The Solitary House (233 page)

“Crisis?” repeated Sir Percival. “It’s a worse crisis than you think for, I can tell you!”

“So I should suppose, from your behaviour for the last day or two,” returned the other, coolly. “But, wait a little. Before we advance to what I do
not
know, let us be quite certain of what I
do
know. Let us first see if I am right about the time that is past, before I make any proposal to you for the time that is to come.”

“Stop till I get the brandy and water. Have some yourself.”

“Thank you, Percival. The cold water with pleasure, a spoon, and the basin of sugar. Eau sucrée, my friend—nothing more.”

“Sugar and water, for a man of your age!—There! mix your sickly mess. You foreigners are all alike.”

“Now, listen, Percival. I will put our position plainly before you, as I understand it; and you shall say if I am right or wrong. You and I both came back to this house from the Continent, with our affairs very seriously embarrassed——”

“Cut it short! I wanted some thousands, and you some hundreds—and, without the money, we were both in a fair way to go to the dogs together. There’s the situation. Make what you can of it. Go on.”

“Well, Percival, in your own solid English words, you wanted some thousands and I wanted some hundreds; and the only way of getting them was for you to raise the money for your own necessity (with a small margin, beyond, for my poor little hundreds), by the help of your
wife. What did I tell you about your wife on our way to England? and what did I tell you again, when we had come here, and when I had seen for myself the sort of woman Miss Halcombe was?”

“How should I know? You talked nineteen to the dozen, I suppose, just as usual.”

“I said this: Human ingenuity, my friend, has hitherto only discovered two ways in which a man can manage a woman. One way is to knock her down—a method largely adopted by the brutal lower orders of the people, but utterly abhorrent to the refined and educated classes above them. The other way (much longer, much more difficult, but, in the end, not less certain) is never to accept a provocation at a woman’s hands. It holds with animals, it holds with children, and it holds with women, who are nothing but children grown up. Quiet resolution is the one quality the animals, the children, and the women all fail in. If they can once shake this superior quality in their master, they get the better of
him
. If they can never succeed in disturbing it, he gets the better of
them
. I said to you, Remember that plain truth, when you want your wife to help you to the money. I said, Remember it doubly and trebly, in the presence of your wife’s sister, Miss Halcombe. Have you remembered it? Not once, in all the complications that have twisted themselves about us in this house. Every provocation that your wife, and her sister, could offer to you, you instantly accepted from them. Your mad temper lost the signature to the deed, lost the ready money, set Miss Halcombe writing to the lawyer, for the first time——”

“First time? what do you mean?”

“This. Miss Halcombe has written to the lawyer for the second time, to-day.”

A chair fell on the pavement of the verandah—fell with a crash, as if it had been struck, or kicked down. It was well
for me that the Count’s revelation roused Sir Percival’s anger, as it did. On hearing that I had been again discovered, my self-control failed me at the critical moment; and I started so that the railing, against which I leaned, cracked again. How, in the name of Heaven, had he found me out? The letters had never left my own possession, till I placed them in Fanny’s hands at the inn.

“Thank your lucky star,” I heard the Count say next, “that you have me in the house, to undo the harm, as fast as you do it. Thank your lucky star that I said, No, when you were mad enough to talk of turning the key to-day on Miss Halcombe, as you turned it, in your mischievous folly, on your wife. Where are your eyes? Can you look at Miss Halcombe, and not see that she has the foresight and the resolution of a man? With that woman for my friend, I would snap these fingers of mine at the world. With that woman for my enemy, I, with all my brains and experience—I, Fosco, cunning as the devil himself, as you have told me a hundred times—I walk, in your English phrase, upon egg-shells! And this grand creature—I drink her health in my sugar and water—this grand creature, who stands in the strength of her love and her courage, firm as a rock between us two, and that poor flimsy pretty blonde wife of yours—this magnificent woman, whom I admire with all my soul, though I oppose her in your interests and in mine, you drive to extremities, as if she was no sharper and no bolder than the rest of her sex. Percival! Percival! you deserve to fail, and you
have
failed.”

