No. 68.] SATURDAY,
AUGUST 11, 1860 [PRICE 2d.
THE WOMAN IN WHITE.
———•———
PART THE THIRD. HARTRIGHT'S NARRATIVE.
I.
Four
months passed. April came—the month of Spring; the month of change.
The course of Time had flowed through the interval
since the winter, peacefully and happily in our new home. I had turned my
long leisure to good account; had largely increased my sources of
employment; and had placed our means of subsistence on surer grounds. Freed
from the suspense and the anxiety which had tried her so sorely, and hung
over her so long, Marian’s spirits rallied; and her natural energy of
character began to assert itself again, with something, if not all, of the
freedom and the vigour of former times.
More pliable under change than her sister, Laura showed
more plainly the progress made by the healing influences of her new life.
The worn and wasted look which had prematurely aged her face, was fast
leaving it; and the expression which had been the first of its charms in
past days, was the first of its beauties that now returned. My closest
observation of her detected but one serious result of the conspiracy which
had once threatened her reason and her life. Her memory of events, from the
period of her leaving Blackwater Park to the period of our meeting in the
burial-ground of Limmeridge Church, was lost beyond all hope of recovery. At
the slightest reference to that time, she changed and trembled still; her
words became confused; her memory wandered and lost itself as helplessly as
ever. Here, and here only, the traces of the past lay deep—too deep to be
effaced.
In all else, she was now so far on the way to recovery,
that, on her best and brightest days, she sometimes looked and spoke like
the Laura of old times. The happy change wrought its natural result in us
both. From their long slumber, on her side and on mine, those imperishable
memories of our past life in Cumberland now awoke, which were one and all
alike, the memories of our love.
Gradually and insensibly, our daily relations towards
each other became constrained. The fond words which I had spoken to her so
naturally, in the days of her sorrow and her suffering, faltered strangely
on my lips. In the time when my dread of losing her was most present to my
mind, I had always kissed her when she left me at night and when she met me
in the morning. The kiss seemed now to have dropped between us—to be lost
out of our lives. Our hands began to tremble again when they met. We hardly
ever looked long at one another out of Marian’s presence. The talk often
flagged between us when we were alone. When I touched her by accident, I
felt my heart beating fast, as it used to beat at Limmeridge House—I saw the
lovely answering flush glowing again in her cheeks, as if we were back among
the Cumberland Hills, in our past characters of master and pupil once more.
She had long intervals of silence and thoughtfulness; and denied she had
been thinking, when Marian asked her the question. I surprised myself, one
day, neglecting my work, to dream over the little water-colour portrait of
her which I had taken in the summer-house where we first met—just as I used
to neglect Mr. Fairlie’s drawings, to dream over the same likeness, when it
was newly finished in the bygone time. Changed as all the circumstances now
were, our position towards each other in the golden days of our first
companionship, seemed to be revived with the revival of our love. It was as
if Time had drifted us back, on the wreck of our early hopes, to the old
familiar shore!
To any other woman, I could have spoken the decisive
words which I still hesitated to speak to
her. The utter helplessness of her
position; her friendless dependence on all the forbearing gentleness that I
could show her; my fear of touching too soon some secret sensitiveness in
her, which my instinct, as a man, might not have been fine enough to
discover—these considerations, and others like them, kept me
self-distrustfully silent. And yet, I knew that the restraint on both sides
must be ended; that the relations in which we stood towards one another must
be altered, in some settled manner, for the future; and that it rested with
me, in the first instance, to recognise the necessity for a change.
The more I thought of our position, the harder the
attempt to alter it appeared, while the domestic conditions on which we
three had been living together since the winter, remained undisturbed. I
cannot account for the capricious state of mind in which this feeling
originated—but the idea nevertheless possessed me, that some previous change
of place and circumstances, some sudden break in the quiet monotony of our
lives, so managed as to vary the home aspect under which we had been
accustomed to see each other, might prepare the way for me to speak, and
might make it easier and less embarrassing for Laura and Marian to hear.
With this purpose in view, I said, one morning, that I
thought we had all earned a little holiday and a change of scene. After some
consideration, it was decided that we should go for a fortnight to the
sea-side. On the next day, we left Fulham for a quiet town on the south
coast. At that early season of the year, we were the only visitors in the
place. The cliffs, the beach, and the walks inland, were all in the solitary
condition which was most welcome to us. The air was mild; the prospects over
hill and wood and down were beautifully varied by the shifting April light
and shade; and the restless sea leapt under our windows, as if it felt like
the land the glow and freshness of spring.
I owed it to Marian to consult her before I spoke to
Laura, and to be guided afterwards by her advice.
On the third day from our arrival, I found a fit
opportunity of speaking to her alone. The moment we looked at one another,
her quick instinct detected the thought in my mind before I could give it
expression. With her customary energy and directness, she spoke at once, and
spoke first.
“You are thinking of that subject which was mentioned
between us on the evening of your return from Hampshire,” she said. “I have
been expecting you to allude to it, for some time past. There must be a
change in our little household, Walter; we cannot go on much longer as we
are now. I see it as plainly as you do—as plainly as Laura sees it, though
she says nothing. How strangely the old times in Cumberland seem to have
come back! You and I are together again; and the one subject of interest
between us is Laura once more. I could almost fancy that this room is the
summer-house at Limmeridge, and that those waves beyond us are beating on
our
sea-shore.”
“I was guided by your advice in those past days,” I
said; “and now, Marian, with reliance tenfold greater, I will be guided by
it again.”
