THE SECOND EPOCH
THE STORY CONTINUED BY MARIAN
HALCOMBE.
I
BLACKWATER PARK, HAMPSHIRE.
June 11th, 1850.—Six months to look back on—six long, lonely months
since Laura and I last saw each other!
How many days have I still to wait? Only one!
To-morrow, the twelfth, the travellers return to
England. I can hardly realise my own happiness—I can
hardly believe that the next four-and-twenty hours
will complete the last day of separation between
Laura and me.
She and her husband have been in Italy all the
winter, and afterwards in the Tyrol. They come back,
accompanied by Count Fosco and his wife, who propose
to settle somewhere in the neighbourhood of London,
and who have engaged to stay at Blackwater Park for
the summer months before deciding on a place of
residence. So long as Laura returns, no matter who
returns with her. Sir Percival may fill the house
from floor to ceiling, if he likes, on condition
that his wife and I inhabit it together.
Meanwhile, here I am, established at Blackwater
Park, "the ancient and interesting seat" (as the
county history obligingly informs me) "of Sir
Percival Glyde, Bart.," and the future abiding-place
(as I may now venture to add on my account) of plain
Marian Halcombe, spinster, now settled in a snug
little sitting-room, with a cup of tea by her side,
and all her earthly possessions ranged round her in
three boxes and a bag.
I left Limmeridge yesterday, having received
Laura's delightful letter from Paris the day before.
I had been previously uncertain whether I was to
meet them in London or in Hampshire, but this last
letter informed me that Sir Percival proposed to
land at Southampton, and to travel straight on to
his country-house. He has spent so much money abroad
that he has none left to defray the expenses of
living in London for the remainder of the season,
and he is economically resolved to pass the summer
and autumn quietly at Blackwater. Laura has had more
than enough of excitement and change of scene, and
is pleased at the prospect of country tranquillity
and retirement which her husband's prudence provides
for her. As for me, I am ready to be happy anywhere
in her society. We are all, therefore, well
contented in our various ways, to begin with.
Last night I slept in London, and was delayed
there so long to-day by various calls and
commissions, that I did not reach Blackwater this
evening till after dusk.
Judging by my vague impressions of the place thus
far, it is the exact opposite of Limmeridge.
The house is situated on a dead flat, and seems
to be shut in—almost suffocated, to my north-country
notions, by trees. I have seen nobody but the
man-servant who opened the door to me, and the
housekeeper, a very civil person, who showed me the
way to my own room, and got me my tea. I have a nice
little boudoir and bedroom, at the end of a long
passage on the first floor. The servants and some of
the spare rooms are on the second floor, and all the
living rooms are on the ground floor. I have not
seen one of them yet, and I know nothing about the
house, except that one wing of it is said to be five
hundred years old, that it had a moat round it once,
and that it gets its name of Blackwater from a lake
in the park.
Eleven o'clock has just struck, in a ghostly and
solemn manner, from a turret over the centre of the
house, which I saw when I came in. A large dog has
been woke, apparently by the sound of the bell, and
is howling and yawning drearily, somewhere round a
corner. I hear echoing footsteps in the passages
below, and the iron thumping of bolts and bars at
the house door. The servants are evidently going to
bed. Shall I follow their example?
No, I am not half sleepy enough. Sleepy, did I
say? I feel as if I should never close my eyes
again. The bare anticipation of seeing that dear
face, and hearing that well-known voice to-morrow,
keeps me in a perpetual fever of excitement. If I
only had the privileges of a man, I would order out
Sir Percival's best horse instantly, and tear away
on a night-gallop, eastward, to meet the rising
sun—a long, hard, heavy, ceaseless gallop of hours
and hours, like the famous highwayman's ride to
York. Being, however, nothing but a woman, condemned
to patience, propriety, and petticoats for life, I
must respect the house-keeper's opinions, and try to
compose myself in some feeble and feminine way.
Reading is out of the question—I can't fix my
attention on books. Let me try if I can write myself
into sleepiness and fatigue. My journal has been
very much neglected of late. What can I
recall—standing, as I now do, on the threshold of a
new life—of persons and events, of chances and
changes, during the past six months—the long, weary,
empty interval since Laura's wedding-day?
Walter Hartright is uppermost in my memory, and he passes first in the
shadowy procession of my absent friends. I received
a few lines from him, after the landing of the
expedition in Honduras, written more cheerfully and
hopefully than he has written yet. A month or six
weeks later I saw an extract from an American
newspaper, describing the departure of the
adventurers on their inland journey. They were last
seen entering a wild primeval forest, each man with
his rifle on his shoulder and his baggage at his
back. Since that time, civilisation has lost all
trace of them. Not a line more have I received from
Walter, not a fragment of news from the expedition
has appeared in any of the public journals.
The same dense, disheartening obscurity hangs
over the fate and fortunes of Anne Catherick, and
her companion, Mrs. Clements. Nothing whatever has
been heard of either of them. Whether they are in
the country or out of it, whether they are living or
dead, no one knows. Even Sir Percival's solicitor
has lost all hope, and has ordered the useless
search after the fugitives to be finally given up.
Our good old friend Mr. Gilmore has met with a
sad check in his active professional career. Early
in the spring we were alarmed by hearing that he had
been found insensible at his desk, and that the
seizure was pronounced to be an apoplectic fit. He
had been long complaining of fulness and oppression
in the head, and his doctor had warned him of the
consequences that would follow his persistency in
continuing to work, early and late, as if he were
still a young man. The result now is that he has
been positively ordered to keep out of his office
for a year to come, at least, and to seek repose of
body and relief of mind by altogether changing his
usual mode of life. The business is left,
accordingly, to be carried on by his partner, and he
is himself, at this moment, away in Germany,
visiting some relations who are settled there in
mercantile pursuits. Thus another true friend and
trustworthy adviser is lost to us—lost, I earnestly
hope and trust, for a time only.
Poor Mrs. Vesey travelled with me as far as
London. It was impossible to abandon her to solitude
at Limmeridge after Laura and I had both left the
house, and we have arranged that she is to live with
an unmarried younger sister of hers, who keeps a
school at Clapham. She is to come here this autumn
to visit her pupil—I might almost say her adopted
child. I saw the good old lady safe to her
destination, and left her in the care of her
relative, quietly happy at the prospect of seeing
Laura again in a few months' time.
As for Mr. Fairlie, I believe I am guilty of no
injustice if I describe him as being unutterably
relieved by having the house clear of us women. The
idea of his missing his niece is simply
preposterous—he used to let months pass in the old
times without attempting to see her—and in my case
and Mrs. Vesey's, I take leave to consider his
telling us both that he was half heart-broken at our
departure, to be equivalent to a confession that he
was secretly rejoiced to get rid of us. His last
caprice has led him to keep two photographers
incessantly employed in producing sun-pictures of
all the treasures and curiosities in his possession.
One complete copy of the collection of the
photographs is to be presented to the Mechanics'
Institution of Carlisle, mounted on the finest
cardboard, with ostentatious red-letter inscriptions
underneath, "Madonna and Child by Raphael. In the
possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire." "Copper
coin of the period of Tiglath Pileser. In the
possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire." "Unique
Rembrandt etching. Known all over Europe as THE
SMUDGE, from a printer's blot in the corner which
exists in no other copy. Valued at three hundred
guineas. In the possession of Frederick Fairlie,
Esq." Dozens of photographs of this sort, and all
inscribed in this manner, were completed before I
left Cumberland, and hundreds more remain to be
done. With this new interest to occupy him, Mr.
Fairlie will be a happy man for months and months to
come, and the two unfortunate photographers will
share the social martyrdom which he has hitherto
inflicted on his valet alone.
So much for the persons and events which hold the
foremost place in my memory. What next of the one
person who holds the foremost place in my heart?
Laura has been present to my thoughts all the while
I have been writing these lines. What can I recall
of her during the past six months, before I close my
journal for the night?
I have only her letters to guide me, and on the
most important of all the questions which our
correspondence can discuss, every one of those
letters leaves me in the dark.
Does he treat her kindly? Is she happier now than
she was when I parted with her on the wedding-day?
All my letters have contained these two inquiries,
put more or less directly, now in one form, and now
in another, and all, on that point only, have
remained without reply, or have been answered as if
my questions merely related to the state of her
health. She informs me, over and over again, that
she is perfectly well—that travelling agrees with
her—that she is getting through the winter, for the
first time in her life, without catching cold—but
not a word can I find anywhere which tells me
plainly that she is reconciled to her marriage, and
that she can now look back to the twenty-second of
December without any bitter feelings of repentance
and regret. The name of her husband is only
mentioned in her letters, as she might mention the
name of a friend who was travelling with them, and
who had undertaken to make all the arrangements for
the journey. "Sir Percival" has settled that we
leave on such a day—"Sir Percival" has decided that
we travel by such a road. Sometimes she writes
"Percival" only, but very seldom—in nine cases out
of ten she gives him his title.
I cannot find that his habits and opinions have
changed and coloured hers in any single particular.
The usual moral transformation which is insensibly
wrought in a young, fresh, sensitive woman by her
marriage, seems never to have taken place in Laura.
She writes of her own thoughts and impressions, amid
all the wonders she has seen, exactly as she might
have written to some one else, if I had been
travelling with her instead of her husband. I see no
betrayal anywhere of sympathy of any kind existing
between them. Even when she wanders from the subject
of her travels, and occupies herself with the
prospects that await her in England, her
speculations are busied with her future as my
sister, and persistently neglect to notice her
future as Sir Percival's wife. In all this there is
no undertone of complaint to warn me that she is
absolutely unhappy in her married life. The
impression I have derived from our correspondence
does not, thank God, lead me to any such distressing
conclusion as that. I only see a sad torpor, an
unchangeable indifference, when I turn my mind from
her in the old character of a sister, and look at
her, through the medium of her letters, in the new
character of a wife. In other words, it is always
Laura Fairlie who has been writing to me for the
last six months, and never Lady Glyde.
The strange silence which she maintains on the
subject of her husband's character and conduct, she
preserves with almost equal resolution in the few
references which her later letters contain to the
name of her husband's bosom friend, Count Fosco.
For some unexplained reason the Count and his
wife appear to have changed their plans abruptly, at
the end of last autumn, and to have gone to Vienna
instead of going to Rome, at which latter place Sir
Percival had expected to find them when he left
England. They only quitted Vienna in the spring, and
travelled as far as the Tyrol to meet the bride and
bridegroom on their homeward journey. Laura writes
readily enough about the meeting with Madame Fosco,
and assures me that she has found her aunt so much
changed for the better—so much quieter, and so much
more sensible as a wife than she was as a single
woman—that I shall hardly know her again when I see
her here. But on the subject of Count Fosco (who
interests me infinitely more than his wife), Laura
is provokingly circumspect and silent. She only says
that he puzzles her, and that she will not tell me
what her impression of him is until I have seen him,
and formed my own opinion first.
This, to my mind, looks ill for the Count. Laura
has preserved, far more perfectly than most people
do in later life, the child's subtle faculty of
knowing a friend by instinct, and if I am right in
assuming that her first impression of Count Fosco
has not been favourable, I for one am in some danger
of doubting and distrusting that illustrious
foreigner before I have so much as set eyes on him.
But, patience, patience—this uncertainty, and many
uncertainties more, cannot last much longer.
To-morrow will see all my doubts in a fair way of
being cleared up, sooner or later.
Twelve o'clock has struck, and I have just come
back to close these pages, after looking out at my
open window.
It is a still, sultry, moonless night. The stars
are dull and few. The trees that shut out the view
on all sides look dimly black and solid in the
distance, like a great wall of rock. I hear the
croaking of frogs, faint and far off, and the echoes
of the great clock hum in the airless calm long
after the strokes have ceased. I wonder how
Blackwater Park will look in the daytime? I don't
altogether like it by night.
12th.—A day of investigations and discoveries—a more interesting day,
for many reasons, than I had ventured to anticipate.
I began my sight-seeing, of course, with the
house.
The main body of the building is of the time of
that highly-overrated woman, Queen Elizabeth. On the
ground floor there are two hugely long galleries,
with low ceilings lying parallel with each other,
and rendered additionally dark and dismal by hideous
family portraits—every one of which I should like to
burn. The rooms on the floor above the two galleries
are kept in tolerable repair, but are very seldom
used. The civil housekeeper, who acted as my guide,
offered to show me over them, but considerately
added that she feared I should find them rather out
of order. My respect for the integrity of my own
petticoats and stockings infinitely exceeds my
respect for all the Elizabethan bedrooms in the
kingdom, so I positively declined exploring the
upper regions of dust and dirt at the risk of
soiling my nice clean clothes. The housekeeper said,
"I am quite of your opinion, miss," and appeared to
think me the most sensible woman she had met with
for a long time past.
So much, then, for the main building. Two wings
are added at either end of it. The half-ruined wing
on the left (as you approach the house) was once a
place of residence standing by itself, and was built
in the fourteenth century. One of Sir Percival's
maternal ancestors—I don't remember, and don't care
which—tacked on the main building, at right angles
to it, in the aforesaid Queen Elizabeth's time. The
housekeeper told me that the architecture of "the
old wing," both outside and inside, was considered
remarkably fine by good judges. On further
investigation I discovered that good judges could
only exercise their abilities on Sir Percival's
piece of antiquity by previously dismissing from
their minds all fear of damp, darkness, and rats.
Under these circumstances, I unhesitatingly
acknowledged myself to be no judge at all, and
suggested that we should treat "the old wing"
precisely as we had previously treated the
Elizabethan bedrooms. Once more the housekeeper
said, "I am quite of your opinion, miss," and once
more she looked at me with undisguised admiration of
my extraordinary common-sense.
We went next to the wing on the right, which was
built, by way of completing the wonderful
architectural jumble at Blackwater Park, in the time
of George the Second.
This is the habitable part of the house, which
has been repaired and redecorated inside on Laura's
account. My two rooms, and all the good bedrooms
besides, are on the first floor, and the basement
contains a drawing-room, a dining-room, a
morning-room, a library, and a pretty little boudoir
for Laura, all very nicely ornamented in the bright
modern way, and all very elegantly furnished with
the delightful modern luxuries. None of the rooms
are anything like so large and airy as our rooms at
Limmeridge, but they all look pleasant to live in. I
was terribly afraid, from what I had heard of
Blackwater Park, of fatiguing antique chairs, and
dismal stained glass, and musty, frouzy hangings,
and all the barbarous lumber which people born
without a sense of comfort accumulate about them, in
defiance of the consideration due to the convenience
of their friends. It is an inexpressible relief to
find that the nineteenth century has invaded this
strange future home of mine, and has swept the dirty
"good old times" out of the way of our daily life.
I dawdled away the morning—part of the time in
the rooms downstairs, and part out of doors in the
great square which is formed by the three sides of
the house, and by the lofty iron railings and gates
which protect it in front. A large circular
fish-pond with stone sides, and an allegorical
leaden monster in the middle, occupies the centre of
the square. The pond itself is full of gold and
silver fish, and is encircled by a broad belt of the
softest turf I ever walked on. I loitered here on
the shady side pleasantly enough till luncheon-time,
and after that took my broad straw hat and wandered
out alone in the warm lovely sunlight to explore the
grounds.
Daylight confirmed the impression which I had
felt the night before, of there being too many trees
at Blackwater. The house is stifled by them. They
are, for the most part, young, and planted far too
thickly. I suspect there must have been a ruinous
cutting down of timber all over the estate before
Sir Percival's time, and an angry anxiety on the
part of the next possessor to fill up all the gaps
as thickly and rapidly as possible. After looking
about me in front of the house, I observed a
flower-garden on my left hand, and walked towards it
to see what I could discover in that direction.
On a nearer view the garden proved to be small
and poor and ill kept. I left it behind me, opened a
little gate in a ring fence, and found myself in a
plantation of fir-trees.
A pretty winding path, artificially made, led me
on among the trees, and my north-country experience
soon informed me that I was approaching sandy,
heathy ground. After a walk of more than half a
mile, I should think, among the firs, the path took
a sharp turn—the trees abruptly ceased to appear on
either side of me, and I found myself standing
suddenly on the margin of a vast open space, and
looking down at the Blackwater lake from which the
house takes its name.
The ground, shelving away below me, was all sand,
with a few little heathy hillocks to break the
monotony of it in certain places. The lake itself
had evidently once flowed to the spot on which I
stood, and had been gradually wasted and dried up to
less than a third of its former size. I saw its
still, stagnant waters, a quarter of a mile away
from me in the hollow, separated into pools and
ponds by twining reeds and rushes, and little knolls
of earth. On the farther bank from me the trees rose
thickly again, and shut out the view, and cast their
black shadows on the sluggish, shallow water. As I
walked down to the lake, I saw that the ground on
its farther side was damp and marshy, overgrown with
rank grass and dismal willows. The water, which was
clear enough on the open sandy side, where the sun
shone, looked black and poisonous opposite to me,
where it lay deeper under the shade of the spongy
banks, and the rank overhanging thickets and tangled
trees. The frogs were croaking, and the rats were
slipping in and out of the shadowy water, like live
shadows themselves, as I got nearer to the marshy
side of the lake. I saw here, lying half in and half
out of the water, the rotten wreck of an old
overturned boat, with a sickly spot of sunlight
glimmering through a gap in the trees on its dry
surface, and a snake basking in the midst of the
spot, fantastically coiled and treacherously still.
Far and near the view suggested the same dreary
impressions of solitude and decay, and the glorious
brightness of the summer sky overhead seemed only to
deepen and harden the gloom and barrenness of the
wilderness on which it shone. I turned and retraced
my steps to the high heathy ground, directing them a
little aside from my former path towards a shabby
old wooden shed, which stood on the outer skirt of
the fir plantation, and which had hitherto been too
unimportant to share my notice with the wide, wild
prospect of the lake.
On approaching the shed I found that it had once
been a boat-house, and that an attempt had
apparently been made to convert it afterwards into a
sort of rude arbour, by placing inside it a firwood
seat, a few stools, and a table. I entered the
place, and sat down for a little while to rest and
get my breath again.
I had not been in the boat-house more than a
minute when it struck me that the sound of my own
quick breathing was very strangely echoed by
something beneath me. I listened intently for a
moment, and heard a low, thick, sobbing breath that
seemed to come from the ground under the seat which
I was occupying. My nerves are not easily shaken by
trifles, but on this occasion I started to my feet
in a fright—called out—received no answer—summoned
back my recreant courage, and looked under the seat.
There, crouched up in the farthest corner, lay
the forlorn cause of my terror, in the shape of a
poor little dog—a black and white spaniel. The
creature moaned feebly when I looked at it and
called to it, but never stirred. I moved away the
seat and looked closer. The poor little dog's eyes
were glazing fast, and there were spots of blood on
its glossy white side. The misery of a weak,
helpless, dumb creature is surely one of the saddest
of all the mournful sights which this world can
show. I lifted the poor dog in my arms as gently as
I could, and contrived a sort of make-shift hammock
for him to lie in, by gathering up the front of my
dress all round him. In this way I took the
creature, as painlessly as possible, and as fast as
possible, back to the house.
Finding no one in the hall I went up at once to
my own sitting-room, made a bed for the dog with one
of my old shawls, and rang the bell. The largest and
fattest of all possible house-maids answered it, in
a state of cheerful stupidity which would have
provoked the patience of a saint. The girl's fat,
shapeless face actually stretched into a broad grin
at the sight of the wounded creature on the floor.
"What do you see there to laugh at?" I asked, as
angrily as if she had been a servant of my own. "Do
you know whose dog it is?"
"No, miss, that I certainly don't." She stooped,
and looked down at the spaniel's injured
side—brightened suddenly with the irradiation of a
new idea—and pointing to the wound with a chuckle of
satisfaction, said, "That's Baxter's doings, that
is."
I was so exasperated that I could have boxed her
ears. "Baxter?" I said. "Who is the brute you call
Baxter?"
The girl grinned again more cheerfully than ever.
"Bless you, miss! Baxter's the keeper, and when he
finds strange dogs hunting about, he takes and
shoots 'em. It's keeper's dooty miss, I think that
dog will die. Here's where he's been shot, ain't it?
That's Baxter's doings, that is. Baxter's doings,
miss, and Baxter's dooty."
I was almost wicked enough to wish that Baxter
had shot the housemaid instead of the dog. Seeing
that it was quite useless to expect this densely
impenetrable personage to give me any help in
relieving the suffering creature at our feet, I told
her to request the housekeeper's attendance with my
compliments. She went out exactly as she had come
in, grinning from ear to ear. As the door closed on
her she said to herself softly, "It's Baxter's
doings and Baxter's dooty—that's what it is."
The housekeeper, a person of some education and
intelligence, thoughtfully brought upstairs with her
some milk and some warm water. The instant she saw
the dog on the floor she started and changed colour.
"Why, Lord bless me," cried the housekeeper,
"that must be Mrs. Catherick's dog!"
"Whose?" I asked, in the utmost astonishment.
"Mrs. Catherick's. You seem to know Mrs.
Catherick, Miss Halcombe?"
"Not personally, but I have heard of her. Does
she live here? Has she had any news of her
daughter?"
"No, Miss Halcombe, she came here to ask for
news."
"When?"
"Only yesterday. She said some one had reported
that a stranger answering to the description of her
daughter had been seen in our neighbourhood. No such
report has reached us here, and no such report was
known in the village, when I sent to make inquiries
there on Mrs. Catherick's account. She certainly
brought this poor little dog with her when she came,
and I saw it trot out after her when she went away.
I suppose the creature strayed into the plantations,
and got shot. Where did you find it, Miss Halcombe?"
"In the old shed that looks out on the lake."
"Ah, yes, that is the plantation side, and the
poor thing dragged itself, I suppose, to the nearest
shelter, as dogs will, to die. If you can moisten
its lips with the milk, Miss Halcombe, I will wash
the clotted hair from the wound. I am very much
afraid it is too late to do any good. However, we
can but try."
Mrs. Catherick! The name still rang in my ears,
as if the housekeeper had only that moment surprised
me by uttering it. While we were attending to the
dog, the words of Walter Hartright's caution to me
returned to my memory: "If ever Anne Catherick
crosses your path, make better use of the
opportunity, Miss Halcombe, than I made of it." The
finding of the wounded spaniel had led me already to
the discovery of Mrs. Catherick's visit to
Blackwater Park, and that event might lead in its
turn, to something more. I determined to make the
most of the chance which was now offered to me, and
to gain as much information as I could.
"Did you say that Mrs. Catherick lived anywhere
in this neighbourhood?" I asked.
"Oh dear, no," said the housekeeper. "She lives
at Welmingham, quite at the other end of the
county—five-and-twenty miles off, at least."
"I suppose you have known Mrs. Catherick for some
years?"
"On the contrary, Miss Halcombe, I never saw her
before she came here yesterday. I had heard of her,
of course, because I had heard of Sir Percival's
kindness in putting her daughter under medical care.
Mrs. Catherick is rather a strange person in her
manners, but extremely respectable-looking. She
seemed sorely put out when she found that there was
no foundation—none, at least, that any of us could
discover—for the report of her daughter having been
seen in this neighbourhood."
"I am rather interested about Mrs. Catherick," I
went on, continuing the conversation as long as
possible. "I wish I had arrived here soon enough to
see her yesterday. Did she stay for any length of
time?"
"Yes," said the housekeeper, "she stayed for some
time; and I think she would have remained longer, if
I had not been called away to speak to a strange
gentleman—a gentleman who came to ask when Sir
Percival was expected back. Mrs. Catherick got up
and left at once, when she heard the maid tell me
what the visitor's errand was. She said to me, at
parting, that there was no need to tell Sir Percival
of her coming here. I thought that rather an odd
remark to make, especially to a person in my
responsible situation."
I thought it an odd remark too. Sir Percival had
certainly led me to believe, at Limmeridge, that the
most perfect confidence existed between himself and
Mrs. Catherick. If that was the case, why should she
be anxious to have her visit at Blackwater Park kept
a secret from him?
"Probably," I said, seeing that the housekeeper
expected me to give my opinion on Mrs. Catherick's
parting words, "probably she thought the
announcement of her visit might vex Sir Percival to
no purpose, by reminding him that her lost daughter
was not found yet. Did she talk much on that
subject?"
"Very little," replied the housekeeper. "She
talked principally of Sir Percival, and asked a
great many questions about where he had been
travelling, and what sort of lady his new wife was.
She seemed to be more soured and put out than
distressed, by failing to find any traces of her
daughter in these parts. 'I give her up,' were the
last words she said that I can remember; 'I give her
up, ma'am, for lost.' And from that she passed at
once to her questions about Lady Glyde, wanting to
know if she was a handsome, amiable lady, comely and
healthy and young——Ah, dear! I thought how it would
end. Look, Miss Halcombe, the poor thing is out of
its misery at last!"
The dog was dead. It had given a faint, sobbing
cry, it had suffered an instant's convulsion of the
limbs, just as those last words, "comely and healthy
and young," dropped from the housekeeper's lips. The
change had happened with startling suddenness—in one
moment the creature lay lifeless under our hands.
Eight o'clock. I have just returned from dining
downstairs, in solitary state. The sunset is burning
redly on the wilderness of trees that I see from my
window, and I am poring over my journal again, to
calm my impatience for the return of the travellers.
They ought to have arrived, by my calculations,
before this. How still and lonely the house is in
the drowsy evening quiet! Oh me! how many minutes
more before I hear the carriage wheels and run
downstairs to find myself in Laura's arms?
The poor little dog! I wish my first day at
Blackwater Park had not been associated with death,
though it is only the death of a stray animal.
Welmingham—I see, on looking back through these
private pages of mine, that Welmingham is the name
of the place where Mrs. Catherick lives. Her note is
still in my possession, the note in answer to that
letter about her unhappy daughter which Sir Percival
obliged me to write. One of these days, when I can
find a safe opportunity, I will take the note with
me by way of introduction, and try what I can make
of Mrs. Catherick at a personal interview. I don't
understand her wishing to conceal her visit to this
place from Sir Percival's knowledge, and I don't
feel half so sure, as the housekeeper seems to do,
that her daughter Anne is not in the neighbourhood
after all. What would Walter Hartright have said in
this emergency? Poor, dear Hartright! I am beginning
to feel the want of his honest advice and his
willing help already.
Surely I heard something. Was it a bustle of
footsteps below stairs? Yes! I hear the horses'
feet—I hear the rolling wheels——
II
June 15th.—The confusion of their arrival has had
time to subside. Two days have elapsed since the
return of the travellers, and that interval has
sufficed to put the new machinery of our lives at
Blackwater Park in fair working order. I may now
return to my journal, with some little chance of
being able to continue the entries in it as
collectedly as usual.
I think I must begin by putting down an odd
remark which has suggested itself to me since Laura
came back.
When two members of a family or two intimate
friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one
remains at home, the return of the relative or
friend who has been travelling always seems to place
the relative or friend who has been staying at home
at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet.
The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new
habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old
thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the
other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the
most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and
to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and
uncontrollable by both, between them on either side.
After the first happiness of my meeting with Laura
was over, after we had sat down together hand in
hand to recover breath enough and calmness enough to
talk, I felt this strangeness instantly, and I could
see that she felt it too. It has partially worn
away, now that we have fallen back into most of our
old habits, and it will probably disappear before
long. But it has certainly had an influence over the
first impressions that I have formed of her, now
that we are living together again—for which reason
only I have thought fit to mention it here.
She has found me unaltered, but I have found her
changed.
Changed in person, and in one respect changed in
character. I cannot absolutely say that she is less
beautiful than she used to be—I can only say that
she is less beautiful to me.
Others, who do not look at her with my eyes and
my recollections, would probably think her improved.
There is more colour and more decision and roundness
of outline in her face than there used to be, and
her figure seems more firmly set and more sure and
easy in all its movements than it was in her maiden
days. But I miss something when I look at
her—something that once belonged to the happy,
innocent life of Laura Fairlie, and that I cannot
find in Lady Glyde. There was in the old times a
freshness, a softness, an ever-varying and yet
ever-remaining tenderness of beauty in her face, the
charm of which it is not possible to express in
words, or, as poor Hartright used often to say, in
painting either. This is gone. I thought I saw the
faint reflection of it for a moment when she turned
pale under the agitation of our sudden meeting on
the evening of her return, but it has never
reappeared since. None of her letters had prepared
me for a personal change in her. On the contrary,
they had led me to expect that her marriage had left
her, in appearance at least, quite unaltered.
Perhaps I read her letters wrongly in the past, and
am now reading her face wrongly in the present? No
matter! Whether her beauty has gained or whether it
has lost in the last six months, the separation
either way has made her own dear self more precious
to me than ever, and that is one good result of her
marriage, at any rate!
The second change, the change that I have
observed in her character, has not surprised me,
because I was prepared for it in this case by the
tone of her letters. Now that she is at home again,
I find her just as unwilling to enter into any
details on the subject of her married life as I had
previously found her all through the time of our
separation, when we could only communicate with each
other by writing. At the first approach I made to
the forbidden topic she put her hand on my lips with
a look and gesture which touchingly, almost
painfully, recalled to my memory the days of her
girlhood and the happy bygone time when there were
no secrets between us.
"Whenever you and I are together, Marian," she
said, "we shall both be happier and easier with one
another, if we accept my married life for what it
is, and say and think as little about it as
possible. I would tell you everything, darling,
about myself," she went on, nervously buckling and
unbuckling the ribbon round my waist, "if my
confidences could only end there. But they could
not—they would lead me into confidences about my
husband too; and now I am married, I think I had
better avoid them, for his sake, and for your sake,
and for mine. I don't say that they would distress
you, or distress me—I wouldn't have you think that
for the world. But—I want to be so happy, now I have
got you back again, and I want you to be so happy
too——" She broke off abruptly, and looked round the
room, my own sitting-room, in which we were talking.
"Ah!" she cried, clapping her hands with a bright
smile of recognition, "another old friend found
already! Your book-case, Marian—your
dear-little-shabby-old-satin-wood book-case—how glad
I am you brought it with you from Limmeridge! And
the horrid heavy man's umbrella, that you always
would walk out with when it rained! And first and
foremost of all, your own dear, dark, clever,
gipsy-face, looking at me just as usual! It is so
like home again to be here. How can we make it more
like home still? I will put my father's portrait in
your room instead of in mine—and I will keep all my
little treasures from Limmeridge here—and we will
pass hours and hours every day with these four
friendly walls round us. Oh, Marian!" she said,
suddenly seating herself on a footstool at my knees,
and looking up earnestly in my face, "promise you
will never marry, and leave me. It is selfish to say
so, but you are so much better off as a single
woman—unless—unless you are very fond of your
husband—but you won't be very fond of anybody but
me, will you?" She stopped again, crossed my hands
on my lap, and laid her face on them. "Have you been
writing many letters, and receiving many letters
lately?" she asked, in low, suddenly-altered tones.
I understood what the question meant, but I thought
it my duty not to encourage her by meeting her half
way. "Have you heard from him?" she went on, coaxing
me to forgive the more direct appeal on which she
now ventured, by kissing my hands, upon which her
face still rested. "Is he well and happy, and
getting on in his profession? Has he recovered
himself—and forgotten me?"
She should not have asked those questions. She
should have remembered her own resolution, on the
morning when Sir Percival held her to her marriage
engagement, and when she resigned the book of
Hartright's drawings into my hands for ever. But, ah
me! where is the faultless human creature who can
persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes
failing and falling back? Where is the woman who has
ever really torn from her heart the image that has
been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us
that such unearthly creatures have existed—but what
does our own experience say in answer to books?
I made no attempt to remonstrate with her:
perhaps, because I sincerely appreciated the
fearless candour which let me see, what other women
in her position might have had reasons for
concealing even from their dearest friends—perhaps,
because I felt, in my own heart and conscience, that
in her place I should have asked the same questions
and had the same thoughts. All I could honestly do
was to reply that I had not written to him or heard
from him lately, and then to turn the conversation
to less dangerous topics.
