The Woman in White Wilkie Collins (bts books to read txt) 📖

“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 downstairs 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 today!”

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 heartsick anxiety to see Laura, my sense of my own helpless ignorance of what had happened at the boathouse, 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