The Woman in White
have been all suspended by a trifling accident which has caused Laura
great regret. She has lost the little brooch I gave her for a keepsake
on the day before her marriage. As she wore it when we went out
yesterday evening we can only suppose that it must have dropped from
her dress, either in the boat-house or on our way back. The servants
have been sent to search, and have returned unsuccessful. And now Laura
herself has gone to look for it. Whether she finds it or not the loss
will help to excuse her absence from the house, if Sir Percival returns
before the letter from Mr. Gilmore’s partner is placed in my hands.
One o’clock has just struck. I am considering whether I had better
wait here for the arrival of the messenger from London, or slip away
quietly, and watch for him outside the lodge gate.
My suspicion of everybody and everything in this house inclines me
to think that the second plan may be the best. The Count is safe in
the breakfast-room. I heard him, through the door, as I ran upstairs
ten minutes since, exercising his canary-birds at their tricks:—“Come
out on my little finger, my pret-pret-pretties! Come out, and hop
upstairs! One, two, three—and up! Three, two, one—and down! One, two,
three—twit-twit-twit-tweet!” The birds burst into their usual ecstasy
of singing, and the Count chirruped and whistled at them in return,
as if he was a bird himself. My room door is open, and I can hear the
shrill singing and whistling at this very moment. If I am really to
slip out without being observed, now is my time.
FOUR O’CLOCK. The three hours that have passed since I made my last
entry have turned the whole march of events at Blackwater Park in a new
direction. Whether for good or for evil, I cannot and dare not decide.
Let me get back first to the place at which I left off, or I shall lose
myself in the confusion of my own thoughts.
I went out, as I had proposed, to meet the messenger with my letter
from London at the lodge gate. On the stairs I saw no one. In the
hall I heard the Count still exercising his birds. But on crossing
the quadrangle outside, I passed Madame Fosco, walking by herself in
her favourite circle, round and round the great fish-pond. I at once
slackened my pace, so as to avoid all appearance of being in a hurry,
and even went the length, for caution’s sake, of inquiring if she
thought of going out before lunch. She smiled at me in the friendliest
manner—said she preferred remaining near the house, nodded pleasantly,
and re-entered the hall. I looked back, and saw that she had closed the
door before I had opened the wicket by the side of the carriage gates.
In less than a quarter of an hour I reached the lodge.
The lane outside took a sudden turn to the left, ran on straight for
a hundred yards or so, and then took another sharp turn to the right
to join the high-road. Between these two turns, hidden from the lodge
on one side, and from the way to the station on the other, I waited,
walking backwards and forwards. High hedges were on either side of me,
and for twenty minutes, by my watch, I neither saw nor heard anything.
At the end of that time the sound of a carriage caught my ear, and
I was met, as I advanced towards the second turning, by a fly from
the railway. I made a sign to the driver to stop. As he obeyed me a
respectable-looking man put his head out of the window to see what was
the matter.
“I beg your pardon,” I said, “but am I right in supposing that you are
going to Blackwater Park?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“With a letter for any one?”
“With a letter for Miss Halcombe, ma’am.”
“You may give me the letter. I am Miss Halcombe.”
The man touched his hat, got out of the fly immediately, and gave me
the letter.
I opened it at once and read these lines. I copy them here, thinking it
best to destroy the original for caution’s sake.
“DEAR MADAM,—Your letter received this morning has caused me very great
anxiety. I will reply to it as briefly and plainly as possible.
“My careful consideration of the statement made by yourself, and my
knowledge of Lady Glyde’s position, as defined in the settlement,
lead me, I regret to say, to the conclusion that a loan of the
trust money to Sir Percival (or, in other words, a loan of some
portion of the twenty thousand pounds of Lady Glyde’s fortune) is in
contemplation, and that she is made a party to the deed, in order to
secure her approval of a flagrant breach of trust, and to have her
signature produced against her if she should complain hereafter. It is
impossible, on any other supposition, to account, situated as she is,
for her execution to a deed of any kind being wanted at all.
“In the event of Lady Glyde’s signing such a document, as I am
compelled to suppose the deed in question to be, her trustees would be
at liberty to advance money to Sir Percival out of her twenty thousand
pounds. If the amount so lent should not be paid back, and if Lady
Glyde should have children, their fortune will then be diminished by
the sum, large or small, so advanced. In plainer terms still, the
transaction, for anything that Lady Glyde knows to the contrary, may be
a fraud upon her unborn children.
“Under these serious circumstances, I would recommend Lady Glyde to
assign as a reason for withholding her signature, that she wishes the
deed to be first submitted to myself, as her family solicitor (in the
absence of my partner, Mr. Gilmore). No reasonable objection can be
made to taking this course—for, if the transaction is an honourable
one, there will necessarily be no difficulty in my giving my approval.
“Sincerely assuring you of my readiness to afford any additional help
or advice that may be wanted, I beg to remain, Madam, your faithful
servant,
“WILLIAM KYRLE.”
