The Woman in White
me with an unutterable awe, forcing on me the conviction of an unseen
design in the long series of complications which had now fastened
round us. I thought of Hartright—as I saw him in the body when he said
farewell; as I saw him in the spirit in my dream—and I too began to
doubt now whether we were not advancing blindfold to an appointed and
an inevitable end.
Leaving Laura to go upstairs alone, I went out to look about me in the
walks near the house. The circumstances under which Anne Catherick had
parted from her had made me secretly anxious to know how Count Fosco
was passing the afternoon, and had rendered me secretly distrustful
of the results of that solitary journey from which Sir Percival had
returned but a few hours since.
After looking for them in every direction and discovering nothing, I
returned to the house, and entered the different rooms on the ground
floor one after another. They were all empty. I came out again into
the hall, and went upstairs to return to Laura. Madame Fosco opened
her door as I passed it in my way along the passage, and I stopped to
see if she could inform me of the whereabouts of her husband and Sir
Percival. Yes, she had seen them both from her window more than an hour
since. The Count had looked up with his customary kindness, and had
mentioned with his habitual attention to her in the smallest trifles,
that he and his friend were going out together for a long walk.
For a long walk! They had never yet been in each other’s company
with that object in my experience of them. Sir Percival cared for no
exercise but riding, and the Count (except when he was polite enough to
be my escort) cared for no exercise at all.
When I joined Laura again, I found that she had called to mind in my
absence the impending question of the signature to the deed, which,
in the interest of discussing her interview with Anne Catherick, we
had hitherto overlooked. Her first words when I saw her expressed her
surprise at the absence of the expected summons to attend Sir Percival
in the library.
“You may make your mind easy on that subject,” I said. “For the
present, at least, neither your resolution nor mine will be exposed to
any further trial. Sir Percival has altered his plans—the business of
the signature is put off.”
“Put off?” Laura repeated amazedly. “Who told you so?”
“My authority is Count Fosco. I believe it is to his interference that
we are indebted for your husband’s sudden change of purpose.”
“It seems impossible, Marian. If the object of my signing was, as we
suppose, to obtain money for Sir Percival that he urgently wanted, how
can the matter be put off?”
“I think, Laura, we have the means at hand of setting that doubt at
rest. Have you forgotten the conversation that I heard between Sir
Percival and the lawyer as they were crossing the hall?”
“No, but I don’t remember——”
“I do. There were two alternatives proposed. One was to obtain your
signature to the parchment. The other was to gain time by giving bills
at three months. The last resource is evidently the resource now
adopted, and we may fairly hope to be relieved from our share in Sir
Percival’s embarrassments for some time to come.”
“Oh, Marian, it sounds too good to be true!”
“Does it, my love? You complimented me on my ready memory not long
since, but you seem to doubt it now. I will get my journal, and you
shall see if I am right or wrong.”
I went away and got the book at once.
On looking back to the entry referring to the lawyer’s visit, we found
that my recollection of the two alternatives presented was accurately
correct. It was almost as great a relief to my mind as to Laura’s, to
find that my memory had served me, on this occasion, as faithfully as
usual. In the perilous uncertainty of our present situation, it is hard
to say what future interests may not depend upon the regularity of the
entries in my journal, and upon the reliability of my recollection at
the time when I make them.
Laura’s face and manner suggested to me that this last consideration
had occurred to her as well as to myself. Anyway, it is only a trifling
matter, and I am almost ashamed to put it down here in writing—it seems
to set the forlornness of our situation in such a miserably vivid
light. We must have little indeed to depend on, when the discovery that
my memory can still be trusted to serve us is hailed as if it was the
discovery of a new friend!
The first bell for dinner separated us. Just as it had done ringing,
Sir Percival and the Count returned from their walk. We heard the
master of the house storming at the servants for being five minutes
late, and the master’s guest interposing, as usual, in the interests of
propriety, patience, and peace.
* * * * * * * * * *
The evening has come and gone. No extraordinary event has happened. But
I have noticed certain peculiarities in the conduct of Sir Percival and
the Count, which have sent me to my bed feeling very anxious and uneasy
about Anne Catherick, and about the results which to-morrow may produce.
I know enough by this time, to be sure, that the aspect of Sir Percival
which is the most false, and which, therefore, means the worst, is his
polite aspect. That long walk with his friend had ended in improving
his manners, especially towards his wife. To Laura’s secret surprise
and to my secret alarm, he called her by her Christian name, asked if
she had heard lately from her uncle, inquired when Mrs. Vesey was to
receive her invitation to Blackwater, and showed her so many other
little attentions that he almost recalled the days of his hateful
courtship at Limmeridge House. This was a bad sign to begin with, and
I thought it more ominous still that he should pretend after dinner to
fall asleep in the drawing-room, and that his eyes should cunningly
follow Laura and me when he thought we neither of us suspected him. I
have never had any doubt that his sudden journey by himself took him to
Welmingham to question Mrs. Catherick—but the experience of to-night
has made me fear that the expedition was not undertaken in vain, and
that he has got the information which he unquestionably left us to
collect. If I knew where Anne Catherick was to be found, I would be up
to-morrow with sunrise and warn her.
