Just then Phoebe Marks arrived to warn Lady Audley that Robert had appeared at the Castle Inn.  She also explained that a bailiff was in the house, as the rent was due, and she wanted money to pay him out.  Lady Audley, insisted to Phoebe’s astonishment, that she herself would bring the money.  She did so; and, unknown to Phoebe, cunningly set fire to the inn, hoping that Robert Audley would meet his death.  She and her maid then left the inn to make the long tramp back to the Court.  Half the distance had been covered, when Phoebe looked back and saw a red glare in the sky.  She stopped, suddenly fell on her knees, and cried:  “Oh, my God!  Say it’s not true!  It’s too horrible!”

“What’s too horrible?” said Lady Audley.

“The thought that is in my mind.”

“I will tell you nothing except that you are a mad woman; and go home.”  Lady Audley walked away in the darkness.

V.—­My Lady Tells the Truth

Lady Audley next day was under the dominion of a terrible restlessness.  Towards the dinner hour she walked in the quadrangle.  In the dusk she lost all self-control when a figure approached.  Her knees sank under her and she dropped to the ground.  It was Robert Audley who helped her to rise and then led her into the library.  In a pitiless voice he called her the incendiary of the fire at the inn.  Fortunately, he had changed his room, and escaped being burnt to death, saving, at the same time, Luke Marks.  The day was now past, he insisted, for mercy, after last night’s deed of horror; and she should no longer pollute the Court with her presence.

“Bring Sir Michael,” she cried, “and I will confess everything!”

And so the confession was made.  Briefly stated, it was that as a little child, in a Hampshire coast village, when she asked where her mother was, the answer always was that that was a secret.  In a fit of passion the foster-mother told her that her own mother was a madwoman in an asylum many miles away.  Afterwards, she learned that the madness was a hereditary disease, and she was instructed to keep the secret because it might affect her injuriously in after life.  Then she detailed the story of her life until her marriage with Sir Michael Audley, justifying that on the ground that she had a right to believe her first husband was dead.  In the sunshine of love at Audley Court she felt, for the first time in her life, the miseries of others, and took pleasure in acts of kindness.

In an Essex paper she read of the return of her first husband to England.  Knowing his character, she thought that unless he could be induced to believe she was dead, he would never abandon his search for her.  Again she became mad.  In collusion with her father she induced a Mrs. Plowson in Southampton, who had a daughter in the last stage of consumption, to pass off that daughter as Mrs. George Talboys, and removed her to Ventnor, Isle of Wight, with her own little boy schooled to call her “mamma.”  There she died in a fortnight, was buried as Mrs. George Talboys, and the advertisement of the death was inserted in the “Times” two days before her husband’s arrival in England.