The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  They led me, starting from the left-hand side of the boat-house, along the edge of the trees, a distance, I should think, of between two and three hundred yards—and then, the sandy ground showed no further trace of them. Feeling that the persons whose course I was tracking, must necessarily have entered the plantation at this point, I entered it, too. At first, I could find no path—but I discovered one, afterwards, just faintly traced among the trees; and followed it. It took me, for some distance, in the direction of the village, until I stopped at a point where another foot-track crossed it. The brambles grew thickly on either side of this second path. I stood, looking down it, uncertain which way to take next; and, while I looked, I saw on one thorny branch, some fragments of fringe from a woman’s shawl. A closer examination of the fringe satisfied me that it had been torn from a shawl of Laura’s; and I instantly followed the second path. It brought me out, at last, to my great relief, at the back of the house. I say to my great relief, because I inferred that Laura must, for some unknown reason, have returned before me by this roundabout way. I went in by the court-yard and the offices. The first person whom I met in crossing the servants’-hall, was Mrs. Michelson, the housekeeper.

  “Do you know,” I asked, “whether Lady Glyde has come in from her walk or not?”

  “My lady came in, a little while ago, with Sir Percival,” answered the housekeeper. “I am afraid, Miss Halcombe, something very distressing has happened.”

  My heart sank within me. “You don’t mean an accident!” I said, faintly.

  “No, no—thank God, no accident. But my lady ran upstairs to her own room in tears; and Sir Percival has ordered me to give Fanny warning to leave in an hour’s time.”

  Fanny was Laura’s maid; a good affectionate girl who had been with her for years—the only person in the house, whose fidelity and devotion we could both depend upon.

  “Where is Fanny?” I inquired.

  “In my room, Miss Halcombe. The young woman is quite overcome; and I told her to sit down, and try to recover herself.”

  I went to Mrs. Michelson’s room, and found Fanny in a corner, with her box by her side, crying bitterly.

  She could give me no explanation whatever of her sudden dismissal. Sir Percival had ordered that she should have a month’s wages, in place of a month’s warning, and go. No reason had been assigned; no objection had been made to her conduct. She had been forbidden to appeal to her mistress, forbidden even to see her for a moment to say good-by. She was to go without explanations or farewells—and to go at once.

  After soothing the poor girl by a few friendly words, I asked where she proposed to sleep that night. She replied that she thought of going to the little inn in the village, the landlady of which was a respectable woman, known to the servants at Blackwater Park. The next morning, by leaving early, she might get back to her friends in Cumberland, without stopping in London, where she was a total stranger.

  I felt directly that Fanny’s departure offered us a safe means of communication with London and with Limmeridge House, of which it might be very important to avail ourselves. Accordingly, I told her that she might expect to hear from her mistress or from me in the course of the evening, and that she might depend on our both doing all that lay in our power to help her, under the trial of leaving us for the present. Those words said, I shook hands with her, and went upstairs.

  The door which led to Laura’s room, was the door of an ante-chamber, opening on to the passage. When I tried it, it was bolted on the inside.

  I knocked, and the door was opened by the same heavy, overgrown housemaid, whose lumpish insensibility had tried my patience so severely, on the day when I found the wounded dog. I had, since that time, discovered that her name was Margaret Porcher, and that she was the most awkward, slatternly, and obstinate servant in the house.

  On opening the door, she instantly stepped out to the threshold, and stood grinning at me in stolid silence.

  “Why do you stand there?” I said. “Don’t you see that I want to come in?”

  “Ah, but you mustn’t come in,” was the answer, with another and a broader grin still.

  “How dare you talk to me in that way? Stand back instantly!”

  She stretched out a great red hand and arm on each side of her, so as to bar the doorway, and slowly nodded her addle head at me.

  “Master’s orders,” she said; and nodded again.

