IV

The course of this narrative, steadily flowing on, bears me away from

the morning-time of our married life, and carries me forward to the end.

In a fortnight more we three were back in London, and the shadow was

stealing over us of the struggle to come.

Marian and I were careful to keep Laura in ignorance of the cause that

had hurried us back—the necessity of making sure of the Count. It was

now the beginning of May, and his term of occupation at the house in

Forest Road expired in June. If he renewed it (and I had reasons,

shortly to be mentioned, for anticipating that he would), I might be

certain of his not escaping me. But if by any chance he disappointed my

expectations and left the country, then I had no time to lose in arming

myself to meet him as I best might.

In the first fulness of my new happiness, there had been moments

when my resolution faltered—moments when I was tempted to be safely

content, now that the dearest aspiration of my life was fulfilled

in the possession of Laura’s love. For the first time I thought

faint-heartedly of the greatness of the risk, of the adverse chances

arrayed against me, of the fair promise of our new life, and of the

peril in which I might place the happiness which we had so hardly

earned. Yes! let me own it honestly. For a brief time I wandered, in

the sweet guiding of love, far from the purpose to which I had been

true under sterner discipline and in darker days. Innocently Laura had

tempted me aside from the hard path—innocently she was destined to lead

me back again.

At times, dreams of the terrible past still disconnectedly recalled to

her, in the mystery of sleep, the events of which her waking memory

had lost all trace. One night (barely two weeks after our marriage),

when I was watching her at rest, I saw the tears come slowly through

her closed eyelids, I heard the faint murmuring words escape her which

told me that her spirit was back again on the fatal journey from

Blackwater Park. That unconscious appeal, so touching and so awful in

the sacredness of her sleep, ran through me like fire. The next day was

the day we came back to London—the day when my resolution returned to

me with tenfold strength.

The first necessity was to know something of the man. Thus far, the

true story of his life was an impenetrable mystery to me.

I began with such scanty sources of information as were at my own

disposal. The important narrative written by Mr. Frederick Fairlie

(which Marian had obtained by following the directions I had given to

her in the winter) proved to be of no service to the special object

with which I now looked at it. While reading it I reconsidered the

disclosure revealed to me by Mrs. Clements of the series of deceptions

which had brought Anne Catherick to London, and which had there devoted

her to the interests of the conspiracy. Here, again, the Count had not

openly committed himself—here, again, he was, to all practical purpose,

out of my reach.

I next returned to Marian’s journal at Blackwater Park. At my request

she read to me again a passage which referred to her past curiosity

about the Count, and to the few particulars which she had discovered

relating to him.

The passage to which I allude occurs in that part of her journal which

delineates his character and his personal appearance. She describes him

as “not having crossed the frontiers of his native country for years

past”—as “anxious to know if any Italian gentlemen were settled in the

nearest town to Blackwater Park”—as “receiving letters with all sorts

of odd stamps on them, and one with a large official-looking seal on

it.” She is inclined to consider that his long absence from his native

country may be accounted for by assuming that he is a political exile.

But she is, on the other hand, unable to reconcile this idea with the

reception of the letter from abroad bearing “the large official-looking

seal”—letters from the Continent addressed to political exiles being

usually the last to court attention from foreign post-offices in that

way.

The considerations thus presented to me in the diary, joined to certain

surmises of my own that grew out of them, suggested a conclusion which

I wondered I had not arrived at before. I now said to myself—what Laura

had once said to Marian at Blackwater Park, what Madame Fosco had

overheard by listening at the door—the Count is a spy!

Laura had applied the word to him at hazard, in natural anger at his

proceedings towards herself. I applied it to him with the deliberate

conviction that his vocation in life was the vocation of a spy. On this

assumption, the reason for his extraordinary stay in England so long

after the objects of the conspiracy had been gained, became, to my

mind, quite intelligible.

The year of which I am now writing was the year of the famous Crystal

Palace Exhibition in Hyde Park. Foreigners in unusually large numbers

had arrived already, and were still arriving in England. Men were among

us by hundreds whom the ceaseless distrustfulness of their governments

had followed privately, by means of appointed agents, to our shores.

