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Title: The Woodlanders

Author: Thomas Hardy

Release date: April 1, 1996 [eBook #482]
                Most recently updated: February 4, 2021

Language: English



*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOODLANDERS ***




The Woodlanders

by Thomas Hardy


Contents

 CHAPTER I.
 CHAPTER II.
 CHAPTER III.
 CHAPTER IV.
 CHAPTER V.
 CHAPTER VI.
 CHAPTER VII.
 CHAPTER VIII.
 CHAPTER IX.
 CHAPTER X.
 CHAPTER XI.
 CHAPTER XII.
 CHAPTER XIII.
 CHAPTER XIV.
 CHAPTER XV.
 CHAPTER XVI.
 CHAPTER XVII.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
 CHAPTER XIX.
 CHAPTER XX.
 CHAPTER XXI.
 CHAPTER XXII.
 CHAPTER XXIII.
 CHAPTER XXIV.
 CHAPTER XXV.
 CHAPTER XXVI.
 CHAPTER XXVII.
 CHAPTER XXVIII.
 CHAPTER XXIX.
 CHAPTER XXX.
 CHAPTER XXXI.
 CHAPTER XXXII.
 CHAPTER XXXIII.
 CHAPTER XXXIV.
 CHAPTER XXXV.
 CHAPTER XXXVI.
 CHAPTER XXXVII.
 CHAPTER XXXVIII.
 CHAPTER XXXIX.
 CHAPTER XL.
 CHAPTER XLI.
 CHAPTER XLII.
 CHAPTER XLIII.
 CHAPTER XLIV.
 CHAPTER XLV.
 CHAPTER XLVI.
 CHAPTER XLVII.
 CHAPTER XLVIII.




CHAPTER I.


The rambler who, for old association or other reasons, should trace the
forsaken coach-road running almost in a meridional line from Bristol to
the south shore of England, would find himself during the latter half
of his journey in the vicinity of some extensive woodlands,
interspersed with apple-orchards. Here the trees, timber or
fruit-bearing, as the case may be, make the wayside hedges ragged by
their drip and shade, stretching over the road with easeful
horizontality, as if they found the unsubstantial air an adequate
support for their limbs. At one place, where a hill is crossed, the
largest of the woods shows itself bisected by the high-way, as the head
of thick hair is bisected by the white line of its parting. The spot is
lonely.

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree
that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like
stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of
what is with what might be probably accounts for this. To step, for
instance, at the place under notice, from the hedge of the plantation
into the adjoining pale thoroughfare, and pause amid its emptiness for
a moment, was to exchange by the act of a single stride the simple
absence of human companionship for an incubus of the forlorn.

At this spot, on the lowering evening of a by-gone winter’s day, there
stood a man who had entered upon the scene much in the aforesaid
manner. Alighting into the road from a stile hard by, he, though by no
means a “chosen vessel” for impressions, was temporarily influenced by
some such feeling of being suddenly more alone than before he had
emerged upon the highway.

It could be seen by a glance at his rather finical style of dress that
he did not belong to the country proper; and from his air, after a
while, that though there might be a sombre beauty in the scenery, music
in the breeze, and a wan procession of coaching ghosts in the sentiment
of this old turnpike-road, he was mainly puzzled about the way. The
dead men’s work that had been expended in climbing that hill, the
blistered soles that had trodden it, and the tears that had wetted it,
were not his concern; for fate had given him no time for any but
practical things.

He looked north and south, and mechanically prodded the ground with his
walking-stick. A closer glance at his face corroborated the testimony
of his clothes. It was self-complacent, yet there was small apparent
ground for such complacence. Nothing irradiated it; to the eye of the
magician in character, if not to the ordinary observer, the expression
enthroned there was absolute submission to and belief in a little
assortment of forms and habitudes.

At first not a soul appeared who could enlighten him as he desired, or
seemed likely to appear that night. But presently a slight noise of
laboring wheels and the steady dig of a horse’s shoe-tips became
audible; and there loomed in the notch of the hill and plantation that
the road formed here at the summit a carrier’s van drawn by a single
horse. When it got nearer, he said, with some relief to himself, “’Tis
Mrs. Dollery’s—this will help me.”

The vehicle was half full of passengers, mostly women. He held up his
stick at its approach, and the woman who was driving drew rein.

“I’ve been trying to find a short way to Little Hintock this last
half-hour, Mrs. Dollery,” he said. “But though I’ve been to Great
Hintock and Hintock House half a dozen times I am at fault about the
small village. You can help me, I dare say?”

She assured him that she could—that as she went to Great Hintock her
van passed near it—that it was only up the lane that branched out of
the lane into which she was about to turn—just ahead. “Though,”
continued Mrs. Dollery, “’tis such a little small place that, as a town
gentleman, you’d need have a candle and lantern to find it if ye don’t
know where ’tis. Bedad! I wouldn’t live there if they’d pay me to. Now
at Great Hintock you do see the world a bit.”

He mounted and sat beside her, with his feet outside, where they were
ever and anon brushed over by the horse’s tail.

This van, driven and owned by Mrs. Dollery, was rather a movable
attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who knew
it well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and color of
heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted by
harness and drudgery from colthood—though if all had their rights, he
ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of some
Eastern plain instead of tugging here—had trodden this road almost
daily for twenty years. Even his subjection was not made congruous
throughout, for the harness being too short, his tail was not drawn
through the crupper, so that the breeching slipped awkwardly to one
side. He knew every subtle incline of the seven or eight miles of
ground between Hintock and Sherton Abbas—the market-town to which he
journeyed—as accurately as any surveyor could have learned it by a
Dumpy level.

The vehicle had a square black tilt which nodded with the motion of the
wheels, and at a point in it over the driver’s head was a hook to which
the reins were hitched at times, when they formed a catenary curve from
the horse’s shoulders. Somewhere about the axles was a loose chain,
whose only known purpose was to clink as it went. Mrs. Dollery, having
to hop up and down many times in the service of her passengers, wore,
especially in windy weather, short leggings under her gown for
modesty’s sake, and instead of a bonnet a felt hat tied down with a
handkerchief, to guard against an earache to which she was frequently
subject. In the rear of the van was a glass window, which she cleaned
with her pocket-handkerchief every market-day before starting. Looking
at the van from the back, the spectator could thus see through its
interior a square piece of the same sky and landscape that he saw
without, but intruded on by the profiles of the seated passengers, who,
as they rumbled onward, their lips moving and heads nodding in animated
private converse, remained in happy unconsciousness that their
mannerisms and facial peculiarities were sharply defined to the public
eye.

This hour of coming home from market was the happy one, if not the
happiest, of the week for them. Snugly ensconced under the tilt, they
could forget the sorrows of the world without, and survey life and
recapitulate the incidents of the day with placid smiles.

The passengers in the back part formed a group to themselves, and while
the new-comer spoke to the proprietress, they indulged in a
confidential chat about him as about other people, which the noise of
the van rendered inaudible to himself and Mrs. Dollery, sitting
forward.

“’Tis Barber Percombe—he that’s got the waxen woman in his window at
the top of Abbey Street,” said one. “What business can bring him from
his shop out here at this time and not a journeyman hair-cutter, but a
master-barber that’s left off his pole because ’tis not genteel!”

They listened to his conversation, but Mr. Percombe, though he had
nodded and spoken genially, seemed indisposed to gratify the curiosity
which he had aroused; and the unrestrained flow of ideas which had
animated the inside of the van before his arrival was checked
thenceforward.

Thus they rode on till they turned into a half-invisible little lane,
whence, as it reached the verge of an eminence, could be discerned in
the dusk, about half a mile to the right, gardens and orchards sunk in
a concave, and, as it were, snipped out of the woodland. From this
self-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke,
which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on
quiet hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches. It was
one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may
usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than
meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in
inferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, no less
than in other places, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean
are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and
closely knit interdependence of the lives therein.

This place was the Little Hintock of the master-barber’s search. The
coming night gradually obscured the smoke of the chimneys, but the
position of the sequestered little world could still be distinguished
by a few faint lights, winking more or less ineffectually through the
leafless boughs, and the undiscerned songsters they bore, in the form
of balls of feathers, at roost among them.

Out of the lane followed by the van branched a yet smaller lane, at the
corner of which the barber alighted, Mrs. Dollery’s van going on to the
larger village, whose superiority to the despised smaller one as an
exemplar of the world’s movements was not particularly apparent in its
means of approach.

“A very clever and learned young doctor, who, they say, is in league
with the devil, lives in the place you be going to—not because there’s
anybody for’n to cure there, but because ’tis the middle of his
district.”

The observation was flung at the barber by one of the women at parting,
as a last attempt to get at his errand that way.

But he made no reply, and without further pause the pedestrian plunged
towards the umbrageous nook, and paced cautiously over the dead leaves
which nearly buried the road or street of the hamlet. As very few
people except themselves passed this way after dark, a majority of the
denizens of Little Hintock deemed window-curtains unnecessary; and on
this account Mr. Percombe made it his business to stop opposite the
casements of each cottage that he came to, with a demeanor which showed
that he was endeavoring to conjecture, from the persons and things he
observed within, the whereabouts of somebody or other who resided here.

Only the smaller dwellings interested him; one or two houses, whose
size, antiquity, and rambling appurtenances signified that
notwithstanding their remoteness they must formerly have been, if they
were not still, inhabited by people of a certain social standing, being
neglected by him entirely. Smells of pomace, and the hiss of fermenting
cider, which reached him from the back quarters of other tenements,
revealed the recent occupation of some of the inhabitants, and joined
with the scent of decay from the perishing leaves underfoot.

Half a dozen dwellings were passed without result. The next, which
stood opposite a tall tree, was in an exceptional state of radiance,
the flickering brightness from the inside shining up the chimney and
making a luminous mist of the emerging smoke. The interior, as seen
through the window, caused him to draw up with a terminative air and
watch. The house was rather large for a cottage, and the door, which
opened immediately into the living-room, stood ajar, so that a ribbon
of light fell through the opening into the dark atmosphere without.
Every now and then a moth, decrepit from the late season, would flit
for a moment across the out-coming rays and disappear again into the
night.




CHAPTER II.


In the room from which this cheerful blaze proceeded, he beheld a girl
seated on a willow chair, and busily occupied by the light of the fire,
which was ample and of wood. With a bill-hook in one hand and a leather
glove, much too large for her, on the other, she was making spars, such
as are used by thatchers, with great rapidity. She wore a leather apron
for this purpose, which was also much too large for her figure. On her
left hand lay a bundle of the straight, smooth sticks called
spar-gads—the raw material of her manufacture; on her right, a heap of
chips and ends—the refuse—with which the fire was maintained; in front,
a pile of the finished articles. To produce them she took up each gad,
looked critically at it from end to end, cut it to length, split it
into four, and sharpened each of the quarters with dexterous blows,
which brought it to a triangular point precisely resembling that of a
bayonet.

Beside her, in case she might require more light, a brass candlestick
stood on a little round table, curiously formed of an old coffin-stool,
with a deal top nailed on, the white surface of the latter contrasting
oddly with the black carved oak of the substructure. The social
position of the household in the past was almost as definitively shown
by the presence of this article as that of an esquire or nobleman by
his old helmets or shields. It had been customary for every well-to-do
villager, whose tenure was by copy of court-roll, or in any way more
permanent than that of the mere cotter, to keep a pair of these stools
for the use of his own dead; but for the last generation or two a
feeling of cui bono had led to the discontinuance of the custom, and
the stools were frequently made use of in the manner described.

The young woman laid down the bill-hook for a moment and examined the
palm of her right hand, which, unlike the other, was ungloved, and
showed little hardness or roughness about it. The palm was red and
blistering, as if this present occupation were not frequent enough with
her to subdue it to what it worked in. As with so many right hands born
to manual labor, there was nothing in its fundamental shape to bear out
the physiological conventionalism that gradations of birth, gentle or
mean, show themselves primarily in the form of this member. Nothing but
a cast of the die of destiny had decided that the girl should handle
the tool; and the fingers which clasped the heavy ash haft might have
skilfully guided the pencil or swept the string, had they only been set
to do it in good time.

Her face had the usual fulness of expression which is developed by a
life of solitude. Where the eyes of a multitude beat like waves upon a
countenance they seem to wear away its individuality; but in the still
water of privacy every tentacle of feeling and sentiment shoots out in
visible luxuriance, to be interpreted as readily as a child’s look by
an intruder. In years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the
necessity of taking thought at a too early period of life had forced
the provisional curves of her childhood’s face to a premature finality.
Thus she had but little pretension to beauty, save in one prominent
particular—her hair. Its abundance made it almost unmanageable; its
color was, roughly speaking, and as seen here by firelight, brown, but
careful notice, or an observation by day, would have revealed that its
true shade was a rare and beautiful approximation to chestnut.

On this one bright gift of Time to the particular victim of his now
before us the new-comer’s eyes were fixed; meanwhile the fingers of his
right hand mechanically played over something sticking up from his
waistcoat-pocket—the bows of a pair of scissors, whose polish made them
feebly responsive to the light within. In her present beholder’s mind
the scene formed by the girlish spar-maker composed itself into a
post-Raffaelite picture of extremest quality, wherein the girl’s hair
alone, as the focus of observation, was depicted with intensity and
distinctness, and her face, shoulders, hands, and figure in general,
being a blurred mass of unimportant detail lost in haze and obscurity.

He hesitated no longer, but tapped at the door and entered. The young
woman turned at the crunch of his boots on the sanded floor, and
exclaiming, “Oh, Mr. Percombe, how you frightened me!” quite lost her
color for a moment.

He replied, “You should shut your door—then you’d hear folk open it.”

“I can’t,” she said; “the chimney smokes so. Mr. Percombe, you look as
unnatural out of your shop as a canary in a thorn-hedge. Surely you
have not come out here on my account—for—”

“Yes—to have your answer about this.” He touched her head with his
cane, and she winced. “Do you agree?” he continued. “It is necessary
that I should know at once, as the lady is soon going away, and it
takes time to make up.”

“Don’t press me—it worries me. I was in hopes you had thought no more
of it. I can _not_ part with it—so there!”

“Now, look here, Marty,” said the barber, sitting down on the
coffin-stool table. “How much do you get for making these spars?”

“Hush—father’s up-stairs awake, and he don’t know that I am doing his
work.”

“Well, now tell me,” said the man, more softly. “How much do you get?”

“Eighteenpence a thousand,” she said, reluctantly.

“Who are you making them for?”

“Mr. Melbury, the timber-dealer, just below here.”

“And how many can you make in a day?”

“In a day and half the night, three bundles—that’s a thousand and a
half.”

“Two and threepence.” The barber paused. “Well, look here,” he
continued, with the remains of a calculation in his tone, which
calculation had been the reduction to figures of the probable monetary
magnetism necessary to overpower the resistant force of her present
purse and the woman’s love of comeliness, “here’s a sovereign—a gold
sovereign, almost new.” He held it out between his finger and thumb.
“That’s as much as you’d earn in a week and a half at that rough man’s
work, and it’s yours for just letting me snip off what you’ve got too
much of.”

The girl’s bosom moved a very little. “Why can’t the lady send to some
other girl who don’t value her hair—not to me?” she exclaimed.

“Why, simpleton, because yours is the exact shade of her own, and ’tis
a shade you can’t match by dyeing. But you are not going to refuse me
now I’ve come all the way from Sherton o’ purpose?”

“I say I won’t sell it—to you or anybody.”

“Now listen,” and he drew up a little closer beside her. “The lady is
very rich, and won’t be particular to a few shillings; so I will
advance to this on my own responsibility—I’ll make the one sovereign
two, rather than go back empty-handed.”

“No, no, no!” she cried, beginning to be much agitated. “You are
a-tempting me, Mr. Percombe. You go on like the Devil to Dr. Faustus in
the penny book. But I don’t want your money, and won’t agree. Why did
you come? I said when you got me into your shop and urged me so much,
that I didn’t mean to sell my hair!” The speaker was hot and stern.

“Marty, now hearken. The lady that wants it wants it badly. And,
between you and me, you’d better let her have it. ’Twill be bad for you
if you don’t.”

“Bad for me? Who is she, then?”

The barber held his tongue, and the girl repeated the question.

“I am not at liberty to tell you. And as she is going abroad soon it
makes no difference who she is at all.”

“She wants it to go abroad wi’?”

Percombe assented by a nod. The girl regarded him reflectively. “Barber
Percombe,” she said, “I know who ’tis. ’Tis she at the House—Mrs.
Charmond!”

“That’s my secret. However, if you agree to let me have it, I’ll tell
you in confidence.”

“I’ll certainly not let you have it unless you tell me the truth. It is
Mrs. Charmond.”

The barber dropped his voice. “Well—it is. You sat in front of her in
church the other day, and she noticed how exactly your hair matched her
own. Ever since then she’s been hankering for it, and at last decided
to get it. As she won’t wear it till she goes off abroad, she knows
nobody will recognize the change. I’m commissioned to get it for her,
and then it is to be made up. I shouldn’t have vamped all these miles
for any less important employer. Now, mind—’tis as much as my business
with her is worth if it should be known that I’ve let out her name; but
honor between us two, Marty, and you’ll say nothing that would injure
me?”

“I don’t wish to tell upon her,” said Marty, coolly. “But my hair is my
own, and I’m going to keep it.”

“Now, that’s not fair, after what I’ve told you,” said the nettled
barber. “You see, Marty, as you are in the same parish, and in one of
her cottages, and your father is ill, and wouldn’t like to turn out, it
would be as well to oblige her. I say that as a friend. But I won’t
press you to make up your mind to-night. You’ll be coming to market
to-morrow, I dare say, and you can call then. If you think it over
you’ll be inclined to bring what I want, I know.”

“I’ve nothing more to say,” she answered.

Her companion saw from her manner that it was useless to urge her
further by speech. “As you are a trusty young woman,” he said, “I’ll
put these sovereigns up here for ornament, that you may see how
handsome they are. Bring the hair to-morrow, or return the sovereigns.”
He stuck them edgewise into the frame of a small mantle looking-glass.
“I hope you’ll bring it, for your sake and mine. I should have thought
she could have suited herself elsewhere; but as it’s her fancy it must
be indulged if possible. If you cut it off yourself, mind how you do it
so as to keep all the locks one way.” He showed her how this was to be
done.

“But I sha’nt,” she replied, with laconic indifference. “I value my
looks too much to spoil ’em. She wants my hair to get another lover
with; though if stories are true she’s broke the heart of many a noble
gentleman already.”

“Lord, it’s wonderful how you guess things, Marty,” said the barber.
“I’ve had it from them that know that there certainly is some foreign
gentleman in her eye. However, mind what I ask.”

“She’s not going to get him through me.”

Percombe had retired as far as the door; he came back, planted his cane
on the coffin-stool, and looked her in the face. “Marty South,” he
said, with deliberate emphasis, “_you’ve got a lover yourself_, and
that’s why you won’t let it go!”

She reddened so intensely as to pass the mild blush that suffices to
heighten beauty; she put the yellow leather glove on one hand, took up
the hook with the other, and sat down doggedly to her work without
turning her face to him again. He regarded her head for a moment, went
to the door, and with one look back at her, departed on his way
homeward.

Marty pursued her occupation for a few minutes, then suddenly laying
down the bill-hook, she jumped up and went to the back of the room,
where she opened a door which disclosed a staircase so whitely scrubbed
that the grain of the wood was wellnigh sodden away by such cleansing.
At the top she gently approached a bedroom, and without entering, said,
“Father, do you want anything?”

A weak voice inside answered in the negative; adding, “I should be all
right by to-morrow if it were not for the tree!”

“The tree again—always the tree! Oh, father, don’t worry so about that.
You know it can do you no harm.”

“Who have ye had talking to ye down-stairs?”

“A Sherton man called—nothing to trouble about,” she said, soothingly.
“Father,” she went on, “can Mrs. Charmond turn us out of our house if
she’s minded to?”

“Turn us out? No. Nobody can turn us out till my poor soul is turned
out of my body. ’Tis life-hold, like Ambrose Winterborne’s. But when my
life drops ’twill be hers—not till then.” His words on this subject so
far had been rational and firm enough. But now he lapsed into his
moaning strain: “And the tree will do it—that tree will soon be the
death of me.”

“Nonsense, you know better. How can it be?” She refrained from further
speech, and descended to the ground-floor again.

“Thank Heaven, then,” she said to herself, “what belongs to me I keep.”




CHAPTER III.


The lights in the village went out, house after house, till there only
remained two in the darkness. One of these came from a residence on the
hill-side, of which there is nothing to say at present; the other shone
from the window of Marty South. Precisely the same outward effect was
produced here, however, by her rising when the clock struck ten and
hanging up a thick cloth curtain. The door it was necessary to keep
ajar in hers, as in most cottages, because of the smoke; but she
obviated the effect of the ribbon of light through the chink by hanging
a cloth over that also. She was one of those people who, if they have
to work harder than their neighbors, prefer to keep the necessity a
secret as far as possible; and but for the slight sounds of
wood-splintering which came from within, no wayfarer would have
perceived that here the cottager did not sleep as elsewhere.

Eleven, twelve, one o’clock struck; the heap of spars grew higher, and
the pile of chips and ends more bulky. Even the light on the hill had
now been extinguished; but still she worked on. When the temperature of
the night without had fallen so low as to make her chilly, she opened a
large blue umbrella to ward off the draught from the door. The two
sovereigns confronted her from the looking-glass in such a manner as to
suggest a pair of jaundiced eyes on the watch for an opportunity.
Whenever she sighed for weariness she lifted her gaze towards them, but
withdrew it quickly, stroking her tresses with her fingers for a
moment, as if to assure herself that they were still secure. When the
clock struck three she arose and tied up the spars she had last made in
a bundle resembling those that lay against the wall.

She wrapped round her a long red woollen cravat and opened the door.
The night in all its fulness met her flatly on the threshold, like the
very brink of an absolute void, or the antemundane Ginnung-Gap believed
in by her Teuton forefathers. For her eyes were fresh from the blaze,
and here there was no street-lamp or lantern to form a kindly
transition between the inner glare and the outer dark. A lingering wind
brought to her ear the creaking sound of two over-crowded branches in
the neighboring wood which were rubbing each other into wounds, and
other vocalized sorrows of the trees, together with the screech of
owls, and the fluttering tumble of some awkward wood-pigeon
ill-balanced on its roosting-bough.

But the pupils of her young eyes soon expanded, and she could see well
enough for her purpose. Taking a bundle of spars under each arm, and
guided by the serrated line of tree-tops against the sky, she went some
hundred yards or more down the lane till she reached a long open shed,
carpeted around with the dead leaves that lay about everywhere. Night,
that strange personality, which within walls brings ominous
introspectiveness and self-distrust, but under the open sky banishes
such subjective anxieties as too trivial for thought, inspired Marty
South with a less perturbed and brisker manner now. She laid the spars
on the ground within the shed and returned for more, going to and fro
till her whole manufactured stock were deposited here.

This erection was the wagon-house of the chief man of business
hereabout, Mr. George Melbury, the timber, bark, and copse-ware
merchant for whom Marty’s father did work of this sort by the piece. It
formed one of the many rambling out-houses which surrounded his
dwelling, an equally irregular block of building, whose immense
chimneys could just be discerned even now. The four huge wagons under
the shed were built on those ancient lines whose proportions have been
ousted by modern patterns, their shapes bulging and curving at the base
and ends like Trafalgar line-of-battle ships, with which venerable
hulks, indeed, these vehicles evidenced a constructed spirit curiously
in harmony. One was laden with sheep-cribs, another with hurdles,
another with ash poles, and the fourth, at the foot of which she had
placed her thatching-spars was half full of similar bundles.

She was pausing a moment with that easeful sense of accomplishment
which follows work done that has been a hard struggle in the doing,
when she heard a woman’s voice on the other side of the hedge say,
anxiously, “George!” In a moment the name was repeated, with “Do come
indoors! What are you doing there?”

The cart-house adjoined the garden, and before Marty had moved she saw
enter the latter from the timber-merchant’s back door an elderly woman
sheltering a candle with her hand, the light from which cast a moving
thorn-pattern of shade on Marty’s face. Its rays soon fell upon a man
whose clothes were roughly thrown on, standing in advance of the
speaker. He was a thin, slightly stooping figure, with a small nervous
mouth and a face cleanly shaven; and he walked along the path with his
eyes bent on the ground. In the pair Marty South recognized her
employer Melbury and his wife. She was the second Mrs. Melbury, the
first having died shortly after the birth of the timber-merchant’s only
child.

“’Tis no use to stay in bed,” he said, as soon as she came up to where
he was pacing restlessly about. “I can’t sleep—I keep thinking of
things, and worrying about the girl, till I’m quite in a fever of
anxiety.” He went on to say that he could not think why “she (Marty
knew he was speaking of his daughter) did not answer his letter. She
must be ill—she must, certainly,” he said.

“No, no. ’Tis all right, George,” said his wife; and she assured him
that such things always did appear so gloomy in the night-time, if
people allowed their minds to run on them; that when morning came it
was seen that such fears were nothing but shadows. “Grace is as well as
you or I,” she declared.

But he persisted that she did not see all—that she did not see as much
as he. His daughter’s not writing was only one part of his worry. On
account of her he was anxious concerning money affairs, which he would
never alarm his mind about otherwise. The reason he gave was that, as
she had nobody to depend upon for a provision but himself, he wished
her, when he was gone, to be securely out of risk of poverty.

To this Mrs. Melbury replied that Grace would be sure to marry well,
and that hence a hundred pounds more or less from him would not make
much difference.

Her husband said that that was what she, Mrs. Melbury, naturally
thought; but there she was wrong, and in that lay the source of his
trouble. “I have a plan in my head about her,” he said; “and according
to my plan she won’t marry a rich man.”

“A plan for her not to marry well?” said his wife, surprised.

“Well, in one sense it is that,” replied Melbury. “It is a plan for her
to marry a particular person, and as he has not so much money as she
might expect, it might be called as you call it. I may not be able to
carry it out; and even if I do, it may not be a good thing for her. I
want her to marry Giles Winterborne.”

His companion repeated the name. “Well, it is all right,” she said,
presently. “He adores the very ground she walks on; only he’s close,
and won’t show it much.”

Marty South appeared startled, and could not tear herself away.

Yes, the timber-merchant asserted, he knew that well enough.
Winterborne had been interested in his daughter for years; that was
what had led him into the notion of their union. And he knew that she
used to have no objection to him. But it was not any difficulty about
that which embarrassed him. It was that, since he had educated her so
well, and so long, and so far above the level of daughters thereabout,
it was _wasting her_ to give her to a man of no higher standing than
the young man in question.

“That’s what I have been thinking,” said Mrs. Melbury.

“Well, then, Lucy, now you’ve hit it,” answered the timber-merchant,
with feeling. “There lies my trouble. I vowed to let her marry him, and
to make her as valuable as I could to him by schooling her as many
years and as thoroughly as possible. I mean to keep my vow. I made it
because I did his father a terrible wrong; and it was a weight on my
conscience ever since that time till this scheme of making amends
occurred to me through seeing that Giles liked her.”

“Wronged his father?” asked Mrs. Melbury.

“Yes, grievously wronged him,” said her husband.

“Well, don’t think of it to-night,” she urged. “Come indoors.”

“No, no, the air cools my head. I shall not stay long.” He was silent a
while; then he told her, as nearly as Marty could gather, that his
first wife, his daughter Grace’s mother, was first the sweetheart of
Winterborne’s father, who loved her tenderly, till he, the speaker, won
her away from him by a trick, because he wanted to marry her himself.
He sadly went on to say that the other man’s happiness was ruined by
it; that though he married Winterborne’s mother, it was but a
half-hearted business with him. Melbury added that he was afterwards
very miserable at what he had done; but that as time went on, and the
children grew up, and seemed to be attached to each other, he
determined to do all he could to right the wrong by letting his
daughter marry the lad; not only that, but to give her the best
education he could afford, so as to make the gift as valuable a one as
it lay in his power to bestow. “I still mean to do it,” said Melbury.

“Then do,” said she.

“But all these things trouble me,” said he; “for I feel I am
sacrificing her for my own sin; and I think of her, and often come down
here and look at this.”

“Look at what?” asked his wife.

He took the candle from her hand, held it to the ground, and removed a
tile which lay in the garden-path. “’Tis the track of her shoe that she
made when she ran down here the day before she went away all those
months ago. I covered it up when she was gone; and when I come here and
look at it, I ask myself again, why should she be sacrificed to a poor
man?”

“It is not altogether a sacrifice,” said the woman. “He is in love with
her, and he’s honest and upright. If she encourages him, what can you
wish for more?”

“I wish for nothing definite. But there’s a lot of things possible for
her. Why, Mrs. Charmond is wanting some refined young lady, I hear, to
go abroad with her—as companion or something of the kind. She’d jump at
Grace.”

“That’s all uncertain. Better stick to what’s sure.”

“True, true,” said Melbury; “and I hope it will be for the best. Yes,
let me get ’em married up as soon as I can, so as to have it over and
done with.” He continued looking at the imprint, while he added,
“Suppose she should be dying, and never make a track on this path any
more?”

“She’ll write soon, depend upon’t. Come, ’tis wrong to stay here and
brood so.”

He admitted it, but said he could not help it. “Whether she write or
no, I shall fetch her in a few days.” And thus speaking, he covered the
track, and preceded his wife indoors.

Melbury, perhaps, was an unlucky man in having within him the sentiment
which could indulge in this foolish fondness about the imprint of a
daughter’s footstep. Nature does not carry on her government with a
view to such feelings, and when advancing years render the open hearts
of those who possess them less dexterous than formerly in shutting
against the blast, they must suffer “buffeting at will by rain and
storm” no less than Little Celandines.

But her own existence, and not Mr. Melbury’s, was the centre of Marty’s
consciousness, and it was in relation to this that the matter struck
her as she slowly withdrew.

“That, then, is the secret of it all,” she said. “And Giles Winterborne
is not for me, and the less I think of him the better.”

She returned to her cottage. The sovereigns were staring at her from
the looking-glass as she had left them. With a preoccupied countenance,
and with tears in her eyes, she got a pair of scissors, and began
mercilessly cutting off the long locks of her hair, arranging and tying
them with their points all one way, as the barber had directed. Upon
the pale scrubbed deal of the coffin-stool table they stretched like
waving and ropy weeds over the washed gravel-bed of a clear stream.

She would not turn again to the little looking-glass, out of humanity
to herself, knowing what a deflowered visage would look back at her,
and almost break her heart; she dreaded it as much as did her own
ancestral goddess Sif the reflection in the pool after the rape of her
locks by Loke the malicious. She steadily stuck to business, wrapped
the hair in a parcel, and sealed it up, after which she raked out the
fire and went to bed, having first set up an alarum made of a candle
and piece of thread, with a stone attached.

But such a reminder was unnecessary to-night. Having tossed till about
five o’clock, Marty heard the sparrows walking down their long holes in
the thatch above her sloping ceiling to their orifice at the eaves;
whereupon she also arose, and descended to the ground-floor again.

It was still dark, but she began moving about the house in those
automatic initiatory acts and touches which represent among housewives
the installation of another day. While thus engaged she heard the
rumbling of Mr. Melbury’s wagons, and knew that there, too, the day’s
toil had begun.

An armful of gads thrown on the still hot embers caused them to blaze
up cheerfully and bring her diminished head-gear into sudden prominence
as a shadow. At this a step approached the door.

“Are folk astir here yet?” inquired a voice she knew well.

“Yes, Mr. Winterborne,” said Marty, throwing on a tilt bonnet, which
completely hid the recent ravages of the scissors. “Come in!”

The door was flung back, and there stepped in upon the mat a man not
particularly young for a lover, nor particularly mature for a person of
affairs. There was reserve in his glance, and restraint upon his mouth.
He carried a horn lantern which hung upon a swivel, and wheeling as it
dangled marked grotesque shapes upon the shadier part of the walls.

He said that he had looked in on his way down, to tell her that they
did not expect her father to make up his contract if he was not well.
Mr. Melbury would give him another week, and they would go their
journey with a short load that day.

“They are done,” said Marty, “and lying in the cart-house.”

“Done!” he repeated. “Your father has not been too ill to work after
all, then?”

She made some evasive reply. “I’ll show you where they be, if you are
going down,” she added.

They went out and walked together, the pattern of the air-holes in the
top of the lantern being thrown upon the mist overhead, where they
appeared of giant size, as if reaching the tent-shaped sky. They had no
remarks to make to each other, and they uttered none. Hardly anything
could be more isolated or more self-contained than the lives of these
two walking here in the lonely antelucan hour, when gray shades,
material and mental, are so very gray. And yet, looked at in a certain
way, their lonely courses formed no detached design at all, but were
part of the pattern in the great web of human doings then weaving in
both hemispheres, from the White Sea to Cape Horn.

The shed was reached, and she pointed out the spars. Winterborne
regarded them silently, then looked at her.

“Now, Marty, I believe—” he said, and shook his head.

“What?”

“That you’ve done the work yourself.”

“Don’t you tell anybody, will you, Mr. Winterborne?” she pleaded, by
way of answer. “Because I am afraid Mr. Melbury may refuse my work if
he knows it is mine.”

“But how could you learn to do it? ’Tis a trade.”

“Trade!” said she. “I’d be bound to learn it in two hours.”

“Oh no, you wouldn’t, Mrs. Marty.” Winterborne held down his lantern,
and examined the cleanly split hazels as they lay. “Marty,” he said,
with dry admiration, “your father with his forty years of practice
never made a spar better than that. They are too good for the thatching
of houses—they are good enough for the furniture. But I won’t tell. Let
me look at your hands—your poor hands!”

He had a kindly manner of a quietly severe tone; and when she seemed
reluctant to show her hands, he took hold of one and examined it as if
it were his own. Her fingers were blistered.

“They’ll get harder in time,” she said. “For if father continues ill, I
shall have to go on wi’ it. Now I’ll help put ’em up in wagon.”

Winterborne without speaking set down his lantern, lifted her as she
was about to stoop over the bundles, placed her behind him, and began
throwing up the bundles himself. “Rather than you should do it I will,”
he said. “But the men will be here directly. Why, Marty!—whatever has
happened to your head? Lord, it has shrunk to nothing—it looks an apple
upon a gate-post!”

Her heart swelled, and she could not speak. At length she managed to
groan, looking on the ground, “I’ve made myself ugly—and hateful—that’s
what I’ve done!”

“No, no,” he answered. “You’ve only cut your hair—I see now.”

“Then why must you needs say that about apples and gate-posts?”

“Let me see.”

“No, no!” She ran off into the gloom of the sluggish dawn. He did not
attempt to follow her. When she reached her father’s door she stood on
the step and looked back. Mr. Melbury’s men had arrived, and were
loading up the spars, and their lanterns appeared from the distance at
which she stood to have wan circles round them, like eyes weary with
watching. She observed them for a few seconds as they set about
harnessing the horses, and then went indoors.




CHAPTER IV.


There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and
presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like
a dead-born child. The villagers everywhere had already bestirred
themselves, rising at this time of the year at the far less dreary hour
of absolute darkness. It had been above an hour earlier, before a
single bird had untucked his head, that twenty lights were struck in as
many bedrooms, twenty pairs of shutters opened, and twenty pairs of
eyes stretched to the sky to forecast the weather for the day.

Owls that had been catching mice in the out-houses, rabbits that had
been eating the wintergreens in the gardens, and stoats that had been
sucking the blood of the rabbits, discerning that their human neighbors
were on the move, discreetly withdrew from publicity, and were seen and
heard no more that day.

The daylight revealed the whole of Mr. Melbury’s homestead, of which
the wagon-sheds had been an outlying erection. It formed three sides of
an open quadrangle, and consisted of all sorts of buildings, the
largest and central one being the dwelling itself. The fourth side of
the quadrangle was the public road.

It was a dwelling-house of respectable, roomy, almost dignified aspect;
which, taken with the fact that there were the remains of other such
buildings thereabout, indicated that Little Hintock had at some time or
other been of greater importance than now, as its old name of Hintock
St. Osmond also testified. The house was of no marked antiquity, yet of
well-advanced age; older than a stale novelty, but no canonized
antique; faded, not hoary; looking at you from the still distinct
middle-distance of the early Georgian time, and awakening on that
account the instincts of reminiscence more decidedly than the remoter
and far grander memorials which have to speak from the misty reaches of
mediaevalism. The faces, dress, passions, gratitudes, and revenues of
the great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers who had been the first to
gaze from those rectangular windows, and had stood under that
key-stoned doorway, could be divined and measured by homely standards
of to-day. It was a house in whose reverberations queer old personal
tales were yet audible if properly listened for; and not, as with those
of the castle and cloister, silent beyond the possibility of echo.

The garden-front remained much as it had always been, and there was a
porch and entrance that way. But the principal house-door opened on the
square yard or quadrangle towards the road, formerly a regular carriage
entrance, though the middle of the area was now made use of for
stacking timber, fagots, bundles, and other products of the wood. It
was divided from the lane by a lichen-coated wall, in which hung a pair
of gates, flanked by piers out of the perpendicular, with a round white
ball on the top of each.

The building on the left of the enclosure was a long-backed erection,
now used for spar-making, sawing, crib-framing, and copse-ware
manufacture in general. Opposite were the wagon-sheds where Marty had
deposited her spars.

Here Winterborne had remained after the girl’s abrupt departure, to see
that the wagon-loads were properly made up. Winterborne was connected
with the Melbury family in various ways. In addition to the sentimental
relationship which arose from his father having been the first Mrs.
Melbury’s lover, Winterborne’s aunt had married and emigrated with the
brother of the timber-merchant many years before—an alliance that was
sufficient to place Winterborne, though the poorer, on a footing of
social intimacy with the Melburys. As in most villages so secluded as
this, intermarriages were of Hapsburgian frequency among the
inhabitants, and there were hardly two houses in Little Hintock
unrelated by some matrimonial tie or other.

For this reason a curious kind of partnership existed between Melbury
and the younger man—a partnership based upon an unwritten code, by
which each acted in the way he thought fair towards the other, on a
give-and-take principle. Melbury, with his timber and copse-ware
business, found that the weight of his labor came in winter and spring.
Winterborne was in the apple and cider trade, and his requirements in
cartage and other work came in the autumn of each year. Hence horses,
wagons, and in some degree men, were handed over to him when the apples
began to fall; he, in return, lending his assistance to Melbury in the
busiest wood-cutting season, as now.

Before he had left the shed a boy came from the house to ask him to
remain till Mr. Melbury had seen him. Winterborne thereupon crossed
over to the spar-house where two or three men were already at work, two
of them being travelling spar-makers from White-hart Lane, who, when
this kind of work began, made their appearance regularly, and when it
was over disappeared in silence till the season came again.

Firewood was the one thing abundant in Little Hintock; and a blaze of
gad-cuds made the outhouse gay with its light, which vied with that of
the day as yet. In the hollow shades of the roof could be seen dangling
etiolated arms of ivy which had crept through the joints of the tiles
and were groping in vain for some support, their leaves being dwarfed
and sickly for want of sunlight; others were pushing in with such force
at the eaves as to lift from their supports the shelves that were fixed
there.

Besides the itinerant journey-workers there were also present John
Upjohn, engaged in the hollow-turnery trade, who lived hard by; old
Timothy Tangs and young Timothy Tangs, top and bottom sawyers, at work
in Mr. Melbury’s pit outside; Farmer Bawtree, who kept the cider-house,
and Robert Creedle, an old man who worked for Winterborne, and stood
warming his hands; these latter being enticed in by the ruddy blaze,
though they had no particular business there. None of them call for any
remark except, perhaps, Creedle. To have completely described him it
would have been necessary to write a military memoir, for he wore under
his smock-frock a cast-off soldier’s jacket that had seen hot service,
its collar showing just above the flap of the frock; also a hunting
memoir, to include the top-boots that he had picked up by chance; also
chronicles of voyaging and shipwreck, for his pocket-knife had been
given him by a weather-beaten sailor. But Creedle carried about with
him on his uneventful rounds these silent testimonies of war, sport,
and adventure, and thought nothing of their associations or their
stories.

Copse-work, as it was called, being an occupation which the secondary
intelligence of the hands and arms could carry on without requiring the
sovereign attention of the head, the minds of its professors wandered
considerably from the objects before them; hence the tales, chronicles,
and ramifications of family history which were recounted here were of a
very exhaustive kind, and sometimes so interminable as to defy
description.

Winterborne, seeing that Melbury had not arrived, stepped back again
outside the door; and the conversation interrupted by his momentary
presence flowed anew, reaching his ears as an accompaniment to the
regular dripping of the fog from the plantation boughs around.

The topic at present handled was a highly popular and frequent one—the
personal character of Mrs. Charmond, the owner of the surrounding woods
and groves.

“My brother-in-law told me, and I have no reason to doubt it,” said
Creedle, “that she’d sit down to her dinner with a frock hardly higher
than her elbows. ‘Oh, you wicked woman!’ he said to himself when he
first see her, ‘you go to your church, and sit, and kneel, as if your
knee-jints were greased with very saint’s anointment, and tell off your
Hear-us-good-Lords like a business man counting money; and yet you can
eat your victuals such a figure as that!’ Whether she’s a reformed
character by this time I can’t say; but I don’t care who the man is,
that’s how she went on when my brother-in-law lived there.”

“Did she do it in her husband’s time?”

“That I don’t know—hardly, I should think, considering his temper. Ah!”
Here Creedle threw grieved remembrance into physical form by slowly
resigning his head to obliquity and letting his eyes water. “That man!
‘Not if the angels of heaven come down, Creedle,’ he said, ‘shall you
do another day’s work for me!’ Yes—he’d say anything—anything; and
would as soon take a winged creature’s name in vain as yours or mine!
Well, now I must get these spars home-along, and to-morrow, thank God,
I must see about using ’em.”

An old woman now entered upon the scene. She was Mr. Melbury’s servant,
and passed a great part of her time in crossing the yard between the
house-door and the spar-shed, whither she had come now for fuel. She
had two facial aspects—one, of a soft and flexible kind, she used
indoors when assisting about the parlor or upstairs; the other, with
stiff lines and corners, when she was bustling among the men in the
spar-house or out-of-doors.

“Ah, Grammer Oliver,” said John Upjohn, “it do do my heart good to see
a old woman like you so dapper and stirring, when I bear in mind that
after fifty one year counts as two did afore! But your smoke didn’t
rise this morning till twenty minutes past seven by my beater; and
that’s late, Grammer Oliver.”

“If you was a full-sized man, John, people might take notice of your
scornful meanings. But your growing up was such a scrimped and scanty
business that really a woman couldn’t feel hurt if you were to spit
fire and brimstone itself at her. Here,” she added, holding out a
spar-gad to one of the workmen, from which dangled a long
black-pudding—“here’s something for thy breakfast, and if you want tea
you must fetch it from in-doors.”

