'Because it strengthens a suspicion I felt when you gave me the letter to read.'
'I suppose you had your reasons, Mr. Hartright, for concealing that suspicion from me till this moment?'
'I was afraid to encourage it in myself. I thought it was utterly preposterous I distrusted it as the result of some perversity in my own imagination. But I can do so no longer. Not only the boy's own answers to your questions, but even a chance expression that dropped from the schoolmaster's lips in explaining his story, have forced the idea back into my mind. Events may yet prove that idea to be a delusion, Miss Halcombe; but the belief is strong in me, at this moment, that the fancied ghost in the churchyard, and the writer of the anonymous letter, are one and the same person.'
She stopped, turned pale, and looked me eagerly in the face.
'What person?'
'The schoolmaster unconsciously told you. When he spoke of the figure that the boy saw in the churchyard he called it "a woman in white."'
'Not Anne Catherick?'
'Yes, Anne Catherick.'
She put her hand through my arm and leaned on it heavily.
'I don't know why,' she said in low tones, 'but there is something in this suspicion of yours that seems to startle and unnerve me. I feel -' She stopped, and tried to laugh it off. 'Mr. Hartright,' she went on, 'I will show you the grave, and then go back at once to the house. I had better not leave Laura too long alone. I had better go back and sit with her.'
We were close to the churchyard when she spoke. The church, a dreary building of grey stone, was situated in a little valley, so as to be sheltered from the bleak winds blowing over the moorland all round it. The burial-ground advanced, from the side of the church, a little way up the slope of the hill. It was surrounded by a rough, low stone wall, and was bare and open to the sky, except at one extremity, where a brook trickled down the stony hill-side, and a clump of dwarf trees threw their narrow shadows over the short, meagre grass. Just beyond the brook and the trees, and not far from one of the three stone stiles which afforded entrance, at various points, to the churchyard, rose the white marble cross that distinguished Mrs. Fairlie's grave from the humbler monuments scattered about it.
'I need go no farther with you,' said Miss Halcombe, pointing to the grave. 'You will let me know if you find anything to confirm the idea you have just mentioned to me. Let us meet again at the house.'
She left me. I descended at once to the churchyard, and crossed the stile which led directly to Mrs. Fairlie's grave.
The grass about it was too short, and the ground too hard, to show any marks of footsteps. Disappointed thus far, I next looked attentively at the cross, and at the square block of marble below it, on which the inscription was cut.
The natural whiteness of the cross was a little clouded, here and there, by weather stains, and rather more than one half of the square block beneath it, on the side which bore the inscription, was in the same condition. The other half, however, attracted my attention at once by its singular freedom from stain or impurity of any kind. I looked closer, and saw that it had been cleaned recently cleaned, in a downward direction from top to bottom. The boundary line between the part that had been cleaned and the part that had not was traceable wherever the inscription left a blank space of marble sharply traceable as a line that had been produced by artificial means. Who had begun the cleansing of the marble, and who had left it unfinished?
I looked about me, wondering how the question was to be solved. No sign of a habitation could be discerned from the point at which I was standing the burial-ground was left in the lonely possession of the dead. I returned to the church, and walked round it till I came to the back of the building; then crossed the boundary wall beyond, by another of the stone stiles, and found myself at the head of a path leading down into a deserted stone quarry. Against one side of the quarry a little two-room cottage was built, and just outside the door an old woman was engaged in washing.
I walked up to her, and entered into conversation about the church and burial-ground. She was ready enough to talk, and almost the first words she said informed me that her husband filled the two offices of clerk and sexton. I said a few words next in praise of Mrs. Fairlie's monument. The old woman shook her head, and told me I had not seen it at its best. It was her husband's business to look after it, but he had been so ailing and weak for months and months past, that he had hardly been able to crawl into church on Sundays to do his duty, and the monument had been neglected in consequence. He was getting a little better now, and in a week or ten days' time he hoped to be strong enough to set to work and clean it.
This information extracted from a long rambling answer in the broadest Cumberland dialect told me all that I most wanted to know. I gave the poor woman a trifle, and returned at once to Limmeridge House.
The partial cleansing of the monument had evidently been accomplished by a strange hand. Connecting what I had discovered, thus far, with what I had suspected after hearing the story of the ghost seen at twilight, I wanted nothing more to confirm my resolution to watch Mrs. Fairlie's grave, in secret, that evening, returning to it at sunset, and waiting within sight of it till the night fell. The work of cleansing the monument had been left unfinished, and the person by whom it had been begun might return to complete it.