I read this kind and sensible letter very thankfully. It supplied Laura
with a reason for objecting to the signature which was unanswerable,
and which we could both of us understand. The messenger waited near me
while I was reading to receive his directions when I had done.
“Will you be good enough to say that I understand the letter, and that
I am very much obliged?” I said. “There is no other reply necessary at
present.”
Exactly at the moment when I was speaking those words, holding the
letter open in my hand, Count Fosco turned the corner of the lane from
the high-road, and stood before me as if he had sprung up out of the
earth.
The suddenness of his appearance, in the very last place under heaven
in which I should have expected to see him, took me completely by
surprise. The messenger wished me good-morning, and got into the fly
again. I could not say a word to him—I was not even able to return
his bow. The conviction that I was discovered—and by that man, of all
others—absolutely petrified me.
“Are you going back to the house, Miss Halcombe?” he inquired, without
showing the least surprise on his side, and without even looking after
the fly, which drove off while he was speaking to me.
I collected myself sufficiently to make a sign in the affirmative.
“I am going back too,” he said. “Pray allow me the pleasure of
accompanying you. Will you take my arm? You look surprised at seeing
me!”
I took his arm. The first of my scattered senses that came back was the
sense that warned me to sacrifice anything rather than make an enemy of
him.
“You look surprised at seeing me!” he repeated in his quietly
pertinacious way.
“I thought, Count, I heard you with your birds in the breakfast-room,”
I answered, as quietly and firmly as I could.
“Surely. But my little feathered children, dear lady, are only too like
other children. They have their days of perversity, and this morning
was one of them. My wife came in as I was putting them back in their
cage, and said she had left you going out alone for a walk. You told
her so, did you not?”
“Certainly.”
“Well, Miss Halcombe, the pleasure of accompanying you was too great a
temptation for me to resist. At my age there is no harm in confessing
so much as that, is there? I seized my hat, and set off to offer myself
as your escort. Even so fat an old man as Fosco is surely better than
no escort at all? I took the wrong path—I came back in despair, and
here I am, arrived (may I say it?) at the height of my wishes.”
He talked on in this complimentary strain with a fluency which left
me no exertion to make beyond the effort of maintaining my composure.
He never referred in the most distant manner to what he had seen in
the lane, or to the letter which I still had in my hand. This ominous
discretion helped to convince me that he must have surprised, by the
most dishonourable means, the secret of my application in Laura’s
interest to the lawyer; and that, having now assured himself of the
private manner in which I had received the answer, he had discovered
enough to suit his purposes, and was only bent on trying to quiet the
suspicions which he knew he must have aroused in my mind. I was wise
enough, under these circumstances, not to attempt to deceive him by
plausible explanations, and woman enough, notwithstanding my dread of
him, to feel as if my hand was tainted by resting on his arm.
On the drive in front of the house we met the dog-cart being taken
round to the stables. Sir Percival had just returned. He came out to
meet us at the house-door. Whatever other results his journey might
have had, it had not ended in softening his savage temper.
“Oh! here are two of you come back,” he said, with a lowering face.
“What is the meaning of the house being deserted in this way? Where is
Lady Glyde?”
I told him of the loss of the brooch, and said that Laura had gone into
the plantation to look for it.
“Brooch or no brooch,” he growled sulkily, “I recommend her not to
forget her appointment in the library this afternoon. I shall expect to
see her in half an hour.”
I took my hand from the Count’s arm, and slowly ascended the steps.
He honoured me with one of his magnificent bows, and then addressed
himself gaily to the scowling master of the house.
“Tell me, Percival,” he said, “have you had a pleasant drive? And has
your pretty shining Brown Molly come back at all tired?”
“Brown Molly be hanged—and the drive too! I want my lunch.”
“And I want five minutes’ talk with you, Percival, first,” returned the
Count. “Five minutes’ talk, my friend, here on the grass.”
“What about?”
“About business that very much concerns you.”
I lingered long enough in passing through the hall-door to hear this
question and answer, and to see Sir Percival thrust his hands into his
pockets in sullen hesitation.
“If you want to badger me with any more of your infernal scruples,” he
said, “I for one won’t hear them. I want my lunch.”
“Come out here and speak to me,” repeated the Count, still perfectly
uninfluenced by the rudest speech that his friend could make to him.
Sir Percival descended the steps. The Count took him by the arm, and
walked him away gently. The “business,” I was sure, referred to the
question of the signature. They were speaking of Laura and of me beyond
a doubt. I felt heart-sick and faint with anxiety. It might be of the
last importance to both of us to know what they were saying to each
other at that moment, and not one word of it could by any possibility
reach my ears.
I walked about the house, from room to room, with the lawyer’s letter
in my bosom (I was afraid by this time even to trust it under lock and
key), till the oppression of my suspense half maddened me. There were
no signs of Laura’s return, and I thought of going out to look for her.
But my strength was so exhausted by the trials and anxieties of the
morning that the heat of the day quite overpowered me, and after an
attempt to get to the door I was obliged to return to the drawing-room