put the key in my pocket, and went downstairs.
Madame Fosco was alone in the hall looking at the weather-glass.
“Still falling,” she said. “I am afraid we must expect more rain.”
Her face was composed again to its customary expression and its customary colour. But the hand with which she pointed to the dial of the weather-glass still trembled.
Could she have told her husband already that she had overheard Laura reviling him, in my company, as a “spy?” My strong suspicion that she must have told him, my irresistible dread (all the more overpowering from its very vagueness) of the consequences which might follow, my fixed conviction, derived from various little self-betrayals which women notice in each other, that Madame Fosco, in spite of her well-assumed external civility, had not forgiven her niece for innocently standing between her and the legacy of ten thousand pounds — all rushed upon my mind together, all impelled me to speak in the vain hope of using my own influence and my own powers of persuasion for the atonement of Laura’s offence.
“May I trust to your kindness to excuse me, Madame Fosco, if I venture to speak to you on an exceedingly painful subject?”
She crossed her hands in front of her and bowed her head solemnly, without uttering a word, and without taking her eyes off mine for a moment.
“When you were so good as to bring me back my handkerchief,” I went on, “I am very, very much afraid you must have accidentally heard Laura say something which I am unwilling to repeat, and which I will not attempt to defend. I will only venture to hope that you have not thought it of sufficient importance to be mentioned to the Count?”
“I think it of no importance whatever,” said Madame Fosco sharply and suddenly. “But,” she added, resuming her icy manner in a moment, “I have no secrets from my husband even in trifles. When he noticed just now that I looked distressed, it was my painful duty to tell him why I was distressed, and I frankly acknowledge to you, Miss Halcombe, that I HAVE told him.”
I was prepared to hear it, and yet she turned me cold all over when she said those words.
“Let me earnestly entreat you, Madame Fosco — let me earnestly entreat the Count — to make some allowances for the sad position in which my sister is placed. She spoke while she was smarting under the insult and injustice inflicted on her by her husband, and she was not herself when she said those rash words. May I hope that they will be considerately and generously forgiven?”
“Most assuredly,” said the Count’s quiet voice behind me. He had stolen on us with his noiseless tread and his book in his hand from the library.
“When Lady Glyde said those hasty words,” he went on, “she did me an injustice which I lament — and forgive. Let us never return to the subject, Miss Halcombe; let us all comfortably combine to forget it from this moment.”
“You are very kind,” I said, “you relieve me inexpressibly.”
I tried to continue, but his eyes were on me; his deadly smile that hides everything was set, hard, and unwavering on his broad, smooth face. My distrust of his unfathomable falseness, my sense of my own degradation in stooping to conciliate his wife and himself, so disturbed and confused me, that the next words failed on my lips, and I stood there in silence.
“I beg you on my knees to say no more, Miss Halcombe — I am truly shocked that you should have thought it necessary to say so much.” With that polite speech he took my hand — oh, how I despise myself! oh, how little comfort there is even in knowing that I submitted to it for Laura’s sake! — he took my hand and put it to his poisonous lips. Never did I know all my horror of him till then. That innocent familiarity turned my blood as if it had been the vilest insult that a man could offer me. Yet I hid my disgust from him — I tried to smile — I, who once mercilessly despised deceit in other women, was as false as the worst of them, as false as the Judas whose lips had touched my hand.
I could not have maintained my degrading self-control — it is all that redeems me in my own estimation to know that I could not — if he had still continued to keep his eyes on my face. His wife’s tigerish jealousy came to my rescue and forced his attention away from me the moment he possessed himself of my hand. Her cold blue eyes caught light, her dull white cheeks flushed into bright colour, she looked years younger than her age in an instant.
“Count!” she said. “Your foreign forms of politeness are not understood by Englishwomen.”
“Pardon me, my angel! The best and dearest Englishwoman in the world understands them.” With those words he dropped my hand and quietly raised his wife’s hand to his lips in place of it.
I ran back up the stairs to take refuge in my own room. If there had been time to think, my thoughts, when I was alone again, would have caused me bitter suffering. But there was no time to think. Happily for the preservation of my calmness and my courage there was time for nothing but action.
The letters to the lawyer and to Mr. Fairlie were still to be written, and I sat down at once without a moment’s hesitation to devote myself to them.
There was no multitude of resources to perplex me — there was absolutely no one to depend on, in the first instance, but myself. Sir Percival had neither friends nor relatives in the neighbourhood whose intercession I could attempt to employ. He was on the coldest terms — in some cases on the worst terms with the families of his own rank and station who lived near him. We two women had neither father nor brother to come to the house and take our parts. There was no choice but to write those two doubtful letters, or to put Laura in the wrong and myself in the wrong, and to make all peaceable negotiation in the future impossible by secretly escaping from Blackwater Park. Nothing but the most imminent personal peril could justify our taking that second course. The letters must be tried first, and I wrote them.
I said nothing to the lawyer about Anne Catherick, because (as I had already hinted to Laura) that topic was connected with a mystery which we could not yet explain, and which it would therefore be useless to write about to a professional man. I left my correspondent to attribute Sir Percival’s disgraceful conduct, if he pleased, to fresh disputes about money matters, and simply consulted him on the possibility of taking legal proceedings for Laura’s protection in the event of her husband’s refusal to allow her to leave Blackwater Park for a time and return with me to Limmeridge. I referred him to Mr. Fairlie for the details of this last arrangement — I assured him that I wrote with Laura’s authority — and I ended by entreating him to act in her name to the utmost extent of his power and with the least possible loss of time.
The letter to Mr. Fairlie occupied me next. I appealed to him on the terms which I had mentioned to Laura as the most likely to make him bestir himself; I enclosed a copy of my letter to the lawyer to show him how serious the case was, and I represented our removal to Limmeridge as the only compromise which would prevent the danger and distress of Laura’s present position from inevitably affecting her uncle as well as herself at no very distant time.
When I had done, and had sealed and directed the two envelopes, I went back with the letters to Laura’s room, to show her that they were written.
“Has anybody disturbed you?” I asked, when she opened the door to me.
“Nobody has knocked,” she replied. “But I heard some one in the outer room.”
“Was it a man or a woman?”
“A woman. I heard the rustling of her gown.”
“A rustling like silk?”
“Yes, like silk.”
Madame Fosco had evidently been watching outside. The mischief she might do by herself was little to be feared. But the mischief she might do, as a willing instrument in her husband’s hands, was too formidable to be overlooked.
“What became of the rustling of the gown when you no longer heard it in the anteroom?” I inquired. “Did you hear it go