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 acquaintance whom one cannot disturb in times of trouble and danger. What I want to know is this: ought I at once to take such steps as I can to discover the writer of the letter? or ought I to wait, and apply to Mr. Fairlie's legal adviser to-morrow? It is a question perhaps a very important one of gaining or losing a day. Tell me what you think, Mr. Hartright. If necessity had not already obliged me to take you into my confidence under very delicate circumstances, even my helpless situation would, perhaps, be no excuse for me. But as things are I cannot surely be wrong, after all that has passed between us, in forgetting that you are a friend of only three months' standing.'
She gave me the letter. It began abruptly, without any preliminary form of address, as follows: 'Do you believe in dreams? I hope, for your own sake, that you do. See what Scripture says about dreams and their fulfilment (Genesis xl. 8, xli. 25; Daniel iv. 1825), and take the warning I send you before it is too late.
'Last night I dreamed about you, Miss Fairlie. I dreamed that I was standing inside the communion rails of a church I on one side of the altar-table, and the clergyman, with his surplice and his prayer-book, on the other.
'After a time there walked towards us, down the aisle of the church, a man and a woman, coming to be married. You were the woman. You looked so pretty and innocent in your beautiful white silk dress, and your long white lace veil, that my heart felt for you, and the tears came into my eyes.
'They were tears of pity, young lady, that heaven blesses; and instead of falling from my eyes like the everyday tears that we all of us shed, they turned into two rays of light which slanted nearer and nearer to the man standing at the altar with you, till they touched his breast. The two rays sprang in arches like two rainbows between me and him. I looked along them, and I saw down into his inmost heart.
'The outside of the man you were marrying was fair enough to see. He was neither tall nor short he was a little below the middle size. A light, active, high-spirited man about five-and-forty years old, to look at. He had a pale face, and was bald over the forehead, but had dark hair on the rest of his head. His beard was shaven on his chin, but was let to grow, of a fine rich brown, on his cheeks and his upper lip. His eyes were brown too, and very bright; his nose straight and handsome, and delicate enough to have done for a woman's. His hands the same. He was troubled from time to time with a dry hacking cough, and when he put up his white right hand to his mouth, he showed the red scar of an old wound across the back of it. Have I dreamt of the right man? You know best, Miss Fairlie, and you can say if I was deceived or not. Read next, what I saw beneath the outside I entreat you, read, and profit.
'I looked along the two rays of light, and I saw down into his inmost heart. It was black as night, and on it were written, in the red flaming letters which are the handwriting of the fallen angel, "Without pity and without remorse. He has strewn with misery the paths of others, and he will live to strew with misery the path of this woman by his side." I read that, and then the rays of light shifted and pointed over his shoulder; and there, behind him, stood a fiend laughing. And the rays of light shifted once more, and pointed over your shoulder; and there, behind you, stood an angel weeping. And the rays of light shifted for the third time, and pointed straight between you and that man. They widened and widened, thrusting you both asunder, one from the other. And the clergyman looked for the marriage-service in vain: it was gone out of the book, and he shut up the leaves, and put it from him in despair. And I woke with my eyes full of tears and my heart beating for I believe in dreams.
'Believe too, Miss Fairlie I beg of you, for your own sake, believe as I do. Joseph and Daniel, and others in Scripture, believed in dreams. Inquire into the past life of that man with the scar on his hand, before you say the words that make you his miserable wife. I don't give you this warning on my account, but on yours. I have an interest in your well-being that will live as long as I draw breath. Your mother's daughter has a tender place in my heart for your mother was my first, my best, my only friend.'
There the extraordinary letter ended, without signature of any sort.
The handwriting afforded no prospect of a clue. It was traced on ruled lines, in the cramped, conventional, copy-book character technically termed 'small hand.' It was feeble and faint, and defaced by blots, but had otherwise nothing to distinguish it.
'That is not an illiterate letter,' said Miss Halcombe, 'and at the same time, it is surely too incoherent to be the letter of an educated person in the higher ranks of life. The reference to the bridal dress and veil, and other little expressions, seem to point to it as the production of some woman. What do you think, Mr. Hartright?'
'I think so too. It seems to me to be not only the letter of a woman, but of a woman whose mind must be -'
'Deranged?' suggested Miss Halcombe. 'It struck me in that light too.'
I did not answer. While I was speaking, my eyes rested on the last sentence of the letter: 'Your mother's daughter has a tender place in my heart for your mother was my first, my best, my only friend.' Those words and the doubt which had just escaped me as to the sanity of the writer of the letter, acting together on my mind, suggested an idea, which I was literally afraid to express openly, or even to encourage secretly. I began to doubt whether my own faculties were not in danger of losing their balance. It seemed almost like a monomania to be tracing back everything strange that happened, everything unexpected that was said, always to the same hidden source and the same sinister influence. I resolved, this time, in defence of my own courage and my own sense, to come to no decision that plain fact did not warrant, and to turn my back resolutely on everything that tempted me in the shape of surmise.
