The Woman in White (88 page)

A slim, light-haired man standing by us, whom I had not noticed
before—a man with a scar on his left cheek—looked attentively at
Pesca as I helped him up, and then looked still more attentively,
following the direction of Pesca's eyes, at the Count. Our
conversation might have reached his ears, and might, as it struck
me, have roused his curiosity.

Meanwhile, Pesca fixed his eyes earnestly on the broad, full,
smiling face turned a little upward, exactly opposite to him.

"No," he said, "I have never set my two eyes on that big fat man
before in all my life."

As he spoke the Count looked downwards towards the boxes behind us
on the pit tier.

The eyes of the two Italians met.

The instant before I had been perfectly satisfied, from his own
reiterated assertion, that Pesca did not know the Count. The
instant afterwards I was equally certain that the Count knew
Pesca!

Knew him, and—more surprising still—FEARED him as well! There
was no mistaking the change that passed over the villain's face.
The leaden hue that altered his yellow complexion in a moment, the
sudden rigidity of all his features, the furtive scrutiny of his
cold grey eyes, the motionless stillness of him from head to foot
told their own tale. A mortal dread had mastered him body and
soul—and his own recognition of Pesca was the cause of it!

The slim man with the scar on his cheek was still close by us. He
had apparently drawn his inference from the effect produced on the
Count by the sight of Pesca as I had drawn mine. He was a mild,
gentlemanlike man, looking like a foreigner, and his interest in
our proceedings was not expressed in anything approaching to an
offensive manner.

For my own part I was so startled by the change in the Count's
face, so astounded at the entirely unexpected turn which events
had taken, that I knew neither what to say or do next. Pesca
roused me by stepping back to his former place at my side and
speaking first.

"How the fat man stares!" he exclaimed. "Is it at ME?
Am I famous? How can he know me when I don't know him?"

I kept my eye still on the Count. I saw him move for the first
time when Pesca moved, so as not to lose sight of the little man
in the lower position in which he now stood. I was curious to see
what would happen if Pesca's attention under these circumstances
was withdrawn from him, and I accordingly asked the Professor if
he recognised any of his pupils that evening among the ladies in
the boxes. Pesca immediately raised the large opera-glass to his
eyes, and moved it slowly all round the upper part of the theatre,
searching for his pupils with the most conscientious scrutiny.

The moment he showed himself to be thus engaged the Count turned
round, slipped past the persons who occupied seats on the farther
side of him from where we stood, and disappeared in the middle
passage down the centre of the pit. I caught Pesca by the arm,
and to his inexpressible astonishment, hurried him round with me
to the back of the pit to intercept the Count before he could get
to the door. Somewhat to my surprise, the slim man hastened out
before us, avoiding a stoppage caused by some people on our side
of the pit leaving their places, by which Pesca and myself were
delayed. When we reached the lobby the Count had disappeared, and
the foreigner with the scar was gone too.

"Come home," I said; "come home, Pesca to your lodgings. I must
speak to you in private—I must speak directly."

"My-soul-bless-my-soul!" cried the Professor, in a state of the
extremest bewilderment. "What on earth is the matter?"

I walked on rapidly without answering. The circumstances under
which the Count had left the theatre suggested to me that his
extraordinary anxiety to escape Pesca might carry him to further
extremities still. He might escape me, too, by leaving London. I
doubted the future if I allowed him so much as a day's freedom to
act as he pleased. And I doubted that foreign stranger, who had
got the start of us, and whom I suspected of intentionally
following him out.

With this double distrust in my mind, I was not long in making
Pesca understand what I wanted. As soon as we two were alone in
his room, I increased his confusion and amazement a hundredfold by
telling him what my purpose was as plainly and unreservedly as I
have acknowledged it here.

"My friend, what can I do?" cried the Professor, piteously
appealing to me with both hands. "Deuce-what-the-deuce! how can I
help you, Walter, when I don't know the man?"

