The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  “My good Percival!” remonstrated the Count. “What is your solid English sense thinking of? The water is too shallow to hide the body; and there is sand everywhere to print off the murderer’s footsteps. It is, upon the whole, the very worst place for a murder that I ever set my eyes on.”

  “Humbug!” said Sir Percival, cutting away fiercely at his stick. “You know what I mean. The dreary scenery—the lonely situation. If you choose to understand me, you can—if you don’t choose, I am not going to trouble myself to explain my meaning.”

  “And why not,” asked the Count, “when your meaning can be explained by anybody in two words? If a fool was going to commit a murder, your lake is the first place he would choose for it. If a wise man was going to commit a murder, your lake is the last place he would choose for it. Is that your meaning? If it is, there is your explanation for you, ready made. Take it Percival, with your good Fosco’s blessing.”

  Laura looked at the Count, with her dislike for him appearing a little too plainly in her face. He was so busy with his mice that he did not notice her.

  “I am so sorry to hear the lake-view connected with anything so horrible as the idea of murder,” she said. “And if Count Fosco must divide murderers into classes, I think he has been very unfortunate in his choice of expressions. To describe them as fools only, seems like treating them with an indulgence to which they have no claim. And to describe them as wise men, sounds to me like a downright contradiction in terms. I have always heard that truly wise men are truly good men, and have a horror of crime.”

  “My dear lady,” said the Count, “those are admirable sentiments; and I have seen them stated at the tops of copybooks.” He lifted one of the white mice in the palm of his hand, and spoke to it in his whimsical way. “My pretty little smooth white rascal,” he said, “here is a moral lesson for you. A truly wise Mouse is a truly good Mouse. Mention that, if you please, to your companions, and never gnaw at the bars of your cage again as long as you live.”

  “It is easy to turn everything into ridicule,” said Laura, resolutely; “but you will not find it quite so easy, Count Fosco, to give me an instance of a wise man who has been a great criminal.”

  The Count shrugged his huge shoulders, and smiled on Laura in the friendliest manner.

  “Most true!” he said. “The fool’s crime is the crime that is found out; and the wise man’s crime is the crime that is not found out. If I could give you an instance, it would not be the instance of a wise man. Dear Lady Glyde, your sound English common sense has been too much for me. It is checkmate for me this time, Miss Halcombe—ha?”

  “Stand to your guns, Laura,” sneered Sir Percival, who had been listening in his place at the door. “Tell him, next, that crimes cause their own detection. There’s another bit of copybook morality for you, Fosco. Crimes cause their own detection. What infernal humbug!”

  “I believe it to be true,” said Laura, quietly.

  Sir Percival burst out laughing; so violently, so outrageously, that he quite startled us all—the Count more than any of us.

  “I believe it, too,” I said, coming to Laura’s rescue.

  Sir Percival, who had been unaccountably amused at his wife’s remark, was, just as unaccountably, irritated by mine. He struck the new walking-stick savagely on the sand, and walked away from us.

  “Poor, dear Percival!” cried Count Fosco, looking after him gaily; “he is the victim of English spleen. But, my dear Miss Halcombe, my dear Lady Glyde, do you really believe that crimes cause their own detection? And you, my angel,” he continued, turning to his wife, who had not uttered a word yet, “do you think so too?”

  “I wait to be instructed,” replied the Countess, in tones of freezing reproof, intended for Laura and me, “before I venture on giving my opinion in the presence of well-informed men.”

  “Do you, indeed?” I said. “I remember the time, Countess, when you advocated the Rights of Women—and freedom of female opinion was one of them.”

  “What is your view of the subject, Count?” asked Madame Fosco, calmly proceeding with her cigarettes, and not taking the least notice of me.

  The Count stroked one of his white mice reflectively with his chubby little-finger before he answered.