On getting back to the house I informed Miss Halcombe of what I intended to do. She looked surprised and uneasy while I was explaining my purpose, but she made no positive objection to the execution of it. She only said, 'I hope it may end well.' Just as she was leaving me again, I stopped her to inquire, as calmly as I could, after Miss Fairlie's health. She was in better spirits, and Miss Halcombe hoped she might be induced to take a little walking exercise while the afternoon sun lasted.
I returned to my own room to resume setting the drawings in order. It was necessary to do this, and doubly necessary to keep my mind employed on anything that would help to distract my attention from myself, and from the hopeless future that lay before me. From time to time I paused in my work to look out of window and watch the sky as the sun sank nearer and nearer to the horizon. On one of those occasions I saw a figure on the broad gravel walk under my window. It was Miss Fairlie.
I had not seen her since the morning, and I had hardly spoken to her then. Another day at Limmeridge was all that remained to me, and after that day my eyes might never look on her again. This thought was enough to hold me at the window. I had sufficient consideration for her to arrange the blind so that she might not see me if she looked up, but I had no strength to resist the temptation of letting my eyes, at least, follow her as far as they could on her walk.
She was dressed in a brown cloak, with a plain black silk gown under it. On her head was the same simple straw hat which she had worn on the morning when we first met. A veil was attached to it now which hid her face from me. By her side trotted a little Italian greyhound, the pet companion of all her walks, smartly dressed in a scarlet cloth wrapper, to keep the sharp air from his delicate skin. She did not seem to notice the dog. She walked straight forward, with her head drooping a little, and her arms folded in her cloak. The dead leaves, which had whirled in the wind before me when I had heard of her marriage engagement in the morning, whirled in the wind before her, and rose and fell and scattered themselves at her feet as she walked on in the pale waning sunlight. The dog shivered and trembled, and pressed against her dress impatiently for notice and encouragement. But she never heeded him. She walked on, farther and farther away from me, with the dead leaves whirling about her on the path walked on, till my aching eyes could see her no more, and I was left alone again with my own heavy heart.
In another hour's time I had done my work, and the sunset was at hand. I got my hat and coat in the hall, and slipped out of the house without meeting any one.
The clouds were wild in the western heaven, and the wind blew chill from the sea. Far as the shore was, the sound of the surf swept over the intervening moorland, and beat drearily in my ears when I entered the churchyard. Not a living creature was in sight. The place looked lonelier than ever as I chose my position, and waited and watched, with my eyes on the white cross that rose over Mrs. Fairlie's grave.
XIII.
THE exposed situation of the churchyard had obliged me to be cautious in choosing the position that I was to occupy.
The main entrance to the church was on the side next to the burial-ground, and the door was screened by a porch walled in on either side. After some little hesitation, caused by natural reluctance to conceal myself, indispensable as that concealment was to the object in view, I had resolved on entering the porch. A loophole window was pierced in each of its side walls. Through one of these windows I could see Mrs. Fairlie's grave. The other looked towards the stone quarry in which the sexton's cottage was built. Before me, fronting the porch entrance, was a patch of bare burial-ground, a line of low stone wall, and a strip of lonely brown hill, with the sunset clouds sailing heavily over it before the strong, steady wind. No living creature was visible or audible no bird flew by me, no dog barked from the sexton's cottage. The pauses in the dull beating of the surf were filled up by the dreary rustling of the dwarf trees near the grave, and the cold faint bubble of the brook over its stony bed. A dreary scene and a dreary hour. My spirits sank fast as I counted out the minutes of the evening in my hiding-place under the church porch.
It was not twilight yet the light of the setting sun still lingered in the heavens, and little more than the first half-hour of my solitary watch had elapsed when I heard footsteps and a voice. The footsteps were approaching from the other side of the church, and the voice was a woman's.
'Don't you fret, my dear, about the letter,' said the voice. 'I gave it to the lad quite safe, and the lad he took it from me without a word. He went his way and I went mine, and not a living soul followed me afterwards that I'll warrant.'
These words strung up my attention to a pitch of expectation that was almost painful. There was a pause of silence, but the footsteps still advanced. In another moment two persons, both women, passed within my range of view from the porch window. They were walking straight towards the grave; and therefore they had their backs turned towards me.
One of the women was dressed in a bonnet and shawl. The other wore a long travelling-cloak of a dark-blue colour, with the hood drawn over her head. A few inches of her gown were visible below the cloak. My heart beat fast as I noted the colour it was white.
After advancing about half-way between the church and the grave they stopped, and the woman in the cloak turned her head towards her companion. But her side face, which a bonnet might now have allowed me to see, was hidden by the heavy, projecting edge of the hood.