She answered by pressing my hand. I saw that the
generous, impulsive nature of the woman was deeply touched by my reference
to the past. We sat together near the window; and, while I spoke and she
listened, we looked at the glory of the sunlight shining on the majesty of
the sea.
“Whatever comes of this confidence between us,” I said,
“whether it ends happily or sorrowfully for
me, Laura’s interests will still
be the interests of my life. When we leave this place, on whatever terms we
leave it, my determination to wrest from Count Fosco the confession which I
failed to obtain from his accomplice, goes back with me to London, as
certainly as I go back myself. Neither you nor I can tell how that man may
turn on me, if I bring him to bay; we only know by his own words and
actions, that he is capable of striking at me, through Laura, without a
moment’s hesitation, or a moment’s remorse. In our present position, I have
no claim on her, which society sanctions, which the law allows, to
strengthen me in resisting him,
and in protecting her. This places
me at a serious disadvantage. If I am to fight our cause with the Count,
strong in the consciousness of Laura’s safety, I must fight it for my Wife.
Do you agree to that, Marian, so far?”
“To every word of it,” she answered.
“I will not plead out of my own heart,” I went on; “I
will not appeal to the love which has survived all changes and all shocks—I
will rest my only vindication of myself for thinking of her and speaking of
her as my wife, on what I have just said. If the chance of forcing a
confession from the Count, is, as I believe it to be, the last chance left
of publicly establishing the fact of Laura’s existence, the least selfish
reason that I can advance for our marriage is recognised by us both. But I
may be wrong in my conviction; other means of achieving our purpose may be
in our power, which are less uncertain and less dangerous. I have searched
anxiously, in my own mind, for those means—and I have not found them. Have
you?”
“No. I have thought about it, too, and thought in
vain.”
“In all likelihood,” I continued, “the same questions
have occurred to you, in considering this difficult subject, which have
occurred to me. Ought we to return with her to Limmeridge, now that she is
like herself again, and trust to the recognition of her by the people of the
village, or by the children at the school? Ought we to appeal to the
practical test of her handwriting? Suppose we did so. Suppose the
recognition of her obtained, and the identity of the handwriting
established. Would success in both those cases do more than supply an
excellent foundation for a trial in a court of law? Would the recognition
and the handwriting prove her identity to Mr. Fairlie and take her back to
Limmeridge House, against the evidence of her aunt, against the evidence of
the medical certificate, against the fact of the funeral and the fact of the
inscription on the tomb? No! We could only hope to succeed in throwing a
serious doubt on the assertion of her death—a doubt which nothing short of a
legal inquiry can settle. I will assume that we possess (what we have
certainly not got) money enough to carry this inquiry on through all its
stages. I will assume that Mr. Fairlie’s prejudices might be reasoned away;
that the false testimony of the Count and his wife, and all the rest of the
false testimony, might be confuted; that the recognition could not possibly
be ascribed to a mistake between Laura and Anne Catherick, or the
handwriting be declared by our enemies to be a clever fraud—all these are
assumptions which, more or less, set plain probabilities at defiance, but
let them pass—and let us ask ourselves what would be the first consequence
of the first questions put to Laura herself on the subject of the
conspiracy. We know only too well what the consequence would be—for we know
that she has never recovered her memory of what happened to her in London.
Examine her privately, or examine her publicly, she is utterly incapable of
assisting the assertion of her own case. If you don’t see this, Marian, as
plainly as I see it, we will go to Limmeridge and try the experiment,
to-morrow.”
“I do see it,
Walter. Even if we had the means of paying all the law expenses, even if we
succeeded in the end, the delays would be unendurable; the perpetual
suspense, after what we have suffered already, would be heart-breaking. You
are right about the hopelessness of going to Limmeridge. I wish I could feel
sure that you are right also in determining to try that last chance with the
Count. Is it a chance at all?”
“Beyond a doubt, Yes. It is the chance of recovering
the lost date of Laura’s journey to London. Without returning to the reasons
I gave you some time since, I am still as firmly persuaded as ever, that
there is a discrepancy between the date of that journey and the date on the
certificate of death. There lies the weak point of the whole conspiracy—it
crumbles to pieces if we attack it in that way; and the means of attacking
it are in possession of the Count——”
“Not in his possession only!” Marian eagerly
interposed. “Surely, Walter, we have both of us overlooked, in the strangest
manner, the letter which Laura wrote to Mrs. Vesey, and which Mrs. Michelson
posted, from Blackwater Park? Even if there is no date to the letter (which
is only too probable), the post-mark would help us.”
“I remembered
the letter, Marian—though, in the press of other anxieties and other
disappointments on my mind, I may have omitted to tell you about it, at the
time. When I went to Mrs. Vesey’s to inquire if Laura had really slept
there, and when I heard that she had never been near the house, I asked for
her letter from Blackwater Park. The letter was given to me—but the envelope
was lost. It had been thrown into the waste-paper basket, and long since
destroyed.”
“Was there no date to the letter?”
“None. Not even the day of the week was mentioned. You
can judge for yourself. I have the letter in my pocket-book, with the other
papers which I always keep about me. Look. She only writes these few
lines:—‘Dearest Mrs. Vesey, I am in sad distress and anxiety, and I may come
to your house to-morrow night and ask for a bed. I can’t tell you what is
the matter in this letter—I write it in such fear of being found out that I
can fix my mind on nothing. Pray be at home to see me. I will give you a
thousand kisses, and tell you everything. Your affectionate Laura.’ What
help is there in those lines? None. I say it again, the last means left of
attacking the conspiracy by recovering the lost date are in the possession
of the Count. If I succeed in wresting them from him, the object of your
life and mine is fulfilled. If I fail, the wrong that Laura has suffered,
will, in this world, never be redressed.”
