When I entered the room, I found Miss Halcombe and an elderly lady
seated at the luncheon-table.
The elderly lady, when I was presented to her, proved to be Miss
Fairlie’s former governess, Mrs. Vesey, who had been briefly described
to me by my lively companion at the breakfast-table, as possessed
of “all the cardinal virtues, and counting for nothing.” I can do
little more than offer my humble testimony to the truthfulness of
Miss Halcombe’s sketch of the old lady’s character. Mrs. Vesey looked
the personification of human composure and female amiability. A calm
enjoyment of a calm existence beamed in drowsy smiles on her plump,
placid face. Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter
through life. Mrs. Vesey SAT through life. Sat in the house, early and
late; sat in the garden; sat in unexpected window-seats in passages;
sat (on a camp-stool) when her friends tried to take her out walking;
sat before she looked at anything, before she talked of anything,
before she answered Yes, or No, to the commonest question—always with
the same serene smile on her lips, the same vacantly-attentive turn
of the head, the same snugly-comfortable position of her hands and
arms, under every possible change of domestic circumstances. A mild, a
compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by
any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since
the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is
engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions,
that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to
distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at
the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain
my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when
Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences
of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.
“Now, Mrs. Vesey,” said Miss Halcombe, looking brighter, sharper, and
readier than ever, by contrast with the undemonstrative old lady at her
side, “what will you have? A cutlet?”
Mrs. Vesey crossed her dimpled hands on the edge of the table, smiled
placidly, and said, “Yes, dear.”
“What is that opposite Mr. Hartright? Boiled chicken, is it not? I
thought you liked boiled chicken better than cutlet, Mrs. Vesey?”
Mrs. Vesey took her dimpled hands off the edge of the table and crossed
them on her lap instead; nodded contemplatively at the boiled chicken,
and said, “Yes, dear.”
“Well, but which will you have, to-day? Shall Mr. Hartright give you
some chicken? or shall I give you some cutlet?”
Mrs. Vesey put one of her dimpled hands back again on the edge of the
table; hesitated drowsily, and said, “Which you please, dear.”
“Mercy on me! it’s a question for your taste, my good lady, not for
mine. Suppose you have a little of both? and suppose you begin with the
chicken, because Mr. Hartright looks devoured by anxiety to carve for
you.”
Mrs. Vesey put the other dimpled hand back on the edge of the table;
brightened dimly one moment; went out again the next; bowed obediently,
and said, “If you please, sir.”
Surely a mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old
lady! But enough, perhaps, for the present, of Mrs. Vesey.
All this time, there were no signs of Miss Fairlie. We finished our
luncheon; and still she never appeared. Miss Halcombe, whose quick eye
nothing escaped, noticed the looks that I cast, from time to time, in
the direction of the door.
“I understand you, Mr. Hartright,” she said; “you are wondering what
has become of your other pupil. She has been downstairs, and has got
over her headache; but has not sufficiently recovered her appetite to
join us at lunch. If you will put yourself under my charge, I think I
can undertake to find her somewhere in the garden.”
She took up a parasol lying on a chair near her, and led the way out,
by a long window at the bottom of the room, which opened on to the
lawn. It is almost unnecessary to say that we left Mrs. Vesey still
seated at the table, with her dimpled hands still crossed on the
edge of it; apparently settled in that position for the rest of the
afternoon.
As we crossed the lawn, Miss Halcombe looked at me significantly, and
shook her head.
“That mysterious adventure of yours,” she said, “still remains involved
in its own appropriate midnight darkness. I have been all the morning
looking over my mother’s letters, and I have made no discoveries yet.
However, don’t despair, Mr. Hartright. This is a matter of curiosity;
and you have got a woman for your ally. Under such conditions success
is certain, sooner or later. The letters are not exhausted. I have
three packets still left, and you may confidently rely on my spending
the whole evening over them.”
Here, then, was one of my anticipations of the morning still
unfulfilled. I began to wonder, next, whether my introduction to Miss
Fairlie would disappoint the expectations that I had been forming of
her since breakfast-time.
