Woman in White (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Wilkie Collins

  ‘Were you and Mrs. Catherick neighbours?’ I inquired, leading her memory on, as encouragingly as I could.

  ‘Yes, sir—neighbours at Old Welmingham.’

  ‘Old Welmingham? There are two places of that name, then, in Hampshire?’

  ‘Well, sir, there used to be in those days—better than three-and-twenty years ago. They built a new town about two miles off, convenient to the river—and Old Welmingham, which was never much more than a village, got in time to be deserted. The new town is the place they call Welmingham, now—but the old parish church is the parish church still. It stands by itself, with the houses pulled down, or gone to ruin all round it. I’ve lived to see sad changes. It was a pleasant, pretty place in my time.’

  ‘Did you live there before your marriage, Mrs. Clements?’

  ‘No, sir—I’m a Norfolk woman. It wasn’t the place my husband belonged to, either. He was from Grimsby, as I told you; and he served his apprenticeship there. But having friends down south, and hearing of an opening, he got into business at Southampton. It was in a small way, but he made enough for a plain man to retire on, and settled at Old Welmingham. I went there with him, when he married me. We were neither of us young; but we lived very happy together—happier than our neighbour, Mr. Catherick, lived along with his wife, when they came to Old Welmingham, a year or two afterwards.’

  ‘Was your husband acquainted with them before that?’

  ‘With Catherick, sir—not with his wife. She was a stranger to both of us. Some gentleman had made interest for Catherick;do and he got the situation of clerk at Welmingham church, which was the reason of his coming to settle in our neighbourhood. He brought his newly-married wife along with him; and we heard, in course of time, she had been lady’s maid in a family that lived at Varneck Hall, near Southampton. Catherick had found it a hard matter to get her to marry him—in consequence of her holding herself uncommonly high. He had asked and asked, and given the thing up at last, seeing she was so contrary about it. When he had given it up, she turned contrary, just the other way, and came to him of her own accord, without rhyme or reason seemingly. My poor husband always said that was the time to have given her a lesson. But Catherick was too fond of her to do anything of the sort; he never checked her, either before they were married or after. He was a quick man in his feelings, letting them carry him a deal too far, now in one way, and now in another; and he would have spoilt a better wife than Mrs. Catherick, if a better had married him. I don’t like to speak ill of any one, sir—but she was a heartless woman, with a terrible will of her own; fond of foolish admiration and fine clothes, and not caring to show so much as decent outward respect to Catherick, kindly as he always treated her. My husband said he thought things would turn out badly, when they first came to live near us; and his words proved true. Before they had been quite four months in our neighbourhood, there was a dreadful scandal and a miserable break-up in their household. Both of them were in fault—I am afraid both of them were equally in fault.’

  ‘You mean both husband and wife?’

  ‘Oh, no, sir! I don’t mean Catherick—he was only to be pitied. I meant his wife, and the person—’

  ‘And the person who caused the scandal?’

  ‘Yes, sir. A gentleman born and brought up, who ought to have set a better example. You know him, sir—and my poor dear Anne knew him, only too well.’

  ‘Sir Percival Glyde?’

  ‘Yes. Sir Percival Glyde.’

  My heart beat fast—I thought I had my hand on the clue. How little I knew, then, of the windings of the labyrinth which were still to mislead me!

  ‘Did Sir Percival live in your neighbourhood at that time?’ I asked.

  ‘No, sir. He came among us as a stranger. His father had died, not long before, in foreign parts. I remember he was in mourning. He put up at the little inn on the river (they have pulled it down since that time,) where gentlemen used to go to fish. He wasn’t much noticed when he first came—it was a common thing enough for gentlemen to travel, from all parts of England, to fish in our river.’

  ‘Did he make his appearance in the village before Anne was born?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Anne was born in the June month of eighteen hundred and twenty-seven—and I think he came at the end of April, or the beginning of May.’

  ‘Came as a stranger to all of you? A stranger to Mrs. Catherick, as well as to the rest of the neighbours?’

