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"She only drew herself away from me again, and leaned her face and arms against the side of the boat-house."
F. A. Fraser
Wood engraving by the Dalziel Brothers
6 ¼ x 4 ⅛ inches (15.9 cm high by 10.3 cm wide)
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, sixth illustration, facing p. 217.
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Scanned image by Simon Cooke and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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“You have friends to take your part. If you know his Secret, he will be afraid of you, he won’t dare use you as he used me. He must treat you mercifully for his own sake, if he is afraid of you and your friends. And if he treats you mercifully, and if I can say it was my doing ——’ I listened eagerly for more, but she stopped at those words.”
“You tried to make her go on?”
“I tried, but she only drew herself away from me again, and leaned her face and arms against the side of the boat-house. ‘Oh!’ I heard her say, with a dreadful, distracted tenderness in her voice, ‘Oh! if I could only be buried with your mother! If I could only wake at her side, when the angel’s trumpet sounds, and the graves give up their dead at the resurrection!‘— Marian! I trembled from head to foot — it was horrible to hear her. ‘But there is no hope of that,’ she said, moving a little, so as to look at me again, ‘no hope for a poor stranger like me. I shall not rest under the marble cross that I washed with my own hands, and made so white and pure for her sake. Oh no! oh no! God’s mercy, not man’s, will take me to her, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.’ She spoke those words quietly and sorrowfully, with a heavy, hopeless sigh, and then waited a little. Her face was confused and troubled, she seemed to be thinking, or trying to think. ‘What was it I said just now?’ she asked after a while. ‘When your mother is in my mind, everything else goes out of it. What was I saying? what was I saying?’ I reminded the poor creature, as kindly and delicately as I could. ‘Ah, yes, yes,’ she said, still in a vacant, perplexed manner. ‘You are helpless with your wicked husband. Yes. And I must do what I have come to do here — I must make it up to you for having been afraid to speak out at a better time.’ ‘What is it you have to tell me?’ I asked. ‘The Secret that your cruel husband is afraid of,’ she answered. ‘I once threatened him with the Secret, and frightened him. You shall threaten him with the Secret, and frighten him too.’ Her face darkened, and a hard, angry stare fixed itself in her eyes. She began waving her hand at me in a vacant, unmeaning manner. ‘My mother knows the Secret,’ she said. ‘My mother has wasted under the Secret half her lifetime. One day, when I was grown up, she said something to me. And the next day your husband ——‘”
“Yes! yes! Go on. What did she tell you about your husband?”
“She stopped again, Marian, at that point ——”
“And said no more?”
“And listened eagerly. ‘Hush!’ she whispered, still waving her hand at me. ‘Hush!’ She moved aside out of the doorway, moved slowly and stealthily, step by step, till I lost her past the edge of the boat-house.” ["Miss Halcombe's Narrative, Continued," Chapter VI from serial instalment XVIII; in the 1875 edition, p. 217]
Anne confides in Laura, now married to the odious Sir Percival Glyde and just returned from her Italian honeymoon, that her mother knows "the Secret" whose disclosure so terrifies the baronet. Since it is far too early in the serialisation to reveal Glyde's illegitimacy, Collins terminates the interview at the boat-house on Sir Percival's Blackwater Lake estate in Hampshire by having Anne express the fear that they are being watched.
Here is an instance in which one may compare a realisation of the same scene in the Harper's serial, with John McLenan's more realistic figures of the two young women, supposedly so much alike, in "Not now," she said; "we are not alone — we are watched." (24 March 1860), which foregrounds Laura and Anne, but which employs latticework to suggest the setting more believably. The fashionable British dress and hat indicated by Green's plate have been supplanted by American fashions of the sixties. More significantly, to enable to serial reader to distinguish readily between the two, McLenan has made Anne more crone-like as well as less fashionably attired.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by John McLenan. Vols. III-IV (16 November 1859 through 8 September 1860).
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White: A Novel. Illustrated by John McLenan. New York: Harper & Bros., 1861.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. London: Sampson Low, 1860; rpt. with illustrations by F. A. Fraser and Sir John Gilbert. London: Chatto & Windus, 1875.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Illustrated by Sir John Gilbert. London: Minerva, 2006.
Created 19 September 2024