THE STORY BEGUN
BY WALTER HARTRIGHT
(of Clement's
Inn, Teacher of Drawing)
This is the
story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and
what a Man's resolution can achieve.
If the
machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom
every case of suspicion, and to conduct every
process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only
from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the
events which fill these pages might have claimed
their share of the public attention in a Court of
Justice.
But the Law
is still, in certain inevitable cases, the
pre-engaged servant of the long purse; and the story
is left to be told, for the first time, in this
place. As the Judge might once have heard it, so the
Reader shall hear it now. No circumstance of
importance, from the beginning to the end of the
disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence.
When the writer of these introductory lines (Walter
Hartright by name) happens to be more closely
connected than others with the incidents to be
recorded, he will describe them in his own person.
When his experience fails, he will retire from the
position of narrator; and his task will be
continued, from the point at which he has left it
off, by other persons who can speak to the
circumstances under notice from their own knowledge,
just as clearly and positively as he has spoken
before them.
Thus, the
story here presented will be told by more than one
pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is
told in Court by more than one witness—with the same
object, in both cases, to present the truth always
in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and
to trace the course of one complete series of
events, by making the persons who have been most
closely connected with them, at each successive
stage, relate their own experience, word for word.
Let Walter
Hartright, teacher of drawing, aged twenty-eight
years, be heard first.
II
It was the
last day of July. The long hot summer was drawing to
a close; and we, the weary pilgrims of the London
pavement, were beginning to think of the
cloud-shadows on the corn-fields, and the autumn
breezes on the sea-shore.
For my own
poor part, the fading summer left me out of health,
out of spirits, and, if the truth must be told, out
of money as well. During the past year I had not
managed my professional resources as carefully as
usual; and my extravagance now limited me to the
prospect of spending the autumn economically between
my mother's cottage at Hampstead and my own chambers
in town.
The evening,
I remember, was still and cloudy; the London air was
at its heaviest; the distant hum of the
street-traffic was at its faintest; the small pulse
of the life within me, and the great heart of the
city around me, seemed to be sinking in unison,
languidly and more languidly, with the sinking sun.
I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming
over rather than reading, and left my chambers to
meet the cool night air in the suburbs. It was one
of the two evenings in every week which I was
accustomed to spend with my mother and my sister. So
I turned my steps northward in the direction of
Hampstead.
Events which
I have yet to relate make it necessary to mention in
this place that my father had been dead some years
at the period of which I am now writing; and that my
sister Sarah and I were the sole survivors of a
family of five children. My father was a
drawing-master before me. His exertions had made him
highly successful in his profession; and his
affectionate anxiety to provide for the future of
those who were dependent on his labours had impelled
him, from the time of his marriage, to devote to the
insuring of his life a much larger portion of his
income than most men consider it necessary to set
aside for that purpose. Thanks to his admirable
prudence and self-denial my mother and sister were
left, after his death, as independent of the world
as they had been during his lifetime. I succeeded to
his connection, and had every reason to feel
grateful for the prospect that awaited me at my
starting in life.
The quiet
twilight was still trembling on the topmost ridges
of the heath; and the view of London below me had
sunk into a black gulf in the shadow of the cloudy
night, when I stood before the gate of my mother's
cottage. I had hardly rung the bell before the house
door was opened violently; my worthy Italian friend,
Professor Pesca, appeared in the servant's place;
and darted out joyously to receive me, with a shrill
foreign parody on an English cheer.
On his own
account, and, I must be allowed to add, on mine
also, the Professor merits the honour of a formal
introduction. Accident has made him the
starting-point of the strange family story which it
is the purpose of these pages to unfold.
I had first
become acquainted with my Italian friend by meeting
him at certain great houses where he taught his own
language and I taught drawing. All I then knew of
the history of his life was, that he had once held a
situation in the University of Padua; that he had
left Italy for political reasons (the nature of
which he uniformly declined to mention to any one);
and that he had been for many years respectably
established in London as a teacher of languages.
Without
being actually a dwarf—for he was perfectly well
proportioned from head to foot—Pesca was, I think,
the smallest human being I ever saw out of a
show-room. Remarkable anywhere, by his personal
appearance, he was still further distinguished among
the rank and file of mankind by the harmless
eccentricity of his character. The ruling idea of
his life appeared to be, that he was bound to show
his gratitude to the country which had afforded him
an asylum and a means of subsistence by doing his
utmost to turn himself into an Englishman. Not
content with paying the nation in general the
compliment of invariably carrying an umbrella, and
invariably wearing gaiters and a white hat, the
Professor further aspired to become an Englishman in
his habits and amusements, as well as in his
personal appearance. Finding us distinguished, as a
nation, by our love of athletic exercises, the
little man, in the innocence of his heart, devoted
himself impromptu to all our English sports and
pastimes whenever he had the opportunity of joining
them; firmly persuaded that he could adopt our
national amusements of the field by an effort of
will precisely as he had adopted our national
gaiters and our national white hat.
I had seen
him risk his limbs blindly at a fox-hunt and in a
cricket-field; and soon afterwards I saw him risk
his life, just as blindly, in the sea at Brighton.
We had met
there accidentally, and were bathing together. If we
had been engaged in any exercise peculiar to my own
nation I should, of course, have looked after Pesca
carefully; but as foreigners are generally quite as
well able to take care of themselves in the water as
Englishmen, it never occurred to me that the art of
swimming might merely add one more to the list of
manly exercises which the Professor believed that he
could learn impromptu. Soon after we had both struck
out from shore, I stopped, finding my friend did not
gain on me, and turned round to look for him. To my
horror and amazement, I saw nothing between me and
the beach but two little white arms which struggled
for an instant above the surface of the water, and
then disappeared from view. When I dived for him,
the poor little man was lying quietly coiled up at
the bottom, in a hollow of shingle, looking by many
degrees smaller than I had ever seen him look
before. During the few minutes that elapsed while I
was taking him in, the air revived him, and he
ascended the steps of the machine with my
assistance. With the partial recovery of his
animation came the return of his wonderful delusion
on the subject of swimming. As soon as his
chattering teeth would let him speak, he smiled
vacantly, and said he thought it must have been the
Cramp.
When he had
thoroughly recovered himself, and had joined me on
the beach, his warm Southern nature broke through
all artificial English restraints in a moment. He
overwhelmed me with the wildest expressions of
affection—exclaimed passionately, in his exaggerated
Italian way, that he would hold his life henceforth
at my disposal—and declared that he should never be
happy again until he had found an opportunity of
proving his gratitude by rendering me some service
which I might remember, on my side, to the end of my
days.
I did my
best to stop the torrent of his tears and
protestations by persisting in treating the whole
adventure as a good subject for a joke; and
succeeded at last, as I imagined, in lessening
Pesca's overwhelming sense of obligation to me.
Little did I think then—little did I think
afterwards when our pleasant holiday had drawn to an
end—that the opportunity of serving me for which my
grateful companion so ardently longed was soon to
come; that he was eagerly to seize it on the
instant; and that by so doing he was to turn the
whole current of my existence into a new channel,
and to alter me to myself almost past recognition.
Yet so it
was. If I had not dived for Professor Pesca when he
lay under water on his shingle bed, I should in all
human probability never have been connected with the
story which these pages will relate—I should never,
perhaps, have heard even the name of the woman who
has lived in all my thoughts, who has possessed
herself of all my energies, who has become the one
guiding influence that now directs the purpose of my
life.
III
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. I could only
conjecture, while he was dragging me in by both
hands, that (knowing my habits) he had come to the
cottage to make sure of meeting me that night, and
that he had some news to tell of an unusually
agreeable kind.
We both
bounced into the parlour in a highly abrupt and
undignified manner. My mother sat by the open window
laughing and fanning herself. Pesca was one of her
especial favourites and his wildest eccentricities
were always pardonable in her eyes. Poor dear soul!
from the first moment when she found out that the
little Professor was deeply and gratefully attached
to her son, she opened her heart to him
unreservedly, and took all his puzzling foreign
peculiarities for granted, without so much as
attempting to understand any one of them.
My sister
Sarah, with all the advantages of youth, was,
strangely enough, less pliable. She did full justice
to Pesca's excellent qualities of heart; but she
could not accept him implicitly, as my mother
accepted him, for my sake. Her insular notions of
propriety rose in perpetual revolt against Pesca's
constitutional contempt for appearances; and she was
always more or less undisguisedly astonished at her
mother's familiarity with the eccentric little
foreigner. I have observed, not only in my sister's
case, but in the instances of others, that we of the
young generation are nothing like so hearty and so
impulsive as some of our elders. I constantly see
old people flushed and excited by the prospect of
some anticipated pleasure which altogether fails to
ruffle the tranquillity of their serene
grandchildren. Are we, I wonder, quite such genuine
boys and girls now as our seniors were in their
time? Has the great advance in education taken
rather too long a stride; and are we in these modern
days, just the least trifle in the world too well
brought up?
Without
attempting to answer those questions decisively, I
may at least record that I never saw my mother and
my sister together in Pesca's society, without
finding my mother much the younger woman of the two.
On this occasion, for example, while the old lady
was laughing heartily over the boyish manner in
which we tumbled into the parlour, Sarah was
perturbedly picking up the broken pieces of a
teacup, which the Professor had knocked off the
table in his precipitate advance to meet me at the
door.
"I don't
know what would have happened, Walter," said my
mother, "if you had delayed much longer. Pesca has
been half mad with impatience, and I have been half
mad with curiosity. The Professor has brought some
wonderful news with him, in which he says you are
concerned; and he has cruelly refused to give us the
smallest hint of it till his friend Walter
appeared."
"Very
provoking: it spoils the Set," murmured Sarah to
herself, mournfully absorbed over the ruins of the
broken cup.
While these
words were being spoken, Pesca, happily and fussily
unconscious of the irreparable wrong which the
crockery had suffered at his hands, was dragging a
large arm-chair to the opposite end of the room, so
as to command us all three, in the character of a
public speaker addressing an audience. Having turned
the chair with its back towards us, he jumped into
it on his knees, and excitedly addressed his small
congregation of three from an impromptu pulpit.
"Now, my
good dears," began Pesca (who always said "good
dears" when he meant "worthy friends"), "listen to
me. The time has come—I recite my good news—I speak
at last."
"Hear,
hear!" said my mother, humouring the joke.
"The next
thing he will break, mamma," whispered Sarah, "will
be the back of the best arm-chair."
"I go back
into my life, and I address myself to the noblest of
created beings," continued Pesca, vehemently
apostrophising my unworthy self over the top rail of
the chair. "Who found me dead at the bottom of the
sea (through Cramp); and who pulled me up to the
top; and what did I say when I got into my own life
and my own clothes again?"
"Much more
than was at all necessary," I answered as doggedly
as possible; for the least encouragement in
connection with this subject invariably let loose
the Professor's emotions in a flood of tears.
"I said,"
persisted Pesca, "that my life belonged to my dear
friend, Walter, for the rest of my days—and so it
does. I said that I should never be happy again till
I had found the opportunity of doing a good
Something for Walter—and I have never been contented
with myself till this most blessed day. Now," cried
the enthusiastic little man at the top of his voice,
"the overflowing happiness bursts out of me at every
pore of my skin, like a perspiration; for on my
faith, and soul, and honour, the something is done
at last, and the only word to say now
is—Right-all-right!"
It may be
necessary to explain here that Pesca prided himself
on being a perfect Englishman in his language, as
well as in his dress, manners, and amusements.
Having picked up a few of our most familiar
colloquial expressions, he scattered them about over
his conversation whenever they happened to occur to
him, turning them, in his high relish for their
sound and his general ignorance of their sense, into
compound words and repetitions of his own, and
always running them into each other, as if they
consisted of one long syllable.
"Among the
fine London Houses where I teach the language of my
native country," said the Professor, rushing into
his long-deferred explanation without another word
of preface, "there is one, mighty fine, in the big
place called Portland. You all know where that is?
Yes, yes—course-of-course. The fine house, my good
dears, has got inside it a fine family. A Mamma,
fair and fat; three young Misses, fair and fat; two
young Misters, fair and fat; and a Papa, the fairest
and the fattest of all, who is a mighty merchant, up
to his eyes in gold—a fine man once, but seeing that
he has got a naked head and two chins, fine no
longer at the present time. Now mind! I teach the
sublime Dante to the young Misses, and
ah!—my-soul-bless-my-soul!—it is not in human
language to say how the sublime Dante puzzles the
pretty heads of all three! No matter—all in good
time—and the more lessons the better for me. Now
mind! Imagine to yourselves that I am teaching the
young Misses to-day, as usual. We are all four of us
down together in the Hell of Dante. At the Seventh
Circle—but no matter for that: all the Circles are
alike to the three young Misses, fair and fat,—at
the Seventh Circle, nevertheless, my pupils are
sticking fast; and I, to set them going again,
recite, explain, and blow myself up red-hot with
useless enthusiasm, when—a creak of boots in the
passage outside, and in comes the golden Papa, the
mighty merchant with the naked head and the two
chins.—Ha! my good dears, I am closer than you think
for to the business, now. Have you been patient so
far? or have you said to yourselves,
'Deuce-what-the-deuce! Pesca is long-winded
to-night?'"
We declared
that we were deeply interested. The Professor went
on:
"In his
hand, the golden Papa has a letter; and after he has
made his excuse for disturbing us in our Infernal
Region with the common mortal Business of the house,
he addresses himself to the three young Misses, and
begins, as you English begin everything in this
blessed world that you have to say, with a great O.
'O, my dears,' says the mighty merchant, 'I have got
here a letter from my friend, Mr.——'(the name has
slipped out of my mind; but no matter; we shall come
back to that; yes, yes—right-all-right). So the Papa
says, 'I have got a letter from my friend, the
Mister; and he wants a recommend from me, of a
drawing-master, to go down to his house in the
country.' My-soul-bless-my-soul! when I heard the
golden Papa say those words, if I had been big
enough to reach up to him, I should have put my arms
round his neck, and pressed him to my bosom in a
long and grateful hug! As it was, I only bounced
upon my chair. My seat was on thorns, and my soul
was on fire to speak but I held my tongue, and let
Papa go on. 'Perhaps you know,' says this good man
of money, twiddling his friend's letter this way and
that, in his golden fingers and thumbs, 'perhaps you
know, my dears, of a drawing-master that I can
recommend?' The three young Misses all look at each
other, and then say (with the indispensable great O
to begin) "O, dear no, Papa! But here is Mr. Pesca'
At the mention of myself I can hold no longer—the
thought of you, my good dears, mounts like blood to
my head—I start from my seat, as if a spike had
grown up from the ground through the bottom of my
chair—I address myself to the mighty merchant, and I
say (English phrase) 'Dear sir, I have the man! The
first and foremost drawing-master of the world!
Recommend him by the post to-night, and send him
off, bag and baggage (English phrase again—ha!),
send him off, bag and baggage, by the train
to-morrow!' 'Stop, stop,' says Papa; 'is he a
foreigner, or an Englishman?' 'English to the bone
of his back,' I answer. 'Respectable?' says Papa.
'Sir,' I say (for this last question of his outrages
me, and I have done being familiar with him—) 'Sir!
the immortal fire of genius burns in this
Englishman's bosom, and, what is more, his father
had it before him!' 'Never mind,' says the golden
barbarian of a Papa, 'never mind about his genius,
Mr. Pesca. We don't want genius in this country,
unless it is accompanied by respectability—and then
we are very glad to have it, very glad indeed. Can
your friend produce testimonials—letters that speak
to his character?' I wave my hand negligently.
'Letters?' I say. 'Ha! my-soul-bless-my-soul! I
should think so, indeed! Volumes of letters and
portfolios of testimonials, if you like!' 'One or
two will do,' says this man of phlegm and money.
'Let him send them to me, with his name and address.
And—stop, stop, Mr. Pesca—before you go to your
friend, you had better take a note.' 'Bank-note!' I
say, indignantly. 'No bank-note, if you please, till
my brave Englishman has earned it first.'
'Bank-note!' says Papa, in a great surprise, 'who
talked of bank-note? I mean a note of the terms—a
memorandum of what he is expected to do. Go on with
your lesson, Mr. Pesca, and I will give you the
necessary extract from my friend's letter.' Down
sits the man of merchandise and money to his pen,
ink, and paper; and down I go once again into the
Hell of Dante, with my three young Misses after me.
In ten minutes' time the note is written, and the
boots of Papa are creaking themselves away in the
passage outside. From that moment, on my faith, and
soul, and honour, I know nothing more! The glorious
thought that I have caught my opportunity at last,
and that my grateful service for my dearest friend
in the world is as good as done already, flies up
into my head and makes me drunk. How I pull my young
Misses and myself out of our Infernal Region again,
how my other business is done afterwards, how my
little bit of dinner slides itself down my throat, I
know no more than a man in the moon. Enough for me,
that here I am, with the mighty merchant's note in
my hand, as large as life, as hot as fire, and as
happy as a king! Ha! ha! ha!
right-right-right-all-right!" Here the Professor
waved the memorandum of terms over his head, and
ended his long and voluble narrative with his shrill
Italian parody on an English cheer."
My mother
rose the moment he had done, with flushed cheeks and
brightened eyes. She caught the little man warmly by
both hands.
"My dear,
good Pesca," she said, "I never doubted your true
affection for Walter—but I am more than ever
persuaded of it now!"
"I am sure
we are very much obliged to Professor Pesca, for
Walter's sake," added Sarah. She half rose, while
she spoke, as if to approach the arm-chair, in her
turn; but, observing that Pesca was rapturously
kissing my mother's hands, looked serious, and
resumed her seat. "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. When the
Professor had quite done with my mother's hand, and
when I had warmly thanked him for his interference
on my behalf, I asked to be allowed to look at the
note of terms which his respectable patron had drawn
up for my inspection.
Pesca handed
me the paper, with a triumphant flourish of the
hand.
"Read!" said
the little man majestically. "I promise you my
friend, the writing of the golden Papa speaks with a
tongue of trumpets for itself."
The note of
terms was plain, straightforward, and comprehensive,
at any rate. It informed me,
First, That
Frederick Fairlie, Esquire, of Limmeridge House.
Cumberland, wanted to engage the services of a
thoroughly competent drawing-master, for a period of
four months certain.
Secondly,
That the duties which the master was expected to
perform would be of a twofold kind. He was to
superintend the instruction of two young ladies in
the art of painting in water-colours; and he was to
devote his leisure time, afterwards, to the business
of repairing and mounting a valuable collection of
drawings, which had been suffered to fall into a
condition of total neglect.
Thirdly,
That the terms offered to the person who should
undertake and properly perform these duties were
four guineas a week; that he was to reside at
Limmeridge House; and that he was to be treated
there on the footing of a gentleman.
Fourthly,
and lastly, That no person need think of applying
for this situation unless he could furnish the most
unexceptionable references to character and
abilities. The references were to be sent to Mr.
Fairlie's friend in London, who was empowered to
conclude all necessary arrangements. These
instructions were followed by the name and address
of Pesca's employer in Portland Place—and there the
note, or memorandum, ended.
The prospect
which this offer of an engagement held out was
certainly an attractive one. The employment was
likely to be both easy and agreeable; it was
proposed to me at the autumn time of the year when I
was least occupied; and the terms, judging by my
personal experience in my profession, were
surprisingly liberal. I knew this; I knew that I
ought to consider myself very fortunate if I
succeeded in securing the offered employment—and
yet, no sooner had I read the memorandum than I felt
an inexplicable unwillingness within me to stir in
the matter. I had never in the whole of my previous
experience found my duty and my inclination so
painfully and so unaccountably at variance as I
found them now.
"Oh, Walter,
your father never had such a chance as this!" said
my mother, when she had read the note of terms and
had handed it back to me.
"Such
distinguished people to know," remarked Sarah,
straightening herself in the chair; "and on such
gratifying terms of equality too!"
"Yes, yes;
the terms, in every sense, are tempting enough," I
replied impatiently. "But before I send in my
testimonials, I should like a little time to
consider——"
"Consider!"
exclaimed my mother. "Why, Walter, what is the
matter with you?"
"Consider!"
echoed my sister. "What a very extraordinary thing
to say, under the circumstances!"
"Consider!"
chimed in the Professor. "What is there to consider
about? Answer me this! Have you not been complaining
of your health, and have you not been longing for
what you call a smack of the country breeze? Well!
there in your hand is the paper that offers you
perpetual choking mouthfuls of country breeze for
four months' time. Is it not so? Ha! Again—you want
money. Well! Is four golden guineas a week nothing?
My-soul-bless-my-soul! only give it to me—and my
boots shall creak like the golden Papa's, with a
sense of the overpowering richness of the man who
walks in them! Four guineas a week, and, more than
that, the charming society of two young misses! and,
more than that, your bed, your breakfast, your
dinner, your gorging English teas and lunches and
drinks of foaming beer, all for nothing—why, Walter,
my dear good friend—deuce-what-the-deuce!—for the
first time in my life I have not eyes enough in my
head to look, and wonder at you!"
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. After starting all the petty
objections that I could think of to going to
Cumberland, and after hearing them answered, one
after another, to my own complete discomfiture, I
tried to set up a last obstacle by asking what was
to become of my pupils in London while I was
teaching Mr. Fairlie's young ladies to sketch from
nature. The obvious answer to this was, that the
greater part of them would be away on their autumn
travels, and that the few who remained at home might
be confided to the care of one of my brother
drawing-masters, whose pupils I had once taken off
his hands under similar circumstances. My sister
reminded me that this gentleman had expressly placed
his services at my disposal, during the present
season, in case I wished to leave town; my mother
seriously appealed to me not to let an idle caprice
stand in the way of my own interests and my own
health; and Pesca piteously entreated that I would
not wound him to the heart by rejecting the first
grateful offer of service that he had been able to
make to the friend who had saved his life.
The evident
sincerity and affection which inspired these
remonstrances would have influenced any man with an
atom of good feeling in his composition. Though I
could not conquer my own unaccountable perversity, I
had at least virtue enough to be heartily ashamed of
it, and to end the discussion pleasantly by giving
way, and promising to do all that was wanted of me.
The rest of
the evening passed merrily enough in humorous
anticipations of my coming life with the two young
ladies in Cumberland. Pesca, inspired by our
national grog, which appeared to get into his head,
in the most marvellous manner, five minutes after it
had gone down his throat, asserted his claims to be
considered a complete Englishman by making a series
of speeches in rapid succession, proposing my
mother's health, my sister's health, my health, and
the healths, in mass, of Mr. Fairlie and the two
young Misses, pathetically returning thanks himself,
immediately afterwards, for the whole party. "A
secret, Walter," said my little friend
confidentially, as we walked home together. "I am
flushed by the recollection of my own eloquence. My
soul bursts itself with ambition. One of these days
I go into your noble Parliament. It is the dream of
my whole life to be Honourable Pesca, M.P.!"
The next
morning I sent my testimonials to the Professor's
employer in Portland Place. Three days passed, and I
concluded, with secret satisfaction, that my papers
had not been found sufficiently explicit. On the
fourth day, however, an answer came. It announced
that Mr. Fairlie accepted my services, and requested
me to start for Cumberland immediately. All the
necessary instructions for my journey were carefully
and clearly added in a postscript.
I made my
arrangements, unwillingly enough, for leaving London
early the next day. Towards evening Pesca looked in,
on his way to a dinner-party, to bid me good-bye.
"I shall dry
my tears in your absence," said the Professor gaily,
"with this glorious thought. It is my auspicious
hand that has given the first push to your fortune
in the world. Go, my friend! When your sun shines in
Cumberland (English proverb), in the name of heaven
make your hay. Marry one of the two young Misses;
become Honourable Hartright, M.P.; and when you are
on the top of the ladder remember that Pesca, at the
bottom, has done it all!"
I tried to
laugh with my little friend over his parting jest,
but my spirits were not to be commanded. Something
jarred in me almost painfully while he was speaking
his light farewell words.
When I was
left alone again nothing remained to be done but to
walk to the Hampstead cottage and bid my mother and
Sarah good-bye.
IV
The heat had
been painfully oppressive all day, and it was now a
close and sultry night.
My mother
and sister had spoken so many last words, and had
begged me to wait another five minutes so many
times, that it was nearly midnight when the servant
locked the garden-gate behind me. I walked forward a
few paces on the shortest way back to London, then
stopped and hesitated.
The moon was
full and broad in the dark blue starless sky, and
the broken ground of the heath looked wild enough in
the mysterious light to be hundreds of miles away
from the great city that lay beneath it. The idea of
descending any sooner than I could help into the
heat and gloom of London repelled me. The prospect
of going to bed in my airless chambers, and the
prospect of gradual suffocation, seemed, in my
present restless frame of mind and body, to be one
and the same thing. I determined to stroll home in
the purer air by the most roundabout way I could
take; to follow the white winding paths across the
lonely heath; and to approach London through its
most open suburb by striking into the Finchley Road,
and so getting back, in the cool of the new morning,
by the western side of the Regent's Park.
I wound my
way down slowly over the heath, enjoying the divine
stillness of the scene, and admiring the soft
alternations of light and shade as they followed
each other over the broken ground on every side of
me. So long as I was proceeding through this first
and prettiest part of my night walk my mind remained
passively open to the impressions produced by the
view; and I thought but little on any
subject—indeed, so far as my own sensations were
concerned, I can hardly say that I thought at all.
But when I
had left the heath and had turned into the by-road,
where there was less to see, the ideas naturally
engendered by the approaching change in my habits
and occupations gradually drew more and more of my
attention exclusively to themselves. By the time I
had arrived at the end of the road I had become
completely absorbed in my own fanciful visions of
Limmeridge House, of Mr. Fairlie, and of the two
ladies whose practice in the art of water-colour
painting I was so soon to superintend.
I had now
arrived at that particular point of my walk where
four roads met—the road to Hampstead, along which I
had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West
End, and the road back to London. I had mechanically
turned in this latter direction, and was strolling
along the lonely high-road—idly wondering, I
remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would
look like—when, in one moment, every drop of blood
in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a
hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from
behind me.
I turned on
the instant, with my fingers tightening round the
handle of my stick.
There, in
the middle of the broad bright high-road—there, as
if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or
dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a
solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white
garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine,
her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as
I faced her.
I was far
too seriously startled by the suddenness with which
this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in
the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask
what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first.
"Is that the
road to London?" she said.
