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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Greatest Mystery Novels of Wilkie Collins (Illustrated)," readers are invited to delve into the pioneering world of detective fiction, crafted by one of the genre's foremost architects. This anthology showcases Collins's signature narrative style'—characterized by intricate plots, vivid characterizations, and a deft blend of psychological insight and sensationalism. The inclusion of illustrations enhances the reading experience, providing visual context to the richly layered narratives, which often intertwine themes of morality and the complexities of human relationships within Victorian society. Wilkie Collins, a contemporary and close associate of Charles Dickens, was profoundly influenced by the societal changes of his time, including the rise of the middle class and the increasing fascination with crime and mystery. His groundbreaking works, such as "The Woman in White" and "The Moonstone," have not only set the standard for modern detective fiction but also explore the intricacies of gender and class in 19th-century England. Collins's personal experiences, including his struggles with illness and taboo themes surrounding his personal life, shaped his unique voice and narrative style. This illustrated collection is a must-read for aficionados of mystery literature and those keen to understand the origins of the genre. Readers will find themselves captivated by Collins's ability to weave suspense with social commentary, making each story a rich tapestry of intrigue that not only entertains but also provokes thoughtful reflection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Greatest Mystery Novels of Wilkie Collins (Illustrated)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents a curated gathering of Wilkie Collins’s most enduring mystery and sensation narratives, offering readers a concentrated view of the novelist’s range in long-form suspense. Rather than an exhaustive “complete works,” the volume brings together eight major titles—The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, The Moonstone, The Haunted Hotel, The Law and the Lady, The Dead Secret, and Miss or Mrs?—that exemplify his influence on Victorian popular fiction and the development of modern mystery. The illustrated format is intended to enhance immersion and atmosphere, supporting the dramatic shifts of scene, character, and tone that distinguish Collins’s storytelling and have captivated readers for generations.
The contents are primarily novels, accompanied by one shorter work commonly treated as a novella. Their shared ground is narrative prose fiction oriented toward mystery, suspense, and the allied mode often termed “sensation” fiction. Within these narratives, Collins makes extensive use of documentary devices—letters, journal entries, statements, depositions, and other written testimonies—integrated as structural elements rather than as separate texts. Readers will not find plays, poems, or essays here; instead, the collection concentrates on his mature long-form storytelling, where shifting voices and embedded documents create a mosaic of perspectives, ambiguities, and disclosures that propel the investigations at the heart of each work.
Across these books, Collins’s hallmarks emerge with clarity: multiple narrators whose motives and blind spots complicate truth; intricate plotting that makes legal, medical, and social detail the engines of suspense; and domestic settings—drawing rooms, country houses, hotels—turned into arenas of peril. Recurring themes include the instability of identity, the vulnerabilities of inheritance and marriage law, the pressure of reputation, and the contest between rational explanation and the appeal of the uncanny. Collins’s heroines and investigators display persistence amid institutional resistance, while his antagonists often conceal themselves behind manners and status. The result is fiction that interrogates justice even as it entertains with orchestrated surprise.
Originally composed for a nineteenth-century audience attuned to serialized revelations, many of these novels were first experienced in monthly or weekly installments. Collins leverages that episodic rhythm—cliffhangers, reversals, and carefully timed disclosures—while maintaining an overarching coherence that rewards both first-time reading and re-reading. His innovations helped define sensation fiction and contributed to the emergence of the English detective novel, exerting a lasting impact on crime and mystery writing. In pairing narrative experiment with a keen eye for social tensions, these works remain vital. The present illustrated edition underscores the landscapes, interiors, and moods that structure the inquiries and complicate their outcomes.
The Woman in White opens with a nocturnal encounter on a lonely road and unfolds into a conspiracy that entangles a drawing master, two half-sisters, and a calculating aristocrat. Its polyphonic structure—testimonies from witnesses and participants—generates a legalistic intensity that suits a plot rooted in identity, marriage, and property. The novel’s enduring fascination lies in how it turns domestic life into a battleground for autonomy, while demonstrating the persuasive force of documentation and narrative control. Often cited as a landmark of sensation fiction, it established Collins’s flair for orchestrating suspense across interlocking perspectives without sacrificing psychological plausibility or moral complexity.
The Moonstone centers on the theft of a celebrated diamond during a country-house gathering and follows an investigation narrated by several observers, including a family retainer and other household figures. The methodical presence of a professional detective, attention to physical evidence, and the fair presentation of clues have led many to call it a pioneering English detective novel. Questions of colonial plunder and addiction shadow the inquiry, lending ethical depth to the puzzle. With its shifts of tone—from comic to grave—and its careful management of time, testimony, and probability, the novel demonstrates Collins’s mature technique in balancing revelation with sustained uncertainty.
No Name examines the devastating legal and social consequences that follow a sudden change in a family’s status, confronting the intricacies of inheritance and legitimacy in Victorian society. What begins as domestic misfortune evolves into a battle of wits, as a determined young woman contends with constraints placed upon her by law and custom. The novel is less a whodunit than a drama of strategy, disguise, and negotiation, where the greatest mysteries are how to maneuver within inequitable systems and how to preserve integrity amid compromise. Collins’s grasp of legal nuance and his sympathy for female agency make the narrative both incisive and moving.
Armadale explores the converging lives of two young men who share the same name and a foreboding legacy that reaches from the past into their intertwined futures. Dreams, warnings, and omens lend gothic color, while worldly temptations and a formidable anti-heroine test the protagonists’ judgment. The novel is expansive, adventurous, and morally ambiguous, dwelling on questions of responsibility, chance, and the extent to which character can resist fate. Collins’s plotting here is audacious yet controlled, juxtaposing heightened sensation with careful construction. The result is a study of destiny and desire that broadens the scope of mystery beyond crime to the hazards of identity itself.
The Law and the Lady features a newly married woman who discovers that her husband’s past involves a Scottish “Not Proven” verdict, prompting her to undertake an independent investigation. Collins turns legal curiosity into narrative propulsion, detailing how persistence, method, and courage can challenge social inhibitions against female inquiry. This work offers an early example of a woman-led investigation in the novel form, grounding its suspense in procedural legwork as much as in peril. The tension arises not solely from danger but from the difficulty of establishing truth within legal and social frameworks that prefer ambiguity, compromise, or silence to clarity.
