The Woman in White
say anything about it—I’ve quieted Catherick for to-night. I’ve told
him to keep his tongue to himself, and his eyes and his ears open, and
to wait a day or two, till he can be quite certain.’ ‘I believe you
are both of you wrong,’ says I. ‘It’s not in nature, comfortable and
respectable as she is here, that Mrs. Catherick should take up with a
chance stranger like Sir Percival Glyde.’ ‘Ay, but is he a stranger to
her?’ says my husband. ‘You forget how Catherick’s wife came to marry
him. She went to him of her own accord, after saying No over and over
again when he asked her. There have been wicked women before her time,
Lizzie, who have used honest men who loved them as a means of saving
their characters, and I’m sorely afraid this Mrs. Catherick is as
wicked as the worst of them. We shall see,’ says my husband, ‘we shall
soon see.’ And only two days afterwards we did see.”
Mrs. Clements waited for a moment before she went on. Even in that
moment, I began to doubt whether the clue that I thought I had found
was really leading me to the central mystery of the labyrinth after
all. Was this common, too common, story of a man’s treachery and a
woman’s frailty the key to a secret which had been the lifelong terror
of Sir Percival Glyde?
“Well, sir, Catherick took my husband’s advice and waited,” Mrs.
Clements continued. “And as I told you, he hadn’t long to wait. On
the second day he found his wife and Sir Percival whispering together
quite familiar, close under the vestry of the church. I suppose they
thought the neighbourhood of the vestry was the last place in the world
where anybody would think of looking after them, but, however that
may be, there they were. Sir Percival, being seemingly surprised and
confounded, defended himself in such a guilty way that poor Catherick
(whose quick temper I have told you of already) fell into a kind of
frenzy at his own disgrace, and struck Sir Percival. He was no match
(and I am sorry to say it) for the man who had wronged him, and he was
beaten in the cruelest manner, before the neighbours, who had come to
the place on hearing the disturbance, could run in to part them. All
this happened towards evening, and before nightfall, when my husband
went to Catherick’s house, he was gone, nobody knew where. No living
soul in the village ever saw him again. He knew too well, by that time,
what his wife’s vile reason had been for marrying him, and he felt his
misery and disgrace, especially after what had happened to him with Sir
Percival, too keenly. The clergyman of the parish put an advertisement
in the paper begging him to come back, and saying that he should not
lose his situation or his friends. But Catherick had too much pride and
spirit, as some people said—too much feeling, as I think, sir—to face
his neighbours again, and try to live down the memory of his disgrace.
My husband heard from him when he had left England, and heard a second
time, when he was settled and doing well in America. He is alive there
now, as far as I know, but none of us in the old country—his wicked
wife least of all—are ever likely to set eyes on him again.”
“What became of Sir Percival?” I inquired. “Did he stay in the
neighbourhood?”
“Not he, sir. The place was too hot to hold him. He was heard at high
words with Mrs. Catherick the same night when the scandal broke out,
and the next morning he took himself off.”
“And Mrs. Catherick? Surely she never remained in the village among the
people who knew of her disgrace?”
“She did, sir. She was hard enough and heartless enough to set the
opinions of all her neighbours at flat defiance. She declared to
everybody, from the clergyman downwards, that she was the victim of a
dreadful mistake, and that all the scandal-mongers in the place should
not drive her out of it, as if she was a guilty woman. All through my
time she lived at Old Welmingham, and after my time, when the new town
was building, and the respectable neighbours began moving to it, she
moved too, as if she was determined to live among them and scandalise
them to the very last. There she is now, and there she will stop, in
defiance of the best of them, to her dying day.”
“But how has she lived through all these years?” I asked. “Was her
husband able and willing to help her?”
“Both able and willing, sir,” said Mrs. Clements. “In the second letter
he wrote to my good man, he said she had borne his name, and lived in
his home, and, wicked as she was, she must not starve like a beggar in
the street. He could afford to make her some small allowance, and she
might draw for it quarterly at a place in London.”
“Did she accept the allowance?”
“Not a farthing of it, sir. She said she would never be beholden to
Catherick for bit or drop, if she lived to be a hundred. And she has
kept her word ever since. When my poor dear husband died, and left
all to me, Catherick’s letter was put in my possession with the other
things, and I told her to let me know if she was ever in want. ‘I’ll
let all England know I’m in want,’ she said, ‘before I tell Catherick,
or any friend of Catherick’s. Take that for your answer, and give it to
HIM for an answer, if he ever writes again.’”
“Do you suppose that she had money of her own?”
“Very little, if any, sir. It was said, and said truly, I am afraid,
that her means of living came privately from Sir Percival Glyde.”
After that last reply I waited a little, to reconsider what I had
heard. If I unreservedly accepted the story so far, it was now plain
that no approach, direct or indirect, to the Secret had yet been
revealed to me, and that the pursuit of my object had ended again
in leaving me face to face with the most palpable and the most
disheartening failure.
But there was one point in the narrative which made me doubt the
propriety of accepting it unreservedly, and which suggested the idea of
something hidden below the surface.