  ‘So we thought at first, sir. But when the scandal broke out, nobody believed they were strangers. I remember how it happened, as well as if it was yesterday. Catherick came into our garden one night, and woke us by throwing up a handful of gravel from the walk, at our window. I heard him beg my husband, for the Lord’s sake, to come down and speak to him. They were a long time together talking in the porch. When my husband came back up-stairs, he was all of a tremble. He sat down on the side of the bed, and he says to me, “Lizzie! I always told you that woman was a bad one; I always said she would end ill—and I’m afraid, in my own mind, that the end has come already. Catherick has found a lot of lace handkerchiefs, and two fine rings, and a new gold watch and chain, hid away in his wife’s drawer—things that nobody but a born lady ought ever to have—and his wife won’t say how she came by them.” “Does he think she stole them?” says I. “No,” says he, “stealing would be bad enough. But it’s worse than that—she’s had no chance of stealing such things as those, and she’s not a woman to take them if she had. They’re gifts, Lizzie—there’s her own initials engraved inside the watch—and Catherick has seen her, talking privately, and carrying on as no married woman should, with that gentleman in mourning—Sir Percival Glyde. Don’t you say anything about it—I’ve quieted Catherick for to-night. I’ve told him to keep his tongue to himself, and his eyes and his ears open, and to wait a day or two, till he can be quite certain.” “I believe you are both of you wrong,” says I. “It’s not in nature, comfortable and respectable as she is here, that Mrs. Catherick should take up with a chance stranger like Sir Percival Glyde.” “Ay, but is he a stranger to her?” says my husband. “You forget how Catherick’s wife came to marry him. She went to him of her own accord, after saying No, over and over again when he asked her. There have been wicked women, before her time, Lizzie, who have used honest men who loved them as a means of saving their characters—and I’m sorely afraid this Mrs. Catherick is as wicked as the worst of them. We shall see,” say my husband, “we shall soon see.” And only two days afterwards, we did see.’

  Mrs. Clements waited for a moment, before she went on. Even in that moment, I began to doubt whether the clue that I thought I had found was really leading me to the central mystery of the labyrinth, after all. Was this common, too common, story of a man’s treachery and a woman’s frailty the key to a secret which had been the life-long terror of Sir Percival Glyde?

  ‘Well, sir, Catherick took my husband’s advice, and waited,’ Mrs. Clements continued. ‘And, as I told you, he hadn’t long to wait. On the second day, he found his wife and Sir Percival whispering together quite familiar, close under the vestrydp of the church. I suppose they thought the neighbourhood of the vestry was the last place in the world where anybody would think of looking after them—but, however that may be, there they were. Sir Percival, being seemingly surprised and confounded, defended himself in such a guilty way that poor Catherick (whose quick temper I have told you of already) fell into a kind of frenzy at his own disgrace, and struck Sir Percival. He was no match (and I am sorry to say it) for the man who had wronged him—and he was beaten in the cruelest manner, before the neighbours who had come to the place on hearing the disturbance, could run in to part them. All this happened towards evening; and, before nightfall, when my husband went to Catherick’s house, he was gone, nobody knew where. No living soul in the village ever saw him again. He knew too well, by that time, what his wife’s vile reason had been for marrying him; and he felt his misery and disgrace—especially after what had happened to him with Sir P
ercival—too keenly. The clergyman of the parish put an advertisement in the paper, begging him to come back, and saying that he should not lose his situation or his friends. But Catherick had too much pride and spirit, as some people said—too much feeling, as I think, sir—to face his neighbours again, and try to live down the memory of his disgrace. My husband heard from him, when he had left England; and heard a second time, when he was settled, and doing well, in America. He is alive there now, as far as I know; but none of us in the old country—his wicked wife least of all—are ever likely to set eyes on him again.’

  ‘What became of Sir Percival?’ I inquired. ‘Did he stay in the neighbourhood?’

  ‘Not he, sir. The place was too hot to hold him. He was heard at high words with Mrs. Catherick, the same night when the scandal broke out—and the next morning he took himself off.’

  ‘And Mrs. Catherick? Surely she never remained in the village, among the people who knew of her disgrace?’