“Mr. Melbury is late this morning,” said the bottom-sawyer.

“Yes. ’Twas a dark dawn,” said Mrs. Oliver. “Even when I opened the
door, so late as I was, you couldn’t have told poor men from gentlemen,
or John from a reasonable-sized object. And I don’t think maister’s
slept at all well to-night. He’s anxious about his daughter; and I know
what that is, for I’ve cried bucketfuls for my own.”

When the old woman had gone Creedle said,

“He’ll fret his gizzard green if he don’t soon hear from that maid of
his. Well, learning is better than houses and lands. But to keep a maid
at school till she is taller out of pattens than her mother was in
’em—’tis tempting Providence.”

“It seems no time ago that she was a little playward girl,” said young
Timothy Tangs.

“I can mind her mother,” said the hollow-turner. “Always a teuny,
delicate piece; her touch upon your hand was as soft and cool as wind.
She was inoculated for the small-pox and had it beautifully fine, just
about the time that I was out of my apprenticeship—ay, and a long
apprenticeship ’twas. I served that master of mine six years and three
hundred and fourteen days.”

The hollow-turner pronounced the days with emphasis, as if, considering
their number, they were a rather more remarkable fact than the years.

“Mr. Winterborne’s father walked with her at one time,” said old
Timothy Tangs. “But Mr. Melbury won her. She was a child of a woman,
and would cry like rain if so be he huffed her. Whenever she and her
husband came to a puddle in their walks together he’d take her up like
a half-penny doll and put her over without dirting her a speck. And if
he keeps the daughter so long at boarding-school, he’ll make her as
nesh as her mother was. But here he comes.”

Just before this moment Winterborne had seen Melbury crossing the court
from his door. He was carrying an open letter in his hand, and came
straight to Winterborne. His gloom of the preceding night had quite
gone.

“I’d no sooner made up my mind, Giles, to go and see why Grace didn’t
come or write than I get a letter from her—‘Clifton: Wednesday. My dear
father,’ says she, ‘I’m coming home to-morrow’ (that’s to-day), ‘but I
didn’t think it worth while to write long beforehand.’ The little
rascal, and didn’t she! Now, Giles, as you are going to Sherton market
to-day with your apple-trees, why not join me and Grace there, and
we’ll drive home all together?”

He made the proposal with cheerful energy; he was hardly the same man
as the man of the small dark hours. Ever it happens that even among the
moodiest the tendency to be cheered is stronger than the tendency to be
cast down; and a soul’s specific gravity stands permanently less than
that of the sea of troubles into which it is thrown.

Winterborne, though not demonstrative, replied to this suggestion with
something like alacrity. There was not much doubt that Marty’s grounds
for cutting off her hair were substantial enough, if Ambrose’s eyes had
been a reason for keeping it on. As for the timber-merchant, it was
plain that his invitation had been given solely in pursuance of his
scheme for uniting the pair. He had made up his mind to the course as a
duty, and was strenuously bent upon following it out.

Accompanied by Winterborne, he now turned towards the door of the
spar-house, when his footsteps were heard by the men as aforesaid.

“Well, John, and Lot,” he said, nodding as he entered. “A rimy
morning.”

“’Tis, sir!” said Creedle, energetically; for, not having as yet been
able to summon force sufficient to go away and begin work, he felt the
necessity of throwing some into his speech. “I don’t care who the man
is, ’tis the rimiest morning we’ve had this fall.”

“I heard you wondering why I’ve kept my daughter so long at
boarding-school,” resumed Mr. Melbury, looking up from the letter which
he was reading anew by the fire, and turning to them with the
suddenness that was a trait in him. “Hey?” he asked, with affected
shrewdness. “But you did, you know. Well, now, though it is my own
business more than anybody else’s, I’ll tell ye. When I was a boy,
another boy—the pa’son’s son—along with a lot of others, asked me ‘Who
dragged Whom round the walls of What?’ and I said, ‘Sam Barrett, who
dragged his wife in a chair round the tower corner when she went to be
churched.’ They laughed at me with such torrents of scorn that I went
home ashamed, and couldn’t sleep for shame; and I cried that night till
my pillow was wet: till at last I thought to myself there and
then—‘They may laugh at me for my ignorance, but that was father’s
fault, and none o’ my making, and I must bear it. But they shall never
laugh at my children, if I have any: I’ll starve first!’ Thank God,
I’ve been able to keep her at school without sacrifice; and her
scholarship is such that she stayed on as governess for a time. Let ’em
laugh now if they can: Mrs. Charmond herself is not better informed
than my girl Grace.”

There was something between high indifference and humble emotion in his
delivery, which made it difficult for them to reply. Winterborne’s
interest was of a kind which did not show itself in words; listening,
he stood by the fire, mechanically stirring the embers with a spar-gad.

“You’ll be, then, ready, Giles?” Melbury continued, awaking from a
reverie. “Well, what was the latest news at Shottsford yesterday, Mr.
Bawtree?”

“Well, Shottsford is Shottsford still—you can’t victual your carcass
there unless you’ve got money; and you can’t buy a cup of genuine
there, whether or no....But as the saying is, ‘Go abroad and you’ll
hear news of home.’ It seems that our new neighbor, this young Dr.
What’s-his-name, is a strange, deep, perusing gentleman; and there’s
good reason for supposing he has sold his soul to the wicked one.”

“’Od name it all,” murmured the timber-merchant, unimpressed by the
news, but reminded of other things by the subject of it; “I’ve got to
meet a gentleman this very morning? and yet I’ve planned to go to
Sherton Abbas for the maid.”

“I won’t praise the doctor’s wisdom till I hear what sort of bargain
he’s made,” said the top-sawyer.

“’Tis only an old woman’s tale,” said Bawtree. “But it seems that he
wanted certain books on some mysterious science or black-art, and in
order that the people hereabout should not know anything about his dark
readings, he ordered ’em direct from London, and not from the Sherton
book-seller. The parcel was delivered by mistake at the pa’son’s, and
he wasn’t at home; so his wife opened it, and went into hysterics when
she read ’em, thinking her husband had turned heathen, and ’twould be
the ruin of the children. But when he came he said he knew no more
about ’em than she; and found they were this Mr. Fitzpier’s property.
So he wrote ‘Beware!’ outside, and sent ’em on by the sexton.”

“He must be a curious young man,” mused the hollow-turner.

“He must,” said Timothy Tangs.

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Melbury, authoritatively, “he’s only a gentleman
fond of science and philosophy and poetry, and, in fact, every kind of
knowledge; and being lonely here, he passes his time in making such
matters his hobby.”

“Well,” said old Timothy, “’tis a strange thing about doctors that the
worse they be the better they be. I mean that if you hear anything of
this sort about ’em, ten to one they can cure ye as nobody else can.”

“True,” said Bawtree, emphatically. “And for my part I shall take my
custom from old Jones and go to this one directly I’ve anything the
matter with me. That last medicine old Jones gave me had no taste in it
at all.”

Mr. Melbury, as became a well-informed man, did not listen to these
recitals, being moreover preoccupied with the business appointment
which had come into his head. He walked up and down, looking on the
floor—his usual custom when undecided. That stiffness about the arm,
hip, and knee-joint which was apparent when he walked was the net
product of the divers sprains and over-exertions that had been required
of him in handling trees and timber when a young man, for he was of the
sort called self-made, and had worked hard. He knew the origin of every
one of these cramps: that in his left shoulder had come of carrying a
pollard, unassisted, from Tutcombe Bottom home; that in one leg was
caused by the crash of an elm against it when they were felling; that
in the other was from lifting a bole. On many a morrow after wearying
himself by these prodigious muscular efforts, he had risen from his bed
fresh as usual; his lassitude had departed, apparently forever; and
confident in the recuperative power of his youth, he had repeated the
strains anew. But treacherous Time had been only hiding ill results
when they could be guarded against, for greater accumulation when they
could not. In his declining years the store had been unfolded in the
form of rheumatisms, pricks, and spasms, in every one of which Melbury
recognized some act which, had its consequence been contemporaneously
made known, he would wisely have abstained from repeating.

On a summons by Grammer Oliver to breakfast, he left the shed. Reaching
the kitchen, where the family breakfasted in winter to save
house-labor, he sat down by the fire, and looked a long time at the
pair of dancing shadows cast by each fire-iron and dog-knob on the
whitewashed chimney-corner—a yellow one from the window, and a blue one
from the fire.

“I don’t quite know what to do to-day,” he said to his wife at last.
“I’ve recollected that I promised to meet Mrs. Charmond’s steward in
Round Wood at twelve o’clock, and yet I want to go for Grace.”

“Why not let Giles fetch her by himself? ’Twill bring ’em together all
the quicker.”

“I could do that—but I should like to go myself. I always have gone,
without fail, every time hitherto. It has been a great pleasure to
drive into Sherton, and wait and see her arrive; and perhaps she’ll be
disappointed if I stay away.”

“You may be disappointed, but I don’t think she will, if you send
Giles,” said Mrs. Melbury, dryly.

“Very well—I’ll send him.”

Melbury was often persuaded by the quietude of his wife’s words when
strenuous argument would have had no effect. This second Mrs. Melbury
was a placid woman, who had been nurse to his child Grace before her
mother’s death. After that melancholy event little Grace had clung to
the nurse with much affection; and ultimately Melbury, in dread lest
the only woman who cared for the girl should be induced to leave her,
persuaded the mild Lucy to marry him. The arrangement—for it was little
more—had worked satisfactorily enough; Grace had thriven, and Melbury
had not repented.

He returned to the spar-house and found Giles near at hand, to whom he
explained the change of plan. “As she won’t arrive till five o’clock,
you can get your business very well over in time to receive her,” said
Melbury. “The green gig will do for her; you’ll spin along quicker with
that, and won’t be late upon the road. Her boxes can be called for by
one of the wagons.”

Winterborne, knowing nothing of the timber-merchant’s restitutory aims,
quietly thought all this to be a kindly chance. Wishing even more than
her father to despatch his apple-tree business in the market before
Grace’s arrival, he prepared to start at once.

Melbury was careful that the turnout should be seemly. The gig-wheels,
for instance, were not always washed during winter-time before a
journey, the muddy roads rendering that labor useless; but they were
washed to-day. The harness was blacked, and when the rather elderly
white horse had been put in, and Winterborne was in his seat ready to
start, Mr. Melbury stepped out with a blacking-brush, and with his own
hands touched over the yellow hoofs of the animal.

“You see, Giles,” he said, as he blacked, “coming from a fashionable
school, she might feel shocked at the homeliness of home; and ’tis
these little things that catch a dainty woman’s eye if they are
neglected. We, living here alone, don’t notice how the whitey-brown
creeps out of the earth over us; but she, fresh from a city—why, she’ll
notice everything!”

“That she will,” said Giles.

“And scorn us if we don’t mind.”

“Not scorn us.”

“No, no, no—that’s only words. She’s too good a girl to do that. But
when we consider what she knows, and what she has seen since she last
saw us, ’tis as well to meet her views as nearly as possible. Why, ’tis
a year since she was in this old place, owing to her going abroad in
the summer, which I agreed to, thinking it best for her; and naturally
we shall look small, just at first—I only say just at first.”

Mr. Melbury’s tone evinced a certain exultation in the very sense of
that inferiority he affected to deplore; for this advanced and refined
being, was she not his own all the time? Not so Giles; he felt
doubtful—perhaps a trifle cynical—for that strand was wound into him
with the rest. He looked at his clothes with misgiving, then with
indifference.

It was his custom during the planting season to carry a specimen
apple-tree to market with him as an advertisement of what he dealt in.
This had been tied across the gig; and as it would be left behind in
the town, it would cause no inconvenience to Miss Grace Melbury coming
home.

He drove away, the twigs nodding with each step of the horse; and
Melbury went in-doors. Before the gig had passed out of sight, Mr.
Melbury reappeared and shouted after—

“Here, Giles,” he said, breathlessly following with some wraps, “it may
be very chilly to-night, and she may want something extra about her.
And, Giles,” he added, when the young man, having taken the articles,
put the horse in motion once more, “tell her that I should have come
myself, but I had particular business with Mrs. Charmond’s agent, which
prevented me. Don’t forget.”

He watched Winterborne out of sight, saying, with a jerk—a shape into
which emotion with him often resolved itself—“There, now, I hope the
two will bring it to a point and have done with it! ’Tis a pity to let
such a girl throw herself away upon him—a thousand pities!...And yet
’tis my duty for his father’s sake.”




CHAPTER V.


Winterborne sped on his way to Sherton Abbas without elation and
without discomposure. Had he regarded his inner self spectacularly, as
lovers are now daily more wont to do, he might have felt pride in the
discernment of a somewhat rare power in him—that of keeping not only
judgment but emotion suspended in difficult cases. But he noted it not.
Neither did he observe what was also the fact, that though he cherished
a true and warm feeling towards Grace Melbury, he was not altogether
her fool just now. It must be remembered that he had not seen her for a
year.

Arrived at the entrance to a long flat lane, which had taken the spirit
out of many a pedestrian in times when, with the majority, to travel
meant to walk, he saw before him the trim figure of a young woman in
pattens, journeying with that steadfast concentration which means
purpose and not pleasure. He was soon near enough to see that she was
Marty South. Click, click, click went the pattens; and she did not turn
her head.

She had, however, become aware before this that the driver of the
approaching gig was Giles. She had shrunk from being overtaken by him
thus; but as it was inevitable, she had braced herself up for his
inspection by closing her lips so as to make her mouth quite
unemotional, and by throwing an additional firmness into her tread.

“Why do you wear pattens, Marty? The turnpike is clean enough, although
the lanes are muddy.”

“They save my boots.”

“But twelve miles in pattens—’twill twist your feet off. Come, get up
and ride with me.”

She hesitated, removed her pattens, knocked the gravel out of them
against the wheel, and mounted in front of the nodding specimen
apple-tree. She had so arranged her bonnet with a full border and
trimmings that her lack of long hair did not much injure her
appearance; though Giles, of course, saw that it was gone, and may have
guessed her motive in parting with it, such sales, though infrequent,
being not unheard of in that locality.

But nature’s adornment was still hard by—in fact, within two feet of
him, though he did not know it. In Marty’s basket was a brown paper
packet, and in the packet the chestnut locks, which, by reason of the
barber’s request for secrecy, she had not ventured to intrust to other
hands.

Giles asked, with some hesitation, how her father was getting on.

He was better, she said; he would be able to work in a day or two; he
would be quite well but for his craze about the tree falling on him.

“You know why I don’t ask for him so often as I might, I suppose?” said
Winterborne. “Or don’t you know?”

“I think I do.”

“Because of the houses?”

She nodded.

“Yes. I am afraid it may seem that my anxiety is about those houses,
which I should lose by his death, more than about him. Marty, I do feel
anxious about the houses, since half my income depends upon them; but I
do likewise care for him; and it almost seems wrong that houses should
be leased for lives, so as to lead to such mixed feelings.”

“After father’s death they will be Mrs. Charmond’s?”

“They’ll be hers.”

“They are going to keep company with my hair,” she thought.

Thus talking, they reached the town. By no pressure would she ride up
the street with him. “That’s the right of another woman,” she said,
with playful malice, as she put on her pattens. “I wonder what you are
thinking of! Thank you for the lift in that handsome gig. Good-by.”

He blushed a little, shook his head at her, and drove on ahead into the
streets—the churches, the abbey, and other buildings on this clear
bright morning having the liny distinctness of architectural drawings,
as if the original dream and vision of the conceiving master-mason,
some mediaeval Vilars or other unknown to fame, were for a few minutes
flashed down through the centuries to an unappreciative age. Giles saw
their eloquent look on this day of transparency, but could not construe
it. He turned into the inn-yard.

Marty, following the same track, marched promptly to the
hair-dresser’s, Mr. Percombe’s. Percombe was the chief of his trade in
Sherton Abbas. He had the patronage of such county offshoots as had
been obliged to seek the shelter of small houses in that ancient town,
of the local clergy, and so on, for some of whom he had made wigs,
while others among them had compensated for neglecting him in their
lifetime by patronizing him when they were dead, and letting him shave
their corpses. On the strength of all this he had taken down his pole,
and called himself “Perruquier to the aristocracy.”

Nevertheless, this sort of support did not quite fill his children’s
mouths, and they had to be filled. So, behind his house there was a
little yard, reached by a passage from the back street, and in that
yard was a pole, and under the pole a shop of quite another description
than the ornamental one in the front street. Here on Saturday nights
from seven till ten he took an almost innumerable succession of
twopences from the farm laborers who flocked thither in crowds from the
country. And thus he lived.

Marty, of course, went to the front shop, and handed her packet to him
silently. “Thank you,” said the barber, quite joyfully. “I hardly
expected it after what you said last night.”

She turned aside, while a tear welled up and stood in each eye at this
reminder.

“Nothing of what I told you,” he whispered, there being others in the
shop. “But I can trust you, I see.”

She had now reached the end of this distressing business, and went
listlessly along the street to attend to other errands. These occupied
her till four o’clock, at which time she recrossed the market-place. It
was impossible to avoid rediscovering Winterborne every time she passed
that way, for standing, as he always did at this season of the year,
with his specimen apple-tree in the midst, the boughs rose above the
heads of the crowd, and brought a delightful suggestion of orchards
among the crowded buildings there. When her eye fell upon him for the
last time he was standing somewhat apart, holding the tree like an
ensign, and looking on the ground instead of pushing his produce as he
ought to have been doing. He was, in fact, not a very successful seller
either of his trees or of his cider, his habit of speaking his mind,
when he spoke at all, militating against this branch of his business.

While she regarded him he suddenly lifted his eyes in a direction away
from Marty, his face simultaneously kindling with recognition and
surprise. She followed his gaze, and saw walking across to him a
flexible young creature in whom she perceived the features of her she
had known as Miss Grace Melbury, but now looking glorified and refined
above her former level. Winterborne, being fixed to the spot by his
apple-tree, could not advance to meet her; he held out his spare hand
with his hat in it, and with some embarrassment beheld her coming on
tiptoe through the mud to the middle of the square where he stood.

Miss Melbury’s arrival so early was, as Marty could see, unexpected by
Giles, which accounted for his not being ready to receive her. Indeed,
her father had named five o’clock as her probable time, for which
reason that hour had been looming out all the day in his forward
perspective, like an important edifice on a plain. Now here she was
come, he knew not how, and his arranged welcome stultified.

His face became gloomy at her necessity for stepping into the road, and
more still at the little look of embarrassment which appeared on hers
at having to perform the meeting with him under an apple-tree ten feet
high in the middle of the market-place. Having had occasion to take off
the new gloves she had bought to come home in, she held out to him a
hand graduating from pink at the tips of the fingers to white at the
palm; and the reception formed a scene, with the tree over their heads,
which was not by any means an ordinary one in Sherton Abbas streets.

Nevertheless, the greeting on her looks and lips was of a restrained
type, which perhaps was not unnatural. For true it was that Giles
Winterborne, well-attired and well-mannered as he was for a yeoman,
looked rough beside her. It had sometimes dimly occurred to him, in his
ruminating silence at Little Hintock, that external phenomena—such as
the lowness or height or color of a hat, the fold of a coat, the make
of a boot, or the chance attitude or occupation of a limb at the
instant of view—may have a great influence upon feminine opinion of a
man’s worth—so frequently founded on non-essentials; but a certain
causticity of mental tone towards himself and the world in general had
prevented to-day, as always, any enthusiastic action on the strength of
that reflection; and her momentary instinct of reserve at first sight
of him was the penalty he paid for his laxness.

He gave away the tree to a by-stander, as soon as he could find one who
would accept the cumbersome gift, and the twain moved on towards the
inn at which he had put up. Marty made as if to step forward for the
pleasure of being recognized by Miss Melbury; but abruptly checking
herself, she glided behind a carrier’s van, saying, dryly, “No; I baint
wanted there,” and critically regarded Winterborne’s companion.

It would have been very difficult to describe Grace Melbury with
precision, either now or at any time. Nay, from the highest point of
view, to precisely describe a human being, the focus of a universe—how
impossible! But, apart from transcendentalism, there never probably
lived a person who was in herself more completely a _reductio ad
absurdum_ of attempts to appraise a woman, even externally, by items of
face and figure. Speaking generally, it may be said that she was
sometimes beautiful, at other times not beautiful, according to the
state of her health and spirits.

In simple corporeal presentment she was of a fair and clear complexion,
rather pale than pink, slim in build and elastic in movement. Her look
expressed a tendency to wait for others’ thoughts before uttering her
own; possibly also to wait for others’ deeds before her own doing. In
her small, delicate mouth, which had perhaps hardly settled down to its
matured curves, there was a gentleness that might hinder sufficient
self-assertion for her own good. She had well-formed eyebrows which,
had her portrait been painted, would probably have been done in Prout’s
or Vandyke brown.

There was nothing remarkable in her dress just now, beyond a natural
fitness and a style that was recent for the streets of Sherton. But,
indeed, had it been the reverse, and quite striking, it would have
meant just as little. For there can be hardly anything less connected
with a woman’s personality than drapery which she has neither designed,
manufactured, cut, sewed, or even seen, except by a glance of approval
when told that such and such a shape and color must be had because it
has been decided by others as imperative at that particular time.

What people, therefore, saw of her in a cursory view was very little;
in truth, mainly something that was not she. The woman herself was a
shadowy, conjectural creature who had little to do with the outlines
presented to Sherton eyes; a shape in the gloom, whose true description
could only be approximated by putting together a movement now and a
glance then, in that patient and long-continued attentiveness which
nothing but watchful loving-kindness ever troubles to give.

There was a little delay in their setting out from the town, and Marty
South took advantage of it to hasten forward, with the view of escaping
them on the way, lest they should feel compelled to spoil their
_tête-à-tête_ by asking her to ride. She walked fast, and one-third of
the journey was done, and the evening rapidly darkening, before she
perceived any sign of them behind her. Then, while ascending a hill,
she dimly saw their vehicle drawing near the lowest part of the
incline, their heads slightly bent towards each other; drawn together,
no doubt, by their souls, as the heads of a pair of horses well in hand
are drawn in by the rein. She walked still faster.

But between these and herself there was a carriage, apparently a
brougham, coming in the same direction, with lighted lamps. When it
overtook her—which was not soon, on account of her pace—the scene was
much darker, and the lights glared in her eyes sufficiently to hide the
details of the equipage.

It occurred to Marty that she might take hold behind this carriage and
so keep along with it, to save herself the mortification of being
overtaken and picked up for pity’s sake by the coming pair.
Accordingly, as the carriage drew abreast of her in climbing the long
ascent, she walked close to the wheels, the rays of the nearest lamp
penetrating her very pores. She had only just dropped behind when the
carriage stopped, and to her surprise the coachman asked her, over his
shoulder, if she would ride. What made the question more surprising was
that it came in obedience to an order from the interior of the vehicle.

Marty gladly assented, for she was weary, very weary, after working all
night and keeping afoot all day. She mounted beside the coachman,
wondering why this good-fortune had happened to her. He was rather a
great man in aspect, and she did not like to inquire of him for some
time.

At last she said, “Who has been so kind as to ask me to ride?”

“Mrs. Charmond,” replied her statuesque companion.

Marty was stirred at the name, so closely connected with her last
night’s experiences. “Is this her carriage?” she whispered.

“Yes; she’s inside.”

Marty reflected, and perceived that Mrs. Charmond must have recognized
her plodding up the hill under the blaze of the lamp; recognized,
probably, her stubbly poll (since she had kept away her face), and
thought that those stubbles were the result of her own desire.

Marty South was not so very far wrong. Inside the carriage a pair of
bright eyes looked from a ripely handsome face, and though behind those
bright eyes was a mind of unfathomed mysteries, beneath them there beat
a heart capable of quick extempore warmth—a heart which could, indeed,
be passionately and imprudently warm on certain occasions. At present,
after recognizing the girl, she had acted on a mere impulse, possibly
feeling gratified at the denuded appearance which signified the success
of her agent in obtaining what she had required.

“’Tis wonderful that she should ask ye,” observed the magisterial
coachman, presently. “I have never known her do it before, for as a
rule she takes no interest in the village folk at all.”

Marty said no more, but occasionally turned her head to see if she
could get a glimpse of the Olympian creature who as the coachman had
truly observed, hardly ever descended from her clouds into the Tempe of
the parishioners. But she could discern nothing of the lady. She also
looked for Miss Melbury and Winterborne. The nose of their horse
sometimes came quite near the back of Mrs. Charmond’s carriage. But
they never attempted to pass it till the latter conveyance turned
towards the park gate, when they sped by. Here the carriage drew up
that the gate might be opened, and in the momentary silence Marty heard
a gentle oral sound, soft as a breeze.

“What’s that?” she whispered.

“Mis’ess yawning.”

“Why should she yawn?”

“Oh, because she’s been used to such wonderfully good life, and finds
it dull here. She’ll soon be off again on account of it.”

“So rich and so powerful, and yet to yawn!” the girl murmured. “Then
things don’t fay with she any more than with we!”

Marty now alighted; the lamp again shone upon her, and as the carriage
rolled on, a soft voice said to her from the interior, “Good-night.”

“Good-night, ma’am,” said Marty. But she had not been able to see the
woman who began so greatly to interest her—the second person of her own
sex who had operated strongly on her mind that day.




CHAPTER VI.


Meanwhile, Winterborne and Grace Melbury had also undergone their
little experiences of the same homeward journey.

As he drove off with her out of the town the glances of people fell
upon them, the younger thinking that Mr. Winterborne was in a pleasant
place, and wondering in what relation he stood towards her. Winterborne
himself was unconscious of this. Occupied solely with the idea of
having her in charge, he did not notice much with outward eye, neither
observing how she was dressed, nor the effect of the picture they
together composed in the landscape.

Their conversation was in briefest phrase for some time, Grace being
somewhat disconcerted, through not having understood till they were
about to start that Giles was to be her sole conductor in place of her
father. When they were in the open country he spoke.

“Don’t Brownley’s farm-buildings look strange to you, now they have
been moved bodily from the hollow where the old ones stood to the top
of the hill?”

She admitted that they did, though she should not have seen any
difference in them if he had not pointed it out.

“They had a good crop of bitter-sweets; they couldn’t grind them all”
(nodding towards an orchard where some heaps of apples had been left
lying ever since the ingathering).

She said “Yes,” but looking at another orchard.

“Why, you are looking at John-apple-trees! You know bitter-sweets—you
used to well enough!”

“I am afraid I have forgotten, and it is getting too dark to
distinguish.”

Winterborne did not continue. It seemed as if the knowledge and
interest which had formerly moved Grace’s mind had quite died away from
her. He wondered whether the special attributes of his image in the
past had evaporated like these other things.

However that might be, the fact at present was merely this, that where
he was seeing John-apples and farm-buildings she was beholding a far
remoter scene—a scene no less innocent and simple, indeed, but much
contrasting—a broad lawn in the fashionable suburb of a fast city, the
evergreen leaves shining in the evening sun, amid which bounding girls,
gracefully clad in artistic arrangements of blue, brown, red, black,
and white, were playing at games, with laughter and chat, in all the
pride of life, the notes of piano and harp trembling in the air from
the open windows adjoining. Moreover, they were girls—and this was a
fact which Grace Melbury’s delicate femininity could not lose sight
of—whose parents Giles would have addressed with a deferential Sir or
Madam. Beside this visioned scene the homely farmsteads did not quite
hold their own from her present twenty-year point of survey. For all
his woodland sequestration, Giles knew the primitive simplicity of the
subject he had started, and now sounded a deeper note.

“’Twas very odd what we said to each other years ago; I often think of
it. I mean our saying that if we still liked each other when you were
twenty and I twenty-five, we’d—”

“It was child’s tattle.”

“H’m!” said Giles, suddenly.

“I mean we were young,” said she, more considerately. That gruff manner
of his in making inquiries reminded her that he was unaltered in much.

“Yes....I beg your pardon, Miss Melbury; your father _sent_ me to meet
you to-day.”

“I know it, and I am glad of it.”

He seemed satisfied with her tone and went on: “At that time you were
sitting beside me at the back of your father’s covered car, when we
were coming home from gypsying, all the party being squeezed in
together as tight as sheep in an auction-pen. It got darker and darker,
and I said—I forget the exact words—but I put my arm round your waist
and there you let it stay till your father, sitting in front suddenly
stopped telling his story to Farmer Bollen, to light his pipe. The
flash shone into the car, and showed us all up distinctly; my arm flew
from your waist like lightning; yet not so quickly but that some of ’em
had seen, and laughed at us. Yet your father, to our amazement, instead
of being angry, was mild as milk, and seemed quite pleased. Have you
forgot all that, or haven’t you?”

She owned that she remembered it very well, now that he mentioned the
circumstances. “But, goodness! I must have been in short frocks,” she
said.

“Come now, Miss Melbury, that won’t do! Short frocks, indeed! You know
better, as well as I.”

Grace thereupon declared that she would not argue with an old friend
she valued so highly as she valued him, saying the words with the easy
elusiveness that will be polite at all costs. It might possibly be
true, she added, that she was getting on in girlhood when that event
took place; but if it were so, then she was virtually no less than an
old woman now, so far did the time seem removed from her present. “Do
you ever look at things philosophically instead of personally?” she
asked.

“I can’t say that I do,” answered Giles, his eyes lingering far ahead
upon a dark spot, which proved to be a brougham.

“I think you may, sometimes, with advantage,” said she. “Look at
yourself as a pitcher drifting on the stream with other pitchers, and
consider what contrivances are most desirable for avoiding cracks in
general, and not only for saving your poor one. Shall I tell you all
about Bath or Cheltenham, or places on the Continent that I visited
last summer?”

“With all my heart.”

She then described places and persons in such terms as might have been
used for that purpose by any woman to any man within the four seas, so
entirely absent from that description was everything specially
appertaining to her own existence. When she had done she said, gayly,
“Now do you tell me in return what has happened in Hintock since I have
been away.”

“Anything to keep the conversation away from her and me,” said Giles
within him.

It was true cultivation had so far advanced in the soil of Miss
Melbury’s mind as to lead her to talk by rote of anything save of that
she knew well, and had the greatest interest in developing—that is to
say, herself.

He had not proceeded far with his somewhat bald narration when they
drew near the carriage that had been preceding them for some time. Miss
Melbury inquired if he knew whose carriage it was.

Winterborne, although he had seen it, had not taken it into account. On
examination, he said it was Mrs. Charmond’s.

Grace watched the vehicle and its easy roll, and seemed to feel more
nearly akin to it than to the one she was in.

“Pooh! We can polish off the mileage as well as they, come to that,”
said Winterborne, reading her mind; and rising to emulation at what it
bespoke, he whipped on the horse. This it was which had brought the
nose of Mr. Melbury’s old gray close to the back of Mrs. Charmond’s
much-eclipsing vehicle.

“There’s Marty South sitting up with the coachman,” said he, discerning
her by her dress.

“Ah, poor Marty! I must ask her to come to see me this very evening.
How does she happen to be riding there?”

“I don’t know. It is very singular.”

Thus these people with converging destinies went along the road
together, till Winterborne, leaving the track of the carriage, turned
into Little Hintock, where almost the first house was the
timber-merchant’s. Pencils of dancing light streamed out of the windows
sufficiently to show the white laurestinus flowers, and glance over the
polished leaves of laurel. The interior of the rooms could be seen
distinctly, warmed up by the fire-flames, which in the parlor were
reflected from the glass of the pictures and bookcase, and in the
kitchen from the utensils and ware.

“Let us look at the dear place for a moment before we call them,” she
said.

In the kitchen dinner was preparing; for though Melbury dined at one
o’clock at other times, to-day the meal had been kept back for Grace. A
rickety old spit was in motion, its end being fixed in the fire-dog,
and the whole kept going by means of a cord conveyed over pulleys along
the ceiling to a large stone suspended in a corner of the room. Old
Grammer Oliver came and wound it up with a rattle like that of a mill.

In the parlor a large shade of Mrs. Melbury’s head fell on the wall and
ceiling; but before the girl had regarded this room many moments their
presence was discovered, and her father and stepmother came out to
welcome her.

The character of the Melbury family was of that kind which evinces some
shyness in showing strong emotion among each other: a trait frequent in
rural households, and one which stands in curiously inverse relation to
most of the peculiarities distinguishing villagers from the people of
towns. Thus hiding their warmer feelings under commonplace talk all
round, Grace’s reception produced no extraordinary demonstrations. But
that more was felt than was enacted appeared from the fact that her
father, in taking her in-doors, quite forgot the presence of Giles
without, as did also Grace herself. He said nothing, but took the gig
round to the yard and called out from the spar-house the man who
particularly attended to these matters when there was no conversation
to draw him off among the copse-workers inside. Winterborne then
returned to the door with the intention of entering the house.

The family had gone into the parlor, and were still absorbed in
themselves. The fire was, as before, the only light, and it irradiated
Grace’s face and hands so as to make them look wondrously smooth and
fair beside those of the two elders; shining also through the loose
hair about her temples as sunlight through a brake. Her father was
surveying her in a dazed conjecture, so much had she developed and
progressed in manner and stature since he last had set eyes on her.

Observing these things, Winterborne remained dubious by the door,
mechanically tracing with his fingers certain time-worn letters carved
in the jambs—initials of by-gone generations of householders who had
lived and died there.

No, he declared to himself, he would not enter and join the family;
they had forgotten him, and it was enough for to-day that he had
brought her home. Still, he was a little surprised that her father’s
eagerness to send him for Grace should have resulted in such an
anticlimax as this.

He walked softly away into the lane towards his own house, looking back
when he reached the turning, from which he could get a last glimpse of
the timber-merchant’s roof. He hazarded guesses as to what Grace was
saying just at that moment, and murmured, with some self-derision,
“nothing about me!” He looked also in the other direction, and saw
against the sky the thatched hip and solitary chimney of Marty’s
cottage, and thought of her too, struggling bravely along under that
humble shelter, among her spar-gads and pots and skimmers.

At the timber-merchant’s, in the mean time, the conversation flowed;
and, as Giles Winterborne had rightly enough deemed, on subjects in
which he had no share. Among the excluding matters there was, for one,
the effect upon Mr. Melbury of the womanly mien and manners of his
daughter, which took him so much unawares that, though it did not make
him absolutely forget the existence of her conductor homeward, thrust
Giles’s image back into quite the obscurest cellarage of his brain.
Another was his interview with Mrs. Charmond’s agent that morning, at
which the lady herself had been present for a few minutes. Melbury had
purchased some standing timber from her a long time before, and now
that the date had come for felling it he was left to pursue almost his
own course. This was what the household were actually talking of during
Giles’s cogitation without; and Melbury’s satisfaction with the clear
atmosphere that had arisen between himself and the deity of the groves
which enclosed his residence was the cause of a counterbalancing
mistiness on the side towards Winterborne.

“So thoroughly does she trust me,” said Melbury, “that I might fell,
top, or lop, on my own judgment, any stick o’ timber whatever in her
wood, and fix the price o’t, and settle the matter. But, name it all! I
wouldn’t do such a thing. However, it may be useful to have this good
understanding with her....I wish she took more interest in the place,
and stayed here all the year round.”

“I am afraid ’tis not her regard for you, but her dislike of Hintock,
that makes her so easy about the trees,” said Mrs. Melbury.

When dinner was over, Grace took a candle and began to ramble
pleasurably through the rooms of her old home, from which she had
latterly become wellnigh an alien. Each nook and each object revived a
memory, and simultaneously modified it. The chambers seemed lower than
they had appeared on any previous occasion of her return, the surfaces
of both walls and ceilings standing in such relations to the eye that
it could not avoid taking microscopic note of their irregularities and
old fashion. Her own bedroom wore at once a look more familiar than
when she had left it, and yet a face estranged. The world of little
things therein gazed at her in helpless stationariness, as though they
had tried and been unable to make any progress without her presence.
Over the place where her candle had been accustomed to stand, when she
had used to read in bed till the midnight hour, there was still the
brown spot of smoke. She did not know that her father had taken
especial care to keep it from being cleaned off.

Having concluded her perambulation of this now uselessly commodious
edifice, Grace began to feel that she had come a long journey since the
morning; and when her father had been up himself, as well as his wife,
to see that her room was comfortable and the fire burning, she prepared
to retire for the night. No sooner, however, was she in bed than her
momentary sleepiness took itself off, and she wished she had stayed up
longer. She amused herself by listening to the old familiar noises that
she could hear to be still going on down-stairs, and by looking towards
the window as she lay. The blind had been drawn up, as she used to have
it when a girl, and she could just discern the dim tree-tops against
the sky on the neighboring hill. Beneath this meeting-line of light and
shade nothing was visible save one solitary point of light, which
blinked as the tree-twigs waved to and fro before its beams. From its
position it seemed to radiate from the window of a house on the
hill-side. The house had been empty when she was last at home, and she
wondered who inhabited the place now.

Her conjectures, however, were not intently carried on, and she was
watching the light quite idly, when it gradually changed color, and at
length shone blue as sapphire. Thus it remained several minutes, and
then it passed through violet to red.

Her curiosity was so widely awakened by the phenomenon that she sat up
in bed, and stared steadily at the shine. An appearance of this sort,
sufficient to excite attention anywhere, was no less than a marvel in
Hintock, as Grace had known the hamlet. Almost every diurnal and
nocturnal effect in that woodland place had hitherto been the direct
result of the regular terrestrial roll which produced the season’s
changes; but here was something dissociated from these normal
sequences, and foreign to local habit and knowledge.

It was about this moment that Grace heard the household below preparing
to retire, the most emphatic noise in the proceeding being that of her
father bolting the doors. Then the stairs creaked, and her father and
mother passed her chamber. The last to come was Grammer Oliver.

Grace slid out of bed, ran across the room, and lifting the latch,
said, “I am not asleep, Grammer. Come in and talk to me.”

Before the old woman had entered, Grace was again under the bedclothes.
Grammer set down her candlestick, and seated herself on the edge of
Miss Melbury’s coverlet.

“I want you to tell me what light that is I see on the hill-side,” said
Grace.

Mrs. Oliver looked across. “Oh, that,” she said, “is from the doctor’s.
He’s often doing things of that sort. Perhaps you don’t know that we’ve
a doctor living here now—Mr. Fitzpiers by name?”

Grace admitted that she had not heard of him.

“Well, then, miss, he’s come here to get up a practice. I know him very
well, through going there to help ’em scrub sometimes, which your
father said I might do, if I wanted to, in my spare time. Being a
bachelor-man, he’ve only a lad in the house. Oh yes, I know him very
well. Sometimes he’ll talk to me as if I were his own mother.”

“Indeed.”

“Yes. ‘Grammer,’ he said one day, when I asked him why he came here
where there’s hardly anybody living, ‘I’ll tell you why I came here. I
took a map, and I marked on it where Dr. Jones’s practice ends to the
north of this district, and where Mr. Taylor’s ends on the south, and
little Jimmy Green’s on the east, and somebody else’s to the west. Then
I took a pair of compasses, and found the exact middle of the country
that was left between these bounds, and that middle was Little Hintock;
so here I am....’ But, Lord, there: poor young man!”

“Why?”

“He said, ‘Grammer Oliver, I’ve been here three months, and although
there are a good many people in the Hintocks and the villages round,
and a scattered practice is often a very good one, I don’t seem to get
many patients. And there’s no society at all; and I’m pretty near
melancholy mad,’ he said, with a great yawn. ‘I should be quite if it
were not for my books, and my lab—laboratory, and what not. Grammer, I
was made for higher things.’ And then he’d yawn and yawn again.”

“Was he really made for higher things, do you think? I mean, is he
clever?”

“Well, no. How can he be clever? He may be able to jine up a broken man
or woman after a fashion, and put his finger upon an ache if you tell
him nearly where ’tis; but these young men—they should live to my time
of life, and then they’d see how clever they were at five-and-twenty!
And yet he’s a projick, a real projick, and says the oddest of rozums.
‘Ah, Grammer,’ he said, at another time, ‘let me tell you that
Everything is Nothing. There’s only Me and not Me in the whole world.’
And he told me that no man’s hands could help what they did, any more
than the hands of a clock....Yes, he’s a man of strange meditations,
and his eyes seem to see as far as the north star.”

“He will soon go away, no doubt.”

“I don’t think so.” Grace did not say “Why?” and Grammer hesitated. At
last she went on: “Don’t tell your father or mother, miss, if I let you
know a secret.”

Grace gave the required promise.

“Well, he talks of buying me; so he won’t go away just yet.”

“Buying you!—how?”

“Not my soul—my body, when I’m dead. One day when I was there cleaning,
he said, ‘Grammer, you’ve a large brain—a very large organ of brain,’
he said. ‘A woman’s is usually four ounces less than a man’s; but yours
is man’s size.’ Well, then—hee, hee!—after he’d flattered me a bit like
that, he said he’d give me ten pounds to have me as a natomy after my
death. Well, knowing I’d no chick nor chiel left, and nobody with any
interest in me, I thought, faith, if I can be of any use to my
fellow-creatures after I’m gone they are welcome to my services; so I
said I’d think it over, and would most likely agree and take the ten
pounds. Now this is a secret, miss, between us two. The money would be
very useful to me; and I see no harm in it.”

“Of course there’s no harm. But oh, Grammer, how can you think to do
it? I wish you hadn’t told me.”

“I wish I hadn’t—if you don’t like to know it, miss. But you needn’t
mind. Lord—hee, hee!—I shall keep him waiting many a year yet, bless
ye!”

“I hope you will, I am sure.”

The girl thereupon fell into such deep reflection that conversation
languished, and Grammer Oliver, taking her candle, wished Miss Melbury
good-night. The latter’s eyes rested on the distant glimmer, around
which she allowed her reasoning fancy to play in vague eddies that
shaped the doings of the philosopher behind that light on the lines of
intelligence just received. It was strange to her to come back from the
world to Little Hintock and find in one of its nooks, like a tropical
plant in a hedgerow, a nucleus of advanced ideas and practices which
had nothing in common with the life around. Chemical experiments,
anatomical projects, and metaphysical conceptions had found a strange
home here.

Thus she remained thinking, the imagined pursuits of the man behind the
light intermingling with conjectural sketches of his personality, till
her eyes fell together with their own heaviness, and she slept.




CHAPTER VII.


Kaleidoscopic dreams of a weird alchemist-surgeon, Grammer Oliver’s
skeleton, and the face of Giles Winterborne, brought Grace Melbury to
the morning of the next day. It was fine. A north wind was blowing—that
not unacceptable compromise between the atmospheric cutlery of the
eastern blast and the spongy gales of the west quarter. She looked from
her window in the direction of the light of the previous evening, and
could just discern through the trees the shape of the surgeon’s house.
Somehow, in the broad, practical daylight, that unknown and lonely
gentleman seemed to be shorn of much of the interest which had invested
his personality and pursuits in the hours of darkness, and as Grace’s
dressing proceeded he faded from her mind.