"HE knows YOU—he is afraid of you—he has left the theatre to
escape you. Pesca! there must be a reason for this. Look back
into your own life before you came to England. You left Italy, as
you have told me yourself, for political reasons. You have never
mentioned those reasons to me, and I don't inquire into them now.
I only ask you to consult your own recollections, and to say if
they suggest no past cause for the terror which the first sight of
you produced in that man."

To my unutterable surprise, these words, harmless as they appeared
to ME, produced the same astounding effect on Pesca which the
sight of Pesca had produced on the Count. The rosy face of my
little friend whitened in an instant, and he drew back from me
slowly, trembling from head to foot.

"Walter!" he said. "You don't know what you ask."

He spoke in a whisper—he looked at me as if I had suddenly
revealed to him some hidden danger to both of us. In less than
one minute of time he was so altered from the easy, lively, quaint
little man of all my past experience, that if I had met him in the
street, changed as I saw him now, I should most certainly not have
known him again.

"Forgive me, if I have unintentionally pained and shocked you," I
replied. "Remember the cruel wrong my wife has suffered at Count
Fosco's hands. Remember that the wrong can never be redressed,
unless the means are in my power of forcing him to do her justice.
I spoke in HER interests, Pesca—I ask you again to forgive me—I
can say no more."

I rose to go. He stopped me before I reached the door.

"Wait," he said. "You have shaken me from head to foot. You
don't know how I left my country, and why I left my country. Let
me compose myself, let me think, if I can."

I returned to my chair. He walked up and down the room, talking
to himself incoherently in his own language. After several turns
backwards and forwards, he suddenly came up to me, and laid his
little hands with a strange tenderness and solemnity on my breast.

"On your heart and soul, Walter," he said, "is there no other way
to get to that man but the chance-way through ME?"

"There is no other way," I answered.

He left me again, opened the door of the room and looked out
cautiously into the passage, closed it once more, and came back.

"You won your right over me, Walter," he said, "on the day when
you saved my life. It was yours from that moment, when you
pleased to take it. Take it now. Yes! I mean what I say. My
next words, as true as the good God is above us, will put my life
into your hands."

The trembling earnestness with which he uttered this extraordinary
warning, carried with it, to my mind, the conviction that he spoke
the truth.

"Mind this!" he went on, shaking his hands at me in the vehemence
of his agitation. "I hold no thread, in my own mind, between that
man Fosco, and the past time which I call back to me for your
sake. If you find the thread, keep it to yourself—tell me
nothing—on my knees I beg and pray, let me be ignorant, let me be
innocent, let me be blind to all the future as I am now!"

He said a few words more, hesitatingly and disconnectedly, then
stopped again.

I saw that the effort of expressing himself in English, on an
occasion too serious to permit him the use of the quaint turns and
phrases of his ordinary vocabulary, was painfully increasing the
difficulty he had felt from the first in speaking to me at all.
Having learnt to read and understand his native language (though
not to speak it), in the earlier days of our intimate
companionship, I now suggested to him that he should express
himself in Italian, while I used English in putting any questions
which might be necessary to my enlightenment. He accepted the
proposal. In his smooth-flowing language, spoken with a vehement
agitation which betrayed itself in the perpetual working of his
features, in the wildness and the suddenness of his foreign
gesticulations, but never in the raising of his voice, I now heard
the words which armed me to meet the last struggle, that is left
for this story to record.
[3]

"You know nothing of my motive for leaving Italy," he began,
"except that it was for political reasons. If I had been driven
to this country by the persecution of my government, I should not
have kept those reasons a secret from you or from any one. I have
concealed them because no government authority has pronounced the
sentence of my exile. You have heard, Walter, of the political
societies that are hidden in every great city on the continent of
Europe? To one of those societies I belonged in Italy—and belong
still in England. When I came to this country, I came by the
direction of my chief. I was over-zealous in my younger time—I
ran the risk of compromising myself and others. For those reasons
I was ordered to emigrate to England and to wait. I emigrated—I
have waited—I wait still. To-morrow I may be called away—ten
years hence I may be called away. It is all one to me—I am here,
I support myself by teaching, and I wait. I violate no oath (you
shall hear why presently) in making my confidence complete by
telling you the name of the society to which I belong. All I do
is to put my life in your hands. If what I say to you now is ever
known by others to have passed my lips, as certainly as we two sit
here, I am a dead man."

