The Woman in White
“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