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

by Lynn Shepherd

  I cannot write at any length of our interview with Mr. Fairlie, for I cannot recall it to mind, without feelings of impatience and contempt, which make the scene, even in remembrance only, utterly repulsive to me. I prefer to record simply that I carried my point. Mr. Fairlie attempted to treat us on his customary plan. We passed without notice his polite insolence at the outset of the interview. We heard without sympathy the protestations with which he tried next to persuade us that the disclosure of the conspiracy had overwhelmed him. He absolutely whined and whimpered, at last, like a fretful child. “How was he to know that his niece was alive, when he was told that she was dead? He would welcome dear Laura, with pleasure, if we would only allow him time to recover. Did we think he looked as if he wanted hurrying into his grave? No. Then, why hurry him?” He reiterated these remonstrances at every available opportunity, until I checked them once for all, by placing him firmly between two inevitable alternatives. I gave him his choice between doing his niece justice, on my terms—or facing the consequences of a public assertion of her identity in a court of law. Mr. Kyrle, to whom he turned for help, told him plainly that he must decide the question, then and there. Characteristically choosing the alternative which promised soonest to release him from all personal anxiety, he announced, with a sudden outburst of energy, that he was not strong enough to bear any more bullying, and that we might do as we pleased.

  Mr. Kyrle and I at once went down stairs, and agreed upon a form of letter which was to be sent round to the tenants who had attended the false funeral, summoning them, in Mr. Fairlie’s name, to assemble in Limmeridge House, on the next day but one. An order, referring to the same date, was also written, directing a statuary in Carlisle to send a man to Limmeridge churchyard, for the purpose of erasing an inscription—Mr. Kyrle, who had arranged to sleep in the house, undertaking that Mr. Fairlie should hear these letters read to him, and should sign them with his own hand.

  I occupied the interval-day, at the farm, in writing a plain narrative of the conspiracy, and in adding to it a statement of the practical contradiction which facts offered to the assertion of Laura’s death. This I submitted to Mr. Kyrle, before I read it, the next day, to the assembled tenants. We also arranged the form in which the evidence should be presented at the close of the reading. After these matters were settled, Mr. Kyrle endeavoured to turn the conversation, next, to Laura’s affairs. Knowing, and desiring to know, nothing of those affairs; and doubting whether he would approve, as a man of business, of my conduct in relation to my wife’s life-interest in the legacy left to Madame Fosco, I begged Mr. Kyrle to excuse me if I abstained from discussing the subject. It was connected, as I could truly tell him, with those sorrows and troubles of the past, which we never referred to among ourselves, and which we instinctively shrank from discussing with others.

  My last labour, as the evening approached, was to obtain “The Narrative of the Tombstone,” by taking a copy of the false inscription on the grave, before it was erased.

  The day came—the day when Laura once more entered the familiar breakfast-room at Limmeridge House. All the persons assembled rose from their seats as Marian and I led her in. A perceptible shock of surprise, an audible murmur of interest, ran through them, at the sight of her face. Mr. Fairlie was present (by my express stipulation), with Mr. Kyrle by his side. His valet stood behind him with a smelling-bottle ready in one hand, and a white handkerchief, saturated with eau-de-Cologne, in the other.

  I opened the proceedings by publicly appealing to Mr. Fairlie to say whether I appeared there with his authority and under his express sanction. He extended an arm, on either side, to Mr. Kyrle and to his valet; was by them assisted to stand on his legs; and then expressed himself in these terms: “Allow me to present Mr. Hartright. I am as great an invalid as ever; and he is so very obliging as to speak for me. The subject is dreadfully embarrassing. Please hear him—and don’t make a noise!” With those words, he slowly sank back again into the chair, and took refuge in his scented pocket-handkerchief.

