The Woman in White (33 page)

Upon the whole, it will be best, perhaps, if I abstain from
forming a decisive opinion of his manners, language, and conduct
in his own house, until time has enabled him to shake off the
anxieties, whatever they may be, which now evidently troubled his
mind in secret. I will turn over to a new page, and my pen shall
let Laura's husband alone for the present.

The two guests—the Count and Countess Fosco—come next in my
catalogue. I will dispose of the Countess first, so as to have
done with the woman as soon as possible.

Laura was certainly not chargeable with any exaggeration, in
writing me word that I should hardly recognise her aunt again when
we met. Never before have I beheld such a change produced in a
woman by her marriage as has been produced in Madame Fosco.

As Eleanor Fairlie (aged seven-and-thirty), she was always talking
pretentious nonsense, and always worrying the unfortunate men with
every small exaction which a vain and foolish woman can impose on
long-suffering male humanity. As Madame Fosco (aged three-and-
forty), she sits for hours together without saying a word, frozen
up in the strangest manner in herself. The hideously ridiculous
love-locks which used to hang on either side of her face are now
replaced by stiff little rows of very short curls, of the sort one
sees in old-fashioned wigs. A plain, matronly cap covers her
head, and makes her look, for the first time in her life since I
remember her, like a decent woman. Nobody (putting her husband
out of the question, of course) now sees in her, what everybody
once saw—I mean the structure of the female skeleton, in the
upper regions of the collar-bones and the shoulder-blades. Clad
in quiet black or grey gowns, made high round the throat—dresses
that she would have laughed at, or screamed at, as the whim of the
moment inclined her, in her maiden days—she sits speechless in
corners; her dry white hands (so dry that the pores of her skin
look chalky) incessantly engaged, either in monotonous embroidery
work or in rolling up endless cigarettes for the Count's own
particular smoking. On the few occasions when her cold blue eyes
are off her work, they are generally turned on her husband, with
the look of mute submissive inquiry which we are all familiar with
in the eyes of a faithful dog. The only approach to an inward
thaw which I have yet detected under her outer covering of icy
constraint, has betrayed itself, once or twice, in the form of a
suppressed tigerish jealousy of any woman in the house (the maids
included) to whom the Count speaks, or on whom he looks with
anything approaching to special interest or attention. Except in
this one particular, she is always, morning, noon, and night,
indoors and out, fair weather or foul, as cold as a statue, and as
impenetrable as the stone out of which it is cut. For the common
purposes of society the extraordinary change thus produced in her
is, beyond all doubt, a change for the better, seeing that it has
transformed her into a civil, silent, unobtrusive woman, who is
never in the way. How far she is really reformed or deteriorated
in her secret self, is another question. I have once or twice
seen sudden changes of expression on her pinched lips, and heard
sudden inflexions of tone in her calm voice, which have led me to
suspect that her present state of suppression may have sealed up
something dangerous in her nature, which used to evaporate
harmlessly in the freedom of her former life. It is quite
possible that I may be altogether wrong in this idea. My own
impression, however, is, that I am right. Time will show.

And the magician who has wrought this wonderful transformation—
the foreign husband who has tamed this once wayward English woman
till her own relations hardly know her again—the Count himself?
What of the Count?

This in two words: He looks like a man who could tame anything.
If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have
tamed the tigress. If he had married me, I should have made his
cigarettes, as his wife does—I should have held my tongue when he
looked at me, as she holds hers.

I am almost afraid to confess it, even to these secret pages. The
man has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like
him. In two short days he has made his way straight into my
favourable estimation, and how he has worked the miracle is more
than I can tell.

It absolutely startles me, now he is in my mind, to find how
plainly I see him!—how much more plainly than I see Sir Percival,
or Mr. Fairlie, or Walter Hartright, or any other absent person of
whom I think, with the one exception of Laura herself! I can hear
his voice, as if he was speaking at this moment. I know what his
conversation was yesterday, as well as if I was hearing it now.
How am I to describe him? There are peculiarities in his personal
appearance, his habits, and his amusements, which I should blame
in the boldest terms, or ridicule in the most merciless manner, if
I had seen them in another man. What is it that makes me unable
to blame them, or to ridicule them in HIM?