“Do you fear failure, yourself, Walter?”
“I dare not anticipate success; and, for that very
reason, Marian, I speak openly and plainly, as I have spoken now. In my
heart and my conscience, I can say it—Laura’s hopes for the future are at
their lowest ebb. I know that her fortune is gone; I know that the last
chance of restoring her to her place in the world lies at the mercy of her
worst enemy, of a man who is now absolutely unassailable, and who may remain
unassailable to the end. With every worldly advantage gone from her; with
all prospect of recovering her rank and station more than doubtful; with no
clearer future before her than the future which her husband can provide—the
poor drawing-master may harmlessly open his heart at last. In the days of
her prosperity, Marian, I was only the teacher who guided her hand—I ask for
it, in her adversity, as the hand of my wife!”
Marian’s eyes met mine affectionately—I could say no
more. My heart was full, my lips were trembling. In spite of myself, I was
in danger of appealing to her pity. I got up to leave the room. She rose at
the same moment, laid her hand gently on my shoulder, and stopped me.
“Walter!” she said, “I once parted you both, for your
good and for hers. Wait here, my Brother!—wait, my dearest, best friend,
till Laura comes, and tells you what I have done now!”
For the first time since the farewell morning at
Limmeridge, she touched my forehead with her lips. A tear dropped on my
face, as she kissed me. She turned quickly, pointed to the chair from which
I had risen, and left the room.
I sat down alone at the window, to wait through the
crisis of my life. My mind, in that breathless interval, felt like a total
blank. I was conscious of nothing but a painful intensity of all familiar
perceptions. The sun grew blinding bright; the white sea birds chasing each
other far beyond me, seemed to be flitting before my face; the mellow murmur
of the waves on the beach was like thunder in my ears.
The door opened; and Laura came in alone. So she had
entered the breakfast-room at Limmeridge House, on the morning when we
parted. Slowly and falteringly, in sorrow and in hesitation, she had once
approached me. Now, she came with the haste of happiness in her feet, with
the light of happiness radiant in her face. Of their own accord, those dear
arms clasped themselves round me; of their own accord, the sweet lips came
to meet mine. “My darling!” she whispered, “we may own we love each other,
now!” Her head nestled with a tender contentedness on my bosom. “Oh,” she
said, innocently, “I am so happy at last!”
Ten days later, we were happier still. We were married.
II.
The
course of this narrative, steadily flowing on, bears me away from the
morning-time of our married life, and carries me forward to the End.
In a fortnight more we three were back in London; and
the shadow was stealing over us of the struggle to come.
Marian and I were careful to keep Laura in ignorance of
the cause that had hurried us back—the necessity of making sure of the
Count. It was now the beginning of May, and his term of occupation at the
house in Forest-road expired in June. If he renewed it (and I had reasons,
shortly to be mentioned, for anticipating that he would), I might be certain
of his not escaping me. But, if by any chance he disappointed my
expectations, and left the country—then, I had no time to lose in arming
myself to meet him as I best might.
In the first fulness of my new happiness, there had
been moments when my resolution faltered—moments, when I was tempted to be
safely content, now that the dearest aspiration of my life was fulfilled in
the possession of Laura’s love. For the first time, I thought
faint-heartedly of the greatness of the risk; of the adverse chances arrayed
against me; of the fair promise of our new lives, and of the peril in which
I might place the happiness which we had so hardly earned. Yes! let me own
it honestly. For a brief time, I wandered, in the sweet guiding of love, far
from the purpose to which I had been true, under sterner discipline and in
darker days. Innocently, Laura had tempted me aside from the hard
path—innocently, she was destined to lead me back again. At times, dreams of
the terrible past still disconnectedly recalled to her, in the mystery of
sleep, the events of which her waking memory had lost all trace. One night
(barely two weeks after our marriage), when I was watching her at rest, I
saw the tears come slowly through her closed eyelids, I heard the faint
murmuring words escape her which told me that her spirit was back again on
the fatal journey from Blackwater Park. That unconscious appeal, so touching
and so awful in the sacredness of her sleep, ran through me like fire. The
next day was the day we came back to London—the day when my resolution
returned to me with tenfold strength.
The first necessity was to know something of the man.
Thus far, the true story of his life was an impenetrable mystery to me.
I began with such scanty sources of information as were
at my own disposal. The important narrative written by Mr. Frederick Fairlie
(which Marian had obtained by following the directions I had given to her in
the winter) proved to be of no service to the special object with which I
now looked at it. While reading it, I reconsidered the disclosure revealed
to me by Mrs. Clements, of the series of deceptions which had brought Anne
Catherick to London, and which had there devoted her to the interests of the
conspiracy. Here, again, the Count had not openly committed himself; here
again, he was, to all practical purpose, out of my reach.
I next returned to Marian’s journal at Blackwater Park.
At my request she read to me again a passage which referred to her past
curiosity about the Count, and to the few particulars which she had
discovered relating to him.