While the aspect under which Sir Percival presented himself to-night
was unhappily but too familiar to me, the aspect under which the Count
appeared was, on the other hand, entirely new in my experience of
him. He permitted me, this evening, to make his acquaintance, for the
first time, in the character of a Man of Sentiment—of sentiment, as I
believe, really felt, not assumed for the occasion.
For instance, he was quiet and subdued—his eyes and his voice expressed
a restrained sensibility. He wore (as if there was some hidden
connection between his showiest finery and his deepest feeling) the
most magnificent waistcoat he has yet appeared in—it was made of
pale sea-green silk, and delicately trimmed with fine silver braid.
His voice sank into the tenderest inflections, his smile expressed
a thoughtful, fatherly admiration, whenever he spoke to Laura or to
me. He pressed his wife’s hand under the table when she thanked him
for trifling little attentions at dinner. He took wine with her.
“Your health and happiness, my angel!” he said, with fond glistening
eyes. He ate little or nothing, and sighed, and said “Good Percival!”
when his friend laughed at him. After dinner, he took Laura by the
hand, and asked her if she would be “so sweet as to play to him.” She
complied, through sheer astonishment. He sat by the piano, with his
watch-chain resting in folds, like a golden serpent, on the sea-green
protuberance of his waistcoat. His immense head lay languidly on one
side, and he gently beat time with two of his yellow-white fingers.
He highly approved of the music, and tenderly admired Laura’s manner
of playing—not as poor Hartright used to praise it, with an innocent
enjoyment of the sweet sounds, but with a clear, cultivated, practical
knowledge of the merits of the composition, in the first place, and of
the merits of the player’s touch in the second. As the evening closed
in, he begged that the lovely dying light might not be profaned, just
yet, by the appearance of the lamps. He came, with his horribly silent
tread, to the distant window at which I was standing, to be out of his
way and to avoid the very sight of him—he came to ask me to support his
protest against the lamps. If any one of them could only have burnt him
up at that moment, I would have gone down to the kitchen and fetched it
myself.
“Surely you like this modest, trembling English twilight?” he said
softly. “Ah! I love it. I feel my inborn admiration of all that is
noble, and great, and good, purified by the breath of heaven on
an evening like this. Nature has such imperishable charms, such
inextinguishable tenderness for me!—I am an old, fat man—talk which
would become your lips, Miss Halcombe, sounds like a derision and
a mockery on mine. It is hard to be laughed at in my moments of
sentiment, as if my soul was like myself, old and overgrown. Observe,
dear lady, what a light is dying on the trees! Does it penetrate your
heart, as it penetrates mine?”
He paused, looked at me, and repeated the famous lines of Dante on the
Evening-time, with a melody and tenderness which added a charm of their
own to the matchless beauty of the poetry itself.
“Bah!” he cried suddenly, as the last cadence of those noble Italian
words died away on his lips; “I make an old fool of myself, and only
weary you all! Let us shut up the window in our bosoms and get back to
the matter-of-fact world. Percival! I sanction the admission of the
lamps. Lady Glyde—Miss Halcombe—Eleanor, my good wife—which of you will
indulge me with a game at dominoes?”
He addressed us all, but he looked especially at Laura.
She had learnt to feel my dread of offending him, and she accepted his
proposal. It was more than I could have done at that moment. I could
not have sat down at the same table with him for any consideration. His
eyes seemed to reach my inmost soul through the thickening obscurity
of the twilight. His voice trembled along every nerve in my body,
and turned me hot and cold alternately. The mystery and terror of my
dream, which had haunted me at intervals all through the evening, now
oppressed my mind with an unendurable foreboding and an unutterable
awe. I saw the white tomb again, and the veiled woman rising out of it
by Hartright’s side. The thought of Laura welled up like a spring in
the depths of my heart, and filled it with waters of bitterness, never,
never known to it before. I caught her by the hand as she passed me on
her way to the table, and kissed her as if that night was to part us
for ever. While they were all gazing at me in astonishment, I ran out
through the low window which was open before me to the ground—ran out
to hide from them in the darkness, to hide even from myself.
We separated that evening later than usual. Towards midnight the
summer silence was broken by the shuddering of a low, melancholy wind
among the trees. We all felt the sudden chill in the atmosphere, but
the Count was the first to notice the stealthy rising of the wind. He
stopped while he was lighting my candle for me, and held up his hand
warningly—
“Listen!” he said. “There will be a change to-morrow.”
VII
June 19th.—The events of yesterday warned me to be ready, sooner or
later, to meet the worst. To-day is not yet at an end, and the worst
has come.
Judging by the closest calculation of time that Laura and I could
make, we arrived at the conclusion that Anne Catherick must have
appeared at the boat-house at half-past two o’clock on the afternoon