The Woman in White (41 page)

The speculations in which we might have indulged this morning, on
the subject of the figure at the lake and the foot-steps in the
plantation, have been all suspended by a trifling accident which
has caused Laura great regret. She has lost the little brooch I
gave her for a keepsake on the day before her marriage. As she
wore it when we went out yesterday evening we can only suppose
that it must have dropped from her dress, either in the boat-house
or on our way back. The servants have been sent to search, and
have returned unsuccessful. And now Laura herself has gone to
look for it. Whether she finds it or not the loss will help to
excuse her absence from the house, if Sir Percival returns before
the letter from Mr. Gilmore's partner is placed in my hands.

One o'clock has just struck. I am considering whether I had
better wait here for the arrival of the messenger from London, or
slip away quietly, and watch for him outside the lodge gate.

My suspicion of everybody and everything in this house inclines me
to think that the second plan may be the best. The Count is safe
in the breakfast-room. I heard him, through the door, as I ran
upstairs ten minutes since, exercising his canary-birds at their
tricks:—"Come out on my little finger, my pret-pret-pretties!
Come out, and hop upstairs! One, two, three—and up! Three, two,
one—and down! One, two, three—twit-twit-twit-tweet!" The birds
burst into their usual ecstasy of singing, and the Count chirruped
and whistled at them in return, as if he was a bird himself. My
room door is open, and I can hear the shrill singing and whistling
at this very moment. If I am really to slip out without being
observed, now is my time.

FOUR O'CLOCK. The three hours that have passed since I made my
last entry have turned the whole march of events at Blackwater
Park in a new direction. Whether for good or for evil, I cannot
and dare not decide.

Let me get back first to the place at which I left off, or I shall
lose myself in the confusion of my own thoughts.

I went out, as I had proposed, to meet the messenger with my
letter from London at the lodge gate. On the stairs I saw no one.
In the hall I heard the Count still exercising his birds. But on
crossing the quadrangle outside, I passed Madame Fosco, walking by
herself in her favourite circle, round and round the great fish-
pond. I at once slackened my pace, so as to avoid all appearance
of being in a hurry, and even went the length, for caution's sake,
of inquiring if she thought of going out before lunch. She smiled
at me in the friendliest manner—said she preferred remaining near
the house, nodded pleasantly, and re-entered the hall. I looked
back, and saw that she had closed the door before I had opened the
wicket by the side of the carriage gates.

In less than a quarter of an hour I reached the lodge.

The lane outside took a sudden turn to the left, ran on straight
for a hundred yards or so, and then took another sharp turn to the
right to join the high-road. Between these two turns, hidden from
the lodge on one side, and from the way to the station on the
other, I waited, walking backwards and forwards. High hedges were
on either side of me, and for twenty minutes, by my watch, I
neither saw nor heard anything. At the end of that time the sound
of a carriage caught my ear, and I was met, as I advanced towards
the second turning, by a fly from the railway. I made a sign to
the driver to stop. As he obeyed me a respectable-looking man put
his head out of the window to see what was the matter.

"I beg your pardon," I said, "but am I right in supposing that you
are going to Blackwater Park?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"With a letter for any one?"

"With a letter for Miss Halcombe, ma'am."

"You may give me the letter. I am Miss Halcombe."

The man touched his hat, got out of the fly immediately, and gave
me the letter.

I opened it at once and read these lines. I copy them here,
thinking it best to destroy the original for caution's sake.

"DEAR MADAM,—Your letter received this morning has caused me very
great anxiety. I will reply to it as briefly and plainly as
possible.

"My careful consideration of the statement made by yourself, and
my knowledge of Lady Glyde's position, as defined in the
settlement, lead me, I regret to say, to the conclusion that a
loan of the trust money to Sir Percival (or, in other words, a
loan of some portion of the twenty thousand pounds of Lady Glyde's
fortune) is in contemplation, and that she is made a party to the
deed, in order to secure her approval of a flagrant breach of
trust, and to have her signature produced against her if she
should complain hereafter. It is impossible, on any other
supposition, to account, situated as she is, for her execution to
a deed of any kind being wanted at all.

