The Woman in White (87 page)

Laura had applied the word to him at hazard, in natural anger at
his proceedings towards herself. I applied it to him with the
deliberate conviction that his vocation in life was the vocation
of a spy. On this assumption, the reason for his extraordinary
stay in England so long after the objects of the conspiracy had
been gained, became, to my mind, quite intelligible.

The year of which I am now writing was the year of the famous
Crystal Palace Exhibition in Hyde Park. Foreigners in unusually
large numbers had arrived already, and were still arriving in
England. Men were among us by hundreds whom the ceaseless
distrustfulness of their governments had followed privately, by
means of appointed agents, to our shores. My surmises did not for
a moment class a man of the Count's abilities and social position
with the ordinary rank and file of foreign spies. I suspected him
of holding a position of authority, of being entrusted by the
government which he secretly served with the organisation and
management of agents specially employed in this country, both men
and women, and I believed Mrs. Rubelle, who had been so
opportunely found to act as nurse at Blackwater Park, to be, in
all probability, one of the number.

Assuming that this idea of mine had a foundation in truth, the
position of the Count might prove to be more assailable than I had
hitherto ventured to hope. To whom could I apply to know
something more of the man's history and of the man himself than I
knew now?

In this emergency it naturally occurred to my mind that a
countryman of his own, on whom I could rely, might be the fittest
person to help me. The first man whom I thought of under these
circumstances was also the only Italian with whom I was intimately
acquainted—my quaint little friend, Professor Pesca.

The professor has been so long absent from these pages that he has
run some risk of being forgotten altogether.

It is the necessary law of such a story as mine that the persons
concerned in it only appear when the course of events takes them
up—they come and go, not by favour of my personal partiality, but
by right of their direct connection with the circumstances to be
detailed. For this reason, not Pesca alone, but my mother and
sister as well, have been left far in the background of the
narrative. My visits to the Hampstead cottage, my mother's belief
in the denial of Laura's identity which the conspiracy had
accomplished, my vain efforts to overcome the prejudice on her
part and on my sister's to which, in their jealous affection for
me, they both continued to adhere, the painful necessity which
that prejudice imposed on me of concealing my marriage from them
till they had learnt to do justice to my wife—all these little
domestic occurrences have been left unrecorded because they were
not essential to the main interest of the story. It is nothing
that they added to my anxieties and embittered my disappointments—
the steady march of events has inexorably passed them by.

For the same reason I have said nothing here of the consolation
that I found in Pesca's brotherly affection for me, when I saw him
again after the sudden cessation of my residence at Limmeridge
House. I have not recorded the fidelity with which my warm-
hearted little friend followed me to the place of embarkation when
I sailed for Central America, or the noisy transport of joy with
which he received me when we next met in London. If I had felt
justified in accepting the offers of service which he made to me
on my return, he would have appeared again long ere this. But,
though I knew that his honour and his courage were to be
implicitly relied on, I was not so sure that his discretion was to
be trusted, and, for that reason only, I followed the course of
all my inquiries alone. It will now be sufficiently understood
that Pesca was not separated from all connection with me and my
interests, although he has hitherto been separated from all
connection with the progress of this narrative. He was as true
and as ready a friend of mine still as ever he had been in his
life.

Before I summoned Pesca to my assistance it was necessary to see
for myself what sort of man I had to deal with. Up to this time I
had never once set eyes on Count Fosco.

Three days after my return with Laura and Marian to London, I set
forth alone for Forest Road, St. John's Wood, between ten and
eleven o'clock in the morning. It was a fine day—I had some
hours to spare—and I thought it likely, if I waited a little for
him, that the Count might be tempted out. I had no great reason
to fear the chance of his recognising me in the daytime, for the
only occasion when I had been seen by him was the occasion on
which he had followed me home at night.

No one appeared at the windows in the front of the house. I
walked down a turning which ran past the side of it, and looked
over the low garden wall. One of the back windows on the lower
floor was thrown up and a net was stretched across the opening. I
saw nobody, but I heard, in the room, first a shrill whistling and
singing of birds, then the deep ringing voice which Marian's
description had made familiar to me. "Come out on my little
finger, my pret-pret-pretties!" cried the voice. "Come out and
hop upstairs! One, two, three—and up! Three, two, one—and down!
One, two, three—twit-twit-twit-tweet!" The Count was exercising
his canaries as he used to exercise them in Marian's time at
Blackwater Park.

I waited a little while, and the singing and the whistling ceased.
"Come, kiss me, my pretties!" said the deep voice. There was a
responsive twittering and chirping—a low, oily laugh—a silence
of a minute or so, and then I heard the opening of the house door.
I turned and retraced my steps. The magnificent melody of the
Prayer in Rossini's Moses, sung in a sonorous bass voice, rose
grandly through the suburban silence of the place. The front
garden gate opened and closed. The Count had come out.

He crossed the road and walked towards the western boundary of the
Regent's Park. I kept on my own side of the way, a little behind
him, and walked in that direction also.

Marian had prepared me for his high stature, his monstrous
corpulence, and his ostentatious mourning garments, but not for
the horrible freshness and cheerfulness and vitality of the man.
He carried his sixty years as if they had been fewer than forty.
He sauntered along, wearing his hat a little on one side, with a
light jaunty step, swinging his big stick, humming to himself,
looking up from time to time at the houses and gardens on either
side of him with superb, smiling patronage. If a stranger had
been told that the whole neighbourhood belonged to him, that
stranger would not have been surprised to hear it. He never
looked back, he paid no apparent attention to me, no apparent
attention to any one who passed him on his own side of the road,
except now and then, when he smiled and smirked, with an easy
paternal good humour, at the nursery-maids and the children whom
he met. In this way he led me on, till we reached a colony of
shops outside the western terraces of the Park.

