The Woman in White

Chapter 9

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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.

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.

The evenings which followed the sketching excursions of the

afternoon varied, rather than checked, these innocent, these

inevitable familiarities. My natural fondness for the music which

she played with such tender feeling, such delicate womanly taste,

and her natural enjoyment of giving me back, by the practice of

her art, the pleasure which I had offered to her by the practice

of mine, only wove another tie which drew us closer and closer to

one another. The accidents of conversation; the simple habits

which regulated even such a little thing as the position of our

places at table; the play of Miss Halcombe's ever-ready raillery,

always directed against my anxiety as teacher, while it sparkled

over her enthusiasm as pupil; the harmless expression of poor Mrs.

Vesey's drowsy approval, which connected Miss Fairlie and me as

two model young people who never disturbed her--every one of these

trifles, and many more, combined to fold us together in the same

domestic atmosphere, and to lead us both insensibly to the same

hopeless end.

I should have remembered my position, and have put myself secretly

on my guard. I did so, but not till it was too late. All the

discretion, all the experience, which had availed me with other

women, and secured me against other temptations, failed me with

her. It had been my profession, for years past, to be in this

close contact with young girls of all ages, and of all orders of

beauty. I had accepted the position as part of my calling in

life; I had trained myself to leave all the sympathies natural to

my age in my employer's outer hall, as coolly as I left my

umbrella there before I went upstairs. I had long since learnt to

understand, composedly and as a matter of course, that my

situation in life was considered a guarantee against any of my

female pupils feeling more than the most ordinary interest in me,

and that I was admitted among beautiful and captivating women much

as a harmless domestic animal is admitted among them. This

guardian experience I had gained early; this guardian experience

had sternly and strictly guided me straight along my own poor

narrow path, without once letting me stray aside, to the right

hand or to the left. And now I and my trusty talisman were parted

for the first time. Yes, my hardly-earned self-control was as

completely lost to me as if I had never possessed it; lost to me,

as it is lost every day to other men, in other critical

situations, where women are concerned. I know, now, that I should

have questioned myself from the first. I should have asked why

any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered

it, and barren as a desert when she went out again--why I always

noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had

noticed and remembered in no other woman's before--why I saw her,

heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and

morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman

in my life? I should have looked into my own heart, and found this

new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was

young. Why was this easiest, simplest work of self-culture always

too much for me? The explanation has been written already in the

three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my

confession. I loved her.

The days passed, the weeks passed; it was approaching the third

month of my stay in Cumberland. The delicious monotony of life in

our calm seclusion flowed on with me, like a smooth stream with a

swimmer who glides down the current. All memory of the past, all

thought of the future, all sense of the falseness and hopelessness

of my own position, lay hushed within me into deceitful rest.

Lulled by the Syren-song that my own heart sung to me, with eyes

shut to all sight, and ears closed to all sound of danger, I

drifted nearer and nearer to the fatal rocks. The warning that

aroused me at last, and startled me into sudden, self-accusing

consciousness of my own weakness, was the plainest, the truest,

the kindest of all warnings, for it came silently from HER.

We had parted one night as usual. No word had fallen from my

lips, at that time or at any time before it, that could betray me,

or startle her into sudden knowledge of the truth. But when we

met again in the morning, a change had come over her--a change

that told me all.

I shrank then--I shrink still--from invading the innermost

sanctuary of her heart, and laying it open to others, as I have

laid open my own. Let it be enough to say that the time when she

first surprised my secret was, I firmly believe, the time when she

first surprised her own, and the time, also, when she changed

towards me in the interval of one night. Her nature, too truthful

to deceive others, was too noble to deceive itself. When the

doubt that I had hushed asleep first laid its weary weight on her

heart, the true face owned all, and said, in its own frank, simple

language--I am sorry for him; I am sorry for myself.

It said this, and more, which I could not then interpret. I

understood but too well the change in her manner, to greater

kindness and quicker readiness in interpreting all my wishes,

before others--to constraint and sadness, and nervous anxiety to

absorb herself in the first occupation she could seize on,

whenever we happened to be left together alone. I understood why

the sweet sensitive lips smiled so rarely and so restrainedly now,

and why the clear blue eyes looked at me, sometimes with the pity

of an angel, sometimes with the innocent perplexity of a child.

But the change meant more than this. There was a coldness in her

hand, there was an unnatural immobility in her face, there was in

all her movements the mute expression of constant fear and

clinging self-reproach. The sensations that I could trace to

herself and to me, the unacknowledged sensations that we were

feeling in common, were not these. There were certain elements of

the change in her that were still secretly drawing us together,

and others that were, as secretly, beginning to drive us apart.

In my doubt and perplexity, in my vague suspicion of something

hidden which I was left to find by my own unaided efforts, I

examined Miss Halcombe's looks and manner for enlightenment.

Living in such intimacy as ours, no serious alteration could take

place in any one of us which did not sympathetically affect the

others. The change in Miss Fairlie was reflected in her half-

sister. Although not a word escaped Miss Halcombe which hinted at

an altered state of feeling towards myself, her penetrating eyes

had contracted a new habit of always watching me. Sometimes the

look was like suppressed anger, sometimes like suppressed dread,

sometimes like neither--like nothing, in short, which I could

understand. A week elapsed, leaving us all three still in this

position of secret constraint towards one another. My situation,

aggravated by the sense of my own miserable weakness and

forgetfulness of myself, now too late awakened in me, was becoming

intolerable. I felt that I must cast off the oppression under

which I was living, at once and for ever--yet how to act for the

best, or what to say first, was more than I could tell.

From this position of helplessness and humiliation I was rescued

by Miss Halcombe. Her lips told me the bitter, the necessary, the

unexpected truth; her hearty kindness sustained me under the shock

of hearing it; her sense and courage turned to its right use an

event which threatened the worst that could happen, to me and to

others, in Limmeridge House.

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