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"Wait a little," I said. "You have the door locked — you see I don't move."
F. A. Fraser
Wood engraving by the Dalziel Brothers
6 by 3 ⅞ inches (15.3 cm high by 10. cm wide)
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, final Fraser illustration, facing p. 462.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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The same livid leaden change passed over his face which I had seen pass over it at the theatre. The deadly glitter in his eyes shone steady and straight into mine. He said nothing. But his left hand slowly opened the table-drawer, and softly slipped into it. The harsh grating noise of something heavy that he was moving unseen to me sounded for a moment, then ceased. The silence that followed was so intense that the faint ticking nibble of the white mice at their wires was distinctly audible where I stood.
My life hung by a thread, and I knew it. At that final moment I thought with his mind, I felt with his fingers — I was as certain as if I had seen it of what he kept hidden from me in the drawer.
“Wait a little,” I said. “You have got the door locked — you see I don’t move — you see my hands are empty. Wait a little. I have something more to say.”
“You have said enough,” he replied, with a sudden composure so unnatural and so ghastly that it tried my nerves as no outbreak of violence could have tried them. “I want one moment for my own thoughts, if you please. Do you guess what I am thinking about?”
“Perhaps I do.”
“I am thinking,” he remarked quietly, “whether I shall add to the disorder in this room by scattering your brains about the fireplace.”
If I had moved at that moment, I saw in his face that he would have done it. ["Part the Third, Hartright's Narrative, VII," p. 462; "IV," pp. 246 in the 1861 volume.]
Fraser constructs the climatic scene so that Fosco rather than Hartright is the focal character in this duel of wits. Both adversaries have conditions before Hartright may leave the room unscathed and Fosco may escape to France. Walter holds a threat over the head of the former member of the revolutionary brotherhood: give me your confession and documentary proof of precisely when Laura Fairlie left Blackwater Park before Glyde and Fosco placed her in the Asylum, or Pesca will open Hartright's letter before the next morning is well advanced, and set the clandestine Brotherhood on the path of vengeance against a traitor to the cause. Fraser emphasizes Fosco's obesity, clean-shaven visage, and bald pate to show why Professor Pesca at the opera house had failed to recognize in the aged Count Fosco his former brother-in-arms.
“I don’t lock up my drawer, Mr. Hartright,” he said, “and I don’t say that I may not scatter your brains about the fireplace yet. But I am a just man even to my enemy, and I will acknowledge beforehand that they are cleverer brains than I thought them. Come to the point, sir! You want something of me?” ["The Story continued by Walter Hartright, VII," 468]
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by John McLenan. Vols. III-IV (16 November 1859 through 8 September 1860).
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. Illustrated by John McLenan. New York: Harper & Bros., 1861.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Illustrated by F. A. Fraser and Sir John Gilbert. London: Sampson Low, 1860; rpt., Chatto & Windus, 1875.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Illustrated by Sir John Gilbert. London: Minerva, 2006.
Created 6 August 2024