He looks like a man who could tame anything. If he married a tigress
instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress. If he had married
_me_, I should have made his cigarettes as his wife does; I should have
held my tongue when he looked at me as she holds hers.
I am almost afraid to confess it even to these secret pages. The man has
interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him. In two short
days he has made his way straight into my favorable estimation; and how
he has worked the miracle is more than I can tell.
It absolutely startles me, now he is in my mind, to find how plainly I
see him! how much more plainly than I see Sir Percival, or Mr. Fairlie,
or Walter Hartright, or any other absent person of whom I think, with
the one exception of Laura herself. I can hear his voice as if he was
speaking at this moment. I know what his conversation was yesterday,
as well as if I was hearing it now. How am I to describe him? There
are peculiarities in his personal appearance, his habits, and his
amusements, which I should blame in the boldest terms or ridicule in the
most merciless manner, if I had seen them in another man. What is it
that makes me unable to blame them or to ridicule them in _him_?
For example, he is immensely fat. Before this time, I have always
especially disliked corpulent humanity. I have always maintained that
the popular notion of connecting excessive grossness of size and
excessive good-humor as inseparable allies was equivalent to declaring
either that no people but amiable people ever get fat, or that the
accidental addition of so many pounds of flesh has a directly favorable
influence over the disposition of the person on whose body they
accumulate. I have invariably combated both these absurd assertions by
quoting examples of fat people who were as mean, vicious, and cruel as
the leanest and worst of their neighbors. I have asked whether Henry the
Eighth was an amiable character? whether Pope Alexander the Sixth was a
good man? whether Mr. Murderer and Mrs. Murderess Manning were not both
unusually stout people? whether hired nurses, proverbially as cruel a
set of women as are to be found in all England, were not, for the most
part, also as fat a set of women as are to be found in all England?--and
so on through dozens of other examples, modern and ancient, native and
foreign, high and low. Holding these strong opinions on the subject with
might and main, as I do at this moment, here nevertheless is Count
Fosco, as fat as Henry the Eighth himself, established in my favor at
one day's notice, without let or hindrance from his own odious
corpulence. Marvelous indeed!
Is it his face that has recommended him?
It may be his face. He is a most remarkable likeness, on a large scale,
of the great Napoleon. His features have Napoleon's magnificent
regularity; his expression recalls the grandly calm immovable power of
the Great Soldier's face. This striking resemblance certainly impressed
me, to begin with; but there is something in him besides the
resemblance, which has impressed me more. I think the influence I am now
trying to find is in his eyes. They are the most unfathomable gray eyes
I ever saw; and they have at times a cold, clear, beautiful,
irresistible glitter in them, which forces me to look at him, and yet
causes me sensations, when I do look, which I would rather not feel.
Other parts of his face and head have their strange peculiarities. His
complexion, for instance, has a singular sallow-fairness, so much at
variance with the dark-brown color of his hair that I suspect the hair
of being a wig; and his face, closely shaven all over, is smoother and
freer from all marks and wrinkles than mine, though (according to Sir
Percival's account of him) he is close on sixty years of age. But these
are not the prominent personal characteristics which distinguish him, to
my mind, from all the other men I have ever seen. The marked peculiarity
which singles him out from the rank and file of humanity lies entirely,
so far as I can tell at present, in the extraordinary expression and
extraordinary power of his eyes.
His manner, and his command of our language, may also have assisted him
in some degree to establish himself in my good opinion. He has that
quiet deference, that look of pleased attentive interest, in listening
to a woman, and that secret gentleness in his voice in speaking to a
woman, which say what we may, we can none of us resist. Here too his
unusual command of the English language necessarily helps him. I had
often heard of the extraordinary aptitude which many Italians show in
mastering our strong hard Northern speech, but until I saw Count Fosco I
had never supposed it possible that any foreigner could have spoken
English as he speaks it. There are times when it is almost impossible to
detect by his accent that he is not a countryman of our own; and as for
fluency, there are very few born Englishmen who can talk with as few
stoppages and repetitions as the Count. He may construct his sentences
more or less in the foreign way; but I have never yet heard him use a
wrong expression, or hesitate for a moment in his choice of words.
