The Woman in White (26 page)

I was determined to make him declare himself, for Laura's sake.

"Sir Percival!" I interposed sharply, "have you nothing to say
when my sister has said so much? More, in my opinion," I added, my
unlucky temper getting the better of me, "than any man alive, in
your position, has a right to hear from her."

That last rash sentence opened a way for him by which to escape me
if he chose, and he instantly took advantage of it.

"Pardon me, Miss Halcombe," he said, still keeping his hand over
his face, "pardon me if I remind you that I have claimed no such
right."

The few plain words which would have brought him back to the point
from which he had wandered were just on my lips, when Laura
checked me by speaking again.

"I hope I have not made my painful acknowledgment in vain," she
continued. "I hope it has secured me your entire confidence in
what I have still to say?"

"Pray be assured of it." He made that brief reply warmly, dropping
his hand on the table while he spoke, and turning towards us
again. Whatever outward change had passed over him was gone now.
His face was eager and expectant—it expressed nothing but the
most intense anxiety to hear her next words.

"I wish you to understand that I have not spoken from any selfish
motive," she said. "If you leave me, Sir Percival, after what you
have just heard, you do not leave me to marry another man, you
only allow me to remain a single woman for the rest of my life.
My fault towards you has begun and ended in my own thoughts. It
can never go any farther. No word has passed—" She hesitated, in
doubt about the expression she should use next, hesitated in a
momentary confusion which it was very sad and very painful to see.
"No word has passed," she patiently and resolutely resumed,
"between myself and the person to whom I am now referring for the
first and last time in your presence of my feelings towards him,
or of his feelings towards me—no word ever can pass—neither he
nor I are likely, in this world, to meet again. I earnestly beg
you to spare me from saying any more, and to believe me, on my
word, in what I have just told you. It is the truth. Sir
Percival, the truth which I think my promised husband has a claim
to hear, at any sacrifice of my own feelings. I trust to his
generosity to pardon me, and to his honour to keep my secret."

"Both those trusts are sacred to me," he said, "and both shall be
sacredly kept."

After answering in those terms he paused, and looked at her as if
he was waiting to hear more.

"I have said all I wish to say," she added quietly—"I have said
more than enough to justify you in withdrawing from your
engagement."

"You have said more than enough," he answered, "to make it the
dearest object of my life to KEEP the engagement." With those
words he rose from his chair, and advanced a few steps towards the
place where she was sitting.

She started violently, and a faint cry of surprise escaped her.
Every word she had spoken had innocently betrayed her purity and
truth to a man who thoroughly understood the priceless value of a
pure and true woman. Her own noble conduct had been the hidden
enemy, throughout, of all the hopes she had trusted to it. I had
dreaded this from the first. I would have prevented it, if she
had allowed me the smallest chance of doing so. I even waited and
watched now, when the harm was done, for a word from Sir Percival
that would give me the opportunity of putting him in the wrong.

"You have left it to ME, Miss Fairlie, to resign you," he
continued. "I am not heartless enough to resign a woman who has
just shown herself to be the noblest of her sex."

He spoke with such warmth and feeling, with such passionate
enthusiasm, and yet with such perfect delicacy, that she raised
her head, flushed up a little, and looked at him with sudden
animation and spirit.

"No!" she said firmly. "The most wretched of her sex, if she must
give herself in marriage when she cannot give her love."

"May she not give it in the future," he asked, "if the one object
of her husband's life is to deserve it?"

"Never!" she answered. "If you still persist in maintaining our
engagement, I may be your true and faithful wife, Sir Percival—
your loving wife, if I know my own heart, never!"

She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words
that no man alive could have steeled his heart against her. I
tried hard to feel that Sir Percival was to blame, and to say so,
but my womanhood would pity him, in spite of myself.

"I gratefully accept your faith and truth," he said. "The least
that you can offer is more to me than the utmost that I could hope
for from any other woman in the world."

