s wife walked toward the house in which her husband slept with the red blaze lighting up the skies behind her, and with nothing but the blackness of the night before.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE BEARER OF THE TIDINGS.

It was very late the next morning when Lady Audley emerged from her dressing-room, exquisitely dressed in a morning costume of delicate muslin, delicate laces, and embroideries; but with a very pale face, and with half-circles of purple shadow under her eyes.  She accounted for this pale face and these hollow eyes by declaring that she had sat up reading until a very late hour on the previous night.

Sir Michael and his young wife breakfasted in the library at a comfortable round table, wheeled close to the blazing fire; and Alicia was compelled to share this meal with her step-mother, however she might avoid that lady in the long interval between breakfast and dinner.

The March morning was bleak and dull, and a drizzling rain fell incessantly, obscuring the landscape and blotting out the distance.  There were very few letters by the morning post; the daily newspapers did not arrive until noon; and such aids to conversation being missing, there was very little talk at the breakfast table.

Alicia looked out at the drizzling rain drifting against the broad window-panes.

“No riding to-day,” she said; “and no chance of any callers to enliven us, unless that ridiculous Bob comes crawling through the wet from Mount Stanning.”