I looked
attentively at her, as she put that singular
question to me. It was then nearly one o'clock. All
I could discern distinctly by the moonlight was a
colourless, youthful face, meagre and sharp to look
at about the cheeks and chin; large, grave,
wistfully attentive eyes; nervous, uncertain lips;
and light hair of a pale, brownish-yellow hue. There
was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner: it
was quiet and self-controlled, a little melancholy
and a little touched by suspicion; not exactly the
manner of a lady, and, at the same time, not the
manner of a woman in the humblest rank of life. The
voice, little as I had yet heard of it, had
something curiously still and mechanical in its
tones, and the utterance was remarkably rapid. She
held a small bag in her hand: and her dress—bonnet,
shawl, and gown all of white—was, so far as I could
guess, certainly not composed of very delicate or
very expensive materials. Her figure was slight, and
rather above the average height—her gait and actions
free from the slightest approach to extravagance.
This was all that I could observe of her in the dim
light and under the perplexingly strange
circumstances of our meeting. What sort of a woman
she was, and how she came to be out alone in the
high-road, an hour after midnight, I altogether
failed to guess. The one thing of which I felt
certain was, that the grossest of mankind could not
have misconstrued her motive in speaking, even at
that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously
lonely place.
"Did you
hear me?" she said, still quietly and rapidly, and
without the least fretfulness or impatience. "I
asked if that was the way to London."
"Yes," I
replied, "that is the way: it leads to St. John's
Wood and the Regent's Park. You must excuse my not
answering you before. I was rather startled by your
sudden appearance in the road; and I am, even now,
quite unable to account for it."
"You don't
suspect me of doing anything wrong, do you? I have
done nothing wrong. I have met with an accident—I am
very unfortunate in being here alone so late. Why do
you suspect me of doing wrong?"
She spoke
with unnecessary earnestness and agitation, and
shrank back from me several paces. I did my best to
reassure her.
"Pray don't
suppose that I have any idea of suspecting you," I
said, "or any other wish than to be of assistance to
you, if I can. I only wondered at your appearance in
the road, because it seemed to me to be empty the
instant before I saw you."
She turned,
and pointed back to a place at the junction of the
road to London and the road to Hampstead, where
there was a gap in the hedge.
"I heard you
coming," she said, "and hid there to see what sort
of man you were, before I risked speaking. I doubted
and feared about it till you passed; and then I was
obliged to steal after you, and touch you."
Steal after
me and touch me? Why not call to me? Strange, to say
the least of it.
"May I trust
you?" she asked. "You don't think the worse of me
because I have met with an accident?" She stopped in
confusion; shifted her bag from one hand to the
other; and sighed bitterly.
The
loneliness and helplessness of the woman touched me.
The natural impulse to assist her and to spare her
got the better of the judgment, the caution, the
worldly tact, which an older, wiser, and colder man
might have summoned to help him in this strange
emergency.
"You may
trust me for any harmless purpose," I said. "If it
troubles you to explain your strange situation to
me, don't think of returning to the subject again. I
have no right to ask you for any explanations. Tell
me how I can help you; and if I can, I will."
"You are
very kind, and I am very, very thankful to have met
you." The first touch of womanly tenderness that I
had heard from her trembled in her voice as she said
the words; but no tears glistened in those large,
wistfully attentive eyes of hers, which were still
fixed on me. "I have only been in London once
before," she went on, more and more rapidly, "and I
know nothing about that side of it, yonder. Can I
get a fly, or a carriage of any kind? Is it too
late? I don't know. If you could show me where to
get a fly—and if you will only promise not to
interfere with me, and to let me leave you, when and
how I please—I have a friend in London who will be
glad to receive me—I want nothing else—will you
promise?"
She looked
anxiously up and down the road; shifted her bag
again from one hand to the other; repeated the
words, "Will you promise?" and looked hard in my
face, with a pleading fear and confusion that it
troubled me to see.
What could I
do? Here was a stranger utterly and helplessly at my
mercy—and that stranger a forlorn woman. No house
was near; no one was passing whom I could consult;
and no earthly right existed on my part to give me a
power of control over her, even if I had known how
to exercise it. I trace these lines,
self-distrustfully, with the shadows of after-events
darkening the very paper I write on; and still I
say, what could I do?
What I did
do, was to try and gain time by questioning her.
"Are you sure that your friend in London will
receive you at such a late hour as this?" I said.
"Quite sure.
Only say you will let me leave you when and how I
please—only say you won't interfere with me. Will
you promise?"
As she
repeated the words for the third time, she came
close to me and laid her hand, with a sudden gentle
stealthiness, on my bosom—a thin hand; a cold hand
(when I removed it with mine) even on that sultry
night. Remember that I was young; remember that the
hand which touched me was a woman's.
"Will you
promise?"
"Yes."
One word!
The little familiar word that is on everybody's
lips, every hour in the day. Oh me! and I tremble,
now, when I write it.
We set our
faces towards London, and walked on together in the
first still hour of the new day—I, and this woman,
whose name, whose character, whose story, whose
objects in life, whose very presence by my side, at
that moment, were fathomless mysteries to me. It was
like a dream. Was I Walter Hartright? Was this the
well-known, uneventful road, where holiday people
strolled on Sundays? Had I really left, little more
than an hour since, the quiet, decent,
conventionally domestic atmosphere of my mother's
cottage? I was too bewildered—too conscious also of
a vague sense of something like self-reproach—to
speak to my strange companion for some minutes. It
was her voice again that first broke the silence
between us.
"I want to
ask you something," she said suddenly. "Do you know
many people in London?"
"Yes, a
great many."
"Many men of
rank and title?" There was an unmistakable tone of
suspicion in the strange question. I hesitated about
answering it.
"Some," I
said, after a moment's silence.
"Many"—she
came to a full stop, and looked me searchingly in
the face—"many men of the rank of Baronet?"
Too much
astonished to reply, I questioned her in my turn.
"Why do you
ask?"
"Because I
hope, for my own sake, there is one Baronet that you
don't know."
"Will you
tell me his name?"
"I can't—I
daren't—I forget myself when I mention it." She
spoke loudly and almost fiercely, raised her
clenched hand in the air, and shook it passionately;
then, on a sudden, controlled herself again, and
added, in tones lowered to a whisper "Tell me which
of them YOU know."
I could
hardly refuse to humour her in such a trifle, and I
mentioned three names. Two, the names of fathers of
families whose daughters I taught; one, the name of
a bachelor who had once taken me a cruise in his
yacht, to make sketches for him.
"Ah! you
DON'T know him," she said, with a sigh of relief.
"Are you a man of rank and title yourself?"
"Far from
it. I am only a drawing-master."
As the reply
passed my lips—a little bitterly, perhaps—she took
my arm with the abruptness which characterised all
her actions.
"Not a man
of rank and title," she repeated to herself. "Thank
God! I may trust HIM."
I had
hitherto contrived to master my curiosity out of
consideration for my companion; but it got the
better of me now.
"I am afraid
you have serious reason to complain of some man of
rank and title?" I said. "I am afraid the baronet,
whose name you are unwilling to mention to me, has
done you some grievous wrong? Is he the cause of
your being out here at this strange time of night?"
"Don't ask
me: don't make me talk of it," she answered. "I'm
not fit now. I have been cruelly used and cruelly
wronged. You will be kinder than ever, if you will
walk on fast, and not speak to me. I sadly want to
quiet myself, if I can."
We moved
forward again at a quick pace; and for half an hour,
at least, not a word passed on either side. From
time to time, being forbidden to make any more
inquiries, I stole a look at her face. It was always
the same; the lips close shut, the brow frowning,
the eyes looking straight forward, eagerly and yet
absently. We had reached the first houses, and were
close on the new Wesleyan college, before her set
features relaxed and she spoke once more.
"Do you live
in London?" she said.
"Yes." As I
answered, it struck me that she might have formed
some intention of appealing to me for assistance or
advice, and that I ought to spare her a possible
disappointment by warning her of my approaching
absence from home. So I added, "But to-morrow I
shall be away from London for some time. I am going
into the country."
"Where?" she
asked. "North or south?"
"North—to
Cumberland."
"Cumberland!" she repeated the word tenderly. "Ah!
wish I was going there too. I was once happy in
Cumberland."
I tried
again to lift the veil that hung between this woman
and me.
"Perhaps you
were born," I said, "in the beautiful Lake country."
"No," she
answered. "I was born in Hampshire; but I once went
to school for a little while in Cumberland. Lakes? I
don't remember any lakes. It's Limmeridge village,
and Limmeridge House, I should like to see again."
It was my
turn now to stop suddenly. In the excited state of
my curiosity, at that moment, the chance reference
to Mr. Fairlie's place of residence, on the lips of
my strange companion, staggered me with
astonishment.
"Did you
hear anybody calling after us?" she asked, looking
up and down the road affrightedly, the instant I
stopped.
"No, no. I
was only struck by the name of Limmeridge House. I
heard it mentioned by some Cumberland people a few
days since."
"Ah! not my
people. Mrs. Fairlie is dead; and her husband is
dead; and their little girl may be married and gone
away by this time. I can't say who lives at
Limmeridge now. If any more are left there of that
name, I only know I love them for Mrs. Fairlie's
sake."
She seemed
about to say more; but while she was speaking, we
came within view of the turnpike, at the top of the
Avenue Road. Her hand tightened round my arm, and
she looked anxiously at the gate before us.
"Is the
turnpike man looking out?" she asked.
He was not
looking out; no one else was near the place when we
passed through the gate. The sight of the gas-lamps
and houses seemed to agitate her, and to make her
impatient.
"This is
London," she said. "Do you see any carriage I can
get? I am tired and frightened. I want to shut
myself in and be driven away."
I explained
to her that we must walk a little further to get to
a cab-stand, unless we were fortunate enough to meet
with an empty vehicle; and then tried to resume the
subject of Cumberland. It was useless. That idea of
shutting herself in, and being driven away, had now
got full possession of her mind. She could think and
talk of nothing else.
We had
hardly proceeded a third of the way down the Avenue
Road when I saw a cab draw up at a house a few doors
below us, on the opposite side of the way. A
gentleman got out and let himself in at the garden
door. I hailed the cab, as the driver mounted the
box again. When we crossed the road, my companion's
impatience increased to such an extent that she
almost forced me to run.
"It's so
late," she said. "I am only in a hurry because it's
so late."
"I can't
take you, sir, if you're not going towards Tottenham
Court Road," said the driver civilly, when I opened
the cab door. "My horse is dead beat, and I can't
get him no further than the stable."
"Yes, yes.
That will do for me. I'm going that way—I'm going
that way." She spoke with breathless eagerness, and
pressed by me into the cab.
I had
assured myself that the man was sober as well as
civil before I let her enter the vehicle. And now,
when she was seated inside, I entreated her to let
me see her set down safely at her destination.
"No, no,
no," she said vehemently. "I'm quite safe, and quite
happy now. If you are a gentleman, remember your
promise. Let him drive on till I stop him. Thank
you—oh! thank you, thank you!"
My hand was
on the cab door. She caught it in hers, kissed it,
and pushed it away. The cab drove off at the same
moment—I started into the road, with some vague idea
of stopping it again, I hardly knew why—hesitated
from dread of frightening and distressing
her—called, at last, but not loudly enough to
attract the driver's attention. The sound of the
wheels grew fainter in the distance—the cab melted
into the black shadows on the road—the woman in
white was gone.
Ten minutes or more had
passed. I was still on the same side of the way; now
mechanically walking forward a few paces; now
stopping again absently. At one moment I found
myself doubting the reality of my own adventure; at
another I was perplexed and distressed by an uneasy
sense of having done wrong, which yet left me
confusedly ignorant of how I could have done right.
I hardly knew where I was going, or what I meant to
do next; I was conscious of nothing but the
confusion of my own thoughts, when I was abruptly
recalled to myself—awakened, I might almost say—by
the sound of rapidly approaching wheels close behind
me.
I was on the
dark side of the road, in the thick shadow of some
garden trees, when I stopped to look round. On the
opposite and lighter side of the way, a short
distance below me, a policeman was strolling along
in the direction of the Regent's Park.
The carriage
passed me—an open chaise driven by two men.
"Stop!"
cried one. "There's a policeman. Let's ask him."
The horse
was instantly pulled up, a few yards beyond the dark
place where I stood.
"Policeman!"
cried the first speaker. "Have you seen a woman pass
this way?"
"What sort
of woman, sir?"
"A woman in
a lavender-coloured gown——"
"No, no,"
interposed the second man. "The clothes we gave her
were found on her bed. She must have gone away in
the clothes she wore when she came to us. In white,
policeman. A woman in white."
"I haven't
seen her, sir."
"If you or
any of your men meet with the woman, stop her, and
send her in careful keeping to that address. I'll
pay all expenses, and a fair reward into the
bargain."
The
policeman looked at the card that was handed down to
him.
"Why are we
to stop her, sir? What has she done?"
"Done! She
has escaped from my Asylum. Don't forget; a woman in
white. Drive on."
V
"She has
escaped from my Asylum!"
I cannot say
with truth that the terrible inference which those
words suggested flashed upon me like a new
revelation. Some of the strange questions put to me
by the woman in white, after my ill-considered
promise to leave her free to act as she pleased, had
suggested the conclusion either that she was
naturally flighty and unsettled, or that some recent
shock of terror had disturbed the balance of her
faculties. But the idea of absolute insanity which
we all associate with the very name of an Asylum,
had, I can honestly declare, never occurred to me,
in connection with her. I had seen nothing, in her
language or her actions, to justify it at the time;
and even with the new light thrown on her by the
words which the stranger had addressed to the
policeman, I could see nothing to justify it now.
What had I
done? Assisted the victim of the most horrible of
all false imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on
the wide world of London an unfortunate creature,
whose actions it was my duty, and every man's duty,
mercifully to control? I turned sick at heart when
the question occurred to me, and when I felt
self-reproachfully that it was asked too late.
In the
disturbed state of my mind, it was useless to think
of going to bed, when I at last got back to my
chambers in Clement's Inn. Before many hours elapsed
it would be necessary to start on my journey to
Cumberland. I sat down and tried, first to sketch,
then to read—but the woman in white got between me
and my pencil, between me and my book. Had the
forlorn creature come to any harm? That was my first
thought, though I shrank selfishly from confronting
it. Other thoughts followed, on which it was less
harrowing to dwell. Where had she stopped the cab?
What had become of her now? Had she been traced and
captured by the men in the chaise? Or was she still
capable of controlling her own actions; and were we
two following our widely parted roads towards one
point in the mysterious future, at which we were to
meet once more?
It was a
relief when the hour came to lock my door, to bid
farewell to London pursuits, London pupils, and
London friends, and to be in movement again towards
new interests and a new life. Even the bustle and
confusion at the railway terminus, so wearisome and
bewildering at other times, roused me and did me
good.
My travelling instructions
directed me to go to Carlisle, and then to diverge
by a branch railway which ran in the direction of
the coast. As a misfortune to begin with, our engine
broke down between Lancaster and Carlisle. The delay
occasioned by this accident caused me to be too late
for the branch train, by which I was to have gone on
immediately. I had to wait some hours; and when a
later train finally deposited me at the nearest
station to Limmeridge House, it was past ten, and
the night was so dark that I could hardly see my way
to the pony-chaise which Mr. Fairlie had ordered to
be in waiting for me.
The driver
was evidently discomposed by the lateness of my
arrival. He was in that state of highly respectful
sulkiness which is peculiar to English servants. We
drove away slowly through the darkness in perfect
silence. The roads were bad, and the dense obscurity
of the night increased the difficulty of getting
over the ground quickly. It was, by my watch, nearly
an hour and a half from the time of our leaving the
station before I heard the sound of the sea in the
distance, and the crunch of our wheels on a smooth
gravel drive. We had passed one gate before entering
the drive, and we passed another before we drew up
at the house. I was received by a solemn man-servant
out of livery, was informed that the family had
retired for the night, and was then led into a large
and lofty room where my supper was awaiting me, in a
forlorn manner, at one extremity of a lonesome
mahogany wilderness of dining-table.
I was too
tired and out of spirits to eat or drink much,
especially with the solemn servant waiting on me as
elaborately as if a small dinner party had arrived
at the house instead of a solitary man. In a quarter
of an hour I was ready to be taken up to my
bedchamber. The solemn servant conducted me into a
prettily furnished room—said, "Breakfast at nine
o'clock, sir"—looked all round him to see that
everything was in its proper place, and noiselessly
withdrew.
"What shall
I see in my dreams to-night?" I thought to myself,
as I put out the candle; "the woman in white? or the
unknown inhabitants of this Cumberland mansion?" It
was a strange sensation to be sleeping in the house,
like a friend of the family, and yet not to know one
of the inmates, even by sight!
VI
When I rose
the next morning and drew up my blind, the sea
opened before me joyously under the broad August
sunlight, and the distant coast of Scotland fringed
the horizon with its lines of melting blue.
The view was
such a surprise, and such a change to me, after my
weary London experience of brick and mortar
landscape, that I seemed to burst into a new life
and a new set of thoughts the moment I looked at it.
A confused sensation of having suddenly lost my
familiarity with the past, without acquiring any
additional clearness of idea in reference to the
present or the future, took possession of my mind.
Circumstances that were but a few days old faded
back in my memory, as if they had happened months
and months since. Pesca's quaint announcement of the
means by which he had procured me my present
employment; the farewell evening I had passed with
my mother and sister; even my mysterious adventure
on the way home from Hampstead—had all become like
events which might have occurred at some former
epoch of my existence. Although the woman in white
was still in my mind, the image of her seemed to
have grown dull and faint already.
A little
before nine o'clock, I descended to the ground-floor
of the house. The solemn man-servant of the night
before met me wandering among the passages, and
compassionately showed me the way to the
breakfast-room.
My first
glance round me, as the man opened the door,
disclosed a well-furnished breakfast-table, standing
in the middle of a long room, with many windows in
it. I looked from the table to the window farthest
from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her
back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested
on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form,
and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her
figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and
well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her
shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist,
perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its
natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it
was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays.
She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I
allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few
moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me,
as the least embarrassing means of attracting her
attention. She turned towards me immediately. The
easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and
body as soon as she began to advance from the far
end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation
to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I
said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward
a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young.
She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a
sense of surprise which words fail me to express),
The lady is ugly!
Never was
the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err,
more flatly contradicted—never was the fair promise
of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly
belied by the face and head that crowned it. The
lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark
down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She
had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw;
prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick,
coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her
forehead. Her expression—bright, frank, and
intelligent—appeared, while she was silent, to be
altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of
gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty
of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete.
To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a
sculptor would have longed to model—to be charmed by
the modest graces of action through which the
symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they
moved, and then to be almost repelled by the
masculine form and masculine look of the features in
which the perfectly shaped figure ended—was to feel
a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort
familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet
cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of
a dream.
"Mr.
Hartright?" said the lady interrogatively, her dark
face lighting up with a smile, and softening and
growing womanly the moment she began to speak. "We
resigned all hope of you last night, and went to bed
as usual. Accept my apologies for our apparent want
of attention; and allow me to introduce myself as
one of your pupils. Shall we shake hands? I suppose
we must come to it sooner or later—and why not
sooner?"
These odd
words of welcome were spoken in a clear, ringing,
pleasant voice. The offered hand—rather large, but
beautifully formed—was given to me with the easy,
unaffected self-reliance of a highly-bred woman. We
sat down together at the breakfast-table in as
cordial and customary a manner as if we had known
each other for years, and had met at Limmeridge
House to talk over old times by previous
appointment.
"I hope you
come here good-humouredly determined to make the
best of your position," continued the lady. "You
will have to begin this morning by putting up with
no other company at breakfast than mine. My sister
is in her own room, nursing that essentially
feminine malady, a slight headache; and her old
governess, Mrs. Vesey, is charitably attending on
her with restorative tea. My uncle, Mr. Fairlie,
never joins us at any of our meals: he is an
invalid, and keeps bachelor state in his own
apartments. There is nobody else in the house but
me. Two young ladies have been staying here, but
they went away yesterday, in despair; and no wonder.
All through their visit (in consequence of Mr.
Fairlie's invalid condition) we produced no such
convenience in the house as a flirtable, danceable,
small-talkable creature of the male sex; and the
consequence was, we did nothing but quarrel,
especially at dinner-time. How can you expect four
women to dine together alone every day, and not
quarrel? We are such fools, we can't entertain each
other at table. You see I don't think much of my own
sex, Mr. Hartright—which will you have, tea or
coffee?—no woman does think much of her own sex,
although few of them confess it as freely as I do.
Dear me, you look puzzled. Why? Are you wondering
what you will have for breakfast? or are you
surprised at my careless way of talking? In the
first case, I advise you, as a friend, to have
nothing to do with that cold ham at your elbow, and
to wait till the omelette comes in. In the second
case, I will give you some tea to compose your
spirits, and do all a woman can (which is very
little, by-the-bye) to hold my tongue."
She handed
me my cup of tea, laughing gaily. Her light flow of
talk, and her lively familiarity of manner with a
total stranger, were accompanied by an unaffected
naturalness and an easy inborn confidence in herself
and her position, which would have secured her the
respect of the most audacious man breathing. While
it was impossible to be formal and reserved in her
company, it was more than impossible to take the
faintest vestige of a liberty with her, even in
thought. I felt this instinctively, even while I
caught the infection of her own bright gaiety of
spirits—even while I did my best to answer her in
her own frank, lively way.
"Yes, yes,"
she said, when I had suggested the only explanation
I could offer, to account for my perplexed looks, "I
understand. You are such a perfect stranger in the
house, that you are puzzled by my familiar
references to the worthy inhabitants. Natural
enough: I ought to have thought of it before. At any
rate, I can set it right now. Suppose I begin with
myself, so as to get done with that part of the
subject as soon as possible? My name is Marian
Halcombe; and I am as inaccurate as women usually
are, in calling Mr. Fairlie my uncle, and Miss
Fairlie my sister. My mother was twice married: the
first time to Mr. Halcombe, my father; the second
time to Mr. Fairlie, my half-sister's father. Except
that we are both orphans, we are in every respect as
unlike each other as possible. My father was a poor
man, and Miss Fairlie's father was a rich man. I
have got nothing, and she has a fortune. I am dark
and ugly, and she is fair and pretty. Everybody
thinks me crabbed and odd (with perfect justice);
and everybody thinks her sweet-tempered and charming
(with more justice still). In short, she is an
angel; and I am—— Try some of that marmalade, Mr.
Hartright, and finish the sentence, in the name of
female propriety, for yourself. What am I to tell
you about Mr. Fairlie? Upon my honour, I hardly
know. He is sure to send for you after breakfast,
and you can study him for yourself. In the meantime,
I may inform you, first, that he is the late Mr.
Fairlie's younger brother; secondly, that he is a
single man; and thirdly, that he is Miss Fairlie's
guardian. I won't live without her, and she can't
live without me; and that is how I come to be at
Limmeridge House. My sister and I are honestly fond
of each other; which, you will say, is perfectly
unaccountable, under the circumstances, and I quite
agree with you—but so it is. You must please both of
us, Mr. Hartright, or please neither of us: and,
what is still more trying, you will be thrown
entirely upon our society. Mrs. Vesey is an
excellent person, who possesses all the cardinal
virtues, and counts for nothing; and Mr. Fairlie is
too great an invalid to be a companion for anybody.
I don't know what is the matter with him, and the
doctors don't know what is the matter with him, and
he doesn't know himself what is the matter with him.
We all say it's on the nerves, and we none of us
know what we mean when we say it. However, I advise
you to humour his little peculiarities, when you see
him to-day. Admire his collection of coins, prints,
and water-colour drawings, and you will win his
heart. Upon my word, if you can be contented with a
quiet country life, I don't see why you should not
get on very well here. From breakfast to lunch, Mr.
Fairlie's drawings will occupy you. After lunch,
Miss Fairlie and I shoulder our sketch-books, and go
out to misrepresent Nature, under your directions.
Drawing is her favourite whim, mind, not mine. Women
can't draw—their minds are too flighty, and their
eyes are too inattentive. No matter—my sister likes
it; so I waste paint and spoil paper, for her sake,
as composedly as any woman in England. As for the
evenings, I think we can help you through them. Miss
Fairlie plays delightfully. For my own poor part, I
don't know one note of music from the other; but I
can match you at chess, backgammon, ecarte, and
(with the inevitable female drawbacks) even at
billiards as well. What do you think of the
programme? Can you reconcile yourself to our quiet,
regular life? or do you mean to be restless, and
secretly thirst for change and adventure, in the
humdrum atmosphere of Limmeridge House?"
She had run
on thus far, in her gracefully bantering way, with
no other interruptions on my part than the
unimportant replies which politeness required of me.
The turn of the expression, however, in her last
question, or rather the one chance word,
"adventure," lightly as it fell from her lips,
recalled my thoughts to my meeting with the woman in
white, and urged me to discover the connection which
the stranger's own reference to Mrs. Fairlie
informed me must once have existed between the
nameless fugitive from the Asylum, and the former
mistress of Limmeridge House.
"Even if I
were the most restless of mankind," I said, "I
should be in no danger of thirsting after adventures
for some time to come. The very night before I
arrived at this house, I met with an adventure; and
the wonder and excitement of it, I can assure you,
Miss Halcombe, will last me for the whole term of my
stay in Cumberland, if not for a much longer
period."
"You don't
say so, Mr. Hartright! May I hear it?"
"You have a
claim to hear it. The chief person in the adventure
was a total stranger to me, and may perhaps be a
total stranger to you; but she certainly mentioned
the name of the late Mrs. Fairlie in terms of the
sincerest gratitude and regard."
"Mentioned
my mother's name! You interest me indescribably.
Pray go on."
I at once
related the circumstances under which I had met the
woman in white, exactly as they had occurred; and I
repeated what she had said to me about Mrs. Fairlie
and Limmeridge House, word for word.
Miss
Halcombe's bright resolute eyes looked eagerly into
mine, from the beginning of the narrative to the
end. Her face expressed vivid interest and
astonishment, but nothing more. She was evidently as
far from knowing of any clue to the mystery as I was
myself.
"Are you
quite sure of those words referring to my mother?"
she asked.
"Quite
sure," I replied. "Whoever she may be, the woman was
once at school in the village of Limmeridge, was
treated with especial kindness by Mrs. Fairlie, and,
in grateful remembrance of that kindness, feels an
affectionate interest in all surviving members of
the family. She knew that Mrs. Fairlie and her
husband were both dead; and she spoke of Miss
Fairlie as if they had known each other when they
were children."
"You said, I
think, that she denied belonging to this place?"
"Yes, she
told me she came from Hampshire."
"And you
entirely failed to find out her name?"
"Entirely."
"Very
strange. I think you were quite justified, Mr.
Hartright, in giving the poor creature her liberty,
for she seems to have done nothing in your presence
to show herself unfit to enjoy it. But I wish you
had been a little more resolute about finding out
her name. We must really clear up this mystery, in
some way. You had better not speak of it yet to Mr.