Meanwhile, Winterborne, though half assured of her father’s favor, was
rendered a little restless by Miss Melbury’s behavior. Despite his dry
self-control, he could not help looking continually from his own door
towards the timber-merchant’s, in the probability of somebody’s
emergence therefrom. His attention was at length justified by the
appearance of two figures, that of Mr. Melbury himself, and Grace
beside him. They stepped out in a direction towards the densest quarter
of the wood, and Winterborne walked contemplatively behind them, till
all three were soon under the trees.

Although the time of bare boughs had now set in, there were sheltered
hollows amid the Hintock plantations and copses in which a more tardy
leave-taking than on windy summits was the rule with the foliage. This
caused here and there an apparent mixture of the seasons; so that in
some of the dells that they passed by holly-berries in full red were
found growing beside oak and hazel whose leaves were as yet not far
removed from green, and brambles whose verdure was rich and deep as in
the month of August. To Grace these well-known peculiarities were as an
old painting restored.

Now could be beheld that change from the handsome to the curious which
the features of a wood undergo at the ingress of the winter months.
Angles were taking the place of curves, and reticulations of surfaces—a
change constituting a sudden lapse from the ornate to the primitive on
Nature’s canvas, and comparable to a retrogressive step from the art of
an advanced school of painting to that of the Pacific Islander.

Winterborne followed, and kept his eye upon the two figures as they
threaded their way through these sylvan phenomena. Mr. Melbury’s long
legs, and gaiters drawn in to the bone at the ankles, his slight stoop,
his habit of getting lost in thought and arousing himself with an
exclamation of “Hah!” accompanied with an upward jerk of the head,
composed a personage recognizable by his neighbors as far as he could
be seen. It seemed as if the squirrels and birds knew him. One of the
former would occasionally run from the path to hide behind the arm of
some tree, which the little animal carefully edged round _pari passu_
with Melbury and his daughters movement onward, assuming a mock manner,
as though he were saying, “Ho, ho; you are only a timber-merchant, and
carry no gun!”

They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through
interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots,
whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves; elbowed
old elms and ashes with great forks, in which stood pools of water that
overflowed on rainy days, and ran down their stems in green cascades.
On older trees still than these, huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs.
Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what
it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a
city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was
interrupted; the lichen eat the vigor of the stalk, and the ivy slowly
strangled to death the promising sapling.

They dived amid beeches under which nothing grew, the younger boughs
still retaining their hectic leaves, that rustled in the breeze with a
sound almost metallic, like the sheet-iron foliage of the fabled
Jarnvid wood. Some flecks of white in Grace’s drapery had enabled Giles
to keep her and her father in view till this time; but now he lost
sight of them, and was obliged to follow by ear—no difficult matter,
for on the line of their course every wood-pigeon rose from its perch
with a continued clash, dashing its wings against the branches with
wellnigh force enough to break every quill. By taking the track of this
noise he soon came to a stile.

Was it worth while to go farther? He examined the doughy soil at the
foot of the stile, and saw among the large sole-and-heel tracks an
impression of a slighter kind from a boot that was obviously not local,
for Winterborne knew all the cobblers’ patterns in that district,
because they were very few to know. The mud-picture was enough to make
him swing himself over and proceed.

The character of the woodland now changed. The bases of the smaller
trees were nibbled bare by rabbits, and at divers points heaps of
fresh-made chips, and the newly-cut stool of a tree, stared white
through the undergrowth. There had been a large fall of timber this
year, which explained the meaning of some sounds that soon reached him.

A voice was shouting intermittently in a sort of human bark, which
reminded Giles that there was a sale of trees and fagots that very day.
Melbury would naturally be present. Thereupon Winterborne remembered
that he himself wanted a few fagots, and entered upon the scene.

A large group of buyers stood round the auctioneer, or followed him
when, between his pauses, he wandered on from one lot of plantation
produce to another, like some philosopher of the Peripatetic school
delivering his lectures in the shady groves of the Lyceum. His
companions were timber-dealers, yeomen, farmers, villagers, and others;
mostly woodland men, who on that account could afford to be curious in
their walking-sticks, which consequently exhibited various
monstrosities of vegetation, the chief being cork-screw shapes in black
and white thorn, brought to that pattern by the slow torture of an
encircling woodbine during their growth, as the Chinese have been said
to mould human beings into grotesque toys by continued compression in
infancy. Two women, wearing men’s jackets on their gowns, conducted in
the rear of the halting procession a pony-cart containing a tapped
barrel of beer, from which they drew and replenished horns that were
handed round, with bread-and-cheese from a basket.

The auctioneer adjusted himself to circumstances by using his
walking-stick as a hammer, and knocked down the lot on any convenient
object that took his fancy, such as the crown of a little boy’s head,
or the shoulders of a by-stander who had no business there except to
taste the brew; a proceeding which would have been deemed humorous but
for the air of stern rigidity which that auctioneer’s face preserved,
tending to show that the eccentricity was a result of that absence of
mind which is engendered by the press of affairs, and no freak of fancy
at all.

Mr. Melbury stood slightly apart from the rest of the Peripatetics, and
Grace beside him, clinging closely to his arm, her modern attire
looking almost odd where everything else was old-fashioned, and
throwing over the familiar garniture of the trees a homeliness that
seemed to demand improvement by the addition of a few contemporary
novelties also. Grace seemed to regard the selling with the interest
which attaches to memories revived after an interval of obliviousness.

Winterborne went and stood close to them; the timber-merchant spoke,
and continued his buying; Grace merely smiled. To justify his presence
there Winterborne began bidding for timber and fagots that he did not
want, pursuing the occupation in an abstracted mood, in which the
auctioneer’s voice seemed to become one of the natural sounds of the
woodland. A few flakes of snow descended, at the sight of which a
robin, alarmed at these signs of imminent winter, and seeing that no
offence was meant by the human invasion, came and perched on the tip of
the fagots that were being sold, and looked into the auctioneer’s face,
while waiting for some chance crumb from the bread-basket. Standing a
little behind Grace, Winterborne observed how one flake would sail
downward and settle on a curl of her hair, and how another would choose
her shoulder, and another the edge of her bonnet, which took up so much
of his attention that his biddings proceeded incoherently; and when the
auctioneer said, every now and then, with a nod towards him, “Yours,
Mr. Winterborne,” he had no idea whether he had bought fagots, poles,
or logwood.

He regretted, with some causticity of humor, that her father should
show such inequalities of temperament as to keep Grace tightly on his
arm to-day, when he had quite lately seemed anxious to recognize their
betrothal as a fact. And thus musing, and joining in no conversation
with other buyers except when directly addressed, he followed the
assemblage hither and thither till the end of the auction, when Giles
for the first time realized what his purchases had been. Hundreds of
fagots, and divers lots of timber, had been set down to him, when all
he had required had been a few bundles of spray for his odd man Robert
Creedle’s use in baking and lighting fires.

Business being over, he turned to speak to the timber merchant. But
Melbury’s manner was short and distant; and Grace, too, looked vexed
and reproachful. Winterborne then discovered that he had been
unwittingly bidding against her father, and picking up his favorite
lots in spite of him. With a very few words they left the spot and
pursued their way homeward.

Giles was extremely sorry at what he had done, and remained standing
under the trees, all the other men having strayed silently away. He saw
Melbury and his daughter pass down a glade without looking back. While
they moved slowly through it a lady appeared on horseback in the middle
distance, the line of her progress converging upon that of Melbury’s.
They met, Melbury took off his hat, and she reined in her horse. A
conversation was evidently in progress between Grace and her father and
this equestrian, in whom he was almost sure that he recognized Mrs.
Charmond, less by her outline than by the livery of the groom who had
halted some yards off.

The interlocutors did not part till after a prolonged pause, during
which much seemed to be said. When Melbury and Grace resumed their walk
it was with something of a lighter tread than before.

Winterborne then pursued his own course homeward. He was unwilling to
let coldness grow up between himself and the Melburys for any trivial
reason, and in the evening he went to their house. On drawing near the
gate his attention was attracted by the sight of one of the bedrooms
blinking into a state of illumination. In it stood Grace lighting
several candles, her right hand elevating the taper, her left hand on
her bosom, her face thoughtfully fixed on each wick as it kindled, as
if she saw in every flame’s growth the rise of a life to maturity. He
wondered what such unusual brilliancy could mean to-night. On getting
in-doors he found her father and step-mother in a state of suppressed
excitement, which at first he could not comprehend.

“I am sorry about my biddings to-day,” said Giles. “I don’t know what I
was doing. I have come to say that any of the lots you may require are
yours.”

“Oh, never mind—never mind,” replied the timber-merchant, with a slight
wave of his hand, “I have so much else to think of that I nearly had
forgot it. Just now, too, there are matters of a different kind from
trade to attend to, so don’t let it concern ye.”

As the timber-merchant spoke, as it were, down to him from a higher
moral plane than his own, Giles turned to Mrs. Melbury.

“Grace is going to the House to-morrow,” she said, quietly. “She is
looking out her things now. I dare say she is wanting me this minute to
assist her.” Thereupon Mrs. Melbury left the room.

Nothing is more remarkable than the independent personality of the
tongue now and then. Mr. Melbury knew that his words had been a sort of
boast. He decried boasting, particularly to Giles; yet whenever the
subject was Grace, his judgment resigned the ministry of speech in
spite of him.

Winterborne felt surprise, pleasure, and also a little apprehension at
the news. He repeated Mrs. Melbury’s words.

“Yes,” said paternal pride, not sorry to have dragged out of him what
he could not in any circumstances have kept in. “Coming home from the
woods this afternoon we met Mrs. Charmond out for a ride. She spoke to
me on a little matter of business, and then got acquainted with Grace.
’Twas wonderful how she took to Grace in a few minutes; that
freemasonry of education made ’em close at once. Naturally enough she
was amazed that such an article—ha, ha!—could come out of my house. At
last it led on to Mis’ess Grace being asked to the House. So she’s busy
hunting up her frills and furbelows to go in.” As Giles remained in
thought without responding, Melbury continued: “But I’ll call her
down-stairs.”

“No, no; don’t do that, since she’s busy,” said Winterborne.

Melbury, feeling from the young man’s manner that his own talk had been
too much at Giles and too little to him, repented at once. His face
changed, and he said, in lower tones, with an effort, “She’s yours,
Giles, as far as I am concerned.”

“Thanks—my best thanks....But I think, since it is all right between us
about the biddings, that I’ll not interrupt her now. I’ll step
homeward, and call another time.”

On leaving the house he looked up at the bedroom again. Grace,
surrounded by a sufficient number of candles to answer all purposes of
self-criticism, was standing before a cheval-glass that her father had
lately bought expressly for her use; she was bonneted, cloaked, and
gloved, and glanced over her shoulder into the mirror, estimating her
aspect. Her face was lit with the natural elation of a young girl
hoping to inaugurate on the morrow an intimate acquaintance with a new,
interesting, and powerful friend.




CHAPTER VIII.


The inspiriting appointment which had led Grace Melbury to indulge in a
six-candle illumination for the arrangement of her attire, carried her
over the ground the next morning with a springy tread. Her sense of
being properly appreciated on her own native soil seemed to brighten
the atmosphere and herbage around her, as the glowworm’s lamp
irradiates the grass. Thus she moved along, a vessel of emotion going
to empty itself on she knew not what.

Twenty minutes’ walking through copses, over a stile, and along an
upland lawn brought her to the verge of a deep glen, at the bottom of
which Hintock House appeared immediately beneath her eye. To describe
it as standing in a hollow would not express the situation of the
manor-house; it stood in a hole, notwithstanding that the hole was full
of beauty. From the spot which Grace had reached a stone could easily
have been thrown over or into, the birds’-nested chimneys of the
mansion. Its walls were surmounted by a battlemented parapet; but the
gray lead roofs were quite visible behind it, with their gutters, laps,
rolls, and skylights, together with incised letterings and
shoe-patterns cut by idlers thereon.

The front of the house exhibited an ordinary manorial presentation of
Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-colored
freestone from local quarries. The ashlar of the walls, where not
overgrown with ivy and other creepers, was coated with lichen of every
shade, intensifying its luxuriance with its nearness to the ground,
till, below the plinth, it merged in moss.

Above the house to the back was a dense plantation, the roots of whose
trees were above the level of the chimneys. The corresponding high
ground on which Grace stood was richly grassed, with only an old tree
here and there. A few sheep lay about, which, as they ruminated, looked
quietly into the bedroom windows. The situation of the house,
prejudicial to humanity, was a stimulus to vegetation, on which account
an endless shearing of the heavy-armed ivy was necessary, and a
continual lopping of trees and shrubs. It was an edifice built in times
when human constitutions were damp-proof, when shelter from the
boisterous was all that men thought of in choosing a dwelling-place,
the insidious being beneath their notice; and its hollow site was an
ocular reminder, by its unfitness for modern lives, of the fragility to
which these have declined. The highest architectural cunning could have
done nothing to make Hintock House dry and salubrious; and ruthless
ignorance could have done little to make it unpicturesque. It was
vegetable nature’s own home; a spot to inspire the painter and poet of
still life—if they did not suffer too much from the relaxing
atmosphere—and to draw groans from the gregariously disposed. Grace
descended the green escarpment by a zigzag path into the drive, which
swept round beneath the slope. The exterior of the house had been
familiar to her from her childhood, but she had never been inside, and
the approach to knowing an old thing in a new way was a lively
experience. It was with a little flutter that she was shown in; but she
recollected that Mrs. Charmond would probably be alone. Up to a few
days before this time that lady had been accompanied in her comings,
stayings, and goings by a relative believed to be her aunt; latterly,
however, these two ladies had separated, owing, it was supposed, to a
quarrel, and Mrs. Charmond had been left desolate. Being presumably a
woman who did not care for solitude, this deprivation might possibly
account for her sudden interest in Grace.

Mrs. Charmond was at the end of a gallery opening from the hall when
Miss Melbury was announced, and saw her through the glass doors between
them. She came forward with a smile on her face, and told the young
girl it was good of her to come.

“Ah! you have noticed those,” she said, seeing that Grace’s eyes were
attracted by some curious objects against the walls. “They are
man-traps. My husband was a connoisseur in man-traps and spring-guns
and such articles, collecting them from all his neighbors. He knew the
histories of all these—which gin had broken a man’s leg, which gun had
killed a man. That one, I remember his saying, had been set by a
game-keeper in the track of a notorious poacher; but the keeper,
forgetting what he had done, went that way himself, received the charge
in the lower part of his body, and died of the wound. I don’t like them
here, but I’ve never yet given directions for them to be taken away.”
She added, playfully, “Man-traps are of rather ominous significance
where a person of our sex lives, are they not?”

Grace was bound to smile; but that side of womanliness was one which
her inexperience had no great zest in contemplating.

“They are interesting, no doubt, as relics of a barbarous time happily
past,” she said, looking thoughtfully at the varied designs of these
instruments of torture—some with semi-circular jaws, some with
rectangular; most of them with long, sharp teeth, but a few with none,
so that their jaws looked like the blank gums of old age.

“Well, we must not take them too seriously,” said Mrs. Charmond, with
an indolent turn of her head, and they moved on inward. When she had
shown her visitor different articles in cabinets that she deemed likely
to interest her, some tapestries, wood-carvings, ivories, miniatures,
and so on—always with a mien of listlessness which might either have
been constitutional, or partly owing to the situation of the place—they
sat down to an early cup of tea.

“Will you pour it out, please? Do,” she said, leaning back in her
chair, and placing her hand above her forehead, while her almond
eyes—those long eyes so common to the angelic legions of early Italian
art—became longer, and her voice more languishing. She showed that
oblique-mannered softness which is perhaps most frequent in women of
darker complexion and more lymphatic temperament than Mrs. Charmond’s
was; who lingeringly smile their meanings to men rather than speak
them, who inveigle rather than prompt, and take advantage of currents
rather than steer.

“I am the most inactive woman when I am here,” she said. “I think
sometimes I was born to live and do nothing, nothing, nothing but float
about, as we fancy we do sometimes in dreams. But that cannot be really
my destiny, and I must struggle against such fancies.”

“I am so sorry you do not enjoy exertion—it is quite sad! I wish I
could tend you and make you very happy.”

There was something so sympathetic, so appreciative, in the sound of
Grace’s voice, that it impelled people to play havoc with their
customary reservations in talking to her. “It is tender and kind of you
to feel that,” said Mrs. Charmond. “Perhaps I have given you the notion
that my languor is more than it really is. But this place oppresses me,
and I have a plan of going abroad a good deal. I used to go with a
relative, but that arrangement has dropped through.” Regarding Grace
with a final glance of criticism, she seemed to make up her mind to
consider the young girl satisfactory, and continued: “Now I am often
impelled to record my impressions of times and places. I have often
thought of writing a ‘New _Sentimental Journey_.’ But I cannot find
energy enough to do it alone. When I am at different places in the
south of Europe I feel a crowd of ideas and fancies thronging upon me
continually, but to unfold writing-materials, take up a cold steel pen,
and put these impressions down systematically on cold, smooth
paper—that I cannot do. So I have thought that if I always could have
somebody at my elbow with whom I am in sympathy, I might dictate any
ideas that come into my head. And directly I had made your acquaintance
the other day it struck me that you would suit me so well. Would you
like to undertake it? You might read to me, too, if desirable. Will you
think it over, and ask your parents if they are willing?”

“Oh yes,” said Grace. “I am almost sure they would be very glad.”

“You are so accomplished, I hear; I should be quite honored by such
intellectual company.”

Grace, modestly blushing, deprecated any such idea.

“Do you keep up your lucubrations at Little Hintock?”

“Oh no. Lucubrations are not unknown at Little Hintock; but they are
not carried on by me.”

“What—another student in that retreat?”

“There is a surgeon lately come, and I have heard that he reads a great
deal—I see his light sometimes through the trees late at night.”

“Oh yes—a doctor—I believe I was told of him. It is a strange place for
him to settle in.”

“It is a convenient centre for a practice, they say. But he does not
confine his studies to medicine, it seems. He investigates theology and
metaphysics and all sorts of subjects.”

“What is his name?”

“Fitzpiers. He represents a very old family, I believe, the Fitzpierses
of Buckbury-Fitzpiers—not a great many miles from here.”

“I am not sufficiently local to know the history of the family. I was
never in the county till my husband brought me here.” Mrs. Charmond did
not care to pursue this line of investigation. Whatever mysterious
merit might attach to family antiquity, it was one which, though she
herself could claim it, her adaptable, wandering _weltbürgerliche_
nature had grown tired of caring about—a peculiarity that made her a
contrast to her neighbors. “It is of rather more importance to know
what the man is himself than what his family is,” she said, “if he is
going to practise upon us as a surgeon. Have you seen him?”

Grace had not. “I think he is not a very old man,” she added.

“Has he a wife?”

“I am not aware that he has.”

“Well, I hope he will be useful here. I must get to know him when I
come back. It will be very convenient to have a medical man—if he is
clever—in one’s own parish. I get dreadfully nervous sometimes, living
in such an outlandish place; and Sherton is so far to send to. No doubt
you feel Hintock to be a great change after watering-place life.”

“I do. But it is home. It has its advantages and its disadvantages.”
Grace was thinking less of the solitude than of the attendant
circumstances.

They chatted on for some time, Grace being set quite at her ease by her
entertainer. Mrs. Charmond was far too well-practised a woman not to
know that to show a marked patronage to a sensitive young girl who
would probably be very quick to discern it, was to demolish her dignity
rather than to establish it in that young girl’s eyes. So, being
violently possessed with her idea of making use of this gentle
acquaintance, ready and waiting at her own door, she took great pains
to win her confidence at starting.

Just before Grace’s departure the two chanced to pause before a mirror
which reflected their faces in immediate juxtaposition, so as to bring
into prominence their resemblances and their contrasts. Both looked
attractive as glassed back by the faithful reflector; but Grace’s
countenance had the effect of making Mrs. Charmond appear more than her
full age. There are complexions which set off each other to great
advantage, and there are those which antagonize, the one killing or
damaging its neighbor unmercifully. This was unhappily the case here.
Mrs. Charmond fell into a meditation, and replied abstractedly to a
cursory remark of her companion’s. However, she parted from her young
friend in the kindliest tones, promising to send and let her know as
soon as her mind was made up on the arrangement she had suggested.

When Grace had ascended nearly to the top of the adjoining slope she
looked back, and saw that Mrs. Charmond still stood at the door,
meditatively regarding her.

Often during the previous night, after his call on the Melburys,
Winterborne’s thoughts ran upon Grace’s announced visit to Hintock
House. Why could he not have proposed to walk with her part of the way?
Something told him that she might not, on such an occasion, care for
his company.

He was still more of that opinion when, standing in his garden next
day, he saw her go past on the journey with such a pretty pride in the
event. He wondered if her father’s ambition, which had purchased for
her the means of intellectual light and culture far beyond those of any
other native of the village, would conduce to the flight of her future
interests above and away from the local life which was once to her the
movement of the world.

Nevertheless, he had her father’s permission to win her if he could;
and to this end it became desirable to bring matters soon to a crisis,
if he ever hoped to do so. If she should think herself too good for
him, he could let her go and make the best of his loss; but until he
had really tested her he could not say that she despised his suit. The
question was how to quicken events towards an issue.

He thought and thought, and at last decided that as good a way as any
would be to give a Christmas party, and ask Grace and her parents to
come as chief guests.

These ruminations were occupying him when there became audible a slight
knocking at his front door. He descended the path and looked out, and
beheld Marty South, dressed for out-door work.

“Why didn’t you come, Mr. Winterborne?” she said. “I’ve been waiting
there hours and hours, and at last I thought I must try to find you.”

“Bless my soul, I’d quite forgot,” said Giles.

What he had forgotten was that there was a thousand young fir-trees to
be planted in a neighboring spot which had been cleared by the
wood-cutters, and that he had arranged to plant them with his own
hands. He had a marvellous power of making trees grow. Although he
would seem to shovel in the earth quite carelessly, there was a sort of
sympathy between himself and the fir, oak, or beech that he was
operating on, so that the roots took hold of the soil in a few days.
When, on the other hand, any of the journeymen planted, although they
seemed to go through an identically similar process, one quarter of the
trees would die away during the ensuing August.

Hence Winterborne found delight in the work even when, as at present,
he contracted to do it on portions of the woodland in which he had no
personal interest. Marty, who turned her hand to anything, was usually
the one who performed the part of keeping the trees in a perpendicular
position while he threw in the mould.

He accompanied her towards the spot, being stimulated yet further to
proceed with the work by the knowledge that the ground was close to the
way-side along which Grace must pass on her return from Hintock House.

“You’ve a cold in the head, Marty,” he said, as they walked. “That
comes of cutting off your hair.”

“I suppose it do. Yes; I’ve three headaches going on in my head at the
same time.”

“Three headaches!”

“Yes, a rheumatic headache in my poll, a sick headache over my eyes,
and a misery headache in the middle of my brain. However, I came out,
for I thought you might be waiting and grumbling like anything if I was
not there.”

The holes were already dug, and they set to work. Winterborne’s fingers
were endowed with a gentle conjuror’s touch in spreading the roots of
each little tree, resulting in a sort of caress, under which the
delicate fibres all laid themselves out in their proper directions for
growth. He put most of these roots towards the south-west; for, he
said, in forty years’ time, when some great gale is blowing from that
quarter, the trees will require the strongest holdfast on that side to
stand against it and not fall.

“How they sigh directly we put ’em upright, though while they are lying
down they don’t sigh at all,” said Marty.

“Do they?” said Giles. “I’ve never noticed it.”

She erected one of the young pines into its hole, and held up her
finger; the soft musical breathing instantly set in, which was not to
cease night or day till the grown tree should be felled—probably long
after the two planters should be felled themselves.

“It seems to me,” the girl continued, “as if they sigh because they are
very sorry to begin life in earnest—just as we be.”

“Just as we be?” He looked critically at her. “You ought not to feel
like that, Marty.”

Her only reply was turning to take up the next tree; and they planted
on through a great part of the day, almost without another word.
Winterborne’s mind ran on his contemplated evening-party, his
abstraction being such that he hardly was conscious of Marty’s presence
beside him. From the nature of their employment, in which he handled
the spade and she merely held the tree, it followed that he got good
exercise and she got none. But she was an heroic girl, and though her
out-stretched hand was chill as a stone, and her cheeks blue, and her
cold worse than ever, she would not complain while he was disposed to
continue work. But when he paused she said, “Mr. Winterborne, can I run
down the lane and back to warm my feet?”

“Why, yes, of course,” he said, awakening anew to her existence.
“Though I was just thinking what a mild day it is for the season. Now I
warrant that cold of yours is twice as bad as it was. You had no
business to chop that hair off, Marty; it serves you almost right. Look
here, cut off home at once.”

“A run down the lane will be quite enough.”

“No, it won’t. You ought not to have come out to-day at all.”

“But I should like to finish the—”

“Marty, I tell you to go home,” said he, peremptorily. “I can manage to
keep the rest of them upright with a stick or something.”

She went away without saying any more. When she had gone down the
orchard a little distance she looked back. Giles suddenly went after
her.

“Marty, it was for your good that I was rough, you know. But warm
yourself in your own way, I don’t care.”

When she had run off he fancied he discerned a woman’s dress through
the holly-bushes which divided the coppice from the road. It was Grace
at last, on her way back from the interview with Mrs. Charmond. He
threw down the tree he was planting, and was about to break through the
belt of holly when he suddenly became aware of the presence of another
man, who was looking over the hedge on the opposite side of the way
upon the figure of the unconscious Grace. He appeared as a handsome and
gentlemanly personage of six or eight and twenty, and was quizzing her
through an eye-glass. Seeing that Winterborne was noticing him, he let
his glass drop with a click upon the rail which protected the hedge,
and walked away in the opposite direction. Giles knew in a moment that
this must be Mr. Fitzpiers. When he was gone, Winterborne pushed
through the hollies, and emerged close beside the interesting object of
their contemplation.




CHAPTER IX.


“I heard the bushes move long before I saw you,” she began. “I said
first, ‘it is some terrible beast;’ next, ‘it is a poacher;’ next, ‘it
is a friend!’”

He regarded her with a slight smile, weighing, not her speech, but the
question whether he should tell her that she had been watched. He
decided in the negative.

“You have been to the house?” he said. “But I need not ask.” The fact
was that there shone upon Miss Melbury’s face a species of exaltation,
which saw no environing details nor his own occupation; nothing more
than his bare presence.

“Why need you not ask?”

“Your face is like the face of Moses when he came down from the Mount.”

She reddened a little and said, “How can you be so profane, Giles
Winterborne?”

“How can you think so much of that class of people? Well, I beg pardon;
I didn’t mean to speak so freely. How do you like her house and her?”

“Exceedingly. I had not been inside the walls since I was a child, when
it used to be let to strangers, before Mrs. Charmond’s late husband
bought the property. She is SO nice!” And Grace fell into such an
abstracted gaze at the imaginary image of Mrs. Charmond and her
niceness that it almost conjured up a vision of that lady in mid-air
before them.

“She has only been here a month or two, it seems, and cannot stay much
longer, because she finds it so lonely and damp in winter. She is going
abroad. Only think, she would like me to go with her.”

Giles’s features stiffened a little at the news. “Indeed; what for? But
I won’t keep you standing here. Hoi, Robert!” he cried to a swaying
collection of clothes in the distance, which was the figure of Creedle
his man. “Go on filling in there till I come back.”

“I’m a-coming, sir; I’m a-coming.”

“Well, the reason is this,” continued she, as they went on
together—“Mrs. Charmond has a delightful side to her character—a desire
to record her impressions of travel, like Alexandre Dumas, and Méry,
and Sterne, and others. But she cannot find energy enough to do it
herself.” And Grace proceeded to explain Mrs. Charmond’s proposal at
large. “My notion is that Méry’s style will suit her best, because he
writes in that soft, emotional, luxurious way she has,” Grace said,
musingly.

“Indeed!” said Winterborne, with mock awe. “Suppose you talk over my
head a little longer, Miss Grace Melbury?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it!” she said, repentantly, looking into his eyes.
“And as for myself, I hate French books. And I love dear old Hintock,
_and the people in it_, fifty times better than all the Continent. But
the scheme; I think it an enchanting notion, don’t you, Giles?”

“It is well enough in one sense, but it will take you away,” said he,
mollified.

“Only for a short time. We should return in May.”

“Well, Miss Melbury, it is a question for your father.”

Winterborne walked with her nearly to her house. He had awaited her
coming, mainly with the view of mentioning to her his proposal to have
a Christmas party; but homely Christmas gatherings in the venerable and
jovial Hintock style seemed so primitive and uncouth beside the lofty
matters of her converse and thought that he refrained.

As soon as she was gone he turned back towards the scene of his
planting, and could not help saying to himself as he walked, that this
engagement of his was a very unpromising business. Her outing to-day
had not improved it. A woman who could go to Hintock House and be
friendly with its mistress, enter into the views of its mistress, talk
like her, and dress not much unlike her, why, she would hardly be
contented with him, a yeoman, now immersed in tree-planting, even
though he planted them well. “And yet she’s a true-hearted girl,” he
said, thinking of her words about Hintock. “I must bring matters to a
point, and there’s an end of it.”

When he reached the plantation he found that Marty had come back, and
dismissing Creedle, he went on planting silently with the girl as
before.

“Suppose, Marty,” he said, after a while, looking at her extended arm,
upon which old scratches from briers showed themselves purple in the
cold wind—“suppose you know a person, and want to bring that person to
a good understanding with you, do you think a Christmas party of some
sort is a warming-up thing, and likely to be useful in hastening on the
matter?”

“Is there to be dancing?”

“There might be, certainly.”

“Will He dance with She?”

“Well, yes.”

“Then it might bring things to a head, one way or the other; I won’t be
the one to say which.”

“It shall be done,” said Winterborne, not to her, though he spoke the
words quite loudly. And as the day was nearly ended, he added, “Here,
Marty, I’ll send up a man to plant the rest to-morrow. I’ve other
things to think of just now.”

She did not inquire what other things, for she had seen him walking
with Grace Melbury. She looked towards the western sky, which was now
aglow like some vast foundery wherein new worlds were being cast.
Across it the bare bough of a tree stretched horizontally, revealing
every twig against the red, and showing in dark profile every beck and
movement of three pheasants that were settling themselves down on it in
a row to roost.

“It will be fine to-morrow,” said Marty, observing them with the
vermilion light of the sun in the pupils of her eyes, “for they are
a-croupied down nearly at the end of the bough. If it were going to be
stormy they’d squeeze close to the trunk. The weather is almost all
they have to think of, isn’t it, Mr. Winterborne? and so they must be
lighter-hearted than we.”

“I dare say they are,” said Winterborne.

Before taking a single step in the preparations, Winterborne, with no
great hopes, went across that evening to the timber-merchant’s to
ascertain if Grace and her parents would honor him with their presence.
Having first to set his nightly gins in the garden, to catch the
rabbits that ate his winter-greens, his call was delayed till just
after the rising of the moon, whose rays reached the Hintock houses but
fitfully as yet, on account of the trees. Melbury was crossing his yard
on his way to call on some one at the larger village, but he readily
turned and walked up and down the path with the young man.

Giles, in his self-deprecatory sense of living on a much smaller scale
than the Melburys did, would not for the world imply that his
invitation was to a gathering of any importance. So he put it in the
mild form of “Can you come in for an hour, when you have done business,
the day after to-morrow; and Mrs. and Miss Melbury, if they have
nothing more pressing to do?”

Melbury would give no answer at once. “No, I can’t tell you to-day,” he
said. “I must talk it over with the women. As far as I am concerned, my
dear Giles, you know I’ll come with pleasure. But how do I know what
Grace’s notions may be? You see, she has been away among cultivated
folks a good while; and now this acquaintance with Mrs. Charmond—Well,
I’ll ask her. I can say no more.”

When Winterborne was gone the timber-merchant went on his way. He knew
very well that Grace, whatever her own feelings, would either go or not
go, according as he suggested; and his instinct was, for the moment, to
suggest the negative. His errand took him past the church, and the way
to his destination was either across the church-yard or along-side it,
the distances being the same. For some reason or other he chose the
former way.

The moon was faintly lighting up the gravestones, and the path, and the
front of the building. Suddenly Mr. Melbury paused, turned ill upon the
grass, and approached a particular headstone, where he read, “In memory
of John Winterborne,” with the subjoined date and age. It was the grave
of Giles’s father.

The timber-merchant laid his hand upon the stone, and was humanized.
“Jack, my wronged friend!” he said. “I’ll be faithful to my plan of
making amends to ’ee.”

When he reached home that evening, he said to Grace and Mrs. Melbury,
who were working at a little table by the fire,

“Giles wants us to go down and spend an hour with him the day after
to-morrow; and I’m thinking, that as ’tis Giles who asks us, we’ll go.”

They assented without demur, and accordingly the timber-merchant sent
Giles the next morning an answer in the affirmative.

Winterborne, in his modesty, or indifference, had mentioned no
particular hour in his invitation; and accordingly Mr. Melbury and his
family, expecting no other guests, chose their own time, which chanced
to be rather early in the afternoon, by reason of the somewhat quicker
despatch than usual of the timber-merchant’s business that day. To show
their sense of the unimportance of the occasion, they walked quite
slowly to the house, as if they were merely out for a ramble, and going
to nothing special at all; or at most intending to pay a casual call
and take a cup of tea.

At this hour stir and bustle pervaded the interior of Winterborne’s
domicile from cellar to apple-loft. He had planned an elaborate high
tea for six o’clock or thereabouts, and a good roaring supper to come
on about eleven. Being a bachelor of rather retiring habits, the whole
of the preparations devolved upon himself and his trusty man and
familiar, Robert Creedle, who did everything that required doing, from
making Giles’s bed to catching moles in his field. He was a survival
from the days when Giles’s father held the homestead, and Giles was a
playing boy.

These two, with a certain dilatoriousness which appertained to both,
were now in the heat of preparation in the bake-house, expecting nobody
before six o’clock. Winterborne was standing before the brick oven in
his shirt-sleeves, tossing in thorn sprays, and stirring about the
blazing mass with a long-handled, three-pronged Beelzebub kind of fork,
the heat shining out upon his streaming face and making his eyes like
furnaces, the thorns crackling and sputtering; while Creedle, having
ranged the pastry dishes in a row on the table till the oven should be
ready, was pressing out the crust of a final apple-pie with a
rolling-pin. A great pot boiled on the fire, and through the open door
of the back kitchen a boy was seen seated on the fender, emptying the
snuffers and scouring the candlesticks, a row of the latter standing
upside down on the hob to melt out the grease.

Looking up from the rolling-pin, Creedle saw passing the window first
the timber-merchant, in his second-best suit, Mrs. Melbury in her best
silk, and Grace in the fashionable attire which, in part brought home
with her from the Continent, she had worn on her visit to Mrs.
Charmond’s. The eyes of the three had been attracted to the proceedings
within by the fierce illumination which the oven threw out upon the
operators and their utensils.

“Lord, Lord! if they baint come a’ready!” said Creedle.

“No—hey?” said Giles, looking round aghast; while the boy in the
background waved a reeking candlestick in his delight. As there was no
help for it, Winterborne went to meet them in the door-way.

“My dear Giles, I see we have made a mistake in the time,” said the
timber-merchant’s wife, her face lengthening with concern.

“Oh, it is not much difference. I hope you’ll come in.”

“But this means a regular randyvoo!” said Mr. Melbury, accusingly,
glancing round and pointing towards the bake-house with his stick.

“Well, yes,” said Giles.

“And—not Great Hintock band, and dancing, surely?”

“I told three of ’em they might drop in if they’d nothing else to do,”
Giles mildly admitted.

“Now, why the name didn’t ye tell us ’twas going to be a serious kind
of thing before? How should I know what folk mean if they don’t say?
Now, shall we come in, or shall we go home and come back along in a
couple of hours?”

“I hope you’ll stay, if you’ll be so good as not to mind, now you are
here. I shall have it all right and tidy in a very little time. I ought
not to have been so backward.” Giles spoke quite anxiously for one of
his undemonstrative temperament; for he feared that if the Melburys
once were back in their own house they would not be disposed to turn
out again.

“’Tis we ought not to have been so forward; that’s what ’tis,” said Mr.
Melbury, testily. “Don’t keep us here in the sitting-room; lead on to
the bakehouse, man. Now we are here we’ll help ye get ready for the
rest. Here, mis’ess, take off your things, and help him out in his
baking, or he won’t get done to-night. I’ll finish heating the oven,
and set you free to go and skiver up them ducks.” His eye had passed
with pitiless directness of criticism into yet remote recesses of
Winterborne’s awkwardly built premises, where the aforesaid birds were
hanging.

“And I’ll help finish the tarts,” said Grace, cheerfully.

“I don’t know about that,” said her father. “’Tisn’t quite so much in
your line as it is in your mother-law’s and mine.”

“Of course I couldn’t let you, Grace!” said Giles, with some distress.

“I’ll do it, of course,” said Mrs. Melbury, taking off her silk train,
hanging it up to a nail, carefully rolling back her sleeves, pinning
them to her shoulders, and stripping Giles of his apron for her own
use.

So Grace pottered idly about, while her father and his wife helped on
the preparations. A kindly pity of his household management, which
Winterborne saw in her eyes whenever he caught them, depressed him much
more than her contempt would have done.

Creedle met Giles at the pump after a while, when each of the others
was absorbed in the difficulties of a _cuisine_ based on utensils,
cupboards, and provisions that were strange to them. He groaned to the
young man in a whisper, “This is a bruckle het, maister, I’m much
afeared! Who’d ha’ thought they’d ha’ come so soon?”

The bitter placidity of Winterborne’s look adumbrated the misgivings he
did not care to express. “Have you got the celery ready?” he asked,
quickly.

“Now that’s a thing I never could mind; no, not if you’d paid me in
silver and gold. And I don’t care who the man is, I says that a stick
of celery that isn’t scrubbed with the scrubbing-brush is not clean.”

“_Very_ well, very well! I’ll attend to it. You go and get ’em
comfortable in-doors.”

He hastened to the garden, and soon returned, tossing the stalks to
Creedle, who was still in a tragic mood. “If ye’d ha’ married, d’ye
see, maister,” he said, “this caddle couldn’t have happened to us.”

Everything being at last under way, the oven set, and all done that
could insure the supper turning up ready at some time or other, Giles
and his friends entered the parlor, where the Melburys again dropped
into position as guests, though the room was not nearly so warm and
cheerful as the blazing bakehouse. Others now arrived, among them
Farmer Bawtree and the hollow-turner, and tea went off very well.

Grace’s disposition to make the best of everything, and to wink at
deficiencies in Winterborne’s menage, was so uniform and persistent
that he suspected her of seeing even more deficiencies than he was
aware of. That suppressed sympathy which had showed in her face ever
since her arrival told him as much too plainly.

“This muddling style of house-keeping is what you’ve not lately been
used to, I suppose?” he said, when they were a little apart.

“No; but I like it; it reminds me so pleasantly that everything here in
dear old Hintock is just as it used to be. The oil is—not quite nice;
but everything else is.”

“The oil?”

“On the chairs, I mean; because it gets on one’s dress. Still, mine is
not a new one.”

Giles found that Creedle, in his zeal to make things look bright, had
smeared the chairs with some greasy kind of furniture-polish, and
refrained from rubbing it dry in order not to diminish the mirror-like
effect that the mixture produced as laid on. Giles apologized and
called Creedle; but he felt that the Fates were against him.




CHAPTER X.


Supper-time came, and with it the hot-baked meats from the oven, laid
on a snowy cloth fresh from the press, and reticulated with folds, as
in Flemish “Last Suppers.” Creedle and the boy fetched and carried with
amazing alacrity, the latter, to mollify his superior and make things
pleasant, expressing his admiration of Creedle’s cleverness when they
were alone.

“I s’pose the time when you learned all these knowing things, Mr.
Creedle, was when you was in the militia?”

“Well, yes. I seed the world at that time somewhat, certainly, and many
ways of strange dashing life. Not but that Giles has worked hard in
helping me to bring things to such perfection to-day. ‘Giles,’ says I,
though he’s maister. Not that I should call’n maister by rights, for
his father growed up side by side with me, as if one mother had twinned
us and been our nourishing.”

“I s’pose your memory can reach a long way back into history, Mr.
Creedle?”

“Oh yes. Ancient days, when there was battles and famines and
hang-fairs and other pomps, seem to me as yesterday. Ah, many’s the
patriarch I’ve seed come and go in this parish! There, he’s calling for
more plates. Lord, why can’t ’em turn their plates bottom upward for
pudding, as they used to do in former days?”

Meanwhile, in the adjoining room Giles was presiding in a
half-unconscious state. He could not get over the initial failures in
his scheme for advancing his suit, and hence he did not know that he
was eating mouthfuls of bread and nothing else, and continually
snuffing the two candles next him till he had reduced them to mere
glimmers drowned in their own grease. Creedle now appeared with a
specially prepared dish, which he served by elevating the little
three-legged pot that contained it, and tilting the contents into a
dish, exclaiming, simultaneously, “Draw back, gentlemen and ladies,
please!”

A splash followed. Grace gave a quick, involuntary nod and blink, and
put her handkerchief to her face.

“Good heavens! what did you do that for, Creedle?” said Giles, sternly,
and jumping up.

“’Tis how I do it when they baint here, maister,” mildly expostulated
Creedle, in an aside audible to all the company.

“Well, yes—but—” replied Giles. He went over to Grace, and hoped none
of it had gone into her eye.

“Oh no,” she said. “Only a sprinkle on my face. It was nothing.”

“Kiss it and make it well,” gallantly observed Mr. Bawtree.

Miss Melbury blushed.

The timber-merchant said, quickly, “Oh, it is nothing! She must bear
these little mishaps.” But there could be discerned in his face
something which said “I ought to have foreseen this.”

Giles himself, since the untoward beginning of the feast, had not quite
liked to see Grace present. He wished he had not asked such people as
Bawtree and the hollow-turner. He had done it, in dearth of other
friends, that the room might not appear empty. In his mind’s eye,
before the event, they had been the mere background or padding of the
scene, but somehow in reality they were the most prominent personages
there.

After supper they played cards, Bawtree and the hollow-turner
monopolizing the new packs for an interminable game, in which a lump of
chalk was incessantly used—a game those two always played wherever they
were, taking a solitary candle and going to a private table in a corner
with the mien of persons bent on weighty matters. The rest of the
company on this account were obliged to put up with old packs for their
round game, that had been lying by in a drawer ever since the time that
Giles’s grandmother was alive. Each card had a great stain in the
middle of its back, produced by the touch of generations of damp and
excited thumbs now fleshless in the grave; and the kings and queens
wore a decayed expression of feature, as if they were rather an
impecunious dethroned race of monarchs hiding in obscure slums than
real regal characters. Every now and then the comparatively few remarks
of the players at the round game were harshly intruded on by the
measured jingle of Farmer Bawtree and the hollow-turner from the back
of the room:

“And I′ will hold′ a wa′-ger with you′
That all′ these marks′ are thirt′-y two!”


accompanied by rapping strokes with the chalk on the table; then an
exclamation, an argument, a dealing of the cards; then the commencement
of the rhymes anew.

