Woman in White (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Wilkie Collins

  Her eyes lit up; her colour rose. She said nothing; but I saw all her sympathies gathering to mine, in her face.

  ‘I don’t disguise from myself, or from you,’ I went on, ‘that the prospect before us is more than doubtful. The risks we have run already are, it may be, trifles, compared with the risks that threaten us in the future—but the venture shall be tried, Marian, for all that. I am not rash enough to measure myself against such a man as the Count, before I am well prepared for him. I have learnt patience; I can wait my time. Let him believe that his message has produced its effect; let him know nothing of us, and hear nothing of us; let us give him full time to feel secure—his own boastful nature, unless I seriously mistake him, will hasten that result. This is one reason for waiting; but there is another more important still. My position, Marian, towards you and towards Laura, ought to be a stronger one than it is now, before I try our last chance.’

  She leaned near to me, with a look of surprise.

  ‘How can it be stronger?’ she asked.

  ‘I will tell you,’ I replied, ‘when the time comes. It has not come yet: it may never come at all. I may be silent about it to Laura for ever—I must be silent, now, even to you, till I see for myself that I can harmlessly and honourably speak. Let us leave that subject. There is another which has more pressing claims on our attention. You have kept Laura, mercifully kept her, in ignorance of her husband’s death—’

  ‘Oh, Walter, surely it must be long yet, before we tell her of it?’

  ‘No, Marian. Better that you should reveal it to her now, than that accident which no one can guard against, should reveal it to her at some future time. Spare her all the details—break it to her very tenderly—but tell her that he is dead.’

  ‘You have a reason, Walter, for wishing her to know of her husband’s death, besides the reason you have just mentioned?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘A reason connected with that subject which must not be mentioned between us yet?—which may never be mentioned to Laura at all?’

  She dwelt on the last words, meaningly. When I answered her, in the affirmative, I dwelt on them too.

  Her face grew pale. For a while, she looked at me with a sad, hesitating interest. An unaccustomed tenderness trembled in her dark eyes and softened her firm lips, as she glanced aside at the empty chair in which the dear companion of all our joys and sorrows had been sitting.

  ‘I think I understand,’ she said. ‘I think I owe it to her and to you, Walter, to tell her of her husband’s death.’

  She sighed, and held my hand fast for a moment—then dropped it abruptly, and left the room. On the next day, Laura knew that his death had released her, and that the error and the calamity of her life lay buried in his tomb.

  His name was mentioned among us no more. Thenceforward, we shrank from the slightest approach to the subject of his death; and, in the same scrupulous manner, Marian and I avoided all further reference to that other subject, which by her consent and mine, was not to be mentioned between us yet. It was not the less present to our minds—it was rather kept alive in them by the restraint which we had imposed on ourselves. We both watched Laura more anxiously than ever; sometimes waiting and hoping, sometimes waiting and fearing, till the time came.

  By degrees, we returned to our accustomed way of life. I resumed the daily work, which had been suspended during my absence in Hampshire. Our new lodgings cost us more than the smaller and less convenient rooms which we had left; and the claim thus implied on my increased exertions was strengthened by the doubtfulness of our future prospects. Emergencies might yet happen which would exhaust our little fund at the banker’s; and the work of my hands might be, ultimately, all we had to look to for support. More permanent and more lucrative employment than had yet been offered to me was a necessity of our position—a necessity for which I now diligently set myself to provide.

  It must not be supposed that the interval of rest and seclusion of which I am now writing, entirely suspended, on my part, all pursuit of the one absorbing purpose with which my thoughts and actions are associated in these pages. That purpose was, for months and months yet, never to relax its claims on me. The slow ripening of it still left me a measure of precaution to take, an obligation of gratitude to perform, and a doubtful question to solve.

  The measure of precaution related, necessarily, to the Count. It was of the last importance to ascertain, if possible, whether his plans committed him to remaining in England—or, in other words, to remaining within my reach. I contrived to set this doubt at rest by very simple means. His address in St. John’s Wood being known to me, I inquired in the neighbourhood; and having found out the agent who had the disposal of the furnished house in which he lived, I asked if number five, Forest Road, was likely to be let within a reasonable time. The reply was in the negative. I was informed that the foreign gentleman then residing in the house had renewed his term of occupation for another six months, and would remain in possession until the end of June in the following year. We were then at the beginning of December only. I left the agent with my mind relieved from all present fear of the Count’s escaping me.

  The obligation I had to perform, took me once more into the presence of Mrs. Clements. I had promised to return, and to confide to her those particulars relating to the death and burial of Anne Catherick, which I had been obliged to withhold at our first interview. Changed as circumstances now were, there was no hindrance to my trusting the good woman with as much of the story of the conspiracy as it was necessary to tell. I had every reason that sympathy and friendly feeling could suggest to urge on me the speedy performance of my promise—and I did conscientiously and carefully perform it. There is no need to burden these pages with any statement of what passed at the interview. It will be more to the purpose to say that the interview itself necessarily brought to my mind the one doubtful question still remaining to be solved—the question of Anne Catherick’s parentage on the father’s side.

