The Solitary House (221 page)

“You needn’t go,” said Sir Percival.

Madame Fosco looked for her orders again, got them again, said she would prefer leaving us to our business, and resolutely walked out. The Count lit a cigarette, went back to the flowers in the window, and puffed little jets of smoke at the leaves, in a state of the deepest anxiety about killing the insects.

Meanwhile, Sir Percival unlocked a cupboard beneath one of the bookcases, and produced from it a piece of parchment folded, longwise, many times over. He placed it on the table, opened the last fold only, and kept his hand on the rest. The last fold displayed a strip of blank parchment with little wafers stuck on it at certain places. Every line of the writing was hidden in the part which he still held folded up under his hand. Laura and I looked at each other. Her face was pale—but it showed no indecision and no fear.

Sir Percival dipped a pen in ink, and handed it to his wife.

“Sign your name, there,” he said, pointing to the place. “You and Fosco are to sign afterwards, Miss Halcombe, opposite those two wafers. Come here, Fosco! witnessing a signature is not to be done by mooning out of window and smoking into the flowers.”

The Count threw away his cigarette, and joined us at the table, with his hands carelessly thrust into the scarlet belt of his blouse, and his eyes steadily fixed on Sir Percival’s face. Laura, who was on the other side of her husband, with the pen in her hand, looked at him, too. He stood between them, holding the folded parchment down firmly on the table, and glancing across at me, as I sat opposite to him, with such a sinister mixture of suspicion and embarrassment
in his face, that he looked more like a prisoner at the bar than a gentleman in his own house.

“Sign there,” he repeated, turning suddenly on Laura, and pointing once more to the place on the parchment.

“What is it I am to sign?” she asked, quietly.

“I have no time to explain,” he answered. “The dog-cart is at the door; and I must go directly. Besides, if I had time, you wouldn’t understand. It is a purely formal document—full of legal technicalities, and all that sort of thing. Come! come! sign your name, and let us have done as soon as possible.”

“I ought surely to know what I am signing, Sir Percival, before I write my name?”

“Nonsense! What have women to do with business? I tell you again, you can’t understand it.”

“At any rate, let me try to understand it. Whenever Mr. Gilmore had any business for me to do, he always explained it, first; and I always understood him.”

“I dare say he did. He was your servant, and was obliged to explain. I am your husband, and am
not
obliged. How much longer do you mean to keep me here? I tell you again, there is no time for reading anything: the dog-cart is waiting at the door. Once for all, will you sign, or will you not?”

She still had the pen in her hand; but she made no approach to signing her name with it.

“If my signature pledges me to anything,” she said, “surely, I have some claim to know what that pledge is?”

He lifted up the parchment, and struck it angrily on the table.

“Speak out!” he said. “You were always famous for telling the truth. Never mind Miss Halcombe; never mind Fosco—say, in plain terms, you distrust me.”

The Count took one of his hands out of his belt, and laid
it on Sir Percival’s shoulder. Sir Percival shook it off irritably. The Count put it on again with unruffled composure.

“Control your unfortunate temper, Percival,” he said. “Lady Glyde is right.”

“Right!” cried Sir Percival. “A wife right in distrusting her husband!”

“It is unjust and cruel to accuse me of distrusting you,” said Laura. “Ask Marian if I am not justified in wanting to know what this writing requires of me, before I sign it?”

“I won’t have any appeals made to Miss Halcombe,” retorted Sir Percival. “Miss Halcombe has nothing to do with the matter.”

I had not spoken hitherto, and I would much rather not have spoken now. But the expression of distress in Laura’s face when she turned it towards me, and the insolent injustice of her husband’s conduct, left me no other alternative than to give my opinion, for her sake, as soon as I was asked for it.

“Excuse me, Sir Percival,” I said—“but, as one of the witnesses to the signature, I venture to think that I
have
something to do with the matter. Laura’s objection seems to me to be a perfectly fair one; and, speaking for myself only, I cannot assume the responsibility of witnessing her signature, unless she first understands what the writing is which you wish her to sign.”

