The Solitary House (228 page)

Laura left the table in ten minutes’ time. I was sorely tempted to accompany her. But if we had both gone out together, we must have excited suspicion; and, worse still, if we allowed Anne Catherick to see Laura accompanied by a second person who was a stranger to her, we should in all probability forfeit her confidence, from that moment, never to regain it again.

I waited, therefore, as patiently as I could, until the servant came in to clear the table. When I quitted the room, there were no signs, in the house or out of it, of Sir Percival’s return. I left the Count with a piece of sugar between his lips, and the vicious cockatoo scrambling up his
waistcoat to get at it; while Madame Fosco, sitting opposite to her husband, watched the proceedings of his bird and himself, as attentively as if she had never seen anything of the sort before in her life. On my way to the plantation I kept carefully beyond the range of view from the luncheon-room window. Nobody saw me and nobody followed me. It was then a quarter to three o’clock by my watch.

Once among the trees, I walked rapidly, until I had advanced more than half way through the plantation. At that point, I slackened my pace, and proceeded cautiously—but I saw no one, and heard no voices. By little and little, I came within view of the back of the boat-house—stopped and listened—then went on, till I was close behind it, and must have heard any persons who had been talking inside. Still the silence was unbroken: still, far and near, no sign of a living creature appeared anywhere.

After skirting round by the back of the building, first on one side, and then on the other, and making no discoveries, I ventured in front of it, and fairly looked in. The place was empty.

I called, “Laura!”—at first, softly—then louder and louder. No one answered, and no one appeared. For all that I could see and hear, the only human creature in the neighbourhood of the lake and the plantation, was myself.

My heart began to beat violently; but I kept my resolution, and searched, first the boat-house, and then the ground in front of it, for any signs which might show me whether Laura had really reached the place or not. No mark of her presence appeared inside the building; but I found traces of her outside it, in footsteps on the sand.

I detected the footsteps of two persons—large footsteps, like a man’s, and small footsteps, which, by putting my own feet into them and testing their size in that manner,
I felt certain were Laura’s. The ground was confusedly marked in this way, just before the boat-house. Close against one side of it, under shelter of the projecting roof, I discovered a little hole in the sand—a hole artificially made, beyond a doubt. I just noticed it, and then turned away immediately to trace the footsteps as far as I could, and to follow the direction in which they might lead me.

They led me, starting from the left-hand side of the boat-house, along the edge of the trees, a distance, I should think, of between two and three hundred yards—and then, the sandy ground showed no further trace of them. Feeling that the persons whose course I was tracking, must necessarily have entered the plantation at this point, I entered it, too. At first, I could find no path—but I discovered one, afterwards, just faintly traced among the trees; and followed it. It took me, for some distance, in the direction of the village, until I stopped at a point where another foot-track crossed it. The brambles grew thickly on either side of this second path. I stood, looking down it, uncertain which way to take next; and, while I looked, I saw on one thorny branch, some fragments of fringe from a woman’s shawl. A closer examination of the fringe satisfied me that it had been torn from a shawl of Laura’s; and I instantly followed the second path. It brought me out, at last, to my great relief, at the back of the house. I say to my great relief, because I inferred that Laura must, for some unknown reason, have returned before me by this roundabout way. I went in by the court-yard and the offices. The first person whom I met in crossing the servants’-hall, was Mrs. Michelson, the housekeeper.

“Do you know,” I asked, “whether Lady Glyde has come in from her walk or not?”

“My lady came in, a little while ago, with Sir Percival,”
answered the housekeeper. “I am afraid, Miss Halcombe, something very distressing has happened.”

My heart sank within me. “You don’t mean an accident!” I said, faintly.

“No, no—thank God, no accident. But my lady ran upstairs to her own room in tears; and Sir Percival has ordered me to give Fanny warning to leave in an hour’s time.”

Fanny was Laura’s maid; a good affectionate girl who had been with her for years—the only person in the house, whose fidelity and devotion we could both depend upon.

“Where is Fanny?” I inquired.

