The Woman in White (65 page)

Lady Glyde's recollection of the events which followed her
departure from Blackwater Park began with her arrival at the
London terminus of the South Western Railway. She had omitted to
make a memorandum beforehand of the day on which she took the
journey. All hope of fixing that important date by any evidence
of hers, or of Mrs. Michelson's, must be given up for lost.

On the arrival of the train at the platform Lady Glyde found Count
Fosco waiting for her. He was at the carriage door as soon as the
porter could open it. The train was unusually crowded, and there
was great confusion in getting the luggage. Some person whom
Count Fosco brought with him procured the luggage which belonged
to Lady Glyde. It was marked with her name. She drove away alone
with the Count in a vehicle which she did not particularly notice
at the time.

Her first question, on leaving the terminus, referred to Miss
Halcombe. The Count informed her that Miss Halcombe had not yet
gone to Cumberland, after-consideration having caused him to doubt
the prudence of her taking so long a journey without some days'
previous rest.

Lady Glyde next inquired whether her sister was then staying in
the Count's house. Her recollection of the answer was confused,
her only distinct impression in relation to it being that the
Count declared he was then taking her to see Miss Halcombe. Lady
Glyde's experience of London was so limited that she could not
tell, at the time, through what streets they were driving. But
they never left the streets, and they never passed any gardens or
trees. When the carriage stopped, it stopped in a small street
behind a square—a square in which there were shops, and public
buildings, and many people. From these recollections (of which
Lady Glyde was certain) it seems quite clear that Count Fosco did
not take her to his own residence in the suburb of St. John's
Wood.

They entered the house, and went upstairs to a back room, either
on the first or second floor. The luggage was carefully brought
in. A female servant opened the door, and a man with a dark
beard, apparently a foreigner, met them in the hall, and with
great politeness showed them the way upstairs. In answer to Lady
Glyde's inquiries, the Count assured her that Miss Halcombe was in
the house, and that she should be immediately informed of her
sister's arrival. He and the foreigner then went away and left
her by herself in the room. It was poorly furnished as a sitting-
room, and it looked out on the backs of houses.

The place was remarkably quiet—no footsteps went up or down the
stairs—she only heard in the room beneath her a dull, rumbling
sound of men's voices talking. Before she had been long left
alone the Count returned, to explain that Miss Halcombe was then
taking rest, and could not be disturbed for a little while. He
was accompanied into the room by a gentleman (an Englishman), whom
he begged to present as a friend of his.

After this singular introduction—in the course of which no names,
to the best of Lady Glyde's recollection, had been mentioned—she
was left alone with the stranger. He was perfectly civil, but he
startled and confused her by some odd questions about herself, and
by looking at her, while he asked them, in a strange manner.
After remaining a short time he went out, and a minute or two
afterwards a second stranger—also an Englishman—came in. This
person introduced himself as another friend of Count Fosco's, and
he, in his turn, looked at her very oddly, and asked some curious
questions—never, as well as she could remember, addressing her by
name, and going out again, after a little while, like the first
man. By this time she was so frightened about herself, and so
uneasy about her sister, that she had thoughts of venturing
downstairs again, and claiming the protection and assistance of
the only woman she had seen in the house—the servant who answered
the door.

Just as she had risen from her chair, the Count came back into the
room.

The moment he appeared she asked anxiously how long the meeting
between her sister and herself was to be still delayed. At first
he returned an evasive answer, but on being pressed, he
acknowledged, with great apparent reluctance, that Miss Halcombe
was by no means so well as he had hitherto represented her to be.
His tone and manner, in making this reply, so alarmed Lady Glyde,
or rather so painfully increased the uneasiness which she had felt
in the company of the two strangers, that a sudden faintness
overcame her, and she was obliged to ask for a glass of water.
The Count called from the door for water, and for a bottle of
smelling-salts. Both were brought in by the foreign-looking man
with the beard. The water, when Lady Glyde attempted to drink it,
had so strange a taste that it increased her faintness, and she
hastily took the bottle of salts from Count Fosco, and smelt at
it. Her head became giddy on the instant. The Count caught the
bottle as it dropped out of her hand, and the last impression of
which she was conscious was that he held it to her nostrils again.