  ‘She did, sir. She was hard enough and heartless enough to set the opinions of all her neighbours at flat defiance. She declared to everybody, from the clergyman downwards, that she was the victim of a dreadful mistake, and that all the scandal-mongers in the place should not drive her out of it as if she was a guilty woman. All through my time, she lived at Old Welmingham; and, after my time, when the new town was building, and the respectable neighbours began moving to it, she moved too, as if she was determined to live among them and scandalize them to the very last. There she is now, and there she will stop, in defiance of the best of them, to her dying day.’

  ‘But how has she lived, through all these years?’ I asked. ‘Was her husband able and willing to help her?’

  ‘Both able and willing, sir,’ said Mrs. Clements. ‘In the second letter he wrote to my good man, he said she had borne his name, and lived in his home, and, wicked as she was, she must not starve like a beggar in the street. He could afford to make her some small allowance, and she might draw for it quarterly, at a place in London.’

  ‘Did she accept the allowance?’

  ‘Not a farthing of it, sir. She said she would never be beholden to Catherick for bit or drop, if she lived to be a hundred. And she has kept her word ever since. When my poor dear husband died, and left all to me, Catherick’s letter was put in my possession with the other things—and I told her to let me know if she was ever in want. “I’ll let all England know I’m in want,” she said, “before I tell Catherick, or any friend of Catherick’s. Take that for your answer—and give it to him for an answer, if he ever writes again.” ’

  ‘Do you suppose that she had money of her own?’

  ‘Very little, if any, sir. It was said, and said truly, I am afraid, that her means of living came privately from Sir Percival Glyde.’

  After that last reply, I waited a little, to reconsider what I had heard. If I unreservedly accepted the story so far, it was now plain that no approach, direct or indirect, to the Secret had yet been revealed to me, and that the pursuit of my object had ended again in leaving me face to face with the most palpable and the most disheartening failure.

  But there was one point in the narrative which made me doubt the propriety of accepting it unreservedly, and which suggested the idea of something hidden below the surface.

  I could not account to myself for the circumstance of the clerk’s guilty wife voluntarily living out all her after-existence on the scene of her disgrace. The woman’s own reported statement that she had taken this strange course as a practical assertion of her innocence, did not satisfy me. It seemed, to my mind, more natural and more probable to assume that she was not so completely a free agent in this matter as she had herself asserted. In that case, who was the likeliest person to possess the power of compelling her to remain at Welmingham? The person unquestionably from whom she derived the means of living. She had refused assistance from her husband, she had no adequate resources of her own, she was a friendless, degraded woman: from what source should she derive help, but from the source at which report pointed—Sir Percival Glyde?

  Reasoning on these assumptions, and always bearing in mind the one certain fact to guide me, that Mrs. Catherick was in possession of the Secret, I easily understood that it was Sir Percival’s interest to keep her at Welmingham, because her character in that place was certain to isolate her from all communication with female neighbours, and to allow her no opportunities of talking incautiously, in moments of free intercourse with inquisitive bosom friends. But what was the mystery to be concealed? Not Sir Percival’s infamous connexion with Mrs. Catherick’s disgrace—for the neighbours were the very people who knew of it. Not the suspicion that he was Anne’s father—for Welmingham was the place in which that suspicion must inevitably exist. If I accepted the guilty appearances described to me, as unreservedly as others had accepted them; if I drew from them the same superficial conclusion which Mr. Catherick and all his neighbours had drawn—where was the suggestion, in all that I had heard, of a dangerous secret between Sir Percival and Mrs. Catherick, which had been kept hidden from that time to this?

  And yet, in those stolen meetings, in those familiar whisperings between the clerk’s wife and ‘the gentleman in mourning’, the clue to discovery existed beyond a doubt.

  Was it possible that appearances, in this case, had pointed one way, while the truth lay, all the while, unsuspected, in another direction? Could Mrs. Catherick’s assertion that she was the victim of a dreadful mistake, by any possibility be true? Or, assuming it to be false, could the conclusion which associated Sir Percival with her guilt, have been founded in some inconceivable error? Had Sir Percival, by any chance, courted the suspicion that was wrong, for the sake of diverting from himself some other suspicion that was right? Here, if I could find it—here was the approach to the Secret, hidden deep under the surface of the apparently unpromising story which I had just heard.

