The Solitary House (273 page)

“I decline to tell you.”

“No matter: I shall find out. If that information is true—mind I say, with the whole force of my resolution,
if—you
are making your market of it here, by treachery of your own, or by treachery of some other man. I note that circumstance, for future use, in my memory which forgets nothing, and proceed.” He held up another finger. “Second question! Those lines you invited me to read, are without signature. Who wrote them?”

“A man whom
I
have every reason to depend on; and whom
you
have every reason to fear.”

My answer reached him to some purpose. His left hand trembled audibly in the drawer.

“How long do you give me,” he asked, putting his third question in a quieter tone, “before the clock strikes and the seal is broken?”

“Time enough for you to come to my terms,” I replied.

“Give me a plainer answer, Mr. Hartright. What hour is the clock to strike?”

“Nine, to-morrow morning.”

“Nine, to-morrow morning? Yes, yes—your trap is laid for me, before I can get my passport regulated, and leave London. It is not earlier, I suppose? We will see about that, presently—I can keep you hostage here, and bargain with you to send for your letter before I let you go. In the mean time, be so good, next, as to mention your terms.”

“You shall hear them. They are simple, and soon stated. You know whose interests I represent in coming here?”

He smiled with the most supreme composure; and carelessly waved his right hand.

“I consent to hazard a guess,” he said, jeeringly. “A lady’s interests, of course!”

“My Wife’s interests.”

He looked at me with the first honest expression that had crossed his face in my presence—an expression of blank amazement. I could see that I sank in his estimation, as a dangerous man, from that moment. He shut up the drawer at once, folded his arms over his breast, and listened to me with a smile of satirical attention.

“You are well enough aware,” I went on, “of the course which my inquiries have taken for many months past, to know that any attempted denial of plain facts will be quite useless in my presence. You are guilty of an infamous conspiracy. And the gain of a fortune of ten thousand pounds was your motive for it.”

He said nothing. But his face became overclouded suddenly by a lowering anxiety.

“Keep your gain,” I said. (His face lightened again immediately, and his eyes opened on me in wider and wider astonishment.) “I am not here to disgrace myself by bargaining
for money which has passed through your hands, and which has been the price of a vile crime——”

“Gently, Mr. Hartright. Your moral claptraps have an excellent effect in England—keep them for yourself and your own countrymen, if you please. The ten thousand pounds was a legacy left to my excellent wife by the late Mr. Fairlie. Place the affair on those grounds; and I will discuss it, if you please. To a man of my sentiments, however, the subject is deplorably sordid. I prefer to pass it over. I invite you to resume the discussion of your terms. What do you demand?”

“In the first place, I demand a full confession of the conspiracy, written and signed in my presence, by yourself.”

He raised his finger again. “One!” he said, checking me off with the steady attention of a practical man.

“In the second place, I demand a plain proof, which does not depend on your personal asseveration, of the date at which my wife left Blackwater Park, and travelled to London.”

“So! so! you can lay your finger, I see, on the weak place,” he remarked, composedly. “Any more?”

“At present, no more.”

“Good! You have mentioned your terms; now listen to mine. The responsibility to myself of admitting, what you are pleased to call the ‘conspiracy,’ is less, perhaps, upon the whole, than the responsibility of laying you dead on that hearth-rug. Let us say that I meet your proposal—on my own conditions. The statement you demand of me shall be written; and the plain proof shall be produced. You call a letter from my late lamented friend, informing me of the day and hour of his wife’s arrival in London, written, signed, and dated by himself, a proof, I suppose? I can give you this. I can also send you to the man of whom I hired
the carriage to fetch my visitor from the railway, on the day when she arrived—his order-book may help you to your date, even if his coachman who drove me proves to be of no use. These things I can do, and will do, on conditions. I recite them. First condition! Madame Fosco and I leave this house, when and how we please, without interference of any kind, on your part. Second condition! You wait here, in company with me, to see my agent, who is coming at seven o’clock in the morning to regulate my affairs. You give my agent a written order to the man who has got your sealed letter to resign his possession of it. You wait here till my agent places that letter unopened in my hands; and you then allow me one clear half-hour to leave the house—after which you resume your own freedom of action, and go where you please. Third condition! You give me the satisfaction of a gentleman, for your intrusion into my private affairs, and for the language you have allowed yourself to use to me, at this conference. The time and place, abroad, to be fixed in a letter from my hand when I am safe on the Continent; and that letter to contain a strip of paper measuring accurately the length of my sword. Those are
my
terms. Inform me if you accept them—Yes, or No.”

