The Woman in White Wilkie Collins (bts books to read txt) 📖

no farther than the point which I have just reached. Other pens than mine will describe the strange circumstances which are now shortly to follow. Seriously and sorrowfully I close this brief record. Seriously and sorrowfully I repeat here the parting words that I spoke at Limmeridge House:⁠—No daughter of mine should have been married to any man alive under such a settlement as I was compelled to make for Laura Fairlie. The Story Continued by Marian Halcombe, in Extracts from Her Diary1 I

Limmeridge House, Nov. 8.

This morning Mr. Gilmore left us.

His interview with Laura had evidently grieved and surprised him more than he liked to confess. I felt afraid, from his look and manner when we parted, that she might have inadvertently betrayed to him the real secret of her depression and my anxiety. This doubt grew on me so, after he had gone, that I declined riding out with Sir Percival, and went up to Laura’s room instead.

I have been sadly distrustful of myself, in this difficult and lamentable matter, ever since I found out my own ignorance of the strength of Laura’s unhappy attachment. I ought to have known that the delicacy and forbearance and sense of honour which drew me to poor Hartright, and made me so sincerely admire and respect him, were just the qualities to appeal most irresistibly to Laura’s natural sensitiveness and natural generosity of nature. And yet, until she opened her heart to me of her own accord, I had no suspicion that this new feeling had taken root so deeply. I once thought time and care might remove it. I now fear that it will remain with her and alter her for life. The discovery that I have committed such an error in judgment as this makes me hesitate about everything else. I hesitate about Sir Percival, in the face of the plainest proofs. I hesitate even in speaking to Laura. On this very morning I doubted, with my hand on the door, whether I should ask her the questions I had come to put, or not.

When I went into her room I found her walking up and down in great impatience. She looked flushed and excited, and she came forward at once, and spoke to me before I could open my lips.

“I wanted you,” she said. “Come and sit down on the sofa with me. Marian! I can bear this no longer⁠—I must and will end it.”

There was too much colour in her cheeks, too much energy in her manner, too much firmness in her voice. The little book of Hartright’s drawings⁠—the fatal book that she will dream over whenever she is alone⁠—was in one of her hands. I began by gently and firmly taking it from her, and putting it out of sight on a side-table.

“Tell me quietly, my darling, what you wish to do,” I said. “Has Mr. Gilmore been advising you?”

She shook her head. “No, not in what I am thinking of now. He was very kind and good to me, Marian, and I am ashamed to say I distressed him by crying. I am miserably helpless⁠—I can’t control myself. For my own sake, and for all our sakes, I must have courage enough to end it.”

“Do you mean courage enough to claim your release?” I asked.

“No,” she said simply. “Courage, dear, to tell the truth.”

She put her arms round my neck, and rested her head quietly on my bosom. On the opposite wall hung the miniature portrait of her father. I bent over her, and saw that she was looking at it while her head lay on my breast.

“I can never claim my release from my engagement,” she went on. “Whatever way it ends it must end wretchedly for me. All I can do, Marian, is not to add the remembrance that I have broken my promise and forgotten my father’s dying words, to make that wretchedness worse.”

“What is it you propose, then?” I asked.

“To tell Sir Percival Glyde the truth with my own lips,” she answered, “and to let him release me, if he will, not because I ask him, but because he knows all.”

“What do you mean, Laura, by ‘all’? Sir Percival will know enough (he has told me so himself) if he knows that the engagement is opposed to your own wishes.”

“Can I tell him that, when the engagement was made for me by my father, with my own consent? I should have kept my promise, not happily, I am afraid, but still contentedly⁠—” she stopped, turned her face to me, and laid her cheek close against mine⁠—“I should have kept my engagement, Marian, if another love had not grown up in my heart, which was not there when I first promised to be Sir Percival’s wife.”

“Laura! you will never lower yourself by making a confession to him?”

“I shall lower myself, indeed, if I gain my release by hiding from him what he has a right to know.”

“He has not the shadow of a right to know it!”

“Wrong, Marian, wrong! I ought to deceive no one⁠—least of all the man to whom my father gave me, and to whom I gave myself.” She put her lips to mine, and kissed me. “My own love,” she said softly, “you are so much too fond of me, and so much too proud of me, that you forget, in my case, what you would remember in your own. Better that Sir Percival should doubt my motives, and misjudge my conduct if he will, than that I should be first false to him in thought, and then mean enough to serve my own interests by hiding the falsehood.”

I held her away from me in astonishment. For the first time in our lives we had changed places⁠—the resolution was all on her side, the hesitation all on mine. I looked into the pale, quiet, resigned young face⁠—I saw the pure, innocent heart, in the loving eyes that looked