There was a pause. I write the villain’s words about myself, because I mean to remember them, because I hope yet for the day when I may speak out, once for all in his presence, and cast them back, one by one, in his teeth.

Sir Percival was the first to break the silence again.

“Yes, yes; bully and bluster as much as you like,” he
said, sulkily; “the difficulty about the money is not the only difficulty. You would be for taking strong measures with the women, yourself—if you knew as much as I do.”

“We will come to that second difficulty, all in good time,” rejoined the Count. “You may confuse yourself, Percival, as much as you please, but you shall not confuse me. Let the question of the money be settled first. Have I convinced your obstinacy? have I shown you that your temper will not let you help yourself?—Or must I go back, and (as you put it in your dear straightforward English) bully and bluster a little more?”

“Pooh! It’s easy enough to grumble at
me
. Say what is to be done—that’s a little harder.”

“Is it? Bah! This is what is to be done: You give up all direction in the business from to-night; you leave it, for the future, in my hands only. I am talking to a Practical British Man—ha? Well, Practical, will that do for you?”

“What do you propose, if I leave it all to you?”

“Answer me first. Is it to be in my hands or not?”

“Say it is in your hands—what then?”

“A few questions, Percival, to begin with. I must wait a little, yet, to let circumstances guide me; and I must know, in every possible way, what those circumstances are likely to be. There is no time to lose. I have told you already that Miss Halcombe has written to the lawyer to-day, for the second time.”

“How did you find it out? What did she say?”

“If I told you, Percival, we should only come back at the end to where we are now. Enough that I have found out—and the finding has caused that trouble and anxiety which made me so inaccessible to you all through to-day. Now, to refresh my memory about your affairs—it is some time since I talked them over with you. The money has been raised, in the absence of your wife’s signature, by means of
bills at three months—raised at a cost that makes my poverty-stricken foreign hair stand on end to think of it! When the bills are due, is there really and truly no earthly way of paying them but by the help of your wife?”

“None.”

“What! You have no money at the banker’s!”

“A few hundreds, when I want as many thousands.”

“Have you no other security to borrow upon?”

“Not a shred.”

“What have you actually got with your wife, at the present moment?”

“Nothing, but the interest of her twenty thousand pounds—barely enough to pay our daily expenses.”

“What do you expect from your wife?”

“Three thousand a year, when her uncle dies.”

“A fine fortune, Percival. What sort of a man is this uncle? Old?”

“No—neither old nor young.”

“A good-tempered, freely-living man? Married? No—I think my wife told me, not married.”

“Of course not. If he was married, and had a son, Lady Glyde would not be next heir to the property. I’ll tell you what he is. He’s a maudlin, twaddling, selfish fool, and bores everybody who comes near him about the state of his health.”

“Men of that sort, Percival, live long, and marry malevolently when you least expect it. I don’t give you much, my friend, for your chance of the three thousand a year. Is there nothing more that comes to you from your wife?”

“Nothing.”

“Absolutely nothing?”

“Absolutely nothing—except in case of her death.”

“Aha? in the case of her death.”

There was another pause. The Count moved from the
verandah to the gravel walk outside. I knew that he had moved, by his voice. “The rain has come at last,” I heard him say. It
had
come. The state of my cloak showed that it had been falling thickly for some little time.

The Count went back under the verandah—I heard the chair creak beneath his weight as he sat down in it again.

“Well, Percival,” he said; “and, in the case of Lady Glyde’s death, what do you get then?”

“If she leaves no children——”

“Which she is likely to do?”

“Which she is not in the least likely to do——”

“Yes?”

“Why, then I get her twenty thousand pounds.”

“Paid down?”

“Paid down.”

They were silent once more. As their voices ceased, Madame Fosco’s shadow darkened the blind again. Instead of passing this time, it remained, for a moment, quite still. I saw her fingers steal round the corner of the blind, and draw it on one side. The dim white outline of her face, looking out straight over me, appeared behind the window. I kept quite still, shrouded from head to foot in my black cloak. The rain, which was fast wetting me, dripped over the glass, blurred it, and prevented her from seeing anything. “More rain!” I heard her say to herself. She dropped the blind—and I breathed again freely.