There has been much to sadden me in our
interview—my first confidential interview with her
since her return. The change which her marriage has
produced in our relations towards each other, by
placing a forbidden subject between us, for the
first time in our lives; the melancholy conviction
of the dearth of all warmth of feeling, of all close
sympathy, between her husband and herself, which her
own unwilling words now force on my mind; the
distressing discovery that the influence of that
ill-fated attachment still remains (no matter how
innocently, how harmlessly) rooted as deeply as ever
in her heart—all these are disclosures to sadden any
woman who loves her as dearly, and feels for her as
acutely, as I do.
There is only one consolation to set against
them—a consolation that ought to comfort me, and
that does comfort me. All the graces and gentleness
of her character—all the frank affection of her
nature—all the sweet, simple, womanly charms which
used to make her the darling and delight of every
one who approached her, have come back to me with
herself. Of my other impressions I am sometimes a
little inclined to doubt. Of this last, best,
happiest of all impressions, I grow more and more
certain every hour in the day.
Let me turn, now, from her to her travelling
companions. Her husband must engage my attention
first. What have I observed in Sir Percival, since
his return, to improve my opinion of him?
I can hardly say. Small vexations and annoyances
seem to have beset him since he came back, and no
man, under those circumstances, is ever presented at
his best. He looks, as I think, thinner than he was
when he left England. His wearisome cough and his
comfortless restlessness have certainly increased.
His manner—at least his manner towards me—is much
more abrupt than it used to be. He greeted me, on
the evening of his return, with little or nothing of
the ceremony and civility of former times—no polite
speeches of welcome—no appearance of extraordinary
gratification at seeing me—nothing but a short shake
of the hand, and a sharp "How-d'ye-do, Miss
Halcombe—glad to see you again." He seemed to accept
me as one of the necessary fixtures of Blackwater
Park, to be satisfied at finding me established in
my proper place, and then to pass me over
altogether.
Most men show something of their disposition in
their own houses, which they have concealed
elsewhere, and Sir Percival has already displayed a
mania for order and regularity, which is quite a new
revelation of him, so far as my previous knowledge
of his character is concerned. If I take a book from
the library and leave it on the table, he follows me
and puts it back again. If I rise from a chair, and
let it remain where I have been sitting, he
carefully restores it to its proper place against
the wall. He picks up stray flower-blossoms from the
carpet, and mutters to himself as discontentedly as
if they were hot cinders burning holes in it, and he
storms at the servants if there is a crease in the
tablecloth, or a knife missing from its place at the
dinner-table, as fiercely as if they had personally
insulted him.
I have already referred to the small annoyances
which appear to have troubled him since his return.
Much of the alteration for the worse which I have
noticed in him may be due to these. I try to
persuade myself that it is so, because I am anxious
not to be disheartened already about the future. It
is certainly trying to any man's temper to be met by
a vexation the moment he sets foot in his own house
again, after a long absence, and this annoying
circumstance did really happen to Sir Percival in my
presence.
On the evening of their arrival the housekeeper
followed me into the hall to receive her master and
mistress and their guests. The instant he saw her,
Sir Percival asked if any one had called lately. The
housekeeper mentioned to him, in reply, what she had
previously mentioned to me, the visit of the strange
gentleman to make inquiries about the time of her
master's return. He asked immediately for the
gentleman's name. No name had been left. The
gentleman's business? No business had been
mentioned. What was the gentleman like? The
housekeeper tried to describe him, but failed to
distinguish the nameless visitor by any personal
peculiarity which her master could recognise. Sir
Percival frowned, stamped angrily on the floor, and
walked on into the house, taking no notice of
anybody. Why he should have been so discomposed by a
trifle I cannot say—but he was seriously
discomposed, beyond all doubt.
Upon the whole, it will be best, perhaps, if I
abstain from forming a decisive opinion of his
manners, language, and conduct in his own house,
until time has enabled him to shake off the
anxieties, whatever they may be, which now evidently
troubled his mind in secret. I will turn over to a
new page, and my pen shall let Laura's husband alone
for the present.
The two guests—the Count and Countess Fosco—come
next in my catalogue. I will dispose of the Countess
first, so as to have done with the woman as soon as
possible.
Laura was certainly not chargeable with any
exaggeration, in writing me word that I should
hardly recognise her aunt again when we met. Never
before have I beheld such a change produced in a
woman by her marriage as has been produced in Madame
Fosco.
As Eleanor Fairlie (aged seven-and-thirty), she
was always talking pretentious nonsense, and always
worrying the unfortunate men with every small
exaction which a vain and foolish woman can impose
on long-suffering male humanity. As Madame Fosco
(aged three-and-forty), she sits for hours together
without saying a word, frozen up in the strangest
manner in herself. The hideously ridiculous
love-locks which used to hang on either side of her
face are now replaced by stiff little rows of very
short curls, of the sort one sees in old-fashioned
wigs. A plain, matronly cap covers her head, and
makes her look, for the first time in her life since
I remember her, like a decent woman. Nobody (putting
her husband out of the question, of course) now sees
in her, what everybody once saw—I mean the structure
of the female skeleton, in the upper regions of the
collar-bones and the shoulder-blades. Clad in quiet
black or grey gowns, made high round the
throat—dresses that she would have laughed at, or
screamed at, as the whim of the moment inclined her,
in her maiden days—she sits speechless in corners;
her dry white hands (so dry that the pores of her
skin look chalky) incessantly engaged, either in
monotonous embroidery work or in rolling up endless
cigarettes for the Count's own particular smoking.
On the few occasions when her cold blue eyes are off
her work, they are generally turned on her husband,
with the look of mute submissive inquiry which we
are all familiar with in the eyes of a faithful dog.
The only approach to an inward thaw which I have yet
detected under her outer covering of icy constraint,
has betrayed itself, once or twice, in the form of a
suppressed tigerish jealousy of any woman in the
house (the maids included) to whom the Count speaks,
or on whom he looks with anything approaching to
special interest or attention. Except in this one
particular, she is always, morning, noon, and night,
indoors and out, fair weather or foul, as cold as a
statue, and as impenetrable as the stone out of
which it is cut. For the common purposes of society
the extraordinary change thus produced in her is,
beyond all doubt, a change for the better, seeing
that it has transformed her into a civil, silent,
unobtrusive woman, who is never in the way. How far
she is really reformed or deteriorated in her secret
self, is another question. I have once or twice seen
sudden changes of expression on her pinched lips,
and heard sudden inflexions of tone in her calm
voice, which have led me to suspect that her present
state of suppression may have sealed up something
dangerous in her nature, which used to evaporate
harmlessly in the freedom of her former life. It is
quite possible that I may be altogether wrong in
this idea. My own impression, however, is, that I am
right. Time will show.
And the magician who has wrought this wonderful
transformation—the foreign husband who has tamed
this once wayward English woman till her own
relations hardly know her again—the Count himself?
What of the Count?
This in two words: He looks like a man who could
tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead
of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress. If he
had married me, I should have made his cigarettes,
as his wife does—I should have held my tongue when
he looked at me, as she holds hers.
I am almost afraid to confess it, even to these
secret pages. The man has interested me, has
attracted me, has forced me to like him. In two
short days he has made his way straight into my
favourable estimation, and how he has worked the
miracle is more than I can tell.
It absolutely startles me, now he is in my mind,
to find how plainly I see him!—how much more plainly
than I see Sir Percival, or Mr. Fairlie, or Walter
Hartright, or any other absent person of whom I
think, with the one exception of Laura herself! I
can hear his voice, as if he was speaking at this
moment. I know what his conversation was yesterday,
as well as if I was hearing it now. How am I to
describe him? There are peculiarities in his
personal appearance, his habits, and his amusements,
which I should blame in the boldest terms, or
ridicule in the most merciless manner, if I had seen
them in another man. What is it that makes me unable
to blame them, or to ridicule them in HIM?
For example, he is immensely fat. Before this
time I have always especially disliked corpulent
humanity. I have always maintained that the popular
notion of connecting excessive grossness of size and
excessive good-humour as inseparable allies was
equivalent to declaring, either that no people but
amiable people ever get fat, or that the accidental
addition of so many pounds of flesh has a directly
favourable influence over the disposition of the
person on whose body they accumulate. I have
invariably combated both these absurd assertions by
quoting examples of fat people who were as mean,
vicious, and cruel as the leanest and the worst of
their neighbours. I have asked whether Henry the
Eighth was an amiable character? Whether Pope
Alexander the Sixth was a good man? Whether Mr.
Murderer and Mrs. Murderess Manning were not both
unusually stout people? Whether hired nurses,
proverbially as cruel a set of women as are to be
found in all England, were not, for the most part,
also as fat a set of women as are to be found in all
England?—and so on, through dozens of other
examples, modern and ancient, native and foreign,
high and low. Holding these strong opinions on the
subject with might and main as I do at this moment,
here, nevertheless, is Count Fosco, as fat as Henry
the Eighth himself, established in my favour, at one
day's notice, without let or hindrance from his own
odious corpulence. Marvellous indeed!
Is it his face that has recommended him?
It may be his face. He is a most remarkable
likeness, on a large scale, of the great Napoleon.
His features have Napoleon's magnificent
regularity—his expression recalls the grandly calm,
immovable power of the Great Soldier's face. This
striking resemblance certainly impressed me, to
begin with; but there is something in him besides
the resemblance, which has impressed me more. I
think the influence I am now trying to find is in
his eyes. They are the most unfathomable grey eyes I
ever saw, and they have at times a cold, clear,
beautiful, irresistible glitter in them which forces
me to look at him, and yet causes me sensations,
when I do look, which I would rather not feel. Other
parts of his face and head have their strange
peculiarities. His complexion, for instance, has a
singular sallow-fairness, so much at variance with
the dark-brown colour of his hair, that I suspect
the hair of being a wig, and his face, closely
shaven all over, is smoother and freer from all
marks and wrinkles than mine, though (according to
Sir Percival's account of him) he is close on sixty
years of age. But these are not the prominent
personal characteristics which distinguish him, to
my mind, from all the other men I have ever seen.
The marked peculiarity which singles him out from
the rank and file of humanity lies entirely, so far
as I can tell at present, in the extraordinary
expression and extraordinary power of his eyes.
His manner and his command of our language may
also have assisted him, in some degree, to establish
himself in my good opinion. He has that quiet
deference, that look of pleased, attentive interest
in listening to a woman, and that secret gentleness
in his voice in speaking to a woman, which, say what
we may, we can none of us resist. Here, too, his
unusual command of the English language necessarily
helps him. I had often heard of the extraordinary
aptitude which many Italians show in mastering our
strong, hard, Northern speech; but, until I saw
Count Fosco, I had never supposed it possible that
any foreigner could have spoken English as he speaks
it. There are times when it is almost impossible to
detect, by his accent that he is not a countryman of
our own, and as for fluency, there are very few born
Englishmen who can talk with as few stoppages and
repetitions as the Count. He may construct his
sentences more or less in the foreign way, but I
have never yet heard him use a wrong expression, or
hesitate for a moment in his choice of a word.
All the smallest characteristics of this strange
man have something strikingly original and
perplexingly contradictory in them. Fat as he is and
old as he is, his movements are astonishingly light
and easy. He is as noiseless in a room as any of us
women, and more than that, with all his look of
unmistakable mental firmness and power, he is as
nervously sensitive as the weakest of us. He starts
at chance noises as inveterately as Laura herself.
He winced and shuddered yesterday, when Sir Percival
beat one of the spaniels, so that I felt ashamed of
my own want of tenderness and sensibility by
comparison with the Count.
The relation of this last incident reminds me of
one of his most curious peculiarities, which I have
not yet mentioned—his extraordinary fondness for pet
animals.
Some of these he has left on the Continent, but
he has brought with him to this house a cockatoo,
two canary-birds, and a whole family of white mice.
He attends to all the necessities of these strange
favourites himself, and he has taught the creatures
to be surprisingly fond of him and familiar with
him. The cockatoo, a most vicious and treacherous
bird towards every one else, absolutely seems to
love him. When he lets it out of its cage, it hops
on to his knee, and claws its way up his great big
body, and rubs its top-knot against his sallow
double chin in the most caressing manner imaginable.
He has only to set the doors of the canaries' cages
open, and to call them, and the pretty little
cleverly trained creatures perch fearlessly on his
hand, mount his fat outstretched fingers one by one,
when he tells them to "go upstairs," and sing
together as if they would burst their throats with
delight when they get to the top finger. His white
mice live in a little pagoda of gaily-painted
wirework, designed and made by himself. They are
almost as tame as the canaries, and they are
perpetually let out like the canaries. They crawl
all over him, popping in and out of his waistcoat,
and sitting in couples, white as snow, on his
capacious shoulders. He seems to be even fonder of
his mice than of his other pets, smiles at them, and
kisses them, and calls them by all sorts of
endearing names. If it be possible to suppose an
Englishman with any taste for such childish
interests and amusements as these, that Englishman
would certainly feel rather ashamed of them, and
would be anxious to apologise for them, in the
company of grown-up people. But the Count,
apparently, sees nothing ridiculous in the amazing
contrast between his colossal self and his frail
little pets. He would blandly kiss his white mice
and twitter to his canary-birds amid an assembly of
English fox-hunters, and would only pity them as
barbarians when they were all laughing their loudest
at him.
It seems hardly credible while I am writing it
down, but it is certainly true, that this same man,
who has all the fondness of an old maid for his
cockatoo, and all the small dexterities of an
organ-boy in managing his white mice, can talk, when
anything happens to rouse him, with a daring
independence of thought, a knowledge of books in
every language, and an experience of society in half
the capitals of Europe, which would make him the
prominent personage of any assembly in the civilised
world. This trainer of canary-birds, this architect
of a pagoda for white mice, is (as Sir Percival
himself has told me) one of the first experimental
chemists living, and has discovered, among other
wonderful inventions, a means of petrifying the body
after death, so as to preserve it, as hard as
marble, to the end of time. This fat, indolent,
elderly man, whose nerves are so finely strung that
he starts at chance noises, and winces when he sees
a house-spaniel get a whipping, went into the
stable-yard on the morning after his arrival, and
put his hand on the head of a chained bloodhound—a
beast so savage that the very groom who feeds him
keeps out of his reach. His wife and I were present,
and I shall not forget the scene that followed,
short as it was.
"Mind that dog, sir," said the groom; "he flies
at everybody!" "He does that, my friend," replied
the Count quietly, "because everybody is afraid of
him. Let us see if he flies at me." And he laid his
plump, yellow-white fingers, on which the
canary-birds had been perching ten minutes before,
upon the formidable brute's head, and looked him
straight in the eyes. "You big dogs are all
cowards," he said, addressing the animal
contemptuously, with his face and the dog's within
an inch of each other. "You would kill a poor cat,
you infernal coward. You would fly at a starving
beggar, you infernal coward. Anything that you can
surprise unawares—anything that is afraid of your
big body, and your wicked white teeth, and your
slobbering, bloodthirsty mouth, is the thing you
like to fly at. You could throttle me at this
moment, you mean, miserable bully, and you daren't
so much as look me in the face, because I'm not
afraid of you. Will you think better of it, and try
your teeth in my fat neck? Bah! not you!" He turned
away, laughing at the astonishment of the men in the
yard, and the dog crept back meekly to his kennel.
"Ah! my nice waistcoat!" he said pathetically. "I am
sorry I came here. Some of that brute's slobber has
got on my pretty clean waistcoat." Those words
express another of his incomprehensible oddities. He
is as fond of fine clothes as the veriest fool in
existence, and has appeared in four magnificent
waistcoats already—all of light garish colours, and
all immensely large even for him—in the two days of
his residence at Blackwater Park.
His tact and cleverness in small things are quite
as noticeable as the singular inconsistencies in his
character, and the childish triviality of his
ordinary tastes and pursuits.
I can see already that he means to live on
excellent terms with all of us during the period of
his sojourn in this place. He has evidently
discovered that Laura secretly dislikes him (she
confessed as much to me when I pressed her on the
subject)—but he has also found out that she is
extravagantly fond of flowers. Whenever she wants a
nosegay he has got one to give her, gathered and
arranged by himself, and greatly to my amusement, he
is always cunningly provided with a duplicate,
composed of exactly the same flowers, grouped in
exactly the same way, to appease his icily jealous
wife before she can so much as think herself
aggrieved. His management of the Countess (in
public) is a sight to see. He bows to her, he
habitually addresses her as "my angel," he carries
his canaries to pay her little visits on his fingers
and to sing to her, he kisses her hand when she
gives him his cigarettes; he presents her with
sugar-plums in return, which he puts into her mouth
playfully, from a box in his pocket. The rod of iron
with which he rules her never appears in company—it
is a private rod, and is always kept upstairs.
His method of recommending himself to me is
entirely different. He flatters my vanity by talking
to me as seriously and sensibly as if I was a man.
Yes! I can find him out when I am away from him—I
know he flatters my vanity, when I think of him up
here in my own room—and yet, when I go downstairs,
and get into his company again, he will blind me
again, and I shall be flattered again, just as if I
had never found him out at all! He can manage me as
he manages his wife and Laura, as he managed the
bloodhound in the stable-yard, as he manages Sir
Percival himself, every hour in the day. "My good
Percival! how I like your rough English humour!"—"My
good Percival! how I enjoy your solid English
sense!" He puts the rudest remarks Sir Percival can
make on his effeminate tastes and amusements quietly
away from him in that manner—always calling the
baronet by his Christian name, smiling at him with
the calmest superiority, patting him on the
shoulder, and bearing with him benignantly, as a
good-humoured father bears with a wayward son.
The interest which I really cannot help feeling
in this strangely original man has led me to
question Sir Percival about his past life.
Sir Percival either knows little, or will tell me
little, about it. He and the Count first met many
years ago, at Rome, under the dangerous
circumstances to which I have alluded elsewhere.
Since that time they have been perpetually together
in London, in Paris, and in Vienna—but never in
Italy again; the Count having, oddly enough, not
crossed the frontiers of his native country for
years past. Perhaps he has been made the victim of
some political persecution? At all events, he seems
to be patriotically anxious not to lose sight of any
of his own countrymen who may happen to be in
England. On the evening of his arrival he asked how
far we were from the nearest town, and whether we
knew of any Italian gentlemen who might happen to be
settled there. He is certainly in correspondence
with people on the Continent, for his letters have
all sorts of odd stamps on them, and I saw one for
him this morning, waiting in his place at the
breakfast-table, with a huge, official-looking seal
on it. Perhaps he is in correspondence with his
government? And yet, that is hardly to be reconciled
either with my other idea that he may be a political
exile.
How much I seem to have written about Count
Fosco! And what does it all amount to?—as poor, dear
Mr. Gilmore would ask, in his impenetrable
business-like way I can only repeat that I do
assuredly feel, even on this short acquaintance, a
strange, half-willing, half-unwilling liking for the
Count. He seems to have established over me the same
sort of ascendency which he has evidently gained
over Sir Percival. Free, and even rude, as he may
occasionally be in his manner towards his fat
friend, Sir Percival is nevertheless afraid, as I
can plainly see, of giving any serious offence to
the Count. I wonder whether I am afraid too? I
certainly never saw a man, in all my experience,
whom I should be so sorry to have for an enemy. Is
this because I like him, or because I am afraid of
him? Chi sa?—as Count Fosco might say in his own
language. Who knows?
June 16th.—Something to chronicle to-day besides my own ideas and
impressions. A visitor has arrived—quite unknown to
Laura and to me, and apparently quite unexpected by
Sir Percival.
We were all at lunch, in the room with the new
French windows that open into the verandah, and the
Count (who devours pastry as I have never yet seen
it devoured by any human beings but girls at
boarding-schools) had just amused us by asking
gravely for his fourth tart—when the servant entered
to announce the visitor.
"Mr. Merriman has just come, Sir Percival, and
wishes to see you immediately."
Sir Percival started, and looked at the man with
an expression of angry alarm.
"Mr. Merriman!" he repeated, as if he thought his
own ears must have deceived him.
"Yes, Sir Percival—Mr. Merriman, from London."
"Where is he?"
"In the library, Sir Percival."
He left the table the instant the last answer was
given, and hurried out of the room without saying a
word to any of us.
"Who is Mr. Merriman?" asked Laura, appealing to
me.
"I have not the least idea," was all I could say
in reply.
The Count had finished his fourth tart, and had
gone to a side-table to look after his vicious
cockatoo. He turned round to us with the bird
perched on his shoulder.
"Mr. Merriman is Sir Percival's solicitor," he
said quietly.
Sir Percival's solicitor. It was a perfectly
straightforward answer to Laura's question, and yet,
under the circumstances, it was not satisfactory. If
Mr. Merriman had been specially sent for by his
client, there would have been nothing very wonderful
in his leaving town to obey the summons. But when a
lawyer travels from London to Hampshire without
being sent for, and when his arrival at a
gentleman's house seriously startles the gentleman
himself, it may be safely taken for granted that the
legal visitor is the bearer of some very important
and very unexpected news—news which may be either
very good or very bad, but which cannot, in either
case, be of the common everyday kind.
Laura and I sat silent at the table for a quarter
of an hour or more, wondering uneasily what had
happened, and waiting for the chance of Sir
Percival's speedy return. There were no signs of his
return, and we rose to leave the room.
The Count, attentive as usual, advanced from the
corner in which he had been feeding his cockatoo,
with the bird still perched on his shoulder, and
opened the door for us. Laura and Madame Fosco went
out first. Just as I was on the point of following
them he made a sign with his hand, and spoke to me,
before I passed him, in the oddest manner.
"Yes," he said, quietly answering the unexpressed
idea at that moment in my mind, as if I had plainly
confided it to him in so many words—"yes, Miss
Halcombe, something HAS happened."
I was on the point of answering, "I never said
so," but the vicious cockatoo ruffled his clipped
wings and gave a screech that set all my nerves on
edge in an instant, and made me only too glad to get
out of the room.
I joined Laura at the foot of the stairs. The
thought in her mind was the same as the thought in
mine, which Count Fosco had surprised, and when she
spoke her words were almost the echo of his. She,
too, said to me secretly that she was afraid
something had happened.
III
June 16th.—I have a few lines more to add to this
day's entry before I go to bed to-night.
About two hours after Sir Percival rose from the
luncheon-table to receive his solicitor, Mr.
Merriman, in the library, I left my room alone to
take a walk in the plantations. Just as I was at the
end of the landing the library door opened and the
two gentlemen came out. Thinking it best not to
disturb them by appearing on the stairs, I resolved
to defer going down till they had crossed the hall.
Although they spoke to each other in guarded tones,
their words were pronounced with sufficient
distinctness of utterance to reach my ears.
"Make your mind easy, Sir Percival," I heard the
lawyer say; "it all rests with Lady Glyde."
I had turned to go back to my own room for a
minute or two, but the sound of Laura's name on the
lips of a stranger stopped me instantly. I daresay
it was very wrong and very discreditable to listen,
but where is the woman, in the whole range of our
sex, who can regulate her actions by the abstract
principles of honour, when those principles point
one way, and when her affections, and the interests
which grow out of them, point the other?
I listened—and under similar circumstances I
would listen again—yes! with my ear at the keyhole,
if I could not possibly manage it in any other way.
"You quite understand, Sir Percival," the lawyer
went on. "Lady Glyde is to sign her name in the
presence of a witness—or of two witnesses, if you
wish to be particularly careful—and is then to put
her finger on the seal and say, 'I deliver this as
my act and deed.' If that is done in a week's time
the arrangement will be perfectly successful, and
the anxiety will be all over. If not——"
"What do you mean by 'if not'?" asked Sir
Percival angrily. "If the thing must be done it
SHALL be done. I promise you that, Merriman."
"Just so, Sir Percival—just so; but there are two
alternatives in all transactions, and we lawyers
like to look both of them in the face boldly. If
through any extraordinary circumstance the
arrangement should not be made, I think I may be
able to get the parties to accept bills at three
months. But how the money is to be raised when the
bills fall due——"
"Damn the bills! The money is only to be got in
one way, and in that way, I tell you again, it SHALL
be got. Take a glass of wine, Merriman, before you
go."
"Much obliged, Sir Percival, I have not a moment
to lose if I am to catch the up-train. You will let
me know as soon as the arrangement is complete? and
you will not forget the caution I recommended——"
"Of course I won't. There's the dog-cart at the
door for you. My groom will get you to the station
in no time. Benjamin, drive like mad! Jump in. If
Mr. Merriman misses the train you lose your place.
Hold fast, Merriman, and if you are upset trust to
the devil to save his own." With that parting
benediction the baronet turned about and walked back
to the library.
I had not heard much, but the little that had
reached my ears was enough to make me feel uneasy.
The "something" that "had happened" was but too
plainly a serious money embarrassment, and Sir
Percival's relief from it depended upon Laura. The
prospect of seeing her involved in her husband's
secret difficulties filled me with dismay,
exaggerated, no doubt, by my ignorance of business
and my settled distrust of Sir Percival. Instead of
going out, as I proposed, I went back immediately to
Laura's room to tell her what I had heard.
She received my bad news so composedly as to
surprise me. She evidently knows more of her
husband's character and her husband's embarrassments
than I have suspected up to this time.
"I feared as much," she said, "when I heard of
that strange gentleman who called, and declined to
leave his name."
"Who do you think the gentleman was, then?" I
asked.
"Some person who has heavy claims on Sir
Percival," she answered, "and who has been the cause
of Mr. Merriman's visit here to-day."
"Do you know anything about those claims?"
"No, I know no particulars."
"You will sign nothing, Laura, without first
looking at it?"
"Certainly not, Marian. Whatever I can harmlessly
and honestly do to help him I will do—for the sake
of making your life and mine, love, as easy and as
happy as possible. But I will do nothing ignorantly,
which we might, one day, have reason to feel ashamed
of. Let us say no more about it now. You have got
your hat on—suppose we go and dream away the
afternoon in the grounds?"
On leaving the house we directed our steps to the
nearest shade.
As we passed an open space among the trees in
front of the house, there was Count Fosco, slowly
walking backwards and forwards on the grass, sunning
himself in the full blaze of the hot June afternoon.
He had a broad straw hat on, with a violet-coloured
ribbon round it. A blue blouse, with profuse white
fancy-work over the bosom, covered his prodigious
body, and was girt about the place where his waist
might once have been with a broad scarlet leather
belt. Nankeen trousers, displaying more white
fancy-work over the ankles, and purple morocco
slippers, adorned his lower extremities. He was
singing Figaro's famous song in the Barber of
Seville, with that crisply fluent vocalisation which
is never heard from any other than an Italian
throat, accompanying himself on the concertina,
which he played with ecstatic throwings-up of his
arms, and graceful twistings and turnings of his
head, like a fat St. Cecilia masquerading in male
attire. "Figaro qua! Figaro la! Figaro su! Figaro
giu!" sang the Count, jauntily tossing up the
concertina at arm's length, and bowing to us, on one
side of the instrument, with the airy grace and
elegance of Figaro himself at twenty years of age.
"Take my word for it, Laura, that man knows
something of Sir Percival's embarrassments," I said,
as we returned the Count's salutation from a safe
distance.
"What makes you think that?" she asked.
"How should he have known, otherwise, that Mr.
Merriman was Sir Percival's solicitor?" I rejoined.
"Besides, when I followed you out of the
luncheon-room, he told me, without a single word of
inquiry on my part, that something had happened.
Depend upon it, he knows more than we do."
"Don't ask him any questions if he does. Don't
take him into our confidence!"
"You seem to dislike him, Laura, in a very
determined manner. What has he said or done to
justify you?"
"Nothing, Marian. On the contrary, he was all
kindness and attention on our journey home, and he
several times checked Sir Percival's outbreaks of
temper, in the most considerate manner towards me.
Perhaps I dislike him because he has so much more
power over my husband than I have. Perhaps it hurts
my pride to be under any obligations to his
interference. All I know is, that I DO dislike him."
The rest of the day and evening passed quietly
enough. The Count and I played at chess. For the
first two games he politely allowed me to conquer
him, and then, when he saw that I had found him out,
begged my pardon, and at the third game checkmated
me in ten minutes. Sir Percival never once referred,
all through the evening, to the lawyer's visit. But
either that event, or something else, had produced a
singular alteration for the better in him. He was as
polite and agreeable to all of us, as he used to be
in the days of his probation at Limmeridge, and he
was so amazingly attentive and kind to his wife,
that even icy Madame Fosco was roused into looking
at him with a grave surprise. What does this mean? I
think I can guess—I am afraid Laura can guess—and I
am sure Count Fosco knows. I caught Sir Percival
looking at him for approval more than once in the
course of the evening.
June 17th.—A day of events. I most fervently hope I may not have to
add, a day of disasters as well.
Sir Percival was as silent at breakfast as he had
been the evening before, on the subject of the
mysterious "arrangement" (as the lawyer called it)
which is hanging over our heads. An hour afterwards,
however, he suddenly entered the morning-room, where
his wife and I were waiting, with our hats on, for
Madame Fosco to join us, and inquired for the Count.
"We expect to see him here directly," I said.
"The fact is," Sir Percival went on, walking
nervously about the room, "I want Fosco and his wife
in the library, for a mere business formality, and I
want you there, Laura, for a minute too." He
stopped, and appeared to notice, for the first time,
that we were in our walking costume. "Have you just
come in?" he asked, "or were you just going out?"
"We were all thinking of going to the lake this
morning," said Laura. "But if you have any other
arrangement to propose——"
"No, no," he answered hastily. "My arrangement
can wait. After lunch will do as well for it as
after breakfast. All going to the lake, eh? A good
idea. Let's have an idle morning—I'll be one of the
party."
There was no mistaking his manner, even if it had
been possible to mistake the uncharacteristic
readiness which his words expressed, to submit his
own plans and projects to the convenience of others.
He was evidently relieved at finding any excuse for
delaying the business formality in the library, to
which his own words had referred. My heart sank
within me as I drew the inevitable inference.
The Count and his wife joined us at that moment.
The lady had her husband's embroidered
tobacco-pouch, and her store of paper in her hand,
for the manufacture of the eternal cigarettes. The
gentleman, dressed, as usual, in his blouse and
straw hat, carried the gay little pagoda-cage, with
his darling white mice in it, and smiled on them,
and on us, with a bland amiability which it was
impossible to resist.
"With your kind permission," said the Count, "I
will take my small family here—my
poor-little-harmless-pretty-Mouseys, out for an
airing along with us. There are dogs about the
house, and shall I leave my forlorn white children
at the mercies of the dogs? Ah, never!"
He chirruped paternally at his small white
children through the bars of the pagoda, and we all
left the house for the lake.
In the plantation Sir Percival strayed away from
us. It seems to be part of his restless disposition
always to separate himself from his companions on
these occasions, and always to occupy himself when
he is alone in cutting new walking-sticks for his
own use. The mere act of cutting and lopping at
hazard appears to please him. He has filled the
house with walking-sticks of his own making, not one
of which he ever takes up for a second time. When
they have been once used his interest in them is all
exhausted, and he thinks of nothing but going on and
making more.
At the old boat-house he joined us again. I will
put down the conversation that ensued when we were
all settled in our places exactly as it passed. It
is an important conversation, so far as I am
concerned, for it has seriously disposed me to
distrust the influence which Count Fosco has
exercised over my thoughts and feelings, and to
resist it for the future as resolutely as I can.
The boat-house was large enough to hold us all,
but Sir Percival remained outside trimming the last
new stick with his pocket-axe. We three women found
plenty of room on the large seat. Laura took her
work, and Madame Fosco began her cigarettes. I, as
usual, had nothing to do. My hands always were, and
always will be, as awkward as a man's. The Count
good-humouredly took a stool many sizes too small
for him, and balanced himself on it with his back
against the side of the shed, which creaked and
groaned under his weight. He put the pagoda-cage on
his lap, and let out the mice to crawl over him as
usual. They are pretty, innocent-looking little
creatures, but the sight of them creeping about a
man's body is for some reason not pleasant to me. It
excites a strange responsive creeping in my own
nerves, and suggests hideous ideas of men dying in
prison with the crawling creatures of the dungeon
preying on them undisturbed.
