There was no lamp in the hall, but by the dim light of the kitchen
candle, which the girl had brought upstairs with her, I saw an elderly
lady steal noiselessly out of a back room on the ground floor. She
cast one viperish look at me as I entered the hall, but said nothing,
and went slowly upstairs without returning my bow. My familiarity with
Marian’s journal sufficiently assured me that the elderly lady was
Madame Fosco.
The servant led me to the room which the Countess had just left. I
entered it, and found myself face to face with the Count.
He was still in his evening dress, except his coat, which he had
thrown across a chair. His shirt-sleeves were turned up at the wrists,
but no higher. A carpet-bag was on one side of him, and a box on the
other. Books, papers, and articles of wearing apparel were scattered
about the room. On a table, at one side of the door, stood the cage,
so well known to me by description, which contained his white mice.
The canaries and the cockatoo were probably in some other room. He was
seated before the box, packing it, when I went in, and rose with some
papers in his hand to receive me. His face still betrayed plain traces
of the shock that had overwhelmed him at the Opera. His fat cheeks hung
loose, his cold grey eyes were furtively vigilant, his voice, look, and
manner were all sharply suspicious alike, as he advanced a step to meet
me, and requested, with distant civility, that I would take a chair.
“You come here on business, sir?” he said. “I am at a loss to know what
that business can possibly be.”
The unconcealed curiosity, with which he looked hard in my face while
he spoke, convinced me that I had passed unnoticed by him at the Opera.
He had seen Pesca first, and from that moment till he left the theatre
he had evidently seen nothing else. My name would necessarily suggest
to him that I had not come into his house with other than a hostile
purpose towards himself, but he appeared to be utterly ignorant thus
far of the real nature of my errand.
“I am fortunate in finding you here to-night,” I said. “You seem to be
on the point of taking a journey?”
“Is your business connected with my journey?”
“In some degree.”
“In what degree? Do you know where I am going to?”
“No. I only know why you are leaving London.”
He slipped by me with the quickness of thought, locked the door, and
put the key in his pocket.
“You and I, Mr. Hartright, are excellently well acquainted with one
another by reputation,” he said. “Did it, by any chance, occur to you
when you came to this house that I was not the sort of man you could
trifle with?”
“It did occur to me,” I replied. “And I have not come to trifle with
you. I am here on a matter of life and death, and if that door which
you have locked was open at this moment, nothing you could say or do
would induce me to pass through it.”
I walked farther into the room, and stood opposite to him on the rug
before the fireplace. He drew a chair in front of the door, and sat
down on it, with his left arm resting on the table. The cage with the
white mice was close to him, and the little creatures scampered out of
their sleeping-place as his heavy arm shook the table, and peered at
him through the gaps in the smartly painted wires.
“On a matter of life and death,” he repeated to himself. “Those words
are more serious, perhaps, than you think. What do you mean?”
“What I say.”
The perspiration broke out thickly on his broad forehead. His left hand
stole over the edge of the table. There was a drawer in it, with a
lock, and the key was in the lock. His finger and thumb closed over the
key, but did not turn it.
“So you know why I am leaving London?” he went on. “Tell me the reason,
if you please.” He turned the key, and unlocked the drawer as he spoke.
“I can do better than that,” I replied. “I can SHOW you the reason, if
you like.”
“How can you show it?”
“You have got your coat off,” I said. “Roll up the shirt-sleeve on your
left arm, and you will see it there.”
The same livid leaden change passed over his face which I had seen pass
over it at the theatre. The deadly glitter in his eyes shone steady
and straight into mine. He said nothing. But his left hand slowly
opened the table-drawer, and softly slipped into it. The harsh grating
noise of something heavy that he was moving unseen to me sounded for a
moment, then ceased. The silence that followed was so intense that the
faint ticking nibble of the white mice at their wires was distinctly
audible where I stood.
My life hung by a thread, and I knew it. At that final moment I thought
with HIS mind, I felt with HIS fingers—I was as certain as if I had
seen it of what he kept hidden from me in the drawer.
“Wait a little,” I said. “You have got the door locked—you see I don’t
move—you see my hands are empty. Wait a little. I have something more
to say.”
“You have said enough,” he replied, with a sudden composure so
unnatural and so ghastly that it tried my nerves as no outbreak of
violence could have tried them. “I want one moment for my own thoughts,
if you please. Do you guess what I am thinking about?”
“Perhaps I do.”
“I am thinking,” he remarked quietly, “whether I shall add to the
disorder in this room by scattering your brains about the fireplace.”
If I had moved at that moment, I saw in his face that he would have
done it.
“I advise you to read two lines of writing which I have about me,” I
rejoined, “before you finally decide that question.”
The proposal appeared to excite his curiosity. He nodded his head.
I took Pesca’s acknowledgment of the receipt of my letter out of my
pocket-book, handed it to him at arm’s length, and returned to my
former position in front of the fireplace.
He read the lines aloud: “Your letter is received. If I don’t hear from
you before the time you mention, I will break the seal when the clock
strikes.”
Another man in his position would have needed some explanation of
those words—the Count felt no such necessity. One reading of the note
showed him the precaution that I had taken as plainly as if he had
been present at the time when I adopted it. The expression of his face
changed on the instant, and his hand came out of the drawer empty.
“I don’t lock up my drawer, Mr. Hartright,” he said, “and I don’t say
that I may not scatter your brains about the fireplace yet. But I am a
just man even to my enemy, and I will acknowledge beforehand that they
are cleverer brains than I thought them. Come to the point, sir! You
want something of me?”
“I do, and I mean to have it.”
“On conditions?”
“On no conditions.”
His hand dropped into the drawer again.
“Bah! we are travelling in a circle,” he said, “and those clever brains
of yours are in danger again. Your tone is deplorably imprudent,
sir—moderate it on the spot! The risk of shooting you on the place
where you stand is less to me than the risk of letting you out of
this house, except on conditions that I dictate and approve. You have
not got my lamented friend to deal with now—you are face to face with
Fosco! If the lives of twenty Mr. Hartrights were the stepping-stones
to my safety, over all those stones I would go, sustained by my sublime
indifference, self-balanced by my impenetrable calm. Respect me, if you
love your own life! I summon you to answer three questions before you
open your lips again. Hear them—they are necessary to this interview.
Answer them—they are necessary to ME.” He held up one finger of his
right hand. “First question!” he said. “You come here possessed of
information which may be true or may be false—where did you get it?”
“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 meantime, 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 clap-traps 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 like. 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 hearthrug. 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 meantime. 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 a 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 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.