For example, he is immensely fat. Before this time I have always
especially disliked corpulent humanity. I have always maintained
that the popular notion of connecting excessive grossness of size
and excessive good-humour as inseparable allies was equivalent to
declaring, either that no people but amiable people ever get fat,
or that the accidental addition of so many pounds of flesh has a
directly favourable influence over the disposition of the person
on whose body they accumulate. I have invariably combated both
these absurd assertions by quoting examples of fat people who were
as mean, vicious, and cruel as the leanest and the worst of their
neighbours. I have asked whether Henry the Eighth was an amiable
character? Whether Pope Alexander the Sixth was a good man?
Whether Mr. Murderer and Mrs. Murderess Manning were not both
unusually stout people? Whether hired nurses, proverbially as
cruel a set of women as are to be found in all England, were not,
for the most part, also as fat a set of women as are to be found
in all England?—and so on, through dozens of other examples,
modern and ancient, native and foreign, high and low. Holding
these strong opinions on the subject with might and main as I do
at this moment, here, nevertheless, is Count Fosco, as fat as
Henry the Eighth himself, established in my favour, at one day's
notice, without let or hindrance from his own odious corpulence.
Marvellous indeed!

Is it his face that has recommended him?

It may be his face. He is a most remarkable likeness, on a large
scale, of the great Napoleon. His features have Napoleon's
magnificent regularity—his expression recalls the grandly calm,
immovable power of the Great Soldier's face. This striking
resemblance certainly impressed me, to begin with; but there is
something in him besides the resemblance, which has impressed me
more. I think the influence I am now trying to find is in his
eyes. They are the most unfathomable grey eyes I ever saw, and
they have at times a cold, clear, beautiful, irresistible glitter
in them which forces me to look at him, and yet causes me
sensations, when I do look, which I would rather not feel. Other
parts of his face and head have their strange peculiarities. His
complexion, for instance, has a singular sallow-fairness, so much
at variance with the dark-brown colour of his hair, that I suspect
the hair of being a wig, and his face, closely shaven all over, is
smoother and freer from all marks and wrinkles than mine, though
(according to Sir Percival's account of him) he is close on sixty
years of age. But these are not the prominent personal
characteristics which distinguish him, to my mind, from all the
other men I have ever seen. The marked peculiarity which singles
him out from the rank and file of humanity lies entirely, so far
as I can tell at present, in the extraordinary expression and
extraordinary power of his eyes.

His manner and his command of our language may also have assisted
him, in some degree, to establish himself in my good opinion. He
has that quiet deference, that look of pleased, attentive interest
in listening to a woman, and that secret gentleness in his voice
in speaking to a woman, which, say what we may, we can none of us
resist. Here, too, his unusual command of the English language
necessarily helps him. I had often heard of the extraordinary
aptitude which many Italians show in mastering our strong, hard,
Northern speech; but, until I saw Count Fosco, I had never
supposed it possible that any foreigner could have spoken English
as he speaks it. There are times when it is almost impossible to
detect, by his accent that he is not a countryman of our own, and
as for fluency, there are very few born Englishmen who can talk
with as few stoppages and repetitions as the Count. He may
construct his sentences more or less in the foreign way, but I
have never yet heard him use a wrong expression, or hesitate for a
moment in his choice of a word.

All the smallest characteristics of this strange man have
something strikingly original and perplexingly contradictory in
them. Fat as he is and old as he is, his movements are
astonishingly light and easy. He is as noiseless in a room as any
of us women, and more than that, with all his look of unmistakable
mental firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive as the
weakest of us. He starts at chance noises as inveterately as
Laura herself. He winced and shuddered yesterday, when Sir
Percival beat one of the spaniels, so that I felt ashamed of my
own want of tenderness and sensibility by comparison with the
Count.

The relation of this last incident reminds me of one of his most
curious peculiarities, which I have not yet mentioned—his
extraordinary fondness for pet animals.