  My disclosure of the conspiracy followed—after I had offered my preliminary explanation, first of all, in the fewest and the plainest words. I was there present (I informed my hearers) to declare first, that my wife, then sitting by me, was the daughter of the late Mr. Philip Fairlie; secondly, to prove, by positive facts, that the funeral which they had attended in Limmeridge churchyard, was the funeral of another woman; thirdly, to give them a plain account of how it had all happened. Without further preface, I at once read the narrative of the conspiracy, describing it in clear outline, and dwelling only upon the pecuniary motive for it, in order to avoid complicating my statement by unnecessary reference to Sir Percival’s secret. This done, I reminded my audience of the date of “Lady Glyde’s” death, recorded on the inscription in the churchyard (the 25th of July); and confirmed its correctness by producing the doctor’s certificate. I then read them Sir Percival’s letter announcing his wife’s intended journey from Hampshire to London on the 26th, and dated from Blackwater on the 25th—the very day when the certificate asserted her decease in St. John’s Wood. I next showed that she had actually taken that journey, by the personal testimony of the driver of the fly; and I proved that she had performed it on the day appointed in her husband’s letter, by the evidence of the order-book at the livery stables. Marian, at my request, next added her own statement of the meeting between Laura and herself at the madhouse, and of her sister’s escape. After which, I closed the proceedings by informing the persons present of Sir Percival’s death, and of my marriage.

  Mr. Kyrle rose, when I resumed my seat, and declared, as the legal adviser of the family, that my case was proved by the plainest evidence he had ever heard in his life. As he spoke those words, I put my arm round Laura, and raised her so that she was plainly visible to every one in the room. “Are you all of the same opinion?” I asked, advancing towards them a few steps, and pointing to my wife.

  The effect of the question was electrical. Far down at the lower end of the room, one of the oldest tenants on the estate, started to his feet, and led the rest with him in an instant. I see the man now, with his honest brown face and his iron-grey hair, mounted on the window-seat, waving his heavy riding-whip frantically over his head, and leading the cheers. “There she is alive and hearty—God bless her! Gi’ it tongue, lads! Gi’ it tongue!” The shout that answered him, reiterated again and again, was the sweetest music I ever heard. The labourers in the village and the boys from the school, assembled on the lawn, caught up the cheering and echoed it back on us. The farmers’ wives clustered round Laura, and struggled which should be first to shake hands with her, and to implore her, with the tears pouring over their own cheeks, to bear up bravely and not to cry. She was so completely overwhelmed, that I was obliged to take her from them, and carry her to the door. There I gave her into Marian’s care—Marian, who had never failed us yet, whose courageous self-control did not fail us now. Left by myself at the door, I invited all the persons present (after thanking them in Laura’s name and mine) to follow me to the churchyard, and see the false inscription struck off the tombstone with their own eyes.

  They all left the house, and all joined the throng of villagers collected round the grave, where the statuary’s man was waiting for us. In a breathless silence, the first sharp stroke of the steel sounded on the marble. Not a voice was heard; not a soul moved, till those three words, “Laura, Lady Glyde,” had vanished from sight. Then, there was a great heave of relief among the crowd, as if they felt that the last fetters of the conspiracy had been struck off Laura herself—and the assembly slowly withdrew. It was late in the day before the whole inscription was erased. One line only was afterwards engraved in its place: “Anne Catherick, July 25th, 1850.”

  I returned to Limmeridge House early enough in the evening to take leave of Mr. Kyrle. He, and his clerk, and the driver of the fly, went back to London by the night train. On their departure, an insolent message was delivered to me from Mr. Fairlie—who
had been carried from the room in a shattered condition, when the first outbreak of cheering answered my appeal to the tenantry. The message conveyed to us “Mr. Fairlie’s best congratulations,” and requested to know whether “we contemplated stopping in the house.” I sent back word that the only object for which we had entered his doors was accomplished; that I contemplated stopping in no man’s house but my own; and that Mr. Fairlie need not entertain the slightest apprehension of ever seeing us, or hearing from us again. We went back to our friends at the farm, to rest that night; and the next morning—escorted to the station, with the heartiest enthusiasm and good will, by the whole village and by all the farmers in the neighbourhood—we returned to London.

