The Woman in White (37 page)

We all entered the house. As we crossed the hall Sir Percival
came out from the library to meet us. He looked hurried and pale
and anxious—but for all that, he was in his most polite mood when
he spoke to us.

"I am sorry to say I am obliged to leave you," he began—"a long
drive—a matter that I can't very well put off. I shall be back
in good time to-morrow—but before I go I should like that little
business-formality, which I spoke of this morning, to be settled.
Laura, will you come into the library? It won't take a minute—a
mere formality. Countess, may I trouble you also? I want you and
the Countess, Fosco, to be witnesses to a signature—nothing more.
Come in at once and get it over."

He held the library door open until they had passed in, followed
them, and shut it softly.

I remained, for a moment afterwards, standing alone in the hall,
with my heart beating fast and my mind misgiving me sadly. Then I
went on to the staircase, and ascended slowly to my own room.

June 17th.—Just as my hand was on the door of my room, I heard
Sir Percival's voice calling to me from below.

"I must beg you to come downstairs again," he said. "It is
Fosco's fault, Miss Halcombe, not mine. He has started some
nonsensical objection to his wife being one of the witnesses, and
has obliged me to ask you to join us in the library."

I entered the room immediately with Sir Percival. Laura was
waiting by the writing-table, twisting and turning her garden hat
uneasily in her hands. Madame Fosco sat near her, in an arm-
chair, imperturbably admiring her husband, who stood by himself at
the other end of the library, picking off the dead leaves from the
flowers in the window.

The moment I appeared the Count advanced to meet me, and to offer
his explanations.

"A thousand pardons, Miss Halcombe," he said. "You know the
character which is given to my countrymen by the English? We
Italians are all wily and suspicious by nature, in the estimation
of the good John Bull. Set me down, if you please, as being no
better than the rest of my race. I am a wily Italian and a
suspicious Italian. You have thought so yourself, dear lady, have
you not? Well! it is part of my wiliness and part of my suspicion
to object to Madame Fosco being a witness to Lady Glyde's
signature, when I am also a witness myself."

"There is not the shadow of a reason for his objection,"
interposed Sir Percival. "I have explained to him that the law of
England allows Madame Fosco to witness a signature as well as her
husband."

"I admit it," resumed the Count. "The law of England says, Yes,
but the conscience of Fosco says, No." He spread out his fat
fingers on the bosom of his blouse, and bowed solemnly, as if he
wished to introduce his conscience to us all, in the character of
an illustrious addition to the society. "What this document which
Lady Glyde is about to sign may be," he continued, "I neither know
nor desire to know. I only say this, circumstances may happen in
the future which may oblige Percival, or his representatives, to
appeal to the two witnesses, in which case it is certainly
desirable that those witnesses should represent two opinions which
are perfectly independent the one of the other. This cannot be if
my wife signs as well as myself, because we have but one opinion
between us, and that opinion is mine. I will not have it cast in
my teeth, at some future day, that Madame Fosco acted under my
coercion, and was, in plain fact, no witness at all. I speak in
Percival's interest, when I propose that my name shall appear (as
the nearest friend of the husband), and your name, Miss Halcombe
(as the nearest friend of the wife). I am a Jesuit, if you please
to think so—a splitter of straws—a man of trifles and crochets
and scruples—but you will humour me, I hope, in merciful
consideration for my suspicious Italian character, and my uneasy
Italian conscience." He bowed again, stepped back a few paces, and
withdrew his conscience from our society as politely as he had
introduced it.

The Count's scruples might have been honourable and reasonable
enough, but there was something in his manner of expressing them
which increased my unwillingness to be concerned in the business
of the signature. No consideration of less importance than my
consideration for Laura would have induced me to consent to be a
witness at all. One look, however, at her anxious face decided me
to risk anything rather than desert her.

"I will readily remain in the room," I said. "And if I find no
reason for starting any small scruples on my side, you may rely on
me as a witness."

