“Without returning? without saying more last words?”
“He turned at the corner of the street, and waved his hand, and then struck it theatrically on his breast. I lost sight of him, after that. He disappeared in the opposite direction to our house; and I ran back to Laura. Before I was in-doors again, I had made up my mind that we must go. The house (especially in your absence) was a place of danger instead of a place of safety, now that the Count had discovered it. If I could have felt certain of your return, I should have risked waiting till you came back. But I was certain of nothing, and I acted at once on my own impulse. You had spoken, before leaving us, of moving into a quieter neighbourhood and purer air, for the sake of Laura’s health. I had only to remind her of that, and to suggest surprising you and saving you trouble by managing the move in your absence, to make her quite as anxious for the change as I was. She helped me to pack up your things—and she has arranged them all for you in your new working-room here.”
“What made you think of coming to this place?”
“My ignorance of other localities in the neighbourhood of London. I felt the necessity of getting as far away as possible from our old lodgings; and I knew something of Fulham because I had once been at school there. I despatched a messenger with a note, on the chance that the school might still be in existence. It was in existence: the daughters of my old mistress were carrying it on for her; and they engaged this place from the instructions I had sent. It was just post-time when the messenger returned to me with the address of the house. We moved after dark—we came here quite unobserved. Have I done right, Walter? Have I justified your trust in me?”
I answered her warmly and gratefully, as I really felt. But the anxious look still remained on her face while I was speaking; and the first question she asked, when I had done, related to Count Fosco. I saw that she was thinking of him now with a changed mind. No fresh outbreak of anger against him, no new appeal to me to hasten the day of reckoning, escaped her. Her conviction that the man’s hateful admiration of herself was really sincere, seemed to have increased a hundredfold her distrust of his unfathomable cunning, her inborn dread of the wicked energy and vigilance of all his faculties. Her voice fell low, her manner was hesitating, her eyes searched into mine with an eager fear, when she asked me what I thought of his message, and what I meant to do next, after hearing it.
“Not many weeks have passed, Marian,” I answered, “since my interview with Mr. Kyrle. When he and I parted, the last words I said to him about Laura were these: ‘Her uncle’s house shall open to receive her, in the presence of every soul who followed the false funeral to the grave; the lie that records her death shall be publicly erased from the tombstone by the authority of the head of the family; and the two men who have wronged her shall answer for their crime to ME, though the justice that sits in tribunals is powerless to pursue them.’ One of those men is beyond mortal reach. The other remains—and my resolution remains.”
Her eyes lit up; her colour rose. She said nothing; but I saw all her sympathies gathering to mine, in her face.
“I don’t disguise from myself, or from you,” I went on, “that the prospect before us is more than doubtful. The risks we have run already are, it may be, trifles, compared with the risks that threaten us in the future—but the venture shall be tried, Marian, for all that. I am not rash enough to measure myself against such a man as the Count before I am well prepared for him. I have learnt patience; I can wait my time. Let him believe that his message has produced its effect; let him know nothing of us, and hear nothing of us; let us give him full time to feel secure—his own boastful nature, unless I seriously mistake him, will hasten that result. This is one reason for waiting; but there is another, more important still. My position, Marian, towards you and towards Laura, ought to be a stronger one than it is now, before I try our last chance.”
She leaned near to me, with a look of surprise.
“How can it be stronger?” she asked.
“I will tell you,” I replied, “when the time comes. It has not come yet: it may never come at all. I may be silent about it to Laura for ever—I must be silent, now, even to you, till I see for myself that I may harmlessly and honourably speak. Let us leave that subject. There is another which has more pressing claims on our attention. You have kept Laura, mercifully kept her, in ignorance of her husband’s death——”
“Oh, Walter, surely it must be long yet, before we tell her of it?”
“No, Marian. Better that you should reveal it to her now, than that accident, which no one can guard against, should reveal it to her at some future time. Spare her all the details—break it to her very tenderly—but tell her that he is dead.”
“You have a reason, Walter, for wishing her to know of her husband’s death, besides the reason you have just mentioned?”
