June 11th, 1850.—Six months to look back on—six long, lonely months
since Laura and I last saw each other!
How many days have I still to wait? Only one! To-morrow, the twelfth,
the travellers return to England. I can hardly realise my own
happiness—I can hardly believe that the next four-and-twenty hours will
complete the last day of separation between Laura and me.
She and her husband have been in Italy all the winter, and afterwards
in the Tyrol. They come back, accompanied by Count Fosco and his wife,
who propose to settle somewhere in the neighbourhood of London, and who
have engaged to stay at Blackwater Park for the summer months before
deciding on a place of residence. So long as Laura returns, no matter
who returns with her. Sir Percival may fill the house from floor to
ceiling, if he likes, on condition that his wife and I inhabit it
together.
Meanwhile, here I am, established at Blackwater Park, “the ancient and
interesting seat” (as the county history obligingly informs me) “of
Sir Percival Glyde, Bart.,” and the future abiding-place (as I may now
venture to add on my account) of plain Marian Halcombe, spinster, now
settled in a snug little sitting-room, with a cup of tea by her side,
and all her earthly possessions ranged round her in three boxes and a
bag.
I left Limmeridge yesterday, having received Laura’s delightful letter
from Paris the day before. I had been previously uncertain whether
I was to meet them in London or in Hampshire, but this last letter
informed me that Sir Percival proposed to land at Southampton, and to
travel straight on to his country-house. He has spent so much money
abroad that he has none left to defray the expenses of living in London
for the remainder of the season, and he is economically resolved to
pass the summer and autumn quietly at Blackwater. Laura has had more
than enough of excitement and change of scene, and is pleased at the
prospect of country tranquillity and retirement which her husband’s
prudence provides for her. As for me, I am ready to be happy anywhere
in her society. We are all, therefore, well contented in our various
ways, to begin with.
Last night I slept in London, and was delayed there so long to-day by
various calls and commissions, that I did not reach Blackwater this
evening till after dusk.
Judging by my vague impressions of the place thus far, it is the exact
opposite of Limmeridge.
The house is situated on a dead flat, and seems to be shut in—almost
suffocated, to my north-country notions, by trees. I have seen nobody
but the man-servant who opened the door to me, and the housekeeper, a
very civil person, who showed me the way to my own room, and got me my
tea. I have a nice little boudoir and bedroom, at the end of a long
passage on the first floor. The servants and some of the spare rooms
are on the second floor, and all the living rooms are on the ground
floor. I have not seen one of them yet, and I know nothing about the
house, except that one wing of it is said to be five hundred years
old, that it had a moat round it once, and that it gets its name of
Blackwater from a lake in the park.
Eleven o’clock has just struck, in a ghostly and solemn manner, from
a turret over the centre of the house, which I saw when I came in. A
large dog has been woke, apparently by the sound of the bell, and is
howling and yawning drearily, somewhere round a corner. I hear echoing
footsteps in the passages below, and the iron thumping of bolts and
bars at the house door. The servants are evidently going to bed. Shall
I follow their example?
No, I am not half sleepy enough. Sleepy, did I say? I feel as if I
should never close my eyes again. The bare anticipation of seeing that
dear face, and hearing that well-known voice to-morrow, keeps me in a
perpetual fever of excitement. If I only had the privileges of a man, I
would order out Sir Percival’s best horse instantly, and tear away on
a night-gallop, eastward, to meet the rising sun—a long, hard, heavy,
ceaseless gallop of hours and hours, like the famous highwayman’s ride
to York. Being, however, nothing but a woman, condemned to patience,
propriety, and petticoats for life, I must respect the house-keeper’s
opinions, and try to compose myself in some feeble and feminine way.
Reading is out of the question—I can’t fix my attention on books. Let
me try if I can write myself into sleepiness and fatigue. My journal
has been very much neglected of late. What can I recall—standing, as
I now do, on the threshold of a new life—of persons and events, of
chances and changes, during the past six months—the long, weary, empty
interval since Laura’s wedding-day?
