The Woman in White (30 page)

Meanwhile, here I am, established at Blackwater Park, "the ancient
and interesting seat" (as the county history obligingly informs
me) "of Sir Percival Glyde, Bart.," and the future abiding-place
(as I may now venture to add on my account) of plain Marian
Halcombe, spinster, now settled in a snug little sitting-room,
with a cup of tea by her side, and all her earthly possessions
ranged round her in three boxes and a bag.

I left Limmeridge yesterday, having received Laura's delightful
letter from Paris the day before. I had been previously uncertain
whether I was to meet them in London or in Hampshire, but this
last letter informed me that Sir Percival proposed to land at
Southampton, and to travel straight on to his country-house. He
has spent so much money abroad that he has none left to defray the
expenses of living in London for the remainder of the season, and
he is economically resolved to pass the summer and autumn quietly
at Blackwater. Laura has had more than enough of excitement and
change of scene, and is pleased at the prospect of country
tranquillity and retirement which her husband's prudence provides
for her. As for me, I am ready to be happy anywhere in her
society. We are all, therefore, well contented in our various
ways, to begin with.

Last night I slept in London, and was delayed there so long to-day
by various calls and commissions, that I did not reach Blackwater
this evening till after dusk.

Judging by my vague impressions of the place thus far, it is the
exact opposite of Limmeridge.

The house is situated on a dead flat, and seems to be shut in—
almost suffocated, to my north-country notions, by trees. I have
seen nobody but the man-servant who opened the door to me, and the
housekeeper, a very civil person, who showed me the way to my own
room, and got me my tea. I have a nice little boudoir and
bedroom, at the end of a long passage on the first floor. The
servants and some of the spare rooms are on the second floor, and
all the living rooms are on the ground floor. I have not seen one
of them yet, and I know nothing about the house, except that one
wing of it is said to be five hundred years old, that it had a
moat round it once, and that it gets its name of Blackwater from a
lake in the park.

Eleven o'clock has just struck, in a ghostly and solemn manner,
from a turret over the centre of the house, which I saw when I
came in. A large dog has been woke, apparently by the sound of
the bell, and is howling and yawning drearily, somewhere round a
corner. I hear echoing footsteps in the passages below, and the
iron thumping of bolts and bars at the house door. The servants
are evidently going to bed. Shall I follow their example?

No, I am not half sleepy enough. Sleepy, did I say? I feel as if
I should never close my eyes again. The bare anticipation of
seeing that dear face, and hearing that well-known voice to-
morrow, keeps me in a perpetual fever of excitement. If I only
had the privileges of a man, I would order out Sir Percival's best
horse instantly, and tear away on a night-gallop, eastward, to
meet the rising sun—a long, hard, heavy, ceaseless gallop of
hours and hours, like the famous highwayman's ride to York.
Being, however, nothing but a woman, condemned to patience,
propriety, and petticoats for life, I must respect the house-
keeper's opinions, and try to compose myself in some feeble and
feminine way.

Reading is out of the question—I can't fix my attention on books.
Let me try if I can write myself into sleepiness and fatigue. My
journal has been very much neglected of late. What can I recall—
standing, as I now do, on the threshold of a new life—of persons
and events, of chances and changes, during the past six months—
the long, weary, empty interval since Laura's wedding-day?

Walter Hartright is uppermost in my memory, and he passes first in
the shadowy procession of my absent friends. I received a few
lines from him, after the landing of the expedition in Honduras,
written more cheerfully and hopefully than he has written yet. A
month or six weeks later I saw an extract from an American
newspaper, describing the departure of the adventurers on their
inland journey. They were last seen entering a wild primeval
forest, each man with his rifle on his shoulder and his baggage at
his back. Since that time, civilisation has lost all trace of
them. Not a line more have I received from Walter, not a fragment
of news from the expedition has appeared in any of the public
journals.

