The Woman in White (9 page)

"I want you to listen while I read the concluding passages in this
letter," said Miss Halcombe. "Tell me if you think they throw any
light upon your strange adventure on the road to London. The
letter is addressed by my mother to her second husband, Mr.
Fairlie, and the date refers to a period of between eleven and
twelve years since. At that time Mr. and Mrs. Fairlie, and my
half-sister Laura, had been living for years in this house; and I
was away from them completing my education at a school in Paris."

She looked and spoke earnestly, and, as I thought, a little
uneasily as well. At the moment when she raised the letter to the
candle before beginning to read it, Miss Fairlie passed us on the
terrace, looked in for a moment, and seeing that we were engaged,
slowly walked on.

Miss Halcombe began to read as follows:—

"'You will be tired, my dear Philip, of hearing perpetually about
my schools and my scholars. Lay the blame, pray, on the dull
uniformity of life at Limmeridge, and not on me. Besides, this
time I have something really interesting to tell you about a new
scholar.

"'You know old Mrs. Kempe at the village shop. Well, after years
of ailing, the doctor has at last given her up, and she is dying
slowly day by day. Her only living relation, a sister, arrived
last week to take care of her. This sister comes all the way from
Hampshire—her name is Mrs. Catherick. Four days ago Mrs.
Catherick came here to see me, and brought her only child with
her, a sweet little girl about a year older than our darling
Laura—-'"

As the last sentence fell from the reader's lips, Miss Fairlie
passed us on the terrace once more. She was softly singing to
herself one of the melodies which she had been playing earlier in
the evening. Miss Halcombe waited till she had passed out of
sight again, and then went on with the letter—

"'Mrs. Catherick is a decent, well-behaved, respectable woman;
middle-aged, and with the remains of having been moderately, only
moderately, nice-looking. There is something in her manner and in
her appearance, however, which I can't make out. She is reserved
about herself to the point of down-right secrecy, and there is a
look in her face—I can't describe it—which suggests to me that
she has something on her mind. She is altogether what you would
call a walking mystery. Her errand at Limmeridge House, however,
was simple enough. When she left Hampshire to nurse her sister,
Mrs. Kempe, through her last illness, she had been obliged to
bring her daughter with her, through having no one at home to take
care of the little girl. Mrs. Kempe may die in a week's time, or
may linger on for months; and Mrs. Catherick's object was to ask
me to let her daughter, Anne, have the benefit of attending my
school, subject to the condition of her being removed from it to
go home again with her mother, after Mrs. Kempe's death. I
consented at once, and when Laura and I went out for our walk, we
took the little girl (who is just eleven years old) to the school
that very day.'"

Once more Miss Fairlie's figure, bright and soft in its snowy
muslin dress—her face prettily framed by the white folds of the
handkerchief which she had tied under her chin—passed by us in
the moonlight. Once more Miss Halcombe waited till she was out of
sight, and then went on—

"'I have taken a violent fancy, Philip, to my new scholar, for a
reason which I mean to keep till the last for the sake of
surprising you. Her mother having told me as little about the
child as she told me of herself, I was left to discover (which I
did on the first day when we tried her at lessons) that the poor
little thing's intellect is not developed as it ought to be at her
age. Seeing this I had her up to the house the next day, and
privately arranged with the doctor to come and watch her and
question her, and tell me what he thought. His opinion is that
she will grow out of it. But he says her careful bringing-up at
school is a matter of great importance just now, because her
unusual slowness in acquiring ideas implies an unusual tenacity in
keeping them, when they are once received into her mind. Now, my
love, you must not imagine, in your off-hand way, that I have been
attaching myself to an idiot. This poor little Anne Catherick is
a sweet, affectionate, grateful girl, and says the quaintest,
prettiest things (as you shall judge by an instance), in the most
oddly sudden, surprised, half-frightened way. Although she is
dressed very neatly, her clothes show a sad want of taste in
colour and pattern. So I arranged, yesterday, that some of our
darling Laura's old white frocks and white hats should be altered
for Anne Catherick, explaining to her that little girls of her
complexion looked neater and better all in white than in anything
else. She hesitated and seemed puzzled for a minute, then flushed
up, and appeared to understand. Her little hand clasped mine
suddenly. She kissed it, Philip, and said (oh, so earnestly!), "I
will always wear white as long as I live. It will help me to
remember you, ma'am, and to think that I am pleasing you still,
when I go away and see you no more." This is only one specimen of
the quaint things she says so prettily. Poor little soul! She
shall have a stock of white frocks, made with good deep tucks, to
let out for her as she grows—-'"