The timber-merchant showed his feelings by talking with a satisfied
sense of weight in his words, and by praising the party in a
patronizing tone, when Winterborne expressed his fear that he and his
were not enjoying themselves.

“Oh yes, yes; pretty much. What handsome glasses those are! I didn’t
know you had such glasses in the house. Now, Lucy” (to his wife), “you
ought to get some like them for ourselves.” And when they had abandoned
cards, and Winterborne was talking to Melbury by the fire, it was the
timber-merchant who stood with his back to the mantle in a proprietary
attitude, from which post of vantage he critically regarded Giles’s
person, rather as a superficies than as a solid with ideas and feelings
inside it, saying, “What a splendid coat that one is you have on,
Giles! I can’t get such coats. You dress better than I.”

After supper there was a dance, the bandsmen from Great Hintock having
arrived some time before. Grace had been away from home so long that
she had forgotten the old figures, and hence did not join in the
movement. Then Giles felt that all was over. As for her, she was
thinking, as she watched the gyrations, of a very different measure
that she had been accustomed to tread with a bevy of sylph-like
creatures in muslin, in the music-room of a large house, most of whom
were now moving in scenes widely removed from this, both as regarded
place and character.

A woman she did not know came and offered to tell her fortune with the
abandoned cards. Grace assented to the proposal, and the woman told her
tale unskilfully, for want of practice, as she declared.

Mr. Melbury was standing by, and exclaimed, contemptuously, “Tell her
fortune, indeed! Her fortune has been told by men of science—what do
you call ’em? Phrenologists. You can’t teach her anything new. She’s
been too far among the wise ones to be astonished at anything she can
hear among us folks in Hintock.”

At last the time came for breaking up, Melbury and his family being the
earliest to leave, the two card-players still pursuing their game
doggedly in the corner, where they had completely covered Giles’s
mahogany table with chalk scratches. The three walked home, the
distance being short and the night clear.

“Well, Giles is a very good fellow,” said Mr. Melbury, as they struck
down the lane under boughs which formed a black filigree in which the
stars seemed set.

“Certainly he is,” said Grace, quickly, and in such a tone as to show
that he stood no lower, if no higher, in her regard than he had stood
before.

When they were opposite an opening through which, by day, the doctor’s
house could be seen, they observed a light in one of his rooms,
although it was now about two o’clock.

“The doctor is not abed yet,” said Mrs. Melbury.

“Hard study, no doubt,” said her husband.

“One would think that, as he seems to have nothing to do about here by
day, he could at least afford to go to bed early at night. ’Tis
astonishing how little we see of him.”

Melbury’s mind seemed to turn with much relief to the contemplation of
Mr. Fitzpiers after the scenes of the evening. “It is natural enough,”
he replied. “What can a man of that sort find to interest him in
Hintock? I don’t expect he’ll stay here long.”

His mind reverted to Giles’s party, and when they were nearly home he
spoke again, his daughter being a few steps in advance: “It is hardly
the line of life for a girl like Grace, after what she’s been
accustomed to. I didn’t foresee that in sending her to boarding-school
and letting her travel, and what not, to make her a good bargain for
Giles, I should be really spoiling her for him. Ah, ’tis a thousand
pities! But he ought to have her—he ought!”

At this moment the two exclusive, chalk-mark men, having at last really
finished their play, could be heard coming along in the rear,
vociferously singing a song to march-time, and keeping vigorous step to
the same in far-reaching strides—

“She may go, oh!
She may go, oh!
She may go to the d—— for me!”


The timber-merchant turned indignantly to Mrs. Melbury. “That’s the
sort of society we’ve been asked to meet,” he said. “For us old folk it
didn’t matter; but for Grace—Giles should have known better!”

Meanwhile, in the empty house from which the guests had just cleared
out, the subject of their discourse was walking from room to room
surveying the general displacement of furniture with no ecstatic
feeling; rather the reverse, indeed. At last he entered the bakehouse,
and found there Robert Creedle sitting over the embers, also lost in
contemplation. Winterborne sat down beside him.

“Well, Robert, you must be tired. You’d better get on to bed.”

“Ay, ay, Giles—what do I call ye? Maister, I would say. But ’tis well
to think the day _is_ done, when ’tis done.”

Winterborne had abstractedly taken the poker, and with a wrinkled
forehead was ploughing abroad the wood-embers on the broad hearth, till
it was like a vast scorching Sahara, with red-hot bowlders lying about
everywhere. “Do you think it went off well, Creedle?” he asked.

“The victuals did; that I know. And the drink did; that I steadfastly
believe, from the holler sound of the barrels. Good, honest drink
’twere, the headiest mead I ever brewed; and the best wine that berries
could rise to; and the briskest Horner-and-Cleeves cider ever wrung
down, leaving out the spice and sperrits I put into it, while that
egg-flip would ha’ passed through muslin, so little curdled ’twere.
’Twas good enough to make any king’s heart merry—ay, to make his whole
carcass smile. Still, I don’t deny I’m afeared some things didn’t go
well with He and his.” Creedle nodded in a direction which signified
where the Melburys lived.

“I’m afraid, too, that it was a failure there!”

“If so, ’twere doomed to be so. Not but what that snail might as well
have come upon anybody else’s plate as hers.”

“What snail?”

“Well, maister, there was a little one upon the edge of her plate when
I brought it out; and so it must have been in her few leaves of
wintergreen.”

“How the deuce did a snail get there?”

“That I don’t know no more than the dead; but there my gentleman was.”

“But, Robert, of all places, that was where he shouldn’t have been!”

“Well, ’twas his native home, come to that; and where else could we
expect him to be? I don’t care who the man is, snails and caterpillars
always will lurk in close to the stump of cabbages in that tantalizing
way.”

“He wasn’t alive, I suppose?” said Giles, with a shudder on Grace’s
account.

“Oh no. He was well boiled. I warrant him well boiled. God forbid that
a _live_ snail should be seed on any plate of victuals that’s served by
Robert Creedle....But Lord, there; I don’t mind ’em myself—them small
ones, for they were born on cabbage, and they’ve lived on cabbage, so
they must be made of cabbage. But she, the close-mouthed little lady,
she didn’t say a word about it; though ’twould have made good small
conversation as to the nater of such creatures; especially as wit ran
short among us sometimes.”

“Oh yes—’tis all over!” murmured Giles to himself, shaking his head
over the glooming plain of embers, and lining his forehead more than
ever. “Do you know, Robert,” he said, “that she’s been accustomed to
servants and everything superfine these many years? How, then, could
she stand our ways?”

“Well, all I can say is, then, that she ought to hob-and-nob elsewhere.
They shouldn’t have schooled her so monstrous high, or else bachelor
men shouldn’t give randys, or if they do give ’em, only to their own
race.”

“Perhaps that’s true,” said Winterborne, rising and yawning a sigh.




CHAPTER XI.


“’Tis a pity—a thousand pities!” her father kept saying next morning at
breakfast, Grace being still in her bedroom.

But how could he, with any self-respect, obstruct Winterborne’s suit at
this stage, and nullify a scheme he had labored to promote—was, indeed,
mechanically promoting at this moment? A crisis was approaching, mainly
as a result of his contrivances, and it would have to be met.

But here was the fact, which could not be disguised: since seeing what
an immense change her last twelve months of absence had produced in his
daughter, after the heavy sum per annum that he had been spending for
several years upon her education, he was reluctant to let her marry
Giles Winterborne, indefinitely occupied as woodsman, cider-merchant,
apple-farmer, and what not, even were she willing to marry him herself.

“She will be his wife if you don’t upset her notion that she’s bound to
accept him as an understood thing,” said Mrs. Melbury. “Bless ye,
she’ll soon shake down here in Hintock, and be content with Giles’s way
of living, which he’ll improve with what money she’ll have from you.
’Tis the strangeness after her genteel life that makes her feel
uncomfortable at first. Why, when _I_ saw Hintock the first time I
thought I never could like it. But things gradually get familiar, and
stone floors seem not so very cold and hard, and the hooting of the
owls not so very dreadful, and loneliness not so very lonely, after a
while.”

“Yes, I believe ye. That’s just it. I _know_ Grace will gradually sink
down to our level again, and catch our manners and way of speaking, and
feel a drowsy content in being Giles’s wife. But I can’t bear the
thought of dragging down to that old level as promising a piece of
maidenhood as ever lived—fit to ornament a palace wi’—that I’ve taken
so much trouble to lift up. Fancy her white hands getting redder every
day, and her tongue losing its pretty up-country curl in talking, and
her bounding walk becoming the regular Hintock shail and wamble!”

“She may shail, but she’ll never wamble,” replied his wife, decisively.

When Grace came down-stairs he complained of her lying in bed so late;
not so much moved by a particular objection to that form of indulgence
as discomposed by these other reflections.

The corners of her pretty mouth dropped a little down. “You used to
complain with justice when I was a girl,” she said. “But I am a woman
now, and can judge for myself....But it is not that; it is something
else!” Instead of sitting down she went outside the door.

He was sorry. The petulance that relatives show towards each other is
in truth directed against that intangible Causality which has shaped
the situation no less for the offenders than the offended, but is too
elusive to be discerned and cornered by poor humanity in irritated
mood. Melbury followed her. She had rambled on to the paddock, where
the white frost lay, and where starlings in flocks of twenties and
thirties were walking about, watched by a comfortable family of
sparrows perched in a line along the string-course of the chimney,
preening themselves in the rays of the sun.

“Come in to breakfast, my girl,” he said. “And as to Giles, use your
own mind. Whatever pleases you will please me.”

“I am promised to him, father; and I cannot help thinking that in honor
I ought to marry him, whenever I do marry.”

He had a strong suspicion that somewhere in the bottom of her heart
there pulsed an old simple indigenous feeling favorable to Giles,
though it had become overlaid with implanted tastes. But he would not
distinctly express his views on the promise. “Very well,” he said. “But
I hope I sha’n’t lose you yet. Come in to breakfast. What did you think
of the inside of Hintock House the other day?”

“I liked it much.”

“Different from friend Winterborne’s?”

She said nothing; but he who knew her was aware that she meant by her
silence to reproach him with drawing cruel comparisons.

“Mrs. Charmond has asked you to come again—when, did you say?”

“She thought Tuesday, but would send the day before to let me know if
it suited her.” And with this subject upon their lips they entered to
breakfast.

Tuesday came, but no message from Mrs. Charmond. Nor was there any on
Wednesday. In brief, a fortnight slipped by without a sign, and it
looked suspiciously as if Mrs. Charmond were not going further in the
direction of “taking up” Grace at present.

Her father reasoned thereon. Immediately after his daughter’s two
indubitable successes with Mrs. Charmond—the interview in the wood and
a visit to the House—she had attended Winterborne’s party. No doubt the
out-and-out joviality of that gathering had made it a topic in the
neighborhood, and that every one present as guests had been widely
spoken of—Grace, with her exceptional qualities, above all. What, then,
so natural as that Mrs. Charmond should have heard the village news,
and become quite disappointed in her expectations of Grace at finding
she kept such company?

Full of this _post hoc_ argument, Mr. Melbury overlooked the infinite
throng of other possible reasons and unreasons for a woman changing her
mind. For instance, while knowing that his Grace was attractive, he
quite forgot that Mrs. Charmond had also great pretensions to beauty.
In his simple estimate, an attractive woman attracted all around.

So it was settled in his mind that her sudden mingling with the
villagers at the unlucky Winterborne’s was the cause of her most
grievous loss, as he deemed it, in the direction of Hintock House.

“’Tis a thousand pities!” he would repeat to himself. “I am ruining her
for conscience’ sake!”

It was one morning later on, while these things were agitating his
mind, that, curiously enough, something darkened the window just as
they finished breakfast. Looking up, they saw Giles in person mounted
on horseback, and straining his neck forward, as he had been doing for
some time, to catch their attention through the window. Grace had been
the first to see him, and involuntarily exclaimed, “There he is—and a
new horse!”

On their faces as they regarded Giles were written their suspended
thoughts and compound feelings concerning him, could he have read them
through those old panes. But he saw nothing: his features just now
were, for a wonder, lit up with a red smile at some other idea. So they
rose from breakfast and went to the door, Grace with an anxious,
wistful manner, her father in a reverie, Mrs. Melbury placid and
inquiring. “We have come out to look at your horse,” she said.

It could be seen that he was pleased at their attention, and explained
that he had ridden a mile or two to try the animal’s paces. “I bought
her,” he added, with warmth so severely repressed as to seem
indifference, “because she has been used to carry a lady.”

Still Mr. Melbury did not brighten. Mrs. Melbury said, “And is she
quiet?”

Winterborne assured her that there was no doubt of it. “I took care of
that. She’s five-and-twenty, and very clever for her age.”

“Well, get off and come in,” said Melbury, brusquely; and Giles
dismounted accordingly.

This event was the concrete result of Winterborne’s thoughts during the
past week or two. The want of success with his evening party he had
accepted in as philosophic a mood as he was capable of; but there had
been enthusiasm enough left in him one day at Sherton Abbas market to
purchase this old mare, which had belonged to a neighboring parson with
several daughters, and was offered him to carry either a gentleman or a
lady, and to do odd jobs of carting and agriculture at a pinch. This
obliging quadruped seemed to furnish Giles with a means of reinstating
himself in Melbury’s good opinion as a man of considerateness by
throwing out future possibilities to Grace.

The latter looked at him with intensified interest this morning, in the
mood which is altogether peculiar to woman’s nature, and which, when
reduced into plain words, seems as impossible as the penetrability of
matter—that of entertaining a tender pity for the object of her own
unnecessary coldness. The imperturbable poise which marked Winterborne
in general was enlivened now by a freshness and animation that set a
brightness in his eye and on his cheek. Mrs. Melbury asked him to have
some breakfast, and he pleasurably replied that he would join them,
with his usual lack of tactical observation, not perceiving that they
had all finished the meal, that the hour was inconveniently late, and
that the note piped by the kettle denoted it to be nearly empty; so
that fresh water had to be brought in, trouble taken to make it boil,
and a general renovation of the table carried out. Neither did he know,
so full was he of his tender ulterior object in buying that horse, how
many cups of tea he was gulping down one after another, nor how the
morning was slipping, nor how he was keeping the family from dispersing
about their duties.

Then he told throughout the humorous story of the horse’s purchase,
looking particularly grim at some fixed object in the room, a way he
always looked when he narrated anything that amused him. While he was
still thinking of the scene he had described, Grace rose and said, “I
have to go and help my mother now, Mr. Winterborne.”

“H’m!” he ejaculated, turning his eyes suddenly upon her.

She repeated her words with a slight blush of awkwardness; whereupon
Giles, becoming suddenly conscious, too conscious, jumped up, saying,
“To be sure, to be sure!” wished them quickly good-morning, and bolted
out of the house.

Nevertheless he had, upon the whole, strengthened his position, with
her at least. Time, too, was on his side, for (as her father saw with
some regret) already the homeliness of Hintock life was fast becoming
effaced from her observation as a singularity; just as the first
strangeness of a face from which we have for years been separated
insensibly passes off with renewed intercourse, and tones itself down
into simple identity with the lineaments of the past.

Thus Mr. Melbury went out of the house still unreconciled to the
sacrifice of the gem he had been at such pains in mounting. He fain
could hope, in the secret nether chamber of his mind, that something
would happen, before the balance of her feeling had quite turned in
Winterborne’s favor, to relieve his conscience and preserve her on her
elevated plane.

He could not forget that Mrs. Charmond had apparently abandoned all
interest in his daughter as suddenly as she had conceived it, and was
as firmly convinced as ever that the comradeship which Grace had shown
with Giles and his crew by attending his party had been the cause.

Matters lingered on thus. And then, as a hoop by gentle knocks on this
side and on that is made to travel in specific directions, the little
touches of circumstance in the life of this young girl shaped the
curves of her career.




CHAPTER XII.


It was a day of rather bright weather for the season. Miss Melbury went
out for a morning walk, and her ever-regardful father, having an hour’s
leisure, offered to walk with her. The breeze was fresh and quite
steady, filtering itself through the denuded mass of twigs without
swaying them, but making the point of each ivy-leaf on the trunks
scratch its underlying neighbor restlessly. Grace’s lips sucked in this
native air of hers like milk. They soon reached a place where the wood
ran down into a corner, and went outside it towards comparatively open
ground. Having looked round about, they were intending to re-enter the
copse when a fox quietly emerged with a dragging brush, trotted past
them tamely as a domestic cat, and disappeared amid some dead fern.
They walked on, her father merely observing, after watching the animal,
“They are hunting somewhere near.”

Farther up they saw in the mid-distance the hounds running hither and
thither, as if there were little or no scent that day. Soon divers
members of the hunt appeared on the scene, and it was evident from
their movements that the chase had been stultified by general
puzzle-headedness as to the whereabouts of the intended victim. In a
minute a farmer rode up to the two pedestrians, panting with acteonic
excitement, and Grace being a few steps in advance, he addressed her,
asking if she had seen the fox.

“Yes,” said she. “We saw him some time ago—just out there.”

“Did you cry Halloo?”

“We said nothing.”

“Then why the d—— didn’t you, or get the old buffer to do it for you?”
said the man, as he cantered away.

She looked rather disconcerted at this reply, and observing her
father’s face, saw that it was quite red.

“He ought not to have spoken to ye like that!” said the old man, in the
tone of one whose heart was bruised, though it was not by the epithet
applied to himself. “And he wouldn’t if he had been a gentleman. ’Twas
not the language to use to a woman of any niceness. You, so well read
and cultivated—how could he expect ye to know what tom-boy field-folk
are in the habit of doing? If so be you had just come from trimming
swedes or mangolds—joking with the rough work-folk and all that—I could
have stood it. But hasn’t it cost me near a hundred a year to lift you
out of all that, so as to show an example to the neighborhood of what a
woman can be? Grace, shall I tell you the secret of it? ’Twas because I
was in your company. If a black-coated squire or pa’son had been
walking with you instead of me he wouldn’t have spoken so.”

“No, no, father; there’s nothing in you rough or ill-mannered!”

“I tell you it is that! I’ve noticed, and I’ve noticed it many times,
that a woman takes her color from the man she’s walking with. The woman
who looks an unquestionable lady when she’s with a polished-up fellow,
looks a mere tawdry imitation article when she’s hobbing and nobbing
with a homely blade. You sha’n’t be treated like that for long, or at
least your children sha’n’t. You shall have somebody to walk with you
who looks more of a dandy than I—please God you shall!”

“But, my dear father,” she said, much distressed, “I don’t mind at all.
I don’t wish for more honor than I already have!”

“A perplexing and ticklish possession is a daughter,” according to
Menander or some old Greek poet, and to nobody was one ever more so
than to Melbury, by reason of her very dearness to him. As for Grace,
she began to feel troubled; she did not perhaps wish there and then to
unambitiously devote her life to Giles Winterborne, but she was
conscious of more and more uneasiness at the possibility of being the
social hope of the family.

“You would like to have more honor, if it pleases me?” asked her
father, in continuation of the subject.

Despite her feeling she assented to this. His reasoning had not been
without its weight upon her.

“Grace,” he said, just before they had reached the house, “if it costs
me my life you shall marry well! To-day has shown me that whatever a
young woman’s niceness, she stands for nothing alone. You shall marry
well.”

He breathed heavily, and his breathing was caught up by the breeze,
which seemed to sigh a soft remonstrance.

She looked calmly at him. “And how about Mr. Winterborne?” she asked.
“I mention it, father, not as a matter of sentiment, but as a question
of keeping faith.”

The timber-merchant’s eyes fell for a moment. “I don’t know—I don’t
know,” he said. “’Tis a trying strait. Well, well; there’s no hurry.
We’ll wait and see how he gets on.”

That evening he called her into his room, a snug little apartment
behind the large parlor. It had at one time been part of the bakehouse,
with the ordinary oval brick oven in the wall; but Mr. Melbury, in
turning it into an office, had built into the cavity an iron safe,
which he used for holding his private papers. The door of the safe was
now open, and his keys were hanging from it.

“Sit down, Grace, and keep me company,” he said. “You may amuse
yourself by looking over these.” He threw out a heap of papers before
her.

“What are they?” she asked.

“Securities of various sorts.” He unfolded them one by one. “Papers
worth so much money each. Now here’s a lot of turnpike bonds for one
thing. Would you think that each of these pieces of paper is worth two
hundred pounds?”

“No, indeed, if you didn’t say so.”

“’Tis so, then. Now here are papers of another sort. They are for
different sums in the three-per-cents. Now these are Port Breedy Harbor
bonds. We have a great stake in that harbor, you know, because I send
off timber there. Open the rest at your pleasure. They’ll interest ye.”

“Yes, I will, some day,” said she, rising.

“Nonsense, open them now. You ought to learn a little of such matters.
A young lady of education should not be ignorant of money affairs
altogether. Suppose you should be left a widow some day, with your
husband’s title-deeds and investments thrown upon your hands—”

“Don’t say that, father—title-deeds; it sounds so vain!”

“It does not. Come to that, I have title-deeds myself. There, that
piece of parchment represents houses in Sherton Abbas.”

“Yes, but—” She hesitated, looked at the fire, and went on in a low
voice: “If what has been arranged about me should come to anything, my
sphere will be quite a middling one.”

“Your sphere ought not to be middling,” he exclaimed, not in passion,
but in earnest conviction. “You said you never felt more at home, more
in your element, anywhere than you did that afternoon with Mrs.
Charmond, when she showed you her house and all her knick-knacks, and
made you stay to tea so nicely in her drawing-room—surely you did!”

“Yes, I did say so,” admitted Grace.

“Was it true?”

“Yes, I felt so at the time. The feeling is less strong now, perhaps.”

“Ah! Now, though you don’t see it, your feeling at the time was the
right one, because your mind and body were just in full and fresh
cultivation, so that going there with her was like meeting like. Since
then you’ve been biding with us, and have fallen back a little, and so
you don’t feel your place so strongly. Now, do as I tell ye, and look
over these papers and see what you’ll be worth some day. For they’ll
all be yours, you know; who have I got to leave ’em to but you? Perhaps
when your education is backed up by what these papers represent, and
that backed up by another such a set and their owner, men such as that
fellow was this morning may think you a little more than a buffer’s
girl.”

So she did as commanded, and opened each of the folded representatives
of hard cash that her father put before her. To sow in her heart
cravings for social position was obviously his strong desire, though in
direct antagonism to a better feeling which had hitherto prevailed with
him, and had, indeed, only succumbed that morning during the ramble.

She wished that she was not his worldly hope; the responsibility of
such a position was too great. She had made it for herself mainly by
her appearance and attractive behavior to him since her return. “If I
had only come home in a shabby dress, and tried to speak roughly, this
might not have happened,” she thought. She deplored less the fact than
the sad possibilities that might lie hidden therein.

Her father then insisted upon her looking over his checkbook and
reading the counterfoils. This, also, she obediently did, and at last
came to two or three which had been drawn to defray some of the late
expenses of her clothes, board, and education.

“I, too, cost a good deal, like the horses and wagons and corn,” she
said, looking up sorrily.

“I didn’t want you to look at those; I merely meant to give you an idea
of my investment transactions. But if you do cost as much as they,
never mind. You’ll yield a better return.”

“Don’t think of me like that!” she begged. “A mere chattel.”

“A what? Oh, a dictionary word. Well, as that’s in your line I don’t
forbid it, even if it tells against me,” he said, good-humoredly. And
he looked her proudly up and down.

A few minutes later Grammer Oliver came to tell them that supper was
ready, and in giving the information she added, incidentally, “So we
shall soon lose the mistress of Hintock House for some time, I hear,
Maister Melbury. Yes, she’s going off to foreign parts to-morrow, for
the rest of the winter months; and be-chok’d if I don’t wish I could do
the same, for my wynd-pipe is furred like a flue.”

When the old woman had left the room, Melbury turned to his daughter
and said, “So, Grace, you’ve lost your new friend, and your chance of
keeping her company and writing her travels is quite gone from ye!”

Grace said nothing.

“Now,” he went on, emphatically, “’tis Winterborne’s affair has done
this. Oh yes, ’tis. So let me say one word. Promise me that you will
not meet him again without my knowledge.”

“I never do meet him, father, either without your knowledge or with
it.”

“So much the better. I don’t like the look of this at all. And I say it
not out of harshness to him, poor fellow, but out of tenderness to you.
For how could a woman, brought up delicately as you have been, bear the
roughness of a life with him?”

She sighed; it was a sigh of sympathy with Giles, complicated by a
sense of the intractability of circumstances.

At that same hour, and almost at that same minute, there was a
conversation about Winterborne in progress in the village street,
opposite Mr. Melbury’s gates, where Timothy Tangs the elder and Robert
Creedle had accidentally met.

The sawyer was asking Creedle if he had heard what was all over the
parish, the skin of his face being drawn two ways on the matter—towards
brightness in respect of it as news, and towards concern in respect of
it as circumstance.

“Why, that poor little lonesome thing, Marty South, is likely to lose
her father. He was almost well, but is much worse again. A man all skin
and grief he ever were, and if he leave Little Hintock for a better
land, won’t it make some difference to your Maister Winterborne,
neighbor Creedle?”

“Can I be a prophet in Israel?” said Creedle. “Won’t it! I was only
shaping of such a thing yesterday in my poor, long-seeing way, and all
the work of the house upon my one shoulders! You know what it means? It
is upon John South’s life that all Mr. Winterborne’s houses hang. If so
be South die, and so make his decease, thereupon the law is that the
houses fall without the least chance of absolution into HER hands at
the House. I told him so; but the words of the faithful be only as
wind!”




CHAPTER XIII.


The news was true. The life—the one fragile life—that had been used as
a measuring-tape of time by law, was in danger of being frayed away. It
was the last of a group of lives which had served this purpose, at the
end of whose breathings the small homestead occupied by South himself,
the larger one of Giles Winterborne, and half a dozen others that had
been in the possession of various Hintock village families for the
previous hundred years, and were now Winterborne’s, would fall in and
become part of the encompassing estate.

Yet a short two months earlier Marty’s father, aged fifty-five years,
though something of a fidgety, anxious being, would have been looked on
as a man whose existence was so far removed from hazardous as any in
the parish, and as bidding fair to be prolonged for another quarter of
a century.

Winterborne walked up and down his garden next day thinking of the
contingency. The sense that the paths he was pacing, the cabbage-plots,
the apple-trees, his dwelling, cider-cellar, wring-house, stables, and
weathercock, were all slipping away over his head and beneath his feet,
as if they were painted on a magic-lantern slide, was curious. In spite
of John South’s late indisposition he had not anticipated danger. To
inquire concerning his health had been to show less sympathy than to
remain silent, considering the material interest he possessed in the
woodman’s life, and he had, accordingly, made a point of avoiding
Marty’s house.

While he was here in the garden somebody came to fetch him. It was
Marty herself, and she showed her distress by her unconsciousness of a
cropped poll.

“Father is still so much troubled in his mind about that tree,” she
said. “You know the tree I mean, Mr. Winterborne? the tall one in front
of the house, that he thinks will blow down and kill us. Can you come
and see if you can persuade him out of his notion? I can do nothing.”

He accompanied her to the cottage, and she conducted him upstairs. John
South was pillowed up in a chair between the bed and the window exactly
opposite the latter, towards which his face was turned.

“Ah, neighbor Winterborne,” he said. “I wouldn’t have minded if my life
had only been my own to lose; I don’t vallie it in much of itself, and
can let it go if ’tis required of me. But to think what ’tis worth to
you, a young man rising in life, that do trouble me! It seems a trick
of dishonesty towards ye to go off at fifty-five! I could bear up, I
know I could, if it were not for the tree—yes, the tree, ’tis that’s
killing me. There he stands, threatening my life every minute that the
wind do blow. He’ll come down upon us and squat us dead; and what will
ye do when the life on your property is taken away?”

“Never you mind me—that’s of no consequence,” said Giles. “Think of
yourself alone.”

He looked out of the window in the direction of the woodman’s gaze. The
tree was a tall elm, familiar to him from childhood, which stood at a
distance of two-thirds its own height from the front of South’s
dwelling. Whenever the wind blew, as it did now, the tree rocked,
naturally enough; and the sight of its motion and sound of its sighs
had gradually bred the terrifying illusion in the woodman’s mind that
it would descend and kill him. Thus he would sit all day, in spite of
persuasion, watching its every sway, and listening to the melancholy
Gregorian melodies which the air wrung out of it. This fear it
apparently was, rather than any organic disease which was eating away
the health of John South.

As the tree waved, South waved his head, making it his flugel-man with
abject obedience. “Ah, when it was quite a small tree,” he said, “and I
was a little boy, I thought one day of chopping it off with my hook to
make a clothes-line prop with. But I put off doing it, and then I again
thought that I would; but I forgot it, and didn’t. And at last it got
too big, and now ’tis my enemy, and will be the death o’ me. Little did
I think, when I let that sapling stay, that a time would come when it
would torment me, and dash me into my grave.”

“No, no,” said Winterborne and Marty, soothingly. But they thought it
possible that it might hasten him into his grave, though in another way
than by falling.

“I tell you what,” added Winterborne, “I’ll climb up this afternoon and
shroud off the lower boughs, and then it won’t be so heavy, and the
wind won’t affect it so.”

“She won’t allow it—a strange woman come from nobody knows where—she
won’t have it done.”

“You mean Mrs. Charmond? Oh, she doesn’t know there’s such a tree on
her estate. Besides, shrouding is not felling, and I’ll risk that
much.”

He went out, and when afternoon came he returned, took a billhook from
the woodman’s shed, and with a ladder climbed into the lower part of
the tree, where he began lopping off—“shrouding,” as they called it at
Hintock—the lowest boughs. Each of these quivered under his attack,
bent, cracked, and fell into the hedge. Having cut away the lowest
tier, he stepped off the ladder, climbed a few steps higher, and
attacked those at the next level. Thus he ascended with the progress of
his work far above the top of the ladder, cutting away his perches as
he went, and leaving nothing but a bare stem below him.

The work was troublesome, for the tree was large. The afternoon wore
on, turning dark and misty about four o’clock. From time to time Giles
cast his eyes across towards the bedroom window of South, where, by the
flickering fire in the chamber, he could see the old man watching him,
sitting motionless with a hand upon each arm of the chair. Beside him
sat Marty, also straining her eyes towards the skyey field of his
operations.

A curious question suddenly occurred to Winterborne, and he stopped his
chopping. He was operating on another person’s property to prolong the
years of a lease by whose termination that person would considerably
benefit. In that aspect of the case he doubted if he ought to go on. On
the other hand he was working to save a man’s life, and this seemed to
empower him to adopt arbitrary measures.

The wind had died down to a calm, and while he was weighing the
circumstances he saw coming along the road through the increasing mist
a figure which, indistinct as it was, he knew well. It was Grace
Melbury, on her way out from the house, probably for a short evening
walk before dark. He arranged himself for a greeting from her, since
she could hardly avoid passing immediately beneath the tree.

But Grace, though she looked up and saw him, was just at that time too
full of the words of her father to give him any encouragement. The
years-long regard that she had had for him was not kindled by her
return into a flame of sufficient brilliancy to make her rebellious.
Thinking that she might not see him, he cried, “Miss Melbury, here I
am.”

She looked up again. She was near enough to see the expression of his
face, and the nails in his soles, silver-bright with constant walking.
But she did not reply; and dropping her glance again, went on.

Winterborne’s face grew strange; he mused, and proceeded automatically
with his work. Grace meanwhile had not gone far. She had reached a
gate, whereon she had leaned sadly, and whispered to herself, “What
shall I do?”

A sudden fog came on, and she curtailed her walk, passing under the
tree again on her return. Again he addressed her. “Grace,” he said,
when she was close to the trunk, “speak to me.” She shook her head
without stopping, and went on to a little distance, where she stood
observing him from behind the hedge.

Her coldness had been kindly meant. If it was to be done, she had said
to herself, it should be begun at once. While she stood out of
observation Giles seemed to recognize her meaning; with a sudden start
he worked on, climbing higher, and cutting himself off more and more
from all intercourse with the sublunary world. At last he had worked
himself so high up the elm, and the mist had so thickened, that he
could only just be discerned as a dark-gray spot on the light-gray sky:
he would have been altogether out of notice but for the stroke of his
billhook and the flight of a bough downward, and its crash upon the
hedge at intervals.

It was not to be done thus, after all: plainness and candor were best.
She went back a third time; he did not see her now, and she lingeringly
gazed up at his unconscious figure, loath to put an end to any kind of
hope that might live on in him still. “Giles— Mr. Winterborne,” she
said.

He was so high amid the fog that he did not hear. “Mr. Winterborne!”
she cried again, and this time he stopped, looked down, and replied.

“My silence just now was not accident,” she said, in an unequal voice.
“My father says it is best not to think too much of that—engagement, or
understanding between us, that you know of. I, too, think that upon the
whole he is right. But we are friends, you know, Giles, and almost
relations.”

“Very well,” he answered, as if without surprise, in a voice which
barely reached down the tree. “I have nothing to say in objection—I
cannot say anything till I’ve thought a while.”

She added, with emotion in her tone, “For myself, I would have married
you—some day—I think. But I give way, for I see it would be unwise.”

He made no reply, but sat back upon a bough, placed his elbow in a
fork, and rested his head upon his hand. Thus he remained till the fog
and the night had completely enclosed him from her view.

Grace heaved a divided sigh, with a tense pause between, and moved
onward, her heart feeling uncomfortably big and heavy, and her eyes
wet. Had Giles, instead of remaining still, immediately come down from
the tree to her, would she have continued in that filial acquiescent
frame of mind which she had announced to him as final? If it be true,
as women themselves have declared, that one of their sex is never so
much inclined to throw in her lot with a man for good and all as five
minutes after she has told him such a thing cannot be, the
probabilities are that something might have been done by the appearance
of Winterborne on the ground beside Grace. But he continued motionless
and silent in that gloomy Niflheim or fog-land which involved him, and
she proceeded on her way.

The spot seemed now to be quite deserted. The light from South’s window
made rays on the fog, but did not reach the tree. A quarter of an hour
passed, and all was blackness overhead. Giles had not yet come down.

Then the tree seemed to shiver, then to heave a sigh; a movement was
audible, and Winterborne dropped almost noiselessly to the ground. He
had thought the matter out, and having returned the ladder and billhook
to their places, pursued his way homeward. He would not allow this
incident to affect his outer conduct any more than the danger to his
leaseholds had done, and went to bed as usual. Two simultaneous
troubles do not always make a double trouble; and thus it came to pass
that Giles’s practical anxiety about his houses, which would have been
enough to keep him awake half the night at any other time, was
displaced and not reinforced by his sentimental trouble about Grace
Melbury. This severance was in truth more like a burial of her than a
rupture with her; but he did not realize so much at present; even when
he arose in the morning he felt quite moody and stern: as yet the
second note in the gamut of such emotions, a tender regret for his
loss, had not made itself heard.

A load of oak timber was to be sent away that morning to a builder
whose works were in a town many miles off. The proud trunks were taken
up from the silent spot which had known them through the buddings and
sheddings of their growth for the foregoing hundred years; chained down
like slaves to a heavy timber carriage with enormous red wheels, and
four of the most powerful of Melbury’s horses were harnessed in front
to draw them.

The horses wore their bells that day. There were sixteen to the team,
carried on a frame above each animal’s shoulders, and tuned to scale,
so as to form two octaves, running from the highest note on the right
or off-side of the leader to the lowest on the left or near-side of the
shaft-horse. Melbury was among the last to retain horse-bells in that
neighborhood; for, living at Little Hintock, where the lanes yet
remained as narrow as before the days of turnpike roads, these
sound-signals were still as useful to him and his neighbors as they had
ever been in former times. Much backing was saved in the course of a
year by the warning notes they cast ahead; moreover, the tones of all
the teams in the district being known to the carters of each, they
could tell a long way off on a dark night whether they were about to
encounter friends or strangers.

The fog of the previous evening still lingered so heavily over the
woods that the morning could not penetrate the trees till long after
its time. The load being a ponderous one, the lane crooked, and the air
so thick, Winterborne set out, as he often did, to accompany the team
as far as the corner, where it would turn into a wider road.

So they rumbled on, shaking the foundations of the roadside cottages by
the weight of their progress, the sixteen bells chiming harmoniously
over all, till they had risen out of the valley and were descending
towards the more open route, the sparks rising from their creaking skid
and nearly setting fire to the dead leaves alongside.

Then occurred one of the very incidents against which the bells were an
endeavor to guard. Suddenly there beamed into their eyes, quite close
to them, the two lamps of a carriage, shorn of rays by the fog. Its
approach had been quite unheard, by reason of their own noise. The
carriage was a covered one, while behind it could be discerned another
vehicle laden with luggage.

Winterborne went to the head of the team, and heard the coachman
telling the carter that he must turn back. The carter declared that
this was impossible.

“You can turn if you unhitch your string-horses,” said the coachman.

“It is much easier for you to turn than for us,” said Winterborne.
“We’ve five tons of timber on these wheels if we’ve an ounce.”

“But I’ve another carriage with luggage at my back.”

Winterborne admitted the strength of the argument. “But even with
that,” he said, “you can back better than we. And you ought to, for you
could hear our bells half a mile off.”

“And you could see our lights.”

“We couldn’t, because of the fog.”

“Well, our time’s precious,” said the coachman, haughtily. “You are
only going to some trumpery little village or other in the
neighborhood, while we are going straight to Italy.”

“Driving all the way, I suppose,” said Winterborne, sarcastically.

The argument continued in these terms till a voice from the interior of
the carriage inquired what was the matter. It was a lady’s.

She was briefly informed of the timber people’s obstinacy; and then
Giles could hear her telling the footman to direct the timber people to
turn their horses’ heads.

The message was brought, and Winterborne sent the bearer back to say
that he begged the lady’s pardon, but that he could not do as she
requested; that though he would not assert it to be impossible, it was
impossible by comparison with the slight difficulty to her party to
back their light carriages. As fate would have it, the incident with
Grace Melbury on the previous day made Giles less gentle than he might
otherwise have shown himself, his confidence in the sex being rudely
shaken.

In fine, nothing could move him, and the carriages were compelled to
back till they reached one of the sidings or turnouts constructed in
the bank for the purpose. Then the team came on ponderously, and the
clanging of its sixteen bells as it passed the discomfited carriages,
tilted up against the bank, lent a particularly triumphant tone to the
team’s progress—a tone which, in point of fact, did not at all attach
to its conductor’s feelings.

Giles walked behind the timber, and just as he had got past the yet
stationary carriages he heard a soft voice say, “Who is that rude man?
Not Melbury?” The sex of the speaker was so prominent in the voice that
Winterborne felt a pang of regret.

“No, ma’am. A younger man, in a smaller way of business in Little
Hintock. Winterborne is his name.”

Thus they parted company. “Why, Mr. Winterborne,” said the wagoner,
when they were out of hearing, “that was She—Mrs. Charmond! Who’d ha’
thought it? What in the world can a woman that does nothing be
cock-watching out here at this time o’ day for? Oh, going to Italy—yes
to be sure, I heard she was going abroad, she can’t endure the winter
here.”

Winterborne was vexed at the incident; the more so that he knew Mr.
Melbury, in his adoration of Hintock House, would be the first to blame
him if it became known. But saying no more, he accompanied the load to
the end of the lane, and then turned back with an intention to call at
South’s to learn the result of the experiment of the preceding evening.

It chanced that a few minutes before this time Grace Melbury, who now
rose soon enough to breakfast with her father, in spite of the
unwontedness of the hour, had been commissioned by him to make the same
inquiry at South’s. Marty had been standing at the door when Miss
Melbury arrived. Almost before the latter had spoken, Mrs. Charmond’s
carriages, released from the obstruction up the lane, came bowling
along, and the two girls turned to regard the spectacle.

Mrs. Charmond did not see them, but there was sufficient light for them
to discern her outline between the carriage windows. A noticeable
feature in her _tournure_ was a magnificent mass of braided locks.

“How well she looks this morning!” said Grace, forgetting Mrs.
Charmond’s slight in her generous admiration. “Her hair so becomes her
worn that way. I have never seen any more beautiful!”

“Nor have I, miss,” said Marty, dryly, unconsciously stroking her
crown.

Grace watched the carriages with lingering regret till they were out of
sight. She then learned of Marty that South was no better. Before she
had come away Winterborne approached the house, but seeing that one of
the two girls standing on the door-step was Grace, he suddenly turned
back again and sought the shelter of his own home till she should have
gone away.




CHAPTER XIV.


The encounter with the carriages having sprung upon Winterborne’s mind
the image of Mrs. Charmond, his thoughts by a natural channel went from
her to the fact that several cottages and other houses in the two
Hintocks, now his own, would fall into her possession in the event of
South’s death. He marvelled what people could have been thinking about
in the past to invent such precarious tenures as these; still more,
what could have induced his ancestors at Hintock, and other village
people, to exchange their old copyholds for life-leases. But having
naturally succeeded to these properties through his father, he had done
his best to keep them in order, though he was much struck with his
father’s negligence in not insuring South’s life.

After breakfast, still musing on the circumstances, he went upstairs,
turned over his bed, and drew out a flat canvas bag which lay between
the mattress and the sacking. In this he kept his leases, which had
remained there unopened ever since his father’s death. It was the usual
hiding-place among rural lifeholders for such documents. Winterborne
sat down on the bed and looked them over. They were ordinary leases for
three lives, which a member of the South family, some fifty years
before this time, had accepted of the lord of the manor in lieu of
certain copyholds and other rights, in consideration of having the
dilapidated houses rebuilt by said lord. They had come into his
father’s possession chiefly through his mother, who was a South.

Pinned to the parchment of one of the indentures was a letter, which
Winterborne had never seen before. It bore a remote date, the
handwriting being that of some solicitor or agent, and the signature
the landholder’s. It was to the effect that at any time before the last
of the stated lives should drop, Mr. Giles Winterborne, senior, or his
representative, should have the privilege of adding his own and his
son’s life to the life remaining on payment of a merely nominal sum;
the concession being in consequence of the elder Winterborne’s consent
to demolish one of the houses and relinquish its site, which stood at
an awkward corner of the lane and impeded the way.

The house had been pulled down years before. Why Giles’s father had not
taken advantage of his privilege to insert his own and his son’s lives
it was impossible to say. The likelihood was that death alone had
hindered him in the execution of his project, as it surely was, the
elder Winterborne having been a man who took much pleasure in dealing
with house property in his small way.

