The Woman in White
the terrace for the third time. Instead of proceeding on her walk,
she stopped, with her back turned towards us, and, leaning on the
balustrade of the terrace, looked down into the garden beyond. My eyes
fixed upon the white gleam of her muslin gown and head-dress in the
moonlight, and a sensation, for which I can find no name—a sensation
that quickened my pulse, and raised a fluttering at my heart—began to
steal over me.
“All in white?” Miss Halcombe repeated. “The most important sentences
in the letter, Mr. Hartright, are those at the end, which I will
read to you immediately. But I can’t help dwelling a little upon the
coincidence of the white costume of the woman you met, and the white
frocks which produced that strange answer from my mother’s little
scholar. The doctor may have been wrong when he discovered the child’s
defects of intellect, and predicted that she would ‘grow out of them.’
She may never have grown out of them, and the old grateful fancy about
dressing in white, which was a serious feeling to the girl, may be a
serious feeling to the woman still.”
I said a few words in answer—I hardly know what. All my attention was
concentrated on the white gleam of Miss Fairlie’s muslin dress.
“Listen to the last sentences of the letter,” said Miss Halcombe. “I
think they will surprise you.”
As she raised the letter to the light of the candle, Miss Fairlie
turned from the balustrade, looked doubtfully up and down the terrace,
advanced a step towards the glass doors, and then stopped, facing us.
Meanwhile Miss Halcombe read me the last sentences to which she had
referred—
“‘And now, my love, seeing that I am at the end of my paper, now for
the real reason, the surprising reason, for my fondness for little Anne
Catherick. My dear Philip, although she is not half so pretty, she is,
nevertheless, by one of those extraordinary caprices of accidental
resemblance which one sometimes sees, the living likeness, in her hair,
her complexion, the colour of her eyes, and the shape of her face——’”
I started up from the ottoman before Miss Halcombe could pronounce the
next words. A thrill of the same feeling which ran through me when the
touch was laid upon my shoulder on the lonely high-road chilled me
again.
There stood Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the moonlight;
in her attitude, in the turn of her head, in her complexion, in the
shape of her face, the living image, at that distance and under those
circumstances, of the woman in white! The doubt which had troubled my
mind for hours and hours past flashed into conviction in an instant.
That “something wanting” was my own recognition of the ominous likeness
between the fugitive from the asylum and my pupil at Limmeridge House.
“You see it!” said Miss Halcombe. She dropped the useless letter, and
her eyes flashed as they met mine. “You see it now, as my mother saw it
eleven years since!”
“I see it—more unwillingly than I can say. To associate that forlorn,
friendless, lost woman, even by an accidental likeness only, with
Miss Fairlie, seems like casting a shadow on the future of the bright
creature who stands looking at us now. Let me lose the impression again
as soon as possible. Call her in, out of the dreary moonlight—pray call
her in!”
“Mr. Hartright, you surprise me. Whatever women may be, I thought that
men, in the nineteenth century, were above superstition.”
“Pray call her in!”
“Hush, hush! She is coming of her own accord. Say nothing in her
presence. Let this discovery of the likeness be kept a secret between
you and me. Come in, Laura, come in, and wake Mrs. Vesey with the
piano. Mr. Hartright is petitioning for some more music, and he wants
it, this time, of the lightest and liveliest kind.”
IX
So ended my eventful first day at Limmeridge House.
Miss Halcombe and I kept our secret. After the discovery of the
likeness no fresh light seemed destined to break over the mystery
of the woman in white. At the first safe opportunity Miss Halcombe
cautiously led her half-sister to speak of their mother, of old
times, and of Anne Catherick. Miss Fairlie’s recollections of the
little scholar at Limmeridge were, however, only of the most vague
and general kind. She remembered the likeness between herself and her
mother’s favourite pupil, as something which had been supposed to
exist in past times; but she did not refer to the gift of the white
dresses, or to the singular form of words in which the child had
artlessly expressed her gratitude for them. She remembered that Anne
had remained at Limmeridge for a few months only, and had then left
it to go back to her home in Hampshire; but she could not say whether
the mother and daughter had ever returned, or had ever been heard
of afterwards. No further search, on Miss Halcombe’s part, through
the few letters of Mrs. Fairlie’s writing which she had left unread,
assisted in clearing up the uncertainties still left to perplex us. We
had identified the unhappy woman whom I had met in the night-time with
Anne Catherick—we had made some advance, at least, towards connecting
the probably defective condition of the poor creature’s intellect
with the peculiarity of her being dressed all in white, and with the
continuance, in her maturer years, of her childish gratitude towards
Mrs. Fairlie—and there, so far as we knew at that time, our discoveries
had ended.
