The Woman in White
marriage engagement, and when she resigned the book of Hartright’s
drawings into my hands for ever. But, ah me! where is the faultless
human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without
sometimes failing and falling back? Where is the woman who has ever
really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it
by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have
existed—but what does our own experience say in answer to books?
I made no attempt to remonstrate with her: perhaps, because I sincerely
appreciated the fearless candour which let me see, what other women
in her position might have had reasons for concealing even from
their dearest friends—perhaps, because I felt, in my own heart and
conscience, that in her place I should have asked the same questions
and had the same thoughts. All I could honestly do was to reply that I
had not written to him or heard from him lately, and then to turn the
conversation to less dangerous topics.
There has been much to sadden me in our interview—my first confidential
interview with her since her return. The change which her marriage has
produced in our relations towards each other, by placing a forbidden
subject between us, for the first time in our lives; the melancholy
conviction of the dearth of all warmth of feeling, of all close
sympathy, between her husband and herself, which her own unwilling
words now force on my mind; the distressing discovery that the
influence of that ill-fated attachment still remains (no matter how
innocently, how harmlessly) rooted as deeply as ever in her heart—all
these are disclosures to sadden any woman who loves her as dearly, and
feels for her as acutely, as I do.
There is only one consolation to set against them—a consolation that
ought to comfort me, and that does comfort me. All the graces and
gentleness of her character—all the frank affection of her nature—all
the sweet, simple, womanly charms which used to make her the darling
and delight of every one who approached her, have come back to me with
herself. Of my other impressions I am sometimes a little inclined to
doubt. Of this last, best, happiest of all impressions, I grow more and
more certain every hour in the day.
Let me turn, now, from her to her travelling companions. Her husband
must engage my attention first. What have I observed in Sir Percival,
since his return, to improve my opinion of him?
I can hardly say. Small vexations and annoyances seem to have beset
him since he came back, and no man, under those circumstances, is
ever presented at his best. He looks, as I think, thinner than he
was when he left England. His wearisome cough and his comfortless
restlessness have certainly increased. His manner—at least his manner
towards me—is much more abrupt than it used to be. He greeted me, on
the evening of his return, with little or nothing of the ceremony and
civility of former times—no polite speeches of welcome—no appearance
of extraordinary gratification at seeing me—nothing but a short shake
of the hand, and a sharp “How-d’ye-do, Miss Halcombe—glad to see you
again.” He seemed to accept me as one of the necessary fixtures of
Blackwater Park, to be satisfied at finding me established in my proper
place, and then to pass me over altogether.
Most men show something of their disposition in their own houses, which
they have concealed elsewhere, and Sir Percival has already displayed
a mania for order and regularity, which is quite a new revelation of
him, so far as my previous knowledge of his character is concerned. If
I take a book from the library and leave it on the table, he follows
me and puts it back again. If I rise from a chair, and let it remain
where I have been sitting, he carefully restores it to its proper
place against the wall. He picks up stray flower-blossoms from the
carpet, and mutters to himself as discontentedly as if they were hot
cinders burning holes in it, and he storms at the servants if there is
a crease in the tablecloth, or a knife missing from its place at the
dinner-table, as fiercely as if they had personally insulted him.
I have already referred to the small annoyances which appear to have
troubled him since his return. Much of the alteration for the worse
which I have noticed in him may be due to these. I try to persuade
myself that it is so, because I am anxious not to be disheartened
already about the future. It is certainly trying to any man’s temper to
be met by a vexation the moment he sets foot in his own house again,
after a long absence, and this annoying circumstance did really happen
to Sir Percival in my presence.
On the evening of their arrival the housekeeper followed me into
the hall to receive her master and mistress and their guests. The
instant he saw her, Sir Percival asked if any one had called lately.
The housekeeper mentioned to him, in reply, what she had previously
mentioned to me, the visit of the strange gentleman to make inquiries
about the time of her master’s return. He asked immediately for the
gentleman’s name. No name had been left. The gentleman’s business?
No business had been mentioned. What was the gentleman like? The
housekeeper tried to describe him, but failed to distinguish the
nameless visitor by any personal peculiarity which her master could
recognise. Sir Percival frowned, stamped angrily on the floor, and
walked on into the house, taking no notice of anybody. Why he should
have been so discomposed by a trifle I cannot say—but he was seriously
discomposed, beyond all doubt.
Upon the whole, it will be best, perhaps, if I abstain from forming
a decisive opinion of his manners, language, and conduct in his own
house, until time has enabled him to shake off the anxieties, whatever
they may be, which now evidently troubled his mind in secret. I will
turn over to a new page, and my pen shall let Laura’s husband alone for
the present.
The two guests—the Count and Countess Fosco—come next in my catalogue.