The Haunted Hotel sets a mysterious death and its aftermath against vivid European locales, with Venice providing an especially atmospheric stage. Rumors of a curse shadow a particular hotel suite, and the narrative sustains an elegant uncertainty between rational explanation and the seductive logic of haunting. Collins uses travel, shifting scenery, and a cosmopolitan cast to examine how fear circulates through rumor, architecture, and memory. The resulting suspense is both psychological and situational, a reminder that mysteries flourish in unfamiliar rooms and foreign streets where witnesses misread signs and the past lingers, not as a specter, but as pressure upon perception.
The Dead Secret revolves around a concealed revelation that reshapes the lives of those bound to a remote house on the Cornish coast. Collins orchestrates the discovery through household routines, servant knowledge, and a steady deepening of motive, illustrating how small acts of concealment can compound into life-altering consequences. The landscape and the architecture become repositories of memory, while the narrative dwells on the ethics of disclosure: who deserves to know, and at what cost. Here the mystery is as much moral as factual, and the slow, scrupulous unveiling showcases Collins’s gift for turning domestic detail into instruments of fate.
Miss or Mrs? compresses Collins’s narrative cunning into a swift novella centered on questions of legal status, timing, and the vulnerabilities of reputation. The story’s brisk pace, tight cast, and focus on a clandestine union foreground the practical stakes of age, consent, and social appearance, all handled with a light yet suspenseful touch. Its ingenuity lies in how a seemingly narrow predicament opens onto wider concerns about guardianship, secrecy, and proof. As a complement to the larger novels, it demonstrates Collins’s ability to sustain tension with economy and to craft puzzles whose solutions depend on careful attention to words, documents, and intent.
Author Biography
Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was a major Victorian novelist, playwright, and journalist, widely regarded as a pioneer of the sensation novel and an architect of early detective fiction. He became famous for meticulously plotted narratives that fused legal puzzles, domestic settings, and psychological tension, notably in The Woman in White and The Moonstone. A close associate of Charles Dickens, Collins wrote extensively for leading periodicals and benefited from the era’s vibrant culture of serialization. His work challenged conventional boundaries between popular and literary fiction, and he remains a touchstone for readers and scholars interested in narrative form, social critique, and the origins of modern suspense.
Collins’s education combined practical training and self-directed study. After an early stint in commerce, he entered Lincoln’s Inn to study law in the 1840s and was called to the bar in the early 1850s, though he made his career in letters. Legal knowledge later proved central to his plots and themes, especially questions of evidence, testimony, and property. Time spent on the Continent broadened his cultural range and sharpened his interest in French and Gothic models, melodrama, and feuilleton techniques. The theater’s emphasis on staging and revelation influenced his fiction’s structure, while engagement with journalism honed the pacing and cliffhangers suited to serial publication.
Collins began with historical and contemporary fiction before achieving major success. Early novels such as Antonina, Basil, and Hide and Seek established his interest in identity, secret histories, and the pressures of social convention. He wrote criticism and tales for Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round, developing a collaborative presence in mid-Victorian print culture. His play The Frozen Deep demonstrated a flair for dramaturgy that fed back into his fiction, especially his orchestration of scenes and revelations. By the late 1850s he had refined a distinctive narrative method, blending multiple perspectives, embedded documents, and legal or medical details to animate domestic peril.
The Woman in White marked his breakthrough, creating a sensation with its serialized unveiling of conspiracy and coercion within ordinary households. Collins’s so-called sensation novels often set crimes and moral shocks amid familiar settings, inviting readers to scrutinize marriage, property, and social authority. He followed with No Name and Armadale, intensifying debates about respectability, inheritance, and female agency. His command of serial form sustained widespread readership, while critics contested the genre’s morality and realism. Yet even detractors noted the technical assurance of his plotting and character voices, which balanced suspense with social inquiry and ensured each installment carried narrative momentum and thematic weight.
The Moonstone consolidated Collins’s reputation and strongly influenced the English detective novel. Its polyphonic structure, attention to evidence, and memorable investigator helped define expectations for procedural inquiry in fiction. Rather than rely solely on a single sleuth, Collins juxtaposed testimonies to explore bias, memory, and the contingencies of proof. Subsequent works, including The Law and the Lady and later crime tales, continued to test legal frameworks and the ethics of investigation. His periodical work with Dickens reinforced a commitment to reader engagement through serial rhythm. Across these novels, Collins fused entertainment with an exploration of how society constructs truth and credulity.
Collins remained prolific through the 1870s and 1880s, often addressing contested social questions. Man and Wife examined marriage law and bodily harm; The New Magdalen treated the stigma of the fallen woman; Heart and Science engaged debates over vivisection. Ill health and the use of pain relief shaped his working habits and informed recurrent concerns with medical authority and altered states. He continued to write for the stage and oversaw adaptations of his fiction, extending his audience beyond the page. While some reviewers perceived a decline from earlier peaks, he retained a strong readership and refined themes of justice, identity, and institutional power.
In later years Collins published works such as The Haunted Hotel, Jezebel’s Daughter, and The Evil Genius, underscoring his sustained interest in psychological tension, finance, and the legal bonds of family life. He died in 1889, leaving an influential body of fiction that remains central to studies of Victorian narrative and genre history. The Woman in White and The Moonstone continue to be widely read and frequently adapted for stage and screen. Modern criticism values his experiments with multiple narrators and documentary framing, as well as his scrutiny of social and legal systems. His legacy endures in sensation, detective, and contemporary domestic suspense.
Historical Context
Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) wrote in high Victorian Britain, an era of urban growth, mass literacy, empire, and sweeping reforms. From The Dead Secret (1857) to The Haunted Hotel (1878), he helped codify the sensation novel and pioneer detective fiction. Works in this collection—The Woman in White (1859–60), No Name (1862–63), Armadale (1866), The Moonstone (1868), The Law and the Lady (1875), Miss or Mrs? (1871)—share a common matrix of anxieties about identity, inheritance, marriage, and crime. London’s lawyers’ chambers, hotels, and suburbs form a central stage, while the British Empire and the European continent supply distance, wealth, and danger that propel plot and mystery.