“And how did you get on with Mr. Fairlie?” inquired Miss Halcombe, as
we left the lawn and turned into a shrubbery. “Was he particularly
nervous this morning? Never mind considering about your answer, Mr.
Hartright. The mere fact of your being obliged to consider is enough
for me. I see in your face that he WAS particularly nervous; and, as
I am amiably unwilling to throw you into the same condition, I ask no
more.”
We turned off into a winding path while she was speaking, and
approached a pretty summer-house, built of wood, in the form of a
miniature Swiss chalet. The one room of the summer-house, as we
ascended the steps of the door, was occupied by a young lady. She was
standing near a rustic table, looking out at the inland view of moor
and hill presented by a gap in the trees, and absently turning over
the leaves of a little sketch-book that lay at her side. This was Miss
Fairlie.
How can I describe her? How can I separate her from my own sensations,
and from all that has happened in the later time? How can I see her
again as she looked when my eyes first rested on her—as she should
look, now, to the eyes that are about to see her in these pages?
The water-colour drawing that I made of Laura Fairlie, at an after
period, in the place and attitude in which I first saw her, lies on my
desk while I write. I look at it, and there dawns upon me brightly,
from the dark greenish-brown background of the summer-house, a light,
youthful figure, clothed in a simple muslin dress, the pattern of it
formed by broad alternate stripes of delicate blue and white. A scarf
of the same material sits crisply and closely round her shoulders, and
a little straw hat of the natural colour, plainly and sparingly trimmed
with ribbon to match the gown, covers her head, and throws its soft
pearly shadow over the upper part of her face. Her hair is of so faint
and pale a brown—not flaxen, and yet almost as light; not golden, and
yet almost as glossy—that it nearly melts, here and there, into the
shadow of the hat. It is plainly parted and drawn back over her ears,
and the line of it ripples naturally as it crosses her forehead. The
eyebrows are rather darker than the hair; and the eyes are of that
soft, limpid, turquoise blue, so often sung by the poets, so seldom
seen in real life. Lovely eyes in colour, lovely eyes in form—large
and tender and quietly thoughtful—but beautiful above all things in
the clear truthfulness of look that dwells in their inmost depths, and
shines through all their changes of expression with the light of a
purer and a better world. The charm—most gently and yet most distinctly
expressed—which they shed over the whole face, so covers and transforms
its little natural human blemishes elsewhere, that it is difficult
to estimate the relative merits and defects of the other features.
It is hard to see that the lower part of the face is too delicately
refined away towards the chin to be in full and fair proportion with
the upper part; that the nose, in escaping the aquiline bend (always
hard and cruel in a woman, no matter how abstractedly perfect it may
be), has erred a little in the other extreme, and has missed the ideal
straightness of line; and that the sweet, sensitive lips are subject
to a slight nervous contraction, when she smiles, which draws them
upward a little at one corner, towards the cheek. It might be possible
to note these blemishes in another woman’s face but it is not easy
to dwell on them in hers, so subtly are they connected with all that
is individual and characteristic in her expression, and so closely
does the expression depend for its full play and life, in every other
feature, on the moving impulse of the eyes.
Does my poor portrait of her, my fond, patient labour of long and
happy days, show me these things? Ah, how few of them are in the dim
mechanical drawing, and how many in the mind with which I regard it!
A fair, delicate girl, in a pretty light dress, trifling with the
leaves of a sketch-book, while she looks up from it with truthful,
innocent blue eyes—that is all the drawing can say; all, perhaps, that
even the deeper reach of thought and pen can say in their language,
either. The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy
conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has
remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep
for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by
other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources
of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of
women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has
claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls. Then, and
then only, has it passed beyond the narrow region on which light falls,
in this world, from the pencil and the pen.
Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses
within you that the rest of her sex had no art to stir. Let the kind,
candid blue eyes meet yours, as they met mine, with the one matchless
look which we both remember so well. Let her voice speak the music that
you once loved best, attuned as sweetly to your ear as to mine. Let her
footstep, as she comes and goes, in these pages, be like that other
footstep to whose airy fall your own heart once beat time. Take her as
the visionary nursling of your own fancy; and she will grow upon you,
all the more clearly, as the living woman who dwells in mine.