The passage to which I allude occurs in that part of
her journal which delineates his character and his personal appearance. She
describes him as “not having crossed the frontiers of his native country for
years past”—as “anxious to know if any Italian gentlemen were settled in the
nearest town to Blackwater Park”—as “receiving letters with all sorts of odd
stamps on them, and one with a large, official-looking seal on it.” She is
inclined to consider that his long absence from his native country may be
accounted for by assuming that he is a political exile. But she is, on the
other hand, unable to reconcile this idea with his reception of the letter
from abroad, bearing “the large official-looking seal”—letters from the
Continent addressed to political exiles being usually the last to court
attention from foreign post-offices in that way.
The considerations thus presented to me in the diary,
joined to certain surmises of my own that grew out of them, suggested a
conclusion which I wondered I had not arrived at before. I now said to
myself—what Laura had once said to Marian at Blackwater Park; what Madame
Fosco had overheard by listening at the door—the Count is a Spy!
Laura had applied the word to him at hazard, in natural
anger at his proceedings towards herself.
I applied
it to him, with the deliberate conviction that his vocation in life was the
vocation of a Spy. On this assumption, the reason for his extraordinary stay
in England, so long after the objects of the conspiracy had been gained,
became, to my mind, quite intelligible.
The year of which I am now writing, was the year of the
famous Crystal Palace Exhibition in Hyde Park. Foreigners, in unusually
large numbers, had arrived already, and were still arriving, in England. Men
were among us, by thousands, whom the ceaseless distrustfulness of their
governments had followed privately, by means of appointed agents, to our
shores. My surmises did not for a moment class a man of the Count’s
abilities and social position with the ordinary rank and file of foreign
spies. I suspected him of holding a position of authority, of being
entrusted, by the government which he secretly served, with the organisation
and management of agents specially employed in this country, both men and
women; and I believed Mrs. Rubelle, who had been so opportunely found to act
as nurse at Blackwater Park, to be, in all probability, one of the number.
Assuming that this idea of mine had a foundation in
truth, the position of the Count might prove to be more assailable than I
had hitherto ventured to hope. To whom could I apply to know something more
of the man’s history, and of the man himself, than I knew now?
In this emergency, it naturally occurred to my mind
that a countryman of his own, on whom I could rely, might be the fittest
person to help me. The first man whom I thought of, under these
circumstances, was also the only Italian with whom I was intimately
acquainted—my quaint little friend, Professor Pesca.
The professor has been so long absent from these pages,
that he has run some risk of being forgotten altogether. It is the necessary
law of such a story as mine, that the persons concerned in it only appear
when the course of events takes them up—they come and go, not by favour of
my personal partiality, but by right of their direct connexion with the
circumstances to be detailed. For this reason, not Pesca only, but my mother
and sister as well, have been left far in the background of the narrative.
My visits to the Hampstead cottage; my mother’s lamentable belief in the
denial of Laura’s identity which the conspiracy had accomplished; my vain
efforts to overcome the prejudice, on her part and on my sister’s, to which,
in their jealous affection for me, they both continued to adhere; the
painful necessity which that prejudice imposed on me of concealing my
marriage from them till they had learnt to do justice to my wife—all these
little domestic occurrences have been left unrecorded, because they were not
essential to the main interest of the story. It is nothing that they added
to my anxieties and embittered my disappointments—the steady march of events
has inexorably passed them by.
For the same reason, I have said nothing, here, of the
consolation that I found in Pesca’s brotherly affection for me, when I saw
him again after the sudden cessation of my residence at Limmeridge House. I
have not recorded the fidelity with which my warm-hearted little friend
followed me to the place of embarkation, when I sailed for Central America,
or the noisy transport of joy with which he received me when we next met in
London. If I had felt justified in accepting the offers of service which he
made to me, on my return, he would have appeared again, long ere this. But,
though I knew that his honour and his courage were to be implicitly relied
on, I was not so sure that his discretion was to be trusted; and, for that
reason only, I followed the course of all my inquiries alone. It will now be
sufficiently understood that Pesca was not separated from all connexion with
me and my interests, although he has hitherto been separated from all
connexion with the progress of this narrative. He was as true and as ready a
friend of mine still, as ever he had been in his life.
Before I summoned Pesca to my assistance, it was
necessary to see for myself what sort of man I had to deal with. Up to this
time, I had never once set eyes on Count Fosco.
Three days after my return with Laura and Marian to
London, I set forth alone for Forest-road, St. John’s Wood, between ten and
eleven o’clock in the morning. It was a fine day—I had some hours to
spare—and I thought it likely, if I waited a little for him, that the Count
might be tempted out. I had no great reason to fear the chance of his
recognising me in the daytime, for the only occasion when I had been seen by
him was the occasion on which he had followed me home at night.
No one appeared at the windows in the front of the
house. I walked down a turning which ran past the side of it, and looked
over the low garden wall. One of the back windows on the lower floor was
thrown up, and a net was stretched across the opening. I saw nobody; but I
heard, in the room, first a shrill whistling and singing of birds—then, the
deep ringing voice which Marian’s description had made familiar to me. “Come
out on my little finger, my pret-pret-pretties!” cried the voice. “Come out,
and hop up-stairs! One, two, three—and up! Three, two, one—and down! One,
two, three—twit-twit-twit-tweet!” The Count was exercising his canaries, as
he used to exercise them in Marian’s time, at Blackwater Park.
I waited a little while, and the singing and the
whistling ceased. “Come, kiss me, my pretties!” said the deep voice. There
was a responsive twittering and chirping—a low, oily laugh—a silence of a
minute or so—and then I heard the opening of the house door. I turned, and
retraced my steps. The magnificent melody of the Prayer in Rossini’s
“Moses,” sung in a sonorous bass voice, rose grandly through the suburban
silence of the place. The front garden gate opened and closed. The Count had
come out.