Collins matured within the world of serialized fiction shaped by Charles Dickens. He contributed to Household Words and, crucially, to Dickens’s All the Year Round, which launched in 1859 and published The Woman in White and The Moonstone in parts. Serialization, with its timed instalments and cliffhangers, trained readers to track evidence and testimony across months, encouraging the multi-voiced narratives Collins perfected. In the United States, illustrated weeklies like Harper’s Weekly ran parallel serials, extending his reach and introducing visual cues that reinforced suspense. The international periodical network, appearing on W. H. Smith railway bookstalls, made mystery a commuter’s as well as a parlor’s pastime.
The mid-century book trade framed how Collins plotted and paced. Mudie’s Select Library, founded in 1842, and other circulating libraries demanded long three-volume novels that would justify subscription fees yet conform to moral expectations. Authors gained access to thousands of middle-class readers but wrote under the shadow of market censorship. The repeal of the newspaper stamp in 1855 and the paper duty in 1861, along with the 1870 Elementary Education Act, expanded readership and ensured that scandals fictional or real rippled quickly through society. Collins’s intricate entanglements of wills, aliases, and blackmail harmonized with this economy of instalments, reviews, and borrowed books.
Modern policing provided narrative machinery for mystery. Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police formed in London in 1829; a Detective Branch followed in 1842 at Scotland Yard. Before fingerprints and modern forensics, investigations relied on witness testimony, handwriting, footprints, and patient observation. The Road Hill House murder of June 1860 and the celebrity of Inspector Jonathan Whicher showcased both promise and fallibility of detectives, shaping public expectations for fictional counterparts. Collins’s investigators and shrewd amateurs inhabit this formative moment, when professional inquiry was new, the private eye had not yet crystallized, and public fascination with method competed with suspicion of official intrusion.
Victorian courts and statutes underwrote Collins’s recurring themes of marriage, legitimacy, and property. The Wills Act 1837 standardized testamentary practice; Chancery’s slow equity procedures haunted families until the Judicature Acts of 1873–75 streamlined jurisdictions. The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 created a civil divorce court, exposing domestic secrets to public scrutiny. The Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 gradually let wives control earnings and property. In this shifting landscape, forged identities, guardianship abuses, and strategic marriages are not merely melodrama but commentary on law’s power over private lives, a power his plots repeatedly test with affidavits, deeds, and delayed revelations.
Asylums and medical authority loom behind conspiracies of confinement. The Lunacy Act 1845 and the County Asylums Act 1845 created a national framework of compulsory institutions overseen by Commissioners in Lunacy. While intended for care, the system could be manipulated through medical certificates and family influence, fueling fears that inconvenient people—especially women—could disappear behind high walls. Contemporary scandals and investigative journalism made wrongful confinement a potent topic. Collins’s interest in depositions, medical opinions, and the fragility of credibility corresponds to a culture grappling with emergent psychiatry, moral treatment, and a new professional class whose signatures could reclassify a person’s identity overnight.
Victorian debates about women’s status inform the tensions that drive Collins’s plots. The ideology of separate spheres framed femininity as domestic and moral, yet campaigns by figures like Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Josephine Butler pressed issues of property rights, education, and bodily autonomy. The Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, and their eventual repeal, as well as the Married Women’s Property reforms, kept gender and law at the fore. Stories of heiresses, governesses, actresses, and resourceful wives navigate perils of guardianship and reputation. Even a brief tale such as Miss or Mrs? resonates with period disputes over consent, youthful marriage, and patriarchal control.
Medicine and intoxicants offered psychological depth and plot engines. Laudanum, a tincture of opium, was a common over-the-counter remedy; the Pharmacy Act 1868 attempted to regulate poisons, including opiates, through registers and labels. Collins’s own experience with chronic pain and opium use sharpened his portrayal of altered states, unreliable memory, and chemically induced behavior. Victorian experiments with mesmerism and the popularity of spiritualism, from the Fox sisters in 1848 to the London séances of D. D. Home in the 1850s, blurred boundaries between science and superstition. Collins often keeps readers poised between rational explanation and the uncanny, reflecting an age of contested belief.
Technology transformed movement and communication, enabling plots of pursuit and evasion. Railways linked country houses to London, creating timetables for alibis and sudden flights. The Uniform Penny Post of 1840 allowed private correspondence to circulate cheaply, setting up intercepted letters and cryptic notes as routine devices. The electric telegraph, spanning Britain in the 1850s and crossing the Atlantic in 1866, sped news and orders, while gaslight prolonged urban life into evening, making streets and hotels stages for nocturnal intrigue. Photography’s cartes de visite helped fix faces in memory yet could be forged or misread, a convenient metaphor for identity’s instability in his fiction.
The empire furnished treasure, servants, and secrets. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 scarred British imaginations and altered imperial governance, while the opium trade and jewel circulations linked London drawing rooms with South Asian wealth and violence. The Moonstone explicitly channels these currents through a contested gem and colonial backstory. Continental Europe, newly reachable through organized tours by Thomas Cook from the 1850s, provided alternative jurisdictions and cosmopolitan settings. Venice, annexed to the Kingdom of Italy in 1866, appears as a modern yet haunted space in later work. Across these geographies, legal loopholes, different police cultures, and language barriers complicate pursuit of truth.
Country houses and hotels crystallize social change. The great estate, sustained by entail and settlement, projected lineage yet harbored vulnerable secrets in libraries and deed boxes. By contrast, the grand metropolitan hotel, such as the Langham in London opened in 1865, epitomized transient modernity: strangers, registers, luggage, and international service routines. Collins exploits both architectures. He mines the house for its archives and inheritances, and he uses hotels to stage accidental meetings, delayed letters, and vanishing guests. These spaces, shaped by new service economies and privacy expectations, are engines for mystery, uniting servants’ knowledge, public corridors, and the misleading safety of respectable interiors.