'Mind you keep that comfortable warm cloak on,' said the same voice which I had already heard the voice of the woman in the shawl. 'Mrs. Todd is right about your looking too particular, yesterday, all in white. I'll walk about a little while you're here, churchyards being not at all in my way, whatever they may be in yours. Finish what you want to do before I come back, and let us be sure and get home again before night.'
With those words she turned about, and retracing her steps, advanced with her face towards me. It was the face of an elderly woman, brown, rugged, and healthy, with nothing dishonest or suspicious in the look of it. Close to the church she stopped to pull her shawl closer round her.
'Queer,' she said to herself, 'always queer, with her whims and her ways, ever since I can remember her. Harmless, though as harmless, poor soul, as a little child.'
She sighed looked about the burial-ground nervously shook her head, as if the dreary prospect by no means pleased her, and disappeared round the corner of the church.
I doubted for a moment whether I ought to follow and speak to her or not. My intense anxiety to find myself face to face with her companion helped me to decide in the negative. I could ensure seeing the woman in the shawl by waiting near the churchyard until she came back although it seemed more than doubtful whether she could give me the information of which I was in search. The person who had delivered the letter was of little consequence. The person who had written it was the one centre of interest, and the one source of information, and that person I now felt convinced was before me in the churchyard.
While these ideas were passing through my mind I saw the woman in the cloak approach close to the grave, and stand looking at it for a little while. She then glanced all round her, and taking a white linen cloth or handkerchief from under her cloak, turned aside towards the brook. The little stream ran into the churchyard under a tiny archway in the bottom of the wall, and ran out again, after a winding course of a few dozen yards, under a similar opening. She dipped the cloth in the water, and returned to the grave. I saw her kiss the white cross, then kneel down before the inscription, and apply her wet cloth to the cleansing of it.
After considering how I could show myself with the least possible chance of frightening her, I resolved to cross the wall before me, to skirt round it outside, and to enter the churchyard again by the stile near the grave, in order that she might see me as I approached. She was so absorbed over her employment that she did not hear me coming until I had stepped over the stile. Then she looked up, started to her feet with a faint cry, and stood facing me in speechless and motionless terror.
'Don't be frightened,' I said. 'Surely you remember me?'
I stopped while I spoke then advanced a few steps gently then stopped again and so approached by little and little till I was close to her. If there had been any doubt still left in my mind, it must have been now set at rest. There, speaking affrightedly for itself there was the same face confronting me over Mrs. Fairlie's grave which had first looked into mine on the high-road by night.
'You remember me?' I said. 'We met very late, and I helped you to find the way to London. Surely you have not forgotten that?'
Her features relaxed, and she drew a heavy breath of relief. I saw the new life of recognition stirring slowly under the death-like stillness which fear had set on her face.
'Don't attempt to speak to me just yet,' I went on. 'Take time to recover yourself take time to feel quite certain that I am a friend.'
'You are very kind to me,' she murmured. 'As kind now as you were then.'
She stopped, and I kept silence on my side. I was not granting time for composure to her only, I was gaining time also for myself. Under the wan wild evening light, that woman and I were met together again, a grave between us, the dead about us, the lonesome hills closing us round on every side. The time, the place, the circumstances under which we now stood face to face in the evening stillness of that dreary valley the lifelong interests which might hang suspended on the next chance words that passed between us the sense that, for aught I knew to the contrary, the whole future of Laura Fairlie's life might be determined, for good or for evil, by my winning or losing the confidence of the forlorn creature who stood trembling by her mother's grave all threatened to shake the steadiness and the self-control on which every inch of the progress I might yet make now depended. I tried hard, as I felt this, to possess myself of all my resources; I did my utmost to turn the few moments for reflection to the best account.
'Are you calmer now?' I said, as soon as I thought it time to speak again. 'Can you talk to me without feeling frightened, and without forgetting that I am a friend?'
'How did you come here?' she asked, without noticing what I had just said to her.
'Don't you remember my telling you, when we last met, that I was going to Cumberland? I have been in Cumberland ever since I have been staying all the time at Limmeridge House.'
'At Limmeridge House!' Her pale face brightened as she repeated the words, her wandering eyes fixed on me with a sudden interest. 'Ah, how happy you must have been!' she said, looking at me eagerly, without a shadow of its former distrust left in her expression.