'If we have any chance of tracing the person who has written this,' I said, returning the letter to Miss Halcombe, 'there can be no harm in seizing our opportunity the moment it offers. I think we ought to speak to the gardener again about the elderly woman who gave him the letter, and then to continue our inquiries in the village. But first let me ask a question. You mentioned just now the alternative of consulting Mr. Fairlie's legal adviser to-morrow. Is there no possibility of communicating with him earlier? Why not to-day?'
'I can only explain,' replied Miss Halcombe, 'by entering into certain particulars, connected with my sister's marriage-engagement, which I did not think it necessary or desirable to mention to you this morning. One of Sir Percival Glyde's objects in coming here on Monday, is to fix the period of his marriage, which has hitherto been left quite unsettled. He is anxious that the event should take place before the end of the year.'
'Does Miss Fairlie know of that wish?' I asked eagerly.
'She has no suspicion of it, and after what has happened, I shall not take the responsibility upon myself of enlightening her. Sir Percival has only mentioned his views to Mr. Fairlie, who has told me himself that he is ready and anxious, as Laura's guardian, to forward them. He has written to London, to the family solicitor, Mr. Gilmore. Mr. Gilmore happens to be away in Glasgow on business, and he has replied by proposing to stop at Limmeridge House on his way back to town. He will arrive to-morrow, and will stay with us a few days, so as to allow Sir Percival time to plead his own cause. If he succeeds, Mr. Gilmore will then return to London, taking with him his instructions for my sister's marriage-settlement. You understand now, Mr. Hartright, why I speak of waiting to take legal advice until to-morrow? Mr. Gilmore is the old and tried friend of two generations of Fairlies, and we can trust him, as we could trust no one else.'
The marriage-settlement! The mere hearing of those two words stung me with a jealous despair that was poison to my higher and better instincts. I began to think it is hard to confess this, but I must suppress nothing from beginning to end of the terrible story that I now stand committed to reveal I began to think, with a hateful eagerness of hope, of the vague charges against Sir Percival Glyde which the anonymous letter contained. What if those wild accusations rested on a foundation of truth? What if their truth could be proved before the fatal words of consent were spoken, and the marriage-settlement was drawn? I have tried to think since, that the feeling which then animated me began and ended in pure devotion to Miss Fairlie's interests, but I have never succeeded in deceiving myself into believing it, and I must not now attempt to deceive others. The feeling began and ended in reckless, vindictive, hopeless hatred of the man who was to marry her.
'If we are to find out anything,' I said, speaking under the new influence which was now directing me, 'we had better not let another minute slip by us unemployed. I can only suggest, once more, the propriety of questioning the gardener a second time, and of inquiring in the village immediately afterwards.'
'I think I may be of help to you in both cases,' said Miss Halcombe, rising. 'Let us go, Mr. Hartright, at once, and do the best we can together.'
I had the door in my hand to open it for her but I stopped, on a sudden, to ask an important question before we set forth.
'One of the paragraphs of the anonymous letter,' I said, 'contains some sentences of minute personal description. Sir Percival Glyde's name is not mentioned, I know but does that description at all resemble him?'
'Accurately even in stating his age to be forty-five -'
Forty-five; and she was not yet twenty-one! Men of his age married wives of her age every day and experience had shown those marriages to be often the happiest ones. I knew that and yet even the mention of his age, when I contrasted it with hers, added to my blind hatred and distrust of him.
'Accurately,' Miss Halcombe continued, 'even to the scar on his right hand, which is the scar of a wound that he received years since when he was travelling in Italy. There can be no doubt that every peculiarity of his personal appearance is thoroughly well known to the writer of the letter.'
'Even a cough that he is troubled with is mentioned, if I remember right?'
'Yes, and mentioned correctly. He treats it lightly himself, though it sometimes makes his friends anxious about him.'
'I suppose no whispers have ever been heard against his character?'
'Mr. Hartright! I hope you are not unjust enough to let that infamous letter influence you?'
I felt the blood rush into my cheeks, for I knew that it had influenced me.
'I hope not,' I answered confusedly. 'Perhaps I had no right to ask the question.'
'I am not sorry you asked it,' she said, 'for it enables me to do justice to Sir Percival's reputation. Not a whisper, Mr. Hartright, has ever reached me, or my family, against him. He has fought successfully two contested elections, and has come out of the ordeal unscathed. A man who can do that, in England, is a man whose character is established.'