All the smallest characteristics of this strange man have something
strikingly original and perplexingly contradictory in them. Fat as he
is, and old as he is, his movements are astonishingly light and easy. He
is as noiseless in a room as any of us women; and more than that, with
all his look of unmistakable mental firmness and power, he is as
nervously sensitive as the weakest of us. He starts at chance noises as
inveterately as Laura herself. He winced and shuddered yesterday when
Sir Percival beat one of the spaniels, so that I felt ashamed of my own
want of tenderness and sensibility by comparison with the Count.
The relation of this last incident reminds me of one of his most curious
peculiarities, which I have not yet mentioned--his extraordinary
fondness for pet animals.
Some of these he has left on the Continent; but he has brought with him
to this house a cockatoo, two canary-birds, and a whole family of white
mice. He attends to all the necessities of these strange favorites
himself, and he has taught the creatures to be surprisingly fond of him
and familiar with him. The cockatoo, a most vicious and treacherous bird
toward every one else, absolutely seems to love him. When he lets it out
of its cage it hops on to his knee, and claws its way up his great big
body, and rubs its topknot against his sallow double chin in the most
caressing manner imaginable. He has only to set the doors of the
canaries' cage open, and to call them; and the pretty little cleverly
trained creatures perch fearlessly on his hand, mount his fat
outstretched fingers one by one when he tells them to "go up-stairs,"
and sing together as if they would burst their throats with delight when
they get to the top finger. His white mice live in a little pagoda of
gayly painted wire-work, designed and made by himself. They are almost
as tame as the canaries, and they are perpetually let out, like the
canaries. They crawl all over him, popping in and out of his waistcoat,
and sitting in couples, white as snow, on his capacious shoulders. He
seems to be even fonder of his mice than of his other pets; smiles at
them, and kisses them, and calls them all sorts of endearing names. If
it be possible to suppose an Englishman with any taste for such childish
interests and amusements as these, that Englishman would certainly feel
rather ashamed of them, and would be anxious to apologize for them in
the company of grown-up people. But the Count apparently sees nothing
ridiculous in the amazing contrast between his colossal self and his
frail little pets. He would blandly kiss his white mice and twitter to
his canary-birds amidst an assembly of English fox-hunters, and would
only pity them as barbarians when they were all laughing their loudest
at him.
It seems hardly credible while I am writing it down, but it is certainly
true that this same man, who has all the fondness of an old maid for his
cockatoo, and all the small dexterities of an organ-boy in managing his
white mice, can talk, when anything happens to rouse him, with a daring
independence of thought, a knowledge of books in every language, and an
experience of society in half the capitals of Europe, which would make
him the prominent personage of any assembly in the civilized world. This
trainer of canary-birds, this architect of a pagoda for white mice, is
(as Sir Percival himself has told me) one of the first experimental
chemists living, and has discovered among other wonderful inventions a
means of petrifying the body after death, so as to preserve it, as hard
as marble, to the end of time. This fat, indolent, elderly man, whose
nerves are so finely strung that he starts at chance noises, and winces
when he sees a house spaniel get a whipping, went into the stable-yard
the morning after his arrival, and put his hand on the head of a chained
bloodhound--a beast so savage that the very groom who feeds him keeps
out of his reach. His wife and I were present, and I shall not forget
the scene that followed, short as it was.
"Mind that dog, sir," said the groom; "he flies at everybody!" "He does
that, my friend," replied the Count quietly, "because everybody is
afraid of him. Let us see if he flies at _me_." And he laid his plump
yellow-white fingers, on which the canary-birds had been perching ten
minutes before, upon the formidable brute's head, and looked him
straight in the eyes. "You big dogs are all cowards," he said,
addressing the animal contemptuously, with his face and the dog's within
an inch of each other. "You would kill a poor cat, you infernal coward.
You would fly at a starving beggar, you infernal coward. Anything that
you can surprise unawares--anything that is afraid of your big body, and
your wicked white teeth, and your slobbering, bloodthirsty mouth, is the
thing you like to fly at. You could throttle me at this moment, you mean
miserable bully; and you daren't so much as look me in the face, because
I'm not afraid of you. Will you think better of it, and try your teeth
in my fat neck? Bah! not you!" He turned away, laughing at the
astonishment of the men in the yard; and the dog crept back meekly to
his kennel. "Ah! my nice waistcoat!" he said pathetically. "I am sorry
I came here. Some of that brute's slobber has got on my pretty clean
waistcoat." Those words express another of his incomprehensible
oddities. He is as fond of fine clothes as the veriest fool in
existence, and has appeared in four magnificent waistcoats already--all
of light garish colors and all immensely large, even for him--in the two
days of his residence at Blackwater Park.