Miss Halcombe paused, and looked at me across the piano.

"Did the forlorn woman whom you met in the high-road seem young?"
she asked. "Young enough to be two- or three-and-twenty?"

"Yes, Miss Halcombe, as young as that."

"And she was strangely dressed, from head to foot, all in white?"

"All in white."

While the answer was passing my lips Miss Fairlie glided into view
on the terrace for the third time. Instead of proceeding on her
walk, she stopped, with her back turned towards us, and, leaning
on the balustrade of the terrace, looked down into the garden
beyond. My eyes fixed upon the white gleam of her muslin gown and
head-dress in the moonlight, and a sensation, for which I can find
no name—a sensation that quickened my pulse, and raised a
fluttering at my heart—began to steal over me.

"All in white?" Miss Halcombe repeated. "The most important
sentences in the letter, Mr. Hartright, are those at the end,
which I will read to you immediately. But I can't help dwelling a
little upon the coincidence of the white costume of the woman you
met, and the white frocks which produced that strange answer from
my mother's little scholar. The doctor may have been wrong when
he discovered the child's defects of intellect, and predicted that
she would 'grow out of them.' She may never have grown out of
them, and the old grateful fancy about dressing in white, which
was a serious feeling to the girl, may be a serious feeling to the
woman still."

I said a few words in answer—I hardly know what. All my
attention was concentrated on the white gleam of Miss Fairlie's
muslin dress.

"Listen to the last sentences of the letter," said Miss Halcombe.
"I think they will surprise you."

As she raised the letter to the light of the candle, Miss Fairlie
turned from the balustrade, looked doubtfully up and down the
terrace, advanced a step towards the glass doors, and then
stopped, facing us.

Meanwhile Miss Halcombe read me the last sentences to which she
had referred—

"'And now, my love, seeing that I am at the end of my paper, now
for the real reason, the surprising reason, for my fondness for
little Anne Catherick. My dear Philip, although she is not half
so pretty, she is, nevertheless, by one of those extraordinary
caprices of accidental resemblance which one sometimes sees, the
living likeness, in her hair, her complexion, the colour of her
eyes, and the shape of her face—-'"

I started up from the ottoman before Miss Halcombe could pronounce
the next words. A thrill of the same feeling which ran through me
when the touch was laid upon my shoulder on the lonely high-road
chilled me again.

There stood Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the moonlight;
in her attitude, in the turn of her head, in her complexion, in
the shape of her face, the living image, at that distance and
under those circumstances, of the woman in white! The doubt which
had troubled my mind for hours and hours past flashed into
conviction in an instant. That "something wanting" was my own
recognition of the ominous likeness between the fugitive from the
asylum and my pupil at Limmeridge House.

"You see it!" said Miss Halcombe. She dropped the useless letter,
and her eyes flashed as they met mine. "You see it now, as my
mother saw it eleven years since!"

"I see it—more unwillingly than I can say. To associate that
forlorn, friendless, lost woman, even by an accidental likeness
only, with Miss Fairlie, seems like casting a shadow on the future
of the bright creature who stands looking at us now. Let me lose
the impression again as soon as possible. Call her in, out of the
dreary moonlight—pray call her in!"

"Mr. Hartright, you surprise me. Whatever women may be, I thought
that men, in the nineteenth century, were above superstition."

"Pray call her in!"