I could not account to myself for the circumstance of the clerk’s
guilty wife voluntarily living out all her after-existence on the scene
of her disgrace. The woman’s own reported statement that she had taken
this strange course as a practical assertion of her innocence did not
satisfy me. It seemed, to my mind, more natural and more probable to
assume that she was not so completely a free agent in this matter as
she had herself asserted. In that case, who was the likeliest person
to possess the power of compelling her to remain at Welmingham? The
person unquestionably from whom she derived the means of living. She
had refused assistance from her husband, she had no adequate resources
of her own, she was a friendless, degraded woman—from what source
should she derive help but from the source at which report pointed—Sir
Percival Glyde?
Reasoning on these assumptions, and always bearing in mind the one
certain fact to guide me, that Mrs. Catherick was in possession of the
Secret, I easily understood that it was Sir Percival’s interest to keep
her at Welmingham, because her character in that place was certain
to isolate her from all communication with female neighbours, and to
allow her no opportunities of talking incautiously in moments of free
intercourse with inquisitive bosom friends. But what was the mystery
to be concealed? Not Sir Percival’s infamous connection with Mrs.
Catherick’s disgrace, for the neighbours were the very people who knew
of it—not the suspicion that he was Anne’s father, for Welmingham was
the place in which that suspicion must inevitably exist. If I accepted
the guilty appearances described to me as unreservedly as others had
accepted them, if I drew from them the same superficial conclusion
which Mr. Catherick and all his neighbours had drawn, where was the
suggestion, in all that I had heard, of a dangerous secret between Sir
Percival and Mrs. Catherick, which had been kept hidden from that time
to this?
And yet, in those stolen meetings, in those familiar whisperings
between the clerk’s wife and “the gentleman in mourning,” the clue to
discovery existed beyond a doubt.
Was it possible that appearances in this case had pointed one way while
the truth lay all the while unsuspected in another direction? Could
Mrs. Catherick’s assertion, that she was the victim of a dreadful
mistake, by any possibility be true? Or, assuming it to be false, could
the conclusion which associated Sir Percival with her guilt have been
founded in some inconceivable error? Had Sir Percival, by any chance,
courted the suspicion that was wrong for the sake of diverting from
himself some other suspicion that was right? Here—if I could find
it—here was the approach to the Secret, hidden deep under the surface
of the apparently unpromising story which I had just heard.
My next questions were now directed to the one object of ascertaining
whether Mr. Catherick had or had not arrived truly at the conviction
of his wife’s misconduct. The answers I received from Mrs. Clements
left me in no doubt whatever on that point. Mrs. Catherick had, on the
clearest evidence, compromised her reputation, while a single woman,
with some person unknown, and had married to save her character. It had
been positively ascertained, by calculations of time and place into
which I need not enter particularly, that the daughter who bore her
husband’s name was not her husband’s child.
The next object of inquiry, whether it was equally certain that Sir
Percival must have been the father of Anne, was beset by far greater
difficulties. I was in no position to try the probabilities on one side
or on the other in this instance by any better test than the test of
personal resemblance.
“I suppose you often saw Sir Percival when he was in your village?” I
said.
“Yes, sir, very often,” replied Mrs. Clements.
“Did you ever observe that Anne was like him?”
“She was not at all like him, sir.”
“Was she like her mother, then?”
“Not like her mother either, sir. Mrs. Catherick was dark, and full in
the face.”
Not like her mother and not like her (supposed) father. I knew that
the test by personal resemblance was not to be implicitly trusted,
but, on the other hand, it was not to be altogether rejected on that
account. Was it possible to strengthen the evidence by discovering any
conclusive facts in relation to the lives of Mrs. Catherick and Sir
Percival before they either of them appeared at Old Welmingham? When I
asked my next questions I put them with this view.
“When Sir Percival first arrived in your neighbourhood,” I said, “did
you hear where he had come from last?”
“No, sir. Some said from Blackwater Park, and some said from
Scotland—but nobody knew.”
“Was Mrs. Catherick living in service at Varneck Hall immediately
before her marriage?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And had she been long in her place?”
“Three or four years, sir; I am not quite certain which.”
“Did you ever hear the name of the gentleman to whom Varneck Hall
belonged at that time?”
“Yes, sir. His name was Major Donthorne.”
“Did Mr. Catherick, or did any one else you knew, ever hear that Sir
Percival was a friend of Major Donthorne’s, or ever see Sir Percival in
the neighbourhood of Varneck Hall?”
“Catherick never did, sir, that I can remember—nor any one else either,
that I know of.”
I noted down Major Donthorne’s name and address, on the chance that
he might still be alive, and that it might be useful at some future
time to apply to him. Meanwhile, the impression on my mind was now
decidedly adverse to the opinion that Sir Percival was Anne’s father,
and decidedly favourable to the conclusion that the secret of his
stolen interviews with Mrs. Catherick was entirely unconnected with the
disgrace which the woman had inflicted on her husband’s good name. I
could think of no further inquiries which I might make to strengthen