The Woman in White
and make your peace with your audience. Tell them virtue’s a fine
thing—they like that, I can promise you.”
The Count laughed inwardly and silently, and two of the white mice in
his waistcoat, alarmed by the internal convulsion going on beneath
them, darted out in a violent hurry, and scrambled into their cage
again.
“The ladies, my good Percival, shall tell me about virtue,” he said.
“They are better authorities than I am, for they know what virtue is,
and I don’t.”
“You hear him?” said Sir Percival. “Isn’t it awful?”
“It is true,” said the Count quietly. “I am a citizen of the world,
and I have met, in my time, with so many different sorts of virtue,
that I am puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right sort
and which is the wrong. Here, in England, there is one virtue. And
there, in China, there is another virtue. And John Englishman says my
virtue is the genuine virtue. And John Chinaman says my virtue is the
genuine virtue. And I say Yes to one, or No to the other, and am just
as much bewildered about it in the case of John with the top-boots as
I am in the case of John with the pigtail. Ah, nice little Mousey!
come, kiss me. What is your own private notion of a virtuous man, my
pret-pret-pretty? A man who keeps you warm, and gives you plenty to
eat. And a good notion, too, for it is intelligible, at the least.”
“Stay a minute, Count,” I interposed. “Accepting your illustration,
surely we have one unquestionable virtue in England which is wanting in
China. The Chinese authorities kill thousands of innocent people on the
most frivolous pretexts. We in England are free from all guilt of that
kind—we commit no such dreadful crime—we abhor reckless bloodshed with
all our hearts.”
“Quite right, Marian,” said Laura. “Well thought of, and well
expressed.”
“Pray allow the Count to proceed,” said Madame Fosco, with stern
civility. “You will find, young ladies, that HE never speaks without
having excellent reasons for all that he says.”
“Thank you, my angel,” replied the Count. “Have a bon-bon?” He took out
of his pocket a pretty little inlaid box, and placed it open on the
table. “Chocolat a la Vanille,” cried the impenetrable man, cheerfully
rattling the sweetmeats in the box, and bowing all round. “Offered by
Fosco as an act of homage to the charming society.”
“Be good enough to go on, Count,” said his wife, with a spiteful
reference to myself. “Oblige me by answering Miss Halcombe.”
“Miss Halcombe is unanswerable,” replied the polite Italian; “that
is to say, so far as she goes. Yes! I agree with her. John Bull does
abhor the crimes of John Chinaman. He is the quickest old gentleman
at finding out faults that are his neighbours’, and the slowest old
gentleman at finding out the faults that are his own, who exists on
the face of creation. Is he so very much better in this way than the
people whom he condemns in their way? English Society, Miss Halcombe,
is as often the accomplice as it is the enemy of crime. Yes! yes! Crime
is in this country what crime is in other countries—a good friend
to a man and to those about him as often as it is an enemy. A great
rascal provides for his wife and family. The worse he is the more
he makes them the objects for your sympathy. He often provides also
for himself. A profligate spendthrift who is always borrowing money
will get more from his friends than the rigidly honest man who only
borrows of them once, under pressure of the direst want. In the one
case the friends will not be at all surprised, and they will give.
In the other case they will be very much surprised, and they will
hesitate. Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of his
career a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr. Honesty
lives in at the end of his career? When John-Howard-Philanthropist
wants to relieve misery he goes to find it in prisons, where crime is
wretched—not in huts and hovels, where virtue is wretched too. Who is
the English poet who has won the most universal sympathy—who makes the
easiest of all subjects for pathetic writing and pathetic painting?
That nice young person who began life with a forgery, and ended it
by a suicide—your dear, romantic, interesting Chatterton. Which gets
on best, do you think, of two poor starving dressmakers—the woman
who resists temptation and is honest, or the woman who falls under
temptation and steals? You all know that the stealing is the making of
that second woman’s fortune—it advertises her from length to breadth of
good-humoured, charitable England—and she is relieved, as the breaker
of a commandment, when she would have been left to starve, as the
keeper of it. Come here, my jolly little Mouse! Hey! presto! pass! I
transform you, for the time being, into a respectable lady. Stop there,
in the palm of my great big hand, my dear, and listen. You marry the
poor man whom you love, Mouse, and one half your friends pity, and the
other half blame you. And now, on the contrary, you sell yourself for
gold to a man you don’t care for, and all your friends rejoice over
you, and a minister of public worship sanctions the base horror of the
vilest of all human bargains, and smiles and smirks afterwards at your
table, if you are polite enough to ask him to breakfast. Hey! presto!
pass! Be a mouse again, and squeak. If you continue to be a lady much
longer, I shall have you telling me that Society abhors crime—and then,
Mouse, I shall doubt if your own eyes and ears are really of any use to
you. Ah! I am a bad man, Lady Glyde, am I not? I say what other people
only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to
accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears
off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath. I will get
up on my big elephant’s legs, before I do myself any more harm in your
amiable estimations—I will get up and take a little airy walk of my
own. Dear ladies, as your excellent Sheridan said, I go—and leave my
character behind me.”
