The Woman in White
and lie down on the nearest sofa to recover.
I was just composing myself when the door opened softly and the Count
looked in.
“A thousand pardons, Miss Halcombe,” he said; “I only venture to
disturb you because I am the bearer of good news. Percival—who is
capricious in everything, as you know—has seen fit to alter his mind
at the last moment, and the business of the signature is put off for
the present. A great relief to all of us, Miss Halcombe, as I see with
pleasure in your face. Pray present my best respects and felicitations,
when you mention this pleasant change of circumstances to Lady Glyde.”
He left me before I had recovered my astonishment. There could be no
doubt that this extraordinary alteration of purpose in the matter of
the signature was due to his influence, and that his discovery of my
application to London yesterday, and of my having received an answer
to it to-day, had offered him the means of interfering with certain
success.
I felt these impressions, but my mind seemed to share the exhaustion
of my body, and I was in no condition to dwell on them with any useful
reference to the doubtful present or the threatening future. I tried
a second time to run out and find Laura, but my head was giddy and my
knees trembled under me. There was no choice but to give it up again
and return to the sofa, sorely against my will.
The quiet in the house, and the low murmuring hum of summer insects
outside the open window, soothed me. My eyes closed of themselves, and
I passed gradually into a strange condition, which was not waking—for I
knew nothing of what was going on about me, and not sleeping—for I was
conscious of my own repose. In this state my fevered mind broke loose
from me, while my weary body was at rest, and in a trance, or day-dream
of my fancy—I know not what to call it—I saw Walter Hartright. I had
not thought of him since I rose that morning—Laura had not said one
word to me either directly or indirectly referring to him—and yet I saw
him now as plainly as if the past time had returned, and we were both
together again at Limmeridge House.
He appeared to me as one among many other men, none of whose faces I
could plainly discern. They were all lying on the steps of an immense
ruined temple. Colossal tropical trees—with rank creepers twining
endlessly about their trunks, and hideous stone idols glimmering and
grinning at intervals behind leaves and stalks and branches—surrounded
the temple and shut out the sky, and threw a dismal shadow over the
forlorn band of men on the steps. White exhalations twisted and curled
up stealthily from the ground, approached the men in wreaths like
smoke, touched them, and stretched them out dead, one by one, in the
places where they lay. An agony of pity and fear for Walter loosened my
tongue, and I implored him to escape. “Come back, come back!” I said.
“Remember your promise to HER and to ME. Come back to us before the
Pestilence reaches you and lays you dead like the rest!”
He looked at me with an unearthly quiet in his face. “Wait,” he said,
“I shall come back. The night when I met the lost Woman on the highway
was the night which set my life apart to be the instrument of a Design
that is yet unseen. Here, lost in the wilderness, or there, welcomed
back in the land of my birth, I am still walking on the dark road which
leads me, and you, and the sister of your love and mine, to the unknown
Retribution and the inevitable End. Wait and look. The Pestilence which
touches the rest will pass ME.”
I saw him again. He was still in the forest, and the numbers of his
lost companions had dwindled to very few. The temple was gone, and
the idols were gone—and in their place the figures of dark, dwarfish
men lurked murderously among the trees, with bows in their hands, and
arrows fitted to the string. Once more I feared for Walter, and cried
out to warn him. Once more he turned to me, with the immovable quiet in
his face.
“Another step,” he said, “on the dark road. Wait and look. The arrows
that strike the rest will spare me.”
I saw him for the third time in a wrecked ship, stranded on a wild,
sandy shore. The overloaded boats were making away from him for the
land, and he alone was left to sink with the ship. I cried to him to
hail the hindmost boat, and to make a last effort for his life. The
quiet face looked at me in return, and the unmoved voice gave me back
the changeless reply. “Another step on the journey. Wait and look. The
Sea which drowns the rest will spare me.”
I saw him for the last time. He was kneeling by a tomb of white marble,
and the shadow of a veiled woman rose out of the grave beneath and
waited by his side. The unearthly quiet of his face had changed to an
unearthly sorrow. But the terrible certainty of his words remained
the same. “Darker and darker,” he said; “farther and farther yet.
Death takes the good, the beautiful, and the young—and spares me. The
Pestilence that wastes, the Arrow that strikes, the Sea that drowns,
the Grave that closes over Love and Hope, are steps of my journey, and
take me nearer and nearer to the End.”
My heart sank under a dread beyond words, under a grief beyond tears.
The darkness closed round the pilgrim at the marble tomb—closed round
the veiled woman from the grave—closed round the dreamer who looked on
them. I saw and heard no more.
I was aroused by a hand laid on my shoulder. It was Laura’s.
She had dropped on her knees by the side of the sofa. Her face was
flushed and agitated, and her eyes met mine in a wild bewildered
manner. I started the instant I saw her.
“What has happened?” I asked. “What has frightened you?”
She looked round at the half-open door, put her lips close to my ear,
and answered in a whisper—
“Marian!—the figure at the lake—the footsteps last night—I’ve just seen
her! I’ve just spoken to her!”
“Who, for Heaven’s sake?”
“Anne Catherick.”