The same dense, disheartening obscurity hangs over the fate and
fortunes of Anne Catherick, and her companion, Mrs. Clements.
Nothing whatever has been heard of either of them. Whether they
are in the country or out of it, whether they are living or dead,
no one knows. Even Sir Percival's solicitor has lost all hope,
and has ordered the useless search after the fugitives to be
finally given up.

Our good old friend Mr. Gilmore has met with a sad check in his
active professional career. Early in the spring we were alarmed
by hearing that he had been found insensible at his desk, and that
the seizure was pronounced to be an apoplectic fit. He had been
long complaining of fulness and oppression in the head, and his
doctor had warned him of the consequences that would follow his
persistency in continuing to work, early and late, as if he were
still a young man. The result now is that he has been positively
ordered to keep out of his office for a year to come, at least,
and to seek repose of body and relief of mind by altogether
changing his usual mode of life. The business is left,
accordingly, to be carried on by his partner, and he is himself,
at this moment, away in Germany, visiting some relations who are
settled there in mercantile pursuits. Thus another true friend
and trustworthy adviser is lost to us—lost, I earnestly hope and
trust, for a time only.

Poor Mrs. Vesey travelled with me as far as London. It was
impossible to abandon her to solitude at Limmeridge after Laura
and I had both left the house, and we have arranged that she is to
live with an unmarried younger sister of hers, who keeps a school
at Clapham. She is to come here this autumn to visit her pupil—I
might almost say her adopted child. I saw the good old lady safe
to her destination, and left her in the care of her relative,
quietly happy at the prospect of seeing Laura again in a few
months' time.

As for Mr. Fairlie, I believe I am guilty of no injustice if I
describe him as being unutterably relieved by having the house
clear of us women. The idea of his missing his niece is simply
preposterous—he used to let months pass in the old times without
attempting to see her—and in my case and Mrs. Vesey's, I take
leave to consider his telling us both that he was half heart-
broken at our departure, to be equivalent to a confession that he
was secretly rejoiced to get rid of us. His last caprice has led
him to keep two photographers incessantly employed in producing
sun-pictures of all the treasures and curiosities in his
possession. One complete copy of the collection of the
photographs is to be presented to the Mechanics' Institution of
Carlisle, mounted on the finest cardboard, with ostentatious red-
letter inscriptions underneath, "Madonna and Child by Raphael. In
the possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire." "Copper coin of the
period of Tiglath Pileser. In the possession of Frederick
Fairlie, Esquire." "Unique Rembrandt etching. Known all over
Europe as THE SMUDGE, from a printer's blot in the corner which
exists in no other copy. Valued at three hundred guineas. In the
possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esq." Dozens of photographs of
this sort, and all inscribed in this manner, were completed before
I left Cumberland, and hundreds more remain to be done. With this
new interest to occupy him, Mr. Fairlie will be a happy man for
months and months to come, and the two unfortunate photographers
will share the social martyrdom which he has hitherto inflicted on
his valet alone.

So much for the persons and events which hold the foremost place
in my memory. What next of the one person who holds the foremost
place in my heart? Laura has been present to my thoughts all the
while I have been writing these lines. What can I recall of her
during the past six months, before I close my journal for the
night?

I have only her letters to guide me, and on the most important of
all the questions which our correspondence can discuss, every one
of those letters leaves me in the dark.

Does he treat her kindly? Is she happier now than she was when I
parted with her on the wedding-day? All my letters have contained
these two inquiries, put more or less directly, now in one form,
and now in another, and all, on that point only, have remained
without reply, or have been answered as if my questions merely
related to the state of her health. She informs me, over and over
again, that she is perfectly well—that travelling agrees with
her—that she is getting through the winter, for the first time in
her life, without catching cold—but not a word can I find
anywhere which tells me plainly that she is reconciled to her
marriage, and that she can now look back to the twenty-second of
December without any bitter feelings of repentance and regret.
The name of her husband is only mentioned in her letters, as she
might mention the name of a friend who was travelling with them,
and who had undertaken to make all the arrangements for the
journey. "Sir Percival" has settled that we leave on such a day—
"Sir Percival" has decided that we travel by such a road.
Sometimes she writes "Percival" only, but very seldom—in nine
cases out of ten she gives him his title.