He got up, put the cage on the table, and paused for a moment to count
the mice in it. “One, two, three, four——Ha!” he cried, with a look of
horror, “where, in the name of Heaven, is the fifth—the youngest, the
whitest, the most amiable of all—my Benjamin of mice!”
Neither Laura nor I were in any favorable disposition to be amused.
The Count’s glib cynicism had revealed a new aspect of his nature from
which we both recoiled. But it was impossible to resist the comical
distress of so very large a man at the loss of so very small a mouse.
We laughed in spite of ourselves; and when Madame Fosco rose to set
the example of leaving the boat-house empty, so that her husband might
search it to its remotest corners, we rose also to follow her out.
Before we had taken three steps, the Count’s quick eye discovered the
lost mouse under the seat that we had been occupying. He pulled aside
the bench, took the little animal up in his hand, and then suddenly
stopped, on his knees, looking intently at a particular place on the
ground just beneath him.
When he rose to his feet again, his hand shook so that he could hardly
put the mouse back in the cage, and his face was of a faint livid
yellow hue all over.
“Percival!” he said, in a whisper. “Percival! come here.”
Sir Percival had paid no attention to any of us for the last ten
minutes. He had been entirely absorbed in writing figures on the sand,
and then rubbing them out again with the point of his stick.
“What’s the matter now?” he asked, lounging carelessly into the
boat-house.
“Do you see nothing there?” said the Count, catching him nervously by
the collar with one hand, and pointing with the other to the place near
which he had found the mouse.
“I see plenty of dry sand,” answered Sir Percival, “and a spot of dirt
in the middle of it.”
“Not dirt,” whispered the Count, fastening the other hand suddenly on
Sir Percival’s collar, and shaking it in his agitation. “Blood.”
Laura was near enough to hear the last word, softly as he whispered it.
She turned to me with a look of terror.
“Nonsense, my dear,” I said. “There is no need to be alarmed. It is
only the blood of a poor little stray dog.”
Everybody was astonished, and everybody’s eyes were fixed on me
inquiringly.
“How do you know that?” asked Sir Percival, speaking first.
“I found the dog here, dying, on the day when you all returned from
abroad,” I replied. “The poor creature had strayed into the plantation,
and had been shot by your keeper.”
“Whose dog was it?” inquired Sir Percival. “Not one of mine?”
“Did you try to save the poor thing?” asked Laura earnestly. “Surely
you tried to save it, Marian?”
“Yes,” I said, “the housekeeper and I both did our best—but the dog was
mortally wounded, and he died under our hands.”
“Whose dog was it?” persisted Sir Percival, repeating his question a
little irritably. “One of mine?”
“No, not one of yours.”
“Whose then? Did the housekeeper know?”
The housekeeper’s report of Mrs. Catherick’s desire to conceal her
visit to Blackwater Park from Sir Percival’s knowledge recurred to my
memory the moment he put that last question, and I half doubted the
discretion of answering it; but in my anxiety to quiet the general
alarm, I had thoughtlessly advanced too far to draw back, except at the
risk of exciting suspicion, which might only make matters worse. There
was nothing for it but to answer at once, without reference to results.
“Yes,” I said. “The housekeeper knew. She told me it was Mrs.
Catherick’s dog.”
Sir Percival had hitherto remained at the inner end of the boat-house
with Count Fosco, while I spoke to him from the door. But the instant
Mrs. Catherick’s name passed my lips he pushed by the Count roughly,
and placed himself face to face with me under the open daylight.
“How came the housekeeper to know it was Mrs. Catherick’s dog?” he
asked, fixing his eyes on mine with a frowning interest and attention,
which half angered, half startled me.
“She knew it,” I said quietly, “because Mrs. Catherick brought the dog
with her.”
“Brought it with her? Where did she bring it with her?”
“To this house.”
“What the devil did Mrs. Catherick want at this house?”
The manner in which he put the question was even more offensive than
the language in which he expressed it. I marked my sense of his want of
common politeness by silently turning away from him.
Just as I moved the Count’s persuasive hand was laid on his shoulder,
and the Count’s mellifluous voice interposed to quiet him.
“My dear Percival!—gently—gently!”
Sir Percival looked round in his angriest manner. The Count only smiled
and repeated the soothing application.
“Gently, my good friend—gently!”
Sir Percival hesitated, followed me a few steps, and, to my great
surprise, offered me an apology.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Halcombe,” he said. “I have been out of order
lately, and I am afraid I am a little irritable. But I should like to
know what Mrs. Catherick could possibly want here. When did she come?
Was the housekeeper the only person who saw her?”
“The only person,” I answered, “so far as I know.”
The Count interposed again.
“In that case why not question the housekeeper?” he said. “Why not go,
Percival, to the fountain-head of information at once?”
“Quite right!” said Sir Percival. “Of course the housekeeper is the
first person to question. Excessively stupid of me not to see it
myself.” With those words he instantly left us to return to the house.
The motive of the Count’s interference, which had puzzled me at
first, betrayed itself when Sir Percival’s back was turned. He had a
host of questions to put to me about Mrs. Catherick, and the cause
of her visit to Blackwater Park, which he could scarcely have asked