Her left hand still held mine, but her right hand hung listlessly
at her side. He raised it gently to his lips—touched it with
them, rather than kissed it—bowed to me—and then, with perfect
delicacy and discretion, silently quitted the room.

She neither moved nor said a word when he was gone—she sat by me,
cold and still, with her eyes fixed on the ground. I saw it was
hopeless and useless to speak, and I only put my arm round her,
and held her to me in silence. We remained together so for what
seemed a long and weary time—so long and so weary, that I grew
uneasy and spoke to her softly, in the hope of producing a change.

The sound of my voice seemed to startle her into consciousness.
She suddenly drew herself away from me and rose to her feet.

"I must submit, Marian, as well as I can," she said. "My new life
has its hard duties, and one of them begins to-day."

As she spoke she went to a side-table near the window, on which
her sketching materials were placed, gathered them together
carefully, and put them in a drawer of her cabinet. She locked
the drawer and brought the key to me.

"I must part from everything that reminds me of him," she said.
"Keep the key wherever you please—I shall never want it again."

Before I could say a word she had turned away to her book-case,
and had taken from it the album that contained Walter Hartright's
drawings. She hesitated for a moment, holding the little volume
fondly in her hands—then lifted it to her lips and kissed it.

"Oh, Laura! Laura!" I said, not angrily, not reprovingly—with
nothing but sorrow in my voice, and nothing but sorrow in my
heart.

"It is the last time, Marian," she pleaded. "I am bidding it
good-bye for ever."

She laid the book on the table and drew out the comb that fastened
her hair. It fell, in its matchless beauty, over her back and
shoulders, and dropped round her, far below her waist. She
separated one long, thin lock from the rest, cut it off, and
pinned it carefully, in the form of a circle, on the first blank
page of the album. The moment it was fastened she closed the
volume hurriedly, and placed it in my hands.

"You write to him and he writes to you," she said. "While I am
alive, if he asks after me always tell him I am well, and never
say I am unhappy. Don't distress him, Marian, for my sake, don't
distress him. If I die first, promise you will give him this
little book of his drawings, with my hair in it. There can be no
harm, when I am gone, in telling him that I put it there with my
own hands. And say—oh, Marian, say for me, then, what I can
never say for myself—say I loved him!"

She flung her arms round my neck, and whispered the last words in
my ear with a passionate delight in uttering them which it almost
broke my heart to hear. All the long restraint she had imposed on
herself gave way in that first last outburst of tenderness. She
broke from me with hysterical vehemence, and threw herself on the
sofa in a paroxysm of sobs and tears that shook her from head to
foot.

I tried vainly to soothe her and reason with her—she was past
being soothed, and past being reasoned with. It was the sad,
sudden end for us two of this memorable day. When the fit had
worn itself out she was too exhausted to speak. She slumbered
towards the afternoon, and I put away the book of drawings so that
she might not see it when she woke. My face was calm, whatever my
heart might be, when she opened her eyes again and looked at me.
We said no more to each other about the distressing interview of
the morning. Sir Percival's name was not mentioned. Walter
Hartright was not alluded to again by either of us for the
remainder of the day.

10th.—Finding that she was composed and like herself this
morning, I returned to the painful subject of yesterday, for the
sole purpose of imploring her to let me speak to Sir Percival and
Mr. Fairlie, more plainly and strongly than she could speak to
either of them herself, about this lamentable marriage. She
interposed, gently but firmly, in the middle of my remonstrances.

"I left yesterday to decide," she said; "and yesterday HAS
decided. It is too late to go back."

Sir Percival spoke to me this afternoon about what had passed in
Laura's room. He assured me that the unparalleled trust she had
placed in him had awakened such an answering conviction of her
innocence and integrity in his mind, that he was guiltless of
having felt even a moment's unworthy jealousy, either at the time
when he was in her presence, or afterwards when he had withdrawn
from it. Deeply as he lamented the unfortunate attachment which
had hindered the progress he might otherwise have made in her
esteem and regard, he firmly believed that it had remained
unacknowledged in the past, and that it would remain, under all
changes of circumstance which it was possible to contemplate,
unacknowledged in the future. This was his absolute conviction;
and the strongest proof he could give of it was the assurance,
which he now offered, that he felt no curiosity to know whether
the attachment was of recent date or not, or who had been the
object of it. His implicit confidence in Miss Fairlie made him
satisfied with what she had thought fit to say to him, and he was
honestly innocent of the slightest feeling of anxiety to hear
more.