“I have.”
“A reason connected with that subject which must not be mentioned between us yet?—which may never be mentioned to Laura at all?”
She dwelt on the last words, meaningly. When I answered her, in the affirmative, I dwelt on them too.
Her face grew pale. For a while, she looked at me with a sad, hesitating interest. An unaccustomed tenderness trembled in her dark eyes and softened her firm lips, as she glanced aside at the empty chair in which the dear companion of all our joys and sorrows had been sitting.
“I think I understand,” she said, “I think I owe it to her and to you, Walter, to tell her of her husband’s death.”
She sighed, and held my hand fast for a moment—then dropped it abruptly, and left the room. On the next day, Laura knew that his death had released her, and that the error and the calamity of her life lay buried in his tomb.
His name was mentioned among us no more. Thenceforward, we shrank from the slightest approach to the subject of his death; and, in the same scrupulous manner, Marian and I avoided all further reference to that other subject, which, by her consent and mine, was not to be mentioned between us yet. It was not the less present to our minds—it was rather kept alive in them by the restraint which we had imposed on ourselves. We both watched Laura more anxiously than ever; sometimes waiting and hoping, sometimes waiting and fearing, till the time came.
By degrees, we returned to our accustomed way of life: it was the best, the only means in our power of helping Laura to look away again from that past sorrow and suffering which the inevitable disclosure had recalled to her mind. We all wanted the quiet and repose which we had now found. I resumed the daily work, which had been suspended during my absence in Hampshire. Our new lodgings cost us more than the smaller and less convenient rooms which we had left; and the claim thus implied on my increased exertions was strengthened by the doubtfulness of our future prospects. Emergencies might yet happen which would exhaust our little fund at the banker’s; and the work of my hands might be, ultimately, all we had to look to for support. More permanent and more lucrative employment than had yet been offered to me was a necessity of our position—a necessity for which I now diligently set myself to provide.
It must not be supposed that the interval of rest and seclusion of which I am now writing, entirely suspended, on my part, all pursuit of the one absorbing purpose with which my thoughts and actions are associated in these pages. That purpose was, for months and months yet, never to relax its claims on me. The slow ripening of it still left me a measure of precaution to take, an obligation of gratitude to perform, and a doubtful question to solve.
The measure of precaution related, necessarily, to the Count. It was of the last importance to ascertain, if possible, whether his plans committed him to remaining in England—or, in other words, to remaining within my reach. I contrived to set this doubt at rest by very simple means. His address in St. John’s Wood being known to me, I inquired in the neighbourhood; and having found out the agent who had the disposal of the furnished house in which he lived, I asked if number five, Forest Road, was likely to be let within a reasonable time. The reply was in th
e negative. I was informed that the foreign gentleman then residing in the house had renewed his term of occupation for another six months, and would remain in possession until the end of June in the following year. We were then at the beginning of December only. I left the agent with my mind relieved from all present fear of the Count’s escaping me.
The obligation I had to perform, took me once more into the presence of Mrs. Clements. I had promised to return, and to confide to her those particulars relating to the death and burial of Anne Catherick, which I had been obliged to withhold at our first interview. Changed as circumstances now were, there was no hindrance to my trusting the good woman with as much of the story of the conspiracy as it was necessary to tell. I had every reason that sympathy and friendly feeling could suggest to urge on me the speedy performance of my promise—and I did conscientiously and carefully perform it. There is no need to burden these pages with any statement of what passed at the interview. It will be more to the purpose to say that the interview itself necessarily brought to my mind the one doubtful question still remaining to be solved—the question of Anne Catherick’s parentage on the father’s side.
A multitude of small considerations in connexion with this subject—trifling enough in themselves, but strikingly important, when massed together—had latterly led my mind to a conclusion which I resolved to verify. I obtained Marian’s permission to write to Major Donthorne, of Varneck Hall (where Mrs. Catherick had lived in service for some years previous to her marriage), to ask him certain questions. I made the inquiries in Marian’s name, and described them as relating to matters of personal interest in her family, which might explain and excuse my application.
