THE STORY CONTINUED BY MRS. CATHERICK
SIR,—You have not come back, as
you said you would. No matter—I know the news, and I
write to tell you so. Did you see anything
particular in my face when you left me? I was
wondering, in my own mind, whether the day of his
downfall had come at last, and whether you were the
chosen instrument for working it. You were, and you
HAVE worked it.
You were weak enough, as I have
heard, to try and save his life. If you had
succeeded, I should have looked upon you as my
enemy. Now you have failed, I hold you as my friend.
Your inquiries frightened him into the vestry by
night—your inquiries, without your privity and
against your will, have served the hatred and
wreaked the vengeance of three-and-twenty years.
Thank you, sir, in spite of yourself.
I owe something to the man who has
done this. How can I pay my debt? If I was a young
woman still I might say, "Come, put your arm round
my waist, and kiss me, if you like." I should have
been fond enough of you even to go that length, and
you would have accepted my invitation—you would,
sir, twenty years ago! But I am an old woman now.
Well! I can satisfy your curiosity, and pay my debt
in that way. You HAD a great curiosity to know
certain private affairs of mine when you came to see
me—private affairs which all your sharpness could
not look into without my help—private affairs which
you have not discovered, even now. You SHALL
discover them—your curiosity shall be satisfied. I
will take any trouble to please you, my estimable
young friend!
You were a little boy, I suppose,
in the year twenty-seven? I was a handsome young
woman at that time, living at Old Welmingham. I had
a contemptible fool for a husband. I had also the
honour of being acquainted (never mind how) with a
certain gentleman (never mind whom). I shall not
call him by his name. Why should I? It was not his
own. He never had a name: you know that, by this
time, as well as I do.
It will be more to the purpose to
tell you how he worked himself into my good graces.
I was born with the tastes of a lady, and he
gratified them—in other words, he admired me, and he
made me presents. No woman can resist admiration and
presents—especially presents, provided they happen
to be just the thing she wants. He was sharp enough
to know that—most men are. Naturally he wanted
something in return—all men do. And what do you
think was the something? The merest trifle. Nothing
but the key of the vestry, and the key of the press
inside it, when my husband's back was turned. Of
course he lied when I asked him why he wished me to
get him the keys in that private way. He might have
saved himself the trouble—I didn't believe him. But
I liked my presents, and I wanted more. So I got him
the keys, without my husband's knowledge, and I
watched him, without his own knowledge. Once, twice,
four times I watched him, and the fourth time I
found him out.
I was never over-scrupulous where
other people's affairs were concerned, and I was not
over-scrupulous about his adding one to the
marriages in the register on his own account.
Of course I knew it was wrong, but
it did no harm to me, which was one good reason for
not making a fuss about it. And I had not got a gold
watch and chain, which was another, still better—and
he had promised me one from London only the day
before, which was a third, best of all. If I had
known what the law considered the crime to be, and
how the law punished it, I should have taken proper
care of myself, and have exposed him then and there.
But I knew nothing, and I longed for the gold watch.
All the conditions I insisted on were that he should
take me into his confidence and tell me everything.
I was as curious about his affairs then as you are
about mine now. He granted my conditions—why, you
will see presently.
This, put in short, is what I
heard from him. He did not willingly tell me all
that I tell you here. I drew some of it from him by
persuasion and some of it by questions. I was
determined to have all the truth, and I believe I
got it.
He knew no more than any one else
of what the state of things really was between his
father and mother till after his mother's death.
Then his father confessed it, and promised to do
what he could for his son. He died having done
nothing—not having even made a will. The son (who
can blame him?) wisely provided for himself. He came
to England at once, and took possession of the
property. There was no one to suspect him, and no
one to say him nay. His father and mother had always
lived as man and wife—none of the few people who
were acquainted with them ever supposed them to be
anything else. The right person to claim the
property (if the truth had been known) was a distant
relation, who had no idea of ever getting it, and
who was away at sea when his father died. He had no
difficulty so far—he took possession, as a matter of
course. But he could not borrow money on the
property as a matter of course. There were two
things wanted of him before he could do this. One
was a certificate of his birth, and the other was a
certificate of his parents' marriage. The
certificate of his birth was easily got—he was born
abroad, and the certificate was there in due form.
The other matter was a difficulty, and that
difficulty brought him to Old Welmingham.
But for one consideration he might
have gone to Knowlesbury instead.
His mother had been living there
just before she met with his father—living under her
maiden name, the truth being that she was really a
married woman, married in Ireland, where her husband
had ill-used her, and had afterwards gone off with
some other person. I give you this fact on good
authority—Sir Felix mentioned it to his son as the
reason why he had not married. You may wonder why
the son, knowing that his parents had met each other
at Knowlesbury, did not play his first tricks with
the register of that church, where it might have
been fairly presumed his father and mother were
married. The reason was that the clergyman who did
duty at Knowlesbury church, in the year eighteen
hundred and three (when, according to his birth
certificate, his father and mother OUGHT to have
been married), was alive still when he took
possession of the property in the New Year of
eighteen hundred and twenty-seven. This awkward
circumstance forced him to extend his inquiries to
our neighbourhood. There no such danger existed, the
former clergyman at our church having been dead for
some years.
Old Welmingham suited his purpose
as well as Knowlesbury. His father had removed his
mother from Knowlesbury, and had lived with her at a
cottage on the river, a little distance from our
village. People who had known his solitary ways when
he was single did not wonder at his solitary ways
when he was supposed to be married. If he had not
been a hideous creature to look at, his retired life
with the lady might have raised suspicions; but, as
things were, his hiding his ugliness and his
deformity in the strictest privacy surprised nobody.
He lived in our neighbourhood till he came in
possession of the Park. After three or four and
twenty years had passed, who was to say (the
clergyman being dead) that his marriage had not been
as private as the rest of his life, and that it had
not taken place at Old Welmingham church?
So, as I told you, the son found
our neighbourhood the surest place he could choose
to set things right secretly in his own interests.
It may surprise you to hear that what he really did
to the marriage register was done on the spur of the
moment—done on second thoughts.
His first notion was only to tear
the leaf out (in the right year and month), to
destroy it privately, to go back to London, and to
tell the lawyers to get him the necessary
certificate of his father's marriage, innocently
referring them of course to the date on the leaf
that was gone. Nobody could say his father and
mother had NOT been married after that, and whether,
under the circumstances, they would stretch a point
or not about lending him the money (he thought they
would), he had his answer ready at all events, if a
question was ever raised about his right to the name
and the estate.
But when he came to look privately
at the register for himself, he found at the bottom
of one of the pages for the year eighteen hundred
and three a blank space left, seemingly through
there being no room to make a long entry there,
which was made instead at the top of the next page.
The sight of this chance altered all his plans. It
was an opportunity he had never hoped for, or
thought of—and he took it—you know how. The blank
space, to have exactly tallied with his birth
certificate, ought to have occurred in the July part
of the register. It occurred in the September part
instead. However, in this case, if suspicious
questions were asked, the answer was not hard to
find. He had only to describe himself as a seven
months' child.
I was fool enough, when he told me
his story, to feel some interest and some pity for
him—which was just what he calculated on, as you
will see. I thought him hardly used. It was not his
fault that his father and mother were not married,
and it was not his father's and mother's fault
either. A more scrupulous woman than I was—a woman
who had not set her heart on a gold watch and
chain—would have found some excuses for him. At all
events, I held my tongue, and helped to screen what
he was about.
He was some time getting the ink
the right colour (mixing it over and over again in
pots and bottles of mine), and some time afterwards
in practising the handwriting. But he succeeded in
the end, and made an honest woman of his mother
after she was dead in her grave! So far, I don't
deny that he behaved honourably enough to myself. He
gave me my watch and chain, and spared no expense in
buying them; both were of superior workmanship, and
very expensive. I have got them still—the watch goes
beautifully.
You said the other day that Mrs.
Clements had told you everything she knew. In that
case there is no need for me to write about the
trumpery scandal by which I was the sufferer—the
innocent sufferer, I positively assert. You must
know as well as I do what the notion was which my
husband took into his head when he found me and my
fine-gentleman acquaintance meeting each other
privately and talking secrets together. But what you
don't know is how it ended between that same
gentleman and myself. You shall read and see how he
behaved to me.
The first words I said to him,
when I saw the turn things had taken, were, "Do me
justice—clear my character of a stain on it which
you know I don't deserve. I don't want you to make a
clean breast of it to my husband—only tell him, on
your word of honour as a gentleman, that he is
wrong, and that I am not to blame in the way he
thinks I am. Do me that justice, at least, after all
I have done for you." He flatly refused, in so many
words. He told me plainly that it was his interest
to let my husband and all my neighbours believe the
falsehood—because, as long as they did so they were
quite certain never to suspect the truth. I had a
spirit of my own, and I told him they should know
the truth from my lips. His reply was short, and to
the point. If I spoke, I was a lost woman, as
certainly as he was a lost man.
Yes! it had come to that. He had
deceived me about the risk I ran in helping him. He
had practised on my ignorance, he had tempted me
with his gifts, he had interested me with his
story—and the result of it was that he made me his
accomplice. He owned this coolly, and he ended by
telling me, for the first time, what the frightful
punishment really was for his offence, and for any
one who helped him to commit it. In those days the
law was not so tender-hearted as I hear it is now.
Murderers were not the only people liable to be
hanged, and women convicts were not treated like
ladies in undeserved distress. I confess he
frightened me—the mean impostor! the cowardly
blackguard! Do you understand now how I hated him?
Do you understand why I am taking all this
trouble—thankfully taking it—to gratify the
curiosity of the meritorious young gentleman who
hunted him down?
Well, to go on. He was hardly fool
enough to drive me to downright desperation. I was
not the sort of woman whom it was quite safe to hunt
into a corner—he knew that, and wisely quieted me
with proposals for the future.
I deserved some reward (he was
kind enough to say) for the service I had done him,
and some compensation (he was so obliging as to add)
for what I had suffered. He was quite
willing—generous scoundrel!—to make me a handsome
yearly allowance, payable quarterly, on two
conditions. First, I was to hold my tongue—in my own
interests as well as in his. Secondly, I was not to
stir away from Welmingham without first letting him
know, and waiting till I had obtained his
permission. In my own neighbourhood, no virtuous
female friends would tempt me into dangerous
gossiping at the tea-table. In my own neighbourhood,
he would always know where to find me. A hard
condition, that second one—but I accepted it.
What else was I to do? I was left
helpless, with the prospect of a coming incumbrance
in the shape of a child. What else was I to do? Cast
myself on the mercy of my runaway idiot of a husband
who had raised the scandal against me? I would have
died first. Besides, the allowance WAS a handsome
one. I had a better income, a better house over my
head, better carpets on my floors, than half the
women who turned up the whites of their eyes at the
sight of me. The dress of Virtue, in our parts, was
cotton print. I had silk.
So I accepted the conditions he
offered me, and made the best of them, and fought my
battle with my respectable neighbours on their own
ground, and won it in course of time—as you saw
yourself. How I kept his Secret (and mine) through
all the years that have passed from that time to
this, and whether my late daughter, Anne, ever
really crept into my confidence, and got the keeping
of the Secret too—are questions, I dare say, to
which you are curious to find an answer. Well! my
gratitude refuses you nothing. I will turn to a
fresh page and give you the answer immediately. But
you must excuse one thing—you must excuse my
beginning, Mr. Hartright, with an expression of
surprise at the interest which you appear to have
felt in my late daughter. It is quite unaccountable
to me. If that interest makes you anxious for any
particulars of her early life, I must refer you to
Mrs. Clements, who knows more of the subject than I
do. Pray understand that I do not profess to have
been at all overfond of my late daughter. She was a
worry to me from first to last, with the additional
disadvantage of being always weak in the head. You
like candour, and I hope this satisfies you.
There is no need to trouble you
with many personal particulars relating to those
past times. It will be enough to say that I observed
the terms of the bargain on my side, and that I
enjoyed my comfortable income in return, paid
quarterly.
Now and then I got away and
changed the scene for a short time, always asking
leave of my lord and master first, and generally
getting it. He was not, as I have already told you,
fool enough to drive me too hard, and he could
reasonably rely on my holding my tongue for my own
sake, if not for his. One of my longest trips away
from home was the trip I took to Limmeridge to nurse
a half-sister there, who was dying. She was reported
to have saved money, and I thought it as well (in
case any accident happened to stop my allowance) to
look after my own interests in that direction. As
things turned out, however, my pains were all thrown
away, and I got nothing, because nothing was to be
had.
I had taken Anne to the north with
me, having my whims and fancies, occasionally, about
my child, and getting, at such times, jealous of
Mrs. Clements' influence over her. I never liked
Mrs. Clements. She was a poor, empty-headed,
spiritless woman—what you call a born drudge—and I
was now and then not averse to plaguing her by
taking Anne away. Not knowing what else to do with
my girl while I was nursing in Cumberland, I put her
to school at Limmeridge. The lady of the manor, Mrs.
Fairlie (a remarkably plain-looking woman, who had
entrapped one of the handsomest men in England into
marrying her), amused me wonderfully by taking a
violent fancy to my girl. The consequence was, she
learnt nothing at school, and was petted and spoilt
at Limmeridge House. Among other whims and fancies
which they taught her there, they put some nonsense
into her head about always wearing white. Hating
white and liking colours myself, I determined to
take the nonsense out of her head as soon as we got
home again.
Strange to say, my daughter
resolutely resisted me. When she HAD got a notion
once fixed in her mind she was, like other
half-witted people, as obstinate as a mule in
keeping it. We quarrelled finely, and Mrs. Clements,
not liking to see it, I suppose, offered to take
Anne away to live in London with her. I should have
said Yes, if Mrs. Clements had not sided with my
daughter about her dressing herself in white. But
being determined she should NOT dress herself in
white, and disliking Mrs. Clements more than ever
for taking part against me, I said No, and meant No,
and stuck to No. The consequence was, my daughter
remained with me, and the consequence of that, in
its turn, was the first serious quarrel that
happened about the Secret.
The circumstance took place long
after the time I have just been writing of. I had
been settled for years in the new town, and was
steadily living down my bad character and slowly
gaining ground among the respectable inhabitants. It
helped me forward greatly towards this object to
have my daughter with me. Her harmlessness and her
fancy for dressing in white excited a certain amount
of sympathy. I left off opposing her favourite whim
on that account, because some of the sympathy was
sure, in course of time, to fall to my share. Some
of it did fall. I date my getting a choice of the
two best sittings to let in the church from that
time, and I date the clergyman's first bow from my
getting the sittings.
Well, being settled in this way, I
received a letter one morning from that highly born
gentleman (now deceased) in answer to one of mine,
warning him, according to agreement, of my wishing
to leave the town for a little change of air and
scene.
The ruffianly side of him must
have been uppermost, I suppose, when he got my
letter, for he wrote back, refusing me in such
abominably insolent language, that I lost all
command over myself, and abused him, in my
daughter's presence, as "a low impostor whom I could
ruin for life if I chose to open my lips and let out
his Secret." I said no more about him than that,
being brought to my senses as soon as those words
had escaped me by the sight of my daughter's face
looking eagerly and curiously at mine. I instantly
ordered her out of the room until I had composed
myself again.
My sensations were not pleasant, I
can tell you, when I came to reflect on my own
folly. Anne had been more than usually crazy and
queer that year, and when I thought of the chance
there might be of her repeating my words in the
town, and mentioning HIS name in connection with
them, if inquisitive people got hold of her, I was
finely terrified at the possible consequences. My
worst fears for myself, my worst dread of what he
might do, led me no farther than this. I was quite
unprepared for what really did happen only the next
day.
On that next day, without any
warning to me to expect him, he came to the house.
His first words, and the tone in
which he spoke them, surly as it was, showed me
plainly enough that he had repented already of his
insolent answer to my application, and that he had
come in a mighty bad temper to try and set matters
right again before it was too late. Seeing my
daughter in the room with me (I had been afraid to
let her out of my sight after what had happened the
day before) he ordered her away. They neither of
them liked each other, and he vented the ill-temper
on HER which he was afraid to show to ME.