Fairlie, or to my sister. They are both of them, I
am certain, quite as ignorant of who the woman is,
and of what her past history in connection with us
can be, as I am myself. But they are also, in widely
different ways, rather nervous and sensitive; and
you would only fidget one and alarm the other to no
purpose. As for myself, I am all aflame with
curiosity, and I devote my whole energies to the
business of discovery from this moment. When my
mother came here, after her second marriage, she
certainly established the village school just as it
exists at the present time. But the old teachers are
all dead, or gone elsewhere; and no enlightenment is
to be hoped for from that quarter. The only other
alternative I can think of——"
At this
point we were interrupted by the entrance of the
servant, with a message from Mr. Fairlie, intimating
that he would be glad to see me, as soon as I had
done breakfast.
"Wait in the
hall," said Miss Halcombe, answering the servant for
me, in her quick, ready way. "Mr. Hartright will
come out directly. I was about to say," she went on,
addressing me again, "that my sister and I have a
large collection of my mother's letters, addressed
to my father and to hers. In the absence of any
other means of getting information, I will pass the
morning in looking over my mother's correspondence
with Mr. Fairlie. He was fond of London, and was
constantly away from his country home; and she was
accustomed, at such times, to write and report to
him how things went on at Limmeridge. Her letters
are full of references to the school in which she
took so strong an interest; and I think it more than
likely that I may have discovered something when we
meet again. The luncheon hour is two, Mr. Hartright.
I shall have the pleasure of introducing you to my
sister by that time, and we will occupy the
afternoon in driving round the neighbourhood and
showing you all our pet points of view. Till two
o'clock, then, farewell."
She nodded
to me with the lively grace, the delightful
refinement of familiarity, which characterised all
that she did and all that she said; and disappeared
by a door at the lower end of the room. As soon as
she had left me, I turned my steps towards the hall,
and followed the servant, on my way, for the first
time, to the presence of Mr. Fairlie.
VII
My conductor
led me upstairs into a passage which took us back to
the bedchamber in which I had slept during the past
night; and opening the door next to it, begged me to
look in.
"I have my
master's orders to show you your own sitting-room,
sir," said the man, "and to inquire if you approve
of the situation and the light."
I must have
been hard to please, indeed, if I had not approved
of the room, and of everything about it. The
bow-window looked out on the same lovely view which
I had admired, in the morning, from my bedroom. The
furniture was the perfection of luxury and beauty;
the table in the centre was bright with gaily bound
books, elegant conveniences for writing, and
beautiful flowers; the second table, near the
window, was covered with all the necessary materials
for mounting water-colour drawings, and had a little
easel attached to it, which I could expand or fold
up at will; the walls were hung with gaily tinted
chintz; and the floor was spread with Indian matting
in maize-colour and red. It was the prettiest and
most luxurious little sitting-room I had ever seen;
and I admired it with the warmest enthusiasm.
The solemn
servant was far too highly trained to betray the
slightest satisfaction. He bowed with icy deference
when my terms of eulogy were all exhausted, and
silently opened the door for me to go out into the
passage again.
We turned a
corner, and entered a long second passage, ascended
a short flight of stairs at the end, crossed a small
circular upper hall, and stopped in front of a door
covered with dark baize. The servant opened this
door, and led me on a few yards to a second; opened
that also, and disclosed two curtains of pale
sea-green silk hanging before us; raised one of them
noiselessly; softly uttered the words, "Mr.
Hartright," and left me.
I found
myself in a large, lofty room, with a magnificent
carved ceiling, and with a carpet over the floor, so
thick and soft that it felt like piles of velvet
under my feet. One side of the room was occupied by
a long book-case of some rare inlaid wood that was
quite new to me. It was not more than six feet high,
and the top was adorned with statuettes in marble,
ranged at regular distances one from the other. On
the opposite side stood two antique cabinets; and
between them, and above them, hung a picture of the
Virgin and Child, protected by glass, and bearing
Raphael's name on the gilt tablet at the bottom of
the frame. On my right hand and on my left, as I
stood inside the door, were chiffoniers and little
stands in buhl and marquetterie, loaded with figures
in Dresden china, with rare vases, ivory ornaments,
and toys and curiosities that sparkled at all points
with gold, silver, and precious stones. At the lower
end of the room, opposite to me, the windows were
concealed and the sunlight was tempered by large
blinds of the same pale sea-green colour as the
curtains over the door. The light thus produced was
deliciously soft, mysterious, and subdued; it fell
equally upon all the objects in the room; it helped
to intensify the deep silence, and the air of
profound seclusion that possessed the place; and it
surrounded, with an appropriate halo of repose, the
solitary figure of the master of the house, leaning
back, listlessly composed, in a large easy-chair,
with a reading-easel fastened on one of its arms,
and a little table on the other.
If a man's
personal appearance, when he is out of his
dressing-room, and when he has passed forty, can be
accepted as a safe guide to his time of life—which
is more than doubtful—Mr. Fairlie's age, when I saw
him, might have been reasonably computed at over
fifty and under sixty years. His beardless face was
thin, worn, and transparently pale, but not
wrinkled; his nose was high and hooked; his eyes
were of a dim greyish blue, large, prominent, and
rather red round the rims of the eyelids; his hair
was scanty, soft to look at, and of that light sandy
colour which is the last to disclose its own changes
towards grey. He was dressed in a dark frock-coat,
of some substance much thinner than cloth, and in
waistcoat and trousers of spotless white. His feet
were effeminately small, and were clad in
buff-coloured silk stockings, and little womanish
bronze-leather slippers. Two rings adorned his white
delicate hands, the value of which even my
inexperienced observation detected to be all but
priceless. Upon the whole, he had a frail,
languidly-fretful, over-refined look—something
singularly and unpleasantly delicate in its
association with a man, and, at the same time,
something which could by no possibility have looked
natural and appropriate if it had been transferred
to the personal appearance of a woman. My morning's
experience of Miss Halcombe had predisposed me to be
pleased with everybody in the house; but my
sympathies shut themselves up resolutely at the
first sight of Mr. Fairlie.
On
approaching nearer to him, I discovered that he was
not so entirely without occupation as I had at first
supposed. Placed amid the other rare and beautiful
objects on a large round table near him, was a dwarf
cabinet in ebony and silver, containing coins of all
shapes and sizes, set out in little drawers lined
with dark purple velvet. One of these drawers lay on
the small table attached to his chair; and near it
were some tiny jeweller's brushes, a wash-leather
"stump," and a little bottle of liquid, all waiting
to be used in various ways for the removal of any
accidental impurities which might be discovered on
the coins. His frail white fingers were listlessly
toying with something which looked, to my
uninstructed eyes, like a dirty pewter medal with
ragged edges, when I advanced within a respectful
distance of his chair, and stopped to make my bow.
"So glad to
possess you at Limmeridge, Mr. Hartright," he said
in a querulous, croaking voice, which combined, in
anything but an agreeable manner, a discordantly
high tone with a drowsily languid utterance. "Pray
sit down. And don't trouble yourself to move the
chair, please. In the wretched state of my nerves,
movement of any kind is exquisitely painful to me.
Have you seen your studio? Will it do?"
"I have just
come from seeing the room, Mr. Fairlie; and I assure
you——"
He stopped
me in the middle of the sentence, by closing his
eyes, and holding up one of his white hands
imploringly. I paused in astonishment; and the
croaking voice honoured me with this explanation—
"Pray excuse
me. But could you contrive to speak in a lower key?
In the wretched state of my nerves, loud sound of
any kind is indescribable torture to me. You will
pardon an invalid? I only say to you what the
lamentable state of my health obliges me to say to
everybody. Yes. And you really like the room?"
"I could
wish for nothing prettier and nothing more
comfortable," I answered, dropping my voice, and
beginning to discover already that Mr. Fairlie's
selfish affectation and Mr. Fairlie's wretched
nerves meant one and the same thing.
"So glad.
You will find your position here, Mr. Hartright,
properly recognised. There is none of the horrid
English barbarity of feeling about the social
position of an artist in this house. So much of my
early life has been passed abroad, that I have quite
cast my insular skin in that respect. I wish I could
say the same of the gentry—detestable word, but I
suppose I must use it—of the gentry in the
neighbourhood. They are sad Goths in Art, Mr.
Hartright. People, I do assure you, who would have
opened their eyes in astonishment, if they had seen
Charles the Fifth pick up Titian's brush for him. Do
you mind putting this tray of coins back in the
cabinet, and giving me the next one to it? In the
wretched state of my nerves, exertion of any kind is
unspeakably disagreeable to me. Yes. Thank you."
As a
practical commentary on the liberal social theory
which he had just favoured me by illustrating, Mr.
Fairlie's cool request rather amused me. I put back
one drawer and gave him the other, with all possible
politeness. He began trifling with the new set of
coins and the little brushes immediately; languidly
looking at them and admiring them all the time he
was speaking to me.
"A thousand
thanks and a thousand excuses. Do you like coins?
Yes. So glad we have another taste in common besides
our taste for Art. Now, about the pecuniary
arrangements between us—do tell me—are they
satisfactory?"
"Most
satisfactory, Mr. Fairlie."
"So glad.
And—what next? Ah! I remember. Yes. In reference to
the consideration which you are good enough to
accept for giving me the benefit of your
accomplishments in art, my steward will wait on you
at the end of the first week, to ascertain your
wishes. And—what next? Curious, is it not? I had a
great deal more to say: and I appear to have quite
forgotten it. Do you mind touching the bell? In that
corner. Yes. Thank you."
I rang; and
a new servant noiselessly made his appearance—a
foreigner, with a set smile and perfectly brushed
hair—a valet every inch of him.
"Louis,"
said Mr. Fairlie, dreamily dusting the tips of his
fingers with one of the tiny brushes for the coins,
"I made some entries in my tablettes this morning.
Find my tablettes. A thousand pardons, Mr.
Hartright, I'm afraid I bore you."
As he
wearily closed his eyes again, before I could
answer, and as he did most assuredly bore me, I sat
silent, and looked up at the Madonna and Child by
Raphael. In the meantime, the valet left the room,
and returned shortly with a little ivory book. Mr.
Fairlie, after first relieving himself by a gentle
sigh, let the book drop open with one hand, and held
up the tiny brush with the other, as a sign to the
servant to wait for further orders.
"Yes. Just
so!" said Mr. Fairlie, consulting the tablettes.
"Louis, take down that portfolio." He pointed, as he
spoke, to several portfolios placed near the window,
on mahogany stands. "No. Not the one with the green
back—that contains my Rembrandt etchings, Mr.
Hartright. Do you like etchings? Yes? So glad we
have another taste in common. The portfolio with the
red back, Louis. Don't drop it! You have no idea of
the tortures I should suffer, Mr. Hartright, if
Louis dropped that portfolio. Is it safe on the
chair? Do YOU think it safe, Mr. Hartright? Yes? So
glad. Will you oblige me by looking at the drawings,
if you really think they are quite safe. Louis, go
away. What an ass you are. Don't you see me holding
the tablettes? Do you suppose I want to hold them?
Then why not relieve me of the tablettes without
being told? A thousand pardons, Mr. Hartright;
servants are such asses, are they not? Do tell
me—what do you think of the drawings? They have come
from a sale in a shocking state—I thought they smelt
of horrid dealers' and brokers' fingers when I
looked at them last. CAN you undertake them?"
Although my
nerves were not delicate enough to detect the odour
of plebeian fingers which had offended Mr. Fairlie's
nostrils, my taste was sufficiently educated to
enable me to appreciate the value of the drawings,
while I turned them over. They were, for the most
part, really fine specimens of English water-colour
art; and they had deserved much better treatment at
the hands of their former possessor than they
appeared to have received.
"The
drawings," I answered, "require careful straining
and mounting; and, in my opinion, they are well
worth——"
"I beg your
pardon," interposed Mr. Fairlie. "Do you mind my
closing my eyes while you speak? Even this light is
too much for them. Yes?"
"I was about
to say that the drawings are well worth all the time
and trouble——"
Mr. Fairlie
suddenly opened his eyes again, and rolled them with
an expression of helpless alarm in the direction of
the window.
"I entreat
you to excuse me, Mr. Hartright," he said in a
feeble flutter. "But surely I hear some horrid
children in the garden—my private garden—below?"
"I can't
say, Mr. Fairlie. I heard nothing myself."
"Oblige
me—you have been so very good in humouring my poor
nerves—oblige me by lifting up a corner of the
blind. Don't let the sun in on me, Mr. Hartright!
Have you got the blind up? Yes? Then will you be so
very kind as to look into the garden and make quite
sure?"
I complied
with this new request. The garden was carefully
walled in, all round. Not a human creature, large or
small, appeared in any part of the sacred seclusion.
I reported that gratifying fact to Mr. Fairlie.
"A thousand
thanks. My fancy, I suppose. There are no children,
thank Heaven, in the house; but the servants
(persons born without nerves) will encourage the
children from the village. Such brats—oh, dear me,
such brats! Shall I confess it, Mr. Hartright?—I
sadly want a reform in the construction of children.
Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines
for the production of incessant noise. Surely our
delightful Raffaello's conception is infinitely
preferable?"
He pointed
to the picture of the Madonna, the upper part of
which represented the conventional cherubs of
Italian Art, celestially provided with sitting
accommodation for their chins, on balloons of
buff-coloured cloud.
"Quite a
model family!" said Mr. Fairlie, leering at the
cherubs. "Such nice round faces, and such nice soft
wings, and—nothing else. No dirty little legs to run
about on, and no noisy little lungs to scream with.
How immeasurably superior to the existing
construction! I will close my eyes again, if you
will allow me. And you really can manage the
drawings? So glad. Is there anything else to settle?
if there is, I think I have forgotten it. Shall we
ring for Louis again?"
Being, by
this time, quite as anxious, on my side, as Mr.
Fairlie evidently was on his, to bring the interview
to a speedy conclusion, I thought I would try to
render the summoning of the servant unnecessary, by
offering the requisite suggestion on my own
responsibility.
"The only
point, Mr. Fairlie, that remains to be discussed," I
said, "refers, I think, to the instruction in
sketching which I am engaged to communicate to the
two young ladies."
"Ah! just
so," said Mr. Fairlie. "I wish I felt strong enough
to go into that part of the arrangement—but I don't.
The ladies who profit by your kind services, Mr.
Hartright, must settle, and decide, and so on, for
themselves. My niece is fond of your charming art.
She knows just enough about it to be conscious of
her own sad defects. Please take pains with her.
Yes. Is there anything else? No. We quite understand
each other—don't we? I have no right to detain you
any longer from your delightful pursuit—have I? So
pleasant to have settled everything—such a sensible
relief to have done business. Do you mind ringing
for Louis to carry the portfolio to your own room?"
"I will
carry it there myself, Mr. Fairlie, if you will
allow me."
"Will you
really? Are you strong enough? How nice to be so
strong! Are you sure you won't drop it? So glad to
possess you at Limmeridge, Mr. Hartright. I am such
a sufferer that I hardly dare hope to enjoy much of
your society. Would you mind taking great pains not
to let the doors bang, and not to drop the
portfolio? Thank you. Gently with the curtains,
please—the slightest noise from them goes through me
like a knife. Yes. GOOD morning!"
When the
sea-green curtains were closed, and when the two
baize doors were shut behind me, I stopped for a
moment in the little circular hall beyond, and drew
a long, luxurious breath of relief. It was like
coming to the surface of the water after deep
diving, to find myself once more on the outside of
Mr. Fairlie's room.
As soon as I
was comfortably established for the morning in my
pretty little studio, the first resolution at which
I arrived was to turn my steps no more in the
direction of the apartments occupied by the master
of the house, except in the very improbable event of
his honouring me with a special invitation to pay
him another visit. Having settled this satisfactory
plan of future conduct in reference to Mr. Fairlie,
I soon recovered the serenity of temper of which my
employer's haughty familiarity and impudent
politeness had, for the moment, deprived me. The
remaining hours of the morning passed away
pleasantly enough, in looking over the drawings,
arranging them in sets, trimming their ragged edges,
and accomplishing the other necessary preparations
in anticipation of the business of mounting them. I
ought, perhaps, to have made more progress than
this; but, as the luncheon-time drew near, I grew
restless and unsettled, and felt unable to fix my
attention on work, even though that work was only of
the humble manual kind.
At two
o'clock I descended again to the breakfast-room, a
little anxiously. Expectations of some interest were
connected with my approaching reappearance in that
part of the house. My introduction to Miss Fairlie
was now close at hand; and, if Miss Halcombe's
search through her mother's letters had produced the
result which she anticipated, the time had come for
clearing up the mystery of the woman in white.
VIII
When I
entered the room, I found Miss Halcombe and an
elderly lady seated at the luncheon-table.
The elderly
lady, when I was presented to her, proved to be Miss
Fairlie's former governess, Mrs. Vesey, who had been
briefly described to me by my lively companion at
the breakfast-table, as possessed of "all the
cardinal virtues, and counting for nothing." I can
do little more than offer my humble testimony to the
truthfulness of Miss Halcombe's sketch of the old
lady's character. Mrs. Vesey looked the
personification of human composure and female
amiability. A calm enjoyment of a calm existence
beamed in drowsy smiles on her plump, placid face.
Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter
through life. Mrs. Vesey SAT through life. Sat in
the house, early and late; sat in the garden; sat in
unexpected window-seats in passages; sat (on a
camp-stool) when her friends tried to take her out
walking; sat before she looked at anything, before
she talked of anything, before she answered Yes, or
No, to the commonest question—always with the same
serene smile on her lips, the same
vacantly-attentive turn of the head, the same
snugly-comfortable position of her hands and arms,
under every possible change of domestic
circumstances. A mild, a compliant, an unutterably
tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any
chance suggested the idea that she had been actually
alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so
much to do in this world, and is engaged in
generating such a vast variety of co-existent
productions, that she must surely be now and then
too flurried and confused to distinguish between the
different processes that she is carrying on at the
same time. Starting from this point of view, it will
always remain my private persuasion that Nature was
absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was
born, and that the good lady suffered the
consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the
mind of the Mother of us all.
"Now, Mrs.
Vesey," said Miss Halcombe, looking brighter,
sharper, and readier than ever, by contrast with the
undemonstrative old lady at her side, "what will you
have? A cutlet?"
Mrs. Vesey
crossed her dimpled hands on the edge of the table,
smiled placidly, and said, "Yes, dear."
"What is
that opposite Mr. Hartright? Boiled chicken, is it
not? I thought you liked boiled chicken better than
cutlet, Mrs. Vesey?"
Mrs. Vesey
took her dimpled hands off the edge of the table and
crossed them on her lap instead; nodded
contemplatively at the boiled chicken, and said,
"Yes, dear."
"Well, but
which will you have, to-day? Shall Mr. Hartright
give you some chicken? or shall I give you some
cutlet?"
Mrs. Vesey
put one of her dimpled hands back again on the edge
of the table; hesitated drowsily, and said, "Which
you please, dear."
"Mercy on
me! it's a question for your taste, my good lady,
not for mine. Suppose you have a little of both? and
suppose you begin with the chicken, because Mr.
Hartright looks devoured by anxiety to carve for
you."
Mrs. Vesey
put the other dimpled hand back on the edge of the
table; brightened dimly one moment; went out again
the next; bowed obediently, and said, "If you
please, sir."
Surely a
mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and
harmless old lady! But enough, perhaps, for the
present, of Mrs. Vesey.
All this time, there were
no signs of Miss Fairlie. We finished our luncheon;
and still she never appeared. Miss Halcombe, whose
quick eye nothing escaped, noticed the looks that I
cast, from time to time, in the direction of the
door.
"I
understand you, Mr. Hartright," she said; "you are
wondering what has become of your other pupil. She
has been downstairs, and has got over her headache;
but has not sufficiently recovered her appetite to
join us at lunch. If you will put yourself under my
charge, I think I can undertake to find her
somewhere in the garden."
She took up
a parasol lying on a chair near her, and led the way
out, by a long window at the bottom of the room,
which opened on to the lawn. It is almost
unnecessary to say that we left Mrs. Vesey still
seated at the table, with her dimpled hands still
crossed on the edge of it; apparently settled in
that position for the rest of the afternoon.
As we
crossed the lawn, Miss Halcombe looked at me
significantly, and shook her head.
"That
mysterious adventure of yours," she said, "still
remains involved in its own appropriate midnight
darkness. I have been all the morning looking over
my mother's letters, and I have made no discoveries
yet. However, don't despair, Mr. Hartright. This is
a matter of curiosity; and you have got a woman for
your ally. Under such conditions success is certain,
sooner or later. The letters are not exhausted. I
have three packets still left, and you may
confidently rely on my spending the whole evening
over them."
Here, then,
was one of my anticipations of the morning still
unfulfilled. I began to wonder, next, whether my
introduction to Miss Fairlie would disappoint the
expectations that I had been forming of her since
breakfast-time.
"And how did
you get on with Mr. Fairlie?" inquired Miss
Halcombe, as we left the lawn and turned into a
shrubbery. "Was he particularly nervous this
morning? Never mind considering about your answer,
Mr. Hartright. The mere fact of your being obliged
to consider is enough for me. I see in your face
that he WAS particularly nervous; and, as I am
amiably unwilling to throw you into the same
condition, I ask no more."
We turned
off into a winding path while she was speaking, and
approached a pretty summer-house, built of wood, in
the form of a miniature Swiss chalet. The one room
of the summer-house, as we ascended the steps of the
door, was occupied by a young lady. She was standing
near a rustic table, looking out at the inland view
of moor and hill presented by a gap in the trees,
and absently turning over the leaves of a little
sketch-book that lay at her side. This was Miss
Fairlie.
How can I
describe her? How can I separate her from my own
sensations, and from all that has happened in the
later time? How can I see her again as she looked
when my eyes first rested on her—as she should look,
now, to the eyes that are about to see her in these
pages?
The
water-colour drawing that I made of Laura Fairlie,
at an after period, in the place and attitude in
which I first saw her, lies on my desk while I
write. I look at it, and there dawns upon me
brightly, from the dark greenish-brown background of
the summer-house, a light, youthful figure, clothed
in a simple muslin dress, the pattern of it formed
by broad alternate stripes of delicate blue and
white. A scarf of the same material sits crisply and
closely round her shoulders, and a little straw hat
of the natural colour, plainly and sparingly trimmed
with ribbon to match the gown, covers her head, and
throws its soft pearly shadow over the upper part of
her face. Her hair is of so faint and pale a
brown—not flaxen, and yet almost as light; not
golden, and yet almost as glossy—that it nearly
melts, here and there, into the shadow of the hat.
It is plainly parted and drawn back over her ears,
and the line of it ripples naturally as it crosses
her forehead. The eyebrows are rather darker than
the hair; and the eyes are of that soft, limpid,
turquoise blue, so often sung by the poets, so
seldom seen in real life. Lovely eyes in colour,
lovely eyes in form—large and tender and quietly
thoughtful—but beautiful above all things in the
clear truthfulness of look that dwells in their
inmost depths, and shines through all their changes
of expression with the light of a purer and a better
world. The charm—most gently and yet most distinctly
expressed—which they shed over the whole face, so
covers and transforms its little natural human
blemishes elsewhere, that it is difficult to
estimate the relative merits and defects of the
other features. It is hard to see that the lower
part of the face is too delicately refined away
towards the chin to be in full and fair proportion
with the upper part; that the nose, in escaping the
aquiline bend (always hard and cruel in a woman, no
matter how abstractedly perfect it may be), has
erred a little in the other extreme, and has missed
the ideal straightness of line; and that the sweet,
sensitive lips are subject to a slight nervous
contraction, when she smiles, which draws them
upward a little at one corner, towards the cheek. It
might be possible to note these blemishes in another
woman's face but it is not easy to dwell on them in
hers, so subtly are they connected with all that is
individual and characteristic in her expression, and
so closely does the expression depend for its full
play and life, in every other feature, on the moving
impulse of the eyes.
Does my poor
portrait of her, my fond, patient labour of long and
happy days, show me these things? Ah, how few of
them are in the dim mechanical drawing, and how many
in the mind with which I regard it! A fair, delicate
girl, in a pretty light dress, trifling with the
leaves of a sketch-book, while she looks up from it
with truthful, innocent blue eyes—that is all the
drawing can say; all, perhaps, that even the deeper
reach of thought and pen can say in their language,
either. The woman who first gives life, light, and
form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a
void in our spiritual nature that has remained
unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie
too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts,
are touched, at such times, by other charms than
those which the senses feel and which the resources
of expression can realise. The mystery which
underlies the beauty of women is never raised above
the reach of all expression until it has claimed
kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.
Then, and then only, has it passed beyond the narrow
region on which light falls, in this world, from the
pencil and the pen.
Think of her
as you thought of the first woman who quickened the
pulses within you that the rest of her sex had no
art to stir. Let the kind, candid blue eyes meet
yours, as they met mine, with the one matchless look
which we both remember so well. Let her voice speak
the music that you once loved best, attuned as
sweetly to your ear as to mine. Let her footstep, as
she comes and goes, in these pages, be like that
other footstep to whose airy fall your own heart
once beat time. Take her as the visionary nursling
of your own fancy; and she will grow upon you, all
the more clearly, as the living woman who dwells in
mine.
Among the
sensations that crowded on me, when my eyes first
looked upon her—familiar sensations which we all
know, which spring to life in most of our hearts,
die again in so many, and renew their bright
existence in so few—there was one that troubled and
perplexed me: one that seemed strangely inconsistent
and unaccountably out of place in Miss Fairlie's
presence.
Mingling
with the vivid impression produced by the charm of
her fair face and head, her sweet expression, and
her winning simplicity of manner, was another
impression, which, in a shadowy way, suggested to me
the idea of something wanting. At one time it seemed
like something wanting in HER: at another, like
something wanting in myself, which hindered me from
understanding her as I ought. The impression was
always strongest in the most contradictory manner,
when she looked at me; or, in other words, when I
was most conscious of the harmony and charm of her
face, and yet, at the same time, most troubled by
the sense of an incompleteness which it was
impossible to discover. Something wanting, something
wanting—and where it was, and what it was, I could
not say.
The effect
of this curious caprice of fancy (as I thought it
then) was not of a nature to set me at my ease,
during a first interview with Miss Fairlie. The few
kind words of welcome which she spoke found me
hardly self-possessed enough to thank her in the
customary phrases of reply. Observing my hesitation,
and no doubt attributing it, naturally enough, to
some momentary shyness on my part, Miss Halcombe
took the business of talking, as easily and readily
as usual, into her own hands.
"Look there,
Mr. Hartright," she said, pointing to the
sketch-book on the table, and to the little delicate
wandering hand that was still trifling with it.
"Surely you will acknowledge that your model pupil
is found at last? The moment she hears that you are
in the house, she seizes her inestimable
sketch-book, looks universal Nature straight in the
face, and longs to begin!"
