The Woman in White
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.
THE STORY CONTINUED BY ISIDOR, OTTAVIO, BALDASSARE FOSCO
(Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of
the Brazen Crown, Perpetual Arch-Master of the Rosicrucian Masons of
Mesopotamia; Attached (in Honorary Capacities) to Societies Musical,
Societies Medical, Societies Philosophical, and Societies General
Benevolent, throughout Europe; etc. etc. etc.)
THE COUNT’S NARRATIVE
In the summer of eighteen hundred and fifty I arrived in England,
charged with a delicate political mission from abroad. Confidential
persons were semi-officially connected with me, whose exertions I was
authorised to direct, Monsieur and Madame Rubelle being among the
number. Some weeks of spare time were at my disposal, before I entered
on my functions by establishing myself in the suburbs of London.
Curiosity may stop here to ask for some explanation of those functions
on my part. I entirely sympathise with the request. I also regret that
diplomatic reserve forbids me to comply with it.
I arranged to pass the preliminary period of repose, to which I have
just referred, in the superb mansion of my late lamented friend,
Sir Percival Glyde. HE arrived from the Continent with his wife. I
arrived from the Continent with MINE. England is the land of domestic
happiness—how appropriately we entered it under these domestic
circumstances!
The bond of friendship which united Percival and myself was
strengthened, on this occasion, by a touching similarity in the
pecuniary position on his side and on mine. We both wanted money.
Immense necessity! Universal want! Is there a civilised human being who
does not feel for us? How insensible must that man be! Or how rich!
I enter into no sordid particulars, in discussing this part of the
subject. My mind recoils from them. With a Roman austerity, I show my
empty purse and Percival’s to the shrinking public gaze. Let us allow
the deplorable fact to assert itself, once for all, in that manner, and
pass on.
We were received at the mansion by the magnificent creature who
is inscribed on my heart as “Marian,” who is known in the colder
atmosphere of society as “Miss Halcombe.”
Just Heaven! with what inconceivable rapidity I learnt to adore that
woman. At sixty, I worshipped her with the volcanic ardour of eighteen.
All the gold of my rich nature was poured hopelessly at her feet. My
wife—poor angel!—my wife, who adores me, got nothing but the shillings
and the pennies. Such is the World, such Man, such Love. What are we
(I ask) but puppets in a show-box? Oh, omnipotent Destiny, pull our
strings gently! Dance us mercifully off our miserable little stage!
The preceding lines, rightly understood, express an entire system of
philosophy. It is mine.
I resume.
The domestic position at the commencement of our residence at
Blackwater Park has been drawn with amazing accuracy, with profound
mental insight, by the hand of Marian herself. (Pass me the
intoxicating familiarity of mentioning this sublime creature by her
Christian name.) Accurate knowledge of the contents of her journal—to
which I obtained access by clandestine means, unspeakably precious
to me in the remembrance—warns my eager pen from topics which this
essentially exhaustive woman has already made her own.
The interests—interests, breathless and immense!—with which I am here
concerned, begin with the deplorable calamity of Marian’s illness.
The situation at this period was emphatically a serious one. Large
sums of money, due at a certain time, were wanted by Percival (I say
nothing of the modicum equally necessary to myself), and the one source
to look to for supplying them was the fortune of his wife, of which
not one farthing was at his disposal until her death. Bad so far, and
worse still farther on. My lamented friend had private troubles of
his own, into which the delicacy of my disinterested attachment to
him forbade me from inquiring too curiously. I knew nothing but that
a woman, named Anne Catherick, was hidden in the neighbourhood, that
she was in communication with Lady Glyde, and that the disclosure of
a secret, which would be the certain ruin of Percival, might be the
result. He had told me himself that he was a lost man, unless his wife
was silenced, and unless Anne Catherick was found. If he was a lost
man, what would become of our pecuniary interests? Courageous as I am
by nature, I absolutely trembled at the idea!