The extraordinary mixture of prompt decision, far-sighted cunning, and mountebank bravado in this speech, staggered me for a moment—and only for a moment. The one question to consider was, whether I was justified, or not, in possessing myself of the means of establishing Laura’s identity, at the cost of allowing the scoundrel who had robbed her of it to escape me with impunity. I knew that the motive of securing the just recognition of my wife in the birthplace from which she had been driven out as an impostor, and of publicly erasing the lie that still profaned
her mother’s tombstone, was far purer, in its freedom from all taint of evil passion, than the vindictive motive which had mingled itself with my purpose from the first. And yet I cannot honestly say that my own moral convictions were strong enough to decide the struggle in me, by themselves. They were helped by my remembrance of Sir Percival’s death. How awfully, at the last moment, had the working of the retribution,
there
, been snatched from my feeble hands! What right had I to decide, in my poor mortal ignorance of the future, that this man, too, must escape with impunity, because he escaped
me
? I thought of these things—perhaps, with the superstition inherent in my nature; perhaps, with a sense worthier of me than superstition. It was hard, when I had fastened my hold on him, at last, to loosen it again of my own accord—but I forced myself to make the sacrifice. In plainer words, I determined to be guided by the one higher motive of which I was certain, the motive of serving the cause of Laura and the cause of Truth.

“I accept your conditions,” I said. “With one reservation, on my part.”

“What reservation may that be?” he asked.

“It refers to the sealed letter,” I answered. “I require you to destroy it, unopened, in my presence, as soon as it is placed in your hands.”

My object in making this stipulation was simply to prevent him from carrying away written evidence of the nature of my communication with Pesca.
The fact
of my communication he would necessarily discover, when I gave the address to his agent, in the morning. But he could make no use of it, on his own unsupported testimony—even if he really ventured to try the experiment—which need excite in me the slightest apprehension on Pesca’s account.

“I grant your reservation,” he replied, after considering the question gravely for a minute or two. “It is not worth dispute—the letter shall be destroyed when it comes into my hands.”

He rose, as he spoke, from the chair in which he had been sitting opposite to me, up to this time. With one effort, he appeared to free his mind from the whole pressure on it of the interview between us, thus far. “Ouf!” he cried, stretching his arms luxuriously; “the skirmish was hot while it lasted. Take a seat, Mr. Hartright. We meet as mortal enemies hereafter—let us, like gallant gentlemen, exchange polite attentions in the mean time. Permit me to take the liberty of calling for my wife.”

He unlocked and opened the door. “Eleanor!” he called out, in his deep voice. The lady of the viperish face came in. “Madame Fosco—Mr. Hartright,” said the Count, introducing us with easy dignity. “My angel,” he went on, addressing his wife; “will your labours of packing-up allow you time to make me some nice strong coffee? I have writing-business to transact with Mr. Hartright—and I require the full possession of my intelligence to do justice to myself.”

Madame Fosco bowed her head twice—once sternly to me; once submissively to her husband—and glided out of the room.

The Count walked to a writing-table near the window; opened his desk, and took from it several quires of paper and a bundle of quill pens. He scattered the pens about the table, so that they might lie ready in all directions to be taken up when wanted, and then cut the paper into a heap of narrow slips, of the form used by professional writers for the press. “I shall make this a remarkable document,” he said, looking at me over his shoulder. “Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that man can possess,
is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?”