“In my room, Miss Halcombe. The young woman is quite overcome; and I told her to sit down, and try to recover herself.”

I went to Mrs. Michelson’s room, and found Fanny in a corner, with her box by her side, crying bitterly.

She could give me no explanation whatever of her sudden dismissal. Sir Percival had ordered that she should have a month’s wages, in place of a month’s warning, and go. No reason had been assigned; no objection had been made to her conduct. She had been forbidden to appeal to her mistress, forbidden even to see her for a moment to say good-by. She was to go without explanations or farewells—and to go at once.

After soothing the poor girl by a few friendly words, I asked where she proposed to sleep that night. She replied that she thought of going to the little inn in the village, the landlady of which was a respectable woman, known to the servants at Blackwater Park. The next morning, by leaving early, she might get back to her friends in Cumberland, without stopping in London, where she was a total stranger.

I felt directly that Fanny’s departure offered us a safe means of communication with London and with Limmeridge House, of which it might be very important to avail ourselves.
Accordingly, I told her that she might expect to hear from her mistress or from me in the course of the evening, and that she might depend on our both doing all that lay in our power to help her, under the trial of leaving us for the present. Those words said, I shook hands with her, and went upstairs.

The door which led to Laura’s room, was the door of an ante-chamber, opening on to the passage. When I tried it, it was bolted on the inside.

I knocked, and the door was opened by the same heavy, overgrown housemaid, whose lumpish insensibility had tried my patience so severely, on the day when I found the wounded dog. I had, since that time, discovered that her name was Margaret Porcher, and that she was the most awkward, slatternly, and obstinate servant in the house.

On opening the door, she instantly stepped out to the threshold, and stood grinning at me in stolid silence.

“Why do you stand there?” I said. “Don’t you see that I want to come in?”

“Ah, but you mustn’t come in,” was the answer, with another and a broader grin still.

“How dare you talk to me in that way? Stand back instantly!”

She stretched out a great red hand and arm on each side of her, so as to bar the doorway, and slowly nodded her addle head at me.

“Master’s orders,” she said; and nodded again.

I had need of all my self-control to warn me against contesting the matter with
her
, and to remind me that the next words I had to say must be addressed to her master. I turned my back on her, and instantly went down stairs to find him. My resolution to keep my temper under all the irritations that Sir Percival could offer, was, by this time, as completely forgotten—I say so to my shame—as if I had
never made it. It did me good—after all I had suffered and suppressed in that house—it actually did me good to feel how angry I was.

The drawing-room and the breakfast-room were both empty. I went on to the library; and there I found Sir Percival, the Count, and Madame Fosco. They were all three standing up, close together, and Sir Percival had a little slip of paper in his hand. As I opened the door, I heard the Count say to him, “No—a thousand times over, No.”

I walked straight up to him, and looked him full in the face.

“Am I to understand, Sir Percival, that your wife’s room is a prison, and that your housemaid is the gaoler who keeps it?” I asked.

“Yes; that
is
what you are to understand,” he answered. “Take care my gaoler hasn’t got double duty to do—take care your room is not a prison, too.”

“Take
you
care how you treat your wife, and how you threaten
me
,” I broke out, in the heat of my anger. “There are laws in England to protect women from cruelty and outrage. If you hurt a hair of Laura’s head, if you dare to interfere with my freedom, come what may, to those laws I will appeal.”

Instead of answering me, he turned round to the Count.

“What did I tell you?” he asked. “What do you say now?”

“What I said before,” replied the Count—“No.”

Even in the vehemence of my anger, I felt his calm, cold, grey eyes on my face. They turned away from me, as soon as he had spoken, and looked significantly at his wife. Madame Fosco immediately moved close to my side, and, in that position, addressed Sir Percival before either of us could speak again.

“Favour me with your attention, for one moment,” she said, in her clear, icily-suppressed tones. “I have to thank
you, Sir Percival, for your hospitality; and to decline taking advantage of it any longer. I remain in no house in which ladies are treated as your wife and Miss Halcombe have been treated here to-day.”