The morning was windy and cloudy, and the rapid
alternations of shadow and sunlight over the waste
of the lake made the view look doubly wild, weird,
and gloomy.
"Some people call that picturesque," said Sir
Percival, pointing over the wide prospect with his
half-finished walking-stick. "I call it a blot on a
gentleman's property. In my great-grandfather's time
the lake flowed to this place. Look at it now! It is
not four feet deep anywhere, and it is all puddles
and pools. I wish I could afford to drain it, and
plant it all over. My bailiff (a superstitious
idiot) says he is quite sure the lake has a curse on
it, like the Dead Sea. What do you think, Fosco? It
looks just the place for a murder, doesn't it?"
"My good Percival," remonstrated the Count. "What
is your solid English sense thinking of? The water
is too shallow to hide the body, and there is sand
everywhere to print off the murderer's footsteps. It
is, upon the whole, the very worst place for a
murder that I ever set my eyes on."
"Humbug!" said Sir Percival, cutting away
fiercely at his stick. "You know what I mean. The
dreary scenery, the lonely situation. If you choose
to understand me, you can—if you don't choose, I am
not going to trouble myself to explain my meaning."
"And why not," asked the Count, "when your
meaning can be explained by anybody in two words? If
a fool was going to commit a murder, your lake is
the first place he would choose for it. If a wise
man was going to commit a murder, your lake is the
last place he would choose for it. Is that your
meaning? If it is, there is your explanation for you
ready made. Take it, Percival, with your good
Fosco's blessing."
Laura looked at the Count with her dislike for
him appearing a little too plainly in her face. He
was so busy with his mice that he did not notice
her.
"I am sorry to hear the lake-view connected with
anything so horrible as the idea of murder," she
said. "And if Count Fosco must divide murderers into
classes, I think he has been very unfortunate in his
choice of expressions. To describe them as fools
only seems like treating them with an indulgence to
which they have no claim. And to describe them as
wise men sounds to me like a downright contradiction
in terms. I have always heard that truly wise men
are truly good men, and have a horror of crime."
"My dear lady," said the Count, "those are
admirable sentiments, and I have seen them stated at
the tops of copy-books." He lifted one of the white
mice in the palm of his hand, and spoke to it in his
whimsical way. "My pretty little smooth white
rascal," he said, "here is a moral lesson for you. A
truly wise mouse is a truly good mouse. Mention
that, if you please, to your companions, and never
gnaw at the bars of your cage again as long as you
live."
"It is easy to turn everything into ridicule,"
said Laura resolutely; "but you will not find it
quite so easy, Count Fosco, to give me an instance
of a wise man who has been a great criminal."
The Count shrugged his huge shoulders, and smiled
on Laura in the friendliest manner.
"Most true!" he said. "The fool's crime is the
crime that is found out, and the wise man's crime is
the crime that is NOT found out. If I could give you
an instance, it would not be the instance of a wise
man. Dear Lady Glyde, your sound English common
sense has been too much for me. It is checkmate for
me this time, Miss Halcombe—ha?"
"Stand to your guns, Laura," sneered Sir
Percival, who had been listening in his place at the
door. "Tell him next, that crimes cause their own
detection. There's another bit of copy-book morality
for you, Fosco. Crimes cause their own detection.
What infernal humbug!"
"I believe it to be true," said Laura quietly.
Sir Percival burst out laughing, so violently, so
outrageously, that he quite startled us all—the
Count more than any of us.
"I believe it too," I said, coming to Laura's
rescue.
Sir Percival, who had been unaccountably amused
at his wife's remark, was just as unaccountably
irritated by mine. He struck the new stick savagely
on the sand, and walked away from us.
"Poor dear Percival!" cried Count Fosco, looking
after him gaily, "he is the victim of English
spleen. But, my dear Miss Halcombe, my dear Lady
Glyde, do you really believe that crimes cause their
own detection? And you, my angel," he continued,
turning to his wife, who had not uttered a word yet,
"do you think so too?"
"I wait to be instructed," replied the Countess,
in tones of freezing reproof, intended for Laura and
me, "before I venture on giving my opinion in the
presence of well-informed men."
"Do you, indeed?" I said. "I remember the time,
Countess, when you advocated the Rights of Women,
and freedom of female opinion was one of them."
"What is your view of the subject, Count?" asked
Madame Fosco, calmly proceeding with her cigarettes,
and not taking the least notice of me.
The Count stroked one of his white mice
reflectively with his chubby little finger before he
answered.
"It is truly wonderful," he said, "how easily
Society can console itself for the worst of its
shortcomings with a little bit of clap-trap. The
machinery it has set up for the detection of crime
is miserably ineffective—and yet only invent a moral
epigram, saying that it works well, and you blind
everybody to its blunders from that moment. Crimes
cause their own detection, do they? And murder will
out (another moral epigram), will it? Ask Coroners
who sit at inquests in large towns if that is true,
Lady Glyde. Ask secretaries of life-assurance
companies if that is true, Miss Halcombe. Read your
own public journals. In the few cases that get into
the newspapers, are there not instances of slain
bodies found, and no murderers ever discovered?
Multiply the cases that are reported by the cases
that are NOT reported, and the bodies that are found
by the bodies that are NOT found, and what
conclusion do you come to? This. That there are
foolish criminals who are discovered, and wise
criminals who escape. The hiding of a crime, or the
detection of a crime, what is it? A trial of skill
between the police on one side, and the individual
on the other. When the criminal is a brutal,
ignorant fool, the police in nine cases out of ten
win. When the criminal is a resolute, educated,
highly-intelligent man, the police in nine cases out
of ten lose. If the police win, you generally hear
all about it. If the police lose, you generally hear
nothing. And on this tottering foundation you build
up your comfortable moral maxim that Crime causes
its own detection! Yes—all the crime you know of.
And what of the rest?"
"Devilish true, and very well put," cried a voice
at the entrance of the boat-house. Sir Percival had
recovered his equanimity, and had come back while we
were listening to the Count.
"Some of it may be true," I said, "and all of it
may be very well put. But I don't see why Count
Fosco should celebrate the victory of the criminal
over Society with so much exultation, or why you,
Sir Percival, should applaud him so loudly for doing
it."
"Do you hear that, Fosco?" asked Sir Percival.
"Take my advice, and make your peace with your
audience. Tell them virtue's a fine thing—they like
that, I can promise you."
The Count laughed inwardly and silently, and two
of the white mice in his waistcoat, alarmed by the
internal convulsion going on beneath them, darted
out in a violent hurry, and scrambled into their
cage again.
"The ladies, my good Percival, shall tell me
about virtue," he said. "They are better authorities
than I am, for they know what virtue is, and I
don't."
"You hear him?" said Sir Percival. "Isn't it
awful?"
"It is true," said the Count quietly. "I am a
citizen of the world, and I have met, in my time,
with so many different sorts of virtue, that I am
puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right
sort and which is the wrong. Here, in England, there
is one virtue. And there, in China, there is another
virtue. And John Englishman says my virtue is the
genuine virtue. And John Chinaman says my virtue is
the genuine virtue. And I say Yes to one, or No to
the other, and am just as much bewildered about it
in the case of John with the top-boots as I am in
the case of John with the pigtail. Ah, nice little
Mousey! come, kiss me. What is your own private
notion of a virtuous man, my pret-pret-pretty? A man
who keeps you warm, and gives you plenty to eat. And
a good notion, too, for it is intelligible, at the
least."
"Stay a minute, Count," I interposed. "Accepting
your illustration, surely we have one unquestionable
virtue in England which is wanting in China. The
Chinese authorities kill thousands of innocent
people on the most frivolous pretexts. We in England
are free from all guilt of that kind—we commit no
such dreadful crime—we abhor reckless bloodshed with
all our hearts."
"Quite right, Marian," said Laura. "Well thought
of, and well expressed."
"Pray allow the Count to proceed," said Madame
Fosco, with stern civility. "You will find, young
ladies, that HE never speaks without having
excellent reasons for all that he says."
"Thank you, my angel," replied the Count. "Have a
bon-bon?" He took out of his pocket a pretty little
inlaid box, and placed it open on the table.
"Chocolat a la Vanille," cried the impenetrable man,
cheerfully rattling the sweetmeats in the box, and
bowing all round. "Offered by Fosco as an act of
homage to the charming society."
"Be good enough to go on, Count," said his wife,
with a spiteful reference to myself. "Oblige me by
answering Miss Halcombe."
"Miss Halcombe is unanswerable," replied the
polite Italian; "that is to say, so far as she goes.
Yes! I agree with her. John Bull does abhor the
crimes of John Chinaman. He is the quickest old
gentleman at finding out faults that are his
neighbours', and the slowest old gentleman at
finding out the faults that are his own, who exists
on the face of creation. Is he so very much better
in this way than the people whom he condemns in
their way? English Society, Miss Halcombe, is as
often the accomplice as it is the enemy of crime.
Yes! yes! Crime is in this country what crime is in
other countries—a good friend to a man and to those
about him as often as it is an enemy. A great rascal
provides for his wife and family. The worse he is
the more he makes them the objects for your
sympathy. He often provides also for himself. A
profligate spendthrift who is always borrowing money
will get more from his friends than the rigidly
honest man who only borrows of them once, under
pressure of the direst want. In the one case the
friends will not be at all surprised, and they will
give. In the other case they will be very much
surprised, and they will hesitate. Is the prison
that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of his career
a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that
Mr. Honesty lives in at the end of his career? When
John-Howard-Philanthropist wants to relieve misery
he goes to find it in prisons, where crime is
wretched—not in huts and hovels, where virtue is
wretched too. Who is the English poet who has won
the most universal sympathy—who makes the easiest of
all subjects for pathetic writing and pathetic
painting? That nice young person who began life with
a forgery, and ended it by a suicide—your dear,
romantic, interesting Chatterton. Which gets on
best, do you think, of two poor starving
dressmakers—the woman who resists temptation and is
honest, or the woman who falls under temptation and
steals? You all know that the stealing is the making
of that second woman's fortune—it advertises her
from length to breadth of good-humoured, charitable
England—and she is relieved, as the breaker of a
commandment, when she would have been left to
starve, as the keeper of it. Come here, my jolly
little Mouse! Hey! presto! pass! I transform you,
for the time being, into a respectable lady. Stop
there, in the palm of my great big hand, my dear,
and listen. You marry the poor man whom you love,
Mouse, and one half your friends pity, and the other
half blame you. And now, on the contrary, you sell
yourself for gold to a man you don't care for, and
all your friends rejoice over you, and a minister of
public worship sanctions the base horror of the
vilest of all human bargains, and smiles and smirks
afterwards at your table, if you are polite enough
to ask him to breakfast. Hey! presto! pass! Be a
mouse again, and squeak. If you continue to be a
lady much longer, I shall have you telling me that
Society abhors crime—and then, Mouse, I shall doubt
if your own eyes and ears are really of any use to
you. Ah! I am a bad man, Lady Glyde, am I not? I say
what other people only think, and when all the rest
of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask
for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears
off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones
beneath. I will get up on my big elephant's legs,
before I do myself any more harm in your amiable
estimations—I will get up and take a little airy
walk of my own. Dear ladies, as your excellent
Sheridan said, I go—and leave my character behind
me."
He got up, put the cage on the table, and paused
for a moment to count the mice in it. "One, two,
three, four——Ha!" he cried, with a look of horror,
"where, in the name of Heaven, is the fifth—the
youngest, the whitest, the most amiable of all—my
Benjamin of mice!"
Neither Laura nor I were in any favorable
disposition to be amused. The Count's glib cynicism
had revealed a new aspect of his nature from which
we both recoiled. But it was impossible to resist
the comical distress of so very large a man at the
loss of so very small a mouse. We laughed in spite
of ourselves; and when Madame Fosco rose to set the
example of leaving the boat-house empty, so that her
husband might search it to its remotest corners, we
rose also to follow her out.
Before we had taken three steps, the Count's
quick eye discovered the lost mouse under the seat
that we had been occupying. He pulled aside the
bench, took the little animal up in his hand, and
then suddenly stopped, on his knees, looking
intently at a particular place on the ground just
beneath him.
When he rose to his feet again, his hand shook so
that he could hardly put the mouse back in the cage,
and his face was of a faint livid yellow hue all
over.
"Percival!" he said, in a whisper. "Percival!
come here."
Sir Percival had paid no attention to any of us
for the last ten minutes. He had been entirely
absorbed in writing figures on the sand, and then
rubbing them out again with the point of his stick.
"What's the matter now?" he asked, lounging
carelessly into the boat-house.
"Do you see nothing there?" said the Count,
catching him nervously by the collar with one hand,
and pointing with the other to the place near which
he had found the mouse.
"I see plenty of dry sand," answered Sir
Percival, "and a spot of dirt in the middle of it."
"Not dirt," whispered the Count, fastening the
other hand suddenly on Sir Percival's collar, and
shaking it in his agitation. "Blood."
Laura was near enough to hear the last word,
softly as he whispered it. She turned to me with a
look of terror.
"Nonsense, my dear," I said. "There is no need to
be alarmed. It is only the blood of a poor little
stray dog."
Everybody was astonished, and everybody's eyes
were fixed on me inquiringly.
"How do you know that?" asked Sir Percival,
speaking first.
"I found the dog here, dying, on the day when you
all returned from abroad," I replied. "The poor
creature had strayed into the plantation, and had
been shot by your keeper."
"Whose dog was it?" inquired Sir Percival. "Not
one of mine?"
"Did you try to save the poor thing?" asked Laura
earnestly. "Surely you tried to save it, Marian?"
"Yes," I said, "the housekeeper and I both did
our best—but the dog was mortally wounded, and he
died under our hands."
"Whose dog was it?" persisted Sir Percival,
repeating his question a little irritably. "One of
mine?"
"No, not one of yours."
"Whose then? Did the housekeeper know?"
The housekeeper's report of Mrs. Catherick's
desire to conceal her visit to Blackwater Park from
Sir Percival's knowledge recurred to my memory the
moment he put that last question, and I half doubted
the discretion of answering it; but in my anxiety to
quiet the general alarm, I had thoughtlessly
advanced too far to draw back, except at the risk of
exciting suspicion, which might only make matters
worse. There was nothing for it but to answer at
once, without reference to results.
"Yes," I said. "The housekeeper knew. She told me
it was Mrs. Catherick's dog."
Sir Percival had hitherto remained at the inner
end of the boat-house with Count Fosco, while I
spoke to him from the door. But the instant Mrs.
Catherick's name passed my lips he pushed by the
Count roughly, and placed himself face to face with
me under the open daylight.
"How came the housekeeper to know it was Mrs.
Catherick's dog?" he asked, fixing his eyes on mine
with a frowning interest and attention, which half
angered, half startled me.
"She knew it," I said quietly, "because Mrs.
Catherick brought the dog with her."
"Brought it with her? Where did she bring it with
her?"
"To this house."
"What the devil did Mrs. Catherick want at this
house?"
The manner in which he put the question was even
more offensive than the language in which he
expressed it. I marked my sense of his want of
common politeness by silently turning away from him.
Just as I moved the Count's persuasive hand was
laid on his shoulder, and the Count's mellifluous
voice interposed to quiet him.
"My dear Percival!—gently—gently!"
Sir Percival looked round in his angriest manner.
The Count only smiled and repeated the soothing
application.
"Gently, my good friend—gently!"
Sir Percival hesitated, followed me a few steps,
and, to my great surprise, offered me an apology.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Halcombe," he said. "I
have been out of order lately, and I am afraid I am
a little irritable. But I should like to know what
Mrs. Catherick could possibly want here. When did
she come? Was the housekeeper the only person who
saw her?"
"The only person," I answered, "so far as I
know."
The Count interposed again.
"In that case why not question the housekeeper?"
he said. "Why not go, Percival, to the fountain-head
of information at once?"
"Quite right!" said Sir Percival. "Of course the
housekeeper is the first person to question.
Excessively stupid of me not to see it myself." With
those words he instantly left us to return to the
house.
The motive of the Count's interference, which had
puzzled me at first, betrayed itself when Sir
Percival's back was turned. He had a host of
questions to put to me about Mrs. Catherick, and the
cause of her visit to Blackwater Park, which he
could scarcely have asked in his friend's presence.
I made my answers as short as I civilly could, for I
had already determined to check the least approach
to any exchanging of confidences between Count Fosco
and myself. Laura, however, unconsciously helped him
to extract all my information, by making inquiries
herself, which left me no alternative but to reply
to her, or to appear in the very unenviable and very
false character of a depositary of Sir Percival's
secrets. The end of it was, that, in about ten
minutes' time, the Count knew as much as I know of
Mrs. Catherick, and of the events which have so
strangely connected us with her daughter, Anne, from
the time when Hartright met with her to this day.
The effect of my information on him was, in one
respect, curious enough.
Intimately as he knows Sir Percival, and closely
as he appears to be associated with Sir Percival's
private affairs in general, he is certainly as far
as I am from knowing anything of the true story of
Anne Catherick. The unsolved mystery in connection
with this unhappy woman is now rendered doubly
suspicious, in my eyes, by the absolute conviction
which I feel, that the clue to it has been hidden by
Sir Percival from the most intimate friend he has in
the world. It was impossible to mistake the eager
curiosity of the Count's look and manner while he
drank in greedily every word that fell from my lips.
There are many kinds of curiosity, I know—but there
is no misinterpreting the curiosity of blank
surprise: if I ever saw it in my life I saw it in
the Count's face.
While the questions and answers were going on, we
had all been strolling quietly back through the
plantation. As soon as we reached the house the
first object that we saw in front of it was Sir
Percival's dog-cart, with the horse put to and the
groom waiting by it in his stable-jacket. If these
unexpected appearances were to be trusted, the
examination of the house-keeper had produced
important results already.
"A fine horse, my friend," said the Count,
addressing the groom with the most engaging
familiarity of manner, "You are going to drive out?"
"I am not going, sir," replied the man, looking
at his stable-jacket, and evidently wondering
whether the foreign gentleman took it for his
livery. "My master drives himself."
"Aha!" said the Count, "does he indeed? I wonder
he gives himself the trouble when he has got you to
drive for him. Is he going to fatigue that nice,
shining, pretty horse by taking him very far
to-day?"
"I don't know, sir," answered the man. "The horse
is a mare, if you please, sir. She's the
highest-couraged thing we've got in the stables. Her
name's Brown Molly, sir, and she'll go till she
drops. Sir Percival usually takes Isaac of York for
the short distances."
"And your shining courageous Brown Molly for the
long?"
"Logical inference, Miss Halcombe," continued the
Count, wheeling round briskly, and addressing me.
"Sir Percival is going a long distance to-day."
I made no reply. I had my own inferences to draw,
from what I knew through the housekeeper and from
what I saw before me, and I did not choose to share
them with Count Fosco.
When Sir Percival was in Cumberland (I thought to
myself), he walked away a long distance, on Anne's
account, to question the family at Todd's Corner.
Now he is in Hampshire, is he going to drive away a
long distance, on Anne's account again, to question
Mrs. Catherick at Welmingham?
We all entered the house. As we crossed the hall
Sir Percival came out from the library to meet us.
He looked hurried and pale and anxious—but for all
that, he was in his most polite mood when he spoke
to us.
"I am sorry to say I am obliged to leave you," he
began—"a long drive—a matter that I can't very well
put off. I shall be back in good time to-morrow—but
before I go I should like that little
business-formality, which I spoke of this morning,
to be settled. Laura, will you come into the
library? It won't take a minute—a mere formality.
Countess, may I trouble you also? I want you and the
Countess, Fosco, to be witnesses to a
signature—nothing more. Come in at once and get it
over."
He held the library door open until they had
passed in, followed them, and shut it softly.
I remained, for a moment afterwards, standing
alone in the hall, with my heart beating fast and my
mind misgiving me sadly. Then I went on to the
staircase, and ascended slowly to my own room.
IV
June 17th.—Just as my hand was on the door of my
room, I heard Sir Percival's voice calling to me
from below.
"I must beg you to come downstairs again," he
said. "It is Fosco's fault, Miss Halcombe, not mine.
He has started some nonsensical objection to his
wife being one of the witnesses, and has obliged me
to ask you to join us in the library."
I entered the room immediately with Sir Percival.
Laura was waiting by the writing-table, twisting and
turning her garden hat uneasily in her hands. Madame
Fosco sat near her, in an arm-chair, imperturbably
admiring her husband, who stood by himself at the
other end of the library, picking off the dead
leaves from the flowers in the window.
The moment I appeared the Count advanced to meet
me, and to offer his explanations.
"A thousand pardons, Miss Halcombe," he said.
"You know the character which is given to my
countrymen by the English? We Italians are all wily
and suspicious by nature, in the estimation of the
good John Bull. Set me down, if you please, as being
no better than the rest of my race. I am a wily
Italian and a suspicious Italian. You have thought
so yourself, dear lady, have you not? Well! it is
part of my wiliness and part of my suspicion to
object to Madame Fosco being a witness to Lady
Glyde's signature, when I am also a witness myself."
"There is not the shadow of a reason for his
objection," interposed Sir Percival. "I have
explained to him that the law of England allows
Madame Fosco to witness a signature as well as her
husband."
"I admit it," resumed the Count. "The law of
England says, Yes, but the conscience of Fosco says,
No." He spread out his fat fingers on the bosom of
his blouse, and bowed solemnly, as if he wished to
introduce his conscience to us all, in the character
of an illustrious addition to the society. "What
this document which Lady Glyde is about to sign may
be," he continued, "I neither know nor desire to
know. I only say this, circumstances may happen in
the future which may oblige Percival, or his
representatives, to appeal to the two witnesses, in
which case it is certainly desirable that those
witnesses should represent two opinions which are
perfectly independent the one of the other. This
cannot be if my wife signs as well as myself,
because we have but one opinion between us, and that
opinion is mine. I will not have it cast in my
teeth, at some future day, that Madame Fosco acted
under my coercion, and was, in plain fact, no
witness at all. I speak in Percival's interest, when
I propose that my name shall appear (as the nearest
friend of the husband), and your name, Miss Halcombe
(as the nearest friend of the wife). I am a Jesuit,
if you please to think so—a splitter of straws—a man
of trifles and crochets and scruples—but you will
humour me, I hope, in merciful consideration for my
suspicious Italian character, and my uneasy Italian
conscience." He bowed again, stepped back a few
paces, and withdrew his conscience from our society
as politely as he had introduced it.
The Count's scruples might have been honourable
and reasonable enough, but there was something in
his manner of expressing them which increased my
unwillingness to be concerned in the business of the
signature. No consideration of less importance than
my consideration for Laura would have induced me to
consent to be a witness at all. One look, however,
at her anxious face decided me to risk anything
rather than desert her.
"I will readily remain in the room," I said. "And
if I find no reason for starting any small scruples
on my side, you may rely on me as a witness."
Sir Percival looked at me sharply, as if he was
about to say something. But at the same moment,
Madame Fosco attracted his attention by rising from
her chair. She had caught her husband's eye, and had
evidently received her orders to leave the room.
"You needn't go," said Sir Percival.
Madame Fosco looked for her orders again, got
them again, said she would prefer leaving us to our
business, and resolutely walked out. The Count lit a
cigarette, went back to the flowers in the window,
and puffed little jets of smoke at the leaves, in a
state of the deepest anxiety about killing the
insects.
Meanwhile Sir Percival unlocked a cupboard
beneath one of the book-cases, and produced from it
a piece of parchment, folded longwise, many times
over. He placed it on the table, opened the last
fold only, and kept his hand on the rest. The last
fold displayed a strip of blank parchment with
little wafers stuck on it at certain places. Every
line of the writing was hidden in the part which he
still held folded up under his hand. Laura and I
looked at each other. Her face was pale, but it
showed no indecision and no fear.
Sir Percival dipped a pen in ink, and handed it
to his wife. "Sign your name there," he said,
pointing to the place. "You and Fosco are to sign
afterwards, Miss Halcombe, opposite those two
wafers. Come here, Fosco! witnessing a signature is
not to be done by mooning out of window and smoking
into the flowers."
The Count threw away his cigarette, and joined us
at the table, with his hands carelessly thrust into
the scarlet belt of his blouse, and his eyes
steadily fixed on Sir Percival's face. Laura, who
was on the other side of her husband, with the pen
in her hand, looked at him too. He stood between
them holding the folded parchment down firmly on the
table, and glancing across at me, as I sat opposite
to him, with such a sinister mixture of suspicion
and embarrassment on his face that he looked more
like a prisoner at the bar than a gentleman in his
own house.
"Sign there," he repeated, turning suddenly on
Laura, and pointing once more to the place on the
parchment.
"What is it I am to sign?" she asked quietly.
"I have no time to explain," he answered. "The
dog-cart is at the door, and I must go directly.
Besides, if I had time, you wouldn't understand. It
is a purely formal document, full of legal
technicalities, and all that sort of thing. Come!
come! sign your name, and let us have done as soon
as possible."
"I ought surely to know what I am signing, Sir
Percival, before I write my name?"
"Nonsense! What have women to do with business? I
tell you again, you can't understand it."
"At any rate, let me try to understand it.
Whenever Mr. Gilmore had any business for me to do,
he always explained it first, and I always
understood him."
"I dare say he did. He was your servant, and was
obliged to explain. I am your husband, and am NOT
obliged. How much longer do you mean to keep me
here? I tell you again, there is no time for reading
anything—the dog-cart is waiting at the door. Once
for all, will you sign or will you not?"
She still had the pen in her hand, but she made
no approach to signing her name with it.
"If my signature pledges me to anything," she
said, "surely I have some claim to know what that
pledge is?"
He lifted up the parchment, and struck it angrily
on the table.
"Speak out!" he said. "You were always famous for
telling the truth. Never mind Miss Halcombe, never
mind Fosco—say, in plain terms, you distrust me."
The Count took one of his hands out of his belt
and laid it on Sir Percival's shoulder. Sir Percival
shook it off irritably. The Count put it on again
with unruffled composure.
"Control your unfortunate temper, Percival," he
said "Lady Glyde is right."
"Right!" cried Sir Percival. "A wife right in
distrusting her husband!"
"It is unjust and cruel to accuse me of
distrusting you," said Laura. "Ask Marian if I am
not justified in wanting to know what this writing
requires of me before I sign it."
"I won't have any appeals made to Miss Halcombe,"
retorted Sir Percival. "Miss Halcombe has nothing to
do with the matter."
I had not spoken hitherto, and I would much
rather not have spoken now. But the expression of
distress in Laura's face when she turned it towards
me, and the insolent injustice of her husband's
conduct, left me no other alternative than to give
my opinion, for her sake, as soon as I was asked for
it.
"Excuse me, Sir Percival," I said—"but as one of
the witnesses to the signature, I venture to think
that I HAVE something to do with the matter. Laura's
objection seems to me a perfectly fair one, and
speaking for myself only, I cannot assume the
responsibility of witnessing her signature, unless
she first understands what the writing is which you
wish her to sign."
"A cool declaration, upon my soul!" cried Sir
Percival. "The next time you invite yourself to a
man's house, Miss Halcombe, I recommend you not to
repay his hospitality by taking his wife's side
against him in a matter that doesn't concern you."
I started to my feet as suddenly as if he had
struck me. If I had been a man, I would have knocked
him down on the threshold of his own door, and have
left his house, never on any earthly consideration
to enter it again. But I was only a woman—and I
loved his wife so dearly!
Thank God, that faithful love helped me, and I
sat down again without saying a word. SHE knew what
I had suffered and what I had suppressed. She ran
round to me, with the tears streaming from her eyes.
"Oh, Marian!" she whispered softly. "If my mother
had been alive, she could have done no more for me!"
"Come back and sign!" cried Sir Percival from the
other side of the table.
"Shall I?" she asked in my ear; "I will, if you
tell me."
"No," I answered. "The right and the truth are
with you—sign nothing, unless you have read it
first."
"Come back and sign!" he reiterated, in his
loudest and angriest tones.
The Count, who had watched Laura and me with a
close and silent attention, interposed for the
second time.
"Percival!" he said. "I remember that I am in the
presence of ladies. Be good enough, if you please,
to remember it too."
Sir Percival turned on him speechless with
passion. The Count's firm hand slowly tightened its
grasp on his shoulder, and the Count's steady voice
quietly repeated, "Be good enough, if you please, to
remember it too."
They both looked at each other. Sir Percival
slowly drew his shoulder from under the Count's
hand, slowly turned his face away from the Count's
eyes, doggedly looked down for a little while at the
parchment on the table, and then spoke, with the
sullen submission of a tamed animal, rather than the
becoming resignation of a convinced man.
"I don't want to offend anybody," he said, "but
my wife's obstinacy is enough to try the patience of
a saint. I have told her this is merely a formal
document—and what more can she want? You may say
what you please, but it is no part of a woman's duty
to set her husband at defiance. Once more, Lady
Glyde, and for the last time, will you sign or will
you not?"
Laura returned to his side of the table, and took
up the pen again.
"I will sign with pleasure," she said, "if you
will only treat me as a responsible being. I care
little what sacrifice is required of me, if it will
affect no one else, and lead to no ill results—"
"Who talked of a sacrifice being required of
You?" he broke in, with a half-suppressed return of
his former violence.
"I only meant," she resumed, "that I would refuse
no concession which I could honourably make. If I
have a scruple about signing my name to an
engagement of which I know nothing, why should you
visit it on me so severely? It is rather hard, I
think, to treat Count Fosco's scruples so much more
indulgently than you have treated mine."
This unfortunate, yet most natural, reference to
the Count's extraordinary power over her husband,
indirect as it was, set Sir Percival's smouldering
temper on fire again in an instant.
"Scruples!" he repeated. "YOUR scruples! It is
rather late in the day for you to be scrupulous. I
should have thought you had got over all weakness of
that sort, when you made a virtue of necessity by
marrying me."
The instant he spoke those words, Laura threw
down the pen—looked at him with an expression in her
eyes which, throughout all my experience of her, I
had never seen in them before, and turned her back
on him in dead silence.
This strong expression of the most open and the
most bitter contempt was so entirely unlike herself,
so utterly out of her character, that it silenced us
all. There was something hidden, beyond a doubt,
under the mere surface-brutality of the words which
her husband had just addressed to her. There was
some lurking insult beneath them, of which I was
wholly ignorant, but which had left the mark of its
profanation so plainly on her face that even a
stranger might have seen it.
The Count, who was no stranger, saw it as
distinctly as I did. When I left my chair to join
Laura, I heard him whisper under his breath to Sir
Percival, "You idiot!"
Laura walked before me to the door as I advanced,
and at the same time her husband spoke to her once
more.
"You positively refuse, then, to give me your
signature?" he said, in the altered tone of a man
who was conscious that he had let his own licence of
language seriously injure him.
"After what you have just said to me," she
replied firmly, "I refuse my signature until I have
read every line in that parchment from the first
word to the last. Come away, Marian, we have
remained here long enough."
"One moment!" interposed the Count before Sir
Percival could speak again—"one moment, Lady Glyde,
I implore you!"
Laura would have left the room without noticing
him, but I stopped her.
"Don't make an enemy of the Count!" I whispered.
"Whatever you do, don't make an enemy of the Count!"
She yielded to me. I closed the door again, and
we stood near it waiting. Sir Percival sat down at
the table, with his elbow on the folded parchment,
and his head resting on his clenched fist. The Count
stood between us—master of the dreadful position in
which we were placed, as he was master of everything
else.
"Lady Glyde," he said, with a gentleness which
seemed to address itself to our forlorn situation
instead of to ourselves, "pray pardon me if I
venture to offer one suggestion, and pray believe
that I speak out of my profound respect and my
friendly regard for the mistress of this house." He
turned sharply towards Sir Percival. "Is it
absolutely necessary," he asked "that this thing
here, under your elbow, should be signed to-day?"
"It is necessary to my plans and wishes,"
returned the other sulkily. "But that consideration,
as you may have noticed, has no influence with Lady
Glyde."
