No. 65.] SATURDAY,
JULY 21, 1860 [PRICE 2d.
THE WOMAN IN WHITE.
———•———
PART THE SECOND. HARTRIGHT'S NARRATIVE.
X.
The
Inquest was hurried for certain local reasons which weighed with the coroner
and the town authorities. It was held on the afternoon of the next day. I
was, necessarily, one among the witnesses.
My first proceeding, in the morning, was to go to the
post-office, and inquire for the letter which I expected from Marian. No
change of circumstances, however extraordinary, could affect the one great
anxiety which weighed on my mind while I was away from London. The morning’s
letter, which was my only assurance that no misfortune had happened, was
still the absorbing interest with which my day began.
To my relief, the letter from Marian was at the office
waiting for me. Nothing had happened—they were both as safe and as well as
when I had left them. Laura sent her love, and begged that I would let her
know of my return, a day beforehand. Her sister added, in explanation of
this message, that she had saved “nearly a sovereign” out of her own private
purse, and that she had claimed the privilege of ordering the dinner and
giving the dinner which was to celebrate the day of my return. I read these
little domestic confidences, in the bright morning, with the terrible
recollection of what had happened the evening before, vivid in my memory.
The necessity of sparing Laura any sudden knowledge of the truth was the
first consideration which the letter suggested to me. I wrote at once to
Marian, to tell her what I have told in these pages; presenting the tidings
as gradually and gently as I could, and warning her not to let any such
thing as a newspaper fall in Laura’s way while I was absent. In the case of
any other woman, less courageous and less reliable, I might have hesitated
before I ventured on unreservedly disclosing the whole truth. But I owed it
to Marian to be faithful to my past experience of her, and to trust her as I
trusted myself.
My letter was necessarily long. It occupied me until
the time for going to the Inquest.
The objects of the legal inquiry were necessarily beset
by peculiar complications and difficulties. Besides the investigation into
the manner in which the deceased had met his death, there were serious
questions to be settled relating to the cause of the fire, to the
abstraction of the keys, and to the presence of a stranger in the vestry at
the time when the flames broke out. Even the identification of the dead man
had not yet been accomplished. The helpless condition of the servant had
made the police distrustful of his asserted recognition of his master. They
had sent to Knowlesbury over-night to secure the attendance of witnesses who
were well acquainted with the person of Sir Percival Glyde, and they had
communicated, the first thing in the morning, with Blackwater Park. These
precautions enabled the coroner and jury to settle the question of identity,
and to confirm the correctness of the servant’s assertion; the evidence
offered by competent witnesses, and by the discovery of certain facts, being
strengthened by the dead man’s watch. The crest and the name of Sir Percival
Glyde were engraved inside it.
The next inquiries related to the fire.
The servant and I, and the boy who had heard the light
struck in the vestry, were the first witnesses called. The boy gave his
evidence clearly enough; but the servant’s mind had not yet recovered the
shock inflicted on it—he was plainly incapable of assisting the objects of
the inquiry, and he was desired to stand down. To my own relief, my
examination was not a long one. I had not known the deceased; I had never
seen him; I was not aware of his presence at Old Welmingham; and I had not
been in the vestry at the finding of the body. All I could prove was that I
had stopped at the clerk’s cottage to ask my way; that I had heard from him
of the loss of the keys; that I had accompanied him to the church to render
what help I could; that I had seen the fire; that I had heard some person
unknown, inside the vestry, trying vainly to unlock the door; and that I had
done what I could, from motives of humanity, to save the man. Other
witnesses, who had been acquainted with the deceased, were asked if they
could explain the mystery of his presumed abstraction of the keys, and his
presence in the burning room. But the coroner seemed to take it for granted,
naturally enough, that I, as a total stranger in the neighbourhood, and a
total stranger to Sir Percival Glyde, could not be in a position to offer
any evidence on these two points.
The course that I was myself bound to take, when my
formal examination had closed, seemed clear to me. I did not feel called on
to volunteer any statement of my own private convictions; in the first
place, because my doing so could serve no practical purpose, now that all
proof in support of any surmises of mine was burnt with the burnt register;
in the second place, because I could not have intelligibly stated my
opinion—my unsupported opinion—without disclosing the whole story of the
conspiracy; and producing the same unsatisfactory effect on the minds of the
coroner and the jury which I had already produced on the mind of Mr. Kyrle.
