“These arrangements seldom come to pass, however,” said Miss Norreys, philosophically. “Had that anything to do with Winifred’s dislike to staying at home, do you think?”
“Oh dear, no,” said Celia. “She did not think it a matter of much importance. She has always wanted to take a line of her own; she has always felt herself cramped by ordinary life. And she wants so to be of real use.”
The two were walking up and down the terrace. For a moment or two Hertha did not speak. Then she said quietly:
“Perhaps I should not discuss the matter with you, dear Celia. You are so much younger than I. But, before I go, I want to have a long talk with your mother. I must tell you that I was completely mistaken about you all. I had no idea whatever that Winifred had such a home, such plain home duties and responsibilities, as I strongly suspect she has. I – I thought you were very poor, and that she had to earn money to help you all.”
Celia grew crimson, and almost gasped for breath. “Miss Norreys!” she exclaimed. Then she added eagerly, “Winifred did not mean to mislead you – she is not like that.”
“N-no,” said Hertha. “I was very indignant at first, but now I don’t think she meant anything, except at all costs to get her own way. Of course there was no calculated deceit about it, otherwise she would have found some means of preventing my coming here. But she has placed me myself in a very disagreeable position, as I must make her see. And she must face the consequences. But I should like to know – you have plenty of sense – do you think she is doing right?”
Celia was sorely pressed. Her loyalty to Winifred rose up in arms. But she was taken at a disadvantage: she had always believed that Miss Norreys had warmly aided and abetted Winifred in her search for a career.
“I – I am so surprised,” she said at last. “I suppose it is best for me to tell you the truth. Yes, at the bottom of my heart I now think – I did not always, but I do now – that she could find plenty to do, and plenty opportunities of being useful to others, here at home. Especially as – you know all that, I suppose? You know that all the property, and it is large, will be hers. She is in the position of an eldest son.”
More and more astonished, Miss Norreys felt at a loss for words.
“No, I had no idea of that,” she said. “That puts her duty beyond all question. I cannot understand her. I feel almost inclined to say I have no patience with her.”
In her excitement she walked on rapidly. They had just, for the second or third time in their stroll, reached the end of the long front terrace, where some steps led down to a straight but more shaded walk, running parallel with one side of the house. Hertha was beginning to go down the steps, when Celia laid her hand on her arm. Turning in some surprise, Miss Norreys saw that she was paler than usual.
“Not down there, please,” she said. “I do dislike that walk: it is so gloomy, and – to tell you the truth, that is the path leading up from the old bowling-green, that they say is haunted.” Hertha could scarcely help laughing. Here, in the broad daylight, it seemed so absurd to be afraid of such things.
“I should, all the same, like to explore it,” she said. “Now I come to think of it, I don’t think I have been down there at all. But of course we won’t go that way if you would rather not;” and she good-naturedly turned back.
“I don’t generally mind so much,” said Celia, looking rather ashamed. “But – she, or it, really has been seen lately – they call her ‘The White Weeper’,” and she instinctively lowered her voice a little. “I mind it just now, because, you see, it seems so mixed up with Winifred.”
Miss Norreys looked puzzled. “Mixed up with Winifred?” she repeated, “how do you mean? What is the story of the White Weeper?”
So Celia related, as she had done to Eric Balderson, the old legend; entering into it in somewhat fuller detail than to that semi-sceptical person. For, as she went on, she saw that Hertha was not at all inclined to laugh at it; on the contrary, she looked as interested and impressed as could be desired.
“It is strange,” she said, when Celia stopped. “A curious tradition to have been handed down through so many generations. And I cannot see but that we should sometimes take these things as warnings or guides to a certain extent. Then the reason of Winifred’s annoyance, whenever it is mentioned, is that the White Weeper would evidently not approve of her present line?”