Since one of the Souths still survived, there was not much doubt that
Giles could do what his father had left undone, as far as his own life
was concerned. This possibility cheered him much, for by those houses
hung many things. Melbury’s doubt of the young man’s fitness to be the
husband of Grace had been based not a little on the precariousness of
his holdings in Little and Great Hintock. He resolved to attend to the
business at once, the fine for renewal being a sum that he could easily
muster. His scheme, however, could not be carried out in a day; and
meanwhile he would run up to South’s, as he had intended to do, to
learn the result of the experiment with the tree.

Marty met him at the door. “Well, Marty,” he said; and was surprised to
read in her face that the case was not so hopeful as he had imagined.

“I am sorry for your labor,” she said. “It is all lost. He says the
tree seems taller than ever.”

Winterborne looked round at it. Taller the tree certainly did seem, the
gauntness of its now naked stem being more marked than before.

“It quite terrified him when he first saw what you had done to it this
morning,” she added. “He declares it will come down upon us and cleave
us, like ‘the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.’”

“Well; can I do anything else?” asked he.

“The doctor says the tree ought to be cut down.”

“Oh—you’ve had the doctor?”

“I didn’t send for him. Mrs. Charmond, before she left, heard that
father was ill, and told him to attend him at her expense.”

“That was very good of her. And he says it ought to be cut down. We
mustn’t cut it down without her knowledge, I suppose.”

He went up-stairs. There the old man sat, staring at the now gaunt tree
as if his gaze were frozen on to its trunk. Unluckily the tree waved
afresh by this time, a wind having sprung up and blown the fog away,
and his eyes turned with its wavings.

They heard footsteps—a man’s, but of a lighter type than usual. “There
is Doctor Fitzpiers again,” she said, and descended. Presently his
tread was heard on the naked stairs.

Mr. Fitzpiers entered the sick-chamber just as a doctor is more or less
wont to do on such occasions, and pre-eminently when the room is that
of a humble cottager, looking round towards the patient with that
preoccupied gaze which so plainly reveals that he has wellnigh
forgotten all about the case and the whole circumstances since he
dismissed them from his mind at his last exit from the same apartment.
He nodded to Winterborne, with whom he was already a little acquainted,
recalled the case to his thoughts, and went leisurely on to where South
sat.

Fitzpiers was, on the whole, a finely formed, handsome man. His eyes
were dark and impressive, and beamed with the light either of energy or
of susceptivity—it was difficult to say which; it might have been a
little of both. That quick, glittering, practical eye, sharp for the
surface of things and for nothing beneath it, he had not. But whether
his apparent depth of vision was real, or only an artistic accident of
his corporeal moulding, nothing but his deeds could reveal.

His face was rather soft than stern, charming than grand, pale than
flushed; his nose—if a sketch of his features be _de rigueur_ for a
person of his pretensions—was artistically beautiful enough to have
been worth doing in marble by any sculptor not over-busy, and was hence
devoid of those knotty irregularities which often mean power; while the
double-cyma or classical curve of his mouth was not without a looseness
in its close. Nevertheless, either from his readily appreciative mien,
or his reflective manner, or the instinct towards profound things which
was said to possess him, his presence bespoke the philosopher rather
than the dandy or macaroni—an effect which was helped by the absence of
trinkets or other trivialities from his attire, though this was more
finished and up to date than is usually the case among rural
practitioners.

Strict people of the highly respectable class, knowing a little about
him by report, might have said that he seemed likely to err rather in
the possession of too many ideas than too few; to be a dreamy ’ist of
some sort, or too deeply steeped in some false kind of ’ism. However
this may be, it will be seen that he was undoubtedly a somewhat rare
kind of gentleman and doctor to have descended, as from the clouds,
upon Little Hintock.

“This is an extraordinary case,” he said at last to Winterborne, after
examining South by conversation, look, and touch, and learning that the
craze about the elm was stronger than ever. “Come down-stairs, and I’ll
tell you what I think.”

They accordingly descended, and the doctor continued, “The tree must be
cut down, or I won’t answer for his life.”

“’Tis Mrs. Charmond’s tree, and I suppose we must get permission?” said
Giles. “If so, as she is gone away, I must speak to her agent.”

“Oh—never mind whose tree it is—what’s a tree beside a life! Cut it
down. I have not the honor of knowing Mrs. Charmond as yet, but I am
disposed to risk that much with her.”

“’Tis timber,” rejoined Giles, more scrupulous than he would have been
had not his own interests stood so closely involved. “They’ll never
fell a stick about here without it being marked first, either by her or
the agent.”

“Then we’ll inaugurate a new era forthwith. How long has he complained
of the tree?” asked the doctor of Marty.

“Weeks and weeks, sir. The shape of it seems to haunt him like an evil
spirit. He says that it is exactly his own age, that it has got human
sense, and sprouted up when he was born on purpose to rule him, and
keep him as its slave. Others have been like it afore in Hintock.”

They could hear South’s voice up-stairs “Oh, he’s rocking this way; he
must come! And then my poor life, that’s worth houses upon houses, will
be squashed out o’ me. Oh! oh!”

“That’s how he goes on,” she added. “And he’ll never look anywhere else
but out of the window, and scarcely have the curtains drawn.”

“Down with it, then, and hang Mrs. Charmond,” said Mr. Fitzpiers. “The
best plan will be to wait till the evening, when it is dark, or early
in the morning before he is awake, so that he doesn’t see it fall, for
that would terrify him worse than ever. Keep the blind down till I
come, and then I’ll assure him, and show him that his trouble is over.”

The doctor then departed, and they waited till the evening. When it was
dusk, and the curtains drawn, Winterborne directed a couple of woodmen
to bring a crosscut-saw, and the tall, threatening tree was soon nearly
off at its base. He would not fell it completely then, on account of
the possible crash, but next morning, before South was awake, they went
and lowered it cautiously, in a direction away from the cottage. It was
a business difficult to do quite silently; but it was done at last, and
the elm of the same birth-year as the woodman’s lay stretched upon the
ground. The weakest idler that passed could now set foot on marks
formerly made in the upper forks by the shoes of adventurous climbers
only; once inaccessible nests could be examined microscopically; and on
swaying extremities where birds alone had perched, the by-standers sat
down.

As soon as it was broad daylight the doctor came, and Winterborne
entered the house with him. Marty said that her father was wrapped up
and ready, as usual, to be put into his chair. They ascended the
stairs, and soon seated him. He began at once to complain of the tree,
and the danger to his life and Winterborne’s house-property in
consequence.

The doctor signalled to Giles, who went and drew back the printed
cotton curtains. “’Tis gone, see,” said Mr. Fitzpiers.

As soon as the old man saw the vacant patch of sky in place of the
branched column so familiar to his gaze, he sprang up, speechless, his
eyes rose from their hollows till the whites showed all round; he fell
back, and a bluish whiteness overspread him.

Greatly alarmed, they put him on the bed. As soon as he came a little
out of his fit, he gasped, “Oh, it is gone!—where?—where?”

His whole system seemed paralyzed by amazement. They were
thunder-struck at the result of the experiment, and did all they could.
Nothing seemed to avail. Giles and Fitzpiers went and came, but
uselessly. He lingered through the day, and died that evening as the
sun went down.

“D—d if my remedy hasn’t killed him!” murmured the doctor.




CHAPTER XV.


When Melbury heard what had happened he seemed much moved, and walked
thoughtfully about the premises. On South’s own account he was
genuinely sorry; and on Winterborne’s he was the more grieved in that
this catastrophe had so closely followed the somewhat harsh dismissal
of Giles as the betrothed of his daughter.

He was quite angry with circumstances for so heedlessly inflicting on
Giles a second trouble when the needful one inflicted by himself was
all that the proper order of events demanded. “I told Giles’s father
when he came into those houses not to spend too much money on lifehold
property held neither for his own life nor his son’s,” he exclaimed.
“But he wouldn’t listen to me. And now Giles has to suffer for it.”

“Poor Giles!” murmured Grace.

“Now, Grace, between us two, it is very, very remarkable. It is almost
as if I had foreseen this; and I am thankful for your escape, though I
am sincerely sorry for Giles. Had we not dismissed him already, we
could hardly have found it in our hearts to dismiss him now. So I say,
be thankful. I’ll do all I can for him as a friend; but as a pretender
to the position of my son-in law, that can never be thought of more.”

And yet at that very moment the impracticability to which poor
Winterborne’s suit had been reduced was touching Grace’s heart to a
warmer sentiment on his behalf than she had felt for years concerning
him.

He, meanwhile, was sitting down alone in the old familiar house which
had ceased to be his, taking a calm if somewhat dismal survey of
affairs. The pendulum of the clock bumped every now and then against
one side of the case in which it swung, as the muffled drum to his
worldly march. Looking out of the window he could perceive that a
paralysis had come over Creedle’s occupation of manuring the garden,
owing, obviously, to a conviction that they might not be living there
long enough to profit by next season’s crop.

He looked at the leases again and the letter attached. There was no
doubt that he had lost his houses by an accident which might easily
have been circumvented if he had known the true conditions of his
holding. The time for performance had now lapsed in strict law; but
might not the intention be considered by the landholder when she became
aware of the circumstances, and his moral right to retain the holdings
for the term of his life be conceded?

His heart sank within him when he perceived that despite all the legal
reciprocities and safeguards prepared and written, the upshot of the
matter amounted to this, that it depended upon the mere caprice—good or
ill—of the woman he had met the day before in such an unfortunate way,
whether he was to possess his houses for life or no.

While he was sitting and thinking a step came to the door, and Melbury
appeared, looking very sorry for his position. Winterborne welcomed him
by a word and a look, and went on with his examination of the
parchments. His visitor sat down.

“Giles,” he said, “this is very awkward, and I am sorry for it. What
are you going to do?”

Giles informed him of the real state of affairs, and how barely he had
missed availing himself of his chance of renewal.

“What a misfortune! Why was this neglected? Well, the best thing you
can do is to write and tell her all about it, and throw yourself upon
her generosity.”

“I would rather not,” murmured Giles.

“But you must,” said Melbury.

In short, he argued so cogently that Giles allowed himself to be
persuaded, and the letter to Mrs. Charmond was written and sent to
Hintock House, whence, as he knew, it would at once be forwarded to
her.

Melbury feeling that he had done so good an action in coming as almost
to extenuate his previous arbitrary conduct to nothing, went home; and
Giles was left alone to the suspense of waiting for a reply from the
divinity who shaped the ends of the Hintock population. By this time
all the villagers knew of the circumstances, and being wellnigh like
one family, a keen interest was the result all round.

Everybody thought of Giles; nobody thought of Marty. Had any of them
looked in upon her during those moonlight nights which preceded the
burial of her father, they would have seen the girl absolutely alone in
the house with the dead man. Her own chamber being nearest the stairs,
the coffin had been placed there for convenience; and at a certain hour
of the night, when the moon arrived opposite the window, its beams
streamed across the still profile of South, sublimed by the august
presence of death, and onward a few feet farther upon the face of his
daughter, lying in her little bed in the stillness of a repose almost
as dignified as that of her companion—the repose of a guileless soul
that had nothing more left on earth to lose, except a life which she
did not overvalue.

South was buried, and a week passed, and Winterborne watched for a
reply from Mrs. Charmond. Melbury was very sanguine as to its tenor;
but Winterborne had not told him of the encounter with her carriage,
when, if ever he had heard an affronted tone on a woman’s lips, he had
heard it on hers.

The postman’s time for passing was just after Melbury’s men had
assembled in the spar-house; and Winterborne, who when not busy on his
own account would lend assistance there, used to go out into the lane
every morning and meet the post-man at the end of one of the green
rides through the hazel copse, in the straight stretch of which his
laden figure could be seen a long way off. Grace also was very anxious;
more anxious than her father; more, perhaps, than Winterborne himself.
This anxiety led her into the spar-house on some pretext or other
almost every morning while they were awaiting the reply.

Fitzpiers too, though he did not personally appear, was much
interested, and not altogether easy in his mind; for he had been
informed by an authority of what he had himself conjectured, that if
the tree had been allowed to stand, the old man would have gone on
complaining, but might have lived for twenty years.

Eleven times had Winterborne gone to that corner of the ride, and
looked up its long straight slope through the wet grays of winter dawn.
But though the postman’s bowed figure loomed in view pretty regularly,
he brought nothing for Giles. On the twelfth day the man of missives,
while yet in the extreme distance, held up his hand, and Winterborne
saw a letter in it. He took it into the spar-house before he broke the
seal, and those who were there gathered round him while he read, Grace
looking in at the door.

The letter was not from Mrs. Charmond herself, but her agent at
Sherton. Winterborne glanced it over and looked up.

“It’s all over,” he said.

“Ah!” said they altogether.

“Her lawyer is instructed to say that Mrs. Charmond sees no reason for
disturbing the natural course of things, particularly as she
contemplates pulling the houses down,” he said, quietly.

“Only think of that!” said several.

Winterborne had turned away, and said vehemently to himself, “Then let
her pull ’em down, and be d—d to her!”

Creedle looked at him with a face of seven sorrows, saying, “Ah, ’twas
that sperrit that lost ’em for ye, maister!”

Winterborne subdued his feelings, and from that hour, whatever they
were, kept them entirely to himself. There could be no doubt that, up
to this last moment, he had nourished a feeble hope of regaining Grace
in the event of this negotiation turning out a success. Not being aware
of the fact that her father could have settled upon her a fortune
sufficient to enable both to live in comfort, he deemed it now an
absurdity to dream any longer of such a vanity as making her his wife,
and sank into silence forthwith.

Yet whatever the value of taciturnity to a man among strangers, it is
apt to express more than talkativeness when he dwells among friends.
The countryman who is obliged to judge the time of day from changes in
external nature sees a thousand successive tints and traits in the
landscape which are never discerned by him who hears the regular chime
of a clock, because they are never in request. In like manner do we use
our eyes on our taciturn comrade. The infinitesimal movement of muscle,
curve, hair, and wrinkle, which when accompanied by a voice goes
unregarded, is watched and translated in the lack of it, till virtually
the whole surrounding circle of familiars is charged with the reserved
one’s moods and meanings.

This was the condition of affairs between Winterborne and his neighbors
after his stroke of ill-luck. He held his tongue; and they observed
him, and knew that he was discomposed.

Mr. Melbury, in his compunction, thought more of the matter than any
one else, except his daughter. Had Winterborne been going on in the old
fashion, Grace’s father could have alluded to his disapproval of the
alliance every day with the greatest frankness; but to speak any
further on the subject he could not find it in his heart to do now. He
hoped that Giles would of his own accord make some final announcement
that he entirely withdrew his pretensions to Grace, and so get the
thing past and done with. For though Giles had in a measure acquiesced
in the wish of her family, he could make matters unpleasant if he chose
to work upon Grace; and hence, when Melbury saw the young man
approaching along the road one day, he kept friendliness and frigidity
exactly balanced in his eye till he could see whether Giles’s manner
was presumptive or not.

His manner was that of a man who abandoned all claims. “I am glad to
meet ye, Mr. Melbury,” he said, in a low voice, whose quality he
endeavored to make as practical as possible. “I am afraid I shall not
be able to keep that mare I bought, and as I don’t care to sell her, I
should like—if you don’t object—to give her to Miss Melbury. The horse
is very quiet, and would be quite safe for her.”

Mr. Melbury was rather affected at this. “You sha’n’t hurt your pocket
like that on our account, Giles. Grace shall have the horse, but I’ll
pay you what you gave for her, and any expense you may have been put to
for her keep.”

He would not hear of any other terms, and thus it was arranged. They
were now opposite Melbury’s house, and the timber-merchant pressed
Winterborne to enter, Grace being out of the way.

“Pull round the settle, Giles,” said the timber-merchant, as soon as
they were within. “I should like to have a serious talk with you.”

Thereupon he put the case to Winterborne frankly, and in quite a
friendly way. He declared that he did not like to be hard on a man when
he was in difficulty; but he really did not see how Winterborne could
marry his daughter now, without even a house to take her to.

Giles quite acquiesced in the awkwardness of his situation. But from a
momentary feeling that he would like to know Grace’s mind from her own
lips, he did not speak out positively there and then. He accordingly
departed somewhat abruptly, and went home to consider whether he would
seek to bring about a meeting with her.

In the evening, while he sat quietly pondering, he fancied that he
heard a scraping on the wall outside his house. The boughs of a monthly
rose which grew there made such a noise sometimes, but as no wind was
stirring he knew that it could not be the rose-tree. He took up the
candle and went out. Nobody was near. As he turned, the light flickered
on the whitewashed rough case of the front, and he saw words written
thereon in charcoal, which he read as follows:

“O Giles, you’ve lost your dwelling-place,
And therefore, Giles, you’ll lose your Grace.”


Giles went in-doors. He had his suspicions as to the scrawler of those
lines, but he could not be sure. What suddenly filled his heart far
more than curiosity about their authorship was a terrible belief that
they were turning out to be true, try to see Grace as he might. They
decided the question for him. He sat down and wrote a formal note to
Melbury, in which he briefly stated that he was placed in such a
position as to make him share to the full Melbury’s view of his own and
his daughter’s promise, made some years before; to wish that it should
be considered as cancelled, and they themselves quite released from any
obligation on account of it.

Having fastened up this their plenary absolution, he determined to get
it out of his hands and have done with it; to which end he went off to
Melbury’s at once. It was now so late that the family had all retired;
he crept up to the house, thrust the note under the door, and stole
away as silently as he had come.

Melbury himself was the first to rise the next morning, and when he had
read the letter his relief was great. “Very honorable of Giles, very
honorable,” he kept saying to himself. “I shall not forget him. Now to
keep her up to her own true level.”

It happened that Grace went out for an early ramble that morning,
passing through the door and gate while her father was in the
spar-house. To go in her customary direction she could not avoid
passing Winterborne’s house. The morning sun was shining flat upon its
white surface, and the words, which still remained, were immediately
visible to her. She read them. Her face flushed to crimson. She could
see Giles and Creedle talking together at the back; the charred
spar-gad with which the lines had been written lay on the ground
beneath the wall. Feeling pretty sure that Winterborne would observe
her action, she quickly went up to the wall, rubbed out “lose” and
inserted “keep” in its stead. Then she made the best of her way home
without looking behind her. Giles could draw an inference now if he
chose.

There could not be the least doubt that gentle Grace was warming to
more sympathy with, and interest in, Giles Winterborne than ever she
had done while he was her promised lover; that since his misfortune
those social shortcomings of his, which contrasted so awkwardly with
her later experiences of life, had become obscured by the generous
revival of an old romantic attachment to him. Though mentally trained
and tilled into foreignness of view, as compared with her youthful
time, Grace was not an ambitious girl, and might, if left to herself,
have declined Winterborne without much discontent or unhappiness. Her
feelings just now were so far from latent that the writing on the wall
had thus quickened her to an unusual rashness.

Having returned from her walk she sat at breakfast silently. When her
step-mother had left the room she said to her father, “I have made up
my mind that I should like my engagement to Giles to continue, for the
present at any rate, till I can see further what I ought to do.”

Melbury looked much surprised.

“Nonsense,” he said, sharply. “You don’t know what you are talking
about. Look here.”

He handed across to her the letter received from Giles.

She read it, and said no more. Could he have seen her write on the
wall? She did not know. Fate, it seemed, would have it this way, and
there was nothing to do but to acquiesce.

It was a few hours after this that Winterborne, who, curiously enough,
had _not_ perceived Grace writing, was clearing away the tree from the
front of South’s late dwelling. He saw Marty standing in her door-way,
a slim figure in meagre black, almost without womanly contours as yet.
He went up to her and said, “Marty, why did you write that on my wall
last night? It _was_ you, you know.”

“Because it was the truth. I didn’t mean to let it stay, Mr.
Winterborne; but when I was going to rub it out you came, and I was
obliged to run off.”

“Having prophesied one thing, why did you alter it to another? Your
predictions can’t be worth much.”

“I have not altered it.”

“But you have.”

“No.”

“It is altered. Go and see.”

She went, and read that, in spite of losing his dwelling-place, he
would _keep_ his Grace. Marty came back surprised.

“Well, I never,” she said. “Who can have made such nonsense of it?”

“Who, indeed?” said he.

“I have rubbed it all out, as the point of it is quite gone.”

“You’d no business to rub it out. I didn’t tell you to. I meant to let
it stay a little longer.”

“Some idle boy did it, no doubt,” she murmured.

As this seemed very probable, and the actual perpetrator was
unsuspected, Winterborne said no more, and dismissed the matter from
his mind.

From this day of his life onward for a considerable time, Winterborne,
though not absolutely out of his house as yet, retired into the
background of human life and action thereabout—a feat not particularly
difficult of performance anywhere when the doer has the assistance of a
lost prestige. Grace, thinking that Winterborne saw her write, made no
further sign, and the frail bark of fidelity that she had thus timidly
launched was stranded and lost.




CHAPTER XVI.


Dr. Fitzpiers lived on the slope of the hill, in a house of much less
pretension, both as to architecture and as to magnitude, than the
timber-merchant’s. The latter had, without doubt, been once the
manorial residence appertaining to the snug and modest domain of Little
Hintock, of which the boundaries were now lost by its absorption with
others of its kind into the adjoining estate of Mrs. Charmond. Though
the Melburys themselves were unaware of the fact, there was every
reason to believe—at least so the parson said—that the owners of that
little manor had been Melbury’s own ancestors, the family name
occurring in numerous documents relating to transfers of land about the
time of the civil wars.

Mr. Fitzpiers’s dwelling, on the contrary, was small, cottage-like, and
comparatively modern. It had been occupied, and was in part occupied
still, by a retired farmer and his wife, who, on the surgeon’s arrival
in quest of a home, had accommodated him by receding from their front
rooms into the kitchen quarter, whence they administered to his wants,
and emerged at regular intervals to receive from him a not unwelcome
addition to their income.

The cottage and its garden were so regular in their arrangement that
they might have been laid out by a Dutch designer of the time of
William and Mary. In a low, dense hedge, cut to wedge-shape, was a door
over which the hedge formed an arch, and from the inside of the door a
straight path, bordered with clipped box, ran up the slope of the
garden to the porch, which was exactly in the middle of the house
front, with two windows on each side. Right and left of the path were
first a bed of gooseberry bushes; next of currant; next of raspberry;
next of strawberry; next of old-fashioned flowers; at the corners
opposite the porch being spheres of box resembling a pair of school
globes. Over the roof of the house could be seen the orchard, on yet
higher ground, and behind the orchard the forest-trees, reaching up to
the crest of the hill.

Opposite the garden door and visible from the parlor window was a
swing-gate leading into a field, across which there ran a footpath. The
swing-gate had just been repainted, and on one fine afternoon, before
the paint was dry, and while gnats were still dying thereon, the
surgeon was standing in his sitting-room abstractedly looking out at
the different pedestrians who passed and repassed along that route.
Being of a philosophical stamp, he perceived that the character of each
of these travellers exhibited itself in a somewhat amusing manner by
his or her method of handling the gate.

As regarded the men, there was not much variety: they gave the gate a
kick and passed through. The women were more contrasting. To them the
sticky wood-work was a barricade, a disgust, a menace, a treachery, as
the case might be.

The first that he noticed was a bouncing woman with her skirts tucked
up and her hair uncombed. She grasped the gate without looking, giving
it a supplementary push with her shoulder, when the white imprint drew
from her an exclamation in language not too refined. She went to the
green bank, sat down and rubbed herself in the grass, cursing the
while.

“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed the doctor.

The next was a girl, with her hair cropped short, in whom the surgeon
recognized the daughter of his late patient, the woodman South.
Moreover, a black bonnet that she wore by way of mourning unpleasantly
reminded him that he had ordered the felling of a tree which had caused
her parent’s death and Winterborne’s losses. She walked and thought,
and not recklessly; but her preoccupation led her to grasp
unsuspectingly the bar of the gate, and touch it with her arm.
Fitzpiers felt sorry that she should have soiled that new black frock,
poor as it was, for it was probably her only one. She looked at her
hand and arm, seemed but little surprised, wiped off the disfigurement
with an almost unmoved face, and as if without abandoning her original
thoughts. Thus she went on her way.

Then there came over the green quite a different sort of personage. She
walked as delicately as if she had been bred in town, and as firmly as
if she had been bred in the country; she seemed one who dimly knew her
appearance to be attractive, but who retained some of the charm of
being ignorant of that fact by forgetting it in a general pensiveness.
She approached the gate. To let such a creature touch it even with a
tip of her glove was to Fitzpiers almost like letting her proceed to
tragical self-destruction. He jumped up and looked for his hat, but was
unable to find the right one; glancing again out of the window he saw
that he was too late. Having come up, she stopped, looked at the gate,
picked up a little stick, and using it as a bayonet, pushed open the
obstacle without touching it at all.

He steadily watched her till she had passed out of sight, recognizing
her as the very young lady whom he had seen once before and been unable
to identify. Whose could that emotional face be? All the others he had
seen in Hintock as yet oppressed him with their crude rusticity; the
contrast offered by this suggested that she hailed from elsewhere.

Precisely these thoughts had occurred to him at the first time of
seeing her; but he now went a little further with them, and considered
that as there had been no carriage seen or heard lately in that spot
she could not have come a very long distance. She must be somebody
staying at Hintock House? Possibly Mrs. Charmond, of whom he had heard
so much—at any rate an inmate, and this probability was sufficient to
set a mild radiance in the surgeon’s somewhat dull sky.

Fitzpiers sat down to the book he had been perusing. It happened to be
that of a German metaphysician, for the doctor was not a practical man,
except by fits, and much preferred the ideal world to the real, and the
discovery of principles to their application. The young lady remained
in his thoughts. He might have followed her; but he was not
constitutionally active, and preferred a conjectural pursuit. However,
when he went out for a ramble just before dusk he insensibly took the
direction of Hintock House, which was the way that Grace had been
walking, it having happened that her mind had run on Mrs. Charmond that
day, and she had walked to the brow of a hill whence the house could be
seen, returning by another route.

Fitzpiers in his turn reached the edge of the glen, overlooking the
manor-house. The shutters were shut, and only one chimney smoked. The
mere aspect of the place was enough to inform him that Mrs. Charmond
had gone away and that nobody else was staying there. Fitzpiers felt a
vague disappointment that the young lady was not Mrs. Charmond, of whom
he had heard so much; and without pausing longer to gaze at a carcass
from which the spirit had flown, he bent his steps homeward.

Later in the evening Fitzpiers was summoned to visit a cottage patient
about two miles distant. Like the majority of young practitioners in
his position he was far from having assumed the dignity of being driven
his rounds by a servant in a brougham that flashed the sunlight like a
mirror; his way of getting about was by means of a gig which he drove
himself, hitching the rein of the horse to the gate post, shutter hook,
or garden paling of the domicile under visitation, or giving pennies to
little boys to hold the animal during his stay—pennies which were well
earned when the cases to be attended were of a certain cheerful kind
that wore out the patience of the little boys.

On this account of travelling alone, the night journeys which Fitzpiers
had frequently to take were dismal enough, a serious apparent
perversity in nature ruling that whenever there was to be a birth in a
particularly inaccessible and lonely place, that event should occur in
the night. The surgeon, having been of late years a town man, hated the
solitary midnight woodland. He was not altogether skilful with the
reins, and it often occurred to his mind that if in some remote depths
of the trees an accident were to happen, the fact of his being alone
might be the death of him. Hence he made a practice of picking up any
countryman or lad whom he chanced to pass by, and under the disguise of
treating him to a nice drive, obtained his companionship on the
journey, and his convenient assistance in opening gates.

The doctor had started on his way out of the village on the night in
question when the light of his lamps fell upon the musing form of
Winterborne, walking leisurely along, as if he had no object in life.
Winterborne was a better class of companion than the doctor usually
could get, and he at once pulled up and asked him if he would like a
drive through the wood that fine night.

Giles seemed rather surprised at the doctor’s friendliness, but said
that he had no objection, and accordingly mounted beside Mr. Fitzpiers.

They drove along under the black boughs which formed a network upon the
stars, all the trees of a species alike in one respect, and no two of
them alike in another. Looking up as they passed under a horizontal
bough they sometimes saw objects like large tadpoles lodged
diametrically across it, which Giles explained to be pheasants there at
roost; and they sometimes heard the report of a gun, which reminded him
that others knew what those tadpole shapes represented as well as he.

Presently the doctor said what he had been going to say for some time:

“Is there a young lady staying in this neighborhood—a very attractive
girl—with a little white boa round her neck, and white fur round her
gloves?”

Winterborne of course knew in a moment that Grace, whom he had caught
the doctor peering at, was represented by these accessories. With a
wary grimness, partly in his character, partly induced by the
circumstances, he evaded an answer by saying, “I saw a young lady
talking to Mrs. Charmond the other day; perhaps it was she.”

Fitzpiers concluded from this that Winterborne had not seen him looking
over the hedge. “It might have been,” he said. “She is quite a
gentlewoman—the one I mean. She cannot be a permanent resident in
Hintock or I should have seen her before. Nor does she look like one.”

“She is not staying at Hintock House?”

“No; it is closed.”

“Then perhaps she is staying at one of the cottages, or farmhouses?”

“Oh no—you mistake. She was a different sort of girl altogether.” As
Giles was nobody, Fitzpiers treated him accordingly, and apostrophized
the night in continuation:

“She moved upon this earth a shape of brightness,
A power, that from its objects scarcely drew
One impulse of her being—in her lightness
Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew,
Which wanders through the waste air’s pathless blue,
To nourish some far desert: she did seem
Beside me, gathering beauty as she grew,
Like the bright shade of some immortal dream
Which walks, when tempests sleep, the wave of life’s dark stream.”


The consummate charm of the lines seemed to Winterborne, though he
divined that they were a quotation, to be somehow the result of his
lost love’s charms upon Fitzpiers.

“You seem to be mightily in love with her, sir,” he said, with a
sensation of heart-sickness, and more than ever resolved not to mention
Grace by name.

“Oh no—I am not that, Winterborne; people living insulated, as I do by
the solitude of this place, get charged with emotive fluid like a
Leyden-jar with electric, for want of some conductor at hand to
disperse it. Human love is a subjective thing—the essence itself of
man, as that great thinker Spinoza the philosopher says—_ipsa hominis
essentia_—it is joy accompanied by an idea which we project against any
suitable object in the line of our vision, just as the rainbow iris is
projected against an oak, ash, or elm tree indifferently. So that if
any other young lady had appeared instead of the one who did appear, I
should have felt just the same interest in her, and have quoted
precisely the same lines from Shelley about her, as about this one I
saw. Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all!”

“Well, it is what we call being in love down in these parts, whether or
no,” said Winterborne.

“You are right enough if you admit that I am in love with something in
my own head, and no thing in itself outside it at all.”

“Is it part of a country doctor’s duties to learn that view of things,
may I ask, sir?” said Winterborne, adopting the Socratic εἰρωνεία with
such well-assumed simplicity that Fitzpiers answered, readily,

“Oh no. The real truth is, Winterborne, that medical practice in places
like this is a very rule-of-thumb matter; a bottle of bitter stuff for
this and that old woman—the bitterer the better—compounded from a few
simple stereotyped prescriptions; occasional attendance at births,
where mere presence is almost sufficient, so healthy and strong are the
people; and a lance for an abscess now and then. Investigation and
experiment cannot be carried on without more appliances than one has
here—though I have attempted it a little.”

Giles did not enter into this view of the case; what he had been struck
with was the curious parallelism between Mr. Fitzpiers’s manner and
Grace’s, as shown by the fact of both of them straying into a subject
of discourse so engrossing to themselves that it made them forget it
was foreign to him.

Nothing further passed between himself and the doctor in relation to
Grace till they were on their way back. They had stopped at a way-side
inn for a glass of brandy and cider hot, and when they were again in
motion, Fitzpiers, possibly a little warmed by the liquor, resumed the
subject by saying, “I should like very much to know who that young lady
was.”

“What difference can it make, if she’s only the tree your rainbow falls
on?”

“Ha! ha! True.”

“You have no wife, sir?”

“I have no wife, and no idea of one. I hope to do better things than
marry and settle in Hintock. Not but that it is well for a medical man
to be married, and sometimes, begad, ’twould be pleasant enough in this
place, with the wind roaring round the house, and the rain and the
boughs beating against it. I hear that you lost your life-holds by the
death of South?”

“I did. I lost in more ways than one.”

They had reached the top of Hintock Lane or Street, if it could be
called such where three-quarters of the road-side consisted of copse
and orchard. One of the first houses to be passed was Melbury’s. A
light was shining from a bedroom window facing lengthwise of the lane.
Winterborne glanced at it, and saw what was coming. He had withheld an
answer to the doctor’s inquiry to hinder his knowledge of Grace; but,
as he thought to himself, “who hath gathered the wind in his fists? who
hath bound the waters in a garment?” he could not hinder what was
doomed to arrive, and might just as well have been outspoken. As they
came up to the house, Grace’s figure was distinctly visible, drawing
the two white curtains together which were used here instead of blinds.

“Why, there she is!” said Fitzpiers. “How does she come there?”

“In the most natural way in the world. It is her home. Mr. Melbury is
her father.”

“Oh, indeed—indeed—indeed! How comes he to have a daughter of that
stamp?”

Winterborne laughed coldly. “Won’t money do anything,” he said, “if
you’ve promising material to work upon? Why shouldn’t a Hintock girl,
taken early from home, and put under proper instruction, become as
finished as any other young lady, if she’s got brains and good looks to
begin with?”

“No reason at all why she shouldn’t,” murmured the surgeon, with
reflective disappointment. “Only I didn’t anticipate quite that kind of
origin for her.”

“And you think an inch or two less of her now.” There was a little
tremor in Winterborne’s voice as he spoke.

“Well,” said the doctor, with recovered warmth, “I am not so sure that
I think less of her. At first it was a sort of blow; but, dammy! I’ll
stick up for her. She’s charming, every inch of her!”

“So she is,” said Winterborne, “but not to me.”

From this ambiguous expression of the reticent woodlander’s, Dr.
Fitzpiers inferred that Giles disliked Miss Melbury because of some
haughtiness in her bearing towards him, and had, on that account,
withheld her name. The supposition did not tend to diminish his
admiration for her.




CHAPTER XVII.


Grace’s exhibition of herself, in the act of pulling-to the
window-curtains, had been the result of an unfortunate incident in the
house that day—nothing less than the illness of Grammer Oliver, a woman
who had never till now lain down for such a reason in her life. Like
others to whom unbroken years of health has made the idea of keeping
their bed almost as repugnant as death itself, she had continued on
foot till she literally fell on the floor; and though she had, as yet,
been scarcely a day off duty, she had sickened into quite a different
personage from the independent Grammer of the yard and spar-house. Ill
as she was, on one point she was firm. On no account would she see a
doctor; in other words, Fitzpiers.

The room in which Grace had been discerned was not her own, but the old
woman’s. On the girl’s way to bed she had received a message from
Grammer, to the effect that she would much like to speak to her that
night.

Grace entered, and set the candle on a low chair beside the bed, so
that the profile of Grammer as she lay cast itself in a keen shadow
upon the whitened wall, her large head being still further magnified by
an enormous turban, which was, really, her petticoat wound in a wreath
round her temples. Grace put the room a little in order, and
approaching the sick woman, said, “I am come, Grammer, as you wish. Do
let us send for the doctor before it gets later.”

“I will not have him,” said Grammer Oliver, decisively.

“Then somebody to sit up with you.”

“Can’t abear it! No; I wanted to see you, Miss Grace, because ’ch have
something on my mind. Dear Miss Grace, _I took that money of the
doctor, after all!_”

“What money?”

“The ten pounds.”

Grace did not quite understand.

“The ten pounds he offered me for my head, because I’ve a large brain.
I signed a paper when I took the money, not feeling concerned about it
at all. I have not liked to tell ye that it was really settled with
him, because you showed such horror at the notion. Well, having thought
it over more at length, I wish I hadn’t done it; and it weighs upon my
mind. John South’s death of fear about the tree makes me think that I
shall die of this....’Ch have been going to ask him again to let me
off, but I hadn’t the face.”

“Why?”

“I’ve spent some of the money—more’n two pounds o’t. It do wherrit me
terribly; and I shall die o’ the thought of that paper I signed with my
holy cross, as South died of his trouble.”

“If you ask him to burn the paper he will, I’m sure, and think no more
of it.”

“‘Ch have done it once already, miss. But he laughed cruel like. ‘Yours
is such a fine brain, Grammer,’ ’er said, ‘that science couldn’t afford
to lose you. Besides, you’ve taken my money.’...Don’t let your father
know of this, please, on no account whatever!”

“No, no. I will let you have the money to return to him.”

Grammer rolled her head negatively upon the pillow. “Even if I should
be well enough to take it to him, he won’t like it. Though why he
should so particular want to look into the works of a poor old woman’s
head-piece like mine when there’s so many other folks about, I don’t
know. I know how he’ll answer me: ‘A lonely person like you, Grammer,’
er woll say. ‘What difference is it to you what becomes of ye when the
breath’s out of your body?’ Oh, it do trouble me! If you only knew how
he do chevy me round the chimmer in my dreams, you’d pity me. How I
could do it I can’t think! But ’ch was always so rackless!...If I only
had anybody to plead for me!”

“Mrs. Melbury would, I am sure.”

“Ay; but he wouldn’t hearken to she! It wants a younger face than hers
to work upon such as he.”

Grace started with comprehension. “You don’t think he would do it for
me?” she said.

“Oh, wouldn’t he!”

“I couldn’t go to him, Grammer, on any account. I don’t know him at
all.”

“Ah, if I were a young lady,” said the artful Grammer, “and could save
a poor old woman’s skellington from a heathen doctor instead of a
Christian grave, I would do it, and be glad to. But nobody will do
anything for a poor old familiar friend but push her out of the way.”

“You are very ungrateful, Grammer, to say that. But you are ill, I
know, and that’s why you speak so. Now believe me, you are not going to
die yet. Remember you told me yourself that you meant to keep him
waiting many a year.”

“Ay, one can joke when one is well, even in old age; but in sickness
one’s gayety falters to grief; and that which seemed small looks large;
and the grim far-off seems near.”

Grace’s eyes had tears in them. “I don’t like to go to him on such an
errand, Grammer,” she said, brokenly. “But I will, to ease your mind.”

It was with extreme reluctance that Grace cloaked herself next morning
for the undertaking. She was all the more indisposed to the journey by
reason of Grammer’s allusion to the effect of a pretty face upon Dr.
Fitzpiers; and hence she most illogically did that which, had the
doctor never seen her, would have operated to stultify the sole motive
of her journey; that is to say, she put on a woollen veil, which hid
all her face except an occasional spark of her eyes.

Her own wish that nothing should be known of this strange and grewsome
proceeding, no less than Grammer Oliver’s own desire, led Grace to take
every precaution against being discovered. She went out by the garden
door as the safest way, all the household having occupations at the
other side. The morning looked forbidding enough when she stealthily
opened it. The battle between frost and thaw was continuing in mid-air:
the trees dripped on the garden-plots, where no vegetables would grow
for the dripping, though they were planted year after year with that
curious mechanical regularity of country people in the face of
hopelessness; the moss which covered the once broad gravel terrace was
swamped; and Grace stood irresolute. Then she thought of poor Grammer,
and her dreams of the doctor running after her, scalpel in hand, and
the possibility of a case so curiously similar to South’s ending in the
same way; thereupon she stepped out into the drizzle.

The nature of her errand, and Grammer Oliver’s account of the compact
she had made, lent a fascinating horror to Grace’s conception of
Fitzpiers. She knew that he was a young man; but her single object in
seeking an interview with him put all considerations of his age and
social aspect from her mind. Standing as she stood, in Grammer Oliver’s
shoes, he was simply a remorseless Jove of the sciences, who would not
have mercy, and would have sacrifice; a man whom, save for this, she
would have preferred to avoid knowing. But since, in such a small
village, it was improbable that any long time could pass without their
meeting, there was not much to deplore in her having to meet him now.

But, as need hardly be said, Miss Melbury’s view of the doctor as a
merciless, unwavering, irresistible scientist was not quite in
accordance with fact. The real Dr. Fitzpiers was a man of too many
hobbies to show likelihood of rising to any great eminence in the
profession he had chosen, or even to acquire any wide practice in the
rural district he had marked out as his field of survey for the
present. In the course of a year his mind was accustomed to pass in a
grand solar sweep through all the zodiacal signs of the intellectual
heaven. Sometimes it was in the Ram, sometimes in the Bull; one month
he would be immersed in alchemy, another in poesy; one month in the
Twins of astrology and astronomy; then in the Crab of German literature
and metaphysics. In justice to him it must be stated that he took such
studies as were immediately related to his own profession in turn with
the rest, and it had been in a month of anatomical ardor without the
possibility of a subject that he had proposed to Grammer Oliver the
terms she had mentioned to her mistress.

As may be inferred from the tone of his conversation with Winterborne,
he had lately plunged into abstract philosophy with much zest; perhaps
his keenly appreciative, modern, unpractical mind found this a realm
more to his taste than any other. Though his aims were desultory,
Fitzpiers’s mental constitution was not without its admirable side; a
keen inquirer he honestly was, even if the midnight rays of his lamp,
visible so far through the trees of Hintock, lighted rank literatures
of emotion and passion as often as, or oftener than, the books and
_matériel_ of science.

But whether he meditated the Muses or the philosophers, the loneliness
of Hintock life was beginning to tell upon his impressionable nature.
Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is
tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful, given certain
conditions, but these are not the conditions which attach to the life
of a professional man who drops down into such a place by mere
accident. They were present to the lives of Winterborne, Melbury, and
Grace; but not to the doctor’s. They are old association—an almost
exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object,
animate and inanimate, within the observer’s horizon. He must know all
about those invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have
traversed the fields which look so gray from his windows; recall whose
creaking plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands
planted the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses
and hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds affect that
particular brake; what domestic dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, or
disappointment have been enacted in the cottages, the mansion, the
street, or on the green. The spot may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity,
convenience; but if it lack memories it will ultimately pall upon him
who settles there without opportunity of intercourse with his kind.

In such circumstances, maybe, an old man dreams of an ideal friend,
till he throws himself into the arms of any impostor who chooses to
wear that title on his face. A young man may dream of an ideal friend
likewise, but some humor of the blood will probably lead him to think
rather of an ideal mistress, and at length the rustle of a woman’s
dress, the sound of her voice, or the transit of her form across the
field of his vision, will enkindle his soul with a flame that blinds
his eyes.

The discovery of the attractive Grace’s name and family would have been
enough in other circumstances to lead the doctor, if not to put her
personality out of his head, to change the character of his interest in
her. Instead of treasuring her image as a rarity, he would at most have
played with it as a toy. He was that kind of a man. But situated here
he could not go so far as amative cruelty. He dismissed all reverential
thought about her, but he could not help taking her seriously.

