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

by Lynn Shepherd

  The extraordinary mixture of prompt decision, far-sighted cunning, and mountebank bravado in this speech, staggered me for a moment—and only for a moment. The one question to consider was, whether I was justified, or not, in possessing myself of the means of establishing Laura’s identity, at the cost of allowing the scoundrel who had robbed her of it to escape me with impunity. I knew that the motive of securing the just recognition of my wife in the birthplace from which she had been driven out as an impostor, and of publicly erasing the lie that still profaned her mother’s tombstone, was far purer, in its freedom from all taint of evil passion, than the vindictive motive which had mingled itself with my purpose from the first. And yet I cannot honestly say that my own moral convictions were strong enough to decide the struggle in me, by themselves. They were helped by my remembrance of Sir Percival’s death. How awfully, at the last moment, had the working of the retribution, there, been snatched from my feeble hands! What right had I to decide, in my poor mortal ignorance of the future, that this man, too, must escape with impunity, because he escaped me? I thought of these things—perhaps, with the superstition inherent in my nature; perhaps, with a sense worthier of me than superstition. It was hard, when I had fastened my hold on him, at last, to loosen it again of my own accord—but I forced myself to make the sacrifice. In plainer words, I determined to be guided by the one higher motive of which I was certain, the motive of serving the cause of Laura and the cause of Truth.

  “I accept your conditions,” I said. “With one reservation, on my part.”

  “What reservation may that be?” he asked.

  “It refers to the sealed letter,” I answered. “I require you to destroy it, unopened, in my presence, as soon as it is placed in your hands.”

  My object in making this stipulation was simply to prevent him from carrying away written evidence of the nature of my communication with Pesca. The fact of my communication he would necessarily discover, when I gave the address to his agent, in the morning. But he could make no use of it, on his own unsupported testimony—even if he really ventured to try the experiment—which need excite in me the slightest apprehension on Pesca’s account.

  “I grant your reservation,” he replied, after considering the question gravely for a minute or two. “It is not worth dispute—the letter shall be destroyed when it comes into my hands.”

  He rose, as he spoke, from the chair in which he had been sitting opposite to me, up to this time. With one effort, he appeared to free his mind from the whole pressure on it of the interview between us, thus far. “Ouf!” he cried, stretching his arms luxuriously; “the skirmish was hot while it lasted. Take a seat, Mr. Hartright. We meet as mortal enemies hereafter—let us, like gallant gentlemen, exchange polite attentions in the mean time. Permit me to take the liberty of calling for my wife.”

  He unlocked and opened the door. “Eleanor!” he called out, in his deep voice. The lady of the viperish face came in. “Madame Fosco—Mr. Hartright,” said the Count, introducing us with easy dignity. “My angel,” he went on, addressing his wife; “will your labours of packing-up allow you time to make me some nice strong coffee? I have writing-business to transact with Mr. Hartright—and I require the full possession of my intelligence to do justice to myself.”

  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 quires 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 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 bodkin 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.

  His next proceeding was to write me the address of the person from whom he had hired the fly to go to the railway, and to hand me Sir Percival’s letter. I read this last with breathless interest. It only contained a few lines; but it distinctly announced the arrival of “Lady Glyde” in London, by the mid-day train from Blackwater, on the 26th of July, 1850—exactly, as I had supposed, one day after the date of her (assumed) death on the doctor’s certificate.
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  “Are you satisfied?” asked the Count.

  “I am.”

  “A quarter past five,” he said, 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, up-stairs? 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 incessantly—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 transcendant 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, 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 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 light-haired 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.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  PART THE THIRD. THE NARRATIVE OF ISIDOR OTTAVIO BALDASSARE FOSCO. COUNT OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. KNIGHT GRAND CROSS OF THE ORDER OF THE BRAZEN CROWN. ARCHMASTER OF THE ROSICRUCIAN MASONS OF MESOPOTAMIA. ATTACHED, IN HONORARY CAPACITIES, TO SOCIETIES MEDICAL, SOCIETIES MUSICAL, SOCIETIES PHILOSOPHICAL, AND SOCIETIES GENERAL BENEVOLENT, THROUGHOUT EUROPE, & C. & C. & C.

  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 di
sposal, 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!