The course of this narrative, steadily flowing on, bears me away
from the morning-time of our married life, and carries me forward
to the end.
In a fortnight more we three were back in London, and the shadow
was stealing over us of the struggle to come.
Marian and I were careful to keep Laura in ignorance of the cause
that had hurried us back--the necessity of making sure of the
Count. It was now the beginning of May, and his term of
occupation at the house in Forest Road expired in June. If he
renewed it (and I had reasons, shortly to be mentioned, for
anticipating that he would), I might be certain of his not
escaping me. But if by any chance he disappointed my expectations
and left the country, then I had no time to lose in arming myself
to meet him as I best might.
In the first fulness of my new happiness, there had been moments
when my resolution faltered--moments when I was tempted to be
safely content, now that the dearest aspiration of my life was
fulfilled in the possession of Laura's love. For the first time I
thought faint-heartedly of the greatness of the risk, of the
adverse chances arrayed against me, of the fair promise of our new
life, and of the peril in which I might place the happiness which
we had so hardly earned. Yes! let me own it honestly. For a
brief time I wandered, in the sweet guiding of love, far from the
purpose to which I had been true under sterner discipline and in
darker days. Innocently Laura had tempted me aside from the hard
path--innocently she was destined to lead me back again.
At times, dreams of the terrible past still disconnectedly
recalled to her, in the mystery of sleep, the events of which her
waking memory had lost all trace. One night (barely two weeks
after our marriage), when I was watching her at rest, I saw the
tears come slowly through her closed eyelids, I heard the faint
murmuring words escape her which told me that her spirit was back
again on the fatal journey from Blackwater Park. That unconscious
appeal, so touching and so awful in the sacredness of her sleep,
ran through me like fire. The next day was the day we came back
to London--the day when my resolution returned to me with tenfold
strength.
The first necessity was to know something of the man. Thus far,
the true story of his life was an impenetrable mystery to me.
I began with such scanty sources of information as were at my own
disposal. The important narrative written by Mr. Frederick
Fairlie (which Marian had obtained by following the directions I
had given to her in the winter) proved to be of no service to the
special object with which I now looked at it. While reading it I
reconsidered the disclosure revealed to me by Mrs. Clements of the
series of deceptions which had brought Anne Catherick to London,
and which had there devoted her to the interests of the
conspiracy. Here, again, the Count had not openly committed
himself--here, again, he was, to all practical purpose, out of my
reach.
I next returned to Marian's journal at Blackwater Park. At my
request she read to me again a passage which referred to her past
curiosity about the Count, and to the few particulars which she
had discovered relating to him.
The passage to which I allude occurs in that part of her journal
which delineates his character and his personal appearance. She
describes him as "not having crossed the frontiers of his native
country for years past"--as "anxious to know if any Italian
gentlemen were settled in the nearest town to Blackwater Park"--as
"receiving letters with all sorts of odd stamps on them, and one
with a large official-looking seal on it." She is inclined to
consider that his long absence from his native country may be
accounted for by assuming that he is a political exile. But she
is, on the other hand, unable to reconcile this idea with the
reception of the letter from abroad bearing "the large official-
looking seal"--letters from the Continent addressed to political
exiles being usually the last to court attention from foreign
post-offices in that way.
The considerations thus presented to me in the diary, joined to
certain surmises of my own that grew out of them, suggested a
conclusion which I wondered I had not arrived at before. I now
said to myself--what Laura had once said to Marian at Blackwater
Park, what Madame Fosco had overheard by listening at the door--
the Count is a spy!
Laura had applied the word to him at hazard, in natural anger at
his proceedings towards herself. I applied it to him with the
deliberate conviction that his vocation in life was the vocation
of a spy. On this assumption, the reason for his extraordinary
stay in England so long after the objects of the conspiracy had
been gained, became, to my mind, quite intelligible.
The year of which I am now writing was the year of the famous
Crystal Palace Exhibition in Hyde Park. Foreigners in unusually
large numbers had arrived already, and were still arriving in
England. Men were among us by hundreds whom the ceaseless
distrustfulness of their governments had followed privately, by
means of appointed agents, to our shores. My surmises did not for
a moment class a man of the Count's abilities and social position
with the ordinary rank and file of foreign spies. I suspected him
of holding a position of authority, of being entrusted by the
government which he secretly served with the organisation and
management of agents specially employed in this country, both men
and women, and I believed Mrs. Rubelle, who had been so
opportunely found to act as nurse at Blackwater Park, to be, in
all probability, one of the number.
Assuming that this idea of mine had a foundation in truth, the
position of the Count might prove to be more assailable than I had
hitherto ventured to hope. To whom could I apply to know
something more of the man's history and of the man himself than I
knew now?
In this emergency it naturally occurred to my mind that a
countryman of his own, on whom I could rely, might be the fittest
person to help me. The first man whom I thought of under these
circumstances was also the only Italian with whom I was intimately
acquainted--my quaint little friend, Professor Pesca.
The professor has been so long absent from these pages that he has
run some risk of being forgotten altogether.
It is the necessary law of such a story as mine that the persons
concerned in it only appear when the course of events takes them
up--they come and go, not by favour of my personal partiality, but
by right of their direct connection with the circumstances to be
detailed. For this reason, not Pesca alone, but my mother and
sister as well, have been left far in the background of the
narrative. My visits to the Hampstead cottage, my mother's belief
in the denial of Laura's identity which the conspiracy had
accomplished, my vain efforts to overcome the prejudice on her
part and on my sister's to which, in their jealous affection for
me, they both continued to adhere, the painful necessity which
that prejudice imposed on me of concealing my marriage from them
till they had learnt to do justice to my wife--all these little
domestic occurrences have been left unrecorded because they were
not essential to the main interest of the story. It is nothing
that they added to my anxieties and embittered my disappointments--
the steady march of events has inexorably passed them by.