“A cool declaration, upon my soul!” cried Sir Percival. “The next time you invite yourself to a man’s house, Miss Halcombe, I recommend you not to repay his hospitality by taking his wife’s side against him in a matter that doesn’t concern you.”

I started to my feet as suddenly as if he had struck me. If I had been a man, I would have knocked him down on the threshold of his own door, and have left his house,
never, on any earthly consideration, to enter it again. But I was only a woman—and I loved his wife so dearly!

Thank God, that faithful love helped me, and I sat down again, without saying a word.
She
knew what I had suffered and what I had suppressed. She ran round to me, with the tears streaming from her eyes. “Oh, Marian!” she whispered softly. “If my mother had been alive, she could have done no more for me!”

“Come back and sign!” cried Sir Percival, from the other side of the table.

“Shall I?” she asked in my ear; “I will, if you tell me.”

“No,” I answered. “The right and the truth are with you—sign nothing, unless you have read it first.”

“Come back and sign!” he reiterated, in his loudest and angriest tones.

The Count, who had watched Laura and me with a close and silent attention, interposed for the second time.

“Percival!” he said. “
I
remember that I am in the presence of ladies. Be good enough, if you please, to remember it, too.”

Sir Percival turned on him, speechless with passion. The Count’s firm hand slowly tightened its grasp on his shoulder, and the Count’s steady voice quietly repeated, “Be good enough, if you please, to remember it, too.”

They both looked at each other. Sir Percival slowly drew his shoulder from under the Count’s hand; slowly turned his face away from the Count’s eyes; doggedly looked down for a little while at the parchment on the table; and then spoke, with the sullen submission of a tamed animal, rather than the becoming resignation of a convinced man.

“I don’t want to offend anybody,” he said. “But my wife’s obstinacy is enough to try the patience of a saint. I have told her this is merely a formal document—and what more can she want? You may say what you please; but it is no part of
a woman’s duty to set her husband at defiance. Once more, Lady Glyde, and for the last time, will you sign or will you not?”

Laura returned to his side of the table, and took up the pen again.

“I will sign with pleasure,” she said, “if you will only treat me as a responsible being. I care little what sacrifice is required of me, if it will affect no one else, and lead to no ill results——”

“Who talked of a sacrifice being required of you?” he broke in, with a half-suppressed return of his former violence.

“I only meant,” she resumed, “that I would refuse no concession which I could honourably make. If I have a scruple about signing my name to an engagement of which I know nothing, why should you visit it on me so severely? It is rather hard, I think, to treat Count Fosco’s scruples so much more indulgently than you have treated mine.”

This unfortunate, yet most natural, reference to the Count’s extraordinary power over her husband, indirect as it was, set Sir Percival’s smouldering temper on fire again in an instant.

“Scruples!” he repeated. “
Your
scruples! It is rather late in the day for you to be scrupulous. I should have thought you had got over all weakness of that sort, when you made a virtue of necessity by marrying
me.
”

The instant he spoke those words, Laura threw down the pen—looked at him with an expression in her eyes, which, throughout all my experience of her, I had never seen in them before—and turned her back on him in dead silence.

This strong expression of the most open and the most bitter contempt, was so entirely unlike herself, so utterly out of her character, that it silenced us all. There was something hidden, beyond a doubt, under the mere surface-brutality of the words which her husband had just addressed
to her. There was some lurking insult beneath them, of which I was wholly ignorant, but which had left the mark of its profanation so plainly on her face that even a stranger might have seen it.

The Count, who was no stranger, saw it as distinctly as I did. When I left my chair to join Laura, I heard him whisper under his breath to Sir Percival: “You idiot!”

Laura walked before me to the door as I advanced; and, at the same time, her husband spoke to her once more.

“You positively refuse, then, to give me your signature?” he said, in the altered tone of a man who was conscious that he had let his own licence of language seriously injure him.

“After what you have said to me,” she replied, firmly, “I refuse my signature until I have read every line in that parchment from the first word to the last. Come away, Marian, we have remained here long enough.”

