The Woman in White (92 page)

The pen spluttered again, and the flourish was attached to his
signature.

"Count! you have not included the mice," said Madame Fosco

He left the table, took her hand, and placed it on his heart.

"All human resolution, Eleanor," he said solemnly, "has its
limits. MY limits are inscribed on that Document. I cannot part
with my white mice. Bear with me, my angel, and remove them to
their travelling cage upstairs."

"Admirable tenderness!" said Madame Fosco, admiring her husband,
with a last viperish look in my direction. She took up the cage
carefully, and left the room.

The Count looked at his watch. In spite of his resolute
assumption of composure, he was getting anxious for the agent's
arrival. The candles had long since been extinguished, and the
sunlight of the new morning poured into the room. It was not till
five minutes past seven that the gate bell rang, and the agent
made his appearance. He was a foreigner with a dark beard.

"Mr. Hartright—Monsieur Rubelle," said the Count, introducing us.
He took the agent (a foreign spy, in every line of his face, if
ever there was one yet) into a corner of the room, whispered some
directions to him, and then left us together. "Monsieur Rubelle,"
as soon as we were alone, suggested with great politeness that I
should favour him with his instructions. I wrote two lines to
Pesca, authorising him to deliver my sealed letter "to the
bearer," directed the note, and handed it to Monsieur Rubelle.

The agent waited with me till his employer returned, equipped in
travelling costume. The Count examined the address of my letter
before he dismissed the agent. "I thought so!" he said, turning
on me with a dark look, and altering again in his manner from that
moment.

He completed his packing, and then sat consulting a travelling
map, making entries in his pocket-book, and looking every now and
then impatiently at his watch. Not another word, addressed to
myself, passed his lips. The near approach of the hour for his
departure, and the proof he had seen of the communication
established between Pesca and myself, had plainly recalled his
whole attention to the measures that were necessary for securing
his escape.

A little before eight o'clock, Monsieur Rubelle came back with my
unopened letter in his hand. The Count looked carefully at the
superscription and the seal, lit a candle, and burnt the letter.
"I perform my promise," he said, "but this matter, Mr. Hartright,
shall not end here."

The agent had kept at the door the cab in which he had returned.
He and the maid-servant now busied themselves in removing the
luggage. Madame Fosco came downstairs, thickly veiled, with the
travelling cage of the white mice in her hand. She neither spoke
to me nor looked towards me. Her husband escorted her to the cab.
"Follow me as far as the passage," he whispered in my ear; "I may
want to speak to you at the last moment."

I went out to the door, the agent standing below me in the front
garden. The Count came back alone, and drew me a few steps inside
the passage.

"Remember the Third condition!" he whispered. "You shall hear
from me, Mr. Hartright—I may claim from you the satisfaction of a
gentleman sooner than you think for." He caught my hand before I
was aware of him, and wrung it hard—then turned to the door,
stopped, and came back to me again.

"One word more," he said confidentially. "When I last saw Miss
Halcombe, she looked thin and ill. I am anxious about that
admirable woman. Take care of her, sir! With my hand on my heart,
I solemnly implore you, take care of Miss Halcombe!"

Those were the last words he said to me before he squeezed his
huge body into the cab and drove off.

The agent and I waited at the door a few moments looking after
him. While we were standing together, a second cab appeared from
a turning a little way down the road. It followed the direction
previously taken by the Count's cab, and as it passed the house
and the open garden gate, a person inside looked at us out of the
window. The stranger at the Opera again!—the foreigner with a
scar on his left cheek.

"You wait here with me, sir, for half an hour more!" said Monsieur
Rubelle.

"I do."

We returned to the sitting-room. I was in no humour to speak to
the agent, or to allow him to speak to me. I took out the papers
which the Count had placed in my hands, and read the terrible
story of the conspiracy told by the man who had planned and
perpetrated it.

(Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight Grand Cross of the Order
of the Brazen Crown, Perpetual Arch-Master of the Rosicrucian
Masons of Mesopotamia; Attached (in Honorary Capacities) to
Societies Musical, Societies Medical, Societies Philosophical, and
Societies General Benevolent, throughout Europe; etc. etc. etc.)