My surmises did not for a moment class a man of the Count’s abilities

and social position with the ordinary rank and file of foreign spies.

I suspected him of holding a position of authority, of being entrusted

by the government which he secretly served with the organisation and

management of agents specially employed in this country, both men and

women, and I believed Mrs. Rubelle, who had been so opportunely found

to act as nurse at Blackwater Park, to be, in all probability, one of

the number.

Assuming that this idea of mine had a foundation in truth, the position

of the Count might prove to be more assailable than I had hitherto

ventured to hope. To whom could I apply to know something more of the

man’s history and of the man himself than I knew now?

In this emergency it naturally occurred to my mind that a countryman

of his own, on whom I could rely, might be the fittest person to help

me. The first man whom I thought of under these circumstances was also

the only Italian with whom I was intimately acquainted—my quaint little

friend, Professor Pesca.

The professor has been so long absent from these pages that he has run

some risk of being forgotten altogether.

It is the necessary law of such a story as mine that the persons

concerned in it only appear when the course of events takes them

up—they come and go, not by favour of my personal partiality, but by

right of their direct connection with the circumstances to be detailed.

For this reason, not Pesca alone, but my mother and sister as well,

have been left far in the background of the narrative. My visits to the

Hampstead cottage, my mother’s belief in the denial of Laura’s identity

which the conspiracy had accomplished, my vain efforts to overcome the

prejudice on her part and on my sister’s to which, in their jealous

affection for me, they both continued to adhere, the painful necessity

which that prejudice imposed on me of concealing my marriage from them

till they had learnt to do justice to my wife—all these little domestic

occurrences have been left unrecorded because they were not essential

to the main interest of the story. It is nothing that they added to my

anxieties and embittered my disappointments—the steady march of events

has inexorably passed them by.

For the same reason I have said nothing here of the consolation that I

found in Pesca’s brotherly affection for me, when I saw him again after

the sudden cessation of my residence at Limmeridge House. I have not

recorded the fidelity with which my warm-hearted little friend followed

me to the place of embarkation when I sailed for Central America, or

the noisy transport of joy with which he received me when we next met

in London. If I had felt justified in accepting the offers of service

which he made to me on my return, he would have appeared again long

ere this. But, though I knew that his honour and his courage were to

be implicitly relied on, I was not so sure that his discretion was to

be trusted, and, for that reason only, I followed the course of all my

inquiries alone. It will now be sufficiently understood that Pesca was

not separated from all connection with me and my interests, although he

has hitherto been separated from all connection with the progress of

this narrative. He was as true and as ready a friend of mine still as

ever he had been in his life.

Before I summoned Pesca to my assistance it was necessary to see for

myself what sort of man I had to deal with. Up to this time I had never

once set eyes on Count Fosco.

Three days after my return with Laura and Marian to London, I set

forth alone for Forest Road, St. John’s Wood, between ten and eleven

o’clock in the morning. It was a fine day—I had some hours to spare—and

I thought it likely, if I waited a little for him, that the Count

might be tempted out. I had no great reason to fear the chance of his

recognising me in the daytime, for the only occasion when I had been

seen by him was the occasion on which he had followed me home at night.

No one appeared at the windows in the front of the house. I walked

down a turning which ran past the side of it, and looked over the low

garden wall. One of the back windows on the lower floor was thrown up

and a net was stretched across the opening. I saw nobody, but I heard,

in the room, first a shrill whistling and singing of birds, then the

deep ringing voice which Marian’s description had made familiar to me.

“Come out on my little finger, my pret-pret-pretties!” cried the voice.

“Come out and hop upstairs! One, two, three—and up! Three, two, one—and

down! One, two, three—twit-twit-twit-tweet!” The Count was exercising

his canaries as he used to exercise them in Marian’s time at Blackwater

Park.

I waited a little while, and the singing and the whistling ceased.