From this point her recollections were found to be confused,
fragmentary, and difficult to reconcile with any reasonable
probability.

Her own impression was that she recovered her senses later in the
evening, that she then left the house, that she went (as she had
previously arranged to go, at Blackwater Park) to Mrs. Vesey's—
that she drank tea there, and that she passed the night under Mrs.
Vesey's roof. She was totally unable to say how, or when, or in
what company she left the house to which Count Fosco had brought
her. But she persisted in asserting that she had been to Mrs.
Vesey's, and still more extraordinary, that she had been helped to
undress and get to bed by Mrs. Rubelle! She could not remember
what the conversation was at Mrs. Vesey's or whom she saw there
besides that lady, or why Mrs. Rubelle should have been present in
the house to help her.

Her recollection of what happened to her the next morning was
still more vague and unreliable.

She had some dim idea of driving out (at what hour she could not
say) with Count Fosco, and with Mrs. Rubelle again for a female
attendant. But when, and why, she left Mrs. Vesey she could not
tell; neither did she know what direction the carriage drove in,
or where it set her down, or whether the Count and Mrs. Rubelle
did or did not remain with her all the time she was out. At this
point in her sad story there was a total blank. She had no
impressions of the faintest kind to communicate—no idea whether
one day, or more than one day, had passed—until she came to
herself suddenly in a strange place, surrounded by women who were
all unknown to her.

This was the Asylum. Here she first heard herself called by Anne
Catherick's name, and here, as a last remarkable circumstance in
the story of the conspiracy, her own eyes informed her that she
had Anne Catherick's clothes on. The nurse, on the first night in
the Asylum, had shown her the marks on each article of her
underclothing as it was taken off, and had said, not at all
irritably or unkindly, "Look at your own name on your own clothes,
and don't worry us all any more about being Lady Glyde. She's
dead and buried, and you're alive and hearty. Do look at your
clothes now! There it is, in good marking ink, and there you will
find it on all your old things, which we have kept in the house—
Anne Catherick, as plain as print!" And there it was, when Miss
Halcombe examined the linen her sister wore, on the night of their
arrival at Limmeridge House.

These were the only recollections—all of them uncertain, and some
of them contradictory—which could be extracted from Lady Glyde by
careful questioning on the journey to Cumberland. Miss Halcombe
abstained from pressing her with any inquiries relating to events
in the Asylum—her mind being but too evidently unfit to bear the
trial of reverting to them. It was known, by the voluntary
admission of the owner of the mad-house, that she was received
there on the twenty-seventh of July. From that date until the
fifteenth of October (the day of her rescue) she had been under
restraint, her identity with Anne Catherick systematically
asserted, and her sanity, from first to last, practically denied.
Faculties less delicately balanced, constitutions less tenderly
organised, must have suffered under such an ordeal as this. No
man could have gone through it and come out of it unchanged.

Arriving at Limmeridge late on the evening of the fifteenth, Miss
Halcombe wisely resolved not to attempt the assertion of Lady
Glyde's identity until the next day.

The first thing in the morning she went to Mr. Fairlie's room, and
using all possible cautions and preparations beforehand, at last
told him in so many words what had happened. As soon as his first
astonishment and alarm had subsided, he angrily declared that Miss
Halcombe had allowed herself to be duped by Anne Catherick. He
referred her to Count Fosco's letter, and to what she had herself
told him of the personal resemblance between Anne and his deceased
niece, and he positively declined to admit to his presence, even
for one minute only, a madwoman, whom it was an insult and an
outrage to have brought into his house at all.

