The Woman in White
Her face was pale and thin and weary—but the sight of it startled me,
as if it had been the sight of my own face in the glass after a long
illness. The discovery—I don’t know why—gave me such a shock, that I
was perfectly incapable of speaking to her for the moment.”
“Did she seem hurt by your silence?”
“I am afraid she was hurt by it. ‘You have not got your mother’s face,’
she said, ‘or your mother’s heart. Your mother’s face was dark, and
your mother’s heart, Miss Fairlie, was the heart of an angel.’ ‘I am
sure I feel kindly towards you,’ I said, ‘though I may not be able to
express it as I ought. Why do you call me Miss Fairlie?——’ ‘Because I
love the name of Fairlie and hate the name of Glyde,’ she broke out
violently. I had seen nothing like madness in her before this, but I
fancied I saw it now in her eyes. ‘I only thought you might not know I
was married,’ I said, remembering the wild letter she wrote to me at
Limmeridge, and trying to quiet her. She sighed bitterly, and turned
away from me. ‘Not know you were married?’ she repeated. ‘I am here
BECAUSE you are married. I am here to make atonement to you, before I
meet your mother in the world beyond the grave.’ She drew farther and
farther away from me, till she was out of the boat-house, and then she
watched and listened for a little while. When she turned round to speak
again, instead of coming back, she stopped where she was, looking in at
me, with a hand on each side of the entrance. ‘Did you see me at the
lake last night?’ she said. ‘Did you hear me following you in the wood?
I have been waiting for days together to speak to you alone—I have left
the only friend I have in the world, anxious and frightened about me—I
have risked being shut up again in the mad-house—and all for your sake,
Miss Fairlie, all for your sake.’ Her words alarmed me, Marian, and yet
there was something in the way she spoke that made me pity her with
all my heart. I am sure my pity must have been sincere, for it made me
bold enough to ask the poor creature to come in, and sit down in the
boat-house, by my side.”
“Did she do so?”
“No. She shook her head, and told me she must stop where she was, to
watch and listen, and see that no third person surprised us. And from
first to last, there she waited at the entrance, with a hand on each
side of it, sometimes bending in suddenly to speak to me, sometimes
drawing back suddenly to look about her. ‘I was here yesterday,’ she
said, ‘before it came dark, and I heard you, and the lady with you,
talking together. I heard you tell her about your husband. I heard you
say you had no influence to make him believe you, and no influence
to keep him silent. Ah! I knew what those words meant—my conscience
told me while I was listening. Why did I ever let you marry him! Oh,
my fear—my mad, miserable, wicked fear!’ She covered up her face in
her poor worn shawl, and moaned and murmured to herself behind it. I
began to be afraid she might break out into some terrible despair which
neither she nor I could master. ‘Try to quiet yourself,’ I said; ‘try
to tell me how you might have prevented my marriage.’ She took the
shawl from her face, and looked at me vacantly. ‘I ought to have had
heart enough to stop at Limmeridge,’ she answered. ‘I ought never to
have let the news of his coming there frighten me away. I ought to have
warned you and saved you before it was too late. Why did I only have
courage enough to write you that letter? Why did I only do harm, when
I wanted and meant to do good? Oh, my fear—my mad, miserable, wicked
fear!’ She repeated those words again, and hid her face again in the
end of her poor worn shawl. It was dreadful to see her, and dreadful to
hear her.”
“Surely, Laura, you asked what the fear was which she dwelt on so
earnestly?”
“Yes, I asked that.”
“And what did she say?”
“She asked me in return, if I should not be afraid of a man who had
shut me up in a mad-house, and who would shut me up again, if he could?
I said, ‘Are you afraid still? Surely you would not be here if you
were afraid now?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I am not afraid now.’ I asked why
not. She suddenly bent forward into the boat-house, and said, ‘Can’t
you guess why?’ I shook my head. ‘Look at me,’ she went on. I told
her I was grieved to see that she looked very sorrowful and very ill.
She smiled for the first time. ‘Ill?’ she repeated; ‘I’m dying. You
know why I’m not afraid of him now. Do you think I shall meet your
mother in heaven? Will she forgive me if I do?’ I was so shocked and
so startled, that I could make no reply. ‘I have been thinking of it,’
she went on, ‘all the time I have been in hiding from your husband,
all the time I lay ill. My thoughts have driven me here—I want to make
atonement—I want to undo all I can of the harm I once did.’ I begged
her as earnestly as I could to tell me what she meant. She still looked
at me with fixed vacant eyes. ‘SHALL I undo the harm?’ she said to
herself doubtfully. ‘You have friends to take your part. If YOU know
his Secret, he will be afraid of you, he won’t dare use you as he used
me. He must treat you mercifully for his own sake, if he is afraid of
you and your friends. And if he treats you mercifully, and if I can
say it was my doing——’ I listened eagerly for more, but she stopped at
those words.”
“You tried to make her go on?”
