The Solitary House (220 page)

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 favourable 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 suspicions, 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 around 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 before them all 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 Hartright 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 connexion 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 housekeeper 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?”

“Yes, sir.”

“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?

We all entered the house. As we crossed the hall, Sir Percival came out from the library to meet us. He looked hurried and pale and anxious—but, for all that, he was in his most polite mood, when he spoke to us.

“I am sorry to say, I am obliged to leave you,” he began—“a long drive—a matter that I can’t very well put off. I shall be back in good time to-morrow—but, before I go, I should like that little business-formality, which I spoke of this morning, to be settled. Laura, will you come into the library? It won’t take a minute—a mere formality. Countess, may I trouble you also? I want you and the Countess, Fosco, to be witnesses to a signature—nothing more. Come in at once, and get it over.”

He held the library door open until they had passed in, followed them, and shut it softly.

I remained, for a moment afterwards, standing alone in the hall, with my heart beating fast, and my mind misgiving me sadly. Then, I went on to the staircase, and ascended slowly to my own room.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

MISS HALCOMBE’S NARRATIVE CONTINUED

June 17th. Just as my hand was on the door of my room, I heard Sir Percival’s voice calling to me from below.

“I must beg you to come down stairs again,” he said. “It
is Fosco’s fault, Miss Halcombe, not mine. He has started some nonsensical objection to his wife being one of the witnesses, and has obliged me to ask you to join us in the library.”

I entered the room immediately with Sir Percival. Laura was waiting by the writing-table, twisting and turning her garden hat uneasily in her hands. Madame Fosco sat near her, in an arm-chair, imperturbably admiring her husband, who stood by himself at the other end of the library, picking off the dead leaves from the flowers in the window.

The moment I appeared, the Count advanced to meet me, and to offer his explanations.

“A thousand pardons, Miss Halcombe,” he said. “You know the character which is given to my countrymen by the English? We Italians are all wily and suspicious by nature, in the estimation of the good John Bull. Set me down, if you please, as being no better than the rest of my race. I am a wily Italian and a suspicious Italian. You have thought so yourself, dear lady, have you not? Well! it is part of my wiliness and part of my suspicion to object to Madame Fosco being a witness to Lady Glyde’s signature, when I am also a witness myself.”

“There is not the shadow of a reason for his objection,” interposed Sir Percival. “I have explained to him that the law of England allows Madame Fosco to witness a signature as well as her husband.”

“I admit it,” resumed the Count. “The law of England says, Yes—but the conscience of Fosco says, No.” He spread out his fat fingers on the bosom of his blouse, and bowed solemnly, as if he wished to introduce his conscience to us all, in the character of an illustrious addition to the society. “What this document which Lady Glyde is about to sign, may be,” he continued, “I neither know nor desire to know. I only say this: circumstances may happen
in the future which may oblige Percival, or his representatives, to appeal to the two witnesses; in which case it is certainly desirable that those witnesses should represent two opinions which are perfectly independent the one of the other. This cannot be if my wife signs as well as myself, because we have but one opinion between us, and that opinion is mine. I will not have it cast in my teeth, at some future day, that Madame Fosco acted under my coercion, and was, in plain fact, no witness at all. I speak in Percival’s interests when I propose that my name shall appear (as the nearest friend of the husband), and your name, Miss Halcombe (as the nearest friend of the wife). I am a Jesuit, if you please to think so—a splitter of straws—a man of trifles and crotchets and scruples—but you will humour me, I hope, in merciful consideration for my suspicious Italian character, and my uneasy Italian conscience.” He bowed again, stepped back a few paces, and withdrew his conscience from our society as politely as he had introduced it.

The Count’s scruples might have been honourable and reasonable enough, but there was something in his manner of expressing them which increased my unwillingness to be concerned in the business of the signature. No consideration of less importance than my consideration for Laura, would have induced me to consent to be a witness at all. One look, however, at her anxious face, decided me to risk anything rather than desert her.

“I will readily remain in the room,” I said. “And if I find no reason for starting any small scruples, on my side, you may rely on me as a witness.”

Sir Percival looked at me sharply, as if he was about to say something. But, at the same moment, Madame Fosco attracted his attention by rising from her chair. She had
caught her husband’s eye, and had evidently received her orders to leave the room.