In these pages, however, and after the time that has
now elapsed, no such cautions and restraints as are here described, need
fetter the free expression of my opinion. I will state, before my pen
occupies itself with other events, how my own convictions lead me to account
for the abstraction of the keys, for the outbreak of the fire, and for the
death of the man.
The news of my being unexpectedly free on bail, drove
Sir Percival, as I believe, to his last resources. The attempted attack on
the road was one of those resources; and the suppression of all practical
proof of his crime, by destroying the page of the register on which the
forgery had been committed, was the other, and the surest of the two. If I
could produce no extract from the original book, to compare with the
certified copy at Knowlesbury, I could produce no positive evidence, and
could threaten him with no fatal exposure. All that was necessary to his end
was, that he should get into the vestry unperceived, that he should tear out
the page in the register, and that he should leave the vestry again as
privately as he had entered it.
On this supposition, it is easy to understand why he
waited until nightfall before he made the attempt, and why he took advantage
of the clerk’s absence to possess himself of the keys. Necessity would
oblige him to strike a light to find his way to the right register; and
common caution would suggest his locking the door on the inside, in case of
intrusion on the part of any inquisitive stranger, or on my part, if I
happened to be in the neighbourhood at the time.
I cannot believe that it was any part of his intention
to make the destruction of the register appear to be the result of accident,
by purposely setting the vestry on fire. The bare chance that prompt
assistance might arrive, and that the books might, by the remotest
possibility, be saved, would have been enough, on a moment’s consideration,
to dismiss any idea of this sort from his mind. Remembering the quantity of
combustible objects in the vestry—the straw, the papers, the packing-cases,
the dry wood, the old wormeaten presses—all the probabilities, in my
estimation, point to the fire as the result of an accident with his matches
or his light.
His first impulse, under these circumstances, was
doubtless to try to extinguish the flames—and, failing in that, his second
impulse (ignorant as he was of the state of the lock) had been to attempt to
escape by the door which had given him entrance. When I had called to him,
the flames must have extended across the door leading into the church, on
either side of which the presses extended, and close to which the other
combustible objects were placed. In all probability, the smoke and flame
(confined as they were to the room) had been too much for him, when he tried
to escape by the inner door. He must have dropped in his death-swoon—he must
have sunk in the place where he was found—just as I got on the roof to break
the skylight-window. Even if we had been able, afterwards, to get into the
church, and to burst open the door from that side, the delay must have been
fatal. He would have been past saving, long past saving, by that time. We
should only have given the flames free ingress into the church: the church,
which was now preserved, but which, in that event, would have shared the
fate of the vestry. There is no doubt in my mind—there can be no doubt in
the mind of any one—that he was a dead man before ever we got to the empty
cottage, and worked with might and main to tear down the beam.
This is the nearest approach that any theory of mine
can make towards accounting for a result which was visible matter of fact.
As I have described them, so events passed to us outside. As I have related
it, so his body was found.
The Inquest was adjourned over one day; no explanation
that the eye of the law could recognise having been discovered, thus far, to
account for the mysterious circumstances of the case.
It was arranged that more witnesses should be summoned,
and that the London solicitor of the deceased should be invited to attend. A
medical man was also charged with the duty of reporting on the mental
condition of the servant, which appeared at present to debar him from giving
any evidence of the least importance. He could only declare, in a dazed way,
that he had been ordered, on the night of the fire, to wait in the lane, and
that he knew nothing else, except that the deceased was certainly his
master. My own impression was, that he had been first used (without any
guilty knowledge on his own part) to ascertain the fact of the clerk’s
absence from home on the previous day; and that he had been afterwards
ordered to wait near the church (but out of sight of the vestry) to assist
his master, in the event of my escaping the attack on the road, and of a
collision occurring between Sir Percival and myself. It is necessary to add,
that the man’s own testimony was never obtained to confirm this view. The
medical report of him declared that what little mental faculty he possessed
was seriously shaken; nothing satisfactory was extracted from him at the
adjourned Inquest; and, for aught I know to the contrary, he may never have
recovered to this day.
