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

by Lynn Shepherd

  Marian preserved her composure while I described my interview with Mr. Kyrle. But her face became troubled when I spoke next of the men who had followed me from the lawyer’s office, and when I told her of the discovery of Sir Percival’s return.

  “Bad news, Walter,” she said; “the worst news you could bring. Have you nothing more to tell me?”

  “I have something to give you,” I replied, handing her the note which Mr. Kyrle had confided to my care.

  She looked at the address, and recognised the handwriting instantly.

  “You know your correspondent?” I said.

  “Too well,” she answered. “My correspondent is Count Fosco.”

  With that reply she opened the note. Her face flushed deeply while she read it—her eyes brightened with anger, as she handed it to me to read in my turn.

  The note contained these lines:

  “Impelled by honourable admiration—honourable to myself, honourable to you—I write, magnificent Marian, in the interests of your tranquillity, to say two consoling words:

  “Fear nothing!

  “Exercise your fine natural sense, and remain in retirement. Dear and admirable woman! invite no dangerous publicity. Resignation is sublime—adopt it. The modest repose of home is eternally fresh—enjoy it. The Storms of life pass harmless over the valley of Seclusion—dwell, dear lady, in the valley.

  “Do this; and I authorise you to fear nothing. No new calamity shall lacerate your sensibilities—sensibilities precious to me as my own. You shall not be molested; the fair companion of your retreat shall not be pursued. She has found a new asylum, in your heart. Priceless asylum!—I envy her, and leave her there.

  “One last word of affectionate warning, of paternal caution—and I tear myself from the charm of addressing you; I close these fervent lines.

  “Advance no farther than you have gone already; compromise no serious interests; threaten nobody. Do not, I implore you, force me into action—ME, the Man of Action—when it is the cherished object of my ambition to be passive, to restrict the vast reach of my energies and my combinations, for your sake. If you have rash friends, moderate their deplorable ardour. If Mr. Hartright returns to England, hold no communication with him. I walk on a path of my own; and Percival follows at my heels. On the day when Mr. Hartright crosses that path, he is a lost man.”

  The only signature to these lines was the initial letter F, surrounded by a circle of intricate flourishes. I threw the letter on the table, with all the contempt that I felt for it.

  “He is trying to frighten you—a sure sign that he is frightened himself,” I said.

  She was too genuine a woman to treat the letter as I treated it. The insolent familiarity of the language was too much for her self-control. As she looked at me across the table, her hands clenched themselves in her lap, and the old quick fiery temper flamed out again, brightly, in her cheeks and her eyes.

  “Walter!” she said, “if ever those two men are at your mercy, and if you are obliged to spare one of them—don’t let it be the Count.”

  “I will keep his letter, Marian, to help my memory when the time comes.”

  She looked at me attentively as I put the letter away in my pocket-book.

  “When the time comes?” she repeated. “Can you speak of the future as if you were certain of it?—certain after what you have heard in Mr. Kyrle’s office, after what has happened to you to-day?”

  “I don’t count the time from to-day, Marian. All I have done to-day, is to ask another man to act for me. I count from to-morrow——”

  “Why from to-morrow?”

  “Because to-morrow I mean to act for myself.”

  “How?”

  “I shall go to Blackwater by the first train; and return, I hope, at night.”

  “To Blackwater!”

  “Yes. I have had time to think, since I left Mr. Kyrle. His opinion, on one point, confirms my own. We must persist, to the last, in hunting down the date of Laura’s journey. The one weak point in the conspiracy, and probably the one chance of proving that she is a living woman, centre in the discovery of that date.”

  “You mean,” said Marian, “the discovery that Laura did not leave Blackwater Park till after the date of her death on the doctor’s certificate?”

  “Certainly.”

  “What makes you think it might have been after? Laura can tell us nothing of the time she was in London.”

  “But the owner of the Asylum told you that she was received there on the twenty-seventh of July. I doubt Count Fosco’s ability to keep her in London, and to keep her insensible to all that was passing around her, more than one night. In that case, she must have started on the twenty-sixth, and must have come to London one day after the date of her own death on the doctor’s certificate. If we can prove that date, we prove our case against Sir Percival and the Count.”

  “Yes, yes—I see! But how is the proof to be obtained?”

  “Mrs. Michelson’s narrative has suggested to me two ways of trying to obtain it. One of them is, to question the doctor, Mr. Dawson—who must know when he resumed his attendance at Blackwater Park, after Laura left the house. The other is, to make inquiries at the inn to which Sir Percival drove away by himself, at night. We know that his departure followed Laura’s, after the lapse of a few hours; and we may get at the date in that way. The attempt is at least worth making—and, to-morrow, I am determined it shall be made.”

  “And suppose it fails—I look at the worst, now, Walter; but I will look at the best, if disappointments come to try us—suppose no one can help you at Blackwater?”

  “There are two men who can help me, and shall help me, in London—Sir Percival and the Count. Innocent people may well forget the date—but they are guilty, and they know it. If I fail everywhere else, I mean to force a confession out of one or both of them on my own terms.”