Miss Fairlie
laughed with a ready good-humour, which broke out as
brightly as if it had been part of the sunshine
above us, over her lovely face.
"I must not
take credit to myself where no credit is due," she
said, her clear, truthful blue eyes looking
alternately at Miss Halcombe and at me. "Fond as I
am of drawing, I am so conscious of my own ignorance
that I am more afraid than anxious to begin. Now I
know you are here, Mr. Hartright, I find myself
looking over my sketches, as I used to look over my
lessons when I was a little girl, and when I was
sadly afraid that I should turn out not fit to be
heard."
She made the
confession very prettily and simply, and, with
quaint, childish earnestness, drew the sketch-book
away close to her own side of the table. Miss
Halcombe cut the knot of the little embarrassment
forthwith, in her resolute, downright way.
"Good, bad,
or indifferent," she said, "the pupil's sketches
must pass through the fiery ordeal of the master's
judgment—and there's an end of it. Suppose we take
them with us in the carriage, Laura, and let Mr.
Hartright see them, for the first time, under
circumstances of perpetual jolting and interruption?
If we can only confuse him all through the drive,
between Nature as it is, when he looks up at the
view, and Nature as it is not when he looks down
again at our sketch-books, we shall drive him into
the last desperate refuge of paying us compliments,
and shall slip through his professional fingers with
our pet feathers of vanity all unruffled."
"I hope Mr.
Hartright will pay ME no compliments," said Miss
Fairlie, as we all left the summer-house.
"May I
venture to inquire why you express that hope?" I
asked.
"Because I
shall believe all that you say to me," she answered
simply.
In those few
words she unconsciously gave me the key to her whole
character: to that generous trust in others which,
in her nature, grew innocently out of the sense of
her own truth. I only knew it intuitively then. I
know it by experience now.
We merely
waited to rouse good Mrs. Vesey from the place which
she still occupied at the deserted luncheon-table,
before we entered the open carriage for our promised
drive. The old lady and Miss Halcombe occupied the
back seat, and Miss Fairlie and I sat together in
front, with the sketch-book open between us, fairly
exhibited at last to my professional eyes. All
serious criticism on the drawings, even if I had
been disposed to volunteer it, was rendered
impossible by Miss Halcombe's lively resolution to
see nothing but the ridiculous side of the Fine
Arts, as practised by herself, her sister, and
ladies in general. I can remember the conversation
that passed far more easily than the sketches that I
mechanically looked over. That part of the talk,
especially, in which Miss Fairlie took any share, is
still as vividly impressed on my memory as if I had
heard it only a few hours ago.
Yes! let me
acknowledge that on this first day I let the charm
of her presence lure me from the recollection of
myself and my position. The most trifling of the
questions that she put to me, on the subject of
using her pencil and mixing her colours; the
slightest alterations of expression in the lovely
eyes that looked into mine with such an earnest
desire to learn all that I could teach, and to
discover all that I could show, attracted more of my
attention than the finest view we passed through, or
the grandest changes of light and shade, as they
flowed into each other over the waving moorland and
the level beach. At any time, and under any
circumstances of human interest, is it not strange
to see how little real hold the objects of the
natural world amid which we live can gain on our
hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in
trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books.
Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world,
which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently
describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of
the original instincts of our nature. As children,
we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or
woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most
exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of
sea and land are also those who are most universally
insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly
associated with the human interest of their calling.
Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the
earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised
accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and,
more, that very capacity is rarely practised by any
of us except when our minds are most indolent and
most unoccupied. How much share have the attractions
of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or painful
interests and emotions of ourselves or our friends?
What space do they ever occupy in the thousand
little narratives of personal experience which pass
every day by word of mouth from one of us to the
other? All that our minds can compass, all that our
hearts can learn, can be accomplished with equal
certainty, equal profit, and equal satisfaction to
ourselves, in the poorest as in the richest prospect
that the face of the earth can show. There is surely
a reason for this want of inborn sympathy between
the creature and the creation around it, a reason
which may perhaps be found in the widely-differing
destinies of man and his earthly sphere. The
grandest mountain prospect that the eye can range
over is appointed to annihilation. The smallest
human interest that the pure heart can feel is
appointed to immortality.
We had been
out nearly three hours, when the carriage again
passed through the gates of Limmeridge House.
On our way
back I had let the ladies settle for themselves the
first point of view which they were to sketch, under
my instructions, on the afternoon of the next day.
When they withdrew to dress for dinner, and when I
was alone again in my little sitting-room, my
spirits seemed to leave me on a sudden. I felt ill
at ease and dissatisfied with myself, I hardly knew
why. Perhaps I was now conscious for the first time
of having enjoyed our drive too much in the
character of a guest, and too little in the
character of a drawing-master. Perhaps that strange
sense of something wanting, either in Miss Fairlie
or in myself, which had perplexed me when I was
first introduced to her, haunted me still. Anyhow,
it was a relief to my spirits when the dinner-hour
called me out of my solitude, and took me back to
the society of the ladies of the house.
I was
struck, on entering the drawing-room, by the curious
contrast, rather in material than in colour, of the
dresses which they now wore. While Mrs. Vesey and
Miss Halcombe were richly clad (each in the manner
most becoming to her age), the first in silver-grey,
and the second in that delicate primrose-yellow
colour which matches so well with a dark complexion
and black hair, Miss Fairlie was unpretendingly and
almost poorly dressed in plain white muslin. It was
spotlessly pure: it was beautifully put on; but
still it was the sort of dress which the wife or
daughter of a poor man might have worn, and it made
her, so far as externals went, look less affluent in
circumstances than her own governess. At a later
period, when I learnt to know more of Miss Fairlie's
character, I discovered that this curious contrast,
on the wrong side, was due to her natural delicacy
of feeling and natural intensity of aversion to the
slightest personal display of her own wealth.
Neither Mrs. Vesey nor Miss Halcombe could ever
induce her to let the advantage in dress desert the
two ladies who were poor, to lean to the side of the
one lady who was rich.
When the
dinner was over we returned together to the
drawing-room. Although Mr. Fairlie (emulating the
magnificent condescension of the monarch who had
picked up Titian's brush for him) had instructed his
butler to consult my wishes in relation to the wine
that I might prefer after dinner, I was resolute
enough to resist the temptation of sitting in
solitary grandeur among bottles of my own choosing,
and sensible enough to ask the ladies' permission to
leave the table with them habitually, on the
civilised foreign plan, during the period of my
residence at Limmeridge House.
The
drawing-room, to which we had now withdrawn for the
rest of the evening, was on the ground-floor, and
was of the same shape and size as the
breakfast-room. Large glass doors at the lower end
opened on to a terrace, beautifully ornamented along
its whole length with a profusion of flowers. The
soft, hazy twilight was just shading leaf and
blossom alike into harmony with its own sober hues
as we entered the room, and the sweet evening scent
of the flowers met us with its fragrant welcome
through the open glass doors. Good Mrs. Vesey
(always the first of the party to sit down) took
possession of an arm-chair in a corner, and dozed
off comfortably to sleep. At my request Miss Fairlie
placed herself at the piano. As I followed her to a
seat near the instrument, I saw Miss Halcombe retire
into a recess of one of the side windows, to proceed
with the search through her mother's letters by the
last quiet rays of the evening light.
How vividly
that peaceful home-picture of the drawing-room comes
back to me while I write! From the place where I sat
I could see Miss Halcombe's graceful figure, half of
it in soft light, half in mysterious shadow, bending
intently over the letters in her lap; while, nearer
to me, the fair profile of the player at the piano
was just delicately defined against the
faintly-deepening background of the inner wall of
the room. Outside, on the terrace, the clustering
flowers and long grasses and creepers waved so
gently in the light evening air, that the sound of
their rustling never reached us. The sky was without
a cloud, and the dawning mystery of moonlight began
to tremble already in the region of the eastern
heaven. The sense of peace and seclusion soothed all
thought and feeling into a rapt, unearthly repose;
and the balmy quiet, that deepened ever with the
deepening light, seemed to hover over us with a
gentler influence still, when there stole upon it
from the piano the heavenly tenderness of the music
of Mozart. It was an evening of sights and sounds
never to forget.
We all sat
silent in the places we had chosen—Mrs. Vesey still
sleeping, Miss Fairlie still playing, Miss Halcombe
still reading—till the light failed us. By this time
the moon had stolen round to the terrace, and soft,
mysterious rays of light were slanting already
across the lower end of the room. The change from
the twilight obscurity was so beautiful that we
banished the lamps, by common consent, when the
servant brought them in, and kept the large room
unlighted, except by the glimmer of the two candles
at the piano.
For half an
hour more the music still went on. After that the
beauty of the moonlight view on the terrace tempted
Miss Fairlie out to look at it, and I followed her.
When the candles at the piano had been lighted Miss
Halcombe had changed her place, so as to continue
her examination of the letters by their assistance.
We left her, on a low chair, at one side of the
instrument, so absorbed over her reading that she
did not seem to notice when we moved.
We had been
out on the terrace together, just in front of the
glass doors, hardly so long as five minutes, I
should think; and Miss Fairlie was, by my advice,
just tying her white handkerchief over her head as a
precaution against the night air—when I heard Miss
Halcombe's voice—low, eager, and altered from its
natural lively tone—pronounce my name.
"Mr.
Hartright," she said, "will you come here for a
minute? I want to speak to you."
I entered
the room again immediately. The piano stood about
half-way down along the inner wall. On the side of
the instrument farthest from the terrace Miss
Halcombe was sitting with the letters scattered on
her lap, and with one in her hand selected from
them, and held close to the candle. On the side
nearest to the terrace there stood a low ottoman, on
which I took my place. In this position I was not
far from the glass doors, and I could see Miss
Fairlie plainly, as she passed and repassed the
opening on to the terrace, walking slowly from end
to end of it in the full radiance of the moon.
"I want you
to listen while I read the concluding passages in
this letter," said Miss Halcombe. "Tell me if you
think they throw any light upon your strange
adventure on the road to London. The letter is
addressed by my mother to her second husband, Mr.
Fairlie, and the date refers to a period of between
eleven and twelve years since. At that time Mr. and
Mrs. Fairlie, and my half-sister Laura, had been
living for years in this house; and I was away from
them completing my education at a school in Paris."
She looked
and spoke earnestly, and, as I thought, a little
uneasily as well. At the moment when she raised the
letter to the candle before beginning to read it,
Miss Fairlie passed us on the terrace, looked in for
a moment, and seeing that we were engaged, slowly
walked on.
Miss
Halcombe began to read as follows:—
"'You will
be tired, my dear Philip, of hearing perpetually
about my schools and my scholars. Lay the blame,
pray, on the dull uniformity of life at Limmeridge,
and not on me. Besides, this time I have something
really interesting to tell you about a new scholar.
"'You know old
Mrs. Kempe at the village shop. Well, after years of
ailing, the doctor has at last given her up, and she
is dying slowly day by day. Her only living
relation, a sister, arrived last week to take care
of her. This sister comes all the way from
Hampshire—her name is Mrs. Catherick. Four days ago
Mrs. Catherick came here to see me, and brought her
only child with her, a sweet little girl about a
year older than our darling Laura——'"
As the last sentence fell
from the reader's lips, Miss Fairlie passed us on
the terrace once more. She was softly singing to
herself one of the melodies which she had been
playing earlier in the evening. Miss Halcombe waited
till she had passed out of sight again, and then
went on with the letter—
"'Mrs.
Catherick is a decent, well-behaved, respectable
woman; middle-aged, and with the remains of having
been moderately, only moderately, nice-looking.
There is something in her manner and in her
appearance, however, which I can't make out. She is
reserved about herself to the point of downright
secrecy, and there is a look in her face—I can't
describe it—which suggests to me that she has
something on her mind. She is altogether what you
would call a walking mystery. Her errand at
Limmeridge House, however, was simple enough. When
she left Hampshire to nurse her sister, Mrs. Kempe,
through her last illness, she had been obliged to
bring her daughter with her, through having no one
at home to take care of the little girl. Mrs. Kempe
may die in a week's time, or may linger on for
months; and Mrs. Catherick's object was to ask me to
let her daughter, Anne, have the benefit of
attending my school, subject to the condition of her
being removed from it to go home again with her
mother, after Mrs. Kempe's death. I consented at
once, and when Laura and I went out for our walk, we
took the little girl (who is just eleven years old)
to the school that very day.'"
Once more Miss Fairlie's
figure, bright and soft in its snowy muslin
dress—her face prettily framed by the white folds of
the handkerchief which she had tied under her
chin—passed by us in the moonlight. Once more Miss
Halcombe waited till she was out of sight, and then
went on—
"'I have
taken a violent fancy, Philip, to my new scholar,
for a reason which I mean to keep till the last for
the sake of surprising you. Her mother having told
me as little about the child as she told me of
herself, I was left to discover (which I did on the
first day when we tried her at lessons) that the
poor little thing's intellect is not developed as it
ought to be at her age. Seeing this I had her up to
the house the next day, and privately arranged with
the doctor to come and watch her and question her,
and tell me what he thought. His opinion is that she
will grow out of it. But he says her careful
bringing-up at school is a matter of great
importance just now, because her unusual slowness in
acquiring ideas implies an unusual tenacity in
keeping them, when they are once received into her
mind. Now, my love, you must not imagine, in your
off-hand way, that I have been attaching myself to
an idiot. This poor little Anne Catherick is a
sweet, affectionate, grateful girl, and says the
quaintest, prettiest things (as you shall judge by
an instance), in the most oddly sudden, surprised,
half-frightened way. Although she is dressed very
neatly, her clothes show a sad want of taste in
colour and pattern. So I arranged, yesterday, that
some of our darling Laura's old white frocks and
white hats should be altered for Anne Catherick,
explaining to her that little girls of her
complexion looked neater and better all in white
than in anything else. She hesitated and seemed
puzzled for a minute, then flushed up, and appeared
to understand. Her little hand clasped mine
suddenly. She kissed it, Philip, and said (oh, so
earnestly!), "I will always wear white as long as I
live. It will help me to remember you, ma'am, and to
think that I am pleasing you still, when I go away
and see you no more." This is only one specimen of
the quaint things she says so prettily. Poor little
soul! She shall have a stock of white frocks, made
with good deep tucks, to let out for her as she
grows——'"
Miss Halcombe paused, and
looked at me across the piano.
"Did the
forlorn woman whom you met in the high-road seem
young?" she asked. "Young enough to be two- or
three-and-twenty?"
"Yes, Miss
Halcombe, as young as that."
"And she was
strangely dressed, from head to foot, all in white?"
"All in
white."
While the
answer was passing my lips Miss Fairlie glided into
view on the terrace for the third time. Instead of
proceeding on her walk, she stopped, with her back
turned towards us, and, leaning on the balustrade of
the terrace, looked down into the garden beyond. My
eyes fixed upon the white gleam of her muslin gown
and head-dress in the moonlight, and a sensation,
for which I can find no name—a sensation that
quickened my pulse, and raised a fluttering at my
heart—began to steal over me.
"All in
white?" Miss Halcombe repeated. "The most important
sentences in the letter, Mr. Hartright, are those at
the end, which I will read to you immediately. But I
can't help dwelling a little upon the coincidence of
the white costume of the woman you met, and the
white frocks which produced that strange answer from
my mother's little scholar. The doctor may have been
wrong when he discovered the child's defects of
intellect, and predicted that she would 'grow out of
them.' She may never have grown out of them, and the
old grateful fancy about dressing in white, which
was a serious feeling to the girl, may be a serious
feeling to the woman still."
I said a few
words in answer—I hardly know what. All my attention
was concentrated on the white gleam of Miss
Fairlie's muslin dress.
"Listen to
the last sentences of the letter," said Miss
Halcombe. "I think they will surprise you."
As she
raised the letter to the light of the candle, Miss
Fairlie turned from the balustrade, looked
doubtfully up and down the terrace, advanced a step
towards the glass doors, and then stopped, facing
us.
Meanwhile
Miss Halcombe read me the last sentences to which
she had referred—
"'And now,
my love, seeing that I am at the end of my paper,
now for the real reason, the surprising reason, for
my fondness for little Anne Catherick. My dear
Philip, although she is not half so pretty, she is,
nevertheless, by one of those extraordinary caprices
of accidental resemblance which one sometimes sees,
the living likeness, in her hair, her complexion,
the colour of her eyes, and the shape of her
face——'"
I started up from the
ottoman before Miss Halcombe could pronounce the
next words. A thrill of the same feeling which ran
through me when the touch was laid upon my shoulder
on the lonely high-road chilled me again.
There stood
Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the
moonlight; in her attitude, in the turn of her head,
in her complexion, in the shape of her face, the
living image, at that distance and under those
circumstances, of the woman in white! The doubt
which had troubled my mind for hours and hours past
flashed into conviction in an instant. That
"something wanting" was my own recognition of the
ominous likeness between the fugitive from the
asylum and my pupil at Limmeridge House.
"You see
it!" said Miss Halcombe. She dropped the useless
letter, and her eyes flashed as they met mine. "You
see it now, as my mother saw it eleven years since!"
"I see
it—more unwillingly than I can say. To associate
that forlorn, friendless, lost woman, even by an
accidental likeness only, with Miss Fairlie, seems
like casting a shadow on the future of the bright
creature who stands looking at us now. Let me lose
the impression again as soon as possible. Call her
in, out of the dreary moonlight—pray call her in!"
"Mr.
Hartright, you surprise me. Whatever women may be, I
thought that men, in the nineteenth century, were
above superstition."
"Pray call
her in!"
"Hush, hush!
She is coming of her own accord. Say nothing in her
presence. Let this discovery of the likeness be kept
a secret between you and me. Come in, Laura, come
in, and wake Mrs. Vesey with the piano. Mr.
Hartright is petitioning for some more music, and he
wants it, this time, of the lightest and liveliest
kind."
IX
So ended my
eventful first day at Limmeridge House.
Miss
Halcombe and I kept our secret. After the discovery
of the likeness no fresh light seemed destined to
break over the mystery of the woman in white. At the
first safe opportunity Miss Halcombe cautiously led
her half-sister to speak of their mother, of old
times, and of Anne Catherick. Miss Fairlie's
recollections of the little scholar at Limmeridge
were, however, only of the most vague and general
kind. She remembered the likeness between herself
and her mother's favourite pupil, as something which
had been supposed to exist in past times; but she
did not refer to the gift of the white dresses, or
to the singular form of words in which the child had
artlessly expressed her gratitude for them. She
remembered that Anne had remained at Limmeridge for
a few months only, and had then left it to go back
to her home in Hampshire; but she could not say
whether the mother and daughter had ever returned,
or had ever been heard of afterwards. No further
search, on Miss Halcombe's part, through the few
letters of Mrs. Fairlie's writing which she had left
unread, assisted in clearing up the uncertainties
still left to perplex us. We had identified the
unhappy woman whom I had met in the night-time with
Anne Catherick—we had made some advance, at least,
towards connecting the probably defective condition
of the poor creature's intellect with the
peculiarity of her being dressed all in white, and
with the continuance, in her maturer years, of her
childish gratitude towards Mrs. Fairlie—and there,
so far as we knew at that time, our discoveries had
ended.
The days passed on, the
weeks passed on, and the track of the golden autumn
wound its bright way visibly through the green
summer of the trees. Peaceful, fast-flowing, happy
time! my story glides by you now as swiftly as you
once glided by me. Of all the treasures of enjoyment
that you poured so freely into my heart, how much is
left me that has purpose and value enough to be
written on this page? Nothing but the saddest of all
confessions that a man can make—the confession of
his own folly.
The secret
which that confession discloses should be told with
little effort, for it has indirectly escaped me
already. The poor weak words, which have failed to
describe Miss Fairlie, have succeeded in betraying
the sensations she awakened in me. It is so with us
all. Our words are giants when they do us an injury,
and dwarfs when they do us a service.
I loved her.
Ah! how well
I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is
contained in those three words. I can sigh over my
mournful confession with the tenderest woman who
reads it and pities me. I can laugh at it as
bitterly as the hardest man who tosses it from him
in contempt. I loved her! Feel for me, or despise
me, I confess it with the same immovable resolution
to own the truth.
Was there no
excuse for me? There was some excuse to be found,
surely, in the conditions under which my term of
hired service was passed at Limmeridge House.
My morning
hours succeeded each other calmly in the quiet and
seclusion of my own room. I had just work enough to
do, in mounting my employer's drawings, to keep my
hands and eyes pleasurably employed, while my mind
was left free to enjoy the dangerous luxury of its
own unbridled thoughts. A perilous solitude, for it
lasted long enough to enervate, not long enough to
fortify me. A perilous solitude, for it was followed
by afternoons and evenings spent, day after day and
week after week alone in the society of two women,
one of whom possessed all the accomplishments of
grace, wit, and high-breeding, the other all the
charms of beauty, gentleness, and simple truth, that
can purify and subdue the heart of man. Not a day
passed, in that dangerous intimacy of teacher and
pupil, in which my hand was not close to Miss
Fairlie's; my cheek, as we bent together over her
sketch-book, almost touching hers. The more
attentively she watched every movement of my brush,
the more closely I was breathing the perfume of her
hair, and the warm fragrance of her breath. It was
part of my service to live in the very light of her
eyes—at one time to be bending over her, so close to
her bosom as to tremble at the thought of touching
it; at another, to feel her bending over me, bending
so close to see what I was about, that her voice
sank low when she spoke to me, and her ribbons
brushed my cheek in the wind before she could draw
them back.
The evenings
which followed the sketching excursions of the
afternoon varied, rather than checked, these
innocent, these inevitable familiarities. My natural
fondness for the music which she played with such
tender feeling, such delicate womanly taste, and her
natural enjoyment of giving me back, by the practice
of her art, the pleasure which I had offered to her
by the practice of mine, only wove another tie which
drew us closer and closer to one another. The
accidents of conversation; the simple habits which
regulated even such a little thing as the position
of our places at table; the play of Miss Halcombe's
ever-ready raillery, always directed against my
anxiety as teacher, while it sparkled over her
enthusiasm as pupil; the harmless expression of poor
Mrs. Vesey's drowsy approval, which connected Miss
Fairlie and me as two model young people who never
disturbed her—every one of these trifles, and many
more, combined to fold us together in the same
domestic atmosphere, and to lead us both insensibly
to the same hopeless end.
I should
have remembered my position, and have put myself
secretly on my guard. I did so, but not till it was
too late. All the discretion, all the experience,
which had availed me with other women, and secured
me against other temptations, failed me with her. It
had been my profession, for years past, to be in
this close contact with young girls of all ages, and
of all orders of beauty. I had accepted the position
as part of my calling in life; I had trained myself
to leave all the sympathies natural to my age in my
employer's outer hall, as coolly as I left my
umbrella there before I went upstairs. I had long
since learnt to understand, composedly and as a
matter of course, that my situation in life was
considered a guarantee against any of my female
pupils feeling more than the most ordinary interest
in me, and that I was admitted among beautiful and
captivating women much as a harmless domestic animal
is admitted among them. This guardian experience I
had gained early; this guardian experience had
sternly and strictly guided me straight along my own
poor narrow path, without once letting me stray
aside, to the right hand or to the left. And now I
and my trusty talisman were parted for the first
time. Yes, my hardly-earned self-control was as
completely lost to me as if I had never possessed
it; lost to me, as it is lost every day to other
men, in other critical situations, where women are
concerned. I know, now, that I should have
questioned myself from the first. I should have
asked why any room in the house was better than home
to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert
when she went out again—why I always noticed and
remembered the little changes in her dress that I
had noticed and remembered in no other woman's
before—why I saw her, heard her, and touched her
(when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had
never seen, heard, and touched any other woman in my
life? I should have looked into my own heart, and
found this new growth springing up there, and
plucked it out while it was young. Why was this
easiest, simplest work of self-culture always too
much for me? The explanation has been written
already in the three words that were many enough,
and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her.
The days
passed, the weeks passed; it was approaching the
third month of my stay in Cumberland. The delicious
monotony of life in our calm seclusion flowed on
with me, like a smooth stream with a swimmer who
glides down the current. All memory of the past, all
thought of the future, all sense of the falseness
and hopelessness of my own position, lay hushed
within me into deceitful rest. Lulled by the
Syren-song that my own heart sung to me, with eyes
shut to all sight, and ears closed to all sound of
danger, I drifted nearer and nearer to the fatal
rocks. The warning that aroused me at last, and
startled me into sudden, self-accusing consciousness
of my own weakness, was the plainest, the truest,
the kindest of all warnings, for it came silently
from HER.
We had
parted one night as usual. No word had fallen from
my lips, at that time or at any time before it, that
could betray me, or startle her into sudden
knowledge of the truth. But when we met again in the
morning, a change had come over her—a change that
told me all.
I shrank
then—I shrink still—from invading the innermost
sanctuary of her heart, and laying it open to
others, as I have laid open my own. Let it be enough
to say that the time when she first surprised my
secret was, I firmly believe, the time when she
first surprised her own, and the time, also, when
she changed towards me in the interval of one night.
Her nature, too truthful to deceive others, was too
noble to deceive itself. When the doubt that I had
hushed asleep first laid its weary weight on her
heart, the true face owned all, and said, in its own
frank, simple language—I am sorry for him; I am
sorry for myself.
It said
this, and more, which I could not then interpret. I
understood but too well the change in her manner, to
greater kindness and quicker readiness in
interpreting all my wishes, before others—to
constraint and sadness, and nervous anxiety to
absorb herself in the first occupation she could
seize on, whenever we happened to be left together
alone. I understood why the sweet sensitive lips
smiled so rarely and so restrainedly now, and why
the clear blue eyes looked at me, sometimes with the
pity of an angel, sometimes with the innocent
perplexity of a child. But the change meant more
than this. There was a coldness in her hand, there
was an unnatural immobility in her face, there was
in all her movements the mute expression of constant
fear and clinging self-reproach. The sensations that
I could trace to herself and to me, the
unacknowledged sensations that we were feeling in
common, were not these. There were certain elements
of the change in her that were still secretly
drawing us together, and others that were, as
secretly, beginning to drive us apart.
In my doubt
and perplexity, in my vague suspicion of something
hidden which I was left to find by my own unaided
efforts, I examined Miss Halcombe's looks and manner
for enlightenment. Living in such intimacy as ours,
no serious alteration could take place in any one of
us which did not sympathetically affect the others.
The change in Miss Fairlie was reflected in her
half-sister. Although not a word escaped Miss
Halcombe which hinted at an altered state of feeling
towards myself, her penetrating eyes had contracted
a new habit of always watching me. Sometimes the
look was like suppressed anger, sometimes like
suppressed dread, sometimes like neither—like
nothing, in short, which I could understand. A week
elapsed, leaving us all three still in this position
of secret constraint towards one another. My
situation, aggravated by the sense of my own
miserable weakness and forgetfulness of myself, now
too late awakened in me, was becoming intolerable. I
felt that I must cast off the oppression under which
I was living, at once and for ever—yet how to act
for the best, or what to say first, was more than I
could tell.