Sir Percival drew back a step, and stared at her in dead silence. The declaration he had just heard—a declaration which he well knew, as I well knew, Madame Fosco would not have ventured to make without her husband’s permission—seemed to petrify him with surprise. The Count stood by, and looked at his wife with the most enthusiastic admiration.

“She is sublime!” he said to himself. He approached her, while he spoke, and drew her hand through his arm. “I am at your service, Eleanor,” he went on, with a quiet dignity that I had never noticed in him before. “And at Miss Halcombe’s service, if she will honour me by accepting all the assistance I can offer her.”

“Damn it! what do you mean?” cried Sir Percival, as the Count quietly moved away, with his wife, to the door.

“At other times I mean what I say; but, at this time, I mean what my wife says,” replied the impenetrable Italian. “We have changed places, Percival, for once; and Madame Fosco’s opinion is—mine.”

Sir Percival crumpled up the paper in his hand; and, pushing past the Count, with another oath, stood between him and the door.

“Have your own way,” he said, with baffled rage in his low, half-whispering tones. “Have your own way—and see what comes of it.” With those words, he left the room.

Madame Fosco glanced inquiringly at her husband. “He has gone away very suddenly,” she said. “What does it mean?”

“It means that you and I together have brought the worst-tempered man in all England to his senses,” answered
the Count. “It means, Miss Halcombe, that Lady Glyde is relieved from a gross indignity, and you from the repetition of an unpardonable insult. Suffer me to express my admiration of your conduct and your courage at a very trying moment.”

“Sincere admiration,” suggested Madame Fosco.

“Sincere admiration,” echoed the Count.

I had no longer the strength of my first angry resistance to outrage and injury to support me. My heart-sick anxiety to see Laura; my sense of my own helpless ignorance of what had happened at the boat-house, pressed on me with an intolerable weight. I tried to keep up appearances, by speaking to the Count and his wife in the tone which they had chosen to adopt in speaking to me. But the words failed on my lips—my breath came short and thick—my eyes looked longingly, in silence, at the door. The Count, understanding my anxiety, opened it, went out, and pulled it to after him. At the same time Sir Percival’s heavy step descended the stairs. I heard them whispering together, outside, while Madame Fosco was assuring me in her calmest and most conventional manner, that she rejoiced, for all our sakes, that Sir Percival’s conduct had not obliged her husband and herself to leave Blackwater Park. Before she had done speaking, the whispering ceased, the door opened, and the Count looked in.

“Miss Halcombe,” he said, “I am happy to inform you that Lady Glyde is mistress again in her own house. I thought it might be more agreeable to you to hear of this change for the better from
me
, than from Sir Percival—and I have, therefore, expressly returned to mention it.”

“Admirable delicacy!” said Madame Fosco, paying back her husband’s tribute of admiration, with the Count’s own coin, in the Count’s own manner. He smiled and
bowed as if he had received a formal compliment from a polite stranger, and drew back to let me pass out first.

Sir Percival was standing in the hall. As I hurried to the stairs I heard him call impatiently to the Count, to come out of the library.

“What are you waiting there for?” he said; “I want to speak to you.”

“And I want to think a little by myself,” replied the other. “Wait till later, Percival—wait till later.”

Neither he nor his friend said any more. I gained the top of the stairs, and ran along the passage. In my haste and my agitation, I left the door of the ante-chamber open—but I closed the door of the bedroom the moment I was inside it.

Laura was sitting alone at the far end of the room; her arms resting wearily on a table, and her face hidden in her hands. She started up, with a cry of delight, when she saw me.

“How did you get here?” she asked. “Who gave you leave? Not Sir Percival?”

In my overpowering anxiety to hear what she had to tell me, I could not answer her—I could only put questions, on my side. Laura’s eagerness to know what had passed down stairs proved, however, too strong to be resisted. She persistently repeated her inquiries.

“The Count, of course!” I answered, impatiently. “Whose influence in the house——”

She stopped me, with a gesture of disgust.

“Don’t speak of him,” she cried. “The Count is the vilest creature breathing! The Count is a miserable Spy——!”