Lady Audleys Secret | Page 3

with
an only child, a daughter, Alicia Audley, now eighteen, and by no
means too well pleased at having a step-mother brought home to the
Court; for Miss Alicia had reigned supreme in her father's house since

her earliest childhood, and had carried the keys, and jingled them in the
pockets of her silk aprons, and lost them in the shrubbery, and dropped
them into the pond, and given all manner of trouble about them from
the hour in which she entered her teens, and had, on that account,
deluded herself into the sincere belief, that for the whole of that period,
she had been keeping the house.
But Miss Alicia's day was over; and now, when she asked anything of
the housekeeper, the housekeeper would tell her that she would speak
to my lady, or she would consult my lady, and if my lady pleased it
should be done. So the baronet's daughter, who was an excellent
horsewoman and a very clever artist, spent most of her time out of
doors, riding about the green lanes, and sketching the cottage children,
and the plow-boys, and the cattle, and all manner of animal life that
came in her way. She set her face with a sulky determination against
any intimacy between herself and the baronet's young wife; and
amiable as that lady was, she found it quite impossible to overcome
Miss Alicia's prejudices and dislike; or to convince the spoilt girl that
she had not done her a cruel injury by marrying Sir Michael Audley.
The truth was that Lady Audley had, in becoming the wife of Sir
Michael, made one of those apparently advantageous matches which
are apt to draw upon a woman the envy and hatred of her sex. She had
come into the neighborhood as a governess in the family of a surgeon
in the village near Audley Court. No one knew anything of her, except
that she came in answer to an advertisement which Mr. Dawson, the
surgeon, had inserted in The Times. She came from London; and the
only reference she gave was to a lady at a school at Brompton, where
she had once been a teacher. But this reference was so satisfactory that
none other was needed, and Miss Lucy Graham was received by the
surgeon as the instructress of his daughters. Her accomplishments were
so brilliant and numerous, that it seemed strange that she should have
answered an advertisement offering such very moderate terms of
remuneration as those named by Mr. Dawson; but Miss Graham
seemed perfectly well satisfied with her situation, and she taught the
girls to play sonatas by Beethoven, and to paint from nature after
Creswick, and walked through a dull, out-of-the-way village to the
humble little church, three times every Sunday, as contentedly as if she

had no higher aspiration in the world than to do so all the rest of her
life.
People who observed this, accounted for it by saying that it was a part
of her amiable and gentle nature always to be light-hearted, happy and
contented under any circumstances.
Wherever she went she seemed to take joy and brightness with her. In
the cottages of the poor her fair face shone like a sunbeam. She would
sit for a quarter of an hour talking to some old woman, and apparently
as pleased with the admiration of a toothless crone as if she had been
listening to the compliments of a marquis; and when she tripped away,
leaving nothing behind her (for her poor salary gave no scope to her
benevolence), the old woman would burst out into senile raptures with
her grace, beauty, and her kindliness, such as she never bestowed upon
the vicar's wife, who half fed and clothed her. For you see, Miss Lucy
Graham was blessed with that magic power of fascination, by which a
woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a smile. Every one
loved, admired, and praised her. The boy who opened the five-barred
gate that stood in her pathway, ran home to his mother to tell of her
pretty looks, and the sweet voice in which she thanked him for the little
service. The verger at the church, who ushered her into the surgeon's
pew; the vicar, who saw the soft blue eyes uplifted to his face as he
preached his simple sermon; the porter from the railway station, who
brought her sometimes a letter or a parcel, and who never looked for
reward from her; her employer; his visitors; her pupils; the servants;
everybody, high and low, united in declaring that Lucy Graham was the
sweetest girl that ever lived.
Perhaps it was the rumor of this which penetrated into the quiet
chamber of Audley Court; or, perhaps, it was the sight of her pretty
face,