The days passed on, the weeks passed on, and the track of the golden
autumn wound its bright way visibly through the green summer of the
trees. Peaceful, fast-flowing, happy time! my story glides by you now
as swiftly as you once glided by me. Of all the treasures of enjoyment
that you poured so freely into my heart, how much is left me that has
purpose and value enough to be written on this page? Nothing but the
saddest of all confessions that a man can make—the confession of his
own folly.
The secret which that confession discloses should be told with little
effort, for it has indirectly escaped me already. The poor weak words,
which have failed to describe Miss Fairlie, have succeeded in betraying
the sensations she awakened in me. It is so with us all. Our words are
giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
I loved her.
Ah! how well I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is
contained in those three words. I can sigh over my mournful confession
with the tenderest woman who reads it and pities me. I can laugh at
it as bitterly as the hardest man who tosses it from him in contempt.
I loved her! Feel for me, or despise me, I confess it with the same
immovable resolution to own the truth.
Was there no excuse for me? There was some excuse to be found, surely,
in the conditions under which my term of hired service was passed at
Limmeridge House.
My morning hours succeeded each other calmly in the quiet and seclusion
of my own room. I had just work enough to do, in mounting my employer’s
drawings, to keep my hands and eyes pleasurably employed, while my
mind was left free to enjoy the dangerous luxury of its own unbridled
thoughts. A perilous solitude, for it lasted long enough to enervate,
not long enough to fortify me. A perilous solitude, for it was followed
by afternoons and evenings spent, day after day and week after week
alone in the society of two women, one of whom possessed all the
accomplishments of grace, wit, and high-breeding, the other all the
charms of beauty, gentleness, and simple truth, that can purify and
subdue the heart of man. Not a day passed, in that dangerous intimacy
of teacher and pupil, in which my hand was not close to Miss Fairlie’s;
my cheek, as we bent together over her sketch-book, almost touching
hers. The more attentively she watched every movement of my brush, the
more closely I was breathing the perfume of her hair, and the warm
fragrance of her breath. It was part of my service to live in the very
light of her eyes—at one time to be bending over her, so close to her
bosom as to tremble at the thought of touching it; at another, to feel
her bending over me, bending so close to see what I was about, that her
voice sank low when she spoke to me, and her ribbons brushed my cheek
in the wind before she could draw them back.
The evenings which followed the sketching excursions of the afternoon
varied, rather than checked, these innocent, these inevitable
familiarities. My natural fondness for the music which she played with
such tender feeling, such delicate womanly taste, and her natural
enjoyment of giving me back, by the practice of her art, the pleasure
which I had offered to her by the practice of mine, only wove another
tie which drew us closer and closer to one another. The accidents of
conversation; the simple habits which regulated even such a little
thing as the position of our places at table; the play of Miss
Halcombe’s ever-ready raillery, always directed against my anxiety as
teacher, while it sparkled over her enthusiasm as pupil; the harmless
expression of poor Mrs. Vesey’s drowsy approval, which connected Miss
Fairlie and me as two model young people who never disturbed her—every
one of these trifles, and many more, combined to fold us together in
the same domestic atmosphere, and to lead us both insensibly to the
same hopeless end.
I should have remembered my position, and have put myself secretly on
my guard. I did so, but not till it was too late. All the discretion,
all the experience, which had availed me with other women, and secured
me against other temptations, failed me with her. It had been my
profession, for years past, to be in this close contact with young
girls of all ages, and of all orders of beauty. I had accepted the
position as part of my calling in life; I had trained myself to leave
all the sympathies natural to my age in my employer’s outer hall, as
coolly as I left my umbrella there before I went upstairs. I had long
since learnt to understand, composedly and as a matter of course,
that my situation in life was considered a guarantee against any of
my female pupils feeling more than the most ordinary interest in me,
and that I was admitted among beautiful and captivating women much
as a harmless domestic animal is admitted among them. This guardian
experience I had gained early; this guardian experience had sternly
and strictly guided me straight along my own poor narrow path, without
once letting me stray aside, to the right hand or to the left. And
now I and my trusty talisman were parted for the first time. Yes, my
hardly-earned self-control was as completely lost to me as if I had
never possessed it; lost to me, as it is lost every day to other men,
in other critical situations, where women are concerned. I know, now,
that I should have questioned myself from the first. I should have
asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she
entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again—why I always
noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had
noticed and remembered in no other woman’s before—why I saw her, heard
her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I
had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman in my life? I should
have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up
there, and plucked it out while it was young. Why was this easiest,
simplest work of self-culture always too much for me? The explanation
has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and
plain enough, for my confession. I loved her.
The days passed, the weeks passed; it was approaching the third month
of my stay in Cumberland. The delicious monotony of life in our calm
seclusion flowed on with me, like a smooth stream with a swimmer who