The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (free ebook reader for ipad TXT) 📖

the day when I may speak out once for all in his presence, and cast them back one by one in his teeth.

Sir Percival was the first to break the silence again.

“Yes, yes, bully and bluster as much as you like,” he said sulkily; “the difficulty about the money is not the only difficulty. You would be for taking strong measures with the women yourself—if you knew as much as I do.”

“We will come to that second difficulty all in good time,” rejoined the Count. “You may confuse yourself, Percival, as much as you please, but you shall not confuse me. Let the question of the money be settled first. Have I convinced your obstinacy? have I shown you that your temper will not let you help yourself?—Or must I go back, and (as you put it in your dear straightforward English) bully and bluster a little more?”

“Pooh! It’s easy enough to grumble at ME. Say what is to be done— that’s a little harder.”

“Is it? Bah! This is what is to be done: You give up all direction in the business from to-night—you leave it for the future in my hands only. I am talking to a Practical British man—ha? Well, Practical, will that do for you?”

“What do you propose if I leave it all to you?”

“Answer me first. Is it to be in my hands or not?”

“Say it is in your hands—what then?”

“A few questions, Percival, to begin with. I must wait a little yet, to let circumstances guide me, and I must know, in every possible way, what those circumstances are likely to be. There is no time to lose. I have told you already that Miss Halcombe has written to the lawyer to-day for the second time.”

“How did you find it out? What did she say?”

“If I told you, Percival, we should only come back at the end to where we are now. Enough that I have found it out—and the finding has caused that trouble and anxiety which made me so inaccessible to you all through to-day. Now, to refresh my memory about your affairs—it is some time since I talked them over with you. The money has been raised, in the absence of your wife’s signature, by means of bills at three months—raised at a cost that makes my poverty-stricken foreign hair stand on end to think of it! When the bills are due, is there really and truly no earthly way of paying them but by the help of your wife?”

“None.”

“What! You have no money at the bankers?”

“A few hundreds, when I want as many thousands.”

“Have you no other security to borrow upon?”

“Not a shred.”

“What have you actually got with your wife at the present moment?”

“Nothing but the interest of her twenty thousand pounds—barely enough to pay our daily expenses.”

“What do you expect from your wife?”

“Three thousand a year when her uncle dies.”

“A fine fortune, Percival. What sort of a man is this uncle? Old?”

“No—neither old nor young.”

“A good-tempered, freely-living man? Married? No—I think my wife told me, not married.”

“Of course not. If he was married, and had a son, Lady Glyde would not be next heir to the property. I’ll tell you what he is. He’s a maudlin, twaddling, selfish fool, and bores everybody who comes near him about the state of his health.”

“Men of that sort, Percival, live long, and marry malevolently when you least expect it. I don’t give you much, my friend, for your chance of the three thousand a year. Is there nothing more that comes to you from your wife?”

“Nothing.”

“Absolutely nothing?”

“Absolutely nothing—except in case of her death.”

“Aha! in the case of her death.”

There was another pause. The Count moved from the verandah to the gravel walk outside. I knew that he had moved by his voice. “The rain has come at last,” I heard him say. It had come. The state of my cloak showed that it had been falling thickly for some little time.

The Count went back under the verandah—I heard the chair creak beneath his weight as he sat down in it again.

“Well, Percival,” he said, “and in the case of Lady Glyde’s death, what do you get then?”

“If she leaves no children----”

“Which she is likely to do?”

“Which she is not in the least likely to do----”

“Yes?”

“Why, then I get her twenty thousand pounds.”

“Paid down?”

“Paid down.”

They were silent once more. As their voices ceased Madame Fosco’s shadow darkened the blind again. Instead of passing this time, it remained, for a moment, quite still. I saw her fingers steal round the corner of the blind, and draw it on one side. The dim white outline of her face, looking out straight over me, appeared behind the window. I kept still, shrouded from head to foot in my black cloak. The rain, which was fast wetting me, dripped over the glass, blurred it, and prevented her from seeing anything. “More rain!” I heard her say to herself. She dropped the blind, and I breathed again freely.

The talk went on below me, the Count resuming it this time.

“Percival! do you care about your wife?”

“Fosco! that’s rather a downright question.”

“I am a downright man, and I repeat it.”

“Why the devil do you look at me in that way?”