Here he stopped at a pastrycook's, went in (probably to give an
order), and came out again immediately with a tart in his hand.
An Italian was grinding an organ before the shop, and a miserable
little shrivelled monkey was sitting on the instrument. The Count
stopped, bit a piece for himself out of the tart, and gravely
handed the rest to the monkey. "My poor little man!" he said,
with grotesque tenderness, "you look hungry. In the sacred name
of humanity, I offer you some lunch!" The organ-grinder piteously
put in his claim to a penny from the benevolent stranger. The
Count shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and passed on.

We reached the streets and the better class of shops between the
New Road and Oxford Street. The Count stopped again and entered a
small optician's shop, with an inscription in the window
announcing that repairs were neatly executed inside. He came out
again with an opera-glass in his hand, walked a few paces on, and
stopped to look at a bill of the opera placed outside a music-
seller's shop. He read the bill attentively, considered a moment,
and then hailed an empty cab as it passed him. "Opera Box-
office," he said to the man, and was driven away.

I crossed the road, and looked at the bill in my turn. The
performance announced was Lucrezia Borgia, and it was to take
place that evening. The opera-glass in the Count's hand, his
careful reading of the bill, and his direction to the cabman, all
suggested that he proposed making one of the audience. I had the
means of getting an admission for myself and a friend to the pit
by applying to one of the scene-painters attached to the theatre,
with whom I had been well acquainted in past times. There was a
chance at least that the Count might be easily visible among the
audience to me and to any one with me, and in this case I had the
means of ascertaining whether Pesca knew his countryman or not
that very night.

This consideration at once decided the disposal of my evening. I
procured the tickets, leaving a note at the Professor's lodgings
on the way. At a quarter to eight I called to take him with me to
the theatre. My little friend was in a state of the highest
excitement, with a festive flower in his button-hole, and the
largest opera-glass I ever saw hugged up under his arm.

"Are you ready?" I asked.

"Right-all-right," said Pesca.

We started for the theatre.

The last notes of the introduction to the opera were being played,
and the seats in the pit were all filled, when Pesca and I reached
the theatre.

There was plenty of room, however, in the passage that ran round
the pit—precisely the position best calculated to answer the
purpose for which I was attending the performance. I went first
to the barrier separating us from the stalls, and looked for the
Count in that part of the theatre. He was not there. Returning
along the passage, on the left-hand side from the stage, and
looking about me attentively, I discovered him in the pit. He
occupied an excellent place, some twelve or fourteen seats from
the end of a bench, within three rows of the stalls. I placed
myself exactly on a line with him. Pesca standing by my side.
The Professor was not yet aware of the purpose for which I had
brought him to the theatre, and he was rather surprised that we
did not move nearer to the stage.

The curtain rose, and the opera began.

Throughout the whole of the first act we remained in our position—
the Count, absorbed by the orchestra and the stage, never casting
so much as a chance glance at us. Not a note of Donizetti's
delicious music was lost on him. There he sat, high above his
neighbours, smiling, and nodding his great head enjoyingly from
time to time. When the people near him applauded the close of an
air (as an English audience in such circumstances always WILL
applaud), without the least consideration for the orchestral
movement which immediately followed it, he looked round at them
with an expression of compassionate remonstrance, and held up one
hand with a gesture of polite entreaty. At the more refined
passages of the singing, at the more delicate phases of the music,
which passed unapplauded by others, his fat hands, adorned with
perfectly-fitting black kid gloves, softly patted each other, in
token of the cultivated appreciation of a musical man. At such
times, his oily murmur of approval, "Bravo! Bra-a-a-a!" hummed
through the silence, like the purring of a great cat. His
immediate neighbours on either side—hearty, ruddy-faced people
from the country, basking amazedly in the sunshine of fashionable
London—seeing and hearing him, began to follow his lead. Many a
burst of applause from the pit that night started from the soft,
comfortable patting of the black-gloved hands. The man's
voracious vanity devoured this implied tribute to his local and
critical supremacy with an appearance of the highest relish.
Smiles rippled continuously over his fat face. He looked about
him, at the pauses in the music, serenely satisfied with himself
and his fellow-creatures. "Yes! yes! these barbarous English
people are learning something from ME. Here, there, and
everywhere, I—Fosco—am an influence that is felt, a man who sits
supreme!" If ever face spoke, his face spoke then, and that was
its language.

The curtain fell on the first act, and the audience rose to look
about them. This was the time I had waited for—the time to try
if Pesca knew him.

He rose with the rest, and surveyed the occupants of the boxes
grandly with his opera-glass. At first his back was towards us,
but he turned round in time, to our side of the theatre, and
looked at the boxes above us, using his glass for a few minutes—
then removing it, but still continuing to look up. This was the
moment I chose, when his full face was in view, for directing
Pesca's attention to him.

"Do you know that man?" I asked.

"Which man, my friend?"

"The tall, fat man, standing there, with his face towards us."

Pesca raised himself on tiptoe, and looked at the Count.

"No," said the Professor. "The big fat man is a stranger to me.
Is he famous? Why do you point him out?"

"Because I have particular reasons for wishing to know something
of him. He is a countryman of yours—his name is Count Fosco. Do
you know that name?"

"Not I, Walter. Neither the name nor the man is known to me."

"Are you quite sure you don't recognise him? Look again—look
carefully. I will tell you why I am so anxious about it when we
leave the theatre. Stop! let me help you up here, where you can
see him better."

I helped the little man to perch himself on the edge of the raised
dais upon which the pit-seats were all placed. His small stature
was no hindrance to him—here he could see over the heads of the
ladies who were seated near the outermost part of the bench.