The Woman in White (11 page)

The sudden kindness—the warm, high-minded, fearless sympathy
which met me on such mercifully equal terms, which appealed with
such delicate and generous abruptness straight to my heart, my
honour, and my courage, overcame me in an instant. I tried to
look at her when she took my hand, but my eves were dim. I tried
to thank her, but my voice failed me.

"Listen to me," she said, considerately avoiding all notice of my
loss of self-control. "Listen to me, and let us get it over at
once. It is a real true relief to me that I am not obliged, in
what I have now to say, to enter into the question—the hard and
cruel question as I think it—of social inequalities.
Circumstances which will try you to the quick, spare me the
ungracious necessity of paining a man who has lived in friendly
intimacy under the same roof with myself by any humiliating
reference to matters of rank and station. You must leave
Limmeridge House, Mr. Hartright, before more harm is done. It is
my duty to say that to you; and it would be equally my duty to say
it, under precisely the same serious necessity, if you were the
representative of the oldest and wealthiest family in England.
You must leave us, not because you are a teacher of drawing—-"

She waited a moment, turned her face full on me, and reaching
across the table, laid her hand firmly on my arm.

"Not because you are a teacher of drawing," she repeated, "but
because Laura Fairlie is engaged to be married."

The last word went like a bullet to my heart. My arm lost all
sensation of the hand that grasped it. I never moved and never
spoke. The sharp autumn breeze that scattered the dead leaves at
our feet came as cold to me, on a sudden, as if my own mad hopes
were dead leaves too, whirled away by the wind like the rest.
Hopes! Betrothed, or not betrothed, she was equally far from me.
Would other men have remembered that in my place? Not if they had
loved her as I did.

The pang passed, and nothing but the dull numbing pain of it
remained. I felt Miss Halcombe's hand again, tightening its hold
on my arm—I raised my head and looked at her. Her large black
eyes were rooted on me, watching the white change on my face,
which I felt, and which she saw.

"Crush it!" she said. "Here, where you first saw her, crush it!
Don't shrink under it like a woman. Tear it out; trample it under
foot like a man!"

The suppressed vehemence with which she spoke, the strength which
her will—concentrated in the look she fixed on me, and in the
hold on my arm that she had not yet relinquished—communicated to
mine, steadied me. We both waited for a minute in silence. At
the end of that time I had justified her generous faith in my
manhood—I had, outwardly at least, recovered my self-control.

"Are you yourself again?"

"Enough myself, Miss Halcombe, to ask your pardon and hers.
Enough myself to be guided by your advice, and to prove my
gratitude in that way, if I can prove it in no other."

"You have proved it already," she answered, "by those words. Mr.
Hartright, concealment is at an end between us. I cannot affect
to hide from you what my sister has unconsciously shown to me.
You must leave us for her sake, as well as for your own. Your
presence here, your necessary intimacy with us, harmless as it has
been, God knows, in all other respects, has unsteadied her and
made her wretched. I, who love her better than my own life—I,
who have learnt to believe in that pure, noble, innocent nature as
I believe in my religion—know but too well the secret misery of
self-reproach that she has been suffering since the first shadow
of a feeling disloyal to her marriage engagement entered her heart
in spite of her. I don't say—it would be useless to attempt to
say it after what has happened—that her engagement has ever had a
strong hold on her affections. It is an engagement of honour, not
of love; her father sanctioned it on his deathbed, two years
since; she herself neither welcomed it nor shrank from it—she was
content to make it. Till you came here she was in the position of
hundreds of other women, who marry men without being greatly
attracted to them or greatly repelled by them, and who learn to
love them (when they don't learn to hate!) after marriage, instead
of before. I hope more earnestly than words can say—and you
should have the self-sacrificing courage to hope too—that the new
thoughts and feelings which have disturbed the old calmness and
the old content have not taken root too deeply to be ever removed.
Your absence (if I had less belief in your honour, and your
courage, and your sense, I should not trust to them as I am
trusting now) your absence will help my efforts, and time will
help us all three. It is something to know that my first
confidence in you was not all misplaced. It is something to know
that you will not be less honest, less manly, less considerate
towards the pupil whose relation to yourself you have had the
misfortune to forget, than towards the stranger and the outcast
whose appeal to you was not made in vain."

Again the chance reference to the woman in white! Was there no
possibility of speaking of Miss Fairlie and of me without raising
the memory of Anne Catherick, and setting her between us like a
fatality that it was hopeless to avoid?

"Tell me what apology I can make to Mr. Fairlie for breaking my
engagement," I said. "Tell me when to go after that apology is
accepted. I promise implicit obedience to you and to your
advice."

"Time is every way of importance," she answered. "You heard me
refer this morning to Monday next, and to the necessity of setting
the purple room in order. The visitor whom we expect on Monday—-"

I could not wait for her to be more explicit. Knowing what I knew
now, the memory of Miss Fairlie's look and manner at the
breakfast-table told me that the expected visitor at Limmeridge
House was her future husband. I tried to force it back; but
something rose within me at that moment stronger than my own will,
and I interrupted Miss Halcombe.