I cannot find that his habits and opinions have changed and
coloured hers in any single particular. The usual moral
transformation which is insensibly wrought in a young, fresh,
sensitive woman by her marriage, seems never to have taken place
in Laura. She writes of her own thoughts and impressions, amid
all the wonders she has seen, exactly as she might have written to
some one else, if I had been travelling with her instead of her
husband. I see no betrayal anywhere of sympathy of any kind
existing between them. Even when she wanders from the subject of
her travels, and occupies herself with the prospects that await
her in England, her speculations are busied with her future as my
sister, and persistently neglect to notice her future as Sir
Percival's wife. In all this there is no undertone of complaint
to warn me that she is absolutely unhappy in her married life.
The impression I have derived from our correspondence does not,
thank God, lead me to any such distressing conclusion as that. I
only see a sad torpor, an unchangeable indifference, when I turn
my mind from her in the old character of a sister, and look at
her, through the medium of her letters, in the new character of a
wife. In other words, it is always Laura Fairlie who has been
writing to me for the last six months, and never Lady Glyde.

The strange silence which she maintains on the subject of her
husband's character and conduct, she preserves with almost equal
resolution in the few references which her later letters contain
to the name of her husband's bosom friend, Count Fosco.

For some unexplained reason the Count and his wife appear to have
changed their plans abruptly, at the end of last autumn, and to
have gone to Vienna instead of going to Rome, at which latter
place Sir Percival had expected to find them when he left England.
They only quitted Vienna in the spring, and travelled as far as
the Tyrol to meet the bride and bridegroom on their homeward
journey. Laura writes readily enough about the meeting with
Madame Fosco, and assures me that she has found her aunt so much
changed for the better—so much quieter, and so much more sensible
as a wife than she was as a single woman—that I shall hardly know
her again when I see her here. But on the subject of Count Fosco
(who interests me infinitely more than his wife), Laura is
provokingly circumspect and silent. She only says that he puzzles
her, and that she will not tell me what her impression of him is
until I have seen him, and formed my own opinion first.

This, to my mind, looks ill for the Count. Laura has preserved,
far more perfectly than most people do in later life, the child's
subtle faculty of knowing a friend by instinct, and if I am right
in assuming that her first impression of Count Fosco has not been
favourable, I for one am in some danger of doubting and
distrusting that illustrious foreigner before I have so much as
set eyes on him. But, patience, patience—this uncertainty, and
many uncertainties more, cannot last much longer. To-morrow will
see all my doubts in a fair way of being cleared up, sooner or
later.

Twelve o'clock has struck, and I have just come back to close
these pages, after looking out at my open window.

It is a still, sultry, moonless night. The stars are dull and
few. The trees that shut out the view on all sides look dimly
black and solid in the distance, like a great wall of rock. I
hear the croaking of frogs, faint and far off, and the echoes of
the great clock hum in the airless calm long after the strokes
have ceased. I wonder how Blackwater Park will look in the
daytime? I don't altogether like it by night.

12th.—A day of investigations and discoveries—a more interesting
day, for many reasons, than I had ventured to anticipate.

I began my sight-seeing, of course, with the house.

The main body of the building is of the time of that highly-
overrated woman, Queen Elizabeth. On the ground floor there are
two hugely long galleries, with low ceilings lying parallel with
each other, and rendered additionally dark and dismal by hideous
family portraits—every one of which I should like to burn. The
rooms on the floor above the two galleries are kept in tolerable
repair, but are very seldom used. The civil housekeeper, who
acted as my guide, offered to show me over them, but considerately
added that she feared I should find them rather out of order. My
respect for the integrity of my own petticoats and stockings
infinitely exceeds my respect for all the Elizabethan bedrooms in
the kingdom, so I positively declined exploring the upper regions
of dust and dirt at the risk of soiling my nice clean clothes.
The housekeeper said, "I am quite of your opinion, miss," and
appeared to think me the most sensible woman she had met with for
a long time past.