He went on to imagine the impossible. So far, indeed, did he go in this
futile direction that, as others are wont to do, he constructed
dialogues and scenes in which Grace had turned out to be the mistress
of Hintock Manor-house, the mysterious Mrs. Charmond, particularly
ready and willing to be wooed by himself and nobody else. “Well, she
isn’t that,” he said, finally. “But she’s a very sweet, nice,
exceptional girl.”

The next morning he breakfasted alone, as usual. It was snowing with a
fine-flaked desultoriness just sufficient to make the woodland gray,
without ever achieving whiteness. There was not a single letter for
Fitzpiers, only a medical circular and a weekly newspaper.

To sit before a large fire on such mornings, and read, and gradually
acquire energy till the evening came, and then, with lamp alight, and
feeling full of vigor, to pursue some engrossing subject or other till
the small hours, had hitherto been his practice. But to-day he could
not settle into his chair. That self-contained position he had lately
occupied, in which the only attention demanded was the concentration of
the inner eye, all outer regard being quite gratuitous, seemed to have
been taken by insidious stratagem, and for the first time he had an
interest outside the house. He walked from one window to another, and
became aware that the most irksome of solitudes is not the solitude of
remoteness, but that which is just outside desirable company.

The breakfast hour went by heavily enough, and the next followed, in
the same half-snowy, half-rainy style, the weather now being the
inevitable relapse which sooner or later succeeds a time too radiant
for the season, such as they had enjoyed in the late midwinter at
Hintock. To people at home there these changeful tricks had their
interests; the strange mistakes that some of the more sanguine trees
had made in budding before their month, to be incontinently glued up by
frozen thawings now; the similar sanguine errors of impulsive birds in
framing nests that were now swamped by snow-water, and other such
incidents, prevented any sense of wearisomeness in the minds of the
natives. But these were features of a world not familiar to Fitzpiers,
and the inner visions to which he had almost exclusively attended
having suddenly failed in their power to absorb him, he felt
unutterably dreary.

He wondered how long Miss Melbury was going to stay in Hintock. The
season was unpropitious for accidental encounters with her
out-of-doors, and except by accident he saw not how they were to become
acquainted. One thing was clear—any acquaintance with her could only,
with a due regard to his future, be casual, at most of the nature of a
flirtation; for he had high aims, and they would some day lead him into
other spheres than this.

Thus desultorily thinking he flung himself down upon the couch, which,
as in many draughty old country houses, was constructed with a hood,
being in fact a legitimate development from the settle. He tried to
read as he reclined, but having sat up till three o’clock that morning,
the book slipped from his hand and he fell asleep.




CHAPTER XVIII.


It was at this time that Grace approached the house. Her knock, always
soft in virtue of her nature, was softer to-day by reason of her
strange errand. However, it was heard by the farmer’s wife who kept the
house, and Grace was admitted. Opening the door of the doctor’s room
the housewife glanced in, and imagining Fitzpiers absent, asked Miss
Melbury to enter and wait a few minutes while she should go and find
him, believing him to be somewhere on the premises. Grace acquiesced,
went in, and sat down close to the door.

As soon as the door was shut upon her she looked round the room, and
started at perceiving a handsome man snugly ensconced in the couch,
like the recumbent figure within some canopied mural tomb of the
fifteenth century, except that his hands were by no means clasped in
prayer. She had no doubt that this was the doctor. Awaken him herself
she could not, and her immediate impulse was to go and pull the broad
ribbon with a brass rosette which hung at one side of the fireplace.
But expecting the landlady to re-enter in a moment she abandoned this
intention, and stood gazing in great embarrassment at the reclining
philosopher.

The windows of Fitzpiers’s soul being at present shuttered, he probably
appeared less impressive than in his hours of animation; but the light
abstracted from his material presence by sleep was more than
counterbalanced by the mysterious influence of that state, in a
stranger, upon the consciousness of a beholder so sensitive. So far as
she could criticise at all, she became aware that she had encountered a
specimen of creation altogether unusual in that locality. The occasions
on which Grace had observed men of this stamp were when she had been
far removed away from Hintock, and even then such examples as had met
her eye were at a distance, and mainly of coarser fibre than the one
who now confronted her.

She nervously wondered why the woman had not discovered her mistake and
returned, and went again towards the bell-pull. Approaching the chimney
her back was to Fitzpiers, but she could see him in the glass. An
indescribable thrill passed through her as she perceived that the eyes
of the reflected image were open, gazing wonderingly at her, and under
the curious unexpectedness of the sight she became as if spellbound,
almost powerless to turn her head and regard the original. However, by
an effort she did turn, when there he lay asleep the same as before.

Her startled perplexity as to what he could be meaning was sufficient
to lead her to precipitately abandon her errand. She crossed quickly to
the door, opened and closed it noiselessly, and went out of the house
unobserved. By the time that she had gone down the path and through the
garden door into the lane she had recovered her equanimity. Here,
screened by the hedge, she stood and considered a while.

Drip, drip, drip, fell the rain upon her umbrella and around; she had
come out on such a morning because of the seriousness of the matter in
hand; yet now she had allowed her mission to be stultified by a
momentary tremulousness concerning an incident which perhaps had meant
nothing after all.

In the mean time her departure from the room, stealthy as it had been,
had roused Fitzpiers, and he sat up. In the reflection from the mirror
which Grace had beheld there was no mystery; he had opened his eyes for
a few moments, but had immediately relapsed into unconsciousness, if,
indeed, he had ever been positively awake. That somebody had just left
the room he was certain, and that the lovely form which seemed to have
visited him in a dream was no less than the real presentation of the
person departed he could hardly doubt.

Looking out of the window a few minutes later, down the box-edged
gravel-path which led to the bottom, he saw the garden door gently
open, and through it enter the young girl of his thoughts, Grace having
just at this juncture determined to return and attempt the interview a
second time. That he saw her coming instead of going made him ask
himself if his first impression of her were not a dream indeed. She
came hesitatingly along, carrying her umbrella so low over her head
that he could hardly see her face. When she reached the point where the
raspberry bushes ended and the strawberry bed began, she made a little
pause.

Fitzpiers feared that she might not be coming to him even now, and
hastily quitting the room, he ran down the path to meet her. The nature
of her errand he could not divine, but he was prepared to give her any
amount of encouragement.

“I beg pardon, Miss Melbury,” he said. “I saw you from the window, and
fancied you might imagine that I was not at home—if it is I you were
coming for.”

“I was coming to speak one word to you, nothing more,” she replied.
“And I can say it here.”

“No, no. Please do come in. Well, then, if you will not come into the
house, come as far as the porch.”

Thus pressed she went on to the porch, and they stood together inside
it, Fitzpiers closing her umbrella for her.

“I have merely a request or petition to make,” she said. “My father’s
servant is ill—a woman you know—and her illness is serious.”

“I am sorry to hear it. You wish me to come and see her at once?”

“No; I particularly wish you not to come.”

“Oh, indeed.”

“Yes; and she wishes the same. It would make her seriously worse if you
were to come. It would almost kill her....My errand is of a peculiar
and awkward nature. It is concerning a subject which weighs on her
mind—that unfortunate arrangement she made with you, that you might
have her body—after death.”

“Oh! Grammer Oliver, the old woman with the fine head. Seriously ill,
is she!”

“And _so_ disturbed by her rash compact! I have brought the money
back—will you please return to her the agreement she signed?” Grace
held out to him a couple of five-pound notes which she had kept ready
tucked in her glove.

Without replying or considering the notes, Fitzpiers allowed his
thoughts to follow his eyes, and dwell upon Grace’s personality, and
the sudden close relation in which he stood to her. The porch was
narrow; the rain increased. It ran off the porch and dripped on the
creepers, and from the creepers upon the edge of Grace’s cloak and
skirts.

“The rain is wetting your dress; please do come in,” he said. “It
really makes my heart ache to let you stay here.”

Immediately inside the front door was the door of his sitting-room; he
flung it open, and stood in a coaxing attitude. Try how she would,
Grace could not resist the supplicatory mandate written in the face and
manner of this man, and distressful resignation sat on her as she
glided past him into the room—brushing his coat with her elbow by
reason of the narrowness.

He followed her, shut the door—which she somehow had hoped he would
leave open—and placing a chair for her, sat down. The concern which
Grace felt at the development of these commonplace incidents was, of
course, mainly owing to the strange effect upon her nerves of that view
of him in the mirror gazing at her with open eyes when she had thought
him sleeping, which made her fancy that his slumber might have been a
feint based on inexplicable reasons.

She again proffered the notes; he awoke from looking at her as at a
piece of live statuary, and listened deferentially as she said, “Will
you then reconsider, and cancel the bond which poor Grammer Oliver so
foolishly gave?”

“I’ll cancel it without reconsideration. Though you will allow me to
have my own opinion about her foolishness. Grammer is a very wise
woman, and she was as wise in that as in other things. You think there
was something very fiendish in the compact, do you not, Miss Melbury?
But remember that the most eminent of our surgeons in past times have
entered into such agreements.”

“Not fiendish—strange.”

“Yes, that may be, since strangeness is not in the nature of a thing,
but in its relation to something extrinsic—in this case an unessential
observer.”

He went to his desk, and searching a while found a paper, which be
unfolded and brought to her. A thick cross appeared in ink at the
bottom—evidently from the hand of Grammer. Grace put the paper in her
pocket with a look of much relief.

As Fitzpiers did not take up the money (half of which had come from
Grace’s own purse), she pushed it a little nearer to him. “No, no. I
shall not take it from the old woman,” he said. “It is more strange
than the fact of a surgeon arranging to obtain a subject for dissection
that our acquaintance should be formed out of it.”

“I am afraid you think me uncivil in showing my dislike to the notion.
But I did not mean to be.”

“Oh no, no.” He looked at her, as he had done before, with puzzled
interest. “I cannot think, I cannot think,” he murmured. “Something
bewilders me greatly.” He still reflected and hesitated. “Last night I
sat up very late,” he at last went on, “and on that account I fell into
a little nap on that couch about half an hour ago. And during my few
minutes of unconsciousness I dreamed—what do you think?—that you stood
in the room.”

Should she tell? She merely blushed.

“You may imagine,” Fitzpiers continued, now persuaded that it had,
indeed, been a dream, “that I should not have dreamed of you without
considerable thinking about you first.”

He could not be acting; of that she felt assured.

“I fancied in my vision that you stood there,” he said, pointing to
where she had paused. “I did not see you directly, but reflected in the
glass. I thought, what a lovely creature! The design is for once
carried out. Nature has at last recovered her lost union with the Idea!
My thoughts ran in that direction because I had been reading the work
of a transcendental philosopher last night; and I dare say it was the
dose of Idealism that I received from it that made me scarcely able to
distinguish between reality and fancy. I almost wept when I awoke, and
found that you had appeared to me in Time, but not in Space, alas!”

At moments there was something theatrical in the delivery of
Fitzpiers’s effusion; yet it would have been inexact to say that it was
intrinsically theatrical. It often happens that in situations of
unrestraint, where there is no thought of the eye of criticism, real
feeling glides into a mode of manifestation not easily distinguishable
from rodomontade. A veneer of affectation overlies a bulk of truth,
with the evil consequence, if perceived, that the substance is
estimated by the superficies, and the whole rejected.

Grace, however, was no specialist in men’s manners, and she admired the
sentiment without thinking of the form. And she was embarrassed:
“lovely creature” made explanation awkward to her gentle modesty.

“But can it be,” said he, suddenly, “that you really were here?”

“I have to confess that I have been in the room once before,” faltered
she. “The woman showed me in, and went away to fetch you; but as she
did not return, I left.”

“And you saw me asleep,” he murmured, with the faintest show of
humiliation.

“Yes—_if_ you were asleep, and did not deceive me.”

“Why do you say if?”

“I saw your eyes open in the glass, but as they were closed when I
looked round upon you, I thought you were perhaps deceiving me.

“Never,” said Fitzpiers, fervently—“never could I deceive you.”

Foreknowledge to the distance of a year or so in either of them might
have spoiled the effect of that pretty speech. Never deceive her! But
they knew nothing, and the phrase had its day.

Grace began now to be anxious to terminate the interview, but the
compelling power of Fitzpiers’s atmosphere still held her there. She
was like an inexperienced actress who, having at last taken up her
position on the boards, and spoken her speeches, does not know how to
move off. The thought of Grammer occurred to her. “I’ll go at once and
tell poor Grammer of your generosity,” she said. “It will relieve her
at once.”

“Grammer’s a nervous disease, too—how singular!” he answered,
accompanying her to the door. “One moment; look at this—it is something
which may interest you.”

He had thrown open the door on the other side of the passage, and she
saw a microscope on the table of the confronting room. “Look into it,
please; you’ll be interested,” he repeated.

She applied her eye, and saw the usual circle of light patterned all
over with a cellular tissue of some indescribable sort. “What do you
think that is?” said Fitzpiers.

She did not know.

“That’s a fragment of old John South’s brain, which I am
investigating.”

She started back, not with aversion, but with wonder as to how it
should have got there. Fitzpiers laughed.

“Here am I,” he said, “endeavoring to carry on simultaneously the study
of physiology and transcendental philosophy, the material world and the
ideal, so as to discover if possible a point of contrast between them;
and your finer sense is quite offended!”

“Oh no, Mr. Fitzpiers,” said Grace, earnestly. “It is not so at all. I
know from seeing your light at night how deeply you meditate and work.
Instead of condemning you for your studies, I admire you very much!”

Her face, upturned from the microscope, was so sweet, sincere, and
self-forgetful in its aspect that the susceptible Fitzpiers more than
wished to annihilate the lineal yard which separated it from his own.
Whether anything of the kind showed in his eyes or not, Grace remained
no longer at the microscope, but quickly went her way into the rain.




CHAPTER XIX.


Instead of resuming his investigation of South’s brain, which perhaps
was not so interesting under the microscope as might have been expected
from the importance of that organ in life, Fitzpiers reclined and
ruminated on the interview. Grace’s curious susceptibility to his
presence, though it was as if the currents of her life were disturbed
rather than attracted by him, added a special interest to her general
charm. Fitzpiers was in a distinct degree scientific, being ready and
zealous to interrogate all physical manifestations, but primarily he
was an idealist. He believed that behind the imperfect lay the perfect;
that rare things were to be discovered amid a bulk of commonplace; that
results in a new and untried case might be different from those in
other cases where the conditions had been precisely similar. Regarding
his own personality as one of unbounded possibilities, because it was
his own—notwithstanding that the factors of his life had worked out a
sorry product for thousands—he saw nothing but what was regular in his
discovery at Hintock of an altogether exceptional being of the other
sex, who for nobody else would have had any existence.

One habit of Fitzpiers’s—commoner in dreamers of more advanced age than
in men of his years—was that of talking to himself. He paced round his
room with a selective tread upon the more prominent blooms of the
carpet, and murmured, “This phenomenal girl will be the light of my
life while I am at Hintock; and the special beauty of the situation is
that our attitude and relations to each other will be purely spiritual.
Socially we can never be intimate. Anything like matrimonial intentions
towards her, charming as she is, would be absurd. They would spoil the
ethereal character of my regard. And, indeed, I have other aims on the
practical side of my life.”

Fitzpiers bestowed a regulation thought on the advantageous marriage he
was bound to make with a woman of family as good as his own, and of
purse much longer. But as an object of contemplation for the present,
as objective spirit rather than corporeal presence, Grace Melbury would
serve to keep his soul alive, and to relieve the monotony of his days.

His first notion—acquired from the mere sight of her without
converse—that of an idle and vulgar flirtation with a timber-merchant’s
pretty daughter, grated painfully upon him now that he had found what
Grace intrinsically was. Personal intercourse with such as she could
take no lower form than intellectual communion, and mutual explorations
of the world of thought. Since he could not call at her father’s,
having no practical views, cursory encounters in the lane, in the wood,
coming and going to and from church, or in passing her dwelling, were
what the acquaintance would have to feed on.

Such anticipated glimpses of her now and then realized themselves in
the event. Rencounters of not more than a minute’s duration, frequently
repeated, will build up mutual interest, even an intimacy, in a lonely
place. Theirs grew as imperceptibly as the tree-twigs budded. There
never was a particular moment at which it could be said they became
friends; yet a delicate understanding now existed between two who in
the winter had been strangers.

Spring weather came on rather suddenly, the unsealing of buds that had
long been swollen accomplishing itself in the space of one warm night.
The rush of sap in the veins of the trees could almost be heard. The
flowers of late April took up a position unseen, and looked as if they
had been blooming a long while, though there had been no trace of them
the day before yesterday; birds began not to mind getting wet. In-door
people said they had heard the nightingale, to which out-door people
replied contemptuously that they had heard him a fortnight before.

The young doctor’s practice being scarcely so large as a London
surgeon’s, he frequently walked in the wood. Indeed such practice as he
had he did not follow up with the assiduity that would have been
necessary for developing it to exceptional proportions. One day, book
in hand, he walked in a part of the wood where the trees were mainly
oaks. It was a calm afternoon, and there was everywhere around that
sign of great undertakings on the part of vegetable nature which is apt
to fill reflective human beings who are not undertaking much themselves
with a sudden uneasiness at the contrast. He heard in the distance a
curious sound, something like the quack of a duck, which, though it was
common enough here about this time, was not common to him.

Looking through the trees Fitzpiers soon perceived the origin of the
noise. The barking season had just commenced, and what he had heard was
the tear of the ripping tool as it ploughed its way along the sticky
parting between the trunk and the rind. Melbury did a large business in
bark, and as he was Grace’s father, and possibly might be found on the
spot, Fitzpiers was attracted to the scene even more than he might have
been by its intrinsic interest. When he got nearer he recognized among
the workmen the two Timothys, and Robert Creedle, who probably had been
“lent” by Winterborne; Marty South also assisted.

Each tree doomed to this flaying process was first attacked by Creedle.
With a small billhook he carefully freed the collar of the tree from
twigs and patches of moss which incrusted it to a height of a foot or
two above the ground, an operation comparable to the “little toilet” of
the executioner’s victim. After this it was barked in its erect
position to a point as high as a man could reach. If a fine product of
vegetable nature could ever be said to look ridiculous it was the case
now, when the oak stood naked-legged, and as if ashamed, till the
axe-man came and cut a ring round it, and the two Timothys finished the
work with the crosscut-saw.

As soon as it had fallen the barkers attacked it like locusts, and in a
short time not a particle of rind was left on the trunk and larger
limbs. Marty South was an adept at peeling the upper parts, and there
she stood encaged amid the mass of twigs and buds like a great bird,
running her tool into the smallest branches, beyond the farthest points
to which the skill and patience of the men enabled them to
proceed—branches which, in their lifetime, had swayed high above the
bulk of the wood, and caught the latest and earliest rays of the sun
and moon while the lower part of the forest was still in darkness.

“You seem to have a better instrument than they, Marty,” said
Fitzpiers.

“No, sir,” she said, holding up the tool—a horse’s leg-bone fitted into
a handle and filed to an edge—“’tis only that they’ve less patience
with the twigs, because their time is worth more than mine.”

A little shed had been constructed on the spot, of thatched hurdles and
boughs, and in front of it was a fire, over which a kettle sung.
Fitzpiers sat down inside the shelter, and went on with his reading,
except when he looked up to observe the scene and the actors. The
thought that he might settle here and become welded in with this sylvan
life by marrying Grace Melbury crossed his mind for a moment. Why
should he go farther into the world than where he was? The secret of
quiet happiness lay in limiting the ideas and aspirations; these men’s
thoughts were conterminous with the margin of the Hintock woodlands,
and why should not his be likewise limited—a small practice among the
people around him being the bound of his desires?

Presently Marty South discontinued her operations upon the quivering
boughs, came out from the reclining oak, and prepared tea. When it was
ready the men were called; and Fitzpiers being in a mood to join, sat
down with them.

The latent reason of his lingering here so long revealed itself when
the faint creaking of the joints of a vehicle became audible, and one
of the men said, “Here’s he.” Turning their heads they saw Melbury’s
gig approaching, the wheels muffled by the yielding moss.

The timber-merchant was on foot leading the horse, looking back at
every few steps to caution his daughter, who kept her seat, where and
how to duck her head so as to avoid the overhanging branches. They
stopped at the spot where the bark-ripping had been temporarily
suspended; Melbury cursorily examined the heaps of bark, and drawing
near to where the workmen were sitting down, accepted their shouted
invitation to have a dish of tea, for which purpose he hitched the
horse to a bough. Grace declined to take any of their beverage, and
remained in her place in the vehicle, looking dreamily at the sunlight
that came in thin threads through the hollies with which the oaks were
interspersed.

When Melbury stepped up close to the shelter, he for the first time
perceived that the doctor was present, and warmly appreciated
Fitzpiers’s invitation to sit down on the log beside him.

“Bless my heart, who would have thought of finding you here,” he said,
obviously much pleased at the circumstance. “I wonder now if my
daughter knows you are so nigh at hand. I don’t expect she do.”

He looked out towards the gig wherein Grace sat, her face still turned
in the opposite direction. “She doesn’t see us. Well, never mind: let
her be.”

Grace was indeed quite unconscious of Fitzpiers’s propinquity. She was
thinking of something which had little connection with the scene before
her—thinking of her friend, lost as soon as found, Mrs. Charmond; of
her capricious conduct, and of the contrasting scenes she was possibly
enjoying at that very moment in other climes, to which Grace herself
had hoped to be introduced by her friend’s means. She wondered if this
patronizing lady would return to Hintock during the summer, and whether
the acquaintance which had been nipped on the last occasion of her
residence there would develop on the next.

Melbury told ancient timber-stories as he sat, relating them directly
to Fitzpiers, and obliquely to the men, who had heard them often
before. Marty, who poured out tea, was just saying, “I think I’ll take
out a cup to Miss Grace,” when they heard a clashing of the
gig-harness, and turning round Melbury saw that the horse had become
restless, and was jerking about the vehicle in a way which alarmed its
occupant, though she refrained from screaming. Melbury jumped up
immediately, but not more quickly than Fitzpiers; and while her father
ran to the horse’s head and speedily began to control him, Fitzpiers
was alongside the gig assisting Grace to descend. Her surprise at his
appearance was so great that, far from making a calm and independent
descent, she was very nearly lifted down in his arms. He relinquished
her when she touched ground, and hoped she was not frightened.

“Oh no, not much,” she managed to say. “There was no danger—unless he
had run under the trees where the boughs are low enough to hit my
head.”

“Which was by no means an impossibility, and justifies any amount of
alarm.”

He referred to what he thought he saw written in her face, and she
could not tell him that this had little to do with the horse, but much
with himself. His contiguity had, in fact, the same effect upon her as
on those former occasions when he had come closer to her than
usual—that of producing in her an unaccountable tendency to
tearfulness. Melbury soon put the horse to rights, and seeing that
Grace was safe, turned again to the work-people. His daughter’s nervous
distress had passed off in a few moments, and she said quite gayly to
Fitzpiers as she walked with him towards the group, “There’s destiny in
it, you see. I was doomed to join in your picnic, although I did not
intend to do so.”

Marty prepared her a comfortable place, and she sat down in the circle,
and listened to Fitzpiers while he drew from her father and the
bark-rippers sundry narratives of their fathers’, their grandfathers’,
and their own adventures in these woods; of the mysterious sights they
had seen—only to be accounted for by supernatural agency; of white
witches and black witches; and the standard story of the spirits of the
two brothers who had fought and fallen, and had haunted Hintock House
till they were exorcised by the priest, and compelled to retreat to a
swamp in this very wood, whence they were returning to their old
quarters at the rate of a cock’s stride every New-year’s Day, old
style; hence the local saying, “On New-year’s tide, a cock’s stride.”

It was a pleasant time. The smoke from the little fire of peeled sticks
rose between the sitters and the sunlight, and behind its blue veil
stretched the naked arms of the prostrate trees. The smell of the
uncovered sap mingled with the smell of the burning wood, and the
sticky inner surface of the scattered bark glistened as it revealed its
pale madder hues to the eye. Melbury was so highly satisfied at having
Fitzpiers as a sort of guest that he would have sat on for any length
of time, but Grace, on whom Fitzpiers’s eyes only too frequently
alighted, seemed to think it incumbent upon her to make a show of
going; and her father thereupon accompanied her to the vehicle.

As the doctor had helped her out of it he appeared to think that he had
excellent reasons for helping her in, and performed the attention
lingeringly enough.

“What were you almost in tears about just now?” he asked, softly.

“I don’t know,” she said: and the words were strictly true.

Melbury mounted on the other side, and they drove on out of the grove,
their wheels silently crushing delicate-patterned mosses, hyacinths,
primroses, lords-and-ladies, and other strange and ordinary plants, and
cracking up little sticks that lay across the track. Their way homeward
ran along the crest of a lofty hill, whence on the right they beheld a
wide valley, differing both in feature and atmosphere from that of the
Hintock precincts. It was the cider country, which met the woodland
district on the axis of this hill. Over the vale the air was blue as
sapphire—such a blue as outside that apple-valley was never seen. Under
the blue the orchards were in a blaze of bloom, some of the richly
flowered trees running almost up to where they drove along. Over a gate
which opened down the incline a man leaned on his arms, regarding this
fair promise so intently that he did not observe their passing.

“That was Giles,” said Melbury, when they had gone by.

“Was it? Poor Giles,” said she.

“All that blooth means heavy autumn work for him and his hands. If no
blight happens before the setting the apple yield will be such as we
have not had for years.”

Meanwhile, in the wood they had come from, the men had sat on so long
that they were indisposed to begin work again that evening; they were
paid by the ton, and their time for labor was as they chose. They
placed the last gatherings of bark in rows for the curers, which led
them farther and farther away from the shed; and thus they gradually
withdrew as the sun went down.

Fitzpiers lingered yet. He had opened his book again, though he could
hardly see a word in it, and sat before the dying fire, scarcely
knowing of the men’s departure. He dreamed and mused till his
consciousness seemed to occupy the whole space of the woodland around,
so little was there of jarring sight or sound to hinder perfect unity
with the sentiment of the place. The idea returned upon him of
sacrificing all practical aims to live in calm contentment here, and
instead of going on elaborating new conceptions with infinite pains, to
accept quiet domesticity according to oldest and homeliest notions.
These reflections detained him till the wood was embrowned with the
coming night, and the shy little bird of this dusky time had begun to
pour out all the intensity of his eloquence from a bush not very far
off.

Fitzpiers’s eyes commanded as much of the ground in front as was open.
Entering upon this he saw a figure, whose direction of movement was
towards the spot where he sat. The surgeon was quite shrouded from
observation by the recessed shadow of the hut, and there was no reason
why he should move till the stranger had passed by. The shape resolved
itself into a woman’s; she was looking on the ground, and walking
slowly as if searching for something that had been lost, her course
being precisely that of Mr. Melbury’s gig. Fitzpiers by a sort of
divination jumped to the idea that the figure was Grace’s; her nearer
approach made the guess a certainty.

Yes, she was looking for something; and she came round by the prostrate
trees that would have been invisible but for the white nakedness which
enabled her to avoid them easily. Thus she approached the heap of
ashes, and acting upon what was suggested by a still shining ember or
two, she took a stick and stirred the heap, which thereupon burst into
a flame. On looking around by the light thus obtained she for the first
time saw the illumined face of Fitzpiers, precisely in the spot where
she had left him.

Grace gave a start and a scream: the place had been associated with him
in her thoughts, but she had not expected to find him there still.
Fitzpiers lost not a moment in rising and going to her side.

“I frightened you dreadfully, I know,” he said. “I ought to have
spoken; but I did not at first expect it to be you. I have been sitting
here ever since.”

He was actually supporting her with his arm, as though under the
impression that she was quite overcome, and in danger of falling. As
soon as she could collect her ideas she gently withdrew from his grasp,
and explained what she had returned for: in getting up or down from the
gig, or when sitting by the hut fire, she had dropped her purse.

“Now we will find it,” said Fitzpiers.

He threw an armful of last year’s leaves on to the fire, which made the
flame leap higher, and the encompassing shades to weave themselves into
a denser contrast, turning eve into night in a moment. By this radiance
they groped about on their hands and knees, till Fitzpiers rested on
his elbow, and looked at Grace. “We must always meet in odd
circumstances,” he said; “and this is one of the oddest. I wonder if it
means anything?”

“Oh no, I am sure it doesn’t,” said Grace in haste, quickly assuming an
erect posture. “Pray don’t say it any more.”

“I hope there was not much money in the purse,” said Fitzpiers, rising
to his feet more slowly, and brushing the leaves from his trousers.

“Scarcely any. I cared most about the purse itself, because it was
given me. Indeed, money is of little more use at Hintock than on
Crusoe’s island; there’s hardly any way of spending it.”

They had given up the search when Fitzpiers discerned something by his
foot. “Here it is,” he said, “so that your father, mother, friend, or
_admirer_ will not have his or her feelings hurt by a sense of your
negligence after all.”

“Oh, he knows nothing of what I do now.”

“The admirer?” said Fitzpiers, slyly.

“I don’t know if you would call him that,” said Grace, with simplicity.
“The admirer is a superficial, conditional creature, and this person is
quite different.”

“He has all the cardinal virtues.”

“Perhaps—though I don’t know them precisely.”

“You unconsciously practise them, Miss Melbury, which is better.
According to Schleiermacher they are Self-control, Perseverance,
Wisdom, and Love; and his is the best list that I know.”

“I am afraid poor—” She was going to say that she feared
Winterborne—the giver of the purse years before—had not much
perseverance, though he had all the other three; but she determined to
go no further in this direction, and was silent.

These half-revelations made a perceptible difference in Fitzpiers. His
sense of personal superiority wasted away, and Grace assumed in his
eyes the true aspect of a mistress in her lover’s regard.

“Miss Melbury,” he said, suddenly, “I divine that this virtuous man you
mention has been refused by you?”

She could do no otherwise than admit it.

“I do not inquire without good reason. God forbid that I should kneel
in another’s place at any shrine unfairly. But, my dear Miss Melbury,
now that he is gone, may I draw near?”

“I—I can’t say anything about that!” she cried, quickly. “Because when
a man has been refused you feel pity for him, and like him more than
you did before.”

This increasing complication added still more value to Grace in the
surgeon’s eyes: it rendered her adorable. “But cannot you say?” he
pleaded, distractedly.

“I’d rather not—I think I must go home at once.”

“Oh yes,” said Fitzpiers. But as he did not move she felt it awkward to
walk straight away from him; and so they stood silently together. A
diversion was created by the accident of two birds, that had either
been roosting above their heads or nesting there, tumbling one over the
other into the hot ashes at their feet, apparently engrossed in a
desperate quarrel that prevented the use of their wings. They speedily
parted, however, and flew up, and were seen no more.

“That’s the end of what is called love!” said some one.

The speaker was neither Grace nor Fitzpiers, but Marty South, who
approached with her face turned up to the sky in her endeavor to trace
the birds. Suddenly perceiving Grace, she exclaimed, “Oh, Miss Melbury!
I have been following they pigeons, and didn’t see you. And here’s Mr.
Winterborne!” she continued, shyly, as she looked towards Fitzpiers,
who stood in the background.

“Marty,” Grace interrupted. “I want you to walk home with me—will you?
Come along.” And without lingering longer she took hold of Marty’s arm
and led her away.

They went between the spectral arms of the peeled trees as they lay,
and onward among the growing trees, by a path where there were no oaks,
and no barking, and no Fitzpiers—nothing but copse-wood, between which
the primroses could be discerned in pale bunches. “I didn’t know Mr.
Winterborne was there,” said Marty, breaking the silence when they had
nearly reached Grace’s door.

“Nor was he,” said Grace.

“But, Miss Melbury, I saw him.”

“No,” said Grace. “It was somebody else. Giles Winterborne is nothing
to me.”




CHAPTER XX.


The leaves over Hintock grew denser in their substance, and the
woodland seemed to change from an open filigree to a solid opaque body
of infinitely larger shape and importance. The boughs cast green
shades, which hurt the complexion of the girls who walked there; and a
fringe of them which overhung Mr. Melbury’s garden dripped on his
seed-plots when it rained, pitting their surface all over as with
pock-marks, till Melbury declared that gardens in such a place were no
good at all. The two trees that had creaked all the winter left off
creaking, the whir of the night-jar, however, forming a very
satisfactory continuation of uncanny music from that quarter. Except at
mid-day the sun was not seen complete by the Hintock people, but rather
in the form of numerous little stars staring through the leaves.

Such an appearance it had on Midsummer Eve of this year, and as the
hour grew later, and nine o’clock drew on, the irradiation of the
daytime became broken up by weird shadows and ghostly nooks of
indistinctness. Imagination could trace upon the trunks and boughs
strange faces and figures shaped by the dying lights; the surfaces of
the holly-leaves would here and there shine like peeping eyes, while
such fragments of the sky as were visible between the trunks assumed
the aspect of sheeted forms and cloven tongues. This was before the
moonrise. Later on, when that planet was getting command of the upper
heaven, and consequently shining with an unbroken face into such open
glades as there were in the neighborhood of the hamlet, it became
apparent that the margin of the wood which approached the
timber-merchant’s premises was not to be left to the customary
stillness of that reposeful time.

Fitzpiers having heard a voice or voices, was looking over his garden
gate—where he now looked more frequently than into his books—fancying
that Grace might be abroad with some friends. He was now irretrievably
committed in heart to Grace Melbury, though he was by no means sure
that she was so far committed to him. That the Idea had for once
completely fulfilled itself in the objective substance—which he had
hitherto deemed an impossibility—he was enchanted enough to fancy must
be the case at last. It was not Grace who had passed, however, but
several of the ordinary village girls in a group—some steadily walking,
some in a mood of wild gayety. He quietly asked his landlady, who was
also in the garden, what these girls were intending, and she informed
him that it being Old Midsummer Eve, they were about to attempt some
spell or enchantment which would afford them a glimpse of their future
partners for life. She declared it to be an ungodly performance, and
one which she for her part would never countenance; saying which, she
entered her house and retired to bed.

The young man lit a cigar and followed the bevy of maidens slowly up
the road. They had turned into the wood at an opening between Melbury’s
and Marty South’s; but Fitzpiers could easily track them by their
voices, low as they endeavored to keep their tones.

In the mean time other inhabitants of Little Hintock had become aware
of the nocturnal experiment about to be tried, and were also sauntering
stealthily after the frisky maidens. Miss Melbury had been informed by
Marty South during the day of the proposed peep into futurity, and,
being only a girl like the rest, she was sufficiently interested to
wish to see the issue. The moon was so bright and the night so calm
that she had no difficulty in persuading Mrs. Melbury to accompany her;
and thus, joined by Marty, these went onward in the same direction.

Passing Winterborne’s house, they heard a noise of hammering. Marty
explained it. This was the last night on which his paternal roof would
shelter him, the days of grace since it fell into hand having expired;
and Giles was taking down his cupboards and bedsteads with a view to an
early exit next morning. His encounter with Mrs. Charmond had cost him
dearly.

When they had proceeded a little farther Marty was joined by Grammer
Oliver (who was as young as the youngest in such matters), and Grace
and Mrs. Melbury went on by themselves till they had arrived at the
spot chosen by the village daughters, whose primary intention of
keeping their expedition a secret had been quite defeated. Grace and
her step-mother paused by a holly-tree; and at a little distance stood
Fitzpiers under the shade of a young oak, intently observing Grace, who
was in the full rays of the moon.

He watched her without speaking, and unperceived by any but Marty and
Grammer, who had drawn up on the dark side of the same holly which
sheltered Mrs. and Miss Melbury on its bright side. The two former
conversed in low tones.

“If they two come up in Wood next Midsummer Night they’ll come as one,”
said Grammer, signifying Fitzpiers and Grace. “Instead of my
skellington he’ll carry home her living carcass before long. But though
she’s a lady in herself, and worthy of any such as he, it do seem to me
that he ought to marry somebody more of the sort of Mrs. Charmond, and
that Miss Grace should make the best of Winterborne.”

Marty returned no comment; and at that minute the girls, some of whom
were from Great Hintock, were seen advancing to work the incantation,
it being now about midnight.

“Directly we see anything we’ll run home as fast as we can,” said one,
whose courage had begun to fail her. To this the rest assented, not
knowing that a dozen neighbors lurked in the bushes around.

“I wish we had not thought of trying this,” said another, “but had
contented ourselves with the hole-digging to-morrow at twelve, and
hearing our husbands’ trades. It is too much like having dealings with
the Evil One to try to raise their forms.”

However, they had gone too far to recede, and slowly began to march
forward in a skirmishing line through the trees towards the deeper
recesses of the wood. As far as the listeners could gather, the
particular form of black-art to be practised on this occasion was one
connected with the sowing of hemp-seed, a handful of which was carried
by each girl. At the moment of their advance they looked back, and
discerned the figure of Miss Melbury, who, alone of all the observers,
stood in the full face of the moonlight, deeply engrossed in the
proceedings. By contrast with her life of late years they made her feel
as if she had receded a couple of centuries in the world’s history. She
was rendered doubly conspicuous by her light dress, and after a few
whispered words, one of the girls—a bouncing maiden, plighted to young
Timothy Tangs—asked her if she would join in. Grace, with some
excitement, said that she would, and moved on a little in the rear of
the rest.

Soon the listeners could hear nothing of their proceedings beyond the
faintest occasional rustle of leaves. Grammer whispered again to Marty:
“Why didn’t ye go and try your luck with the rest of the maids?”

“I don’t believe in it,” said Marty, shortly.

“Why, half the parish is here—the silly hussies should have kept it
quiet. I see Mr. Winterborne through the leaves, just come up with
Robert Creedle. Marty, we ought to act the part o’ Providence
sometimes. Do go and tell him that if he stands just behind the bush at
the bottom of the slope, Miss Grace must pass down it when she comes
back, and she will most likely rush into his arms; for as soon as the
clock strikes, they’ll bundle back home—along like hares. I’ve seen
such larries before.”

“Do you think I’d better?” said Marty, reluctantly.

“Oh yes, he’ll bless ye for it.”

“I don’t want that kind of blessing.” But after a moment’s thought she
went and delivered the information; and Grammer had the satisfaction of
seeing Giles walk slowly to the bend in the leafy defile along which
Grace would have to return.

Meanwhile Mrs. Melbury, deserted by Grace, had perceived Fitzpiers and
Winterborne, and also the move of the latter. An improvement on
Grammer’s idea entered the mind of Mrs. Melbury, for she had lately
discerned what her husband had not—that Grace was rapidly fascinating
the surgeon. She therefore drew near to Fitzpiers.

“You should be where Mr. Winterborne is standing,” she said to him,
significantly. “She will run down through that opening much faster than
she went up it, if she is like the rest of the girls.”

Fitzpiers did not require to be told twice. He went across to
Winterborne and stood beside him. Each knew the probable purpose of the
other in standing there, and neither spoke, Fitzpiers scorning to look
upon Winterborne as a rival, and Winterborne adhering to the off-hand
manner of indifference which had grown upon him since his dismissal.

Neither Grammer nor Marty South had seen the surgeon’s manoeuvre, and,
still to help Winterborne, as she supposed, the old woman suggested to
the wood-girl that she should walk forward at the heels of Grace, and
“tole” her down the required way if she showed a tendency to run in
another direction. Poor Marty, always doomed to sacrifice desire to
obligation, walked forward accordingly, and waited as a beacon, still
and silent, for the retreat of Grace and her giddy companions, now
quite out of hearing.

The first sound to break the silence was the distant note of Great
Hintock clock striking the significant hour. About a minute later that
quarter of the wood to which the girls had wandered resounded with the
flapping of disturbed birds; then two or three hares and rabbits
bounded down the glade from the same direction, and after these the
rustling and crackling of leaves and dead twigs denoted the hurried
approach of the adventurers, whose fluttering gowns soon became
visible. Miss Melbury, having gone forward quite in the rear of the
rest, was one of the first to return, and the excitement being
contagious, she ran laughing towards Marty, who still stood as a
hand-post to guide her; then, passing on, she flew round the fatal bush
where the undergrowth narrowed to a gorge. Marty arrived at her heels
just in time to see the result. Fitzpiers had quickly stepped forward
in front of Winterborne, who, disdaining to shift his position, had
turned on his heel, and then the surgeon did what he would not have
thought of doing but for Mrs. Melbury’s encouragement and the sentiment
of an eve which effaced conventionality. Stretching out his arms as the
white figure burst upon him, he captured her in a moment, as if she had
been a bird.

“Oh!” cried Grace, in her fright.

“You are in my arms, dearest,” said Fitzpiers, “and I am going to claim
you, and keep you there all our two lives!”

She rested on him like one utterly mastered, and it was several seconds
before she recovered from this helplessness. Subdued screams and
struggles, audible from neighboring brakes, revealed that there had
been other lurkers thereabout for a similar purpose. Grace, unlike most
of these companions of hers, instead of gasping and writhing, said in a
trembling voice, “Mr. Fitzpiers, will you let me go?”

“Certainly,” he said, laughing; “as soon as you have recovered.”

She waited another few moments, then quietly and firmly pushed him
aside, and glided on her path, the moon whitening her hot blush away.
But it had been enough—new relations between them had begun.

The case of the other girls was different, as has been said. They
wrestled and tittered, only escaping after a desperate struggle.
Fitzpiers could hear these enactments still going on after Grace had
left him, and he remained on the spot where he had caught her,
Winterborne having gone away. On a sudden another girl came bounding
down the same descent that had been followed by Grace—a fine-framed
young woman with naked arms. Seeing Fitzpiers standing there, she said,
with playful effrontery, “May’st kiss me if ‘canst catch me, Tim!”

Fitzpiers recognized her as Suke Damson, a hoydenish damsel of the
hamlet, who was plainly mistaking him for her lover. He was impulsively
disposed to profit by her error, and as soon as she began racing away
he started in pursuit.

On she went under the boughs, now in light, now in shade, looking over
her shoulder at him every few moments and kissing her hand; but so
cunningly dodging about among the trees and moon-shades that she never
allowed him to get dangerously near her. Thus they ran and doubled,
Fitzpiers warming with the chase, till the sound of their companions
had quite died away. He began to lose hope of ever overtaking her, when
all at once, by way of encouragement, she turned to a fence in which
there was a stile and leaped over it. Outside the scene was a changed
one—a meadow, where the half-made hay lay about in heaps, in the
uninterrupted shine of the now high moon.

Fitzpiers saw in a moment that, having taken to open ground, she had
placed herself at his mercy, and he promptly vaulted over after her.
She flitted a little way down the mead, when all at once her light form
disappeared as if it had sunk into the earth. She had buried herself in
one of the hay-cocks.