From this
position of helplessness and humiliation I was
rescued by Miss Halcombe. Her lips told me the
bitter, the necessary, the unexpected truth; her
hearty kindness sustained me under the shock of
hearing it; her sense and courage turned to its
right use an event which threatened the worst that
could happen, to me and to others, in Limmeridge
House.
X
It was on a
Thursday in the week, and nearly at the end of the
third month of my sojourn in Cumberland.
In the
morning, when I went down into the breakfast-room at
the usual hour, Miss Halcombe, for the first time
since I had known her, was absent from her customary
place at the table.
Miss Fairlie
was out on the lawn. She bowed to me, but did not
come in. Not a word had dropped from my lips, or
from hers, that could unsettle either of us—and yet
the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made
us shrink alike from meeting one another alone. She
waited on the lawn, and I waited in the
breakfast-room, till Mrs. Vesey or Miss Halcombe
came in. How quickly I should have joined her: how
readily we should have shaken hands, and glided into
our customary talk, only a fortnight ago.
In a few
minutes Miss Halcombe entered. She had a preoccupied
look, and she made her apologies for being late
rather absently.
"I have been
detained," she said, "by a consultation with Mr.
Fairlie on a domestic matter which he wished to
speak to me about."
Miss Fairlie
came in from the garden, and the usual morning
greeting passed between us. Her hand struck colder
to mine than ever. She did not look at me, and she
was very pale. Even Mrs. Vesey noticed it when she
entered the room a moment after.
"I suppose
it is the change in the wind," said the old lady.
"The winter is coming—ah, my love, the winter is
coming soon!"
In her heart
and in mine it had come already!
Our morning
meal—once so full of pleasant good-humoured
discussion of the plans for the day—was short and
silent. Miss Fairlie seemed to feel the oppression
of the long pauses in the conversation, and looked
appealingly to her sister to fill them up. Miss
Halcombe, after once or twice hesitating and
checking herself, in a most uncharacteristic manner,
spoke at last.
"I have seen
your uncle this morning, Laura," she said. "He
thinks the purple room is the one that ought to be
got ready, and he confirms what I told you. Monday
is the day—not Tuesday."
While these
words were being spoken Miss Fairlie looked down at
the table beneath her. Her fingers moved nervously
among the crumbs that were scattered on the cloth.
The paleness on her cheeks spread to her lips, and
the lips themselves trembled visibly. I was not the
only person present who noticed this. Miss Halcombe
saw it, too, and at once set us the example of
rising from table.
Mrs. Vesey
and Miss Fairlie left the room together. The kind
sorrowful blue eyes looked at me, for a moment, with
the prescient sadness of a coming and a long
farewell. I felt the answering pang in my own
heart—the pang that told me I must lose her soon,
and love her the more unchangeably for the loss.
I turned
towards the garden when the door had closed on her.
Miss Halcombe was standing with her hat in her hand,
and her shawl over her arm, by the large window that
led out to the lawn, and was looking at me
attentively.
"Have you
any leisure time to spare," she asked, "before you
begin to work in your own room?"
"Certainly,
Miss Halcombe. I have always time at your service."
"I want to
say a word to you in private, Mr. Hartright. Get
your hat and come out into the garden. We are not
likely to be disturbed there at this hour in the
morning."
As we
stepped out on to the lawn, one of the
under-gardeners—a mere lad—passed us on his way to
the house, with a letter in his hand. Miss Halcombe
stopped him.
"Is that
letter for me?" she asked.
"Nay, miss;
it's just said to be for Miss Fairlie," answered the
lad, holding out the letter as he spoke.
Miss
Halcombe took it from him and looked at the address.
"A strange
handwriting," she said to herself. "Who can Laura's
correspondent be? Where did you get this?" she
continued, addressing the gardener.
"Well,
miss," said the lad, "I just got it from a woman."
"What
woman?"
"A woman
well stricken in age."
"Oh, an old
woman. Any one you knew?"
"I canna'
tak' it on mysel' to say that she was other than a
stranger to me."
"Which way
did she go?"
"That gate,"
said the under-gardener, turning with great
deliberation towards the south, and embracing the
whole of that part of England with one comprehensive
sweep of his arm.
"Curious,"
said Miss Halcombe; "I suppose it must be a
begging-letter. There," she added, handing the
letter back to the lad, "take it to the house, and
give it to one of the servants. And now, Mr.
Hartright, if you have no objection, let us walk
this way."
She led me
across the lawn, along the same path by which I had
followed her on the day after my arrival at
Limmeridge.
At the
little summer-house, in which Laura Fairlie and I
had first seen each other, she stopped, and broke
the silence which she had steadily maintained while
we were walking together.
"What I have
to say to you I can say here."
With those
words she entered the summer-house, took one of the
chairs at the little round table inside, and signed
to me to take the other. I suspected what was coming
when she spoke to me in the breakfast-room; I felt
certain of it now.
"Mr.
Hartright," she said, "I am going to begin by making
a frank avowal to you. I am going to say—without
phrase-making, which I detest, or paying
compliments, which I heartily despise—that I have
come, in the course of your residence with us, to
feel a strong friendly regard for you. I was
predisposed in your favour when you first told me of
your conduct towards that unhappy woman whom you met
under such remarkable circumstances. Your management
of the affair might not have been prudent, but it
showed the self-control, the delicacy, and the
compassion of a man who was naturally a gentleman.
It made me expect good things from you, and you have
not disappointed my expectations."
She
paused—but held up her hand at the same time, as a
sign that she awaited no answer from me before she
proceeded. When I entered the summer-house, no
thought was in me of the woman in white. But now,
Miss Halcombe's own words had put the memory of my
adventure back in my mind. It remained there
throughout the interview—remained, and not without a
result.
"As your
friend," she proceeded, "I am going to tell you, at
once, in my own plain, blunt, downright language,
that I have discovered your secret—without help or
hint, mind, from any one else. Mr. Hartright, you
have thoughtlessly allowed yourself to form an
attachment—a serious and devoted attachment I am
afraid—to my sister Laura. I don't put you to the
pain of confessing it in so many words, because I
see and know that you are too honest to deny it. I
don't even blame you—I pity you for opening your
heart to a hopeless affection. You have not
attempted to take any underhand advantage—you have
not spoken to my sister in secret. You are guilty of
weakness and want of attention to your own best
interests, but of nothing worse. If you had acted,
in any single respect, less delicately and less
modestly, I should have told you to leave the house
without an instant's notice, or an instant's
consultation of anybody. As it is, I blame the
misfortune of your years and your position—I don't
blame YOU. Shake hands—I have given you pain; I am
going to give you more, but there is no help for
it—shake hands with your friend, Marian Halcombe,
first."
The sudden
kindness—the warm, high-minded, fearless sympathy
which met me on such mercifully equal terms, which
appealed with such delicate and generous abruptness
straight to my heart, my honour, and my courage,
overcame me in an instant. I tried to look at her
when she took my hand, but my eves were dim. I tried
to thank her, but my voice failed me.
"Listen to
me," she said, considerately avoiding all notice of
my loss of self-control. "Listen to me, and let us
get it over at once. It is a real true relief to me
that I am not obliged, in what I have now to say, to
enter into the question—the hard and cruel question
as I think it—of social inequalities. Circumstances
which will try you to the quick, spare me the
ungracious necessity of paining a man who has lived
in friendly intimacy under the same roof with myself
by any humiliating reference to matters of rank and
station. You must leave Limmeridge House, Mr.
Hartright, before more harm is done. It is my duty
to say that to you; and it would be equally my duty
to say it, under precisely the same serious
necessity, if you were the representative of the
oldest and wealthiest family in England. You must
leave us, not because you are a teacher of
drawing——"
She waited a
moment, turned her face full on me, and reaching
across the table, laid her hand firmly on my arm.
"Not because
you are a teacher of drawing," she repeated, "but
because Laura Fairlie is engaged to be married."
The last
word went like a bullet to my heart. My arm lost all
sensation of the hand that grasped it. I never moved
and never spoke. The sharp autumn breeze that
scattered the dead leaves at our feet came as cold
to me, on a sudden, as if my own mad hopes were dead
leaves too, whirled away by the wind like the rest.
Hopes! Betrothed, or not betrothed, she was equally
far from me. Would other men have remembered that in
my place? Not if they had loved her as I did.
The pang
passed, and nothing but the dull numbing pain of it
remained. I felt Miss Halcombe's hand again,
tightening its hold on my arm—I raised my head and
looked at her. Her large black eyes were rooted on
me, watching the white change on my face, which I
felt, and which she saw.
"Crush it!"
she said. "Here, where you first saw her, crush it!
Don't shrink under it like a woman. Tear it out;
trample it under foot like a man!"
The
suppressed vehemence with which she spoke, the
strength which her will—concentrated in the look she
fixed on me, and in the hold on my arm that she had
not yet relinquished—communicated to mine, steadied
me. We both waited for a minute in silence. At the
end of that time I had justified her generous faith
in my manhood—I had, outwardly at least, recovered
my self-control.
"Are you
yourself again?"
"Enough
myself, Miss Halcombe, to ask your pardon and hers.
Enough myself to be guided by your advice, and to
prove my gratitude in that way, if I can prove it in
no other."
"You have
proved it already," she answered, "by those words.
Mr. Hartright, concealment is at an end between us.
I cannot affect to hide from you what my sister has
unconsciously shown to me. You must leave us for her
sake, as well as for your own. Your presence here,
your necessary intimacy with us, harmless as it has
been, God knows, in all other respects, has
unsteadied her and made her wretched. I, who love
her better than my own life—I, who have learnt to
believe in that pure, noble, innocent nature as I
believe in my religion—know but too well the secret
misery of self-reproach that she has been suffering
since the first shadow of a feeling disloyal to her
marriage engagement entered her heart in spite of
her. I don't say—it would be useless to attempt to
say it after what has happened—that her engagement
has ever had a strong hold on her affections. It is
an engagement of honour, not of love; her father
sanctioned it on his deathbed, two years since; she
herself neither welcomed it nor shrank from it—she
was content to make it. Till you came here she was
in the position of hundreds of other women, who
marry men without being greatly attracted to them or
greatly repelled by them, and who learn to love them
(when they don't learn to hate!) after marriage,
instead of before. I hope more earnestly than words
can say—and you should have the self-sacrificing
courage to hope too—that the new thoughts and
feelings which have disturbed the old calmness and
the old content have not taken root too deeply to be
ever removed. Your absence (if I had less belief in
your honour, and your courage, and your sense, I
should not trust to them as I am trusting now) your
absence will help my efforts, and time will help us
all three. It is something to know that my first
confidence in you was not all misplaced. It is
something to know that you will not be less honest,
less manly, less considerate towards the pupil whose
relation to yourself you have had the misfortune to
forget, than towards the stranger and the outcast
whose appeal to you was not made in vain."
Again the
chance reference to the woman in white! Was there no
possibility of speaking of Miss Fairlie and of me
without raising the memory of Anne Catherick, and
setting her between us like a fatality that it was
hopeless to avoid?
"Tell me
what apology I can make to Mr. Fairlie for breaking
my engagement," I said. "Tell me when to go after
that apology is accepted. I promise implicit
obedience to you and to your advice."
"Time is
every way of importance," she answered. "You heard
me refer this morning to Monday next, and to the
necessity of setting the purple room in order. The
visitor whom we expect on Monday——"
I could not
wait for her to be more explicit. Knowing what I
knew now, the memory of Miss Fairlie's look and
manner at the breakfast-table told me that the
expected visitor at Limmeridge House was her future
husband. I tried to force it back; but something
rose within me at that moment stronger than my own
will, and I interrupted Miss Halcombe.
"Let me go
to-day," I said bitterly. "The sooner the better."
"No, not
to-day," she replied. "The only reason you can
assign to Mr. Fairlie for your departure, before the
end of your engagement, must be that an unforeseen
necessity compels you to ask his permission to
return at once to London. You must wait till
to-morrow to tell him that, at the time when the
post comes in, because he will then understand the
sudden change in your plans, by associating it with
the arrival of a letter from London. It is miserable
and sickening to descend to deceit, even of the most
harmless kind—but I know Mr. Fairlie, and if you
once excite his suspicions that you are trifling
with him, he will refuse to release you. Speak to
him on Friday morning: occupy yourself afterwards
(for the sake of your own interests with your
employer) in leaving your unfinished work in as
little confusion as possible, and quit this place on
Saturday. It will be time enough then, Mr.
Hartright, for you, and for all of us."
Before I
could assure her that she might depend on my acting
in the strictest accordance with her wishes, we were
both startled by advancing footsteps in the
shrubbery. Some one was coming from the house to
seek for us! I felt the blood rush into my cheeks
and then leave them again. Could the third person
who was fast approaching us, at such a time and
under such circumstances, be Miss Fairlie?
It was a
relief—so sadly, so hopelessly was my position
towards her changed already—it was absolutely a
relief to me, when the person who had disturbed us
appeared at the entrance of the summer-house, and
proved to be only Miss Fairlie's maid.
"Could I
speak to you for a moment, miss?" said the girl, in
rather a flurried, unsettled manner.
Miss
Halcombe descended the steps into the shrubbery, and
walked aside a few paces with the maid.
Left by
myself, my mind reverted, with a sense of forlorn
wretchedness which it is not in any words that I can
find to describe, to my approaching return to the
solitude and the despair of my lonely London home.
Thoughts of my kind old mother, and of my sister,
who had rejoiced with her so innocently over my
prospects in Cumberland—thoughts whose long
banishment from my heart it was now my shame and my
reproach to realise for the first time—came back to
me with the loving mournfulness of old, neglected
friends. My mother and my sister, what would they
feel when I returned to them from my broken
engagement, with the confession of my miserable
secret—they who had parted from me so hopefully on
that last happy night in the Hampstead cottage!
Anne
Catherick again! Even the memory of the farewell
evening with my mother and my sister could not
return to me now unconnected with that other memory
of the moonlight walk back to London. What did it
mean? Were that woman and I to meet once more? It
was possible, at the least. Did she know that I
lived in London? Yes; I had told her so, either
before or after that strange question of hers, when
she had asked me so distrustfully if I knew many men
of the rank of Baronet. Either before or after—my
mind was not calm enough, then, to remember which.
A few
minutes elapsed before Miss Halcombe dismissed the
maid and came back to me. She, too, looked flurried
and unsettled now.
"We have
arranged all that is necessary, Mr. Hartright," she
said. "We have understood each other, as friends
should, and we may go back at once to the house. To
tell you the truth, I am uneasy about Laura. She has
sent to say she wants to see me directly, and the
maid reports that her mistress is apparently very
much agitated by a letter that she has received this
morning—the same letter, no doubt, which I sent on
to the house before we came here."
We retraced
our steps together hastily along the shrubbery path.
Although Miss Halcombe had ended all that she
thought it necessary to say on her side, I had not
ended all that I wanted to say on mine. From the
moment when I had discovered that the expected
visitor at Limmeridge was Miss Fairlie's future
husband, I had felt a bitter curiosity, a burning
envious eagerness, to know who he was. It was
possible that a future opportunity of putting the
question might not easily offer, so I risked asking
it on our way back to the house.
"Now that
you are kind enough to tell me we have understood
each other, Miss Halcombe," I said, "now that you
are sure of my gratitude for your forbearance and my
obedience to your wishes, may I venture to ask
who"—(I hesitated—I had forced myself to think of
him, but it was harder still to speak of him, as her
promised husband)—"who the gentleman engaged to Miss
Fairlie is?"
Her mind was
evidently occupied with the message she had received
from her sister. She answered in a hasty, absent
way—
"A gentleman
of large property in Hampshire."
Hampshire!
Anne Catherick's native place. Again, and yet again,
the woman in white. There WAS a fatality in it.
"And his
name?" I said, as quietly and indifferently as I
could.
"Sir
Percival Glyde."
SIR—Sir
Percival! Anne Catherick's question—that suspicious
question about the men of the rank of Baronet whom I
might happen to know—had hardly been dismissed from
my mind by Miss Halcombe's return to me in the
summer-house, before it was recalled again by her
own answer. I stopped suddenly, and looked at her.
"Sir
Percival Glyde," she repeated, imagining that I had
not heard her former reply.
"Knight, or
Baronet?" I asked, with an agitation that I could
hide no longer.
She paused
for a moment, and then answered, rather coldly—
"Baronet, of
course."
XI
Not a word
more was said, on either side, as we walked back to
the house. Miss Halcombe hastened immediately to her
sister's room, and I withdrew to my studio to set in
order all of Mr. Fairlie's drawings that I had not
yet mounted and restored before I resigned them to
the care of other hands. Thoughts that I had
hitherto restrained, thoughts that made my position
harder than ever to endure, crowded on me now that I
was alone.
She was
engaged to be married, and her future husband was
Sir Percival Glyde. A man of the rank of Baronet,
and the owner of property in Hampshire.
There were
hundreds of baronets in England, and dozens of
landowners in Hampshire. Judging by the ordinary
rules of evidence, I had not the shadow of a reason,
thus far, for connecting Sir Percival Glyde with the
suspicious words of inquiry that had been spoken to
me by the woman in white. And yet, I did connect him
with them. Was it because he had now become
associated in my mind with Miss Fairlie, Miss
Fairlie being, in her turn, associated with Anne
Catherick, since the night when I had discovered the
ominous likeness between them? Had the events of the
morning so unnerved me already that I was at the
mercy of any delusion which common chances and
common coincidences might suggest to my imagination?
Impossible to say. I could only feel that what had
passed between Miss Halcombe and myself, on our way
from the summer-house, had affected me very
strangely. The foreboding of some undiscoverable
danger lying hid from us all in the darkness of the
future was strong on me. The doubt whether I was not
linked already to a chain of events which even my
approaching departure from Cumberland would be
powerless to snap asunder—the doubt whether we any
of us saw the end as the end would really
be—gathered more and more darkly over my mind.
Poignant as it was, the sense of suffering caused by
the miserable end of my brief, presumptuous love
seemed to be blunted and deadened by the still
stronger sense of something obscurely impending,
something invisibly threatening, that Time was
holding over our heads.
I had been
engaged with the drawings little more than half an
hour, when there was a knock at the door. It opened,
on my answering; and, to my surprise, Miss Halcombe
entered the room.
Her manner
was angry and agitated. She caught up a chair for
herself before I could give her one, and sat down in
it, close at my side.
"Mr.
Hartright," she said, "I had hoped that all painful
subjects of conversation were exhausted between us,
for to-day at least. But it is not to be so. There
is some underhand villainy at work to frighten my
sister about her approaching marriage. You saw me
send the gardener on to the house, with a letter
addressed, in a strange handwriting, to Miss
Fairlie?"
"Certainly."
"The letter
is an anonymous letter—a vile attempt to injure Sir
Percival Glyde in my sister's estimation. It has so
agitated and alarmed her that I have had the
greatest possible difficulty in composing her
spirits sufficiently to allow me to leave her room
and come here. I know this is a family matter on
which I ought not to consult you, and in which you
can feel no concern or interest——"
"I beg your
pardon, Miss Halcombe. I feel the strongest possible
concern and interest in anything that affects Miss
Fairlie's happiness or yours."
"I am glad
to hear you say so. You are the only person in the
house, or out of it, who can advise me. Mr. Fairlie,
in his state of health and with his horror of
difficulties and mysteries of all kinds, is not to
be thought of. The clergyman is a good, weak man,
who knows nothing out of the routine of his duties;
and our neighbours are just the sort of comfortable,
jog-trot acquaintances whom one cannot disturb in
times of trouble and danger. What I want to know is
this: ought I at once to take such steps as I can to
discover the writer of the letter? or ought I to
wait, and apply to Mr. Fairlie's legal adviser
to-morrow? It is a question—perhaps a very important
one—of gaining or losing a day. Tell me what you
think, Mr. Hartright. If necessity had not already
obliged me to take you into my confidence under very
delicate circumstances, even my helpless situation
would, perhaps, be no excuse for me. But as things
are I cannot surely be wrong, after all that has
passed between us, in forgetting that you are a
friend of only three months' standing."
She gave me
the letter. It began abruptly, without any
preliminary form of address, as follows—
"Do you believe in dreams?
I hope, for your own sake, that you do. See what
Scripture says about dreams and their fulfilment
(Genesis xl. 8, xli. 25; Daniel iv. 18-25), and take
the warning I send you before it is too late.
"Last night
I dreamed about you, Miss Fairlie. I dreamed that I
was standing inside the communion rails of a
church—I on one side of the altar-table, and the
clergyman, with his surplice and his prayer-book, on
the other.
"After a
time there walked towards us, down the aisle of the
church, a man and a woman, coming to be married. You
were the woman. You looked so pretty and innocent in
your beautiful white silk dress, and your long white
lace veil, that my heart felt for you, and the tears
came into my eyes.
"They were
tears of pity, young lady, that heaven blesses and
instead of falling from my eyes like the everyday
tears that we all of us shed, they turned into two
rays of light which slanted nearer and nearer to the
man standing at the altar with you, till they
touched his breast. The two rays sprang ill arches
like two rainbows between me and him. I looked along
them, and I saw down into his inmost heart.
"The outside
of the man you were marrying was fair enough to see.
He was neither tall nor short—he was a little below
the middle size. A light, active, high-spirited
man—about five-and-forty years old, to look at. He
had a pale face, and was bald over the forehead, but
had dark hair on the rest of his head. His beard was
shaven on his chin, but was let to grow, of a fine
rich brown, on his cheeks and his upper lip. His
eyes were brown too, and very bright; his nose
straight and handsome and delicate enough to have
done for a woman's. His hands the same. He was
troubled from time to time with a dry hacking cough,
and when he put up his white right hand to his
mouth, he showed the red scar of an old wound across
the back of it. Have I dreamt of the right man? You
know best, Miss Fairlie and you can say if I was
deceived or not. Read next, what I saw beneath the
outside—I entreat you, read, and profit.
"I looked
along the two rays of light, and I saw down into his
inmost heart. It was black as night, and on it were
written, in the red flaming letters which are the
handwriting of the fallen angel, 'Without pity and
without remorse. He has strewn with misery the paths
of others, and he will live to strew with misery the
path of this woman by his side.' I read that, and
then the rays of light shifted and pointed over his
shoulder; and there, behind him, stood a fiend
laughing. And the rays of light shifted once more,
and pointed over your shoulder; and there behind
you, stood an angel weeping. And the rays of light
shifted for the third time, and pointed straight
between you and that man. They widened and widened,
thrusting you both asunder, one from the other. And
the clergyman looked for the marriage-service in
vain: it was gone out of the book, and he shut up
the leaves, and put it from him in despair. And I
woke with my eyes full of tears and my heart
beating—for I believe in dreams.
"Believe
too, Miss Fairlie—I beg of you, for your own sake,
believe as I do. Joseph and Daniel, and others in
Scripture, believed in dreams. Inquire into the past
life of that man with the scar on his hand, before
you say the words that make you his miserable wife.
I don't give you this warning on my account, but on
yours. I have an interest in your well-being that
will live as long as I draw breath. Your mother's
daughter has a tender place in my heart—for your
mother was my first, my best, my only friend."
There the extraordinary
letter ended, without signature of any sort.
The
handwriting afforded no prospect of a clue. It was
traced on ruled lines, in the cramped, conventional,
copy-book character technically termed "small hand."
It was feeble and faint, and defaced by blots, but
had otherwise nothing to distinguish it.
"That is not
an illiterate letter," said Miss Halcombe, "and at
the same time, it is surely too incoherent to be the
letter of an educated person in the higher ranks of
life. The reference to the bridal dress and veil,
and other little expressions, seem to point to it as
the production of some woman. What do you think, Mr.
Hartright?"
"I think so
too. It seems to me to be not only the letter of a
woman, but of a woman whose mind must be——"
"Deranged?"
suggested Miss Halcombe. "It struck me in that light
too."
I did not
answer. While I was speaking, my eyes rested on the
last sentence of the letter: "Your mother's daughter
has a tender place in my heart—for your mother was
my first, my best, my only friend." Those words and
the doubt which had just escaped me as to the sanity
of the writer of the letter, acting together on my
mind, suggested an idea, which I was literally
afraid to express openly, or even to encourage
secretly. I began to doubt whether my own faculties
were not in danger of losing their balance. It
seemed almost like a monomania to be tracing back
everything strange that happened, everything
unexpected that was said, always to the same hidden
source and the same sinister influence. I resolved,
this time, in defence of my own courage and my own
sense, to come to no decision that plain fact did
not warrant, and to turn my back resolutely on
everything that tempted me in the shape of surmise.
"If we have
any chance of tracing the person who has written
this," I said, returning the letter to Miss
Halcombe, "there can be no harm in seizing our
opportunity the moment it offers. I think we ought
to speak to the gardener again about the elderly
woman who gave him the letter, and then to continue
our inquiries in the village. But first let me ask a
question. You mentioned just now the alternative of
consulting Mr. Fairlie's legal adviser to-morrow. Is
there no possibility of communicating with him
earlier? Why not to-day?"
"I can only
explain," replied Miss Halcombe, "by entering into
certain particulars, connected with my sister's
marriage-engagement, which I did not think it
necessary or desirable to mention to you this
morning. One of Sir Percival Glyde's objects in
coming here on Monday, is to fix the period of his
marriage, which has hitherto been left quite
unsettled. He is anxious that the event should take
place before the end of the year."
"Does Miss
Fairlie know of that wish?" I asked eagerly.
"She has no
suspicion of it, and after what has happened, I
shall not take the responsibility upon myself of
enlightening her. Sir Percival has only mentioned
his views to Mr. Fairlie, who has told me himself
that he is ready and anxious, as Laura's guardian,
to forward them. He has written to London, to the
family solicitor, Mr. Gilmore. Mr. Gilmore happens
to be away in Glasgow on business, and he has
replied by proposing to stop at Limmeridge House on
his way back to town. He will arrive to-morrow, and
will stay with us a few days, so as to allow Sir
Percival time to plead his own cause. If he
succeeds, Mr. Gilmore will then return to London,
taking with him his instructions for my sister's
marriage-settlement. You understand now, Mr.
Hartright, why I speak of waiting to take legal
advice until to-morrow? Mr. Gilmore is the old and
tried friend of two generations of Fairlies, and we
can trust him, as we could trust no one else."