  As our view of the Cumberland hills faded in the distance, I thought of the first disheartening circumstances under which the long struggle that was now past and over had been pursued. It was strange to look back and to see, now, that the poverty which had denied us all hope of assistance, had been the indirect means of our success, by forcing me to act for myself. If we had been rich enough to find legal help, what would have been the result? The gain (on Mr. Kyrle’s own showing) would have been more than doubtful; the loss—judging by the plain test of events as they had really happened—certain. The Law would never have obtained me my interview with Mrs. Catherick. The Law would never have made Pesca the means of forcing a confession from the Count.

  II

  Two more events remain to be added to the chain, before it reaches fairly from the outset of the story to the close.

  While our new sense of freedom from the long oppression of the past was still strange to us, I was sent for by the friend who had given me my first employment in wood engraving, to receive from him a fresh testimony of his regard for my welfare. He had been commissioned by his employers to go to Paris, and to examine for them a French discovery in the practical application of his Art, the merits of which they were anxious to ascertain. His own engagements had not allowed him leisure time to undertake the errand; and he had most kindly suggested that it should be transferred to me. I could have no hesitation in thankfully accepting the offer; for if I acquitted myself of my commission as I hoped I should, the result would be a permanent engagement on the illustrated newspaper, to which I was now only occasionally attached.

  I received my instructions and packed up for the journey the next day. On leaving Laura once more (under what changed circumstances!) in her sister’s care, a serious consideration recurred to me, which had more than once crossed my wife’s mind, as well as my own, already—I mean the consideration of Marian’s future. Had we any right to let our selfish affection accept the devotion of all that generous life? Was it not our duty, our best expression of gratitude, to forget ourselves, and to think only of her? I tried to say this, when we were alone for a moment, before I went away. She took my hand, and silenced me, at the first words.

  “After all that we three have suffered together,” she said, “there can be no parting between us, till the last parting of all. My heart and my happiness, Walter, are with Laura and you. Wait a little till there are children’s voices at your fireside. I will teach them to speak for me, in their language; and the first lesson they say to their father and mother shall be—We can’t spare our aunt!”

  My journey to Paris was not undertaken alone. At the eleventh hour, Pesca decided that he would accompany me. He had not recovered his customary cheerfulness, since the night at the Opera; and he determined to try what a week’s holiday would do to raise his spirits.

  I performed the errand entrusted to me, and drew out the necessary report, on the fourth day from our arrival in Paris. The fifth day, I arranged to devote to sight-seeing and amusement in Pesca’s company.

  Our hotel had been too full to accommodate us both on the same floor. My room was on the second storey, and Pesca’s was above me, on the third. On the morning of the fifth day, I went up-stairs to see if the Professor was ready to go out. Just before I reached the landing, I saw his door opened from the inside; a long, delicate, nervous hand (not my friend’s hand certainly) held it ajar. At the same time, I heard Pesca’s voice saying eagerly, in low tones, and in his own language: “I remember the name, but I don’t know the man you saw at the Opera. He was so changed that I could not recognise him. I will forward the report—I can do no more.” “No more need be done,” answered a second voice. The door opened wide; and the light-haired man with the scar on his cheek—the man I had seen following Count Fosco’s cab a week before—came out. He bowed, as I drew aside to let him pass—his face was fearfully pale—and he held fast by the banisters, as he descended the stairs.

  I pushed open the door, and entered Pesca’s room. He was crouched up, in the strangest manner, in a corner of the sofa. He seemed to shrink from himself—to shrink from me, when I approached him.

  “Am I disturbing you?” I asked. “I did not know you had a friend with you till I saw him come out.”

  “No friend,” said Pesca, eagerly. “I see him to-day for the first time, and the last.”

  “I am afraid he has brought you bad news?”