Among the sensations that crowded on me, when my eyes first looked upon
her—familiar sensations which we all know, which spring to life in most
of our hearts, die again in so many, and renew their bright existence
in so few—there was one that troubled and perplexed me: one that seemed
strangely inconsistent and unaccountably out of place in Miss Fairlie’s
presence.
Mingling with the vivid impression produced by the charm of her fair
face and head, her sweet expression, and her winning simplicity of
manner, was another impression, which, in a shadowy way, suggested to
me the idea of something wanting. At one time it seemed like something
wanting in HER: at another, like something wanting in myself, which
hindered me from understanding her as I ought. The impression was
always strongest in the most contradictory manner, when she looked
at me; or, in other words, when I was most conscious of the harmony
and charm of her face, and yet, at the same time, most troubled by
the sense of an incompleteness which it was impossible to discover.
Something wanting, something wanting—and where it was, and what it was,
I could not say.
The effect of this curious caprice of fancy (as I thought it then) was
not of a nature to set me at my ease, during a first interview with
Miss Fairlie. The few kind words of welcome which she spoke found me
hardly self-possessed enough to thank her in the customary phrases of
reply. Observing my hesitation, and no doubt attributing it, naturally
enough, to some momentary shyness on my part, Miss Halcombe took the
business of talking, as easily and readily as usual, into her own hands.
“Look there, Mr. Hartright,” she said, pointing to the sketch-book on
the table, and to the little delicate wandering hand that was still
trifling with it. “Surely you will acknowledge that your model pupil
is found at last? The moment she hears that you are in the house, she
seizes her inestimable sketch-book, looks universal Nature straight in
the face, and longs to begin!”
Miss Fairlie laughed with a ready good-humour, which broke out as
brightly as if it had been part of the sunshine above us, over her
lovely face.
“I must not take credit to myself where no credit is due,” she said,
her clear, truthful blue eyes looking alternately at Miss Halcombe and
at me. “Fond as I am of drawing, I am so conscious of my own ignorance
that I am more afraid than anxious to begin. Now I know you are here,
Mr. Hartright, I find myself looking over my sketches, as I used to
look over my lessons when I was a little girl, and when I was sadly
afraid that I should turn out not fit to be heard.”
She made the confession very prettily and simply, and, with quaint,
childish earnestness, drew the sketch-book away close to her own side
of the table. Miss Halcombe cut the knot of the little embarrassment
forthwith, in her resolute, downright way.
“Good, bad, or indifferent,” she said, “the pupil’s sketches must
pass through the fiery ordeal of the master’s judgment—and there’s an
end of it. Suppose we take them with us in the carriage, Laura, and
let Mr. Hartright see them, for the first time, under circumstances
of perpetual jolting and interruption? If we can only confuse him
all through the drive, between Nature as it is, when he looks up at
the view, and Nature as it is not when he looks down again at our
sketch-books, we shall drive him into the last desperate refuge of
paying us compliments, and shall slip through his professional fingers
with our pet feathers of vanity all unruffled.”
“I hope Mr. Hartright will pay ME no compliments,” said Miss Fairlie,
as we all left the summer-house.
“May I venture to inquire why you express that hope?” I asked.
“Because I shall believe all that you say to me,” she answered simply.
In those few words she unconsciously gave me the key to her whole
character: to that generous trust in others which, in her nature,
grew innocently out of the sense of her own truth. I only knew it
intuitively then. I know it by experience now.
We merely waited to rouse good Mrs. Vesey from the place which she
still occupied at the deserted luncheon-table, before we entered the
open carriage for our promised drive. The old lady and Miss Halcombe
occupied the back seat, and Miss Fairlie and I sat together in front,
with the sketch-book open between us, fairly exhibited at last to my
professional eyes. All serious criticism on the drawings, even if I
had been disposed to volunteer it, was rendered impossible by Miss
Halcombe’s lively resolution to see nothing but the ridiculous side
of the Fine Arts, as practised by herself, her sister, and ladies in
general. I can remember the conversation that passed far more easily
than the sketches that I mechanically looked over. That part of the
talk, especially, in which Miss Fairlie took any share, is still as
vividly impressed on my memory as if I had heard it only a few hours
ago.
