The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (portable ebook reader txt) 📕

“I gratefully accept your faith and truth,” he said. “The least that you can offer is more to me than the utmost that I could hope for from any other woman in the world.”

Her left hand still held mine, but her right hand hung listlessly at her side. He raised it gently to his lips⁠—touched it with them, rather than kissed it⁠—bowed to me⁠—and then, with perfect delicacy and discretion, silently quitted the room.

She neither moved nor said a word when he was gone⁠—she sat by me, cold and still, with her eyes fixed on the ground. I saw it was hopeless and useless to speak, and I only put my arm round her, and held her to me in silence. We remained together so for what seemed a long and weary time⁠—so long and so weary, that I grew uneasy and spoke to her softly, in the hope of producing a change.

The sound of my voice seemed to startle her into consciousness. She suddenly drew herself away from me and rose to her feet.

“I must submit, Marian, as well as I can,” she said. “My new life has its hard duties, and one of them begins today.”

As she spoke she went to a side-table near the window, on which her sketching materials were placed, gathered them together carefully, and put them in a drawer of her cabinet. She locked the drawer and brought the key to me.

“I must part from everything that reminds me of him,” she said. “Keep the key wherever you please⁠—I shall never want it again.”

Before I could say a word she had turned away to her bookcase, and had taken from it the album that contained Walter Hartright’s drawings. She hesitated for a moment, holding the little volume fondly in her hands⁠—then lifted it to her lips and kissed it.

“Oh, Laura! Laura!” I said, not angrily, not reprovingly⁠—with nothing but sorrow in my voice, and nothing but sorrow in my heart.

“It is the last time, Marian,” she pleaded. “I am bidding it goodbye forever.”

She laid the book on the table and drew out the comb that fastened her hair. It fell, in its matchless beauty, over her back and shoulders, and dropped round her, far below her waist. She separated one long, thin lock from the rest, cut it off, and pinned it carefully, in the form of a circle, on the first blank page of the album. The moment it was fastened she closed the volume hurriedly, and placed it in my hands.

“You write to him and he writes to you,” she said. “While I am alive, if he asks after me always tell him I am well, and never say I am unhappy. Don’t distress him, Marian, for my sake, don’t distress him. If I die first, promise you will give him this little book of his drawings, with my hair in it. There can be no harm, when I am gone, in telling him that I put it there with my own hands. And say⁠—oh, Marian, say for me, then, what I can never say for myself⁠—say I loved him!”

She flung her arms round my neck, and whispered the last words in my ear with a passionate delight in uttering them which it almost broke my heart to hear. All the long restraint she had imposed on herself gave way in that first last outburst of tenderness. She broke from me with hysterical vehemence, and threw herself on the sofa in a paroxysm of sobs and tears that shook her from head to foot.

I tried vainly to soothe her and reason with her⁠—she was past being soothed, and past being reasoned with. It was the sad, sudden end for us two of this memorable day. When the fit had worn itself out she was too exhausted to speak. She slumbered towards the afternoon, and I put away the book of drawings so that she might not see it when she woke. My face was calm, whatever my heart might be, when she opened her eyes again and looked at me. We said no more to each other about the distressing interview of the morning. Sir Percival’s name was not mentioned. Walter Hartright was not alluded to again by either of us for the remainder of the day.

10th.⁠—Finding that she was composed and like herself this morning, I returned to the painful subject of yesterday, for the sole purpose of imploring her to let me speak to Sir Percival and Mr. Fairlie, more plainly and strongly than she could speak to either of them herself, about this lamentable marriage. She interposed, gently but firmly, in the middle of my remonstrances.

“I left yesterday to decide,” she said; “and yesterday has decided. It is too late to go back.”

Sir Percival spoke to me this afternoon about what had passed in Laura’s room. He assured me that the unparalleled trust she had placed in him had awakened such an answering conviction of her innocence and integrity in his mind, that he was guiltless of having felt even a moment’s unworthy jealousy, either at the time when he was in her presence, or afterwards when he had withdrawn from it. Deeply as he lamented the unfortunate attachment which had hindered the progress he might otherwise have made in her esteem and regard, he firmly believed that it had remained unacknowledged in the past, and that it would remain, under all changes of circumstance which it was possible to contemplate, unacknowledged in the future. This was his absolute conviction; and the strongest proof he could give of it was the assurance, which he now offered, that he felt no curiosity to know whether the attachment was of recent date or not, or who had been the object of it. His implicit confidence in Miss Fairlie made him satisfied with what she had thought fit to say to him, and he was honestly innocent of the slightest