The Woman in White
“I have come here at great personal inconvenience,” I said, “to serve
the interests of your niece and your family, and I think I have
established some slight claim to be favoured with your attention in
return.”
“Don’t bully me!” exclaimed Mr. Fairlie, falling back helplessly in the
chair, and closing his eyes. “Please don’t bully me. I’m not strong
enough.”
I was determined not to let him provoke me, for Laura Fairlie’s sake.
“My object,” I went on, “is to entreat you to reconsider your letter,
and not to force me to abandon the just rights of your niece, and of
all who belong to her. Let me state the case to you once more, and for
the last time.”
Mr. Fairlie shook his head and sighed piteously.
“This is heartless of you, Gilmore—very heartless,” he said. “Never
mind, go on.”
I put all the points to him carefully—I set the matter before him
in every conceivable light. He lay back in the chair the whole time
I was speaking with his eyes closed. When I had done he opened them
indolently, took his silver smelling-bottle from the table, and sniffed
at it with an air of gentle relish.
“Good Gilmore!” he said between the sniffs, “how very nice this is of
you! How you reconcile one to human nature!”
“Give me a plain answer to a plain question, Mr. Fairlie. I tell you
again, Sir Percival Glyde has no shadow of a claim to expect more
than the income of the money. The money itself if your niece has no
children, ought to be under her control, and to return to her family.
If you stand firm, Sir Percival must give way—he must give way, I tell
you, or he exposes himself to the base imputation of marrying Miss
Fairlie entirely from mercenary motives.”
Mr. Fairlie shook the silver smelling-bottle at me playfully.
“You dear old Gilmore, how you do hate rank and family, don’t you? How
you detest Glyde because he happens to be a baronet. What a Radical you
are—oh, dear me, what a Radical you are!”
A Radical!!! I could put up with a good deal of provocation, but, after
holding the soundest Conservative principles all my life, I could NOT
put up with being called a Radical. My blood boiled at it—I started out
of my chair—I was speechless with Indignation.
“Don’t shake the room!” cried Mr. Fairlie—“for Heaven’s sake don’t
shake the room! Worthiest of all possible Gilmores, I meant no offence.
My own views are so extremely liberal that I think I am a Radical
myself. Yes. We are a pair of Radicals. Please don’t be angry. I can’t
quarrel—I haven’t stamina enough. Shall we drop the subject? Yes. Come
and look at these sweet etchings. Do let me teach you to understand the
heavenly pearliness of these lines. Do now, there’s a good Gilmore!”
While he was maundering on in this way I was, fortunately for my own
self-respect, returning to my senses. When I spoke again I was composed
enough to treat his impertinence with the silent contempt that it
deserved.
“You are entirely wrong, sir,” I said, “in supposing that I speak from
any prejudice against Sir Percival Glyde. I may regret that he has so
unreservedly resigned himself in this matter to his lawyer’s direction
as to make any appeal to himself impossible, but I am not prejudiced
against him. What I have said would equally apply to any other man in
his situation, high or low. The principle I maintain is a recognised
principle. If you were to apply at the nearest town here, to the first
respectable solicitor you could find, he would tell you as a stranger
what I tell you as a friend. He would inform you that it is against all
rule to abandon the lady’s money entirely to the man she marries. He
would decline, on grounds of common legal caution, to give the husband,
under any circumstances whatever, an interest of twenty thousand pounds
in his wife’s death.”
“Would he really, Gilmore?” said Mr. Fairlie. “If he said anything half
so horrid, I do assure you I should tinkle my bell for Louis, and have
him sent out of the house immediately.”
“You shall not irritate me, Mr. Fairlie—for your niece’s sake and for
her father’s sake, you shall not irritate me. You shall take the whole
responsibility of this discreditable settlement on your own shoulders
before I leave the room.”
“Don’t!—now please don’t!” said Mr. Fairlie. “Think how precious your
time is, Gilmore, and don’t throw it away. I would dispute with you if
I could, but I can’t—I haven’t stamina enough. You want to upset me,
to upset yourself, to upset Glyde, and to upset Laura; and—oh, dear
me!—all for the sake of the very last thing in the world that is likely
to happen. No, dear friend—in the interests of peace and quietness,
positively No!”
“I am to understand, then, that you hold by the determination expressed
in your letter?”
“Yes, please. So glad we understand each other at last. Sit down
again—do!”
I walked at once to the door, and Mr. Fairlie resignedly “tinkled” his
hand-bell. Before I left the room I turned round and addressed him for
the last time.
“Whatever happens in the future, sir,” I said, “remember that my plain
duty of warning you has been performed. As the faithful friend and
servant of your family, I tell you, at parting, that no daughter of
mine should be married to any man alive under such a settlement as you
are forcing me to make for Miss Fairlie.”
The door opened behind me, and the valet stood waiting on the threshold.
“Louis,” said Mr. Fairlie, “show Mr. Gilmore out, and then come back
and hold up my etchings for me again. Make them give you a good lunch
downstairs. Do, Gilmore, make my idle beasts of servants give you a
good lunch!”
I was too much disgusted to reply—I turned on my heel, and left him in
silence. There was an up train at two o’clock in the afternoon, and by
that train I returned to London.