I opened the door for her in silence, and followed her out. She had not convinced me. If the recording angel had come down from heaven to confirm her, and had opened his book to my mortal eyes, the recording angel would not have convinced me.
We found the gardener at work as usual. No amount of questioning could extract a single answer of any importance from the lad's impenetrable stupidity. The woman who had given him the letter was an elderly woman; she had not spoken a word to him, and she had gone away towards the south in a great hurry. That was all the gardener could tell us.
The village lay southward of the house. So to the village we went next.
XII.
OUR inquiries at Limmeridge were patiently pursued in all directions, and among all sorts and conditions of people. But nothing came of them. Three of the villagers did certainly assure us that they had seen the woman, but as they were quite unable to describe her, and quite incapable of agreeing about the exact direction in which she was proceeding when they last saw her, these three bright exceptions to the general rule of total ignorance afforded no more real assistance to us than the mass of their unhelpful and unobservant neighbours.
The course of our useless investigations brought us, in time, to the end of the village at which the schools established by Mrs. Fairlie were situated. As we passed the side of the building appropriated to the use of the boys, I suggested the propriety of making a last inquiry of the schoolmaster, whom we might presume to be, in virtue of his office, the most intelligent man in the place.
'I am afraid the schoolmaster must have been occupied with his scholars,' said Miss Halcombe, 'just at the time when the woman passed through the village and returned again. However, we can but try.'
We entered the playground enclosure, and walked by the schoolroom window to get round to the door, which was situated at the back of the building. I stopped for a moment at the window and looked in.
The schoolmaster was sitting at his high desk, with his back to me, apparently haranguing the pupils, who were all gathered together in front of him, with one exception. The one exception was a sturdy white-headed boy, standing apart from all the rest on a stool in a corner a forlorn little Crusoe, isolated in his own desert island of solitary penal disgrace.
The door, when we got round to it, was ajar, and the schoolmaster's voice reached us plainly, as we both stopped for a minute under the porch.
'Now, boys,' said the voice, 'mind what I tell you. If I hear another word spoken about ghosts in this school, it will be the worse for all of you. There are no such things as ghosts, and therefore any boy who believes in ghosts believes in what can't possibly be; and a boy who belongs to Limmeridge School, and believes in what can't possibly be, sets up his back against reason and discipline, and must be punished accordingly. You all see Jacob Postlethwaite standing up on the stool there in disgrace. He has been punished, not because he said he saw a ghost last night, but because he is too impudent and too obstinate to listen to reason, and because he persists in saying he saw the ghost after I have told him that no such thing can possibly be. If nothing else will do, I mean to cane the ghost out of Jacob Postlethwaite, and if the thing spreads among any of the rest of you, I mean to go a step farther, and cane the ghost out of the whole school.'
'We seem to have chosen an awkward moment for our visit,' said Miss Halcombe, pushing open the door at the end of the schoolmaster's address, and leading the way in.
Our appearance produced a strong sensation among the boys. They appeared to think that we had arrived for the express purpose of seeing Jacob Postlethwaite caned.
'Go home all of you to dinner,' said the schoolmaster, 'except Jacob. Jacob must stop where he is; and the ghost may bring him his dinner, if the ghost pleases.'
Jacob's fortitude deserted him at the double disappearance of his schoolfellows and his prospect of dinner. He took his hands out of his pockets, looked hard at his knuckles, raised them with great deliberation to his eyes, and when they got there, ground them round and round slowly, accompanying the action by short spasms of sniffing, which followed each other at regular intervals the nasal minute guns of juvenile distress.
'We came here to ask you a question, Mr. Dempster,' said Miss Halcombe, addressing the schoolmaster; 'and we little expected to find you occupied in exorcising a ghost. What does it all mean? What has really happened?'
'That wicked boy has been frightening the whole school, Miss Halcombe, by declaring that he saw a ghost yesterday evening,' answered the master; 'and he still persists in his absurd story, in spite of all that I can say to him.'
'Most extraordinary,' said Miss Halcombe. 'I should not have thought it possible that any of the boys had imagination enough to see a ghost. This is a new accession indeed to the hard labour of forming the youthful mind at Limmeridge, and I heartily wish you well through it, Mr. Dempster. In the meantime, let me explain why you see me here, and what it is I want.'
She then put the same question to the schoolmaster which we had asked already of almost every one else in the village. It was met by the same discouraging answer. Mr. Dempster had not set eyes on the stranger of whom we were in search.
'We may as well return to the house, Mr. Hartright,' said Miss Halcombe; 'the information we want is evidently not to be found.'