"Leave us," he said, looking at
her over his shoulder. She looked back over HER
shoulder and waited as if she didn't care to go. "Do
you hear?" he roared out, "leave the room." "Speak
to me civilly," says she, getting red in the face.
"Turn the idiot out," says he, looking my way. She
had always had crazy notions of her own about her
dignity, and that word "idiot" upset her in a
moment. Before I could interfere she stepped up to
him in a fine passion. "Beg my pardon, directly,"
says she, "or I'll make it the worse for you. I'll
let out your Secret. I can ruin you for life if I
choose to open my lips." My own words!—repeated
exactly from what I had said the day
before—repeated, in his presence, as if they had
come from herself. He sat speechless, as white as
the paper I am writing on, while I pushed her out of
the room. When he recovered himself——
No! I am too respectable a woman
to mention what he said when he recovered himself.
My pen is the pen of a member of the rector's
congregation, and a subscriber to the "Wednesday
Lectures on Justification by Faith"—how can you
expect me to employ it in writing bad language?
Suppose, for yourself, the raging, swearing frenzy
of the lowest ruffian in England, and let us get on
together, as fast as may be, to the way in which it
all ended.
It ended, as you probably guess by
this time, in his insisting on securing his own
safety by shutting her up.
I tried to set things right. I
told him that she had merely repeated, like a
parrot, the words she had heard me say and that she
knew no particulars whatever, because I had
mentioned none. I explained that she had affected,
out of crazy spite against him, to know what she
really did NOT know—that she only wanted to threaten
him and aggravate him for speaking to her as he had
just spoken—and that my unlucky words gave her just
the chance of doing mischief of which she was in
search. I referred him to other queer ways of hers,
and to his own experience of the vagaries of
half-witted people—it was all to no purpose—he would
not believe me on my oath—he was absolutely certain
I had betrayed the whole Secret. In short, he would
hear of nothing but shutting her up.
Under these circumstances, I did
my duty as a mother. "No pauper Asylum," I said, "I
won't have her put in a pauper Asylum. A Private
Establishment, if you please. I have my feelings as
a mother, and my character to preserve in the town,
and I will submit to nothing but a Private
Establishment, of the sort which my genteel
neighbours would choose for afflicted relatives of
their own." Those were my words. It is gratifying to
me to reflect that I did my duty. Though never
overfond of my late daughter, I had a proper pride
about her. No pauper stain—thanks to my firmness and
resolution—ever rested on MY child.
Having carried my point (which I
did the more easily, in consequence of the
facilities offered by private Asylums), I could not
refuse to admit that there were certain advantages
gained by shutting her up. In the first place, she
was taken excellent care of—being treated (as I took
care to mention in the town) on the footing of a
lady. In the second place, she was kept away from
Welmingham, where she might have set people
suspecting and inquiring, by repeating my own
incautious words.
The only drawback of putting her
under restraint was a very slight one. We merely
turned her empty boast about knowing the Secret into
a fixed delusion. Having first spoken in sheer crazy
spitefulness against the man who had offended her,
she was cunning enough to see that she had seriously
frightened him, and sharp enough afterwards to
discover that HE was concerned in shutting her up.
The consequence was she flamed out into a perfect
frenzy of passion against him, going to the Asylum,
and the first words she said to the nurses, after
they had quieted her, were, that she was put in
confinement for knowing his Secret, and that she
meant to open her lips and ruin him, when the right
time came.
She may have said the same thing
to you, when you thoughtlessly assisted her escape.
She certainly said it (as I heard last summer) to
the unfortunate woman who married our
sweet-tempered, nameless gentleman lately deceased.
If either you, or that unlucky lady, had questioned
my daughter closely, and had insisted on her
explaining what she really meant, you would have
found her lose all her self-importance suddenly, and
get vacant, and restless, and confused—you would
have discovered that I am writing nothing here but
the plain truth. She knew that there was a
Secret—she knew who was connected with it—she knew
who would suffer by its being known—and beyond that,
whatever airs of importance she may have given
herself, whatever crazy boasting she may have
indulged in with strangers, she never to her dying
day knew more.
Have I satisfied your curiosity? I
have taken pains enough to satisfy it at any rate.
There is really nothing else I have to tell you
about myself or my daughter. My worst
responsibilities, so far as she was concerned, were
all over when she was secured in the Asylum. I had a
form of letter relating to the circumstances under
which she was shut up, given me to write, in answer
to one Miss Halcombe, who was curious in the matter,
and who must have heard plenty of lies about me from
a certain tongue well accustomed to the telling of
the same. And I did what I could afterwards to trace
my runaway daughter, and prevent her from doing
mischief by making inquiries myself in the
neighbourhood where she was falsely reported to have
been seen. But these, and other trifles like them,
are of little or no interest to you after what you
have heard already.
So far, I have written in the
friendliest possible spirit. But I cannot close this
letter without adding a word here of serious
remonstrance and reproof, addressed to yourself.
In the course of your personal
interview with me, you audaciously referred to my
late daughter's parentage on the father's side, as
if that parentage was a matter of doubt. This was
highly improper and very ungentlemanlike on your
part! If we see each other again, remember, if you
please, that I will allow no liberties to be taken
with my reputation, and that the moral atmosphere of
Welmingham (to use a favourite expression of my
friend the rector's) must not be tainted by loose
conversation of any kind. If you allow yourself to
doubt that my husband was Anne's father, you
personally insult me in the grossest manner. If you
have felt, and if you still continue to feel, an
unhallowed curiosity on this subject, I recommend
you, in your own interests, to check it at once, and
for ever. On this side of the grave, Mr. Hartright,
whatever may happen on the other, THAT curiosity
will never be gratified.
Perhaps, after what I have just
said, you will see the necessity of writing me an
apology. Do so, and I will willingly receive it. I
will, afterwards, if your wishes point to a second
interview with me, go a step farther, and receive
you. My circumstances only enable me to invite you
to tea—not that they are at all altered for the
worse by what has happened. I have always lived, as
I think I told you, well within my income, and I
have saved enough, in the last twenty years, to make
me quite comfortable for the rest of my life. It is
not my intention to leave Welmingham. There are one
or two little advantages which I have still to gain
in the town. The clergyman bows to me—as you saw. He
is married, and his wife is not quite so civil. I
propose to join the Dorcas Society, and I mean to
make the clergyman's wife bow to me next.
If you favour me with your
company, pray understand that the conversation must
be entirely on general subjects. Any attempted
reference to this letter will be quite useless—I am
determined not to acknowledge having written it. The
evidence has been destroyed in the fire, I know, but
I think it desirable to err on the side of caution,
nevertheless.
On this account no names are
mentioned here, nor is any signature attached to
these lines: the handwriting is disguised
throughout, and I mean to deliver the letter myself,
under circumstances which will prevent all fear of
its being traced to my house. You can have no
possible cause to complain of these precautions,
seeing that they do not affect the information I
here communicate, in consideration of the special
indulgence which you have deserved at my hands. My
hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered
toast waits for nobody.
THE STORY CONTINUED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT
I
My first impulse, after reading Mrs. Catherick's
extraordinary narrative, was to destroy it. The
hardened shameless depravity of the whole
composition, from beginning to end—the atrocious
perversity of mind which persistently associated me
with a calamity for which I was in no sense
answerable, and with a death which I had risked my
life in trying to avert—so disgusted me, that I was
on the point of tearing the letter, when a
consideration suggested itself which warned me to
wait a little before I destroyed it.
This consideration was entirely unconnected with
Sir Percival. The information communicated to me, so
far as it concerned him, did little more than
confirm the conclusions at which I had already
arrived.
He had committed his offence, as I had supposed
him to have committed it, and the absence of all
reference, on Mrs. Catherick's part, to the
duplicate register at Knowlesbury, strengthened my
previous conviction that the existence of the book,
and the risk of detection which it implied, must
have been necessarily unknown to Sir Percival. My
interest in the question of the forgery was now at
an end, and my only object in keeping the letter was
to make it of some future service in clearing up the
last mystery that still remained to baffle me—the
parentage of Anne Catherick on the father's side.
There were one or two sentences dropped in her
mother's narrative, which it might be useful to
refer to again, when matters of more immediate
importance allowed me leisure to search for the
missing evidence. I did not despair of still finding
that evidence, and I had lost none of my anxiety to
discover it, for I had lost none of my interest in
tracing the father of the poor creature who now lay
at rest in Mrs. Fairlie's grave.
Accordingly, I sealed up the letter and put it
away carefully in my pocket-book, to be referred to
again when the time came.
The next day was my last in Hampshire. When I had
appeared again before the magistrate at Knowlesbury,
and when I had attended at the adjourned inquest, I
should be free to return to London by the afternoon
or the evening train.
My first errand in the morning was, as usual, to
the post-office. The letter from Marian was there,
but I thought when it was handed to me that it felt
unusually light. I anxiously opened the envelope.
There was nothing inside but a small strip of paper
folded in two. The few blotted hurriedly-written
lines which were traced on it contained these words:
"Come back as soon as you can. I have been
obliged to move. Come to Gower's Walk, Fulham
(number five). I will be on the look-out for you.
Don't be alarmed about us, we are both safe and
well. But come back.—Marian."
The news which those lines contained—news which I
instantly associated with some attempted treachery
on the part of Count Fosco—fairly overwhelmed me. I
stood breathless with the paper crumpled up in my
hand. What had happened? What subtle wickedness had
the Count planned and executed in my absence? A
night had passed since Marian's note was
written—hours must elapse still before I could get
back to them—some new disaster might have happened
already of which I was ignorant. And here, miles and
miles away from them, here I must remain—held,
doubly held, at the disposal of the law!
I hardly know to what forgetfulness of my
obligations anxiety and alarm might not have tempted
me, but for the quieting influence of my faith in
Marian. My absolute reliance on her was the one
earthly consideration which helped me to restrain
myself, and gave me courage to wait. The inquest was
the first of the impediments in the way of my
freedom of action. I attended it at the appointed
time, the legal formalities requiring my presence in
the room, but as it turned out, not calling on me to
repeat my evidence. This useless delay was a hard
trial, although I did my best to quiet my impatience
by following the course of the proceedings as
closely as I could.
The London solicitor of the deceased (Mr.
Merriman) was among the persons present. But he was
quite unable to assist the objects of the inquiry.
He could only say that he was inexpressibly shocked
and astonished, and that he could throw no light
whatever on the mysterious circumstances of the
case. At intervals during the adjourned
investigation, he suggested questions which the
Coroner put, but which led to no results. After a
patient inquiry, which lasted nearly three hours,
and which exhausted every available source of
information, the jury pronounced the customary
verdict in cases of sudden death by accident. They
added to the formal decision a statement, that there
had been no evidence to show how the keys had been
abstracted, how the fire had been caused, or what
the purpose was for which the deceased had entered
the vestry. This act closed the proceedings. The
legal representative of the dead man was left to
provide for the necessities of the interment, and
the witnesses were free to retire.
Resolved not to lose a minute in getting to
Knowlesbury, I paid my bill at the hotel, and hired
a fly to take me to the town. A gentleman who heard
me give the order, and who saw that I was going
alone, informed me that he lived in the
neighbourhood of Knowlesbury, and asked if I would
have any objection to his getting home by sharing
the fly with me. I accepted his proposal as a matter
of course.
Our conversation during the drive was naturally
occupied by the one absorbing subject of local
interest.
My new acquaintance had some knowledge of the
late Sir Percival's solicitor, and he and Mr.
Merriman had been discussing the state of the
deceased gentleman's affairs and the succession to
the property. Sir Percival's embarrassments were so
well known all over the county that his solicitor
could only make a virtue of necessity and plainly
acknowledge them. He had died without leaving a
will, and he had no personal property to bequeath,
even if he had made one, the whole fortune which he
had derived from his wife having been swallowed up
by his creditors. The heir to the estate (Sir
Percival having left no issue) was a son of Sir
Felix Glyde's first cousin, an officer in command of
an East Indiaman. He would find his unexpected
inheritance sadly encumbered, but the property would
recover with time, and, if "the captain" was
careful, he might be a rich man yet before he died.
Absorbed as I was in the one idea of getting to
London, this information (which events proved to be
perfectly correct) had an interest of its own to
attract my attention. I thought it justified me in
keeping secret my discovery of Sir Percival's fraud.
The heir, whose rights he had usurped, was the heir
who would now have the estate. The income from it,
for the last three-and-twenty years, which should
properly have been his, and which the dead man had
squandered to the last farthing, was gone beyond
recall. If I spoke, my speaking would confer
advantage on no one. If I kept the secret, my
silence concealed the character of the man who had
cheated Laura into marrying him. For her sake, I
wished to conceal it—for her sake, still, I tell
this story under feigned names.
I parted with my chance companion at Knowlesbury,
and went at once to the town-hall. As I had
anticipated, no one was present to prosecute the
case against me—the necessary formalities were
observed, and I was discharged. On leaving the court
a letter from Mr. Dawson was put into my hand. It
informed me that he was absent on professional duty,
and it reiterated the offer I had already received
from him of any assistance which I might require at
his hands. I wrote back, warmly acknowledging my
obligations to his kindness, and apologising for not
expressing my thanks personally, in consequence of
my immediate recall on pressing business to town.
Half an hour later I was speeding back to London
by the express train.
II
It was between nine and ten o'clock before I
reached Fulham, and found my way to Gower's Walk.
Both Laura and Marian came to the door to let me
in. I think we had hardly known how close the tie
was which bound us three together, until the evening
came which united us again. We met as if we had been
parted for months instead of for a few days only.
Marian's face was sadly worn and anxious. I saw who
had known all the danger and borne all the trouble
in my absence the moment I looked at her. Laura's
brighter looks and better spirits told me how
carefully she had been spared all knowledge of the
dreadful death at Welmingham, and of the true reason
of our change of abode.
The stir of the removal seemed to have cheered
and interested her. She only spoke of it as a happy
thought of Marian's to surprise me on my return with
a change from the close, noisy street to the
pleasant neighbourhood of trees and fields and the
river. She was full of projects for the future—of
the drawings she was to finish—of the purchasers I
had found in the country who were to buy them—of the
shillings and sixpences she had saved, till her
purse was so heavy that she proudly asked me to
weigh it in my own hand. The change for the better
which had been wrought in her during the few days of
my absence was a surprise to me for which I was
quite unprepared—and for all the unspeakable
happiness of seeing it, I was indebted to Marian's
courage and to Marian's love.
When Laura had left us, and when we could speak
to one another without restraint, I tried to give
some expression to the gratitude and the admiration
which filled my heart. But the generous creature
would not wait to hear me. That sublime
self-forgetfulness of women, which yields so much
and asks so little, turned all her thoughts from
herself to me.
"I had only a moment left before post-time," she
said, "or I should have written less abruptly. You
look worn and weary, Walter. I am afraid my letter
must have seriously alarmed you?"
"Only at first," I replied. "My mind was quieted,
Marian, by my trust in you. Was I right in
attributing this sudden change of place to some
threatened annoyance on the part of Count Fosco?"
"Perfectly right," she said. "I saw him
yesterday, and worse than that, Walter—I spoke to
him."
"Spoke to him? Did he know where we lived? Did he
come to the house?"
"He did. To the house—but not upstairs. Laura
never saw him—Laura suspects nothing. I will tell
you how it happened: the danger, I believe and hope,
is over now. Yesterday, I was in the sitting-room,
at our old lodgings. Laura was drawing at the table,
and I was walking about and setting things to
rights. I passed the window, and as I passed it,
looked out into the street. There, on the opposite
side of the way, I saw the Count, with a man talking
to him——"
"Did he notice you at the window?"
"No—at least, I thought not. I was too violently
startled to be quite sure."
"Who was the other man? A stranger?"
"Not a stranger, Walter. As soon as I could draw
my breath again, I recognised him. He was the owner
of the Lunatic Asylum."
"Was the Count pointing out the house to him?"