“Come, kiss me, my pretties!” said the deep voice. There was a

responsive twittering and chirping—a low, oily laugh—a silence of

a minute or so, and then I heard the opening of the house door. I

turned and retraced my steps. The magnificent melody of the Prayer in

Rossini’s Moses, sung in a sonorous bass voice, rose grandly through

the suburban silence of the place. The front garden gate opened and

closed. The Count had come out.

He crossed the road and walked towards the western boundary of the

Regent’s Park. I kept on my own side of the way, a little behind him,

and walked in that direction also.

Marian had prepared me for his high stature, his monstrous corpulence,

and his ostentatious mourning garments, but not for the horrible

freshness and cheerfulness and vitality of the man. He carried his

sixty years as if they had been fewer than forty. He sauntered

along, wearing his hat a little on one side, with a light jaunty

step, swinging his big stick, humming to himself, looking up from

time to time at the houses and gardens on either side of him with

superb, smiling patronage. If a stranger had been told that the

whole neighbourhood belonged to him, that stranger would not have

been surprised to hear it. He never looked back, he paid no apparent

attention to me, no apparent attention to any one who passed him on

his own side of the road, except now and then, when he smiled and

smirked, with an easy paternal good humour, at the nursery-maids and

the children whom he met. In this way he led me on, till we reached a

colony of shops outside the western terraces of the Park.

Here he stopped at a pastrycook’s, went in (probably to give an order),

and came out again immediately with a tart in his hand. An Italian was

grinding an organ before the shop, and a miserable little shrivelled

monkey was sitting on the instrument. The Count stopped, bit a piece

for himself out of the tart, and gravely handed the rest to the monkey.

“My poor little man!” he said, with grotesque tenderness, “you look

hungry. In the sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch!” The

organ-grinder piteously put in his claim to a penny from the benevolent

stranger. The Count shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and passed

on.

We reached the streets and the better class of shops between the

New Road and Oxford Street. The Count stopped again and entered a

small optician’s shop, with an inscription in the window announcing

that repairs were neatly executed inside. He came out again with an

opera-glass in his hand, walked a few paces on, and stopped to look at

a bill of the opera placed outside a music-seller’s shop. He read the

bill attentively, considered a moment, and then hailed an empty cab as

it passed him. “Opera Box-office,” he said to the man, and was driven

away.

I crossed the road, and looked at the bill in my turn. The performance

announced was Lucrezia Borgia, and it was to take place that evening.

The opera-glass in the Count’s hand, his careful reading of the bill,

and his direction to the cabman, all suggested that he proposed making

one of the audience. I had the means of getting an admission for myself

and a friend to the pit by applying to one of the scene-painters

attached to the theatre, with whom I had been well acquainted in past

times. There was a chance at least that the Count might be easily

visible among the audience to me and to any one with me, and in this

case I had the means of ascertaining whether Pesca knew his countryman

or not that very night.

This consideration at once decided the disposal of my evening. I

procured the tickets, leaving a note at the Professor’s lodgings on the

way. At a quarter to eight I called to take him with me to the theatre.

My little friend was in a state of the highest excitement, with a

festive flower in his button-hole, and the largest opera-glass I ever

saw hugged up under his arm.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

“Right-all-right,” said Pesca.

We started for the theatre.

V

The last notes of the introduction to the opera were being played, and

the seats in the pit were all filled, when Pesca and I reached the

theatre.

There was plenty of room, however, in the passage that ran round the

pit—precisely the position best calculated to answer the purpose for

which I was attending the performance. I went first to the barrier

separating us from the stalls, and looked for the Count in that part

of the theatre. He was not there. Returning along the passage, on the

left-hand side from the stage, and looking about me attentively, I

discovered him in the pit. He occupied an excellent place, some twelve

or fourteen seats from the end of a bench, within three rows of the

stalls. I placed myself exactly on a line with him; Pesca standing by

my side. The Professor was not yet aware of the purpose for which I had

brought him to the theatre, and he was rather surprised that we did not

move nearer to the stage.

The curtain rose, and the opera began.