He crossed the road, and walked towards the western
boundary of the Regent’s Park. I kept on my own side of the way, a little
behind him, and walked in that direction also.
Marian had prepared me for his high stature, his
monstrous corpulence, and his ostentatious mourning garments—but not for the
horrible freshness and cheerfulness and vitality of the man. He carried his
sixty years as if they had been fewer than forty. He sauntered along,
wearing his hat a little on one side, with a light jaunty step; swinging his
big stick; humming to himself; looking up, from time to time, at the houses
and gardens on either side of him, with superb, smiling patronage. If a
stranger had been told that the whole neighbourhood belonged to him, that
stranger would not have been surprised to hear it. He never looked back: he
paid no apparent attention to me, no apparent attention to any one who
passed him on his own side of the road—except, now and then, when he smiled
and smirked, with an easy, paternal good humour, at the nurserymaids and the
children whom he met. In this way, he led me on, till we reached a colony of
shops outside the western terraces of the Park.
Here, he stopped at a pastrycook’s, went in (probably
to give an order), and came out again immediately with a tart in his hand.
An Italian was grinding an organ before the shop, and a miserable little
shrivelled monkey was sitting on the instrument. The Count stopped; bit a
piece for himself out of the tart; and gravely handed the rest to the
monkey. “My poor little man!” he said, with grotesque tenderness; “you look
hungry. In the sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch!” The
organ-grinder piteously put in his claim to a penny from the benevolent
stranger. The Count shrugged his shoulders contemptuously—and passed on.
We reached the streets and the better class of shops,
between the New-road and Oxford-street. The Count stopped again, and entered
a small optician’s shop, with an inscription in the window, announcing that
repairs were neatly executed inside. He came out again, with an opera-glass
in his hand; walked a few paces on; and stopped to look at a bill of the
Opera, placed outside a music-seller’s shop. He read the bill attentively,
considered a moment, and then hailed an empty cab as it passed him.
“Opera-box-office,” he said to the man—and was driven away.
I crossed the road, and looked at the bill in my turn.
The performance announced was “Lucrezia Borgia,” and it was to take place
that evening. The opera-glass in the Count’s hand, his careful reading of
the bill, and his direction to the cabman, all suggested that he proposed
making one of the audience. I had the means of getting an admission for
myself and a friend, to the pit, by applying to one of the scene-painters
attached to the theatre, with whom I had been well acquainted in past times.
There was a chance, at least, that the Count might be easily visible among
the audience, to me, and to any one with me; and, in this case, I had the
means of ascertaining whether Pesca knew his countryman, or not, that very
night.
This consideration at once decided the disposal of my
evening. I procured the tickets, leaving a note at the Professor’s lodgings
on the way. At a quarter to eight, I called to take him with me to the
theatre. My little friend was in a state of the highest excitement, with a
festive flower in his button-hole, and the largest opera-glass I ever saw
hugged up under his arm.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
“Right-all-right,” said Pesca.
We started for the theatre.
III.
The
last notes of the introduction to the opera were being played, and the seats
in the pit were all filled, when Pesca and I reached the theatre.
There was plenty of room, however, in the passage that
ran round the pit, which was precisely the position best calculated to
answer the purpose for which I was attending the performance. I went first
to the barrier separating us from the stalls; and looked for the Count in
that part of the theatre. He was not there. Returning along the passage, on
the left hand side from the stage, and looking about me attentively, I
discovered him in the pit. He occupied an excellent place, some twelve or
fourteen seats from the end of a bench, within three rows of the stalls. I
placed myself exactly on a line with him; Pesca standing by my side. The
Professor was not yet aware of the purpose for which I had brought him to
the theatre, and he was rather surprised that we did not move nearer to the
stage.
The curtain rose, and the opera began.
Throughout the whole of the first act, we remained in
our position; the Count, absorbed by the orchestra and the stage, never
casting so much as a chance glance at us. Not a note of Donizetti’s
delicious music was lost on him. There he sat, high above his neighbours,
smiling, and nodding his great head enjoyingly, from time to time. When the
people near him applauded the close of an air (as an English audience in
such circumstances always will
applaud), without the least
consideration for the orchestral movement which immediately followed it, he
looked round at them with an expression of compassionate remonstrance, and
held up one hand with a gesture of polite entreaty. At the more refined
passages of the singing, at the more delicate phrases of the music, which
passed unapplauded by others, his fat hands adorned with perfectly-fitting
black kid gloves, softly patted each other, in token of the cultivated
appreciation of a musical man. At such times, his oily murmur of approval,
“Bravo! Bra-a-a-a!” hummed through the silence, like the purring of a great
cat. His immediate neighbours on either side—hearty, ruddy-faced people from
the country, basking amazedly in the sunshine of fashionable London—seeing
and hearing him, began to follow his lead. Many a burst of applause from the
pit, that night, started from the soft, comfortable patting of the
black-gloved hands. The man’s voracious vanity devoured this implied tribute
to his local and critical supremacy, with an appearance of the highest
relish. Smiles rippled continuously over his fat face. He looked about him,
at the pauses in the music, serenely satisfied with himself and his
fellow-creatures. “Yes! yes! these barbarous English people are learning
something from me. Here, there,
and everywhere, I—Fosco—am an Influence that is felt, a Man who sits
supreme!” If ever face spoke, his face spoke then—and that was its language.