Fitzpiers, now thoroughly excited, was not going to let her escape him
thus. He approached, and set about turning over the heaps one by one.
As soon as he paused, tantalized and puzzled, he was directed anew by
an imitative kiss which came from her hiding-place, and by snatches of
a local ballad in the smallest voice she could assume:

“O come in from the foggy, foggy dew.”


In a minute or two he uncovered her.

“Oh, ’tis not Tim!” said she, burying her face.

Fitzpiers, however, disregarded her resistance by reason of its
mildness, stooped and imprinted the purposed kiss, then sunk down on
the next hay-cock, panting with his race.

“Whom do you mean by Tim?” he asked, presently.

“My young man, Tim Tangs,” said she.

“Now, honor bright, did you really think it was he?”

“I did at first.”

“But you didn’t at last?”

“I didn’t at last.”

“Do you much mind that it was not?”

“No,” she answered, slyly.

Fitzpiers did not pursue his questioning. In the moonlight Suke looked
very beautiful, the scratches and blemishes incidental to her out-door
occupation being invisible under these pale rays. While they remain
silent the coarse whir of the eternal night-jar burst sarcastically
from the top of a tree at the nearest corner of the wood. Besides this
not a sound of any kind reached their ears, the time of nightingales
being now past, and Hintock lying at a distance of two miles at least.
In the opposite direction the hay-field stretched away into remoteness
till it was lost to the eye in a soft mist.




CHAPTER XXI.


When the general stampede occurred Winterborne had also been looking
on, and encountering one of the girls, had asked her what caused them
all to fly.

She said with solemn breathlessness that they had seen something very
different from what they had hoped to see, and that she for one would
never attempt such unholy ceremonies again. “We saw Satan pursuing us
with his hour-glass. It was terrible!”

This account being a little incoherent, Giles went forward towards the
spot from which the girls had retreated. After listening there a few
minutes he heard slow footsteps rustling over the leaves, and looking
through a tangled screen of honeysuckle which hung from a bough, he saw
in the open space beyond a short stout man in evening-dress, carrying
on one arm a light overcoat and also his hat, so awkwardly arranged as
possibly to have suggested the “hour-glass” to his timid observers—if
this were the person whom the girls had seen. With the other hand he
silently gesticulated and the moonlight falling upon his bare brow
showed him to have dark hair and a high forehead of the shape seen
oftener in old prints and paintings than in real life. His curious and
altogether alien aspect, his strange gestures, like those of one who is
rehearsing a scene to himself, and the unusual place and hour, were
sufficient to account for any trepidation among the Hintock daughters
at encountering him.

He paused, and looked round, as if he had forgotten where he was; not
observing Giles, who was of the color of his environment. The latter
advanced into the light. The gentleman held up his hand and came
towards Giles, the two meeting half-way.

“I have lost my way,” said the stranger. “Perhaps you can put me in the
path again.” He wiped his forehead with the air of one suffering under
an agitation more than that of simple fatigue.

“The turnpike-road is over there,” said Giles

“I don’t want the turnpike-road,” said the gentleman, impatiently. “I
came from that. I want Hintock House. Is there not a path to it across
here?”

“Well, yes, a sort of path. But it is hard to find from this point.
I’ll show you the way, sir, with great pleasure.”

“Thanks, my good friend. The truth is that I decided to walk across the
country after dinner from the hotel at Sherton, where I am staying for
a day or two. But I did not know it was so far.”

“It is about a mile to the house from here.”

They walked on together. As there was no path, Giles occasionally
stepped in front and bent aside the underboughs of the trees to give
his companion a passage, saying every now and then when the twigs, on
being released, flew back like whips, “Mind your eyes, sir.” To which
the stranger replied, “Yes, yes,” in a preoccupied tone.

So they went on, the leaf-shadows running in their usual quick
succession over the forms of the pedestrians, till the stranger said,

“Is it far?”

“Not much farther,” said Winterborne. “The plantation runs up into a
corner here, close behind the house.” He added with hesitation, “You
know, I suppose, sir, that Mrs. Charmond is not at home?”

“You mistake,” said the other, quickly. “Mrs. Charmond has been away
for some time, but she’s at home now.”

Giles did not contradict him, though he felt sure that the gentleman
was wrong.

“You are a native of this place?” the stranger said.

“Yes.”

“Well, you are happy in having a home. It is what I don’t possess.”

“You come from far, seemingly?”

“I come now from the south of Europe.”

“Oh, indeed, sir. You are an Italian, or Spanish, or French gentleman,
perhaps?”

“I am not either.”

Giles did not fill the pause which ensued, and the gentleman, who
seemed of an emotional nature, unable to resist friendship, at length
answered the question.

“I am an Italianized American, a South Carolinian by birth,” he said.
“I left my native country on the failure of the Southern cause, and
have never returned to it since.”

He spoke no more about himself, and they came to the verge of the wood.
Here, striding over the fence out upon the upland sward, they could at
once see the chimneys of the house in the gorge immediately beneath
their position, silent, still, and pale.

“Can you tell me the time?” the gentleman asked. “My watch has
stopped.”

“It is between twelve and one,” said Giles.

His companion expressed his astonishment. “I thought it between nine
and ten at latest! Dear me—dear me!”

He now begged Giles to return, and offered him a gold coin, which
looked like a sovereign, for the assistance rendered. Giles declined to
accept anything, to the surprise of the stranger, who, on putting the
money back into his pocket, said, awkwardly, “I offered it because I
want you to utter no word about this meeting with me. Will you
promise?”

Winterborne promised readily. He thereupon stood still while the other
ascended the slope. At the bottom he looked back dubiously. Giles would
no longer remain when he was so evidently desired to leave, and
returned through the boughs to Hintock.

He suspected that this man, who seemed so distressed and melancholy,
might be that lover and persistent wooer of Mrs. Charmond whom he had
heard so frequently spoken of, and whom it was said she had treated
cavalierly. But he received no confirmation of his suspicion beyond a
report which reached him a few days later that a gentleman had called
up the servants who were taking care of Hintock House at an hour past
midnight; and on learning that Mrs. Charmond, though returned from
abroad, was as yet in London, he had sworn bitterly, and gone away
without leaving a card or any trace of himself.

The girls who related the story added that he sighed three times before
he swore, but this part of the narrative was not corroborated. Anyhow,
such a gentleman had driven away from the hotel at Sherton next day in
a carriage hired at that inn.




CHAPTER XXII.


The sunny, leafy week which followed the tender doings of Midsummer Eve
brought a visitor to Fitzpiers’s door; a voice that he knew sounded in
the passage. Mr. Melbury had called. At first he had a particular
objection to enter the parlor, because his boots were dusty, but as the
surgeon insisted he waived the point and came in.

Looking neither to the right nor to the left, hardly at Fitzpiers
himself, he put his hat under his chair, and with a preoccupied gaze at
the floor, he said, “I’ve called to ask you, doctor, quite privately, a
question that troubles me. I’ve a daughter, Grace, an only daughter, as
you may have heard. Well, she’s been out in the dew—on Midsummer Eve in
particular she went out in thin slippers to watch some vagary of the
Hintock maids—and she’s got a cough, a distinct hemming and hacking,
that makes me uneasy. Now, I have decided to send her away to some
seaside place for a change—”

“Send her away!” Fitzpiers’s countenance had fallen.

“Yes. And the question is, where would you advise me to send her?”

The timber-merchant had happened to call at a moment when Fitzpiers was
at the spring-tide of a sentiment that Grace was a necessity of his
existence. The sudden pressure of her form upon his breast as she came
headlong round the bush had never ceased to linger with him, ever since
he adopted the manoeuvre for which the hour and the moonlight and the
occasion had been the only excuse. Now she was to be sent away.
Ambition? it could be postponed. Family? culture and reciprocity of
tastes had taken the place of family nowadays. He allowed himself to be
carried forward on the wave of his desire.

“How strange, how very strange it is,” he said, “that you should have
come to me about her just now. I have been thinking every day of coming
to you on the very same errand.”

“Ah!—you have noticed, too, that her health——”

“I have noticed nothing the matter with her health, because there is
nothing. But, Mr. Melbury, I have seen your daughter several times by
accident. I have admired her infinitely, and I was coming to ask you if
I may become better acquainted with her—pay my addresses to her?”

Melbury was looking down as he listened, and did not see the air of
half-misgiving at his own rashness that spread over Fitzpiers’s face as
he made this declaration.

“You have—got to know her?” said Melbury, a spell of dead silence
having preceded his utterance, during which his emotion rose with
almost visible effect.

“Yes,” said Fitzpiers.

“And you wish to become better acquainted with her? You mean with a
view to marriage—of course that is what you mean?”

“Yes,” said the young man. “I mean, get acquainted with her, with a
view to being her accepted lover; and if we suited each other, what
would naturally follow.”

The timber-merchant was much surprised, and fairly agitated; his hand
trembled as he laid by his walking-stick. “This takes me unawares,”
said he, his voice wellnigh breaking down. “I don’t mean that there is
anything unexpected in a gentleman being attracted by her; but it did
not occur to me that it would be you. I always said,” continued he,
with a lump in his throat, “that my Grace would make a mark at her own
level some day. That was why I educated her. I said to myself, ‘I’ll do
it, cost what it may;’ though her mother-law was pretty frightened at
my paying out so much money year after year. I knew it would tell in
the end. ‘Where you’ve not good material to work on, such doings would
be waste and vanity,’ I said. ‘But where you have that material it is
sure to be worth while.’”

“I am glad you don’t object,” said Fitzpiers, almost wishing that Grace
had not been quite so cheap for him.

“If she is willing I don’t object, certainly. Indeed,” added the honest
man, “it would be deceit if I were to pretend to feel anything else
than highly honored personally; and it is a great credit to her to have
drawn to her a man of such good professional station and venerable old
family. That huntsman-fellow little thought how wrong he was about her!
Take her and welcome, sir.”

“I’ll endeavor to ascertain her mind.”

“Yes, yes. But she will be agreeable, I should think. She ought to be.”

“I hope she may. Well, now you’ll expect to see me frequently.”

“Oh yes. But, name it all—about her cough, and her going away. I had
quite forgot that that was what I came about.”

“I assure you,” said the surgeon, “that her cough can only be the
result of a slight cold, and it is not necessary to banish her to any
seaside place at all.”

Melbury looked unconvinced, doubting whether he ought to take
Fitzpiers’s professional opinion in circumstances which naturally led
him to wish to keep her there. The doctor saw this, and honestly
dreading to lose sight of her, he said, eagerly, “Between ourselves, if
I am successful with her I will take her away myself for a month or
two, as soon as we are married, which I hope will be before the chilly
weather comes on. This will be so very much better than letting her go
now.”

The proposal pleased Melbury much. There could be hardly any danger in
postponing any desirable change of air as long as the warm weather
lasted, and for such a reason. Suddenly recollecting himself, he said,
“Your time must be precious, doctor. I’ll get home-along. I am much
obliged to ye. As you will see her often, you’ll discover for yourself
if anything serious is the matter.”

“I can assure you it is nothing,” said Fitzpiers, who had seen Grace
much oftener already than her father knew of.

When he was gone Fitzpiers paused, silent, registering his sensations,
like a man who has made a plunge for a pearl into a medium of which he
knows not the density or temperature. But he had done it, and Grace was
the sweetest girl alive.

As for the departed visitor, his own last words lingered in Melbury’s
ears as he walked homeward; he felt that what he had said in the
emotion of the moment was very stupid, ungenteel, and unsuited to a
dialogue with an educated gentleman, the smallness of whose practice
was more than compensated by the former greatness of his family. He had
uttered thoughts before they were weighed, and almost before they were
shaped. They had expressed in a certain sense his feeling at
Fitzpiers’s news, but yet they were not right. Looking on the ground,
and planting his stick at each tread as if it were a flag-staff, he
reached his own precincts, where, as he passed through the court, he
automatically stopped to look at the men working in the shed and
around. One of them asked him a question about wagon-spokes.

“Hey?” said Melbury, looking hard at him. The man repeated the words.

Melbury stood; then turning suddenly away without answering, he went up
the court and entered the house. As time was no object with the
journeymen, except as a thing to get past, they leisurely surveyed the
door through which he had disappeared.

“What maggot has the gaffer got in his head now?” said Tangs the elder.
“Sommit to do with that chiel of his! When you’ve got a maid of yer
own, John Upjohn, that costs ye what she costs him, that will take the
squeak out of your Sunday shoes, John! But you’ll never be tall enough
to accomplish such as she; and ’tis a lucky thing for ye, John, as
things be. Well, he ought to have a dozen—that would bring him to
reason. I see ’em walking together last Sunday, and when they came to a
puddle he lifted her over like a halfpenny doll. He ought to have a
dozen; he’d let ’em walk through puddles for themselves then.”

Meanwhile Melbury had entered the house with the look of a man who sees
a vision before him. His wife was in the room. Without taking off his
hat he sat down at random.

“Luce—we’ve done it!” he said. “Yes—the thing is as I expected. The
spell, that I foresaw might be worked, has worked. She’s done it, and
done it well. Where is she—Grace, I mean?”

“Up in her room—what has happened!”

Mr. Melbury explained the circumstances as coherently as he could. “I
told you so,” he said. “A maid like her couldn’t stay hid long, even in
a place like this. But where is Grace? Let’s have her down.
Here—Gra-a-ace!”

She appeared after a reasonable interval, for she was sufficiently
spoiled by this father of hers not to put herself in a hurry, however
impatient his tones. “What is it, father?” said she, with a smile.

“Why, you scamp, what’s this you’ve been doing? Not home here more than
six months, yet, instead of confining yourself to your father’s rank,
making havoc in the educated classes.”

Though accustomed to show herself instantly appreciative of her
father’s meanings, Grace was fairly unable to look anyhow but at a loss
now.

“No, no—of course you don’t know what I mean, or you pretend you don’t;
though, for my part, I believe women can see these things through a
double hedge. But I suppose I must tell ye. Why, you’ve flung your
grapnel over the doctor, and he’s coming courting forthwith.”

“Only think of that, my dear! Don’t you feel it a triumph?” said Mrs.
Melbury.

“Coming courting! I’ve done nothing to make him,” Grace exclaimed.

“’Twasn’t necessary that you should, ’Tis voluntary that rules in these
things....Well, he has behaved very honorably, and asked my consent.
You’ll know what to do when he gets here, I dare say. I needn’t tell
you to make it all smooth for him.”

“You mean, to lead him on to marry me?”

“I do. Haven’t I educated you for it?”

Grace looked out of the window and at the fireplace with no animation
in her face. “Why is it settled off-hand in this way?” said she,
coquettishly. “You’ll wait till you hear what I think of him, I
suppose?”

“Oh yes, of course. But you see what a good thing it will be.”

She weighed the statement without speaking.

“You will be restored to the society you’ve been taken away from,”
continued her father; “for I don’t suppose he’ll stay here long.”

She admitted the advantage; but it was plain that though Fitzpiers
exercised a certain fascination over her when he was present, or even
more, an almost psychic influence, and though his impulsive act in the
wood had stirred her feelings indescribably, she had never regarded him
in the light of a destined husband. “I don’t know what to answer,” she
said. “I have learned that he is very clever.”

“He’s all right, and he’s coming here to see you.”

A premonition that she could not resist him if he came strangely moved
her. “Of course, father, you remember that it is only lately that
Giles—”

“You know that you can’t think of him. He has given up all claim to
you.”

She could not explain the subtleties of her feeling as he could state
his opinion, even though she had skill in speech, and her father had
none. That Fitzpiers acted upon her like a dram, exciting her, throwing
her into a novel atmosphere which biassed her doings until the
influence was over, when she felt something of the nature of regret for
the mood she had experienced—still more if she reflected on the silent,
almost sarcastic, criticism apparent in Winterborne’s air towards
her—could not be told to this worthy couple in words.

It so happened that on this very day Fitzpiers was called away from
Hintock by an engagement to attend some medical meetings, and his
visits, therefore, did not begin at once. A note, however, arrived from
him addressed to Grace, deploring his enforced absence. As a material
object this note was pretty and superfine, a note of a sort that she
had been unaccustomed to see since her return to Hintock, except when a
school friend wrote to her—a rare instance, for the girls were
respecters of persons, and many cooled down towards the timber-dealer’s
daughter when she was out of sight. Thus the receipt of it pleased her,
and she afterwards walked about with a reflective air.

In the evening her father, who knew that the note had come, said, “Why
be ye not sitting down to answer your letter? That’s what young folks
did in my time.”

She replied that it did not require an answer.

“Oh, you know best,” he said. Nevertheless, he went about his business
doubting if she were right in not replying; possibly she might be so
mismanaging matters as to risk the loss of an alliance which would
bring her much happiness.

Melbury’s respect for Fitzpiers was based less on his professional
position, which was not much, than on the standing of his family in the
county in by-gone days. That implicit faith in members of
long-established families, as such, irrespective of their personal
condition or character, which is still found among old-fashioned people
in the rural districts reached its full intensity in Melbury. His
daughter’s suitor was descended from a family he had heard of in his
grandfather’s time as being once great, a family which had conferred
its name upon a neighboring village; how, then, could anything be amiss
in this betrothal?

“I must keep her up to this,” he said to his wife. “She sees it is for
her happiness; but still she’s young, and may want a little prompting
from an older tongue.”




CHAPTER XXIII.


With this in view he took her out for a walk, a custom of his when he
wished to say anything specially impressive. Their way was over the top
of that lofty ridge dividing their woodland from the cider district,
whence they had in the spring beheld the miles of apple-trees in bloom.
All was now deep green. The spot recalled to Grace’s mind the last
occasion of her presence there, and she said, “The promise of an
enormous apple-crop is fulfilling itself, is it not? I suppose Giles is
getting his mills and presses ready.”

This was just what her father had not come there to talk about. Without
replying he raised his arm, and moved his finger till he fixed it at a
point. “There,” he said, “you see that plantation reaching over the
hill like a great slug, and just behind the hill a particularly green
sheltered bottom? That’s where Mr. Fitzpiers’s family were lords of the
manor for I don’t know how many hundred years, and there stands the
village of Buckbury Fitzpiers. A wonderful property ’twas—wonderful!”

“But they are not lords of the manor there now.”

“Why, no. But good and great things die as well as little and foolish.
The only ones representing the family now, I believe, are our doctor
and a maiden lady living I don’t know where. You can’t help being
happy, Grace, in allying yourself with such a romantical family. You’ll
feel as if you’ve stepped into history.”

“We’ve been at Hintock as long as they’ve been at Buckbury; is it not
so? You say our name occurs in old deeds continually.”

“Oh yes—as yeomen, copyholders, and such like. But think how much
better this will be for ’ee. You’ll be living a high intellectual life,
such as has now become natural to you; and though the doctor’s practice
is small here, he’ll no doubt go to a dashing town when he’s got his
hand in, and keep a stylish carriage, and you’ll be brought to know a
good many ladies of excellent society. If you should ever meet me then,
Grace, you can drive past me, looking the other way. I shouldn’t expect
you to speak to me, or wish such a thing, unless it happened to be in
some lonely, private place where ’twouldn’t lower ye at all. Don’t
think such men as neighbor Giles your equal. He and I shall be good
friends enough, but he’s not for the like of you. He’s lived our rough
and homely life here, and his wife’s life must be rough and homely
likewise.”

So much pressure could not but produce some displacement. As Grace was
left very much to herself, she took advantage of one fine day before
Fitzpiers’s return to drive into the aforesaid vale where stood the
village of Buckbury Fitzpiers. Leaving her father’s man at the inn with
the horse and gig, she rambled onward to the ruins of a castle, which
stood in a field hard by. She had no doubt that it represented the
ancient stronghold of the Fitzpiers family.

The remains were few, and consisted mostly of remnants of the lower
vaulting, supported on low stout columns surmounted by the _crochet_
capital of the period. The two or three arches of these vaults that
were still in position were utilized by the adjoining farmer as shelter
for his calves, the floor being spread with straw, amid which the young
creatures rustled, cooling their thirsty tongues by licking the quaint
Norman carving, which glistened with the moisture. It was a degradation
of even such a rude form of art as this to be treatad so grossly, she
thought, and for the first time the family of Fitzpiers assumed in her
imagination the hues of a melancholy romanticism.

It was soon time to drive home, and she traversed the distance with a
preoccupied mind. The idea of so modern a man in science and aesthetics
as the young surgeon springing out of relics so ancient was a kind of
novelty she had never before experienced. The combination lent him a
social and intellectual interest which she dreaded, so much weight did
it add to the strange influence he exercised upon her whenever he came
near her.

In an excitement which was not love, not ambition, rather a fearful
consciousness of hazard in the air, she awaited his return.

Meanwhile her father was awaiting him also. In his house there was an
old work on medicine, published towards the end of the last century,
and to put himself in harmony with events Melbury spread this work on
his knees when he had done his day’s business, and read about Galen,
Hippocrates, and Herophilus—of the dogmatic, the empiric, the
hermetical, and other sects of practitioners that have arisen in
history; and thence proceeded to the classification of maladies and the
rules for their treatment, as laid down in this valuable book with
absolute precision. Melbury regretted that the treatise was so old,
fearing that he might in consequence be unable to hold as complete a
conversation as he could wish with Mr. Fitzpiers, primed, no doubt,
with more recent discoveries.

The day of Fitzpiers’s return arrived, and he sent to say that he would
call immediately. In the little time that was afforded for putting the
house in order the sweeping of Melbury’s parlor was as the sweeping of
the parlor at the Interpreter’s which wellnigh choked the Pilgrim. At
the end of it Mrs. Melbury sat down, folded her hands and lips, and
waited. Her husband restlessly walked in and out from the timber-yard,
stared at the interior of the room, jerked out “ay, ay,” and retreated
again. Between four and five Fitzpiers arrived, hitching his horse to
the hook outside the door.

As soon as he had walked in and perceived that Grace was not in the
room, he seemed to have a misgiving. Nothing less than her actual
presence could long keep him to the level of this impassioned
enterprise, and that lacking he appeared as one who wished to retrace
his steps.

He mechanically talked at what he considered a woodland matron’s level
of thought till a rustling was heard on the stairs, and Grace came in.
Fitzpiers was for once as agitated as she. Over and above the genuine
emotion which she raised in his heart there hung the sense that he was
casting a die by impulse which he might not have thrown by judgment.

Mr. Melbury was not in the room. Having to attend to matters in the
yard, he had delayed putting on his afternoon coat and waistcoat till
the doctor’s appearance, when, not wishing to be backward in receiving
him, he entered the parlor hastily buttoning up those garments. Grace’s
fastidiousness was a little distressed that Fitzpiers should see by
this action the strain his visit was putting upon her father; and to
make matters worse for her just then, old Grammer seemed to have a
passion for incessantly pumping in the back kitchen, leaving the doors
open so that the banging and splashing were distinct above the parlor
conversation.

Whenever the chat over the tea sank into pleasant desultoriness Mr.
Melbury broke in with speeches of labored precision on very remote
topics, as if he feared to let Fitzpiers’s mind dwell critically on the
subject nearest the hearts of all. In truth a constrained manner was
natural enough in Melbury just now, for the greatest interest of his
life was reaching its crisis. Could the real have been beheld instead
of the corporeal merely, the corner of the room in which he sat would
have been filled with a form typical of anxious suspense, large-eyed,
tight-lipped, awaiting the issue. That paternal hopes and fears so
intense should be bound up in the person of one child so peculiarly
circumstanced, and not have dispersed themselves over the larger field
of a whole family, involved dangerous risks to future happiness.

Fitzpiers did not stay more than an hour, but that time had apparently
advanced his sentiments towards Grace, once and for all, from a vaguely
liquescent to an organic shape. She would not have accompanied him to
the door in response to his whispered “Come!” if her mother had not
said in a matter-of-fact way, “Of course, Grace; go to the door with
Mr. Fitzpiers.” Accordingly Grace went, both her parents remaining in
the room. When the young pair were in the great brick-floored hall the
lover took the girl’s hand in his, drew it under his arm, and thus led
her on to the door, where he stealthily kissed her.

She broke from him trembling, blushed and turned aside, hardly knowing
how things had advanced to this. Fitzpiers drove off, kissing his hand
to her, and waving it to Melbury who was visible through the window.
Her father returned the surgeon’s action with a great flourish of his
own hand and a satisfied smile.

The intoxication that Fitzpiers had, as usual, produced in Grace’s
brain during the visit passed off somewhat with his withdrawal. She
felt like a woman who did not know what she had been doing for the
previous hour, but supposed with trepidation that the afternoon’s
proceedings, though vague, had amounted to an engagement between
herself and the handsome, coercive, irresistible Fitzpiers.

This visit was a type of many which followed it during the long summer
days of that year. Grace was borne along upon a stream of reasonings,
arguments, and persuasions, supplemented, it must be added, by
inclinations of her own at times. No woman is without aspirations,
which may be innocent enough within certain limits; and Grace had been
so trained socially, and educated intellectually, as to see clearly
enough a pleasure in the position of wife to such a man as Fitzpiers.
His material standing of itself, either present or future, had little
in it to give her ambition, but the possibilities of a refined and
cultivated inner life, of subtle psychological intercourse, had their
charm. It was this rather than any vulgar idea of marrying well which
caused her to float with the current, and to yield to the immense
influence which Fitzpiers exercised over her whenever she shared his
society.

Any observer would shrewdly have prophesied that whether or not she
loved him as yet in the ordinary sense, she was pretty sure to do so in
time.

One evening just before dusk they had taken a rather long walk
together, and for a short cut homeward passed through the shrubberies
of Hintock House—still deserted, and still blankly confronting with its
sightless shuttered windows the surrounding foliage and slopes. Grace
was tired, and they approached the wall, and sat together on one of the
stone sills—still warm with the sun that had been pouring its rays upon
them all the afternoon.

“This place would just do for us, would it not, dearest,” said her
betrothed, as they sat, turning and looking idly at the old facade.

“Oh yes,” said Grace, plainly showing that no such fancy had ever
crossed her mind. “She is away from home still,” Grace added in a
minute, rather sadly, for she could not forget that she had somehow
lost the valuable friendship of the lady of this bower.

“Who is?—oh, you mean Mrs. Charmond. Do you know, dear, that at one
time I thought you lived here.”

“Indeed!” said Grace. “How was that?”

He explained, as far as he could do so without mentioning his
disappointment at finding it was otherwise; and then went on: “Well,
never mind that. Now I want to ask you something. There is one detail
of our wedding which I am sure you will leave to me. My inclination is
not to be married at the horrid little church here, with all the yokels
staring round at us, and a droning parson reading.”

“Where, then, can it be? At a church in town?”

“No. Not at a church at all. At a registry office. It is a quieter,
snugger, and more convenient place in every way.”

“Oh,” said she, with real distress. “How can I be married except at
church, and with all my dear friends round me?”

“Yeoman Winterborne among them.”

“Yes—why not? You know there was nothing serious between him and me.”

“You see, dear, a noisy bell-ringing marriage at church has this
objection in our case: it would be a thing of report a long way round.
Now I would gently, as gently as possible, indicate to you how
inadvisable such publicity would be if we leave Hintock, and I purchase
the practice that I contemplate purchasing at Budmouth—hardly more than
twenty miles off. Forgive my saying that it will be far better if
nobody there knows where you come from, nor anything about your
parents. Your beauty and knowledge and manners will carry you anywhere
if you are not hampered by such retrospective criticism.”

“But could it not be a quiet ceremony, even at church?” she pleaded.

“I don’t see the necessity of going there!” he said, a trifle
impatiently. “Marriage is a civil contract, and the shorter and simpler
it is made the better. People don’t go to church when they take a
house, or even when they make a will.”

“Oh, Edgar—I don’t like to hear you speak like that.”

“Well, well—I didn’t mean to. But I have mentioned as much to your
father, who has made no objection; and why should you?”

She gave way, deeming the point one on which she ought to allow
sentiment to give way to policy—if there were indeed policy in his
plan. But she was indefinably depressed as they walked homeward.




CHAPTER XXIV.


He left her at the door of her father’s house. As he receded, and was
clasped out of sight by the filmy shades, he impressed Grace as a man
who hardly appertained to her existence at all. Cleverer, greater than
herself, one outside her mental orbit, as she considered him, he seemed
to be her ruler rather than her equal, protector, and dear familiar
friend.

The disappointment she had experienced at his wish, the shock given to
her girlish sensibilities by his irreverent views of marriage, together
with the sure and near approach of the day fixed for committing her
future to his keeping, made her so restless that she could scarcely
sleep at all that night. She rose when the sparrows began to walk out
of the roof-holes, sat on the floor of her room in the dim light, and
by-and-by peeped out behind the window-curtains. It was even now day
out-of-doors, though the tones of morning were feeble and wan, and it
was long before the sun would be perceptible in this overshadowed vale.
Not a sound came from any of the out-houses as yet. The tree-trunks,
the road, the out-buildings, the garden, every object wore that aspect
of mesmeric fixity which the suspensive quietude of daybreak lends to
such scenes. Outside her window helpless immobility seemed to be
combined with intense consciousness; a meditative inertness possessed
all things, oppressively contrasting with her own active emotions.
Beyond the road were some cottage roofs and orchards; over these roofs
and over the apple-trees behind, high up the slope, and backed by the
plantation on the crest, was the house yet occupied by her future
husband, the rough-cast front showing whitely through its creepers. The
window-shutters were closed, the bedroom curtains closely drawn, and
not the thinnest coil of smoke rose from the rugged chimneys.

Something broke the stillness. The front door of the house she was
gazing at opened softly, and there came out into the porch a female
figure, wrapped in a large shawl, beneath which was visible the white
skirt of a long loose garment. A gray arm, stretching from within the
porch, adjusted the shawl over the woman’s shoulders; it was withdrawn
and disappeared, the door closing behind her.

The woman went quickly down the box-edged path between the raspberries
and currants, and as she walked her well-developed form and gait
betrayed her individuality. It was Suke Damson, the affianced one of
simple young Tim Tangs. At the bottom of the garden she entered the
shelter of the tall hedge, and only the top of her head could be seen
hastening in the direction of her own dwelling.

Grace had recognized, or thought she recognized, in the gray arm
stretching from the porch, the sleeve of a dressing-gown which Mr.
Fitzpiers had been wearing on her own memorable visit to him. Her face
fired red. She had just before thought of dressing herself and taking a
lonely walk under the trees, so coolly green this early morning; but
she now sat down on her bed and fell into reverie. It seemed as if
hardly any time had passed when she heard the household moving briskly
about, and breakfast preparing down-stairs; though, on rousing herself
to robe and descend, she found that the sun was throwing his rays
completely over the tree-tops, a progress of natural phenomena denoting
that at least three hours had elapsed since she last looked out of the
window.

When attired she searched about the house for her father; she found him
at last in the garden, stooping to examine the potatoes for signs of
disease. Hearing her rustle, he stood up and stretched his back and
arms, saying, “Morning t’ye, Gracie. I congratulate ye. It is only a
month to-day to the time!”

She did not answer, but, without lifting her dress, waded between the
dewy rows of tall potato-green into the middle of the plot where he
was.

“I have been thinking very much about my position this morning—ever
since it was light,” she began, excitedly, and trembling so that she
could hardly stand. “And I feel it is a false one. I wish not to marry
Mr. Fitzpiers. I wish not to marry anybody; but I’ll marry Giles
Winterborne if you say I must as an alternative.”

Her father’s face settled into rigidity, he turned pale, and came
deliberately out of the plot before he answered her. She had never seen
him look so incensed before.

“Now, hearken to me,” he said. “There’s a time for a woman to alter her
mind; and there’s a time when she can no longer alter it, if she has
any right eye to her parents’ honor and the seemliness of things. That
time has come. I won’t say to ye, you _shall_ marry him. But I will say
that if you refuse, I shall forever be ashamed and a-weary of ye as a
daughter, and shall look upon you as the hope of my life no more. What
do you know about life and what it can bring forth, and how you ought
to act to lead up to best ends? Oh, you are an ungrateful maid, Grace;
you’ve seen that fellow Giles, and he has got over ye; that’s where the
secret lies, I’ll warrant me!”

“No, father, no! It is not Giles—it is something I cannot tell you of—”

“Well, make fools of us all; make us laughing-stocks; break it off;
have your own way.”

“But who knows of the engagement as yet? how can breaking it disgrace
you?”

Melbury then by degrees admitted that he had mentioned the engagement
to this acquaintance and to that, till she perceived that in his
restlessness and pride he had published it everywhere. She went
dismally away to a bower of laurel at the top of the garden. Her father
followed her.

“It is that Giles Winterborne!” he said, with an upbraiding gaze at
her.

“No, it is not; though for that matter you encouraged him once,” she
said, troubled to the verge of despair. “It is not Giles, it is Mr.
Fitzpiers.”

“You’ve had a tiff—a lovers’ tiff—that’s all, I suppose!”

“It is some woman—”

“Ay, ay; you are jealous. The old story. Don’t tell me. Now do you bide
here. I’ll send Fitzpiers to you. I saw him smoking in front of his
house but a minute by-gone.”

He went off hastily out of the garden-gate and down the lane. But she
would not stay where she was; and edging through a slit in the
garden-fence, walked away into the wood. Just about here the trees were
large and wide apart, and there was no undergrowth, so that she could
be seen to some distance; a sylph-like, greenish-white creature, as
toned by the sunlight and leafage. She heard a foot-fall crushing dead
leaves behind her, and found herself reconnoitered by Fitzpiers
himself, approaching gay and fresh as the morning around them.

His remote gaze at her had been one of mild interest rather than of
rapture. But she looked so lovely in the green world about her, her
pink cheeks, her simple light dress, and the delicate flexibility of
her movement acquired such rarity from their wild-wood setting, that
his eyes kindled as he drew near.

“My darling, what is it? Your father says you are in the pouts, and
jealous, and I don’t know what. Ha! ha! ha! as if there were any rival
to you, except vegetable nature, in this home of recluses! We know
better.”

“Jealous; oh no, it is not so,” said she, gravely. “That’s a mistake of
his and yours, sir. I spoke to him so closely about the question of
marriage with you that he did not apprehend my state of mind.”

“But there’s something wrong—eh?” he asked, eying her narrowly, and
bending to kiss her. She shrank away, and his purposed kiss miscarried.

“What is it?” he said, more seriously for this little defeat.

She made no answer beyond, “Mr. Fitzpiers, I have had no breakfast, I
must go in.”

“Come,” he insisted, fixing his eyes upon her. “Tell me at once, I
say.”

It was the greater strength against the smaller; but she was mastered
less by his manner than by her own sense of the unfairness of silence.
“I looked out of the window,” she said, with hesitation. “I’ll tell you
by-and-by. I must go in-doors. I have had no breakfast.”

By a sort of divination his conjecture went straight to the fact. “Nor
I,” said he, lightly. “Indeed, I rose late to-day. I have had a broken
night, or rather morning. A girl of the village—I don’t know her
name—came and rang at my bell as soon as it was light—between four and
five, I should think it was—perfectly maddened with an aching tooth. As
no-body heard her ring, she threw some gravel at my window, till at
last I heard her and slipped on my dressing-gown and went down. The
poor thing begged me with tears in her eyes to take out her tormentor,
if I dragged her head off. Down she sat and out it came—a lovely molar,
not a speck upon it; and off she went with it in her handkerchief, much
contented, though it would have done good work for her for fifty years
to come.”

It was all so plausible—so completely explained. Knowing nothing of the
incident in the wood on old Midsummer-eve, Grace felt that her
suspicions were unworthy and absurd, and with the readiness of an
honest heart she jumped at the opportunity of honoring his word. At the
moment of her mental liberation the bushes about the garden had moved,
and her father emerged into the shady glade. “Well, I hope it is made
up?” he said, cheerily.

“Oh yes,” said Fitzpiers, with his eyes fixed on Grace, whose eyes were
shyly bent downward.

“Now,” said her father, “tell me, the pair of ye, that you still mean
to take one another for good and all; and on the strength o’t you shall
have another couple of hundred paid down. I swear it by the name.”

Fitzpiers took her hand. “We declare it, do we not, my dear Grace?”
said he.

Relieved of her doubt, somewhat overawed, and ever anxious to please,
she was disposed to settle the matter; yet, womanlike, she would not
relinquish her opportunity of asking a concession of some sort. “If our
wedding can be at church, I say yes,” she answered, in a measured
voice. “If not, I say no.”

Fitzpiers was generous in his turn. “It shall be so,” he rejoined,
gracefully. “To holy church we’ll go, and much good may it do us.”

They returned through the bushes indoors, Grace walking, full of
thought between the other two, somewhat comforted, both by Fitzpiers’s
ingenious explanation and by the sense that she was not to be deprived
of a religious ceremony. “So let it be,” she said to herself. “Pray God
it is for the best.”

From this hour there was no serious attempt at recalcitration on her
part. Fitzpiers kept himself continually near her, dominating any
rebellious impulse, and shaping her will into passive concurrence with
all his desires. Apart from his lover-like anxiety to possess her, the
few golden hundreds of the timber-dealer, ready to hand, formed a warm
background to Grace’s lovely face, and went some way to remove his
uneasiness at the prospect of endangering his professional and social
chances by an alliance with the family of a simple countryman.

The interim closed up its perspective surely and silently. Whenever
Grace had any doubts of her position, the sense of contracting time was
like a shortening chamber: at other moments she was comparatively
blithe. Day after day waxed and waned; the one or two woodmen who
sawed, shaped, spokeshaved on her father’s premises at this inactive
season of the year, regularly came and unlocked the doors in the
morning, locked them in the evening, supped, leaned over their
garden-gates for a whiff of evening air, and to catch any last and
farthest throb of news from the outer world, which entered and expired
at Little Hintock like the exhausted swell of a wave in some innermost
cavern of some innermost creek of an embayed sea; yet no news
interfered with the nuptial purpose at their neighbor’s house. The
sappy green twig-tips of the season’s growth would not, she thought, be
appreciably woodier on the day she became a wife, so near was the time;
the tints of the foliage would hardly have changed. Everything was so
much as usual that no itinerant stranger would have supposed a woman’s
fate to be hanging in the balance at that summer’s decline.

But there were preparations, imaginable readily enough by those who had
special knowledge. In the remote and fashionable town of Sandbourne
something was growing up under the hands of several persons who had
never seen Grace Melbury, never would see her, or care anything about
her at all, though their creation had such interesting relation to her
life that it would enclose her very heart at a moment when that heart
would beat, if not with more emotional ardor, at least with more
emotional turbulence than at any previous time.

Why did Mrs. Dollery’s van, instead of passing along at the end of the
smaller village to Great Hintock direct, turn one Saturday night into
Little Hintock Lane, and never pull up till it reached Mr. Melbury’s
gates? The gilding shine of evening fell upon a large, flat box not
less than a yard square, and safely tied with cord, as it was handed
out from under the tilt with a great deal of care. But it was not heavy
for its size; Mrs. Dollery herself carried it into the house. Tim
Tangs, the hollow-turner, Bawtree, Suke Damson, and others, looked
knowing, and made remarks to each other as they watched its entrance.
Melbury stood at the door of the timber-shed in the attitude of a man
to whom such an arrival was a trifling domestic detail with which he
did not condescend to be concerned. Yet he well divined the contents of
that box, and was in truth all the while in a pleasant exaltation at
the proof that thus far, at any rate, no disappointment had supervened.
While Mrs. Dollery remained—which was rather long, from her sense of
the importance of her errand—he went into the out-house; but as soon as
she had had her say, been paid, and had rumbled away, he entered the
dwelling, to find there what he knew he should find—his wife and
daughter in a flutter of excitement over the wedding-gown, just arrived
from the leading dress-maker of Sandbourne watering-place aforesaid.

During these weeks Giles Winterborne was nowhere to be seen or heard
of. At the close of his tenure in Hintock he had sold some of his
furniture, packed up the rest—a few pieces endeared by associations, or
necessary to his occupation—in the house of a friendly neighbor, and
gone away. People said that a certain laxity had crept into his life;
that he had never gone near a church latterly, and had been sometimes
seen on Sundays with unblacked boots, lying on his elbow under a tree,
with a cynical gaze at surrounding objects. He was likely to return to
Hintock when the cider-making season came round, his apparatus being
stored there, and travel with his mill and press from village to
village.

The narrow interval that stood before the day diminished yet. There was
in Grace’s mind sometimes a certain anticipative satisfaction, the
satisfaction of feeling that she would be the heroine of an hour;
moreover, she was proud, as a cultivated woman, to be the wife of a
cultivated man. It was an opportunity denied very frequently to young
women in her position, nowadays not a few; those in whom parental
discovery of the value of education has implanted tastes which parental
circles fail to gratify. But what an attenuation was this cold pride of
the dream of her youth, in which she had pictured herself walking in
state towards the altar, flushed by the purple light and bloom of her
own passion, without a single misgiving as to the sealing of the bond,
and fervently receiving as her due

“The homage of a thousand hearts; the fond, deep love of one.”


Everything had been clear then, in imagination; now something was
undefined. She had little carking anxieties; a curious fatefulness
seemed to rule her, and she experienced a mournful want of some one to
confide in.

The day loomed so big and nigh that her prophetic ear could, in fancy,
catch the noise of it, hear the murmur of the villagers as she came out
of church, imagine the jangle of the three thin-toned Hintock bells.
The dialogues seemed to grow louder, and the ding-ding-dong of those
three crazed bells more persistent. She awoke: the morning had come.

Five hours later she was the wife of Fitzpiers.




CHAPTER XXV.


The chief hotel at Sherton-Abbas was an old stone-fronted inn with a
yawning arch, under which vehicles were driven by stooping coachmen to
back premises of wonderful commodiousness. The windows to the street
were mullioned into narrow lights, and only commanded a view of the
opposite houses; hence, perhaps, it arose that the best and most
luxurious private sitting-room that the inn could afford over-looked
the nether parts of the establishment, where beyond the yard were to be
seen gardens and orchards, now bossed, nay incrusted, with scarlet and
gold fruit, stretching to infinite distance under a luminous lavender
mist. The time was early autumn,

“When the fair apples, red as evening sky,
Do bend the tree unto the fruitful ground,
When juicy pears, and berries of black dye,
Do dance in air, and call the eyes around.”


The landscape confronting the window might, indeed, have been part of
the identical stretch of country which the youthful Chatterton had in
his mind.

In this room sat she who had been the maiden Grace Melbury till the
finger of fate touched her and turned her to a wife. It was two months
after the wedding, and she was alone. Fitzpiers had walked out to see
the abbey by the light of sunset, but she had been too fatigued to
accompany him. They had reached the last stage of a long eight-weeks’
tour, and were going on to Hintock that night.

