Lady Audleys Secret | Page 2

a lazy rope so rotten that the pail had broken away
from it, and had fallen into the water.
A noble place; inside as well as out, a noble place--a house in which
you incontinently lost yourself if ever you were so rash as to attempt to
penetrate its mysteries alone; a house in which no one room had any
sympathy with another, every chamber running off at a tangent into an
inner chamber, and through that down some narrow staircase leading to
a door which, in its turn, led back into that very part of the house from
which you thought yourself the furthest; a house that could never have
been planned by any mortal architect, but must have been the
handiwork of that good old builder, Time, who, adding a room one year,
and knocking down a room another year, toppling down a chimney
coeval with the Plantagenets, and setting up one in the style of the
Tudors; shaking down a bit of Saxon wall, allowing a Norman arch to
stand here; throwing in a row of high narrow windows in the reign of
Queen Anne, and joining on a dining-room after the fashion of the time
of Hanoverian George I, to a refectory that had been standing since the
Conquest, had contrived, in some eleven centuries, to run up such a
mansion as was not elsewhere to be met with throughout the county of
Essex. Of course, in such a house there were secret chambers; the little
daughter of the present owner, Sir Michael Audley, had fallen by
accident upon the discovery of one. A board had rattled under her feet
in the great nursery where she played, and on attention being drawn to
it, it was found to be loose, and so removed, revealed a ladder, leading
to a hiding-place between the floor of the nursery and the ceiling of the
room below--a hiding-place so small that he who had hid there must
have crouched on his hands and knees or lain at full length, and yet
large enough to contain a quaint old carved oak chest, half filled with
priests' vestments, which had been hidden away, no doubt, in those
cruel days when the life of a man was in danger if he was discovered to
have harbored a Roman Catholic priest, or to have mass said in his
house.
The broad outer moat was dry and grass-grown, and the laden trees of
the orchard hung over it with gnarled, straggling branches that drew

fantastical shadows upon the green slope. Within this moat there was,
as I have said, the fish-pond--a sheet of water that extended the whole
length of the garden and bordering which there was an avenue called
the lime-tree walk; an avenue so shaded from the sun and sky, so
screened from observation by the thick shelter of the over-arching trees
that it seemed a chosen place for secret meetings or for stolen
interviews; a place in which a conspiracy might have been planned, or a
lover's vow registered with equal safety; and yet it was scarcely twenty
paces from the house.
At the end of this dark arcade there was the shrubbery, where, half
buried among the tangled branches and the neglected weeds, stood the
rusty wheel of that old well of which I have spoken. It had been of
good service in its time, no doubt; and busy nuns have perhaps drawn
the cool water with their own fair hands; but it had fallen into disuse
now, and scarcely any one at Audley Court knew whether the spring
had dried up or not. But sheltered as was the solitude of this lime-tree
walk, I doubt very much if it was ever put to any romantic uses. Often
in the cool of the evening Sir Michael Audley would stroll up and
down smoking his cigar, with his dogs at his heels, and his pretty
young wife dawdling by his side; but in about ten minutes the baronet
and his companion would grow tired of the rustling limes and the still
water, hidden under the spreading leaves of the water-lilies, and the
long green vista with the broken well at the end, and would stroll back
to the drawing-room, where my lady played dreamy melodies by
Beethoven and Mendelssohn till her husband fell asleep in his
easy-chair.
Sir Michael Audley was fifty-six years of age, and he had married a
second wife three months after his fifty-fifth birthday. He was a big
man, tall and stout, with a deep, sonorous voice, handsome black eyes,
and a white beard--a white beard which made him look venerable
against his will, for he was as active as a boy, and one of the hardest
riders in the country. For seventeen years he had been a widower