Toxicology and celebrated trials fed the sensation for crime. The Marsh test for arsenic (1836) and the authority of Alfred Swaine Taylor advanced forensic discourse, while notorious cases like Dr William Palmer, executed in 1856, popularized fears of domestic poisoning. The Offences Against the Person Act 1861 consolidated statutes relating to bodily harm, yet evidence often remained circumstantial. Without fingerprints—introduced to British policing only in 1901—investigators leaned on handwriting, stains, and testimony. Collins converts this evidentiary culture into narrative form, where readers evaluate conflicting statements, weigh expert opinions, and feel the pull of moral judgment before the law itself passes sentence.
Theatre and print culture were intertwined in Collins’s career. He acted and wrote for amateur theatricals with Dickens—The Frozen Deep was staged in 1857—absorbing melodramatic timing, tableau, and revelation scenes that animate his novels. Many of his narratives were dramatized or adapted for the stage, a feedback loop that rewarded striking situations and strongly motivated villains and heroines. At the same time, illustrated journalism—The Illustrated London News, Harper’s Weekly—shaped how the public saw crime, costume, and setting. Theatricality and reportage converge in his multiplatform storytelling, where letters, diaries, depositions, and eyewitness accounts play the roles of testimony and cross-examination.
Collins’s London is mapped through law and commerce. He studied at Lincoln’s Inn in the 1840s and filled his fiction with solicitors, clerks, and copyists who inhabit Chancery Lane, Holborn, and the Strand. Newspapers proliferated after 1855, and gossip traveled quickly through clubs and reading rooms. Servants, the largest occupational group in the 1861 Census, move through these spaces carrying keys, messages, and knowledge, making them pivotal to concealment and disclosure. Beyond the metropolis, Cornwall’s cliffs and villages, significant in The Dead Secret, supplied an edge-world of wreckers’ legends and hidden chapels, while new rail links folded remote coasts into the national itinerary.
Foreigners and exiles complicate Victorian respectability. London hosted communities displaced by the 1848 revolutions, including Italians associated with Mazzini, and the city’s cosmopolitan crowds unsettled national self-confidence. Collins’s charismatic outsiders—figures with continental manners, languages, and ambiguous pasts—reflect both fascination and fear. They flourish in salons and hotels yet are closely watched by a culture wary of Catholicism, radical politics, and secret societies. The period’s journalism amplified stereotypes even as travel and trade made cross-cultural contact routine. This tension between hospitality and suspicion feeds plots of deception, alliance, and betrayal across English estates and European cities alike.
Collins wrote under and against a moral economy policed by reviewers and librarians. The Saturday Review and the Quarterly Review attacked sensation fiction in the 1860s—Henry Mansel’s 1863 essay became a touchstone—warning that tales of bigamy, forgery, and madness undermined domestic virtue. Yet sales and borrowings soared, and readers learned to savor plausible scandal wrapped in moral closure. Collins’s sophisticated structures and ethical questions influenced later crime writing; T. S. Eliot would praise The Moonstone in the twentieth century as a foundational English detective novel. The contested reception shows how his mysteries mediated between entertainment, social critique, and evolving literary standards.
Late Victorian changes reframed Collins’s subjects as his career advanced. Economic shocks, such as the Overend Gurney collapse in 1866, underlined the fragility of fortunes built on credit, while the 1873–75 Judicature Acts and the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act nudged the legal context of inheritance and marriage toward modernity. International travel grew easier, and electric light began to challenge gas by the late 1870s, brightening hotels and streets yet casting new shadows. Collins’s health declined with gout and laudanum use, but his interest in contested testimony, women’s agency, and the ambiguities of science and superstition remained constant to the end.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Woman in White
An art teacher’s midnight encounter with a terrified woman dressed in white draws him into a web of identity deception, secret marriages, and wrongful confinement. Told through interlocking testimonies, the novel exposes a conspiracy that imperils two sisters while testing the line between truth and appearance.
No Name
After a legal technicality brands two sisters illegitimate and strips them of their inheritance, the younger pursues daring stratagems to reclaim what was lost. Disguises, shifting alliances, and the letter of the law drive a tale of ingenuity and suspense.
Armadale
Two young men who share the same name inherit a dangerous legacy from a past crime, as ominous dreams and warnings shadow their friendship. Their intertwined fates attract a brilliant, ruthless adventuress whose schemes propel a story of chance, identity, and moral choice.
The Moonstone
A sacred diamond disappears during a country-house gathering, prompting a pioneering detective inquiry told through multiple, contrasting narrators. As clues and contradictions accumulate, the investigation explores memory, guilt, and the gem’s roots in British India.
The Haunted Hotel
A sudden death and rumors of a curse converge on a sinister Venetian hotel, ensnaring a newlywed, a glamorous countess, and wary observers in a web of fear. Gothic atmosphere meets methodical inquiry as the narrative tests whether the ‘haunting’ conceals human crime.
The Law and The Lady
On discovering her husband once faced a notorious ‘Not Proven’ verdict for his first wife’s death, a determined bride undertakes her own investigation. Her quest challenges legal conventions and social expectations as she seeks to overturn suspicion with evidence.
The Dead Secret
A dying woman hides a confession in a Cornish mansion, and its revelation years later threatens to alter a family’s identity. The search for the truth weaves through secret rooms, divided loyalties, and the moral weight of long-buried facts.
Miss or Mrs?
A clandestine marriage whose legality is clouded by the bride’s age and guardianship pits a young heiress and her true love against a desperate suitor. Questions of consent, proof, and motive drive a swift tale of romantic peril and legal intrigue.
Greatest Mystery Novels of Wilkie Collins (Illustrated)
The Woman in White
First Epoch
The Story Begun by Walter Hartright
I
This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.[1q]
If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their share of the public attention in a Court of Justice.
But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged servant of the long purse; and the story is left to be told, for the first time, in this place. As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now. No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence. When the writer of these introductory lines (Walter Hartright by name) happens to be more closely connected than others with the incidents to be recorded, he will describe them in his own person. When his experience fails, he will retire from the position of narrator; and his task will be continued, from the point at which he has left it off, by other persons who can speak to the circumstances under notice from their own knowledge, just as clearly and positively as he has spoken before them.
Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness — with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word.
Let Walter Hartright, teacher of drawing, aged twenty-eight years, be heard first.