He marched backwards and forwards in the room, until the coffee appeared, humming to himself, and marking the places at which obstacles occurred in the arrangement of his ideas, by striking his forehead, from time to time, with the palm of his hand. The enormous audacity with which he seized on the situation in which I had placed him, and made it the pedestal on which his vanity mounted for the one cherished purpose of self-display, mastered my astonishment by main force. Sincerely as I loathed the man, the prodigious strength of his character, even in its most trivial aspects, impressed me in spite of myself.

The coffee was brought in by Madame Fosco. He kissed her hand, in grateful acknowledgment, and escorted her to the door; returned, poured out a cup of coffee for himself, and took it to the writing-table.

“May I offer you some coffee, Mr. Hartright?” he said, before he sat down.

I declined.

“What! you think I shall poison you?” he said, gaily. “The English intellect is sound, so far as it goes,” he continued, seating himself at the table; “but it has one grave defect—it is always cautious in the wrong place.”

He dipped his pen in the ink; placed the first slip of paper before him, with a thump of his hand on the desk; cleared his throat; and began. He wrote with great noise and rapidity, in so large and bold a hand, and with such wide spaces between the lines, that he reached the bottom of the slip in not more than two minutes certainly from the time when he started at the top. Each slip as he finished it, was paged, and tossed over his shoulder, out of his way, on the floor. When his first pen was worn out,
that
went over his shoulder too; and he pounced on a second from the
supply scattered about the table. Slip after slip, by dozens, by fifties, by hundreds, flew over his shoulders on either side of him, till he had snowed himself up in paper all round his chair. Hour after hour passed—and there I sat, watching; there he sat, writing. He never stopped, except to sip his coffee; and when that was exhausted, to smack his forehead, from time to time. One o’clock struck, two, three, four—and still the slips flew about all round him; still the untiring pen scraped its way ceaselessly from top to bottom of the page; still the white chaos of paper rose higher and higher all round his chair. At four o’clock, I heard a sudden splutter of the pen, indicative of the flourish with which he signed his name. “Bravo!” he cried—springing to his feet with the activity of a young man, and looking me straight in the face with a smile of superb triumph.

“Done, Mr. Hartright!” he announced, with a self-renovating thump of his fist on his broad breast. “Done, to my own profound satisfaction—to
your
profound astonishment, when you read what I have written. The subject is exhausted: the Man—Fosco—is not. I proceed to the arrangement of my slips, to the revision of my slips, to the reading of my slips—addressed, emphatically, to your private ear. Four o’clock has just struck. Good! Arrangement, revision, reading, from four to five. Short snooze of restoration for myself, from five to six. Final preparations, from six to seven. Affair of agent and sealed letter from seven to eight. At eight,
en route
. Behold the programme!”

He sat down cross-legged on the floor, among his papers; strung them together with a bodkin and a piece of string; revised them; wrote all the titles and honours by which he was personally distinguished, at the head of the first page; and then read the manuscript to me, with loud theatrical emphasis and profuse theatrical gesticulation.

The reader will have an opportunity, ere long, of forming his own opinion of the document. It will be sufficient to mention here that it answered my purpose.

His next proceeding was to write me the address of the person from whom he had hired the fly to go to the railway, and to hand me Sir Percival’s letter. I read this last with breathless interest. It only contained a few lines; but it distinctly announced the arrival of “Lady Glyde” in London, by the mid-day train from Blackwater,
on the 26th of July
, 1850—exactly, as I had supposed, one day after the date of her (assumed) death on the doctor’s certificate.

“Are you satisfied?” asked the Count.

“I am.”

“A quarter past five,” he said, looking at his watch. “Time for my restorative snooze. I personally resemble Napoleon the Great (as you may have remarked, Mr. Hartright)—I also resemble that immortal man in my power of commanding sleep at will. Excuse me, one moment. I will summon Madame Fosco, to keep you from feeling dull.”