"Come back and sign!" he reiterated, in his loudest and angriest tones.
The Count, who had watched Laura and me with a close and silent attention, interposed for the second time.
"Percival!" he said. "I remember that I am in the presence of ladies.
Be good enough, if you please, to remember it too."
Sir Percival turned on him speechless with passion.
The Count's firm hand slowly tightened its grasp on his shoulder, and the Count's steady voice quietly repeated,
"Be good enough, if you please, to remember it too."
They both looked at each other.
Sir Percival slowly drew his shoulder from under the Count's hand, slowly turned his face away from the Count's eyes, doggedly looked down for a little while at the parchment on the table, and then spoke, with the sullen submission of a tamed animal, rather than the becoming resignation of a convinced man.
"I don't want to offend anybody," he said, "but my wife's obstinacy is enough to try the patience of a saint.
I have told her this is merely a formal document—and what more can she want?
You may say what you please, but it is no part of a woman's duty to set her husband at defiance.
Once more, Lady Glyde, and for the last time, will you sign or will you not?"
Laura returned to his side of the table, and took up the pen again.
"I will sign with pleasure," she said, "if you will only treat me as a responsible being.
I care little what sacrifice is required of me, if it will affect no one else, and lead to no ill results—"
"Who talked of a sacrifice being required of You?" he broke in, with a half-suppressed return of his former violence.
"I only meant," she resumed, "that I would refuse no concession which I could honourably make.
If I have a scruple about signing my name to an engagement of which I know nothing, why should you visit it on me so severely?
It is rather hard, I think, to treat Count Fosco's scruples so much more indulgently than you have treated mine."
This unfortunate, yet most natural, reference to the Count's extraordinary power over her husband, indirect as it was, set Sir Percival's smouldering temper on fire again in an instant.
"Scruples!" he repeated. "YOUR scruples!
It is rather late in the day for you to be scrupulous.
I should have thought you had got over all weakness of that sort, when you made a virtue of necessity by marrying me."
The instant he spoke those words, Laura threw down the pen—looked at him with an expression in her eyes which, throughout all my experience of her, I had never seen in them before, and turned her back on him in dead silence.
This strong expression of the most open and the most bitter contempt was so entirely unlike herself, so utterly out of her character, that it silenced us all.
There was something hidden, beyond a doubt, under the mere surface-brutality of the words which her husband had just addressed to her.
There was some lurking insult beneath them, of which I was wholly ignorant, but which had left the mark of its profanation so plainly on her face that even a stranger might have seen it.
The Count, who was no stranger, saw it as distinctly as I did.
When I left my chair to join Laura, I heard him whisper under his breath to Sir Percival,
"You idiot!"
Laura walked before me to the door as I advanced, and at the same time her husband spoke to her once more.
"You positively refuse, then, to give me your signature?" he said, in the altered tone of a man who was conscious that he had let his own licence of language seriously injure him.
"After what you have just said to me," she replied firmly, "I refuse my signature until I have read every line in that parchment from the first word to the last.
Come away, Marian, we have remained here long enough."
"One moment!" interposed the Count before Sir Percival could speak again—"one moment, Lady Glyde, I implore you!"
Laura would have left the room without noticing him, but I stopped her.
"Don't make an enemy of the Count!" I whispered.
"Whatever you do, don't make an enemy of the Count!"
She yielded to me.
I closed the door again, and we stood near it waiting.
Sir Percival sat down at the table, with his elbow on the folded parchment, and his head resting on his clenched fist.
The Count stood between us—master of the dreadful position in which we were placed, as he was master of everything else.
"Lady Glyde," he said, with a gentleness which seemed to address itself to our forlorn situation instead of to ourselves, "pray pardon me if I venture to offer one suggestion, and pray believe that I speak out of my profound respect and my friendly regard for the mistress of this house."
He turned sharply towards Sir Percival.
"Is it absolutely necessary," he asked "that this thing here, under your elbow, should be signed to-day?"
"It is necessary to my plans and wishes," returned the other sulkily.
"But that consideration, as you may have noticed, has no influence with Lady Glyde."
"Answer my plain question plainly.
Can the business of the signature be put off till to-morrow—Yes or No?"