"Answer my plain question plainly. Can the
business of the signature be put off till
to-morrow—Yes or No?"
"Yes, if you will have it so."
"Then what are you wasting your time for here?
Let the signature wait till to-morrow—let it wait
till you come back."
Sir Percival looked up with a frown and an oath.
"You are taking a tone with me that I don't
like," he said. "A tone I won't bear from any man."
"I am advising you for your good," returned the
Count, with a smile of quiet contempt. "Give
yourself time—give Lady Glyde time. Have you
forgotten that your dog-cart is waiting at the door?
My tone surprises you—ha? I dare say it does—it is
the tone of a man who can keep his temper. How many
doses of good advice have I given you in my time?
More than you can count. Have I ever been wrong? I
defy you to quote me an instance of it. Go! take
your drive. The matter of the signature can wait
till to-morrow. Let it wait—and renew it when you
come back."
Sir Percival hesitated and looked at his watch.
His anxiety about the secret journey which he was to
take that day, revived by the Count's words, was now
evidently disputing possession of his mind with his
anxiety to obtain Laura's signature. He considered
for a little while, and then got up from his chair.
"It is easy to argue me down," he said, "when I
have no time to answer you. I will take your advice,
Fosco—not because I want it, or believe in it, but
because I can't stop here any longer." He paused,
and looked round darkly at his wife. "If you don't
give me your signature when I come back to-morrow!"
The rest was lost in the noise of his opening the
book-case cupboard again, and locking up the
parchment once more. He took his hat and gloves off
the table, and made for the door. Laura and I drew
back to let him pass. "Remember to-morrow!" he said
to his wife, and went out.
We waited to give him time to cross the hall and
drive away. The Count approached us while we were
standing near the door.
"You have just seen Percival at his worst, Miss
Halcombe," he said. "As his old friend, I am sorry
for him and ashamed of him. As his old friend, I
promise you that he shall not break out to-morrow in
the same disgraceful manner in which he has broken
out to-day."
Laura had taken my arm while he was speaking and
she pressed it significantly when he had done. It
would have been a hard trial to any woman to stand
by and see the office of apologist for her husband's
misconduct quietly assumed by his male friend in her
own house—and it was a trial to HER. I thanked the
Count civilly, and let her out. Yes! I thanked him:
for I felt already, with a sense of inexpressible
helplessness and humiliation, that it was either his
interest or his caprice to make sure of my
continuing to reside at Blackwater Park, and I knew
after Sir Percival's conduct to me, that without the
support of the Count's influence, I could not hope
to remain there. His influence, the influence of all
others that I dreaded most, was actually the one tie
which now held me to Laura in the hour of her utmost
need!
We heard the wheels of the dog-cart crashing on
the gravel of the drive as we came into the hall.
Sir Percival had started on his journey.
"Where is he going to, Marian?" Laura whispered.
"Every fresh thing he does seems to terrify me about
the future. Have you any suspicions?"
After what she had undergone that morning, I was
unwilling to tell her my suspicions.
"How should I know his secrets?" I said
evasively.
"I wonder if the housekeeper knows?" she
persisted.
"Certainly not," I replied. "She must be quite as
ignorant as we are."
Laura shook her head doubtfully.
"Did you not hear from the housekeeper that there
was a report of Anne Catherick having been seen in
this neighbourhood? Don't you think he may have gone
away to look for her?"
"I would rather compose myself, Laura, by not
thinking about it at all, and after what has
happened, you had better follow my example. Come
into my room, and rest and quiet yourself a little."
We sat down together close to the window, and let
the fragrant summer air breathe over our faces.
"I am ashamed to look at you, Marian," she said,
"after what you submitted to downstairs, for my
sake. Oh, my own love, I am almost heartbroken when
I think of it! But I will try to make it up to you—I
will indeed!"
"Hush! hush!" I replied; "don't talk so. What is
the trifling mortification of my pride compared to
the dreadful sacrifice of your happiness?"
"You heard what he said to me?" she went on
quickly and vehemently. "You heard the words—but you
don't know what they meant—you don't know why I
threw down the pen and turned my back on him." She
rose in sudden agitation, and walked about the room.
"I have kept many things from your knowledge,
Marian, for fear of distressing you, and making you
unhappy at the outset of our new lives. You don't
know how he has used me. And yet you ought to know,
for you saw how he used me to-day. You heard him
sneer at my presuming to be scrupulous—you heard him
say I had made a virtue of necessity in marrying
him." She sat down again, her face flushed deeply,
and her hands twisted and twined together in her
lap. "I can't tell you about it now," she said; "I
shall burst out crying if I tell you now—later,
Marian, when I am more sure of myself. My poor head
aches, darling—aches, aches, aches. Where is your
smelling-bottle? Let me talk to you about yourself.
I wish I had given him my signature, for your sake.
Shall I give it to him to-morrow? I would rather
compromise myself than compromise you. After your
taking my part against him, he will lay all the
blame on you if I refuse again. What shall we do?
Oh, for a friend to help us and advise us!—a friend
we could really trust!"
She sighed bitterly. I saw in her face that she
was thinking of Hartright—saw it the more plainly
because her last words set me thinking of him too.
In six months only from her marriage we wanted the
faithful service he had offered to us in his
farewell words. How little I once thought that we
should ever want it at all!
"We must do what we can to help ourselves," I
said. "Let us try to talk it over calmly, Laura—let
us do all in our power to decide for the best."
Putting what she knew of her husband's
embarrassments and what I had heard of his
conversation with the lawyer together, we arrived
necessarily at the conclusion that the parchment in
the library had been drawn up for the purpose of
borrowing money, and that Laura's signature was
absolutely necessary to fit it for the attainment of
Sir Percival's object.
The second question, concerning the nature of the
legal contract by which the money was to be
obtained, and the degree of personal responsibility
to which Laura might subject herself if she signed
it in the dark, involved considerations which lay
far beyond any knowledge and experience that either
of us possessed. My own convictions led me to
believe that the hidden contents of the parchment
concealed a transaction of the meanest and the most
fraudulent kind.
I had not formed this conclusion in consequence
of Sir Percival's refusal to show the writing or to
explain it, for that refusal might well have
proceeded from his obstinate disposition and his
domineering temper alone. My sole motive for
distrusting his honesty sprang from the change which
I had observed in his language and his manners at
Blackwater Park, a change which convinced me that he
had been acting a part throughout the whole period
of his probation at Limmeridge House. His elaborate
delicacy, his ceremonious politeness which
harmonised so agreeably with Mr. Gilmore's
old-fashioned notions, his modesty with Laura, his
candour with me, his moderation with Mr. Fairlie—all
these were the artifices of a mean, cunning, and
brutal man, who had dropped his disguise when his
practised duplicity had gained its end, and had
openly shown himself in the library on that very
day. I say nothing of the grief which this discovery
caused me on Laura's account, for it is not to be
expressed by any words of mine. I only refer to it
at all, because it decided me to oppose her signing
the parchment, whatever the consequences might be,
unless she was first made acquainted with the
contents.
Under these circumstances, the one chance for us
when to-morrow came was to be provided with an
objection to giving the signature, which might rest
on sufficiently firm commercial or legal grounds to
shake Sir Percival's resolution, and to make him
suspect that we two women understood the laws and
obligations of business as well as himself.
After some pondering, I determined to write to
the only honest man within reach whom we could trust
to help us discreetly in our forlorn situation. That
man was Mr. Gilmore's partner, Mr. Kyrle, who
conducted the business now that our old friend had
been obliged to withdraw from it, and to leave
London on account of his health. I explained to
Laura that I had Mr. Gilmore's own authority for
placing implicit confidence in his partner's
integrity, discretion, and accurate knowledge of all
her affairs, and with her full approval I sat down
at once to write the letter, I began by stating our
position to Mr. Kyrle exactly as it was, and then
asked for his advice in return, expressed in plain,
downright terms which he could comprehend without
any danger of misinterpretations and mistakes. My
letter was as short as I could possibly make it, and
was, I hope, unencumbered by needless apologies and
needless details.
Just as I was about to put the address on the
envelope an obstacle was discovered by Laura, which
in the effort and preoccupation of writing had
escaped my mind altogether.
"How are we to get the answer in time?" she
asked. "Your letter will not be delivered in London
before to-morrow morning, and the post will not
bring the reply here till the morning after."
The only way of overcoming this difficulty was to
have the answer brought to us from the lawyer's
office by a special messenger. I wrote a postscript
to that effect, begging that the messenger might be
despatched with the reply by the eleven o'clock
morning train, which would bring him to our station
at twenty minutes past one, and so enable him to
reach Blackwater Park by two o'clock at the latest.
He was to be directed to ask for me, to answer no
questions addressed to him by any one else, and to
deliver his letter into no hands but mine.
"In case Sir Percival should come back to-morrow
before two o'clock," I said to Laura, "the wisest
plan for you to adopt is to be out in the grounds
all the morning with your book or your work, and not
to appear at the house till the messenger has had
time to arrive with the letter. I will wait here for
him all the morning, to guard against any
misadventures or mistakes. By following this
arrangement I hope and believe we shall avoid being
taken by surprise. Let us go down to the
drawing-room now. We may excite suspicion if we
remain shut up together too long."
"Suspicion?" she repeated. "Whose suspicion can
we excite, now that Sir Percival has left the house?
Do you mean Count Fosco?"
"Perhaps I do, Laura."
"You are beginning to dislike him as much as I
do, Marian."
"No, not to dislike him. Dislike is always more
or less associated with contempt—I can see nothing
in the Count to despise."
"You are not afraid of him, are you?"
"Perhaps I am—a little."
"Afraid of him, after his interference in our
favour to-day!"
"Yes. I am more afraid of his interference than I
am of Sir Percival's violence. Remember what I said
to you in the library. Whatever you do, Laura, don't
make an enemy of the Count!"
We went downstairs. Laura entered the
drawing-room, while I proceeded across the hall,
with my letter in my hand, to put it into the
post-bag, which hung against the wall opposite to
me.
The house door was open, and as I crossed past
it, I saw Count Fosco and his wife standing talking
together on the steps outside, with their faces
turned towards me.
The Countess came into the hall rather hastily,
and asked if I had leisure enough for five minutes'
private conversation. Feeling a little surprised by
such an appeal from such a person, I put my letter
into the bag, and replied that I was quite at her
disposal. She took my arm with unaccustomed
friendliness and familiarity, and instead of leading
me into an empty room, drew me out with her to the
belt of turf which surrounded the large fish-pond.
As we passed the Count on the steps he bowed and
smiled, and then went at once into the house,
pushing the hall door to after him, but not actually
closing it.
The Countess walked me gently round the
fish-pond. I expected to be made the depositary of
some extraordinary confidence, and I was astonished
to find that Madame Fosco's communication for my
private ear was nothing more than a polite assurance
of her sympathy for me, after what had happened in
the library. Her husband had told her of all that
had passed, and of the insolent manner in which Sir
Percival had spoken to me. This information had so
shocked and distressed her, on my account and on
Laura's, that she had made up her mind, if anything
of the sort happened again, to mark her sense of Sir
Percival's outrageous conduct by leaving the house.
The Count had approved of her idea, and she now
hoped that I approved of it too.
I thought this a very strange proceeding on the
part of such a remarkably reserved woman as Madame
Fosco, especially after the interchange of sharp
speeches which had passed between us during the
conversation in the boat-house on that very morning.
However, it was my plain duty to meet a polite and
friendly advance on the part of one of my elders
with a polite and friendly reply. I answered the
Countess accordingly in her own tone, and then,
thinking we had said all that was necessary on
either side, made an attempt to get back to the
house.
But Madame Fosco seemed resolved not to part with
me, and to my unspeakable amazement, resolved also
to talk. Hitherto the most silent of women, she now
persecuted me with fluent conventionalities on the
subject of married life, on the subject of Sir
Percival and Laura, on the subject of her own
happiness, on the subject of the late Mr. Fairlie's
conduct to her in the matter of her legacy, and on
half a dozen other subjects besides, until she had
detained me walking round and round the fish-pond
for more than half an hour, and had quite wearied me
out. Whether she discovered this or not, I cannot
say, but she stopped as abruptly as she had
begun—looked towards the house door, resumed her icy
manner in a moment, and dropped my arm of her own
accord before I could think of an excuse for
accomplishing my own release from her.
As I pushed open the door and entered the hall, I
found myself suddenly face to face with the Count
again. He was just putting a letter into the
post-bag.
After he had dropped it in and had closed the
bag, he asked me where I had left Madame Fosco. I
told him, and he went out at the hall door
immediately to join his wife. His manner when he
spoke to me was so unusually quiet and subdued that
I turned and looked after him, wondering if he were
ill or out of spirits.
Why my next proceeding was to go straight up to
the post-bag and take out my own letter and look at
it again, with a vague distrust on me, and why the
looking at it for the second time instantly
suggested the idea to my mind of sealing the
envelope for its greater security—are mysteries
which are either too deep or too shallow for me to
fathom. Women, as everybody knows, constantly act on
impulses which they cannot explain even to
themselves, and I can only suppose that one of those
impulses was the hidden cause of my unaccountable
conduct on this occasion.
Whatever influence animated me, I found cause to
congratulate myself on having obeyed it as soon as I
prepared to seal the letter in my own room. I had
originally closed the envelope in the usual way by
moistening the adhesive point and pressing it on the
paper beneath, and when I now tried it with my
finger, after a lapse of full three-quarters of an
hour, the envelope opened on the instant, without
sticking or tearing. Perhaps I had fastened it
insufficiently? Perhaps there might have been some
defect in the adhesive gum?
Or, perhaps——No! it is quite revolting enough to
feel that third conjecture stirring in my mind. I
would rather not see it confronting me in plain
black and white.
I almost dread to-morrow—so much depends on my
discretion and self-control. There are two
precautions, at all events, which I am sure not to
forget. I must be careful to keep up friendly
appearances with the Count, and I must be well on my
guard when the messenger from the office comes here
with the answer to my letter.
V
June 17th.—When the dinner hour brought us
together again, Count Fosco was in his usual
excellent spirits. He exerted himself to interest
and amuse us, as if he was determined to efface from
our memories all recollection of what had passed in
the library that afternoon. Lively descriptions of
his adventures in travelling, amusing anecdotes of
remarkable people whom he had met with abroad,
quaint comparisons between the social customs of
various nations, illustrated by examples drawn from
men and women indiscriminately all over Europe,
humorous confessions of the innocent follies of his
own early life, when he ruled the fashions of a
second-rate Italian town, and wrote preposterous
romances on the French model for a second-rate
Italian newspaper—all flowed in succession so easily
and so gaily from his lips, and all addressed our
various curiosities and various interests so
directly and so delicately, that Laura and I
listened to him with as much attention and,
inconsistent as it may seem, with as much admiration
also, as Madame Fosco herself. Women can resist a
man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal
appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot
resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to
them.
After dinner, while the favourable impression
which he had produced on us was still vivid in our
minds, the Count modestly withdrew to read in the
library.
Laura proposed a stroll in the grounds to enjoy
the close of the long evening. It was necessary in
common politeness to ask Madame Fosco to join us,
but this time she had apparently received her orders
beforehand, and she begged we would kindly excuse
her. "The Count will probably want a fresh supply of
cigarettes," she remarked by way of apology, "and
nobody can make them to his satisfaction but
myself." Her cold blue eyes almost warmed as she
spoke the words—she looked actually proud of being
the officiating medium through which her lord and
master composed himself with tobacco-smoke!
Laura and I went out together alone.
It was a misty, heavy evening. There was a sense
of blight in the air; the flowers were drooping in
the garden, and the ground was parched and dewless.
The western heaven, as we saw it over the quiet
trees, was of a pale yellow hue, and the sun was
setting faintly in a haze. Coming rain seemed
near—it would fall probably with the fall of night.
"Which way shall we go?" I asked
"Towards the lake, Marian, if you like," she
answered.
"You seem unaccountably fond, Laura, of that
dismal lake."
"No, not of the lake but of the scenery about it.
The sand and heath and the fir-trees are the only
objects I can discover, in all this large place, to
remind me of Limmeridge. But we will walk in some
other direction if you prefer it."
"I have no favourite walks at Blackwater Park, my
love. One is the same as another to me. Let us go to
the lake—we may find it cooler in the open space
than we find it here."
We walked through the shadowy plantation in
silence. The heaviness in the evening air oppressed
us both, and when we reached the boat-house we were
glad to sit down and rest inside.
A white fog hung low over the lake. The dense
brown line of the trees on the opposite bank
appeared above it, like a dwarf forest floating in
the sky. The sandy ground, shelving downward from
where we sat, was lost mysteriously in the outward
layers of the fog. The silence was horrible. No
rustling of the leaves—no bird's note in the wood—no
cry of water-fowl from the pools of the hidden lake.
Even the croaking of the frogs had ceased to-night.
"It is very desolate and gloomy," said Laura.
"But we can be more alone here than anywhere else."
She spoke quietly and looked at the wilderness of
sand and mist with steady, thoughtful eyes. I could
see that her mind was too much occupied to feel the
dreary impressions from without which had fastened
themselves already on mine.
"I promised, Marian, to tell you the truth about
my married life, instead of leaving you any longer
to guess it for yourself," she began. "That secret
is the first I have ever had from you, love, and I
am determined it shall be the last. I was silent, as
you know, for your sake—and perhaps a little for my
own sake as well. It is very hard for a woman to
confess that the man to whom she has given her whole
life is the man of all others who cares least for
the gift. If you were married yourself, Marian—and
especially if you were happily married—you would
feel for me as no single woman CAN feel, however
kind and true she may be."
What answer could I make? I could only take her
hand and look at her with my whole heart as well as
my eyes would let me.
"How often," she went on, "I have heard you
laughing over what you used to call your 'poverty!'
how often you have made me mock-speeches of
congratulation on my wealth! Oh, Marian, never laugh
again. Thank God for your poverty—it has made you
your own mistress, and has saved you from the lot
that has fallen on ME."
A sad beginning on the lips of a young wife!—sad
in its quiet plain-spoken truth. The few days we had
all passed together at Blackwater Park had been many
enough to show me—to show any one—what her husband
had married her for.
"You shall not be distressed," she said, "by
hearing how soon my disappointments and my trials
began—or even by knowing what they were. It is bad
enough to have them on my memory. If I tell you how
he received the first and last attempt at
remonstrance that I ever made, you will know how he
has always treated me, as well as if I had described
it in so many words. It was one day at Rome when we
had ridden out together to the tomb of Cecilia
Metella. The sky was calm and lovely, and the grand
old ruin looked beautiful, and the remembrance that
a husband's love had raised it in the old time to a
wife's memory, made me feel more tenderly and more
anxiously towards my husband than I had ever felt
yet. 'Would you build such a tomb for ME, Percival?'
I asked him. 'You said you loved me dearly before we
were married, and yet, since that time——' I could
get no farther. Marian! he was not even looking at
me! I pulled down my veil, thinking it best not to
let him see that the tears were in my eyes. I
fancied he had not paid any attention to me, but he
had. He said, 'Come away,' and laughed to himself as
he helped me on to my horse. He mounted his own
horse and laughed again as we rode away. 'If I do
build you a tomb,' he said, 'it will be done with
your own money. I wonder whether Cecilia Metella had
a fortune and paid for hers.' I made no reply—how
could I, when I was crying behind my veil? 'Ah, you
light-complexioned women are all sulky,' he said.
'What do you want? compliments and soft speeches?
Well! I'm in a good humour this morning. Consider
the compliments paid and the speeches said.' Men
little know when they say hard things to us how well
we remember them, and how much harm they do us. It
would have been better for me if I had gone on
crying, but his contempt dried up my tears and
hardened my heart. From that time, Marian, I never
checked myself again in thinking of Walter
Hartright. I let the memory of those happy days,
when we were so fond of each other in secret, come
back and comfort me. What else had I to look to for
consolation? If we had been together you would have
helped me to better things. I know it was wrong,
darling, but tell me if I was wrong without any
excuse."
I was obliged to turn my face from her. "Don't
ask me!" I said. "Have I suffered as you have
suffered? What right have I to decide?"
"I used to think of him," she pursued, dropping
her voice and moving closer to me, "I used to think
of him when Percival left me alone at night to go
among the Opera people. I used to fancy what I might
have been if it had pleased God to bless me with
poverty, and if I had been his wife. I used to see
myself in my neat cheap gown, sitting at home and
waiting for him while he was earning our
bread—sitting at home and working for him and loving
him all the better because I had to work for
him—seeing him come in tired and taking off his hat
and coat for him, and, Marian, pleasing him with
little dishes at dinner that I had learnt to make
for his sake. Oh! I hope he is never lonely enough
and sad enough to think of me and see me as I have
thought of HIM and see HIM!"
As she said those melancholy words, all the lost
tenderness returned to her voice, and all the lost
beauty trembled back into her face. Her eyes rested
as lovingly on the blighted, solitary, ill-omened
view before us, as if they saw the friendly hills of
Cumberland in the dim and threatening sky.
"Don't speak of Walter any more," I said, as soon
as I could control myself. "Oh, Laura, spare us both
the wretchedness of talking of him now!"
She roused herself, and looked at me tenderly.
"I would rather be silent about him for ever,"
she answered, "than cause you a moment's pain."
"It is in your interests," I pleaded; "it is for
your sake that I speak. If your husband heard you——"
"It would not surprise him if he did hear me."
She made that strange reply with a weary calmness
and coldness. The change in her manner, when she
gave the answer, startled me almost as much as the
answer itself.
"Not surprise him!" I repeated. "Laura! remember
what you are saying—you frighten me!"
"It is true," she said; "it is what I wanted to
tell you to-day, when we were talking in your room.
My only secret when I opened my heart to him at
Limmeridge was a harmless secret, Marian—you said so
yourself. The name was all I kept from him, and he
has discovered it."
I heard her, but I could say nothing. Her last
words had killed the little hope that still lived in
me.
"It happened at Rome," she went on, as wearily
calm and cold as ever. "We were at a little party
given to the English by some friends of Sir
Percival's—Mr. and Mrs. Markland. Mrs. Markland had
the reputation of sketching very beautifully, and
some of the guests prevailed on her to show us her
drawings. We all admired them, but something I said
attracted her attention particularly to me. 'Surely
you draw yourself?' she asked. 'I used to draw a
little once,' I answered, 'but I have given it up.'
'If you have once drawn,' she said, 'you may take to
it again one of these days, and if you do, I wish
you would let me recommend you a master.' I said
nothing—you know why, Marian—and tried to change the
conversation. But Mrs. Markland persisted. 'I have
had all sorts of teachers,' she went on, 'but the
best of all, the most intelligent and the most
attentive, was a Mr. Hartright. If you ever take up
your drawing again, do try him as a master. He is a
young man—modest and gentlemanlike—I am sure you
will like him. 'Think of those words being spoken to
me publicly, in the presence of strangers—strangers
who had been invited to meet the bride and
bridegroom! I did all I could to control myself—I
said nothing, and looked down close at the drawings.
When I ventured to raise my head again, my eyes and
my husband's eyes met, and I knew, by his look, that
my face had betrayed me. 'We will see about Mr.
Hartright,' he said, looking at me all the time,
'when we get back to England. I agree with you, Mrs.
Markland—I think Lady Glyde is sure to like him.' He
laid an emphasis on the last words which made my
cheeks burn, and set my heart beating as if it would
stifle me. Nothing more was said. We came away
early. He was silent in the carriage driving back to
the hotel. He helped me out, and followed me
upstairs as usual. But the moment we were in the
drawing-room, he locked the door, pushed me down
into a chair, and stood over me with his hands on my
shoulders. 'Ever since that morning when you made
your audacious confession to me at Limmeridge,' he
said, 'I have wanted to find out the man, and I
found him in your face to-night. Your drawing-master
was the man, and his name is Hartright. You shall
repent it, and he shall repent it, to the last hour
of your lives. Now go to bed and dream of him if you
like, with the marks of my horsewhip on his
shoulders.' Whenever he is angry with me now he
refers to what I acknowledged to him in your
presence with a sneer or a threat. I have no power
to prevent him from putting his own horrible
construction on the confidence I placed in him. I
have no influence to make him believe me, or to keep
him silent. You looked surprised to-day when you
heard him tell me that I had made a virtue of
necessity in marrying him. You will not be surprised
again when you hear him repeat it, the next time he
is out of temper——Oh, Marian! don't! don't! you hurt
me!"
I had caught her in my arms, and the sting and
torment of my remorse had closed them round her like
a vice. Yes! my remorse. The white despair of
Walter's face, when my cruel words struck him to the
heart in the summer-house at Limmeridge, rose before
me in mute, unendurable reproach. My hand had
pointed the way which led the man my sister loved,
step by step, far from his country and his friends.
Between those two young hearts I had stood, to
sunder them for ever, the one from the other, and
his life and her life lay wasted before me alike in
witness of the deed. I had done this, and done it
for Sir Percival Glyde.
For Sir Percival Glyde.
I heard her speaking, and I knew by the tone of her voice that she was
comforting me—I, who deserved nothing but the
reproach of her silence! How long it was before I
mastered the absorbing misery of my own thoughts, I
cannot tell. I was first conscious that she was
kissing me, and then my eyes seemed to wake on a
sudden to their sense of outward things, and I knew
that I was looking mechanically straight before me
at the prospect of the lake.
"It is late," I heard her whisper. "It will be
dark in the plantation." She shook my arm and
repeated, "Marian! it will be dark in the
plantation."
"Give me a minute longer," I said—"a minute, to
get better in."
I was afraid to trust myself to look at her yet,
and I kept my eyes fixed on the view.
It WAS late. The dense brown line of trees in the
sky had faded in the gathering darkness to the faint
resemblance of a long wreath of smoke. The mist over
the lake below had stealthily enlarged, and advanced
on us. The silence was as breathless as ever, but
the horror of it had gone, and the solemn mystery of
its stillness was all that remained.
"We are far from the house," she whispered. "Let
us go back."
She stopped suddenly, and turned her face from me
towards the entrance of the boat-house.
"Marian!" she said, trembling violently. "Do you
see nothing? Look!"
"Where?"
"Down there, below us."
She pointed. My eyes followed her hand, and I saw
it too.
A living figure was moving over the waste of
heath in the distance. It crossed our range of view
from the boat-house, and passed darkly along the
outer edge of the mist. It stopped far off, in front
of us—waited—and passed on; moving slowly, with the
white cloud of mist behind it and above it—slowly,
slowly, till it glided by the edge of the
boat-house, and we saw it no more.
We were both unnerved by what had passed between
us that evening. Some minutes elapsed before Laura
would venture into the plantation, and before I
could make up my mind to lead her back to the house.
"Was it a man or a woman?" she asked in a
whisper, as we moved at last into the dark dampness
of the outer air.
"I am not certain."
"Which do you think?"
"It looked like a woman."
"I was afraid it was a man in a long cloak."
"It may be a man. In this dim light it is not
possible to be certain."
"Wait, Marian! I'm frightened—I don't see the
path. Suppose the figure should follow us?"
"Not at all likely, Laura. There is really
nothing to be alarmed about. The shores of the lake
are not far from the village, and they are free to
any one to walk on by day or night. It is only
wonderful we have seen no living creature there
before."
We were now in the plantation. It was very
dark—so dark, that we found some difficulty in
keeping the path. I gave Laura my arm, and we walked
as fast as we could on our way back.
Before we were half-way through she stopped, and
forced me to stop with her. She was listening.
"Hush," she whispered. "I hear something behind
us."
"Dead leaves," I said to cheer her, "or a twig
blown off the trees."
"It is summer time, Marian, and there is not a
breath of wind. Listen!"
I heard the sound too—a sound like a light
footstep following us.
"No matter who it is, or what it is," I said,
"let us walk on. In another minute, if there is
anything to alarm us, we shall be near enough to the
house to be heard."
We went on quickly—so quickly, that Laura was
breathless by the time we were nearly through the
plantation, and within sight of the lighted windows.
I waited a moment to give her breathing-time.
Just as we were about to proceed she stopped me
again, and signed to me with her hand to listen once
more. We both heard distinctly a long, heavy sigh
behind us, in the black depths of the trees.
"Who's there?" I called out.
There was no answer.
"Who's there?" I repeated.
An instant of silence followed, and then we heard
the light fall of the footsteps again, fainter and
fainter—sinking away into the darkness—sinking,
sinking, sinking—till they were lost in the silence.
We hurried out from the trees to the open lawn
beyond crossed it rapidly; and without another word
passing between us, reached the house.
In the light of the hall-lamp Laura looked at me,
with white cheeks and startled eyes.
"I am half dead with fear," she said. "Who could
it have been?"
"We will try to guess to-morrow," I replied. "In
the meantime say nothing to any one of what we have
heard and seen."
"Why not?"
"Because silence is safe, and we have need of
safety in this house."
I sent Laura upstairs immediately, waited a
minute to take off my hat and put my hair smooth,
and then went at once to make my first
investigations in the library, on pretence of
searching for a book.
There sat the Count, filling out the largest
easy-chair in the house, smoking and reading calmly,
with his feet on an ottoman, his cravat across his
knees, and his shirt collar wide open. And there sat
Madame Fosco, like a quiet child, on a stool by his
side, making cigarettes. Neither husband nor wife
could, by any possibility, have been out late that
evening, and have just got back to the house in a
hurry. I felt that my object in visiting the library
was answered the moment I set eyes on them.
Count Fosco rose in polite confusion and tied his
cravat on when I entered the room.
"Pray don't let me disturb you," I said. "I have
only come here to get a book."
"All unfortunate men of my size suffer from the
heat," said the Count, refreshing himself gravely
with a large green fan. "I wish I could change
places with my excellent wife. She is as cool at
this moment as a fish in the pond outside."
The Countess allowed herself to thaw under the
influence of her husband's quaint comparison. "I am
never warm, Miss Halcombe," she remarked, with the
modest air of a woman who was confessing to one of
her own merits.
"Have you and Lady Glyde been out this evening?"
asked the Count, while I was taking a book from the
shelves to preserve appearances.
"Yes, we went out to get a little air."
"May I ask in what direction?"
"In the direction of the lake—as far as the
boat-house."
"Aha? As far as the boat-house?"
Under other circumstances I might have resented
his curiosity. But to-night I hailed it as another
proof that neither he nor his wife were connected
with the mysterious appearance at the lake.
"No more adventures, I suppose, this evening?" he
went on. "No more discoveries, like your discovery
of the wounded dog?"
He fixed his unfathomable grey eyes on me, with
that cold, clear, irresistible glitter in them which
always forces me to look at him, and always makes me
uneasy while I do look. An unutterable suspicion
that his mind is prying into mine overcomes me at
these times, and it overcame me now.
"No," I said shortly; "no adventures—no
discoveries."
I tried to look away from him and leave the room.
Strange as it seems, I hardly think I should have
succeeded in the attempt if Madame Fosco had not
helped me by causing him to move and look away
first.
"Count, you are keeping Miss Halcombe standing,"
she said.
The moment he turned round to get me a chair, I
seized my opportunity—thanked him—made my
excuses—and slipped out.
An hour later, when Laura's maid happened to be
in her mistress's room, I took occasion to refer to
the closeness of the night, with a view to
ascertaining next how the servants had been passing
their time.
"Have you been suffering much from the heat
downstairs?" I asked.
"No, miss," said the girl, "we have not felt it
to speak of."
"You have been out in the woods then, I suppose?"
"Some of us thought of going, miss. But cook said
she should take her chair into the cool court-yard,
outside the kitchen door, and on second thoughts,
all the rest of us took our chairs out there too."
The housekeeper was now the only person who
remained to be accounted for.
"Is Mrs. Michelson gone to bed yet?" I inquired.
"I should think not, miss," said the girl,
smiling. "Mrs. Michelson is more likely to be
getting up just now than going to bed."
"Why? What do you mean? Has Mrs. Michelson been
taking to her bed in the daytime?"
"No, miss, not exactly, but the next thing to it.
She's been asleep all the evening on the sofa in her
own room."