Yes! let me acknowledge that on this first day I let the charm of her
presence lure me from the recollection of myself and my position. The
most trifling of the questions that she put to me, on the subject of
using her pencil and mixing her colours; the slightest alterations
of expression in the lovely eyes that looked into mine with such an
earnest desire to learn all that I could teach, and to discover all
that I could show, attracted more of my attention than the finest view
we passed through, or the grandest changes of light and shade, as they
flowed into each other over the waving moorland and the level beach.
At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not
strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world
amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature
for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration
of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so
largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us,
one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of
us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose
lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of
sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to
every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest
of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the
earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised accomplishments
which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely
practised by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and
most unoccupied. How much share have the attractions of Nature ever
had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of ourselves
or our friends? What space do they ever occupy in the thousand little
narratives of personal experience which pass every day by word of
mouth from one of us to the other? All that our minds can compass, all
that our hearts can learn, can be accomplished with equal certainty,
equal profit, and equal satisfaction to ourselves, in the poorest as
in the richest prospect that the face of the earth can show. There is
surely a reason for this want of inborn sympathy between the creature
and the creation around it, a reason which may perhaps be found in
the widely-differing destinies of man and his earthly sphere. The
grandest mountain prospect that the eye can range over is appointed to
annihilation. The smallest human interest that the pure heart can feel
is appointed to immortality.
We had been out nearly three hours, when the carriage again passed
through the gates of Limmeridge House.
On our way back I had let the ladies settle for themselves the first
point of view which they were to sketch, under my instructions, on the
afternoon of the next day. When they withdrew to dress for dinner, and
when I was alone again in my little sitting-room, my spirits seemed to
leave me on a sudden. I felt ill at ease and dissatisfied with myself,
I hardly knew why. Perhaps I was now conscious for the first time of
having enjoyed our drive too much in the character of a guest, and
too little in the character of a drawing-master. Perhaps that strange
sense of something wanting, either in Miss Fairlie or in myself, which
had perplexed me when I was first introduced to her, haunted me still.
Anyhow, it was a relief to my spirits when the dinner-hour called me
out of my solitude, and took me back to the society of the ladies of
the house.
I was struck, on entering the drawing-room, by the curious contrast,
rather in material than in colour, of the dresses which they now wore.
While Mrs. Vesey and Miss Halcombe were richly clad (each in the manner
most becoming to her age), the first in silver-grey, and the second
in that delicate primrose-yellow colour which matches so well with a
dark complexion and black hair, Miss Fairlie was unpretendingly and
almost poorly dressed in plain white muslin. It was spotlessly pure:
it was beautifully put on; but still it was the sort of dress which
the wife or daughter of a poor man might have worn, and it made her,
so far as externals went, look less affluent in circumstances than her
own governess. At a later period, when I learnt to know more of Miss
Fairlie’s character, I discovered that this curious contrast, on the
wrong side, was due to her natural delicacy of feeling and natural
intensity of aversion to the slightest personal display of her own
wealth. Neither Mrs. Vesey nor Miss Halcombe could ever induce her to
let the advantage in dress desert the two ladies who were poor, to lean
to the side of the one lady who was rich.
When the dinner was over we returned together to the drawing-room.
Although Mr. Fairlie (emulating the magnificent condescension of the
monarch who had picked up Titian’s brush for him) had instructed his
butler to consult my wishes in relation to the wine that I might
prefer after dinner, I was resolute enough to resist the temptation
of sitting in solitary grandeur among bottles of my own choosing, and
sensible enough to ask the ladies’ permission to leave the table with
them habitually, on the civilised foreign plan, during the period of my
residence at Limmeridge House.
