The Woman in White
my heart beating as if it would stifle me. Nothing more was said. We
came away early. He was silent in the carriage driving back to the
hotel. He helped me out, and followed me upstairs as usual. But the
moment we were in the drawing-room, he locked the door, pushed me down
into a chair, and stood over me with his hands on my shoulders. ‘Ever
since that morning when you made your audacious confession to me at
Limmeridge,’ he said, ‘I have wanted to find out the man, and I found
him in your face to-night. Your drawing-master was the man, and his
name is Hartright. You shall repent it, and he shall repent it, to the
last hour of your lives. Now go to bed and dream of him if you like,
with the marks of my horsewhip on his shoulders.’ Whenever he is angry
with me now he refers to what I acknowledged to him in your presence
with a sneer or a threat. I have no power to prevent him from putting
his own horrible construction on the confidence I placed in him. I have
no influence to make him believe me, or to keep him silent. You looked
surprised to-day when you heard him tell me that I had made a virtue
of necessity in marrying him. You will not be surprised again when you
hear him repeat it, the next time he is out of temper——Oh, Marian!
don’t! don’t! you hurt me!”
I had caught her in my arms, and the sting and torment of my remorse
had closed them round her like a vice. Yes! my remorse. The white
despair of Walter’s face, when my cruel words struck him to the heart
in the summer-house at Limmeridge, rose before me in mute, unendurable
reproach. My hand had pointed the way which led the man my sister
loved, step by step, far from his country and his friends. Between
those two young hearts I had stood, to sunder them for ever, the one
from the other, and his life and her life lay wasted before me alike
in witness of the deed. I had done this, and done it for Sir Percival
Glyde.
For Sir Percival Glyde.
I heard her speaking, and I knew by the tone of her voice that she was
comforting me—I, who deserved nothing but the reproach of her silence!
How long it was before I mastered the absorbing misery of my own
thoughts, I cannot tell. I was first conscious that she was kissing me,
and then my eyes seemed to wake on a sudden to their sense of outward
things, and I knew that I was looking mechanically straight before me
at the prospect of the lake.
“It is late,” I heard her whisper. “It will be dark in the plantation.”
She shook my arm and repeated, “Marian! it will be dark in the
plantation.”
“Give me a minute longer,” I said—“a minute, to get better in.”
I was afraid to trust myself to look at her yet, and I kept my eyes
fixed on the view.
It WAS late. The dense brown line of trees in the sky had faded in the
gathering darkness to the faint resemblance of a long wreath of smoke.
The mist over the lake below had stealthily enlarged, and advanced on
us. The silence was as breathless as ever, but the horror of it had
gone, and the solemn mystery of its stillness was all that remained.
“We are far from the house,” she whispered. “Let us go back.”
She stopped suddenly, and turned her face from me towards the entrance
of the boat-house.
“Marian!” she said, trembling violently. “Do you see nothing? Look!”
“Where?”
“Down there, below us.”
She pointed. My eyes followed her hand, and I saw it too.
A living figure was moving over the waste of heath in the distance.
It crossed our range of view from the boat-house, and passed darkly
along the outer edge of the mist. It stopped far off, in front of
us—waited—and passed on; moving slowly, with the white cloud of mist
behind it and above it—slowly, slowly, till it glided by the edge of
the boat-house, and we saw it no more.
We were both unnerved by what had passed between us that evening. Some
minutes elapsed before Laura would venture into the plantation, and
before I could make up my mind to lead her back to the house.
“Was it a man or a woman?” she asked in a whisper, as we moved at last
into the dark dampness of the outer air.
“I am not certain.”
“Which do you think?”
“It looked like a woman.”
“I was afraid it was a man in a long cloak.”
“It may be a man. In this dim light it is not possible to be certain.”
“Wait, Marian! I’m frightened—I don’t see the path. Suppose the figure
should follow us?”
“Not at all likely, Laura. There is really nothing to be alarmed about.
The shores of the lake are not far from the village, and they are free
to any one to walk on by day or night. It is only wonderful we have
seen no living creature there before.”
We were now in the plantation. It was very dark—so dark, that we found
some difficulty in keeping the path. I gave Laura my arm, and we walked
as fast as we could on our way back.
Before we were half-way through she stopped, and forced me to stop with
her. She was listening.
“Hush,” she whispered. “I hear something behind us.”
“Dead leaves,” I said to cheer her, “or a twig blown off the trees.”
“It is summer time, Marian, and there is not a breath of wind. Listen!”
I heard the sound too—a sound like a light footstep following us.
“No matter who it is, or what it is,” I said, “let us walk on. In
another minute, if there is anything to alarm us, we shall be near
enough to the house to be heard.”
We went on quickly—so quickly, that Laura was breathless by the time
we were nearly through the plantation, and within sight of the lighted
windows.
I waited a moment to give her breathing-time. Just as we were about to
proceed she stopped me again, and signed to me with her hand to listen
once more. We both heard distinctly a long, heavy sigh behind us, in
the black depths of the trees.
“Who’s there?” I called out.
There was no answer.
“Who’s there?” I repeated.