The curtain fell on the first act; and the audience
rose to look about them. This was the time I had waited for—the time to try
if Pesca knew him.
He rose with the rest, and surveyed the occupants of
the boxes grandly with his opera-glass. At first, his back was towards us;
but he turned round, in time, to our side of the theatre, and looked at the
boxes above us; using his glass for a few minutes—then removing it, but
still continuing to look up. This was the moment I chose, when his full face
was in view, for directing Pesca’s attention to him.
“Do you know that man?” I asked.
“Which man, my friend?”
“The tall, fat man, standing there, with his face
towards us.”
Pesca raised himself on tiptoe, and looked at the
Count.
“No,” said the Professor. “The big fat man is a
stranger to me. Is he famous? Why do you point him out?”
“Because I have particular reasons for wishing to know
something of him. He is a countryman of yours; his name is Count Fosco. Do
you know that name?”
“Not I, Walter. Neither the name nor the man is known
to me.”
“Are you quite sure you don’t recognise him? Look
again; look carefully. I will tell you why I am so anxious about it, when we
leave the theatre. Stop! let me help you up here, where you can see him
better.”
I helped the little man to perch himself on the edge of
the raised dais upon which the pit-seats were all placed. Here, his small
stature was no hindrance to him; here, he could see over the heads of the
ladies who were seated near the outermost part of the bench. A slim,
light-haired man, standing by us, whom I had not noticed before—a man with a
scar on his left cheek—looked attentively at Pesca as I helped him up, and
then looked still more attentively, following the direction of Pesca’s eyes,
at the Count. Our conversation might have reached his ears, and might, as it
struck me, have roused his curiosity.
Meanwhile, Pesca fixed his eyes earnestly on the broad,
full, smiling face turned a little upward, exactly opposite to him.
“No,” he said; “I have never set my two eyes on that
big fat man before, in all my life.”
As he spoke, the Count looked downwards towards the
boxes behind us on the pit tier.
The eyes of the two Italians met.
The instant before, I had been perfectly satisfied,
from his own reiterated assertion, that Pesca did not know the Count. The
instant afterwards, I was equally certain that the Count knew Pesca!
Knew him; and—more surprising still—feared him as well! There was no mistaking the change that passed
over the villain’s face. The leaden hue that altered his yellow complexion
in a moment, the sudden rigidity of all his features, the furtive scrutiny
of his cold grey eyes, the motionless stillness of him from head to foot,
told their own tale. A mortal dread had mastered him, body and soul—and his
own recognition of Pesca was the cause of it!
The slim man, with the scar on his cheek, was still
close by us. He had apparently drawn his inference from the effect produced
on the Count by the sight of Pesca, as I had drawn mine. He was a mild
gentlemanlike man, looking like a foreigner; and his interest in our
proceedings was not expressed in anything approaching to an offensive
manner.
For my own part, I was so startled by the change in the
Count’s face, so astounded at the entirely unexpected turn which events had
taken, that I knew neither what to say or do next. Pesca roused me by
stepping back to his former place at my side, and speaking first.
“How the fat man stares!” he exclaimed. “Is it at
me? Am
I famous? How can he know me, when I don’t know him?”
I kept my eye still on the Count. I saw him move for
the first time when Pesca moved, so as not to lose sight of the little man,
in the lower position in which he now stood. I was curious to see what would
happen, if Pesca’s attention, under these circumstances, was withdrawn from
him; and I accordingly asked the Professor if he recognised any of his
pupils, that evening, among the ladies in the boxes. Pesca immediately
raised the large opera glass to his eyes, and moved it slowly all round the
upper part of the theatre, searching for his pupils with the most
conscientious scrutiny.
The moment he showed himself to be thus engaged, the
Count turned round; slipped past the persons who occupied seats on the
farther side of him from where we stood; and disappeared in the middle
passage down the centre of the pit. I caught Pesca by the arm; and, to his
inexpressible astonishment, hurried him round with me to the back of the
pit, to intercept the Count before he could get to the door. Somewhat to my
surprise, the slim man hastened out before us, avoiding a stoppage caused by
some people on our side of the pit leaving their places, by which Pesca and
myself were delayed. When we reached the lobby the Count had disappeared -
and the foreigner with the scar was gone too.
“Come home,” I said; “come home, Pesca, to your
lodgings. I must speak to you in private—I must speak directly.”
“My-soul-bless-my-soul!” cried the Professor, in a
state of the extremest bewilderment. “What on earth is the matter?”
I walked on rapidly, without answering. The
circumstances under which the Count had left the theatre suggested to me
that his extraordinary anxiety to escape Pesca might carry him to further
extremities still. He might escape me,
too, by leaving London. I doubted the future, if I allowed him so much as a
day’s freedom to act as he pleased. And I doubted that foreign stranger who
had got the start of us, and whom I suspected of intentionally following him
out.
With this double distrust in my mind, I was not long in
making Pesca understand what I wanted. As soon as we two were alone in his
room, I increased his confusion and amazement a hundredfold by telling him
what my purpose was, as plainly and unreservedly as I have acknowledged it
here.
“My friend, what can I do?” cried the Professor,
piteously appealing to me with both hands. “Deuce-what-the-deuce! how can I
help you, Walter, when I don’t know the man?”