II
It was the last day of July. The long hot summer was drawing to a close; and we, the weary pilgrims of the London pavement, were beginning to think of the cloud-shadows on the cornfields, and the autumn breezes on the seashore.
For my own poor part, the fading summer left me out of health, out of spirits, and, if the truth must be told, out of money as well. During the past year I had not managed my professional resources as carefully as usual; and my extravagance now limited me to the prospect of spending the autumn economically between my mother’s cottage at Hampstead and my own chambers in town.
The evening, I remember, was still and cloudy; the London air was at its heaviest; the distant hum of the street-traffic was at its faintest; the small pulse of the life within me, and the great heart of the city around me, seemed to be sinking in unison, languidly and more languidly, with the sinking sun. I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs. It was one of the two evenings in every week which I was accustomed to spend with my mother and my sister. So I turned my steps northward in the direction of Hampstead.
Events which I have yet to relate make it necessary to mention in this place that my father had been dead some years at the period of which I am now writing; and that my sister Sarah and I were the sole survivors of a family of five children. My father was a drawing-master before me. His exertions had made him highly successful in his profession; and his affectionate anxiety to provide for the future of those who were dependent on his labours had impelled him, from the time of his marriage, to devote to the insuring of his life a much larger portion of his income than most men consider it necessary to set aside for that purpose. Thanks to his admirable prudence and self-denial my mother and sister were left, after his death, as independent of the world as they had been during his lifetime. I succeeded to his connection, and had every reason to feel grateful for the prospect that awaited me at my starting in life.
The quiet twilight was still trembling on the topmost ridges of the heath; and the view of London below me had sunk into a black gulf in the shadow of the cloudy night, when I stood before the gate of my mother’s cottage. I had hardly rung the bell before the house door was opened violently; my worthy Italian friend, Professor Pesca, appeared in the servant’s place; and darted out joyously to receive me, with a shrill foreign parody on an English cheer.
On his own account, and, I must be allowed to add, on mine also, the Professor merits the honour of a formal introduction. Accident has made him the starting-point of the strange family story which it is the purpose of these pages to unfold.
I had first become acquainted with my Italian friend by meeting him at certain great houses where he taught his own language and I taught drawing. All I then knew of the history of his life was, that he had once held a situation in the University of Padua; that he had left Italy for political reasons (the nature of which he uniformly declined to mention to any one); and that he had been for many years respectably established in London as a teacher of languages.
Without being actually a dwarf — for he was perfectly well proportioned from head to foot — Pesca was, I think, the smallest human being I ever saw out of a showroom. Remarkable anywhere, by his personal appearance, he was still further distinguished among the rank and file of mankind by the harmless eccentricity of his character. The ruling idea of his life appeared to be, that he was bound to show his gratitude to the country which had afforded him an asylum and a means of subsistence by doing his utmost to turn himself into an Englishman. Not content with paying the nation in general the compliment of invariably carrying an umbrella, and invariably wearing gaiters and a white hat, the Professor further aspired to become an Englishman in his habits and amusements, as well as in his personal appearance. Finding us distinguished, as a nation, by our love of athletic exercises, the little man, in the innocence of his heart, devoted himself impromptu to all our English sports and pastimes whenever he had the opportunity of joining them; firmly persuaded that he could adopt our national amusements of the field by an effort of will precisely as he had adopted our national gaiters and our national white hat.
I had seen him risk his limbs blindly at a fox-hunt and in a cricket-field; and soon afterwards I saw him risk his life, just as blindly, in the sea at Brighton.
We had met there accidentally, and were bathing together. If we had been engaged in any exercise peculiar to my own nation I should, of course, have looked after Pesca carefully; but as foreigners are generally quite as well able to take care of themselves in the water as Englishmen, it never occurred to me that the art of swimming might merely add one more to the list of manly exercises which the Professor believed that he could learn impromptu. Soon after we had both struck out from shore, I stopped, finding my friend did not gain on me, and turned round to look for him. To my horror and amazement, I saw nothing between me and the beach but two little white arms which struggled for an instant above the surface of the water, and then disappeared from view. When I dived for him, the poor little man was lying quietly coiled up at the bottom, in a hollow of shingle, looking by many degrees smaller than I had ever seen him look before. During the few minutes that elapsed while I was taking him in, the air revived him, and he ascended the steps of the machine with my assistance. With the partial recovery of his animation came the return of his wonderful delusion on the subject of swimming. As soon as his chattering teeth would let him speak, he smiled vacantly, and said he thought it must have been the Cramp.
When he had thoroughly recovered himself, and had joined me on the beach, his warm Southern nature broke through all artificial English restraints in a moment. He overwhelmed me with the wildest expressions of affection — exclaimed passionately, in his exaggerated Italian way, that he would hold his life henceforth at my disposal — and declared that he should never be happy again until he had found an opportunity of proving his gratitude by rendering me some service which I might remember, on my side, to the end of my days.
I did my best to stop the torrent of his tears and protestations by persisting in treating the whole adventure as a good subject for a joke; and succeeded at last, as I imagined, in lessening Pesca’s overwhelming sense of obligation to me. Little did I think then — little did I think afterwards when our pleasant holiday had drawn to an end — that the opportunity of serving me for which my grateful companion so ardently longed was soon to come; that he was eagerly to seize it on the instant; and that by so doing he was to turn the whole current of my existence into a new channel, and to alter me to myself almost past recognition.
Yet so it was. If I had not dived for Professor Pesca when he lay under water on his shingle bed, I should in all human probability never have been connected with the story which these pages will relate — I should never, perhaps, have heard even the name of the woman who has lived in all my thoughts, who has possessed herself of all my energies, who has become the one guiding influence that now directs the purpose of my life.
III
Pesca’s face and manner, on the evening when we confronted each other at my mother’s gate, were more than sufficient to inform me that something extraordinary had happened. It was quite useless, however, to ask him for an immediate explanation. I could only conjecture, while he was dragging me in by both hands, that (knowing my habits) he had come to the cottage to make sure of meeting me that night, and that he had some news to tell of an unusually agreeable kind.
