The Woman in White
Sir Percival are not to have it all their own way.”
She sighed bitterly, and still held my dress.
“No!” she said faintly. “Too late, Marian, too late!”
“Not a minute too late,” I retorted. “The question of time is OUR
question—and trust me, Laura, to take a woman’s full advantage of it.”
I unclasped her hand from my gown while I spoke; but she slipped
both her arms round my waist at the same moment, and held me more
effectually than ever.
“It will only involve us in more trouble and more confusion,” she said.
“It will set you and my uncle at variance, and bring Sir Percival here
again with fresh causes of complaint—”
“So much the better!” I cried out passionately. “Who cares for his
causes of complaint? Are you to break your heart to set his mind at
ease? No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men!
They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace—they drag us away
from our parents’ love and our sisters’ friendship—they take us body
and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they
chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in
return? Let me go, Laura—I’m mad when I think of it!”
The tears—miserable, weak, women’s tears of vexation and rage—started
to my eyes. She smiled sadly, and put her handkerchief over my face to
hide for me the betrayal of my own weakness—the weakness of all others
which she knew that I most despised.
“Oh, Marian!” she said. “You crying! Think what you would say to me,
if the places were changed, and if those tears were mine. All your
love and courage and devotion will not alter what must happen, sooner
or later. Let my uncle have his way. Let us have no more troubles and
heart-burnings that any sacrifice of mine can prevent. Say you will
live with me, Marian, when I am married—and say no more.”
But I did say more. I forced back the contemptible tears that were no
relief to ME, and that only distressed HER, and reasoned and pleaded
as calmly as I could. It was of no avail. She made me twice repeat the
promise to live with her when she was married, and then suddenly asked
a question which turned my sorrow and my sympathy for her into a new
direction.
“While we were at Polesdean,” she said, “you had a letter, Marian——”
Her altered tone—the abrupt manner in which she looked away from me and
hid her face on my shoulder—the hesitation which silenced her before
she had completed her question, all told me, but too plainly, to whom
the half-expressed inquiry pointed.
“I thought, Laura, that you and I were never to refer to him again,” I
said gently.
“You had a letter from him?” she persisted.
“Yes,” I replied, “if you must know it.”
“Do you mean to write to him again?”
I hesitated. I had been afraid to tell her of his absence from England,
or of the manner in which my exertions to serve his new hopes and
projects had connected me with his departure. What answer could I make?
He was gone where no letters could reach him for months, perhaps for
years, to come.
“Suppose I do mean to write to him again,” I said at last. “What then,
Laura?”
Her cheek grew burning hot against my neck, and her arms trembled and
tightened round me.
“Don’t tell him about THE TWENTY-SECOND,” she whispered. “Promise,
Marian—pray promise you will not even mention my name to him when you
write next.”
I gave the promise. No words can say how sorrowfully I gave it. She
instantly took her arm from my waist, walked away to the window, and
stood looking out with her back to me. After a moment she spoke once
more, but without turning round, without allowing me to catch the
smallest glimpse of her face.
“Are you going to my uncle’s room?” she asked. “Will you say that I
consent to whatever arrangement he may think best? Never mind leaving
me, Marian. I shall be better alone for a little while.”
I went out. If, as soon as I got into the passage, I could have
transported Mr. Fairlie and Sir Percival Glyde to the uttermost ends
of the earth by lifting one of my fingers, that finger would have been
raised without an instant’s hesitation. For once my unhappy temper now
stood my friend. I should have broken down altogether and burst into
a violent fit of crying, if my tears had not been all burnt up in the
heat of my anger. As it was, I dashed into Mr. Fairlie’s room—called to
him as harshly as possible, “Laura consents to the twenty-second”—and
dashed out again without waiting for a word of answer. I banged the
door after me, and I hope I shattered Mr. Fairlie’s nervous system for
the rest of the day.
28th.—This morning I read poor Hartright’s farewell letter over again,
a doubt having crossed my mind since yesterday, whether I am acting
wisely in concealing the fact of his departure from Laura.
On reflection, I still think I am right. The allusions in his letter
to the preparations made for the expedition to Central America, all
show that the leaders of it know it to be dangerous. If the discovery
of this makes me uneasy, what would it make HER? It is bad enough to
feel that his departure has deprived us of the friend of all others to
whose devotion we could trust in the hour of need, if ever that hour
comes and finds us helpless; but it is far worse to know that he has
gone from us to face the perils of a bad climate, a wild country, and a
disturbed population. Surely it would be a cruel candour to tell Laura
this, without a pressing and a positive necessity for it?
