The Woman in White
“Yes, all. He insisted on it—I was alone with him—I could conceal
nothing.”
“Did he say anything when you had done?”
“He looked at me, and laughed to himself in a mocking, bitter way. ‘I
mean to have the rest out of you,’ he said, ‘do you hear?—the rest.’ I
declared to him solemnly that I had told him everything I knew. ‘Not
you,’ he answered, ‘you know more than you choose to tell. Won’t you
tell it? You shall! I’ll wring it out of you at home if I can’t wring
it out of you here.’ He led me away by a strange path through the
plantation—a path where there was no hope of our meeting you—and he
spoke no more till we came within sight of the house. Then he stopped
again, and said, ‘Will you take a second chance, if I give it to you?
Will you think better of it, and tell me the rest?’ I could only repeat
the same words I had spoken before. He cursed my obstinacy, and went
on, and took me with him to the house. ‘You can’t deceive me,’ he said,
‘you know more than you choose to tell. I’ll have your secret out of
you, and I’ll have it out of that sister of yours as well. There shall
be no more plotting and whispering between you. Neither you nor she
shall see each other again till you have confessed the truth. I’ll have
you watched morning, noon, and night, till you confess the truth.’ He
was deaf to everything I could say. He took me straight upstairs into
my own room. Fanny was sitting there, doing some work for me, and he
instantly ordered her out. ‘I’ll take good care YOU’RE not mixed up in
the conspiracy,’ he said. ‘You shall leave this house to-day. If your
mistress wants a maid, she shall have one of my choosing.’ He pushed me
into the room, and locked the door on me. He set that senseless woman
to watch me outside, Marian! He looked and spoke like a madman. You may
hardly understand it—he did indeed.”
“I do understand it, Laura. He is mad—mad with the terrors of a guilty
conscience. Every word you have said makes me positively certain
that when Anne Catherick left you yesterday you were on the eve of
discovering a secret which might have been your vile husband’s ruin,
and he thinks you HAVE discovered it. Nothing you can say or do will
quiet that guilty distrust, and convince his false nature of your
truth. I don’t say this, my love, to alarm you. I say it to open your
eyes to your position, and to convince you of the urgent necessity of
letting me act, as I best can, for your protection while the chance
is our own. Count Fosco’s interference has secured me access to you
to-day, but he may withdraw that interference to-morrow. Sir Percival
has already dismissed Fanny because she is a quick-witted girl, and
devotedly attached to you, and has chosen a woman to take her place who
cares nothing for your interests, and whose dull intelligence lowers
her to the level of the watch-dog in the yard. It is impossible to say
what violent measures he may take next, unless we make the most of our
opportunities while we have them.”
“What can we do, Marian? Oh, if we could only leave this house, never
to see it again!”
“Listen to me, my love, and try to think that you are not quite
helpless so long as I am here with you.”
“I will think so—I do think so. Don’t altogether forget poor Fanny in
thinking of me. She wants help and comfort too.”
“I will not forget her. I saw her before I came up here, and I have
arranged to communicate with her to-night. Letters are not safe in the
post-bag at Blackwater Park, and I shall have two to write to-day, in
your interests, which must pass through no hands but Fanny’s.”
“What letters?”
“I mean to write first, Laura, to Mr. Gilmore’s partner, who has
offered to help us in any fresh emergency. Little as I know of the law,
I am certain that it can protect a woman from such treatment as that
ruffian has inflicted on you to-day. I will go into no details about
Anne Catherick, because I have no certain information to give. But the
lawyer shall know of those bruises on your arm, and of the violence
offered to you in this room—he shall, before I rest to-night!”
“But think of the exposure, Marian!”
“I am calculating on the exposure. Sir Percival has more to dread from
it than you have. The prospect of an exposure may bring him to terms
when nothing else will.”
I rose as I spoke, but Laura entreated me not to leave her. “You will
drive him to desperation,” she said, “and increase our dangers tenfold.”
I felt the truth—the disheartening truth—of those words. But I could
not bring myself plainly to acknowledge it to her. In our dreadful
position there was no help and no hope for us but in risking the worst.
I said so in guarded terms. She sighed bitterly, but did not contest
the matter. She only asked about the second letter that I had proposed
writing. To whom was it to be addressed?
“To Mr. Fairlie,” I said. “Your uncle is your nearest male relative,
and the head of the family. He must and shall interfere.”
Laura shook her head sorrowfully.
“Yes, yes,” I went on, “your uncle is a weak, selfish, worldly man,
I know, but he is not Sir Percival Glyde, and he has no such friend
about him as Count Fosco. I expect nothing from his kindness or his
tenderness of feeling towards you or towards me, but he will do
anything to pamper his own indolence, and to secure his own quiet. Let
me only persuade him that his interference at this moment will save him
inevitable trouble and wretchedness and responsibility hereafter, and
he will bestir himself for his own sake. I know how to deal with him,
Laura—I have had some practice.”
“If you could only prevail on him to let me go back to Limmeridge for a
little while and stay there quietly with you, Marian, I could be almost
as happy again as I was before I was married!”
