The Woman in White
her, while he asked them, in a strange manner. After remaining a short
time he went out, and a minute or two afterwards a second stranger—also
an Englishman—came in. This person introduced himself as another friend
of Count Fosco’s, and he, in his turn, looked at her very oddly, and
asked some curious questions—never, as well as she could remember,
addressing her by name, and going out again, after a little while, like
the first man. By this time she was so frightened about herself, and so
uneasy about her sister, that she had thoughts of venturing downstairs
again, and claiming the protection and assistance of the only woman she
had seen in the house—the servant who answered the door.
Just as she had risen from her chair, the Count came back into the room.
The moment he appeared she asked anxiously how long the meeting between
her sister and herself was to be still delayed. At first he returned
an evasive answer, but on being pressed, he acknowledged, with great
apparent reluctance, that Miss Halcombe was by no means so well as he
had hitherto represented her to be. His tone and manner, in making this
reply, so alarmed Lady Glyde, or rather so painfully increased the
uneasiness which she had felt in the company of the two strangers, that
a sudden faintness overcame her, and she was obliged to ask for a glass
of water. The Count called from the door for water, and for a bottle of
smelling-salts. Both were brought in by the foreign-looking man with
the beard. The water, when Lady Glyde attempted to drink it, had so
strange a taste that it increased her faintness, and she hastily took
the bottle of salts from Count Fosco, and smelt at it. Her head became
giddy on the instant. The Count caught the bottle as it dropped out of
her hand, and the last impression of which she was conscious was that
he held it to her nostrils again.
From this point her recollections were found to be confused,
fragmentary, and difficult to reconcile with any reasonable probability.
Her own impression was that she recovered her senses later in the
evening, that she then left the house, that she went (as she had
previously arranged to go, at Blackwater Park) to Mrs. Vesey’s—that she
drank tea there, and that she passed the night under Mrs. Vesey’s roof.
She was totally unable to say how, or when, or in what company she
left the house to which Count Fosco had brought her. But she persisted
in asserting that she had been to Mrs. Vesey’s, and still more
extraordinary, that she had been helped to undress and get to bed by
Mrs. Rubelle! She could not remember what the conversation was at Mrs.
Vesey’s or whom she saw there besides that lady, or why Mrs. Rubelle
should have been present in the house to help her.
Her recollection of what happened to her the next morning was still
more vague and unreliable.
She had some dim idea of driving out (at what hour she could not say)
with Count Fosco, and with Mrs. Rubelle again for a female attendant.
But when, and why, she left Mrs. Vesey she could not tell; neither
did she know what direction the carriage drove in, or where it set
her down, or whether the Count and Mrs. Rubelle did or did not remain
with her all the time she was out. At this point in her sad story
there was a total blank. She had no impressions of the faintest
kind to communicate—no idea whether one day, or more than one day,
had passed—until she came to herself suddenly in a strange place,
surrounded by women who were all unknown to her.
This was the Asylum. Here she first heard herself called by Anne
Catherick’s name, and here, as a last remarkable circumstance in the
story of the conspiracy, her own eyes informed her that she had Anne
Catherick’s clothes on. The nurse, on the first night in the Asylum,
had shown her the marks on each article of her underclothing as it
was taken off, and had said, not at all irritably or unkindly, “Look
at your own name on your own clothes, and don’t worry us all any more
about being Lady Glyde. She’s dead and buried, and you’re alive and
hearty. Do look at your clothes now! There it is, in good marking ink,
and there you will find it on all your old things, which we have kept
in the house—Anne Catherick, as plain as print!” And there it was, when
Miss Halcombe examined the linen her sister wore, on the night of their
arrival at Limmeridge House.
These were the only recollections—all of them uncertain, and some of
them contradictory—which could be extracted from Lady Glyde by careful
questioning on the journey to Cumberland. Miss Halcombe abstained from
pressing her with any inquiries relating to events in the Asylum—her
mind being but too evidently unfit to bear the trial of reverting
to them. It was known, by the voluntary admission of the owner of
the mad-house, that she was received there on the twenty-seventh
of July. From that date until the fifteenth of October (the day of
her rescue) she had been under restraint, her identity with Anne
Catherick systematically asserted, and her sanity, from first to last,
practically denied. Faculties less delicately balanced, constitutions
less tenderly organised, must have suffered under such an ordeal as
this. No man could have gone through it and come out of it unchanged.
Arriving at Limmeridge late on the evening of the fifteenth, Miss
Halcombe wisely resolved not to attempt the assertion of Lady Glyde’s
identity until the next day.
The first thing in the morning she went to Mr. Fairlie’s room, and
using all possible cautions and preparations beforehand, at last
told him in so many words what had happened. As soon as his first
astonishment and alarm had subsided, he angrily declared that Miss
Halcombe had allowed herself to be duped by Anne Catherick. He referred
her to Count Fosco’s letter, and to what she had herself told him of
the personal resemblance between Anne and his deceased niece, and he
positively declined to admit to his presence, even for one minute only,
a madwoman, whom it was an insult and an outrage to have brought into
his house at all.
