The Woman in White
Sir Percival drew back a step, and stared at her in dead silence. The
declaration he had just heard—a declaration which he well knew, as I
well knew, Madame Fosco would not have ventured to make without her
husband’s permission—seemed to petrify him with surprise. The Count
stood by, and looked at his wife with the most enthusiastic admiration.
“She is sublime!” he said to himself. He approached her while he spoke,
and drew her hand through his arm. “I am at your service, Eleanor,” he
went on, with a quiet dignity that I had never noticed in him before.
“And at Miss Halcombe’s service, if she will honour me by accepting all
the assistance I can offer her.”
“Damn it! what do you mean?” cried Sir Percival, as the Count quietly
moved away with his wife to the door.
“At other times I mean what I say, but at this time I mean what my
wife says,” replied the impenetrable Italian. “We have changed places,
Percival, for once, and Madame Fosco’s opinion is—mine.”
Sir Percival crumpled up the paper in his hand, and pushing past the
Count, with another oath, stood between him and the door.
“Have your own way,” he said, with baffled rage in his low,
half-whispering tones. “Have your own way—and see what comes of it.”
With those words he left the room.
Madame Fosco glanced inquiringly at her husband. “He has gone away very
suddenly,” she said. “What does it mean?”
“It means that you and I together have brought the worst-tempered man
in all England to his senses,” answered the Count. “It means, Miss
Halcombe, that Lady Glyde is relieved from a gross indignity, and you
from the repetition of an unpardonable insult. Suffer me to express my
admiration of your conduct and your courage at a very trying moment.”
“Sincere admiration,” suggested Madame Fosco.
“Sincere admiration,” echoed the Count.
I had no longer the strength of my first angry resistance to outrage
and injury to support me. My heart-sick anxiety to see Laura, my
sense of my own helpless ignorance of what had happened at the
boat-house, pressed on me with an intolerable weight. I tried to keep
up appearances by speaking to the Count and his wife in the tone which
they had chosen to adopt in speaking to me, but the words failed on
my lips—my breath came short and thick—my eyes looked longingly, in
silence, at the door. The Count, understanding my anxiety, opened it,
went out, and pulled it to after him. At the same time Sir Percival’s
heavy step descended the stairs. I heard them whispering together
outside, while Madame Fosco was assuring me, in her calmest and most
conventional manner, that she rejoiced, for all our sakes, that Sir
Percival’s conduct had not obliged her husband and herself to leave
Blackwater Park. Before she had done speaking the whispering ceased,
the door opened, and the Count looked in.
“Miss Halcombe,” he said, “I am happy to inform you that Lady Glyde is
mistress again in her own house. I thought it might be more agreeable
to you to hear of this change for the better from me than from Sir
Percival, and I have therefore expressly returned to mention it.”
“Admirable delicacy!” said Madame Fosco, paying back her husband’s
tribute of admiration with the Count’s own coin, in the Count’s own
manner. He smiled and bowed as if he had received a formal compliment
from a polite stranger, and drew back to let me pass out first.
Sir Percival was standing in the hall. As I hurried to the stairs I
heard him call impatiently to the Count to come out of the library.
“What are you waiting there for?” he said. “I want to speak to you.”
“And I want to think a little by myself,” replied the other. “Wait till
later, Percival, wait till later.”
Neither he nor his friend said any more. I gained the top of the stairs
and ran along the passage. In my haste and my agitation I left the door
of the ante-chamber open, but I closed the door of the bedroom the
moment I was inside it.
Laura was sitting alone at the far end of the room, her arms resting
wearily on a table, and her face hidden in her hands. She started up
with a cry of delight when she saw me.
“How did you get here?” she asked. “Who gave you leave? Not Sir
Percival?”
In my overpowering anxiety to hear what she had to tell me, I could not
answer her—I could only put questions on my side. Laura’s eagerness
to know what had passed downstairs proved, however, too strong to be
resisted. She persistently repeated her inquiries.
“The Count, of course,” I answered impatiently. “Whose influence in the
house——”
She stopped me with a gesture of disgust.
“Don’t speak of him,” she cried. “The Count is the vilest creature
breathing! The Count is a miserable Spy——!”
Before we could either of us say another word we were alarmed by a soft
knocking at the door of the bedroom.
I had not yet sat down, and I went first to see who it was. When I
opened the door Madame Fosco confronted me with my handkerchief in her
hand.
“You dropped this downstairs, Miss Halcombe,” she said, “and I thought
I could bring it to you, as I was passing by to my own room.”
Her face, naturally pale, had turned to such a ghastly whiteness that
I started at the sight of it. Her hands, so sure and steady at all
other times, trembled violently, and her eyes looked wolfishly past me
through the open door, and fixed on Laura.
She had been listening before she knocked! I saw it in her white face,
I saw it in her trembling hands, I saw it in her look at Laura.
After waiting an instant she turned from me in silence, and slowly
walked away.
I closed the door again. “Oh, Laura! Laura! We shall both rue the day
when you called the Count a Spy!”
“You would have called him so yourself, Marian, if you had known what I
know. Anne Catherick was right. There was a third person watching us in
the plantation yesterday, and that third person—-”
“Are you sure it was the Count?”
