












The Woman in White


by

Wilkie Collins




CONTENTS

First Epoch

  THE STORY BEGUN BY WALTER HARTRIGHT
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY VINCENT GILMORE
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY MARIAN HALCOMBE


Second Epoch

  THE STORY CONTINUED BY MARIAN HALCOMBE.
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY FREDERICK FAIRLIE, ESQ.
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY ELIZA MICHELSON
  THE STORY CONTINUED IN SEVERAL NARRATIVES

     THE NARRATIVE OF HESTER PINHORN
     THE NARRATIVE OF THE DOCTOR
     THE NARRATIVE OF JANE GOULD
     THE NARRATIVE OF THE TOMBSTONE
     THE NARRATIVE OF WALTER HARTRIGHT


Third Epoch

  THE STORY CONTINUED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT.
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY MRS. CATHERICK
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT
  THE STORY CONTINUED BY ISIDOR, OTTAVIO, BALDASSARE FOSCO
  THE STORY CONCLUDED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT




THE STORY BEGUN BY WALTER HARTRIGHT

(of Clement's Inn, Teacher of Drawing)


This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a
Man's resolution can achieve.

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 corn-fields, and the
autumn breezes on the sea-shore.

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.