  “It is truly wonderful,” he said, “how easily Society can console itself for the worst of its short-comings with a little bit of clap-trap. The machinery it has set up for the detection of crime is miserably ineffective—and yet only invent a moral epigram, saying that it works well, and you blind everybody to its blunders, from that moment. Crimes cause their own detection, do they? And murder will out (another moral epigram), will it? Ask Coroners who sit at inquests in large towns if that is true, Lady Glyde. Ask secretaries of life-assurance companies if that is true, Miss Halcombe. Read your own public journals. In the few cases that get into the newspapers, are there not instances of slain bodies found, and no murderers ever discovered? Multiply the cases that are reported by the cases that are not reported, and the bodies that are found by the bodies that are not found; and what conclusion do you come to? This. That there are foolish criminals who are discovered, and wise criminals who escape. The hiding of a crime, or the detection of a crime, what is it? A trial of skill between the police on one side, and the individual on the other. When the criminal is a brutal, ignorant fool, the police, in nine cases out of ten, win. When the criminal is a resolute, educated, highly-intelligent man, the police, in nine cases out of ten, lose. If the police win, you generally hear all about it. If the police lose, you generally hear nothing. And on this tottering foundation you build up your comfortable moral maxim that Crime causes its own detection! Yes—all the crime you know of. And, what of the rest?”

  “Devilish true, and very well put,” cried a voice at the entrance of the boat-house. Sir Percival had recovered his equanimity, and had come back while we were listening to the Count.

  “Some of it may be true,” I said; “and all of it may be very well put. But I don’t see why Count Fosco should celebrate the victory of the criminal over society with so much exultation, or why you, Sir Percival, should applaud him so loudly for doing it.”

  “Do you hear that, Fosco?” asked Sir Percival, with a sneer. “Take my advice, and make your peace with your audience. Tell them Virtue’s a fine thing—they like that, I can promise you.”

  The Count laughed inwardly and silently; and two of the white mice in his waistcoat, alarmed by the internal convulsion going on beneath them, darted out in a violent hurry, and scrambled into their cage again.

  “The ladies, my good Percival, shall tell me about virtue,” he said. “They are better authorities than I am; for they know what virtue is, and I don’t.”

  “You hear him?” said Sir Percival. “Isn’t it awful?”

  “It is true,” said the Count, quietly. “I am a citizen of the world, and I have met, in my time, with so many different sorts of virtue, that I am puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right sort and which is the wrong. Here, in England, there is one virtue. And there, in China, there is another virtue. And John Englishman says my virtue is the genuine virtue. And John Chinaman says my virtue is the genuine virtue. And I say Yes to one, or No to the other, and am just as much bewildered about it in the case of John with the top-boots as I am in the case of John with the pigtail. Ah, nice little Mousey! come, kiss me. What is your own private notion of a virtuous man, my pret-pret-pretty? A man who keeps you warm, and gives you plenty to eat. And a good notion, too, for it is intelligible, at the least.”

  “Stay a minute, Count,” I interposed. “Accepting your illustration, surely we have one unquestionable virtue in England, which is wanting in China. The Chinese authorities kill thousands of innocent people, on the most horribly frivolous pretexts. We, in England, are free from all guilt of that kind—we commit no such dreadful crime—we abhor reckless bloodshed, with all our hearts.”

  “Quite right, Marian,” said Laura. “Well thought of, and well expressed.
”

  “Pray allow the Count to proceed,” said Madame Fosco, with stern civility. “You will find, young ladies, that he never speaks without having excellent reasons for all that he says.”

  “Thank you, my angel,” replied the Count. “Have a bonbon?” He took out of his pocket a pretty little inlaid box, and placed it open on the table. “Chocolat à la Vanille,” cried the impenetrable man, cheerfully rattling the sweetmeats in the box, and bowing all round. “Offered by Fosco as an act of homage to the charming society.”

  “Be good enough to go on, Count,” said his wife, with a spiteful reference to myself. “Oblige me by answering Miss Halcombe.”

