“I am going back too,” he said. “Pray allow me the pleasure of
accompanying you. Will you take my arm? You look surprised at seeing
me!”
I took his arm. The first of my scattered senses that came back was the
sense that warned me to sacrifice anything rather than make an enemy of
him.
“You look surprised at seeing me!” he repeated in his quietly
pertinacious way.
“I thought, Count, I heard you with your birds in the breakfast-room,”
I answered, as quietly and firmly as I could.
“Surely. But my little feathered children, dear lady, are only too like
other children. They have their days of perversity, and this morning
was one of them. My wife came in as I was putting them back in their
cage, and said she had left you going out alone for a walk. You told
her so, did you not?”
“Certainly.”
“Well, Miss Halcombe, the pleasure of accompanying you was too great a
temptation for me to resist. At my age there is no harm in confessing
so much as that, is there? I seized my hat, and set off to offer myself
as your escort. Even so fat an old man as Fosco is surely better than
no escort at all? I took the wrong path—I came back in despair, and
here I am, arrived (may I say it?) at the height of my wishes.”
He talked on in this complimentary strain with a fluency which left
me no exertion to make beyond the effort of maintaining my composure.
He never referred in the most distant manner to what he had seen in
the lane, or to the letter which I still had in my hand. This ominous
discretion helped to convince me that he must have surprised, by the
most dishonourable means, the secret of my application in Laura’s
interest to the lawyer; and that, having now assured himself of the
private manner in which I had received the answer, he had discovered
enough to suit his purposes, and was only bent on trying to quiet the
suspicions which he knew he must have aroused in my mind. I was wise
enough, under these circumstances, not to attempt to deceive him by
plausible explanations, and woman enough, notwithstanding my dread of
him, to feel as if my hand was tainted by resting on his arm.
On the drive in front of the house we met the dog-cart being taken
round to the stables. Sir Percival had just returned. He came out to
meet us at the house-door. Whatever other results his journey might
have had, it had not ended in softening his savage temper.
“Oh! here are two of you come back,” he said, with a lowering face.
“What is the meaning of the house being deserted in this way? Where is
Lady Glyde?”
I told him of the loss of the brooch, and said that Laura had gone into
the plantation to look for it.
“Brooch or no brooch,” he growled sulkily, “I recommend her not to
forget her appointment in the library this afternoon. I shall expect to
see her in half an hour.”
I took my hand from the Count’s arm, and slowly ascended the steps.
He honoured me with one of his magnificent bows, and then addressed
himself gaily to the scowling master of the house.
“Tell me, Percival,” he said, “have you had a pleasant drive? And has
your pretty shining Brown Molly come back at all tired?”
“Brown Molly be hanged—and the drive too! I want my lunch.”
“And I want five minutes’ talk with you, Percival, first,” returned the
Count. “Five minutes’ talk, my friend, here on the grass.”
“What about?”
“About business that very much concerns you.”
I lingered long enough in passing through the hall-door to hear this
question and answer, and to see Sir Percival thrust his hands into his
pockets in sullen hesitation.
“If you want to badger me with any more of your infernal scruples,” he
said, “I for one won’t hear them. I want my lunch.”
“Come out here and speak to me,” repeated the Count, still perfectly
uninfluenced by the rudest speech that his friend could make to him.
Sir Percival descended the steps. The Count took him by the arm, and
walked him away gently. The “business,” I was sure, referred to the
question of the signature. They were speaking of Laura and of me beyond
a doubt. I felt heart-sick and faint with anxiety. It might be of the
last importance to both of us to know what they were saying to each
other at that moment, and not one word of it could by any possibility
reach my ears.
I walked about the house, from room to room, with the lawyer’s letter
in my bosom (I was afraid by this time even to trust it under lock and
key), till the oppression of my suspense half maddened me. There were
no signs of Laura’s return, and I thought of going out to look for her.
But my strength was so exhausted by the trials and anxieties of the
morning that the heat of the day quite overpowered me, and after an
attempt to get to the door I was obliged to return to the drawing-room
and lie down on the nearest sofa to recover.
I was just composing myself when the door opened softly and the Count
looked in.