"No, they were talking together as if they had
accidentally met in the street. I remained at the
window looking at them from behind the curtain. If I
had turned round, and if Laura had seen my face at
that moment——Thank God, she was absorbed over her
drawing! They soon parted. The man from the Asylum
went one way, and the Count the other. I began to
hope they were in the street by chance, till I saw
the Count come back, stop opposite to us again, take
out his card-case and pencil, write something, and
then cross the road to the shop below us. I ran past
Laura before she could see me, and said I had
forgotten something upstairs. As soon as I was out
of the room I went down to the first landing and
waited—I was determined to stop him if he tried to
come upstairs. He made no such attempt. The girl
from the shop came through the door into the
passage, with his card in her hand—a large gilt card
with his name, and a coronet above it, and these
lines underneath in pencil: 'Dear lady' (yes! the
villain could address me in that way still)—'dear
lady, one word, I implore you, on a matter serious
to us both.' If one can think at all, in serious
difficulties, one thinks quick. I felt directly that
it might be a fatal mistake to leave myself and to
leave you in the dark, where such a man as the Count
was concerned. I felt that the doubt of what he
might do, in your absence, would be ten times more
trying to me if I declined to see him than if I
consented. 'Ask the gentleman to wait in the shop,'
I said. 'I will be with him in a moment.' I ran
upstairs for my bonnet, being determined not to let
him speak to me indoors. I knew his deep ringing
voice, and I was afraid Laura might hear it, even in
the shop. In less than a minute I was down again in
the passage, and had opened the door into the
street. He came round to meet me from the shop.
There he was in deep mourning, with his smooth bow
and his deadly smile, and some idle boys and women
near him, staring at his great size, his fine black
clothes, and his large cane with the gold knob to
it. All the horrible time at Blackwater came back to
me the moment I set eyes on him. All the old
loathing crept and crawled through me, when he took
off his hat with a flourish and spoke to me, as if
we had parted on the friendliest terms hardly a day
since."
"You remember what he said?"
"I can't repeat it, Walter. You shall know
directly what he said about you—-but I can't repeat
what he said to me. It was worse than the polite
insolence of his letter. My hands tingled to strike
him, as if I had been a man! I only kept them quiet
by tearing his card to pieces under my shawl.
Without saying a word on my side, I walked away from
the house (for fear of Laura seeing us), and he
followed, protesting softly all the way. In the
first by-street I turned, and asked him what he
wanted with me. He wanted two things. First, if I
had no objection, to express his sentiments. I
declined to hear them. Secondly, to repeat the
warning in his letter. I asked, what occasion there
was for repeating it. He bowed and smiled, and said
he would explain. The explanation exactly confirmed
the fears I expressed before you left us. I told
you, if you remember, that Sir Percival would be too
headstrong to take his friend's advice where you
were concerned, and that there was no danger to be
dreaded from the Count till his own interests were
threatened, and he was roused into acting for
himself?"
"I recollect, Marian."
"Well, so it has really turned out. The Count
offered his advice, but it was refused. Sir Percival
would only take counsel of his own violence, his own
obstinacy, and his own hatred of you. The Count let
him have his way, first privately ascertaining, in
case of his own interests being threatened next,
where we lived. You were followed, Walter, on
returning here, after your first journey to
Hampshire, by the lawyer's men for some distance
from the railway, and by the Count himself to the
door of the house. How he contrived to escape being
seen by you he did not tell me, but he found us out
on that occasion, and in that way. Having made the
discovery, he took no advantage of it till the news
reached him of Sir Percival's death, and then, as I
told you, he acted for himself, because he believed
you would next proceed against the dead man's
partner in the conspiracy. He at once made his
arrangements to meet the owner of the Asylum in
London, and to take him to the place where his
runaway patient was hidden, believing that the
results, whichever way they ended, would be to
involve you in interminable legal disputes and
difficulties, and to tie your hands for all purposes
of offence, so far as he was concerned. That was his
purpose, on his own confession to me. The only
consideration which made him hesitate, at the last
moment——"
"Yes?"
"It is hard to acknowledge it, Walter, and yet I
must. I was the only consideration. No words can say
how degraded I feel in my own estimation when I
think of it, but the one weak point in that man's
iron character is the horrible admiration he feels
for me. I have tried, for the sake of my own
self-respect, to disbelieve it as long as I could;
but his looks, his actions, force on me the shameful
conviction of the truth. The eyes of that monster of
wickedness moistened while he was speaking to
me—they did, Walter! He declared that at the moment
of pointing out the house to the doctor, he thought
of my misery if I was separated from Laura, of my
responsibility if I was called on to answer for
effecting her escape, and he risked the worst that
you could do to him, the second time, for my sake.
All he asked was that I would remember the
sacrifice, and restrain your rashness, in my own
interests—interests which he might never be able to
consult again. I made no such bargain with him—I
would have died first. But believe him or not,
whether it is true or false that he sent the doctor
away with an excuse, one thing is certain, I saw the
man leave him without so much as a glance at our
window, or even at our side of the way."
"I believe it, Marian. The best men are not
consistent in good—why should the worst men be
consistent in evil? At the same time, I suspect him
of merely attempting to frighten you, by threatening
what he cannot really do. I doubt his power of
annoying us, by means of the owner of the Asylum,
now that Sir Percival is dead, and Mrs. Catherick is
free from all control. But let me hear more. What
did the Count say of me?"
"He spoke last of you. His eyes brightened and
hardened, and his manner changed to what I remember
it in past times—to that mixture of pitiless
resolution and mountebank mockery which makes it so
impossible to fathom him. 'Warn Mr. Hartright!' he
said in his loftiest manner. 'He has a man of brains
to deal with, a man who snaps his big fingers at the
laws and conventions of society, when he measures
himself with ME. If my lamented friend had taken my
advice, the business of the inquest would have been
with the body of Mr. Hartright. But my lamented
friend was obstinate. See! I mourn his loss—inwardly
in my soul, outwardly on my hat. This trivial crape
expresses sensibilities which I summon Mr. Hartright
to respect. They may be transformed to immeasurable
enmities if he ventures to disturb them. Let him be
content with what he has got—with what I leave
unmolested, for your sake, to him and to you. Say to
him (with my compliments), if he stirs me, he has
Fosco to deal with. In the English of the Popular
Tongue, I inform him—Fosco sticks at nothing. Dear
lady, good morning.' His cold grey eyes settled on
my face—he took off his hat solemnly—bowed,
bare-headed—and left me."
"Without returning? without saying more last
words?"
"He turned at the corner of the street, and waved
his hand, and then struck it theatrically on his
breast. I lost sight of him after that. He
disappeared in the opposite direction to our house,
and I ran back to Laura. Before I was indoors again,
I had made up my mind that we must go. The house
(especially in your absence) was a place of danger
instead of a place of safety, now that the Count had
discovered it. If I could have felt certain of your
return, I should have risked waiting till you came
back. But I was certain of nothing, and I acted at
once on my own impulse. You had spoken, before
leaving us, of moving into a quieter neighbourhood
and purer air, for the sake of Laura's health. I had
only to remind her of that, and to suggest
surprising you and saving you trouble by managing
the move in your absence, to make her quite as
anxious for the change as I was. She helped me to
pack up your things, and she has arranged them all
for you in your new working-room here."
"What made you think of coming to this place?"
"My ignorance of other localities in the
neighbourhood of London. I felt the necessity of
getting as far away as possible from our old
lodgings, and I knew something of Fulham, because I
had once been at school there. I despatched a
messenger with a note, on the chance that the school
might still be in existence. It was in existence—the
daughters of my old mistress were carrying it on for
her, and they engaged this place from the
instructions I had sent. It was just post-time when
the messenger returned to me with the address of the
house. We moved after dark—we came here quite
unobserved. Have I done right, Walter? Have I
justified your trust in me?"
I answered her warmly and gratefully, as I really
felt. But the anxious look still remained on her
face while I was speaking, and the first question
she asked, when I had done, related to Count Fosco.
I saw that she was thinking of him now with a
changed mind. No fresh outbreak of anger against
him, no new appeal to me to hasten the day of
reckoning escaped her. Her conviction that the man's
hateful admiration of herself was really sincere,
seemed to have increased a hundredfold her distrust
of his unfathomable cunning, her inborn dread of the
wicked energy and vigilance of all his faculties.
Her voice fell low, her manner was hesitating, her
eyes searched into mine with an eager fear when she
asked me what I thought of his message, and what I
meant to do next after hearing it.
"Not many weeks have passed, Marian," I answered,
"since my interview with Mr. Kyrle. When he and I
parted, the last words I said to him about Laura
were these: 'Her uncle's house shall open to receive
her, in the presence of every soul who followed the
false funeral to the grave; the lie that records her
death shall be publicly erased from the tombstone by
the authority of the head of the family, and the two
men who have wronged her shall answer for their
crime to ME, though the justice that sits in
tribunals is powerless to pursue them.' One of those
men is beyond mortal reach. The other remains, and
my resolution remains."
Her eyes lit up—her colour rose. She said
nothing, but I saw all her sympathies gathering to
mine in her face.
"I don't disguise from myself, or from you," I
went on, "that the prospect before us is more than
doubtful. The risks we have run already are, it may
be, trifles compared with the risks that threaten us
in the future, but the venture shall be tried,
Marian, for all that. I am not rash enough to
measure myself against such a man as the Count
before I am well prepared for him. I have learnt
patience—I can wait my time. Let him believe that
his message has produced its effect—let him know
nothing of us, and hear nothing of us—let us give
him full time to feel secure—his own boastful
nature, unless I seriously mistake him, will hasten
that result. This is one reason for waiting, but
there is another more important still. My position,
Marian, towards you and towards Laura ought to be a
stronger one than it is now before I try our last
chance."
She leaned near to me, with a look of surprise.
"How can it be stronger?" she asked.
"I will tell you," I replied, "when the time
comes. It has not come yet—it may never come at all.
I may be silent about it to Laura for ever—I must be
silent now, even to YOU, till I see for myself that
I can harmlessly and honourably speak. Let us leave
that subject. There is another which has more
pressing claims on our attention. You have kept
Laura, mercifully kept her, in ignorance of her
husband's death——"
"Oh, Walter, surely it must be long yet before we
tell her of it?"
"No, Marian. Better that you should reveal it to
her now, than that accident, which no one can guard
against, should reveal it to her at some future
time. Spare her all the details—break it to her very
tenderly, but tell her that he is dead."
"You have a reason, Walter, for wishing her to
know of her husband's death besides the reason you
have just mentioned?"
"I have."
"A reason connected with that subject which must
not be mentioned between us yet?—which may never be
mentioned to Laura at all?"
She dwelt on the last words meaningly. When I
answered her in the affirmative, I dwelt on them
too.
Her face grew pale. For a while she looked at me
with a sad, hesitating interest. An unaccustomed
tenderness trembled in her dark eyes and softened
her firm lips, as she glanced aside at the empty
chair in which the dear companion of all our joys
and sorrows had been sitting.
"I think I understand," she said. "I think I owe
it to her and to you, Walter, to tell her of her
husband's death."
She sighed, and held my hand fast for a
moment—then dropped it abruptly, and left the room.
On the next day Laura knew that his death had
released her, and that the error and the calamity of
her life lay buried in his tomb.
His name was mentioned among us no more. Thenceforward, we shrank from
the slightest approach to the subject of his death,
and in the same scrupulous manner, Marian and I
avoided all further reference to that other subject,
which, by her consent and mine, was not to be
mentioned between us yet. It was not the less
present in our minds—it was rather kept alive in
them by the restraint which we had imposed on
ourselves. We both watched Laura more anxiously than
ever, sometimes waiting and hoping, sometimes
waiting and fearing, till the time came.
By degrees we returned to our accustomed way of
life. I resumed the daily work, which had been
suspended during my absence in Hampshire. Our new
lodgings cost us more than the smaller and less
convenient rooms which we had left, and the claim
thus implied on my increased exertions was
strengthened by the doubtfulness of our future
prospects. Emergencies might yet happen which would
exhaust our little fund at the banker's, and the
work of my hands might be, ultimately, all we had to
look to for support. More permanent and more
lucrative employment than had yet been offered to me
was a necessity of our position—a necessity for
which I now diligently set myself to provide.
It must not be supposed that the interval of rest
and seclusion of which I am now writing, entirely
suspended, on my part, all pursuit of the one
absorbing purpose with which my thoughts and actions
are associated in these pages. That purpose was, for
months and months yet, never to relax its claims on
me. The slow ripening of it still left me a measure
of precaution to take, an obligation of gratitude to
perform, and a doubtful question to solve.
The measure of precaution related, necessarily,
to the Count. It was of the last importance to
ascertain, if possible, whether his plans committed
him to remaining in England—or, in other words, to
remaining within my reach. I contrived to set this
doubt at rest by very simple means. His address in
St. John's Wood being known to me, I inquired in the
neighbourhood, and having found out the agent who
had the disposal of the furnished house in which he
lived, I asked if number five, Forest Road, was
likely to be let within a reasonable time. The reply
was in the negative. I was informed that the foreign
gentleman then residing in the house had renewed his
term of occupation for another six months, and would
remain in possession until the end of June in the
following year. We were then at the beginning of
December only. I left the agent with my mind
relieved from all present fear of the Count's
escaping me.
The obligation I had to perform took me once more
into the presence of Mrs. Clements. I had promised
to return, and to confide to her those particulars
relating to the death and burial of Anne Catherick
which I had been obliged to withhold at our first
interview. Changed as circumstances now were, there
was no hindrance to my trusting the good woman with
as much of the story of the conspiracy as it was
necessary to tell. I had every reason that sympathy
and friendly feeling could suggest to urge on me the
speedy performance of my promise, and I did
conscientiously and carefully perform it. There is
no need to burden these pages with any statement of
what passed at the interview. It will be more to the
purpose to say, that the interview itself
necessarily brought to my mind the one doubtful
question still remaining to be solved—the question
of Anne Catherick's parentage on the father's side.
A multitude of small considerations in connection
with this subject—trifling enough in themselves, but
strikingly important when massed together—had
latterly led my mind to a conclusion which I
resolved to verify. I obtained Marian's permission
to write to Major Donthorne, of Varneck Hall (where
Mrs. Catherick had lived in service for some years
previous to her marriage), to ask him certain
questions. I made the inquiries in Marian's name,
and described them as relating to matters of
personal history in her family, which might explain
and excuse my application. When I wrote the letter I
had no certain knowledge that Major Donthorne was
still alive—I despatched it on the chance that he
might be living, and able and willing to reply.
After a lapse of two days proof came, in the
shape of a letter, that the Major was living, and
that he was ready to help us.
The idea in my mind when I wrote to him, and the
nature of my inquiries will be easily inferred from
his reply. His letter answered my questions by
communicating these important facts—
In the first place, "the late Sir Percival Glyde,
of Blackwater Park," had never set foot in Varneck
Hall. The deceased gentleman was a total stranger to
Major Donthorne, and to all his family.
In the second place, "the late Mr. Philip
Fairlie, of Limmeridge House," had been, in his
younger days, the intimate friend and constant guest
of Major Donthorne. Having refreshed his memory by
looking back to old letters and other papers, the
Major was in a position to say positively that Mr.
Philip Fairlie was staying at Varneck Hall in the
month of August, eighteen hundred and twenty-six,
and that he remained there for the shooting during
the month of September and part of October
following. He then left, to the best of the Major's
belief, for Scotland, and did not return to Varneck
Hall till after a lapse of time, when he reappeared
in the character of a newly-married man.
Taken by itself, this statement was, perhaps, of
little positive value, but taken in connection with
certain facts, every one of which either Marian or I
knew to be true, it suggested one plain conclusion
that was, to our minds, irresistible.