  I had need of all my self-control to warn me against contesting the matter with her, and to remind me that the next words I had to say must be addressed to her master. I turned my back on her, and instantly went down stairs to find him. My resolution to keep my temper under all the irritations that Sir Percival could offer, was, by this time, as completely forgotten—I say so to my shame—as if I had never made it. It did me good—after all I had suffered and suppressed in that house—it actually did me good to feel how angry I was.

  The drawing-room and the breakfast-room were both empty. I went on to the library; and there I found Sir Percival, the Count, and Madame Fosco. They were all three standing up, close together, and Sir Percival had a little slip of paper in his hand. As I opened the door, I heard the Count say to him, “No—a thousand times over, No.”

  I walked straight up to him, and looked him full in the face.

  “Am I to understand, Sir Percival, that your wife’s room is a prison, and that your housemaid is the gaoler who keeps it?” I asked.

  “Yes; that is what you are to understand,” he answered. “Take care my gaoler hasn’t got double duty to do—take care your room is not a prison, too.”

  “Take you care how you treat your wife, and how you threaten me,” I broke out, in the heat of my anger. “There are laws in England to protect women from cruelty and outrage. If you hurt a hair of Laura’s head, if you dare to interfere with my freedom, come what may, to those laws I will appeal.”

  Instead of answering me, he turned round to the Count.

  “What did I tell you?” he asked. “What do you say now?”

  “What I said before,” replied the Count—“No.”

  Even in the vehemence of my anger, I felt his calm, cold, grey eyes on my face. They turned away from me, as soon as he had spoken, and looked significantly at his wife. Madame Fosco immediately moved close to my side, and, in that position, addressed Sir Percival before either of us could speak again.

  “Favour me with your attention, for one moment,” she said, in her clear, icily-suppressed tones. “I have to thank you, Sir Percival, for your hospitality; and to decline taking advantage of it any longer. I remain in no house in which ladies are treated as your wife and Miss Halcombe have been treated here to-day.”

  Sir Percival drew back a step, and stared at her in dead silence. The declaration he had just heard—a declaration which he well knew, as I well knew, Madame Fosco would not have ventured to make without her husband’s permission—seemed to petrify him with surprise. The Count stood by, and looked at his wife with the most enthusiastic admiration.

  “She is sublime!” he said to himself. He approached her, while he spoke, and drew her hand through his arm. “I am at your service, Eleanor,” he went on, with a quiet dignity that I had never noticed in him before. “And at Miss Halcombe’s service, if she will honour me by accepting all the assistance I can offer her.”

  “Damn it! what do you mean?” cried Sir Percival, as the Count quietly moved away, with his wife, to the door.

  “At other times I mean what I say; but, at this time, I mean what my wife says,” replied the impenetrable Italian. “We have changed places, Percival, for once; and Madame Fosco’s opinion is—mine.”

  Sir Percival crumpled up the paper in his hand; and, pushing past the Count, with another oath, stood between him and the door.

  “Have your own way,” he said, with baffled rage in his low, half-whispering tones. “Have your own way—and see what comes of it.” With those words, he left the room.

  Madame Fosco glanced inquiringly at he
r husband. “He has gone away very suddenly,” she said. “What does it mean?”

  “It means that you and I together have brought the worst-tempered man in all England to his senses,” answered the Count. “It means, Miss Halcombe, that Lady Glyde is relieved from a gross indignity, and you from the repetition of an unpardonable insult. Suffer me to express my admiration of your conduct and your courage at a very trying moment.”

  “Sincere admiration,” suggested Madame Fosco.

  “Sincere admiration,” echoed the Count.

  I had no longer the strength of my first angry resistance to outrage and injury to support me. My heart-sick anxiety to see Laura; my sense of my own helpless ignorance of what had happened at the boat-house, pressed on me with an intolerable weight. I tried to keep up appearances, by speaking to the Count and his wife in the tone which they had chosen to adopt in speaking to me. But the words failed on my lips—my breath came short and thick—my eyes looked longingly, in silence, at the door. The Count, understanding my anxiety, opened it, went out, and pulled it to after him. At the same time Sir Percival’s heavy step descended the stairs. I heard them whispering together, outside, while Madame Fosco was assuring me in her calmest and most conventional manner, that she rejoiced, for all our sakes, that Sir Percival’s conduct had not obliged her husband and herself to leave Blackwater Park. Before she had done speaking, the whispering ceased, the door opened, and the Count looked in.

