The Woman in White Page #2

The Woman in White is Wilkie Collins's fifth published novel, written in 1859. It is a mystery novel and falls under the genre of "sensation novels". The story is an early example of detective fiction with protagonist Walter Hartright employing many of the sleuthing techniques of later private detectives

• Mystery

								

believed that he could learn impromptu.  Soon after we had both struck
out from shore, I stopped, finding my friend did not gain on me, and
turned round to look for him.  To my horror and amazement, I saw
nothing between me and the beach but two little white arms which
struggled for an instant above the surface of the water, and then
disappeared from view.  When I dived for him, the poor little man was
lying quietly coiled up at the bottom, in a hollow of shingle, looking
by many degrees smaller than I had ever seen him look before.  During
the few minutes that elapsed while I was taking him in, the air revived
him, and he ascended the steps of the machine with my assistance.  With
the partial recovery of his animation came the return of his wonderful
delusion on the subject of swimming.  As soon as his chattering teeth
would let him speak, he smiled vacantly, and said he thought it must
have been the Cramp.

When he had thoroughly recovered himself, and had joined me on the
beach, his warm Southern nature broke through all artificial English
restraints in a moment.  He overwhelmed me with the wildest expressions
of affection--exclaimed passionately, in his exaggerated Italian way,
that he would hold his life henceforth at my disposal--and declared
that he should never be happy again until he had found an opportunity
of proving his gratitude by rendering me some service which I might
remember, on my side, to the end of my days.

I did my best to stop the torrent of his tears and protestations by
persisting in treating the whole adventure as a good subject for a
joke; and succeeded at last, as I imagined, in lessening Pesca's
overwhelming sense of obligation to me.  Little did I think
then--little did I think afterwards when our pleasant holiday had drawn
to an end--that the opportunity of serving me for which my grateful
companion so ardently longed was soon to come; that he was eagerly to
seize it on the instant; and that by so doing he was to turn the whole
current of my existence into a new channel, and to alter me to myself
almost past recognition.

Yet so it was.  If I had not dived for Professor Pesca when he lay
under water on his shingle bed, I should in all human probability never
have been connected with the story which these pages will relate--I
should never, perhaps, have heard even the name of the woman who has
lived in all my thoughts, who has possessed herself of all my energies,
who has become the one guiding influence that now directs the purpose
of my life.



III

Pesca's face and manner, on the evening when we confronted each other
at my mother's gate, were more than sufficient to inform me that
something extraordinary had happened.  It was quite useless, however,
to ask him for an immediate explanation.  I could only conjecture,
while he was dragging me in by both hands, that (knowing my habits) he
had come to the cottage to make sure of meeting me that night, and that
he had some news to tell of an unusually agreeable kind.

We both bounced into the parlour in a highly abrupt and undignified
manner.  My mother sat by the open window laughing and fanning herself.
Pesca was one of her especial favourites and his wildest eccentricities
were always pardonable in her eyes.  Poor dear soul! from the first
moment when she found out that the little Professor was deeply and
gratefully attached to her son, she opened her heart to him
unreservedly, and took all his puzzling foreign peculiarities for
granted, without so much as attempting to understand any one of them.

My sister Sarah, with all the advantages of youth, was, strangely
enough, less pliable.  She did full justice to Pesca's excellent
qualities of heart; but she could not accept him implicitly, as my
mother accepted him, for my sake.  Her insular notions of propriety
rose in perpetual revolt against Pesca's constitutional contempt for
appearances; and she was always more or less undisguisedly astonished
at her mother's familiarity with the eccentric little foreigner.  I
have observed, not only in my sister's case, but in the instances of
others, that we of the young generation are nothing like so hearty and
so impulsive as some of our elders.  I constantly see old people
flushed and excited by the prospect of some anticipated pleasure which
altogether fails to ruffle the tranquillity of their serene
grandchildren.  Are we, I wonder, quite such genuine boys and girls now
as our seniors were in their time? Has the great advance in education
taken rather too long a stride; and are we in these modern days, just
the least trifle in the world too well brought up?

Without attempting to answer those questions decisively, I may at least
record that I never saw my mother and my sister together in Pesca's
society, without finding my mother much the younger woman of the two.
On this occasion, for example, while the old lady was laughing heartily
over the boyish manner in which we tumbled into the parlour, Sarah was
perturbedly picking up the broken pieces of a teacup, which the
Professor had knocked off the table in his precipitate advance to meet
me at the door.

"I don't know what would have happened, Walter," said my mother, "if
you had delayed much longer.  Pesca has been half mad with impatience,
and I have been half mad with curiosity.  The Professor has brought
some wonderful news with him, in which he says you are concerned; and
he has cruelly refused to give us the smallest hint of it till his
friend Walter appeared."

"Very provoking: it spoils the Set," murmured Sarah to herself,
mournfully absorbed over the ruins of the broken cup.

While these words were being spoken, Pesca, happily and fussily
unconscious of the irreparable wrong which the crockery had suffered at
his hands, was dragging a large arm-chair to the opposite end of the
room, so as to command us all three, in the character of a public
speaker addressing an audience.  Having turned the chair with its back
towards us, he jumped into it on his knees, and excitedly addressed his
small congregation of three from an impromptu pulpit.

"Now, my good dears," began Pesca (who always said "good dears" when he
meant "worthy friends"), "listen to me.  The time has come--I recite my
good news--I speak at last."

"Hear, hear!" said my mother, humouring the joke.

"The next thing he will break, mamma," whispered Sarah, "will be the
back of the best arm-chair."

"I go back into my life, and I address myself to the noblest of created
beings," continued Pesca, vehemently apostrophising my unworthy self
over the top rail of the chair.  "Who found me dead at the bottom of
the sea (through Cramp); and who pulled me up to the top; and what did
I say when I got into my own life and my own clothes again?"

"Much more than was at all necessary," I answered as doggedly as
possible; for the least encouragement in connection with this subject
invariably let loose the Professor's emotions in a flood of tears.

"I said," persisted Pesca, "that my life belonged to my dear friend,
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