Sir Percival looked at me sharply, as if he was about to say
something. But at the same moment, Madame Fosco attracted his
attention by rising from her chair. She had caught her husband's
eye, and had evidently received her orders to leave the room.

"You needn't go," said Sir Percival.

Madame Fosco looked for her orders again, got them again, said she
would prefer leaving us to our business, and resolutely walked
out. The Count lit a cigarette, went back to the flowers in the
window, and puffed little jets of smoke at the leaves, in a state
of the deepest anxiety about killing the insects.

Meanwhile Sir Percival unlocked a cupboard beneath one of the
book-cases, and produced from it a piece of parchment, folded
longwise, many times over. He placed it on the table, opened the
last fold only, and kept his hand on the rest. The last fold
displayed a strip of blank parchment with little wafers stuck on
it at certain places. Every line of the writing was hidden in the
part which he still held folded up under his hand. Laura and I
looked at each other. Her face was pale, but it showed no
indecision and no fear.

Sir Percival dipped a pen in ink, and handed it to his wife. "Sign
your name there," he said, pointing to the place. "You and Fosco
are to sign afterwards, Miss Halcombe, opposite those two wafers.
Come here, Fosco! witnessing a signature is not to be done by
mooning out of window and smoking into the flowers."

The Count threw away his cigarette, and joined us at the table,
with his hands carelessly thrust into the scarlet belt of his
blouse, and his eyes steadily fixed on Sir Percival's face.
Laura, who was on the other side of her husband, with the pen in
her hand, looked at him too. He stood between them holding the
folded parchment down firmly on the table, and glancing across at
me, as I sat opposite to him, with such a sinister mixture of
suspicion and embarrassment on his face that he looked more like a
prisoner at the bar than a gentleman in his own house.

"Sign there," he repeated, turning suddenly on Laura, and pointing
once more to the place on the parchment.

"What is it I am to sign?" she asked quietly.

"I have no time to explain," he answered. "The dog-cart is at the
door, and I must go directly. Besides, if I had time, you
wouldn't understand. It is a purely formal document, full of
legal technicalities, and all that sort of thing. Come! come!
sign your name, and let us have done as soon as possible."

"I ought surely to know what I am signing, Sir Percival, before I
write my name?"

"Nonsense! What have women to do with business? I tell you again,
you can't understand it."

"At any rate, let me try to understand it. Whenever Mr. Gilmore
had any business for me to do, he always explained it first, and I
always understood him."

"I dare say he did. He was your servant, and was obliged to
explain. I am your husband, and am NOT obliged. How much longer
do you mean to keep me here? I tell you again, there is no time
for reading anything—the dog-cart is waiting at the door. Once
for all, will you sign or will you not?"

She still had the pen in her hand, but she made no approach to
signing her name with it.

"If my signature pledges me to anything," she said, "surely I have
some claim to know what that pledge is?"

He lifted up the parchment, and struck it angrily on the table.

"Speak out!" he said. "You were always famous for telling the
truth. Never mind Miss Halcombe, never mind Fosco—say, in plain
terms, you distrust me."

The Count took one of his hands out of his belt and laid it on Sir
Percival's shoulder. Sir Percival shook it off irritably. The
Count put it on again with unruffled composure.

"Control your unfortunate temper, Percival," he said "Lady Glyde
is right."

"Right!" cried Sir Percival. "A wife right in distrusting her
husband!"

"It is unjust and cruel to accuse me of distrusting you," said
Laura. "Ask Marian if I am not justified in wanting to know what
this writing requires of me before I sign it."

"I won't have any appeals made to Miss Halcombe," retorted Sir
Percival. "Miss Halcombe has nothing to do with the matter."

I had not spoken hitherto, and I would much rather not have spoken
now. But the expression of distress in Laura's face when she
turned it towards me, and the insolent injustice of her husband's
conduct, left me no other alternative than to give my opinion, for
her sake, as soon as I was asked for it.