We both bounced into the parlour in a highly abrupt and undignified manner. My mother sat by the open window laughing and fanning herself. Pesca was one of her especial favourites and his wildest eccentricities were always pardonable in her eyes. Poor dear soul! from the first moment when she found out that the little Professor was deeply and gratefully attached to her son, she opened her heart to him unreservedly, and took all his puzzling foreign peculiarities for granted, without so much as attempting to understand any one of them.
My sister Sarah, with all the advantages of youth, was, strangely enough, less pliable. She did full justice to Pesca’s excellent qualities of heart; but she could not accept him implicitly, as my mother accepted him, for my sake. Her insular notions of propriety rose in perpetual revolt against Pesca’s constitutional contempt for appearances; and she was always more or less undisguisedly astonished at her mother’s familiarity with the eccentric little foreigner. I have observed, not only in my sister’s case, but in the instances of others, that we of the young generation are nothing like so hearty and so impulsive as some of our elders. I constantly see old people flushed and excited by the prospect of some anticipated pleasure which altogether fails to ruffle the tranquillity of their serene grandchildren. Are we, I wonder, quite such genuine boys and girls now as our seniors were in their time? Has the great advance in education taken rather too long a stride; and are we in these modern days, just the least trifle in the world too well brought up?
Without attempting to answer those questions decisively, I may at least record that I never saw my mother and my sister together in Pesca’s society, without finding my mother much the younger woman of the two. On this occasion, for example, while the old lady was laughing heartily over the boyish manner in which we tumbled into the parlour, Sarah was perturbedly picking up the broken pieces of a teacup, which the Professor had knocked off the table in his precipitate advance to meet me at the door.
“I don’t know what would have happened, Walter,” said my mother, “if you had delayed much longer. Pesca has been half mad with impatience, and I have been half mad with curiosity. The Professor has brought some wonderful news with him, in which he says you are concerned; and he has cruelly refused to give us the smallest hint of it till his friend Walter appeared.”
“Very provoking: it spoils the Set,” murmured Sarah to herself, mournfully absorbed over the ruins of the broken cup.
While these words were being spoken, Pesca, happily and fussily unconscious of the irreparable wrong which the crockery had suffered at his hands, was dragging a large armchair to the opposite end of the room, so as to command us all three, in the character of a public speaker addressing an audience. Having turned the chair with its back towards us, he jumped into it on his knees, and excitedly addressed his small congregation of three from an impromptu pulpit.
“Now, my good dears,” began Pesca (who always said “good dears” when he meant “worthy friends”), “listen to me. The time has come — I recite my good news — I speak at last.”
“Hear, hear!” said my mother, humouring the joke.
“The next thing he will break, mamma,” whispered Sarah, “will be the back of the best armchair.”
“I go back into my life, and I address myself to the noblest of created beings,” continued Pesca, vehemently apostrophising my unworthy self over the top rail of the chair. “Who found me dead at the bottom of the sea (through Cramp); and who pulled me up to the top; and what did I say when I got into my own life and my own clothes again?”
“Much more than was at all necessary,” I answered as doggedly as possible; for the least encouragement in connection with this subject invariably let loose the Professor’s emotions in a flood of tears.
“I said,” persisted Pesca, “that my life belonged to my dear friend, Walter, for the rest of my days — and so it does. I said that I should never be happy again till I had found the opportunity of doing a good Something for Walter — and I have never been contented with myself till this most blessed day. Now,” cried the enthusiastic little man at the top of his voice, “the overflowing happiness bursts out of me at every pore of my skin, like a perspiration; for on my faith, and soul, and honour, the something is done at last, and the only word to say now is — Right-all-right!”
It may be necessary to explain here that Pesca prided himself on being a perfect Englishman in his language, as well as in his dress, manners, and amusements. Having picked up a few of our most familiar colloquial expressions, he scattered them about over his conversation whenever they happened to occur to him, turning them, in his high relish for their sound and his general ignorance of their sense, into compound words and repetitions of his own, and always running them into each other, as if they consisted of one long syllable.
“Among the fine London Houses where I teach the language of my native country,” said the Professor, rushing into his long-deferred explanation without another word of preface, “there is one, mighty fine, in the big place called Portland. You all know where that is? Yes, yes — course-of-course. The fine house, my good dears, has got inside it a fine family. A Mamma, fair and fat; three young Misses, fair and fat; two young Misters, fair and fat; and a Papa, the fairest and the fattest of all, who is a mighty merchant, up to his eyes in gold — a fine man once, but seeing that he has got a naked head and two chins, fine no longer at the present time. Now mind! I teach the sublime Dante to the young Misses, and ah! — my-soul-bless-my-soul! — it is not in human language to say how the sublime Dante puzzles the pretty heads of all three! No matter — all in good time — and the more lessons the better for me. Now mind! Imagine to yourselves that I am teaching the young Misses to-day, as usual. We are all four of us down together in the Hell of Dante. At the Seventh Circle — but no matter for that: all the Circles are alike to the three young Misses, fair and fat, — at the Seventh Circle, nevertheless, my pupils are sticking fast; and I, to set them going again, recite, explain, and blow myself up red-hot with useless enthusiasm, when — a creak of boots in the passage outside, and in comes the golden Papa, the mighty merchant with the naked head and the two chins. — Ha! my good dears, I am closer than you think for to the business, now. Have you been patient so far? or have you said to yourselves, ‘Deuce-what-the-deuce! Pesca is long-winded tonight?’“
We declared that we were deeply interested. The Professor went on:
“In his hand, the golden Papa has a letter; and after he has made his excuse for disturbing us in our Infernal Region with the common mortal Business of the house, he addresses himself to the three young Misses, and begins, as you English begin everything in this blessed world that you have to say, with a great O. ‘O, my dears,’ says the mighty merchant, ‘I have got here a letter from my friend, Mr. — — ’(the name has slipped out of my mind; but no matter; we shall come back to that; yes, yes — right-all-right). So the Papa says, ‘I have got a letter from my friend, the Mister; and he wants a recommend from me, of a drawing-master, to go down to his house in the country.’ My-soul-bless-my-soul! when I heard the golden Papa say those words, if I had been big enough to reach up to him, I should have put my arms round his neck, and pressed him to my bosom in a long and grateful hug! As it was, I only bounced upon my chair. My seat was on thorns, and my soul was on fire to speak but I held my tongue, and let Papa go on. ‘Perhaps you know,’ says this good man of money, twiddling his friend’s letter this way and that, in his golden fingers and thumbs, ‘perhaps you know, my dears, of a drawing-master that I can recommend?’ The three young Misses all look at each other, and then say (with the indispensable great O to begin) “O, dear no, Papa! But here is Mr. Pesca’ At the mention of myself I can hold no longer — the thought of you, my good dears, mounts like blood to my head — I start from my seat, as if a spike had grown up from the ground through the bottom of my chair — I address myself to the mighty merchant, and I say (English phrase) ‘Dear sir, I have the man! The first and foremost drawing-master of the world! Recommend him by the post tonight, and send him off, bag and baggage (English phrase again — ha!), send him off, bag and baggage, by the train tomorrow!’ ‘Stop, stop,’ says Papa; ‘is he a foreigner, or an Englishman?’ ‘English to the bone of his back,’ I answer. ‘Respectable?’ says Papa. ‘Sir,’ I say (for this last question of his outrages me, and I have done being familiar with him — ) ‘Sir! the immortal fire of genius burns in this Englishman’s bosom, and, what is more, his father had it before him!’ ‘Never mind,’ says the golden barbarian of a Papa, ‘never mind about his genius, Mr. Pesca. We don’t want genius in this country, unless it is accompanied by respectability — and then we are very glad to have it, very glad indeed. Can your friend produce testimonials — letters that speak to his character?’ I wave my hand negligently. ‘Letters?’ I say. ‘Ha! my-soul-bless-my-soul! I should think so, indeed! Volumes of letters and portfolios of testimonials, if you like!’ ‘One or two will do,’ says this man of phlegm and money. ‘Let him send them to me, with his name and address. And — stop, stop, Mr. Pesca — before you go to your friend, you had better take a note.’ ‘Banknote!’ I say, indignantly. ‘No banknote, if you please, till my brave Englishman has earned it first.’ ‘Banknote!’ says Papa, in a great surprise, ‘who talked of banknote? I mean a note of the terms — a memorandum of what he is expected to do. Go on with your lesson, Mr. Pesca, and I will give you the necessary extract from my friend’s letter.’ Down sits the man of merchandise and money to his pen, ink, and paper; and down I go once again into the Hell of Dante, with my three young Misses after me. In ten minutes’ time the note is written, and the boots of Papa are creaking themselves away in the passage outside. From that moment, on my faith, and soul, and honour, I know nothing more! The glorious thought that I have caught my opportunity at last, and that my grateful service for my dearest friend in the world is as good as done already, flies up into my head and makes me drunk. How I pull my young Misses and myself out of our Infernal Region again, how my other business is done afterwards, how my little bit of dinner slides itself down my throat, I know no more than a man in the moon. Enough for me, that here I am, with the mighty merchant’s note in my hand, as large as life, as hot as fire, and as happy as a king! Ha! ha! ha! right-right-right-all-right!” Here the Professor waved the memorandum of terms over his head, and ended his long and voluble narrative with his shrill Italian parody on an English cheer.”
My mother rose the moment he had done, with flushed cheeks and brightened eyes. She caught the little man warmly by both hands.
“My dear, good Pesca,” she said, “I never doubted your true affection for Walter — but I am more than ever persuaded of it now!”
“I am sure we are very much obliged to Professor Pesca, for Walter’s sake,” added Sarah. She half rose, while she spoke, as if to approach the armchair, in her turn; but, observing that Pesca was rapturously kissing my mother’s hands, looked serious, and resumed her seat. “If the familiar little man treats my mother in that way, how will he treat ME?” Faces sometimes tell truth; and that was unquestionably the thought in Sarah’s mind, as she sat down again.
Although I myself was gratefully sensible of the kindness of Pesca’s motives, my spirits were hardly so much elevated as they ought to have been by the prospect of future employment now placed before me. When the Professor had quite done with my mother’s hand, and when I had warmly thanked him for his interference on my behalf, I asked to be allowed to look at the note of terms which his respectable patron had drawn up for my inspection.
Pesca handed me the paper, with a triumphant flourish of the hand.
“Read!” said the little man majestically. “I promise you my friend, the writing of the golden Papa speaks with a tongue of trumpets for itself.”
The note of terms was plain, straightforward, and comprehensive, at any rate. It informed me,
First, That Frederick Fairlie, Esquire, of Limmeridge House. Cumberland, wanted to engage the services of a thoroughly competent drawing-master, for a period of four months certain.
Secondly, That the duties which the master was expected to perform would be of a twofold kind. He was to superintend the instruction of two young ladies in the art of painting in watercolours; and he was to devote his leisure time, afterwards, to the business of repairing and mounting a valuable collection of drawings, which had been suffered to fall into a condition of total neglect.
Thirdly, That the terms offered to the person who should undertake and properly perform these duties were four guineas a week; that he was to reside at Limmeridge House; and that he was to be treated there on the footing of a gentleman.
Fourthly, and lastly, That no person need think of applying for this situation unless he could furnish the most unexceptionable references to character and abilities. The references were to be sent to Mr. Fairlie’s friend in London, who was empowered to conclude all necessary arrangements. These instructions were followed by the name and address of Pesca’s employer in Portland Place — and there the note, or memorandum, ended.
The prospect which this offer of an engagement held out was certainly an attractive one. The employment was likely to be both easy and agreeable; it was proposed to me at the autumn time of the year when I was least occupied; and the terms, judging by my personal experience in my profession, were surprisingly liberal. I knew this; I knew that I ought to consider myself very fortunate if I succeeded in securing the offered employment — and yet, no sooner had I read the memorandum than I felt an inexplicable unwillingness within me to stir in the matter. I had never in the whole of my previous experience found my duty and my inclination so painfully and so unaccountably at variance as I found them now.
“Oh, Walter, your father never had such a chance as this!” said my mother, when she had read the note of terms and had handed it back to me.
“Such distinguished people to know,” remarked Sarah, straightening herself in the chair; “and on such gratifying terms of equality too!”