  “Miss Halcombe,” he said, “I am happy to inform you that Lady Glyde is mistress again in her own house. I thought it might be more agreeable to you to hear of this change for the better from me, than from Sir Percival—and I have, therefore, expressly returned to mention it.”

  “Admirable delicacy!” said Madame Fosco, paying back her husband’s tribute of admiration, with the Count’s own coin, in the Count’s own manner. He smiled and bowed as if he had received a formal compliment from a polite stranger, and drew back to let me pass out first.

  Sir Percival was standing in the hall. As I hurried to the stairs I heard him call impatiently to the Count, to come out of the library.

  “What are you waiting there for?” he said; “I want to speak to you.”

  “And I want to think a little by myself,” replied the other. “Wait till later, Percival—wait till later.”

  Neither he nor his friend said any more. I gained the top of the stairs, and ran along the passage. In my haste and my agitation, I left the door of the ante-chamber open—but I closed the door of the bedroom the moment I was inside it.

  Laura was sitting alone at the far end of the room; her arms resting wearily on a table, and her face hidden in her hands. She started up, with a cry of delight, when she saw me.

  “How did you get here?” she asked. “Who gave you leave? Not Sir Percival?”

  In my overpowering anxiety to hear what she had to tell me, I could not answer her—I could only put questions, on my side. Laura’s eagerness to know what had passed down stairs proved, however, too strong to be resisted. She persistently repeated her inquiries.

  “The Count, of course!” I answered, impatiently. “Whose influence in the house——”

  She stopped me, with a gesture of disgust.

  “Don’t speak of him,” she cried. “The Count is the vilest creature breathing! The Count is a miserable Spy——!”

  Before we could either of us say another word, we were alarmed by a soft knocking at the door of the bedroom.

  I had not yet sat down; and I went first to see who it was. When I opened the door, Madame Fosco confronted me, with my handkerchief in her hand.

  “You dropped this down stairs, Miss Halcombe,” she said; “and I thought I could bring it to you, as I was passing by to my own room.”

  Her face, naturally pale, had turned to such a ghastly whiteness, that I started at the sight of it. Her hands, so sure and steady at all other times, trembled violently; and her eyes looked wolfishly past me through the open door, and fixed on Laura.

  She had been listening before she knocked! I saw it in her white face; I saw it in her trembling hands; I saw it in her look at Laura.

  After waiting an instant, she turned from me in silence, and slowly walked away.

  I closed the door again. “Oh, Laura! Laura! We shall both rue the day when you spoke those words!”

  “You would have spoken them yourself, Marian, if you had known what I know. Anne Catherick was right. There was a third person watching us in the plantation, yesterday; and that third person——”

  “Are you sure it was the Count?”

  “I am absolutely certain. He was Sir Percival’s spy—he was Sir Percival’s informer—he set Sir Percival watching and waiting, all the morning through, for Anne Catherick and for me.”

  “Is Anne found? Did you see her at the lake?”

  “No. She has saved herself by keeping away from the place. When I got to the boat-house, no one was there.”

  “Yes? yes?”

  “I went in, and sat waiting for a few minutes. But my restlessness made me get up again, to walk about a little. As I passed out, I saw some marks on the sand, close under the front of the boat-house. I stooped down to examine them, and discovered a word written in large letters, on the sand. The word was—LOOK.”

  “And you scraped away the sand, and dug a hollow place in it?”

  “How do you know that, Marian?”

  “I saw the hollow-place myself, when I followed you to the boat-house. Go on—go on!”