For the same reason I have said nothing here of the consolation
that I found in Pesca's brotherly affection for me, when I saw him
again after the sudden cessation of my residence at Limmeridge
House. I have not recorded the fidelity with which my warm-
hearted little friend followed me to the place of embarkation when
I sailed for Central America, or the noisy transport of joy with
which he received me when we next met in London. If I had felt
justified in accepting the offers of service which he made to me
on my return, he would have appeared again long ere this. But,
though I knew that his honour and his courage were to be
implicitly relied on, I was not so sure that his discretion was to
be trusted, and, for that reason only, I followed the course of
all my inquiries alone. It will now be sufficiently understood
that Pesca was not separated from all connection with me and my
interests, although he has hitherto been separated from all
connection with the progress of this narrative. He was as true
and as ready a friend of mine still as ever he had been in his
life.
Before I summoned Pesca to my assistance it was necessary to see
for myself what sort of man I had to deal with. Up to this time I
had never once set eyes on Count Fosco.
Three days after my return with Laura and Marian to London, I set
forth alone for Forest Road, St. John's Wood, between ten and
eleven o'clock in the morning. It was a fine day--I had some
hours to spare--and I thought it likely, if I waited a little for
him, that the Count might be tempted out. I had no great reason
to fear the chance of his recognising me in the daytime, for the
only occasion when I had been seen by him was the occasion on
which he had followed me home at night.
No one appeared at the windows in the front of the house. I
walked down a turning which ran past the side of it, and looked
over the low garden wall. One of the back windows on the lower
floor was thrown up and a net was stretched across the opening. I
saw nobody, but I heard, in the room, first a shrill whistling and
singing of birds, then the deep ringing voice which Marian's
description had made familiar to me. "Come out on my little
finger, my pret-pret-pretties!" cried the voice. "Come out and
hop upstairs! One, two, three--and up! Three, two, one--and down!
One, two, three--twit-twit-twit-tweet!" The Count was exercising
his canaries as he used to exercise them in Marian's time at
Blackwater Park.
I waited a little while, and the singing and the whistling ceased.
"Come, kiss me, my pretties!" said the deep voice. There was a
responsive twittering and chirping--a low, oily laugh--a silence
of a minute or so, and then I heard the opening of the house door.
I turned and retraced my steps. The magnificent melody of the
Prayer in Rossini's Moses, sung in a sonorous bass voice, rose
grandly through the suburban silence of the place. The front
garden gate opened and closed. The Count had come out.
He crossed the road and walked towards the western boundary of the
Regent's Park. I kept on my own side of the way, a little behind
him, and walked in that direction also.
Marian had prepared me for his high stature, his monstrous
corpulence, and his ostentatious mourning garments, but not for
the horrible freshness and cheerfulness and vitality of the man.
He carried his sixty years as if they had been fewer than forty.
He sauntered along, wearing his hat a little on one side, with a
light jaunty step, swinging his big stick, humming to himself,
looking up from time to time at the houses and gardens on either
side of him with superb, smiling patronage. If a stranger had
been told that the whole neighbourhood belonged to him, that
stranger would not have been surprised to hear it. He never
looked back, he paid no apparent attention to me, no apparent
attention to any one who passed him on his own side of the road,
except now and then, when he smiled and smirked, with an easy
paternal good humour, at the nursery-maids and the children whom
he met. In this way he led me on, till we reached a colony of
shops outside the western terraces of the Park.
Here he stopped at a pastrycook's, went in (probably to give an
order), and came out again immediately with a tart in his hand.
An Italian was grinding an organ before the shop, and a miserable
little shrivelled monkey was sitting on the instrument. The Count
stopped, bit a piece for himself out of the tart, and gravely
handed the rest to the monkey. "My poor little man!" he said,
with grotesque tenderness, "you look hungry. In the sacred name
of humanity, I offer you some lunch!" The organ-grinder piteously
put in his claim to a penny from the benevolent stranger. The
Count shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and passed on.
We reached the streets and the better class of shops between the
New Road and Oxford Street. The Count stopped again and entered a
small optician's shop, with an inscription in the window
announcing that repairs were neatly executed inside. He came out
again with an opera-glass in his hand, walked a few paces on, and
stopped to look at a bill of the opera placed outside a music-
seller's shop. He read the bill attentively, considered a moment,
and then hailed an empty cab as it passed him. "Opera Box-
office," he said to the man, and was driven away.
I crossed the road, and looked at the bill in my turn. The
performance announced was Lucrezia Borgia, and it was to take
place that evening. The opera-glass in the Count's hand, his
careful reading of the bill, and his direction to the cabman, all
suggested that he proposed making one of the audience. I had the
means of getting an admission for myself and a friend to the pit
by applying to one of the scene-painters attached to the theatre,
with whom I had been well acquainted in past times. There was a
chance at least that the Count might be easily visible among the
audience to me and to any one with me, and in this case I had the
means of ascertaining whether Pesca knew his countryman or not
that very night.
This consideration at once decided the disposal of my evening. I
procured the tickets, leaving a note at the Professor's lodgings
on the way. At a quarter to eight I called to take him with me to
the theatre. My little friend was in a state of the highest
excitement, with a festive flower in his button-hole, and the
largest opera-glass I ever saw hugged up under his arm.
"Are you ready?" I asked.
"Right-all-right," said Pesca.
We started for the theatre.