Knowing, now, that Mr. Philip Fairlie had been at
Varneck Hall in the autumn of eighteen hundred and
twenty-six, and that Mrs. Catherick had been living
there in service at the same time, we knew
also—first, that Anne had been born in June,
eighteen hundred and twenty-seven; secondly, that
she had always presented an extraordinary personal
resemblance to Laura; and, thirdly, that Laura
herself was strikingly like her father. Mr. Philip
Fairlie had been one of the notoriously handsome men
of his time. In disposition entirely unlike his
brother Frederick, he was the spoilt darling of
society, especially of the women—an easy,
light-hearted, impulsive, affectionate man—generous
to a fault—constitutionally lax in his principles,
and notoriously thoughtless of moral obligations
where women were concerned. Such were the facts we
knew—such was the character of the man. Surely the
plain inference that follows needs no pointing out?
Read by the new light which had now broken upon
me, even Mrs. Catherick's letter, in despite of
herself, rendered its mite of assistance towards
strengthening the conclusion at which I had arrived.
She had described Mrs. Fairlie (in writing to me) as
"plain-looking," and as having "entrapped the
handsomest man in England into marrying her." Both
assertions were gratuitously made, and both were
false. Jealous dislike (which, in such a woman as
Mrs. Catherick, would express itself in petty malice
rather than not express itself at all) appeared to
me to be the only assignable cause for the peculiar
insolence of her reference to Mrs. Fairlie, under
circumstances which did not necessitate any
reference at all.
The mention here of Mrs. Fairlie's name naturally
suggests one other question. Did she ever suspect
whose child the little girl brought to her at
Limmeridge might be?
Marian's testimony was positive on this point.
Mrs. Fairlie's letter to her husband, which had been
read to me in former days—the letter describing
Anne's resemblance to Laura, and acknowledging her
affectionate interest in the little stranger—had
been written, beyond all question, in perfect
innocence of heart. It even seemed doubtful, on
consideration, whether Mr. Philip Fairlie himself
had been nearer than his wife to any suspicion of
the truth. The disgracefully deceitful circumstances
under which Mrs. Catherick had married, the purpose
of concealment which the marriage was intended to
answer, might well keep her silent for caution's
sake, perhaps for her own pride's sake also, even
assuming that she had the means, in his absence, of
communicating with the father of her unborn child.
As this surmise floated through my mind, there
rose on my memory the remembrance of the Scripture
denunciation which we have all thought of in our
time with wonder and with awe: "The sins of the
fathers shall be visited on the children." But for
the fatal resemblance between the two daughters of
one father, the conspiracy of which Anne had been
the innocent instrument and Laura the innocent
victim could never have been planned. With what
unerring and terrible directness the long chain of
circumstances led down from the thoughtless wrong
committed by the father to the heartless injury
inflicted on the child!
These thoughts came to me, and others with them,
which drew my mind away to the little Cumberland
churchyard where Anne Catherick now lay buried. I
thought of the bygone days when I had met her by
Mrs. Fairlie's grave, and met her for the last time.
I thought of her poor helpless hands beating on the
tombstone, and her weary, yearning words, murmured
to the dead remains of her protectress and her
friend: "Oh, if I could die, and be hidden and at
rest with YOU!" Little more than a year had passed
since she breathed that wish; and how inscrutably,
how awfully, it had been fulfilled! The words she
had spoken to Laura by the shores of the lake, the
very words had now come true. "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!"
Through what mortal crime and horror, through what
darkest windings of the way down to death—the lost
creature had wandered in God's leading to the last
home that, living, she never hoped to reach! In that
sacred rest I leave her—in that dread companionship
let her remain undisturbed.
So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my
life, goes down into the impenetrable gloom. Like a
shadow she first came to me in the loneliness of the
night. Like a shadow she passes away in the
loneliness of the dead.
III
Four months elapsed. April came—the month of
spring—the month of change.
The course of time had flowed through the
interval since the winter peacefully and happily in
our new home. I had turned my long leisure to good
account, had largely increased my sources of
employment, and had placed our means of subsistence
on surer grounds. Freed from the suspense and the
anxiety which had tried her so sorely and hung over
her so long, Marian's spirits rallied, and her
natural energy of character began to assert itself
again, with something, if not all, of the freedom
and the vigour of former times.
More pliable under change than her sister, Laura
showed more plainly the progress made by the healing
influences of her new life. The worn and wasted look
which had prematurely aged her face was fast leaving
it, and the expression which had been the first of
its charms in past days was the first of its
beauties that now returned. My closest observations
of her detected but one serious result of the
conspiracy which had once threatened her reason and
her life. Her memory of events, from the period of
her leaving Blackwater Park to the period of our
meeting in the burial-ground of Limmeridge Church,
was lost beyond all hope of recovery. At the
slightest reference to that time she changed and
trembled still, her words became confused, her
memory wandered and lost itself as helplessly as
ever. Here, and here only, the traces of the past
lay deep—too deep to be effaced.
In all else she was now so far on the way to
recovery that, on her best and brightest days, she
sometimes looked and spoke like the Laura of old
times. The happy change wrought its natural result
in us both. From their long slumber, on her side and
on mine, those imperishable memories of our past
life in Cumberland now awoke, which were one and all
alike, the memories of our love.
Gradually and insensibly our daily relations
towards each other became constrained. The fond
words which I had spoken to her so naturally, in the
days of her sorrow and her suffering, faltered
strangely on my lips. In the time when my dread of
losing her was most present to my mind, I had always
kissed her when she left me at night and when she
met me in the morning. The kiss seemed now to have
dropped between us—to be lost out of our lives. Our
hands began to tremble again when they met. We
hardly ever looked long at one another out of
Marian's presence. The talk often flagged between us
when we were alone. When I touched her by accident I
felt my heart beating fast, as it used to beat at
Limmeridge House—I saw the lovely answering flush
glowing again in her cheeks, as if we were back
among the Cumberland Hills in our past characters of
master and pupil once more. She had long intervals
of silence and thoughtfulness, and denied she had
been thinking when Marian asked her the question. I
surprised myself one day neglecting my work to dream
over the little water-colour portrait of her which I
had taken in the summer-house where we first
met—just as I used to neglect Mr. Fairlie's drawings
to dream over the same likeness when it was newly
finished in the bygone time. Changed as all the
circumstances now were, our position towards each
other in the golden days of our first companionship
seemed to be revived with the revival of our love.
It was as if Time had drifted us back on the wreck
of our early hopes to the old familiar shore!
To any other woman I could have spoken the
decisive words which I still hesitated to speak to
HER. The utter helplessness of her position—her
friendless dependence on all the forbearing
gentleness that I could show her—my fear of touching
too soon some secret sensitiveness in her which my
instinct as a man might not have been fine enough to
discover—these considerations, and others like them,
kept me self-distrustfully silent. And yet I knew
that the restraint on both sides must be ended, that
the relations in which we stood towards one another
must be altered in some settled manner for the
future, and that it rested with me, in the first
instance, to recognise the necessity for a change.
The more I thought of our position, the harder
the attempt to alter it appeared, while the domestic
conditions on which we three had been living
together since the winter remained undisturbed. I
cannot account for the capricious state of mind in
which this feeling originated, but the idea
nevertheless possessed me that some previous change
of place and circumstances, some sudden break in the
quiet monotony of our lives, so managed as to vary
the home aspect under which we had been accustomed
to see each other, might prepare the way for me to
speak, and might make it easier and less
embarrassing for Laura and Marian to hear.
With this purpose in view, I said, one morning,
that I thought we had all earned a little holiday
and a change of scene. After some consideration, it
was decided that we should go for a fortnight to the
sea-side.
On the next day we left Fulham for a quiet town
on the south coast. At that early season of the year
we were the only visitors in the place. The cliffs,
the beach, and the walks inland were all in the
solitary condition which was most welcome to us. The
air was mild—the prospects over hill and wood and
down were beautifully varied by the shifting April
light and shade, and the restless sea leapt under
our windows, as if it felt, like the land, the glow
and freshness of spring.
I owed it to Marian to consult her before I spoke
to Laura, and to be guided afterwards by her advice.
On the third day from our arrival I found a fit
opportunity of speaking to her alone. The moment we
looked at one another, her quick instinct detected
the thought in my mind before I could give it
expression. With her customary energy and directness
she spoke at once, and spoke first.
"You are thinking of that subject which was
mentioned between us on the evening of your return
from Hampshire," she said. "I have been expecting
you to allude to it for some time past. There must
be a change in our little household, Walter, we
cannot go on much longer as we are now. I see it as
plainly as you do—as plainly as Laura sees it,
though she says nothing. How strangely the old times
in Cumberland seem to have come back! You and I are
together again, and the one subject of interest
between us is Laura once more. I could almost fancy
that this room is the summer-house at Limmeridge,
and that those waves beyond us are beating on our
sea-shore."
"I was guided by your advice in those past days,"
I said, "and now, Marian, with reliance tenfold
greater I will be guided by it again."
She answered by pressing my hand. I saw that she
was deeply touched by my reference to the past. We
sat together near the window, and while I spoke and
she listened, we looked at the glory of the sunlight
shining on the majesty of the sea.
"Whatever comes of this confidence between us," I
said, "whether it ends happily or sorrowfully for
ME, Laura's interests will still be the interests of
my life. When we leave this place, on whatever terms
we leave it, my determination to wrest from Count
Fosco the confession which I failed to obtain from
his accomplice, goes back with me to London, as
certainly as I go back myself. Neither you nor I can
tell how that man may turn on me, if I bring him to
bay; we only know, by his own words and actions,
that he is capable of striking at me through Laura,
without a moment's hesitation, or a moment's
remorse. In our present position I have no claim on
her which society sanctions, which the law allows,
to strengthen me in resisting him, and in protecting
HER. This places me at a serious disadvantage. If I
am to fight our cause with the Count, strong in the
consciousness of Laura's safety, I must fight it for
my Wife. Do you agree to that, Marian, so far?"
"To every word of it," she answered.
"I will not plead out of my own heart," I went
on; "I will not appeal to the love which has
survived all changes and all shocks—I will rest my
only vindication of myself for thinking of her, and
speaking of her as my wife, on what I have just
said. If the chance of forcing a confession from the
Count is, as I believe it to be, the last chance
left of publicly establishing the fact of Laura's
existence, the least selfish reason that I can
advance for our marriage is recognised by us both.
But I may be wrong in my conviction—other means of
achieving our purpose may be in our power, which are
less uncertain and less dangerous. I have searched
anxiously, in my own mind, for those means, and I
have not found them. Have you?"
"No. I have thought about it too, and thought in
vain."
"In all likelihood," I continued, "the same
questions have occurred to you, in considering this
difficult subject, which have occurred to me. Ought
we to return with her to Limmeridge, now that she is
like herself again, and trust to the recognition of
her by the people of the village, or by the children
at the school? Ought we to appeal to the practical
test of her handwriting? Suppose we did so. Suppose
the recognition of her obtained, and the identity of
the handwriting established. Would success in both
those cases do more than supply an excellent
foundation for a trial in a court of law? Would the
recognition and the handwriting prove her identity
to Mr. Fairlie and take her back to Limmeridge
House, against the evidence of her aunt, against the
evidence of the medical certificate, against the
fact of the funeral and the fact of the inscription
on the tomb? No! We could only hope to succeed in
throwing a serious doubt on the assertion of her
death, a doubt which nothing short of a legal
inquiry can settle. I will assume that we possess
(what we have certainly not got) money enough to
carry this inquiry on through all its stages. I will
assume that Mr. Fairlie's prejudices might be
reasoned away—that the false testimony of the Count
and his wife, and all the rest of the false
testimony, might be confuted—that the recognition
could not possibly be ascribed to a mistake between
Laura and Anne Catherick, or the handwriting be
declared by our enemies to be a clever fraud—all
these are assumptions which, more or less, set plain
probabilities at defiance; but let them pass—and let
us ask ourselves what would be the first consequence
or the first questions put to Laura herself on the
subject of the conspiracy. We know only too well
what the consequence would be, for we know that she
has never recovered her memory of what happened to
her in London. Examine her privately, or examine her
publicly, she is utterly incapable of assisting the
assertion of her own case. If you don't see this,
Marian, as plainly as I see it, we will go to
Limmeridge and try the experiment to-morrow."
"I DO see it, Walter. Even if we had the means of
paying all the law expenses, even if we succeeded in
the end, the delays would be unendurable, the
perpetual suspense, after what we have suffered
already, would be heartbreaking. You are right about
the hopelessness of going to Limmeridge. I wish I
could feel sure that you are right also in
determining to try that last chance with the Count.
IS it a chance at all?"
"Beyond a doubt, Yes. It is the chance of
recovering the lost date of Laura's journey to
London. Without returning to the reasons I gave you
some time since, I am still as firmly persuaded as
ever that there is a discrepancy between the date of
that journey and the date on the certificate of
death. There lies the weak point of the whole
conspiracy—it crumbles to pieces if we attack it in
that way, and the means of attacking it are in
possession of the Count. If I succeed in wresting
them from him, the object of your life and mine is
fulfilled. If I fail, the wrong that Laura has
suffered will, in this world, never be redressed."
"Do you fear failure yourself, Walter?"
"I dare not anticipate success, and for that very
reason, Marian, I speak openly and plainly as I have
spoken now. In my heart and my conscience I can say
it, Laura's hopes for the future are at their lowest
ebb. I know that her fortune is gone—I know that the
last chance of restoring her to her place in the
world lies at the mercy of her worst enemy, of a man
who is now absolutely unassailable, and who may
remain unassailable to the end. With every worldly
advantage gone from her, with all prospect of
recovering her rank and station more than doubtful,
with no clearer future before her than the future
which her husband can provide, the poor
drawing-master may harmlessly open his heart at
last. In the days of her prosperity, Marian, I was
only the teacher who guided her hand—I ask for it,
in her adversity, as the hand of my wife!"
Marian's eyes met mine affectionately—I could say
no more. My heart was full, my lips were trembling.
In spite of myself I was in danger of appealing to
her pity. I got up to leave the room. She rose at
the same moment, laid her hand gently on my
shoulder, and stopped me.
"Walter!" she said, "I once parted you both, for
your good and for hers. Wait here, my brother!—wait,
my dearest, best friend, till Laura comes, and tells
you what I have done now!"
For the first time since the farewell morning at
Limmeridge she touched my forehead with her lips. A
tear dropped on my face as she kissed me. She turned
quickly, pointed to the chair from which I had
risen, and left the room.
I sat down alone at the window to wait through
the crisis of my life. My mind in that breathless
interval felt like a total blank. I was conscious of
nothing but a painful intensity of all familiar
perceptions. The sun grew blinding bright, the white
sea birds chasing each other far beyond me seemed to
be flitting before my face, the mellow murmur of the
waves on the beach was like thunder in my ears.
The door opened, and Laura came in alone. So she
had entered the breakfast-room at Limmeridge House
on the morning when we parted. Slowly and
falteringly, in sorrow and in hesitation, she had
once approached me. Now she came with the haste of
happiness in her feet, with the light of happiness
radiant in her face. Of their own accord those dear
arms clasped themselves round me, of their own
accord the sweet lips came to meet mine. "My
darling!" she whispered, "we may own we love each
other now?" Her head nestled with a tender
contentedness on my bosom. "Oh," she said
innocently, "I am so happy at last!"
Ten days later we were happier still. We were married.
IV
The course of this narrative, steadily flowing
on, bears me away from the morning-time of our
married life, and carries me forward to the end.
In a fortnight more we three were back in London,
and the shadow was stealing over us of the struggle
to come.
Marian and I were careful to keep Laura in
ignorance of the cause that had hurried us back—the
necessity of making sure of the Count. It was now
the beginning of May, and his term of occupation at
the house in Forest Road expired in June. If he
renewed it (and I had reasons, shortly to be
mentioned, for anticipating that he would), I might
be certain of his not escaping me. But if by any
chance he disappointed my expectations and left the
country, then I had no time to lose in arming myself
to meet him as I best might.