  A multitude of small considerations in connexion with this subject—trifling enough in themselves, but strikingly important, when massed together—had latterly led my mind to a conclusion which I resolved to verify. I obtained Marian’s permission to write to Major Donthorne, of Varneck Hall (where Mrs. Catherick had lived in service for some years previous to her marriage), to ask him certain questions. I made the inquiries in Marian’s name, and described them as relating to matters of personal interest in her family, which might explain and excuse my application. When I wrote the letter, I had no certain knowledge that Major Donthorne was still alive; I despatched it on the chance that he might be living, and able and willing to reply.

  After a lapse of two days, proof came, in the shape of a letter, that the Major was living, and that he was ready to help us.

  The idea in my mind when I wrote to him, and the nature of my inquiries, will be easily inferred from his reply. His letter answered my questions, by communicating these important facts:

  In the first place, ‘the late Sir Percival Glyde, of Blackwater Park’, had never set foot in Varneck Hall. The deceased gentleman was a total stranger to Major Donthorne, and to all his family.

  In the second place, ‘the late Mr. Philip Fairlie, of Limmeridge House’, had been, in his younger days, the intimate friend and constant guest of Major Donthorne. Having refreshed his memory by looking back to old letters and other papers, the Major was in a position to say positively, that Mr. Philip Fairlie was staying at Varneck Hall in the month of August, eighteen hundred and twenty-six, and that he remained there, for the shooting, during the month of September and part of October following. He then left, to the best of the Major’s belief, for Scotland, and did not return to Varneck Hall till after a lapse of time, when he reappeared in the character of a newly-married man.

  Taken by itself, this statement was, perhaps, of little positive value—but, taken in connexion with certain facts, every one of which either Marian or I knew to be true, it suggested one plain conclusion
that was, to our minds, irresistible.

  Knowing, now, that Mr. Philip Fairlie had been at Varneck Hall in the autumn of eighteen hundred and twenty-six, and that Mrs. Catherick had been living there in service at the same time, we knew also:—first, that Anne had been born in June, eighteen hundred and twenty-seven; secondly, that she had always presented an extraordinary personal resemblance to Laura; and, thirdly, that Laura herself was strikingly like her father. Mr. Philip Fairlie had been one of the notoriously handsome men of his time. In disposition entirely unlike his brother Frederick, he was the spoilt darling of society, especially of the women—an easy, light-hearted, impulsive, affectionate man; generous to a fault; constitutionally lax in his principles, and notoriously thoughtless of moral obligations where women were concerned. Such were the facts we knew; such was the character of the man. Surely, the plain inference that follows needs no pointing out?

  Read by the new light which had now broken upon me, even Mrs. Catherick’s letter, in despite of herself, rendered its mite of assistance towards strengthening the conclusion at which I had arrived. She had described Mrs. Fairlie (in writing to me) as ‘plain-looking’, and as having ‘entrapped the handsomest man in England into marrying her’. Both assertions were gratuitously made, and both were false. Jealous dislike (which, in such a woman as Mrs. Catherick, would express itself in petty malice rather than not express itself at all) appeared to me to be the only assignable cause for the peculiar insolence of her reference to Mrs. Fairlie, under circumstances which did not necessitate any reference at all.

  The mention here of Mrs. Fairlie’s name naturally suggests one other question. Did she ever suspect whose child the little girl brought to her at Limmeridge might be?

  Marian’s testimony was positive on this point. Mrs. Fairlie’s letter to her husband, which had been read to me in former days—the letter describing Anne’s resemblance to Laura, and acknowledging her affectionate interest in the little stranger—had been written, beyond all question, in perfect innocence of heart. It even seemed doubtful, on consideration, whether Mr. Philip Fairlie himself had been nearer than his wife to any suspicion of the truth. The disgracefully deceitful circumstances under which Mrs. Catherick had married, the purpose of concealment which the marriage was intended to answer, might well keep her silent for caution’s sake, perhaps for her own pride’s sake also—even assuming that she had the means, in his absence, of communicating with the father of her unborn child.

  As this surmise floated through my mind, there rose on my memory the remembrance of the Scripture denunciation which we have all thought of, in our time, with wonder and with awe: ‘The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.’el But for the fatal resemblance between the two daughters of one father, the conspiracy of which Anne had been the innocent instrument and Laura the innocent victim, could never have been planned. With what unerring and terrible directness the long chain of circumstances led down from the thoughtless wrong committed by the father to the heartless injury inflicted on the child!

  These thoughts came to me, and others with them, which drew my mind away to the little Cumberland churchyard where Anne Catherick now lay buried. I thought of the bygone days when I had met her by Mrs. Fairlie’s grave, and met her for the last time. I thought of her poor helpless hands beating on the tombstone, and her weary, yearning words, murmured to the dead remains of her protectress and her friend. ‘Oh, if I could die, and be hidden and at rest with you!’ Little more than a year had passed since she breathed that wish; and how inscrutably, how awfully, it had been fulfilled! The words she had spoken to Laura by the shores of the lake, the very words had now come true. ‘Oh, if I could only be buried with your mother! If I could only wake at her side when the angel’s trumpet sounds, and the graves give up their dead at the resurrection!’ Through what mortal crime and horror, through what darkest windings of the way down to Death, the lost creature had wandered in God’s leading to the last home that, living, she never hoped to reach! In that sacred rest, I leave her—in that dread companionship, let her remain undisturbed.