His tact and cleverness in small things are quite as noticeable as the
singular inconsistencies in his character, and the childish triviality
of his ordinary tastes and pursuits.
I can see already that he means to live on excellent terms with all of
us during the period of his sojourn in this place. He has evidently
discovered that Laura secretly dislikes him (she confessed as much to me
when I pressed her on the subject), but he has also found out that she
is extravagantly fond of flowers. Whenever she wants a nosegay he has
got one to give her, gathered and arranged by himself; and greatly to my
amusement, he is always cunningly provided with a duplicate, composed of
exactly the same flowers, grouped in exactly the same way, to appease
his icily jealous wife, before she can so much as think herself
aggrieved. His management of the Countess (in public) is a sight to see.
He bows to her; he habitually addresses her as "my angel"; he carries
his canaries to pay her little visits on his fingers, and to sing to
her; he kisses her hand when she gives him his cigarettes; he presents
her with sugar-plums in return, which he puts into her mouth playfully,
from a box in his pocket. The rod of iron with which he rules her never
appears in company--it is a private rod and is always kept up-stairs.
His method of recommending himself to _me_ is entirely different. He
flatters my vanity by talking to me as seriously and sensibly as if I
was a man. Yes! I can find him out when I am away from him; I know he
flatters my vanity, when I think of him up here in my own room--and yet
when I go down-stairs and get into his company again he will blind me
again, and I shall be flattered again, just as if I had never found him
out at all! He can manage me as he manages his wife and Laura, as he
manages the bloodhound in the stable yard, as he manages Sir Percival
himself every hour in the day. "My good Percival! how I like your rough
English humor!"--"My good Percival! how I enjoy your solid English
sense!" He puts the rudest remarks Sir Percival can make on his
effeminate tastes and amusements quietly away from him in that
manner--always calling the baronet by his Christian name; smiling at him
with the calmest superiority; patting him on the shoulder; and bearing
with him benignantly, as a good-humored father bears with a wayward son.
The interest which I really cannot help feeling in this strangely
original man has led me to question Sir Percival about his past life.
Sir Percival either knows little, or will tell me little about it. He
and the Count first met many years ago, at Rome, under the dangerous
circumstances to which I have alluded elsewhere. Since that time they
have been perpetually together, in London, in Paris, and in Vienna--but
never in Italy again; the Count having, oddly enough, not crossed the
frontiers of his native country for years past. Perhaps he has been made
the victim of some political persecution? At all events, he seems to be
patriotically anxious not to lose sight of any of his own countrymen who
may happen to be in England. On the evening of his arrival, he asked
how far we were from the nearest town, and whether we knew of any
Italian gentlemen who might happen to be settled there. He is certainly
in correspondence with people on the Continent, for his letters have all
sorts of odd stamps on them; and I saw one for him this morning, waiting
in his place at the breakfast-table, with a huge official-looking seal
on it. Perhaps he is in correspondence with his government? And yet that
is hardly to be reconciled, either, with my other idea that he may be a
political exile.
How much I seem to have written about Count Fosco! And what does it all
amount to?--as poor dear Mr. Gilmore would ask in his impenetrable
business-like way. I can only repeat that I do assuredly feel, even on
this short acquaintance, a strange, half-willing, half-unwilling liking
for the Count. He seems to have established over me the same sort of
ascendency which he has evidently gained over Sir Percival. Free and
even rude as he may occasionally be in his manner toward his fat friend,
Sir Percival is nevertheless afraid, as I can plainly see, of giving any
serious offense to the Count. I wonder whether I am afraid too? I
certainly never saw a man, in all my experience, whom I should be so
sorry to have for an enemy. Is this because I like him, or because I am
afraid of him? _Chi sa?_--as Count Fosco might say in his own language.
Who knows?