"Hush, hush! She is coming of her own accord. Say nothing in her
presence. Let this discovery of the likeness be kept a secret
between you and me. Come in, Laura, come in, and wake Mrs. Vesey
with the piano. Mr. Hartright is petitioning for some more music,
and he wants it, this time, of the lightest and liveliest kind."

So ended my eventful first day at Limmeridge House.

Miss Halcombe and I kept our secret. After the discovery of the
likeness no fresh light seemed destined to break over the mystery
of the woman in white. At the first safe opportunity Miss
Halcombe cautiously led her half-sister to speak of their mother,
of old times, and of Anne Catherick. Miss Fairlie's recollections
of the little scholar at Limmeridge were, however, only of the
most vague and general kind. She remembered the likeness between
herself and her mother's favourite pupil, as something which had
been supposed to exist in past times; but she did not refer to the
gift of the white dresses, or to the singular form of words in
which the child had artlessly expressed her gratitude for them.
She remembered that Anne had remained at Limmeridge for a few
months only, and had then left it to go back to her home in
Hampshire; but she could not say whether the mother and daughter
had ever returned, or had ever been heard of afterwards. No
further search, on Miss Halcombe's part, through the few letters
of Mrs. Fairlie's writing which she had left unread, assisted in
clearing up the uncertainties still left to perplex us. We had
identified the unhappy woman whom I had met in the night-time with
Anne Catherick—we had made some advance, at least, towards
connecting the probably defective condition of the poor creature's
intellect with the peculiarity of her being dressed all in white,
and with the continuance, in her maturer years, of her childish
gratitude towards Mrs. Fairlie—and there, so far as we knew at
that time, our discoveries had ended.

The days passed on, the weeks passed on, and the track of the
golden autumn wound its bright way visibly through the green
summer of the trees. Peaceful, fast-flowing, happy time! my story
glides by you now as swiftly as you once glided by me. Of all the
treasures of enjoyment that you poured so freely into my heart,
how much is left me that has purpose and value enough to be
written on this page? Nothing but the saddest of all confessions
that a man can make—the confession of his own folly.

The secret which that confession discloses should be told with
little effort, for it has indirectly escaped me already. The poor
weak words, which have failed to describe Miss Fairlie, have
succeeded in betraying the sensations she awakened in me. It is
so with us all. Our words are giants when they do us an injury,
and dwarfs when they do us a service.

I loved her.

Ah! how well I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is
contained in those three words. I can sigh over my mournful
confession with the tenderest woman who reads it and pities me. I
can laugh at it as bitterly as the hardest man who tosses it from
him in contempt. I loved her! Feel for me, or despise me, I
confess it with the same immovable resolution to own the truth.

Was there no excuse for me? There was some excuse to be found,
surely, in the conditions under which my term of hired service was
passed at Limmeridge House.

My morning hours succeeded each other calmly in the quiet and
seclusion of my own room. I had just work enough to do, in
mounting my employer's drawings, to keep my hands and eyes
pleasurably employed, while my mind was left free to enjoy the
dangerous luxury of its own unbridled thoughts. A perilous
solitude, for it lasted long enough to enervate, not long enough
to fortify me. A perilous solitude, for it was followed by
afternoons and evenings spent, day after day and week after week
alone in the society of two women, one of whom possessed all the
accomplishments of grace, wit, and high-breeding, the other all
the charms of beauty, gentleness, and simple truth, that can
purify and subdue the heart of man. Not a day passed, in that
dangerous intimacy of teacher and pupil, in which my hand was not
close to Miss Fairlie's; my cheek, as we bent together over her
sketch-book, almost touching hers. The more attentively she
watched every movement of my brush, the more closely I was
breathing the perfume of her hair, and the warm fragrance of her
breath. It was part of my service to live in the very light of
her eyes—at one time to be bending over her, so close to her
bosom as to tremble at the thought of touching it; at another, to
feel her bending over me, bending so close to see what I was
about, that her voice sank low when she spoke to me, and her
ribbons brushed my cheek in the wind before she could draw them
back.