“Yes, yes; the terms, in every sense, are tempting enough,” I replied impatiently. “But before I send in my testimonials, I should like a little time to consider — — ”
“Consider!” exclaimed my mother. “Why, Walter, what is the matter with you?”
“Consider!” echoed my sister. “What a very extraordinary thing to say, under the circumstances!”
“Consider!” chimed in the Professor. “What is there to consider about? Answer me this! Have you not been complaining of your health, and have you not been longing for what you call a smack of the country breeze? Well! there in your hand is the paper that offers you perpetual choking mouthfuls of country breeze for four months’ time. Is it not so? Ha! Again — you want money. Well! Is four golden guineas a week nothing? My-soul-bless-my-soul! only give it to me — and my boots shall creak like the golden Papa’s, with a sense of the overpowering richness of the man who walks in them! Four guineas a week, and, more than that, the charming society of two young misses! and, more than that, your bed, your breakfast, your dinner, your gorging English teas and lunches and drinks of foaming beer, all for nothing — why, Walter, my dear good friend — deuce-what-the-deuce! — for the first time in my life I have not eyes enough in my head to look, and wonder at you!”
Neither my mother’s evident astonishment at my behaviour, nor Pesca’s fervid enumeration of the advantages offered to me by the new employment, had any effect in shaking my unreasonable disinclination to go to Limmeridge House. After starting all the petty objections that I could think of to going to Cumberland, and after hearing them answered, one after another, to my own complete discomfiture, I tried to set up a last obstacle by asking what was to become of my pupils in London while I was teaching Mr. Fairlie’s young ladies to sketch from nature. The obvious answer to this was, that the greater part of them would be away on their autumn travels, and that the few who remained at home might be confided to the care of one of my brother drawing-masters, whose pupils I had once taken off his hands under similar circumstances. My sister reminded me that this gentleman had expressly placed his services at my disposal, during the present season, in case I wished to leave town; my mother seriously appealed to me not to let an idle caprice stand in the way of my own interests and my own health; and Pesca piteously entreated that I would not wound him to the heart by rejecting the first grateful offer of service that he had been able to make to the friend who had saved his life.
The evident sincerity and affection which inspired these remonstrances would have influenced any man with an atom of good feeling in his composition. Though I could not conquer my own unaccountable perversity, I had at least virtue enough to be heartily ashamed of it, and to end the discussion pleasantly by giving way, and promising to do all that was wanted of me.
The rest of the evening passed merrily enough in humorous anticipations of my coming life with the two young ladies in Cumberland. Pesca, inspired by our national grog, which appeared to get into his head, in the most marvellous manner, five minutes after it had gone down his throat, asserted his claims to be considered a complete Englishman by making a series of speeches in rapid succession, proposing my mother’s health, my sister’s health, my health, and the healths, in mass, of Mr. Fairlie and the two young Misses, pathetically returning thanks himself, immediately afterwards, for the whole party. “A secret, Walter,” said my little friend confidentially, as we walked home together. “I am flushed by the recollection of my own eloquence. My soul bursts itself with ambition. One of these days I go into your noble Parliament. It is the dream of my whole life to be Honourable Pesca, M.P.!”
The next morning I sent my testimonials to the Professor’s employer in Portland Place. Three days passed, and I concluded, with secret satisfaction, that my papers had not been found sufficiently explicit. On the fourth day, however, an answer came. It announced that Mr. Fairlie accepted my services, and requested me to start for Cumberland immediately. All the necessary instructions for my journey were carefully and clearly added in a postscript.
I made my arrangements, unwillingly enough, for leaving London early the next day. Towards evening Pesca looked in, on his way to a dinner-party, to bid me goodbye.
“I shall dry my tears in your absence,” said the Professor gaily, “with this glorious thought. It is my auspicious hand that has given the first push to your fortune in the world. Go, my friend! When your sun shines in Cumberland (English proverb), in the name of heaven make your hay. Marry one of the two young Misses; become Honourable Hartright, M.P.; and when you are on the top of the ladder remember that Pesca, at the bottom, has done it all!”
I tried to laugh with my little friend over his parting jest, but my spirits were not to be commanded. Something jarred in me almost painfully while he was speaking his light farewell words.
When I was left alone again nothing remained to be done but to walk to the Hampstead cottage and bid my mother and Sarah goodbye.
IV
The heat had been painfully oppressive all day, and it was now a close and sultry night.
My mother and sister had spoken so many last words, and had begged me to wait another five minutes so many times, that it was nearly midnight when the servant locked the garden-gate behind me. I walked forward a few paces on the shortest way back to London, then stopped and hesitated.
The moon was full and broad in the dark blue starless sky, and the broken ground of the heath looked wild enough in the mysterious light to be hundreds of miles away from the great city that lay beneath it. The idea of descending any sooner than I could help into the heat and gloom of London repelled me. The prospect of going to bed in my airless chambers, and the prospect of gradual suffocation, seemed, in my present restless frame of mind and body, to be one and the same thing. I determined to stroll home in the purer air by the most roundabout way I could take; to follow the white winding paths across the lonely heath; and to approach London through its most open suburb by striking into the Finchley Road, and so getting back, in the cool of the new morning, by the western side of the Regent’s Park.
I wound my way down slowly over the heath, enjoying the divine stillness of the scene, and admiring the soft alternations of light and shade as they followed each other over the broken ground on every side of me. So long as I was proceeding through this first and prettiest part of my night walk my mind remained passively open to the impressions produced by the view; and I thought but little on any subject — indeed, so far as my own sensations were concerned, I can hardly say that I thought at all.
But when I had left the heath and had turned into the by-road, where there was less to see, the ideas naturally engendered by the approaching change in my habits and occupations gradually drew more and more of my attention exclusively to themselves. By the time I had arrived at the end of the road I had become completely absorbed in my own fanciful visions of Limmeridge House, of Mr. Fairlie, and of the two ladies whose practice in the art of watercolour painting I was so soon to superintend.
I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met — the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the lonely highroad — idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like — when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me.
I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick.
There, in the middle of the broad bright highroad — there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven — stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.