Putting together what I observed for myself in
the library, and what I have just heard from Laura's
maid, one conclusion seems inevitable. The figure we
saw at the lake was not the figure of Madame Fosco,
of her husband, or of any of the servants. The
footsteps we heard behind us were not the footsteps
of any one belonging to the house.
Who could it have been?
It seems useless to inquire. I cannot even decide
whether the figure was a man's or a woman's. I can
only say that I think it was a woman's.
VI
June 18th.—The misery of self-reproach which I
suffered yesterday evening, on hearing what Laura
told me in the boat-house, returned in the
loneliness of the night, and kept me waking and
wretched for hours.
I lighted my candle at last, and searched through
my old journals to see what my share in the fatal
error of her marriage had really been, and what I
might have once done to save her from it. The result
soothed me a little for it showed that, however
blindly and ignorantly I acted, I acted for the
best. Crying generally does me harm; but it was not
so last night—I think it relieved me. I rose this
morning with a settled resolution and a quiet mind.
Nothing Sir Percival can say or do shall ever
irritate me again, or make me forget for one moment
that I am staying here in defiance of
mortifications, insults, and threats, for Laura's
service and for Laura's sake.
The speculations in which we might have indulged
this morning, on the subject of the figure at the
lake and the footsteps in the plantation, have been
all suspended by a trifling accident which has
caused Laura great regret. She has lost the little
brooch I gave her for a keepsake on the day before
her marriage. As she wore it when we went out
yesterday evening we can only suppose that it must
have dropped from her dress, either in the
boat-house or on our way back. The servants have
been sent to search, and have returned unsuccessful.
And now Laura herself has gone to look for it.
Whether she finds it or not the loss will help to
excuse her absence from the house, if Sir Percival
returns before the letter from Mr. Gilmore's partner
is placed in my hands.
One o'clock has just struck. I am considering
whether I had better wait here for the arrival of
the messenger from London, or slip away quietly, and
watch for him outside the lodge gate.
My suspicion of everybody and everything in this
house inclines me to think that the second plan may
be the best. The Count is safe in the
breakfast-room. I heard him, through the door, as I
ran upstairs ten minutes since, exercising his
canary-birds at their tricks:—"Come out on my little
finger, my pret-pret-pretties! Come out, and hop
upstairs! One, two, three—and up! Three, two,
one—and down! One, two, three—twit-twit-twit-tweet!"
The birds burst into their usual ecstasy of singing,
and the Count chirruped and whistled at them in
return, as if he was a bird himself. My room door is
open, and I can hear the shrill singing and
whistling at this very moment. If I am really to
slip out without being observed, now is my time.
FOUR O'CLOCK. The three hours that have passed since I made my last
entry have turned the whole march of events at
Blackwater Park in a new direction. Whether for good
or for evil, I cannot and dare not decide.
Let me get back first to the place at which I
left off, or I shall lose myself in the confusion of
my own thoughts.
I went out, as I had proposed, to meet the
messenger with my letter from London at the lodge
gate. On the stairs I saw no one. In the hall I
heard the Count still exercising his birds. But on
crossing the quadrangle outside, I passed Madame
Fosco, walking by herself in her favourite circle,
round and round the great fish-pond. I at once
slackened my pace, so as to avoid all appearance of
being in a hurry, and even went the length, for
caution's sake, of inquiring if she thought of going
out before lunch. She smiled at me in the
friendliest manner—said she preferred remaining near
the house, nodded pleasantly, and re-entered the
hall. I looked back, and saw that she had closed the
door before I had opened the wicket by the side of
the carriage gates.
In less than a quarter of an hour I reached the
lodge.
The lane outside took a sudden turn to the left,
ran on straight for a hundred yards or so, and then
took another sharp turn to the right to join the
high-road. Between these two turns, hidden from the
lodge on one side, and from the way to the station
on the other, I waited, walking backwards and
forwards. High hedges were on either side of me, and
for twenty minutes, by my watch, I neither saw nor
heard anything. At the end of that time the sound of
a carriage caught my ear, and I was met, as I
advanced towards the second turning, by a fly from
the railway. I made a sign to the driver to stop. As
he obeyed me a respectable-looking man put his head
out of the window to see what was the matter.
"I beg your pardon," I said, "but am I right in
supposing that you are going to Blackwater Park?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"With a letter for any one?"
"With a letter for Miss Halcombe, ma'am."
"You may give me the letter. I am Miss Halcombe."
The man touched his hat, got out of the fly
immediately, and gave me the letter.
I opened it at once and read these lines. I copy
them here, thinking it best to destroy the original
for caution's sake.
"DEAR MADAM,—Your letter received this morning has
caused me very great anxiety. I will reply to it as
briefly and plainly as possible.
"My careful consideration of the
statement made by yourself, and my knowledge of Lady
Glyde's position, as defined in the settlement, lead
me, I regret to say, to the conclusion that a loan
of the trust money to Sir Percival (or, in other
words, a loan of some portion of the twenty thousand
pounds of Lady Glyde's fortune) is in contemplation,
and that she is made a party to the deed, in order
to secure her approval of a flagrant breach of
trust, and to have her signature produced against
her if she should complain hereafter. It is
impossible, on any other supposition, to account,
situated as she is, for her execution to a deed of
any kind being wanted at all.
"In the event of Lady Glyde's
signing such a document, as I am compelled to
suppose the deed in question to be, her trustees
would be at liberty to advance money to Sir Percival
out of her twenty thousand pounds. If the amount so
lent should not be paid back, and if Lady Glyde
should have children, their fortune will then be
diminished by the sum, large or small, so advanced.
In plainer terms still, the transaction, for
anything that Lady Glyde knows to the contrary, may
be a fraud upon her unborn children.
"Under these serious
circumstances, I would recommend Lady Glyde to
assign as a reason for withholding her signature,
that she wishes the deed to be first submitted to
myself, as her family solicitor (in the absence of
my partner, Mr. Gilmore). No reasonable objection
can be made to taking this course—for, if the
transaction is an honourable one, there will
necessarily be no difficulty in my giving my
approval.
"Sincerely assuring you of my
readiness to afford any additional help or advice
that may be wanted, I beg to remain, Madam, your
faithful servant,
"WILLIAM KYRLE."
I read this kind and sensible letter very thankfully. It supplied Laura
with a reason for objecting to the signature which
was unanswerable, and which we could both of us
understand. The messenger waited near me while I was
reading to receive his directions when I had done.
"Will you be good enough to say that I understand
the letter, and that I am very much obliged?" I
said. "There is no other reply necessary at
present."
Exactly at the moment when I was speaking those
words, holding the letter open in my hand, Count
Fosco turned the corner of the lane from the
high-road, and stood before me as if he had sprung
up out of the earth.
The suddenness of his appearance, in the very
last place under heaven in which I should have
expected to see him, took me completely by surprise.
The messenger wished me good-morning, and got into
the fly again. I could not say a word to him—I was
not even able to return his bow. The conviction that
I was discovered—and by that man, of all
others—absolutely petrified me.
"Are you going back to the house, Miss Halcombe?"
he inquired, without showing the least surprise on
his side, and without even looking after the fly,
which drove off while he was speaking to me.
I collected myself sufficiently to make a sign in
the affirmative.
"I am going back too," he said. "Pray allow me
the pleasure of accompanying you. Will you take my
arm? You look surprised at seeing me!"
I took his arm. The first of my scattered senses
that came back was the sense that warned me to
sacrifice anything rather than make an enemy of him.
"You look surprised at seeing me!" he repeated in
his quietly pertinacious way.
"I thought, Count, I heard you with your birds in
the breakfast-room," I answered, as quietly and
firmly as I could.
"Surely. But my little feathered children, dear
lady, are only too like other children. They have
their days of perversity, and this morning was one
of them. My wife came in as I was putting them back
in their cage, and said she had left you going out
alone for a walk. You told her so, did you not?"
"Certainly."
"Well, Miss Halcombe, the pleasure of
accompanying you was too great a temptation for me
to resist. At my age there is no harm in confessing
so much as that, is there? I seized my hat, and set
off to offer myself as your escort. Even so fat an
old man as Fosco is surely better than no escort at
all? I took the wrong path—I came back in despair,
and here I am, arrived (may I say it?) at the height
of my wishes."
He talked on in this complimentary strain with a
fluency which left me no exertion to make beyond the
effort of maintaining my composure. He never
referred in the most distant manner to what he had
seen in the lane, or to the letter which I still had
in my hand. This ominous discretion helped to
convince me that he must have surprised, by the most
dishonourable means, the secret of my application in
Laura's interest to the lawyer; and that, having now
assured himself of the private manner in which I had
received the answer, he had discovered enough to
suit his purposes, and was only bent on trying to
quiet the suspicions which he knew he must have
aroused in my mind. I was wise enough, under these
circumstances, not to attempt to deceive him by
plausible explanations, and woman enough,
notwithstanding my dread of him, to feel as if my
hand was tainted by resting on his arm.
On the drive in front of the house we met the
dog-cart being taken round to the stables. Sir
Percival had just returned. He came out to meet us
at the house-door. Whatever other results his
journey might have had, it had not ended in
softening his savage temper.
"Oh! here are two of you come back," he said,
with a lowering face. "What is the meaning of the
house being deserted in this way? Where is Lady
Glyde?"
I told him of the loss of the brooch, and said
that Laura had gone into the plantation to look for
it.
"Brooch or no brooch," he growled sulkily, "I
recommend her not to forget her appointment in the
library this afternoon. I shall expect to see her in
half an hour."
I took my hand from the Count's arm, and slowly
ascended the steps. He honoured me with one of his
magnificent bows, and then addressed himself gaily
to the scowling master of the house.
"Tell me, Percival," he said, "have you had a
pleasant drive? And has your pretty shining Brown
Molly come back at all tired?"
"Brown Molly be hanged—and the drive too! I want
my lunch."
"And I want five minutes' talk with you,
Percival, first," returned the Count. "Five minutes'
talk, my friend, here on the grass."
"What about?"
"About business that very much concerns you."
I lingered long enough in passing through the
hall-door to hear this question and answer, and to
see Sir Percival thrust his hands into his pockets
in sullen hesitation.
"If you want to badger me with any more of your
infernal scruples," he said, "I for one won't hear
them. I want my lunch."
"Come out here and speak to me," repeated the
Count, still perfectly uninfluenced by the rudest
speech that his friend could make to him.
Sir Percival descended the steps. The Count took
him by the arm, and walked him away gently. The
"business," I was sure, referred to the question of
the signature. They were speaking of Laura and of me
beyond a doubt. I felt heart-sick and faint with
anxiety. It might be of the last importance to both
of us to know what they were saying to each other at
that moment, and not one word of it could by any
possibility reach my ears.
I walked about the house, from room to room, with
the lawyer's letter in my bosom (I was afraid by
this time even to trust it under lock and key), till
the oppression of my suspense half maddened me.
There were no signs of Laura's return, and I thought
of going out to look for her. But my strength was so
exhausted by the trials and anxieties of the morning
that the heat of the day quite overpowered me, and
after an attempt to get to the door I was obliged to
return to the drawing-room and lie down on the
nearest sofa to recover.
I was just composing myself when the door opened
softly and the Count looked in.
"A thousand pardons, Miss Halcombe," he said; "I
only venture to disturb you because I am the bearer
of good news. Percival—who is capricious in
everything, as you know—has seen fit to alter his
mind at the last moment, and the business of the
signature is put off for the present. A great relief
to all of us, Miss Halcombe, as I see with pleasure
in your face. Pray present my best respects and
felicitations, when you mention this pleasant change
of circumstances to Lady Glyde."
He left me before I had recovered my
astonishment. There could be no doubt that this
extraordinary alteration of purpose in the matter of
the signature was due to his influence, and that his
discovery of my application to London yesterday, and
of my having received an answer to it to-day, had
offered him the means of interfering with certain
success.
I felt these impressions, but my mind seemed to
share the exhaustion of my body, and I was in no
condition to dwell on them with any useful reference
to the doubtful present or the threatening future. I
tried a second time to run out and find Laura, but
my head was giddy and my knees trembled under me.
There was no choice but to give it up again and
return to the sofa, sorely against my will.
The quiet in the house, and the low murmuring hum
of summer insects outside the open window, soothed
me. My eyes closed of themselves, and I passed
gradually into a strange condition, which was not
waking—for I knew nothing of what was going on about
me, and not sleeping—for I was conscious of my own
repose. In this state my fevered mind broke loose
from me, while my weary body was at rest, and in a
trance, or day-dream of my fancy—I know not what to
call it—I saw Walter Hartright. I had not thought of
him since I rose that morning—Laura had not said one
word to me either directly or indirectly referring
to him—and yet I saw him now as plainly as if the
past time had returned, and we were both together
again at Limmeridge House.
He appeared to me as one among many other men,
none of whose faces I could plainly discern. They
were all lying on the steps of an immense ruined
temple. Colossal tropical trees—with rank creepers
twining endlessly about their trunks, and hideous
stone idols glimmering and grinning at intervals
behind leaves and stalks and branches—surrounded the
temple and shut out the sky, and threw a dismal
shadow over the forlorn band of men on the steps.
White exhalations twisted and curled up stealthily
from the ground, approached the men in wreaths like
smoke, touched them, and stretched them out dead,
one by one, in the places where they lay. An agony
of pity and fear for Walter loosened my tongue, and
I implored him to escape. "Come back, come back!" I
said. "Remember your promise to HER and to ME. Come
back to us before the Pestilence reaches you and
lays you dead like the rest!"
He looked at me with an unearthly quiet in his
face. "Wait," he said, "I shall come back. The night
when I met the lost Woman on the highway was the
night which set my life apart to be the instrument
of a Design that is yet unseen. Here, lost in the
wilderness, or there, welcomed back in the land of
my birth, I am still walking on the dark road which
leads me, and you, and the sister of your love and
mine, to the unknown Retribution and the inevitable
End. Wait and look. The Pestilence which touches the
rest will pass ME."
I saw him again. He was still in the forest, and
the numbers of his lost companions had dwindled to
very few. The temple was gone, and the idols were
gone—and in their place the figures of dark,
dwarfish men lurked murderously among the trees,
with bows in their hands, and arrows fitted to the
string. Once more I feared for Walter, and cried out
to warn him. Once more he turned to me, with the
immovable quiet in his face.
"Another step," he said, "on the dark road. Wait
and look. The arrows that strike the rest will spare
me."
I saw him for the third time in a wrecked ship,
stranded on a wild, sandy shore. The overloaded
boats were making away from him for the land, and he
alone was left to sink with the ship. I cried to him
to hail the hindmost boat, and to make a last effort
for his life. The quiet face looked at me in return,
and the unmoved voice gave me back the changeless
reply. "Another step on the journey. Wait and look.
The Sea which drowns the rest will spare me."
I saw him for the last time. He was kneeling by a
tomb of white marble, and the shadow of a veiled
woman rose out of the grave beneath and waited by
his side. The unearthly quiet of his face had
changed to an unearthly sorrow. But the terrible
certainty of his words remained the same. "Darker
and darker," he said; "farther and farther yet.
Death takes the good, the beautiful, and the
young—and spares me. The Pestilence that wastes, the
Arrow that strikes, the Sea that drowns, the Grave
that closes over Love and Hope, are steps of my
journey, and take me nearer and nearer to the End."
My heart sank under a dread beyond words, under a
grief beyond tears. The darkness closed round the
pilgrim at the marble tomb—closed round the veiled
woman from the grave—closed round the dreamer who
looked on them. I saw and heard no more.
I was aroused by a hand laid on my shoulder. It
was Laura's.
She had dropped on her knees by the side of the
sofa. Her face was flushed and agitated, and her
eyes met mine in a wild bewildered manner. I started
the instant I saw her.
"What has happened?" I asked. "What has
frightened you?"
She looked round at the half-open door, put her
lips close to my ear, and answered in a whisper—
"Marian!—the figure at the lake—the footsteps
last night—I've just seen her! I've just spoken to
her!"
"Who, for Heaven's sake?"
"Anne Catherick."
I was so startled by the disturbance in Laura's
face and manner, and so dismayed by the first waking
impressions of my dream, that I was not fit to bear
the revelation which burst upon me when that name
passed her lips. I could only stand rooted to the
floor, looking at her in breathless silence.
She was too much absorbed by what had happened to
notice the effect which her reply had produced on
me. "I have seen Anne Catherick! I have spoken to
Anne Catherick!" she repeated as if I had not heard
her. "Oh, Marian, I have such things to tell you!
Come away—we may be interrupted here—come at once
into my room."
With those eager words she caught me by the hand,
and led me through the library, to the end room on
the ground floor, which had been fitted up for her
own especial use. No third person, except her maid,
could have any excuse for surprising us here. She
pushed me in before her, locked the door, and drew
the chintz curtains that hung over the inside.
The strange, stunned feeling which had taken
possession of me still remained. But a growing
conviction that the complications which had long
threatened to gather about her, and to gather about
me, had suddenly closed fast round us both, was now
beginning to penetrate my mind. I could not express
it in words—I could hardly even realise it dimly in
my own thoughts. "Anne Catherick!" I whispered to
myself, with useless, helpless reiteration—"Anne
Catherick!"
Laura drew me to the nearest seat, an ottoman in
the middle of the room. "Look!" she said, "look
here!"—and pointed to the bosom of her dress.
I saw, for the first time, that the lost brooch
was pinned in its place again. There was something
real in the sight of it, something real in the
touching of it afterwards, which seemed to steady
the whirl and confusion in my thoughts, and to help
me to compose myself.
"Where did you find your brooch?" The first words
I could say to her were the words which put that
trivial question at that important moment.
"SHE found it, Marian."
"Where?"
"On the floor of the boat-house. Oh, how shall I
begin—how shall I tell you about it! She talked to
me so strangely—she looked so fearfully ill—she left
me so suddenly!"
Her voice rose as the tumult of her recollections
pressed upon her mind. The inveterate distrust which
weighs, night and day, on my spirits in this house,
instantly roused me to warn her—just as the sight of
the brooch had roused me to question her, the moment
before.
"Speak low," I said. "The window is open, and the
garden path runs beneath it. Begin at the beginning,
Laura. Tell me, word for word, what passed between
that woman and you."
"Shall I close the window?"
"No, only speak low—only remember that Anne
Catherick is a dangerous subject under your
husband's roof. Where did you first see her?"
"At the boat-house, Marian. I went out, as you
know, to find my brooch, and I walked along the path
through the plantation, looking down on the ground
carefully at every step. In that way I got on, after
a long time, to the boat-house, and as soon as I was
inside it, I went on my knees to hunt over the
floor. I was still searching with my back to the
doorway, when I heard a soft, strange voice behind
me say, 'Miss Fairlie.'"
"Miss Fairlie!"
"Yes, my old name—the dear, familiar name that I
thought I had parted from for ever. I started up—not
frightened, the voice was too kind and gentle to
frighten anybody—but very much surprised. There,
looking at me from the doorway, stood a woman, whose
face I never remembered to have seen before—"
"How was she dressed?"
"She had a neat, pretty white gown on, and over
it a poor worn thin dark shawl. Her bonnet was of
brown straw, as poor and worn as the shawl. I was
struck by the difference between her gown and the
rest of her dress, and she saw that I noticed it.
'Don't look at my bonnet and shawl,' she said,
speaking in a quick, breathless, sudden way; 'if I
mustn't wear white, I don't care what I wear. Look
at my gown as much as you please—I'm not ashamed of
that.' Very strange, was it not? Before I could say
anything to soothe her, she held out one of her
hands, and I saw my brooch in it. I was so pleased
and so grateful, that I went quite close to her to
say what I really felt. 'Are you thankful enough to
do me one little kindness?' she asked. 'Yes,
indeed,' I answered, 'any kindness in my power I
shall be glad to show you.' 'Then let me pin your
brooch on for you, now I have found it.' Her request
was so unexpected, Marian, and she made it with such
extraordinary eagerness, that I drew back a step or
two, not well knowing what to do. 'Ah!' she said,
'your mother would have let me pin on the brooch.'
There was something in her voice and her look, as
well as in her mentioning my mother in that
reproachful manner, which made me ashamed of my
distrust. I took her hand with the brooch in it, and
put it up gently on the bosom of my dress. 'You knew
my mother?' I said. 'Was it very long ago? have I
ever seen you before?' Her hands were busy fastening
the brooch: she stopped and pressed them against my
breast. 'You don't remember a fine spring day at
Limmeridge,' she said, 'and your mother walking down
the path that led to the school, with a little girl
on each side of her? I have had nothing else to
think of since, and I remember it. You were one of
the little girls, and I was the other. Pretty,
clever Miss Fairlie, and poor dazed Anne Catherick
were nearer to each other then than they are now!'"
"Did you remember her, Laura, when she told you
her name?"
"Yes, I remembered your asking me about Anne
Catherick at Limmeridge, and your saying that she
had once been considered like me."
"What reminded you of that, Laura?"
"SHE reminded me. While I was looking at her,
while she was very close to me, it came over my mind
suddenly that we were like each other! Her face was
pale and thin and weary—but the sight of it startled
me, as if it had been the sight of my own face in
the glass after a long illness. The discovery—I
don't know why—gave me such a shock, that I was
perfectly incapable of speaking to her for the
moment."
"Did she seem hurt by your silence?"
"I am afraid she was hurt by it. 'You have not
got your mother's face,' she said, 'or your mother's
heart. Your mother's face was dark, and your
mother's heart, Miss Fairlie, was the heart of an
angel.' 'I am sure I feel kindly towards you,' I
said, 'though I may not be able to express it as I
ought. Why do you call me Miss Fairlie?——' 'Because
I love the name of Fairlie and hate the name of
Glyde,' she broke out violently. I had seen nothing
like madness in her before this, but I fancied I saw
it now in her eyes. 'I only thought you might not
know I was married,' I said, remembering the wild
letter she wrote to me at Limmeridge, and trying to
quiet her. She sighed bitterly, and turned away from
me. 'Not know you were married?' she repeated. 'I am
here BECAUSE you are married. I am here to make
atonement to you, before I meet your mother in the
world beyond the grave.' She drew farther and
farther away from me, till she was out of the
boat-house, and then she watched and listened for a
little while. When she turned round to speak again,
instead of coming back, she stopped where she was,
looking in at me, with a hand on each side of the
entrance. 'Did you see me at the lake last night?'
she said. 'Did you hear me following you in the
wood? I have been waiting for days together to speak
to you alone—I have left the only friend I have in
the world, anxious and frightened about me—I have
risked being shut up again in the mad-house—and all
for your sake, Miss Fairlie, all for your sake.' Her
words alarmed me, Marian, and yet there was
something in the way she spoke that made me pity her
with all my heart. I am sure my pity must have been
sincere, for it made me bold enough to ask the poor
creature to come in, and sit down in the boat-house,
by my side."
"Did she do so?"
"No. She shook her head, and told me she must
stop where she was, to watch and listen, and see
that no third person surprised us. And from first to
last, there she waited at the entrance, with a hand
on each side of it, sometimes bending in suddenly to
speak to me, sometimes drawing back suddenly to look
about her. 'I was here yesterday,' she said, 'before
it came dark, and I heard you, and the lady with
you, talking together. I heard you tell her about
your husband. I heard you say you had no influence
to make him believe you, and no influence to keep
him silent. Ah! I knew what those words meant—my
conscience told me while I was listening. Why did I
ever let you marry him! Oh, my fear—my mad,
miserable, wicked fear! 'She covered up her face in
her poor worn shawl, and moaned and murmured to
herself behind it. I began to be afraid she might
break out into some terrible despair which neither
she nor I could master. 'Try to quiet yourself,' I
said; 'try to tell me how you might have prevented
my marriage.' She took the shawl from her face, and
looked at me vacantly. 'I ought to have had heart
enough to stop at Limmeridge,' she answered. 'I
ought never to have let the news of his coming there
frighten me away. I ought to have warned you and
saved you before it was too late. Why did I only
have courage enough to write you that letter? Why
did I only do harm, when I wanted and meant to do
good? Oh, my fear—my mad, miserable, wicked fear!'
She repeated those words again, and hid her face
again in the end of her poor worn shawl. It was
dreadful to see her, and dreadful to hear her."
"Surely, Laura, you asked what the fear was which
she dwelt on so earnestly?"
"Yes, I asked that."
"And what did she say?"
"She asked me in return, if I should not be
afraid of a man who had shut me up in a mad-house,
and who would shut me up again, if he could? I said,
'Are you afraid still? Surely you would not be here
if you were afraid now?' 'No,' she said, 'I am not
afraid now.' I asked why not. She suddenly bent
forward into the boat-house, and said, 'Can't you
guess why?' I shook my head. 'Look at me,' she went
on. I told her I was grieved to see that she looked
very sorrowful and very ill. She smiled for the
first time. 'Ill?' she repeated; 'I'm dying. You
know why I'm not afraid of him now. Do you think I
shall meet your mother in heaven? Will she forgive
me if I do?' I was so shocked and so startled, that
I could make no reply. 'I have been thinking of it,'
she went on, 'all the time I have been in hiding
from your husband, all the time I lay ill. My
thoughts have driven me here—I want to make
atonement—I want to undo all I can of the harm I
once did.' I begged her as earnestly as I could to
tell me what she meant. She still looked at me with
fixed vacant eyes. 'SHALL I undo the harm?' she said
to herself doubtfully. 'You have friends to take
your part. If YOU know his Secret, he will be afraid
of you, he won't dare use you as he used me. He must
treat you mercifully for his own sake, if he is
afraid of you and your friends. And if he treats you
mercifully, and if I can say it was my doing——' I
listened eagerly for more, but she stopped at those
words."
"You tried to make her go on?"
"I tried, but she only drew herself away from me
again, and leaned her face and arms against the side
of the boat-house. 'Oh!' I heard her say, with a
dreadful, distracted tenderness in her voice, 'oh!
if I could only be buried with your mother! If I
could only wake at her side, when the angel's
trumpet sounds, and the graves give up their dead at
the resurrection!'—Marian! I trembled from head to
foot—it was horrible to hear her. 'But there is no
hope of that,' she said, moving a little, so as to
look at me again, 'no hope for a poor stranger like
me. I shall not rest under the marble cross that I
washed with my own hands, and made so white and pure
for her sake. Oh no! oh no! God's mercy, not man's,
will take me to her, where the wicked cease from
troubling and the weary are at rest.' She spoke
those words quietly and sorrowfully, with a heavy,
hopeless sigh, and then waited a little. Her face
was confused and troubled, she seemed to be
thinking, or trying to think. 'What was it I said
just now?' she asked after a while. 'When your
mother is in my mind, everything else goes out of
it. What was I saying? what was I saying?' I
reminded the poor creature, as kindly and delicately
as I could. 'Ah, yes, yes,' she said, still in a
vacant, perplexed manner. 'You are helpless with
your wicked husband. Yes. And I must do what I have
come to do here—I must make it up to you for having
been afraid to speak out at a better time.' 'What IS
it you have to tell me?' I asked. 'The Secret that
your cruel husband is afraid of,' she answered. 'I
once threatened him with the Secret, and frightened
him. You shall threaten him with the Secret, and
frighten him too.' Her face darkened, and a hard,
angry stare fixed itself in her eyes. She began
waving her hand at me in a vacant, unmeaning manner.
'My mother knows the Secret,' she said. 'My mother
has wasted under the Secret half her lifetime. One
day, when I was grown up, she said something to ME.
And the next day your husband——'"
"Yes! yes! Go on. What did she tell you about
your husband?"
"She stopped again, Marian, at that point——"
"And said no more?"
"And listened eagerly. 'Hush!' she whispered,
still waving her hand at me. 'Hush!' She moved aside
out of the doorway, moved slowly and stealthily,
step by step, till I lost her past the edge of the
boat-house."
"Surely you followed her?"
"Yes, my anxiety made me bold enough to rise and
follow her. Just as I reached the entrance, she
appeared again suddenly, round the side of the
boat-house. 'The Secret,' I whispered to her—'wait
and tell me the Secret!' She caught hold of my arm,
and looked at me with wild frightened eyes. 'Not
now,' she said, 'we are not alone—we are watched.
Come here to-morrow at this time—by yourself—mind—by
yourself.' She pushed me roughly into the boat-house
again, and I saw her no more."
"Oh, Laura, Laura, another chance lost! If I had
only been near you she should not have escaped us.
On which side did you lose sight of her?"
"On the left side, where the ground sinks and the
wood is thickest."
"Did you run out again? did you call after her?"
"How could I? I was too terrified to move or
speak."
"But when you DID move—when you came out?"
"I ran back here, to tell you what had happened."
"Did you see any one, or hear any one, in the
plantation?"
"No, it seemed to be all still and quiet when I
passed through it."
I waited for a moment to consider. Was this third
person, supposed to have been secretly present at
the interview, a reality, or the creature of Anne
Catherick's excited fancy? It was impossible to
determine. The one thing certain was, that we had
failed again on the very brink of discovery—failed
utterly and irretrievably, unless Anne Catherick
kept her appointment at the boat-house for the next
day.
"Are you quite sure you have told me everything
that passed? Every word that was said?" I inquired.
"I think so," she answered. "My powers of memory,
Marian, are not like yours. But I was so strongly
impressed, so deeply interested, that nothing of any
importance can possibly have escaped me."
"My dear Laura, the merest trifles are of
importance where Anne Catherick is concerned. Think
again. Did no chance reference escape her as to the
place in which she is living at the present time?"
"None that I can remember."
"Did she not mention a companion and friend—a
woman named Mrs. Clements?"
"Oh yes! yes! I forgot that. She told me Mrs.
Clements wanted sadly to go with her to the lake and
take care of her, and begged and prayed that she
would not venture into this neighbourhood alone."
"Was that all she said about Mrs. Clements?"
"Yes, that was all."
"She told you nothing about the place in which
she took refuge after leaving Todd's Corner?"
"Nothing—I am quite sure."
"Nor where she has lived since? Nor what her
illness had been?"
"No, Marian, not a word. Tell me, pray tell me,
what you think about it. I don't know what to think,
or what to do next."
"You must do this, my love: You must carefully
keep the appointment at the boat-house to-morrow. It
is impossible to say what interests may not depend
on your seeing that woman again. You shall not be
left to yourself a second time. I will follow you at
a safe distance. Nobody shall see me, but I will
keep within hearing of your voice, if anything
happens. Anne Catherick has escaped Walter
Hartright, and has escaped you. Whatever happens,
she shall not escape ME."
Laura's eyes read mine attentively.
"You believe," she said, "in this secret that my
husband is afraid of? Suppose, Marian, it should
only exist after all in Anne Catherick's fancy?
Suppose she only wanted to see me and to speak to
me, for the sake of old remembrances? Her manner was
so strange—I almost doubted her. Would you trust her
in other things?"
"I trust nothing, Laura, but my own observation
of your husband's conduct. I judge Anne Catherick's
words by his actions, and I believe there is a
secret."
I said no more, and got up to leave the room.
Thoughts were troubling me which I might have told
her if we had spoken together longer, and which it
might have been dangerous for her to know. The
influence of the terrible dream from which she had
awakened me hung darkly and heavily over every fresh
impression which the progress of her narrative
produced on my mind. I felt the ominous future
coming close, chilling me with an unutterable awe,
forcing on me the conviction of an unseen design in
the long series of complications which had now
fastened round us. I thought of Hartright—as I saw
him in the body when he said farewell; as I saw him
in the spirit in my dream—and I too began to doubt
now whether we were not advancing blindfold to an
appointed and an inevitable end.
Leaving Laura to go upstairs alone, I went out to
look about me in the walks near the house. The
circumstances under which Anne Catherick had parted
from her had made me secretly anxious to know how
Count Fosco was passing the afternoon, and had
rendered me secretly distrustful of the results of
that solitary journey from which Sir Percival had
returned but a few hours since.
After looking for them in every direction and
discovering nothing, I returned to the house, and
entered the different rooms on the ground floor one
after another. They were all empty. I came out again
into the hall, and went upstairs to return to Laura.