Walter Hartright is uppermost in my memory, and he passes first in
the shadowy procession of my absent friends. I received a few lines
from him, after the landing of the expedition in Honduras, written
more cheerfully and hopefully than he has written yet. A month or six
weeks later I saw an extract from an American newspaper, describing the
departure of the adventurers on their inland journey. They were last
seen entering a wild primeval forest, each man with his rifle on his
shoulder and his baggage at his back. Since that time, civilisation has
lost all trace of them. Not a line more have I received from Walter,
not a fragment of news from the expedition has appeared in any of the
public journals.
The same dense, disheartening obscurity hangs over the fate and
fortunes of Anne Catherick, and her companion, Mrs. Clements. Nothing
whatever has been heard of either of them. Whether they are in the
country or out of it, whether they are living or dead, no one knows.
Even Sir Percival’s solicitor has lost all hope, and has ordered the
useless search after the fugitives to be finally given up.
Our good old friend Mr. Gilmore has met with a sad check in his active
professional career. Early in the spring we were alarmed by hearing
that he had been found insensible at his desk, and that the seizure
was pronounced to be an apoplectic fit. He had been long complaining
of fulness and oppression in the head, and his doctor had warned him
of the consequences that would follow his persistency in continuing to
work, early and late, as if he were still a young man. The result now
is that he has been positively ordered to keep out of his office for a
year to come, at least, and to seek repose of body and relief of mind
by altogether changing his usual mode of life. The business is left,
accordingly, to be carried on by his partner, and he is himself, at
this moment, away in Germany, visiting some relations who are settled
there in mercantile pursuits. Thus another true friend and trustworthy
adviser is lost to us—lost, I earnestly hope and trust, for a time only.
Poor Mrs. Vesey travelled with me as far as London. It was impossible
to abandon her to solitude at Limmeridge after Laura and I had both
left the house, and we have arranged that she is to live with an
unmarried younger sister of hers, who keeps a school at Clapham. She
is to come here this autumn to visit her pupil—I might almost say her
adopted child. I saw the good old lady safe to her destination, and
left her in the care of her relative, quietly happy at the prospect of
seeing Laura again in a few months’ time.
As for Mr. Fairlie, I believe I am guilty of no injustice if I describe
him as being unutterably relieved by having the house clear of us
women. The idea of his missing his niece is simply preposterous—he
used to let months pass in the old times without attempting to see
her—and in my case and Mrs. Vesey’s, I take leave to consider his
telling us both that he was half heart-broken at our departure, to
be equivalent to a confession that he was secretly rejoiced to get
rid of us. His last caprice has led him to keep two photographers
incessantly employed in producing sun-pictures of all the treasures
and curiosities in his possession. One complete copy of the collection
of the photographs is to be presented to the Mechanics’ Institution of
Carlisle, mounted on the finest cardboard, with ostentatious red-letter
inscriptions underneath, “Madonna and Child by Raphael. In the
possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire.” “Copper coin of the period
of Tiglath Pileser. In the possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire.”
“Unique Rembrandt etching. Known all over Europe as THE SMUDGE, from a
printer’s blot in the corner which exists in no other copy. Valued at
three hundred guineas. In the possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esq.”
Dozens of photographs of this sort, and all inscribed in this manner,
were completed before I left Cumberland, and hundreds more remain to
be done. With this new interest to occupy him, Mr. Fairlie will be
a happy man for months and months to come, and the two unfortunate
photographers will share the social martyrdom which he has hitherto
inflicted on his valet alone.
So much for the persons and events which hold the foremost place in my
memory. What next of the one person who holds the foremost place in
my heart? Laura has been present to my thoughts all the while I have
been writing these lines. What can I recall of her during the past six
months, before I close my journal for the night?
I have only her letters to guide me, and on the most important of all
the questions which our correspondence can discuss, every one of those
letters leaves me in the dark.
