Considering the subject only as a reader of newspapers, cases recurred to my memory, both in London and in Paris, of foreigners found stabbed in the streets, whose assassins could never be traced -- of bodies and parts of bodies thrown into the Thames and the Seine, by hands that could never be discovered -- of deaths by secret violence which could only be accounted for in one way. I have disguised nothing relating to myself in these pages, and I do not disguise here that I believed I had written Count Fosco's death-warrant, if the fatal emergency happened which authorised Pesca to open my enclosure.
I left my room to go down to the ground floor of the house, and speak to the landlord about finding me a messenger. He happened to be ascending the stairs at the time, and we met on the landing. His son, a quick lad, was the messenger he proposed to me on hearing what I wanted. We had the boy upstairs, and I gave him his directions. He was to take the letter in a cab, to put it into Professor Pesca's own hands, and to bring me back a line of acknowledgment from that gentleman -- returning in the cab, and keeping it at the door for my use. It was then nearly half-past ten. I calculated that the boy might be back in twenty minutes, and that I might drive to St John's Wood, on his return, in twenty minutes more.
When the lad had departed on his errand I returned to my own room for a little while, to put certain papers in order, so that they might be easily 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 pocket-book, and made for the door. Marian met me on the threshold, and pushed me hack into the room, where the candle-light 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.