The Woman in White
“No, no, no,” she said vehemently. “I’m quite safe, and quite happy
now. If you are a gentleman, remember your promise. Let him drive on
till I stop him. Thank you—oh! thank you, thank you!”
My hand was on the cab door. She caught it in hers, kissed it, and
pushed it away. The cab drove off at the same moment—I started into
the road, with some vague idea of stopping it again, I hardly knew
why—hesitated from dread of frightening and distressing her—called,
at last, but not loudly enough to attract the driver’s attention. The
sound of the wheels grew fainter in the distance—the cab melted into
the black shadows on the road—the woman in white was gone.
Ten minutes or more had passed. I was still on the same side of the
way; now mechanically walking forward a few paces; now stopping again
absently. At one moment I found myself doubting the reality of my own
adventure; at another I was perplexed and distressed by an uneasy sense
of having done wrong, which yet left me confusedly ignorant of how
I could have done right. I hardly knew where I was going, or what I
meant to do next; I was conscious of nothing but the confusion of my
own thoughts, when I was abruptly recalled to myself—awakened, I might
almost say—by the sound of rapidly approaching wheels close behind me.
I was on the dark side of the road, in the thick shadow of some garden
trees, when I stopped to look round. On the opposite and lighter side
of the way, a short distance below me, a policeman was strolling along
in the direction of the Regent’s Park.
The carriage passed me—an open chaise driven by two men.
“Stop!” cried one. “There’s a policeman. Let’s ask him.”
The horse was instantly pulled up, a few yards beyond the dark place
where I stood.
“Policeman!” cried the first speaker. “Have you seen a woman pass this
way?”
“What sort of woman, sir?”
“A woman in a lavender-coloured gown——”
“No, no,” interposed the second man. “The clothes we gave her were
found on her bed. She must have gone away in the clothes she wore when
she came to us. In white, policeman. A woman in white.”
“I haven’t seen her, sir.”
“If you or any of your men meet with the woman, stop her, and send her
in careful keeping to that address. I’ll pay all expenses, and a fair
reward into the bargain.”
The policeman looked at the card that was handed down to him.
“Why are we to stop her, sir? What has she done?”
“Done! She has escaped from my Asylum. Don’t forget; a woman in white.
Drive on.”
V
“She has escaped from my Asylum!”
I cannot say with truth that the terrible inference which those words
suggested flashed upon me like a new revelation. Some of the strange
questions put to me by the woman in white, after my ill-considered
promise to leave her free to act as she pleased, had suggested the
conclusion either that she was naturally flighty and unsettled, or that
some recent shock of terror had disturbed the balance of her faculties.
But the idea of absolute insanity which we all associate with the very
name of an Asylum, had, I can honestly declare, never occurred to me,
in connection with her. I had seen nothing, in her language or her
actions, to justify it at the time; and even with the new light thrown
on her by the words which the stranger had addressed to the policeman,
I could see nothing to justify it now.
What had I done? Assisted the victim of the most horrible of all false
imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on the wide world of London an
unfortunate creature, whose actions it was my duty, and every man’s
duty, mercifully to control? I turned sick at heart when the question
occurred to me, and when I felt self-reproachfully that it was asked
too late.
In the disturbed state of my mind, it was useless to think of going to
bed, when I at last got back to my chambers in Clement’s Inn. Before
many hours elapsed it would be necessary to start on my journey to
Cumberland. I sat down and tried, first to sketch, then to read—but the
woman in white got between me and my pencil, between me and my book.
Had the forlorn creature come to any harm? That was my first thought,
though I shrank selfishly from confronting it. Other thoughts followed,
on which it was less harrowing to dwell. Where had she stopped the cab?
What had become of her now? Had she been traced and captured by the men
in the chaise? Or was she still capable of controlling her own actions;
and were we two following our widely parted roads towards one point in
the mysterious future, at which we were to meet once more?
It was a relief when the hour came to lock my door, to bid farewell
to London pursuits, London pupils, and London friends, and to be in
movement again towards new interests and a new life. Even the bustle
and confusion at the railway terminus, so wearisome and bewildering at
other times, roused me and did me good.
My travelling instructions directed me to go to Carlisle, and then to
diverge by a branch railway which ran in the direction of the coast.