“A thousand pardons, Miss Halcombe,” he said; “I only venture to
disturb you because I am the bearer of good news. Percival—who is
capricious in everything, as you know—has seen fit to alter his mind
at the last moment, and the business of the signature is put off for
the present. A great relief to all of us, Miss Halcombe, as I see with
pleasure in your face. Pray present my best respects and felicitations,
when you mention this pleasant change of circumstances to Lady Glyde.”
He left me before I had recovered my astonishment. There could be no
doubt that this extraordinary alteration of purpose in the matter of
the signature was due to his influence, and that his discovery of my
application to London yesterday, and of my having received an answer
to it to-day, had offered him the means of interfering with certain
success.
I felt these impressions, but my mind seemed to share the exhaustion
of my body, and I was in no condition to dwell on them with any useful
reference to the doubtful present or the threatening future. I tried
a second time to run out and find Laura, but my head was giddy and my
knees trembled under me. There was no choice but to give it up again
and return to the sofa, sorely against my will.
The quiet in the house, and the low murmuring hum of summer insects
outside the open window, soothed me. My eyes closed of themselves, and
I passed gradually into a strange condition, which was not waking—for I
knew nothing of what was going on about me, and not sleeping—for I was
conscious of my own repose. In this state my fevered mind broke loose
from me, while my weary body was at rest, and in a trance, or day-dream
of my fancy—I know not what to call it—I saw Walter Hartright. I had
not thought of him since I rose that morning—Laura had not said one
word to me either directly or indirectly referring to him—and yet I saw
him now as plainly as if the past time had returned, and we were both
together again at Limmeridge House.
He appeared to me as one among many other men, none of whose faces I
could plainly discern. They were all lying on the steps of an immense
ruined temple. Colossal tropical trees—with rank creepers twining
endlessly about their trunks, and hideous stone idols glimmering and
grinning at intervals behind leaves and stalks and branches—surrounded
the temple and shut out the sky, and threw a dismal shadow over the
forlorn band of men on the steps. White exhalations twisted and curled
up stealthily from the ground, approached the men in wreaths like
smoke, touched them, and stretched them out dead, one by one, in the
places where they lay. An agony of pity and fear for Walter loosened my
tongue, and I implored him to escape. “Come back, come back!” I said.
“Remember your promise to HER and to ME. Come back to us before the
Pestilence reaches you and lays you dead like the rest!”
He looked at me with an unearthly quiet in his face. “Wait,” he said,
“I shall come back. The night when I met the lost Woman on the highway
was the night which set my life apart to be the instrument of a Design
that is yet unseen. Here, lost in the wilderness, or there, welcomed
back in the land of my birth, I am still walking on the dark road which
leads me, and you, and the sister of your love and mine, to the unknown
Retribution and the inevitable End. Wait and look. The Pestilence which
touches the rest will pass ME.”
I saw him again. He was still in the forest, and the numbers of his
lost companions had dwindled to very few. The temple was gone, and
the idols were gone—and in their place the figures of dark, dwarfish
men lurked murderously among the trees, with bows in their hands, and
arrows fitted to the string. Once more I feared for Walter, and cried
out to warn him. Once more he turned to me, with the immovable quiet in
his face.
“Another step,” he said, “on the dark road. Wait and look. The arrows
that strike the rest will spare me.”
I saw him for the third time in a wrecked ship, stranded on a wild,
sandy shore. The overloaded boats were making away from him for the
land, and he alone was left to sink with the ship. I cried to him to
hail the hindmost boat, and to make a last effort for his life. The
quiet face looked at me in return, and the unmoved voice gave me back
the changeless reply. “Another step on the journey. Wait and look. The
Sea which drowns the rest will spare me.”
I saw him for the last time. He was kneeling by a tomb of white marble,
and the shadow of a veiled woman rose out of the grave beneath and
waited by his side. The unearthly quiet of his face had changed to an
unearthly sorrow. But the terrible certainty of his words remained
the same. “Darker and darker,” he said; “farther and farther yet.
Death takes the good, the beautiful, and the young—and spares me. The
Pestilence that wastes, the Arrow that strikes, the Sea that drowns,
the Grave that closes over Love and Hope, are steps of my journey, and
take me nearer and nearer to the End.”
My heart sank under a dread beyond words, under a grief beyond tears.
The darkness closed round the pilgrim at the marble tomb—closed round
the veiled woman from the grave—closed round the dreamer who looked on
them. I saw and heard no more.