The Woman in White
attending to the dog, the words of Walter Hartright’s caution to me
returned to my memory: “If ever Anne Catherick crosses your path, make
better use of the opportunity, Miss Halcombe, than I made of it.” The
finding of the wounded spaniel had led me already to the discovery of
Mrs. Catherick’s visit to Blackwater Park, and that event might lead
in its turn, to something more. I determined to make the most of the
chance which was now offered to me, and to gain as much information as
I could.
“Did you say that Mrs. Catherick lived anywhere in this neighbourhood?”
I asked.
“Oh dear, no,” said the housekeeper. “She lives at Welmingham, quite at
the other end of the county—five-and-twenty miles off, at least.”
“I suppose you have known Mrs. Catherick for some years?”
“On the contrary, Miss Halcombe, I never saw her before she came
here yesterday. I had heard of her, of course, because I had heard
of Sir Percival’s kindness in putting her daughter under medical
care. Mrs. Catherick is rather a strange person in her manners, but
extremely respectable-looking. She seemed sorely put out when she
found that there was no foundation—none, at least, that any of us
could discover—for the report of her daughter having been seen in this
neighbourhood.”
“I am rather interested about Mrs. Catherick,” I went on, continuing
the conversation as long as possible. “I wish I had arrived here soon
enough to see her yesterday. Did she stay for any length of time?”
“Yes,” said the housekeeper, “she stayed for some time; and I think
she would have remained longer, if I had not been called away to speak
to a strange gentleman—a gentleman who came to ask when Sir Percival
was expected back. Mrs. Catherick got up and left at once, when she
heard the maid tell me what the visitor’s errand was. She said to me,
at parting, that there was no need to tell Sir Percival of her coming
here. I thought that rather an odd remark to make, especially to a
person in my responsible situation.”
I thought it an odd remark too. Sir Percival had certainly led me
to believe, at Limmeridge, that the most perfect confidence existed
between himself and Mrs. Catherick. If that was the case, why should
she be anxious to have her visit at Blackwater Park kept a secret from
him?
“Probably,” I said, seeing that the housekeeper expected me to give
my opinion on Mrs. Catherick’s parting words, “probably she thought
the announcement of her visit might vex Sir Percival to no purpose, by
reminding him that her lost daughter was not found yet. Did she talk
much on that subject?”
“Very little,” replied the housekeeper. “She talked principally of Sir
Percival, and asked a great many questions about where he had been
travelling, and what sort of lady his new wife was. She seemed to be
more soured and put out than distressed, by failing to find any traces
of her daughter in these parts. ‘I give her up,’ were the last words
she said that I can remember; ‘I give her up, ma’am, for lost.’ And
from that she passed at once to her questions about Lady Glyde, wanting
to know if she was a handsome, amiable lady, comely and healthy and
young——Ah, dear! I thought how it would end. Look, Miss Halcombe, the
poor thing is out of its misery at last!”
The dog was dead. It had given a faint, sobbing cry, it had suffered an
instant’s convulsion of the limbs, just as those last words, “comely
and healthy and young,” dropped from the housekeeper’s lips. The change
had happened with startling suddenness—in one moment the creature lay
lifeless under our hands.
Eight o’clock. I have just returned from dining downstairs, in solitary
state. The sunset is burning redly on the wilderness of trees that I
see from my window, and I am poring over my journal again, to calm
my impatience for the return of the travellers. They ought to have
arrived, by my calculations, before this. How still and lonely the
house is in the drowsy evening quiet! Oh me! how many minutes more
before I hear the carriage wheels and run downstairs to find myself in
Laura’s arms?
The poor little dog! I wish my first day at Blackwater Park had not
been associated with death, though it is only the death of a stray
animal.
Welmingham—I see, on looking back through these private pages of mine,
that Welmingham is the name of the place where Mrs. Catherick lives.
Her note is still in my possession, the note in answer to that letter
about her unhappy daughter which Sir Percival obliged me to write. One
of these days, when I can find a safe opportunity, I will take the
note with me by way of introduction, and try what I can make of Mrs.
Catherick at a personal interview. I don’t understand her wishing to
conceal her visit to this place from Sir Percival’s knowledge, and
I don’t feel half so sure, as the housekeeper seems to do, that her
daughter Anne is not in the neighbourhood after all. What would Walter
Hartright have said in this emergency? Poor, dear Hartright! I am
beginning to feel the want of his honest advice and his willing help
already.
Surely I heard something. Was it a bustle of footsteps below stairs?
Yes! I hear the horses’ feet—I hear the rolling wheels——
II
June 15th.—The confusion of their arrival has had time to subside. Two
days have elapsed since the return of the travellers, and that interval
has sufficed to put the new machinery of our lives at Blackwater Park
in fair working order. I may now return to my journal, with some little
chance of being able to continue the entries in it as collectedly as
usual.