Throughout the whole of the first act we remained in our position—the

Count, absorbed by the orchestra and the stage, never casting so much

as a chance glance at us. Not a note of Donizetti’s delicious music

was lost on him. There he sat, high above his neighbours, smiling, and

nodding his great head enjoyingly from time to time. When the people

near him applauded the close of an air (as an English audience in such

circumstances always WILL applaud), without the least consideration

for the orchestral movement which immediately followed it, he looked

round at them with an expression of compassionate remonstrance, and

held up one hand with a gesture of polite entreaty. At the more

refined passages of the singing, at the more delicate phases of the

music, which passed unapplauded by others, his fat hands, adorned

with perfectly-fitting black kid gloves, softly patted each other, in

token of the cultivated appreciation of a musical man. At such times,

his oily murmur of approval, “Bravo! Bra-a-a-a!” hummed through the

silence, like the purring of a great cat. His immediate neighbours

on either side—hearty, ruddy-faced people from the country, basking

amazedly in the sunshine of fashionable London—seeing and hearing him,

began to follow his lead. Many a burst of applause from the pit that

night started from the soft, comfortable patting of the black-gloved

hands. The man’s voracious vanity devoured this implied tribute to

his local and critical supremacy with an appearance of the highest

relish. Smiles rippled continuously over his fat face. He looked about

him, at the pauses in the music, serenely satisfied with himself and

his fellow-creatures. “Yes! yes! these barbarous English people are

learning something from ME. Here, there, and everywhere, I—Fosco—am an

influence that is felt, a man who sits supreme!” If ever face spoke,

his face spoke then, and that was its language.

The curtain fell on the first act, and the audience rose to look about

them. This was the time I had waited for—the time to try if Pesca knew

him.

He rose with the rest, and surveyed the occupants of the boxes grandly

with his opera-glass. At first his back was towards us, but he turned

round in time, to our side of the theatre, and looked at the boxes

above us, using his glass for a few minutes—then removing it, but still

continuing to look up. This was the moment I chose, when his full face

was in view, for directing Pesca’s attention to him.

“Do you know that man?” I asked.

“Which man, my friend?”

“The tall, fat man, standing there, with his face towards us.”

Pesca raised himself on tiptoe, and looked at the Count.

“No,” said the Professor. “The big fat man is a stranger to me. Is he

famous? Why do you point him out?”

“Because I have particular reasons for wishing to know something of

him. He is a countryman of yours—his name is Count Fosco. Do you know

that name?”

“Not I, Walter. Neither the name nor the man is known to me.”

“Are you quite sure you don’t recognise him? Look again—look carefully.

I will tell you why I am so anxious about it when we leave the theatre.

Stop! let me help you up here, where you can see him better.”

I helped the little man to perch himself on the edge of the raised

dais upon which the pit-seats were all placed. His small stature was

no hindrance to him—here he could see over the heads of the ladies who

were seated near the outermost part of the bench.

A slim, light-haired man standing by us, whom I had not noticed

before—a man with a scar on his left cheek—looked attentively at Pesca

as I helped him up, and then looked still more attentively, following

the direction of Pesca’s eyes, at the Count. Our conversation might

have reached his ears, and might, as it struck me, have roused his

curiosity.

Meanwhile, Pesca fixed his eyes earnestly on the broad, full, smiling

face turned a little upward, exactly opposite to him.

“No,” he said, “I have never set my two eyes on that big fat man before

in all my life.”

As he spoke the Count looked downwards towards the boxes behind us on

the pit tier.

The eyes of the two Italians met.

The instant before I had been perfectly satisfied, from his own

reiterated assertion, that Pesca did not know the Count. The instant

afterwards I was equally certain that the Count knew Pesca!

Knew him, and—more surprising still—FEARED him as well! There was no

mistaking the change that passed over the villain’s face. The leaden

hue that altered his yellow complexion in a moment, the sudden rigidity

of all his features, the furtive scrutiny of his cold grey eyes, the

motionless stillness of him from head to foot told their own tale. A

mortal dread had mastered him body and soul—and his own recognition of

Pesca was the cause of it!