He whispered the next words in my ear. I keep the secret which he
thus communicated. The society to which he belonged will be
sufficiently individualised for the purpose of these pages, if I
call it "The Brotherhood," on the few occasions when any reference
to the subject will be needed in this place.

"The object of the Brotherhood," Pesca went on, "is, briefly, the
object of other political societies of the same sort—the
destruction of tyranny and the assertion of the rights of the
people. The principles of the Brotherhood are two. So long as a
man's life is useful, or even harmless only, he has the right to
enjoy it. But, if his life inflicts injury on the well-being of
his fellow-men, from that moment he forfeits the right, and it is
not only no crime, but a positive merit, to deprive him of it. It
is not for me to say in what frightful circumstances of oppression
and suffering this society took its rise. It is not for you to
say—you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago,
that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what
extremities you proceeded to in the conquering—it is not for you
to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not,
carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation. The iron that has
entered into our souls has gone too deep for you to find it.
Leave the refugee alone! Laugh at him, distrust him, open your
eyes in wonder at that secret self which smoulders in him,
sometimes under the every-day respectability and tranquillity of a
man like me—sometimes under the grinding poverty, the fierce
squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am—
but judge us not! In the time of your first Charles you might have
done us justice—the long luxury of your own freedom has made you
incapable of doing us justice now."

All the deepest feelings of his nature seemed to force themselves
to the surface in those words—all his heart was poured out to me
for the first time in our lives—but still his voice never rose,
still his dread of the terrible revelation he was making to me
never left him.

"So far," he resumed, "you think the society like other societies.
Its object (in your English opinion) is anarchy and revolution.
It takes the life of a bad king or a bad minister, as if the one
and the other were dangerous wild beasts to be shot at the first
opportunity. I grant you this. But the laws of the Brotherhood
are the laws of no other political society on the face of the
earth. The members are not known to one another. There is a
president in Italy; there are presidents abroad. Each of these
has his secretary. The presidents and the secretaries know the
members, but the members, among themselves, are all strangers,
until their chiefs see fit, in the political necessity of the
time, or in the private necessity of the society, to make them
known to each other. With such a safeguard as this there is no
oath among us on admittance. We are identified with the
Brotherhood by a secret mark, which we all bear, which lasts while
our lives last. We are told to go about our ordinary business,
and to report ourselves to the president, or the secretary, four
times a year, in the event of our services being required. We are
warned, if we betray the Brotherhood, or if we injure it by
serving other interests, that we die by the principles of the
Brotherhood—die by the hand of a stranger who may be sent from
the other end of the world to strike the blow—or by the hand of
our own bosom-friend, who may have been a member unknown to us
through all the years of our intimacy. Sometimes the death is
delayed—sometimes it follows close on the treachery. It is our
first business to know how to wait—our second business to know
how to obey when the word is spoken. Some of us may wait our
lives through, and may not be wanted. Some of us may be called to
the work, or to the preparation for the work, the very day of our
admission. I myself—the little, easy, cheerful man you know,
who, of his own accord, would hardly lift up his handkerchief to
strike down the fly that buzzes about his face—I, in my younger
time, under provocation so dreadful that I will not tell you of
it, entered the Brotherhood by an impulse, as I might have killed
myself by an impulse. I must remain in it now—it has got me,
whatever I may think of it in my better circumstances and my
cooler manhood, to my dying day. While I was still in Italy I was
chosen secretary, and all the members of that time, who were
brought face to face with my president, were brought face to face
also with me."