“Yes,” said Celia. “And – it does seem distinct. She,” and the girl gave a half-frightened look over her shoulder in the direction of the shady walk, “she has been seen lately, two or three times. And the people who have seen her were in more than one instance strangers here – and even those who have heard about the ghost don’t know the reason of her coming. They only think it portends some trouble. But I do think it strange that she should have begun to come so much more since Winifred has been so determined on leaving home.”
“You don’t disapprove altogether, at least you did not, of her ideas?” said Hertha.
Celia looked unhappy.
“I told you, dear Miss Norreys, that I have changed. I did sympathise more than I do now, and then I feel as if I were disloyal to her. I would rather not say more than that.”
Hertha did not press her.
“You don’t think Winifred is at all afraid of the White Weeper?” she said, with a little smile.
“She always mocks at it, but she gets angry too,” said Celia.
“Ah, that shows a latent misgiving somewhere. I am rather glad of it,” Miss Norreys replied.
Then, feeling that she had perhaps said as much as was wise to the girl, who was, after all, the youngest member of the family, she changed the subject.
But that evening she had a long and exhaustive talk with Mrs Maryon, which ended by Winifred’s mother feeling that she could never be thankful enough for the chance which had brought them the friendship of the woman she had so misjudged.
“And you prefer to put it all before Winifred yourself, then, my dear Miss Norreys?” said Mrs Maryon at the close of their conversation.
“I think so. I have strong grounds of my own. For, you see, though I do absolve her from any intention of deceiving me, the result to me is the same as if she had deliberately done so. In fact, it is almost worse – it makes me seem such a foolish person! I shall tell her that the whole must be explained to Mr Montague, and, as regards the society, it must be left in his hands. And she will not have the excuse of putting it upon Celia now. I may tell her what we have planned for her, may I not?”
“Certainly, most certainly,” said Mrs Maryon. “There is one comfort,” she went on. “If Winifred does give in, she will do so heartily. There is nothing small about her – no jealousies or resentfulness. If she stays at home or sets to work to do her duty here, she will be thorough about it.”
“Then let us devoutly trust she will,” said Miss Norreys. “I feel rather hopeful. I am not sure but that at the bottom of her heart she is a little désillusionnée about her career. It has not all been smooth sailing.”
But at this Winifred’s mother shook her head.
“That, I fear, in a nature like hers, would only rouse greater determination – not to use the harsher word, obstinacy,” she said.
But Hertha was sanguine and confident. She felt her own ground sure, and though personally willing enough to sink her own cause of complaint, she intended to make use of it for the sake of others.
That was to be a day – an evening rather – of explanations. The young people were amusing themselves in the billiard-room after dinner, and Miss Norreys, feeling a little tired, and having no special liking for billiards, was sitting quietly in the drawing-room, thinking over the family complications in which she found herself so unexpectedly involved, when the sound of some one entering the room made her look up. Somewhat to her astonishment, she saw that the new-comer was Lennox Maryon. Still more surprised did she feel when he came forward and drew a chair close to her own.
“Am I intruding?” he said; “you look nearly as startled as if I were the famous White Weeper herself.” His tone was bantering, but underneath Hertha perceived a touch of nervousness.
“I fancied you were absorbed in your game,” she said. “No, I did not fancy you were the White Weeper, though I confess I have been thinking about her. But she never comes inside the house?”
“She has never done so up to now,” said Lennox, “but Heaven knows what desperate steps she may not be driven to take if things go on as they are doing at present.”
His tone was so peculiar that Miss Norreys glanced at him questioningly.
“I hope devoutly she will wait till I have gone, then,” she said, half laughingly. “I have no wish at all to make her acquaintance. Are you joking, Mr Maryon, or are you at all, just a little, in earnest?”
“Yes and no,” he replied. “I am half joking out of the excess of my earnestness. Miss Norreys, I have something to tell you – a confession to make. Do you know, sometimes I have fancied you guessed, that I am very seriously, very thoroughly, in love, for the first time in my life?”
“With?” asked Hertha.
“My cousin Louise,” he said, quietly, though his sunburnt face deepened a little in colour.
Hertha nodded her head.