The drawing-room, to which we had now withdrawn for the rest of the
evening, was on the ground-floor, and was of the same shape and size as
the breakfast-room. Large glass doors at the lower end opened on to a
terrace, beautifully ornamented along its whole length with a profusion
of flowers. The soft, hazy twilight was just shading leaf and blossom
alike into harmony with its own sober hues as we entered the room, and
the sweet evening scent of the flowers met us with its fragrant welcome
through the open glass doors. Good Mrs. Vesey (always the first of
the party to sit down) took possession of an arm-chair in a corner,
and dozed off comfortably to sleep. At my request Miss Fairlie placed
herself at the piano. As I followed her to a seat near the instrument,
I saw Miss Halcombe retire into a recess of one of the side windows, to
proceed with the search through her mother’s letters by the last quiet
rays of the evening light.
How vividly that peaceful home-picture of the drawing-room comes
back to me while I write! From the place where I sat I could see
Miss Halcombe’s graceful figure, half of it in soft light, half in
mysterious shadow, bending intently over the letters in her lap; while,
nearer to me, the fair profile of the player at the piano was just
delicately defined against the faintly-deepening background of the
inner wall of the room. Outside, on the terrace, the clustering flowers
and long grasses and creepers waved so gently in the light evening air,
that the sound of their rustling never reached us. The sky was without
a cloud, and the dawning mystery of moonlight began to tremble already
in the region of the eastern heaven. The sense of peace and seclusion
soothed all thought and feeling into a rapt, unearthly repose; and the
balmy quiet, that deepened ever with the deepening light, seemed to
hover over us with a gentler influence still, when there stole upon it
from the piano the heavenly tenderness of the music of Mozart. It was
an evening of sights and sounds never to forget.
We all sat silent in the places we had chosen—Mrs. Vesey still
sleeping, Miss Fairlie still playing, Miss Halcombe still reading—till
the light failed us. By this time the moon had stolen round to the
terrace, and soft, mysterious rays of light were slanting already
across the lower end of the room. The change from the twilight
obscurity was so beautiful that we banished the lamps, by common
consent, when the servant brought them in, and kept the large room
unlighted, except by the glimmer of the two candles at the piano.
For half an hour more the music still went on. After that the beauty of
the moonlight view on the terrace tempted Miss Fairlie out to look at
it, and I followed her. When the candles at the piano had been lighted
Miss Halcombe had changed her place, so as to continue her examination
of the letters by their assistance. We left her, on a low chair, at one
side of the instrument, so absorbed over her reading that she did not
seem to notice when we moved.
We had been out on the terrace together, just in front of the glass
doors, hardly so long as five minutes, I should think; and Miss Fairlie
was, by my advice, just tying her white handkerchief over her head
as a precaution against the night air—when I heard Miss Halcombe’s
voice—low, eager, and altered from its natural lively tone—pronounce my
name.
“Mr. Hartright,” she said, “will you come here for a minute? I want to
speak to you.”
I entered the room again immediately. The piano stood about half-way
down along the inner wall. On the side of the instrument farthest from
the terrace Miss Halcombe was sitting with the letters scattered on her
lap, and with one in her hand selected from them, and held close to the
candle. On the side nearest to the terrace there stood a low ottoman,
on which I took my place. In this position I was not far from the glass
doors, and I could see Miss Fairlie plainly, as she passed and repassed
the opening on to the terrace, walking slowly from end to end of it in
the full radiance of the moon.
“I want you to listen while I read the concluding passages in this
letter,” said Miss Halcombe. “Tell me if you think they throw any
light upon your strange adventure on the road to London. The letter
is addressed by my mother to her second husband, Mr. Fairlie, and the
date refers to a period of between eleven and twelve years since. At
that time Mr. and Mrs. Fairlie, and my half-sister Laura, had been
living for years in this house; and I was away from them completing my
education at a school in Paris.”
She looked and spoke earnestly, and, as I thought, a little uneasily
as well. At the moment when she raised the letter to the candle before
beginning to read it, Miss Fairlie passed us on the terrace, looked in
for a moment, and seeing that we were engaged, slowly walked on.