I took advantage of her newly-aroused confidence in me to observe her face, with an attention and a curiosity which I had hitherto restrained myself from showing, for caution's sake. I looked at her, with my mind full of that other lovely face which had so ominously recalled her to my memory on the terrace by moonlight. I had seen Anne Catherick's likeness in Miss Fairlie. I now saw Miss Fairlie's likeness in Anne Catherick saw it all the more clearly because the points of dissimilarity between the two were presented to me as well as the points of resemblance. In the general outline of the countenance and general proportion of the features in the colour of the hair and in the little nervous uncertainty about the lips in the height and size of the figure, and the carriage of the head and body, the likeness appeared even more startling than I had ever felt it to be yet. But there the resemblance ended, and the dissimilarity, in details, began. The delicate beauty of Miss Fairlie's complexion, the transparent clearness of her eyes, the smooth purity of her skin, the tender bloom of colour on her lips, were all missing from the worn weary face that was now turned towards mine. Although I hated myself even for thinking such a thing, still, while I looked at the woman before me, the idea would force itself into my mind that one sad change, in the future, was all that was wanting to make the likeness complete, which I now saw to be so imperfect in detail. If ever sorrow and suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie's face, then, and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance resemblance, the living reflections of one another.
I shuddered at the thought. There was something horrible in the blind unreasoning distrust of the future which the mere passage of it through my mind seemed to imply. It was a welcome interruption to be roused by feeling Anne Catherick's hand laid on my shoulder. The touch was as stealthy and as sudden as that other touch which had petrified me from head to foot on the night when we first met.
'You are looking at me, and you are thinking of something,' she said, with her strange breathless rapidity of utterance. 'What is it?'
'Nothing extraordinary,' I answered. 'I was only wondering how you came here.'
'I came with a friend who is very good to me. I have only been here two days.'
'And you found your way to this place yesterday?'
'How do you know that?'
'I only guessed it.'
She turned from me, and knelt down before the inscription once more.
'Where should I go if not here?' she said. 'The friend who was better than a mother to me is the only friend I have to visit at Limmeridge. Oh, it makes my heart ache to see a stain on her tomb! It ought to be kept white as snow, for her sake. I was tempted to begin cleaning it yesterday, and I can't help coming back to go on with it to-day. Is there anything wrong in that? I hope not. Surely nothing can be wrong that I do for Mrs. Fairlie's sake?'
The old grateful sense of her benefactress's kindness was evidently the ruling idea still in the poor creature's mind the narrow mind which had but too plainly opened to no other lasting impression since that first impression of her younger and happier days. I saw that my best chance of winning her confidence lay in encouraging her to proceed with the artless employment which she had come into the burial-ground to pursue. She resumed it at once, on my telling her she might do so, touching the hard marble as tenderly as if it had been a sentient thing, and whispering the words of the inscription to herself, over and over again, as if the lost days of her girlhood had returned and she was patiently learning her lesson once more at Mrs. Fairlie's knees.
'Should you wonder very much,' I said, preparing the way as cautiously as I could for the questions that were to come, 'if I owned that it is a satisfaction to me, as well as a surprise, to see you here? I felt very uneasy about you after you left me in the cab.'
She looked up quickly and suspiciously.
'Uneasy,' she repeated. 'Why?'
'A strange thing happened after we parted that night. Two men overtook me in a chaise. They did not see where I was standing, but they stopped near me, and spoke to a policeman on the other side of the way.'
She instantly suspended her employment. The hand holding the damp cloth with which she had been cleaning the inscription dropped to her side. The other hand grasped the marble cross at the head of the grave. Her face turned towards me slowly, with the blank look of terror set rigidly on it once more. I went on at all hazards it was too late now to draw back.
'The two men spoke to the policeman,' I said, 'and asked him if he had seen you. He had not seen you; and then one of the men spoke again, and said you had escaped from his Asylum.'
She sprang to her feet as if my last words had set the pursuers on her track.
'Stop! and hear the end,' I cried. 'Stop! and you shall know how I befriended you. A word from me would have told the men which way you had gone and I never spoke that word. I helped your escape I made it safe and certain. Think, try to think. Try to understand what I tell you.'
My manner seemed to influence her more than my words. She made an effort to grasp the new idea. Her hands shifted the damp cloth hesitatingly from one to the other, exactly as they had shifted the little travelling-bag on the night when I first saw her. Slowly the purpose of my words seemed to force its way through the confusion and agitation of her mind. Slowly her features relaxed, and her eyes looked at me with their expression gaining in curiosity what it was fast losing in fear.
'You don't think I ought to be back in the Asylum, do you?' she said.
'Certainly not. I am glad you escaped from it I am glad I helped you.'
