Woman in White (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Wilkie Collins

  ‘Queer,’ she said to herself, ‘always queer, with her whims and her way, 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 deathlike 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 life-long 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 reflexions 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 b
een a sentient thing, and whispering the words of the inscription to herself, over and over again, as if the lost days of her girlhood had returned and she was patiently learning her lesson once more at Mrs. Fairlie’s knees.

  ‘Should you wonder very much,’ I said, preparing the way as cautiously as I could for the questions that were to come, ‘if I owned that it is a satisfaction to me, as well as a surprise, to see you here? I felt very uneasy about you after you left me in the cab.’

  She looked up quickly and suspiciously.

  ‘Uneasy,’ she repeated. ‘Why?’

  ‘A strange thing happened, after we parted, that night. Two men overtook me in a chaise. They did not see where I was standing; but they stopped near me, and spoke to a policeman, on the other side of the way.’

  She instantly suspended her employment. The hand holding the damp cloth with which she had been cleaning the inscription, dropped to her side. The other hand grasped the marble cross at the head of the grave. Her face turned towards me slowly, with the blank look of terror set rigidly on it once more. I went on at all hazards; it was too late now to draw back.

  ‘The two men spoke to the policeman,’ I said, ‘and asked him if he had seen you. He had not seen you; and then one of the men spoke again, and said you had escaped from his Asylum.’

  She sprang to her feet, as if my last words had set the pursuers on her track.

  ‘Stop! and hear the end,’ I cried. ‘Stop! and you shall know how I befriended you. A word from me would have told the men which way you had gone—and I never spoke that word. I helped your escape—I made it safe and certain. Think, try to think. Try to understand what I tell you.’

  My manner seemed to influence her more than my words. She made an effort to grasp the new idea. Her hands shifted the damp cloth hesitatingly from one to the other, exactly as they had shifted the little travelling-bag on the night when I first saw her. Slowly the purpose of my words seemed to force its way through the confusion and agitation of her mind. Slowly, her features relaxed, and her eyes looked at me with their expression gaining in curiosity what it was fast losing in fear.

  ‘You don’t think I ought to be back in the Asylum, do you?’ she said.

  ‘Certainly not. I am glad you escaped from it; I am glad I helped you.

  ‘Yes, yes; you did help me indeed; you helped me at the hard part,’ she went on, a little vacantly. ‘It was easy to escape, or I should not have got away. They never suspected me as they suspected the others. I was so quiet, and so obedient, and so easily frightened. The finding London was the hard part; and there you helped me. Did I thank you at the time? I thank you now, very kindly.’

  ‘Was the Asylum far from where you met me? Come! show that you believe me to be your friend, and tell me where it was.’

  She mentioned the place—a private Asylum, as its situation informed me; a private Asylum not very far from the spot where I had seen her—and then, with evident suspicion of the use to which I might put her answer, anxiously repeated her former inquiry: ‘You don’t think I ought to be taken back, do you?’

  ‘Once again, I am glad you escaped; I am glad you prospered well, after you left me,’ I answered. ‘You said you had a friend in London to go to. Did you find the friend?’

  ‘Yes. It was very late; but there was a girl up at needlework in the house, and she helped me to rouse Mrs. Clements. Mrs. Clements is my friend. A good, kind woman, but not like Mrs. Fairlie. Ah, no, nobody is like Mrs. Fairlie!’

  ‘Is Mrs. Clements an old friend of yours? Have you known her a long time?’

  ‘Yes; she was a neighbour of ours once, at home, in Hampshire; and liked me, and took care of me when I was a little girl. Years ago, when she went away from us, she wrote down in my prayer-book for me, where she was going to live in London, and she said, “If you are ever in trouble, Anne, come to me. I have no husband alive to say me nay, and no children to look after; and I will take care of you.” Kind words, were they not? I suppose I remember them because they were kind. It’s little enough I remember besides—little enough, little enough!’

  ‘Had you no father or mother to take care of you?’

  ‘Father? I never saw him; I never heard mother speak of him. Father? Ah, dear! he is dead I suppose.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘I don’t get on well with her. We are a trouble and a fear to each other.’

  A trouble and a fear to each other! At those words, the suspicion crossed my mind, for the first time, that her mother might be the person who had placed her under restraint.

  ‘Don’t ask me about mother,’ she went on. ‘I’d rather talk of Mrs. Clements. Mrs. Clements is like you, she doesn’t think that I ought to be back in the Asylum; and she is as glad as you are that I escaped from it. She cried over my misfortune, and said it must be kept secret from everybody.’

