Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (361 page)

“In some degree.”

“In what degree? Do you know where I am going to?”

“No. I only know why you are leaving London.”

He slipped by me with the quickness of thought, locked the door, and put the key in his pocket.

“You and I, Mr. Hartright, are excellently well acquainted with one another by reputation,” he said. “Did it, by any chance, occur to you when you came to this house that I was not the sort of man you could trifle with?”

“It did occur to me,” I replied. “And I have not come to trifle with you. I am here on a matter of life and death, and if that door which you have locked was open at this moment, nothing you could say or do would induce me to pass through it.”

I walked farther into the room, and stood opposite to him on the rug before the fireplace. He drew a chair in front of the door, and sat down on it, with his left arm resting on the table. The cage with the white mice was close to him, and the little creatures scampered out of their sleeping-place as his heavy arm shook the table, and peered at him through the gaps in the smartly painted wires.

“On a matter of life and death,” he repeated to himself. “Those words are more serious, perhaps, than you think. What do you mean?”

“What I say.”

The perspiration broke out thickly on his broad forehead. His left hand stole over the edge of the table. There was a drawer in it, with a lock, and the key was in the lock. His finger and thumb closed over the key, but did not turn it.

“So you know why I am leaving London?” he went on. “Tell me the reason, if you please.” He turned the key, and unlocked the drawer as he spoke.

“I can do better than that,” I replied. “I can SHOW you the reason, if you like.”

“How can you show it?”

“You have got your coat off,” I said. “Roll up the shirt-sleeve on your left arm, and you will see it there.”

The same livid leaden change passed over his face which I had seen pass over it at the theatre. The deadly glitter in his eyes shone steady and straight into mine. He said nothing. But his left hand slowly opened the table-drawer, and softly slipped into it. The harsh grating noise of something heavy that he was moving unseen to me sounded for a moment, then ceased. The silence that followed was so intense that the faint ticking nibble of the white mice at their wires was distinctly audible where I stood.

My life hung by a thread, and I knew it. At that final moment I thought with HIS mind, I felt with HIS fingers — I was as certain as if I had seen it of what he kept hidden from me in the drawer.

“Wait a little,” I said. “You have got the door locked — you see I don’t move — you see my hands are empty. Wait a little. I have something more to say.”

“You have said enough,” he replied, with a sudden composure so unnatural and so ghastly that it tried my nerves as no outbreak of violence could have tried them. “I want one moment for my own thoughts, if you please. Do you guess what I am thinking about?”

“Perhaps I do.”

“I am thinking,” he remarked quietly, “whether I shall add to the disorder in this room by scattering your brains about the fireplace.”

If I had moved at that moment, I saw in his face that he would have done it.

“I advise you to read two lines of writing which I have about me,” I rejoined, “before you finally decide that question.”

The proposal appeared to excite his curiosity. He nodded his head. I took Pesca’s acknowledgment of the receipt of my letter out of my pocket-book, handed it to him at arm’s length, and returned to my former position in front of the fireplace.

He read the lines aloud: “Your letter is received. If I don’t hear from you before the time you mention, I will break the seal when the clock strikes.”

Another man in his position would have needed some explanation of those words — the Count felt no such necessity. One reading of the note showed him the precaution that I had taken as plainly as if he had been present at the time when I adopted it. The expression of his face changed on the instant, and his hand came out of the drawer empty.

“I don’t lock up my drawer, Mr. Hartright,” he said, “and I don’t say that I may not scatter your brains about the fireplace yet. But I am a just man even to my enemy, and I will acknowledge beforehand that they are cleverer brains than I thought them. Come to the point, sir! You want something of me?”

“I do, and I mean to have it.”

“On conditions?”

“On no conditions.”

His hand dropped into the drawer again.

“Bah! we are travelling in a circle,” he said, “and those clever brains of yours are in danger again. Your tone is deplorably imprudent, sir — moderate it on the spot! The risk of shooting you on the place where you stand is less to me than the risk of letting you out of this house, except on conditions that I dictate and approve. You have not got my lamented friend to deal with now — you are face to face with Fosco! If the lives of twenty Mr. Hartrights were the stepping-stones to my safety, over all those stones I would go, sustained by my sublime indifference, self-balanced by my impenetrable calm. Respect me, if you love your own life! I summon you to answer three questions before you open your lips again. Hear them — they are necessary to this interview. Answer them — they are necessary to ME.” He held up one finger of his right hand. “First question!” he said. “You come here possessed of information which may be true or may be false — where did you get it?”

“I decline to tell you.”

“No matter — I shall find out. If that information is true — mind I say, with the whole force of my resolution, if — you are making your market of it here by treachery of your own or by treachery of some other man. I note that circumstance for future use in my memory, which forgets nothing, and proceed.” He held up another finger. “Second question! Those lines you invited me to read are without signature. Who wrote them?”

“A man whom I have every reason to depend on, and whom you have every reason to fear.”

My answer reached him to some purpose. His left hand trembled audibly in the drawer.

“How long do you give me,” he asked, putting his third question in a quieter tone, “before the clock strikes and the seal is broken?”