"In the event of Lady Glyde's signing such a document, as I am
compelled to suppose the deed in question to be, her trustees
would be at liberty to advance money to Sir Percival out of her
twenty thousand pounds. If the amount so lent should not be paid
back, and if Lady Glyde should have children, their fortune will
then be diminished by the sum, large or small, so advanced. In
plainer terms still, the transaction, for anything that Lady Glyde
knows to the contrary, may be a fraud upon her unborn children.

"Under these serious circumstances, I would recommend Lady Glyde
to assign as a reason for withholding her signature, that she
wishes the deed to be first submitted to myself, as her family
solicitor (in the absence of my partner, Mr. Gilmore). No
reasonable objection can be made to taking this course—for, if
the transaction is an honourable one, there will necessarily be no
difficulty in my giving my approval.

"Sincerely assuring you of my readiness to afford any additional
help or advice that may be wanted, I beg to remain, Madam, your
faithful servant,

WILLIAM KYRLE.

I read this kind and sensible letter very thankfully. It supplied
Laura with a reason for objecting to the signature which was
unanswerable, and which we could both of us understand. The
messenger waited near me while I was reading to receive his
directions when I had done.

"Will you be good enough to say that I understand the letter, and
that I am very much obliged?" I said. "There is no other reply
necessary at present."

Exactly at the moment when I was speaking those words, holding the
letter open in my hand, Count Fosco turned the corner of the lane
from the high-road, and stood before me as if he had sprung up out
of the earth.

The suddenness of his appearance, in the very last place under
heaven in which I should have expected to see him, took me
completely by surprise. The messenger wished me good-morning, and
got into the fly again. I could not say a word to him—I was not
even able to return his bow. The conviction that I was
discovered—and by that man, of all others—absolutely petrified
me.

"Are you going back to the house, Miss Halcombe?" he inquired,
without showing the least surprise on his side, and without even
looking after the fly, which drove off while he was speaking to
me.

I collected myself sufficiently to make a sign in the affirmative.

"I am going back too," he said. "Pray allow me the pleasure of
accompanying you. Will you take my arm? You look surprised at
seeing me!"

I took his arm. The first of my scattered senses that came back
was the sense that warned me to sacrifice anything rather than
make an enemy of him.

"You look surprised at seeing me!" he repeated in his quietly
pertinacious way.

"I thought, Count, I heard you with your birds in the breakfast-
room," I answered, as quietly and firmly as I could.

"Surely. But my little feathered children, dear lady, are only
too like other children. They have their days of perversity, and
this morning was one of them. My wife came in as I was putting
them back in their cage, and said she had left you going out alone
for a walk. You told her so, did you not?"

"Certainly."

"Well, Miss Halcombe, the pleasure of accompanying you was too
great a temptation for me to resist. At my age there is no harm in
confessing so much as that, is there? I seized my hat, and set off
to offer myself as your escort. Even so fat an old man as Fosco
is surely better than no escort at all? I took the wrong path—I
came back in despair, and here I am, arrived (may I say it?) at
the height of my wishes."

He talked on in this complimentary strain with a fluency which
left me no exertion to make beyond the effort of maintaining my
composure. He never referred in the most distant manner to what
he had seen in the lane, or to the letter which I still had in my
hand. This ominous discretion helped to convince me that he must
have surprised, by the most dishonourable means, the secret of my
application in Laura's interest to the lawyer; and that, having
now assured himself of the private manner in which I had received
the answer, he had discovered enough to suit his purposes, and was
only bent on trying to quiet the suspicions which he knew he must
have aroused in my mind. I was wise enough, under these
circumstances, not to attempt to deceive him by plausible
explanations, and woman enough, notwithstanding my dread of him,
to feel as if my hand was tainted by resting on his arm.

