The Woman in White
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