“Yes,” she said, “I thought so. And – what about Winifred, Mr Maryon?”
“I know the difference now,” he replied. “That was a case of thinking I was what every one wished me to be. Now – oh, what a difference!”
“You should be very grateful to Winifred,” said Hertha, drily.
“I am,” he said, naïvely, “most grateful. But,” – and here his honest eyes grew troubled – “it is far from plain sailing. As things are, Louise won’t hear of it, and she is a girl of her word. It all depends upon Winifred. Miss Norreys, she is infatuated.”
A full explanation followed. Lennox was clear-headed and entirely candid, and before the conversation was at an end, Hertha saw and understood things more thoroughly than even after her talk with Mrs Maryon.
“I will do what I can,” she said, “but I feel less confident than I did, somehow. I almost think I could brave a visit from the ghostly guardian of the family, if I thought her influence would carry the day.”
“Hush, my dear Miss Norreys,” said Lennox.
“I admire your devotion, but I tremble. Supposing she – it – took you at your word.”
And again Hertha felt uncertain if he were joking or in earnest.
But before she could say more, Celia appeared in the doorway.
“You lazy people!” she said, “everybody’s asking for you. We are going to have a dance in the hall before we go to bed.”
Chapter Ten.
Dreams and no Dreams
Miss Norreys’s mind, though a remarkably well-balanced one, was yet far from phlegmatic or unimpressionable. So far, indeed, from such did she know her inner self to be, that she had learned by experience to beware of her own natural impulsiveness, to have profound belief in “second thoughts.”
But she was full of quick sympathy, and ever ready to feel keen interest in her surroundings. It is scarcely to be wondered at, therefore, that on the night following the day we have been describing, she went up to her own room greatly engrossed by all she had heard, anxiously eager to prove herself a friend worthy of the name to the various members of the Maryon family who had appealed to her for assistance or advice. It was a beautiful night. Before Hertha got into bed she drew back the curtains of one of the two windows – her room was a corner one – as was her custom. For she loved the early morning light, and it never disturbed her slumbers before her usual hour for waking.
A flood of moonlight lay on the terrace beneath. The night was perfectly, peculiarly still, and not a leaf seemed to flutter. There was something curiously dream-like about the whole scene – for the room in which Hertha stood, and on which she threw a glance as she turned again, was, like most of those in the old house, quaint and picturesque in its very simplicity. White-panelled and wainscoted, with little wreaths of carved flowers above the lintel of the door and over the two old mirrors sunk in the walls; the bed in a sort of alcove; the ancient fireplace, surmounted by a very high and narrow carved and moulded mantel-piece, of the same dull, matt, white-painted wood, which was the chief characteristic of the house, the whole effect was like nothing that Miss Norreys remembered ever to have seen.
“It is very un-English, very un-nineteenth-century, very unlike all the attempted reproductions of the past we have so many of,” thought. Hertha. “It is so exactly what it may have been, and probably was, three or four hundred years ago. One can realise how the family life has gone on unbrokenly, with all the changing actors in it, generation after generation.”
And again she glanced out. For the first time it struck her that this window overlooked the lower terrace walk which Celia preferred to avoid. With a sudden increase of interest, Hertha pushed up the sash, and leaned out. Yes, that was the very place, the walk bare and open at the end near the house, growing dim and shady as it was lost to view in the shrubberies farther on.
“If it were worth the trouble,” thought Hertha, “I should like to put on a cloak and go right along to the end and back. I don’t think I should be afraid; the moonlight is so bright, and everything is so still. No flopping branches or sighing wind to make one fanciful. Yes, I think I should venture. And how proud I should be to tell them of it in the morning.”
But even as she gazed, a slight misgiving seized her. Was the night so perfectly still, or was the wind suddenly getting up? Something was moving at the far end of the walk – the “White Weeper’s” walk. What? The branch of a tree probably; there were aspens down there, Hertha remembered, and a mere nothing would set them quivering.
