THE VENICE MYSTERIES: The Woman in White, The Haunted Hotel & The Moonstone (3 Books in One Edition). Wilkie Collins Collins
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and then leave them again. Could the third person who was fast approaching us, at such a time and under such circumstances, be Miss Fairlie?
It was a relief — so sadly, so hopelessly was my position towards her changed already — it was absolutely a relief to me, when the person who had disturbed us appeared at the entrance of the summer-house, and proved to be only Miss Fairlie’s maid.
“Could I speak to you for a moment, miss?” said the girl, in rather a flurried, unsettled manner.
Miss Halcombe descended the steps into the shrubbery, and walked aside a few paces with the maid.
Left by myself, my mind reverted, with a sense of forlorn wretchedness which it is not in any words that I can find to describe, to my approaching return to the solitude and the despair of my lonely London home. Thoughts of my kind old mother, and of my sister, who had rejoiced with her so innocently over my prospects in Cumberland — thoughts whose long banishment from my heart it was now my shame and my reproach to realise for the first time — came back to me with the loving mournfulness of old, neglected friends. My mother and my sister, what would they feel when I returned to them from my broken engagement, with the confession of my miserable secret — they who had parted from me so hopefully on that last happy night in the Hampstead cottage!
Anne Catherick again! Even the memory of the farewell evening with my mother and my sister could not return to me now unconnected with that other memory of the moonlight walk back to London. What did it mean? Were that woman and I to meet once more? It was possible, at the least. Did she know that I lived in London? Yes; I had told her so, either before or after that strange question of hers, when she had asked me so distrustfully if I knew many men of the rank of Baronet. Either before or after — my mind was not calm enough, then, to remember which.
A few minutes elapsed before Miss Halcombe dismissed the maid and came back to me. She, too, looked flurried and unsettled now.
“We have arranged all that is necessary, Mr. Hartright,” she said. “We have understood each other, as friends should, and we may go back at once to the house. To tell you the truth, I am uneasy about Laura. She has sent to say she wants to see me directly, and the maid reports that her mistress is apparently very much agitated by a letter that she has received this morning — the same letter, no doubt, which I sent on to the house before we came here.”
We retraced our steps together hastily along the shrubbery path. Although Miss Halcombe had ended all that she thought it necessary to say on her side, I had not ended all that I wanted to say on mine. From the moment when I had discovered that the expected visitor at Limmeridge was Miss Fairlie’s future husband, I had felt a bitter curiosity, a burning envious eagerness, to know who he was. It was possible that a future opportunity of putting the question might not easily offer, so I risked asking it on our way back to the house.
“Now that you are kind enough to tell me we have understood each other, Miss Halcombe,” I said, “now that you are sure of my gratitude for your forbearance and my obedience to your wishes, may I venture to ask who”—(I hesitated — I had forced myself to think of him, but it was harder still to speak of him, as her promised husband)—“who the gentleman engaged to Miss Fairlie is?”
Her mind was evidently occupied with the message she had received from her sister. She answered in a hasty, absent way —
“A gentleman of large property in Hampshire.”
Hampshire! Anne Catherick’s native place. Again, and yet again, the woman in white. There WAS a fatality in it.
“And his name?” I said, as quietly and indifferently as I could.
“Sir Percival Glyde.”
SIR— Sir Percival! Anne Catherick’s question — that suspicious question about the men of the rank of Baronet whom I might happen to know — had hardly been dismissed from my mind by Miss Halcombe’s return to me in the summer-house, before it was recalled again by her own answer. I stopped suddenly, and looked at her.
“Sir Percival Glyde,” she repeated, imagining that I had not heard her former reply.
“Knight, or Baronet?” I asked, with an agitation that I could hide no longer.
She paused for a moment, and then answered, rather coldly —
“Baronet, of course.”
xi
Not a word more was said, on either side, as we walked back to the house. Miss Halcombe hastened immediately to her sister’s room, and I withdrew to my studio to set in order all of Mr. Fairlie’s drawings that I had not yet mounted and restored before I resigned them to the care of other hands. Thoughts that I had hitherto restrained, thoughts that made my position harder than ever to endure, crowded on me now that I was alone.
She was engaged to be married, and her future husband was Sir Percival Glyde. A man of the rank of Baronet, and the owner of property in Hampshire.
There were hundreds of baronets in England, and dozens of landowners in Hampshire. Judging by the ordinary rules of evidence, I had not the shadow of a reason, thus far, for connecting Sir Percival Glyde with the suspicious words of inquiry that had been spoken to me by the woman in white. And yet, I did connect him with them. Was it because he had now become associated in my mind with Miss Fairlie, Miss Fairlie being, in her turn, associated with Anne Catherick, since the night when I had discovered the ominous likeness between them? Had the events of the morning so unnerved me already that I was at the mercy of any delusion which common chances and common coincidences might suggest to my imagination? Impossible to say. I could only feel that what had passed between Miss Halcombe and myself, on our way from the summer-house, had affected me very strangely. The foreboding of some undiscoverable danger lying hid from us all in the darkness of the future was strong on me. The doubt whether I was not linked already to a chain of events which even my approaching departure from Cumberland would be powerless to snap asunder — the doubt whether we any of us saw the end as the end would really be — gathered more and more darkly over my mind. Poignant as it was, the sense of suffering caused by the miserable end of my brief, presumptuous love seemed to be blunted and deadened by the still stronger sense of something obscurely impending, something invisibly threatening, that Time was holding over our heads.
I had been engaged with the drawings little more than half an hour, when there was a knock at the door. It opened, on my answering; and, to my surprise, Miss Halcombe entered the room.
Her manner was angry and agitated. She caught up a chair for herself before I could give her one, and sat down in it, close at my side.
“Mr. Hartright,” she said, “I had hoped that all painful subjects of conversation were exhausted between us, for to-day at least. But it is not to be so. There is some underhand villainy at work to frighten my sister about her approaching marriage. You saw me send the gardener on to the house, with a letter addressed, in a strange handwriting, to Miss Fairlie?”
“Certainly.”
“The letter is an anonymous letter — a vile attempt to injure Sir Percival Glyde in my sister’s estimation. It has so agitated and alarmed her that I have had the greatest possible difficulty in composing her spirits sufficiently to allow me to leave her room and come here. I know this is a family matter on which I ought not to consult you, and in which you can feel no concern or interest ——”
“I beg your pardon, Miss Halcombe. I feel the strongest possible concern and interest in anything that affects Miss Fairlie’s happiness or yours.”
“I am glad to hear you say so. You are the only person in the house, or out of it, who can advise me. Mr. Fairlie, in his state of health and with his horror of difficulties and mysteries of all kinds, is not to be thought of. The clergyman is a good, weak man, who knows nothing out of the routine of his duties; and our neighbours are just the sort of comfortable, jog-trot acquaintances whom one cannot disturb