  “Horrible news, Walter! Let us go back to London—I don’t want to stop here—I am sorry I ever came. The misfortunes of my youth are very hard upon me,” he said, turning his face to the wall; “very hard upon me, in my later time. I try to forget them—and they will not forget me!”

  “We can’t return, I am afraid, before the afternoon,” I replied. “Would you like to come out with me, in the mean time?”

  “No, my friend; I will wait here. But let us go back to-day—pray let us go back.”

  I left him, with the assurance that he should leave Paris that afternoon. We had arranged the evening before, to ascend the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, with Victor Hugo’s noble romance for our guide. There was nothing in the French capital that I was more anxious to see—and I departed, by myself, for the church.

  Approaching Notre-Dame by the river-side, I passed, on my way, the terrible dead-house of Paris—the Morgue. A great crowd clamoured and heaved round the door. There was evidently something inside which excited the popular curiosity, and fed the popular appetite for horror.

  I should have walked on to the church, if the conversation of two men and a woman on the outskirts of the crowd had not caught my ear. They had just come out from seeing the sight in the Morgue; and the account they were giving of the dead body to their neighbours, described it as the corpse of a man—a man of immense size, with a strange mark on his left arm.

  The moment those words reached me, I stopped, and took my place with the crowd going in. Some dim foreshadowing of the truth had crossed my mind, when I heard Pesca’s voice through the open door, and when I saw the stranger’s face as he passed me on the stairs of the hotel. Now, the truth itself was revealed to me—revealed, in the chance words that had just reached my ears. Other vengeance than mine had followed that fated man from the theatre to his own door; from his own door to his refuge in Paris. Other vengeance than mine had called him to the day of reckoning, and had exacted from him the penalty of his life. The moment when I had pointed him out to Pesca, at the theatre, in the hearing of that stranger by our side, who was looking for him, too—was the moment that sealed his doom. I remembered the struggle in my own heart, when he and I stood face to face—the struggle before I could let him escape me—and shuddered as I recalled it.

  Slowly, inch by inch, I pressed in with the crowd, moving nearer and nearer to the great glass screen that parts the dead from the living at the Morgue—nearer and nearer, till I was close behind the front row of spectators, and could look in.

  There he lay, unowned, unknown; exposed to the flippant curiosity of a French mob—there was the dreadful end of that long life of degraded ability and heartless crime! Hushed in the sublime repose of death, the broad, firm, massive face and head fronted us so grandly, that the chattering Frenchwomen about me lifted their hands in admiration, and cried, in shrill chorus, “Ah, what a handsome man!” Th
e wound that had killed him had been struck with a knife or dagger exactly over his heart. No other traces of violence appeared about the body, except on the left arm; and there, exactly in the place where I had seen the brand on Pesca’s arm, were two deep cuts in the shape of the letter T, which entirely obliterated the mark of the Brotherhood. His clothes hung above him, showed that he had been himself conscious of his danger—they were clothes that had disguised him as a French artisan. For a few moments, but not for longer, I forced myself to see these things through the glass screen. I can write of them at no greater length, for I saw no more.

  The few facts, in connexion with his death which I subsequently ascertained (partly from Pesca and partly from other sources), may be stated here, before the subject is dismissed from these pages.

  His body was taken out of the Seine, in the disguise which I have described; nothing being found on him which revealed his name, his rank, or his place of abode. The hand that struck him was never traced; and the circumstances under which he was killed were never discovered. I leave others to draw their own conclusions, in reference to the secret of the assassination, as I have drawn mine. When I have intimated that the foreigner with the scar was a Member of the Brotherhood (admitted in Italy, after Pesca’s departure from his native country), and when I have further added that the two cuts, in the form of a T, on the left arm of the dead man, signified the Italian word, “Traditore,” and showed that justice had been done by the Brotherhood on a Traitor, I have contributed all that I know towards elucidating the mystery of Count Fosco’s death.