The Woman in White (36 page)

"Stay a minute, Count," I interposed. "Accepting your
illustration, surely we have one unquestionable virtue in England
which is wanting in China. The Chinese authorities kill thousands
of innocent people on the most frivolous pretexts. We in England
are free from all guilt of that kind—we commit no such dreadful
crime—we abhor reckless bloodshed with all our hearts."

"Quite right, Marian," said Laura. "Well thought of, and well
expressed."

"Pray allow the Count to proceed," said Madame Fosco, with stern
civility. "You will find, young ladies, that HE never speaks
without having excellent reasons for all that he says."

"Thank you, my angel," replied the Count. "Have a bon-bon?" He
took out of his pocket a pretty little inlaid box, and placed it
open on the table. "Chocolat a la Vanille," cried the
impenetrable man, cheerfully rattling the sweetmeats in the box,
and bowing all round. "Offered by Fosco as an act of homage to
the charming society."

"Be good enough to go on, Count," said his wife, with a spiteful
reference to myself. "Oblige me by answering Miss Halcombe."

"Miss Halcombe is unanswerable," replied the polite Italian; "that
is to say, so far as she goes. Yes! I agree with her. John Bull
does abhor the crimes of John Chinaman. He is the quickest old
gentleman at finding out faults that are his neighbours', and the
slowest old gentleman at finding out the faults that are his own,
who exists on the face of creation. Is he so very much better in
this way than the people whom he condemns in their way? English
Society, Miss Halcombe, is as often the accomplice as it is the
enemy of crime. Yes! yes! Crime is in this country what crime is
in other countries—a good friend to a man and to those about him
as often as it is an enemy. A great rascal provides for his wife
and family. The worse he is the more he makes them the objects
for your sympathy. He often provides also for himself. A
profligate spendthrift who is always borrowing money will get more
from his friends than the rigidly honest man who only borrows of
them once, under pressure of the direst want. In the one case the
friends will not be at all surprised, and they will give. In the
other case they will be very much surprised, and they will
hesitate. Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of
his career a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr.
Honesty lives in at the end of his career? When John-Howard-
Philanthropist wants to relieve misery he goes to find it in
prisons, where crime is wretched—not in huts and hovels, where
virtue is wretched too. Who is the English poet who has won the
most universal sympathy—who makes the easiest of all subjects for
pathetic writing and pathetic painting? That nice young person who
began life with a forgery, and ended it by a suicide—your dear,
romantic, interesting Chatterton. Which gets on best, do you
think, of two poor starving dressmakers—the woman who resists
temptation and is honest, or the woman who falls under temptation
and steals? You all know that the stealing is the making of that
second woman's fortune—it advertises her from length to breadth
of good-humoured, charitable England—and she is relieved, as the
breaker of a commandment, when she would have been left to starve,
as the keeper of it. Come here, my jolly little Mouse! Hey!
presto! pass! I transform you, for the time being, into a
respectable lady. Stop there, in the palm of my great big hand,
my dear, and listen. You marry the poor man whom you love, Mouse,
and one half your friends pity, and the other half blame you. And
now, on the contrary, you sell yourself for gold to a man you
don't care for, and all your friends rejoice over you, and a
minister of public worship sanctions the base horror of the vilest
of all human bargains, and smiles and smirks afterwards at your
table, if you are polite enough to ask him to breakfast. Hey!
presto! pass! Be a mouse again, and squeak. If you continue to be
a lady much longer, I shall have you telling me that Society
abhors crime—and then, Mouse, I shall doubt if your own eyes and
ears are really of any use to you. Ah! I am a bad man, Lady
Glyde, am I not? I say what other people only think, and when all
the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for
the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump
pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath. I will get up on my
big elephant's legs, before I do myself any more harm in your
amiable estimations—I will get up and take a little airy walk of
my own. Dear ladies, as your excellent Sheridan said, I go—and
leave my character behind me."