Miss Halcombe left the room—waited till the first heat of her
indignation had passed away—decided on reflection that Mr. Fairlie
should see his niece in the interests of common humanity before he
closed his doors on her as a stranger—and thereupon, without a word of
previous warning, took Lady Glyde with her to his room. The servant
was posted at the door to prevent their entrance, but Miss Halcombe
insisted on passing him, and made her way into Mr. Fairlie’s presence,
leading her sister by the hand.
The scene that followed, though it only lasted for a few minutes,
was too painful to be described—Miss Halcombe herself shrank from
referring to it. Let it be enough to say that Mr. Fairlie declared, in
the most positive terms, that he did not recognise the woman who had
been brought into his room—that he saw nothing in her face and manner
to make him doubt for a moment that his niece lay buried in Limmeridge
churchyard, and that he would call on the law to protect him if before
the day was over she was not removed from the house.
Taking the very worst view of Mr. Fairlie’s selfishness, indolence,
and habitual want of feeling, it was manifestly impossible to suppose
that he was capable of such infamy as secretly recognising and openly
disowning his brother’s child. Miss Halcombe humanely and sensibly
allowed all due force to the influence of prejudice and alarm in
preventing him from fairly exercising his perceptions, and accounted
for what had happened in that way. But when she next put the servants
to the test, and found that they too were, in every case, uncertain,
to say the least of it, whether the lady presented to them was their
young mistress or Anne Catherick, of whose resemblance to her they had
all heard, the sad conclusion was inevitable that the change produced
in Lady Glyde’s face and manner by her imprisonment in the Asylum was
far more serious than Miss Halcombe had at first supposed. The vile
deception which had asserted her death defied exposure even in the
house where she was born, and among the people with whom she had lived.
In a less critical situation the effort need not have been given up as
hopeless even yet.
For example, the maid, Fanny, who happened to be then absent from
Limmeridge, was expected back in two days, and there would be a chance
of gaining her recognition to start with, seeing that she had been in
much more constant communication with her mistress, and had been much
more heartily attached to her than the other servants. Again, Lady
Glyde might have been privately kept in the house or in the village to
wait until her health was a little recovered and her mind was a little
steadied again. When her memory could be once more trusted to serve
her, she would naturally refer to persons and events in the past with
a certainty and a familiarity which no impostor could simulate, and
so the fact of her identity, which her own appearance had failed to
establish, might subsequently be proved, with time to help her, by the
surer test of her own words.
But the circumstances under which she had regained her freedom rendered
all recourse to such means as these simply impracticable. The pursuit
from the Asylum, diverted to Hampshire for the time only, would
infallibly next take the direction of Cumberland. The persons appointed
to seek the fugitive might arrive at Limmeridge House at a few hours’
notice, and in Mr. Fairlie’s present temper of mind they might count
on the immediate exertion of his local influence and authority to
assist them. The commonest consideration for Lady Glyde’s safety forced
on Miss Halcombe the necessity of resigning the struggle to do her
justice, and of removing her at once from the place of all others that
was now most dangerous to her—the neighbourhood of her own home.
An immediate return to London was the first and wisest measure of
security which suggested itself. In the great city all traces of
them might be most speedily and most surely effaced. There were no
preparations to make—no farewell words of kindness to exchange with
any one. On the afternoon of that memorable day of the sixteenth Miss
Halcombe roused her sister to a last exertion of courage, and without a
living soul to wish them well at parting, the two took their way into
the world alone, and turned their backs for ever on Limmeridge House.
They had passed the hill above the churchyard, when Lady Glyde
insisted on turning back to look her last at her mother’s grave. Miss
Halcombe tried to shake her resolution, but, in this one instance,
tried in vain. She was immovable. Her dim eyes lit with a sudden fire,
and flashed through the veil that hung over them—her wasted fingers
strengthened moment by moment round the friendly arm by which they had
held so listlessly till this time. I believe in my soul that the hand
of God was pointing their way back to them, and that the most innocent
and the most afflicted of His creatures was chosen in that dread moment
to see it.
They retraced their steps to the burial-ground, and by that act sealed
the future of our three lives.
III
This was the story of the past—the story so far as we knew it then.
Two obvious conclusions presented themselves to my mind after hearing
it. In the first place, I saw darkly what the nature of the conspiracy
had been, how chances had been watched, and how circumstances had been
handled to ensure impunity to a daring and an intricate crime. While
all details were still a mystery to me, the vile manner in which the
personal resemblance between the woman in white and Lady Glyde had
been turned to account was clear beyond a doubt. It was plain that
Anne Catherick had been introduced into Count Fosco’s house as Lady