I was so startled by the disturbance in Laura’s face and manner, and so
dismayed by the first waking impressions of my dream, that I was not
fit to bear the revelation which burst upon me when that name passed
her lips. I could only stand rooted to the floor, looking at her in
breathless silence.
She was too much absorbed by what had happened to notice the effect
which her reply had produced on me. “I have seen Anne Catherick! I have
spoken to Anne Catherick!” she repeated as if I had not heard her. “Oh,
Marian, I have such things to tell you! Come away—we may be interrupted
here—come at once into my room.”
With those eager words she caught me by the hand, and led me through
the library, to the end room on the ground floor, which had been fitted
up for her own especial use. No third person, except her maid, could
have any excuse for surprising us here. She pushed me in before her,
locked the door, and drew the chintz curtains that hung over the inside.
The strange, stunned feeling which had taken possession of me still
remained. But a growing conviction that the complications which had
long threatened to gather about her, and to gather about me, had
suddenly closed fast round us both, was now beginning to penetrate my
mind. I could not express it in words—I could hardly even realise it
dimly in my own thoughts. “Anne Catherick!” I whispered to myself, with
useless, helpless reiteration—“Anne Catherick!”
Laura drew me to the nearest seat, an ottoman in the middle of the
room. “Look!” she said, “look here!”—and pointed to the bosom of her
dress.
I saw, for the first time, that the lost brooch was pinned in its place
again. There was something real in the sight of it, something real in
the touching of it afterwards, which seemed to steady the whirl and
confusion in my thoughts, and to help me to compose myself.
“Where did you find your brooch?” The first words I could say to her
were the words which put that trivial question at that important moment.
“SHE found it, Marian.”
“Where?”
“On the floor of the boat-house. Oh, how shall I begin—how shall I tell
you about it! She talked to me so strangely—she looked so fearfully
ill—she left me so suddenly!”
Her voice rose as the tumult of her recollections pressed upon her
mind. The inveterate distrust which weighs, night and day, on my
spirits in this house, instantly roused me to warn her—just as the
sight of the brooch had roused me to question her, the moment before.
“Speak low,” I said. “The window is open, and the garden path runs
beneath it. Begin at the beginning, Laura. Tell me, word for word, what
passed between that woman and you.”
“Shall I close the window?”
“No, only speak low—only remember that Anne Catherick is a dangerous
subject under your husband’s roof. Where did you first see her?”
“At the boat-house, Marian. I went out, as you know, to find my brooch,
and I walked along the path through the plantation, looking down on
the ground carefully at every step. In that way I got on, after a long
time, to the boat-house, and as soon as I was inside it, I went on my
knees to hunt over the floor. I was still searching with my back to
the doorway, when I heard a soft, strange voice behind me say, ‘Miss
Fairlie.’”
“Miss Fairlie!”
“Yes, my old name—the dear, familiar name that I thought I had parted
from for ever. I started up—not frightened, the voice was too kind and
gentle to frighten anybody—but very much surprised. There, looking at
me from the doorway, stood a woman, whose face I never remembered to
have seen before—”
“How was she dressed?”
“She had a neat, pretty white gown on, and over it a poor worn thin
dark shawl. Her bonnet was of brown straw, as poor and worn as the
shawl. I was struck by the difference between her gown and the rest
of her dress, and she saw that I noticed it. ‘Don’t look at my bonnet
and shawl,’ she said, speaking in a quick, breathless, sudden way;
‘if I mustn’t wear white, I don’t care what I wear. Look at my gown
as much as you please—I’m not ashamed of that.’ Very strange, was
it not? Before I could say anything to soothe her, she held out one
of her hands, and I saw my brooch in it. I was so pleased and so
grateful, that I went quite close to her to say what I really felt.
‘Are you thankful enough to do me one little kindness?’ she asked.
‘Yes, indeed,’ I answered, ‘any kindness in my power I shall be glad
to show you.’ ‘Then let me pin your brooch on for you, now I have
found it.’ Her request was so unexpected, Marian, and she made it with
such extraordinary eagerness, that I drew back a step or two, not well
knowing what to do. ‘Ah!’ she said, ‘your mother would have let me pin
on the brooch.’ There was something in her voice and her look, as well
as in her mentioning my mother in that reproachful manner, which made
me ashamed of my distrust. I took her hand with the brooch in it, and
put it up gently on the bosom of my dress. ‘You knew my mother?’ I
said. ‘Was it very long ago? have I ever seen you before?’ Her hands
were busy fastening the brooch: she stopped and pressed them against my
breast. ‘You don’t remember a fine spring day at Limmeridge,’ she said,
‘and your mother walking down the path that led to the school, with a
little girl on each side of her? I have had nothing else to think of
since, and I remember it. You were one of the little girls, and I was
the other. Pretty, clever Miss Fairlie, and poor dazed Anne Catherick
were nearer to each other then than they are now!’”
“Did you remember her, Laura, when she told you her name?”
“Yes, I remembered your asking me about Anne Catherick at Limmeridge,
and your saying that she had once been considered like me.”
“What reminded you of that, Laura?”
“SHE reminded me. While I was looking at her, while she was very close
to me, it came over my mind suddenly that we were like each other!