He got up, put the cage on the table, and paused for a moment to
count the mice in it. "One, two, three, four—-Ha!" he cried,
with a look of horror, "where, in the name of Heaven, is the
fifth—the youngest, the whitest, the most amiable of all—my
Benjamin of mice!"

Neither Laura nor I were in any favorable disposition to be
amused. The Count's glib cynicism had revealed a new aspect of
his nature from which we both recoiled. But it was impossible to
resist the comical distress of so very large a man at the loss of
so very small a mouse. We laughed in spite of ourselves; and when
Madame Fosco rose to set the example of leaving the boat-house
empty, so that her husband might search it to its remotest
corners, we rose also to follow her out.

Before we had taken three steps, the Count's quick eye discovered
the lost mouse under the seat that we had been occupying. He
pulled aside the bench, took the little animal up in his hand, and
then suddenly stopped, on his knees, looking intently at a
particular place on the ground just beneath him.

When he rose to his feet again, his hand shook so that he could
hardly put the mouse back in the cage, and his face was of a faint
livid yellow hue all over.

"Percival!" he said, in a whisper. "Percival! come here."

Sir Percival had paid no attention to any of us for the last ten
minutes. He had been entirely absorbed in writing figures on the
sand, and then rubbing them out again with the point of his stick.

"What's the matter now?" he asked, lounging carelessly into the
boat-house.

"Do you see nothing there?" said the Count, catching him nervously
by the collar with one hand, and pointing with the other to the
place near which he had found the mouse.

"I see plenty of dry sand," answered Sir Percival, "and a spot of
dirt in the middle of it."

"Not dirt," whispered the Count, fastening the other hand suddenly
on Sir Percival's collar, and shaking it in his agitation.
"Blood."

Laura was near enough to hear the last word, softly as he
whispered it. She turned to me with a look of terror.

"Nonsense, my dear," I said. "There is no need to be alarmed. It
is only the blood of a poor little stray dog."

Everybody was astonished, and everybody's eyes were fixed on me
inquiringly.

"How do you know that?" asked Sir Percival, speaking first.

"I found the dog here, dying, on the day when you all returned
from abroad," I replied. "The poor creature had strayed into the
plantation, and had been shot by your keeper."

"Whose dog was it?" inquired Sir Percival. "Not one of mine?"

"Did you try to save the poor thing?" asked Laura earnestly.
"Surely you tried to save it, Marian?"

"Yes," I said, "the housekeeper and I both did our best—but the
dog was mortally wounded, and he died under our hands."

"Whose dog was it?" persisted Sir Percival, repeating his question
a little irritably. "One of mine?"

"No, not one of yours."

"Whose then? Did the housekeeper know?"

The housekeeper's report of Mrs. Catherick's desire to conceal her
visit to Blackwater Park from Sir Percival's knowledge recurred to
my memory the moment he put that last question, and I half doubted
the discretion of answering it; but in my anxiety to quiet the
general alarm, I had thoughtlessly advanced too far to draw back,
except at the risk of exciting suspicion, which might only make
matters worse. There was nothing for it but to answer at once,
without reference to results.

"Yes," I said. "The housekeeper knew. She told me it was Mrs.
Catherick's dog."

Sir Percival had hitherto remained at the inner end of the boat-
house with Count Fosco, while I spoke to him from the door. But
the instant Mrs. Catherick's name passed my lips he pushed by the
Count roughly, and placed himself face to face with me under the
open daylight.

"How came the housekeeper to know it was Mrs. Catherick's dog?" he
asked, fixing his eyes on mine with a frowning interest and
attention, which half angered, half startled me.

"She knew it," I said quietly, "because Mrs. Catherick brought the
dog with her."

"Brought it with her? Where did she bring it with her?"

"To this house."

"What the devil did Mrs. Catherick want at this house?"

The manner in which he put the question was even more offensive
than the language in which he expressed it. I marked my sense of
his want of common politeness by silently turning away from him.

Just as I moved the Count's persuasive hand was laid on his
shoulder, and the Count's mellifluous voice interposed to quiet
him.

