The Woman in White
dreary hour. My spirits sank fast as I counted out the minutes of the
evening in my hiding-place under the church porch.
It was not twilight yet—the light of the setting sun still lingered in
the heavens, and little more than the first half-hour of my solitary
watch had elapsed—when I heard footsteps and a voice. The footsteps
were approaching from the other side of the church, and the voice was a
woman’s.
“Don’t you fret, my dear, about the letter,” said the voice. “I gave it
to the lad quite safe, and the lad he took it from me without a word.
He went his way and I went mine, and not a living soul followed me
afterwards—that I’ll warrant.”
These words strung up my attention to a pitch of expectation that was
almost painful. There was a pause of silence, but the footsteps still
advanced. In another moment two persons, both women, passed within my
range of view from the porch window. They were walking straight towards
the grave; and therefore they had their backs turned towards me.
One of the women was dressed in a bonnet and shawl. The other wore a
long travelling-cloak of a dark-blue colour, with the hood drawn over
her head. A few inches of her gown were visible below the cloak. My
heart beat fast as I noted the colour—it was white.
After advancing about half-way between the church and the grave they
stopped, and the woman in the cloak turned her head towards her
companion. But her side face, which a bonnet might now have allowed me
to see, was hidden by the heavy, projecting edge of the hood.
“Mind you keep that comfortable warm cloak on,” said the same voice
which I had already heard—the voice of the woman in the shawl. “Mrs.
Todd is right about your looking too particular, yesterday, all in
white. I’ll walk about a little while you’re here, churchyards being
not at all in my way, whatever they may be in yours. Finish what you
want to do before I come back, and let us be sure and get home again
before night.”
With those words she turned about, and retracing her steps, advanced
with her face towards me. It was the face of an elderly woman, brown,
rugged, and healthy, with nothing dishonest or suspicious in the look
of it. Close to the church she stopped to pull her shawl closer round
her.
“Queer,” she said to herself, “always queer, with her whims and her
ways, ever since I can remember her. Harmless, though—as harmless, poor
soul, as a little child.”
She sighed—looked about the burial-ground nervously—shook her head, as
if the dreary prospect by no means pleased her, and disappeared round
the corner of the church.
I doubted for a moment whether I ought to follow and speak to her or
not. My intense anxiety to find myself face to face with her companion
helped me to decide in the negative. I could ensure seeing the woman in
the shawl by waiting near the churchyard until she came back—although
it seemed more than doubtful whether she could give me the information
of which I was in search. The person who had delivered the letter was
of little consequence. The person who had written it was the one centre
of interest, and the one source of information, and that person I now
felt convinced was before me in the churchyard.
While these ideas were passing through my mind I saw the woman in
the cloak approach close to the grave, and stand looking at it for a
little while. She then glanced all round her, and taking a white linen
cloth or handkerchief from under her cloak, turned aside towards the
brook. The little stream ran into the churchyard under a tiny archway
in the bottom of the wall, and ran out again, after a winding course
of a few dozen yards, under a similar opening. She dipped the cloth in
the water, and returned to the grave. I saw her kiss the white cross,
then kneel down before the inscription, and apply her wet cloth to the
cleansing of it.
After considering how I could show myself with the least possible
chance of frightening her, I resolved to cross the wall before me, to
skirt round it outside, and to enter the churchyard again by the stile
near the grave, in order that she might see me as I approached. She was
so absorbed over her employment that she did not hear me coming until
I had stepped over the stile. Then she looked up, started to her feet
with a faint cry, and stood facing me in speechless and motionless
terror.
“Don’t be frightened,” I said. “Surely you remember me?”
I stopped while I spoke—then advanced a few steps gently—then stopped
again—and so approached by little and little till I was close to her.
If there had been any doubt still left in my mind, it must have been
now set at rest. There, speaking affrightedly for itself—there was the
same face confronting me over Mrs. Fairlie’s grave which had first
looked into mine on the high-road by night.
“You remember me?” I said. “We met very late, and I helped you to find
the way to London. Surely you have not forgotten that?”
Her features relaxed, and she drew a heavy breath of relief. I saw the
new life of recognition stirring slowly under the death-like stillness
which fear had set on her face.
“Don’t attempt to speak to me just yet,” I went on. “Take time to
recover yourself—take time to feel quite certain that I am a friend.”
“You are very kind to me,” she murmured. “As kind now as you were then.”
She stopped, and I kept silence on my side. I was not granting time
for composure to her only, I was gaining time also for myself. Under
the wan wild evening light, that woman and I were met together again,
a grave between us, the dead about us, the lonesome hills closing us
round on every side. The time, the place, the circumstances under
which we now stood face to face in the evening stillness of that
dreary valley—the lifelong interests which might hang suspended on the
next chance words that passed between us—the sense that, for aught I
knew to the contrary, the whole future of Laura Fairlie’s life might
be determined, for good or for evil, by my winning or losing the
confidence of the forlorn creature who stood trembling by her mother’s
grave—all threatened to shake the steadiness and the self-control on
which every inch of the progress I might yet make now depended. I tried
hard, as I felt this, to possess myself of all my resources; I did my
utmost to turn the few moments for reflection to the best account.