On the drive in front of the house we met the dog-cart being taken
round to the stables. Sir Percival had just returned. He came
out to meet us at the house-door. Whatever other results his
journey might have had, it had not ended in softening his savage
temper.

"Oh! here are two of you come back," he said, with a lowering
face. "What is the meaning of the house being deserted in this
way? Where is Lady Glyde?"

I told him of the loss of the brooch, and said that Laura had gone
into the plantation to look for it.

"Brooch or no brooch," he growled sulkily, "I recommend her not to
forget her appointment in the library this afternoon. I shall
expect to see her in half an hour."

I took my hand from the Count's arm, and slowly ascended the
steps. He honoured me with one of his magnificent bows, and then
addressed himself gaily to the scowling master of the house.

"Tell me, Percival," he said, "have you had a pleasant drive? And
has your pretty shining Brown Molly come back at all tired?"

"Brown Molly be hanged—and the drive too! I want my lunch."

"And I want five minutes' talk with you, Percival, first,"
returned the Count. "Five minutes' talk, my friend, here on the
grass."

"What about?"

"About business that very much concerns you."

I lingered long enough in passing through the hall-door to hear
this question and answer, and to see Sir Percival thrust his hands
into his pockets in sullen hesitation.

"If you want to badger me with any more of your infernal
scruples," he said, "I for one won't hear them. I want my lunch."

"Come out here and speak to me," repeated the Count, still
perfectly uninfluenced by the rudest speech that his friend could
make to him.

Sir Percival descended the steps. The Count took him by the arm,
and walked him away gently. The "business," I was sure, referred
to the question of the signature. They were speaking of Laura and
of me beyond a doubt. I felt heart-sick and faint with anxiety.
It might be of the last importance to both of us to know what they
were saying to each other at that moment, and not one word of it
could by any possibility reach my ears.

I walked about the house, from room to room, with the lawyer's
letter in my bosom (I was afraid by this time even to trust it
under lock and key), till the oppression of my suspense half
maddened me. There were no signs of Laura's return, and I thought
of going out to look for her. But my strength was so exhausted by
the trials and anxieties of the morning that the heat of the day
quite overpowered me, and after an attempt to get to the door I
was obliged to return to the drawing-room and lie down on the
nearest sofa to recover.

I was just composing myself when the door opened softly and the
Count looked in.

"A thousand pardons, Miss Halcombe," he said; "I only venture to
disturb you because I am the bearer of good news. Percival—who
is capricious in everything, as you know—has seen fit to alter
his mind at the last moment, and the business of the signature is
put off for the present. A great relief to all of us, Miss
Halcombe, as I see with pleasure in your face. Pray present my
best respects and felicitations, when you mention this pleasant
change of circumstances to Lady Glyde."

He left me before I had recovered my astonishment. There could be
no doubt that this extraordinary alteration of purpose in the
matter of the signature was due to his influence, and that his
discovery of my application to London yesterday, and of my having
received an answer to it to-day, had offered him the means of
interfering with certain success.

I felt these impressions, but my mind seemed to share the
exhaustion of my body, and I was in no condition to dwell on them
with any useful reference to the doubtful present or the
threatening future. I tried a second time to run out and find
Laura, but my head was giddy and my knees trembled under me.
There was no choice but to give it up again and return to the
sofa, sorely against my will.

The quiet in the house, and the low murmuring hum of summer
insects outside the open window, soothed me. My eyes closed of
themselves, and I passed gradually into a strange condition, which
was not waking—for I knew nothing of what was going on about me,
and not sleeping—for I was conscious of my own repose. In this
state my fevered mind broke loose from me, while my weary body was
at rest, and in a trance, or day-dream of my fancy—I know not
what to call it—I saw Walter Hartright. I had not thought of him
since I rose that morning—Laura had not said one word to me
either directly or indirectly referring to him—and yet I saw him
now as plainly as if the past time had returned, and we were both
together again at Limmeridge House.