  All the woman flushed up in Marian’s face, as I spoke.

  “Begin with the Count!” she whispered, eagerly. “For my sake, begin with the Count.”

  “We must begin, for Laura’s sake, where there is the best chance of success,” I replied.

  The colour faded from her face again, and she shook her head sadly.

  “Yes,” she said, “you are right—it was mean and miserable of me to say that. I try to be patient, Walter, and succeed better now than I did in happier times. But I have a little of my old temper still left—and it will get the better of me when I think of the Count!”

  “His turn will come,” I said. “But, remember, there is no weak place in his life that we know of, yet.” I waited a little to let her recover her self-possession; and then spoke the decisive words:

  “Marian! There is a weak place we both know of in Sir Percival’s life——”

  “You mean the Secret!”

  “Yes: the Secret. It is our only sure hold on him. I can force him from his position of security, I can drag him and his villainy into the face of day, by no other means. Whatever the Count may have done, Sir Percival has consented to the conspiracy against Laura from another motive besides the motive of gain. You heard him tell the Count that he believed his wife knew enough to ruin him? You heard him say that he was a lost man if the secret of Anne Catherick was known?”

  “Yes! yes! I did.”

  “Well, Marian, when our other resources have failed us, I mean to know it. My old superstition clings to me, even yet. I say again, the woman in white is a living influence in our three lives. The End is appointed; the End is drawing us on—and Anne Catherick, dead in her grave, points the way to it still!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  PART THE SECOND. HARTRIGHT’S NARRATIVE

  V

  THE STORY of my first inquiries in Hampshire is soon told.

  My early departure from London enabled me to reach Mr. Dawson’s house in the forenoon. Our interview, so far as the object of my visit was concerned, led to no satisfactory result. Mr. Dawson’s books certainly showed when he had resumed his a
ttendance on Miss Halcombe, at Blackwater Park; but it was not possible to calculate back from this date with any exactness, without such help from Mrs. Michelson as I knew she was unable to afford. She could not say from memory (who, in similar cases, ever can?) how many days had elapsed between the renewal of the doctor’s attendance on his patient and the previous departure of Lady Glyde. She was almost certain of having mentioned the circumstance of the departure to Miss Halcombe, on the day after it happened—but then she was no more able to fix the date of the day on which this disclosure took place, than to fix the date of the day before, when Lady Glyde had left for London. Neither could she calculate, with any nearer approach to exactness, the time that had passed from the departure of her mistress, to the period when the undated letter from Madame Fosco arrived. Lastly, as if to complete the series of difficulties, the doctor himself, having been ill at the time, had omitted to make his usual entry of the day of the week and month when the gardener from Blackwater Park had called on him to deliver Mrs. Michelson’s message.

  Hopeless of obtaining assistance from Mr. Dawson, I resolved to try next if I could establish the date of Sir Percival’s arrival at Knowlesbury. It seemed like a fatality! When I reached Knowlesbury the inn was shut up; and bills were posted on the walls. The speculation had been a bad one, as I was informed, ever since the time of the railway. The new hotel at the station had gradually absorbed the business; and the old inn (which we knew to be the inn at which Sir Percival had put up), had been closed about two months since. The proprietor had left the town with all his goods and chattels, and where he had gone I could not positively ascertain from any one. The four people of whom I inquired gave me four different accounts of his plans and projects when he left Knowlesbury.

  There were still some hours to spare before the last train left for London; and I drove back again, in a fly from the Knowlesbury station, to Blackwater Park, with the purpose of questioning the gardener and the person who kept the lodge. If they, too, proved unable to assist me, my resources, for the present, were at an end, and I might return to town.

  I dismissed the fly a mile distant from the park; and, getting my directions from the driver, proceeded by myself to the house. As I turned into the lane from the high-road, I saw a man, with a carpet-bag, walking before me rapidly on the way to the lodge. He was a little man, dressed in shabby black, and wearing a remarkably large hat. I set him down (as well as it was possible to judge) for a lawyer’s clerk; and stopped at once to widen the distance between us. He had not heard me; and he walked on out of sight, without looking back. When I passed through the gates myself, a little while afterwards, he was not visible—he had evidently gone on to the house.

  There were two women in the lodge. One of them was old; the other, I knew at once, by Marian’s description of her, to be Margaret Porcher. I asked first if Sir Percival was at the park; and, receiving a reply in the negative, inquired next when he had left it. Neither of the women could tell me more than that he had gone away in the summer. I could extract nothing from Margaret Porcher but vacant smiles and shakings of the head. The old woman was a little more intelligent; and I managed to lead her into speaking of the manner of Sir Percival’s departure, and of the alarm that it caused her. She remembered her master calling her out of bed, and remembered his frightening her by swearing—but the date at which the occurrence happened was, as she honestly acknowledged, “quite beyond her.”

  On leaving the lodge, I saw the gardener at work not far off. When I first addressed him, he looked at me rather distrustfully; but, on my using Mrs. Michelson’s name, with a civil reference to himself, he entered into conversation readily enough. There is no need to describe what passed between us: it ended, as all my other attempts to discover the date had ended. The gardener knew that his master had driven away, at night “some time in July, the last fortnight or the last ten days in the month”—and knew no more.