THE COUNT'S NARRATIVE

In the summer of eighteen hundred and fifty I arrived in England,
charged with a delicate political mission from abroad.
Confidential persons were semi-officially connected with me, whose
exertions I was authorised to direct, Monsieur and Madame Rubelle
being among the number. Some weeks of spare time were at my
disposal, before I entered on my functions by establishing myself
in the suburbs of London. Curiosity may stop here to ask for some
explanation of those functions on my part. I entirely sympathise
with the request. I also regret that diplomatic reserve forbids
me to comply with it.

I arranged to pass the preliminary period of repose, to which I
have just referred, in the superb mansion of my late lamented
friend, Sir Percival Glyde. HE arrived from the Continent with
his wife. I arrived from the Continent with MINE. England is the
land of domestic happiness—how appropriately we entered it under
these domestic circumstances!

The bond of friendship which united Percival and myself was
strengthened, on this occasion, by a touching similarity in the
pecuniary position on his side and on mine. We both wanted money.
Immense necessity! Universal want! Is there a civilised human
being who does not feel for us? How insensible must that man be!
Or how rich!

I enter into no sordid particulars, in discussing this part of the
subject. My mind recoils from them. With a Roman austerity, I
show my empty purse and Percival's to the shrinking public gaze.
Let us allow the deplorable fact to assert itself, once for all,
in that manner, and pass on.

We were received at the mansion by the magnificent creature who is
inscribed on my heart as "Marian," who is known in the colder
atmosphere of society as "Miss Halcombe."

Just Heaven! with what inconceivable rapidity I learnt to adore
that woman. At sixty, I worshipped her with the volcanic ardour
of eighteen. All the gold of my rich nature was poured hopelessly
at her feet. My wife—poor angel!—my wife, who adores me, got
nothing but the shillings and the pennies. Such is the World,
such Man, such Love. What are we (I ask) but puppets in a show-
box? Oh, omnipotent Destiny, pull our strings gently! Dance us
mercifully off our miserable little stage!

The preceding lines, rightly understood, express an entire system
of philosophy. It is mine.

I resume.

The domestic position at the commencement of our residence at
Blackwater Park has been drawn with amazing accuracy, with
profound mental insight, by the hand of Marian herself. (Pass me
the intoxicating familiarity of mentioning this sublime creature
by her Christian name.) Accurate knowledge of the contents of her
journal—to which I obtained access by clandestine means,
unspeakably precious to me in the remembrance—warns my eager pen
from topics which this essentially exhaustive woman has already
made her own.

The interests—interests, breathless and immense!—with which I am
here concerned, begin with the deplorable calamity of Marian's
illness.

The situation at this period was emphatically a serious one.
Large sums of money, due at a certain time, were wanted by
Percival (I say nothing of the modicum equally necessary to
myself), and the one source to look to for supplying them was the
fortune of his wife, of which not one farthing was at his disposal
until her death. Bad so far, and worse still farther on. My
lamented friend had private troubles of his own, into which the
delicacy of my disinterested attachment to him forbade me from
inquiring too curiously. I knew nothing but that a woman, named
Anne Catherick, was hidden in the neighbourhood, that she was in
communication with Lady Glyde, and that the disclosure of a
secret, which would be the certain ruin of Percival, might be the
result. He had told me himself that he was a lost man, unless his
wife was silenced, and unless Anne Catherick was found. If he was
a lost man, what would become of our pecuniary interests?
Courageous as I am by nature, I absolutely trembled at the idea!

The whole force of my intelligence was now directed to the finding
of Anne Catherick. Our money affairs, important as they were,
admitted of delay—but the necessity of discovering the woman
admitted of none. I only knew her by description, as presenting
an extraordinary personal resemblance to Lady Glyde. The
statement of this curious fact—intended merely to assist me in
identifying the person of whom we were in search—when coupled
with the additional information that Anne Catherick had escaped
from a mad-house, started the first immense conception in my mind,
which subsequently led to such amazing results. That conception
involved nothing less than the complete transformation of two
separate identities. Lady Glyde and Anne Catherick were to change
names, places, and destinies, the one with the other—the
prodigious consequences contemplated by the change being the gain
of thirty thousand pounds, and the eternal preservation of Sir
Percival's secret.