"My dear Percival!—gently—gently!"

Sir Percival looked round in his angriest manner. The Count only
smiled and repeated the soothing application.

"Gently, my good friend—gently!"

Sir Percival hesitated, followed me a few steps, and, to my great
surprise, offered me an apology.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Halcombe," he said. "I have been out of
order lately, and I am afraid I am a little irritable. But I
should like to know what Mrs. Catherick could possibly want here.
When did she come? Was the housekeeper the only person who saw
her?"

"The only person," I answered, "so far as I know."

The Count interposed again.

"In that case why not question the housekeeper?" he said. "Why
not go, Percival, to the fountain-head of information at once?"

"Quite right!" said Sir Percival. "Of course the housekeeper is
the first person to question. Excessively stupid of me not to see
it myself." With those words he instantly left us to return to the
house.

The motive of the Count's interference, which had puzzled me at
first, betrayed itself when Sir Percival's back was turned. He
had a host of questions to put to me about Mrs. Catherick, and the
cause of her visit to Blackwater Park, which he could scarcely
have asked in his friend's presence. I made my answers as short
as I civilly could, for I had already determined to check the
least approach to any exchanging of confidences between Count
Fosco and myself. Laura, however, unconsciously helped him to
extract all my information, by making inquiries herself, which
left me no alternative but to reply to her, or to appear in the
very unenviable and very false character of a depositary of Sir
Percival's secrets. The end of it was, that, in about ten
minutes' time, the Count knew as much as I know of Mrs. Catherick,
and of the events which have so strangely connected us with her
daughter, Anne, from the time when Cartright met with her to this
day.

The effect of my information on him was, in one respect, curious
enough.

Intimately as he knows Sir Percival, and closely as he appears to
be associated with Sir Percival's private affairs in general, he
is certainly as far as I am from knowing anything of the true
story of Anne Catherick. The unsolved mystery in connection with
this unhappy woman is now rendered doubly suspicious, in my eyes,
by the absolute conviction which I feel, that the clue to it has
been hidden by Sir Percival from the most intimate friend he has
in the world. It was impossible to mistake the eager curiosity of
the Count's look and manner while he drank in greedily every word
that fell from my lips. There are many kinds of curiosity, I
know—but there is no misinterpreting the curiosity of blank
surprise: if I ever saw it in my life I saw it in the Count's
face.

While the questions and answers were going on, we had all been
strolling quietly back through the plantation. As soon as we
reached the house the first object that we saw in front of it was
Sir Percival's dog-cart, with the horse put to and the groom
waiting by it in his stable-jacket. If these unexpected
appearances were to be trusted, the examination of the house-
keeper had produced important results already.

"A fine horse, my friend," said the Count, addressing the groom
with the most engaging familiarity of manner, "You are going to
drive out?"

"I am not going, sir," replied the man, looking at his stable-
jacket, and evidently wondering whether the foreign gentleman took
it for his livery. "My master drives himself."

"Aha!" said the Count, "does he indeed? I wonder he gives himself
the trouble when he has got you to drive for him. Is he going to
fatigue that nice, shining, pretty horse by taking him very far
to-day?"

"I don't know, sir," answered the man. "The horse is a mare, if
you please, sir. She's the highest-couraged thing we've got in
the stables. Her name's Brown Molly, sir, and she'll go till she
drops. Sir Percival usually takes Isaac of York for the short
distances."

"And your shining courageous Brown Molly for the long?"

"Logical inference, Miss Halcombe," continued the Count, wheeling
round briskly, and addressing me. "Sir Percival is going a long
distance to-day."

I made no reply. I had my own inferences to draw, from what I
knew through the housekeeper and from what I saw before me, and I
did not choose to share them with Count Fosco.

When Sir Percival was in Cumberland (I thought to myself), he
walked away a long distance, on Anne's account, to question the
family at Todd's Corner. Now he is in Hampshire, is he going to
drive away a long distance, on Anne's account again, to question
Mrs. Catherick at Welmingham?