Those words set me thinking in a new direction. Would it be possible
to place Sir Percival between the two alternatives of either exposing
himself to the scandal of legal interference on his wife’s behalf,
or of allowing her to be quietly separated from him for a time under
pretext of a visit to her uncle’s house? And could he, in that case, be
reckoned on as likely to accept the last resource? It was doubtful—more
than doubtful. And yet, hopeless as the experiment seemed, surely it
was worth trying. I resolved to try it in sheer despair of knowing what
better to do.
“Your uncle shall know the wish you have just expressed,” I said, “and
I will ask the lawyer’s advice on the subject as well. Good may come of
it—and will come of it, I hope.”
Saying that I rose again, and again Laura tried to make me resume my
seat.
“Don’t leave me,” she said uneasily. “My desk is on that table. You can
write here.”
It tried me to the quick to refuse her, even in her own interests.
But we had been too long shut up alone together already. Our chance
of seeing each other again might entirely depend on our not exciting
any fresh suspicions. It was full time to show myself, quietly and
unconcernedly, among the wretches who were at that very moment,
perhaps, thinking of us and talking of us downstairs. I explained the
miserable necessity to Laura, and prevailed on her to recognise it as I
did.
“I will come back again, love, in an hour or less,” I said. “The worst
is over for to-day. Keep yourself quiet and fear nothing.”
“Is the key in the door, Marian? Can I lock it on the inside?”
“Yes, here is the key. Lock the door, and open it to nobody until I
come upstairs again.”
I kissed her and left her. It was a relief to me as I walked away to
hear the key turned in the lock, and to know that the door was at her
own command.
VIII
June 19th.—I had only got as far as the top of the stairs when the
locking of Laura’s door suggested to me the precaution of also locking
my own door, and keeping the key safely about me while I was out of
the room. My journal was already secured with other papers in the
table drawer, but my writing materials were left out. These included a
seal bearing the common device of two doves drinking out of the same
cup, and some sheets of blotting-paper, which had the impression on
them of the closing lines of my writing in these pages traced during
the past night. Distorted by the suspicion which had now become a
part of myself, even such trifles as these looked too dangerous to be
trusted without a guard—even the locked table drawer seemed to be not
sufficiently protected in my absence until the means of access to it
had been carefully secured as well.
I found no appearance of any one having entered the room while I had
been talking with Laura. My writing materials (which I had given the
servant instructions never to meddle with) were scattered over the
table much as usual. The only circumstance in connection with them that
at all struck me was that the seal lay tidily in the tray with the
pencils and the wax. It was not in my careless habits (I am sorry to
say) to put it there, neither did I remember putting it there. But as
I could not call to mind, on the other hand, where else I had thrown
it down, and as I was also doubtful whether I might not for once have
laid it mechanically in the right place, I abstained from adding to the
perplexity with which the day’s events had filled my mind by troubling
it afresh about a trifle. I locked the door, put the key in my pocket,
and went downstairs.
Madame Fosco was alone in the hall looking at the weather-glass.
“Still falling,” she said. “I am afraid we must expect more rain.”
Her face was composed again to its customary expression and its
customary colour. But the hand with which she pointed to the dial of
the weather-glass still trembled.
Could she have told her husband already that she had overheard Laura
reviling him, in my company, as a “spy?” My strong suspicion that she
must have told him, my irresistible dread (all the more overpowering
from its very vagueness) of the consequences which might follow,
my fixed conviction, derived from various little self-betrayals
which women notice in each other, that Madame Fosco, in spite of
her well-assumed external civility, had not forgiven her niece for
innocently standing between her and the legacy of ten thousand
pounds—all rushed upon my mind together, all impelled me to speak in
the vain hope of using my own influence and my own powers of persuasion
for the atonement of Laura’s offence.
“May I trust to your kindness to excuse me, Madame Fosco, if I venture
to speak to you on an exceedingly painful subject?”
She crossed her hands in front of her and bowed her head solemnly,
without uttering a word, and without taking her eyes off mine for a
moment.
“When you were so good as to bring me back my handkerchief,” I went on,
“I am very, very much afraid you must have accidentally heard Laura say
something which I am unwilling to repeat, and which I will not attempt
to defend. I will only venture to hope that you have not thought it of
sufficient importance to be mentioned to the Count?”
“I think it of no importance whatever,” said Madame Fosco sharply and
suddenly. “But,” she added, resuming her icy manner in a moment, “I
have no secrets from my husband even in trifles. When he noticed just
now that I looked distressed, it was my painful duty to tell him why I
was distressed, and I frankly acknowledge to you, Miss Halcombe, that I
HAVE told him.”
I was prepared to hear it, and yet she turned me cold all over when she
said those words.
“Let me earnestly entreat you, Madame Fosco—let me earnestly entreat
the Count—to make some allowances for the sad position in which my
sister is placed. She spoke while she was smarting under the insult and
injustice inflicted on her by her husband, and she was not herself when
she said those rash words. May I hope that they will be considerately
and generously forgiven?”