The Woman in White: List 4

Mr. Fairlie had received his first intimation of his niece's death from his sister, Madame Fosco, this letter also not containing any exact reference to dates.

But on Miss Halcombe's declaring that she only wanted to put some questions which she was too much agitated to ask at that moment, and that she had no intention of misleading the nurse into any dereliction of duty, the woman took the money, and proposed three o'clock on the next day as the time for the interview.

A very little reflection, when the capacity to reflect returned, convinced her that any attempt to identify Lady Glyde and to rescue her by legal means, would, even if successful, involve a delay that might be fatal to her sister's intellects, which were shaken already by the horror of the situation to which she had been consigned.

But the circumstances under which she had regained her freedom rendered all recourse to such means as these simply impracticable.

We could live cheaply by the daily work of my hands, and could save every farthing we possessed to forward the purpose, the righteous purpose, of redressing an infamous wrong—which, from first to last, I now kept steadily in view.

"But is it not possible," I urged, "by dint of patience and exertion, to discover additional evidence?..."

The proprietor had left the town with all his goods and chattels, and where he had gone I could not positively ascertain from any one.

Upon this Mrs. Clements at once confided her errand to him, and entreated that he would help to allay Anne's anxiety by trusting his message to her.

Even as a mere matter of expediency the proceeding was doubtful in the extreme.

Chairs, tables, cheffonier, and sofa, all gleamed with the glutinous brightness of cheap upholstery.

Her iron-grey hair hung in heavy bands on either side of her face—her dark eyes looked straight forward, with a hard, defiant, implacable stare.

His companion, the tall man in the gamekeeper's clothes, sprang to my right side, and the next moment the two scoundrels held me pinioned between them in the middle of the road.

He remanded me at once for the production of the witness, expressing, at the same time, his willingness to take bail for my reappearance if I could produce one responsible surety to offer it.

I parried the question as well as I could. It was impossible at this stage of the investigation to be too cautious, and it was just as well not to let Mr. Wansborough know prematurely that I had already examined the original register.

He looked suspicious and confused—his ruddy cheeks were deeply flushed—and his first words, when he spoke, were quite unintelligible to me.

All remembrance of the heartless injury the man's crimes had inflicted—of the love, the innocence, the happiness he had pitilessly laid waste—of the oath I had sworn in my own heart to summon him to the terrible reckoning that he deserved—passed from my memory like a dream.

I got on his back, with my cudgel in my mouth, seized the parapet with both hands, and was instantly on the roof.

A medical man was also charged with the duty of reporting on the mental condition of the servant, which appeared at present to debar him from giving any evidence of the least importance.

I returned to the hotel at Welmingham so jaded in body and mind, so weakened and depressed by all that I had gone through, as to be quite unfit to endure the local gossip about the inquest, and to answer the trivial questions that the talkers addressed to me in the coffee-room.

One of the village women, whose white wild face I remembered the picture of terror when we pulled down the beam, was giggling with another woman, the picture of inanity, over an old washing-tub.

I will take any trouble to please you, my estimable young friend!

She was a poor, empty-headed, spiritless woman—what you call a born drudge—and I was now and then not averse to plaguing her by taking Anne away.

I referred him to other queer ways of hers, and to his own experience of the vagaries of half-witted people—it was all to no purpose—he would not believe me on my oath—he was absolutely certain I had betrayed the whole Secret.

The legal representative of the dead man was left to provide for the necessities of the interment, and the witnesses were free to retire.

His eyes brightened and hardened, and his manner changed to what I remember it in past times—to that mixture of pitiless resolution and mountebank mockery which makes it so impossible to fathom him.

The passage to which I allude occurs in that part of her journal which delineates his character and his personal appearance.

It is nothing that they added to my anxieties and embittered my disappointments—the steady march of events has inexorably passed them by.

I helped the little man to perch himself on the edge of the raised dais upon which the pit-seats were all placed.

To a man of my sentiments, however, the subject is deplorably sordid.

With a Roman austerity, I show my empty purse and Percival's to the shrinking public gaze.

Large sums of money, due at a certain time, were wanted by Percival (I say nothing of the modicum equally necessary to myself), and the one source to look to for supplying them was the fortune of his wife, of which not one farthing was at his disposal until her death.

Touched by such superfluity of simple confidence in a woman of her mature years, I opened the ample reservoirs of my nature and absorbed it all.

It has been assumed that I used my vast chemical resources against Anne Catherick, and that I would have used them if I could against the magnificent Marian herself. Odious insinuations both!

She and I had no affinities of sympathy—she had committed the unpardonable outrage on my sensibilities of calling me a spy—she was a stumbling-block in my way and in Percival's—but, for all that, my magnanimity forbade me to put her in danger of infection with my own hand.

The fear from which she was suffering I might have soothed, but the serious heart-disease, under which she laboured, was beyond the reach of all moral palliatives.

Have I not carefully avoided exposing myself to the odium of committing unnecessary crime?

Receive these fervid lines—my last legacy to the country I leave for ever.

Then there was a great heave of relief among the crowd, as if they felt that the last fetters of the conspiracy had been struck off Laura herself, and the assembly slowly withdrew.

There he lay, unowned, unknown, exposed to the flippant curiosity of a French mob!

When I have intimated that the foreigner with the scar was a member of the Brotherhood (admitted in Italy after Pesca's departure from his native country), and when I have further added that the two cuts, in the form of a T, on the left arm of the dead man, signified the Italian word "Traditore," and showed that justice had been done by the Brotherhood on a traitor, I have contributed all that I know towards elucidating the mystery of Count Fosco's death.