  Her ‘misfortune’. In what sense was she using that word? In a sense which might explain her motive in writing the anonymous letter? In a sense which might show it to be the too common and too customary motive that has led many a woman to interpose anonymous hindrances to the marriage of the man who has ruined her? I resolved to attempt the clearing up of this doubt, before more words passed between us on either side.

  ‘What misfortune?’ I asked.

  ‘The misfortune of my being shut up,’ she answered, with every appearance of feeling surprised at my question. ‘What other misfortune could there be?’

  I determined to persist, as delicately and forbearingly as possible. It was of very great importance that I should be absolutely sure of every step in the investigation which I now gained in advance.

  ‘There is another misfortune,’ I said, ‘to which a woman may be liable, and by which she may suffer life-long sorrow and shame.’

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, eagerly.

  ‘The misfortune of believing too innocently in her own virtue, and in the faith and honour of the man she loves,’ I answered.

  She looked up at me, with the artless bewilderment of a child. Not the slightest confusion or change of colour; not the faintest trace of any secret consciousness of shame struggling to the surface, appeared in her face—that face which betrayed every other emotion with such transparent clearness. No words that ever were spoken could have assured me, as her look and manner now assured me, that the motive which I had assigned for her writing the letter and sending it to Miss Fairlie was plainly and distinctly the wrong one. That doubt, at any rate, was now set at rest; but the very removal of it opened a new prospect of uncertainty. The letter, as I knew from positive testimony, pointed at Sir Percival Glyde, though it did not name him. She must have had some strong motive, originating in some deep sense of injury, for secretly denouncing him to Miss Fairlie, in such terms as she had employed—and that motive was unquestionably not to be traced to the loss of her innocence and her character. Whatever wrong he might have inflicted on her was not of that nature. Of what nature could it be?

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ she said, after evidently trying hard, and trying in vain to discover the meaning of the words I had last said to her.

  ‘Never mind,’ I answered. ‘Let us go on with what we were talking about. Tell me how long you stayed with Mrs. Clements in London, and how you came here.’

  ‘How long?’ she repeated. ‘I stayed with Mrs. Clements till we both came to this place, two days ago.’

  ‘You are living in the village, then?’ I said. ‘It is strange I should not have heard of you, though you have only been here two days.’

  ‘No, no; not in the village. Three miles away at a farm. Do you know the farm? They call it Todd’s Corner.’

  I remembered the place perfectly; we had often passed by it in our drives. It was one of the oldest farms in the neighbourhood, situated in a solitary, sheltered spot, inland at the junction of two hills.

  ‘They are relations of Mrs. Clements at Todd’s Corner,’ she went on, ‘and they had often asked her to go and see them. She said she would go
, and take me with her, for the quiet and the fresh air. It was very kind, was it not? I would have gone anywhere to be quiet, and safe, and out of the way. But when I heard thatTodd’s Corner was near Limmeridge—oh! I was so happy I would have walked all the way barefoot to get there, and see the schools and the village and Limmeridge House again. They are very good people at Todd’s Corner. I hope I shall stay there a long time. There is only one thing I don’t like about them, and don’t like about Mrs. Clements—’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They will tease me about dressing all in white—they say it looks so particular. How do they know? Mrs. Fairlie knew best. Mrs. Fairlie would never have made me wear this ugly blue cloak! Ah! she was fond of white in her lifetime; and here is white stone about her grave—and I am making it whiter for her sake. She often wore white herself; and she always dressed her little daughter in white. Is Miss Fairlie well and happy? Does she wear white now, as she used when she was a girl?’

  Her voice sank when she put the questions about Miss Fairlie; and she turned her head farther and farther away from me. I thought I detected, in the alteration of her manner, an uneasy consciousness of the risk she had run in sending the anonymous letter; and I instantly determined so to frame my answer as to surprise her into owning it.

  ‘Miss Fairlie is not very well or very happy this morning,’ I said.

  She murmured a few words; but they were spoken so confusedlly, and in such a low tone, that I could not even guess at what they meant.

  ‘Did you ask me why Miss Fairlie was neither well nor happy this morning?’ I continued.

  ‘No,’ she said, quickly and eagerly—‘oh, no, I never asked that.’

  ‘I will tell you without your asking,’ I went on. ‘Miss Fairlie has received your letter.’

  She had been down on her knees for some little time past, carefully removing the last weather-stains left about the inscription while we were speaking together. The first sentence of the words I had just addressed to her made her pause in her occupation, and turn slowly without rising from her knees, so as to face me. The second sentence literally petrified her. The cloth she had been holding dropped from her hands; her lips fell apart; all the little colour that there was naturally in her face left it in an instant.