The Woman in White (32 page)

The dog was dead. It had given a faint, sobbing cry, it had
suffered an instant's convulsion of the limbs, just as those last
words, "comely and healthy and young," dropped from the
housekeeper's lips. The change had happened with startling
suddenness—in one moment the creature lay lifeless under our
hands.

Eight o'clock. I have just returned from dining downstairs, in
solitary state. The sunset is burning redly on the wilderness of
trees that I see from my window, and I am poring over my journal
again, to calm my impatience for the return of the travellers.
They ought to have arrived, by my calculations, before this. How
still and lonely the house is in the drowsy evening quiet! Oh me!
how many minutes more before I hear the carriage wheels and run
downstairs to find myself in Laura's arms?

The poor little dog! I wish my first day at Blackwater Park had
not been associated with death, though it is only the death of a
stray animal.

Welmingham—I see, on looking back through these private pages of
mine, that Welmingham is the name of the place where Mrs.
Catherick lives. Her note is still in my possession, the note in
answer to that letter about her unhappy daughter which Sir
Percival obliged me to write. One of these days, when I can find
a safe opportunity, I will take the note with me by way of
introduction, and try what I can make of Mrs. Catherick at a
personal interview. I don't understand her wishing to conceal her
visit to this place from Sir Percival's knowledge, and I don't
feel half so sure, as the housekeeper seems to do, that her
daughter Anne is not in the neighbourhood after all. What would
Walter Hartright have said in this emergency? Poor, dear
Hartright! I am beginning to feel the want of his honest advice
and his willing help already.

Surely I heard something. Was it a bustle of footsteps below
stairs? Yes! I hear the horses' feet—I hear the rolling wheels—-

June 15th.—The confusion of their arrival has had time to
subside. Two days have elapsed since the return of the
travellers, and that interval has sufficed to put the new
machinery of our lives at Blackwater Park in fair working order.
I may now return to my journal, with some little chance of being
able to continue the entries in it as collectedly as usual.

I think I must begin by putting down an odd remark which has
suggested itself to me since Laura came back.

When two members of a family or two intimate friends are
separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return
of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to
place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a
painful disadvantage when the two first meet. The sudden
encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the
one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved
in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most
loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden
strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both,
between them on either side. After the first happiness of my
meeting with Laura was over, after we had sat down together hand
in hand to recover breath enough and calmness enough to talk, I
felt this strangeness instantly, and I could see that she felt it
too. It has partially worn away, now that we have fallen back
into most of our old habits, and it will probably disappear before
long. But it has certainly had an influence over the first
impressions that I have formed of her, now that we are living
together again—for which reason only I have thought fit to
mention it here.

She has found me unaltered, but I have found her changed.

Changed in person, and in one respect changed in character. I
cannot absolutely say that she is less beautiful than she used to
be—I can only say that she is less beautiful to me.

Others, who do not look at her with my eyes and my recollections,
would probably think her improved. There is more colour and more
decision and roundness of outline in her face than there used to
be, and her figure seems more firmly set and more sure and easy in
all its movements than it was in her maiden days. But I miss
something when I look at her—something that once belonged to the
happy, innocent life of Laura Fairlie, and that I cannot find in
Lady Glyde. There was in the old times a freshness, a softness,
an ever-varying and yet ever-remaining tenderness of beauty in her
face, the charm of which it is not possible to express in words,
or, as poor Hartright used often to say, in painting either. This
is gone. I thought I saw the faint reflection of it for a moment
when she turned pale under the agitation of our sudden meeting on
the evening of her return, but it has never reappeared since.
None of her letters had prepared me for a personal change in her.
On the contrary, they had led me to expect that her marriage had
left her, in appearance at least, quite unaltered. Perhaps I read
her letters wrongly in the past, and am now reading her face
wrongly in the present? No matter! Whether her beauty has gained
or whether it has lost in the last six months, the separation
either way has made her own dear self more precious to me than
ever, and that is one good result of her marriage, at any rate!

The second change, the change that I have observed in her
character, has not surprised me, because I was prepared for it in
this case by the tone of her letters. Now that she is at home
again, I find her just as unwilling to enter into any details on
the subject of her married life as I had previously found her all
through the time of our separation, when we could only communicate
with each other by writing. At the first approach I made to the
forbidden topic she put her hand on my lips with a look and
gesture which touchingly, almost painfully, recalled to my memory
the days of her girlhood and the happy bygone time when there were
no secrets between us.

