The Woman in White
in his friend’s presence. I made my answers as short as I civilly
could, for I had already determined to check the least approach to
any exchanging of confidences between Count Fosco and myself. Laura,
however, unconsciously helped him to extract all my information, by
making inquiries herself, which left me no alternative but to reply
to her, or to appear in the very unenviable and very false character
of a depositary of Sir Percival’s secrets. The end of it was, that,
in about ten minutes’ time, the Count knew as much as I know of Mrs.
Catherick, and of the events which have so strangely connected us with
her daughter, Anne, from the time when Hartright met with her to this
day.
The effect of my information on him was, in one respect, curious enough.
Intimately as he knows Sir Percival, and closely as he appears to
be associated with Sir Percival’s private affairs in general, he is
certainly as far as I am from knowing anything of the true story of
Anne Catherick. The unsolved mystery in connection with this unhappy
woman is now rendered doubly suspicious, in my eyes, by the absolute
conviction which I feel, that the clue to it has been hidden by
Sir Percival from the most intimate friend he has in the world. It
was impossible to mistake the eager curiosity of the Count’s look
and manner while he drank in greedily every word that fell from my
lips. There are many kinds of curiosity, I know—but there is no
misinterpreting the curiosity of blank surprise: if I ever saw it in my
life I saw it in the Count’s face.
While the questions and answers were going on, we had all been
strolling quietly back through the plantation. As soon as we reached
the house the first object that we saw in front of it was Sir
Percival’s dog-cart, with the horse put to and the groom waiting by
it in his stable-jacket. If these unexpected appearances were to be
trusted, the examination of the house-keeper had produced important
results already.
“A fine horse, my friend,” said the Count, addressing the groom with
the most engaging familiarity of manner, “You are going to drive out?”
“I am not going, sir,” replied the man, looking at his stable-jacket,
and evidently wondering whether the foreign gentleman took it for his
livery. “My master drives himself.”
“Aha!” said the Count, “does he indeed? I wonder he gives himself the
trouble when he has got you to drive for him. Is he going to fatigue
that nice, shining, pretty horse by taking him very far to-day?”
“I don’t know, sir,” answered the man. “The horse is a mare, if you
please, sir. She’s the highest-couraged thing we’ve got in the stables.
Her name’s Brown Molly, sir, and she’ll go till she drops. Sir Percival
usually takes Isaac of York for the short distances.”
“And your shining courageous Brown Molly for the long?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Logical inference, Miss Halcombe,” continued the Count, wheeling round
briskly, and addressing me. “Sir Percival is going a long distance
to-day.”
I made no reply. I had my own inferences to draw, from what I knew
through the housekeeper and from what I saw before me, and I did not
choose to share them with Count Fosco.
When Sir Percival was in Cumberland (I thought to myself), he walked
away a long distance, on Anne’s account, to question the family at
Todd’s Corner. Now he is in Hampshire, is he going to drive away a
long distance, on Anne’s account again, to question Mrs. Catherick at
Welmingham?
We all entered the house. As we crossed the hall Sir Percival came out
from the library to meet us. He looked hurried and pale and anxious—but
for all that, he was in his most polite mood when he spoke to us.
“I am sorry to say I am obliged to leave you,” he began—“a long drive—a
matter that I can’t very well put off. I shall be back in good time
to-morrow—but before I go I should like that little business-formality,
which I spoke of this morning, to be settled. Laura, will you come into
the library? It won’t take a minute—a mere formality. Countess, may I
trouble you also? I want you and the Countess, Fosco, to be witnesses
to a signature—nothing more. Come in at once and get it over.”
He held the library door open until they had passed in, followed them,
and shut it softly.
I remained, for a moment afterwards, standing alone in the hall, with
my heart beating fast and my mind misgiving me sadly. Then I went on to
the staircase, and ascended slowly to my own room.
IV
June 17th.—Just as my hand was on the door of my room, I heard Sir
Percival’s voice calling to me from below.
“I must beg you to come downstairs again,” he said. “It is Fosco’s
fault, Miss Halcombe, not mine. He has started some nonsensical
objection to his wife being one of the witnesses, and has obliged me to
ask you to join us in the library.”
I entered the room immediately with Sir Percival. Laura was waiting
by the writing-table, twisting and turning her garden hat uneasily in
her hands. Madame Fosco sat near her, in an arm-chair, imperturbably
admiring her husband, who stood by himself at the other end of the
library, picking off the dead leaves from the flowers in the window.
The moment I appeared the Count advanced to meet me, and to offer his
explanations.
“A thousand pardons, Miss Halcombe,” he said. “You know the character
which is given to my countrymen by the English? We Italians are all
wily and suspicious by nature, in the estimation of the good John Bull.
Set me down, if you please, as being no better than the rest of my
race. I am a wily Italian and a suspicious Italian. You have thought so
yourself, dear lady, have you not? Well! it is part of my wiliness and
part of my suspicion to object to Madame Fosco being a witness to Lady
Glyde’s signature, when I am also a witness myself.”