Some of these he has left on the Continent, but he has brought
with him to this house a cockatoo, two canary-birds, and a whole
family of white mice. He attends to all the necessities of these
strange favourites himself, and he has taught the creatures to be
surprisingly fond of him and familiar with him. The cockatoo, a
most vicious and treacherous bird towards every one else,
absolutely seems to love him. When he lets it out of its cage, it
hops on to his knee, and claws its way up his great big body, and
rubs its top-knot against his sallow double chin in the most
caressing manner imaginable. He has only to set the doors of the
canaries' cages open, and to call them, and the pretty little
cleverly trained creatures perch fearlessly on his hand, mount his
fat outstretched fingers one by one, when he tells them to "go
upstairs," and sing together as if they would burst their throats
with delight when they get to the top finger. His white mice live
in a little pagoda of gaily-painted wirework, designed and made by
himself. They are almost as tame as the canaries, and they are
perpetually let out like the canaries. They crawl all over him,
popping in and out of his waistcoat, and sitting in couples, white
as snow, on his capacious shoulders. He seems to be even fonder
of his mice than of his other pets, smiles at them, and kisses
them, and calls them by all sorts of endearing names. If it be
possible to suppose an Englishman with any taste for such childish
interests and amusements as these, that Englishman would certainly
feel rather ashamed of them, and would be anxious to apologise for
them, in the company of grown-up people. But the Count,
apparently, sees nothing ridiculous in the amazing contrast
between his colossal self and his frail little pets. He would
blandly kiss his white mice and twitter to his canary-birds amid
an assembly of English fox-hunters, and would only pity them as
barbarians when they were all laughing their loudest at him.

It seems hardly credible while I am writing it down, but it is
certainly true, that this same man, who has all the fondness of an
old maid for his cockatoo, and all the small dexterities of an
organ-boy in managing his white mice, can talk, when anything
happens to rouse him, with a daring independence of thought, a
knowledge of books in every language, and an experience of society
in half the capitals of Europe, which would make him the prominent
personage of any assembly in the civilised world. This trainer of
canary-birds, this architect of a pagoda for white mice, is (as
Sir Percival himself has told me) one of the first experimental
chemists living, and has discovered, among other wonderful
inventions, a means of petrifying the body after death, so as to
preserve it, as hard as marble, to the end of time. This fat,
indolent, elderly man, whose nerves are so finely strung that he
starts at chance noises, and winces when he sees a house-spaniel
get a whipping, went into the stable-yard on the morning after his
arrival, and put his hand on the head of a chained bloodhound—a
beast so savage that the very groom who feeds him keeps out of his
reach. His wife and I were present, and I shall not forget the
scene that followed, short as it was.

"Mind that dog, sir," said the groom; "he flies at everybody!" "He
does that, my friend," replied the Count quietly, "because
everybody is afraid of him. Let us see if he flies at me." And he
laid his plump, yellow-white fingers, on which the canary-birds
had been perching ten minutes before, upon the formidable brute's
head, and looked him straight in the eyes. "You big dogs are all
cowards," he said, addressing the animal contemptuously, with his
face and the dog's within an inch of each other. "You would kill
a poor cat, you infernal coward. You would fly at a starving
beggar, you infernal coward. Anything that you can surprise
unawares—anything that is afraid of your big body, and your
wicked white teeth, and your slobbering, bloodthirsty mouth, is
the thing you like to fly at. You could throttle me at this
moment, you mean, miserable bully, and you daren't so much as look
me in the face, because I'm not afraid of you. Will you think
better of it, and try your teeth in my fat neck? Bah! not you!" He
turned away, laughing at the astonishment of the men in the yard,
and the dog crept back meekly to his kennel. "Ah! my nice
waistcoat!" he said pathetically. "I am sorry I came here. Some
of that brute's slobber has got on my pretty clean waistcoat."
Those words express another of his incomprehensible oddities. He
is as fond of fine clothes as the veriest fool in existence, and
has appeared in four magnificent waistcoats already—all of light
garish colours, and all immensely large even for him—in the two
days of his residence at Blackwater Park.