A slight shiver ran through her – it was growing chilly. With a half-contemptuous smile at herself, she drew down the window, and in a very few moments was safely ensconced in bed, though somewhat shivery still.
“I hope I haven’t caught cold through my own folly,” was her last waking thought.
For, notwithstanding her preoccupied mind and a certain amount of excitement, of which she was conscious, Hertha fell asleep quickly, and any one seeing her would have said that her slumbers were sound and untroubled.
But, in point of fact, she was dreaming vividly – all the events of the last few days seemed to be re-enacted before her, with the addition of various fantastic accompaniments such as dreamers know well. Friends and acquaintances she had not thought of for years suddenly appeared as familiar guests among the members of the family at White Turrets. Her own grandmother, whom as a child Hertha had been very fond of, seemed to be there as an ancient châtelaine of the place, pointing out to her, among the visitors, historical personages whom no living being could have known outside a book.
“We are expecting the King – Louis XVI – of course, and Queen Marie Antoinette, this evening. They have long wished to visit White Turrets, and now,” her grandmother was explaining to her, when, with a sudden start, Hertha awoke.
She was not sorry, for though the dream had been of curiously fascinating and fantastic interest, she had been conscious – and the consciousness remained with her even after she was awake – of a strange indescribable fear, that dream fear which, I fancy, at some time or other, every one must have experienced: a fear as of fate, all-pervading and irresistible, of perfectly unspeakable strangeness, as if we had got on to another plane of existence altogether, where nothing was as we had ever known it, where we feel ourselves alone in an isolation such as real life has never, even faintly, figured to us. Through all the familiar scenery of her dream – through the sound of her grandmother’s voice, and the perfect knowledge that she was here, at White Turrets, among the friends she seemed now to know so well – through the laughter and the smiles she knew to be around her, was this terrible ghastly consciousness of fear. And it did not at once disappear when she awoke. It seemed still to be clinging to her, haunting the air round about her. Never had Hertha suffered in the same way to such an extent.
“What can be the matter with me?” she said to herself. “I feel poisoned with fear. Dear me, if this sort of thing is the kind of sensation one has in a haunted room, Heaven preserve me from such an experience! But can there be any thing uncanny in this room? I have never felt it before. Oh no, it must all be fancy and nonsense. My nerves are upset, I suppose. I have been taking my friends’ troubles too much to heart.”
But she could not get to sleep again. Indeed, she felt almost afraid of doing so for fear of a repetition of her dream terrors. They grew fainter after a while, but she became increasingly wakeful. And at last she got out of bed, and throwing her dressing-gown round her, she went towards the window, of which the blind was drawn up.
It was the same window where she had sat looking out on the moonlight late the night before. Why did she go back there? Afterwards she could not tell. It seemed as if some invisible power had drawn her thither, and for the moment she had forgotten the slight shiver she had felt at believing she saw something moving in the shrubbery. But no sooner was she seated again at her old post than the remembrance returned to her; she would have liked to move away, but a sort of fascination, partly curiosity, partly a feeling she could not describe, retained her.
The moonlight was much less brilliant now. There seemed a slight haze, scarcely amounting to clouds, over the sky. But the night – for dawn was still some way off – was very calm, and there was no wind at all.
“There is literally nothing moving,” thought Hertha. “The stillness almost frightens me. How quite absurdly fanciful I am becoming!” and, as if in a kind of anticipation of something, she knew not what, she held her breath in an intensity of listening. Then came over her the feeling of being no longer under her own control. She could not have moved had she wished to do so. But she did not wish it. With this new sensation her fears had all disappeared.
It came – the something she was watching for. Far off, at the extreme end of the walk already described, a faint flutter, between light and shadow – a movement– grew perceptible. A presence of some kind was there. It came on and on, slowly but steadily, and the moon came out again more clearly, its rays reflected on the vaguely defined figure, of which the most Hertha could for some moments have said was that it moved, and that it was white.
