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

her ladyship, but she was deaf to me. She held my arm fast enough to force me to go downstairs with her, and she still clung to me with all the little strength she had at the moment when I opened the dining-room door.

Sir Percival was sitting at the table with a decanter of wine before him. He raised the glass to his lips as we went in and drained it at a draught. Seeing that he looked at me angrily when he put it down again, I attempted to make some apology for my accidental presence in the room.

“Do you suppose there are any secrets going on here?” he broke out suddenly; “there are none⁠—there is nothing underhand, nothing kept from you or from anyone.” After speaking those strange words loudly and sternly, he filled himself another glass of wine and asked Lady Glyde what she wanted of him.

“If my sister is fit to travel, I am fit to travel” said her ladyship, with more firmness than she had yet shown. “I come to beg you will make allowances for my anxiety about Marian, and let me follow her at once by the afternoon train.”

“You must wait till tomorrow,” replied Sir Percival, “and then if you don’t hear to the contrary you can go. I don’t suppose you are at all likely to hear to the contrary, so I shall write to Fosco by tonight’s post.”

He said those last words holding his glass up to the light, and looking at the wine in it instead of at Lady Glyde. Indeed he never once looked at her throughout the conversation. Such a singular want of good breeding in a gentleman of his rank impressed me, I own, very painfully.

“Why should you write to Count Fosco?” she asked, in extreme surprise.

“To tell him to expect you by the midday train,” said Sir Percival. “He will meet you at the station when you get to London, and take you on to sleep at your aunt’s in St. John’s Wood.”

Lady Glyde’s hand began to tremble violently round my arm⁠—why I could not imagine.

“There is no necessity for Count Fosco to meet me,” she said. “I would rather not stay in London to sleep.”

“You must. You can’t take the whole journey to Cumberland in one day. You must rest a night in London⁠—and I don’t choose you to go by yourself to an hotel. Fosco made the offer to your uncle to give you houseroom on the way down, and your uncle has accepted it. Here! here is a letter from him addressed to yourself. I ought to have sent it up this morning, but I forgot. Read it and see what Mr. Fairlie himself says to you.”

Lady Glyde looked at the letter for a moment and then placed it in my hands.

“Read it,” she said faintly. “I don’t know what is the matter with me. I can’t read it myself.”

It was a note of only four lines⁠—so short and so careless that it quite struck me. If I remember correctly it contained no more than these words⁠—

“Dearest Laura, Please come whenever you like. Break the journey by sleeping at your aunt’s house. Grieved to hear of dear Marian’s illness. Affectionately yours, Frederick Fairlie.”

“I would rather not go there⁠—I would rather not stay a night in London,” said her ladyship, breaking out eagerly with those words before I had quite done reading the note, short as it was. “Don’t write to Count Fosco! Pray, pray don’t write to him!”

Sir Percival filled another glass from the decanter so awkwardly that he upset it and spilt all the wine over the table. “My sight seems to be failing me,” he muttered to himself, in an odd, muffled voice. He slowly set the glass up again, refilled it, and drained it once more at a draught. I began to fear, from his look and manner, that the wine was getting into his head.

“Pray don’t write to Count Fosco,” persisted Lady Glyde, more earnestly than ever.

“Why not, I should like to know?” cried Sir Percival, with a sudden burst of anger that startled us both. “Where can you stay more properly in London than at the place your uncle himself chooses for you⁠—at your aunt’s house? Ask Mrs. Michelson.”

The arrangement proposed was so unquestionably the right and the proper one, that I could make no possible objection to it. Much as I sympathised with Lady Glyde in other respects, I could not sympathise with her in her unjust prejudices against Count Fosco. I never before met with any lady of her rank and station who was so lamentably narrow-minded on the subject of foreigners. Neither her uncle’s note nor Sir Percival’s increasing impatience seemed to have the least effect on her. She still objected to staying a night in London, she still implored her husband not to write to the Count.

“Drop it!” said Sir Percival, rudely turning his back on us. “If you haven’t sense enough to know what is best for yourself other people must know it for you. The arrangement is made and there is an end of it. You are only wanted to do what Miss Halcombe has done before you⁠—”

“Marian?” repeated her Ladyship, in a bewildered manner; “Marian sleeping in Count Fosco’s house!”

“Yes, in Count Fosco’s house. She slept there last night to break the journey, and you are to follow her example, and do what your uncle tells you. You are to sleep at Fosco’s tomorrow night, as your sister did, to break the journey. Don’t throw too many obstacles in my way! don’t make me repent of letting you go at all!”

He started to his feet, and suddenly walked out into the verandah through the open glass doors.

“Will your ladyship excuse me,” I whispered, “if I suggest that we had better not wait here till Sir Percival comes back? I am very much afraid he is overexcited with wine.”

She consented to leave the room in a weary, absent manner.

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