I returned to the hotel at Welmingham, so jaded in body
and mind, so weakened and depressed by all that I had gone through, as to be
quite unfit to endure the local gossip about the Inquest, and to answer the
trivial questions that the talkers addressed to me in the coffee-room. I
withdrew from my scanty dinner to my cheap garret-chamber, to secure myself
a little quiet, and to think, undisturbed, of Laura and Marian.
If I had been a richer man, I would have gone back to
London, and would have comforted myself with a sight of the two dear faces
again, that night. But, I was bound to appear, if called on, at the
adjourned Inquest, and doubly bound to answer my bail before the magistrate
at Knowlesbury. Our slender resources had suffered already; and the doubtful
future—more doubtful than ever now—made me dread decreasing our means, by
allowing myself an indulgence, even at the small cost of a double railway
journey, in the carriages of the second class.
The next day—the day immediately following the
Inquest—was left at my own disposal. I began the morning by again applying
at the post-office for my regular report from Marian. It was waiting for me,
as before, and it was written, throughout, in good spirits. I read the
letter thankfully; and then set forth, with my mind at ease for the day, to
walk to Old Welmingham, and to view the scene of the fire by the morning
light.
Truly has the great poet said, “There is nothing
serious in mortality.” Through all the ways of our unintelligible world, the
trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together. The irony of
circumstances holds no mortal catastrophe in respect. When I reached the
church, the trampled condition of the burial-ground was the only serious
trace left of the fire and the death. A rough hoarding of boards had been
knocked up before the vestry doorway. Rude caricatures were scrawled on it
already; and the village children were fighting and shouting for the
possession of the best peep-hole to see through. On the spot where I had
heard the cry for help from the burning room, on the spot where the
panic-stricken servant had dropped on his knees, a fussy flock of poultry
was now scrambling for the first choice of worms after the rain—and on the
ground at my feet, where the door and its dreadful burden had been laid, a
workman’s dinner was waiting for him, tied up in a yellow basin, and his
faithful cur in charge was yelping at me for coming near the food. The old
clerk, looking idly at the slow commencement of the repairs, had only one
interest that he could talk about, now—the interest of escaping all blame,
for his own part, on account of the accident that had happened. One of the
village women, whose white, wild face I remembered, the picture of terror,
when we pulled down the beam, was giggling with another woman, the picture
of inanity, over an old washing-tub. Nothing serious in mortality! Solomon
in all his glory, was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking
in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace.
As I left the place, my thoughts turned, not for the
first time, to the complete overthrow that all present hope of establishing
Laura’s identity had now suffered through Sir Percival’s death. If he had
lived—well! if he had, would that total change of circumstances really have
altered the result? Could I have made my discovery a marketable commodity,
even for Laura’s sake, after I had found out that robbery of the rights of
others was the essence of Sir Percival’s crime? Could I have offered the
price of my silence for
his confession of the
conspiracy, when the effect of that silence must have been to keep the right
heir from the estates, and the right owner from the name? Impossible! If Sir
Percival had lived, the discovery, from which (in my ignorance of the true
nature of the Secret) I had hoped so much, could not have been mine to
suppress, or to make public, as I thought best, for the vindication of
Laura’s rights. In common honesty and common honour, I must have gone at
once to the stranger whose birthright had been usurped—I must have renounced
the victory at the moment when it was mine, by placing my discovery
unreservedly in that stranger’s hands—and I must have faced afresh all the
difficulties which stood between me and the one object of my life, exactly
as I was resolved, in my heart of hearts, to face them now!
I returned to Welmingham with my mind composed; feeling
more sure of myself and my resolution than I had felt yet.
On my way to the hotel, I passed the end of the square
in which Mrs. Catherick lived. Should I go back to the house, and make
another attempt to see her? No. That news of Sir Percival’s death, which was
the last news she ever expected to hear, must have reached her, hours since.
All the proceedings at the Inquest had been reported in the local paper that
morning: there was nothing I could tell her which she did not know already.