She sat as if turned to stone, yet she was no longer afraid. Not even when, by degrees, she became aware that the form was undoubtedly that of a woman – a woman, young, graceful, but in dire distress, for as it advanced, with its slow, cadenced step, till within a few yards of the terrace just below her, she saw it lift its pallid arms in their shadowy white drapery, as if in piteous appeal, then wringing its hands, for one fleeting moment its face was raised to her as if her presence were known and realised, and she saw that it was that of a beautiful woman, weeping, weeping sorely, as if her very heart would break, for woe she was powerless to avert.
And a whisper ran through Hertha’s overwrought brain: “It is she – the White Weeper – she is appealing to me.”
But there was no sound, only the intense gaze of the exquisite though death-like and mournful face – and while she felt those eyes upon her, Hertha could have felt nothing beside.
Then they withdrew. Something made her at last able to close her own, and she half fell back on her chair. And when she looked again there was nothing – nothing whatever but the trees and the garden in the moonlight, utterly still, as if in an enchanted sleep.
And Hertha went back to bed, and fell almost at once into sound and perfectly dreamless slumber.
She woke at her usual hour, to sunshine and the sound of the birds’ joyous carolling this time. She lay still, thinking deeply, as she went over in her mind the strange experiences of the night. The question – “Was it all a dream?” – never for one moment occurred to her. Neither then nor at any future time did any doubt of the objective reality of what she had seen shake the intensity of the impression that had been made upon her.
Yet the fear was all gone – in fact, ever since she had thrown off the nightmare-like oppression of her fantastic dream, it had been no longer there. She felt no reluctance to stay on at White Turrets, no repulsion to the room, no shrinking even from the long terrace walk, up and down which had paced those ghostly steps – the pitiful, shadowy form of the White Weeper. But still there was much for Hertha to consider. Why had the weird family guardian appeared to her?
“She may be there every night – always, for aught I know,” thought Miss Norreys, “but why were my eyes opened to perceive her? Why did she appeal to me, as I feel convinced she did? Why not to self-willed Winifred, the cause of all the trouble and anxiety? Possibly she could not: perhaps Winifred is so constituted that no spirit could make its presence known to her. It must be that, I suppose. But what can I do? Winifred must know by this time that I do not sympathise with her mania for ‘a career,’ and that she has involved me in her folly in a far from pleasant way. However, I suppose I must speak to her more plainly and strongly than I have done – that is the only response I can make to you, poor troubled spirit!”
And before she began to dress she stood for a moment at the window, gazing along the path, now gleaming and brilliant in the clear morning sunshine, and while she did so, a sudden idea struck her. She would tell, in the first place at least, no one, except Winifred, of what she had seen.
“It shall be a confidence between her and me,” she decided, “and as such it may impress her the more – far more than if I told them all, and she heard every one cross-questioning me about it.” And no sooner had she thus resolved than she was conscious of a curious sensation of satisfaction, as if for the first time she had fully grasped the nature of the commission entrusted to her to perform.
She did not look quite like herself that morning when she went down-stairs. Her beautiful eyes were less clear and open; she seemed tired and slightly preoccupied, though she did her best to hide any signs of disturbance.
But Mrs Maryon and her two younger daughters were keen sighted, much more so than Winifred, and Hertha was assailed with affectionate inquiries as to whether she had a headache, or had she not slept well, etc, which she parried as best she could.
There were two or three letters for her – one, a large, rather thick one, in Mr Montague’s handwriting, she looked at irresolutely, then put it into her pocket unopened.
“It must be in reply to the long letter I sent him two days after I got here,” she said to herself. “I am glad he is back in England, but I think I would rather not know what he says till after I have spoken to Winifred.”
