found in case of the worst. The key of the old-fashioned bureau in which the papers were kept I sealed up, and left it on my table, with Marian’s name written on the outside of the little packet. This done, I went downstairs to the sitting-room, in which I expected to find Laura and Marian awaiting my return from the Opera. I felt my hand trembling for the first time when I laid it on the lock of the door.
No one was in the room but Marian. She was reading, and she looked at her watch, in surprise, when I came in.
“How early you are back!” she said. “You must have come away before the Opera was over.”
“Yes,” I replied, “neither Pesca nor I waited for the end. Where is Laura?”
“She had one of her bad headaches this evening, and I advised her to go to bed when we had done tea.”
I left the room again on the pretext of wishing to see whether Laura was asleep. Marian’s quick eyes were beginning to look inquiringly at my face — Marian’s quick instinct was beginning to discover that I had something weighing on my mind.
When I entered the bedchamber, and softly approached the bedside by the dim flicker of the night-lamp, my wife was asleep.
We had not been married quite a month yet. If my heart was heavy, if my resolution for a moment faltered again, when I looked at her face turned faithfully to my pillow in her sleep — when I saw her hand resting open on the coverlid, as if it was waiting unconsciously for mine — surely there was some excuse for me? I only allowed myself a few minutes to kneel down at the bedside, and to look close at her — so close that her breath, as it came and went, fluttered on my face. I only touched her hand and her cheek with my lips at parting. She stirred in her sleep and murmured my name, but without waking. I lingered for an instant at the door to look at her again. “God bless and keep you, my darling!” I whispered, and left her.
Marian was at the stairhead waiting for me. She had a folded slip of paper in her hand.
“The landlord’s son has brought this for you,” she said. “He has got a cab at the door — he says you ordered him to keep it at your disposal.”
“Quite right, Marian. I want the cab — I am going out again.”
I descended the stairs as I spoke, and looked into the sitting-room to read the slip of paper by the light on the table. It contained these two sentences in Pesca’s handwriting —
“Your letter is received. If I don’t see you before the time you mention, I will break the seal when the clock strikes.”
I placed the paper in my pocketbook, and made for the door. Marian met me on the threshold, and pushed me back into the room, where the candlelight fell full on my face. She held me by both hands, and her eyes fastened searchingly on mine.
“I see!” she said, in a low eager whisper. “You are trying the last chance tonight.”
“Yes, the last chance and the best,” I whispered back.
“Not alone! Oh, Walter, for God’s sake, not alone! Let me go with you. Don’t refuse me because I’m only a woman. I must go! I will go! I’ll wait outside in the cab!”
It was my turn now to hold HER. She tried to break away from me and get down first to the door.
“If you want to help me,” I said, “stop here and sleep in my wife’s room tonight. Only let me go away with my mind easy about Laura, and I answer for everything else. Come, Marian, give me a kiss, and show that you have the courage to wait till I come back.”
I dared not allow her time to say a word more. She tried to hold me again. I unclasped her hands, and was out of the room in a moment. The boy below heard me on the stairs, and opened the hall-door. I jumped into the cab before the driver could get off the box. “Forest Road, St. John’s Wood,” I called to him through the front window. “Double fare if you get there in a quarter of an hour.” “I’ll do it, sir.” I looked at my watch. Eleven o’clock. Not a minute to lose.
The rapid motion of the cab, the sense that every instant now was bringing me nearer to the Count, the conviction that I was embarked at last, without let or hindrance, on my hazardous enterprise, heated me into such a fever of excitement that I shouted to the man to go faster and faster. As we left the streets, and crossed St. John’s Wood Road, my impatience so completely overpowered me that I stood up in the cab and stretched my head out of the window, to see the end of the journey before we reached it. Just as a church clock in the distance struck the quarter past, we turned into the Forest Road. I stopped the driver a little away from the Count’s house, paid and dismissed him, and walked on to the door.
As I approached the garden gate, I saw another person advancing towards it also from the direction opposite to mine. We met under the gas lamp in the road, and looked at each other. I instantly recognised the light-haired foreigner with the scar on his cheek, and I thought he recognised me. He said nothing, and instead of stopping at the house, as I did, he slowly walked on. Was he in the Forest Road by accident? Or had he followed the Count home from the Opera?
I did not pursue those questions. After waiting a little till the foreigner had slowly passed out of sight, I rang the gate bell. It was then twenty minutes past eleven — late enough to make it quite easy for the Count to get rid of me by the excuse that he was in bed.
The only way of providing against this contingency was to send in my name without asking any preliminary questions, and to let him know, at the same time, that I had a serious motive for wishing to see him at that late hour. Accordingly, while I was waiting, I took out my card and wrote under my name “On important business.” The maidservant answered the door while I was writing the last word in pencil, and asked me distrustfully what I “pleased to want.”
“Be so good as to take that to your master,” I replied, giving her the card.
I saw, by the girl’s hesitation of manner, that if I had asked for the Count in the first instance she would only have followed her instructions by telling me he was not at home. She was staggered by the confidence with which I gave her the card. After staring at me, in great perturbation, she went back into the house with my message, closing the door, and leaving me to wait in the garden.
In a minute or so she reappeared. “Her master’s compliments, and would I be so obliging as to say what my business was?” “Take my compliments back,” I replied, “and say that the business cannot be mentioned to any one but your master.” She left me again, again returned, and this time asked me to walk in.
I followed her at once. In another moment I was inside the Count’s house.
VII
There was no lamp in the hall, but by the dim light of the kitchen candle, which the girl had brought upstairs with her, I saw an elderly lady steal noiselessly out of a back room on the ground floor. She cast one viperish look at me as I entered the hall, but said nothing, and went slowly upstairs without returning my bow. My familiarity with Marian’s journal sufficiently assured me that the elderly lady was Madame Fosco.
The servant led me to the room which the Countess had just left. I entered it, and found myself face to face with the Count.
He was still in his evening dress, except his coat, which he had thrown across a chair. His shirt-sleeves were turned up at the wrists, but no higher. A carpet-bag was on one side of him, and a box on the other. Books, papers, and articles of wearing apparel were scattered about the room. On a table, at one side of the door, stood the cage, so well known to me by description, which contained his white mice. The canaries and the cockatoo were probably in some other room. He was seated before the box, packing it, when I went in, and rose with some papers in his hand to receive me. His face still betrayed plain traces of the shock that had overwhelmed him at the Opera. His fat cheeks hung loose, his cold grey eyes were furtively vigilant, his voice, look, and manner were all sharply suspicious alike, as he advanced a step to meet me, and requested, with distant civility, that I would take a chair.
“You come here on business, sir?”