"Let me go to-day," I said bitterly. "The sooner the better."

"No, not to-day," she replied. "The only reason you can assign to
Mr. Fairlie for your departure, before the end of your engagement,
must be that an unforeseen necessity compels you to ask his
permission to return at once to London. You must wait till to-
morrow to tell him that, at the time when the post comes in,
because he will then understand the sudden change in your plans,
by associating it with the arrival of a letter from London. It is
miserable and sickening to descend to deceit, even of the most
harmless kind—but I know Mr. Fairlie, and if you once excite his
suspicions that you are trifling with him, he will refuse to
release you. Speak to him on Friday morning: occupy yourself
afterwards (for the sake of your own interests with your employer)
in leaving your unfinished work in as little confusion as
possible, and quit this place on Saturday. It will be time enough
then, Mr. Hartright, for you, and for all of us."

Before I could assure her that she might depend on my acting in
the strictest accordance with her wishes, we were both startled by
advancing footsteps in the shrubbery. Some one was coming from
the house to seek for us! I felt the blood rush into my cheeks and
then leave them again. Could the third person who was fast
approaching us, at such a time and under such circumstances, be
Miss Fairlie?

It was a relief—so sadly, so hopelessly was my position towards
her changed already—it was absolutely a relief to me, when the
person who had disturbed us appeared at the entrance of the
summer-house, and proved to be only Miss Fairlie's maid.

"Could I speak to you for a moment, miss?" said the girl, in
rather a flurried, unsettled manner.

Miss Halcombe descended the steps into the shrubbery, and walked
aside a few paces with the maid.

Left by myself, my mind reverted, with a sense of forlorn
wretchedness which it is not in any words that I can find to
describe, to my approaching return to the solitude and the despair
of my lonely London home. Thoughts of my kind old mother, and of
my sister, who had rejoiced with her so innocently over my
prospects in Cumberland—thoughts whose long banishment from my
heart it was now my shame and my reproach to realise for the first
time—came back to me with the loving mournfulness of old,
neglected friends. My mother and my sister, what would they feel
when I returned to them from my broken engagement, with the
confession of my miserable secret—they who had parted from me so
hopefully on that last happy night in the Hampstead cottage!

Anne Catherick again! Even the memory of the farewell evening with
my mother and my sister could not return to me now unconnected
with that other memory of the moonlight walk back to London. What
did it mean? Were that woman and I to meet once more? It was
possible, at the least. Did she know that I lived in London? Yes;
I had told her so, either before or after that strange question of
hers, when she had asked me so distrustfully if I knew many men of
the rank of Baronet. Either before or after—my mind was not calm
enough, then, to remember which.

A few minutes elapsed before Miss Halcombe dismissed the maid and
came back to me. She, too, looked flurried and unsettled now.

"We have arranged all that is necessary, Mr. Hartright," she said.
"We have understood each other, as friends should, and we may go
back at once to the house. To tell you the truth, I am uneasy
about Laura. She has sent to say she wants to see me directly,
and the maid reports that her mistress is apparently very much
agitated by a letter that she has received this morning—the same
letter, no doubt, which I sent on to the house before we came
here."

We retraced our steps together hastily along the shrubbery path.
Although Miss Halcombe had ended all that she thought it necessary
to say on her side, I had not ended all that I wanted to say on
mine. From the moment when I had discovered that the expected
visitor at Limmeridge was Miss Fairlie's future husband, I had
felt a bitter curiosity, a burning envious eagerness, to know who
he was. It was possible that a future opportunity of putting the
question might not easily offer, so I risked asking it on our way
back to the house.

"Now that you are kind enough to tell me we have understood each
other, Miss Halcombe," I said, "now that you are sure of my
gratitude for your forbearance and my obedience to your wishes,
may I venture to ask who"—(I hesitated—I had forced myself to
think of him, but it was harder still to speak of him, as her
promised husband)—"who the gentleman engaged to Miss Fairlie is?"

Her mind was evidently occupied with the message she had received
from her sister. She answered in a hasty, absent way—

"A gentleman of large property in Hampshire."

Hampshire! Anne Catherick's native place. Again, and yet again,
the woman in white. There WAS a fatality in it.

"And his name?" I said, as quietly and indifferently as I could.

"Sir Percival Glyde."

SIR—Sir Percival! Anne Catherick's question—that suspicious
question about the men of the rank of Baronet whom I might happen
to know—had hardly been dismissed from my mind by Miss Halcombe's
return to me in the summer-house, before it was recalled again by
her own answer. I stopped suddenly, and looked at her.

"Sir Percival Glyde," she repeated, imagining that I had not heard
her former reply.

"Knight, or Baronet?" I asked, with an agitation that I could hide
no longer.

She paused for a moment, and then answered, rather coldly—

"Baronet, of course."

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.