The Woman in White (7 page)

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.

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.