Woman in White (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Wilkie Collins

  Madame Fosco bowed her head twice—once sternly to me; once submissively to her husband—and glided out of the room.

  The Count walked to a writing-table near the window; opened his desk, and took from it several quireser of paper and a bundle of quill pens. He scattered the pens about the table, so that they might lie ready in all directions to be taken up when wanted, and then cut the paper into a heap of narrow slips, of the form used by professional writers for the press. ‘I shall make this a remarkable document,’ he said, looking at me over his shoulder. ‘Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess, is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?’

  He marched backwards and forwards in the room, until the coffee appeared, humming to himself, and marking the places at which obstacles occurred in the arrangement of his ideas, by striking his forehead, from time to time, with the palm of his hand. The enormous audacity with which he seized on the situation in which I had placed him, and made it the pedestal on which his vanity mounted for the one cherished purpose of self-display, mastered my astonishment by main force. Sincerely as I loathed the man, the prodigious strength of his character, even in its most trivial aspects, impressed me in spite of myself.

  The coffee was brought in by Madame Fosco. He kissed her hand, in grateful acknowledgment, and escorted her to the door; returned, poured out a cup of coffee for himself, and took it to the writing-table.

  ‘May I offer you some coffee, Mr. Hartright?’ he said, before he sat down.

  I declined.

  ‘What! you think I shall poison you?’ he said, gaily. ‘The English intellect is sound, so far as it goes,’ he continued, seating himself at the table; ‘but it has one grave defect—it is always cautious in the wrong place.’

  He dipped his pen in the ink; placed the first slip of paper before him, with a thump of his hand on the desk; cleared his throat; and began. He wrote with great noise and rapidity, in so large and bold a hand, and with such wide spaces between the lines, that he reached the bottom of the slip in not more than two minutes certainly from the time when he started at the top. Each slip as he finished it, was paged, and tossed over his shoulder, out of his way, on the floor. When his first pen was worn out, that went over his shoulder too; and he pounced on a second from the supply scattered about the table. Slip after slip, by dozens, by fifties, by hundreds, flew over his shoulders on either side of him, till he had snowed himself up in paper all round his chair. Hour after hour passed—and there I sat watching; there he sat, writing. He never stopped, except to sip his coffee; and when that was exhausted, to smack his forehead, from time to time. One o‘clock struck, two, three, four—and still the slips flew about all round him; still the untiring pen scraped its way ceaselessly from top to bottom of the page; still the white chaos of paper rose higher and higher all round his chair. At four o’clock, I heard a sudden splutter of the pen, indicative of the flourish with which he signed his name. ‘Bravo!’ he cried—springing to his feet with the activity of a young man, and looking me straight in the face with a smile of superb triumph.

  ‘Done, Mr. Hartright!’ he announced, with a self-renovating thump of his fist on his broad breast. ‘Done, to my own profound satisfaction—to your profound astonishment, when you read what I have written. The subject is exhausted: the man—Fosco—is not. I proceed to the arrangement of my slips, to the revision of my slips, to the reading of my slips—addressed, emphatically, to your private ear. Four o’clock has just struck. Good! Arrangement, revision, reading, from four to five. Short snooze of restoration for myself; from five to six. Final preparations, from six to seven. Affair of agent and sealed letter from seven to eight. At eight, en route. Behold the programme!’

  He sat down cross-legged on the floor, among his papers; strung them together with a bodkines and a piece of string; revised them; wrote all the titles and honours by which he was personally distinguished, at the head of the first page; and then read the manuscript to me, with loud theatrical emphasis and profuse theatrical gesticulation. The reader will have an opportunity, ere long, of forming his own opinion of the document. It will be sufficient to mention here that it answered my purpose.

  He next wrote me the address of the person from whom he had hired the fly, and handed me Sir Percival’s letter. It was dated from Hampshire, on the 25th of July; and it announced the journey of ‘Lady Glyde’ to London, on the 26th. Thus, on the very day (the 25th), when the doctor’s certificate declared that she had died in St. John’s Wood, she was alive, by Sir Percival’s own showing, at Blackwater—and, on the day after, she was to take a journey! When the proof of that journey was obtained from the flyman, the evidence would be complete.

  ‘A quarter past five,’ said the Count, looking at his watch. ‘Time for my restorative snooze. I personally resemble Napoleon the Great, as you may have remarked, Mr. Hartright—I also resemble that immortal man in my power of commanding sleep at will. Excuse me, one moment. I will summon Madame Fosco, to keep you from feeling dull.’

  Knowing as well as he did, that he was summoning Madame Fosco, to ensure my not leaving the house while he was asleep, I made no reply, and occupied myself in tying up the papers which he had placed in my possession.

  The lady came in, cool, pale, and venomous as ever. ‘Amuse Mr. Hartright, my angel,’ said the Count. He placed a chair for her, kissed her hand for the second time, withdrew to a sofa, and, in three minutes, was as peacefully and happily asleep as the most virtuous man in existence.

  Madame Fosco took a book from the table—sat down—and looked at me, with the steady, vindictive malice of a woman who never forgot and never forgave.

  ‘I have been listening to your conversation with my husband,’ she said. ‘If I had been in his place—I would have laid you dead on the hearth-rug.’

  With those words, she opened her book; and never looked at me, or spoke to me, from that time till the time when her husband woke.

  He opened his eyes and rose from the sofa, accurately to an hour from the time when he had gone to sleep.

  ‘I feel infinitely refreshed,’ he remarked. ‘Eleanor, my good wife, are you all ready, upstairs? That is well. My little packing here can be completed in ten minutes—my travelling-dress assumed in ten minutes more. What remains, before the agent comes?’ He looked about the room, and noticed the cage with his white mice in it. ‘Ah!’ he cried piteously; ‘a last laceration of my sympathies still remains. My innocent pets! my little cherished children! what am I to do with them? For the present, we are settled nowhere; for the present, we travel incessandy—the less baggage we carry, the better for ourselves. My cockatoo, my canaries, and my little mice—who will cherish them, when their good Papa is gone?’

  He walked about the room, deep in thought. He had not been at all troubled about writing his confession, but he was visibly perplexed and distressed about the far more important question of the disposal of his pets. After long consideration, he suddenly sat down again at the writing-table.

  ‘An idea!’ he exclaimed. ‘I will offer my canaries and my cockatoo to this vast Metropolis—my agent shall present them, in my name, to the Zoological Gardens of London. The Document that describes them shall be drawn out on the spot.’

  He began to write, repeating the words as they flowed from his pen.

  ‘Number One. Cockatoo of transcendent plumage: attraction, of himself, to all visitors of taste. Number Two. Canaries of unrivalled vivacity and intelligence: worthy of the garden of Eden, worthy also of the garden in the Regent’s Park. Homage to British Zoology. Offered by Fosco.’

  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, up-stairs.’

  ‘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 down stairs, 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 the 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.

  The Story continued by Isidor, Ottavio, Baldassare Fosco; 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;18

  Attached (in Honorary Capacities) to Societies Musical, Societies Medical,

  Societies Philosophical, and Societies General Benevolent, throughout

  Europe; &c., &c., &c.

  The Count’s Narrative.

  In the summer of eighteen hundred and fifty, I arrived in England, charged with a delicate political mission from abroad.et 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 civilized 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 madhouse, 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.