My instincts (which seldom err) suggested to me, on reviewing the
circumstances, that our invisible Anne would, sooner or later,
return to the boat-house at the Blackwater lake. There I posted
myself, previously mentioning to Mrs. Michelson, the housekeeper,
that I might be found when wanted, immersed in study, in that
solitary place. It is my rule never to make unnecessary
mysteries, and never to set people suspecting me for want of a
little seasonable candour on my part. Mrs. Michelson believed in
me from first to last. This ladylike person (widow of a
Protestant priest) overflowed with faith. Touched by such
superfluity of simple confidence in a woman of her mature years, I
opened the ample reservoirs of my nature and absorbed it all.

I was rewarded for posting myself sentinel at the lake by the
appearance—not of Anne Catherick herself, but of the person in
charge of her. This individual also overflowed with simple faith,
which I absorbed in myself, as in the case already mentioned. I
leave her to describe the circumstances (if she has not done so
already) under which she introduced me to the object of her
maternal care. When I first saw Anne Catherick she was asleep. I
was electrified by the likeness between this unhappy woman and
Lady Glyde. The details of the grand scheme which had suggested
themselves in outline only, up to that period, occurred to me, in
all their masterly combination, at the sight of the sleeping face.
At the same time, my heart, always accessible to tender
influences, dissolved in tears at the spectacle of suffering
before me. I instantly set myself to impart relief. In other
words, I provided the necessary stimulant for strengthening Anne
Catherick to perform the journey to London.

The best years of my life have been passed in the ardent study of
medical and chemical science. Chemistry especially has always had
irresistible attractions for me from the enormous, the illimitable
power which the knowledge of it confers. Chemists—I assert it
emphatically—might sway, if they pleased, the destinies of
humanity. Let me explain this before I go further.

Mind, they say, rules the world. But what rules the mind? The
body (follow me closely here) lies at the mercy of the most
omnipotent of all potentates—the Chemist. Give me—Fosco—
chemistry; and when Shakespeare has conceived Hamlet, and sits
down to execute the conception—with a few grains of powder
dropped into his daily food, I will reduce his mind, by the action
of his body, till his pen pours out the most abject drivel that
has ever degraded paper. Under similar circumstances, revive me
the illustrious Newton. I guarantee that when he sees the apple
fall he shall EAT IT, instead of discovering the principle of
gravitation. Nero's dinner shall transform Nero into the mildest
of men before he has done digesting it, and the morning draught of
Alexander the Great shall make Alexander run for his life at the
first sight of the enemy the same afternoon. On my sacred word of
honour it is lucky for Society that modern chemists are, by
incomprehensible good fortune, the most harmless of mankind. The
mass are worthy fathers of families, who keep shops. The few are
philosophers besotted with admiration for the sound of their own
lecturing voices, visionaries who waste their lives on fantastic
impossibilities, or quacks whose ambition soars no higher than our
corns. Thus Society escapes, and the illimitable power of
Chemistry remains the slave of the most superficial and the most
insignificant ends.

Why this outburst? Why this withering eloquence?

Because my conduct has been misrepresented, because my motives
have been misunderstood. It has been assumed that I used my vast
chemical resources against Anne Catherick, and that I would have
used them if I could against the magnificent Marian herself.
Odious insinuations both! All my interests were concerned (as will
be seen presently) in the preservation of Anne Catherick's life.
All my anxieties were concentrated on Marian's rescue from the
hands of the licensed imbecile who attended her, and who found my
advice confirmed from first to last by the physician from London.
On two occasions only—both equally harmless to the individual on
whom I practised—did I summon to myself the assistance of
chemical knowledge. On the first of the two, after following
Marian to the inn at Blackwater (studying, behind a convenient
waggon which hid me from her, the poetry of motion, as embodied in
her walk), I availed myself of the services of my invaluable wife,
to copy one and to intercept the other of two letters which my
adored enemy had entrusted to a discarded maid. In this case, the
letters being in the bosom of the girl's dress, Madame Fosco could
only open them, read them, perform her instructions, seal them,
and put them back again by scientific assistance—which assistance
I rendered in a half-ounce bottle. The second occasion, when the
same means were employed, was the occasion (to which I shall soon
refer) of Lady Glyde's arrival in London. Never at any other time
was I indebted to my Art as distinguished from myself. To all
other emergencies and complications my natural capacity for
grappling, single-handed, with circumstances, was invariably
equal. I affirm the all-pervading intelligence of that capacity.
At the expense of the Chemist I vindicate the Man.