“I am absolutely certain. He was Sir Percival’s spy—he was Sir
Percival’s informer—he set Sir Percival watching and waiting, all the
morning through, for Anne Catherick and for me.”
“Is Anne found? Did you see her at the lake?”
“No. She has saved herself by keeping away from the place. When I got
to the boat-house no one was there.”
“Yes? Yes?”
“I went in and sat waiting for a few minutes. But my restlessness made
me get up again, to walk about a little. As I passed out I saw some
marks on the sand, close under the front of the boat-house. I stooped
down to examine them, and discovered a word written in large letters on
the sand. The word was—LOOK.”
“And you scraped away the sand, and dug a hollow place in it?”
“How do you know that, Marian?”
“I saw the hollow place myself when I followed you to the boat-house.
Go on—go on!”
“Yes, I scraped away the sand on the surface, and in a little while I
came to a strip of paper hidden beneath, which had writing on it. The
writing was signed with Anne Catherick’s initials.”
“Where is it?”
“Sir Percival has taken it from me.”
“Can you remember what the writing was? Do you think you can repeat it
to me?”
“In substance I can, Marian. It was very short. You would have
remembered it, word for word.”
“Try to tell me what the substance was before we go any further.”
She complied. I write the lines down here exactly as she repeated them
to me. They ran thus—
“I was seen with you, yesterday, by a tall, stout old man, and had to
run to save myself. He was not quick enough on his feet to follow me,
and he lost me among the trees. I dare not risk coming back here to-day
at the same time. I write this, and hide it in the sand, at six in the
morning, to tell you so. When we speak next of your wicked husband’s
Secret we must speak safely, or not at all. Try to have patience. I
promise you shall see me again and that soon.—A. C.”
The reference to the “tall, stout old man” (the terms of which Laura
was certain that she had repeated to me correctly) left no doubt as
to who the intruder had been. I called to mind that I had told Sir
Percival, in the Count’s presence the day before, that Laura had gone
to the boat-house to look for her brooch. In all probability he had
followed her there, in his officious way, to relieve her mind about
the matter of the signature, immediately after he had mentioned the
change in Sir Percival’s plans to me in the drawing-room. In this
case he could only have got to the neighbourhood of the boat-house at
the very moment when Anne Catherick discovered him. The suspiciously
hurried manner in which she parted from Laura had no doubt prompted his
useless attempt to follow her. Of the conversation which had previously
taken place between them he could have heard nothing. The distance
between the house and the lake, and the time at which he left me in
the drawing-room, as compared with the time at which Laura and Anne
Catherick had been speaking together, proved that fact to us at any
rate, beyond a doubt.
Having arrived at something like a conclusion so far, my next great
interest was to know what discoveries Sir Percival had made after Count
Fosco had given him his information.
“How came you to lose possession of the letter?” I asked. “What did you
do with it when you found it in the sand?”
“After reading it once through,” she replied, “I took it into the
boat-house with me to sit down and look over it a second time. While I
was reading a shadow fell across the paper. I looked up, and saw Sir
Percival standing in the doorway watching me.”
“Did you try to hide the letter?”
“I tried, but he stopped me. ‘You needn’t trouble to hide that,’ he
said. ‘I happen to have read it.’ I could only look at him helplessly—I
could say nothing. ‘You understand?’ he went on; ‘I have read it. I dug
it up out of the sand two hours since, and buried it again, and wrote
the word above it again, and left it ready to your hands. You can’t
lie yourself out of the scrape now. You saw Anne Catherick in secret
yesterday, and you have got her letter in your hand at this moment. I
have not caught HER yet, but I have caught YOU. Give me the letter.’ He
stepped close up to me—I was alone with him, Marian—what could I do?—I
gave him the letter.”
“What did he say when you gave it to him?”
“At first he said nothing. He took me by the arm, and led me out of the
boat-house, and looked about him on all sides, as if he was afraid of
our being seen or heard. Then he clasped his hand fast round my arm,
and whispered to me, ‘What did Anne Catherick say to you yesterday? I
insist on hearing every word, from first to last.’”
“Did you tell him?”
“I was alone with him, Marian—his cruel hand was bruising my arm—what
could I do?”
“Is the mark on your arm still? Let me see it.”
“Why do you want to see it?”
“I want to see it, Laura, because our endurance must end, and our
resistance must begin to-day. That mark is a weapon to strike him with.
Let me see it now—I may have to swear to it at some future time.”
“Oh, Marian, don’t look so—don’t talk so! It doesn’t hurt me now!”
“Let me see it!”
She showed me the marks. I was past grieving over them, past crying
over them, past shuddering over them. They say we are either better
than men, or worse. If the temptation that has fallen in some women’s
way, and made them worse, had fallen in mine at that moment—Thank
God! my face betrayed nothing that his wife could read. The gentle,
innocent, affectionate creature thought I was frightened for her and
sorry for her, and thought no more.
“Don’t think too seriously of it, Marian,” she said simply, as she
pulled her sleeve down again. “It doesn’t hurt me now.”
“I will try to think quietly of it, my love, for your sake.—Well! well!
And you told him all that Anne Catherick had said to you—all that you
told me?”