“One moment!” interposed the Count, before Sir Percival could speak again—“one moment, Lady Glyde, I implore you!”

Laura would have left the room without noticing him; but I stopped her.

“Don’t make an enemy of the Count!” I whispered. “Whatever you do, don’t make an enemy of the Count!”

She yielded to me. I closed the door again; and we stood near it, waiting. Sir Percival sat down at the table, with his elbow on the folded parchment, and his head resting on his clenched fist. The Count stood between us—master of the dreadful position in which we were placed, as he was master of everything else.

“Lady Glyde,” he said, with a gentleness which seemed to address itself to our forlorn situation instead of to ourselves, “pray pardon me, if I venture to offer one suggestion; and pray believe that I speak out of my profound respect and my friendly regard for the mistress of this
house.” He turned sharply towards Sir Percival. “Is it absolutely necessary,” he asked, “that this thing here, under your elbow, should be signed to-day?”

“It is necessary to my plans and wishes,” replied the other, sulkily. “But that consideration, as you may have noticed, has no influence with Lady Glyde.”

“Answer my plain question, plainly. Can the business of the signature be put off till to-morrow—Yes, or No?”

“Yes—if you will have it so.”

“Then, what are you wasting your time for, here? Let the signature wait till to-morrow—let it wait till you come back.”

Sir Percival looked up with a frown and an oath.

“You are taking a tone with me that I don’t like,” he said. “A tone I won’t bear from any man.”

“I am advising you for your good,” returned the Count, with a smile of quiet contempt. “Give yourself time; give Lady Glyde time. Have you forgotten that your dog-cart is waiting at the door? My tone surprises you—ha? I dare say it does—it is the tone of a man who can keep his temper. How many doses of good advice have I given you in my time? More than you can count. Have I ever been wrong? I defy you to quote me an instance of it. Go! take your drive. The matter of the signature can wait till to-morrow. Let it wait—and renew it when you come back.”

Sir Percival hesitated, and looked at his watch. His anxiety about the secret journey which he was to take that day, revived by the Count’s words, was now evidently disputing possession of his mind with his anxiety to obtain Laura’s signature. He considered for a little while; and then got up from his chair.

“It is easy to argue me down,” he said, “when I have no time to answer you. I will take your advice, Fosco—not because I want it, or believe in it, but because I can’t stop
here any longer.” He paused, and looked round darkly at his wife. “If you don’t give me your signature when I come back to-morrow——!” The rest was lost in the noise of his opening the bookcase cupboard again, and locking up the parchment once more. He took his hat and gloves off the table, and made for the door. Laura and I drew back to let him pass. “Remember to-morrow!” he said to his wife; and went out.

We waited to give him time to cross the hall, and drive away. The Count approached us while we were standing near the door.

“You have just seen Percival at his worst, Miss Halcombe,” he said. “As his old friend, I am sorry for him and ashamed of him. As his old friend, I promise you that he shall not break out to-morrow in the same disgraceful manner in which he has broken out to-day.”

Laura had taken my arm while he was speaking, and she pressed it significantly when he had done. It would have been a hard trial to any woman to stand by and see the office of apologist for her husband’s misconduct quietly assumed by his male friend in her own house—and it was a hard trial to
her
. I thanked the Count civilly, and led her out. Yes! I thanked him: for I felt already, with a sense of inexpressible helplessness and humiliation, that it was either his interest or his caprice to make sure of my continuing to reside at Blackwater Park; and I knew, after Sir Percival’s conduct to me, that without the support of the Count’s influence, I could not hope to remain there. His influence, the influence of all others that I dreaded most, was actually the one tie which now held me to Laura in the hour of her utmost need!

We heard the wheels of the dog-cart crashing on the gravel of the drive, as we came out into the hall. Sir Percival had started on his journey.

“Where is he going to, Marian?” Laura whispered. “Every fresh thing he does, seems to terrify me about the future. Have you any suspicions?”

After what she had undergone that morning, I was unwilling to tell her my suspicions.

“How should I know his secrets,” I said, evasively.

“I wonder if the housekeeper knows?” she persisted.