  While we were speaking together, I saw the man in black, with the large hat, come out from the house, and stand at some little distance observing us.

  Certain suspicions of his errand at Blackwater Park had already crossed my mind. They were now increased by the gardener’s inability (or unwillingness) to tell me who the man was; and I determined to clear the way before me, if possible, by speaking to him. The plainest question I could put, as a stranger, would be to inquire if the house was allowed to be shown to visitors. I walked up to the man at once, and accosted him in those words.

  His look and manner unmistakably betrayed that he knew who I was, and that he wanted to irritate me into quarrelling with him. His reply was insolent enough to have answered the purpose, if I had been less determined to control myself. As it was, I met him with the most resolute politeness; apologised for my involuntary intrusion (which he called a “trespass”), and left the grounds. It was exactly as I suspected. The recognition of me, when I left Mr. Kyrle’s office, had been evidently communicated to Sir Percival Glyde; and the man in black had been sent to the park, in anticipation of my making inquiries at the house, or in the neighbourhood. If I had given him the least chance of lodging any sort of legal complaint against me, the interference of the local magistrate would no doubt have been turned to account, as a clog on my proceedings, and a means of separating me from Marian and Laura for some days at least.

  I was prepared to be watched on the way from Blackwater Park to the station, exactly as I had been watched, in London, the day before. But I could not discover at the time, whether I was really followed on this occasion or not. The man in black might have had means of tracking me at his disposal of which I was not aware—but I certainly saw nothing of him, in his own person, either on the way to the station, or afterwards on my arrival at the London terminus, in the evening. I reached home, on foot; taking the precaution, before I approached our own door, of walking round by the loneliest street in the neighbourhood, and there stopping and looking back more than once over the open space behind me. I had first learnt to use this stratagem against suspected treachery in the wilds of Central America—and now I was practising it again, with the same purpose and with even greater caution, in the heart of civilised London!

  Nothing had happened to alarm Marian during my absence. She asked eagerly what success I had met with. When I told her, she could not conceal her surprise at the indifference with which I spoke of the failure of my investigations, thus far.

  The truth was, that the ill-success of my inquiries had in no sense daunted me. I had pursued them as a matter of duty, and I had expected nothing from them. In the state of my mind, at that time, it was almost a relief to me to know that the struggle was now narrowed to a trial of strength between myself and Sir Percival Glyde. The vindictive motive had mingled itself, all along, with my other and better motives; and I confess it was a satisfaction to me to feel that the surest way—the only way left—of serving Laura’s cause, was to fasten my hold firmly on the villain who had married her. I acknowledge that I was not strong enough to keep my motives above the reach of this instinct of revenge. But I can honestly say that no base speculation on the future relations of Laura and myself, and on the private and personal concessions which I might force from Sir Percival if I once had him at my mercy, ever entered my mind. I never said to myself, “If I do succeed, it shall be one result of my success that I put it out of her husband’s power to take her from me again.” I could not look at her and think of the future with such thoughts as those. The sad sight of the change in her from her former self, made the one interest of my love an interest of tenderness and compassion, which her father or her brother might have felt, and which I felt, God knows, in my inmost heart. All my hopes looked no farther on, now, than to the day of her recovery. There, till she was strong again and happy again—there, till she could look at me as she had once looked, and speak to me as she had once spoken—the future of my happiest thoughts and my dearest wishes ended. These words are written under no prompting of idle self-contemplation. Passages in this narrative
are soon to come, which will set the minds of others in judgment on my conduct. It is right that the best and the worst of me should be fairly balanced, before that time.

  On the morning after my return from Hampshire, I took Marian up-stairs into my working-room; and there laid before her the plan that I had matured, thus far, for mastering the one assailable point in the life of Sir Percival Glyde.

  The way to the Secret lay through the mystery, hitherto impenetrable to all of us, of the woman in white. The approach to that, in its turn, might be gained by obtaining the assistance of Anne Catherick’s mother; and the only ascertainable means of prevailing on Mrs. Catherick to act or to speak in the matter, depended on the chance of my discovering local particulars and family particulars, first of all, from Mrs. Clements. I had thought the subject over carefully; and I felt certain that the new inquiries could only begin, to any purpose, by my placing myself in communication with the faithful friend and protectress of Anne Catherick.

  The first difficulty, then, was to find Mrs. Clements.

  I was indebted to Marian’s quick perception for meeting this necessity at once by the best and simplest means. She proposed to write to the farm near Limmeridge (Todd’s Corner), to inquire whether Mrs. Clements had communicated with Mrs. Todd during the past few months. How Mrs. Clements had been separated from Anne, it was impossible for us to say; but that separation once effected, it would certainly occur to Mrs. Clements to inquire after the missing woman in the neighbourhood of all others to which she was known to be most attached—the neighbourhood of Limmeridge. I saw directly that Marian’s proposal offered us a prospect of success; and she wrote to Mrs. Todd accordingly by that day’s post.