The Woman in White
her—I saw that hard, firm, fearless, self-possessed woman quail under a
terror which her utmost resolution was not strong enough to resist when
I said those five last words, “the vestry of the church.”
For a minute or more we stood looking at each other in silence. I spoke
first.
“Do you still refuse to trust me?” I asked.
She could not call the colour that had left it back to her face,
but she had steadied her voice, she had recovered the defiant
self-possession of her manner when she answered me.
“I do refuse,” she said.
“Do you still tell me to go?”
“Yes. Go—and never come back.”
I walked to the door, waited a moment before I opened it, and turned
round to look at her again.
“I may have news to bring you of Sir Percival which you don’t expect,”
I said, “and in that case I shall come back.”
“There is no news of Sir Percival that I don’t expect, except——”
She stopped, her pale face darkened, and she stole back with a quiet,
stealthy, cat-like step to her chair.
“Except the news of his death,” she said, sitting down again, with the
mockery of a smile just hovering on her cruel lips, and the furtive
light of hatred lurking deep in her steady eyes.
As I opened the door of the room to go out, she looked round at me
quickly. The cruel smile slowly widened her lips—she eyed me, with a
strange stealthy interest, from head to foot—an unutterable expectation
showed itself wickedly all over her face. Was she speculating, in
the secrecy of her own heart, on my youth and strength, on the force
of my sense of injury and the limits of my self-control, and was she
considering the lengths to which they might carry me, if Sir Percival
and I ever chanced to meet? The bare doubt that it might be so drove me
from her presence, and silenced even the common forms of farewell on my
lips. Without a word more, on my side or on hers, I left the room.
As I opened the outer door, I saw the same clergyman who had already
passed the house once, about to pass it again, on his way back through
the square. I waited on the door-step to let him go by, and looked
round, as I did so, at the parlour window.
Mrs. Catherick had heard his footsteps approaching, in the silence
of that lonely place, and she was on her feet at the window again,
waiting for him. Not all the strength of all the terrible passions I
had roused in that woman’s heart, could loosen her desperate hold on
the one fragment of social consideration which years of resolute effort
had just dragged within her grasp. There she was again, not a minute
after I had left her, placed purposely in a position which made it a
matter of common courtesy on the part of the clergyman to bow to her
for a second time. He raised his hat once more. I saw the hard ghastly
face behind the window soften, and light up with gratified pride—I saw
the head with the grim black cap bend ceremoniously in return. The
clergyman had bowed to her, and in my presence, twice in one day!
IX
I left the house, feeling that Mrs. Catherick had helped me a step
forward, in spite of herself. Before I had reached the turning which
led out of the square, my attention was suddenly aroused by the sound
of a closing door behind me.
I looked round, and saw an undersized man in black on the door-step
of a house, which, as well as I could judge, stood next to Mrs.
Catherick’s place of abode—next to it, on the side nearest to me. The
man did not hesitate a moment about the direction he should take.
He advanced rapidly towards the turning at which I had stopped. I
recognised him as the lawyer’s clerk, who had preceded me in my visit
to Blackwater Park, and who had tried to pick a quarrel with me, when I
asked him if I could see the house.
I waited where I was, to ascertain whether his object was to come to
close quarters and speak on this occasion. To my surprise he passed
on rapidly, without saying a word, without even looking up in my face
as he went by. This was such a complete inversion of the course of
proceeding which I had every reason to expect on his part, that my
curiosity, or rather my suspicion, was aroused, and I determined on my
side to keep him cautiously in view, and to discover what the business
might be in which he was now employed. Without caring whether he saw
me or not, I walked after him. He never looked back, and he led me
straight through the streets to the railway station.
The train was on the point of starting, and two or three passengers who
were late were clustering round the small opening through which the
tickets were issued. I joined them, and distinctly heard the lawyer’s
clerk demand a ticket for the Blackwater station. I satisfied myself
that he had actually left by the train before I came away.
There was only one interpretation that I could place on what I had
just seen and heard. I had unquestionably observed the man leaving a
house which closely adjoined Mrs. Catherick’s residence. He had been
probably placed there, by Sir Percival’s directions, as a lodger,
in anticipation of my inquiries leading me, sooner or later, to
communicate with Mrs. Catherick. He had doubtless seen me go in and
come out, and he had hurried away by the first train to make his report
at Blackwater Park, to which place Sir Percival would naturally betake
himself (knowing what he evidently knew of my movements), in order to
be ready on the spot, if I returned to Hampshire. Before many days were
over, there seemed every likelihood now that he and I might meet.
Whatever result events might be destined to produce, I resolved to
pursue my own course, straight to the end in view, without stopping or
turning aside for Sir Percival or for any one. The great responsibility
which weighed on me heavily in London—the responsibility of so guiding
my slightest actions as to prevent them from leading accidentally to
the discovery of Laura’s place of refuge—was removed, now that I was
in Hampshire. I could go and come as I pleased at Welmingham, and if I
chanced to fail in observing any necessary precautions, the immediate
results, at least, would affect no one but myself.