“There is not the shadow of a reason for his objection,” interposed
Sir Percival. “I have explained to him that the law of England allows
Madame Fosco to witness a signature as well as her husband.”
“I admit it,” resumed the Count. “The law of England says, Yes, but the
conscience of Fosco says, No.” He spread out his fat fingers on the
bosom of his blouse, and bowed solemnly, as if he wished to introduce
his conscience to us all, in the character of an illustrious addition
to the society. “What this document which Lady Glyde is about to sign
may be,” he continued, “I neither know nor desire to know. I only say
this, circumstances may happen in the future which may oblige Percival,
or his representatives, to appeal to the two witnesses, in which case
it is certainly desirable that those witnesses should represent two
opinions which are perfectly independent the one of the other. This
cannot be if my wife signs as well as myself, because we have but
one opinion between us, and that opinion is mine. I will not have it
cast in my teeth, at some future day, that Madame Fosco acted under
my coercion, and was, in plain fact, no witness at all. I speak in
Percival’s interest, when I propose that my name shall appear (as the
nearest friend of the husband), and your name, Miss Halcombe (as the
nearest friend of the wife). I am a Jesuit, if you please to think so—a
splitter of straws—a man of trifles and crochets and scruples—but you
will humour me, I hope, in merciful consideration for my suspicious
Italian character, and my uneasy Italian conscience.” He bowed again,
stepped back a few paces, and withdrew his conscience from our society
as politely as he had introduced it.
The Count’s scruples might have been honourable and reasonable enough,
but there was something in his manner of expressing them which
increased my unwillingness to be concerned in the business of the
signature. No consideration of less importance than my consideration
for Laura would have induced me to consent to be a witness at all. One
look, however, at her anxious face decided me to risk anything rather
than desert her.
“I will readily remain in the room,” I said. “And if I find no reason
for starting any small scruples on my side, you may rely on me as a
witness.”
Sir Percival looked at me sharply, as if he was about to say something.
But at the same moment, Madame Fosco attracted his attention by rising
from her chair. She had caught her husband’s eye, and had evidently
received her orders to leave the room.
“You needn’t go,” said Sir Percival.
Madame Fosco looked for her orders again, got them again, said she
would prefer leaving us to our business, and resolutely walked out.
The Count lit a cigarette, went back to the flowers in the window, and
puffed little jets of smoke at the leaves, in a state of the deepest
anxiety about killing the insects.
Meanwhile Sir Percival unlocked a cupboard beneath one of the
book-cases, and produced from it a piece of parchment, folded longwise,
many times over. He placed it on the table, opened the last fold only,
and kept his hand on the rest. The last fold displayed a strip of blank
parchment with little wafers stuck on it at certain places. Every line
of the writing was hidden in the part which he still held folded up
under his hand. Laura and I looked at each other. Her face was pale,
but it showed no indecision and no fear.
Sir Percival dipped a pen in ink, and handed it to his wife. “Sign your
name there,” he said, pointing to the place. “You and Fosco are to sign
afterwards, Miss Halcombe, opposite those two wafers. Come here, Fosco!
witnessing a signature is not to be done by mooning out of window and
smoking into the flowers.”
The Count threw away his cigarette, and joined us at the table, with
his hands carelessly thrust into the scarlet belt of his blouse, and
his eyes steadily fixed on Sir Percival’s face. Laura, who was on the
other side of her husband, with the pen in her hand, looked at him too.
He stood between them holding the folded parchment down firmly on the
table, and glancing across at me, as I sat opposite to him, with such
a sinister mixture of suspicion and embarrassment on his face that he
looked more like a prisoner at the bar than a gentleman in his own
house.
“Sign there,” he repeated, turning suddenly on Laura, and pointing once
more to the place on the parchment.
“What is it I am to sign?” she asked quietly.
“I have no time to explain,” he answered. “The dog-cart is at
the door, and I must go directly. Besides, if I had time, you
wouldn’t understand. It is a purely formal document, full of legal
technicalities, and all that sort of thing. Come! come! sign your name,
and let us have done as soon as possible.”
“I ought surely to know what I am signing, Sir Percival, before I write
my name?”
“Nonsense! What have women to do with business? I tell you again, you
can’t understand it.”
“At any rate, let me try to understand it. Whenever Mr. Gilmore had
any business for me to do, he always explained it first, and I always
understood him.”
“I dare say he did. He was your servant, and was obliged to explain.
I am your husband, and am NOT obliged. How much longer do you mean
to keep me here? I tell you again, there is no time for reading
anything—the dog-cart is waiting at the door. Once for all, will you
sign or will you not?”
She still had the pen in her hand, but she made no approach to signing
her name with it.
“If my signature pledges me to anything,” she said, “surely I have some
claim to know what that pledge is?”
He lifted up the parchment, and struck it angrily on the table.
“Speak out!” he said. “You were always famous for telling the truth.
Never mind Miss Halcombe, never mind Fosco—say, in plain terms, you
distrust me.”
The Count took one of his hands out of his belt and laid it on Sir
Percival’s shoulder. Sir Percival shook it off irritably. The Count put
it on again with unruffled composure.