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The Woman in White

by Wilkie Collins · English · Gutenberg #583 · 1,370,156 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Woman in White

Author: Wilkie Collins


        
Release date: July 1, 1996 [eBook #583]
                Most recently updated: July 28, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/583


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN IN WHITE ***




The Woman in White

by

Wilkie Collins




CONTENTS

First Epoch

  THE STORY BEGUN BY WALTER HARTRIGHT
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY VINCENT GILMORE
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY MARIAN HALCOMBE


Second Epoch

  THE STORY CONTINUED BY MARIAN HALCOMBE.
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY FREDERICK FAIRLIE, ESQ.
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY ELIZA MICHELSON
  THE STORY CONTINUED IN SEVERAL NARRATIVES

     THE NARRATIVE OF HESTER PINHORN
     THE NARRATIVE OF THE DOCTOR
     THE NARRATIVE OF JANE GOULD
     THE NARRATIVE OF THE TOMBSTONE
     THE NARRATIVE OF WALTER HARTRIGHT


Third Epoch

  THE STORY CONTINUED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT.
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY MRS. CATHERICK
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY ISIDOR, OTTAVIO, BALDASSARE FOSCO
  THE STORY CONCLUDED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT




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! I 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 eyes 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 in 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.”

Sh

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