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

Page 204

by Lynn Shepherd


  To any other woman, I could have spoken the decisive words which I still hesitated to speak to her. The utter helplessness of her position; her friendless dependence on all the forbearing gentleness that I could show her; my fear of touching too soon some secret sensitiveness in her, which my instinct, as a man, might not have been fine enough to discover—these considerations, and others like them, kept me self-distrustfully silent. And yet, I knew that the restraint on both sides must be ended; that the relations in which we stood towards one another must be altered, in some settled manner, for the future; and that it rested with me, in the first instance, to recognise the necessity for a change.

  The more I thought of our position, the harder the attempt to alter it appeared, while the domestic conditions on which we three had been living together since the winter, remained undisturbed. I cannot account for the capricious state of mind in which this feeling originated—but the idea nevertheless possessed me, that some previous change of place and circumstances, some sudden break in the quiet monotony of our lives, so managed as to vary the home aspect under which we had been accustomed to see each other, might prepare the way for me to speak, and might make it easier and less embarrassing for Laura and Marian to hear.

  With this purpose in view, I said, one morning, that I thought we had all earned a little holiday and change of scene. After some consideration, it was decided that we should go for a fortnight to the sea-side. On the next day, we left Fulham for a quiet town on the south coast. At that early season of the year, we were the only visitors in the place. The cliffs, the beach, and the walks inland, were all in the solitary condition which was most welcome to us. The air was mild; the prospects over hill and wood and down were beautifully varied by the shifting April light and shade; and the restless sea leapt under our windows, as if it felt like the land the glow and freshness of spring.

  I owed it to Marian to consult her before I spoke to Laura, and to be guided afterwards by her advice.

  On the third day from our arrival, I found a fit opportunity of speaking to her alone. The moment we looked at one another, her quick instinct detected the thought in my mind before I could give it expression. With her customary energy and directness, she spoke at once, and spoke first.

  “You are thinking of that subject which was mentioned between us on the evening of your return from Hampshire,” she said. “I have been expecting you to allude to it, for some time past. There must be a change in our little household, Walter; we cannot go on much longer as we are now. I see it as plainly as you do—as plainly as Laura sees it, though she says nothing. How strangely the old times in Cumberland seem to have come back! You and I are together again; and the one subject of interest between us is Laura once more. I could almost fancy that this room is the summer-house at Limmeridge, and that those waves beyond us are beating on our sea-shore.”

  “I was guided by your advice in those past days,” I said; “and now, Marian, with reliance tenfold greater, I will be guided by it again.”

  She answered by pressing my hand. I saw that the generous, impulsive nature of the woman was deeply touched by my reference to the past. We sat together near the window; and, while I spoke and she listened, we looked at the glory of the sunlight shining on the majesty of the sea.

  “Whatever comes of this confidence between us,” I said, “whether it ends happily or sorrowfully for me, Laura’s interests will still be the interests of my life. When we leave this place, on whatever terms we leave it, my determination to wrest from Count Fosco the confession which I failed to obtain from his accomplice, goes back with me to London, as certainly as I go back myself. Neither you nor I can tell how that man may turn on me, if I bring him to bay; we only know by his own words and actions, that he is capable of striking at me, through Laura, without a moment’s hesitation, or a moment’s remorse. In our present position, I have no claim on her, which society sanctions, which the law allows, to strengthen me in resisting him, and in protecting her. This places me at a serious disadvantage. If I am to fight our cause with the Count, strong in the consciousness of Laura’s safety, I must fight it for my Wife. Do you agree to that, Marian, so far?”

  “To every word of it,” she answered.

  “I will not plead out of my own heart,” I went on; “I will not appeal to the love which has survived all changes and all shocks—I will rest my only vindication of myself for thinking of her and speaking of her as my wife, on what I have just said. If the chance of forcing a confession from the Count, is, as I believe it to be, the last chance left of publicly establishing the fact of Laura’s existence, the least selfish reason that I can advance for our marriage is recognised by us both. But I may be wrong in my conviction; other means of achieving our purpose may be in our power, which are less uncertain and less dangerous. I have searched anxiously, in my own mind, for those means—and I have not found them. Have you?”

  “No. I have thought about it, too, and thought in vain.”

  “In all likelihood,” I continued, “the same questions have occurred to you, in considering this difficult subject, which have occurred to me. Ought we to return with her to Limmeridge, now that she is like herself again, and trust to the recognition of her by the people of the village, or by the children at the school? Ought we to appeal to the practical test of her handwriting? Suppose we did so. Suppose the recognition of her obtained, and the identity of the handwriting established. Would success in both those cases do more than supply an excellent foundation for a trial in a court of law? Would the recognition and the handwriting prove her identity to Mr. Fairlie and take her back to Limmeridge House, against the evidence of her aunt, against the evidence of the medical certificate, against the fact of the funeral and the fact of the inscription on the tomb? No! We could only hope to succeed in throwing a serious doubt on the assertion of her death—a doubt which nothing short of a legal inquiry can settle. I will assume that we possess (what we have certainly not got) money enough to carry this inquiry on through all its stages. I will assume that Mr. Fairlie’s prejudices might be reasoned away; that the false testimony of the Count and his wife, and all the rest of the false testimony, might be confuted; that the recognition could not possibly be ascribed to a mistake between Laura and Anne Catherick, or the handwriting be declared by our enemies to be a clever fraud—all these are assumptions which, more or less, set plain probabilities at defiance, but let them pass—and let us ask ourselves what would be the first consequence of the first questions put to Laura herself on the subject of the conspiracy. We know only too well what the consequence would be—for we know that she has never recovered her memory of what happened to her in London. Examine her privately, or examine her publicly, she is utterly incapable of assisting the assertion of her own case. If you don’t see this, Marian, as plainly as I see it, we will go to Limmeridge and try the experiment, to-morrow.”