I will dispose of the Countess first, so as to have done with the woman
as soon as possible.
Laura was certainly not chargeable with any exaggeration, in writing me
word that I should hardly recognise her aunt again when we met. Never
before have I beheld such a change produced in a woman by her marriage
as has been produced in Madame Fosco.
As Eleanor Fairlie (aged seven-and-thirty), she was always talking
pretentious nonsense, and always worrying the unfortunate men with
every small exaction which a vain and foolish woman can impose on
long-suffering male humanity. As Madame Fosco (aged three-and-forty),
she sits for hours together without saying a word, frozen up in the
strangest manner in herself. The hideously ridiculous love-locks which
used to hang on either side of her face are now replaced by stiff
little rows of very short curls, of the sort one sees in old-fashioned
wigs. A plain, matronly cap covers her head, and makes her look,
for the first time in her life since I remember her, like a decent
woman. Nobody (putting her husband out of the question, of course)
now sees in her, what everybody once saw—I mean the structure of the
female skeleton, in the upper regions of the collar-bones and the
shoulder-blades. Clad in quiet black or grey gowns, made high round the
throat—dresses that she would have laughed at, or screamed at, as the
whim of the moment inclined her, in her maiden days—she sits speechless
in corners; her dry white hands (so dry that the pores of her skin look
chalky) incessantly engaged, either in monotonous embroidery work or in
rolling up endless cigarettes for the Count’s own particular smoking.
On the few occasions when her cold blue eyes are off her work, they
are generally turned on her husband, with the look of mute submissive
inquiry which we are all familiar with in the eyes of a faithful dog.
The only approach to an inward thaw which I have yet detected under her
outer covering of icy constraint, has betrayed itself, once or twice,
in the form of a suppressed tigerish jealousy of any woman in the house
(the maids included) to whom the Count speaks, or on whom he looks with
anything approaching to special interest or attention. Except in this
one particular, she is always, morning, noon, and night, indoors and
out, fair weather or foul, as cold as a statue, and as impenetrable as
the stone out of which it is cut. For the common purposes of society
the extraordinary change thus produced in her is, beyond all doubt,
a change for the better, seeing that it has transformed her into a
civil, silent, unobtrusive woman, who is never in the way. How far
she is really reformed or deteriorated in her secret self, is another
question. I have once or twice seen sudden changes of expression on her
pinched lips, and heard sudden inflexions of tone in her calm voice,
which have led me to suspect that her present state of suppression
may have sealed up something dangerous in her nature, which used
to evaporate harmlessly in the freedom of her former life. It is
quite possible that I may be altogether wrong in this idea. My own
impression, however, is, that I am right. Time will show.
And the magician who has wrought this wonderful transformation—the
foreign husband who has tamed this once wayward English woman till her
own relations hardly know her again—the Count himself? What of the
Count?
This in two words: He looks like a man who could tame anything. If he
had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the
tigress. If he had married me, I should have made his cigarettes, as
his wife does—I should have held my tongue when he looked at me, as she
holds hers.
I am almost afraid to confess it, even to these secret pages. The man
has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him. In two
short days he has made his way straight into my favourable estimation,
and how he has worked the miracle is more than I can tell.
It absolutely startles me, now he is in my mind, to find how plainly I
see him!—how much more plainly than I see Sir Percival, or Mr. Fairlie,
or Walter Hartright, or any other absent person of whom I think, with
the one exception of Laura herself! I can hear his voice, as if he was
speaking at this moment. I know what his conversation was yesterday,
as well as if I was hearing it now. How am I to describe him? There
are peculiarities in his personal appearance, his habits, and his
amusements, which I should blame in the boldest terms, or ridicule in
the most merciless manner, if I had seen them in another man. What is
it that makes me unable to blame them, or to ridicule them in HIM?
For example, he is immensely fat. Before this time I have always
especially disliked corpulent humanity. I have always maintained
that the popular notion of connecting excessive grossness of size
and excessive good-humour as inseparable allies was equivalent to
declaring, either that no people but amiable people ever get fat,
or that the accidental addition of so many pounds of flesh has a
directly favourable influence over the disposition of the person on
whose body they accumulate. I have invariably combated both these
absurd assertions by quoting examples of fat people who were as mean,
vicious, and cruel as the leanest and the worst of their neighbours. I
have asked whether Henry the Eighth was an amiable character? Whether
Pope Alexander the Sixth was a good man? Whether Mr. Murderer and Mrs.
Murderess Manning were not both unusually stout people? Whether hired
nurses, proverbially as cruel a set of women as are to be found in
all England, were not, for the most part, also as fat a set of women
as are to be found in all England?—and so on, through dozens of other
examples, modern and ancient, native and foreign, high and low. Holding