I know enough by this time, to be sure that the aspect of Sir Percival which is the most false, and which, therefore, means the worst, is his polite aspect. That long walk with his friend had ended in improving his manners, especially towards his wife. To Laura's secret surprise and to my secret alarm, he called her by her Christian name, asked if she had heard lately from her uncle, inquired when Mrs Vesey was to receive her invitation to Blackwater, and showed her so many other little attentions that he almost recalled the days of his hateful courtship at Limmeridge House. This was a bad sign to begin with, and I thought it more ominous still that he should pretend after dinner to fall asleep in the drawing-room, and that his eyes should cunningly follow Laura and me when he thought we neither of us suspected him. I have never had any doubt that his sudden journey by himself took him to Welmingham to question Mrs Catherick -- but the experience of tonight has made me fear that the expedition was not undertaken in vain, and that he has got the information which he unquestionably left us to collect. If I knew where Anne Catherick was to be found, I would be up tomorrow with sunrise and warn her.
While the aspect under which Sir Percival presented himself tonight was unhappily but too familiar to me, the aspect under which the Count appeared was, on the other hand, entirely new in my experience of him.
He permitted me, this evening, to make his acquaintance, for the first time, in the character of a Man of Sentiment -- of sentiment, as I believe, really felt, not assumed for the occasion.
For instance, he was quiet and subdued -- his eyes and his voice expressed a restrained sensibility. He wore (as if there was some hidden connection between his showiest finery and his deepest feeling) the most magnificent waistcoat he has yet appeared in -- it was made of pale sea-green silk, and delicately trimmed with fine silver braid. His voice sank into the tenderest inflections, his smile expressed a thoughtful, fatherly admiration, whenever he spoke to Laura or to me. He pressed his wife's hand under the table when she thanked him for trifling little attentions at dinner. He took wine with her. ‘Your health and happiness, my angel!' he said, with fond glistening eyes. He ate little or nothing, and sighed, and said ‘Good Percival!' when his friend laughed at him. After dinner, he took Laura by the hand, and asked her if she would be ‘so sweet as to play to him.'
She complied, through sheer astonishment. He sat by the piano, with his watch-chain resting in folds, like a golden serpent, on the sea-green protuberance of his waistcoat. His immense head lay languidly on one side, and he gently beat time with two of his yellow-white fingers. He highly approved of the music, and tenderly admired Laura's manner of playing -- not as poor Hartright used to praise it, with an innocent enjoyment of the sweet sounds, but with a clear, cultivated, practical knowledge of the merits of the composition, in the first place, and of the merits of the player's touch in the second.
As the evening closed in, he begged that the lovely dying light might not be profaned, just yet, by the appearance of the lamps. He came, with his horribly silent tread, to the distant window at which I was standing, to be out of his way and to avoid the very sight of him -- he came to ask me to support his protest against the lamps. If any one of them could only have burnt him up at that moment, I would have gone down to the kitchen, and fetched it myself.
‘Surely you like this modest, trembling English twilight?' he said softly.
‘Ah! I love it. I feel my inborn admiration of all that is noble, and great, and good, purified by the breath of heaven on an evening like this. Nature has such imperishable charms, such inextinguishable tenderness for me!
-- I am an old, fat man -- talk which would become your lips, Miss Halcombe, sounds like a derision and a mockery on mine. It is hard to be laughed at in my moment of sentiment, as if my soul was like myself, old and overgrown.
Observe, dear lady, what a light is dying on the trees! Does it penetrate your heart, as it penetrates mine?'
He paused, looked at me, and repeated the famous lines of Dante on the Evening-time, with a melody and tenderness which added a charm of their own to the matchless beauty of the poetry itself.
‘Bah!' he cried suddenly, as the last cadence of those noble Italian words died away on his lips; ‘I make an old fool of myself, and only weary you all! Let us shut up the window in our bosons and get back to the matter-of-fact world. Percival! I sanction the admission of the lamps. Lady Glyde -- Miss Halcombe -- Eleanor, my good wife -- which of you will indulge me with a game at dominoes?'
He addressed us all, but he looked especially at Laura.
She had learnt to feel my dread of offending him, and she accepted his proposal. It was more than I could have done at that moment. I could not have sat down at the same table with him for any consideration. His eyes seemed to reach my inmost soul through the thickening obscurity of the twilight. His voice trembled along every nerve in my body, and turned me hot and cold alternately. The mystery and terror of my dream, which had haunted me at intervals all through the evening, now oppressed my mind with an unendurable foreboding and an unutterable awe. I saw the white tomb again, and the veiled woman rising out of it by Hartright's side.
The thought of Laura welled up like a spring in the depths of my heart, and filled it with waters of bitterness, never, never known to it before.
I caught her by the hand as she passed me on her way to the table, and kissed her as if that night was to part us for ever. While they were all gazing at me in astonishment, I ran out through the low window which was open before me to the ground -- ran out to hide from them in the darkness, to hide even from myself.
We separated that evening later than usual. Towards midnight the summer silence was broken by the shuddering of a low, melancholy wind among the trees. We all felt the sudden chill in the atmosphere, but the Count was the first to notice the stealthy rising of the wind. He stopped while he was lighting my candle for me, and held up his hand warningly --
‘Listen!' he said. ‘There will be a change tomorrow.'