The
marriage-settlement! The mere hearing of those two
words stung me with a jealous despair that was
poison to my higher and better instincts. I began to
think—it is hard to confess this, but I must
suppress nothing from beginning to end of the
terrible story that I now stand committed to
reveal—I began to think, with a hateful eagerness of
hope, of the vague charges against Sir Percival
Glyde which the anonymous letter contained. What if
those wild accusations rested on a foundation of
truth? What if their truth could be proved before
the fatal words of consent were spoken, and the
marriage-settlement was drawn? I have tried to think
since, that the feeling which then animated me began
and ended in pure devotion to Miss Fairlie's
interests, but I have never succeeded in deceiving
myself into believing it, and I must not now attempt
to deceive others. The feeling began and ended in
reckless, vindictive, hopeless hatred of the man who
was to marry her.
"If we are
to find out anything," I said, speaking under the
new influence which was now directing me, "we had
better not let another minute slip by us unemployed.
I can only suggest, once more, the propriety of
questioning the gardener a second time, and of
inquiring in the village immediately afterwards."
"I think I
may be of help to you in both cases," said Miss
Halcombe, rising. "Let us go, Mr. Hartright, at
once, and do the best we can together."
I had the
door in my hand to open it for her—but I stopped, on
a sudden, to ask an important question before we set
forth.
"One of the
paragraphs of the anonymous letter," I said,
"contains some sentences of minute personal
description. Sir Percival Glyde's name is not
mentioned, I know—but does that description at all
resemble him?"
"Accurately—even in stating his age to be
forty-five——"
Forty-five;
and she was not yet twenty-one! Men of his age
married wives of her age every day—and experience
had shown those marriages to be often the happiest
ones. I knew that—and yet even the mention of his
age, when I contrasted it with hers, added to my
blind hatred and distrust of him.
"Accurately," Miss Halcombe continued, "even to the
scar on his right hand, which is the scar of a wound
that he received years since when he was travelling
in Italy. There can be no doubt that every
peculiarity of his personal appearance is thoroughly
well known to the writer of the letter."
"Even a
cough that he is troubled with is mentioned, if I
remember right?"
"Yes, and
mentioned correctly. He treats it lightly himself,
though it sometimes makes his friends anxious about
him."
"I suppose
no whispers have ever been heard against his
character?"
"Mr.
Hartright! I hope you are not unjust enough to let
that infamous letter influence you?"
I felt the
blood rush into my cheeks, for I knew that it HAD
influenced me.
"I hope
not," I answered confusedly. "Perhaps I had no right
to ask the question."
"I am not
sorry you asked it," she said, "for it enables me to
do justice to Sir Percival's reputation. Not a
whisper, Mr. Hartright, has ever reached me, or my
family, against him. He has fought successfully two
contested elections, and has come out of the ordeal
unscathed. A man who can do that, in England, is a
man whose character is established."
I opened the
door for her in silence, and followed her out. She
had not convinced me. If the recording angel had
come down from heaven to confirm her, and had opened
his book to my mortal eyes, the recording angel
would not have convinced me.
We found the
gardener at work as usual. No amount of questioning
could extract a single answer of any importance from
the lad's impenetrable stupidity. The woman who had
given him the letter was an elderly woman; she had
not spoken a word to him, and she had gone away
towards the south in a great hurry. That was all the
gardener could tell us.
The village
lay southward of the house. So to the village we
went next.
XII
Our
inquiries at Limmeridge were patiently pursued in
all directions, and among all sorts and conditions
of people. But nothing came of them. Three of the
villagers did certainly assure us that they had seen
the woman, but as they were quite unable to describe
her, and quite incapable of agreeing about the exact
direction in which she was proceeding when they last
saw her, these three bright exceptions to the
general rule of total ignorance afforded no more
real assistance to us than the mass of their
unhelpful and unobservant neighbours.
The course
of our useless investigations brought us, in time,
to the end of the village at which the schools
established by Mrs. Fairlie were situated. As we
passed the side of the building appropriated to the
use of the boys, I suggested the propriety of making
a last inquiry of the schoolmaster, whom we might
presume to be, in virtue of his office, the most
intelligent man in the place.
"I am afraid
the schoolmaster must have been occupied with his
scholars," said Miss Halcombe, "just at the time
when the woman passed through the village and
returned again. However, we can but try."
We entered
the playground enclosure, and walked by the
schoolroom window to get round to the door, which
was situated at the back of the building. I stopped
for a moment at the window and looked in.
The
schoolmaster was sitting at his high desk, with his
back to me, apparently haranguing the pupils, who
were all gathered together in front of him, with one
exception. The one exception was a sturdy
white-headed boy, standing apart from all the rest
on a stool in a corner—a forlorn little Crusoe,
isolated in his own desert island of solitary penal
disgrace.
The door,
when we got round to it, was ajar, and the
school-master's voice reached us plainly, as we both
stopped for a minute under the porch.
"Now, boys,"
said the voice, "mind what I tell you. If I hear
another word spoken about ghosts in this school, it
will be the worse for all of you. There are no such
things as ghosts, and therefore any boy who believes
in ghosts believes in what can't possibly be; and a
boy who belongs to Limmeridge School, and believes
in what can't possibly be, sets up his back against
reason and discipline, and must be punished
accordingly. You all see Jacob Postlethwaite
standing up on the stool there in disgrace. He has
been punished, not because he said he saw a ghost
last night, but because he is too impudent and too
obstinate to listen to reason, and because he
persists in saying he saw the ghost after I have
told him that no such thing can possibly be. If
nothing else will do, I mean to cane the ghost out
of Jacob Postlethwaite, and if the thing spreads
among any of the rest of you, I mean to go a step
farther, and cane the ghost out of the whole
school."
"We seem to
have chosen an awkward moment for our visit," said
Miss Halcombe, pushing open the door at the end of
the schoolmaster's address, and leading the way in.
Our
appearance produced a strong sensation among the
boys. They appeared to think that we had arrived for
the express purpose of seeing Jacob Postlethwaite
caned.
"Go home all
of you to dinner," said the schoolmaster, "except
Jacob. Jacob must stop where he is; and the ghost
may bring him his dinner, if the ghost pleases."
Jacob's
fortitude deserted him at the double disappearance
of his schoolfellows and his prospect of dinner. He
took his hands out of his pockets, looked hard at
his knuckles, raised them with great deliberation to
his eyes, and when they got there, ground them round
and round slowly, accompanying the action by short
spasms of sniffing, which followed each other at
regular intervals—the nasal minute guns of juvenile
distress.
"We came
here to ask you a question, Mr. Dempster," said Miss
Halcombe, addressing the schoolmaster; "and we
little expected to find you occupied in exorcising a
ghost. What does it all mean? What has really
happened?"
"That wicked
boy has been frightening the whole school, Miss
Halcombe, by declaring that he saw a ghost yesterday
evening," answered the master; "and he still
persists in his absurd story, in spite of all that I
can say to him."
"Most
extraordinary," said Miss Halcombe "I should not
have thought it possible that any of the boys had
imagination enough to see a ghost. This is a new
accession indeed to the hard labour of forming the
youthful mind at Limmeridge, and I heartily wish you
well through it, Mr. Dempster. In the meantime, let
me explain why you see me here, and what it is I
want."
She then put
the same question to the schoolmaster which we had
asked already of almost every one else in the
village. It was met by the same discouraging answer
Mr. Dempster had not set eyes on the stranger of
whom we were in search.
"We may as
well return to the house, Mr. Hartright," said Miss
Halcombe; "the information we want is evidently not
to be found."
She had
bowed to Mr. Dempster, and was about to leave the
schoolroom, when the forlorn position of Jacob
Postlethwaite, piteously sniffing on the stool of
penitence, attracted her attention as she passed
him, and made her stop good-humouredly to speak a
word to the little prisoner before she opened the
door.
"You foolish
boy," she said, "why don't you beg Mr. Dempster's
pardon, and hold your tongue about the ghost?"
"Eh!—but I
saw t' ghaist," persisted Jacob Postlethwaite, with
a stare of terror and a burst of tears.
"Stuff and
nonsense! You saw nothing of the kind. Ghost indeed!
What ghost——"
"I beg your
pardon, Miss Halcombe," interposed the schoolmaster
a little uneasily—"but I think you had better not
question the boy. The obstinate folly of his story
is beyond all belief; and you might lead him into
ignorantly——"
"Ignorantly
what?" inquired Miss Halcombe sharply.
"Ignorantly
shocking your feelings," said Mr. Dempster, looking
very much discomposed.
"Upon my
word, Mr. Dempster, you pay my feelings a great
compliment in thinking them weak enough to be
shocked by such an urchin as that!" She turned with
an air of satirical defiance to little Jacob, and
began to question him directly. "Come!" she said, "I
mean to know all about this. You naughty boy, when
did you see the ghost?"
"Yestere'en,
at the gloaming," replied Jacob.
"Oh! you saw
it yesterday evening, in the twilight? And what was
it like?"
"Arl in
white—as a ghaist should be," answered the
ghost-seer, with a confidence beyond his years.
"And where
was it?"
"Away
yander, in t' kirkyard—where a ghaist ought to be."
"As a
'ghaist' should be—where a 'ghaist' ought to be—why,
you little fool, you talk as if the manners and
customs of ghosts had been familiar to you from your
infancy! You have got your story at your fingers'
ends, at any rate. I suppose I shall hear next that
you can actually tell me whose ghost it was?"
"Eh! but I
just can," replied Jacob, nodding his head with an
air of gloomy triumph.
Mr. Dempster
had already tried several times to speak while Miss
Halcombe was examining his pupil, and he now
interposed resolutely enough to make himself heard.
"Excuse me,
Miss Halcombe," he said, "if I venture to say that
you are only encouraging the boy by asking him these
questions."
"I will
merely ask one more, Mr. Dempster, and then I shall
be quite satisfied. Well," she continued, turning to
the boy, "and whose ghost was it?"
"T' ghaist
of Mistress Fairlie," answered Jacob in a whisper.
The effect
which this extraordinary reply produced on Miss
Halcombe fully justified the anxiety which the
schoolmaster had shown to prevent her from hearing
it. Her face crimsoned with indignation—she turned
upon little Jacob with an angry suddenness which
terrified him into a fresh burst of tears—opened her
lips to speak to him—then controlled herself, and
addressed the master instead of the boy.
"It is
useless," she said, "to hold such a child as that
responsible for what he says. I have little doubt
that the idea has been put into his head by others.
If there are people in this village, Mr. Dempster,
who have forgotten the respect and gratitude due
from every soul in it to my mother's memory, I will
find them out, and if I have any influence with Mr.
Fairlie, they shall suffer for it."
"I
hope—indeed, I am sure, Miss Halcombe—that you are
mistaken," said the schoolmaster. "The matter begins
and ends with the boy's own perversity and folly. He
saw, or thought he saw, a woman in white, yesterday
evening, as he was passing the churchyard; and the
figure, real or fancied, was standing by the marble
cross, which he and every one else in Limmeridge
knows to be the monument over Mrs. Fairlie's grave.
These two circumstances are surely sufficient to
have suggested to the boy himself the answer which
has so naturally shocked you?"
Although
Miss Halcombe did not seem to be convinced, she
evidently felt that the schoolmaster's statement of
the case was too sensible to be openly combated. She
merely replied by thanking him for his attention,
and by promising to see him again when her doubts
were satisfied. This said, she bowed, and led the
way out of the schoolroom.
Throughout
the whole of this strange scene I had stood apart,
listening attentively, and drawing my own
conclusions. As soon as we were alone again, Miss
Halcombe asked me if I had formed any opinion on
what I had heard.
"A very
strong opinion," I answered; "the boy's story, as I
believe, has a foundation in fact. I confess I am
anxious to see the monument over Mrs. Fairlie's
grave, and to examine the ground about it."
"You shall
see the grave."
She paused
after making that reply, and reflected a little as
we walked on. "What has happened in the schoolroom,"
she resumed, "has so completely distracted my
attention from the subject of the letter, that I
feel a little bewildered when I try to return to it.
Must we give up all idea of making any further
inquiries, and wait to place the thing in Mr.
Gilmore's hands to-morrow?"
"By no
means, Miss Halcombe. What has happened in the
schoolroom encourages me to persevere in the
investigation."
"Why does it
encourage you?"
"Because it
strengthens a suspicion I felt when you gave me the
letter to read."
"I suppose
you had your reasons, Mr. Hartright, for concealing
that suspicion from me till this moment?"
"I was
afraid to encourage it in myself. I thought it was
utterly preposterous—I distrusted it as the result
of some perversity in my own imagination. But I can
do so no longer. Not only the boy's own answers to
your questions, but even a chance expression that
dropped from the schoolmaster's lips in explaining
his story, have forced the idea back into my mind.
Events may yet prove that idea to be a delusion,
Miss Halcombe; but the belief is strong in me, at
this moment, that the fancied ghost in the
churchyard, and the writer of the anonymous letter,
are one and the same person."
She stopped,
turned pale, and looked me eagerly in the face.
"What
person?"
"The
schoolmaster unconsciously told you. When he spoke
of the figure that the boy saw in the churchyard he
called it 'a woman in white.'"
"Not Anne
Catherick?"
"Yes, Anne
Catherick."
She put her
hand through my arm and leaned on it heavily.
"I don't
know why," she said in low tones, "but there is
something in this suspicion of yours that seems to
startle and unnerve me. I feel——" She stopped, and
tried to laugh it off. "Mr. Hartright," she went on,
"I will show you the grave, and then go back at once
to the house. I had better not leave Laura too long
alone. I had better go back and sit with her."
We were
close to the churchyard when she spoke. The church,
a dreary building of grey stone, was situated in a
little valley, so as to be sheltered from the bleak
winds blowing over the moorland all round it. The
burial-ground advanced, from the side of the church,
a little way up the slope of the hill. It was
surrounded by a rough, low stone wall, and was bare
and open to the sky, except at one extremity, where
a brook trickled down the stony hill-side, and a
clump of dwarf trees threw their narrow shadows over
the short, meagre grass. Just beyond the brook and
the trees, and not far from one of the three stone
stiles which afforded entrance, at various points,
to the churchyard, rose the white marble cross that
distinguished Mrs. Fairlie's grave from the humbler
monuments scattered about it.
"I need go
no farther with you," said Miss Halcombe, pointing
to the grave. "You will let me know if you find
anything to confirm the idea you have just mentioned
to me. Let us meet again at the house."
She left me.
I descended at once to the churchyard, and crossed
the stile which led directly to Mrs. Fairlie's
grave.
The grass
about it was too short, and the ground too hard, to
show any marks of footsteps. Disappointed thus far,
I next looked attentively at the cross, and at the
square block of marble below it, on which the
inscription was cut.
The natural
whiteness of the cross was a little clouded, here
and there, by weather stains, and rather more than
one half of the square block beneath it, on the side
which bore the inscription, was in the same
condition. The other half, however, attracted my
attention at once by its singular freedom from stain
or impurity of any kind. I looked closer, and saw
that it had been cleaned—recently cleaned, in a
downward direction from top to bottom. The boundary
line between the part that had been cleaned and the
part that had not was traceable wherever the
inscription left a blank space of marble—sharply
traceable as a line that had been produced by
artificial means. Who had begun the cleansing of the
marble, and who had left it unfinished?
I looked
about me, wondering how the question was to be
solved. No sign of a habitation could be discerned
from the point at which I was standing—the
burial-ground was left in the lonely possession of
the dead. I returned to the church, and walked round
it till I came to the back of the building; then
crossed the boundary wall beyond, by another of the
stone stiles, and found myself at the head of a path
leading down into a deserted stone quarry. Against
one side of the quarry a little two-room cottage was
built, and just outside the door an old woman was
engaged in washing.
I walked up
to her, and entered into conversation about the
church and burial-ground. She was ready enough to
talk, and almost the first words she said informed
me that her husband filled the two offices of clerk
and sexton. I said a few words next in praise of
Mrs. Fairlie's monument. The old woman shook her
head, and told me I had not seen it at its best. It
was her husband's business to look after it, but he
had been so ailing and weak for months and months
past, that he had hardly been able to crawl into
church on Sundays to do his duty, and the monument
had been neglected in consequence. He was getting a
little better now, and in a week or ten days' time
he hoped to be strong enough to set to work and
clean it.
This
information—extracted from a long rambling answer in
the broadest Cumberland dialect—told me all that I
most wanted to know. I gave the poor woman a trifle,
and returned at once to Limmeridge House.
The partial
cleansing of the monument had evidently been
accomplished by a strange hand. Connecting what I
had discovered, thus far, with what I had suspected
after hearing the story of the ghost seen at
twilight, I wanted nothing more to confirm my
resolution to watch Mrs. Fairlie's grave, in secret,
that evening, returning to it at sunset, and waiting
within sight of it till the night fell. The work of
cleansing the monument had been left unfinished, and
the person by whom it had been begun might return to
complete it.
On getting
back to the house I informed Miss Halcombe of what I
intended to do. She looked surprised and uneasy
while I was explaining my purpose, but she made no
positive objection to the execution of it. She only
said, "I hope it may end well."
Just as she
was leaving me again, I stopped her to inquire, as
calmly as I could, after Miss Fairlie's health. She
was in better spirits, and Miss Halcombe hoped she
might be induced to take a little walking exercise
while the afternoon sun lasted.
I returned
to my own room to resume setting the drawings in
order. It was necessary to do this, and doubly
necessary to keep my mind employed on anything that
would help to distract my attention from myself, and
from the hopeless future that lay before me. From
time to time I paused in my work to look out of
window and watch the sky as the sun sank nearer and
nearer to the horizon. On one of those occasions I
saw a figure on the broad gravel walk under my
window. It was Miss Fairlie.
I had not
seen her since the morning, and I had hardly spoken
to her then. Another day at Limmeridge was all that
remained to me, and after that day my eyes might
never look on her again. This thought was enough to
hold me at the window. I had sufficient
consideration for her to arrange the blind so that
she might not see me if she looked up, but I had no
strength to resist the temptation of letting my
eyes, at least, follow her as far as they could on
her walk.
She was
dressed in a brown cloak, with a plain black silk
gown under it. On her head was the same simple straw
hat which she had worn on the morning when we first
met. A veil was attached to it now which hid her
face from me. By her side trotted a little Italian
greyhound, the pet companion of all her walks,
smartly dressed in a scarlet cloth wrapper, to keep
the sharp air from his delicate skin. She did not
seem to notice the dog. She walked straight forward,
with her head drooping a little, and her arms folded
in her cloak. The dead leaves, which had whirled in
the wind before me when I had heard of her marriage
engagement in the morning, whirled in the wind
before her, and rose and fell and scattered
themselves at her feet as she walked on in the pale
waning sunlight. The dog shivered and trembled, and
pressed against her dress impatiently for notice and
encouragement. But she never heeded him. She walked
on, farther and farther away from me, with the dead
leaves whirling about her on the path—walked on,
till my aching eyes could see her no more, and I was
left alone again with my own heavy heart.
In another
hour's time I had done my work, and the sunset was
at hand. I got my hat and coat in the hall, and
slipped out of the house without meeting any one.
The clouds
were wild in the western heaven, and the wind blew
chill from the sea. Far as the shore was, the sound
of the surf swept over the intervening moorland, and
beat drearily in my ears when I entered the
churchyard. Not a living creature was in sight. The
place looked lonelier than ever as I chose my
position, and waited and watched, with my eyes on
the white cross that rose over Mrs. Fairlie's grave.
XIII
The exposed
situation of the churchyard had obliged me to be
cautious in choosing the position that I was to
occupy.
The main
entrance to the church was on the side next to the
burial-ground, and the door was screened by a porch
walled in on either side. After some little
hesitation, caused by natural reluctance to conceal
myself, indispensable as that concealment was to the
object in view, I had resolved on entering the
porch. A loophole window was pierced in each of its
side walls. Through one of these windows I could see
Mrs. Fairlie's grave. The other looked towards the
stone quarry in which the sexton's cottage was
built. Before me, fronting the porch entrance, was a
patch of bare burial-ground, a line of low stone
wall, and a strip of lonely brown hill, with the
sunset clouds sailing heavily over it before the
strong, steady wind. No living creature was visible
or audible—no bird flew by me, no dog barked from
the sexton's cottage. The pauses in the dull beating
of the surf were filled up by the dreary rustling of
the dwarf trees near the grave, and the cold faint
bubble of the brook over its stony bed. A dreary
scene and a dreary hour. My spirits sank fast as I
counted out the minutes of the evening in my
hiding-place under the church porch.
It was not
twilight yet—the light of the setting sun still
lingered in the heavens, and little more than the
first half-hour of my solitary watch had
elapsed—when I heard footsteps and a voice. The
footsteps were approaching from the other side of
the church, and the voice was a woman's.
"Don't you
fret, my dear, about the letter," said the voice. "I
gave it to the lad quite safe, and the lad he took
it from me without a word. He went his way and I
went mine, and not a living soul followed me
afterwards—that I'll warrant."
These words
strung up my attention to a pitch of expectation
that was almost painful. There was a pause of
silence, but the footsteps still advanced. In
another moment two persons, both women, passed
within my range of view from the porch window. They
were walking straight towards the grave; and
therefore they had their backs turned towards me.
One of the
women was dressed in a bonnet and shawl. The other
wore a long travelling-cloak of a dark-blue colour,
with the hood drawn over her head. A few inches of
her gown were visible below the cloak. My heart beat
fast as I noted the colour—it was white.
After
advancing about half-way between the church and the
grave they stopped, and the woman in the cloak
turned her head towards her companion. But her side
face, which a bonnet might now have allowed me to
see, was hidden by the heavy, projecting edge of the
hood.
"Mind you
keep that comfortable warm cloak on," said the same
voice which I had already heard—the voice of the
woman in the shawl. "Mrs. Todd is right about your
looking too particular, yesterday, all in white.
I'll walk about a little while you're here,
churchyards being not at all in my way, whatever
they may be in yours. Finish what you want to do
before I come back, and let us be sure and get home
again before night."
With those
words she turned about, and retracing her steps,
advanced with her face towards me. It was the face
of an elderly woman, brown, rugged, and healthy,
with nothing dishonest or suspicious in the look of
it. Close to the church she stopped to pull her
shawl closer round her.
"Queer," she
said to herself, "always queer, with her whims and
her ways, ever since I can remember her. Harmless,
though—as harmless, poor soul, as a little child."
She
sighed—looked about the burial-ground
nervously—shook her head, as if the dreary prospect
by no means pleased her, and disappeared round the
corner of the church.
I doubted
for a moment whether I ought to follow and speak to
her or not. My intense anxiety to find myself face
to face with her companion helped me to decide in
the negative. I could ensure seeing the woman in the
shawl by waiting near the churchyard until she came
back—although it seemed more than doubtful whether
she could give me the information of which I was in
search. The person who had delivered the letter was
of little consequence. The person who had written it
was the one centre of interest, and the one source
of information, and that person I now felt convinced
was before me in the churchyard.
While these
ideas were passing through my mind I saw the woman
in the cloak approach close to the grave, and stand
looking at it for a little while. She then glanced
all round her, and taking a white linen cloth or
handkerchief from under her cloak, turned aside
towards the brook. The little stream ran into the
churchyard under a tiny archway in the bottom of the
wall, and ran out again, after a winding course of a
few dozen yards, under a similar opening. She dipped
the cloth in the water, and returned to the grave. I
saw her kiss the white cross, then kneel down before
the inscription, and apply her wet cloth to the
cleansing of it.
After
considering how I could show myself with the least
possible chance of frightening her, I resolved to
cross the wall before me, to skirt round it outside,
and to enter the churchyard again by the stile near
the grave, in order that she might see me as I
approached. She was so absorbed over her employment
that she did not hear me coming until I had stepped
over the stile. Then she looked up, started to her
feet with a faint cry, and stood facing me in
speechless and motionless terror.
"Don't be
frightened," I said. "Surely you remember me?"
I stopped
while I spoke—then advanced a few steps gently—then
stopped again—and so approached by little and little
till I was close to her. If there had been any doubt
still left in my mind, it must have been now set at
rest. There, speaking affrightedly for itself—there
was the same face confronting me over Mrs. Fairlie's
grave which had first looked into mine on the
high-road by night.
"You
remember me?" I said. "We met very late, and I
helped you to find the way to London. Surely you
have not forgotten that?"
Her features
relaxed, and she drew a heavy breath of relief. I
saw the new life of recognition stirring slowly
under the death-like stillness which fear had set on
her face.
"Don't
attempt to speak to me just yet," I went on. "Take
time to recover yourself—take time to feel quite
certain that I am a friend."
"You are
very kind to me," she murmured. "As kind now as you
were then."
She stopped,
and I kept silence on my side. I was not granting
time for composure to her only, I was gaining time
also for myself. Under the wan wild evening light,
that woman and I were met together again, a grave
between us, the dead about us, the lonesome hills
closing us round on every side. The time, the place,
the circumstances under which we now stood face to
face in the evening stillness of that dreary
valley—the lifelong interests which might hang
suspended on the next chance words that passed
between us—the sense that, for aught I knew to the
contrary, the whole future of Laura Fairlie's life
might be determined, for good or for evil, by my
winning or losing the confidence of the forlorn
creature who stood trembling by her mother's
grave—all threatened to shake the steadiness and the
self-control on which every inch of the progress I
might yet make now depended. I tried hard, as I felt
this, to possess myself of all my resources; I did
my utmost to turn the few moments for reflection to
the best account.
"Are you
calmer now?" I said, as soon as I thought it time to
speak again. "Can you talk to me without feeling
frightened, and without forgetting that I am a
friend?"
"How did you
come here?" she asked, without noticing what I had
just said to her.
"Don't you
remember my telling you, when we last met, that I
was going to Cumberland? I have been in Cumberland
ever since—I have been staying all the time at
Limmeridge House."
"At
Limmeridge House!" Her pale face brightened as she
repeated the words, her wandering eyes fixed on me
with a sudden interest. "Ah, how happy you must have
been!" she said, looking at me eagerly, without a
shadow of its former distrust left in her
expression.
I took
advantage of her newly-aroused confidence in me to
observe her face, with an attention and a curiosity
which I had hitherto restrained myself from showing,
for caution's sake. I looked at her, with my mind
full of that other lovely face which had so
ominously recalled her to my memory on the terrace
by moonlight. I had seen Anne Catherick's likeness
in Miss Fairlie. I now saw Miss Fairlie's likeness
in Anne Catherick—saw it all the more clearly
because the points of dissimilarity between the two
were presented to me as well as the points of
resemblance. In the general outline of the
countenance and general proportion of the
features—in the colour of the hair and in the little
nervous uncertainty about the lips—in the height and
size of the figure, and the carriage of the head and
body, the likeness appeared even more startling than
I had ever felt it to be yet. But there the
resemblance ended, and the dissimilarity, in
details, began. The delicate beauty of Miss
Fairlie's complexion, the transparent clearness of
her eyes, the smooth purity of her skin, the tender
bloom of colour on her lips, were all missing from
the worn weary face that was now turned towards
mine. Although I hated myself even for thinking such
a thing, still, while I looked at the woman before
me, the idea would force itself into my mind that
one sad change, in the future, was all that was
wanting to make the likeness complete, which I now
saw to be so imperfect in detail. If ever sorrow and
suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and
beauty of Miss Fairlie's face, then, and then only,
Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of
chance resemblance, the living reflections of one
another.