"Whenever you and I are together, Marian," she said, "we shall
both be happier and easier with one another, if we accept my
married life for what it is, and say and think as little about it
as possible. I would tell you everything, darling, about myself,"
she went on, nervously buckling and unbuckling the ribbon round my
waist, "if my confidences could only end there. But they could
not—they would lead me into confidences about my husband too; and
now I am married, I think I had better avoid them, for his sake,
and for your sake, and for mine. I don't say that they would
distress you, or distress me—I wouldn't have you think that for
the world. But—I want to be so happy, now I have got you back
again, and I want you to be so happy too—-" She broke off
abruptly, and looked round the room, my own sitting-room, in which
we were talking. "Ah!" she cried, clapping her hands with a
bright smile of recognition, "another old friend found already!
Your bookcase, Marian—your dear-little-shabby-old-satin-wood
bookcase—how glad I am you brought it with you from Limmeridge!
And the horrid heavy man's umbrella, that you always would walk
out with when it rained! And first and foremost of all, your own
dear, dark, clever, gipsy-face, looking at me just as usual! It is
so like home again to be here. How can we make it more like home
still? I will put my father's portrait in your room instead of in
mine—and I will keep all my little treasures from Limmeridge
here—and we will pass hours and hours every day with these four
friendly walls round us. Oh, Marian!" she said, suddenly seating
herself on a footstool at my knees, and looking up earnestly in my
face, "promise you will never marry, and leave me. It is selfish
to say so, but you are so much better off as a single woman—
unless—unless you are very fond of your husband—but you won't be
very fond of anybody but me, will you?" She stopped again, crossed
my hands on my lap, and laid her face on them. "Have you been
writing many letters, and receiving many letters lately?" she
asked, in low, suddenly-altered tones. I understood what the
question meant, but I thought it my duty not to encourage her by
meeting her half way. "Have you heard from him?" she went on,
coaxing me to forgive the more direct appeal on which she now
ventured, by kissing my hands, upon which her face still rested.
"Is he well and happy, and getting on in his profession? Has he
recovered himself—and forgotten me?"

She should not have asked those questions. She should have
remembered her own resolution, on the morning when Sir Percival
held her to her marriage engagement, and when she resigned the
book of Hartright's drawings into my hands for ever. But, ah me!
where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good
resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back? Where is
the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that
has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such
unearthly creatures have existed—but what does our own experience
say in answer to books?

I made no attempt to remonstrate with her: perhaps, because I
sincerely appreciated the fearless candour which let me see, what
other women in her position might have had reasons for concealing
even from their dearest friends—perhaps, because I felt, in my
own heart and conscience, that in her place I should have asked
the same questions and had the same thoughts. All I could
honestly do was to reply that I had not written to him or heard
from him lately, and then to turn the conversation to less
dangerous topics.

There has been much to sadden me in our interview—my first
confidential interview with her since her return. The change
which her marriage has produced in our relations towards each
other, by placing a forbidden subject between us, for the first
time in our lives; the melancholy conviction of the dearth of all
warmth of feeling, of all close sympathy, between her husband and
herself, which her own unwilling words now force on my mind; the
distressing discovery that the influence of that ill-fated
attachment still remains (no matter how innocently, how
harmlessly) rooted as deeply as ever in her heart—all these are
disclosures to sadden any woman who loves her as dearly, and feels
for her as acutely, as I do.

There is only one consolation to set against them—a consolation
that ought to comfort me, and that does comfort me. All the
graces and gentleness of her character—all the frank affection of
her nature—all the sweet, simple, womanly charms which used to
make her the darling and delight of every one who approached her,
have come back to me with herself. Of my other impressions I am
sometimes a little inclined to doubt. Of this last, best,
happiest of all impressions, I grow more and more certain every
hour in the day.

Let me turn, now, from her to her travelling companions. Her
husband must engage my attention first. What have I observed in
Sir Percival, since his return, to improve my opinion of him?

I can hardly say. Small vexations and annoyances seem to have
beset him since he came back, and no man, under those
circumstances, is ever presented at his best. He looks, as I
think, thinner than he was when he left England. His wearisome
cough and his comfortless restlessness have certainly increased.
His manner—at least his manner towards me—is much more abrupt
than it used to be. He greeted me, on the evening of his return,
with little or nothing of the ceremony and civility of former
times—no polite speeches of welcome—no appearance of
extraordinary gratification at seeing me—nothing but a short
shake of the hand, and a sharp "How-d'ye-do, Miss Halcombe—glad
to see you again." He seemed to accept me as one of the necessary
fixtures of Blackwater Park, to be satisfied at finding me
established in my proper place, and then to pass me over
altogether.

Most men show something of their disposition in their own houses,
which they have concealed elsewhere, and Sir Percival has already
displayed a mania for order and regularity, which is quite a new
revelation of him, so far as my previous knowledge of his
character is concerned. If I take a book from the library and
leave it on the table, he follows me and puts it back again. If I
rise from a chair, and let it remain where I have been sitting, he
carefully restores it to its proper place against the wall. He
picks up stray flower-blossoms from the carpet, and mutters to
himself as discontentedly as if they were hot cinders burning
holes in it, and he storms at the servants if there is a crease in
the tablecloth, or a knife missing from its place at the dinner-
table, as fiercely as if they had personally insulted him.

I have already referred to the small annoyances which appear to
have troubled him since his return. Much of the alteration for
the worse which I have noticed in him may be due to these. I try
to persuade myself that it is so, because I am anxious not to be
disheartened already about the future. It is certainly trying to
any man's temper to be met by a vexation the moment he sets foot
in his own house again, after a long absence, and this annoying
circumstance did really happen to Sir Percival in my presence.

On the evening of their arrival the housekeeper followed me into
the hall to receive her master and mistress and their guests. The
instant he saw her, Sir Percival asked if any one had called
lately. The housekeeper mentioned to him, in reply, what she had
previously mentioned to me, the visit of the strange gentleman to
make inquiries about the time of her master's return. He asked
immediately for the gentleman's name. No name had been left. The
gentleman's business? No business had been mentioned. What was
the gentleman like? The housekeeper tried to describe him, but
failed to distinguish the nameless visitor by any personal
peculiarity which her master could recognise. Sir Percival
frowned, stamped angrily on the floor, and walked on into the
house, taking no notice of anybody. Why he should have been so
discomposed by a trifle I cannot say—but he was seriously
discomposed, beyond all doubt.