I think I must begin by putting down an odd remark which has suggested
itself to me since Laura came back.
When two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and
one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative
or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative
or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when
the two first meet. The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new
habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old
habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the
sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and
to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable
by both, between them on either side. After the first happiness of
my meeting with Laura was over, after we had sat down together hand
in hand to recover breath enough and calmness enough to talk, I felt
this strangeness instantly, and I could see that she felt it too. It
has partially worn away, now that we have fallen back into most of
our old habits, and it will probably disappear before long. But it
has certainly had an influence over the first impressions that I have
formed of her, now that we are living together again—for which reason
only I have thought fit to mention it here.
She has found me unaltered, but I have found her changed.
Changed in person, and in one respect changed in character. I cannot
absolutely say that she is less beautiful than she used to be—I can
only say that she is less beautiful to me.
Others, who do not look at her with my eyes and my recollections, would
probably think her improved. There is more colour and more decision and
roundness of outline in her face than there used to be, and her figure
seems more firmly set and more sure and easy in all its movements
than it was in her maiden days. But I miss something when I look at
her—something that once belonged to the happy, innocent life of Laura
Fairlie, and that I cannot find in Lady Glyde. There was in the old
times a freshness, a softness, an ever-varying and yet ever-remaining
tenderness of beauty in her face, the charm of which it is not possible
to express in words, or, as poor Hartright used often to say, in
painting either. This is gone. I thought I saw the faint reflection of
it for a moment when she turned pale under the agitation of our sudden
meeting on the evening of her return, but it has never reappeared
since. None of her letters had prepared me for a personal change in
her. On the contrary, they had led me to expect that her marriage had
left her, in appearance at least, quite unaltered. Perhaps I read her
letters wrongly in the past, and am now reading her face wrongly in the
present? No matter! Whether her beauty has gained or whether it has
lost in the last six months, the separation either way has made her own
dear self more precious to me than ever, and that is one good result of
her marriage, at any rate!
The second change, the change that I have observed in her character,
has not surprised me, because I was prepared for it in this case by the
tone of her letters. Now that she is at home again, I find her just as
unwilling to enter into any details on the subject of her married life
as I had previously found her all through the time of our separation,
when we could only communicate with each other by writing. At the first
approach I made to the forbidden topic she put her hand on my lips with
a look and gesture which touchingly, almost painfully, recalled to my
memory the days of her girlhood and the happy bygone time when there
were no secrets between us.
“Whenever you and I are together, Marian,” she said, “we shall both be
happier and easier with one another, if we accept my married life for
what it is, and say and think as little about it as possible. I would
tell you everything, darling, about myself,” she went on, nervously
buckling and unbuckling the ribbon round my waist, “if my confidences
could only end there. But they could not—they would lead me into
confidences about my husband too; and now I am married, I think I had
better avoid them, for his sake, and for your sake, and for mine. I
don’t say that they would distress you, or distress me—I wouldn’t have
you think that for the world. But—I want to be so happy, now I have
got you back again, and I want you to be so happy too——” She broke off
abruptly, and looked round the room, my own sitting-room, in which we
were talking. “Ah!” she cried, clapping her hands with a bright smile
of recognition, “another old friend found already! Your book-case,
Marian—your dear-little-shabby-old-satin-wood book-case—how glad I am
you brought it with you from Limmeridge! And the horrid heavy man’s
umbrella, that you always would walk out with when it rained! And first
and foremost of all, your own dear, dark, clever, gipsy-face, looking
at me just as usual! It is so like home again to be here. How can we
make it more like home still? I will put my father’s portrait in your
room instead of in mine—and I will keep all my little treasures from
Limmeridge here—and we will pass hours and hours every day with these
four friendly walls round us. Oh, Marian!” she said, suddenly seating
herself on a footstool at my knees, and looking up earnestly in my
face, “promise you will never marry, and leave me. It is selfish to say
so, but you are so much better off as a single woman—unless—unless you
are very fond of your husband—but you won’t be very fond of anybody but
me, will you?” She stopped again, crossed my hands on my lap, and laid
her face on them. “Have you been writing many letters, and receiving
many letters lately?” she asked, in low, suddenly-altered tones. I
understood what the question meant, but I thought it my duty not to
encourage her by meeting her half way. “Have you heard from him?” she
went on, coaxing me to forgive the more direct appeal on which she now
ventured, by kissing my hands, upon which her face still rested. “Is
he well and happy, and getting on in his profession? Has he recovered
himself—and forgotten me?”
She should not have asked those questions. She should have remembered
her own resolution, on the morning when Sir Percival held her to her