She had bowed to Mr. Dempster, and was about to leave the schoolroom, when the forlorn position of Jacob Postlethwaite, piteously sniffing on the stool of penitence, attracted her attention as she passed him, and made her stop good-humouredly to speak a word to the little prisoner before she opened the door.
'You foolish boy,' she said, 'why don't you beg Mr. Dempster's pardon, and hold your tongue about the ghost?'
'Eh! but I saw t' ghaist,' persisted Jacob Postlethwaite, with a stare of terror and a burst of tears.
'Stuff and nonsense! You saw nothing of the kind. Ghost indeed! What ghost -'
'I beg your pardon. Miss Halcombe,' interposed the schoolmaster a little uneasily 'but I think you had better not question the boy. The obstinate folly of his story is beyond all belief; and you might lead him into ignorantly -'
'Ignorantly what?' inquired Miss Halcombe sharply.
'Ignorantly shocking your feelings,' said Mr. Dempster, looking very much discomposed.
'Upon my word, Mr. Dempster, you pay my feelings a great compliment in thinking them weak enough to be shocked by such an urchin as that!' She turned with an air of satirical defiance to little Jacob, and began to question him directly. 'Come!' she said, 'I mean to know all about this. You naughty boy, when did you see the ghost?'
'Yestere'en, at the gloaming,' replied Jacob.
'Oh! you saw it yesterday evening, in the twilight? And what was it like?'
'Arl in white as a ghaist should be,' answered the ghost-seer, with a confidence beyond his years.
'And where was it?'
'Away yander, in t' kirkyard where a ghaist ought to be.'
'As a "ghaist" should be where a "ghaist" ought to be why, you little fool, you talk as if the manners and customs of ghosts had been familiar to you from your infancy! You have got your story at your fingers' ends, at any rate. I suppose I shall hear next that you can actually tell me whose ghost it was?'
'Eh! but I just can,' replied Jacob, nodding his head with an air of gloomy triumph.
Mr. Dempster had already tried several times to speak while Miss Halcombe was examining his pupil, and he now interposed resolutely enough to make himself heard.
'Excuse me, Miss Halcombe,' he said, 'if I venture to say that you are only encouraging the boy by asking him these questions.'
'I will merely ask one more, Mr. Dempster, and then I shall be quite satisfied. Well,' she continued, turning to the boy, 'and whose ghost was it?'
'T' ghaist of Mistress Fairlie,' answered Jacob in a whisper.
The effect which this extraordinary reply produced on Miss Halcombe fully justified the anxiety which the schoolmaster had shown to prevent her from hearing it. Her face crimsoned with indignation she turned upon little Jacob with an angry suddenness which terrified him into a fresh burst of tears opened her lips to speak to him then controlled herself, and addressed the master instead of the boy.
'It is useless,' she said, 'to hold such a child as that responsible for what he says. I have little doubt that the idea has been put into his head by others. If there are people in this village, Mr. Dempster, who have forgotten the respect and gratitude due from every soul in it to my mother's memory, I will find them out, and if I have any influence with Mr. Fairlie, they shall suffer for it.'
'I hope indeed, I am sure, Miss Halcombe that you are mistaken,' said the schoolmaster. 'The matter begins and ends with the boy's own perversity and folly. He saw, or thought he saw, a woman in white, yesterday evening, as he was passing the churchyard; and the figure, real or fancied, was standing by the marble cross, which he and every one else in Limmeridge knows to be the monument over Mrs. Fairlie's grave. These two circumstances are surely sufficient to have suggested to the boy himself the answer which has so naturally shocked you?'
Although Miss Halcombe did not seem to be convinced, she evidently felt that the schoolmaster's statement of the case was too sensible to be openly combated. She merely replied by thanking him for his attention, and by promising to see him again when her doubts were satisfied. This said, she bowed, and led the way out of the schoolroom.
Throughout the whole of this strange scene I had stood apart, listening attentively, and drawing my own conclusions. As soon as we were alone again, Miss Halcombe asked me if I had formed any opinion on what I had heard.
'A very strong opinion,' I answered; 'the boy's story, as I believe, has a foundation in fact. I confess I am anxious to see the monument over Mrs. Fairlie's grave, and to examine the ground about it.'
'You shall see the grave.'
She paused after making that reply, and reflected a little as we walked on. 'What has happened in the schoolroom,' she resumed, 'has so completely distracted my attention from the subject, of the letter, that I feel a little bewildered when I try to return to it. Must we give up all idea of making any further inquiries, and wait to place the thing in Mr. Gilmore's hands to-morrow?'
'By no means, Miss Halcombe. What has happened in the schoolroom encourages me to persevere in the investigation.'
'Why does it encourage you?'