An instant of silence followed, and then we heard the light fall
of the footsteps again, fainter and fainter—sinking away into the
darkness—sinking, sinking, sinking—till they were lost in the silence.
We hurried out from the trees to the open lawn beyond, crossed it
rapidly; and without another word passing between us, reached the house.
In the light of the hall-lamp Laura looked at me, with white cheeks and
startled eyes.
“I am half dead with fear,” she said. “Who could it have been?”
“We will try to guess to-morrow,” I replied. “In the meantime say
nothing to any one of what we have heard and seen.”
“Why not?”
“Because silence is safe, and we have need of safety in this house.”
I sent Laura upstairs immediately, waited a minute to take off my
hat and put my hair smooth, and then went at once to make my first
investigations in the library, on pretence of searching for a book.
There sat the Count, filling out the largest easy-chair in the house,
smoking and reading calmly, with his feet on an ottoman, his cravat
across his knees, and his shirt collar wide open. And there sat Madame
Fosco, like a quiet child, on a stool by his side, making cigarettes.
Neither husband nor wife could, by any possibility, have been out late
that evening, and have just got back to the house in a hurry. I felt
that my object in visiting the library was answered the moment I set
eyes on them.
Count Fosco rose in polite confusion and tied his cravat on when I
entered the room.
“Pray don’t let me disturb you,” I said. “I have only come here to get
a book.”
“All unfortunate men of my size suffer from the heat,” said the Count,
refreshing himself gravely with a large green fan. “I wish I could
change places with my excellent wife. She is as cool at this moment as
a fish in the pond outside.”
The Countess allowed herself to thaw under the influence of her
husband’s quaint comparison. “I am never warm, Miss Halcombe,” she
remarked, with the modest air of a woman who was confessing to one of
her own merits.
“Have you and Lady Glyde been out this evening?” asked the Count, while
I was taking a book from the shelves to preserve appearances.
“Yes, we went out to get a little air.”
“May I ask in what direction?”
“In the direction of the lake—as far as the boat-house.”
“Aha? As far as the boat-house?”
Under other circumstances I might have resented his curiosity. But
to-night I hailed it as another proof that neither he nor his wife were
connected with the mysterious appearance at the lake.
“No more adventures, I suppose, this evening?” he went on. “No more
discoveries, like your discovery of the wounded dog?”
He fixed his unfathomable grey eyes on me, with that cold, clear,
irresistible glitter in them which always forces me to look at him,
and always makes me uneasy while I do look. An unutterable suspicion
that his mind is prying into mine overcomes me at these times, and it
overcame me now.
“No,” I said shortly; “no adventures—no discoveries.”
I tried to look away from him and leave the room. Strange as it seems,
I hardly think I should have succeeded in the attempt if Madame Fosco
had not helped me by causing him to move and look away first.
“Count, you are keeping Miss Halcombe standing,” she said.
The moment he turned round to get me a chair, I seized my
opportunity—thanked him—made my excuses—and slipped out.
An hour later, when Laura’s maid happened to be in her mistress’s room,
I took occasion to refer to the closeness of the night, with a view to
ascertaining next how the servants had been passing their time.
“Have you been suffering much from the heat downstairs?” I asked.
“No, miss,” said the girl, “we have not felt it to speak of.”
“You have been out in the woods then, I suppose?”
“Some of us thought of going, miss. But cook said she should take her
chair into the cool court-yard, outside the kitchen door, and on second
thoughts, all the rest of us took our chairs out there too.”
The housekeeper was now the only person who remained to be accounted
for.
“Is Mrs. Michelson gone to bed yet?” I inquired.
“I should think not, miss,” said the girl, smiling. “Mrs. Michelson is
more likely to be getting up just now than going to bed.”
“Why? What do you mean? Has Mrs. Michelson been taking to her bed in
the daytime?”
“No, miss, not exactly, but the next thing to it. She’s been asleep all
the evening on the sofa in her own room.”
Putting together what I observed for myself in the library, and what I
have just heard from Laura’s maid, one conclusion seems inevitable. The
figure we saw at the lake was not the figure of Madame Fosco, of her
husband, or of any of the servants. The footsteps we heard behind us
were not the footsteps of any one belonging to the house.
Who could it have been?
It seems useless to inquire. I cannot even decide whether the figure
was a man’s or a woman’s. I can only say that I think it was a woman’s.
VI
June 18th.—The misery of self-reproach which I suffered yesterday
evening, on hearing what Laura told me in the boat-house, returned in
the loneliness of the night, and kept me waking and wretched for hours.
I lighted my candle at last, and searched through my old journals to
see what my share in the fatal error of her marriage had really been,
and what I might have once done to save her from it. The result soothed
me a little for it showed that, however blindly and ignorantly I acted,
I acted for the best. Crying generally does me harm; but it was not so
last night—I think it relieved me. I rose this morning with a settled
resolution and a quiet mind. Nothing Sir Percival can say or do shall
ever irritate me again, or make me forget for one moment that I am
staying here in defiance of mortifications, insults, and threats, for
Laura’s service and for Laura’s sake.
The speculations in which we might have indulged this morning, on the
subject of the figure at the lake and the footsteps in the plantation,