When I wrote the letter, I had no certain knowledge that Major Donthorne was still alive; I despatched it on the chance that he might be living, and able and willing to reply.
After a lapse of two days, proof came, in the shape of a letter, that the Major was living, and that he was ready to help us.
The idea in my mind when I wrote to him, and the nature of my inquiries, will be easily inferred from his reply. His letter answered my questions, by communicating these important facts:
In the first place, “the late Sir Percival Glyde, of Blackwater Park,” had never set foot in Varneck Hall. The deceased gentleman was a total stranger to Major Donthorne, and to all his family.
In the second place, “the late Mr. Philip Fairlie, of Limmeridge House,” had been, in his younger days, the intimate friend and constant guest of Major Donthorne. Having refreshed his memory by looking back to old letters and other papers, the Major was in a position to say positively, that Mr. Philip Fairlie was staying at Varneck Hall in the month of August, eighteen hundred and twenty-six, and that he remained there, for the shooting, during the month of September and part of October following. He then left, to the best of the Major’s belief, for Scotland, and did not return to Varneck Hall till after a lapse of time, when he reappeared in the character of a newly-married man.
Taken by itself, this statement was, perhaps, of little positive value—but, taken in connexion with certain facts, every one of which either Marian or I knew to be true, it suggested one plain conclusion that was, to our minds, irresistible.
Knowing, now, that Mr. Philip Fairlie had been at Varneck Hall in the autumn of eighteen hundred and twenty-six, and that Mrs. Catherick had been living there in service at the same time, we knew also:—first, that Anne had been born in June, eighteen hundred and twenty-seven; secondly, that she had always presented an extraordinary personal resemblance to Laura; and, thirdly, that Laura herself was strikingly like her father. Mr. Philip Fairlie had been one of the notoriously handsome men of his time. In disposition entirely unlike his brother Frederick, he was the spoilt darling of society, especially of the women—an easy, light-hearted, impulsive, affectionate man; generous to a fault; constitutionally lax in his principles, and notoriously thoughtless of moral obligations where women were concerned. Such were the facts we knew; such was the character of the man. Surely, the plain inference that follows needs no pointing out?
Read by the new light which had now broken upon me, even Mrs. Catherick’s letter, in despite of herself, rendered its mite of assistance towards strengthening the conclusion at which I had arrived. She had described Mrs. Fairlie (in writing to me) as “plain-looking,” and as having “entrapped the handsomest man in England into marrying her.” Both assertions were gratuitously made, and both were false. Jealous dislike (which, in such a woman as Mrs. Catherick, would express itself in petty malice rather than not express itself at all) appeared to me to be the only assignable cause for the peculiar insolence of her reference to Mrs. Fairlie, under circumstances which did not necessitate any reference at all.
The mention here of Mrs. Fairlie’s name naturally suggests one other question. Did she ever suspect whose child the little girl brought to her at Limmeridge might be?
Marian’s testimony was positive on this point. Mrs. Fairlie’s letter to her husband, which had been read to me in former days—the letter describing Anne’s resemblance to Laura, and acknowledging her affectionate interest in the little stranger—had been written, beyond all question, in perfect innocence of heart. It even seemed doubtful, on consideration, whether Mr. Philip Fairlie himself had been nearer than his wife to any suspicion of the truth. The disgracefully deceitful circumstances under which Mrs. Catherick had married, the purpose of concealment which the marriage was intended to answer, might well keep her silent for caution’s sake, perhaps for her own pride’s sake also—even assuming that she had the means, in his absence, of communicating with the father of her unborn child.
As this surmise floated through my mind, there rose on my memory the remembrance of the Scripture denunciation which we have all thought of, in our time, with wonder and with awe: “The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.” But for the fatal resemblance between the two daughters of one father, the conspirary of which Anne had been the innocent instrument and Laura the innocent victim, could never have been planned. With what unerring and terrible directness the long chain of circumstances led down from the thoughtless wrong committed by the father to the heartless injury inflicted on the child!