On the Tuesday I sent in the altered settlement, which practically
disinherited the very persons whom Miss Fairlie’s own lips had informed
me she was most anxious to benefit. I had no choice. Another lawyer
would have drawn up the deed if I had refused to undertake it.
My task is done. My personal share in the events of the family story
extends no farther than the point which I have just reached. Other
pens than mine will describe the strange circumstances which are now
shortly to follow. Seriously and sorrowfully I close this brief record.
Seriously and sorrowfully I repeat here the parting words that I spoke
at Limmeridge House:—No daughter of mine should have been married to
any man alive under such a settlement as I was compelled to make for
Laura Fairlie.
The End of Mr. Gilmore’s Narrative.
THE STORY CONTINUED BY MARIAN HALCOMBE
(in Extracts from her Diary)
LIMMERIDGE HOUSE, Nov. 8.[1]
[1] The passages omitted, here and elsewhere, in Miss Halcombe’s Diary
are only those which bear no reference to Miss Fairlie or to any of the
persons with whom she is associated in these pages.
This morning Mr. Gilmore left us.
His interview with Laura had evidently grieved and surprised him more
than he liked to confess. I felt afraid, from his look and manner when
we parted, that she might have inadvertently betrayed to him the real
secret of her depression and my anxiety. This doubt grew on me so,
after he had gone, that I declined riding out with Sir Percival, and
went up to Laura’s room instead.
I have been sadly distrustful of myself, in this difficult and
lamentable matter, ever since I found out my own ignorance of the
strength of Laura’s unhappy attachment. I ought to have known that
the delicacy and forbearance and sense of honour which drew me to
poor Hartright, and made me so sincerely admire and respect him, were
just the qualities to appeal most irresistibly to Laura’s natural
sensitiveness and natural generosity of nature. And yet, until she
opened her heart to me of her own accord, I had no suspicion that this
new feeling had taken root so deeply. I once thought time and care
might remove it. I now fear that it will remain with her and alter her
for life. The discovery that I have committed such an error in judgment
as this makes me hesitate about everything else. I hesitate about
Sir Percival, in the face of the plainest proofs. I hesitate even in
speaking to Laura. On this very morning I doubted, with my hand on the
door, whether I should ask her the questions I had come to put, or not.
When I went into her room I found her walking up and down in great
impatience. She looked flushed and excited, and she came forward at
once, and spoke to me before I could open my lips.
“I wanted you,” she said. “Come and sit down on the sofa with me.
Marian! I can bear this no longer—I must and will end it.”
There was too much colour in her cheeks, too much energy in her
manner, too much firmness in her voice. The little book of Hartright’s
drawings—the fatal book that she will dream over whenever she is
alone—was in one of her hands. I began by gently and firmly taking it
from her, and putting it out of sight on a side-table.
“Tell me quietly, my darling, what you wish to do,” I said. “Has Mr.
Gilmore been advising you?”
She shook her head. “No, not in what I am thinking of now. He was very
kind and good to me, Marian, and I am ashamed to say I distressed him
by crying. I am miserably helpless—I can’t control myself. For my own
sake, and for all our sakes, I must have courage enough to end it.”
“Do you mean courage enough to claim your release?” I asked.
“No,” she said simply. “Courage, dear, to tell the truth.”
She put her arms round my neck, and rested her head quietly on my
bosom. On the opposite wall hung the miniature portrait of her father.
I bent over her, and saw that she was looking at it while her head lay
on my breast.
“I can never claim my release from my engagement,” she went on.
“Whatever way it ends it must end wretchedly for me. All I can do,
Marian, is not to add the remembrance that I have broken my promise and
forgotten my father’s dying words, to make that wretchedness worse.”
“What is it you propose, then?” I asked.
“To tell Sir Percival Glyde the truth with my own lips,” she answered,
“and to let him release me, if he will, not because I ask him, but
because he knows all.”
“What do you mean, Laura, by ‘all’? Sir Percival will know enough (he
has told me so himself) if he knows that the engagement is opposed to
your own wishes.”
“Can I tell him that, when the engagement was made for me by my father,
with my own consent? I should have kept my promise, not happily, I am
afraid, but still contentedly—” she stopped, turned her face to me, and
laid her cheek close against mine—“I should have kept my engagement,
Marian, if another love had not grown up in my heart, which was not
there when I first promised to be Sir Percival’s wife.”
“Laura! you will never lower yourself by making a confession to him?”
“I shall lower myself, indeed, if I gain my release by hiding from him
what he has a right to know.”
“He has not the shadow of a right to know it!”
“Wrong, Marian, wrong! I ought to deceive no one—least of all the man
to whom my father gave me, and to whom I gave myself.” She put her lips
to mine, and kissed me. “My own love,” she said softly, “you are so
much too fond of me, and so much too proud of me, that you forget, in
my case, what you would remember in your own. Better that Sir Percival
should doubt my motives, and misjudge my conduct if he will, than that
I should be first false to him in thought, and then mean enough to
serve my own interests by hiding the falsehood.”
I held her away from me in astonishment. For the first time in our
lives we had changed places—the resolution was all on her side, the
hesitation all on mine. I looked into the pale, quiet, resigned young
face—I saw the pure, innocent heart, in the loving eyes that looked