In the first fulness of my new happiness, there
had been moments when my resolution faltered—moments
when I was tempted to be safely content, now that
the dearest aspiration of my life was fulfilled in
the possession of Laura's love. For the first time I
thought faint-heartedly of the greatness of the
risk, of the adverse chances arrayed against me, of
the fair promise of our new life, and of the peril
in which I might place the happiness which we had so
hardly earned. Yes! let me own it honestly. For a
brief time I wandered, in the sweet guiding of love,
far from the purpose to which I had been true under
sterner discipline and in darker days. Innocently
Laura had tempted me aside from the hard
path—innocently she was destined to lead me back
again.
At times, dreams of the terrible past still
disconnectedly recalled to her, in the mystery of
sleep, the events of which her waking memory had
lost all trace. One night (barely two weeks after
our marriage), when I was watching her at rest, I
saw the tears come slowly through her closed
eyelids, I heard the faint murmuring words escape
her which told me that her spirit was back again on
the fatal journey from Blackwater Park. That
unconscious appeal, so touching and so awful in the
sacredness of her sleep, ran through me like fire.
The next day was the day we came back to London—the
day when my resolution returned to me with tenfold
strength.
The first necessity was to know something of the
man. Thus far, the true story of his life was an
impenetrable mystery to me.
I began with such scanty sources of information
as were at my own disposal. The important narrative
written by Mr. Frederick Fairlie (which Marian had
obtained by following the directions I had given to
her in the winter) proved to be of no service to the
special object with which I now looked at it. While
reading it I reconsidered the disclosure revealed to
me by Mrs. Clements of the series of deceptions
which had brought Anne Catherick to London, and
which had there devoted her to the interests of the
conspiracy. Here, again, the Count had not openly
committed himself—here, again, he was, to all
practical purpose, out of my reach.
I next returned to Marian's journal at Blackwater
Park. At my request she read to me again a passage
which referred to her past curiosity about the
Count, and to the few particulars which she had
discovered relating to him.
The passage to which I allude occurs in that part
of her journal which delineates his character and
his personal appearance. She describes him as "not
having crossed the frontiers of his native country
for years past"—as "anxious to know if any Italian
gentlemen were settled in the nearest town to
Blackwater Park"—as "receiving letters with all
sorts of odd stamps on them, and one with a large
official-looking seal on it." She is inclined to
consider that his long absence from his native
country may be accounted for by assuming that he is
a political exile. But she is, on the other hand,
unable to reconcile this idea with the reception of
the letter from abroad bearing "the large
official-looking seal"—letters from the Continent
addressed to political exiles being usually the last
to court attention from foreign post-offices in that
way.
The considerations thus presented to me in the
diary, joined to certain surmises of my own that
grew out of them, suggested a conclusion which I
wondered I had not arrived at before. I now said to
myself—what Laura had once said to Marian at
Blackwater Park, what Madame Fosco had overheard by
listening at the door—the Count is a spy!
Laura had applied the word to him at hazard, in
natural anger at his proceedings towards herself. I
applied it to him with the deliberate conviction
that his vocation in life was the vocation of a spy.
On this assumption, the reason for his extraordinary
stay in England so long after the objects of the
conspiracy had been gained, became, to my mind,
quite intelligible.
The year of which I am now writing was the year
of the famous Crystal Palace Exhibition in Hyde
Park. Foreigners in unusually large numbers had
arrived already, and were still arriving in England.
Men were among us by hundreds whom the ceaseless
distrustfulness of their governments had followed
privately, by means of appointed agents, to our
shores. My surmises did not for a moment class a man
of the Count's abilities and social position with
the ordinary rank and file of foreign spies. I
suspected him of holding a position of authority, of
being entrusted by the government which he secretly
served with the organisation and management of
agents specially employed in this country, both men
and women, and I believed Mrs. Rubelle, who had been
so opportunely found to act as nurse at Blackwater
Park, to be, in all probability, one of the number.
Assuming that this idea of mine had a foundation
in truth, the position of the Count might prove to
be more assailable than I had hitherto ventured to
hope. To whom could I apply to know something more
of the man's history and of the man himself than I
knew now?
In this emergency it naturally occurred to my
mind that a countryman of his own, on whom I could
rely, might be the fittest person to help me. The
first man whom I thought of under these
circumstances was also the only Italian with whom I
was intimately acquainted—my quaint little friend,
Professor Pesca.
The professor has been so long absent from these pages that he has run
some risk of being forgotten altogether.
It is the necessary law of such a story as mine
that the persons concerned in it only appear when
the course of events takes them up—they come and go,
not by favour of my personal partiality, but by
right of their direct connection with the
circumstances to be detailed. For this reason, not
Pesca alone, but my mother and sister as well, have
been left far in the background of the narrative. My
visits to the Hampstead cottage, my mother's belief
in the denial of Laura's identity which the
conspiracy had accomplished, my vain efforts to
overcome the prejudice on her part and on my
sister's to which, in their jealous affection for
me, they both continued to adhere, the painful
necessity which that prejudice imposed on me of
concealing my marriage from them till they had
learnt to do justice to my wife—all these little
domestic occurrences have been left unrecorded
because they were not essential to the main interest
of the story. It is nothing that they added to my
anxieties and embittered my disappointments—the
steady march of events has inexorably passed them
by.
For the same reason I have said nothing here of
the consolation that I found in Pesca's brotherly
affection for me, when I saw him again after the
sudden cessation of my residence at Limmeridge
House. I have not recorded the fidelity with which
my warm-hearted little friend followed me to the
place of embarkation when I sailed for Central
America, or the noisy transport of joy with which he
received me when we next met in London. If I had
felt justified in accepting the offers of service
which he made to me on my return, he would have
appeared again long ere this. But, though I knew
that his honour and his courage were to be
implicitly relied on, I was not so sure that his
discretion was to be trusted, and, for that reason
only, I followed the course of all my inquiries
alone. It will now be sufficiently understood that
Pesca was not separated from all connection with me
and my interests, although he has hitherto been
separated from all connection with the progress of
this narrative. He was as true and as ready a friend
of mine still as ever he had been in his life.
Before I summoned Pesca to my assistance it was necessary to see for
myself what sort of man I had to deal with. Up to
this time I had never once set eyes on Count Fosco.
Three days after my return with Laura and Marian
to London, I set forth alone for Forest Road, St.
John's Wood, between ten and eleven o'clock in the
morning. It was a fine day—I had some hours to
spare—and I thought it likely, if I waited a little
for him, that the Count might be tempted out. I had
no great reason to fear the chance of his
recognising me in the daytime, for the only occasion
when I had been seen by him was the occasion on
which he had followed me home at night.
No one appeared at the windows in the front of
the house. I walked down a turning which ran past
the side of it, and looked over the low garden wall.
One of the back windows on the lower floor was
thrown up and a net was stretched across the
opening. I saw nobody, but I heard, in the room,
first a shrill whistling and singing of birds, then
the deep ringing voice which Marian's description
had made familiar to me. "Come out on my little
finger, my pret-pret-pretties!" cried the voice.
"Come out and hop upstairs! One, two, three—and up!
Three, two, one—and down! One, two,
three—twit-twit-twit-tweet!" The Count was
exercising his canaries as he used to exercise them
in Marian's time at Blackwater Park.
I waited a little while, and the singing and the
whistling ceased. "Come, kiss me, my pretties!" said
the deep voice. There was a responsive twittering
and chirping—a low, oily laugh—a silence of a minute
or so, and then I heard the opening of the house
door. I turned and retraced my steps. The
magnificent melody of the Prayer in Rossini's Moses,
sung in a sonorous bass voice, rose grandly through
the suburban silence of the place. The front garden
gate opened and closed. The Count had come out.
He crossed the road and walked towards the
western boundary of the Regent's Park. I kept on my
own side of the way, a little behind him, and walked
in that direction also.
Marian had prepared me for his high stature, his
monstrous corpulence, and his ostentatious mourning
garments, but not for the horrible freshness and
cheerfulness and vitality of the man. He carried his
sixty years as if they had been fewer than forty. He
sauntered along, wearing his hat a little on one
side, with a light jaunty step, swinging his big
stick, humming to himself, looking up from time to
time at the houses and gardens on either side of him
with superb, smiling patronage. If a stranger had
been told that the whole neighbourhood belonged to
him, that stranger would not have been surprised to
hear it. He never looked back, he paid no apparent
attention to me, no apparent attention to any one
who passed him on his own side of the road, except
now and then, when he smiled and smirked, with an
easy paternal good humour, at the nursery-maids and
the children whom he met. In this way he led me on,
till we reached a colony of shops outside the
western terraces of the Park.
Here he stopped at a pastrycook's, went in
(probably to give an order), and came out again
immediately with a tart in his hand. An Italian was
grinding an organ before the shop, and a miserable
little shrivelled monkey was sitting on the
instrument. The Count stopped, bit a piece for
himself out of the tart, and gravely handed the rest
to the monkey. "My poor little man!" he said, with
grotesque tenderness, "you look hungry. In the
sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch!"
The organ-grinder piteously put in his claim to a
penny from the benevolent stranger. The Count
shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and passed
on.
We reached the streets and the better class of
shops between the New Road and Oxford Street. The
Count stopped again and entered a small optician's
shop, with an inscription in the window announcing
that repairs were neatly executed inside. He came
out again with an opera-glass in his hand, walked a
few paces on, and stopped to look at a bill of the
opera placed outside a music-seller's shop. He read
the bill attentively, considered a moment, and then
hailed an empty cab as it passed him. "Opera
Box-office," he said to the man, and was driven
away.
I crossed the road, and looked at the bill in my
turn. The performance announced was Lucrezia Borgia,
and it was to take place that evening. The
opera-glass in the Count's hand, his careful reading
of the bill, and his direction to the cabman, all
suggested that he proposed making one of the
audience. I had the means of getting an admission
for myself and a friend to the pit by applying to
one of the scene-painters attached to the theatre,
with whom I had been well acquainted in past times.
There was a chance at least that the Count might be
easily visible among the audience to me and to any
one with me, and in this case I had the means of
ascertaining whether Pesca knew his countryman or
not that very night.
This consideration at once decided the disposal
of my evening. I procured the tickets, leaving a
note at the Professor's lodgings on the way. At a
quarter to eight I called to take him with me to the
theatre. My little friend was in a state of the
highest excitement, with a festive flower in his
button-hole, and the largest opera-glass I ever saw
hugged up under his arm.
"Are you ready?" I asked.
"Right-all-right," said Pesca.
We started for the theatre.
V
The last notes of the introduction to the opera
were being played, and the seats in the pit were all
filled, when Pesca and I reached the theatre.
There was plenty of room, however, in the passage
that ran round the pit—precisely the position best
calculated to answer the purpose for which I was
attending the performance. I went first to the
barrier separating us from the stalls, and looked
for the Count in that part of the theatre. He was
not there. Returning along the passage, on the
left-hand side from the stage, and looking about me
attentively, I discovered him in the pit. He
occupied an excellent place, some twelve or fourteen
seats from the end of a bench, within three rows of
the stalls. I placed myself exactly on a line with
him. Pesca standing by my side. The Professor was
not yet aware of the purpose for which I had brought
him to the theatre, and he was rather surprised that
we did not move nearer to the stage.
The curtain rose, and the opera began.
Throughout the whole of the first act we remained
in our position—the Count, absorbed by the orchestra
and the stage, never casting so much as a chance
glance at us. Not a note of Donizetti's delicious
music was lost on him. There he sat, high above his
neighbours, smiling, and nodding his great head
enjoyingly from time to time. When the people near
him applauded the close of an air (as an English
audience in such circumstances always WILL applaud),
without the least consideration for the orchestral
movement which immediately followed it, he looked
round at them with an expression of compassionate
remonstrance, and held up one hand with a gesture of
polite entreaty. At the more refined passages of the
singing, at the more delicate phases of the music,
which passed unapplauded by others, his fat hands,
adorned with perfectly-fitting black kid gloves,
softly patted each other, in token of the cultivated
appreciation of a musical man. At such times, his
oily murmur of approval, "Bravo! Bra-a-a-a!" hummed
through the silence, like the purring of a great
cat. His immediate neighbours on either side—hearty,
ruddy-faced people from the country, basking
amazedly in the sunshine of fashionable
London—seeing and hearing him, began to follow his
lead. Many a burst of applause from the pit that
night started from the soft, comfortable patting of
the black-gloved hands. The man's voracious vanity
devoured this implied tribute to his local and
critical supremacy with an appearance of the highest
relish. Smiles rippled continuously over his fat
face. He looked about him, at the pauses in the
music, serenely satisfied with himself and his
fellow-creatures. "Yes! yes! these barbarous English
people are learning something from ME. Here, there,
and everywhere, I—Fosco—am an influence that is
felt, a man who sits supreme!" If ever face spoke,
his face spoke then, and that was its language.
The curtain fell on the first act, and the
audience rose to look about them. This was the time
I had waited for—the time to try if Pesca knew him.
He rose with the rest, and surveyed the occupants
of the boxes grandly with his opera-glass. At first
his back was towards us, but he turned round in
time, to our side of the theatre, and looked at the
boxes above us, using his glass for a few
minutes—then removing it, but still continuing to
look up. This was the moment I chose, when his full
face was in view, for directing Pesca's attention to
him.
"Do you know that man?" I asked.
"Which man, my friend?"
"The tall, fat man, standing there, with his face
towards us."
Pesca raised himself on tiptoe, and looked at the
Count.
"No," said the Professor. "The big fat man is a
stranger to me. Is he famous? Why do you point him
out?"
"Because I have particular reasons for wishing to
know something of him. He is a countryman of
yours—his name is Count Fosco. Do you know that
name?"
"Not I, Walter. Neither the name nor the man is
known to me."
"Are you quite sure you don't recognise him? Look
again—look carefully. I will tell you why I am so
anxious about it when we leave the theatre. Stop!
let me help you up here, where you can see him
better."
I helped the little man to perch himself on the
edge of the raised dais upon which the pit-seats
were all placed. His small stature was no hindrance
to him—here he could see over the heads of the
ladies who were seated near the outermost part of
the bench.
A slim, light-haired man standing by us, whom I
had not noticed before—a man with a scar on his left
cheek—looked attentively at Pesca as I helped him
up, and then looked still more attentively,
following the direction of Pesca's eyes, at the
Count. Our conversation might have reached his ears,
and might, as it struck me, have roused his
curiosity.
Meanwhile, Pesca fixed his eyes earnestly on the
broad, full, smiling face turned a little upward,
exactly opposite to him.
"No," he said, "I have never set my two eyes on
that big fat man before in all my life."
As he spoke the Count looked downwards towards
the boxes behind us on the pit tier.
The eyes of the two Italians met.
The instant before I had been perfectly
satisfied, from his own reiterated assertion, that
Pesca did not know the Count. The instant afterwards
I was equally certain that the Count knew Pesca!
Knew him, and—more surprising still—FEARED him as
well! There was no mistaking the change that passed
over the villain's face. The leaden hue that altered
his yellow complexion in a moment, the sudden
rigidity of all his features, the furtive scrutiny
of his cold grey eyes, the motionless stillness of
him from head to foot told their own tale. A mortal
dread had mastered him body and soul—and his own
recognition of Pesca was the cause of it!
The slim man with the scar on his cheek was still
close by us. He had apparently drawn his inference
from the effect produced on the Count by the sight
of Pesca as I had drawn mine. He was a mild,
gentlemanlike man, looking like a foreigner, and his
interest in our proceedings was not expressed in
anything approaching to an offensive manner.
For my own part I was so startled by the change
in the Count's face, so astounded at the entirely
unexpected turn which events had taken, that I knew
neither what to say or do next. Pesca roused me by
stepping back to his former place at my side and
speaking first.
"How the fat man stares!" he exclaimed. "Is it at
ME? Am I famous? How can he know me when I don't
know him?"
I kept my eye still on the Count. I saw him move
for the first time when Pesca moved, so as not to
lose sight of the little man in the lower position
in which he now stood. I was curious to see what
would happen if Pesca's attention under these
circumstances was withdrawn from him, and I
accordingly asked the Professor if he recognised any
of his pupils that evening among the ladies in the
boxes. Pesca immediately raised the large
opera-glass to his eyes, and moved it slowly all
round the upper part of the theatre, searching for
his pupils with the most conscientious scrutiny.