“He knows
you—he is afraid of you—he has
left the theatre to escape you. Pesca! there must be a reason for this. Look
back into your own life, before you came to England. You left Italy, as you
have told me yourself, for political reasons. You have never mentioned those
reasons to me; and I don’t inquire into them, now. I only ask you to consult
your own recollections, and to say if they suggest no past cause for the
terror which the first sight of you produced in that man.”
To my unutterable surprise, these words, harmless as
they appeared to me, produced the
same astounding effect on Pesca which the sight of Pesca had produced on the
Count. The rosy face of my little friend whitened in an instant; and he drew
back from me slowly, trembling from head to foot.
“Walter!” he said. “You don’t know what you ask.”
He spoke in a whisper—he looked at me as if I had
suddenly revealed to him some hidden danger to both of us. In less than one
minute of time, he was so altered from the easy, lively, quaint little man
of all my past experience, that if I had met him in the street, changed as I
saw him now, I should most certainly not have known him again.
“Forgive me, if I have unintentionally pained and
shocked you,” I replied. “Remember the cruel wrong my wife has suffered at
Count Fosco’s hands. Remember that the wrong can never be redressed, unless
the means are in my power of forcing him to do her justice. I spoke in
her interests, Pesca—I ask you again to forgive me—I can say no
more.”
I rose to go. He stopped me before I reached the door.
“Wait,” he said. “You have shaken me from head to foot.
You don’t know how I left my country, and why I left my country. Let me
compose myself—let me think, if I can.”
I returned to my chair. He walked up and down the room,
talking to himself incoherently in his own language. After several turns
backwards and forwards, he suddenly came up to me, and laid his little hands
with a strange tenderness and solemnity on my breast.
“On your heart and soul, Walter,” he said, “is there no
other way to get to that man but the chance-way through
me? ”
“There is no other way,” I answered.
He left me again; opened the door of the room and
looked out cautiously into the passage; closed it once more; and came back.
“You won your right over me, Walter,” he said, “on the
day when you saved my life. It was yours from that moment, when you pleased
to take it. Take it now. Yes! I mean what I say. My next words, as true as
the good God is above us, will put my life into your hands.”
The trembling earnestness with which he uttered this
extraordinary warning, carried with it to my mind the conviction that he
spoke the truth.
“Mind this!” he went on, shaking his hands at me in the
vehemence of his agitation. “I hold no thread, in my own mind, between that
man, Fosco, and the past time which I call back to me, for your sake. If
you find the thread, keep it to
yourself—tell me nothing—on my knees, I beg and pray, let me be ignorant,
let me be innocent, let me be blind to all the future, as I am now!”
He said a few words more, hesitatingly and
disconnectedly—then stopped again.
I saw that the effort of expressing himself in English,
on an occasion too serious to permit him the use of the quaint turns and
phrases of his ordinary vocabulary, was painfully increasing the difficulty
he had felt from the first in speaking to me at all. Having learnt to read
and understand his native language (though not to speak it), in the earlier
days of our intimate companionship, I now suggested to him that he should
express himself in Italian, while I used English in putting any questions
which might be necessary to my enlightenment. He accepted the proposal. In
his own smooth-flowing language—spoken with a vehement agitation which
betrayed itself in the perpetual working of his features, in the wildness
and the suddenness of his foreign gesticulations, but never in the raising
of his voice—I now heard the words which armed me to meet the last struggle
that is left for this story to record.*
———————————————————————--
*It is only right to mention, here, that I repeat Pesca’s statement to me,
with the careful suppressions and alterations which the serious nature of
the subject and my own sense of duty to my friend demand. My first and last
concealments from the reader are those which caution renders absolutely
necessary in this portion of the narrative.
———————————————————————--
“You know nothing of my motive for leaving Italy,” he
began, “except that it was for political reasons. If I had been driven to
this country by the persecution of my government, I should not have kept
those reasons a secret from you or from any one. I have concealed them
because no government authority has pronounced the sentence of my exile. You
have heard, Walter, of the political Societies that are hidden in every
great city on the continent of Europe? To one of those Societies I belonged
in Italy—and belong still, in England. When I came to this country, I came
by the direction of my Chief. I was
over-zealous in my younger time; I ran the risk of compromising myself and
others. For those reasons, I was ordered to emigrate to England, and to
wait. I emigrated—I have waited—I wait still. To-morrow, I may be called
away: ten years hence, I may be called away. It is all one to me—I am here,
I support myself by teaching, and I wait. I violate no oath (you shall hear
why presently) in making my confidence complete by telling you the name of
the Society to which I belong. All I do is to put my life in your hands. If
what I say to you now is ever known by others to have passed my lips, as
certainly as we two sit here, I am a dead man.”
He whispered the next words in my ear. I keep the
secret which he thus communicated. The Society to which he belonged, will be
sufficiently individualised for the purpose of these pages, if I call it
“The Brotherhood,” on the few occasions when any reference to the subject
will be needed in this place.
“The object of the Brotherhood,” Pesca went on, “is,
briefly, the object of other political societies of the same sort—the
destruction of tyranny, and the assertion of the rights of the people. The
principles of the Brotherhood are two. So long as a man’s life is useful, or
even harmless only, he has the right to enjoy it. But, if his life inflicts
injury on the well-being of his fellow-men, from that moment he forfeits the
right, and it is not only no crime but a positive merit to deprive him of
it. It is not for me to say in what frightful circumstances of oppression
and suffering this Society took its rise. It is not for you to say—you
Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have
conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you
proceeded to in the conquering—it is not for
you to say how far the worst of
all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved
nation. The iron that has entered into our souls has gone too deep for
you
to find it. Leave the refugee alone!