My interest in making her speak had slackened. I remembered the furtive
hatred in her face, when she said, “There is no news of Sir Percival that I
don’t expect—except the news of his death.” I remembered the stealthy
interest in her eyes when they settled on me at parting, after she had
spoken those words. Some instinct, deep in my heart, which I felt to be a
true one, made the prospect of again entering her presence repulsive to me—I
turned away from the square, and went straight back to the hotel.
Some hours later, while I was resting in the
coffee-room, a letter was placed in my hands by the waiter. It was addressed
to me, by name; and I found, on inquiry, that it had been left at the bar by
a woman, just as it was near dusk, and just before the gas was lighted. She
had said nothing; and she had gone away again before there was time to speak
to her, or even to notice who she was.
I opened the letter. It was neither dated, nor signed;
and the handwriting was palpably disguised. Before I had read the first
sentence, however, I knew who my correspondent was. Mrs. Catherick.
The letter ran as follows—I copy it exactly, word for
word:
“Sir, you have not come back, as you said you would. No
matter; I know the news, and I write to tell you so. Did you see anything
particular in my face when you left me? I was wondering whether the day of
his downfal had come at last, and whether you were the chosen instrument for
working it. You were—and you have
worked it. You were weak enough, as I have heard, to try and save his life.
If you had succeeded, I should have looked upon you as my enemy. Now you
have failed, I hold you as my friend. Your inquiries frightened him into the
vestry by night; your inquiries, without your privity, and against your
will, have served the hatred and wreaked the vengeance of three-and-twenty
years. Thank you, sir, in spite of yourself.
“I owe something to the man who has done this. How can
I pay my debt? If I was a young woman still, I might say, ‘Come! put your
arm round my waist, and kiss me, if you like.’ I should have been fond
enough of you, even to go that length; and you would have accepted my
invitation—you would, sir, twenty years ago! But I am an old woman, now.
Well! I can satisfy your curiosity, and pay my debt in that way. You
had
a great curiosity to know certain
private affairs of mine, when you came to see me—private affairs which all
your sharpness could not look into without my help—private affairs which you
have not discovered, even now. You
shall discover them; your
curiosity shall be satisfied. I will take any trouble to please you, my
estimable young friend!
“You were a little boy, I suppose, in the year
twenty-seven? I was a handsome young woman, at that time, living at Old
Welmingham. I had a contemptible fool for a husband. I had also the honour
of being acquainted (never mind how) with a certain gentleman (never mind
whom). I shall not call him by his name. Why should I? It was not his own.
He never had a name: you know that, by this time, as well as I do.
“It will be more to the purpose to tell you how he
worked himself into my good graces. I was born with the tastes of a lady;
and he gratified them. In other words, he admired me, and he made me
presents. No woman can resist admiration and presents—especially presents,
provided they happen to be just the things she wants. He was sharp enough to
know that—most men are. Naturally, he wanted something, in return—all men
do. And what do you think was the something? The merest trifle. Nothing but
the key of the vestry, and the key of the press inside it, when my husband’s
back was turned. Of course he lied when I asked him why he wished me to get
him the keys, in that private way. He might have saved himself the trouble—I
didn’t believe him. But I liked my presents, and I wanted more. So I got him
the keys, without my husband’s knowledge. I watched him, without his own
knowledge. Once, twice, four times, I watched him—and the fourth time I
found him out.
“I was never over-scrupulous where other people’s
affairs were concerned; and I was not over-scrupulous about his adding one
to the marriages in the register, on his own account. Of course, I knew it
was wrong; but it did no harm to me—which
was one good reason for not making a fuss about it. And I had not got a gold
watch and chain—which was another, still better. And he had promised me one
from London, only the day before—which was a third, best of all. If I had
known what the law considered the crime to be, and how the law punished it,
I should have taken proper care of myself, and have exposed him then and
there. But I knew nothing—and I longed for the gold watch. All the
conditions I insisted on were that he should tell me everything. I was as
curious about his affairs then, as you are about mine now. He granted my
conditions—why, you will see presently.
“This, put in short, is what I heard from him. He did
not willingly tell me all that I tell you here. I drew some of it from him
by persuasion, some of it by questions. I was determined to have all the
truth—and I believe I got it.