The slim man with the scar on his cheek was still close by us. He had

apparently drawn his inference from the effect produced on the Count by

the sight of Pesca as I had drawn mine. He was a mild, gentlemanlike

man, looking like a foreigner, and his interest in our proceedings was

not expressed in anything approaching to an offensive manner.

For my own part I was so startled by the change in the Count’s face, so

astounded at the entirely unexpected turn which events had taken, that

I knew neither what to say or do next. Pesca roused me by stepping back

to his former place at my side and speaking first.

“How the fat man stares!” he exclaimed. “Is it at ME? Am I famous? How

can he know me when I don’t know him?”

I kept my eye still on the Count. I saw him move for the first time

when Pesca moved, so as not to lose sight of the little man in the

lower position in which he now stood. I was curious to see what would

happen if Pesca’s attention under these circumstances was withdrawn

from him, and I accordingly asked the Professor if he recognised

any of his pupils that evening among the ladies in the boxes. Pesca

immediately raised the large opera-glass to his eyes, and moved it

slowly all round the upper part of the theatre, searching for his

pupils with the most conscientious scrutiny.

The moment he showed himself to be thus engaged the Count turned round,

slipped past the persons who occupied seats on the farther side of him

from where we stood, and disappeared in the middle passage down the

centre of the pit. I caught Pesca by the arm, and to his inexpressible

astonishment, hurried him round with me to the back of the pit to

intercept the Count before he could get to the door. Somewhat to my

surprise, the slim man hastened out before us, avoiding a stoppage

caused by some people on our side of the pit leaving their places, by

which Pesca and myself were delayed. When we reached the lobby the

Count had disappeared, and the foreigner with the scar was gone too.

“Come home,” I said; “come home, Pesca, to your lodgings. I must speak

to you in private—I must speak directly.”

“My-soul-bless-my-soul!” cried the Professor, in a state of the

extremest bewilderment. “What on earth is the matter?”

I walked on rapidly without answering. The circumstances under which

the Count had left the theatre suggested to me that his extraordinary

anxiety to escape Pesca might carry him to further extremities still.

He might escape me, too, by leaving London. I doubted the future if

I allowed him so much as a day’s freedom to act as he pleased. And I

doubted that foreign stranger, who had got the start of us, and whom I

suspected of intentionally following him out.

With this double distrust in my mind, I was not long in making Pesca

understand what I wanted. As soon as we two were alone in his room, I

increased his confusion and amazement a hundredfold by telling him what

my purpose was as plainly and unreservedly as I have acknowledged it

here.

“My friend, what can I do?” cried the Professor, piteously appealing to

me with both hands. “Deuce-what-the-deuce! how can I help you, Walter,

when I don’t know the man?”

“HE knows YOU—he is afraid of you—he has left the theatre to escape

you. Pesca! there must be a reason for this. Look back into your own

life before you came to England. You left Italy, as you have told me

yourself, for political reasons. You have never mentioned those reasons

to me, and I don’t inquire into them now. I only ask you to consult

your own recollections, and to say if they suggest no past cause for

the terror which the first sight of you produced in that man.”

To my unutterable surprise, these words, harmless as they appeared to

ME, produced the same astounding effect on Pesca which the sight of

Pesca had produced on the Count. The rosy face of my little friend

whitened in an instant, and he drew back from me slowly, trembling from

head to foot.

“Walter!” he said. “You don’t know what you ask.”

He spoke in a whisper—he looked at me as if I had suddenly revealed to

him some hidden danger to both of us. In less than one minute of time

he was so altered from the easy, lively, quaint little man of all my

past experience, that if I had met him in the street, changed as I saw

him now, I should most certainly not have known him again.

“Forgive me, if I have unintentionally pained and shocked you,” I

replied. “Remember the cruel wrong my wife has suffered at Count

Fosco’s hands. Remember that the wrong can never be redressed, unless

the means are in my power of forcing him to do her justice. I spoke in

HER interests, Pesca—I ask you again to forgive me—I can say no more.”