I shuddered
at the thought. There was something horrible in the
blind unreasoning distrust of the future which the
mere passage of it through my mind seemed to imply.
It was a welcome interruption to be roused by
feeling Anne Catherick's hand laid on my shoulder.
The touch was as stealthy and as sudden as that
other touch which had petrified me from head to foot
on the night when we first met.
"You are
looking at me, and you are thinking of something,"
she said, with her strange breathless rapidity of
utterance. "What is it?"
"Nothing
extraordinary," I answered. "I was only wondering
how you came here."
"I came with
a friend who is very good to me. I have only been
here two days."
"And you
found your way to this place yesterday?"
"How do you
know that?"
"I only
guessed it."
She turned
from me, and knelt down before the inscription once
more.
"Where
should I go if not here?" she said. "The friend who
was better than a mother to me is the only friend I
have to visit at Limmeridge. Oh, it makes my heart
ache to see a stain on her tomb! It ought to be kept
white as snow, for her sake. I was tempted to begin
cleaning it yesterday, and I can't help coming back
to go on with it to-day. Is there anything wrong in
that? I hope not. Surely nothing can be wrong that I
do for Mrs. Fairlie's sake?"
The old
grateful sense of her benefactress's kindness was
evidently the ruling idea still in the poor
creature's mind—the narrow mind which had but too
plainly opened to no other lasting impression since
that first impression of her younger and happier
days. I saw that my best chance of winning her
confidence lay in encouraging her to proceed with
the artless employment which she had come into the
burial-ground to pursue. She resumed it at once, on
my telling her she might do so, touching the hard
marble as tenderly as if it had been a sentient
thing, and whispering the words of the inscription
to herself, over and over again, as if the lost days
of her girlhood had returned and she was patiently
learning her lesson once more at Mrs. Fairlie's
knees.
"Should you
wonder very much," I said, preparing the way as
cautiously as I could for the questions that were to
come, "if I owned that it is a satisfaction to me,
as well as a surprise, to see you here? I felt very
uneasy about you after you left me in the cab."
She looked
up quickly and suspiciously.
"Uneasy,"
she repeated. "Why?"
"A strange
thing happened after we parted that night. Two men
overtook me in a chaise. They did not see where I
was standing, but they stopped near me, and spoke to
a policeman on the other side of the way."
She
instantly suspended her employment. The hand holding
the damp cloth with which she had been cleaning the
inscription dropped to her side. The other hand
grasped the marble cross at the head of the grave.
Her face turned towards me slowly, with the blank
look of terror set rigidly on it once more. I went
on at all hazards—it was too late now to draw back.
"The two men
spoke to the policeman," I said, "and asked him if
he had seen you. He had not seen you; and then one
of the men spoke again, and said you had escaped
from his Asylum."
She sprang
to her feet as if my last words had set the pursuers
on her track.
"Stop! and
hear the end," I cried. "Stop! and you shall know
how I befriended you. A word from me would have told
the men which way you had gone—and I never spoke
that word. I helped your escape—I made it safe and
certain. Think, try to think. Try to understand what
I tell you."
My manner
seemed to influence her more than my words. She made
an effort to grasp the new idea. Her hands shifted
the damp cloth hesitatingly from one to the other,
exactly as they had shifted the little
travelling-bag on the night when I first saw her.
Slowly the purpose of my words seemed to force its
way through the confusion and agitation of her mind.
Slowly her features relaxed, and her eyes looked at
me with their expression gaining in curiosity what
it was fast losing in fear.
"YOU don't
think I ought to be back in the Asylum, do you?" she
said.
"Certainly
not. I am glad you escaped from it—I am glad I
helped you."
"Yes, yes,
you did help me indeed; you helped me at the hard
part," she went on a little vacantly. "It was easy
to escape, or I should not have got away. They never
suspected me as they suspected the others. I was so
quiet, and so obedient, and so easily frightened.
The finding London was the hard part, and there you
helped me. Did I thank you at the time? I thank you
now very kindly."
"Was the
Asylum far from where you met me? Come! show that
you believe me to be your friend, and tell me where
it was."
She
mentioned the place—a private Asylum, as its
situation informed me; a private Asylum not very far
from the spot where I had seen her—and then, with
evident suspicion of the use to which I might put
her answer, anxiously repeated her former inquiry,
"You don't think I ought to be taken back, do you?"
"Once again,
I am glad you escaped—I am glad you prospered well
after you left me," I answered. "You said you had a
friend in London to go to. Did you find the friend?"
"Yes. It was
very late, but there was a girl up at needle-work in
the house, and she helped me to rouse Mrs. Clements.
Mrs. Clements is my friend. A good, kind woman, but
not like Mrs. Fairlie. Ah no, nobody is like Mrs.
Fairlie!"
"Is Mrs.
Clements an old friend of yours? Have you known her
a long time?"
"Yes, she
was a neighbour of ours once, at home, in Hampshire,
and liked me, and took care of me when I was a
little girl. Years ago, when she went away from us,
she wrote down in my Prayer-book for me where she
was going to live in London, and she said, 'If you
are ever in trouble, Anne, come to me. I have no
husband alive to say me nay, and no children to look
after, and I will take care of you.' Kind words,
were they not? I suppose I remember them because
they were kind. It's little enough I remember
besides—little enough, little enough!"
"Had you no
father or mother to take care of you?"
"Father?—I
never saw him—I never heard mother speak of him.
Father? Ah, dear! he is dead, I suppose."
"And your
mother?"
"I don't get
on well with her. We are a trouble and a fear to
each other."
A trouble
and a fear to each other! At those words the
suspicion crossed my mind, for the first time, that
her mother might be the person who had placed her
under restraint.
"Don't ask
me about mother," she went on. "I'd rather talk of
Mrs. Clements. Mrs. Clements is like you, she
doesn't think that I ought to be back in the Asylum,
and she is as glad as you are that I escaped from
it. She cried over my misfortune, and said it must
be kept secret from everybody."
Her
"misfortune." In what sense was she using that word?
In a sense which might explain her motive in writing
the anonymous letter? In a sense which might show it
to be the too common and too customary motive that
has led many a woman to interpose anonymous
hindrances to the marriage of the man who has ruined
her? I resolved to attempt the clearing up of this
doubt before more words passed between us on either
side.
"What
misfortune?" I asked.
"The
misfortune of my being shut up," she answered, with
every appearance of feeling surprised at my
question. "What other misfortune could there be?"
I determined
to persist, as delicately and forbearingly as
possible. It was of very great importance that I
should be absolutely sure of every step in the
investigation which I now gained in advance.
"There is
another misfortune," I said, "to which a woman may
be liable, and by which she may suffer lifelong
sorrow and shame."
"What is
it?" she asked eagerly.
"The
misfortune of believing too innocently in her own
virtue, and in the faith and honour of the man she
loves," I answered.
She looked
up at me with the artless bewilderment of a child.
Not the slightest confusion or change of colour—not
the faintest trace of any secret consciousness of
shame struggling to the surface appeared in her
face—that face which betrayed every other emotion
with such transparent clearness. No words that ever
were spoken could have assured me, as her look and
manner now assured me, that the motive which I had
assigned for her writing the letter and sending it
to Miss Fairlie was plainly and distinctly the wrong
one. That doubt, at any rate, was now set at rest;
but the very removal of it opened a new prospect of
uncertainty. The letter, as I knew from positive
testimony, pointed at Sir Percival Glyde, though it
did not name him. She must have had some strong
motive, originating in some deep sense of injury,
for secretly denouncing him to Miss Fairlie in such
terms as she had employed, and that motive was
unquestionably not to be traced to the loss of her
innocence and her character. Whatever wrong he might
have inflicted on her was not of that nature. Of
what nature could it be?
"I don't
understand you," she said, after evidently trying
hard, and trying in vain, to discover the meaning of
the words I had last said to her.
"Never
mind," I answered. "Let us go on with what we were
talking about. Tell me how long you stayed with Mrs.
Clements in London, and how you came here."
"How long?"
she repeated. "I stayed with Mrs. Clements till we
both came to this place, two days ago."
"You are
living in the village, then?" I said. "It is strange
I should not have heard of you, though you have only
been here two days."
"No, no, not
in the village. Three miles away at a farm. Do you
know the farm? They call it Todd's Corner."
I remembered
the place perfectly—we had often passed by it in our
drives. It was one of the oldest farms in the
neighbourhood, situated in a solitary, sheltered
spot, inland at the junction of two hills.
"They are
relations of Mrs. Clements at Todd's Corner," she
went on, "and they had often asked her to go and see
them. She said she would go, and take me with her,
for the quiet and the fresh air. It was very kind,
was it not? I would have gone anywhere to be quiet,
and safe, and out of the way. But when I heard that
Todd's Corner was near Limmeridge—oh! I was so happy
I would have walked all the way barefoot to get
there, and see the schools and the village and
Limmeridge House again. They are very good people at
Todd's Corner. I hope I shall stay there a long
time. There is only one thing I don't like about
them, and don't like about Mrs. Clements——"
"What is
it?"
"They will
tease me about dressing all in white—they say it
looks so particular. How do they know? Mrs. Fairlie
knew best. Mrs. Fairlie would never have made me
wear this ugly blue cloak! Ah! she was fond of white
in her lifetime, and here is white stone about her
grave—and I am making it whiter for her sake. She
often wore white herself, and she always dressed her
little daughter in white. Is Miss Fairlie well and
happy? Does she wear white now, as she used when she
was a girl?"
Her voice
sank when she put the questions about Miss Fairlie,
and she turned her head farther and farther away
from me. I thought I detected, in the alteration of
her manner, an uneasy consciousness of the risk she
had run in sending the anonymous letter, and I
instantly determined so to frame my answer as to
surprise her into owning it.
"Miss
Fairlie was not very well or very happy this
morning," I said.
She murmured
a few words, but they were spoken so confusedly, and
in such a low tone, that I could not even guess at
what they meant.
"Did you ask
me why Miss Fairlie was neither well nor happy this
morning?" I continued.
"No," she
said quickly and eagerly—"oh no, I never asked
that."
"I will tell
you without your asking," I went on. "Miss Fairlie
has received your letter."
She had been
down on her knees for some little time past,
carefully removing the last weather-stains left
about the inscription while we were speaking
together. The first sentence of the words I had just
addressed to her made her pause in her occupation,
and turn slowly without rising from her knees, so as
to face me. The second sentence literally petrified
her. The cloth she had been holding dropped from her
hands—her lips fell apart—all the little colour that
there was naturally in her face left it in an
instant.
"How do you
know?" she said faintly. "Who showed it to you?" The
blood rushed back into her face—rushed
overwhelmingly, as the sense rushed upon her mind
that her own words had betrayed her. She struck her
hands together in despair. "I never wrote it," she
gasped affrightedly; "I know nothing about it!"
"Yes," I
said, "you wrote it, and you know about it. It was
wrong to send such a letter, it was wrong to
frighten Miss Fairlie. If you had anything to say
that it was right and necessary for her to hear, you
should have gone yourself to Limmeridge House—you
should have spoken to the young lady with your own
lips."
She crouched
down over the flat stone of the grave, till her face
was hidden on it, and made no reply.
"Miss
Fairlie will be as good and kind to you as her
mother was, if you mean well," I went on. "Miss
Fairlie will keep your secret, and not let you come
to any harm. Will you see her to-morrow at the farm?
Will you meet her in the garden at Limmeridge
House?"
"Oh, if I
could die, and be hidden and at rest with YOU!" Her
lips murmured the words close on the grave-stone,
murmured them in tones of passionate endearment, to
the dead remains beneath. "You know how I love your
child, for your sake! Oh, Mrs. Fairlie! Mrs.
Fairlie! tell me how to save her. Be my darling and
my mother once more, and tell me what to do for the
best."
I heard her
lips kissing the stone—I saw her hands beating on it
passionately. The sound and the sight deeply
affected me. I stooped down, and took the poor
helpless hands tenderly in mine, and tried to soothe
her.
It was
useless. She snatched her hands from me, and never
moved her face from the stone. Seeing the urgent
necessity of quieting her at any hazard and by any
means, I appealed to the only anxiety that she
appeared to feel, in connection with me and with my
opinion of her—the anxiety to convince me of her
fitness to be mistress of her own actions.
"Come,
come," I said gently. "Try to compose yourself, or
you will make me alter my opinion of you. Don't let
me think that the person who put you in the Asylum
might have had some excuse——"
The next
words died away on my lips. The instant I risked
that chance reference to the person who had put her
in the Asylum she sprang up on her knees. A most
extraordinary and startling change passed over her.
Her face, at all ordinary times so touching to look
at, in its nervous sensitiveness, weakness, and
uncertainty, became suddenly darkened by an
expression of maniacally intense hatred and fear,
which communicated a wild, unnatural force to every
feature. Her eyes dilated in the dim evening light,
like the eyes of a wild animal. She caught up the
cloth that had fallen at her side, as if it had been
a living creature that she could kill, and crushed
it in both her hands with such convulsive strength,
that the few drops of moisture left in it trickled
down on the stone beneath her.
"Talk of
something else," she said, whispering through her
teeth. "I shall lose myself if you talk of that."
Every
vestige of the gentler thoughts which had filled her
mind hardly a minute since seemed to be swept from
it now. It was evident that the impression left by
Mrs. Fairlie's kindness was not, as I had supposed,
the only strong impression on her memory. With the
grateful remembrance of her school-days at
Limmeridge, there existed the vindictive remembrance
of the wrong inflicted on her by her confinement in
the Asylum. Who had done that wrong? Could it really
be her mother?
It was hard
to give up pursuing the inquiry to that final point,
but I forced myself to abandon all idea of
continuing it. Seeing her as I saw her now, it would
have been cruel to think of anything but the
necessity and the humanity of restoring her
composure.
"I will talk
of nothing to distress you," I said soothingly.
"You want
something," she answered sharply and suspiciously.
"Don't look at me like that. Speak to me—tell me
what you want."
"I only want
you to quiet yourself, and when you are calmer, to
think over what I have said."
"Said?" She
paused—twisted the cloth in her hands, backwards and
forwards, and whispered to herself, "What is it he
said?" She turned again towards me, and shook her
head impatiently. "Why don't you help me?" she
asked, with angry suddenness.
"Yes, yes,"
I said, "I will help you, and you will soon
remember. I ask you to see Miss Fairlie to-morrow
and to tell her the truth about the letter."
"Ah! Miss
Fairlie—Fairlie—Fairlie——"
The mere
utterance of the loved familiar name seemed to quiet
her. Her face softened and grew like itself again.
"You need
have no fear of Miss Fairlie," I continued, "and no
fear of getting into trouble through the letter. She
knows so much about it already, that you will have
no difficulty in telling her all. There can be
little necessity for concealment where there is
hardly anything left to conceal. You mention no
names in the letter; but Miss Fairlie knows that the
person you write of is Sir Percival Glyde——"
The instant
I pronounced that name she started to her feet, and
a scream burst from her that rang through the
churchyard, and made my heart leap in me with the
terror of it. The dark deformity of the expression
which had just left her face lowered on it once
more, with doubled and trebled intensity. The shriek
at the name, the reiterated look of hatred and fear
that instantly followed, told all. Not even a last
doubt now remained. Her mother was guiltless of
imprisoning her in the Asylum. A man had shut her
up—and that man was Sir Percival Glyde.
The scream
had reached other ears than mine. On one side I
heard the door of the sexton's cottage open; on the
other I heard the voice of her companion, the woman
in the shawl, the woman whom she had spoken of as
Mrs. Clements.
"I'm coming!
I'm coming!" cried the voice from behind the clump
of dwarf trees.
In a moment
more Mrs. Clements hurried into view.
"Who are
you?" she cried, facing me resolutely as she set her
foot on the stile. "How dare you frighten a poor
helpless woman like that?"
She was at
Anne Catherick's side, and had put one arm around
her, before I could answer. "What is it, my dear?"
she said. "What has he done to you?"
"Nothing,"
the poor creature answered. "Nothing. I'm only
frightened."
Mrs.
Clements turned on me with a fearless indignation,
for which I respected her.
"I should be
heartily ashamed of myself if I deserved that angry
look," I said. "But I do not deserve it. I have
unfortunately startled her without intending it.
This is not the first time she has seen me. Ask her
yourself, and she will tell you that I am incapable
of willingly harming her or any woman."
I spoke
distinctly, so that Anne Catherick might hear and
understand me, and I saw that the words and their
meaning had reached her.
"Yes, yes,"
she said—"he was good to me once—he helped me——" She
whispered the rest into her friend's ear.
"Strange,
indeed!" said Mrs. Clements, with a look of
perplexity. "It makes all the difference, though.
I'm sorry I spoke so rough to you, sir; but you must
own that appearances looked suspicious to a
stranger. It's more my fault than yours, for
humouring her whims, and letting her be alone in
such a place as this. Come, my dear—come home now."
I thought
the good woman looked a little uneasy at the
prospect of the walk back, and I offered to go with
them until they were both within sight of home. Mrs.
Clements thanked me civilly, and declined. She said
they were sure to meet some of the farm-labourers as
soon as they got to the moor.
"Try to
forgive me," I said, when Anne Catherick took her
friend's arm to go away. Innocent as I had been of
any intention to terrify and agitate her, my heart
smote me as I looked at the poor, pale, frightened
face.
"I will
try," she answered. "But you know too much—I'm
afraid you'll always frighten me now."
Mrs.
Clements glanced at me, and shook her head
pityingly.
"Good-night,
sir," she said. "You couldn't help it, I know but I
wish it was me you had frightened, and not her."
They moved
away a few steps. I thought they had left me, but
Anne suddenly stopped, and separated herself from
her friend.
"Wait a
little," she said. "I must say good-bye."
She returned
to the grave, rested both hands tenderly on the
marble cross, and kissed it.
"I'm better
now," she sighed, looking up at me quietly. "I
forgive you."
She joined
her companion again, and they left the
burial-ground. I saw them stop near the church and
speak to the sexton's wife, who had come from the
cottage, and had waited, watching us from a
distance. Then they went on again up the path that
led to the moor. I looked after Anne Catherick as
she disappeared, till all trace of her had faded in
the twilight—looked as anxiously and sorrowfully as
if that was the last I was to see in this weary
world of the woman in white.
XIV
Half an hour
later I was back at the house, and was informing
Miss Halcombe of all that had happened.
She listened
to me from beginning to end with a steady, silent
attention, which, in a woman of her temperament and
disposition, was the strongest proof that could be
offered of the serious manner in which my narrative
affected her.
"My mind
misgives me," was all she said when I had done. "My
mind misgives me sadly about the future."
"The future
may depend," I suggested, "on the use we make of the
present. It is not improbable that Anne Catherick
may speak more readily and unreservedly to a woman
than she has spoken to me. If Miss Fairlie——"
"Not to be
thought of for a moment," interposed Miss Halcombe,
in her most decided manner.
"Let me
suggest, then," I continued, "that you should see
Anne Catherick yourself, and do all you can to win
her confidence. For my own part, I shrink from the
idea of alarming the poor creature a second time, as
I have most unhappily alarmed her already. Do you
see any objection to accompanying me to the
farmhouse to-morrow?"
"None
whatever. I will go anywhere and do anything to
serve Laura's interests. What did you say the place
was called?"
"You must
know it well. It is called Todd's Corner."
"Certainly.
Todd's Corner is one of Mr. Fairlie's farms. Our
dairymaid here is the farmer's second daughter. She
goes backwards and forwards constantly between this
house and her father's farm, and she may have heard
or seen something which it may be useful to us to
know. Shall I ascertain, at once, if the girl is
downstairs?"
She rang the
bell, and sent the servant with his message. He
returned, and announced that the dairymaid was then
at the farm. She had not been there for the last
three days, and the housekeeper had given her leave
to go home for an hour or two that evening.
"I can speak
to her to-morrow," said Miss Halcombe, when the
servant had left the room again. "In the meantime,
let me thoroughly understand the object to be gained
by my interview with Anne Catherick. Is there no
doubt in your mind that the person who confined her
in the Asylum was Sir Percival Glyde?"
"There is
not the shadow of a doubt. The only mystery that
remains is the mystery of his MOTIVE. Looking to the
great difference between his station in life and
hers, which seems to preclude all idea of the most
distant relationship between them, it is of the last
importance—even assuming that she really required to
be placed under restraint—to know why HE should have
been the person to assume the serious responsibility
of shutting her up——"
"In a
private Asylum, I think you said?"
"Yes, in a
private Asylum, where a sum of money, which no poor
person could afford to give, must have been paid for
her maintenance as a patient."
"I see where
the doubt lies, Mr. Hartright, and I promise you
that it shall be set at rest, whether Anne Catherick
assists us to-morrow or not. Sir Percival Glyde
shall not be long in this house without satisfying
Mr. Gilmore, and satisfying me. My sister's future
is my dearest care in life, and I have influence
enough over her to give me some power, where her
marriage is concerned, in the disposal of it."
We parted
for the night.
After breakfast the next
morning, an obstacle, which the events of the
evening before had put out of my memory, interposed
to prevent our proceeding immediately to the farm.
This was my last day at Limmeridge House, and it was
necessary, as soon as the post came in, to follow
Miss Halcombe's advice, and to ask Mr. Fairlie's
permission to shorten my engagement by a month, in
consideration of an unforeseen necessity for my
return to London.
Fortunately
for the probability of this excuse, so far as
appearances were concerned, the post brought me two
letters from London friends that morning. I took
them away at once to my own room, and sent the
servant with a message to Mr. Fairlie, requesting to
know when I could see him on a matter of business.
I awaited
the man's return, free from the slightest feeling of
anxiety about the manner in which his master might
receive my application. With Mr. Fairlie's leave or
without it, I must go. The consciousness of having
now taken the first step on the dreary journey which
was henceforth to separate my life from Miss
Fairlie's seemed to have blunted my sensibility to
every consideration connected with myself. I had
done with my poor man's touchy pride—I had done with
all my little artist vanities. No insolence of Mr.
Fairlie's, if he chose to be insolent, could wound
me now.
The servant
returned with a message for which I was not
unprepared. Mr. Fairlie regretted that the state of
his health, on that particular morning, was such as
to preclude all hope of his having the pleasure of
receiving me. He begged, therefore, that I would
accept his apologies, and kindly communicate what I
had to say in the form of a letter. Similar messages
to this had reached me, at various intervals, during
my three months' residence in the house. Throughout
the whole of that period Mr. Fairlie had been
rejoiced to "possess" me, but had never been well
enough to see me for a second time. The servant took
every fresh batch of drawings that I mounted and
restored back to his master with my "respects," and
returned empty-handed with Mr. Fairlie's "kind
compliments," "best thanks," and "sincere regrets"
that the state of his health still obliged him to
remain a solitary prisoner in his own room. A more
satisfactory arrangement to both sides could not
possibly have been adopted. It would be hard to say
which of us, under the circumstances, felt the most
grateful sense of obligation to Mr. Fairlie's
accommodating nerves.
I sat down
at once to write the letter, expressing myself in it
as civilly, as clearly, and as briefly as possible.
Mr. Fairlie did not hurry his reply. Nearly an hour
elapsed before the answer was placed in my hands. It
was written with beautiful regularity and neatness
of character, in violet-coloured ink, on note-paper
as smooth as ivory and almost as thick as cardboard,
and it addressed me in these terms—
"Mr.
Fairlie's compliments to Mr. Hartright. Mr. Fairlie
is more surprised and disappointed than he can say
(in the present state of his health) by Mr.
Hartright's application. Mr. Fairlie is not a man of
business, but he has consulted his steward, who is,
and that person confirms Mr. Fairlie's opinion that
Mr. Hartright's request to be allowed to break his
engagement cannot be justified by any necessity
whatever, excepting perhaps a case of life and
death. If the highly-appreciative feeling towards
Art and its professors, which it is the consolation
and happiness of Mr. Fairlie's suffering existence
to cultivate, could be easily shaken, Mr.
Hartright's present proceeding would have shaken it.
It has not done so—except in the instance of Mr.
Hartright himself.
"Having
stated his opinion—so far, that is to say, as acute
nervous suffering will allow him to state
anything—Mr. Fairlie has nothing to add but the
expression of his decision, in reference to the
highly irregular application that has been made to
him. Perfect repose of body and mind being to the
last degree important in his case, Mr. Fairlie will
not suffer Mr. Hartright to disturb that repose by
remaining in the house under circumstances of an
essentially irritating nature to both sides.
Accordingly, Mr. Fairlie waives his right of
refusal, purely with a view to the preservation of
his own tranquillity—and informs Mr. Hartright that
he may go."
I folded the
letter up, and put it away with my other papers. The
time had been when I should have resented it as an
insult—I accepted it now as a written release from
my engagement. It was off my mind, it was almost out
of my memory, when I went downstairs to the
breakfast-room, and informed Miss Halcombe that I
was ready to walk with her to the farm.
"Has Mr.
Fairlie given you a satisfactory answer?" she asked
as we left the house.
"He has
allowed me to go, Miss Halcombe."
She looked
up at me quickly, and then, for the first time since
I had known her, took my arm of her own accord. No
words could have expressed so delicately that she
understood how the permission to leave my employment
had been granted, and that she gave me her sympathy,
not as my superior, but as my friend. I had not felt
the man's insolent letter, but I felt deeply the
woman's atoning kindness.
On our way
to the farm we arranged that Miss Halcombe was to
enter the house alone, and that I was to wait
outside, within call. We adopted this mode of
proceeding from an apprehension that my presence,
after what had happened in the churchyard the
evening before, might have the effect of renewing
Anne Catherick's nervous dread, and of rendering her
additionally distrustful of the advances of a lady
who was a stranger to her. Miss Halcombe left me,
with the intention of speaking, in the first
instance, to the farmer's wife (of whose friendly
readiness to help her in any way she was well
assured), while I waited for her in the near
neighbourhood of the house.
I had fully
expected to be left alone for some time. To my
surprise, however, little more than five minutes had
elapsed before Miss Halcombe returned.
"Does Anne
Catherick refuse to see you?" I asked in
astonishment.
"Anne
Catherick is gone," replied Miss Halcombe.
"Gone?"
"Gone with
Mrs. Clements. They both left the farm at eight
o'clock this morning."
I could say
nothing—I could only feel that our last chance of
discovery had gone with them.