  My next questions were now directed to the one object of ascertaining whether Mr. Catherick had, or had not, arrived truly at the conviction of his wife’s misconduct. The answers I received from Mrs. Clements, left me in no doubt whatever on that point. Mrs. Catherick had, on the clearest evidence, compromised her reputation, while a single woman, with some person unknown; and had married to save her character. It had been positively ascertained, by calculations of time and place into which I need not enter particularly, that the daughter who bore her husband’s name was not her husband’s child.

  The next object of inquiry, whether it was equally certain that Sir Percival must have been the father of Anne, was beset by far greater difficulties. I was in no position to try the probabilities on one side or on the other, in this instance, by any better test than the test of personal resemblance.

  ‘I suppose you often saw Sir Percival, when he was in your village?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, sir—very often,’ replied Mrs. Clements.

  ‘Did you ever observe that Anne was like him?’

  ‘She was not at all like him, sir.’

  ‘Was she like her mother, then?’

  ‘Not like her mother, either, sir. Mrs. Catherick was dark, and full in the face.’

  Not like her mother, and not like her (supposed) father. I knew that the test by personal resemblance was not to be implicitly trusted—but, on the other hand, it was not to be altogether rejected on that account. Was it possible to strengthen the evidence, by discovering any conclusive facts in relation to the lives of Mrs. Catherick and Sir Percival, before they either of them appeared at Old Welmingham? When I asked my next questions, I put them with this view.

  ‘When Sir Percival first arrived in your neighbourhood,’ I said, ‘did you hear where he had come from last?’

  ‘No, sir. Some said from Blackwater Park, and some said from Scotland—but nobody knew.’

  ‘Was Mrs. Catherick living in service at Varneck Hall, immediately before her marriage?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And had she been long in her place?’

 
‘Three or four years, sir; I am not quite certain which.’

  ‘Did you ever hear the name of the gentleman to whom Varneck Hall belonged at that time?’

  ‘Yes, sir. His name was Major Donthorne.’

  ‘Did Mr. Catherick, or did any one else you knew, ever hear that Sir Percival was a friend of Major Donthorne’s, or ever see Sir Percival in the neighbourhood of Varneck Hall?’

  ‘Catherick never did, sir, that I can remember—nor any one else, either, that I know of.’

  I noted down Major Donthorne’s name and address, on the chance that he might still be alive, and that it might be useful, at some future time, to apply to him. Meanwhile, the impression on my mind was now decidedly adverse to the opinion that Sir Percival was Anne’s father, and decidedly favourable to the conclusion that the secret of his stolen interviews with Mrs. Catherick was entirely unconnected with the disgrace which the woman had inflicted on her husband’s good name. I could think of no further inquiries which I might make to strengthen this impression—I could only encourage Mrs. Clements to speak next of Anne’s early days, and watch for any chance-suggestion which might in this way offer itself to me.

  ‘I have not heard yet,’ I said, ‘how the poor child, born in all this sin and misery, came to be trusted, Mrs. Clements, to your care.’

  ‘There was nobody else, sir, to take the little helpless creature in hand,’ replied Mrs. Clements. ‘The wicked mother seemed to hate it—as if the poor baby was in fault!—from the day it was born. My heart was heavy for the child; and I made the offer to bring it up as tenderly as if it was my own.’

  ‘Did Anne remain entirely under your care, from that time?’

  ‘Not quite entirely, sir. Mrs. Catherick had her whims and fancies about it, at times; and used now and then to lay claim to the child, as if she wanted to spite me for bringing it up. But these fits of hers never lasted for long. Poor little Anne was always returned to me, and was always glad to get back—though she led but a gloomy life in my house, having no playmates, like other children, to brighten her up. Our longest separation was when her mother took her to Limmeridge. Just at that time, I lost my husband; and I felt it was as well, in that miserable affliction, that Anne should not be in the house. She was between ten and eleven years old, then; slow at her lessons, poor soul, and not so cheerful as other children—but as pretty a little girl to look at as you would wish to see. I waited at home till her mother brought her back; and then I made the offer to take her with me to London—the truth being, sir, that I could not find it in my heart to stop at Old Welmingham, after my husband’s death, the place was so changed and so dismal to me.’