Laugh at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at that secret self
which smoulders in him, sometimes under the every-day respectability and
tranquillity of a man like me; sometimes under the grinding poverty, the
fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am—but
judge us not! In the time of your first Charles you might have done us
justice; the long luxury of your own freedom has made you incapable of doing
us justice now.”
All the deepest feelings of his nature seemed to force
themselves to the surface in those words; all his heart was poured out to
me, for the first time in our lives—but still, his voice never rose; still
his dread of the terrible revelation he was making to me, never left him.
“So far,” he resumed, “you think the Society like other
Societies. Its object (in your English opinion) is anarchy and revolution.
It takes the life of a bad King or a bad Minister, as if the one and the
other were dangerous wild beasts to be shot at the first opportunity. I
grant you this. But the laws of the Brotherhood are the laws of no other
political society on the face of the earth. The members are not known to one
another. There is a President in Italy; there are Presidents abroad. Each of
these has his Secretary. The Presidents and the Secretaries know the
members; but the members, among themselves, are all strangers, until their
Chiefs see fit, in the political necessity of the time, or in the private
necessity of the society, to make them known to each other. With such a
safeguard as this, there is no oath among us on admittance. We are
identified with the Brotherhood by a secret mark, which we all bear, which
lasts while our lives last. We are told to go about our ordinary business,
and to report ourselves to the President, or the Secretary, four times a
year, in the event of our services being required. We are warned, if we
betray the Brotherhood, or if we injure it by serving other interests, that
we die by the principles of the Brotherhood—die by the hand of a stranger
who may be sent from the other end of the world to strike the blow—or by the
hand of our own bosom-friend, who may have been a member unknown to us
through all the years of our intimacy. Sometimes, the death is delayed;
sometimes, it follows close on the treachery. It is our first business to
know how to wait—our second business to know how to obey when the word is
spoken. Some of us may wait our lives through, and may not be wanted. Some
of us may be called to the work, or to the preparation for the work, the
very day of our admission. I myself—the little, easy, cheerful man you know,
who, of his own accord, would hardly lift up his handkerchief to strike down
the fly that buzzes about his face—I, in my younger time, under provocation
so dreadful that I will not tell you of it, entered the Brotherhood by an
impulse, as I might have killed myself by an impulse. I must remain in it,
now—it has got me, whatever I may think of it in my better circumstances and
my cooler manhood, to my dying day. While I was still in Italy, I was chosen
Secretary; and all the members of that time, who were brought face to face
with my President, were brought face to face also with
me.”
I began to understand him; I saw the end towards which
his extraordinary disclosure was now tending. He waited a moment, watching
me earnestly—watching, till he had evidently guessed what was passing in my
mind, before he resumed.
“You have drawn your own conclusion already,” he said.
“I see it in your face. Tell me nothing; keep me out of the secret of your
thoughts. Let me make my one last sacrifice of myself, for your sake—and
then have done with this subject, never to return to it again.”
He signed to me not to answer him—rose—removed his
coat—and rolled up the shirt-sleeve on his left arm.
“I promised you that this confidence should be
complete,” he whispered, speaking close at my ear, with his eyes looking
watchfully at the door. “Whatever comes of it, you shall not reproach me
with having hidden anything from you which it was necessary to your
interests to know. I have said that the Brotherhood identifies its members
by a mark that lasts for life. See the place, and the mark on it, for
yourself.”
He raised his bare arm, and showed me, high on the
upper part of it and in the inner side, a brand deeply burnt in the flesh
and stained of a bright blood-red colour. I abstain from describing the
device which the brand represented. It will be sufficient to say that it was
circular in form, and so small that it would have been completely covered by
a shilling coin.
“A man who has this mark, branded in this place,” he
said, covering his arm again, “is a member of the Brotherhood. A man who has
been false to the Brotherhood is discovered, sooner or later, by the Chiefs
who know him—Presidents or Secretaries, as the case may be. And a man
discovered by the Chiefs is dead. No
human laws can protect him. Remember what you have seen and heard; draw
what conclusions you like; act as you please. But, in the name of God,
whatever you discover, whatever you do, tell me nothing! Let me remain free
from a responsibility which it horrifies me to think of—which I know, in my
conscience, is not my
responsibility, now. For the last
time, I say it—on my honour as a gentleman, on my oath as a Christian, if
the man you pointed out at the Opera knows
me, he is so altered, or so
disguised, that I do not know him. I am ignorant of his proceedings or his purposes in England—I
never saw him, I never heard his name, to my knowledge, before to-night. I
say no more. Leave me a little, Walter: I am overpowered by what has
happened; I am shaken by what I have said. Let me try to be like myself
again, when we meet next.”
He dropped into a chair; and, turning away from me, hid
his face in his hands. I gently opened the door, so as not to disturb
him—and spoke my few parting words in low tones, which he might hear or not,
as he pleased.
“I will keep the memory of to-night in my heart of
hearts,” I said. “You shall never repent the trust you have reposed in me.
May I come to you to-morrow? May I come as early as nine o’clock?”
“Yes, Walter,” he replied, looking up at me kindly, and
speaking in English once more, as if his one anxiety, now, was to get back
to our former relations towards each other. “Come to my little bit of
breakfast, before I go my ways among the pupils that I teach.”
“Good night, Pesca.”
“Good night, my friend.”
All The Year Round, 11 August 1860, Vol.III, No.68, pp.409-418
Weekly Part 38.
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