I almost doubt whether I ought not to go a step farther, and burn the
letter at once, for fear of its one day falling into wrong hands. It
not only refers to Laura in terms which ought to remain a secret for
ever between the writer and me, but it reiterates his suspicion—so
obstinate, so unaccountable, and so alarming—that he has been secretly
watched since he left Limmeridge. He declares that he saw the faces
of the two strange men who followed him about the streets of London,
watching him among the crowd which gathered at Liverpool to see the
expedition embark, and he positively asserts that he heard the name of
Anne Catherick pronounced behind him as he got into the boat. His own
words are, “These events have a meaning, these events must lead to a
result. The mystery of Anne Catherick is NOT cleared up yet. She may
never cross my path again, but if ever she crosses yours, make better
use of the opportunity, Miss Halcombe, than I made of it. I speak on
strong conviction—I entreat you to remember what I say.” These are his
own expressions. There is no danger of my forgetting them—my memory is
only too ready to dwell on any words of Hartright’s that refer to Anne
Catherick. But there is danger in my keeping the letter. The merest
accident might place it at the mercy of strangers. I may fall ill—I may
die. Better to burn it at once, and have one anxiety the less.
It is burnt. The ashes of his farewell letter—the last he may ever
write to me—lie in a few black fragments on the hearth. Is this the sad
end to all that sad story? Oh, not the end—surely, surely not the end
already!
29th.—The preparations for the marriage have begun. The dressmaker has
come to receive her orders. Laura is perfectly impassive, perfectly
careless about the question of all others in which a woman’s personal
interests are most closely bound up. She has left it all to the
dressmaker and to me. If poor Hartright had been the baronet, and the
husband of her father’s choice, how differently she would have behaved!
How anxious and capricious she would have been, and what a hard task
the best of dressmakers would have found it to please her!
30th.—We hear every day from Sir Percival. The last news is that
the alterations in his house will occupy from four to six months
before they can be properly completed. If painters, paperhangers, and
upholsterers could make happiness as well as splendour, I should be
interested about their proceedings in Laura’s future home. As it is,
the only part of Sir Percival’s last letter which does not leave me
as it found me, perfectly indifferent to all his plans and projects,
is the part which refers to the wedding tour. He proposes, as Laura
is delicate, and as the winter threatens to be unusually severe, to
take her to Rome, and to remain in Italy until the early part of next
summer. If this plan should not be approved, he is equally ready,
although he has no establishment of his own in town, to spend the
season in London, in the most suitable furnished house that can be
obtained for the purpose.
Putting myself and my own feelings entirely out of the question (which
it is my duty to do, and which I have done), I, for one, have no doubt
of the propriety of adopting the first of these proposals. In either
case a separation between Laura and me is inevitable. It will be a
longer separation, in the event of their going abroad, than it would be
in the event of their remaining in London—but we must set against this
disadvantage the benefit to Laura, on the other side, of passing the
winter in a mild climate, and more than that, the immense assistance in
raising her spirits, and reconciling her to her new existence, which
the mere wonder and excitement of travelling for the first time in her
life in the most interesting country in the world, must surely afford.
She is not of a disposition to find resources in the conventional
gaieties and excitements of London. They would only make the first
oppression of this lamentable marriage fall the heavier on her. I dread
the beginning of her new life more than words can tell, but I see some
hope for her if she travels—none if she remains at home.
It is strange to look back at this latest entry in my journal, and to
find that I am writing of the marriage and the parting with Laura, as
people write of a settled thing. It seems so cold and so unfeeling to
be looking at the future already in this cruelly composed way. But what
other way is possible, now that the time is drawing so near? Before
another month is over our heads she will be HIS Laura instead of mine!
HIS Laura! I am as little able to realise the idea which those two
words convey—my mind feels almost as dulled and stunned by it—as if
writing of her marriage were like writing of her death.
December 1st.—A sad, sad day—a day that I have no heart to describe at
any length. After weakly putting it off last night, I was obliged to
speak to her this morning of Sir Percival’s proposal about the wedding
tour.
In the full conviction that I should be with her wherever she went,
the poor child—for a child she is still in many things—was almost
happy at the prospect of seeing the wonders of Florence and Rome and
Naples. It nearly broke my heart to dispel her delusion, and to bring
her face to face with the hard truth. I was obliged to tell her that no
man tolerates a rival—not even a woman rival—in his wife’s affections,
when he first marries, whatever he may do afterwards. I was obliged to
warn her that my chance of living with her permanently under her own
roof, depended entirely on my not arousing Sir Percival’s jealousy and
distrust by standing between them at the beginning of their marriage,
in the position of the chosen depositary of his wife’s closest secrets.
Drop by drop I poured the profaning bitterness of this world’s wisdom
into that pure heart and that innocent mind, while every higher and
better feeling within me recoiled from my miserable task. It is over
now. She has learnt her hard, her inevitable lesson. The simple
illusions of her girlhood are gone, and my hand has stripped them off.
Better mine than his—that is all my consolation—better mine than his.
So the first proposal is the proposal accepted. They are to go to
Italy, and I am to arrange, with Sir Percival’s permission, for meeting