"All that
Mrs. Todd knows about her guests, I know," Miss
Halcombe went on, "and it leaves me, as it leaves
her, in the dark. They both came back safe last
night, after they left you, and they passed the
first part of the evening with Mr. Todd's family as
usual. Just before supper-time, however, Anne
Catherick startled them all by being suddenly seized
with faintness. She had had a similar attack, of a
less alarming kind, on the day she arrived at the
farm; and Mrs. Todd had connected it, on that
occasion, with something she was reading at the time
in our local newspaper, which lay on the farm table,
and which she had taken up only a minute or two
before."
"Does Mrs.
Todd know what particular passage in the newspaper
affected her in that way?" I inquired.
"No,"
replied Miss Halcombe. "She had looked it over, and
had seen nothing in it to agitate any one. I asked
leave, however, to look it over in my turn, and at
the very first page I opened I found that the editor
had enriched his small stock of news by drawing upon
our family affairs, and had published my sister's
marriage engagement, among his other announcements,
copied from the London papers, of Marriages in High
Life. I concluded at once that this was the
paragraph which had so strangely affected Anne
Catherick, and I thought I saw in it, also, the
origin of the letter which she sent to our house the
next day."
"There can
be no doubt in either case. But what did you hear
about her second attack of faintness yesterday
evening?"
"Nothing.
The cause of it is a complete mystery. There was no
stranger in the room. The only visitor was our
dairymaid, who, as I told you, is one of Mr. Todd's
daughters, and the only conversation was the usual
gossip about local affairs. They heard her cry out,
and saw her turn deadly pale, without the slightest
apparent reason. Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Clements took
her upstairs, and Mrs. Clements remained with her.
They were heard talking together until long after
the usual bedtime, and early this morning Mrs.
Clements took Mrs. Todd aside, and amazed her beyond
all power of expression by saying that they must go.
The only explanation Mrs. Todd could extract from
her guest was, that something had happened, which
was not the fault of any one at the farmhouse, but
which was serious enough to make Anne Catherick
resolve to leave Limmeridge immediately. It was
quite useless to press Mrs. Clements to be more
explicit. She only shook her head, and said that,
for Anne's sake, she must beg and pray that no one
would question her. All she could repeat, with every
appearance of being seriously agitated herself, was
that Anne must go, that she must go with her, and
that the destination to which they might both betake
themselves must be kept a secret from everybody. I
spare you the recital of Mrs. Todd's hospitable
remonstrances and refusals. It ended in her driving
them both to the nearest station, more than three
hours since. She tried hard on the way to get them
to speak more plainly, but without success; and she
set them down outside the station-door, so hurt and
offended by the unceremonious abruptness of their
departure and their unfriendly reluctance to place
the least confidence in her, that she drove away in
anger, without so much as stopping to bid them
good-bye. That is exactly what has taken place.
Search your own memory, Mr. Hartright, and tell me
if anything happened in the burial-ground yesterday
evening which can at all account for the
extraordinary departure of those two women this
morning."
"I should
like to account first, Miss Halcombe, for the sudden
change in Anne Catherick which alarmed them at the
farmhouse, hours after she and I had parted, and
when time enough had elapsed to quiet any violent
agitation that I might have been unfortunate enough
to cause. Did you inquire particularly about the
gossip which was going on in the room when she
turned faint?"
"Yes. But
Mrs. Todd's household affairs seem to have divided
her attention that evening with the talk in the
farmhouse parlour. She could only tell me that it
was 'just the news,'—meaning, I suppose, that they
all talked as usual about each other."
"The
dairymaid's memory may be better than her mother's,"
I said. "It may be as well for you to speak to the
girl, Miss Halcombe, as soon as we get back."
My
suggestion was acted on the moment we returned to
the house. Miss Halcombe led me round to the
servants' offices, and we found the girl in the
dairy, with her sleeves tucked up to her shoulders,
cleaning a large milk-pan and singing blithely over
her work.
"I have
brought this gentleman to see your dairy, Hannah,"
said Miss Halcombe. "It is one of the sights of the
house, and it always does you credit."
The girl
blushed and curtseyed, and said shyly that she hoped
she always did her best to keep things neat and
clean.
"We have
just come from your father's," Miss Halcombe
continued. "You were there yesterday evening, I
hear, and you found visitors at the house?"
"Yes, miss."
"One of them
was taken faint and ill, I am told. I suppose
nothing was said or done to frighten her? You were
not talking of anything very terrible, were you?"
"Oh no,
miss!" said the girl, laughing. "We were only
talking of the news."
"Your
sisters told you the news at Todd's Corner, I
suppose?"
"Yes, miss."
"And you
told them the news at Limmeridge House?"
"Yes, miss.
And I'm quite sure nothing was said to frighten the
poor thing, for I was talking when she was taken
ill. It gave me quite a turn, miss, to see it, never
having been taken faint myself."
Before any
more questions could be put to her, she was called
away to receive a basket of eggs at the dairy door.
As she left us I whispered to Miss Halcombe—
"Ask her if
she happened to mention, last night, that visitors
were expected at Limmeridge House."
Miss
Halcombe showed me, by a look, that she understood,
and put the question as soon as the dairymaid
returned to us.
"Oh yes,
miss, I mentioned that," said the girl simply. "The
company coming, and the accident to the brindled
cow, was all the news I had to take to the farm."
"Did you
mention names? Did you tell them that Sir Percival
Glyde was expected on Monday?"
"Yes, miss—I
told them Sir Percival Glyde was coming. I hope
there was no harm in it—I hope I didn't do wrong."
"Oh no, no
harm. Come, Mr. Hartright, Hannah will begin to
think us in the way, if we interrupt her any longer
over her work."
We stopped
and looked at one another the moment we were alone
again.
"Is there
any doubt in your mind, NOW, Miss Halcombe?"
"Sir
Percival Glyde shall remove that doubt, Mr.
Hartright—or Laura Fairlie shall never be his wife."
XV
As we walked
round to the front of the house a fly from the
railway approached us along the drive. Miss Halcombe
waited on the door-steps until the fly drew up, and
then advanced to shake hands with an old gentleman,
who got out briskly the moment the steps were let
down. Mr. Gilmore had arrived.
I looked at
him, when we were introduced to each other, with an
interest and a curiosity which I could hardly
conceal. This old man was to remain at Limmeridge
House after I had left it, he was to hear Sir
Percival Glyde's explanation, and was to give Miss
Halcombe the assistance of his experience in forming
her judgment; he was to wait until the question of
the marriage was set at rest; and his hand, if that
question were decided in the affirmative, was to
draw the settlement which bound Miss Fairlie
irrevocably to her engagement. Even then, when I
knew nothing by comparison with what I know now, I
looked at the family lawyer with an interest which I
had never felt before in the presence of any man
breathing who was a total stranger to me.
In external
appearance Mr. Gilmore was the exact opposite of the
conventional idea of an old lawyer. His complexion
was florid—his white hair was worn rather long and
kept carefully brushed—his black coat, waistcoat,
and trousers fitted him with perfect neatness—his
white cravat was carefully tied, and his
lavender-coloured kid gloves might have adorned the
hands of a fashionable clergyman, without fear and
without reproach. His manners were pleasantly marked
by the formal grace and refinement of the old school
of politeness, quickened by the invigorating
sharpness and readiness of a man whose business in
life obliges him always to keep his faculties in
good working order. A sanguine constitution and fair
prospects to begin with—a long subsequent career of
creditable and comfortable prosperity—a cheerful,
diligent, widely-respected old age—such were the
general impressions I derived from my introduction
to Mr. Gilmore, and it is but fair to him to add,
that the knowledge I gained by later and better
experience only tended to confirm them.
I left the
old gentleman and Miss Halcombe to enter the house
together, and to talk of family matters undisturbed
by the restraint of a stranger's presence. They
crossed the hall on their way to the drawing-room,
and I descended the steps again to wander about the
garden alone.
My hours
were numbered at Limmeridge House—my departure the
next morning was irrevocably settled—my share in the
investigation which the anonymous letter had
rendered necessary was at an end. No harm could be
done to any one but myself if I let my heart loose
again, for the little time that was left me, from
the cold cruelty of restraint which necessity had
forced me to inflict upon it, and took my farewell
of the scenes which were associated with the brief
dream-time of my happiness and my love.
I turned
instinctively to the walk beneath my study-window,
where I had seen her the evening before with her
little dog, and followed the path which her dear
feet had trodden so often, till I came to the wicket
gate that led into her rose garden. The winter
bareness spread drearily over it now. The flowers
that she had taught me to distinguish by their
names, the flowers that I had taught her to paint
from, were gone, and the tiny white paths that led
between the beds were damp and green already. I went
on to the avenue of trees, where we had breathed
together the warm fragrance of August evenings,
where we had admired together the myriad
combinations of shade and sunlight that dappled the
ground at our feet. The leaves fell about me from
the groaning branches, and the earthy decay in the
atmosphere chilled me to the bones. A little farther
on, and I was out of the grounds, and following the
lane that wound gently upward to the nearest hills.
The old felled tree by the wayside, on which we had
sat to rest, was sodden with rain, and the tuft of
ferns and grasses which I had drawn for her,
nestling under the rough stone wall in front of us,
had turned to a pool of water, stagnating round an
island of draggled weeds. I gained the summit of the
hill, and looked at the view which we had so often
admired in the happier time. It was cold and
barren—it was no longer the view that I remembered.
The sunshine of her presence was far from me—the
charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear. She
had talked to me, on the spot from which I now
looked down, of her father, who was her last
surviving parent—had told me how fond of each other
they had been, and how sadly she missed him still
when she entered certain rooms in the house, and
when she took up forgotten occupations and
amusements with which he had been associated. Was
the view that I had seen, while listening to those
words, the view that I saw now, standing on the
hill-top by myself? I turned and left it—I wound my
way back again, over the moor, and round the
sandhills, down to the beach. There was the white
rage of the surf, and the multitudinous glory of the
leaping waves—but where was the place on which she
had once drawn idle figures with her parasol in the
sand—the place where we had sat together, while she
talked to me about myself and my home, while she
asked me a woman's minutely observant questions
about my mother and my sister, and innocently
wondered whether I should ever leave my lonely
chambers and have a wife and a house of my own? Wind
and wave had long since smoothed out the trace of
her which she had left in those marks on the sand, I
looked over the wide monotony of the sea-side
prospect, and the place in which we two had idled
away the sunny hours was as lost to me as if I had
never known it, as strange to me as if I stood
already on a foreign shore.
The empty
silence of the beach struck cold to my heart. I
returned to the house and the garden, where traces
were left to speak of her at every turn.
On the west
terrace walk I met Mr. Gilmore. He was evidently in
search of me, for he quickened his pace when we
caught sight of each other. The state of my spirits
little fitted me for the society of a stranger; but
the meeting was inevitable, and I resigned myself to
make the best of it.
"You are the
very person I wanted to see," said the old
gentleman. "I had two words to say to you, my dear
sir; and If you have no objection I will avail
myself of the present opportunity. To put it
plainly, Miss Halcombe and I have been talking over
family affairs—affairs which are the cause of my
being here—and in the course of our conversation she
was naturally led to tell me of this unpleasant
matter connected with the anonymous letter, and of
the share which you have most creditably and
properly taken in the proceedings so far. That
share, I quite understand, gives you an interest
which you might not otherwise have felt, in knowing
that the future management of the investigation
which you have begun will be placed in safe hands.
My dear sir, make yourself quite easy on that
point—it will be placed in MY hands."
"You are, in
every way, Mr. Gilmore, much fitter to advise and to
act in the matter than I am. Is it an indiscretion
on my part to ask if you have decided yet on a
course of proceeding?"
"So far as
it is possible to decide, Mr. Hartright, I have
decided. I mean to send a copy of the letter,
accompanied by a statement of the circumstances, to
Sir Percival Glyde's solicitor in London, with whom
I have some acquaintance. The letter itself I shall
keep here to show to Sir Percival as soon as he
arrives. The tracing of the two women I have already
provided for, by sending one of Mr. Fairlie's
servants—a confidential person—to the station to
make inquiries. The man has his money and his
directions, and he will follow the women in the
event of his finding any clue. This is all that can
be done until Sir Percival comes on Monday. I have
no doubt myself that every explanation which can be
expected from a gentleman and a man of honour, he
will readily give. Sir Percival stands very high,
sir—an eminent position, a reputation above
suspicion—I feel quite easy about results—quite
easy, I am rejoiced to assure you. Things of this
sort happen constantly in my experience. Anonymous
letters—unfortunate woman—sad state of society. I
don't deny that there are peculiar complications in
this case; but the case itself is, most unhappily,
common—common."
"I am
afraid, Mr. Gilmore, I have the misfortune to differ
from you in the view I take of the case."
"Just so, my
dear sir—just so. I am an old man, and I take the
practical view. You are a young man, and you take
the romantic view. Let us not dispute about our
views. I live professionally in an atmosphere of
disputation, Mr. Hartright, and I am only too glad
to escape from it, as I am escaping here. We will
wait for events—yes, yes, yes—we will wait for
events. Charming place this. Good shooting? Probably
not, none of Mr. Fairlie's land is preserved, I
think. Charming place, though, and delightful
people. You draw and paint, I hear, Mr. Hartright?
Enviable accomplishment. What style?"
We dropped
into general conversation, or rather, Mr. Gilmore
talked and I listened. My attention was far from
him, and from the topics on which he discoursed so
fluently. The solitary walk of the last two hours
had wrought its effect on me—it had set the idea in
my mind of hastening my departure from Limmeridge
House. Why should I prolong the hard trial of saying
farewell by one unnecessary minute? What further
service was required of me by any one? There was no
useful purpose to be served by my stay in
Cumberland—there was no restriction of time in the
permission to leave which my employer had granted to
me. Why not end it there and then?
I determined
to end it. There were some hours of daylight still
left—there was no reason why my journey back to
London should not begin on that afternoon. I made
the first civil excuse that occurred to me for
leaving Mr. Gilmore, and returned at once to the
house.
On my way up
to my own room I met Miss Halcombe on the stairs.
She saw, by the hurry of my movements and the change
in my manner, that I had some new purpose in view,
and asked what had happened.
I told her
the reasons which induced me to think of hastening
my departure, exactly as I have told them here.
"No, no,"
she said, earnestly and kindly, "leave us like a
friend—break bread with us once more. Stay here and
dine, stay here and help us to spend our last
evening with you as happily, as like our first
evenings, as we can. It is my invitation—Mrs.
Vesey's invitation——" she hesitated a little, and
then added, "Laura's invitation as well."
I promised
to remain. God knows I had no wish to leave even the
shadow of a sorrowful impression with any one of
them.
My own room
was the best place for me till the dinner bell rang.
I waited there till it was time to go downstairs.
I had not
spoken to Miss Fairlie—I had not even seen her—all
that day. The first meeting with her, when I entered
the drawing-room, was a hard trial to her
self-control and to mine. She, too, had done her
best to make our last evening renew the golden
bygone time—the time that could never come again.
She had put on the dress which I used to admire more
than any other that she possessed—a dark blue silk,
trimmed quaintly and prettily with old-fashioned
lace; she came forward to meet me with her former
readiness—she gave me her hand with the frank,
innocent good-will of happier days. The cold fingers
that trembled round mine—the pale cheeks with a
bright red spot burning in the midst of them—the
faint smile that struggled to live on her lips and
died away from them while I looked at it, told me at
what sacrifice of herself her outward composure was
maintained. My heart could take her no closer to me,
or I should have loved her then as I had never loved
her yet.
Mr. Gilmore
was a great assistance to us. He was in high
good-humour, and he led the conversation with
unflagging spirit. Miss Halcombe seconded him
resolutely, and I did all I could to follow her
example. The kind blue eyes, whose slightest changes
of expression I had learnt to interpret so well,
looked at me appealingly when we first sat down to
table. Help my sister—the sweet anxious face seemed
to say—help my sister, and you will help me.
We got
through the dinner, to all outward appearance at
least, happily enough. When the ladies had risen
from table, and Mr. Gilmore and I were left alone in
the dining-room, a new interest presented itself to
occupy our attention, and to give me an opportunity
of quieting myself by a few minutes of needful and
welcome silence. The servant who had been despatched
to trace Anne Catherick and Mrs. Clements returned
with his report, and was shown into the dining-room
immediately.
"Well," said
Mr. Gilmore, "what have you found out?"
"I have
found out, sir," answered the man, "that both the
women took tickets at our station here for
Carlisle."
"You went to
Carlisle, of course, when you heard that?"
"I did, sir,
but I am sorry to say I could find no further trace
of them."
"You
inquired at the railway?"
"Yes, sir."
"And at the
different inns?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you
left the statement I wrote for you at the police
station?"
"I did,
sir."
"Well, my
friend, you have done all you could, and I have done
all I could, and there the matter must rest till
further notice. We have played our trump cards, Mr.
Hartright," continued the old gentleman when the
servant had withdrawn. "For the present, at least,
the women have outmanoeuvred us, and our only
resource now is to wait till Sir Percival Glyde
comes here on Monday next. Won't you fill your glass
again? Good bottle of port, that—sound, substantial,
old wine. I have got better in my own cellar,
though."
We returned
to the drawing-room—the room in which the happiest
evenings of my life had been passed—the room which,
after this last night, I was never to see again. Its
aspect was altered since the days had shortened and
the weather had grown cold. The glass doors on the
terrace side were closed, and hidden by thick
curtains. Instead of the soft twilight obscurity, in
which we used to sit, the bright radiant glow of
lamplight now dazzled my eyes. All was
changed—indoors and out all was changed.
Miss
Halcombe and Mr. Gilmore sat down together at the
card-table—Mrs. Vesey took her customary chair.
There was no restraint on the disposal of THEIR
evening, and I felt the restraint on the disposal of
mine all the more painfully from observing it. I saw
Miss Fairlie lingering near the music-stand. The
time had been when I might have joined her there. I
waited irresolutely—I knew neither where to go nor
what to do next. She cast one quick glance at me,
took a piece of music suddenly from the stand, and
came towards me of her own accord.
"Shall I
play some of those little melodies of Mozart's which
you used to like so much?" she asked, opening the
music nervously, and looking down at it while she
spoke.
Before I
could thank her she hastened to the piano. The chair
near it, which I had always been accustomed to
occupy, stood empty. She struck a few chords—then
glanced round at me—then looked back again at her
music.
"Won't you
take your old place?" she said, speaking very
abruptly and in very low tones.
"I may take
it on the last night," I answered.
She did not
reply—she kept her attention riveted on the
music—music which she knew by memory, which she had
played over and over again, in former times, without
the book. I only knew that she had heard me, I only
knew that she was aware of my being close to her, by
seeing the red spot on the cheek that was nearest to
me fade out, and the face grow pale all over.
"I am very
sorry you are going," she said, her voice almost
sinking to a whisper, her eyes looking more and more
intently at the music, her fingers flying over the
keys of the piano with a strange feverish energy
which I had never noticed in her before.
"I shall
remember those kind words, Miss Fairlie, long after
to-morrow has come and gone."
The paleness
grew whiter on her face, and she turned it farther
away from me.
"Don't speak
of to-morrow," she said. "Let the music speak to us
of to-night, in a happier language than ours."
Her lips
trembled—a faint sigh fluttered from them, which she
tried vainly to suppress. Her fingers wavered on the
piano—she struck a false note, confused herself in
trying to set it right, and dropped her hands
angrily on her lap. Miss Halcombe and Mr. Gilmore
looked up in astonishment from the card-table at
which they were playing. Even Mrs. Vesey, dozing in
her chair, woke at the sudden cessation of the
music, and inquired what had happened.
"You play at
whist, Mr. Hartright?" asked Miss Halcombe, with her
eyes directed significantly at the place I occupied.
I knew what
she meant—I knew she was right, and I rose at once
to go to the card-table. As I left the piano Miss
Fairlie turned a page of the music, and touched the
keys again with a surer hand.
"I WILL play
it," she said, striking the notes almost
passionately. "I WILL play it on the last night."
"Come, Mrs.
Vesey," said Miss Halcombe, "Mr. Gilmore and I are
tired of ecarte—come and be Mr. Hartright's partner
at whist."
The old
lawyer smiled satirically. His had been the winning
hand, and he had just turned up a king. He evidently
attributed Miss Halcombe's abrupt change in the
card-table arrangements to a lady's inability to
play the losing game.
The rest of
the evening passed without a word or a look from
her. She kept her place at the piano, and I kept
mine at the card-table. She played
unintermittingly—played as if the music was her only
refuge from herself. Sometimes her fingers touched
the notes with a lingering fondness—a soft,
plaintive, dying tenderness, unutterably beautiful
and mournful to hear; sometimes they faltered and
failed her, or hurried over the instrument
mechanically, as if their task was a burden to them.
But still, change and waver as they might in the
expression they imparted to the music, their
resolution to play never faltered. She only rose
from the piano when we all rose to say Good-night.
Mrs. Vesey
was the nearest to the door, and the first to shake
hands with me.
"I shall not
see you again, Mr. Hartright," said the old lady. "I
am truly sorry you are going away. You have been
very kind and attentive, and an old woman like me
feels kindness and attention. I wish you happy,
sir—I wish you a kind good-bye."
Mr. Gilmore
came next.
"I hope we
shall have a future opportunity of bettering our
acquaintance, Mr. Hartright. You quite understand
about that little matter of business being safe in
my hands? Yes, yes, of course. Bless me, how cold it
is! Don't let me keep you at the door. Bon voyage,
my dear sir—bon voyage, as the French say."
Miss
Halcombe followed.
"Half-past
seven to-morrow morning," she said—then added in a
whisper, "I have heard and seen more than you think.
Your conduct to-night has made me your friend for
life."
Miss Fairlie
came last. I could not trust myself to look at her
when I took her hand, and when I thought of the next
morning.
"My
departure must be a very early one," I said. "I
shall be gone, Miss Fairlie, before you——"
"No, no,"
she interposed hastily, "not before I am out of my
room. I shall be down to breakfast with Marian. I am
not so ungrateful, not so forgetful of the past
three months——"
Her voice
failed her, her hand closed gently round mine—then
dropped it suddenly. Before I could say "Good-night"
she was gone.
The end comes fast to meet
me—comes inevitably, as the light of the last
morning came at Limmeridge House.
It was
barely half-past seven when I went downstairs, but I
found them both at the breakfast-table waiting for
me. In the chill air, in the dim light, in the
gloomy morning silence of the house, we three sat
down together, and tried to eat, tried to talk. The
struggle to preserve appearances was hopeless and
useless, and I rose to end it.
As I held
out my hand, as Miss Halcombe, who was nearest to
me, took it, Miss Fairlie turned away suddenly and
hurried from the room.
"Better so,"
said Miss Halcombe, when the door had closed—"better
so, for you and for her."
I waited a
moment before I could speak—it was hard to lose her,
without a parting word or a parting look. I
controlled myself—I tried to take leave of Miss
Halcombe in fitting terms; but all the farewell
words I would fain have spoken dwindled to one
sentence.
"Have I
deserved that you should write to me?" was all I
could say.
"You have
nobly deserved everything that I can do for you, as
long as we both live. Whatever the end is you shall
know it."
"And if I
can ever be of help again, at any future time, long
after the memory of my presumption and my folly is
forgotten . . ."
I could add
no more. My voice faltered, my eyes moistened in
spite of me.
She caught
me by both hands—she pressed them with the strong,
steady grasp of a man—her dark eyes glittered—her
brown complexion flushed deep—the force and energy
of her face glowed and grew beautiful with the pure
inner light of her generosity and her pity.
"I will
trust you—if ever the time comes I will trust you as
my friend and HER friend, as my brother and HER
brother." She stopped, drew me nearer to her—the
fearless, noble creature—touched my forehead,
sister-like, with her lips, and called me by my
Christian name. "God bless you, Walter!" she said.
"Wait here alone and compose yourself—I had better
not stay for both our sakes—I had better see you go
from the balcony upstairs."
She left the
room. I turned away towards the window, where
nothing faced me but the lonely autumn landscape—I
turned away to master myself, before I too left the
room in my turn, and left it for ever.
A minute
passed—it could hardly have been more—when I heard
the door open again softly, and the rustling of a
woman's dress on the carpet moved towards me. My
heart beat violently as I turned round. Miss Fairlie
was approaching me from the farther end of the room.
She stopped
and hesitated when our eyes met, and when she saw
that we were alone. Then, with that courage which
women lose so often in the small emergency, and so
seldom in the great, she came on nearer to me,
strangely pale and strangely quiet, drawing one hand
after her along the table by which she walked, and
holding something at her side in the other, which
was hidden by the folds of her dress.
"I only went
into the drawing-room," she said, "to look for this.
It may remind you of your visit here, and of the
friends you leave behind you. You told me I had
improved very much when I did it, and I thought you
might like——"
She turned
her head away, and offered me a little sketch, drawn
throughout by her own pencil, of the summer-house in
which we had first met. The paper trembled in her
hand as she held it out to me—trembled in mine as I
took it from her.
I was afraid
to say what I felt—I only answered, "It shall never
leave me—all my life long it shall be the treasure
that I prize most. I am very grateful for it—very
grateful to you, for not letting me go away without
bidding you good-bye."
"Oh!" she
said innocently, "how could I let you go, after we
have passed so many happy days together!"
"Those days
may never return, Miss Fairlie—my way of life and
yours are very far apart. But if a time should come,
when the devotion of my whole heart and soul and
strength will give you a moment's happiness, or
spare you a moment's sorrow, will you try to
remember the poor drawing-master who has taught you?
Miss Halcombe has promised to trust me—will you
promise too?"
The farewell
sadness in the kind blue eyes shone dimly through
her gathering tears.
"I promise
it," she said in broken tones. "Oh, don't look at me
like that! I promise it with all my heart."
I ventured a
little nearer to her, and held out my hand.
"You have
many friends who love you, Miss Fairlie. Your happy
future is the dear object of many hopes. May I say,
at parting, that it is the dear object of MY hopes
too?"
The tears
flowed fast down her cheeks. She rested one
trembling hand on the table to steady herself while
she gave me the other. I took it in mine—I held it
fast. My head drooped over it, my tears fell on it,
my lips pressed it—not in love; oh, not in love, at
that last moment, but in the agony and the
self-abandonment of despair.
"For God's
sake, leave me!" she said faintly.
The
confession of her heart's secret burst from her in
those pleading words. I had no right to hear them,
no right to answer them—they were the words that
banished me, in the name of her sacred weakness,
from the room. It was all over. I dropped her hand,
I said no more. The blinding tears shut her out from
my eyes, and I dashed them away to look at her for
the last time. One look as she sank into a chair, as
her arms fell on the table, as her fair head dropped
on them wearily. One farewell look, and the door had
closed upon her—the great gulf of separation had
opened between us—the image of Laura Fairlie was a
memory of the past already.
The End of
Hartright's Narrative.