  So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable Gloom. Like a Shadow she first came to me, in the loneliness of the night. Like a Shadow she passes away, in the loneliness of the dead.

  III

  FOUR MONTHS ELAPSED. APRIL came—the month of Spring; the month of change.

  The course of Time had flowed through the interval since the winter, peacefully and happily in our new home. I had turned my long leisure to good account; had largely increased my sources of employment; and had placed our means of subsistence on surer grounds. Freed from the suspense and the anxiety which had tried her so sorely, and hung over her so long, Marian’s spirits rallied; and her natural energy of character began to assert itself again, with something, if not all, of the freedom and the vigour of former times.

  More pliable under change than her sister, Laura showed more plainly the progress made by the healing influences of her new life. The worn and wasted look which had prematurely aged her face, was fast leaving it; and the expression which had been the first of its charms in past days, was the first of its beauties that now returned. My closest observation of her detected but one serious result of the conspiracy which had once threatened her reason and her life. Her memory of events, from the period of her leaving Blackwater Park to the period of our meeting in the burial-ground of Limmeridge Church, was lost beyond all hope of recovery. At the slightest reference to that time, she changed and trembled still; her words became confused; her memory wandered and lost itself as helplessly as ever. Here, and here only, the traces of the past lay deep—too deep to be effaced.

  In all else, she was now so far on the way to recovery, that, on her best and brightest days, she sometimes looked and spoke like the Laura of old times. The happy change wrought its natural result in us both. From their long slumber, on her side and on mine, those imperishable memories of our past life in Cumberland now awoke, which were one and all alike, the memories of our love.

  Gradually and insensibly, our daily relations towards each other became constrained. The fond words which I had spoken to her so naturally, in the days of her sorrow and her suffering, faltered strangely on my lips. In the time when my dread of losing her was most present to my mind, I had always kissed her when she left me at night and when she met me in the morning. The kiss seemed now to have dropped between us—to be lost out of our lives. Our hands began to tremble again when they met. We hardly ever looked long at one another out of Marian’s presence. The talk often flagged between us when we were alone. When I touched her by accident, I felt my heart beating fast, as it used to beat at Limmeridge House—I saw the lovely answering flush glowing again in her cheeks, as if we were back among the Cumberland Hills, in our past characters of master and pupil once more. She had long intervals of silence and thoughtfulness; and denied she had been thinking, when Marian asked her the question. I surprised myself, one day, neglecting my work, to dream over the little water-colour portrait of her which I had taken in the summer-house where we first met—just as 1 used to neglect Mr. Fairlie’s drawings, to dream over the same likeness, when it was newly finished in the bygone time. Changed as all the circumstances now were, our position towards each other in the golden days of our first companionship, seemed to be revived with the revival of our love. It was as if Time had drifted us back on the wreck of our early hopes, to the old familiar shore!

  To any other woman, I could have spoken the decisive words which I still hesitated to speak to her. The utter helplessness of her position; her friendless dependence on all the forbearing gentleness that I could show her; my fear of touching too soon some secret sensitiveness in her, which my instinct, as a man, might not have been fine enough to discover—these considerations, and others like them, kept me self-distrustfullysilent. And yet, I knew that the restraint on both sides must be ended; that the relations in which we stood towards one another must
be altered, in some settled manner, for the future; and that it rested with me, in the first instance, to recognise the necessity for a change.

  The more I thought of our position, the harder the attempt to alter it appeared, while the domestic conditions on which we three had been living together since the winter, remained undisturbed. I cannot account for the capricious state of mind in which this feeling originated—but the idea nevertheless possessed me, that some previous change of place and circumstances, some sudden break in the quiet monotony of our lives, so managed as to vary the home aspect under which we had been accustomed to see each other, might prepare the way for me to speak, and might make it easier and less embarrassing for Laura and Marian to hear.

  With this purpose in view, I said, one morning, that I thought we had all earned a little holiday and a change of scene. After some consideration, it was decided that we should go for a fortnight to the seaside.

  On the next day, we left Fulham for a quiet town on the south coast. At that early season of the year, we were the only visitors in the place. The cliffs, the beach, and the walks inland, were all in the solitary condition which was most welcome to us. The air was mild; the prospects over hill and wood and down were beautifully varied by the shifting April light and shade; and the restless sea leapt under our windows, as if it felt, like the land, the glow and freshness of spring.

  I owed it to Marian to consult her before I spoke to Laura, and to be guided afterwards by her advice.

  On the third day from our arrival, I found a fit opportunity of speaking to her alone. The moment we looked at one another, her quick instinct detected the thought in my mind before I could give it expression. With her customary energy and directness, she spoke at once, and spoke first.