‘You have proved it already,' she answered, ‘by those words. Mr Hartright, concealment is at an end between us. I cannot affect to hide from you what my sister has unconsciously shown to me . You must leave us for her sake, as well as for your own. Your presence here, your necessary intimacy with us, harmless as it has been, God knows, in all other respects, has unsteadied her and made her wretched. I, who love her better than my own life -- I, who have learnt to believe in that pure, noble, innocent nature as I believe in my religion -- know but too well the secret misery of self-reproach that she has been suffering since the first shadow of a feeling disloyal to her marriage engagement entered her heart in spite of her. I don't say -- it would be useless to attempt to say it after what has happened -- that her engagement has ever had a strong hold on her affections. It is an engagement of honour, not of love; her father sanctioned it on his deathbed, two years since; she herself neither welcomed it nor shrank from it -- she was content to make it. Till you came here she was in the position of hundreds of other women, who marry men without being greatly attracted to them or greatly repelled by them, and who learn to love them (when they don't learn to hate!) after marriage, instead of before. I hope more earnestly than words can say -- and you should have the self-sacrificing courage to hope too -- that the new thoughts and feelings which have disturbed the old calmness and the old content have not taken root too deeply to be ever removed. Your absence (if I had less belief in your honour, and your courage, and your sense, I should not trust to them as I am trusting now) -- your absence will help my efforts, and time will help us all three.
It is something to know that my first confidence in you was not all misplaced.
It is something to know that you will not be less honest, less manly, less considerate towards the pupil whose relation to yourself you have had the misfortune to forget, than towards the stranger and the outcast whose appeal to you was not made in vain.'
Again the chance reference to the woman in white! Was there no possibility of speaking of Miss Fairlie and of me without raising the memory of Anne Catherick, and setting her between us like a fatality that it was hopeless to avoid?
‘Tell me what apology I can make to Mr Fairlie for breaking my engagement,'
I said. ‘Tell me when to go after that apology is accepted. I promise implicit obedience to you and to your advice.
‘Time is every way of importance,' she answered. ‘You heard me refer this morning to Monday next, and to the necessity of setting the purple room in order. The visitor whom we expect on Monday --'
I could not wait for her to be more explicit. Knowing what I knew now, the memory of Miss Fairlie's look and manner at the breakfast-table told me that the expected visitor at Limmeridge House was her future husband.
I tried to force it back; but something rose within me at that moment stronger than my own will, and I interrupted Miss Halcombe.
‘Let me go today,' I said bitterly. ‘The sooner the better.'
‘No, not today,' she replied. ‘The only reason you can assign to Mr Fairlie for your departure, before the end of your engagement, must be that an unforeseen necessity compels you to ask his permission to return at once to London. You must wait till tomorrow to tell him that, at the time when the post comes in, because he will then understand the sudden change in your plans, by associating it with the arrival of a letter from London. It is miserable and sickening to descend to deceit, even of the most harmless kind -- but I know Mr Fairlie, and if you once excite his suspicions that you are trifling with him, he will refuse to release you.
Speak to him on Friday morning: occupy yourself afterwards (for the sake of your own interests with your employer) in leaving your unfinished work in as little confusion as possible, and quit this place on Saturday. It will be time enough then, Mr Hartright, for you, and for all of us.'