  “Miss Halcombe is unanswerable,” replied the polite Italian—“that is to say, so far as she goes. Yes! I agree with her. John Bull does abhor the crimes of John Chinaman. He is the quickest old gentleman at finding out the faults that are his neighbours’, and the slowest old gentleman at finding out the faults that are his own, who exists on the face of creation. Is he so very much better in his way, than the people whom he condemns in their way? English society, Miss Halcombe, is as often the accomplice, as it is the enemy of crime. Yes! yes! Crime is in this country what crime is in other countries—a good friend to a man and to those about him, as often as it is an enemy. A great rascal provides for his wife and family. The worse he is, the more he makes them the objects for your sympathy. He often provides, also, for himself. A profligate spendthrift who is always borrowing money, will get more from his friends than the rigidly honest man who only borrows of them once, under pressure of the direst want. In the one case, the friends will not be at all surprised, and they will give. In the other case, they will be very much surprised, and they will hesitate. Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in, at the end of his career, a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr. Honesty lives in, at the end of his career? When John-Howard-Philanthropist wants to relieve misery, he goes to find it in prisons, where crime is wretched—not in huts and hovels, where virtue is wretched too. Who is the English poet who has won the most universal sympathy—who makes the easiest of all subjects for pathetic writing and pathetic painting? That nice young person who began life with a forgery, and ended it by a suicide—your dear, romantic, interesting Chatterton. Which gets on best, do you think, of two poor starving dressmakers—the woman who resists temptation, and is honest, or the woman who falls under temptation, and steals? You all know that the stealing is the making of that second woman’s fortune—it advertises her from length to breadth of good-humoured, charitable England—and she is relieved, as the breaker of a commandment, when she would have been left to starve, as the keeper of it. Come here, my jolly little Mouse! Hey! presto! pass! I transform you, for the time being, into a respectable lady. Stop there, in the palm of my great big hand, my dear, and listen. You marry the poor man whom you love, Mouse; and one half your friends pity, and the other half blame you. And, now, on the contrary, you sell yourself for gold to a man you don’t care for; and all your friends rejoice over you; and a minister of public worship sanctions the base horror of the vilest of all human bargains; and smiles and smirks afterwards at your table, if you are polite enough to ask him to breakfast. Hey! presto! pass! Be a mouse again, and squeak. If you continue to be a lady much longer, I shall have you telling me that Society abhors crime—and then, Mouse, I shall doubt if your own eyes and ears are really of any use to you. Ah! I am a bad man, Lady Glyde, am I not? I say what other people only think; and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath. I will get up on my big, elephant’s legs, before I do myself any more harm in your amiable estimations—I will get up, and take a little airy walk of my own. Dear ladies, as your excellent Sheridan said, I go—and leave my character behind me.”

  He got up; put the cage on the table; and paused, for a moment, to count the mice in it. “One, two, three, four——Ha!” he cried, with a look of horror, “where, in the name of Heaven, is the fifth—the youngest, the whitest, the most amiable of all—my Benjamin of mice!”

  Neither Laura nor I were in any favourable disposition to be amused. The Count’s glib cynicism had revealed a new aspect of his nature from which we both recoiled. But it was impossible to resist the comical distress of so very large a man at the loss of so very small a mouse. We laughed, in spite of ourselves; and when Madame Fosco rose to set the example of leaving the boat-house empty, so that her husband might search it to its remotest corners, we rose also to follow her out.

  Before we had taken three steps, the Count’s quick eye discovered the lost mouse under the seat that we had been occupying. He pulled aside the bench; took the little animal up in his hand; and then suddenly stopped, on his knees, looking intently at a particular place on the ground just beneath him.

  When he rose to his feet again, his hand shook so that he could hardly put the mouse back in the cage, and his face was of a faint livid yellow hue all over.

  “Percival!” he said, in a whisper. “Percival! come here.”

  Sir Percival had paid no attention to any of us, for the last ten minutes. He had been entirely absorbed in writing figures on the sand, and then rubbing them out again, with the point of his stick.

  “What’s the matter, now?” he asked, lounging carelessly into the boat-house.

  “Do you see nothing, there?” said the Count, catching him nervously by the collar with one hand, and pointing with the other to the place near which he had found the mouse.

  “I see plenty of dry sand,” answered Sir Percival; “and a spot of dirt in the middle of it.”

  “Not dirt,” whispered the Count, fastening the other hand suddenly on Sir Percival’s collar, and shaking it in his agitation. “Blood.”

