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"If the familiar little man treats my mother in that way, how will he treat ME?" Faces sometimes tell truth; and that was unquestionably the thought in Sarah's mind, as she sat down again. Although I myself was gratefully sensible of the kindness of Pesca's motives, my spirits were hardly so much elevated as they ought to have been by the prospect of future employment now placed before me.
The door opened wide, and the light-haired man with the scar on his cheek the man I had seen following Count Fosco's cab a week before came out. He bowed as I drew aside to let him pass his face was fearfully pale and he held fast by the banisters as he descended the stairs. I pushed open the door and entered Pesca's room. He was crouched up, in the strangest manner, in a corner of the sofa.
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.
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.
The fact of my communication he would necessarily discover, when I gave the address to his agent in the morning. But he could make no use of it on his own unsupported testimony even if he really ventured to try the experiment which need excite in me the slightest apprehension on Pesca's account. "I grant your reservation," he replied, after considering the question gravely for a minute or two.
If anything happened to me in the Count's house, I had now provided for his answering it with his life. That the means of preventing his escape, under any circumstances whatever, were at Pesca's disposal, if he chose to exert them, I did not for an instant doubt.
Neither my mother's evident astonishment at my behaviour, nor Pesca's fervid enumeration of the advantages offered to me by the new employment, had any effect in shaking my unreasonable disinclination to go to Limmeridge House.
The wound that had killed him had been struck with a knife or dagger exactly over his heart. No other traces of violence appeared about the body except on the left arm, and there, exactly in the place where I had seen the brand on Pesca's arm, were two deep cuts in the shape of the letter T, which entirely obliterated the mark of the Brotherhood.
A slim, light-haired man standing by us, whom I had not noticed before a man with a scar on his left cheek looked attentively at Pesca as I helped him up, and then looked still more attentively, following the direction of Pesca's eyes, at the Count. Our conversation might have reached his ears, and might, as it struck me, have roused his curiosity.
Pesca's face and manner, on the evening when we confronted each other at my mother's gate, were more than sufficient to inform me that something extraordinary had happened. It was quite useless, however, to ask him for an immediate explanation. We both bounced into the parlour in a highly abrupt and undignified manner. My mother sat by the open window laughing and fanning herself.
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