“Are you calmer now?” I said, as soon as I thought it time to speak
again. “Can you talk to me without feeling frightened, and without
forgetting that I am a friend?”
“How did you come here?” she asked, without noticing what I had just
said to her.
“Don’t you remember my telling you, when we last met, that I was going
to Cumberland? I have been in Cumberland ever since—I have been staying
all the time at Limmeridge House.”
“At Limmeridge House!” Her pale face brightened as she repeated the
words, her wandering eyes fixed on me with a sudden interest. “Ah, how
happy you must have been!” she said, looking at me eagerly, without a
shadow of its former distrust left in her expression.
I took advantage of her newly-aroused confidence in me to observe
her face, with an attention and a curiosity which I had hitherto
restrained myself from showing, for caution’s sake. I looked at her,
with my mind full of that other lovely face which had so ominously
recalled her to my memory on the terrace by moonlight. I had seen Anne
Catherick’s likeness in Miss Fairlie. I now saw Miss Fairlie’s likeness
in Anne Catherick—saw it all the more clearly because the points of
dissimilarity between the two were presented to me as well as the
points of resemblance. In the general outline of the countenance and
general proportion of the features—in the colour of the hair and in
the little nervous uncertainty about the lips—in the height and size
of the figure, and the carriage of the head and body, the likeness
appeared even more startling than I had ever felt it to be yet. But
there the resemblance ended, and the dissimilarity, in details, began.
The delicate beauty of Miss Fairlie’s complexion, the transparent
clearness of her eyes, the smooth purity of her skin, the tender bloom
of colour on her lips, were all missing from the worn weary face that
was now turned towards mine. Although I hated myself even for thinking
such a thing, still, while I looked at the woman before me, the idea
would force itself into my mind that one sad change, in the future, was
all that was wanting to make the likeness complete, which I now saw
to be so imperfect in detail. If ever sorrow and suffering set their
profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie’s face, then,
and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of
chance resemblance, the living reflections of one another.
I shuddered at the thought. There was something horrible in the blind
unreasoning distrust of the future which the mere passage of it through
my mind seemed to imply. It was a welcome interruption to be roused by
feeling Anne Catherick’s hand laid on my shoulder. The touch was as
stealthy and as sudden as that other touch which had petrified me from
head to foot on the night when we first met.
“You are looking at me, and you are thinking of something,” she said,
with her strange breathless rapidity of utterance. “What is it?”
“Nothing extraordinary,” I answered. “I was only wondering how you came
here.”
“I came with a friend who is very good to me. I have only been here two
days.”
“And you found your way to this place yesterday?”
“How do you know that?”
“I only guessed it.”
She turned from me, and knelt down before the inscription once more.
“Where should I go if not here?” she said. “The friend who was better
than a mother to me is the only friend I have to visit at Limmeridge.
Oh, it makes my heart ache to see a stain on her tomb! It ought to be
kept white as snow, for her sake. I was tempted to begin cleaning it
yesterday, and I can’t help coming back to go on with it to-day. Is
there anything wrong in that? I hope not. Surely nothing can be wrong
that I do for Mrs. Fairlie’s sake?”
The old grateful sense of her benefactress’s kindness was evidently the
ruling idea still in the poor creature’s mind—the narrow mind which had
but too plainly opened to no other lasting impression since that first
impression of her younger and happier days. I saw that my best chance
of winning her confidence lay in encouraging her to proceed with the
artless employment which she had come into the burial-ground to pursue.
She resumed it at once, on my telling her she might do so, touching
the hard marble as tenderly as if it had been a sentient thing, and
whispering the words of the inscription to herself, over and over
again, as if the lost days of her girlhood had returned and she was
patiently learning her lesson once more at Mrs. Fairlie’s knees.
“Should you wonder very much,” I said, preparing the way as cautiously
as I could for the questions that were to come, “if I owned that it is
a satisfaction to me, as well as a surprise, to see you here? I felt
very uneasy about you after you left me in the cab.”
She looked up quickly and suspiciously.
“Uneasy,” she repeated. “Why?”
“A strange thing happened after we parted that night. Two men overtook
me in a chaise. They did not see where I was standing, but they stopped
near me, and spoke to a policeman on the other side of the way.”
She instantly suspended her employment. The hand holding the damp cloth
with which she had been cleaning the inscription dropped to her side.
The other hand grasped the marble cross at the head of the grave.
Her face turned towards me slowly, with the blank look of terror set
rigidly on it once more. I went on at all hazards—it was too late now
to draw back.