A special and uninterrupted talk with one member of a fairly large party, even if that party be a family one, is not always easy to achieve unobserved, though in a country-house it would seem a simple enough matter. But of late Winifred had rather avoided than sought Miss Norreys’s society. Some idea of the possible causes of complaint Hertha might believe herself to have against her for the conduct which Winifred was beginning to realise as not being, in appearance at least, candid, made the girl less at ease than heretofore in her friend’s society. She did not as yet allow this to herself: she would not own, even in thought, that she had been to blame. She “put it all down” to this visit of Miss Norreys to White Turrets, where, though on one side the favourable impression her friend had made on Mrs Maryon and the others was gratifying to Winifred, on the other it was somewhat irritating.
“I must wait till we are back in London again,” she said to herself. “Of course she must be civil and pleasant to them all, and they certainly have been very kind and nice. But she is more impressionable than I thought her. Seeing things here as she has done, I am afraid she will never sympathise thoroughly in the monotony and dullness of this narrow home-life. Still, after all, it can’t be helped. I must do without sympathy, I suppose. But – I do wish it had never come into mother’s head to invite Hertha down here.”
She was standing by herself in front of one of the windows of a long corridor, on to which opened several of the principal rooms on the first floor, when these reflections crossed her mind. This window overlooked the entrance to the walk so carefully eschewed by Celia – though not so much of it could be seen as from Miss Norreys’s room, situated in an angle of the house.
The association of the White Weeper’s reputed preference for this walk was always an irritation to Winifred, as was, in fact, everything real or imaginary which had to do with the old story.
She gave herself a little shake when she took in whither her gaze was absently directed.
“Ridiculous nonsense!” she half murmured, as she turned to go, and why she should have started violently, as at that moment a hand was laid upon her shoulder, she could not have told. It was not the sign of a guilty conscience, for, in all good faith, Winifred as yet had barely taken in that she had been at all to blame. “Misunderstood,” “narrowly judged,” she had told herself she had been, and she allowed that to others her conduct might have seemed disingenuous. But she was essentially honest, and it is sometimes as difficult for naturally candid persons to take in that they have put themselves into a crooked position, as for a crafty and calculating character to believe in straightforwardness in itself or others.
Still she started. And she was assuredly not nervous.
It was Hertha’s face she looked up into as she turned: Hertha’s eyes, searching – and what more? Was it reproach or anxiety, or a mingling of both, that Winifred read in their clear depths? And in spite of herself the girl looked away, while her colour deepened a little.
“Did I startle you?” said Miss Norreys. “I am sorry, but – I wanted to speak to you quietly. I have been looking for you.”
“I am only too ready and delighted to have a chance of you,” said Winifred, trying to carry the war into the enemy’s country. “But you know I scarcely see you; mamma and the others monopolise you so.”
There was a touch of truth in the reproach, but Hertha did not feel guilty. She had avoided tête-à-tête conversation with Winifred out of consideration for the girl herself as much as for others.
“It is true that I have not sought for opportunities of being alone with you,” she said. “I am now quite ready to explain why, though I think you must have some idea of what I felt.” Winifred did not at once reply. She was again staring out of the window, and again a feeling of irritation came over her. Did every side of the house look out on that detestable lower terrace?
“I am quite ready for as long a talk as you like,” she said. “I daresay you have felt a little shaken in me, but – I think I can make you understand me.”
And she looked up in Hertha’s face so frankly, that again – and she was glad of it – the conviction of Winifred’s honesty of intention and absence of cunning or calculation returned to Miss Norreys almost as at first.
“Shall we go out for our talk?” Hertha said. “It is a lovely fresh morning, and I have just a little – headache of a kind. At least, I did not sleep well.”
“No, I remember: you did not look like yourself when you came down to breakfast,” said Winifred, with sudden compunction. “And I am keeping you standing about. Are you sure it won’t tire you? After all, we shall have plenty of time for talking in the future, I hope.”
Hertha shook her head.
“I don’t want to put it off,” she said. “Indeed, I cannot. If there were no other reason, you know how seldom I have a free half-day even at home. And there are other reasons. Can you get your hat? The air will do me good. I will wait for you by the sun-dial,” and she moved away as she spoke.
“I will be with you in two minutes,” said Winifred.