“Time enough for you to come to my terms,” I replied.

“Give me a plainer answer, Mr. Hartright. What hour is the clock to strike?”

“Nine, to-morrow morning.”

“Nine, to-morrow morning? Yes, yes — your trap is laid for me before I can get my passport regulated and leave London. It is not earlier, I suppose? We will see about that presently — I can keep you hostage here, and bargain with you to send for your letter before I let you go. In the meantime, be so good next as to mention your terms.”

“You shall hear them. They are simple, and soon stated. You know whose interests I represent in coming here?”

He smiled with the most supreme composure, and carelessly waved his right hand.

“I consent to hazard a guess,” he said jeeringly. “A lady’s interests, of course!”

“My Wife’s interests.”

He looked at me with the first honest expression that had crossed his face in my presence — an expression of blank amazement. I could see that I sank in his estimation as a dangerous man from that moment. He shut up the drawer at once, folded his arms over his breast, and listened to me with a smile of satirical attention.

“You are well enough aware,” I went on, “of the course which my inquiries have taken for many months past, to know that any attempted denial of plain facts will be quite useless in my presence. You are guilty of an infamous conspiracy! And the gain of a fortune of ten thousand pounds was your motive for it.”

He said nothing. But his face became overclouded suddenly by a lowering anxiety.

“Keep your gain,” I said. (His face lightened again immediately, and his eyes opened on me in wider and wider astonishment.) “I am not here to disgrace myself by bargaining for money which has passed through your hands, and which has been the price of a vile crime.

“Gently, Mr. Hartright. Your moral clap-traps have an excellent effect in England — keep them for yourself and your own countrymen, if you please. The ten thousand pounds was a legacy left to my excellent wife by the late Mr. Fairlie. Place the affair on those grounds, and I will discuss it if you like. To a man of my sentiments, however, the subject is deplorably sordid. I prefer to pass it over. I invite you to resume the discussion of your terms. What do you demand?”

“In the first place, I demand a full confession of the conspiracy, written and signed in my presence by yourself.”

He raised his finger again. “One!” he said, checking me off with the steady attention of a practical man.

“In the second place, I demand a plain proof, which does not depend on your personal asseveration, of the date at which my wife left Blackwater Park and travelled to London.”

“So! so! you can lay your finger, I see, on the weak place,” he remarked composedly. “Any more?”

“At present, no more.”

“Good! you have mentioned your terms, now listen to mine. The responsibility to myself of admitting what you are pleased to call the ‘conspiracy’ is less, perhaps, upon the whole, than the responsibility of laying you dead on that hearthrug. Let us say that I meet your proposal — on my own conditions. The statement you demand of me shall be written, and the plain proof shall be produced. You call a letter from my late lamented friend informing me of the day and hour of his wife’s arrival in London, written, signed, and dated by himself, a proof, I suppose? I can give you this. I can also send you to the man of whom I hired the carriage to fetch my visitor from the railway, on the day when she arrived — his order-book may help you to your date, even if his coachman who drove me proves to be of no use. These things I can do, and will do, on conditions. I recite them. First condition! Madame Fosco and I leave this house when and how we please, without interference of any kind on your part. Second condition! You wait here, in company with me, to see my agent, who is coming at seven o’clock in the morning to regulate my affairs. You give my agent a written order to the man who has got your sealed letter to resign his possession of it. You wait here till my agent places that letter unopened in my hands, and you then allow me one clear half-hour to leave the house — after which you resume your own freedom of action and go where you please. Third condition! You give me the satisfaction of a gentleman for your intrusion into my private affairs, and for the language you have allowed yourself to use to me at this conference. The time and place, abroad, to be fixed in a letter from my hand when I am safe on the Continent, and that letter to contain a strip of paper measuring accurately the length of my sword. Those are my terms. Inform me if you accept them — Yes or No.”

The extraordinary mixture of prompt decision, far-sighted cunning, and mountebank bravado in this speech, staggered me for a moment — and only for a moment. The one question to consider was, whether I was justified or not in possessing myself of the means of establishing Laura’s identity at the cost of allowing the scoundrel who had robbed her of it to escape me with impunity. I knew that the motive of securing the just recognition of my wife in the birthplace from which she had been driven out as an impostor, and of publicly erasing the lie that still profaned her mother’s tombstone, was far purer, in its freedom from all taint of evil passion, than the vindictive motive which had mingled itself with my purpose from the first. And yet I cannot honestly say that my own moral convictions were strong enough to decide the struggle in me by themselves. They were helped by my remembrance of Sir Percival’s death. How awfully, at the last moment, had the working of the retribution THERE been snatched from my feeble hands! What right had I to decide, in my poor mortal ignorance of the future, that this man, too, must escape with impunity because he escaped ME? I thought of these things — perhaps with the superstition inherent in my nature, perhaps with a sense worthier of me than superstition. It was hard, when I had fastened my hold on him at last, to loosen it again of my own accord — but I forced myself to make the sacrifice. In plainer words, I determined to be guided by the one higher motive of which I was certain, the motive of serving the cause of Laura and the cause of Truth.