The moment he showed himself to be thus engaged
the Count turned round, slipped past the persons who
occupied seats on the farther side of him from where
we stood, and disappeared in the middle passage down
the centre of the pit. I caught Pesca by the arm,
and to his inexpressible astonishment, hurried him
round with me to the back of the pit to intercept
the Count before he could get to the door. Somewhat
to my surprise, the slim man hastened out before us,
avoiding a stoppage caused by some people on our
side of the pit leaving their places, by which Pesca
and myself were delayed. When we reached the lobby
the Count had disappeared, and the foreigner with
the scar was gone too.
"Come home," I said; "come home, Pesca to your
lodgings. I must speak to you in private—I must
speak directly."
"My-soul-bless-my-soul!" cried the Professor, in
a state of the extremest bewilderment. "What on
earth is the matter?"
I walked on rapidly without answering. The
circumstances under which the Count had left the
theatre suggested to me that his extraordinary
anxiety to escape Pesca might carry him to further
extremities still. He might escape me, too, by
leaving London. I doubted the future if I allowed
him so much as a day's freedom to act as he pleased.
And I doubted that foreign stranger, who had got the
start of us, and whom I suspected of intentionally
following him out.
With this double distrust in my mind, I was not
long in making Pesca understand what I wanted. As
soon as we two were alone in his room, I increased
his confusion and amazement a hundredfold by telling
him what my purpose was as plainly and unreservedly
as I have acknowledged it here.
"My friend, what can I do?" cried the Professor,
piteously appealing to me with both hands.
"Deuce-what-the-deuce! how can I help you, Walter,
when I don't know the man?"
"HE knows YOU—he is afraid of you—he has left the
theatre to escape you. Pesca! there must be a reason
for this. Look back into your own life before you
came to England. You left Italy, as you have told me
yourself, for political reasons. You have never
mentioned those reasons to me, and I don't inquire
into them now. I only ask you to consult your own
recollections, and to say if they suggest no past
cause for the terror which the first sight of you
produced in that man."
To my unutterable surprise, these words, harmless
as they appeared to ME, produced the same astounding
effect on Pesca which the sight of Pesca had
produced on the Count. The rosy face of my little
friend whitened in an instant, and he drew back from
me slowly, trembling from head to foot.
"Walter!" he said. "You don't know what you ask."
He spoke in a whisper—he looked at me as if I had
suddenly revealed to him some hidden danger to both
of us. In less than one minute of time he was so
altered from the easy, lively, quaint little man of
all my past experience, that if I had met him in the
street, changed as I saw him now, I should most
certainly not have known him again.
"Forgive me, if I have unintentionally pained and
shocked you," I replied. "Remember the cruel wrong
my wife has suffered at Count Fosco's hands.
Remember that the wrong can never be redressed,
unless the means are in my power of forcing him to
do her justice. I spoke in HER interests, Pesca—I
ask you again to forgive me—I can say no more."
I rose to go. He stopped me before I reached the
door.
"Wait," he said. "You have shaken me from head to
foot. You don't know how I left my country, and why
I left my country. Let me compose myself, let me
think, if I can."
I returned to my chair. He walked up and down the
room, talking to himself incoherently in his own
language. After several turns backwards and
forwards, he suddenly came up to me, and laid his
little hands with a strange tenderness and solemnity
on my breast.
"On your heart and soul, Walter," he said, "is
there no other way to get to that man but the
chance-way through ME?"
"There is no other way," I answered.
He left me again, opened the door of the room and
looked out cautiously into the passage, closed it
once more, and came back.
"You won your right over me, Walter," he said,
"on the day when you saved my life. It was yours
from that moment, when you pleased to take it. Take
it now. Yes! I mean what I say. My next words, as
true as the good God is above us, will put my life
into your hands."
The trembling earnestness with which he uttered
this extraordinary warning, carried with it, to my
mind, the conviction that he spoke the truth.
"Mind this!" he went on, shaking his hands at me
in the vehemence of his agitation. "I hold no
thread, in my own mind, between that man Fosco, and
the past time which I call back to me for your sake.
If you find the thread, keep it to yourself—tell me
nothing—on my knees I beg and pray, let me be
ignorant, let me be innocent, let me be blind to all
the future as I am now!"
He said a few words more, hesitatingly and
disconnectedly, then stopped again.
I saw that the effort of expressing himself in
English, on an occasion too serious to permit him
the use of the quaint turns and phrases of his
ordinary vocabulary, was painfully increasing the
difficulty he had felt from the first in speaking to
me at all. Having learnt to read and understand his
native language (though not to speak it), in the
earlier days of our intimate companionship, I now
suggested to him that he should express himself in
Italian, while I used English in putting any
questions which might be necessary to my
enlightenment. He accepted the proposal. In his
smooth-flowing language, spoken with a vehement
agitation which betrayed itself in the perpetual
working of his features, in the wildness and the
suddenness of his foreign gesticulations, but never
in the raising of his voice, I now heard the words
which armed me to meet the last struggle, that is
left for this story to record.[3]
[3] It is only right to mention here, that I
repeat Pesco's statement to me with the careful
suppressions and alterations which the serious
nature of the subject and my own sense of duty to my
friend demand. My first and last concealments from
the reader are those which caution renders
absolutely necessary in this portion of the
narrative.
"You know nothing of my motive for leaving
Italy," he began, "except that it was for political
reasons. If I had been driven to this country by the
persecution of my government, I should not have kept
those reasons a secret from you or from any one. I
have concealed them because no government authority
has pronounced the sentence of my exile. You have
heard, Walter, of the political societies that are
hidden in every great city on the continent of
Europe? To one of those societies I belonged in
Italy—and belong still in England. When I came to
this country, I came by the direction of my chief. I
was over-zealous in my younger time—I ran the risk
of compromising myself and others. For those reasons
I was ordered to emigrate to England and to wait. I
emigrated—I have waited—I wait still. To-morrow I
may be called away—ten years hence I may be called
away. It is all one to me—I am here, I support
myself by teaching, and I wait. I violate no oath
(you shall hear why presently) in making my
confidence complete by telling you the name of the
society to which I belong. All I do is to put my
life in your hands. If what I say to you now is ever
known by others to have passed my lips, as certainly
as we two sit here, I am a dead man."
He whispered the next words in my ear. I keep the
secret which he thus communicated. The society to
which he belonged will be sufficiently
individualised for the purpose of these pages, if I
call it "The Brotherhood," on the few occasions when
any reference to the subject will be needed in this
place.
"The object of the Brotherhood," Pesca went on,
"is, briefly, the object of other political
societies of the same sort—the destruction of
tyranny and the assertion of the rights of the
people. The principles of the Brotherhood are two.
So long as a man's life is useful, or even harmless
only, he has the right to enjoy it. But, if his life
inflicts injury on the well-being of his fellow-men,
from that moment he forfeits the right, and it is
not only no crime, but a positive merit, to deprive
him of it. It is not for me to say in what frightful
circumstances of oppression and suffering this
society took its rise. It is not for you to say—you
Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long
ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood
you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in
the conquering—it is not for you to say how far the
worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry
the maddened men of an enslaved nation. The iron
that has entered into our souls has gone too deep
for you to find it. Leave the refugee alone! Laugh
at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at
that secret self which smoulders in him, sometimes
under the everyday respectability and tranquillity
of a man like me—sometimes under the grinding
poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less
pliable, less patient than I am—but judge us not! In
the time of your first Charles you might have done
us justice—the long luxury of your own freedom has
made you incapable of doing us justice now."
All the deepest feelings of his nature seemed to
force themselves to the surface in those words—all
his heart was poured out to me for the first time in
our lives—but still his voice never rose, still his
dread of the terrible revelation he was making to me
never left him.
"So far," he resumed, "you think the society like
other societies. Its object (in your English
opinion) is anarchy and revolution. It takes the
life of a bad king or a bad minister, as if the one
and the other were dangerous wild beasts to be shot
at the first opportunity. I grant you this. But the
laws of the Brotherhood are the laws of no other
political society on the face of the earth. The
members are not known to one another. There is a
president in Italy; there are presidents abroad.
Each of these has his secretary. The presidents and
the secretaries know the members, but the members,
among themselves, are all strangers, until their
chiefs see fit, in the political necessity of the
time, or in the private necessity of the society, to
make them known to each other. With such a safeguard
as this there is no oath among us on admittance. We
are identified with the Brotherhood by a secret
mark, which we all bear, which lasts while our lives
last. We are told to go about our ordinary business,
and to report ourselves to the president, or the
secretary, four times a year, in the event of our
services being required. We are warned, if we betray
the Brotherhood, or if we injure it by serving other
interests, that we die by the principles of the
Brotherhood—die by the hand of a stranger who may be
sent from the other end of the world to strike the
blow—or by the hand of our own bosom-friend, who may
have been a member unknown to us through all the
years of our intimacy. Sometimes the death is
delayed—sometimes it follows close on the treachery.
It is our first business to know how to wait—our
second business to know how to obey when the word is
spoken. Some of us may wait our lives through, and
may not be wanted. Some of us may be called to the
work, or to the preparation for the work, the very
day of our admission. I myself—the little, easy,
cheerful man you know, who, of his own accord, would
hardly lift up his handkerchief to strike down the
fly that buzzes about his face—I, in my younger
time, under provocation so dreadful that I will not
tell you of it, entered the Brotherhood by an
impulse, as I might have killed myself by an
impulse. I must remain in it now—it has got me,
whatever I may think of it in my better
circumstances and my cooler manhood, to my dying
day. While I was still in Italy I was chosen
secretary, and all the members of that time, who
were brought face to face with my president, were
brought face to face also with me."
I began to understand him—I saw the end towards
which his extraordinary disclosure was now tending.
He waited a moment, watching me earnestly—watching
till he had evidently guessed what was passing in my
mind before he resumed.
"You have drawn your own conclusion already," he
said. "I see it in your face. Tell me nothing—keep
me out of the secret of your thoughts. Let me make
my one last sacrifice of myself, for your sake, and
then have done with this subject, never to return to
it again."
He signed to me not to answer him—rose—removed
his coat—and rolled up the shirt-sleeve on his left
arm.
"I promised you that this confidence should be
complete," he whispered, speaking close at my ear,
with his eyes looking watchfully at the door.
"Whatever comes of it you shall not reproach me with
having hidden anything from you which it was
necessary to your interests to know. I have said
that the Brotherhood identifies its members by a
mark that lasts for life. See the place, and the
mark on it for yourself."
He raised his bare arm, and showed me, high on
the upper part of it and in the inner side, a brand
deeply burnt in the flesh and stained of a bright
blood-red colour. I abstain from describing the
device which the brand represented. It will be
sufficient to say that it was circular in form, and
so small that it would have been completely covered
by a shilling coin.
"A man who has this mark, branded in this place,"
he said, covering his arm again, "is a member of the
Brotherhood. A man who has been false to the
Brotherhood is discovered sooner or later by the
chiefs who know him—presidents or secretaries, as
the case may be. And a man discovered by the chiefs
is dead. NO HUMAN LAWS CAN PROTECT HIM. Remember
what you have seen and heard—draw what conclusions
YOU like—act as you please. But, in the name of God,
whatever you discover, whatever you do, tell me
nothing! Let me remain free from a responsibility
which it horrifies me to think of—which I know, in
my conscience, is not my responsibility now. For the
last time I say it—on my honour as a gentleman, on
my oath as a Christian, if the man you pointed out
at the Opera knows ME, he is so altered, or so
disguised, that I do not know him. I am ignorant of
his proceedings or his purposes in England. I never
saw him, I never heard the name he goes by, to my
knowledge, before to-night. I say no more. Leave me
a little, Walter. I am overpowered by what has
happened—I am shaken by what I have said. Let me try
to be like myself again when we meet next."
He dropped into a chair, and turning away from
me, hid his face in his hands. I gently opened the
door so as not to disturb him, and spoke my few
parting words in low tones, which he might hear or
not, as he pleased.
"I will keep the memory of to-night in my heart
of hearts," I said. "You shall never repent the
trust you have reposed in me. May I come to you
to-morrow? May I come as early as nine o'clock?"
"Yes, Walter," he replied, looking up at me
kindly, and speaking in English once more, as if his
one anxiety now was to get back to our former
relations towards each other. "Come to my little bit
of breakfast before I go my ways among the pupils
that I teach."
"Good-night, Pesca."
"Good-night, my friend."
VI
MY first conviction as soon as I found myself
outside the house, was that no alternative was left
me but to act at once on the information I had
received—to make sure of the Count that night, or to
risk the loss, if I only delayed till the morning,
of Laura's last chance. I looked at my watch—it was
ten o'clock.
Not the shadow of a doubt crossed my mind of the
purpose for which the Count had left the theatre.
His escape from us, that evening, was beyond all
question the preliminary only to his escape from
London. The mark of the Brotherhood was on his arm—I
felt as certain of it as if he had shown me the
brand; and the betrayal of the Brotherhood was on
his conscience—I had seen it in his recognition of
Pesca.
It was easy to understand why that recognition
had not been mutual. A man of the Count's character
would never risk the terrible consequences of
turning spy without looking to his personal security
quite as carefully as he looked to his golden
reward. The shaven face, which I had pointed out at
the Opera, might have been covered by a beard in
Pesca's time—his dark brown hair might be a wig—his
name was evidently a false one. The accident of time
might have helped him as well—his immense corpulence
might have come with his later years. There was
every reason why Pesca should not have known him
again—every reason also why he should have known
Pesca, whose singular personal appearance made a
marked man of him, go where he might.
I have said that I felt certain of the purpose in
the Count's mind when he escaped us at the theatre.
How could I doubt it, when I saw, with my own eyes,
that he believed himself, in spite of the change in
his appearance, to have been recognised by Pesca,
and to be therefore in danger of his life? If I
could get speech of him that night, if I could show
him that I, too knew of the mortal peril in which he
stood, what result would follow? Plainly this. One
of us must be master of the situation—one of us must
inevitably be at the mercy of the other.
I owed it to myself to consider the chances
against me before I confronted them. I owed it to my
wife to do all that lay in my power to lessen the
risk.
The chances against me wanted no reckoning
up—they were all merged in one. If the Count
discovered, by my own avowal, that the direct way to
his safety lay through my life, he was probably the
last man in existence who would shrink from throwing
me off my guard and taking that way, when he had me
alone within his reach. The only means of defence
against him on which I could at all rely to lessen
the risk, presented themselves, after a little
careful thinking, clearly enough. Before I made any
personal acknowledgment of my discovery in his
presence, I must place the discovery itself where it
would be ready for instant use against him, and safe
from any attempt at suppression on his part. If I
laid the mine under his feet before I approached
him, and if I left instructions with a third person
to fire it on the expiration of a certain time,
unless directions to the contrary were previously
received under my own hand, or from my own lips—in
that event the Count's security was absolutely
dependent upon mine, and I might hold the vantage
ground over him securely, even in his own house.
This idea occurred to me when I was close to the
new lodgings which we had taken on returning from
the sea-side. I went in without disturbing any one,
by the help of my key. A light was in the hall, and
I stole up with it to my workroom to make my
preparations, and absolutely to commit myself to an
interview with the Count, before either Laura or
Marian could have the slightest suspicion of what I
intended to do.
A letter addressed to Pesca represented the
surest measure of precaution which it was now
possible for me to take. I wrote as follows—
"The man whom I pointed out to you at the Opera
is a member of the Brotherhood, and has been false
to his trust. Put both these assertions to the test
instantly. You know the name he goes by in England.
His address is No. 5 Forest Road, St. John's Wood.
On the love you once bore me, use the power
entrusted to you without mercy and without delay
against that man. I have risked all and lost all—and
the forfeit of my failure has been paid with my
life."
I signed and dated these lines, enclosed them in
an envelope, and sealed it up. On the outside I
wrote this direction: "Keep the enclosure unopened
until nine o'clock to-morrow morning. If you do not
hear from me, or see me, before that time, break the
seal when the clock strikes, and read the contents."