Madame Fosco opened her door as I passed it in my
way along the passage, and I stopped to see if she
could inform me of the whereabouts of her husband
and Sir Percival. Yes, she had seen them both from
her window more than an hour since. The Count had
looked up with his customary kindness, and had
mentioned with his habitual attention to her in the
smallest trifles, that he and his friend were going
out together for a long walk.
For a long walk! They had never yet been in each
other's company with that object in my experience of
them. Sir Percival cared for no exercise but riding,
and the Count (except when he was polite enough to
be my escort) cared for no exercise at all.
When I joined Laura again, I found that she had
called to mind in my absence the impending question
of the signature to the deed, which, in the interest
of discussing her interview with Anne Catherick, we
had hitherto overlooked. Her first words when I saw
her expressed her surprise at the absence of the
expected summons to attend Sir Percival in the
library.
"You may make your mind easy on that subject," I
said. "For the present, at least, neither your
resolution nor mine will be exposed to any further
trial. Sir Percival has altered his plans—the
business of the signature is put off."
"Put off?" Laura repeated amazedly. "Who told you
so?"
"My authority is Count Fosco. I believe it is to
his interference that we are indebted for your
husband's sudden change of purpose."
"It seems impossible, Marian. If the object of my
signing was, as we suppose, to obtain money for Sir
Percival that he urgently wanted, how can the matter
be put off?"
"I think, Laura, we have the means at hand of
setting that doubt at rest. Have you forgotten the
conversation that I heard between Sir Percival and
the lawyer as they were crossing the hall?"
"No, but I don't remember——"
"I do. There were two alternatives proposed. One
was to obtain your signature to the parchment. The
other was to gain time by giving bills at three
months. The last resource is evidently the resource
now adopted, and we may fairly hope to be relieved
from our share in Sir Percival's embarrassments for
some time to come."
"Oh, Marian, it sounds too good to be true!"
"Does it, my love? You complimented me on my
ready memory not long since, but you seem to doubt
it now. I will get my journal, and you shall see if
I am right or wrong."
I went away and got the book at once.
On looking back to the entry referring to the
lawyer's visit, we found that my recollection of the
two alternatives presented was accurately correct.
It was almost as great a relief to my mind as to
Laura's, to find that my memory had served me, on
this occasion, as faithfully as usual. In the
perilous uncertainty of our present situation, it is
hard to say what future interests may not depend
upon the regularity of the entries in my journal,
and upon the reliability of my recollection at the
time when I make them.
Laura's face and manner suggested to me that this
last consideration had occurred to her as well as to
myself. Anyway, it is only a trifling matter, and I
am almost ashamed to put it down here in writing—it
seems to set the forlornness of our situation in
such a miserably vivid light. We must have little
indeed to depend on, when the discovery that my
memory can still be trusted to serve us is hailed as
if it was the discovery of a new friend!
The first bell for dinner separated us. Just as
it had done ringing, Sir Percival and the Count
returned from their walk. We heard the master of the
house storming at the servants for being five
minutes late, and the master's guest interposing, as
usual, in the interests of propriety, patience, and
peace.
The evening has come and gone. No extraordinary
event has happened. But I have noticed certain
peculiarities in the conduct of Sir Percival and the
Count, which have sent me to my bed feeling very
anxious and uneasy about Anne Catherick, and about
the results which to-morrow may produce.
I know enough by this time, to be sure, that the
aspect of Sir Percival which is the most false, and
which, therefore, means the worst, is his polite
aspect. That long walk with his friend had ended in
improving his manners, especially towards his wife.
To Laura's secret surprise and to my secret alarm,
he called her by her Christian name, asked if she
had heard lately from her uncle, inquired when Mrs.
Vesey was to receive her invitation to Blackwater,
and showed her so many other little attentions that
he almost recalled the days of his hateful courtship
at Limmeridge House. This was a bad sign to begin
with, and I thought it more ominous still that he
should pretend after dinner to fall asleep in the
drawing-room, and that his eyes should cunningly
follow Laura and me when he thought we neither of us
suspected him. I have never had any doubt that his
sudden journey by himself took him to Welmingham to
question Mrs. Catherick—but the experience of
to-night has made me fear that the expedition was
not undertaken in vain, and that he has got the
information which he unquestionably left us to
collect. If I knew where Anne Catherick was to be
found, I would be up to-morrow with sunrise and warn
her.
While the aspect under which Sir Percival
presented himself to-night was unhappily but too
familiar to me, the aspect under which the Count
appeared was, on the other hand, entirely new in my
experience of him. He permitted me, this evening, to
make his acquaintance, for the first time, in the
character of a Man of Sentiment—of sentiment, as I
believe, really felt, not assumed for the occasion.
For instance, he was quiet and subdued—his eyes
and his voice expressed a restrained sensibility. He
wore (as if there was some hidden connection between
his showiest finery and his deepest feeling) the
most magnificent waistcoat he has yet appeared in—it
was made of pale sea-green silk, and delicately
trimmed with fine silver braid. His voice sank into
the tenderest inflections, his smile expressed a
thoughtful, fatherly admiration, whenever he spoke
to Laura or to me. He pressed his wife's hand under
the table when she thanked him for trifling little
attentions at dinner. He took wine with her. "Your
health and happiness, my angel!" he said, with fond
glistening eyes. He ate little or nothing, and
sighed, and said "Good Percival!" when his friend
laughed at him. After dinner, he took Laura by the
hand, and asked her if she would be "so sweet as to
play to him." She complied, through sheer
astonishment. He sat by the piano, with his
watch-chain resting in folds, like a golden serpent,
on the sea-green protuberance of his waistcoat. His
immense head lay languidly on one side, and he
gently beat time with two of his yellow-white
fingers. He highly approved of the music, and
tenderly admired Laura's manner of playing—not as
poor Hartright used to praise it, with an innocent
enjoyment of the sweet sounds, but with a clear,
cultivated, practical knowledge of the merits of the
composition, in the first place, and of the merits
of the player's touch in the second. As the evening
closed in, he begged that the lovely dying light
might not be profaned, just yet, by the appearance
of the lamps. He came, with his horribly silent
tread, to the distant window at which I was
standing, to be out of his way and to avoid the very
sight of him—he came to ask me to support his
protest against the lamps. If any one of them could
only have burnt him up at that moment, I would have
gone down to the kitchen and fetched it myself.
"Surely you like this modest, trembling English
twilight?" he said softly. "Ah! I love it. I feel my
inborn admiration of all that is noble, and great,
and good, purified by the breath of heaven on an
evening like this. Nature has such imperishable
charms, such inextinguishable tenderness for me!—I
am an old, fat man—talk which would become your
lips, Miss Halcombe, sounds like a derision and a
mockery on mine. It is hard to be laughed at in my
moments of sentiment, as if my soul was like myself,
old and overgrown. Observe, dear lady, what a light
is dying on the trees! Does it penetrate your heart,
as it penetrates mine?"
He paused, looked at me, and repeated the famous
lines of Dante on the Evening-time, with a melody
and tenderness which added a charm of their own to
the matchless beauty of the poetry itself.
"Bah!" he cried suddenly, as the last cadence of
those noble Italian words died away on his lips; "I
make an old fool of myself, and only weary you all!
Let us shut up the window in our bosoms and get back
to the matter-of-fact world. Percival! I sanction
the admission of the lamps. Lady Glyde—Miss
Halcombe—Eleanor, my good wife—which of you will
indulge me with a game at dominoes?"
He addressed us all, but he looked especially at
Laura.
She had learnt to feel my dread of offending him,
and she accepted his proposal. It was more than I
could have done at that moment. I could not have sat
down at the same table with him for any
consideration. His eyes seemed to reach my inmost
soul through the thickening obscurity of the
twilight. His voice trembled along every nerve in my
body, and turned me hot and cold alternately. The
mystery and terror of my dream, which had haunted me
at intervals all through the evening, now oppressed
my mind with an unendurable foreboding and an
unutterable awe. I saw the white tomb again, and the
veiled woman rising out of it by Hartright's side.
The thought of Laura welled up like a spring in the
depths of my heart, and filled it with waters of
bitterness, never, never known to it before. I
caught her by the hand as she passed me on her way
to the table, and kissed her as if that night was to
part us for ever. While they were all gazing at me
in astonishment, I ran out through the low window
which was open before me to the ground—ran out to
hide from them in the darkness, to hide even from
myself.
We separated that evening later than usual. Towards midnight the summer
silence was broken by the shuddering of a low,
melancholy wind among the trees. We all felt the
sudden chill in the atmosphere, but the Count was
the first to notice the stealthy rising of the wind.
He stopped while he was lighting my candle for me,
and held up his hand warningly—
"Listen!" he said. "There will be a change
to-morrow."
VII
June 19th.—The events of yesterday warned me to
be ready, sooner or later, to meet the worst. To-day
is not yet at an end, and the worst has come.
Judging by the closest calculation of time that
Laura and I could make, we arrived at the conclusion
that Anne Catherick must have appeared at the
boat-house at half-past two o'clock on the afternoon
of yesterday. I accordingly arranged that Laura
should just show herself at the luncheon-table
to-day, and should then slip out at the first
opportunity, leaving me behind to preserve
appearances, and to follow her as soon as I could
safely do so. This mode of proceeding, if no
obstacles occurred to thwart us, would enable her to
be at the boat-house before half-past two, and (when
I left the table, in my turn) would take me to a
safe position in the plantation before three.
The change in the weather, which last night's
wind warned us to expect, came with the morning. It
was raining heavily when I got up, and it continued
to rain until twelve o'clock—when the clouds
dispersed, the blue sky appeared, and the sun shone
again with the bright promise of a fine afternoon.
My anxiety to know how Sir Percival and the Count
would occupy the early part of the day was by no
means set at rest, so far as Sir Percival was
concerned, by his leaving us immediately after
breakfast, and going out by himself, in spite of the
rain. He neither told us where he was going nor when
we might expect him back. We saw him pass the
breakfast-room window hastily, with his high boots
and his waterproof coat on—and that was all.
The Count passed the morning quietly indoors,
some part of it in the library, some part in the
drawing-room, playing odds and ends of music on the
piano, and humming to himself. Judging by
appearances, the sentimental side of his character
was persistently inclined to betray itself still. He
was silent and sensitive, and ready to sigh and
languish ponderously (as only fat men CAN sigh and
languish) on the smallest provocation.
Luncheon-time came and Sir Percival did not
return. The Count took his friend's place at the
table, plaintively devoured the greater part of a
fruit tart, submerged under a whole jugful of cream,
and explained the full merit of the achievement to
us as soon as he had done. "A taste for sweets," he
said in his softest tones and his tenderest manner,
"is the innocent taste of women and children. I love
to share it with them—it is another bond, dear
ladies, between you and me."
Laura left the table in ten minutes' time. I was
sorely tempted to accompany her. But if we had both
gone out together we must have excited suspicion,
and worse still, if we allowed Anne Catherick to see
Laura, accompanied by a second person who was a
stranger to her, we should in all probability
forfeit her confidence from that moment, never to
regain it again.
I waited, therefore, as patiently as I could,
until the servant came in to clear the table. When I
quitted the room, there were no signs, in the house
or out of it, of Sir Percival's return. I left the
Count with a piece of sugar between his lips, and
the vicious cockatoo scrambling up his waistcoat to
get at it, while Madame Fosco, sitting opposite to
her husband, watched the proceedings of his bird and
himself as attentively as if she had never seen
anything of the sort before in her life. On my way
to the plantation I kept carefully beyond the range
of view from the luncheon-room window. Nobody saw me
and nobody followed me. It was then a quarter to
three o'clock by my watch.
Once among the trees I walked rapidly, until I
had advanced more than half-way through the
plantation. At that point I slackened my pace and
proceeded cautiously, but I saw no one, and heard no
voices. By little and little I came within view of
the back of the boat-house—stopped and listened—then
went on, till I was close behind it, and must have
heard any persons who were talking inside. Still the
silence was unbroken—still far and near no sign of a
living creature appeared anywhere.
After skirting round by the back of the building,
first on one side and then on the other, and making
no discoveries, I ventured in front of it, and
fairly looked in. The place was empty.
I called, "Laura!"—at first softly, then louder
and louder. No one answered and no one appeared. For
all that I could see and hear, the only human
creature in the neighbourhood of the lake and the
plantation was myself.
My heart began to beat violently, but I kept my
resolution, and searched, first the boat-house and
then the ground in front of it, for any signs which
might show me whether Laura had really reached the
place or not. No mark of her presence appeared
inside the building, but I found traces of her
outside it, in footsteps on the sand.
I detected the footsteps of two persons—large
footsteps like a man's, and small footsteps, which,
by putting my own feet into them and testing their
size in that manner, I felt certain were Laura's.
The ground was confusedly marked in this way just
before the boat-house. Close against one side of it,
under shelter of the projecting roof, I discovered a
little hole in the sand—a hole artificially made,
beyond a doubt. I just noticed it, and then turned
away immediately to trace the footsteps as far as I
could, and to follow the direction in which they
might lead me.
They led me, starting from the left-hand side of
the boat-house, along the edge of the trees, a
distance, I should think, of between two and three
hundred yards, and then the sandy ground showed no
further trace of them. Feeling that the persons
whose course I was tracking must necessarily have
entered the plantation at this point, I entered it
too. At first I could find no path, but I discovered
one afterwards, just faintly traced among the trees,
and followed it. It took me, for some distance, in
the direction of the village, until I stopped at a
point where another foot-track crossed it. The
brambles grew thickly on either side of this second
path. I stood looking down it, uncertain which way
to take next, and while I looked I saw on one thorny
branch some fragments of fringe from a woman's
shawl. A closer examination of the fringe satisfied
me that it had been torn from a shawl of Laura's,
and I instantly followed the second path. It brought
me out at last, to my great relief, at the back of
the house. I say to my great relief, because I
inferred that Laura must, for some unknown reason,
have returned before me by this roundabout way. I
went in by the court-yard and the offices. The first
person whom I met in crossing the servants' hall was
Mrs. Michelson, the housekeeper.
"Do you know," I asked, "whether Lady Glyde has
come in from her walk or not?"
"My lady came in a little while ago with Sir
Percival," answered the housekeeper. "I am afraid,
Miss Halcombe, something very distressing has
happened."
My heart sank within me. "You don't mean an
accident?" I said faintly.
"No, no—thank God, no accident. But my lady ran
upstairs to her own room in tears, and Sir Percival
has ordered me to give Fanny warning to leave in an
hour's time."
Fanny was Laura's maid—a good affectionate girl
who had been with her for years—the only person in
the house whose fidelity and devotion we could both
depend upon.
"Where is Fanny?" I inquired.
"In my room, Miss Halcombe. The young woman is
quite overcome, and I told her to sit down and try
to recover herself."
I went to Mrs. Michelson's room, and found Fanny
in a corner, with her box by her side, crying
bitterly.
She could give me no explanation whatever of her
sudden dismissal. Sir Percival had ordered that she
should have a month's wages, in place of a month's
warning, and go. No reason had been assigned—no
objection had been made to her conduct. She had been
forbidden to appeal to her mistress, forbidden even
to see her for a moment to say good-bye. She was to
go without explanations or farewells, and to go at
once.
After soothing the poor girl by a few friendly
words, I asked where she proposed to sleep that
night. She replied that she thought of going to the
little inn in the village, the landlady of which was
a respectable woman, known to the servants at
Blackwater Park. The next morning, by leaving early,
she might get back to her friends in Cumberland
without stopping in London, where she was a total
stranger.
I felt directly that Fanny's departure offered us
a safe means of communication with London and with
Limmeridge House, of which it might be very
important to avail ourselves. Accordingly, I told
her that she might expect to hear from her mistress
or from me in the course of the evening, and that
she might depend on our both doing all that lay in
our power to help her, under the trial of leaving us
for the present. Those words said, I shook hands
with her and went upstairs.
The door which led to Laura's room was the door
of an ante-chamber opening on to the passage. When I
tried it, it was bolted on the inside.
I knocked, and the door was opened by the same
heavy, overgrown housemaid whose lumpish
insensibility had tried my patience so severely on
the day when I found the wounded dog.
I had, since that time, discovered that her name
was Margaret Porcher, and that she was the most
awkward, slatternly, and obstinate servant in the
house.
On opening the door she instantly stepped out to
the threshold, and stood grinning at me in stolid
silence.
"Why do you stand there?" I said. "Don't you see
that I want to come in?"
"Ah, but you mustn't come in," was the answer,
with another and a broader grin still.
"How dare you talk to me in that way? Stand back
instantly!"
She stretched out a great red hand and arm on
each side of her, so as to bar the doorway, and
slowly nodded her addle head at me.
"Master's orders," she said, and nodded again.
I had need of all my self-control to warn me
against contesting the matter with HER, and to
remind me that the next words I had to say must be
addressed to her master. I turned my back on her,
and instantly went downstairs to find him. My
resolution to keep my temper under all the
irritations that Sir Percival could offer was, by
this time, as completely forgotten—I say so to my
shame—as if I had never made it. It did me good,
after all I had suffered and suppressed in that
house—it actually did me good to feel how angry I
was.
The drawing-room and the breakfast-room were both
empty. I went on to the library, and there I found
Sir Percival, the Count, and Madame Fosco. They were
all three standing up, close together, and Sir
Percival had a little slip of paper in his hand. As
I opened the door I heard the Count say to him,
"No—a thousand times over, no."
I walked straight up to him, and looked him full
in the face.
"Am I to understand, Sir Percival, that your
wife's room is a prison, and that your housemaid is
the gaoler who keeps it?" I asked.
"Yes, that is what you are to understand," he
answered. "Take care my gaoler hasn't got double
duty to do—take care your room is not a prison too."
"Take YOU care how you treat your wife, and how
you threaten ME," I broke out in the heat of my
anger. "There are laws in England to protect women
from cruelty and outrage. If you hurt a hair of
Laura's head, if you dare to interfere with my
freedom, come what may, to those laws I will
appeal."
Instead of answering me he turned round to the
Count.
"What did I tell you?" he asked. "What do you say
now?"
"What I said before," replied the Count—"No."
Even in the vehemence of my anger I felt his
calm, cold, grey eyes on my face. They turned away
from me as soon as he had spoken, and looked
significantly at his wife. Madame Fosco immediately
moved close to my side, and in that position
addressed Sir Percival before either of us could
speak again.
"Favour me with your attention for one moment,"
she said, in her clear icily-suppressed tones. "I
have to thank you, Sir Percival, for your
hospitality, and to decline taking advantage of it
any longer. I remain in no house in which ladies are
treated as your wife and Miss Halcombe have been
treated here to-day!"
Sir Percival drew back a step, and stared at her
in dead silence. The declaration he had just heard—a
declaration which he well knew, as I well knew,
Madame Fosco would not have ventured to make without
her husband's permission—seemed to petrify him with
surprise. The Count stood by, and looked at his wife
with the most enthusiastic admiration.
"She is sublime!" he said to himself. He
approached her while he spoke, and drew her hand
through his arm. "I am at your service, Eleanor," he
went on, with a quiet dignity that I had never
noticed in him before. "And at Miss Halcombe's
service, if she will honour me by accepting all the
assistance I can offer her."
"Damn it! what do you mean?" cried Sir Percival,
as the Count quietly moved away with his wife to the
door.
"At other times I mean what I say, but at this
time I mean what my wife says," replied the
impenetrable Italian. "We have changed places,
Percival, for once, and Madame Fosco's opinion
is—mine."
Sir Percival crumpled up the paper in his hand,
and pushing past the Count, with another oath, stood
between him and the door.
"Have your own way," he said, with baffled rage
in his low, half-whispering tones. "Have your own
way—and see what comes of it." With those words he
left the room.
Madame Fosco glanced inquiringly at her husband.
"He has gone away very suddenly," she said. "What
does it mean?"
"It means that you and I together have brought
the worst-tempered man in all England to his
senses," answered the Count. "It means, Miss
Halcombe, that Lady Glyde is relieved from a gross
indignity, and you from the repetition of an
unpardonable insult. Suffer me to express my
admiration of your conduct and your courage at a
very trying moment."
"Sincere admiration," suggested Madame Fosco.
"Sincere admiration," echoed the Count.
I had no longer the strength of my first angry
resistance to outrage and injury to support me. My
heart-sick anxiety to see Laura, my sense of my own
helpless ignorance of what had happened at the
boat-house, pressed on me with an intolerable
weight. I tried to keep up appearances by speaking
to the Count and his wife in the tone which they had
chosen to adopt in speaking to me, but the words
failed on my lips—my breath came short and thick—my
eyes looked longingly, in silence, at the door. The
Count, understanding my anxiety, opened it, went
out, and pulled it to after him. At the same time
Sir Percival's heavy step descended the stairs. I
heard them whispering together outside, while Madame
Fosco was assuring me, in her calmest and most
conventional manner, that she rejoiced, for all our
sakes, that Sir Percival's conduct had not obliged
her husband and herself to leave Blackwater Park.
Before she had done speaking the whispering ceased,
the door opened, and the Count looked in.
"Miss Halcombe," he said, "I am happy to inform
you that Lady Glyde is mistress again in her own
house. I thought it might be more agreeable to you
to hear of this change for the better from me than
from Sir Percival, and I have therefore expressly
returned to mention it."
"Admirable delicacy!" said Madame Fosco, paying
back her husband's tribute of admiration with the
Count's own coin, in the Count's own manner. He
smiled and bowed as if he had received a formal
compliment from a polite stranger, and drew back to
let me pass out first.
Sir Percival was standing in the hall. As I
hurried to the stairs I heard him call impatiently
to the Count to come out of the library.
"What are you waiting there for?" he said. "I
want to speak to you."
"And I want to think a little by myself," replied
the other. "Wait till later, Percival, wait till
later."
Neither he nor his friend said any more. I gained
the top of the stairs and ran along the passage. In
my haste and my agitation I left the door of the
ante-chamber open, but I closed the door of the
bedroom the moment I was inside it.
Laura was sitting alone at the far end of the
room, her arms resting wearily on a table, and her
face hidden in her hands. She started up with a cry
of delight when she saw me.
"How did you get here?" she asked. "Who gave you
leave? Not Sir Percival?"
In my overpowering anxiety to hear what she had
to tell me, I could not answer her—I could only put
questions on my side. Laura's eagerness to know what
had passed downstairs proved, however, too strong to
be resisted. She persistently repeated her
inquiries.
"The Count, of course," I answered impatiently.
"Whose influence in the house——"
She stopped me with a gesture of disgust.
"Don't speak of him," she cried. "The Count is
the vilest creature breathing! The Count is a
miserable Spy——!"
Before we could either of us say another word we
were alarmed by a soft knocking at the door of the
bedroom.
I had not yet sat down, and I went first to see
who it was. When I opened the door Madame Fosco
confronted me with my handkerchief in her hand.
"You dropped this downstairs, Miss Halcombe," she
said, "and I thought I could bring it to you, as I
was passing by to my own room."
Her face, naturally pale, had turned to such a
ghastly whiteness that I started at the sight of it.
Her hands, so sure and steady at all other times,
trembled violently, and her eyes looked wolfishly
past me through the open door, and fixed on Laura.
She had been listening before she knocked! I saw
it in her white face, I saw it in her trembling
hands, I saw it in her look at Laura.
After waiting an instant she turned from me in
silence, and slowly walked away.
I closed the door again. "Oh, Laura! Laura! We
shall both rue the day when you called the Count a
Spy!"
"You would have called him so yourself, Marian,
if you had known what I know. Anne Catherick was
right. There was a third person watching us in the
plantation yesterday, and that third person—-"
"Are you sure it was the Count?"
"I am absolutely certain. He was Sir Percival's
spy—he was Sir Percival's informer—he set Sir
Percival watching and waiting, all the morning
through, for Anne Catherick and for me."
"Is Anne found? Did you see her at the lake?"
"No. She has saved herself by keeping away from
the place. When I got to the boat-house no one was
there."
"Yes? Yes?"
"I went in and sat waiting for a few minutes. But
my restlessness made me get up again, to walk about
a little. As I passed out I saw some marks on the
sand, close under the front of the boat-house. I
stooped down to examine them, and discovered a word
written in large letters on the sand. The word
was—LOOK."
"And you scraped away the sand, and dug a hollow
place in it?"
"How do you know that, Marian?"
"I saw the hollow place myself when I followed
you to the boat-house. Go on—go on!"
"Yes, I scraped away the sand on the surface, and
in a little while I came to a strip of paper hidden
beneath, which had writing on it. The writing was
signed with Anne Catherick's initials."
"Where is it?"
"Sir Percival has taken it from me."
"Can you remember what the writing was? Do you
think you can repeat it to me?"
"In substance I can, Marian. It was very short.
You would have remembered it, word for word."
"Try to tell me what the substance was before we
go any further."
She complied. I write the lines down here exactly
as she repeated them to me. They ran thus—
"I was seen with you, yesterday, by a tall, stout old
man, and had to run to save myself. He was not quick
enough on his feet to follow me, and he lost me
among the trees. I dare not risk coming back here
to-day at the same time. I write this, and hide it
in the sand, at six in the morning, to tell you so.
When we speak next of your wicked husband's Secret
we must speak safely, or not at all. Try to have
patience. I promise you shall see me again and that
soon.—A. C."
The reference to the "tall, stout old man" (the terms of which Laura
was certain that she had repeated to me correctly)
left no doubt as to who the intruder had been. I
called to mind that I had told Sir Percival, in the
Count's presence the day before, that Laura had gone
to the boat-house to look for her brooch. In all
probability he had followed her there, in his
officious way, to relieve her mind about the matter
of the signature, immediately after he had mentioned
the change in Sir Percival's plans to me in the
drawing-room. In this case he could only have got to
the neighbourhood of the boat-house at the very
moment when Anne Catherick discovered him. The
suspiciously hurried manner in which she parted from
Laura had no doubt prompted his useless attempt to
follow her. Of the conversation which had previously
taken place between them he could have heard
nothing. The distance between the house and the
lake, and the time at which he left me in the
drawing-room, as compared with the time at which
Laura and Anne Catherick had been speaking together,
proved that fact to us at any rate, beyond a doubt.
Having arrived at something like a conclusion so
far, my next great interest was to know what
discoveries Sir Percival had made after Count Fosco
had given him his information.
"How came you to lose possession of the letter?"
I asked. "What did you do with it when you found it
in the sand?"
"After reading it once through," she replied, "I
took it into the boat-house with me to sit down and
look over it a second time. While I was reading a
shadow fell across the paper. I looked up, and saw
Sir Percival standing in the doorway watching me."
"Did you try to hide the letter?"
"I tried, but he stopped me. 'You needn't trouble
to hide that,' he said. 'I happen to have read it.'
I could only look at him helplessly—I could say
nothing. 'You understand?' he went on; 'I have read
it. I dug it up out of the sand two hours since, and
buried it again, and wrote the word above it again,
and left it ready to your hands. You can't lie
yourself out of the scrape now. You saw Anne
Catherick in secret yesterday, and you have got her
letter in your hand at this moment. I have not
caught HER yet, but I have caught YOU. Give me the
letter.' He stepped close up to me—I was alone with
him, Marian—what could I do?—I gave him the letter."
"What did he say when you gave it to him?"
"At first he said nothing. He took me by the arm,
and led me out of the boat-house, and looked about
him on all sides, as if he was afraid of our being
seen or heard. Then he clasped his hand fast round
my arm, and whispered to me, 'What did Anne
Catherick say to you yesterday? I insist on hearing
every word, from first to last.'"
"Did you tell him?"
"I was alone with him, Marian—his cruel hand was
bruising my arm—what could I do?"
"Is the mark on your arm still? Let me see it."
"Why do you want to see it?"
"I want to see it, Laura, because our endurance
must end, and our resistance must begin to-day. That
mark is a weapon to strike him with. Let me see it
now—I may have to swear to it at some future time."
"Oh, Marian, don't look so—don't talk so! It
doesn't hurt me now!"
"Let me see it!"
She showed me the marks. I was past grieving over
them, past crying over them, past shuddering over
them. They say we are either better than men, or
worse. If the temptation that has fallen in some
women's way, and made them worse, had fallen in mine
at that moment—Thank God! my face betrayed nothing
that his wife could read. The gentle, innocent,
affectionate creature thought I was frightened for
her and sorry for her, and thought no more.
"Don't think too seriously of it, Marian," she
said simply, as she pulled her sleeve down again.
"It doesn't hurt me now."
"I will try to think quietly of it, my love, for
your sake.—Well! well! And you told him all that
Anne Catherick had said to you—all that you told
me?"
"Yes, all. He insisted on it—I was alone with
him—I could conceal nothing."
"Did he say anything when you had done?"
"He looked at me, and laughed to himself in a
mocking, bitter way. 'I mean to have the rest out of
you,' he said, 'do you hear?—the rest.' I declared
to him solemnly that I had told him everything I
knew. 'Not you,' he answered, 'you know more than
you choose to tell. Won't you tell it? You shall!
I'll wring it out of you at home if I can't wring it
out of you here.' He led me away by a strange path
through the plantation—a path where there was no
hope of our meeting you—and he spoke no more till we
came within sight of the house. Then he stopped
again, and said, 'Will you take a second chance, if
I give it to you? Will you think better of it, and
tell me the rest?' I could only repeat the same
words I had spoken before. He cursed my obstinacy,
and went on, and took me with him to the house. 'You
can't deceive me,' he said, 'you know more than you
choose to tell. I'll have your secret out of you,
and I'll have it out of that sister of yours as
well. There shall be no more plotting and whispering
between you. Neither you nor she shall see each
other again till you have confessed the truth. I'll
have you watched morning, noon, and night, till you
confess the truth.' He was deaf to everything I
could say. He took me straight upstairs into my own
room. Fanny was sitting there, doing some work for
me, and he instantly ordered her out. 'I'll take
good care YOU'RE not mixed up in the conspiracy,' he
said. 'You shall leave this house to-day. If your
mistress wants a maid, she shall have one of my
choosing.' He pushed me into the room, and locked
the door on me. He set that senseless woman to watch
me outside, Marian! He looked and spoke like a
madman. You may hardly understand it—he did indeed."
"I do understand it, Laura. He is mad—mad with
the terrors of a guilty conscience. Every word you
have said makes me positively certain that when Anne
Catherick left you yesterday you were on the eve of
discovering a secret which might have been your vile
husband's ruin, and he thinks you HAVE discovered
it. Nothing you can say or do will quiet that guilty
distrust, and convince his false nature of your
truth. I don't say this, my love, to alarm you. I
say it to open your eyes to your position, and to
convince you of the urgent necessity of letting me
act, as I best can, for your protection while the
chance is our own. Count Fosco's interference has
secured me access to you to-day, but he may withdraw
that interference to-morrow. Sir Percival has
already dismissed Fanny because she is a
quick-witted girl, and devotedly attached to you,
and has chosen a woman to take her place who cares
nothing for your interests, and whose dull
intelligence lowers her to the level of the
watch-dog in the yard. It is impossible to say what
violent measures he may take next, unless we make
the most of our opportunities while we have them."
"What can we do, Marian? Oh, if we could only
leave this house, never to see it again!"
"Listen to me, my love, and try to think that you
are not quite helpless so long as I am here with
you."
"I will think so—I do think so. Don't altogether
forget poor Fanny in thinking of me. She wants help
and comfort too."
"I will not forget her. I saw her before I came
up here, and I have arranged to communicate with her
to-night. Letters are not safe in the post-bag at
Blackwater Park, and I shall have two to write
to-day, in your interests, which must pass through
no hands but Fanny's."
"What letters?"
"I mean to write first, Laura, to Mr. Gilmore's
partner, who has offered to help us in any fresh
emergency. Little as I know of the law, I am certain
that it can protect a woman from such treatment as
that ruffian has inflicted on you to-day. I will go
into no details about Anne Catherick, because I have
no certain information to give. But the lawyer shall
know of those bruises on your arm, and of the
violence offered to you in this room—he shall,
before I rest to-night!"