The talk went on below me; the Count resuming it, this time.

“Percival! do you care about your wife?”

“Fosco! that’s rather a downright question.”

“I am a downright man; and I repeat it.”

“Why the devil do you look at me in that way?”

“You won’t answer me? Well, then; let us say your wife dies before the summer is out——”

“Drop it, Fosco!”

“Let us say your wife dies——”

“Drop it, I tell you!”

“In that case, you would gain twenty thousand pounds; and you would lose——”

“I should lose the chance of three thousand a year.”

“The
remote
chance, Percival—the remote chance only. And you want money, at once. In your position, the gain is certain—the loss doubtful.”

“Speak for yourself as well as for me. Some of the money I want has been borrowed
for you
. And if you come to gain,
my
wife’s death would be ten thousand pounds in
your
wife’s pocket. Sharp as you are, you seem to have conveniently forgotten Madame Fosco’s legacy. Don’t look at me in that way! I won’t have it! What with your looks and your questions, upon my soul, you make my flesh creep!”

“Your flesh? Does flesh mean conscience in English? I speak of your wife’s death, as I speak of a possibility. Why not? The respectable lawyers who scribble-scrabble your deeds and your wills, look the deaths of living people in the face. Do lawyers make your flesh creep? Why should I? It is my business tonight, to clear up your position beyond the possibility of mistake—and I have now done it. Here is your position. If your wife lives, you pay those bills with her signature to the parchment. If your wife dies, you pay them with her death.”

As he spoke, the light in Madame Fosco’s room was extinguished; and the whole second floor of the house was now sunk in darkness.

“Talk! talk!” grumbled Sir Percival. “One would think, to hear you, that my wife’s signature to the deed was got already.”

“You have left the matter in my hands,” retorted the
Count; “and I have more than two months before me to turn round in. Say no more about it, if you please, for the present. When the bills are due, you will see for yourself if my ‘talk! talk!’ is worth something, or if it is not. And now, Percival, having done with the money matters, for to-night, I can place my attention at your disposal, if you wish to consult me on that second difficulty, which has mixed itself up with our little embarrassments, and which has so altered you for the worse, that I hardly know you again. Speak, my friend—and pardon me if I shock your fiery national tastes by mixing myself a second glass of sugar-and-water.”

“It’s very well to say speak,” replied Sir Percival, in a far more quiet and more polite tone than he had yet adopted; “but it’s not so easy to know how to begin.”

“Shall I help you?” suggested the Count. “Shall I give this private difficulty of yours a name? What, if I call it—Anne Catherick?”

“Look here, Fosco, you and I have known each other for a long time; and, if you have helped me out of one or two scrapes before this, I have done the best I could to help you in return, as far as money would go. We have made as many friendly sacrifices, on both sides, as men could; but we have had our secrets from each other, of course—haven’t we?”

“You have had a secret from
me
, Percival. There is a skeleton in your cupboard here at Blackwater Park, that has peeped out, in these last few days, at other people besides yourself.”

“Well, suppose it has. If it doesn’t concern you, you needn’t be curious about it, need you?”

“Do I look curious about it?”

“Yes, you do.”

“So! so! my face speaks the truth, then? What an immense foundation of good there must be in the nature of a man who arrives at my age, and whose face has not yet lost the habit of speaking the truth!—Come, Glyde! let us be candid one with the other. This secret of yours has sought
me:
I have not sought
it
. Let us say I am curious—do you ask me, as your old friend, to respect your secret, and to leave it, once for all, in your own keeping?”

“Yes—that’s just what I do ask.”

“Then my curiosity is at an end. It dies in me, from this moment.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“What makes you doubt me?”

“I have had some experience, Fosco, of your roundabout ways; and I am not so sure that you won’t worm it out of me, after all.”