When I left the station the winter evening was beginning to close in.
There was little hope of continuing my inquiries after dark to any
useful purpose in a neighbourhood that was strange to me. Accordingly,
I made my way to the nearest hotel, and ordered my dinner and my bed.
This done, I wrote to Marian, to tell her that I was safe and well,
and that I had fair prospects of success. I had directed her, on
leaving home, to address the first letter she wrote to me (the letter I
expected to receive the next morning) to “The Post-Office, Welmingham,”
and I now begged her to send her second day’s letter to the same
address.
I could easily receive it by writing to the postmaster if I happened to
be away from the town when it arrived.
The coffee-room of the hotel, as it grew late in the evening, became a
perfect solitude. I was left to reflect on what I had accomplished that
afternoon as uninterruptedly as if the house had been my own. Before
I retired to rest I had attentively thought over my extraordinary
interview with Mrs. Catherick from beginning to end, and had verified
at my leisure the conclusions which I had hastily drawn in the earlier
part of the day.
The vestry of Old Welmingham church was the starting-point from which
my mind slowly worked its way back through all that I had heard Mrs.
Catherick say, and through all I had seen Mrs. Catherick do.
At the time when the neighbourhood of the vestry was first referred
to in my presence by Mrs. Clements, I had thought it the strangest
and most unaccountable of all places for Sir Percival to select for
a clandestine meeting with the clerk’s wife. Influenced by this
impression, and by no other, I had mentioned “the vestry of the church”
before Mrs. Catherick on pure speculation—it represented one of the
minor peculiarities of the story which occurred to me while I was
speaking. I was prepared for her answering me confusedly or angrily,
but the blank terror that seized her when I said the words took me
completely by surprise. I had long before associated Sir Percival’s
Secret with the concealment of a serious crime which Mrs. Catherick
knew of, but I had gone no further than this. Now the woman’s paroxysm
of terror associated the crime, either directly or indirectly, with the
vestry, and convinced me that she had been more than the mere witness
of it—she was also the accomplice, beyond a doubt.
What had been the nature of the crime? Surely there was a contemptible
side to it, as well as a dangerous side, or Mrs. Catherick would not
have repeated my own words, referring to Sir Percival’s rank and power,
with such marked disdain as she had certainly displayed. It was a
contemptible crime then and a dangerous crime, and she had shared in
it, and it was associated with the vestry of the church.
The next consideration to be disposed of led me a step farther from
this point.
Mrs. Catherick’s undisguised contempt for Sir Percival plainly extended
to his mother as well. She had referred with the bitterest sarcasm to
the great family he had descended from—“especially by the mother’s
side.” What did this mean?
There appeared to be only two explanations of it. Either his mother’s
birth had been low, or his mother’s reputation was damaged by some
hidden flaw with which Mrs. Catherick and Sir Percival were both
privately acquainted? I could only put the first explanation to the
test by looking at the register of her marriage, and so ascertaining
her maiden name and her parentage as a preliminary to further inquiries.
On the other hand, if the second case supposed were the true one, what
had been the flaw in her reputation? Remembering the account which
Marian had given me of Sir Percival’s father and mother, and of the
suspiciously unsocial secluded life they had both led, I now asked
myself whether it might not be possible that his mother had never been
married at all. Here again the register might, by offering written
evidence of the marriage, prove to me, at any rate, that this doubt had
no foundation in truth. But where was the register to be found? At this
point I took up the conclusions which I had previously formed, and the
same mental process which had discovered the locality of the concealed
crime, now lodged the register also in the vestry of Old Welmingham
church.
These were the results of my interview with Mrs. Catherick—these were
the various considerations, all steadily converging to one point, which
decided the course of my proceedings on the next day.
The morning was cloudy and lowering, but no rain fell. I left my bag at
the hotel to wait there till I called for it, and, after inquiring the
way, set forth on foot for Old Welmingham church.
It was a walk of rather more than two miles, the ground rising slowly
all the way.
On the highest point stood the church—an ancient, weather-beaten
building, with heavy buttresses at its sides, and a clumsy square tower
in front. The vestry at the back was built out from the church, and
seemed to be of the same age. Round the building at intervals appeared
the remains of the village which Mrs. Clements had described to me as
her husband’s place of abode in former years, and which the principal
inhabitants had long since deserted for the new town. Some of the empty
houses had been dismantled to their outer walls, some had been left to
decay with time, and some were still inhabited by persons evidently of
the poorest class. It was a dreary scene, and yet, in the worst aspect
of its ruin, not so dreary as the modern town that I had just left.
Here there was the brown, breezy sweep of surrounding fields for the
eye to repose on—here the trees, leafless as they were, still varied