"But think of the exposure, Marian!"
"I am calculating on the exposure. Sir Percival
has more to dread from it than you have. The
prospect of an exposure may bring him to terms when
nothing else will."
I rose as I spoke, but Laura entreated me not to
leave her. "You will drive him to desperation," she
said, "and increase our dangers tenfold."
I felt the truth—the disheartening truth—of those
words. But I could not bring myself plainly to
acknowledge it to her. In our dreadful position
there was no help and no hope for us but in risking
the worst. I said so in guarded terms. She sighed
bitterly, but did not contest the matter. She only
asked about the second letter that I had proposed
writing. To whom was it to be addressed?
"To Mr. Fairlie," I said. "Your uncle is your
nearest male relative, and the head of the family.
He must and shall interfere."
Laura shook her head sorrowfully.
"Yes, yes," I went on, "your uncle is a weak,
selfish, worldly man, I know, but he is not Sir
Percival Glyde, and he has no such friend about him
as Count Fosco. I expect nothing from his kindness
or his tenderness of feeling towards you or towards
me, but he will do anything to pamper his own
indolence, and to secure his own quiet. Let me only
persuade him that his interference at this moment
will save him inevitable trouble and wretchedness
and responsibility hereafter, and he will bestir
himself for his own sake. I know how to deal with
him, Laura—I have had some practice."
"If you could only prevail on him to let me go
back to Limmeridge for a little while and stay there
quietly with you, Marian, I could be almost as happy
again as I was before I was married!"
Those words set me thinking in a new direction.
Would it be possible to place Sir Percival between
the two alternatives of either exposing himself to
the scandal of legal interference on his wife's
behalf, or of allowing her to be quietly separated
from him for a time under pretext of a visit to her
uncle's house? And could he, in that case, be
reckoned on as likely to accept the last resource?
It was doubtful—more than doubtful. And yet,
hopeless as the experiment seemed, surely it was
worth trying. I resolved to try it in sheer despair
of knowing what better to do.
"Your uncle shall know the wish you have just
expressed," I said, "and I will ask the lawyer's
advice on the subject as well. Good may come of
it—and will come of it, I hope."
Saying that I rose again, and again Laura tried
to make me resume my seat.
"Don't leave me," she said uneasily. "My desk is
on that table. You can write here."
It tried me to the quick to refuse her, even in
her own interests. But we had been too long shut up
alone together already. Our chance of seeing each
other again might entirely depend on our not
exciting any fresh suspicions. It was full time to
show myself, quietly and unconcernedly, among the
wretches who were at that very moment, perhaps,
thinking of us and talking of us downstairs. I
explained the miserable necessity to Laura, and
prevailed on her to recognise it as I did.
"I will come back again, love, in an hour or
less," I said. "The worst is over for to-day. Keep
yourself quiet and fear nothing."
"Is the key in the door, Marian? Can I lock it on
the inside?"
"Yes, here is the key. Lock the door, and open it
to nobody until I come upstairs again."
I kissed her and left her. It was a relief to me
as I walked away to hear the key turned in the lock,
and to know that the door was at her own command.
VIII
June 19th.—I had only got as far as the top of
the stairs when the locking of Laura's door
suggested to me the precaution of also locking my
own door, and keeping the key safely about me while
I was out of the room. My journal was already
secured with other papers in the table drawer, but
my writing materials were left out. These included a
seal bearing the common device of two doves drinking
out of the same cup, and some sheets of
blotting-paper, which had the impression on them of
the closing lines of my writing in these pages
traced during the past night. Distorted by the
suspicion which had now become a part of myself,
even such trifles as these looked too dangerous to
be trusted without a guard—even the locked table
drawer seemed to be not sufficiently protected in my
absence until the means of access to it had been
carefully secured as well.
I found no appearance of any one having entered
the room while I had been talking with Laura. My
writing materials (which I had given the servant
instructions never to meddle with) were scattered
over the table much as usual. The only circumstance
in connection with them that at all struck me was
that the seal lay tidily in the tray with the
pencils and the wax. It was not in my careless
habits (I am sorry to say) to put it there, neither
did I remember putting it there. But as I could not
call to mind, on the other hand, where else I had
thrown it down, and as I was also doubtful whether I
might not for once have laid it mechanically in the
right place, I abstained from adding to the
perplexity with which the day's events had filled my
mind by troubling it afresh about a trifle. I locked
the door, put the key in my pocket, and went
downstairs.
Madame Fosco was alone in the hall looking at the
weather-glass.
"Still falling," she said. "I am afraid we must
expect more rain."
Her face was composed again to its customary
expression and its customary colour. But the hand
with which she pointed to the dial of the
weather-glass still trembled.
Could she have told her husband already that she
had overheard Laura reviling him, in my company, as
a "spy?" My strong suspicion that she must have told
him, my irresistible dread (all the more
overpowering from its very vagueness) of the
consequences which might follow, my fixed
conviction, derived from various little
self-betrayals which women notice in each other,
that Madame Fosco, in spite of her well-assumed
external civility, had not forgiven her niece for
innocently standing between her and the legacy of
ten thousand pounds—all rushed upon my mind
together, all impelled me to speak in the vain hope
of using my own influence and my own powers of
persuasion for the atonement of Laura's offence.
"May I trust to your kindness to excuse me,
Madame Fosco, if I venture to speak to you on an
exceedingly painful subject?"
She crossed her hands in front of her and bowed
her head solemnly, without uttering a word, and
without taking her eyes off mine for a moment.
"When you were so good as to bring me back my
handkerchief," I went on, "I am very, very much
afraid you must have accidentally heard Laura say
something which I am unwilling to repeat, and which
I will not attempt to defend. I will only venture to
hope that you have not thought it of sufficient
importance to be mentioned to the Count?"
"I think it of no importance whatever," said
Madame Fosco sharply and suddenly. "But," she added,
resuming her icy manner in a moment, "I have no
secrets from my husband even in trifles. When he
noticed just now that I looked distressed, it was my
painful duty to tell him why I was distressed, and I
frankly acknowledge to you, Miss Halcombe, that I
HAVE told him."
I was prepared to hear it, and yet she turned me
cold all over when she said those words.
"Let me earnestly entreat you, Madame Fosco—let
me earnestly entreat the Count—to make some
allowances for the sad position in which my sister
is placed. She spoke while she was smarting under
the insult and injustice inflicted on her by her
husband, and she was not herself when she said those
rash words. May I hope that they will be
considerately and generously forgiven?"
"Most assuredly," said the Count's quiet voice
behind me. He had stolen on us with his noiseless
tread and his book in his hand from the library.
"When Lady Glyde said those hasty words," he went
on, "she did me an injustice which I lament—and
forgive. Let us never return to the subject, Miss
Halcombe; let us all comfortably combine to forget
it from this moment."
"You are very kind," I said, "you relieve me
inexpressibly."
I tried to continue, but his eyes were on me; his
deadly smile that hides everything was set, hard,
and unwavering on his broad, smooth face. My
distrust of his unfathomable falseness, my sense of
my own degradation in stooping to conciliate his
wife and himself, so disturbed and confused me, that
the next words failed on my lips, and I stood there
in silence.
"I beg you on my knees to say no more, Miss
Halcombe—I am truly shocked that you should have
thought it necessary to say so much." With that
polite speech he took my hand—oh, how I despise
myself! oh, how little comfort there is even in
knowing that I submitted to it for Laura's sake!—he
took my hand and put it to his poisonous lips. Never
did I know all my horror of him till then. That
innocent familiarity turned my blood as if it had
been the vilest insult that a man could offer me.
Yet I hid my disgust from him—I tried to smile—I,
who once mercilessly despised deceit in other women,
was as false as the worst of them, as false as the
Judas whose lips had touched my hand.
I could not have maintained my degrading
self-control—it is all that redeems me in my own
estimation to know that I could not—if he had still
continued to keep his eyes on my face. His wife's
tigerish jealousy came to my rescue and forced his
attention away from me the moment he possessed
himself of my hand. Her cold blue eyes caught light,
her dull white cheeks flushed into bright colour,
she looked years younger than her age in an instant.
"Count!" she said. "Your foreign forms of
politeness are not understood by Englishwomen."
"Pardon me, my angel! The best and dearest
Englishwoman in the world understands them." With
those words he dropped my hand and quietly raised
his wife's hand to his lips in place of it.
I ran back up the stairs to take refuge in my own
room. If there had been time to think, my thoughts,
when I was alone again, would have caused me bitter
suffering. But there was no time to think. Happily
for the preservation of my calmness and my courage
there was time for nothing but action.
The letters to the lawyer and to Mr. Fairlie were
still to be written, and I sat down at once without
a moment's hesitation to devote myself to them.
There was no multitude of resources to perplex
me—there was absolutely no one to depend on, in the
first instance, but myself. Sir Percival had neither
friends nor relatives in the neighbourhood whose
intercession I could attempt to employ. He was on
the coldest terms—in some cases on the worst terms
with the families of his own rank and station who
lived near him. We two women had neither father nor
brother to come to the house and take our parts.
There was no choice but to write those two doubtful
letters, or to put Laura in the wrong and myself in
the wrong, and to make all peaceable negotiation in
the future impossible by secretly escaping from
Blackwater Park. Nothing but the most imminent
personal peril could justify our taking that second
course. The letters must be tried first, and I wrote
them.
I said nothing to the lawyer about Anne
Catherick, because (as I had already hinted to
Laura) that topic was connected with a mystery which
we could not yet explain, and which it would
therefore be useless to write about to a
professional man. I left my correspondent to
attribute Sir Percival's disgraceful conduct, if he
pleased, to fresh disputes about money matters, and
simply consulted him on the possibility of taking
legal proceedings for Laura's protection in the
event of her husband's refusal to allow her to leave
Blackwater Park for a time and return with me to
Limmeridge. I referred him to Mr. Fairlie for the
details of this last arrangement—I assured him that
I wrote with Laura's authority—and I ended by
entreating him to act in her name to the utmost
extent of his power and with the least possible loss
of time.
The letter to Mr. Fairlie occupied me next. I
appealed to him on the terms which I had mentioned
to Laura as the most likely to make him bestir
himself; I enclosed a copy of my letter to the
lawyer to show him how serious the case was, and I
represented our removal to Limmeridge as the only
compromise which would prevent the danger and
distress of Laura's present position from inevitably
affecting her uncle as well as herself at no very
distant time.
When I had done, and had sealed and directed the
two envelopes, I went back with the letters to
Laura's room, to show her that they were written.
"Has anybody disturbed you?" I asked, when she
opened the door to me.
"Nobody has knocked," she replied. "But I heard
some one in the outer room."
"Was it a man or a woman?"
"A woman. I heard the rustling of her gown."
"A rustling like silk?"
"Yes, like silk."
Madame Fosco had evidently been watching outside.
The mischief she might do by herself was little to
be feared. But the mischief she might do, as a
willing instrument in her husband's hands, was too
formidable to be overlooked.
"What became of the rustling of the gown when you
no longer heard it in the ante-room?" I inquired.
"Did you hear it go past your wall, along the
passage?"
"Yes. I kept still and listened, and just heard
it."
"Which way did it go?"
"Towards your room."
I considered again. The sound had not caught my
ears. But I was then deeply absorbed in my letters,
and I write with a heavy hand and a quill pen,
scraping and scratching noisily over the paper. It
was more likely that Madame Fosco would hear the
scraping of my pen than that I should hear the
rustling of her dress. Another reason (if I had
wanted one) for not trusting my letters to the
post-bag in the hall.
Laura saw me thinking. "More difficulties!" she
said wearily; "more difficulties and more dangers!"
"No dangers," I replied. "Some little difficulty,
perhaps. I am thinking of the safest way of putting
my two letters into Fanny's hands."
"You have really written them, then? Oh, Marian,
run no risks—pray, pray run no risks!"
"No, no—no fear. Let me see—what o'clock is it
now?"
It was a quarter to six. There would be time for
me to get to the village inn, and to come back again
before dinner. If I waited till the evening I might
find no second opportunity of safely leaving the
house.
"Keep the key turned in the lock. Laura," I said,
"and don't be afraid about me. If you hear any
inquiries made, call through the door, and say that
I am gone out for a walk."
"When shall you be back?"
"Before dinner, without fail. Courage, my love.
By this time to-morrow you will have a clear-headed,
trustworthy man acting for your good. Mr. Gilmore's
partner is our next best friend to Mr. Gilmore
himself."
A moment's reflection, as soon as I was alone,
convinced me that I had better not appear in my
walking-dress until I had first discovered what was
going on in the lower part of the house. I had not
ascertained yet whether Sir Percival was indoors or
out.
The singing of the canaries in the library, and
the smell of tobacco-smoke that came through the
door, which was not closed, told me at once where
the Count was. I looked over my shoulder as I passed
the doorway, and saw to my surprise that he was
exhibiting the docility of the birds in his most
engagingly polite manner to the housekeeper. He must
have specially invited her to see them—for she would
never have thought of going into the library of her
own accord. The man's slightest actions had a
purpose of some kind at the bottom of every one of
them. What could be his purpose here?
It was no time then to inquire into his motives.
I looked about for Madame Fosco next, and found her
following her favourite circle round and round the
fish-pond.
I was a little doubtful how she would meet me,
after the outbreak of jealousy of which I had been
the cause so short a time since. But her husband had
tamed her in the interval, and she now spoke to me
with the same civility as usual. My only object in
addressing myself to her was to ascertain if she
knew what had become of Sir Percival. I contrived to
refer to him indirectly, and after a little fencing
on either side she at last mentioned that he had
gone out.
"Which of the horses has he taken?" I asked
carelessly.
"None of them," she replied. "He went away two
hours since on foot. As I understood it, his object
was to make fresh inquiries about the woman named
Anne Catherick. He appears to be unreasonably
anxious about tracing her. Do you happen to know if
she is dangerously mad, Miss Halcombe?"
"I do not, Countess."
"Are you going in?"
"Yes, I think so. I suppose it will soon be time
to dress for dinner."
We entered the house together. Madame Fosco
strolled into the library, and closed the door. I
went at once to fetch my hat and shawl. Every moment
was of importance, if I was to get to Fanny at the
inn and be back before dinner.
When I crossed the hall again no one was there,
and the singing of the birds in the library had
ceased. I could not stop to make any fresh
investigations. I could only assure myself that the
way was clear, and then leave the house with the two
letters safe in my pocket.
On my way to the village I prepared myself for
the possibility of meeting Sir Percival. As long as
I had him to deal with alone I felt certain of not
losing my presence of mind. Any woman who is sure of
her own wits is a match at any time for a man who is
not sure of his own temper. I had no such fear of
Sir Percival as I had of the Count. Instead of
fluttering, it had composed me, to hear of the
errand on which he had gone out. While the tracing
of Anne Catherick was the great anxiety that
occupied him, Laura and I might hope for some
cessation of any active persecution at his hands.
For our sakes now, as well as for Anne's, I hoped
and prayed fervently that she might still escape
him.
I walked on as briskly as the heat would let me
till I reached the cross-road which led to the
village, looking back from time to time to make sure
that I was not followed by any one.
Nothing was behind me all the way but an empty
country waggon. The noise made by the lumbering
wheels annoyed me, and when I found that the waggon
took the road to the village, as well as myself, I
stopped to let it go by and pass out of hearing. As
I looked toward it, more attentively than before, I
thought I detected at intervals the feet of a man
walking close behind it, the carter being in front,
by the side of his horses. The part of the
cross-road which I had just passed over was so
narrow that the waggon coming after me brushed the
trees and thickets on either side, and I had to wait
until it went by before I could test the correctness
of my impression. Apparently that impression was
wrong, for when the waggon had passed me the road
behind it was quite clear.
I reached the inn without meeting Sir Percival,
and without noticing anything more, and was glad to
find that the landlady had received Fanny with all
possible kindness. The girl had a little parlour to
sit in, away from the noise of the taproom, and a
clean bedchamber at the top of the house. She began
crying again at the sight of me, and said, poor
soul, truly enough, that it was dreadful to feel
herself turned out into the world as if she had
committed some unpardonable fault, when no blame
could be laid at her door by anybody—not even by her
master, who had sent her away.
"Try to make the best of it, Fanny," I said.
"Your mistress and I will stand your friends, and
will take care that your character shall not suffer.
Now, listen to me. I have very little time to spare,
and I am going to put a great trust in your hands. I
wish you to take care of these two letters. The one
with the stamp on it you are to put into the post
when you reach London to-morrow. The other, directed
to Mr. Fairlie, you are to deliver to him yourself
as soon as you get home. Keep both the letters about
you and give them up to no one. They are of the last
importance to your mistress's interests."
Fanny put the letters into the bosom of her
dress. "There they shall stop, miss," she said,
"till I have done what you tell me."
"Mind you are at the station in good time
to-morrow morning," I continued. "And when you see
the housekeeper at Limmeridge give her my
compliments, and say that you are in my service
until Lady Glyde is able to take you back. We may
meet again sooner than you think. So keep a good
heart, and don't miss the seven o'clock train."
"Thank you, miss—thank you kindly. It gives one
courage to hear your voice again. Please to offer my
duty to my lady, and say I left all the things as
tidy as I could in the time. Oh, dear! dear! who
will dress her for dinner to-day? It really breaks
my heart, miss, to think of it."
When I got back to the house I had only a quarter of an hour to spare
to put myself in order for dinner, and to say two
words to Laura before I went downstairs.
"The letters are in Fanny's hands," I whispered
to her at the door. "Do you mean to join us at
dinner?"
"Oh, no, no—not for the world."
"Has anything happened? Has any one disturbed
you?"
"Yes—just now—Sir Percival——"
"Did he come in?"
"No, he frightened me by a thump on the door
outside. I said, 'Who's there?' 'You know,' he
answered. 'Will you alter your mind, and tell me the
rest? You shall! Sooner or later I'll wring it out
of you. You know where Anne Catherick is at this
moment.' 'Indeed, indeed,' I said, 'I don't.' 'You
do!' he called back. 'I'll crush your obstinacy—mind
that!—I'll wring it out of you!' He went away with
those words—went away, Marian, hardly five minutes
ago."
He had not found Anne! We were safe for that
night—he had not found her yet.
"You are going downstairs, Marian? Come up again
in the evening."
"Yes, yes. Don't be uneasy if I am a little
late—I must be careful not to give offence by
leaving them too soon."
The dinner-bell rang and I hastened away.
Sir Percival took Madame Fosco into the
dining-room, and the Count gave me his arm. He was
hot and flushed, and was not dressed with his
customary care and completeness. Had he, too, been
out before dinner, and been late in getting back? or
was he only suffering from the heat a little more
severely than usual?
However this might be, he was unquestionably
troubled by some secret annoyance or anxiety, which,
with all his powers of deception, he was not able
entirely to conceal. Through the whole of dinner he
was almost as silent as Sir Percival himself, and
he, every now and then, looked at his wife with an
expression of furtive uneasiness which was quite new
in my experience of him. The one social obligation
which he seemed to be self-possessed enough to
perform as carefully as ever was the obligation of
being persistently civil and attentive to me. What
vile object he has in view I cannot still discover,
but be the design what it may, invariable politeness
towards myself, invariable humility towards Laura,
and invariable suppression (at any cost) of Sir
Percival's clumsy violence, have been the means he
has resolutely and impenetrably used to get to his
end ever since he set foot in this house. I
suspected it when he first interfered in our favour,
on the day when the deed was produced in the
library, and I feel certain of it now.
When Madame Fosco and I rose to leave the table,
the Count rose also to accompany us back to the
drawing-room.
"What are you going away for?" asked Sir
Percival—"I mean YOU, Fosco."
"I am going away because I have had dinner
enough, and wine enough," answered the Count. "Be so
kind, Percival, as to make allowances for my foreign
habit of going out with the ladies, as well as
coming in with them."
"Nonsense! Another glass of claret won't hurt
you. Sit down again like an Englishman. I want half
an hour's quiet talk with you over our wine."
"A quiet talk, Percival, with all my heart, but
not now, and not over the wine. Later in the
evening, if you please—later in the evening."
"Civil!" said Sir Percival savagely. "Civil
behaviour, upon my soul, to a man in his own house!"
I had more than once seen him look at the Count
uneasily during dinner-time, and had observed that
the Count carefully abstained from looking at him in
return. This circumstance, coupled with the host's
anxiety for a little quiet talk over the wine, and
the guest's obstinate resolution not to sit down
again at the table, revived in my memory the request
which Sir Percival had vainly addressed to his
friend earlier in the day to come out of the library
and speak to him. The Count had deferred granting
that private interview, when it was first asked for
in the afternoon, and had again deferred granting
it, when it was a second time asked for at the
dinner-table. Whatever the coming subject of
discussion between them might be, it was clearly an
important subject in Sir Percival's estimation—and
perhaps (judging from his evident reluctance to
approach it) a dangerous subject as well, in the
estimation of the Count.
These considerations occurred to me while we were
passing from the dining-room to the drawing-room.
Sir Percival's angry commentary on his friend's
desertion of him had not produced the slightest
effect. The Count obstinately accompanied us to the
tea-table—waited a minute or two in the room—went
out into the hall—and returned with the post-bag in
his hands. It was then eight o'clock—the hour at
which the letters were always despatched from
Blackwater Park.
"Have you any letter for the post, Miss
Halcombe?" he asked, approaching me with the bag.
I saw Madame Fosco, who was making the tea,
pause, with the sugar-tongs in her hand, to listen
for my answer.
"No, Count, thank you. No letters to-day."
He gave the bag to the servant, who was then in
the room; sat down at the piano, and played the air
of the lively Neapolitan street-song, "La mia
Carolina," twice over. His wife, who was usually the
most deliberate of women in all her movements, made
the tea as quickly as I could have made it
myself—finished her own cup in two minutes, and
quietly glided out of the room.
I rose to follow her example—partly because I
suspected her of attempting some treachery upstairs
with Laura, partly because I was resolved not to
remain alone in the same room with her husband.
Before I could get to the door the Count stopped
me, by a request for a cup of tea. I gave him the
cup of tea, and tried a second time to get away. He
stopped me again—this time by going back to the
piano, and suddenly appealing to me on a musical
question in which he declared that the honour of his
country was concerned.
I vainly pleaded my own total ignorance of music,
and total want of taste in that direction. He only
appealed to me again with a vehemence which set all
further protest on my part at defiance. "The English
and the Germans (he indignantly declared) were
always reviling the Italians for their inability to
cultivate the higher kinds of music. We were
perpetually talking of our Oratorios, and they were
perpetually talking of their Symphonies. Did we
forget and did they forget his immortal friend and
countryman, Rossini? What was Moses in Egypt but a
sublime oratorio, which was acted on the stage
instead of being coldly sung in a concert-room? What
was the overture to Guillaume Tell but a symphony
under another name? Had I heard Moses in Egypt?
Would I listen to this, and this, and this, and say
if anything more sublimely sacred and grand had ever
been composed by mortal man?"—And without waiting
for a word of assent or dissent on my part, looking
me hard in the face all the time, he began
thundering on the piano, and singing to it with loud
and lofty enthusiasm—only interrupting himself, at
intervals, to announce to me fiercely the titles of
the different pieces of music: "Chorus of Egyptians
in the Plague of Darkness, Miss
Halcombe!"—"Recitativo of Moses with the tables of
the Law."—"Prayer of Israelites, at the passage of
the Red Sea. Aha! Aha! Is that sacred? is that
sublime?" The piano trembled under his powerful
hands, and the teacups on the table rattled, as his
big bass voice thundered out the notes, and his
heavy foot beat time on the floor.
There was something horrible—something fierce and
devilish—in the outburst of his delight at his own
singing and playing, and in the triumph with which
he watched its effect upon me as I shrank nearer and
nearer to the door. I was released at last, not by
my own efforts, but by Sir Percival's interposition.
He opened the dining-room door, and called out
angrily to know what "that infernal noise" meant.
The Count instantly got up from the piano. "Ah! if
Percival is coming," he said, "harmony and melody
are both at an end. The Muse of Music, Miss
Halcombe, deserts us in dismay, and I, the fat old
minstrel, exhale the rest of my enthusiasm in the
open air!" He stalked out into the verandah, put his
hands in his pockets, and resumed the Recitativo of
Moses, sotto voce, in the garden.
I heard Sir Percival call after him from the
dining-room window. But he took no notice—he seemed
determined not to hear. That long-deferred quiet
talk between them was still to be put off, was still
to wait for the Count's absolute will and pleasure.
He had detained me in the drawing-room nearly
half an hour from the time when his wife left us.
Where had she been, and what had she been doing in
that interval?
I went upstairs to ascertain, but I made no
discoveries, and when I questioned Laura, I found
that she had not heard anything. Nobody had
disturbed her, no faint rustling of the silk dress
had been audible, either in the ante-room or in the
passage.
It was then twenty minutes to nine. After going
to my room to get my journal, I returned, and sat
with Laura, sometimes writing, sometimes stopping to
talk with her. Nobody came near us, and nothing
happened. We remained together till ten o'clock. I
then rose, said my last cheering words, and wished
her good-night. She locked her door again after we
had arranged that I should come in and see her the
first thing in the morning.
I had a few sentences more to add to my diary
before going to bed myself, and as I went down again
to the drawing-room after leaving Laura for the last
time that weary day, I resolved merely to show
myself there, to make my excuses, and then to retire
an hour earlier than usual for the night.
Sir Percival, and the Count and his wife, were
sitting together. Sir Percival was yawning in an
easy-chair, the Count was reading, Madame Fosco was
fanning herself. Strange to say, HER face was
flushed now. She, who never suffered from the heat,
was most undoubtedly suffering from it to-night.
"I am afraid, Countess, you are not quite so well
as usual?" I said.
"The very remark I was about to make to you," she
replied. "You are looking pale, my dear."
My dear! It was the first time she had ever
addressed me with that familiarity! There was an
insolent smile too on her face when she said the
words.
"I am suffering from one of my bad headaches," I
answered coldly.
"Ah, indeed? Want of exercise, I suppose? A walk
before dinner would have been just the thing for
you." She referred to the "walk" with a strange
emphasis. Had she seen me go out? No matter if she
had. The letters were safe now in Fanny's hands.
"Come and have a smoke, Fosco," said Sir
Percival, rising, with another uneasy look at his
friend.
"With pleasure, Percival, when the ladies have
gone to bed," replied the Count.
"Excuse me, Countess, if I set you the example of
retiring," I said. "The only remedy for such a
headache as mine is going to bed."
I took my leave. There was the same insolent
smile on the woman's face when I shook hands with
her. Sir Percival paid no attention to me. He was
looking impatiently at Madame Fosco, who showed no
signs of leaving the room with me. The Count smiled
to himself behind his book. There was yet another
delay to that quiet talk with Sir Percival—and the
Countess was the impediment this time.
IX
June 19th.—Once safely shut into my own room, I
opened these pages, and prepared to go on with that
part of the day's record which was still left to
write.
For ten minutes or more I sat idle, with the pen
in my hand, thinking over the events of the last
twelve hours. When I at last addressed myself to my
task, I found a difficulty in proceeding with it
which I had never experienced before. In spite of my
efforts to fix my thoughts on the matter in hand,
they wandered away with the strangest persistency in
the one direction of Sir Percival and the Count, and
all the interest which I tried to concentrate on my
journal centred instead in that private interview
between them which had been put off all through the
day, and which was now to take place in the silence
and solitude of the night.
In this perverse state of my mind, the
recollection of what had passed since the morning
would not come back to me, and there was no resource
but to close my journal and to get away from it for
a little while.
I opened the door which led from my bedroom into
my sitting-room, and having passed through, pulled
it to again, to prevent any accident in case of
draught with the candle left on the dressing-table.
My sitting-room window was wide open, and I leaned
out listlessly to look at the night.
It was dark and quiet. Neither moon nor stars
were visible. There was a smell like rain in the
still, heavy air, and I put my hand out of window.
No. The rain was only threatening, it had not come
yet.
I remained leaning on the window-sill for nearly
a quarter of an hour, looking out absently into the
black darkness, and hearing nothing, except now and
then the voices of the servants, or the distant
sound of a closing door, in the lower part of the
house.
Just as I was turning away wearily from the
window to go back to the bedroom and make a second
attempt to complete the unfinished entry in my
journal, I smelt the odour of tobacco-smoke stealing
towards me on the heavy night air. The next moment I
saw a tiny red spark advancing from the farther end
of the house in the pitch darkness. I heard no
footsteps, and I could see nothing but the spark. It
travelled along in the night, passed the window at
which I was standing, and stopped opposite my
bedroom window, inside which I had left the light
burning on the dressing-table.
The spark remained stationary for a moment, then
moved back again in the direction from which it had
advanced. As I followed its progress I saw a second
red spark, larger than the first, approaching from
the distance. The two met together in the darkness.
Remembering who smoked cigarettes and who smoked
cigars, I inferred immediately that the Count had
come out first to look and listen under my window,
and that Sir Percival had afterwards joined him.
They must both have been walking on the lawn—or I
should certainly have heard Sir Percival's heavy
footfall, though the Count's soft step might have
escaped me, even on the gravel walk.
I waited quietly at the window, certain that they
could neither of them see me in the darkness of the
room.
"What's the matter?" I heard Sir Percival say in
a low voice. "Why don't you come in and sit down?"
"I want to see the light out of that window,"
replied the Count softly.
"What harm does the light do?"
"It shows she is not in bed yet. She is sharp
enough to suspect something, and bold enough to come
downstairs and listen, if she can get the chance.
Patience, Percival—patience."
"Humbug! You're always talking of patience."
"I shall talk of something else presently. My
good friend, you are on the edge of your domestic
precipice, and if I let you give the women one other
chance, on my sacred word of honour they will push
you over it!"
"What the devil do you mean?"
"We will come to our explanations, Percival, when
the light is out of that window, and when I have had
one little look at the rooms on each side of the
library, and a peep at the staircase as well."
They slowly moved away, and the rest of the
conversation between them (which had been conducted
throughout in the same low tones) ceased to be
audible. It was no matter. I had heard enough to
determine me on justifying the Count's opinion of my
sharpness and my courage. Before the red sparks were
out of sight in the darkness I had made up my mind
that there should be a listener when those two men
sat down to their talk—and that the listener, in
spite of all the Count's precautions to the
contrary, should be myself. I wanted but one motive
to sanction the act to my own conscience, and to
give me courage enough for performing it—and that
motive I had. Laura's honour, Laura's
happiness—Laura's life itself—might depend on my
quick ears and my faithful memory to-night.
I had heard the Count say that he meant to
examine the rooms on each side of the library, and
the staircase as well, before he entered on any
explanation with Sir Percival. This expression of
his intentions was necessarily sufficient to inform
me that the library was the room in which he
proposed that the conversation should take place.
The one moment of time which was long enough to
bring me to that conclusion was also the moment
which showed me a means of baffling his
precautions—or, in other words, of hearing what he
and Sir Percival said to each other, without the
risk of descending at all into the lower regions of
the house.
In speaking of the rooms on the ground floor I
have mentioned incidentally the verandah outside
them, on which they all opened by means of French
windows, extending from the cornice to the floor.
The top of this verandah was flat, the rain-water
being carried off from it by pipes into tanks which
helped to supply the house. On the narrow leaden
roof, which ran along past the bedrooms, and which
was rather less, I should think, than three feet
below the sills of the window, a row of flower-pots
was ranged, with wide intervals between each pot—the
whole being protected from falling in high winds by
an ornamental iron railing along the edge of the
roof.
The plan which had now occurred to me was to get
out at my sitting-room window on to this roof, to
creep along noiselessly till I reached that part of
it which was immediately over the library window,
and to crouch down between the flower-pots, with my
ear against the outer railing. If Sir Percival and
the Count sat and smoked to-night, as I had seen
them sitting and smoking many nights before, with
their chairs close at the open window, and their
feet stretched on the zinc garden seats which were
placed under the verandah, every word they said to
each other above a whisper (and no long
conversation, as we all know by experience, can be
carried on IN a whisper) must inevitably reach my
ears. If, on the other hand, they chose to-night to
sit far back inside the room, then the chances were
that I should hear little or nothing—and in that
case, I must run the far more serious risk of trying
to outwit them downstairs.