“He knew no more than any one else of what the state of
things really was between his father and mother, till after his mother’s
death. Then, his father confessed it, and promised to do what he could for
his son. He died having done nothing—not having even made a will. The son
(who can blame him?) wisely provided for himself. He came to England at
once, and took possession of the property. There was no one to suspect him,
and no one to say him nay. His father and mother had always lived as man and
wife—none of the few people who were acquainted with them ever supposed them
to be anything else. The right person to claim the property (if the truth
had been known) was a distant relation, who had no idea of ever getting it,
and who was away at sea when his father died. He had no difficulty, so
far—he took possession, as a matter of course. But he could not borrow money
on the property as a matter of course. There were two things wanted of him,
before he could do this. One was a certificate of his birth, and the other
was a certificate of his parents’ marriage. The certificate of his birth was
easily got—he was born abroad, and the certificate was there in due form.
The other matter was a difficulty—and that difficulty brought him to Old
Welmingham.
“But for one consideration, he might have gone to
Knowlesbury instead. His mother had been living there just before she met
with his father—living under her maiden name; the truth being that she was
really a married woman, married in Ireland, where her husband had ill-used
her and had afterwards gone off with some other person. I give you this fact
on good authority: Sir Felix mentioned it to his son, as the reason why he
had not married. You may wonder why the son, knowing that his parents had
met each other at Knowlesbury, did not play his first tricks with the
register of that church, where it might have been fairly presumed his father
and mother were married. The reason was, that the clergyman who did duty at
Knowlesbury church, in the year eighteen hundred and three (when, according
to his birth-certificate, his father and mother
ought
to have been married), was alive
still, when he took possession of the property in the New Year of eighteen
hundred and twenty-seven. This awkward circumstance forced him to extend his
inquiries to our neighbourhood. There, no such danger existed: the former
clergyman at our church having been dead for some years.
“Old Welmingham suited his purpose, as well as
Knowlesbury. His father had removed his mother from Knowlesbury, and had
lived with her at a cottage on the river, a little distance from our
village. People who had known his solitary ways when he was single, did not
wonder at his solitary ways when he was married. If he had been anything but
a hideous, crooked creature to look at, his retired life with the lady might
have raised some suspicions; but, as things were, his hiding his ugliness
and his deformity in the strictest privacy surprised nobody. He lived in our
neighbourhood till he came in possession of the Park. After three or four
and twenty years had passed, who was to say (the clergyman being dead) that
his marriage had not been as private as the rest of his life, and that it
had not taken place at Old Welmingham church?
“So, as I told you, the son found our neighbourhood the
surest place he could choose, to set things right secretly in his own
interests. It may surprise you to hear that what he really did to the
marriage-register was done on the spur of the moment—done on second
thoughts.
“His first notion was only to tear the leaf out (in the
right year and month), to destroy it privately, to go back to London, and to
tell the lawyers to get him the necessary certificate of his father’s
marriage, innocently referring them of course to the date on the leaf that
was gone. Nobody could say his father and mother had
not
been married, after that—and whether,
under the circumstances, they would stretch a point or not, about lending
him the money (he thought they would), he had his answer ready, at all
events, if a question was ever raised about his right to the name and the
estate.
“But when he came to look privately at the register for
himself, he found at the bottom of one of the pages for the year eighteen
hundred and three, a blank space left, seemingly through there being no room
to make a long entry there, which was made instead at the top of the next
page. The sight of this chance altered all his plans. It was an opportunity
he had never hoped for, or thought of—and he took it, you know how. The
blank space, to have exactly tallied with his birth-certificate, ought to
have occurred in the February part of the register. It occurred in the April
part instead. However, in this case, if suspicious questions were asked, the
answer was not hard to find. He had only to describe himself as a seven
months’ child.
“I was fool enough, when he told me his story, to feel
some interest and some pity for him—which was just what he calculated on, as
you will see. I thought him hardly used. It was not his fault that his
father and mother were not married; and it was not his father’s and mother’s
fault, either. A more scrupulous woman than I was—a woman who had not set
her heart on a gold watch and chain—would have found some excuses for him.