“You won’t answer me? Well, then, let us say your wife dies before the summer is out----”

“Drop it, Fosco!”

“Let us say your wife dies----”

“Drop it, I tell you!”

“In that case, you would gain twenty thousand pounds, and you would lose----”

“I should lose the chance of three thousand a year.”

“The REMOTE chance, Percival—the remote chance only. And you want money, at once. In your position the gain is certain—the loss doubtful.”

“Speak for yourself as well as for me. Some of the money I want has been borrowed for you. And if you come to gain, my wife’s death would be ten thousand pounds in your wife’s pocket. Sharp as you are, you seem to have conveniently forgotten Madame Fosco’s legacy. Don’t look at me in that way! I won’t have it! What with your looks and your questions, upon my soul, you make my flesh creep!”

“Your flesh? Does flesh mean conscience in English? speak of your wife’s death as I speak of a possibility. Why not? The respectable lawyers who scribble-scrabble your deeds and your wills look the deaths of living people in the face. Do lawyers make your flesh creep? Why should I? It is my business to-night to clear up your position beyond the possibility of mistake, and I have now done it. Here is your position. If your wife lives, you pay those bills with her signature to the parchment. If your wife dies, you pay them with her death.”

As he spoke the light in Madame Fosco’s room was extinguished, and the whole second floor of the house was now sunk in darkness,

“Talk! talk!” grumbled Sir Percival. “One would think, to hear you, that my wife’s signature to the deed was got already.”

“You have left the matter in my hands,” retorted the Count, “and I have more than two months before me to turn round in. Say no more about it, if you please, for the present. When the bills are due, you will see for yourself if my ‘talk! talk!’ is worth something, or if it is not. And now, Percival, having done with the money matters for to-night, I can place my attention at your disposal, if you wish to consult me on that second difficulty which has mixed itself up with our little embarrassments, and which has so altered you for the worse, that I hardly know you again. Speak, my friend—and pardon me if I shock your fiery national tastes by mixing myself a second glass of sugar-and-water.”

“It’s very well to say speak,” replied Sir Percival, in a far more quiet and more polite tone than he had yet adopted, “but it’s not so easy to know how to begin.”

“Shall I help you?” suggested the Count. “Shall I give this private difficulty of yours a name? What if I call it—Anne Catherick?”

“Look here, Fosco, you and I have known each other for a long time, and if you have helped me out of one or two scrapes before this, I have done the best I could to help you in return, as far as money would go. We have made as many friendly sacrifices, on both sides, as men could, but we have had our secrets from each other, of course—haven’t we?”

“You have had a secret from me, Percival. There is a skeleton in your cupboard here at Blackwater Park that has peeped out in these last few days at other people besides yourself.”

“Well, suppose it has. If it doesn’t concern you, you needn’t be curious about it, need you?”

“Do I look curious about it?”

“Yes, you do.”

“So! so! my face speaks the truth, then? What an immense foundation of good there must be in the nature of a man who arrives at my age, and whose face has not yet lost the habit of speaking the truth!—Come, Glyde! let us be candid one with the other. This secret of yours has sought me: I have not sought it. Let us say I am curious—do you ask me, as your old friend, to respect your secret, and to leave it, once for all, in your own keeping?”

“Yes—that’s just what I do ask.”

“Then my curiosity is at an end. It dies in me from this moment.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“What makes you doubt me?”

“I have had some experience, Fosco, of your roundabout ways, and I am not so sure that you won’t worm it out of me after all.”

The chair below suddenly creaked again—I felt the trellis-work pillar under me shake from top to bottom. The Count had started to his feet, and had struck it with his hand in indignation.

“Percival! Percival!” he cried passionately, “do you know me no better than that? Has all your experience shown you nothing of my character yet? I am a man of the antique type! I am capable of the most exalted acts of virtue—when I have the chance of performing them. It has been the misfortune of my life that I have had few chances. My conception of friendship is sublime! Is it my fault that your skeleton has peeped out at me? Why do I confess my curiosity? You poor superficial Englishman, it is to magnify my own self-control. I could draw your secret out of you, if I liked, as I draw this finger out of the palm of my hand—you know I could! But you have appealed to my friendship, and the duties of friendship are sacred to me. See! I trample my base curiosity under my feet. My exalted sentiments lift me above it. Recognise them, Percival! imitate them, Percival! Shake hands—I forgive you.”

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