  “Yes; I scraped away the sand on the surface; and in a little while, I came to a strip of paper hidden beneath, which had writing on it. The writing was signed with Anne Catherick’s initials.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Sir Percival has taken it from me.”

  “Can you remember what the writing was? Do you think you can repeat it to me?”

  “In substance I can, Marian. It was very short. You would have remembered it, word for word.”

  “Try to tell me what the substance was, before we go any further.”

  She complied. I write the lines down here, exactly as she repeated them to me. They ran thus:

  “I was seen with you, yesterday, by a tall stout old man, and had to run to save myself. He was not quick enough on his feet to follow me, and he lost me among the trees. I dare not risk coming back here today, at the same time. I write this, and hide it in the sand, at six in the morning, to tell you so. When we speak next of your wicked husband’s Secret we must speak safely, or not at all. Try to have patience. I promise you shall see me again; and that soon.—A. C.”

  The reference to the “tall stout old man” (the terms of which Laura was certain that she had repeated to me correctly), left no doubt as to who the intruder had been. I called to mind that I had told Sir Percival, in the Count’s presence, the day before, that Laura had gone to the boat-house to look for her brooch. In all probability he had followed her there, in his officious way, to relieve her mind about the matter of the signature, immediately after he had mentioned the change in Sir Percival’s plans to me in the drawing-room. In this case, he could only have got to the neighbourhood of the boat-house, at the very moment when Anne Catherick discovered him. The suspiciously hurried manner in which she parted from Laura, had no doubt prompted his useless attempt to follow her. Of the conversation which had previously taken place between them, he could have heard nothing. The distance between the house and the lake, and the time at which he left me in the drawing-room, as compared with the time at which Laura and Anne Catherick had been speaking together, proved that fact to us, at any rate, beyond a doubt.

  Having arrived at something like a conclusion, so far, my next great interest was to know what discoveries Sir Percival had made, after Count Fosco had given him his information.

  “How came you to lose possession of the letter?” I asked. “What did you do with it, when you found it in the sand?”

  “After reading it once through,” she replied, “I took it i
nto the boat-house with me, to sit down, and look it over a second time. While I was reading, a shadow fell across the paper. I looked up; and saw Sir Percival standing in the doorway watching me.”

  “Did you try to hide the letter?”

  “I tried—but he stopped me. ‘You needn’t trouble to hide that,’ he said. ‘I happen to have read it.’ I could only look at him, helplessly—I could say nothing. ‘You understand?’ he went on; ‘I have read it. I dug it up out of the sand two hours since, and buried it again, and wrote the word above it again, and left it ready to your hands. You can’t lie yourself out of the scrape now. You saw Anne Catherick in secret yesterday; and you have got her letter in your hand at this moment. I have not caught her yet; but I have caught you. Give me the letter.’ He stepped close up to me—I was alone with him, Marian—what could I do?—I gave him the letter.”

  “What did he say, when you gave it to him?”

  “At first, he said nothing. He took me by the arm, and led me out of the boat-house, and looked about him, on all sides, as if he was afraid of our being seen or heard. Then, he clasped his hand fast round my arm, and whispered to me—‘What did Anne Catherick say to you yesterday?—I insist on hearing every word, from first to last.’ ”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “I was alone with him, Marian—his cruel hand was bruising my arm—what could I do?”

  “Is the mark on your arm still? Let me see it?”

  “Why do you want to see it?”

  “I want to see it, Laura, because our endurance must end, and our resistance must begin, to-day. That mark is a weapon to strike him with. Let me see it now—I may have to swear to it, at some future time.”

  “Oh, Marian, don’t look so! don’t talk so! It doesn’t hurt me, now!”

  “Let me see it!”

  She showed me the marks. I was past grieving over them, past crying over them, past shuddering over them. They say we are either better than men, or worse. If the temptation that has fallen in some women’s way, and made them worse, had fallen in mine, at that moment——Thank God! my face betrayed nothing that his wife could read. The gentle, innocent, affectionate creature thought I was frightened for her and sorry for her—and thought no more.