The Woman In White

The Woman in White
by
Wilkie Collins
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 lubricatinginfluences 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 ofimportance, 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 becontinued, 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, topresent 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 professionalresources
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 thecity 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 thedirection 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 anxietyto
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...