I added my initials, and protected the whole by
enclosing it in a second sealed envelope, addressed
to Pesca at his lodgings.
Nothing remained to be done after this but to
find the means of sending my letter to its
destination immediately. I should then have
accomplished all that lay in my power. If anything
happened to me in the Count's house, I had now
provided for his answering it with his life.
That the means of preventing his escape, under
any circumstances whatever, were at Pesca's
disposal, if he chose to exert them, I did not for
an instant doubt. The extraordinary anxiety which he
had expressed to remain unenlightened as to the
Count's identity—or, in other words, to be left
uncertain enough about facts to justify him to his
own conscience in remaining passive—betrayed plainly
that the means of exercising the terrible justice of
the Brotherhood were ready to his hand, although, as
a naturally humane man, he had shrunk from plainly
saying as much in my presence. The deadly certainty
with which the vengeance of foreign political
societies can hunt down a traitor to the cause, hide
himself where he may, had been too often
exemplified, even in my superficial experience, to
allow of any doubt. Considering the subject only as
a reader of newspapers, cases recurred to my memory,
both in London and in Paris, of foreigners found
stabbed in the streets, whose assassins could never
be traced—of bodies and parts of bodies thrown into
the Thames and the Seine, by hands that could never
be discovered—of deaths by secret violence which
could only be accounted for in one way. I have
disguised nothing relating to myself in these pages,
and I do not disguise here that I believed I had
written Count Fosco's death-warrant, if the fatal
emergency happened which authorised Pesca to open my
enclosure.
I left my room to go down to the ground floor of
the house, and speak to the landlord about finding
me a messenger. He happened to be ascending the
stairs at the time, and we met on the landing. His
son, a quick lad, was the messenger he proposed to
me on hearing what I wanted. We had the boy
upstairs, and I gave him his directions. He was to
take the letter in a cab, to put it into Professor
Pesca's own hands, and to bring me back a line of
acknowledgment from that gentleman—returning in the
cab, and keeping it at the door for my use. It was
then nearly half-past ten. I calculated that the boy
might be back in twenty minutes, and that I might
drive to St. John's Wood, on his return, in twenty
minutes more.
When the lad had departed on his errand I
returned to my own room for a little while, to put
certain papers in order, so that they might be
easily found in case of the worst. The key of the
old-fashioned bureau in which the papers were kept I
sealed up, and left it on my table, with Marian's
name written on the outside of the little packet.
This done, I went downstairs to the sitting-room, in
which I expected to find Laura and Marian awaiting
my return from the Opera. I felt my hand trembling
for the first time when I laid it on the lock of the
door.
No one was in the room but Marian. She was
reading, and she looked at her watch, in surprise,
when I came in.
"How early you are back!" she said. "You must
have come away before the Opera was over."
"Yes," I replied, "neither Pesca nor I waited for
the end. Where is Laura?"
"She had one of her bad headaches this evening,
and I advised her to go to bed when we had done
tea."
I left the room again on the pretext of wishing
to see whether Laura was asleep. Marian's quick eyes
were beginning to look inquiringly at my
face—Marian's quick instinct was beginning to
discover that I had something weighing on my mind.
When I entered the bedchamber, and softly
approached the bedside by the dim flicker of the
night-lamp, my wife was asleep.
We had not been married quite a month yet. If my
heart was heavy, if my resolution for a moment
faltered again, when I looked at her face turned
faithfully to my pillow in her sleep—when I saw her
hand resting open on the coverlid, as if it was
waiting unconsciously for mine—surely there was some
excuse for me? I only allowed myself a few minutes
to kneel down at the bedside, and to look close at
her—so close that her breath, as it came and went,
fluttered on my face. I only touched her hand and
her cheek with my lips at parting. She stirred in
her sleep and murmured my name, but without waking.
I lingered for an instant at the door to look at her
again. "God bless and keep you, my darling!" I
whispered, and left her.
Marian was at the stairhead waiting for me. She
had a folded slip of paper in her hand.
"The landlord's son has brought this for you,"
she said. "He has got a cab at the door—he says you
ordered him to keep it at your disposal."
"Quite right, Marian. I want the cab—I am going
out again."
I descended the stairs as I spoke, and looked
into the sitting-room to read the slip of paper by
the light on the table. It contained these two
sentences in Pesca's handwriting—
"Your letter is received. If I don't see you
before the time you mention, I will break the seal
when the clock strikes."
I placed the paper in my pocket-book, and made
for the door. Marian met me on the threshold, and
pushed me back into the room, where the candle-light
fell full on my face. She held me by both hands, and
her eyes fastened searchingly on mine.
"I see!" she said, in a low eager whisper. "You
are trying the last chance to-night."
"Yes, the last chance and the best," I whispered
back.
"Not alone! Oh, Walter, for God's sake, not
alone! Let me go with you. Don't refuse me because
I'm only a woman. I must go! I will go! I'll wait
outside in the cab!"
It was my turn now to hold HER. She tried to
break away from me and get down first to the door.
"If you want to help me," I said, "stop here and
sleep in my wife's room to-night. Only let me go
away with my mind easy about Laura, and I answer for
everything else. Come, Marian, give me a kiss, and
show that you have the courage to wait till I come
back."
I dared not allow her time to say a word more.
She tried to hold me again. I unclasped her hands,
and was out of the room in a moment. The boy below
heard me on the stairs, and opened the hall-door. I
jumped into the cab before the driver could get off
the box. "Forest Road, St. John's Wood," I called to
him through the front window. "Double fare if you
get there in a quarter of an hour." "I'll do it,
sir." I looked at my watch. Eleven o'clock. Not a
minute to lose.
The rapid motion of the cab, the sense that every
instant now was bringing me nearer to the Count, the
conviction that I was embarked at last, without let
or hindrance, on my hazardous enterprise, heated me
into such a fever of excitement that I shouted to
the man to go faster and faster. As we left the
streets, and crossed St. John's Wood Road, my
impatience so completely overpowered me that I stood
up in the cab and stretched my head out of the
window, to see the end of the journey before we
reached it. Just as a church clock in the distance
struck the quarter past, we turned into the Forest
Road. I stopped the driver a little away from the
Count's house, paid and dismissed him, and walked on
to the door.
As I approached the garden gate, I saw another
person advancing towards it also from the direction
opposite to mine. We met under the gas lamp in the
road, and looked at each other. I instantly
recognised the light-haired foreigner with the scar
on his cheek, and I thought he recognised me. He
said nothing, and instead of stopping at the house,
as I did, he slowly walked on. Was he in the Forest
Road by accident? Or had he followed the Count home
from the Opera?
I did not pursue those questions. After waiting a
little till the foreigner had slowly passed out of
sight, I rang the gate bell. It was then twenty
minutes past eleven—late enough to make it quite
easy for the Count to get rid of me by the excuse
that he was in bed.
The only way of providing against this
contingency was to send in my name without asking
any preliminary questions, and to let him know, at
the same time, that I had a serious motive for
wishing to see him at that late hour. Accordingly,
while I was waiting, I took out my card and wrote
under my name "On important business." The
maid-servant answered the door while I was writing
the last word in pencil, and asked me distrustfully
what I "pleased to want."
"Be so good as to take that to your master," I
replied, giving her the card.
I saw, by the girl's hesitation of manner, that
if I had asked for the Count in the first instance
she would only have followed her instructions by
telling me he was not at home. She was staggered by
the confidence with which I gave her the card. After
staring at me, in great perturbation, she went back
into the house with my message, closing the door,
and leaving me to wait in the garden.
In a minute or so she reappeared. "Her master's
compliments, and would I be so obliging as to say
what my business was?" "Take my compliments back," I
replied, "and say that the business cannot be
mentioned to any one but your master." She left me
again, again returned, and this time asked me to
walk in.
I followed her at once. In another moment I was
inside the Count's house.
VII
There was no lamp in the hall, but by the dim
light of the kitchen candle, which the girl had
brought upstairs with her, I saw an elderly lady
steal noiselessly out of a back room on the ground
floor. She cast one viperish look at me as I entered
the hall, but said nothing, and went slowly upstairs
without returning my bow. My familiarity with
Marian's journal sufficiently assured me that the
elderly lady was Madame Fosco.
The servant led me to the room which the Countess
had just left. I entered it, and found myself face
to face with the Count.
He was still in his evening dress, except his
coat, which he had thrown across a chair. His
shirt-sleeves were turned up at the wrists, but no
higher. A carpet-bag was on one side of him, and a
box on the other. Books, papers, and articles of
wearing apparel were scattered about the room. On a
table, at one side of the door, stood the cage, so
well known to me by description, which contained his
white mice. The canaries and the cockatoo were
probably in some other room. He was seated before
the box, packing it, when I went in, and rose with
some papers in his hand to receive me. His face
still betrayed plain traces of the shock that had
overwhelmed him at the Opera. His fat cheeks hung
loose, his cold grey eyes were furtively vigilant,
his voice, look, and manner were all sharply
suspicious alike, as he advanced a step to meet me,
and requested, with distant civility, that I would
take a chair.
"You come here on business, sir?" he said. "I am
at a loss to know what that business can possibly
be."
The unconcealed curiosity, with which he looked
hard in my face while he spoke, convinced me that I
had passed unnoticed by him at the Opera. He had
seen Pesca first, and from that moment till he left
the theatre he had evidently seen nothing else. My
name would necessarily suggest to him that I had not
come into his house with other than a hostile
purpose towards himself, but he appeared to be
utterly ignorant thus far of the real nature of my
errand.
"I am fortunate in finding you here to-night," I
said. "You seem to be on the point of taking a
journey?"
"Is your business connected with my journey?"
"In some degree."
"In what degree? Do you know where I am going
to?"
"No. I only know why you are leaving London."
He slipped by me with the quickness of thought,
locked the door, and put the key in his pocket.
"You and I, Mr. Hartright, are excellently well
acquainted with one another by reputation," he said.
"Did it, by any chance, occur to you when you came
to this house that I was not the sort of man you
could trifle with?"
"It did occur to me," I replied. "And I have not
come to trifle with you. I am here on a matter of
life and death, and if that door which you have
locked was open at this moment, nothing you could
say or do would induce me to pass through it."
I walked farther into the room, and stood
opposite to him on the rug before the fireplace. He
drew a chair in front of the door, and sat down on
it, with his left arm resting on the table. The cage
with the white mice was close to him, and the little
creatures scampered out of their sleeping-place as
his heavy arm shook the table, and peered at him
through the gaps in the smartly painted wires.
"On a matter of life and death," he repeated to
himself. "Those words are more serious, perhaps,
than you think. What do you mean?"
"What I say."
The perspiration broke out thickly on his broad
forehead. His left hand stole over the edge of the
table. There was a drawer in it, with a lock, and
the key was in the lock. His finger and thumb closed
over the key, but did not turn it.
"So you know why I am leaving London?" he went
on. "Tell me the reason, if you please." He turned
the key, and unlocked the drawer as he spoke.
"I can do better than that," I replied. "I can
SHOW you the reason, if you like."
"How can you show it?"
"You have got your coat off," I said. "Roll up
the shirt-sleeve on your left arm, and you will see
it there."
The same livid leaden change passed over his face
which I had seen pass over it at the theatre. The
deadly glitter in his eyes shone steady and straight
into mine. He said nothing. But his left hand slowly
opened the table-drawer, and softly slipped into it.
The harsh grating noise of something heavy that he
was moving unseen to me sounded for a moment, then
ceased. The silence that followed was so intense
that the faint ticking nibble of the white mice at
their wires was distinctly audible where I stood.
My life hung by a thread, and I knew it. At that
final moment I thought with HIS mind, I felt with
HIS fingers—I was as certain as if I had seen it of
what he kept hidden from me in the drawer.
"Wait a little," I said. "You have got the door
locked—you see I don't move—you see my hands are
empty. Wait a little. I have something more to say."
"You have said enough," he replied, with a sudden
composure so unnatural and so ghastly that it tried
my nerves as no outbreak of violence could have
tried them. "I want one moment for my own thoughts,
if you please. Do you guess what I am thinking
about?"
"Perhaps I do."
"I am thinking," he remarked quietly, "whether I
shall add to the disorder in this room by scattering
your brains about the fireplace."
If I had moved at that moment, I saw in his face
that he would have done it.
"I advise you to read two lines of writing which
I have about me," I rejoined, "before you finally
decide that question."
The proposal appeared to excite his curiosity. He
nodded his head. I took Pesca's acknowledgment of
the receipt of my letter out of my pocket-book,
handed it to him at arm's length, and returned to my
former position in front of the fireplace.
He read the lines aloud: "Your letter is
received. If I don't hear from you before the time
you mention, I will break the seal when the clock
strikes."
Another man in his position would have needed
some explanation of those words—the Count felt no
such necessity. One reading of the note showed him
the precaution that I had taken as plainly as if he
had been present at the time when I adopted it. The
expression of his face changed on the instant, and
his hand came out of the drawer empty.
"I don't lock up my drawer, Mr. Hartright," he
said, "and I don't say that I may not scatter your
brains about the fireplace yet. But I am a just man
even to my enemy, and I will acknowledge beforehand
that they are cleverer brains than I thought them.
Come to the point, sir! You want something of me?"
"I do, and I mean to have it."
"On conditions?"
"On no conditions."
His hand dropped into the drawer again.
"Bah! we are travelling in a circle," he said,
"and those clever brains of yours are in danger
again. Your tone is deplorably imprudent,
sir—moderate it on the spot! The risk of shooting
you on the place where you stand is less to me than
the risk of letting you out of this house, except on
conditions that I dictate and approve. You have not
got my lamented friend to deal with now—you are face
to face with Fosco! If the lives of twenty Mr.
Hartrights were the stepping-stones to my safety,
over all those stones I would go, sustained by my
sublime indifference, self-balanced by my
impenetrable calm. Respect me, if you love your own
life! I summon you to answer three questions before
you open your lips again. Hear them—they are
necessary to this interview. Answer them—they are
necessary to ME." He held up one finger of his right
hand. "First question!" he said. "You come here
possessed of information which may be true or may be
false—where did you get it?"
"I decline to tell you."
"No matter—I shall find out. If that information
is true—mind I say, with the whole force of my
resolution, if—you are making your market of it here
by treachery of your own or by treachery of some
other man. I note that circumstance for future use
in my memory, which forgets nothing, and proceed."
He held up another finger. "Second question! Those
lines you invited me to read are without signature.
Who wrote them?"
"A man whom I have every reason to depend on, and
whom you have every reason to fear."
My answer reached him to some purpose. His left
hand trembled audibly in the drawer.
"How long do you give me," he asked, putting his
third question in a quieter tone, "before the clock
strikes and the seal is broken?"
"Time enough for you to come to my terms," I
replied.
"Give me a plainer answer, Mr. Hartright. What
hour is the clock to strike?"
"Nine, to-morrow morning."
"Nine, to-morrow morning? Yes, yes—your trap is
laid for me before I can get my passport regulated
and leave London. It is not earlier, I suppose? We
will see about that presently—I can keep you hostage
here, and bargain with you to send for your letter
before I let you go. In the meantime, be so good
next as to mention your terms."
"You shall hear them. They are simple, and soon
stated. You know whose interests I represent in
coming here?"
He smiled with the most supreme composure, and
carelessly waved his right hand.
"I consent to hazard a guess," he said jeeringly.
"A lady's interests, of course!"
"My Wife's interests."
He looked at me with the first honest expression
that had crossed his face in my presence—an
expression of blank amazement. I could see that I
sank in his estimation as a dangerous man from that
moment. He shut up the drawer at once, folded his
arms over his breast, and listened to me with a
smile of satirical attention.
"You are well enough aware," I went on, "of the
course which my inquiries have taken for many months
past, to know that any attempted denial of plain
facts will be quite useless in my presence. You are
guilty of an infamous conspiracy! And the gain of a
fortune of ten thousand pounds was your motive for
it."