"Excuse me, Sir Percival," I said—"but as one of the witnesses to
the signature, I venture to think that I HAVE something to do with
the matter. Laura's objection seems to me a perfectly fair one,
and speaking for myself only, I cannot assume the responsibility
of witnessing her signature, unless she first understands what the
writing is which you wish her to sign."

"A cool declaration, upon my soul!" cried Sir Percival. "The next
time you invite yourself to a man's house, Miss Halcombe, I
recommend you not to repay his hospitality by taking his wife's
side against him in a matter that doesn't concern you."

I started to my feet as suddenly as if he had struck me. If I had
been a man, I would have knocked him down on the threshold of his
own door, and have left his house, never on any earthly
consideration to enter it again. But I was only a woman—and I
loved his wife so dearly!

Thank God, that faithful love helped me, and I sat down again
without saying a word. SHE knew what I had suffered and what I
had suppressed. She ran round to me, with the tears streaming
from her eyes. "Oh, Marian!" she whispered softly. "If my mother
had been alive, she could have done no more for me!"

"Come back and sign!" cried Sir Percival from the other side of
the table.

"Shall I?" she asked in my ear; "I will, if you tell me."

"No," I answered. "The right and the truth are with you—sign
nothing, unless you have read it first."

"Come back and sign!" he reiterated, in his loudest and angriest
tones.

The Count, who had watched Laura and me with a close and silent
attention, interposed for the second time.

"Percival!" he said. "I remember that I am in the presence of
ladies. Be good enough, if you please, to remember it too."

Sir Percival turned on him speechless with passion. The Count's
firm hand slowly tightened its grasp on his shoulder, and the
Count's steady voice quietly repeated, "Be good enough, if you
please, to remember it too."

They both looked at each other. Sir Percival slowly drew his
shoulder from under the Count's hand, slowly turned his face away
from the Count's eyes, doggedly looked down for a little while at
the parchment on the table, and then spoke, with the sullen
submission of a tamed animal, rather than the becoming resignation
of a convinced man.

"I don't want to offend anybody," he said, "but my wife's
obstinacy is enough to try the patience of a saint. I have told
her this is merely a formal document—and what more can she want?
You may say what you please, but it is no part of a woman's duty
to set her husband at defiance. Once more, Lady Glyde, and for
the last time, will you sign or will you not?"

Laura returned to his side of the table, and took up the pen
again.

"I will sign with pleasure," she said, "if you will only treat me
as a responsible being. I care little what sacrifice is required
of me, if it will affect no one else, and lead to no ill results—"

"Who talked of a sacrifice being required of You?" he broke in,
with a half-suppressed return of his former violence.

"I only meant," she resumed, "that I would refuse no concession
which I could honourably make. If I have a scruple about signing
my name to an engagement of which I know nothing, why should you
visit it on me so severely? It is rather hard, I think, to treat
Count Fosco's scruples so much more indulgently than you have
treated mine."

This unfortunate, yet most natural, reference to the Count's
extraordinary power over her husband, indirect as it was, set Sir
Percival's smouldering temper on fire again in an instant.

"Scruples!" he repeated. "YOUR scruples! It is rather late in the
day for you to be scrupulous. I should have thought you had got
over all weakness of that sort, when you made a virtue of
necessity by marrying me."

The instant he spoke those words, Laura threw down the pen—looked
at him with an expression in her eyes which, throughout all my
experience of her, I had never seen in them before, and turned her
back on him in dead silence.

This strong expression of the most open and the most bitter
contempt was so entirely unlike herself, so utterly out of her
character, that it silenced us all. There was something hidden,
beyond a doubt, under the mere surface-brutality of the words
which her husband had just addressed to her. There was some
lurking insult beneath them, of which I was wholly ignorant, but
which had left the mark of its profanation so plainly on her face
that even a stranger might have seen it.

The Count, who was no stranger, saw it as distinctly as I did.
When I left my chair to join Laura, I heard him whisper under his
breath to Sir Percival, "You idiot!"