The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (portable ebook reader txt) 📕

for pathetic writing and pathetic painting? That nice young person who began life with a forgery, and ended it by a suicide⁠—your dear, romantic, interesting Chatterton. Which gets on best, do you think, of two poor starving dressmakers⁠—the woman who resists temptation and is honest, or the woman who falls under temptation and steals? You all know that the stealing is the making of that second woman’s fortune⁠—it advertises her from length to breadth of good-humoured, charitable England⁠—and she is relieved, as the breaker of a commandment, when she would have been left to starve, as the keeper of it. Come here, my jolly little Mouse! Hey! presto! pass! I transform you, for the time being, into a respectable lady. Stop there, in the palm of my great big hand, my dear, and listen. You marry the poor man whom you love, Mouse, and one half your friends pity, and the other half blame you. And now, on the contrary, you sell yourself for gold to a man you don’t care for, and all your friends rejoice over you, and a minister of public worship sanctions the base horror of the vilest of all human bargains, and smiles and smirks afterwards at your table, if you are polite enough to ask him to breakfast. Hey! presto! pass! Be a mouse again, and squeak. If you continue to be a lady much longer, I shall have you telling me that Society abhors crime⁠—and then, Mouse, I shall doubt if your own eyes and ears are really of any use to you. Ah! I am a bad man, Lady Glyde, am I not? I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath. I will get up on my big elephant’s legs, before I do myself any more harm in your amiable estimations⁠—I will get up and take a little airy walk of my own. Dear ladies, as your excellent Sheridan said, I go⁠—and leave my character behind me.”

He got up, put the cage on the table, and paused for a moment to count the mice in it. “One, two, three, four⁠—Ha!” he cried, with a look of horror, “where, in the name of Heaven, is the fifth⁠—the youngest, the whitest, the most amiable of all⁠—my Benjamin of mice!”

Neither Laura nor I were in any favorable disposition to be amused. The Count’s glib cynicism had revealed a new aspect of his nature from which we both recoiled. But it was impossible to resist the comical distress of so very large a man at the loss of so very small a mouse. We laughed in spite of ourselves; and when Madame Fosco rose to set the example of leaving the boathouse empty, so that her husband might search it to its remotest corners, we rose also to follow her out.

Before we had taken three steps, the Count’s quick eye discovered the lost mouse under the seat that we had been occupying. He pulled aside the bench, took the little animal up in his hand, and then suddenly stopped, on his knees, looking intently at a particular place on the ground just beneath him.

When he rose to his feet again, his hand shook so that he could hardly put the mouse back in the cage, and his face was of a faint livid yellow hue all over.

“Percival!” he said, in a whisper. “Percival! come here.”

Sir Percival had paid no attention to any of us for the last ten minutes. He had been entirely absorbed in writing figures on the sand, and then rubbing them out again with the point of his stick.

“What’s the matter now?” he asked, lounging carelessly into the boathouse.

“Do you see nothing there?” said the Count, catching him nervously by the collar with one hand, and pointing with the other to the place near which he had found the mouse.

“I see plenty of dry sand,” answered Sir Percival, “and a spot of dirt in the middle of it.”

“Not dirt,” whispered the Count, fastening the other hand suddenly on Sir Percival’s collar, and shaking it in his agitation. “Blood.”

Laura was near enough to hear the last word, softly as he whispered it. She turned to me with a look of terror.

“Nonsense, my dear,” I said. “There is no need to be alarmed. It is only the blood of a poor little stray dog.”

Everybody was astonished, and everybody’s eyes were fixed on me inquiringly.

“How do you know that?” asked Sir Percival, speaking first.

“I found the dog here, dying, on the day when you all returned from abroad,” I replied. “The poor creature had strayed into the plantation, and had been shot by your keeper.”

“Whose dog was it?” inquired Sir Percival. “Not one of mine?”

“Did you try to save the poor thing?” asked Laura earnestly. “Surely you tried to save it, Marian?”

“Yes,” I said, “the housekeeper and I both did our best⁠—but the dog was mortally wounded, and he died under our hands.”

“Whose dog was it?” persisted Sir Percival, repeating his question a little irritably. “One of mine?”

“No, not one of yours.”

“Whose then? Did the housekeeper know?”

The housekeeper’s report of Mrs. Catherick’s desire to conceal her visit to Blackwater Park from Sir Percival’s knowledge recurred to my memory the moment he put that last question, and I half doubted the discretion of answering it; but in my anxiety to quiet the general alarm, I had thoughtlessly advanced too far to draw back, except at the risk of exciting suspicion, which might only make matters worse. There was nothing for it but to answer at once, without reference to results.

“Yes,” I said. “The housekeeper knew. She told me it was Mrs. Catherick’s dog.”

Sir Percival had hitherto remained at the inner end of the boathouse with Count Fosco, while I spoke to him from the door. But the instant Mrs. Catherick’s name passed my lips