Miss Halcombe left the room—waited till the first heat of her
indignation had passed away—decided on reflection that Mr.
Fairlie should see his niece in the interests of common humanity
before he closed his doors on her as a stranger—and thereupon,
without a word of previous warning, took Lady Glyde with her to
his room. The servant was posted at the door to prevent their
entrance, but Miss Halcombe insisted on passing him, and made her
way into Mr. Fairlie's presence, leading her sister by the hand.

The scene that followed, though it only lasted for a few minutes,
was too painful to be described—Miss Halcombe herself shrank from
referring to it. Let it be enough to say that Mr. Fairlie
declared, in the most positive terms, that he did not recognise
the woman who had been brought into his room—that he saw nothing
in her face and manner to make him doubt for a moment that his
niece lay buried in Limmeridge churchyard, and that he would call
on the law to protect him if before the day was over she was not
removed from the house.

Taking the very worst view of Mr. Fairlie's selfishness,
indolence, and habitual want of feeling, it was manifestly
impossible to suppose that he was capable of such infamy as
secretly recognising and openly disowning his brother's child.
Miss Halcombe humanely and sensibly allowed all due force to the
influence of prejudice and alarm in preventing him from fairly
exercising his perceptions, and accounted for what had happened in
that way. But when she next put the servants to the test, and
found that they too were, in every case, uncertain, to say the
least of it, whether the lady presented to them was their young
mistress or Anne Catherick, of whose resemblance to her they had
all heard, the sad conclusion was inevitable that the change
produced in Lady Glyde's face and manner by her imprisonment in
the Asylum was far more serious than Miss Halcombe had at first
supposed. The vile deception which had asserted her death defied
exposure even in the house where she was born, and among the
people with whom she had lived.

In a less critical situation the effort need not have been given
up as hopeless even yet.

For example, the maid, Fanny, who happened to be then absent from
Limmeridge, was expected back in two days, and there would be a
chance of gaining her recognition to start with, seeing that she
had been in much more constant communication with her mistress,
and had been much more heartily attached to her than the other
servants. Again, Lady Glyde might have been privately kept in the
house or in the village to wait until her health was a little
recovered and her mind was a little steadied again. When her
memory could be once more trusted to serve her, she would
naturally refer to persons and events in the past with a certainty
and a familiarity which no impostor could simulate, and so the
fact of her identity, which her own appearance had failed to
establish, might subsequently be proved, with time to help her, by
the surer test of her own words.

But the circumstances under which she had regained her freedom
rendered all recourse to such means as these simply impracticable.
The pursuit from the Asylum, diverted to Hampshire for the time
only, would infallibly next take the direction of Cumberland. The
persons appointed to seek the fugitive might arrive at Limmeridge
House at a few hours' notice, and in Mr. Fairlie's present temper
of mind they might count on the immediate exertion of his local
influence and authority to assist them. The commonest
consideration for Lady Glyde's safety forced on Miss Halcombe the
necessity of resigning the struggle to do her justice, and of
removing her at once from the place of all others that was now
most dangerous to her—the neighbourhood of her own home.

An immediate return to London was the first and wisest measure of
security which suggested itself. In the great city all traces of
them might be most speedily and most surely effaced. There were
no preparations to make—no farewell words of kindness to exchange
with any one. On the afternoon of that memorable day of the
sixteenth Miss Halcombe roused her sister to a last exertion of
courage, and without a living soul to wish them well at parting,
the two took their way into the world alone, and turned their
backs for ever on Limmeridge House.

They had passed the hill above the churchyard, when Lady Glyde
insisted on turning back to look her last at her mother's grave.
Miss Halcombe tried to shake her resolution, but, in this one
instance, tried in vain. She was immovable. Her dim eyes lit
with a sudden fire, and flashed through the veil that hung over
them—her wasted fingers strengthened moment by moment round the
friendly arm by which they had held so listlessly till this time.
I believe in my soul that the hand of God was pointing their way
back to them, and that the most innocent and the most afflicted of
His creatures was chosen in that dread moment to see it.