These thoughts came to me, and others with them, which drew my mind away to the little Cumberland churchyard where Anne Catherick now lay buried. I thought of the bygone days when I had met her by Mrs. Fairlie’s grave, and met her for the last time. I thought of her poor helpless hands beating on the tombstone, and her weary, yearning words, murmured to the dead remains of her protectress and her friend. “Oh, if I could die, and be hidden and at rest with you!” Little more than a year had passed since she breathed that wish; and how inscrutably, how awfully, it had been fulfilled. The words she had spoken to Laura by the shores of the lake, the very words had now come true. “Oh, if I could only be buried with your mother! If I could only wake at her side when the angel’s trumpet sounds, and the graves give up their dead at the resurrection!” Through what mortal crime and horror, through what darkest windings of the way down to Death, the lost creature had wandered in God’s leading to the last home that, living, she never hoped to reach! There (I said in my own heart)—there, if ever I have the power to will it, all that is mortal of her shall remain, and share the grave-bed with the loved friend of her childhood, with the dear remembrance of her life. That rest shall be sacred—that companionship always undisturbed!
So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable Gloom. Like a Shadow she first came to me, in the loneliness of the night. Like a Shadow she passes away, in the loneliness of the dead.
Forward now! Forward on the way that winds through other scenes, and leads to brighter times.
THE END OF THE SECOND PART
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
PART THE THIRD. HARTRIGHT’S NARRATIVE
I
Four months passed. April came—the month of Spring; the month of change
.
The course of Time had flowed through the interval since the winter, peacefully and happily in our new home. I had turned my long leisure to good account; had largely increased my sources of employment; and had placed our means of subsistence on surer grounds. Freed from the suspense and the anxiety which had tried her so sorely, and hung over her so long, Marian’s spirits rallied; and her natural energy of character began to assert itself again, with something, if not all, of the freedom and the vigour of former times.
More pliable under change than her sister, Laura showed more plainly the progress made by the healing influences of her new life. The worn and wasted look which had prematurely aged her face, was fast leaving it; and the expression which had been the first of its charms in past days, was the first of its beauties that now returned. My closest observation of her detected but one serious result of the conspiracy which had once threatened her reason and her life. Her memory of events, from the period of her leaving Blackwater Park to the period of our meeting in the burial-ground of Limmeridge Church, was lost beyond all hope of recovery. At the slightest reference to that time, she changed and trembled still; her words became confused; her memory wandered and lost itself as helplessly as ever. Here, and here only, the traces of the past lay deep—too deep to be effaced.
In all else, she was now so far on the way to recovery, that, on her best and brightest days, she sometimes looked and spoke like the Laura of old times. The happy change wrought its natural result in us both. From their long slumber, on her side and on mine, those imperishable memories of our past life in Cumberland now awoke, which were one and all alike, the memories of our love.
Gradually and insensibly, our daily relations towards each other became constrained. The fond words which I had spoken to her so naturally, in the days of her sorrow and her suffering, faltered strangely on my lips. In the time when my dread of losing her was most present to my mind, I had always kissed her when she left me at night and when she met me in the morning. The kiss seemed now to have dropped between us—to be lost out of our lives. Our hands began to tremble again when they met. We hardly ever looked long at one another out of Marian’s presence. The talk often flagged between us when we were alone. When I touched her by accident, I felt my heart beating fast, as it used to beat at Limmeridge House—I saw the lovely answering flush glowing again in her cheeks, as if we were back among the Cumberland Hills, in our past characters of master and pupil once more. She had long intervals of silence and thoughtfulness; and denied she had been thinking, when Marian asked her the question. I surprised myself, one day, neglecting my work, to dream over the little water-colour portrait of her which I had taken in the summer-house where we first met—just as I used to neglect Mr. Fairlie’s drawings, to dream over the same likeness, when it was newly finished in the bygone time. Changed as all the circumstances now were, our position towards each other in the golden days of our first companionship, seemed to be revived with the revival of our love. It was as if Time had drifted us back, on the wreck of our early hopes, to the old familiar shore!
The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White) Page 203