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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?”
“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.”
