The Woman in White

This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what
a Man's resolution can achieve.

If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every
case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with
moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of
gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their
share of the public attention in a Court of Justice.

But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged
servant of the long purse; and the story is left to be told, for
the first time, in this place. As the Judge might once have heard
it, so the Reader shall hear it now. No circumstance of
importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall
be related on hearsay evidence. When the writer of these
introductory lines (Walter Hartright by name) happens to be more
closely connected than others with the incidents to be recorded,
he will describe them in his own person. When his experience
fails, he will retire from the position of narrator; and his task
will be continued, from the point at which he has left it off, by
other persons who can speak to the circumstances under notice from
their own knowledge, just as clearly and positively as he has
spoken before them.

Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen,
as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by
more than one witness—with the same object, in both cases, to
present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible
aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events,
by making the persons who have been most closely connected with
them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word
for word.

Let Walter Hartright, teacher of drawing, aged twenty-eight years,
be heard first.

It was the last day of July. The long hot summer was drawing to a
close; and we, the weary pilgrims of the London pavement, were
beginning to think of the cloud-shadows on the corn-fields, and
the autumn breezes on the sea-shore.

For my own poor part, the fading summer left me out of health, out
of spirits, and, if the truth must be told, out of money as well.
During the past year I had not managed my professional resources
as carefully as usual; and my extravagance now limited me to the
prospect of spending the autumn economically between my mother's
cottage at Hampstead and my own chambers in town.

The evening, I remember, was still and cloudy; the London air was
at its heaviest; the distant hum of the street-traffic was at its
faintest; the small pulse of the life within me, and the great
heart of the city around me, seemed to be sinking in unison,
languidly and more languidly, with the sinking sun. I roused
myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than
reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the
suburbs. It was one of the two evenings in every week which I was
accustomed to spend with my mother and my sister. So I turned my
steps northward in the direction of Hampstead.

Events which I have yet to relate make it necessary to mention in
this place that my father had been dead some years at the period
of which I am now writing; and that my sister Sarah and I were the
sole survivors of a family of five children. My father was a
drawing-master before me. His exertions had made him highly
successful in his profession; and his affectionate anxiety to
provide for the future of those who were dependent on his labours
had impelled him, from the time of his marriage, to devote to the
insuring of his life a much larger portion of his income than most
men consider it necessary to set aside for that purpose. Thanks
to his admirable prudence and self-denial my mother and sister
were left, after his death, as independent of the world as they
had been during his lifetime. I succeeded to his connection, and
had every reason to feel grateful for the prospect that awaited me
at my starting in life.

The quiet twilight was still trembling on the topmost ridges of
the heath; and the view of London below me had sunk into a black
gulf in the shadow of the cloudy night, when I stood before the
gate of my mother's cottage. I had hardly rung the bell before
the house door was opened violently; my worthy Italian friend,
Professor Pesca, appeared in the servant's place; and darted out
joyously to receive me, with a shrill foreign parody on an English
cheer.

On his own account, and, I must be allowed to add, on mine also,
the Professor merits the honour of a formal introduction.
Accident has made him the starting-point of the strange family
story which it is the purpose of these pages to unfold.

I had first become acquainted with my Italian friend by meeting
him at certain great houses where he taught his own language and I
taught drawing. All I then knew of the history of his life was,
that he had once held a situation in the University of Padua; that
he had left Italy for political reasons (the nature of which he
uniformly declined to mention to any one); and that he had been
for many years respectably established in London as a teacher of
languages.

Without being actually a dwarf—for he was perfectly well
proportioned from head to foot—Pesca was, I think, the smallest
human being I ever saw out of a show-room. Remarkable anywhere,
by his personal appearance, he was still further distinguished
among the rank and file of mankind by the harmless eccentricity of
his character. The ruling idea of his life appeared to be, that
he was bound to show his gratitude to the country which had
afforded him an asylum and a means of subsistence by doing his
utmost to turn himself into an Englishman. Not content with
paying the nation in general the compliment of invariably carrying
an umbrella, and invariably wearing gaiters and a white hat, the
Professor further aspired to become an Englishman in his habits
and amusements, as well as in his personal appearance. Finding us
distinguished, as a nation, by our love of athletic exercises, the
little man, in the innocence of his heart, devoted himself
impromptu to all our English sports and pastimes whenever he had
the opportunity of joining them; firmly persuaded that he could
adopt our national amusements of the field by an effort of will
precisely as he had adopted our national gaiters and our national
white hat.