  “I do see it, Walter. Even if we had the means of paying all the law expenses, even if we succeeded in the end, the delays would be unendurable; the perpetual suspense, after what we have suffered already, would be heart-breaking. You are right about the hopelessness of going to Limmeridge. I wish I could feel sure that you are right also in determining to try that last chance with the Count. Is it a chance at all?”

  “Beyond a doubt. Yes. It is the chance of recovering the lost date of Laura’s journey to London. Without returning to the reasons I gave you some time since, I am still as firmly persuaded as ever, that there is a discrepancy between the date of that journey and the date on the certificate of death. There lies the weak point of the whole conspiracy—it crumbles to pieces if we attack it in that way; and the means of attacking it are in possession of the Count——”

  “Not in his possession only!” Marian eagerly interposed. “Surely, Walter, we have both of us overlooked, in the strangest manner, the letter which Laura wrote to Mrs. Vesey, and which Mrs. Michelson posted, from Blackwater Park? Even if there is no date to the letter (which is only too probable),
the post-mark would help us.”

  “I remembered the letter, Marian—though, in the press of other anxieties and other disappointments on my mind, I may have omitted to tell you about it, at the time. When I went to Mrs. Vesey’s to inquire if Laura had really slept there, and when I heard that she had never been near the house, I asked for her letter from Blackwater Park. The letter was given to me—but the envelope was lost. It had been thrown into the waste-paper basket, and long since destroyed.”

  “Was there no date to the letter?”

  “None. Not even the day of the week was mentioned. You can judge for yourself. I have the letter in my pocket-book, with the other papers which I always keep about me. Look. She only writes these few lines. I say it again, the last means left of attacking the conspiracy by recovering the lost date are in the possession of the Count. If I succeed in wresting them from him, the object of your life and mine is fulfilled. If I fail, the wrong that Laura has suffered, will, in this world, never be redressed.”

  “Do you fear failure, yourself, Walter?”

  “I dare not anticipate success; and, for that very reason, Marian, I speak openly and plainly, as I have spoken now. In my heart and my conscience, I can say it—Laura’s hopes for the future are at their lowest ebb. I know that her fortune is gone; I know that the last chance of restoring her to her place in the world lies at the mercy of her worst enemy, of a man who is now absolutely unassailable, and who may remain unassailable to the end. With every worldly advantage gone from her; with all prospect of recovering her rank and station more than doubtful; with no clearer future before her than the future which her husband can provide—the poor drawing-master may harmlessly open his heart at last. In the days of her prosperity, Marian, I was only the teacher who guided her hand—I ask for it, in her adversity, as the hand of my wife!”

  Marian’s eyes met mine affectionately—I could say no more. My heart was full, my lips were trembling. In spite of myself, I was in danger of appealing to her pity. I got up to leave the room. She rose at the same moment, laid her hand gently on my shoulder, and stopped me.

  “Walter!” she said, “I once parted you both, for your good and for hers. Wait here, my Brother!—wait, my dearest, best friend, till Laura comes, and tells you what I have done now!”

  For the first time since the farewell morning at Limmeridge, she touched my forehead with her lips. A tear dropped on my face, as she kissed me. She turned quickly, pointed to the chair from which I had risen, and left the room.

  I sat down alone at the window, to wait through the crisis of my life. My mind, in that breathless interval, felt like a total blank. I was conscious of nothing by a painful intensity of all familiar perceptions. The sun grew blinding bright; the white sea birds chasing each other far beyond me, seemed to be flitting before my face; the mellow murmur of the waves on the beach was like thunder in my ears.

  The door opened; and Laura came in alone. So she had entered the breakfast-room at Limmeridge House, on the morning when we parted. Slowly and falteringly, in sorrow and in hesitation, she had once approached me. Now, she came with the haste of happiness in her feet, with the light of happiness radiant in her face. Of their own accord, those dear arms clasped themselves round me; of their own accord, the sweet lips came to meet mine. “My darling!” she whispered, “we may own we love each other, now!” Her head nestled with a tender contentedness on my bosom. “Oh,” she said, innocently, “I am so happy at last!”

  Ten days later, we were happier still. We were married.

  II

  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 lives, 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 his 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 y
ear 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 thousands, 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.

 

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