At all events, I held my tongue, and helped to screen what he was about. He
was some time getting the ink the right colour (mixing it over and over
again in pots and bottles of mine), and some time, afterwards, in practising
the handwriting. He succeeded in the end—and made an honest woman of his
mother, after she was in her grave. So far, I don’t deny that he behaved
honourably enough to me. He gave me my watch and chain; both were of
superior workmanship, and very expensive. I have got them still—the watch
goes beautifully.
“You said, the other day, that Mrs. Clements had told
you everything she knew. In that case, there is no need for me to write
about the trumpery scandal by which I was the sufferer—the innocent
sufferer, I positively assert. You must know as well as I do what the notion
was which my husband took into his head, when he found me and my
fine-gentleman acquaintance meeting each other privately, and talking
secrets together. But what you don’t know, is how it ended between that same
gentleman and myself. You shall read, and see how he behaved to me.
“The first words I said to him, when I saw the turn
things had taken, were, ‘Do me justice—clear my character of a stain on it
which you know I don’t deserve. I don’t want you to make a clean breast of
it to my husband—only tell him, on your word of honour as a gentleman, that
he is wrong, and that I am not to blame in the way he thinks I am. Do me
that justice, at least, after all I have done for you.’ He flatly refused,
in so many words. He told me, plainly, that it was his interest to let my
husband and all my neighbours believe the falsehood—because, as long as they
did so, they were quite certain never to suspect the truth. I had a spirit
of my own; and I told him they should know the truth from my lips. His reply
was short, and to the point. If I spoke, I was a lost woman, as certainly as
he was a lost man.
“Yes! it had come to that. He had deceived me about the
risk I ran in helping him. He had practised on my ignorance; he had tempted
me with his gifts; he had interested me with his story—and the result of it
was that he had made me his accomplice. He owned this, coolly; and he ended
by telling me, for the first time, what the frightful punishment really was
for his offence, and for any one who helped him to commit it. In those days,
the Law was not so tender-hearted as I hear it is now. Murderers were not
the only people liable to be hanged; and women convicts were not treated
like ladies in undeserved distress. I confess he frightened me—the mean
impostor! the cowardly blackguard! Do you understand, now, how I hated him?
Do you understand why I am taking all this trouble—thankfully taking it—to
gratify the curiosity of the meritorious young gentleman who hunted him
down?
“Well, to go on. He was hardly fool enough to drive me
to downright desperation. I was not the sort of woman whom it was quite safe
to hunt into a corner—he knew that, and wisely quieted me with proposals for
the future. I deserved some reward (he was kind enough to say) for the
service I had done him, and some compensation (he was so obliging as to add)
for what I had suffered. He was quite willing—generous scoundrel!—to make me
a handsome yearly allowance, payable quarterly, on two conditions. First, I
was to hold my tongue—in my own interests as well as in his. Secondly, I was
not to stir away from Welmingham, without first letting him know, and
waiting till I had obtained his permission. In my own neighbourhood, no
virtuous female friends would tempt me into dangerous gossiping at the
tea-table—in my own neighbourhood, he would always know where to find me. A
hard condition, that second one—but I accepted it. What else was I to do? I
was left helpless, with the prospect of a coming incumbrance in the shape of
a child. What else was I to do? Cast myself on the mercy of my runaway idiot
of a husband who had raised the scandal against me? I would have died first.
Besides, the allowance was
a handsome one. I had a better
income, a better house over my head, better carpets on my floors, than half
the women who turned up the whites of their eyes at the sight of me. The
dress of Virtue, in our parts, was cotton print. I had silk.
“So, I accepted the conditions he offered me, and made
the best of them, and fought my battle with my respectable neighbours on
their own ground, and won it in course of time—as you saw yourself. How I
kept his Secret (and mine) through all the years that have passed from that
time to this; and whether my late daughter, Anne, ever really crept into my
confidence, and got the keeping of the Secret too—are questions, I dare say,
to which you are curious to find an answer. Well! my gratitude refuses you
nothing. I will turn to a fresh page, and give you the answer, presently.”
All The Year Round, 21 July 1860, Vol.III, No.65, pp.337-342
Weekly Part 35.
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