'Yes, yes, you did help me indeed; you helped me at the hard part,' she went on a little vacantly. 'It was easy to escape, or I should not have got away. They never suspected me as they suspected the others. I was so quiet, and so obedient, and so easily frightened. The finding London was the hard part, and there you helped me. Did I thank you at the time? I thank you now very kindly.'
'Was the Asylum far from where you met me? Come! show that you believe me to be your friend, and tell me where it was.'
She mentioned the place a private Asylum, as its situation informed me; a private Asylum not very far from the spot where I had seen her and then, with evident suspicion of the use to which I might put her answer, anxiously repeated her former inquiry, 'You don't think I ought to be taken back, do you?'
'Once again, I am glad you escaped I am glad you prospered well after you left me,' I answered. 'You said you had a friend in London to go to. Did you find the friend?'
'Yes. It was very late, but there was a girl up at needlework in the house, and she helped me to rouse Mrs. Clements. Mrs. Clements is my friend. A good, kind woman, but not like Mrs. Fairlie. Ah no, nobody is like Mrs. Fairlie!'
'Is Mrs. Clements an old friend of yours? Have you known her a long time?'
'Yes, she was a neighbour of ours once, at home, in Hampshire, and liked me, and took care of me when I was a little girl. Years ago, when she went away from us, she wrote down in my Prayer-book for me where she was going to live in London, and she said, "If you are ever in trouble, Anne, come to me. I have no husband alive to say me nay, and no children to look after, and I will take care of you." Kind words, were they not? I suppose I remember them because they were kind. It's little enough I remember besides little enough, little enough!'
'Had you no father or mother to take care of you?'
'Father? I never saw him I never heard mother speak of him. Father? Ah, dear! he is dead, I suppose.'
'And your mother?'
'I don't get on well with her. We are a trouble and a fear to each other.'
A trouble and a fear to each other! At those words the suspicion crossed my mind, for the first time, that her mother might be the person who had placed her under restraint.
'Don't ask me about mother,' she went on. 'I'd rather talk of Mrs. Clements. Mrs. Clements is like you, she doesn't think that I ought to be back in the Asylum, and she is as glad as you are that I escaped from it. She cried over my misfortune, and said it must be kept secret from everybody.'
Her 'misfortune.' In what sense was she using that word? In a sense which might explain her motive in writing the anonymous letter? In a sense which might show it to be the too common and too customary motive that has led many a woman to interpose anonymous hindrances to the marriage of the man who has ruined her? I resolved to attempt the clearing up of this doubt before more words passed between us on either side.
'What misfortune?' I asked.
'The misfortune of my being shut up,' she answered, with every appearance of feeling surprised at my question. 'What other misfortune could there be?'
I determined to persist, as delicately and forbearingly as possible. It was of very great importance that I should be absolutely sure of every step in the investigation which I now gained in advance.
'There is another misfortune,' I said, 'to which a woman may be liable, and by which she may suffer lifelong sorrow and shame.'
'What is it?' she asked eagerly.
'The misfortune of believing too innocently in her own virtue, and in the faith and honour of the man she loves,' I answered.
She looked up at me with the artless bewilderment of a child. Not the slightest confusion or change of colour not the faintest trace of any secret consciousness of shame struggling to the surface appeared in her face that face which betrayed every other emotion with such transparent clearness. No words that ever were spoken could have assured me, as her look and manner now assured me, that the motive which I had assigned for her writing the letter and sending it to Miss Fairlie was plainly and distinctly the wrong one. That doubt, at any rate, was now set at rest; but the very removal of it opened a new prospect of uncertainty. The letter, as I knew from positive testimony, pointed at Sir Percival Glyde, though it did not name him. She must have had some strong motive, originating in some deep sense of injury, for secretly denouncing him to Miss Fairlie in such terms as she had employed, and that motive was unquestionably not to be traced to the loss of her innocence and her character. Whatever wrong he might have inflicted on her was not of that nature. Of what nature could it be?
'I don't understand you,' she said, after evidently trying hard, and trying in vain, to discover the meaning of the words I had last said to her.
'Never mind,' I answered. 'Let us go on with what we were talking about. Tell me how long you stayed with Mrs. Clements in London, and how you came here.'
'How long?' she repeated. 'I stayed with Mrs. Clements till we both came to this place, two days ago.'
'You are living in the village, then?' I said. 'It is strange I should not have heard of you, though you have only been here two days.'
'No, no, not in the village. Three miles away at a farm. Do you know the farm? They call it Todd's Corner.'
I remembered the place perfectly we had often passed by it in our drives. It was one of the oldest farms in the neighbourhood, situated in a solitary, sheltered spot, inland at the junction of two hills.