He said nothing. But his face became overclouded
suddenly by a lowering anxiety.
"Keep your gain," I said. (His face lightened
again immediately, and his eyes opened on me in
wider and wider astonishment.) "I am not here to
disgrace myself by bargaining for money which has
passed through your hands, and which has been the
price of a vile crime.
"Gently, Mr. Hartright. Your moral clap-traps
have an excellent effect in England—keep them for
yourself and your own countrymen, if you please. The
ten thousand pounds was a legacy left to my
excellent wife by the late Mr. Fairlie. Place the
affair on those grounds, and I will discuss it if
you like. To a man of my sentiments, however, the
subject is deplorably sordid. I prefer to pass it
over. I invite you to resume the discussion of your
terms. What do you demand?"
"In the first place, I demand a full confession
of the conspiracy, written and signed in my presence
by yourself."
He raised his finger again. "One!" he said,
checking me off with the steady attention of a
practical man.
"In the second place, I demand a plain proof,
which does not depend on your personal asseveration,
of the date at which my wife left Blackwater Park
and travelled to London."
"So! so! you can lay your finger, I see, on the
weak place," he remarked composedly. "Any more?"
"At present, no more."
"Good! you have mentioned your terms, now listen
to mine. The responsibility to myself of admitting
what you are pleased to call the 'conspiracy' is
less, perhaps, upon the whole, than the
responsibility of laying you dead on that hearthrug.
Let us say that I meet your proposal—on my own
conditions. The statement you demand of me shall be
written, and the plain proof shall be produced. You
call a letter from my late lamented friend informing
me of the day and hour of his wife's arrival in
London, written, signed, and dated by himself, a
proof, I suppose? I can give you this. I can also
send you to the man of whom I hired the carriage to
fetch my visitor from the railway, on the day when
she arrived—his order-book may help you to your
date, even if his coachman who drove me proves to be
of no use. These things I can do, and will do, on
conditions. I recite them. First condition! Madame
Fosco and I leave this house when and how we please,
without interference of any kind on your part.
Second condition! You wait here, in company with me,
to see my agent, who is coming at seven o'clock in
the morning to regulate my affairs. You give my
agent a written order to the man who has got your
sealed letter to resign his possession of it. You
wait here till my agent places that letter unopened
in my hands, and you then allow me one clear
half-hour to leave the house—after which you resume
your own freedom of action and go where you please.
Third condition! You give me the satisfaction of a
gentleman for your intrusion into my private
affairs, and for the language you have allowed
yourself to use to me at this conference. The time
and place, abroad, to be fixed in a letter from my
hand when I am safe on the Continent, and that
letter to contain a strip of paper measuring
accurately the length of my sword. Those are my
terms. Inform me if you accept them—Yes or No."
The extraordinary mixture of prompt decision, far-sighted cunning, and
mountebank bravado in this speech, staggered me for
a moment—and only for a moment. The one question to
consider was, whether I was justified or not in
possessing myself of the means of establishing
Laura's identity at the cost of allowing the
scoundrel who had robbed her of it to escape me with
impunity. I knew that the motive of securing the
just recognition of my wife in the birthplace from
which she had been driven out as an impostor, and of
publicly erasing the lie that still profaned her
mother's tombstone, was far purer, in its freedom
from all taint of evil passion, than the vindictive
motive which had mingled itself with my purpose from
the first. And yet I cannot honestly say that my own
moral convictions were strong enough to decide the
struggle in me by themselves. They were helped by my
remembrance of Sir Percival's death. How awfully, at
the last moment, had the working of the retribution
THERE been snatched from my feeble hands! What right
had I to decide, in my poor mortal ignorance of the
future, that this man, too, must escape with
impunity because he escaped ME? I thought of these
things—perhaps with the superstition inherent in my
nature, perhaps with a sense worthier of me than
superstition. It was hard, when I had fastened my
hold on him at last, to loosen it again of my own
accord—but I forced myself to make the sacrifice. In
plainer words, I determined to be guided by the one
higher motive of which I was certain, the motive of
serving the cause of Laura and the cause of Truth.
"I accept your conditions," I said. "With one reservation on my part."
"What reservation may that be?" he asked.
"It refers to the sealed letter," I answered. "I
require you to destroy it unopened in my presence as
soon as it is placed in your hands."
My object in making this stipulation was simply
to prevent him from carrying away written evidence
of the nature of my communication with Pesca. The
fact of my communication he would necessarily
discover, when I gave the address to his agent in
the morning. But he could make no use of it on his
own unsupported testimony—even if he really ventured
to try the experiment—which need excite in me the
slightest apprehension on Pesca's account.
"I grant your reservation," he replied, after
considering the question gravely for a minute or
two. "It is not worth dispute—the letter shall be
destroyed when it comes into my hands."
He rose, as he spoke, from the chair in which he
had been sitting opposite to me up to this time.
With one effort he appeared to free his mind from
the whole pressure on it of the interview between us
thus far. "Ouf!" he cried, stretching his arms
luxuriously, "the skirmish was hot while it lasted.
Take a seat, Mr. Hartright. We meet as mortal
enemies hereafter—let us, like gallant gentlemen,
exchange polite attentions in the meantime. Permit
me to take the liberty of calling for my wife."
He unlocked and opened the door. "Eleanor!" he
called out in his deep voice. The lady of the
viperish face came in "Madame Fosco—Mr. Hartright,"
said the Count, introducing us with easy dignity.
"My angel," he went on, addressing his wife, "will
your labours of packing up allow you time to make me
some nice strong coffee? I have writing business to
transact with Mr. Hartright—and I require the full
possession of my intelligence to do justice to
myself."
Madame Fosco bowed her head twice—once sternly to
me, once submissively to her husband, and glided out
of the room.
The Count walked to a writing-table near the
window, opened his desk, and took from it several
quires of paper and a bundle of quill pens. He
scattered the pens about the table, so that they
might lie ready in all directions to be taken up
when wanted, and then cut the paper into a heap of
narrow slips, of the form used by professional
writers for the press. "I shall make this a
remarkable document," he said, looking at me over
his shoulder. "Habits of literary composition are
perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all
the intellectual accomplishments that a man can
possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas.
Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?"
He marched backwards and forwards in the room,
until the coffee appeared, humming to himself, and
marking the places at which obstacles occurred in
the arrangement of his ideas, by striking his
forehead from time to time with the palm of his
hand. The enormous audacity with which he seized on
the situation in which I placed him, and made it the
pedestal on which his vanity mounted for the one
cherished purpose of self-display, mastered my
astonishment by main force. Sincerely as I loathed
the man, the prodigious strength of his character,
even in its most trivial aspects, impressed me in
spite of myself.
The coffee was brought in by Madame Fosco. He
kissed her hand in grateful acknowledgment, and
escorted her to the door; returned, poured out a cup
of coffee for himself, and took it to the
writing-table.
"May I offer you some coffee, Mr. Hartright?" he
said, before he sat down.
I declined.
"What! you think I shall poison you?" he said
gaily. "The English intellect is sound, so far as it
goes," he continued, seating himself at the table;
"but it has one grave defect—it is always cautious
in the wrong place."
He dipped his pen in the ink, placed the first
slip of paper before him with a thump of his hand on
the desk, cleared his throat, and began. He wrote
with great noise and rapidity, in so large and bold
a hand, and with such wide spaces between the lines,
that he reached the bottom of the slip in not more
than two minutes certainly from the time when he
started at the top. Each slip as he finished it was
paged, and tossed over his shoulder out of his way
on the floor. When his first pen was worn out, THAT
went over his shoulder too, and he pounced on a
second from the supply scattered about the table.
Slip after slip, by dozens, by fifties, by hundreds,
flew over his shoulders on either side of him till
he had snowed himself up in paper all round his
chair. Hour after hour passed—and there I sat
watching, there he sat writing. He never stopped,
except to sip his coffee, and when that was
exhausted, to smack his forehead from time to time.
One o'clock struck, two, three, four—and still the
slips flew about all round him; still the untiring
pen scraped its way ceaselessly from top to bottom
of the page, still the white chaos of paper rose
higher and higher all round his chair. At four
o'clock I heard a sudden splutter of the pen,
indicative of the flourish with which he signed his
name. "Bravo!" he cried, springing to his feet with
the activity of a young man, and looking me straight
in the face with a smile of superb triumph.
"Done, Mr. Hartright!" he announced with a
self-renovating thump of his fist on his broad
breast. "Done, to my own profound satisfaction—to
YOUR profound astonishment, when you read what I
have written. The subject is exhausted: the
man—Fosco—is not. I proceed to the arrangement of my
slips—to the revision of my slips—to the reading of
my slips—addressed emphatically to your private ear.
Four o'clock has just struck. Good! Arrangement,
revision, reading, from four to five. Short snooze
of restoration for myself from five to six. Final
preparations from six to seven. Affair of agent and
sealed letter from seven to eight. At eight, en
route. Behold the programme!"
He sat down cross-legged on the floor among his
papers, strung them together with a bodkin and a
piece of string—revised them, wrote all the titles
and honours by which he was personally distinguished
at the head of the first page, and then read the
manuscript to me with loud theatrical emphasis and
profuse theatrical gesticulation. The reader will
have an opportunity, ere long, of forming his own
opinion of the document. It will be sufficient to
mention here that it answered my purpose.
He next wrote me the address of the person from
whom he had hired the fly, and handed me Sir
Percival's letter. It was dated from Hampshire on
the 25th of July, and it announced the journey of
"Lady Glyde" to London on the 26th. Thus, on the
very day (the 25th) when the doctor's certificate
declared that she had died in St. John's Wood, she
was alive, by Sir Percival's own showing, at
Blackwater—and, on the day after, she was to take a
journey! When the proof of that journey was obtained
from the flyman, the evidence would be complete.
"A quarter-past five," said the Count, looking at
his watch. "Time for my restorative snooze. I
personally resemble Napoleon the Great, as you may
have remarked, Mr. Hartright—I also resemble that
immortal man in my power of commanding sleep at
will. Excuse me one moment. I will summon Madame
Fosco, to keep you from feeling dull."
Knowing as well as he did, that he was summoning
Madame Fosco to ensure my not leaving the house
while he was asleep, I made no reply, and occupied
myself in tying up the papers which he had placed in
my possession.
The lady came in, cool, pale, and venomous as
ever. "Amuse Mr. Hartright, my angel," said the
Count. He placed a chair for her, kissed her hand
for the second time, withdrew to a sofa, and, in
three minutes, was as peacefully and happily asleep
as the most virtuous man in existence.
Madame Fosco took a book from the table, sat
down, and looked at me, with the steady vindictive
malice of a woman who never forgot and never
forgave.
"I have been listening to your conversation with
my husband," she said. "If I had been in HIS place—I
would have laid you dead on the hearthrug."
With those words she opened her book, and never
looked at me or spoke to me from that time till the
time when her husband woke.
He opened his eyes and rose from the sofa,
accurately to an hour from the time when he had gone
to sleep.
"I feel infinitely refreshed," he remarked.
"Eleanor, my good wife, are you all ready upstairs?
That is well. My little packing here can be
completed in ten minutes—my travelling-dress assumed
in ten minutes more. What remains before the agent
comes?" He looked about the room, and noticed the
cage with his white mice in it. "Ah!" he cried
piteously, "a last laceration of my sympathies still
remains. My innocent pets! my little cherished
children! what am I to do with them? For the present
we are settled nowhere; for the present we travel
incessantly—the less baggage we carry the better for
ourselves. My cockatoo, my canaries, and my little
mice—who will cherish them when their good Papa is
gone?"
He walked about the room deep in thought. He had
not been at all troubled about writing his
confession, but he was visibly perplexed and
distressed about the far more important question of
the disposal of his pets. After long consideration
he suddenly sat down again at the writing-table.
"An idea!" he exclaimed. "I will offer my
canaries and my cockatoo to this vast Metropolis—my
agent shall present them in my name to the
Zoological Gardens of London. The Document that
describes them shall be drawn out on the spot."
He began to write, repeating the words as they
flowed from his pen.
"Number one. Cockatoo of transcendent plumage:
attraction, of himself, to all visitors of taste.
Number two. Canaries of unrivalled vivacity and
intelligence: worthy of the garden of Eden, worthy
also of the garden in the Regent's Park. Homage to
British Zoology. Offered by Fosco."
The pen spluttered again, and the flourish was
attached to his signature.
"Count! you have not included the mice," said
Madame Fosco
He left the table, took her hand, and placed it
on his heart.
"All human resolution, Eleanor," he said
solemnly, "has its limits. MY limits are inscribed
on that Document. I cannot part with my white mice.
Bear with me, my angel, and remove them to their
travelling cage upstairs."
"Admirable tenderness!" said Madame Fosco,
admiring her husband, with a last viperish look in
my direction. She took up the cage carefully, and
left the room.
The Count looked at his watch. In spite of his
resolute assumption of composure, he was getting
anxious for the agent's arrival. The candles had
long since been extinguished, and the sunlight of
the new morning poured into the room. It was not
till five minutes past seven that the gate bell
rang, and the agent made his appearance. He was a
foreigner with a dark beard.
"Mr. Hartright—Monsieur Rubelle," said the Count,
introducing us. He took the agent (a foreign spy, in
every line of his face, if ever there was one yet)
into a corner of the room, whispered some directions
to him, and then left us together. "Monsieur
Rubelle," as soon as we were alone, suggested with
great politeness that I should favour him with his
instructions. I wrote two lines to Pesca,
authorising him to deliver my sealed letter "to the
bearer," directed the note, and handed it to
Monsieur Rubelle.
The agent waited with me till his employer
returned, equipped in travelling costume. The Count
examined the address of my letter before he
dismissed the agent. "I thought so!" he said,
turning on me with a dark look, and altering again
in his manner from that moment.
He completed his packing, and then sat consulting
a travelling map, making entries in his pocket-book,
and looking every now and then impatiently at his
watch. Not another word, addressed to myself, passed
his lips. The near approach of the hour for his
departure, and the proof he had seen of the
communication established between Pesca and myself,
had plainly recalled his whole attention to the
measures that were necessary for securing his
escape.
A little before eight o'clock, Monsieur Rubelle
came back with my unopened letter in his hand. The
Count looked carefully at the superscription and the
seal, lit a candle, and burnt the letter. "I perform
my promise," he said, "but this matter, Mr.
Hartright, shall not end here."
The agent had kept at the door the cab in which
he had returned. He and the maid-servant now busied
themselves in removing the luggage. Madame Fosco
came downstairs, thickly veiled, with the travelling
cage of the white mice in her hand. She neither
spoke to me nor looked towards me. Her husband
escorted her to the cab. "Follow me as far as the
passage," he whispered in my ear; "I may want to
speak to you at the last moment."
I went out to the door, the agent standing below
me in the front garden. The Count came back alone,
and drew me a few steps inside the passage.
"Remember the Third condition!" he whispered.
"You shall hear from me, Mr. Hartright—I may claim
from you the satisfaction of a gentleman sooner than
you think for." He caught my hand before I was aware
of him, and wrung it hard—then turned to the door,
stopped, and came back to me again.
"One word more," he said confidentially. "When I
last saw Miss Halcombe, she looked thin and ill. I
am anxious about that admirable woman. Take care of
her, sir! With my hand on my heart, I solemnly
implore you, take care of Miss Halcombe!"
Those were the last words he said to me before he
squeezed his huge body into the cab and drove off.
The agent and I waited at the door a few moments
looking after him. While we were standing together,
a second cab appeared from a turning a little way
down the road. It followed the direction previously
taken by the Count's cab, and as it passed the house
and the open garden gate, a person inside looked at
us out of the window. The stranger at the Opera
again!—the foreigner with a scar on his left cheek.
"You wait here with me, sir, for half an hour more!" said Monsieur
Rubelle.
"I do."
We returned to the sitting-room. I was in no
humour to speak to the agent, or to allow him to
speak to me. I took out the papers which the Count
had placed in my hands, and read the terrible story
of the conspiracy told by the man who had planned
and perpetrated it.