Strongly as I was fortified in my resolution by
the desperate nature of our situation, I hoped most
fervently that I might escape this last emergency.
My courage was only a woman's courage after all, and
it was very near to failing me when I thought of
trusting myself on the ground floor, at the dead of
night, within reach of Sir Percival and the Count.
I went softly back to my bedroom to try the safer
experiment of the verandah roof first.
A complete change in my dress was imperatively
necessary for many reasons. I took off my silk gown
to begin with, because the slightest noise from it
on that still night might have betrayed me. I next
removed the white and cumbersome parts of my
underclothing, and replaced them by a petticoat of
dark flannel. Over this I put my black travelling
cloak, and pulled the hood on to my head. In my
ordinary evening costume I took up the room of three
men at least. In my present dress, when it was held
close about me, no man could have passed through the
narrowest spaces more easily than I. The little
breadth left on the roof of the verandah, between
the flower-pots on one side and the wall and the
windows of the house on the other, made this a
serious consideration. If I knocked anything down,
if I made the least noise, who could say what the
consequences might be?
I only waited to put the matches near the candle
before I extinguished it, and groped my way back
into the sitting-room, I locked that door, as I had
locked my bedroom door—then quietly got out of the
window, and cautiously set my feet on the leaden
roof of the verandah.
My two rooms were at the inner extremity of the
new wing of the house in which we all lived, and I
had five windows to pass before I could reach the
position it was necessary to take up immediately
over the library. The first window belonged to a
spare room which was empty. The second and third
windows belonged to Laura's room. The fourth window
belonged to Sir Percival's room. The fifth belonged
to the Countess's room. The others, by which it was
not necessary for me to pass, were the windows of
the Count's dressing-room, of the bathroom, and of
the second empty spare room.
No sound reached my ears—the black blinding
darkness of the night was all round me when I first
stood on the verandah, except at that part of it
which Madame Fosco's window overlooked. There, at
the very place above the library to which my course
was directed—there I saw a gleam of light! The
Countess was not yet in bed.
It was too late to draw back—it was no time to
wait. I determined to go on at all hazards, and
trust for security to my own caution and to the
darkness of the night. "For Laura's sake!" I thought
to myself, as I took the first step forward on the
roof, with one hand holding my cloak close round me,
and the other groping against the wall of the house.
It was better to brush close by the wall than to
risk striking my feet against the flower-pots within
a few inches of me, on the other side.
I passed the dark window of the spare room,
trying the leaden roof at each step with my foot
before I risked resting my weight on it. I passed
the dark windows of Laura's room ("God bless her and
keep her to-night!"). I passed the dark window of
Sir Percival's room. Then I waited a moment, knelt
down with my hands to support me, and so crept to my
position, under the protection of the low wall
between the bottom of the lighted window and the
verandah roof.
When I ventured to look up at the window itself I
found that the top of it only was open, and that the
blind inside was drawn down. While I was looking I
saw the shadow of Madame Fosco pass across the white
field of the blind—then pass slowly back again. Thus
far she could not have heard me, or the shadow would
surely have stopped at the blind, even if she had
wanted courage enough to open the window and look
out?
I placed myself sideways against the railing of
the verandah—first ascertaining, by touching them,
the position of the flower-pots on either side of
me. There was room enough for me to sit between them
and no more. The sweet-scented leaves of the flower
on my left hand just brushed my cheek as I lightly
rested my head against the railing.
The first sounds that reached me from below were
caused by the opening or closing (most probably the
latter) of three doors in succession—the doors, no
doubt, leading into the hall and into the rooms on
each side of the library, which the Count had
pledged himself to examine. The first object that I
saw was the red spark again travelling out into the
night from under the verandah, moving away towards
my window, waiting a moment, and then returning to
the place from which it had set out.
"The devil take your restlessness! When do you
mean to sit down?" growled Sir Percival's voice
beneath me.
"Ouf! how hot it is!" said the Count, sighing and
puffing wearily.
His exclamation was followed by the scraping of
the garden chairs on the tiled pavement under the
verandah—the welcome sound which told me they were
going to sit close at the window as usual. So far
the chance was mine. The clock in the turret struck
the quarter to twelve as they settled themselves in
their chairs. I heard Madame Fosco through the open
window yawning, and saw her shadow pass once more
across the white field of the blind.
Meanwhile, Sir Percival and the Count began
talking together below, now and then dropping their
voices a little lower than usual, but never sinking
them to a whisper. The strangeness and peril of my
situation, the dread, which I could not master, of
Madame Fosco's lighted window, made it difficult,
almost impossible, for me, at first, to keep my
presence of mind, and to fix my attention solely on
the conversation beneath. For some minutes I could
only succeed in gathering the general substance of
it. I understood the Count to say that the one
window alight was his wife's, that the ground floor
of the house was quite clear, and that they might
now speak to each other without fear of accidents.
Sir Percival merely answered by upbraiding his
friend with having unjustifiably slighted his wishes
and neglected his interests all through the day. The
Count thereupon defended himself by declaring that
he had been beset by certain troubles and anxieties
which had absorbed all his attention, and that the
only safe time to come to an explanation was a time
when they could feel certain of being neither
interrupted nor overheard. "We are at a serious
crisis in our affairs, Percival," he said, "and if
we are to decide on the future at all, we must
decide secretly to-night."
That sentence of the Count's was the first which
my attention was ready enough to master exactly as
it was spoken. From this point, with certain breaks
and interruptions, my whole interest fixed
breathlessly on the conversation, and I followed it
word for word.
"Crisis?" repeated Sir Percival. "It's a worse
crisis than you think for, I can tell you."
"So I should suppose, from your behaviour for the
last day or two," returned the other coolly. "But
wait a little. Before we advance to what I do NOT
know, let us be quite certain of what I DO know. Let
us first see if I am right about the time that is
past, before I make any proposal to you for the time
that is to come."
"Stop till I get the brandy and water. Have some
yourself."
"Thank you, Percival. The cold water with
pleasure, a spoon, and the basin of sugar. Eau
sucree, my friend—nothing more."
"Sugar-and-water for a man of your age!—There!
mix your sickly mess. You foreigners are all alike."
"Now listen, Percival. I will put our position
plainly before you, as I understand it, and you
shall say if I am right or wrong. You and I both
came back to this house from the Continent with our
affairs very seriously embarrassed—"
"Cut it short! I wanted some thousands and you
some hundreds, and without the money we were both in
a fair way to go to the dogs together. There's the
situation. Make what you can of it. Go on."
"Well, Percival, in your own solid English words,
you wanted some thousands and I wanted some
hundreds, and the only way of getting them was for
you to raise the money for your own necessity (with
a small margin beyond for my poor little hundreds)
by the help of your wife. What did I tell you about
your wife on our way to England?—and what did I tell
you again when we had come here, and when I had seen
for myself the sort of woman Miss Halcombe was?"
"How should I know? You talked nineteen to the
dozen, I suppose, just as usual."
"I said this: Human ingenuity, my friend, has
hitherto only discovered two ways in which a man can
manage a woman. One way is to knock her down—a
method largely adopted by the brutal lower orders of
the people, but utterly abhorrent to the refined and
educated classes above them. The other way (much
longer, much more difficult, but in the end not less
certain) is never to accept a provocation at a
woman's hands. It holds with animals, it holds with
children, and it holds with women, who are nothing
but children grown up. Quiet resolution is the one
quality the animals, the children, and the women all
fail in. If they can once shake this superior
quality in their master, they get the better of HIM.
If they can never succeed in disturbing it, he gets
the better of THEM. I said to you, Remember that
plain truth when you want your wife to help you to
the money. I said, Remember it doubly and trebly in
the presence of your wife's sister, Miss Halcombe.
Have you remembered it? Not once in all the
implications that have twisted themselves about us
in this house. Every provocation that your wife and
her sister could offer to you, you instantly
accepted from them. Your mad temper lost the
signature to the deed, lost the ready money, set
Miss Halcombe writing to the lawyer for the first
time."
"First time! Has she written again?"
"Yes, she has written again to-day."
A chair fell on the pavement of the verandah—fell
with a crash, as if it had been kicked down.
It was well for me that the Count's revelation
roused Sir Percival's anger as it did. On hearing
that I had been once more discovered I started so
that the railing against which I leaned cracked
again. Had he followed me to the inn? Did he infer
that I must have given my letters to Fanny when I
told him I had none for the post-bag. Even if it was
so, how could he have examined the letters when they
had gone straight from my hand to the bosom of the
girl's dress?
"Thank your lucky star," I heard the Count say
next, "that you have me in the house to undo the
harm as fast as you do it. Thank your lucky star
that I said No when you were mad enough to talk of
turning the key to-day on Miss Halcombe, as you
turned it in your mischievous folly on your wife.
Where are your eyes? Can you look at Miss Halcombe
and not see that she has the foresight and the
resolution of a man? With that woman for my friend I
would snap these fingers of mine at the world. With
that woman for my enemy, I, with all my brains and
experience—I, Fosco, cunning as the devil himself,
as you have told me a hundred times—I walk, in your
English phrase, upon egg-shells! And this grand
creature—I drink her health in my
sugar-and-water—this grand creature, who stands in
the strength of her love and her courage, firm as a
rock, between us two and that poor, flimsy, pretty
blonde wife of yours—this magnificent woman, whom I
admire with all my soul, though I oppose her in your
interests and in mine, you drive to extremities as
if she was no sharper and no bolder than the rest of
her sex. Percival! Percival! you deserve to fail,
and you HAVE failed."
There was a pause. I write the villain's words
about myself because I mean to remember them—because
I hope yet for the day when I may speak out once for
all in his presence, and cast them back one by one
in his teeth.
Sir Percival was the first to break the silence
again.
"Yes, yes, bully and bluster as much as you
like," he said sulkily; "the difficulty about the
money is not the only difficulty. You would be for
taking strong measures with the women yourself—if
you knew as much as I do."
"We will come to that second difficulty all in
good time," rejoined the Count. "You may confuse
yourself, Percival, as much as you please, but you
shall not confuse me. Let the question of the money
be settled first. Have I convinced your obstinacy?
have I shown you that your temper will not let you
help yourself?—Or must I go back, and (as you put it
in your dear straightforward English) bully and
bluster a little more?"
"Pooh! It's easy enough to grumble at ME. Say
what is to be done—that's a little harder."
"Is it? Bah! This is what is to be done: You give
up all direction in the business from to-night—you
leave it for the future in my hands only. I am
talking to a Practical British man—ha? Well,
Practical, will that do for you?"
"What do you propose if I leave it all to you?"
"Answer me first. Is it to be in my hands or
not?"
"Say it is in your hands—what then?"
"A few questions, Percival, to begin with. I must
wait a little yet, to let circumstances guide me,
and I must know, in every possible way, what those
circumstances are likely to be. There is no time to
lose. I have told you already that Miss Halcombe has
written to the lawyer to-day for the second time."
"How did you find it out? What did she say?"
"If I told you, Percival, we should only come
back at the end to where we are now. Enough that I
have found it out—and the finding has caused that
trouble and anxiety which made me so inaccessible to
you all through to-day. Now, to refresh my memory
about your affairs—it is some time since I talked
them over with you. The money has been raised, in
the absence of your wife's signature, by means of
bills at three months—raised at a cost that makes my
poverty-stricken foreign hair stand on end to think
of it! When the bills are due, is there really and
truly no earthly way of paying them but by the help
of your wife?"
"None."
"What! You have no money at the bankers?"
"A few hundreds, when I want as many thousands."
"Have you no other security to borrow upon?"
"Not a shred."
"What have you actually got with your wife at the
present moment?"
"Nothing but the interest of her twenty thousand
pounds—barely enough to pay our daily expenses."
"What do you expect from your wife?"
"Three thousand a year when her uncle dies."
"A fine fortune, Percival. What sort of a man is
this uncle? Old?"
"No—neither old nor young."
"A good-tempered, freely-living man? Married?
No—I think my wife told me, not married."
"Of course not. If he was married, and had a son,
Lady Glyde would not be next heir to the property.
I'll tell you what he is. He's a maudlin, twaddling,
selfish fool, and bores everybody who comes near him
about the state of his health."
"Men of that sort, Percival, live long, and marry
malevolently when you least expect it. I don't give
you much, my friend, for your chance of the three
thousand a year. Is there nothing more that comes to
you from your wife?"
"Nothing."
"Absolutely nothing?"
"Absolutely nothing—except in case of her death."
"Aha! in the case of her death."
There was another pause. The Count moved from the
verandah to the gravel walk outside. I knew that he
had moved by his voice. "The rain has come at last,"
I heard him say. It had come. The state of my cloak
showed that it had been falling thickly for some
little time.
The Count went back under the verandah—I heard
the chair creak beneath his weight as he sat down in
it again.
"Well, Percival," he said, "and in the case of
Lady Glyde's death, what do you get then?"
"If she leaves no children——"
"Which she is likely to do?"
"Which she is not in the least likely to do——"
"Yes?"
"Why, then I get her twenty thousand pounds."
"Paid down?"
"Paid down."
They were silent once more. As their voices
ceased Madame Fosco's shadow darkened the blind
again. Instead of passing this time, it remained,
for a moment, quite still. I saw her fingers steal
round the corner of the blind, and draw it on one
side. The dim white outline of her face, looking out
straight over me, appeared behind the window. I kept
still, shrouded from head to foot in my black cloak.
The rain, which was fast wetting me, dripped over
the glass, blurred it, and prevented her from seeing
anything. "More rain!" I heard her say to herself.
She dropped the blind, and I breathed again freely.
The talk went on below me, the Count resuming it
this time.
"Percival! do you care about your wife?"
"Fosco! that's rather a downright question."
"I am a downright man, and I repeat it."
"Why the devil do you look at me in that way?"
"You won't answer me? Well, then, let us say your
wife dies before the summer is out——"
"Drop it, Fosco!"
"Let us say your wife dies——"
"Drop it, I tell you!"
"In that case, you would gain twenty thousand
pounds, and you would lose——"
"I should lose the chance of three thousand a
year."
"The REMOTE chance, Percival—the remote chance
only. And you want money, at once. In your position
the gain is certain—the loss doubtful."
"Speak for yourself as well as for me. Some of
the money I want has been borrowed for you. And if
you come to gain, my wife's death would be ten
thousand pounds in your wife's pocket. Sharp as you
are, you seem to have conveniently forgotten Madame
Fosco's legacy. Don't look at me in that way! I
won't have it! What with your looks and your
questions, upon my soul, you make my flesh creep!"
"Your flesh? Does flesh mean conscience in
English? I speak of your wife's death as I speak of
a possibility. Why not? The respectable lawyers who
scribble-scrabble your deeds and your wills look the
deaths of living people in the face. Do lawyers make
your flesh creep? Why should I? It is my business
to-night to clear up your position beyond the
possibility of mistake, and I have now done it. Here
is your position. If your wife lives, you pay those
bills with her signature to the parchment. If your
wife dies, you pay them with her death."
As he spoke the light in Madame Fosco's room was
extinguished, and the whole second floor of the
house was now sunk in darkness.
"Talk! talk!" grumbled Sir Percival. "One would
think, to hear you, that my wife's signature to the
deed was got already."
"You have left the matter in my hands," retorted
the Count, "and I have more than two months before
me to turn round in. Say no more about it, if you
please, for the present. When the bills are due, you
will see for yourself if my 'talk! talk!' is worth
something, or if it is not. And now, Percival,
having done with the money matters for to-night, I
can place my attention at your disposal, if you wish
to consult me on that second difficulty which has
mixed itself up with our little embarrassments, and
which has so altered you for the worse, that I
hardly know you again. Speak, my friend—and pardon
me if I shock your fiery national tastes by mixing
myself a second glass of sugar-and-water."
"It's very well to say speak," replied Sir
Percival, in a far more quiet and more polite tone
than he had yet adopted, "but it's not so easy to
know how to begin."
"Shall I help you?" suggested the Count. "Shall I
give this private difficulty of yours a name? What
if I call it—Anne Catherick?"
"Look here, Fosco, you and I have known each
other for a long time, and if you have helped me out
of one or two scrapes before this, I have done the
best I could to help you in return, as far as money
would go. We have made as many friendly sacrifices,
on both sides, as men could, but we have had our
secrets from each other, of course—haven't we?"
"You have had a secret from me, Percival. There
is a skeleton in your cupboard here at Blackwater
Park that has peeped out in these last few days at
other people besides yourself."
"Well, suppose it has. If it doesn't concern you,
you needn't be curious about it, need you?"
"Do I look curious about it?"
"Yes, you do."
"So! so! my face speaks the truth, then? What an
immense foundation of good there must be in the
nature of a man who arrives at my age, and whose
face has not yet lost the habit of speaking the
truth!—Come, Glyde! let us be candid one with the
other. This secret of yours has sought me: I have
not sought it. Let us say I am curious—do you ask
me, as your old friend, to respect your secret, and
to leave it, once for all, in your own keeping?"
"Yes—that's just what I do ask."
"Then my curiosity is at an end. It dies in me
from this moment."
"Do you really mean that?"
"What makes you doubt me?"
"I have had some experience, Fosco, of your
roundabout ways, and I am not so sure that you won't
worm it out of me after all."
The chair below suddenly creaked again—I felt the
trellis-work pillar under me shake from top to
bottom. The Count had started to his feet, and had
struck it with his hand in indignation.
"Percival! Percival!" he cried passionately, "do
you know me no better than that? Has all your
experience shown you nothing of my character yet? I
am a man of the antique type! I am capable of the
most exalted acts of virtue—when I have the chance
of performing them. It has been the misfortune of my
life that I have had few chances. My conception of
friendship is sublime! Is it my fault that your
skeleton has peeped out at me? Why do I confess my
curiosity? You poor superficial Englishman, it is to
magnify my own self-control. I could draw your
secret out of you, if I liked, as I draw this finger
out of the palm of my hand—you know I could! But you
have appealed to my friendship, and the duties of
friendship are sacred to me. See! I trample my base
curiosity under my feet. My exalted sentiments lift
me above it. Recognise them, Percival! imitate them,
Percival! Shake hands—I forgive you."
His voice faltered over the last words—faltered,
as if he were actually shedding tears!
Sir Percival confusedly attempted to excuse
himself, but the Count was too magnanimous to listen
to him.
"No!" he said. "When my friend has wounded me, I
can pardon him without apologies. Tell me, in plain
words, do you want my help?"
"Yes, badly enough."
"And you can ask for it without compromising
yourself?"
"I can try, at any rate."
"Try, then."
"Well, this is how it stands:—I told you to-day
that I had done my best to find Anne Catherick, and
failed."
"Yes, you did."
"Fosco! I'm a lost man if I DON'T find her."
"Ha! Is it so serious as that?"
A little stream of light travelled out under the
verandah, and fell over the gravel-walk. The Count
had taken the lamp from the inner part of the room
to see his friend clearly by the light of it.
"Yes!" he said. "Your face speaks the truth this
time. Serious, indeed—as serious as the money
matters themselves."
"More serious. As true as I sit here, more
serious!"
The light disappeared again and the talk went on.
"I showed you the letter to my wife that Anne
Catherick hid in the sand," Sir Percival continued.
"There's no boasting in that letter, Fosco—she DOES
know the Secret."
"Say as little as possible, Percival, in my
presence, of the Secret. Does she know it from you?"
"No, from her mother."
"Two women in possession of your private
mind—bad, bad, bad, my friend! One question here,
before we go any farther. The motive of your
shutting up the daughter in the asylum is now plain
enough to me, but the manner of her escape is not
quite so clear. Do you suspect the people in charge
of her of closing their eyes purposely, at the
instance of some enemy who could afford to make it
worth their while?"
"No, she was the best-behaved patient they
had—and, like fools, they trusted her. She's just
mad enough to be shut up, and just sane enough to
ruin me when she's at large—if you understand that?"
"I do understand it. Now, Percival, come at once
to the point, and then I shall know what to do.
Where is the danger of your position at the present
moment?"
"Anne Catherick is in this neighbourhood, and in
communication with Lady Glyde—there's the danger,
plain enough. Who can read the letter she hid in the
sand, and not see that my wife is in possession of
the Secret, deny it as she may?"
"One moment, Percival. If Lady Glyde does know
the Secret, she must know also that it is a
compromising secret for you. As your wife, surely it
is her interest to keep it?"
"Is it? I'm coming to that. It might be her
interest if she cared two straws about me. But I
happen to be an encumbrance in the way of another
man. She was in love with him before she married
me—she's in love with him now—an infernal vagabond
of a drawing-master, named Hartright."
"My dear friend! what is there extraordinary in
that? They are all in love with some other man. Who
gets the first of a woman's heart? In all my
experience I have never yet met with the man who was
Number One. Number Two, sometimes. Number Three,
Four, Five, often. Number One, never! He exists, of
course—but I have not met with him."
"Wait! I haven't done yet. Who do you think
helped Anne Catherick to get the start, when the
people from the mad-house were after her? Hartright.
Who do you think saw her again in Cumberland?
Hartright. Both times he spoke to her alone. Stop!
don't interrupt me. The scoundrel's as sweet on my
wife as she is on him. He knows the Secret, and she
knows the Secret. Once let them both get together
again, and it's her interest and his interest to
turn their information against me."
"Gently, Percival—gently! Are you insensible to
the virtue of Lady Glyde?"
"That for the virtue of Lady Glyde! I believe in
nothing about her but her money. Don't you see how
the case stands? She might be harmless enough by
herself; but if she and that vagabond Hartright——"
"Yes, yes, I see. Where is Mr. Hartright?"
"Out of the country. If he means to keep a whole
skin on his bones, I recommend him not to come back
in a hurry."
"Are you sure he is out of the country?"
"Certain. I had him watched from the time he left
Cumberland to the time he sailed. Oh, I've been
careful, I can tell you! Anne Catherick lived with
some people at a farmhouse near Limmeridge. I went
there myself, after she had given me the slip, and
made sure that they knew nothing. I gave her mother
a form of letter to write to Miss Halcombe,
exonerating me from any bad motive in putting her
under restraint. I've spent, I'm afraid to say how
much, in trying to trace her, and in spite of it
all, she turns up here and escapes me on my own
property! How do I know who else may see her, who
else may speak to her? That prying scoundrel,
Hartright, may come back without my knowing it, and
may make use of her to-morrow——"
"Not he, Percival! While I am on the spot, and
while that woman is in the neighbourhood, I will
answer for our laying hands on her before Mr.
Hartright—even if he does come back. I see! yes,
yes, I see! The finding of Anne Catherick is the
first necessity—make your mind easy about the rest.
Your wife is here, under your thumb—Miss Halcombe is
inseparable from her, and is, therefore, under your
thumb also—and Mr. Hartright is out of the country.
This invisible Anne of yours is all we have to think
of for the present. You have made your inquiries?"
"Yes. I have been to her mother, I have ransacked
the village—and all to no purpose."
"Is her mother to be depended on?"
"Yes."
"She has told your secret once."
"She won't tell it again."
"Why not? Are her own interests concerned in
keeping it, as well as yours?"
"Yes—deeply concerned."
"I am glad to hear it, Percival, for your sake.
Don't be discouraged, my friend. Our money matters,
as I told you, leave me plenty of time to turn round
in, and I may search for Anne Catherick to-morrow to
better purpose than you. One last question before we
go to bed."
"What is it?"
"It is this. When I went to the boat-house to
tell Lady Glyde that the little difficulty of her
signature was put off, accident took me there in
time to see a strange woman parting in a very
suspicious manner from your wife. But accident did
not bring me near enough to see this same woman's
face plainly. I must know how to recognise our
invisible Anne. What is she like?"
"Like? Come! I'll tell you in two words. She's a
sickly likeness of my wife."
The chair creaked, and the pillar shook once
more. The Count was on his feet again—this time in
astonishment.
"What!!!" he exclaimed eagerly.
"Fancy my wife, after a bad illness, with a touch
of something wrong in her head—and there is Anne
Catherick for you," answered Sir Percival.
"Are they related to each other?"
"Not a bit of it."
"And yet so like?"
"Yes, so like. What are you laughing about?"
There was no answer, and no sound of any kind.
The Count was laughing in his smooth silent internal
way.
"What are you laughing about?" reiterated Sir
Percival.
"Perhaps at my own fancies, my good friend. Allow
me my Italian humour—do I not come of the
illustrious nation which invented the exhibition of
Punch? Well, well, well, I shall know Anne Catherick
when I see her—and so enough for to-night. Make your
mind easy, Percival. Sleep, my son, the sleep of the
just, and see what I will do for you when daylight
comes to help us both. I have my projects and my
plans here in my big head. You shall pay those bills
and find Anne Catherick—my sacred word of honour on
it, but you shall! Am I a friend to be treasured in
the best corner of your heart, or am I not? Am I
worth those loans of money which you so delicately
reminded me of a little while since? Whatever you
do, never wound me in my sentiments any more.
Recognise them, Percival! imitate them, Percival! I
forgive you again—I shake hands again. Good-night!"
Not another word was spoken. I heard the Count close the library door.
I heard Sir Percival barring up the window-shutters.
It had been raining, raining all the time. I was
cramped by my position and chilled to the bones.
When I first tried to move, the effort was so
painful to me that I was obliged to desist. I tried
a second time, and succeeded in rising to my knees
on the wet roof.
As I crept to the wall, and raised myself against
it, I looked back, and saw the window of the Count's
dressing-room gleam into light. My sinking courage
flickered up in me again, and kept my eyes fixed on
his window, as I stole my way back, step by step,
past the wall of the house.
The clock struck the quarter after one, when I
laid my hands on the window-sill of my own room. I
had seen nothing and heard nothing which could lead
me to suppose that my retreat had been discovered.
X
June 20th.—Eight o'clock. The sun is shining in a
clear sky. I have not been near my bed—I have not
once closed my weary wakeful eyes. From the same
window at which I looked out into the darkness of
last night, I look out now at the bright stillness
of the morning.
I count the hours that have passed since I
escaped to the shelter of this room by my own
sensations—and those hours seem like weeks.
How short a time, and yet how long to ME—since I
sank down in the darkness, here, on the
floor—drenched to the skin, cramped in every limb,
cold to the bones, a useless, helpless,
panic-stricken creature.
I hardly know when I roused myself. I hardly know
when I groped my way back to the bedroom, and
lighted the candle, and searched (with a strange
ignorance, at first, of where to look for them) for
dry clothes to warm me. The doing of these things is
in my mind, but not the time when they were done.
Can I even remember when the chilled, cramped
feeling left me, and the throbbing heat came in its
place?
Surely it was before the sun rose? Yes, I heard
the clock strike three. I remember the time by the
sudden brightness and clearness, the feverish strain
and excitement of all my faculties which came with
it. I remember my resolution to control myself, to
wait patiently hour after hour, till the chance
offered of removing Laura from this horrible place,
without the danger of immediate discovery and
pursuit. I remember the persuasion settling itself
in my mind that the words those two men had said to
each other would furnish us, not only with our
justification for leaving the house, but with our
weapons of defence against them as well. I recall
the impulse that awakened in me to preserve those
words in writing, exactly as they were spoken, while
the time was my own, and while my memory vividly
retained them. All this I remember plainly: there is
no confusion in my head yet. The coming in here from
the bedroom, with my pen and ink and paper, before
sunrise—the sitting down at the widely-opened window
to get all the air I could to cool me—the ceaseless
writing, faster and faster, hotter and hotter,
driving on more and more wakefully, all through the
dreadful interval before the house was astir
again—how clearly I recall it, from the beginning by
candle-light, to the end on the page before this, in
the sunshine of the new day!
Why do I sit here still? Why do I weary my hot
eyes and my burning head by writing more? Why not
lie down and rest myself, and try to quench the
fever that consumes me, in sleep?
I dare not attempt it. A fear beyond all other
fears has got possession of me. I am afraid of this
heat that parches my skin. I am afraid of the
creeping and throbbing that I feel in my head. If I
lie down now, how do I know that I may have the
sense and the strength to rise again?
Oh, the rain, the rain—the cruel rain that
chilled me last night!
Nine o'clock. Was it nine struck, or eight? Nine,
surely? I am shivering again—shivering, from head to
foot, in the summer air. Have I been sitting here
asleep? I don't know what I have been doing.
Oh, my God! am I going to be ill?
Ill, at such a time as this!
My head—I am sadly afraid of my head. I can
write, but the lines all run together. I see the
words. Laura—I can write Laura, and see I write it.
Eight or nine—which was it?
So cold, so cold—oh, that rain last night!—and
the strokes of the clock, the strokes I can't count,
keep striking in my head——
Note [At this place the entry in the Diary ceases
to be legible. The two or three lines which follow
contain fragments of words only, mingled with blots
and scratches of the pen. The last marks on the
paper bear some resemblance to the first two letters
(L and A) of the name of Lady Glyde.
On the next page of the Diary, another entry
appears. It is in a man's handwriting, large, bold,
and firmly regular, and the date is "June the 21st."
It contains these lines—]
POSTSCRIPT BY A SINCERE FRIEND
The illness of our excellent Miss Halcombe has afforded
me the opportunity of enjoying an unexpected
intellectual pleasure.
I refer to the perusal (which I
have just completed) of this interesting Diary.
There are many hundred pages here.
I can lay my hand on my heart, and declare that
every page has charmed, refreshed, delighted me.
To a man of my sentiments it is
unspeakably gratifying to be able to say this.
Admirable woman!
I allude to Miss Halcombe.
Stupendous effort!
I refer to the Diary.
Yes! these pages are amazing. The
tact which I find here, the discretion, the rare
courage, the wonderful power of memory, the accurate
observation of character, the easy grace of style,
the charming outbursts of womanly feeling, have all
inexpressibly increased my admiration of this
sublime creature, of this magnificent Marian. The
presentation of my own character is masterly in the
extreme. I certify, with my whole heart, to the
fidelity of the portrait. I feel how vivid an
impression I must have produced to have been painted
in such strong, such rich, such massive colours as
these. I lament afresh the cruel necessity which
sets our interests at variance, and opposes us to
each other. Under happier circumstances how worthy I
should have been of Miss Halcombe—how worthy Miss
Halcombe would have been of ME.
The sentiments which animate my
heart assure me that the lines I have just written
express a Profound Truth.
Those sentiments exalt me above
all merely personal considerations. I bear witness,
in the most disinterested manner, to the excellence
of the stratagem by which this unparalleled woman
surprised the private interview between Percival and
myself—also to the marvellous accuracy of her report
of the whole conversation from its beginning to its
end.
Those sentiments have induced me
to offer to the unimpressionable doctor who attends
on her my vast knowledge of chemistry, and my
luminous experience of the more subtle resources
which medical and magnetic science have placed at
the disposal of mankind. He has hitherto declined to
avail himself of my assistance. Miserable man!
Finally, those sentiments dictate
the lines—grateful, sympathetic, paternal
lines—which appear in this place. I close the book.
My strict sense of propriety restores it (by the
hands of my wife) to its place on the writer's
table. Events are hurrying me away. Circumstances
are guiding me to serious issues. Vast perspectives
of success unroll themselves before my eyes. I
accomplish my destiny with a calmness which is
terrible to myself. Nothing but the homage of my
admiration is my own. I deposit it with respectful
tenderness at the feet of Miss Halcombe.
I breathe my wishes for her
recovery.
I condole with her on the
inevitable failure of every plan that she has formed
for her sister's benefit. At the same time, I
entreat her to believe that the information which I
have derived from her Diary will in no respect help
me to contribute to that failure. It simply confirms
the plan of conduct which I had previously arranged.
I have to thank these pages for awakening the finest
sensibilities in my nature—nothing more.
To a person of similar sensibility
this simple assertion will explain and excuse
everything.
Miss Halcombe is a person of
similar sensibility.
In that persuasion I sign myself,
Fosco.