He waited after saying those words and looked at me. I was so
conscious of my unreasonable prejudice against him—so conscious
of an unworthy suspicion that he might be speculating on my
impulsively answering the very questions which he had just
described himself as resolved not to ask—that I evaded all
reference to this part of the subject with something like a
feeling of confusion on my own part. At the same time I was
resolved not to lose even the smallest opportunity of trying to
plead Laura's cause, and I told him boldly that I regretted his
generosity had not carried him one step farther, and induced him
to withdraw from the engagement altogether.

Here, again, he disarmed me by not attempting to defend himself.
He would merely beg me to remember the difference there was
between his allowing Miss Fairlie to give him up, which was a
matter of submission only, and his forcing himself to give up Miss
Fairlie, which was, in other words, asking him to be the suicide
of his own hopes. Her conduct of the day before had so
strengthened the unchangeable love and admiration of two long
years, that all active contention against those feelings, on his
part, was henceforth entirely out of his power. I must think him
weak, selfish, unfeeling towards the very woman whom he idolised,
and he must bow to my opinion as resignedly as he could—only
putting it to me, at the same time, whether her future as a single
woman, pining under an unhappily placed attachment which she could
never acknowledge, could be said to promise her a much brighter
prospect than her future as the wife of a man who worshipped the
very ground she walked on? In the last case there was hope from
time, however slight it might be—in the first case, on her own
showing, there was no hope at all.

I answered him—more because my tongue is a woman's, and must
answer, than because I had anything convincing to say. It was
only too plain that the course Laura had adopted the day before
had offered him the advantage if he chose to take it—and that he
HAD chosen to take it. I felt this at the time, and I feel it
just as strongly now, while I write these lines, in my own room.
The one hope left is that his motives really spring, as he says
they do, from the irresistible strength of his attachment to
Laura.

Before I close my diary for to-night I must record that I wrote
to-day, in poor Hartright's interest, to two of my mother's old
friends in London—both men of influence and position. If they
can do anything for him, I am quite sure they will. Except Laura,
I never was more anxious about any one than I am now about Walter.
All that has happened since he left us has only increased my
strong regard and sympathy for him. I hope I am doing right in
trying to help him to employment abroad—I hope, most earnestly
and anxiously, that it will end well.

11th.—Sir Percival had an interview with Mr. Fairlie, and I was
sent for to join them.

I found Mr. Fairlie greatly relieved at the prospect of the
"family worry" (as he was pleased to describe his niece's
marriage) being settled at last. So far, I did not feel called on
to say anything to him about my own opinion, but when he
proceeded, in his most aggravatingly languid manner, to suggest
that the time for the marriage had better be settled next, in
accordance with Sir Percival's wishes, I enjoyed the satisfaction
of assailing Mr. Fairlie's nerves with as strong a protest against
hurrying Laura's decision as I could put into words. Sir Percival
immediately assured me that he felt the force of my objection, and
begged me to believe that the proposal had not been made in
consequence of any interference on his part. Mr. Fairlie leaned
back in his chair, closed his eyes, said we both of us did honour
to human nature, and then repeated his suggestion as coolly as if
neither Sir Percival nor I had said a word in opposition to it.
It ended in my flatly declining to mention the subject to Laura,
unless she first approached it of her own accord. I left the room
at once after making that declaration. Sir Percival looked
seriously embarrassed and distressed, Mr. Fairlie stretched out
his lazy legs on his velvet footstool, and said, "Dear Marian! how
I envy you your robust nervous system! Don't bang the door!"