  Laura was near enough to hear the last word, softly as he whispered it. She turned to me with a look of terror.

  “Nonsense, my dear,” I said. “There is no need to be alarmed. It is only the blood of a poor little stray dog.”

  Everybody was astonished, and everybody’s eyes were fixed on me inquiringly.

  “How do you know that?” asked Sir Percival, speaking first.

  “I found the dog here, dying, on the day when you all returned from abroad,” I replied. “The poor creature had strayed into the plantation, and had been shot by your keeper.”

  “Whose dog was it?” inquired Sir Percival. “Not one of mine?”

  “Did you try to save the poor thing?” asked Laura, earnestly. “Surely you tried to save it, Marian?”

  “Yes,” I said; “the housekeeper and I both did our best—but the dog was mortally wounded, and he died under our hands.”

  “Whose dog was it?” persisted Sir Percival, repeating his question a little irritably. “One of mine?”

  “No; not one of yours.”

  “Whose then? Did the housekeeper know?”

  The housekeeper’s report of Mrs. Catherick’s desire to conceal her visit to Blackwater Park from Sir Percival’s knowledge, recurred to my memory the moment he put that last question; and I half doubted the discretion of answering it. But, in my anxiety to quiet the general alarm, I had thoughtlessly advanced too far to draw back, except at the risk of exciting suspicions, which might only make matters worse. There was nothing for it but to answer at once, without reference to results.

  “Yes,” I said. “The housekeeper knew. She told me it was Mrs. Catherick’s dog.”

  Sir Percival had hitherto remained at the inner end of the boat-house with Count Fosco, while I spoke to him from the door. But the instant Mrs. Catherick’s name passed my lips, he pushed by the Count roughly, and placed himself face to face with me, under the open daylight.

  “How came the housekeeper to know it was Mrs. Catherick’s dog?” he asked, fixing his eyes on mine with a frowning interest and attention, which half angered, half startled me.

  “She knew it,” I said, quietly, “because Mrs.
Catherick brought the dog with her.”

  “Brought it with her? Where did she bring it with her?”

  “To this house.”

  “What the devil did Mrs. Catherick want at this house?”

  The manner in which he put the question was even more offensive than the language in which he expressed it. I marked my sense of his want of common politeness, by silently turning away from him.

  Just as I moved, the Count’s persuasive hand was laid on his shoulder, and the Count’s mellifluous voice interposed to quiet him.

  “My dear Percival!—gently—gently.”

  Sir Percival looked around in his angriest manner. The Count only smiled, and repeated the soothing application.

  “Gently, my good friend—gently!”

  Sir Percival hesitated—followed me a few steps—and, to my great surprise, offered me an apology.

  “I beg your pardon, Miss Halcombe,” he said. “I have been out of order lately; and I am afraid I am a little irritable. But I should like to know what Mrs. Catherick could possibly want here. When did she come? Was the housekeeper the only person who saw her?”

  “The only person,” I answered, “so far as I know.”

  The Count interposed again.

  “In that case, why not question the housekeeper?” he said. “Why not go, Percival, to the fountain-head of information at once?”

  “Quite right!” said Sir Percival. “Of course the housekeeper is the first person to question. Excessively stupid of me not to see it myself.” With those words, he instantly left us to return to the house.

  The motive of the Count’s interference, which had puzzled me at first, betrayed itself when Sir Percival’s back was turned. He had a host of questions to put to me about Mrs. Catherick, and the cause of her visit to Blackwater Park, which he could scarcely have asked in his friend’s presence. I made my answers as short as I civilly could—for I had already determined to check the least approach to any exchanging of confidences between Count Fosco and myself. Laura, however, unconsciously helped him to extract all my information, by making inquiries herself, which left me no alternative but to reply to her, or to appear before them all in the very unenviable and very false character of a depositary of Sir Percival’s secrets. The end of it was, that, in about ten minutes’ time, the Count knew as much as I know of Mrs. Catherick, and of the events which have so strangely connected us with her daughter, Anne, from the time when Hartright met with her, to this day.