“I tried, but she only drew herself away from me again, and leaned
her face and arms against the side of the boat-house. ‘Oh!’ I heard
her say, with a dreadful, distracted tenderness in her voice, ‘oh! if
I could only be buried with your mother! If I could only wake at her
side, when the angel’s trumpet sounds, and the graves give up their
dead at the resurrection!‘—Marian! I trembled from head to foot—it was
horrible to hear her. ‘But there is no hope of that,’ she said, moving
a little, so as to look at me again, ‘no hope for a poor stranger like
me. I shall not rest under the marble cross that I washed with my own
hands, and made so white and pure for her sake. Oh no! oh no! God’s
mercy, not man’s, will take me to her, where the wicked cease from
troubling and the weary are at rest.’ She spoke those words quietly and
sorrowfully, with a heavy, hopeless sigh, and then waited a little. Her
face was confused and troubled, she seemed to be thinking, or trying
to think. ‘What was it I said just now?’ she asked after a while.
‘When your mother is in my mind, everything else goes out of it. What
was I saying? what was I saying?’ I reminded the poor creature, as
kindly and delicately as I could. ‘Ah, yes, yes,’ she said, still in a
vacant, perplexed manner. ‘You are helpless with your wicked husband.
Yes. And I must do what I have come to do here—I must make it up to
you for having been afraid to speak out at a better time.’ ‘What IS it
you have to tell me?’ I asked. ‘The Secret that your cruel husband is
afraid of,’ she answered. ‘I once threatened him with the Secret, and
frightened him. You shall threaten him with the Secret, and frighten
him too.’ Her face darkened, and a hard, angry stare fixed itself
in her eyes. She began waving her hand at me in a vacant, unmeaning
manner. ‘My mother knows the Secret,’ she said. ‘My mother has wasted
under the Secret half her lifetime. One day, when I was grown up, she
said something to ME. And the next day your husband——’”
“Yes! yes! Go on. What did she tell you about your husband?”
“She stopped again, Marian, at that point——”
“And said no more?”
“And listened eagerly. ‘Hush!’ she whispered, still waving her hand
at me. ‘Hush!’ She moved aside out of the doorway, moved slowly
and stealthily, step by step, till I lost her past the edge of the
boat-house.”
“Surely you followed her?”
“Yes, my anxiety made me bold enough to rise and follow her. Just as
I reached the entrance, she appeared again suddenly, round the side
of the boat-house. ‘The Secret,’ I whispered to her—‘wait and tell me
the Secret!’ She caught hold of my arm, and looked at me with wild
frightened eyes. ‘Not now,’ she said, ‘we are not alone—we are watched.
Come here to-morrow at this time—by yourself—mind—by yourself.’ She
pushed me roughly into the boat-house again, and I saw her no more.”
“Oh, Laura, Laura, another chance lost! If I had only been near you she
should not have escaped us. On which side did you lose sight of her?”
“On the left side, where the ground sinks and the wood is thickest.”
“Did you run out again? did you call after her?”
“How could I? I was too terrified to move or speak.”
“But when you DID move—when you came out?”
“I ran back here, to tell you what had happened.”
“Did you see any one, or hear any one, in the plantation?”
“No, it seemed to be all still and quiet when I passed through it.”
I waited for a moment to consider. Was this third person, supposed to
have been secretly present at the interview, a reality, or the creature
of Anne Catherick’s excited fancy? It was impossible to determine. The
one thing certain was, that we had failed again on the very brink of
discovery—failed utterly and irretrievably, unless Anne Catherick kept
her appointment at the boat-house for the next day.
“Are you quite sure you have told me everything that passed? Every word
that was said?” I inquired.
“I think so,” she answered. “My powers of memory, Marian, are not like
yours. But I was so strongly impressed, so deeply interested, that
nothing of any importance can possibly have escaped me.”
“My dear Laura, the merest trifles are of importance where Anne
Catherick is concerned. Think again. Did no chance reference escape her
as to the place in which she is living at the present time?”
“None that I can remember.”
“Did she not mention a companion and friend—a woman named Mrs.
Clements?”
“Oh yes! yes! I forgot that. She told me Mrs. Clements wanted sadly to
go with her to the lake and take care of her, and begged and prayed
that she would not venture into this neighbourhood alone.”
“Was that all she said about Mrs. Clements?”
“Yes, that was all.”
“She told you nothing about the place in which she took refuge after
leaving Todd’s Corner?”
“Nothing—I am quite sure.”
“Nor where she has lived since? Nor what her illness had been?”
“No, Marian, not a word. Tell me, pray tell me, what you think about
it. I don’t know what to think, or what to do next.”
“You must do this, my love: You must carefully keep the appointment at
the boat-house to-morrow. It is impossible to say what interests may
not depend on your seeing that woman again. You shall not be left to
yourself a second time. I will follow you at a safe distance. Nobody
shall see me, but I will keep within hearing of your voice, if anything
happens. Anne Catherick has escaped Walter Hartright, and has escaped
you. Whatever happens, she shall not escape ME.”
Laura’s eyes read mine attentively.
“You believe,” she said, “in this secret that my husband is afraid of?
Suppose, Marian, it should only exist after all in Anne Catherick’s
fancy? Suppose she only wanted to see me and to speak to me, for the
sake of old remembrances? Her manner was so strange—I almost doubted
her. Would you trust her in other things?”
“I trust nothing, Laura, but my own observation of your husband’s
conduct. I judge Anne Catherick’s words by his actions, and I believe
there is a secret.”
I said no more, and got up to leave the room. Thoughts were troubling
me which I might have told her if we had spoken together longer, and
which it might have been dangerous for her to know. The influence of
the terrible dream from which she had awakened me hung darkly and
heavily over every fresh impression which the progress of her narrative
produced on my mind. I felt the ominous future coming close, chilling