I had seen him risk his limbs blindly at a fox-hunt and in a
cricket-field; and soon afterwards I saw him risk his life, just
as blindly, in the sea at Brighton.

We had met there accidentally, and were bathing together. If we
had been engaged in any exercise peculiar to my own nation I
should, of course, have looked after Pesca carefully; but as
foreigners are generally quite as well able to take care of
themselves in the water as Englishmen, it never occurred to me
that the art of swimming might merely add one more to the list of
manly exercises which the Professor believed that he could learn
impromptu. Soon after we had both struck out from shore, I
stopped, finding my friend did not gain on me, and turned round to
look for him. To my horror and amazement, I saw nothing between
me and the beach but two little white arms which struggled for an
instant above the surface of the water, and then disappeared from
view. When I dived for him, the poor little man was lying quietly
coiled up at the bottom, in a hollow of shingle, looking by many
degrees smaller than I had ever seen him look before. During the
few minutes that elapsed while I was taking him in, the air
revived him, and he ascended the steps of the machine with my
assistance. With the partial recovery of his animation came the
return of his wonderful delusion on the subject of swimming. As
soon as his chattering teeth would let him speak, he smiled
vacantly, and said he thought it must have been the Cramp.

When he had thoroughly recovered himself, and had joined me on the
beach, his warm Southern nature broke through all artificial
English restraints in a moment. He overwhelmed me with the
wildest expressions of affection—exclaimed passionately, in his
exaggerated Italian way, that he would hold his life henceforth at
my disposal—and declared that he should never be happy again
until he had found an opportunity of proving his gratitude by
rendering me some service which I might remember, on my side, to
the end of my days.

I did my best to stop the torrent of his tears and protestations
by persisting in treating the whole adventure as a good subject
for a joke; and succeeded at last, as I imagined, in lessening
Pesca's overwhelming sense of obligation to me. Little did I
think then—little did I think afterwards when our pleasant
holiday had drawn to an end—that the opportunity of serving me
for which my grateful companion so ardently longed was soon to
come; that he was eagerly to seize it on the instant; and that by
so doing he was to turn the whole current of my existence into a
new channel, and to alter me to myself almost past recognition.

Yet so it was. If I had not dived for Professor Pesca when he lay
under water on his shingle bed, I should in all human probability
never have been connected with the story which these pages will
relate—I should never, perhaps, have heard even the name of the
woman who has lived in all my thoughts, who has possessed herself
of all my energies, who has become the one guiding influence that
now directs the purpose of my life.

Pesca's face and manner, on the evening when we confronted each
other at my mother's gate, were more than sufficient to inform me
that something extraordinary had happened. It was quite useless,
however, to ask him for an immediate explanation. I could only
conjecture, while he was dragging me in by both hands, that
(knowing my habits) he had come to the cottage to make sure of
meeting me that night, and that he had some news to tell of an
unusually agreeable kind.

We both bounced into the parlour in a highly abrupt and
undignified manner. My mother sat by the open window laughing and
fanning herself. Pesca was one of her especial favourites and his
wildest eccentricities were always pardonable in her eyes. Poor
dear soul! from the first moment when she found out that the
little Professor was deeply and gratefully attached to her son,
she opened her heart to him unreservedly, and took all his
puzzling foreign peculiarities for granted, without so much as
attempting to understand any one of them.

My sister Sarah, with all the advantages of youth, was, strangely
enough, less pliable. She did full justice to Pesca's excellent
qualities of heart; but she could not accept him implicitly, as my
mother accepted him, for my sake. Her insular notions of
propriety rose in perpetual revolt against Pesca's constitutional
contempt for appearances; and she was always more or less
undisguisedly astonished at her mother's familiarity with the
eccentric little foreigner. I have observed, not only in my
sister's case, but in the instances of others, that we of the
young generation are nothing like so hearty and so impulsive as
some of our elders. I constantly see old people flushed and
excited by the prospect of some anticipated pleasure which
altogether fails to ruffle the tranquillity of their serene
grandchildren. Are we, I wonder, quite such genuine boys and
girls now as our seniors were in their time? Has the great advance
in education taken rather too long a stride; and are we in these
modern days, just the least trifle in the world too well brought
up?