As a misfortune to begin with, our engine broke down between Lancaster
and Carlisle. The delay occasioned by this accident caused me to be too
late for the branch train, by which I was to have gone on immediately.
I had to wait some hours; and when a later train finally deposited me
at the nearest station to Limmeridge House, it was past ten, and the
night was so dark that I could hardly see my way to the pony-chaise
which Mr. Fairlie had ordered to be in waiting for me.
The driver was evidently discomposed by the lateness of my arrival. He
was in that state of highly respectful sulkiness which is peculiar to
English servants. We drove away slowly through the darkness in perfect
silence. The roads were bad, and the dense obscurity of the night
increased the difficulty of getting over the ground quickly. It was,
by my watch, nearly an hour and a half from the time of our leaving
the station before I heard the sound of the sea in the distance, and
the crunch of our wheels on a smooth gravel drive. We had passed one
gate before entering the drive, and we passed another before we drew
up at the house. I was received by a solemn man-servant out of livery,
was informed that the family had retired for the night, and was then
led into a large and lofty room where my supper was awaiting me, in a
forlorn manner, at one extremity of a lonesome mahogany wilderness of
dining-table.
I was too tired and out of spirits to eat or drink much, especially
with the solemn servant waiting on me as elaborately as if a small
dinner party had arrived at the house instead of a solitary man. In
a quarter of an hour I was ready to be taken up to my bedchamber.
The solemn servant conducted me into a prettily furnished room—said,
“Breakfast at nine o’clock, sir”—looked all round him to see that
everything was in its proper place, and noiselessly withdrew.
“What shall I see in my dreams to-night?” I thought to myself, as I
put out the candle; “the woman in white? or the unknown inhabitants of
this Cumberland mansion?” It was a strange sensation to be sleeping in
the house, like a friend of the family, and yet not to know one of the
inmates, even by sight!
VI
When I rose the next morning and drew up my blind, the sea opened
before me joyously under the broad August sunlight, and the distant
coast of Scotland fringed the horizon with its lines of melting blue.
The view was such a surprise, and such a change to me, after my weary
London experience of brick and mortar landscape, that I seemed to burst
into a new life and a new set of thoughts the moment I looked at it.
A confused sensation of having suddenly lost my familiarity with the
past, without acquiring any additional clearness of idea in reference
to the present or the future, took possession of my mind. Circumstances
that were but a few days old faded back in my memory, as if they had
happened months and months since. Pesca’s quaint announcement of the
means by which he had procured me my present employment; the farewell
evening I had passed with my mother and sister; even my mysterious
adventure on the way home from Hampstead—had all become like events
which might have occurred at some former epoch of my existence.
Although the woman in white was still in my mind, the image of her
seemed to have grown dull and faint already.
A little before nine o’clock, I descended to the ground-floor of the
house. The solemn man-servant of the night before met me wandering
among the passages, and compassionately showed me the way to the
breakfast-room.
My first glance round me, as the man opened the door, disclosed a
well-furnished breakfast-table, standing in the middle of a long room,
with many windows in it. I looked from the table to the window farthest
from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards
me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty
of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure
was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her
head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist,
perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place,
it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully
undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and
I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before
I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means
of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The
easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she
began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of
expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to
myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to
myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself
(with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is
ugly!
Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more
flatly contradicted—never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more
strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it.
The lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her
upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine
mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick,
coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Her
expression—bright, frank, and intelligent—appeared, while she was
silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of
gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest
woman alive is beauty incomplete. To see such a face as this set on
shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model—to be charmed
by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs
betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled
by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the
perfectly shaped figure ended—was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the
helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet
cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream.
“Mr. Hartright?” said the lady interrogatively, her dark face lighting
up with a smile, and softening and growing womanly the moment she
began to speak. “We resigned all hope of you last night, and went to
bed as usual. Accept my apologies for our apparent want of attention;
and allow me to introduce myself as one of your pupils. Shall we shake
hands? I suppose we must come to it sooner or later—and why not sooner?”
These odd words of welcome were spoken in a clear, ringing, pleasant
voice. The offered hand—rather large, but beautifully formed—was given
to me with the easy, unaffected self-reliance of a highly-bred woman.