Does he treat her kindly? Is she happier now than she was when I parted
with her on the wedding-day? All my letters have contained these two
inquiries, put more or less directly, now in one form, and now in
another, and all, on that point only, have remained without reply, or
have been answered as if my questions merely related to the state of
her health. She informs me, over and over again, that she is perfectly
well—that travelling agrees with her—that she is getting through the
winter, for the first time in her life, without catching cold—but not a
word can I find anywhere which tells me plainly that she is reconciled
to her marriage, and that she can now look back to the twenty-second
of December without any bitter feelings of repentance and regret. The
name of her husband is only mentioned in her letters, as she might
mention the name of a friend who was travelling with them, and who had
undertaken to make all the arrangements for the journey. “Sir Percival”
has settled that we leave on such a day—“Sir Percival” has decided that
we travel by such a road. Sometimes she writes “Percival” only, but
very seldom—in nine cases out of ten she gives him his title.
I cannot find that his habits and opinions have changed and coloured
hers in any single particular. The usual moral transformation which is
insensibly wrought in a young, fresh, sensitive woman by her marriage,
seems never to have taken place in Laura. She writes of her own
thoughts and impressions, amid all the wonders she has seen, exactly
as she might have written to some one else, if I had been travelling
with her instead of her husband. I see no betrayal anywhere of sympathy
of any kind existing between them. Even when she wanders from the
subject of her travels, and occupies herself with the prospects that
await her in England, her speculations are busied with her future
as my sister, and persistently neglect to notice her future as Sir
Percival’s wife. In all this there is no undertone of complaint to warn
me that she is absolutely unhappy in her married life. The impression
I have derived from our correspondence does not, thank God, lead me
to any such distressing conclusion as that. I only see a sad torpor,
an unchangeable indifference, when I turn my mind from her in the old
character of a sister, and look at her, through the medium of her
letters, in the new character of a wife. In other words, it is always
Laura Fairlie who has been writing to me for the last six months, and
never Lady Glyde.
The strange silence which she maintains on the subject of her husband’s
character and conduct, she preserves with almost equal resolution in
the few references which her later letters contain to the name of her
husband’s bosom friend, Count Fosco.
For some unexplained reason the Count and his wife appear to have
changed their plans abruptly, at the end of last autumn, and to have
gone to Vienna instead of going to Rome, at which latter place Sir
Percival had expected to find them when he left England. They only
quitted Vienna in the spring, and travelled as far as the Tyrol to
meet the bride and bridegroom on their homeward journey. Laura writes
readily enough about the meeting with Madame Fosco, and assures me that
she has found her aunt so much changed for the better—so much quieter,
and so much more sensible as a wife than she was as a single woman—that
I shall hardly know her again when I see her here. But on the subject
of Count Fosco (who interests me infinitely more than his wife), Laura
is provokingly circumspect and silent. She only says that he puzzles
her, and that she will not tell me what her impression of him is until
I have seen him, and formed my own opinion first.
This, to my mind, looks ill for the Count. Laura has preserved, far
more perfectly than most people do in later life, the child’s subtle
faculty of knowing a friend by instinct, and if I am right in assuming
that her first impression of Count Fosco has not been favourable, I
for one am in some danger of doubting and distrusting that illustrious
foreigner before I have so much as set eyes on him. But, patience,
patience—this uncertainty, and many uncertainties more, cannot last
much longer. To-morrow will see all my doubts in a fair way of being
cleared up, sooner or later.
Twelve o’clock has struck, and I have just come back to close these
pages, after looking out at my open window.
It is a still, sultry, moonless night. The stars are dull and few. The
trees that shut out the view on all sides look dimly black and solid in
the distance, like a great wall of rock. I hear the croaking of frogs,
faint and far off, and the echoes of the great clock hum in the airless
calm long after the strokes have ceased. I wonder how Blackwater Park
will look in the daytime? I don’t altogether like it by night.
12th.—A day of investigations and discoveries—a more interesting day,
for many reasons, than I had ventured to anticipate.