In the yard, between Grace and the orchards, there progressed a scene
natural to the locality at this time of the year. An apple-mill and
press had been erected on the spot, to which some men were bringing
fruit from divers points in mawn-baskets, while others were grinding
them, and others wringing down the pomace, whose sweet juice gushed
forth into tubs and pails. The superintendent of these proceedings, to
whom the others spoke as master, was a young yeoman of prepossessing
manner and aspect, whose form she recognized in a moment. He had hung
his coat to a nail of the out-house wall, and wore his shirt-sleeves
rolled up beyond his elbows, to keep them unstained while he rammed the
pomace into the bags of horse-hair. Fragments of apple-rind had
alighted upon the brim of his hat—probably from the bursting of a
bag—while brown pips of the same fruit were sticking among the down
upon his fine, round arms.

She realized in a moment how he had come there. Down in the heart of
the apple country nearly every farmer kept up a cider-making apparatus
and wring-house for his own use, building up the pomace in great straw
“cheeses,” as they were called; but here, on the margin of Pomona’s
plain, was a debatable land neither orchard nor sylvan exclusively,
where the apple produce was hardly sufficient to warrant each
proprietor in keeping a mill of his own. This was the field of the
travelling cider-maker. His press and mill were fixed to wheels instead
of being set up in a cider-house; and with a couple of horses, buckets,
tubs, strainers, and an assistant or two, he wandered from place to
place, deriving very satisfactory returns for his trouble in such a
prolific season as the present.

The back parts of the town were just now abounding with
apple-gatherings. They stood in the yards in carts, baskets, and loose
heaps; and the blue, stagnant air of autumn which hung over everything
was heavy with a sweet cidery smell. Cakes of pomace lay against the
walls in the yellow sun, where they were drying to be used as fuel. Yet
it was not the great make of the year as yet; before the standard crop
came in there accumulated, in abundant times like this, a large
superfluity of early apples, and windfalls from the trees of later
harvest, which would not keep long. Thus, in the baskets, and quivering
in the hopper of the mill, she saw specimens of mixed dates, including
the mellow countenances of streaked-jacks, codlins, costards,
stubbards, ratheripes, and other well-known friends of her ravenous
youth.

Grace watched the head-man with interest. The slightest sigh escaped
her. Perhaps she thought of the day—not so far distant—when that friend
of her childhood had met her by her father’s arrangement in this same
town, warm with hope, though diffident, and trusting in a promise
rather implied than given. Or she might have thought of days earlier
yet—days of childhood—when her mouth was somewhat more ready to receive
a kiss from his than was his to bestow one. However, all that was over.
She had felt superior to him then, and she felt superior to him now.

She wondered why he never looked towards her open window. She did not
know that in the slight commotion caused by their arrival at the inn
that afternoon Winterborne had caught sight of her through the archway,
had turned red, and was continuing his work with more concentrated
attention on the very account of his discovery. Robert Creedle, too,
who travelled with Giles, had been incidentally informed by the hostler
that Dr. Fitzpiers and his young wife were in the hotel, after which
news Creedle kept shaking his head and saying to himself, “Ah!” very
audibly, between his thrusts at the screw of the cider-press.

“Why the deuce do you sigh like that, Robert?” asked Winterborne, at
last.

“Ah, maister—’tis my thoughts—’tis my thoughts!...Yes, ye’ve lost a
hundred load o’ timber well seasoned; ye’ve lost five hundred pound in
good money; ye’ve lost the stone-windered house that’s big enough to
hold a dozen families; ye’ve lost your share of half a dozen good
wagons and their horses—all lost!—through your letting slip she that
was once yer own!”

“Good God, Creedle, you’ll drive me mad!” said Giles, sternly. “Don’t
speak of that any more!”

Thus the subject had ended in the yard. Meanwhile, the passive cause of
all this loss still regarded the scene. She was beautifully dressed;
she was seated in the most comfortable room that the inn afforded; her
long journey had been full of variety, and almost luxuriously
performed—for Fitzpiers did not study economy where pleasure was in
question. Hence it perhaps arose that Giles and all his belongings
seemed sorry and common to her for the moment—moving in a plane so far
removed from her own of late that she could scarcely believe she had
ever found congruity therein. “No—I could never have married him!” she
said, gently shaking her head. “Dear father was right. It would have
been too coarse a life for me.” And she looked at the rings of sapphire
and opal upon her white and slender fingers that had been gifts from
Fitzpiers.

Seeing that Giles still kept his back turned, and with a little of the
above-described pride of life—easily to be understood, and possibly
excused, in a young, inexperienced woman who thought she had married
well—she said at last, with a smile on her lips, “Mr. Winterborne!”

He appeared to take no heed, and she said a second time, “Mr.
Winterborne!”

Even now he seemed not to hear, though a person close enough to him to
see the expression of his face might have doubted it; and she said a
third time, with a timid loudness, “Mr. Winterborne! What, have you
forgotten my voice?” She remained with her lips parted in a welcoming
smile.

He turned without surprise, and came deliberately towards the window.
“Why do you call me?” he said, with a sternness that took her
completely unawares, his face being now pale. “Is it not enough that
you see me here moiling and muddling for my daily bread while you are
sitting there in your success, that you can’t refrain from opening old
wounds by calling out my name?”

She flushed, and was struck dumb for some moments; but she forgave his
unreasoning anger, knowing so well in what it had its root. “I am sorry
I offended you by speaking,” she replied, meekly. “Believe me, I did
not intend to do that. I could hardly sit here so near you without a
word of recognition.”

Winterborne’s heart had swollen big, and his eyes grown moist by this
time, so much had the gentle answer of that familiar voice moved him.
He assured her hurriedly, and without looking at her, that he was not
angry. He then managed to ask her, in a clumsy, constrained way, if she
had had a pleasant journey, and seen many interesting sights. She spoke
of a few places that she had visited, and so the time passed till he
withdrew to take his place at one of the levers which pulled round the
screw.

Forgotten her voice! Indeed, he had not forgotten her voice, as his
bitterness showed. But though in the heat of the moment he had
reproached her keenly, his second mood was a far more tender one—that
which could regard her renunciation of such as he as her glory and her
privilege, his own fidelity notwithstanding. He could have declared
with a contemporary poet—

                    “If I forget,
The salt creek may forget the ocean;
                    If I forget
The heart whence flows my heart’s bright motion,
May I sink meanlier than the worst
Abandoned, outcast, crushed, accurst,
                    If I forget.


                    “Though you forget,
No word of mine shall mar your pleasure;
                    Though you forget,
You filled my barren life with treasure,
You may withdraw the gift you gave;
You still are queen, I still am slave,
                    Though you forget.”


She had tears in her eyes at the thought that she could not remind him
of what he ought to have remembered; that not herself but the pressure
of events had dissipated the dreams of their early youth. Grace was
thus unexpectedly worsted in her encounter with her old friend. She had
opened the window with a faint sense of triumph, but he had turned it
into sadness; she did not quite comprehend the reason why. In truth it
was because she was not cruel enough in her cruelty. If you have to use
the knife, use it, say the great surgeons; and for her own peace Grace
should have contemned Winterborne thoroughly or not at all. As it was,
on closing the window an indescribable, some might have said dangerous,
pity quavered in her bosom for him.

Presently her husband entered the room, and told her what a wonderful
sunset there was to be seen.

“I have not noticed it. But I have seen somebody out there that we
know,” she replied, looking into the court.

Fitzpiers followed the direction of her eyes, and said he did not
recognize anybody.

“Why, Mr. Winterborne—there he is, cider-making. He combines that with
his other business, you know.”

“Oh—that fellow,” said Fitzpiers, his curiosity becoming extinct.

She, reproachfully: “What, call Mr. Winterborne a fellow, Edgar? It is
true I was just saying to myself that I never could have married him;
but I have much regard for him, and always shall.”

“Well, do by all means, my dear one. I dare say I am inhuman, and
supercilious, and contemptibly proud of my poor old ramshackle family;
but I do honestly confess to you that I feel as if I belonged to a
different species from the people who are working in that yard.”

“And from me too, then. For my blood is no better than theirs.”

He looked at her with a droll sort of awakening. It was, indeed, a
startling anomaly that this woman of the tribe without should be
standing there beside him as his wife, if his sentiments were as he had
said. In their travels together she had ranged so unerringly at his
level in ideas, tastes, and habits that he had almost forgotten how his
heart had played havoc with his principles in taking her to him.

“Ah YOU—you are refined and educated into something quite different,”
he said, self-assuringly.

“I don’t quite like to think that,” she murmured with soft regret. “And
I think you underestimate Giles Winterborne. Remember, I was brought up
with him till I was sent away to school, so I cannot be radically
different. At any rate, I don’t feel so. That is, no doubt, my fault,
and a great blemish in me. But I hope you will put up with it, Edgar.”

Fitzpiers said that he would endeavor to do so; and as it was now
getting on for dusk, they prepared to perform the last stage of their
journey, so as to arrive at Hintock before it grew very late.

In less than half an hour they started, the cider-makers in the yard
having ceased their labors and gone away, so that the only sounds
audible there now were the trickling of the juice from the tightly
screwed press, and the buzz of a single wasp, which had drunk itself so
tipsy that it was unconscious of nightfall. Grace was very cheerful at
the thought of being soon in her sylvan home, but Fitzpiers sat beside
her almost silent. An indescribable oppressiveness had overtaken him
with the near approach of the journey’s end and the realities of life
that lay there.

“You don’t say a word, Edgar,” she observed. “Aren’t you glad to get
back? I am.”

“You have friends here. I have none.”

“But my friends are yours.”

“Oh yes—in that sense.”

The conversation languished, and they drew near the end of Hintock
Lane. It had been decided that they should, at least for a time, take
up their abode in her father’s roomy house, one wing of which was quite
at their service, being almost disused by the Melburys. Workmen had
been painting, papering, and whitewashing this set of rooms in the
wedded pair’s absence; and so scrupulous had been the timber-dealer
that there should occur no hitch or disappointment on their arrival,
that not the smallest detail remained undone. To make it all complete a
ground-floor room had been fitted up as a surgery, with an independent
outer door, to which Fitzpiers’s brass plate was screwed—for mere
ornament, such a sign being quite superfluous where everybody knew the
latitude and longitude of his neighbors for miles round.

Melbury and his wife welcomed the twain with affection, and all the
house with deference. They went up to explore their rooms, that opened
from a passage on the left hand of the staircase, the entrance to which
could be shut off on the landing by a door that Melbury had hung for
the purpose. A friendly fire was burning in the grate, although it was
not cold. Fitzpiers said it was too soon for any sort of meal, they
only having dined shortly before leaving Sherton-Abbas. He would walk
across to his old lodging, to learn how his locum tenens had got on in
his absence.

In leaving Melbury’s door he looked back at the house. There was
economy in living under that roof, and economy was desirable, but in
some way he was dissatisfied with the arrangement; it immersed him so
deeply in son-in-lawship to Melbury. He went on to his former
residence. His deputy was out, and Fitzpiers fell into conversation
with his former landlady.

“Well, Mrs. Cox, what’s the best news?” he asked of her, with cheery
weariness.

She was a little soured at losing by his marriage so profitable a
tenant as the surgeon had proved to be during his residence under her
roof; and the more so in there being hardly the remotest chance of her
getting such another settler in the Hintock solitudes. “’Tis what I
don’t wish to repeat, sir; least of all to you,” she mumbled.

“Never mind me, Mrs. Cox; go ahead.”

“It is what people say about your hasty marrying, Dr. Fitzpiers.
Whereas they won’t believe you know such clever doctrines in physic as
they once supposed of ye, seeing as you could marry into Mr. Melbury’s
family, which is only Hintock-born, such as me.”

“They are kindly welcome to their opinion,” said Fitzpiers, not
allowing himself to recognize that he winced. “Anything else?”

“Yes; _she’s_ come home at last.”

“Who’s she?”

“Mrs. Charmond.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Fitzpiers, with but slight interest. “I’ve never
seen her.”

“She has seen you, sir, whether or no.”

“Never.”

“Yes; she saw you in some hotel or street for a minute or two while you
were away travelling, and accidentally heard your name; and when she
made some remark about you, Miss Ellis—that’s her maid—told her you was
on your wedding-tower with Mr. Melbury’s daughter; and she said, ‘He
ought to have done better than that. I fear he has spoiled his
chances,’ she says.”

Fitzpiers did not talk much longer to this cheering housewife, and
walked home with no very brisk step. He entered the door quietly, and
went straight up-stairs to the drawing-room extemporized for their use
by Melbury in his and his bride’s absence, expecting to find her there
as he had left her. The fire was burning still, but there were no
lights. He looked into the next apartment, fitted up as a little
dining-room, but no supper was laid. He went to the top of the stairs,
and heard a chorus of voices in the timber-merchant’s parlor below,
Grace’s being occasionally intermingled.

Descending, and looking into the room from the door-way, he found quite
a large gathering of neighbors and other acquaintances, praising and
congratulating Mrs. Fitzpiers on her return, among them being the
dairyman, Farmer Bawtree, and the master-blacksmith from Great Hintock;
also the cooper, the hollow-turner, the exciseman, and some others,
with their wives, who lived hard by. Grace, girl that she was, had
quite forgotten her new dignity and her husband’s; she was in the midst
of them, blushing, and receiving their compliments with all the
pleasure of old-comradeship.

Fitzpiers experienced a profound distaste for the situation. Melbury
was nowhere in the room, but Melbury’s wife, perceiving the doctor,
came to him. “We thought, Grace and I,” she said, “that as they have
called, hearing you were come, we could do no less than ask them to
supper; and then Grace proposed that we should all sup together, as it
is the first night of your return.”

By this time Grace had come round to him. “Is it not good of them to
welcome me so warmly?” she exclaimed, with tears of friendship in her
eyes. “After so much good feeling I could not think of our shutting
ourselves up away from them in our own dining-room.”

“Certainly not—certainly not,” said Fitzpiers; and he entered the room
with the heroic smile of a martyr.

As soon as they sat down to table Melbury came in, and seemed to see at
once that Fitzpiers would much rather have received no such
demonstrative reception. He thereupon privately chid his wife for her
forwardness in the matter. Mrs. Melbury declared that it was as much
Grace’s doing as hers, after which there was no more to be said by that
young woman’s tender father. By this time Fitzpiers was making the best
of his position among the wide-elbowed and genial company who sat
eating and drinking and laughing and joking around him; and getting
warmed himself by the good cheer, was obliged to admit that, after all,
the supper was not the least enjoyable he had ever known.

At times, however, the words about his having spoiled his
opportunities, repeated to him as those of Mrs. Charmond, haunted him
like a handwriting on the wall. Then his manner would become suddenly
abstracted. At one moment he would mentally put an indignant query why
Mrs. Charmond or any other woman should make it her business to have
opinions about his opportunities; at another he thought that he could
hardly be angry with her for taking an interest in the doctor of her
own parish. Then he would drink a glass of grog and so get rid of the
misgiving. These hitches and quaffings were soon perceived by Grace as
well as by her father; and hence both of them were much relieved when
the first of the guests to discover that the hour was growing late rose
and declared that he must think of moving homeward. At the words
Melbury rose as alertly as if lifted by a spring, and in ten minutes
they were gone.

“Now, Grace,” said her husband as soon as he found himself alone with
her in their private apartments, “we’ve had a very pleasant evening,
and everybody has been very kind. But we must come to an understanding
about our way of living here. If we continue in these rooms there must
be no mixing in with your people below. I can’t stand it, and that’s
the truth.”

She had been sadly surprised at the suddenness of his distaste for
those old-fashioned woodland forms of life which in his courtship he
had professed to regard with so much interest. But she assented in a
moment.

“We must be simply your father’s tenants,” he continued, “and our
goings and comings must be as independent as if we lived elsewhere.”

“Certainly, Edgar—I quite see that it must be so.”

“But you joined in with all those people in my absence, without knowing
whether I should approve or disapprove. When I came I couldn’t help
myself at all.”

She, sighing: “Yes—I see I ought to have waited; though they came
unexpectedly, and I thought I had acted for the best.”

Thus the discussion ended, and the next day Fitzpiers went on his old
rounds as usual. But it was easy for so super-subtle an eye as his to
discern, or to think he discerned, that he was no longer regarded as an
extrinsic, unfathomed gentleman of limitless potentiality, scientific
and social; but as Mr. Melbury’s compeer, and therefore in a degree
only one of themselves. The Hintock woodlandlers held with all the
strength of inherited conviction to the aristocratic principle, and as
soon as they had discovered that Fitzpiers was one of the old Buckbury
Fitzpierses they had accorded to him for nothing a touching of
hat-brims, promptness of service, and deference of approach, which
Melbury had to do without, though he paid for it over and over. But
now, having proved a traitor to his own cause by this marriage,
Fitzpiers was believed in no more as a superior hedged by his own
divinity; while as doctor he began to be rated no higher than old
Jones, whom they had so long despised.

His few patients seemed in his two months’ absence to have dwindled
considerably in number, and no sooner had he returned than there came
to him from the Board of Guardians a complaint that a pauper had been
neglected by his substitute. In a fit of pride Fitzpiers resigned his
appointment as one of the surgeons to the union, which had been the
nucleus of his practice here.

At the end of a fortnight he came in-doors one evening to Grace more
briskly than usual. “They have written to me again about that practice
in Budmouth that I once negotiated for,” he said to her. “The premium
asked is eight hundred pounds, and I think that between your father and
myself it ought to be raised. Then we can get away from this place
forever.”

The question had been mooted between them before, and she was not
unprepared to consider it. They had not proceeded far with the
discussion when a knock came to the door, and in a minute Grammer ran
up to say that a message had arrived from Hintock House requesting Dr.
Fitzpiers to attend there at once. Mrs. Charmond had met with a slight
accident through the overturning of her carriage.

“This is something, anyhow,” said Fitzpiers, rising with an interest
which he could not have defined. “I have had a presentiment that this
mysterious woman and I were to be better acquainted.”

The latter words were murmured to himself alone.

“Good-night,” said Grace, as soon as he was ready. “I shall be asleep,
probably, when you return.”

“Good-night,” he replied, inattentively, and went down-stairs. It was
the first time since their marriage that he had left her without a
kiss.




CHAPTER XXVI.


Winterborne’s house had been pulled down. On this account his face had
been seen but fitfully in Hintock; and he would probably have
disappeared from the place altogether but for his slight business
connection with Melbury, on whose premises Giles kept his cider-making
apparatus, now that he had no place of his own to stow it in. Coming
here one evening on his way to a hut beyond the wood where he now
slept, he noticed that the familiar brown-thatched pinion of his
paternal roof had vanished from its site, and that the walls were
levelled. In present circumstances he had a feeling for the spot that
might have been called morbid, and when he had supped in the hut
aforesaid he made use of the spare hour before bedtime to return to
Little Hintock in the twilight and ramble over the patch of ground on
which he had first seen the day.

He repeated this evening visit on several like occasions. Even in the
gloom he could trace where the different rooms had stood; could mark
the shape of the kitchen chimney-corner, in which he had roasted apples
and potatoes in his boyhood, cast his bullets, and burned his initials
on articles that did and did not belong to him. The apple-trees still
remained to show where the garden had been, the oldest of them even now
retaining the crippled slant to north-east given them by the great
November gale of 1824, which carried a brig bodily over the Chesil
Bank. They were at present bent to still greater obliquity by the
heaviness of their produce. Apples bobbed against his head, and in the
grass beneath he crunched scores of them as he walked. There was nobody
to gather them now.

It was on the evening under notice that, half sitting, half leaning
against one of these inclined trunks, Winterborne had become lost in
his thoughts, as usual, till one little star after another had taken up
a position in the piece of sky which now confronted him where his walls
and chimneys had formerly raised their outlines. The house had jutted
awkwardly into the road, and the opening caused by its absence was very
distinct.

In the silence the trot of horses and the spin of carriage-wheels
became audible; and the vehicle soon shaped itself against the blank
sky, bearing down upon him with the bend in the lane which here
occurred, and of which the house had been the cause. He could discern
the figure of a woman high up on the driving-seat of a phaeton, a groom
being just visible behind. Presently there was a slight scrape, then a
scream. Winterborne went across to the spot, and found the phaeton half
overturned, its driver sitting on the heap of rubbish which had once
been his dwelling, and the man seizing the horses’ heads. The equipage
was Mrs. Charmond’s, and the unseated charioteer that lady herself.

To his inquiry if she were hurt she made some incoherent reply to the
effect that she did not know. The damage in other respects was little
or none: the phaeton was righted, Mrs. Charmond placed in it, and the
reins given to the servant. It appeared that she had been deceived by
the removal of the house, imagining the gap caused by the demolition to
be the opening of the road, so that she turned in upon the ruins
instead of at the bend a few yards farther on.

“Drive home—drive home!” cried the lady, impatiently; and they started
on their way. They had not, however, gone many paces when, the air
being still, Winterborne heard her say “Stop; tell that man to call the
doctor—Mr. Fitzpiers—and send him on to the House. I find I am hurt
more seriously than I thought.”

Winterborne took the message from the groom and proceeded to the
doctor’s at once. Having delivered it, he stepped back into the
darkness, and waited till he had seen Fitzpiers leave the door. He
stood for a few minutes looking at the window which by its light
revealed the room where Grace was sitting, and went away under the
gloomy trees.

Fitzpiers duly arrived at Hintock House, whose doors he now saw open
for the first time. Contrary to his expectation there was visible no
sign of that confusion or alarm which a serious accident to the
mistress of the abode would have occasioned. He was shown into a room
at the top of the staircase, cosily and femininely draped, where, by
the light of the shaded lamp, he saw a woman of full round figure
reclining upon a couch in such a position as not to disturb a pile of
magnificent hair on the crown of her head. A deep purple dressing-gown
formed an admirable foil to the peculiarly rich brown of her
hair-plaits; her left arm, which was naked nearly up to the shoulder,
was thrown upward, and between the fingers of her right hand she held a
cigarette, while she idly breathed from her plump lips a thin stream of
smoke towards the ceiling.

The doctor’s first feeling was a sense of his exaggerated prevision in
having brought appliances for a serious case; the next, something more
curious. While the scene and the moment were new to him and
unanticipated, the sentiment and essence of the moment were
indescribably familiar. What could be the cause of it? Probably a
dream.

Mrs. Charmond did not move more than to raise her eyes to him, and he
came and stood by her. She glanced up at his face across her brows and
forehead, and then he observed a blush creep slowly over her decidedly
handsome cheeks. Her eyes, which had lingered upon him with an
inquiring, conscious expression, were hastily withdrawn, and she
mechanically applied the cigarette again to her lips.

For a moment he forgot his errand, till suddenly arousing himself he
addressed her, formally condoled with her, and made the usual
professional inquiries about what had happened to her, and where she
was hurt.

“That’s what I want you to tell me,” she murmured, in tones of
indefinable reserve. “I quite believe in you, for I know you are very
accomplished, because you study so hard.”

“I’ll do my best to justify your good opinion,” said the young man,
bowing. “And none the less that I am happy to find the accident has not
been serious.”

“I am very much shaken,” she said.

“Oh yes,” he replied; and completed his examination, which convinced
him that there was really nothing the matter with her, and more than
ever puzzled him as to why he had been fetched, since she did not
appear to be a timid woman. “You must rest a while, and I’ll send
something,” he said.

“Oh, I forgot,” she returned. “Look here.” And she showed him a little
scrape on her arm—the full round arm that was exposed. “Put some
court-plaster on that, please.”

He obeyed. “And now,” she said, “before you go I want to put a question
to you. Sit round there in front of me, on that low chair, and bring
the candles, or one, to the little table. Do you smoke? Yes? That’s
right—I am learning. Take one of these; and here’s a light.” She threw
a matchbox across.

Fitzpiers caught it, and having lit up, regarded her from his new
position, which, with the shifting of the candles, for the first time
afforded him a full view of her face. “How many years have passed since
first we met!” she resumed, in a voice which she mainly endeavored to
maintain at its former pitch of composure, and eying him with daring
bashfulness.

“_We_ met, do you say?”

She nodded. “I saw you recently at an hotel in London, when you were
passing through, I suppose, with your bride, and I recognized you as
one I had met in my girlhood. Do you remember, when you were studying
at Heidelberg, an English family that was staying there, who used to
walk—”

“And the young lady who wore a long tail of rare-colored hair—ah, I see
it before my eyes!—who lost her gloves on the Great Terrace—who was
going back in the dusk to find them—to whom I said, ‘I’ll go for them,’
and you said, ‘Oh, they are not worth coming all the way up again for.’
I _do_ remember, and how very long we stayed talking there! I went next
morning while the dew was on the grass: there they lay—the little
fingers sticking out damp and thin. I see them now! I picked them up,
and then—”

“Well?”

“I kissed them,” he rejoined, rather shamefacedly.

“But you had hardly ever seen me except in the dusk?”

“Never mind. I was young then, and I kissed them. I wondered how I
could make the most of my _trouvaille_, and decided that I would call
at your hotel with them that afternoon. It rained, and I waited till
next day. I called, and you were gone.”

“Yes,” answered she, with dry melancholy. “My mother, knowing my
disposition, said she had no wish for such a chit as me to go falling
in love with an impecunious student, and spirited me away to Baden. As
it is all over and past I’ll tell you one thing: I should have sent you
a line passing warm had I known your name. That name I never knew till
my maid said, as you passed up the hotel stairs a month ago, ‘There’s
Dr. Fitzpiers.’”

“Good Heaven!” said Fitzpiers, musingly. “How the time comes back to
me! The evening, the morning, the dew, the spot. When I found that you
really were gone it was as if a cold iron had been passed down my back.
I went up to where you had stood when I last saw you—I flung myself on
the grass, and—being not much more than a boy—my eyes were literally
blinded with tears. Nameless, unknown to me as you were, I couldn’t
forget your voice.”

“For how long?”

“Oh—ever so long. Days and days.”

“Days and days! _Only_ days and days? Oh, the heart of a man! Days and
days!”

“But, my dear madam, I had not known you more than a day or two. It was
not a full-blown love—it was the merest bud—red, fresh, vivid, but
small. It was a colossal passion in posse, a giant in embryo. It never
matured.”

“So much the better, perhaps.”

“Perhaps. But see how powerless is the human will against
predestination. We were prevented meeting; we have met. One feature of
the case remains the same amid many changes. You are still rich, and I
am still poor. Better than that, you have (judging by your last remark)
outgrown the foolish, impulsive passions of your early girl-hood. I
have not outgrown mine.”

“I beg your pardon,” said she, with vibrations of strong feeling in her
words. “I have been placed in a position which hinders such
outgrowings. Besides, I don’t believe that the genuine subjects of
emotion do outgrow them; I believe that the older such people get the
worse they are. Possibly at ninety or a hundred they may feel they are
cured; but a mere threescore and ten won’t do it—at least for me.”

He gazed at her in undisguised admiration. Here was a soul of souls!

“Mrs. Charmond, you speak truly,” he exclaimed. “But you speak sadly as
well. Why is that?”

“I always am sad when I come here,” she said, dropping to a low tone
with a sense of having been too demonstrative.

“Then may I inquire why you came?”

“A man brought me. Women are always carried about like corks upon the
waves of masculine desires....I hope I have not alarmed you; but
Hintock has the curious effect of bottling up the emotions till one can
no longer hold them; I am often obliged to fly away and discharge my
sentiments somewhere, or I should die outright.”

“There is very good society in the county for those who have the
privilege of entering it.”

“Perhaps so. But the misery of remote country life is that your
neighbors have no toleration for difference of opinion and habit. My
neighbors think I am an atheist, except those who think I am a Roman
Catholic; and when I speak disrespectfully of the weather or the crops
they think I am a blasphemer.”

She broke into a low musical laugh at the idea.

“You don’t wish me to stay any longer?” he inquired, when he found that
she remained musing.

“No—I think not.”

“Then tell me that I am to be gone.”

“Why? Cannot you go without?”

“I may consult my own feelings only, if left to myself.”

“Well, if you do, what then? Do you suppose you’ll be in my way?”

“I feared it might be so.”

“Then fear no more. But good-night. Come to-morrow and see if I am
going on right. This renewal of acquaintance touches me. I have already
a friendship for you.”

“If it depends upon myself it shall last forever.”

“My best hopes that it may. Good-by.”

Fitzpiers went down the stairs absolutely unable to decide whether she
had sent for him in the natural alarm which might have followed her
mishap, or with the single view of making herself known to him as she
had done, for which the capsize had afforded excellent opportunity.
Outside the house he mused over the spot under the light of the stars.
It seemed very strange that he should have come there more than once
when its inhabitant was absent, and observed the house with a nameless
interest; that he should have assumed off-hand before he knew Grace
that it was here she lived; that, in short, at sundry times and seasons
the individuality of Hintock House should have forced itself upon him
as appertaining to some existence with which he was concerned.

The intersection of his temporal orbit with Mrs. Charmond’s for a day
or two in the past had created a sentimental interest in her at the
time, but it had been so evanescent that in the ordinary onward roll of
affairs he would scarce ever have recalled it again. To find her here,
however, in these somewhat romantic circumstances, magnified that
by-gone and transitory tenderness to indescribable proportions.

On entering Little Hintock he found himself regarding it in a new
way—from the Hintock House point of view rather than from his own and
the Melburys’. The household had all gone to bed, and as he went
up-stairs he heard the snore of the timber-merchant from his quarter of
the building, and turned into the passage communicating with his own
rooms in a strange access of sadness. A light was burning for him in
the chamber; but Grace, though in bed, was not asleep. In a moment her
sympathetic voice came from behind the curtains.

“Edgar, is she very seriously hurt?”

Fitzpiers had so entirely lost sight of Mrs. Charmond as a patient that
he was not on the instant ready with a reply.

“Oh no,” he said. “There are no bones broken, but she is shaken. I am
going again to-morrow.”

Another inquiry or two, and Grace said,

“Did she ask for me?”

“Well—I think she did—I don’t quite remember; but I am under the
impression that she spoke of you.”

“Cannot you recollect at all what she said?”

“I cannot, just this minute.”

“At any rate she did not talk much about me?” said Grace with
disappointment.

“Oh no.”

“But you did, perhaps,” she added, innocently fishing for a compliment.

“Oh yes—you may depend upon that!” replied he, warmly, though scarcely
thinking of what he was saying, so vividly was there present to his
mind the personality of Mrs. Charmond.




CHAPTER XXVII.


The doctor’s professional visit to Hintock House was promptly repeated
the next day and the next. He always found Mrs. Charmond reclining on a
sofa, and behaving generally as became a patient who was in no great
hurry to lose that title. On each occasion he looked gravely at the
little scratch on her arm, as if it had been a serious wound.

He had also, to his further satisfaction, found a slight scar on her
temple, and it was very convenient to put a piece of black plaster on
this conspicuous part of her person in preference to gold-beater’s
skin, so that it might catch the eyes of the servants, and make his
presence appear decidedly necessary, in case there should be any doubt
of the fact.

“Oh—you hurt me!” she exclaimed one day.

He was peeling off the bit of plaster on her arm, under which the
scrape had turned the color of an unripe blackberry previous to
vanishing altogether. “Wait a moment, then—I’ll damp it,” said
Fitzpiers. He put his lips to the place and kept them there till the
plaster came off easily. “It was at your request I put it on,” said he.

“I know it,” she replied. “Is that blue vein still in my temple that
used to show there? The scar must be just upon it. If the cut had been
a little deeper it would have spilt my hot blood indeed!” Fitzpiers
examined so closely that his breath touched her tenderly, at which
their eyes rose to an encounter—hers showing themselves as deep and
mysterious as interstellar space. She turned her face away suddenly.
“Ah! none of that! none of that—I cannot coquet with you!” she cried.
“Don’t suppose I consent to for one moment. Our poor, brief, youthful
hour of love-making was too long ago to bear continuing now. It is as
well that we should understand each other on that point before we go
further.”

“Coquet! Nor I with you. As it was when I found the historic gloves, so
it is now. I might have been and may be foolish; but I am no trifler. I
naturally cannot forget that little space in which I flitted across the
field of your vision in those days of the past, and the recollection
opens up all sorts of imaginings.”

“Suppose my mother had not taken me away?” she murmured, her dreamy
eyes resting on the swaying tip of a distant tree.

“I should have seen you again.”

“And then?”

“Then the fire would have burned higher and higher. What would have
immediately followed I know not; but sorrow and sickness of heart at
last.”

“Why?”

“Well—that’s the end of all love, according to Nature’s law. I can give
no other reason.”

“Oh, don’t speak like that,” she exclaimed. “Since we are only
picturing the possibilities of that time, don’t, for pity’s sake, spoil
the picture.” Her voice sank almost to a whisper as she added, with an
incipient pout upon her full lips, “Let me think at least that if you
had really loved me at all seriously, you would have loved me for ever
and ever!”

“You are right—think it with all your heart,” said he. “It is a
pleasant thought, and costs nothing.”

She weighed that remark in silence a while. “Did you ever hear anything
of me from then till now?” she inquired.

“Not a word.”

“So much the better. I had to fight the battle of life as well as you.
I may tell you about it some day. But don’t ever ask me to do it, and
particularly do not press me to tell you now.”

Thus the two or three days that they had spent in tender acquaintance
on the romantic slopes above the Neckar were stretched out in
retrospect to the length and importance of years; made to form a canvas
for infinite fancies, idle dreams, luxurious melancholies, and sweet,
alluring assertions which could neither be proved nor disproved. Grace
was never mentioned between them, but a rumor of his proposed domestic
changes somehow reached her ears.

“Doctor, you are going away,” she exclaimed, confronting him with
accusatory reproach in her large dark eyes no less than in her rich
cooing voice. “Oh yes, you are,” she went on, springing to her feet
with an air which might almost have been called passionate. “It is no
use denying it. You have bought a practice at Budmouth. I don’t blame
you. Nobody can live at Hintock—least of all a professional man who
wants to keep abreast of recent discovery. And there is nobody here to
induce such a one to stay for other reasons. That’s right, that’s
right—go away!”

“But no, I have not actually bought the practice as yet, though I am
indeed in treaty for it. And, my dear friend, if I continue to feel
about the business as I feel at this moment—perhaps I may conclude
never to go at all.”

“But you hate Hintock, and everybody and everything in it that you
don’t mean to take away with you?”

Fitzpiers contradicted this idea in his most vibratory tones, and she
lapsed into the frivolous archness under which she hid passions of no
mean strength—strange, smouldering, erratic passions, kept down like a
stifled conflagration, but bursting out now here, now there—the only
certain element in their direction being its unexpectedness. If one
word could have expressed her it would have been Inconsequence. She was
a woman of perversities, delighting in frequent contrasts. She liked
mystery, in her life, in her love, in her history. To be fair to her,
there was nothing in the latter which she had any great reason to be
ashamed of, and many things of which she might have been proud; but it
had never been fathomed by the honest minds of Hintock, and she rarely
volunteered her experiences. As for her capricious nature, the people
on her estates grew accustomed to it, and with that marvellous subtlety
of contrivance in steering round odd tempers, that is found in sons of
the soil and dependants generally, they managed to get along under her
government rather better than they would have done beneath a more
equable rule.

Now, with regard to the doctor’s notion of leaving Hintock, he had
advanced further towards completing the purchase of the Budmouth
surgeon’s good-will than he had admitted to Mrs. Charmond. The whole
matter hung upon what he might do in the ensuing twenty-four hours. The
evening after leaving her he went out into the lane, and walked and
pondered between the high hedges, now greenish-white with wild
clematis—here called “old-man’s beard,” from its aspect later in the
year.

The letter of acceptance was to be written that night, after which his
departure from Hintock would be irrevocable. But could he go away,
remembering what had just passed? The trees, the hills, the leaves, the
grass—each had been endowed and quickened with a subtle charm since he
had discovered the person and history, and, above all, mood of their
owner. There was every temporal reason for leaving; it would be
entering again into a world which he had only quitted in a passion for
isolation, induced by a fit of Achillean moodiness after an imagined
slight. His wife herself saw the awkwardness of their position here,
and cheerfully welcomed the purposed change, towards which every step
had been taken but the last. But could he find it in his heart—as he
found it clearly enough in his conscience—to go away?

He drew a troubled breath, and went in-doors. Here he rapidly penned a
letter, wherein he withdrew once for all from the treaty for the
Budmouth practice. As the postman had already left Little Hintock for
that night, he sent one of Melbury’s men to intercept a mail-cart on
another turnpike-road, and so got the letter off.

The man returned, met Fitzpiers in the lane, and told him the thing was
done. Fitzpiers went back to his house musing. Why had he carried out
this impulse—taken such wild trouble to effect a probable injury to his
own and his young wife’s prospects? His motive was fantastic, glowing,
shapeless as the fiery scenery about the western sky. Mrs. Charmond
could overtly be nothing more to him than a patient now, and to his
wife, at the outside, a patron. In the unattached bachelor days of his
first sojourning here how highly proper an emotional reason for
lingering on would have appeared to troublesome dubiousness.
Matrimonial ambition is such an honorable thing.

“My father has told me that you have sent off one of the men with a
late letter to Budmouth,” cried Grace, coming out vivaciously to meet
him under the declining light of the sky, wherein hung, solitary, the
folding star. “I said at once that you had finally agreed to pay the
premium they ask, and that the tedious question had been settled. When
do we go, Edgar?”

“I have altered my mind,” said he. “They want too much—seven hundred
and fifty is too large a sum—and in short, I have declined to go
further. We must wait for another opportunity. I fear I am not a good
business-man.” He spoke the last words with a momentary faltering at
the great foolishness of his act; for, as he looked in her fair and
honorable face, his heart reproached him for what he had done.

Her manner that evening showed her disappointment. Personally she liked
the home of her childhood much, and she was not ambitious. But her
husband had seemed so dissatisfied with the circumstances hereabout
since their marriage that she had sincerely hoped to go for his sake.

It was two or three days before he visited Mrs. Charmond again. The
morning had been windy, and little showers had sowed themselves like
grain against the walls and window-panes of the Hintock cottages. He
went on foot across the wilder recesses of the park, where slimy
streams of green moisture, exuding from decayed holes caused by old
amputations, ran down the bark of the oaks and elms, the rind below
being coated with a lichenous wash as green as emerald. They were
stout-trunked trees, that never rocked their stems in the fiercest
gale, responding to it entirely by crooking their limbs. Wrinkled like
an old crone’s face, and antlered with dead branches that rose above
the foliage of their summits, they were nevertheless still green—though
yellow had invaded the leaves of other trees.

She was in a little boudoir or writing-room on the first floor, and
Fitzpiers was much surprised to find that the window-curtains were
closed and a red-shaded lamp and candles burning, though out-of-doors
it was broad daylight. Moreover, a large fire was burning in the grate,
though it was not cold.

“What does it all mean?” he asked.

She sat in an easy-chair, her face being turned away. “Oh,” she
murmured, “it is because the world is so dreary outside. Sorrow and
bitterness in the sky, and floods of agonized tears beating against the
panes. I lay awake last night, and I could hear the scrape of snails
creeping up the window-glass; it was so sad! My eyes were so heavy this
morning that I could have wept my life away. I cannot bear you to see
my face; I keep it away from you purposely. Oh! why were we given
hungry hearts and wild desires if we have to live in a world like this?
Why should Death only lend what Life is compelled to borrow—rest?
Answer that, Dr. Fitzpiers.”

“You must eat of a second tree of knowledge before _you_ can do it,
Felice Charmond.”

“Then, when my emotions have exhausted themselves, I become full of
fears, till I think I shall die for very fear. The terrible
insistencies of society—how severe they are, and cold and
inexorable—ghastly towards those who are made of wax and not of stone.
Oh, I am afraid of them; a stab for this error, and a stab for
that—correctives and regulations framed that society may tend to
perfection—an end which I don’t care for in the least. Yet for this,
all I do care for has to be stunted and starved.”

Fitzpiers had seated himself near her. “What sets you in this mournful
mood?” he asked, gently. (In reality he knew that it was the result of
a loss of tone from staying in-doors so much, but he did not say so.)

“My reflections. Doctor, you must not come here any more. They begin to
think it a farce already. I say you must come no more. There—don’t be
angry with me;” and she jumped up, pressed his hand, and looked
anxiously at him. “It is necessary. It is best for both you and me.”

“But,” said Fitzpiers, gloomily, “what have we done?”

“Done—we have done nothing. Perhaps we have thought the more. However,
it is all vexation. I am going away to Middleton Abbey, near
Shottsford, where a relative of my late husband lives, who is confined
to her bed. The engagement was made in London, and I can’t get out of
it. Perhaps it is for the best that I go there till all this is past.
When are you going to enter on your new practice, and leave Hintock
behind forever, with your pretty wife on your arm?”

“I have refused the opportunity. I love this place too well to depart.”

“You _have?_” she said, regarding him with wild uncertainty. “Why do
you ruin yourself in that way? Great Heaven, what have I done!”

“Nothing. Besides, you are going away.”

“Oh yes; but only to Middleton Abbey for a month or two. Yet perhaps I
shall gain strength there—particularly strength of mind—I require it.
And when I come back I shall be a new woman; and you can come and see
me safely then, and bring your wife with you, and we’ll be friends—she
and I. Oh, how this shutting up of one’s self does lead to indulgence
in idle sentiments. I shall not wish you to give your attendance to me
after to-day. But I am glad that you are not going away—if your
remaining does not injure your prospects at all.”

As soon as he had left the room the mild friendliness she had preserved
in her tone at parting, the playful sadness with which she had
conversed with him, equally departed from her. She became as heavy as
lead—just as she had been before he arrived. Her whole being seemed to
dissolve in a sad powerlessness to do anything, and the sense of it
made her lips tremulous and her closed eyes wet. His footsteps again
startled her, and she turned round.

“I returned for a moment to tell you that the evening is going to be
fine. The sun is shining; so do open your curtains and put out those
lights. Shall I do it for you?”

“Please—if you don’t mind.”

He drew back the window-curtains, whereupon the red glow of the lamp
and the two candle-flames became almost invisible with the flood of
late autumn sunlight that poured in. “Shall I come round to you?” he
asked, her back being towards him.

“No,” she replied.

“Why not?”

“Because I am crying, and I don’t want to see you.”

He stood a moment irresolute, and regretted that he had killed the
rosy, passionate lamplight by opening the curtains and letting in
garish day.

“Then I am going,” he said.

“Very well,” she answered, stretching one hand round to him, and
patting her eyes with a handkerchief held in the other.

“Shall I write a line to you at—”

“No, no.” A gentle reasonableness came into her tone as she added, “It
must not be, you know. It won’t do.”

“Very well. Good-by.” The next moment he was gone.

In the evening, with listless adroitness, she encouraged the maid who
dressed her for dinner to speak of Dr. Fitzpiers’s marriage.

“Mrs. Fitzpiers was once supposed to favor Mr. Winterborne,” said the
young woman.

“And why didn’t she marry him?” said Mrs. Charmond.

“Because, you see, ma’am, he lost his houses.”

“Lost his houses? How came he to do that?”

“The houses were held on lives, and the lives dropped, and your agent
wouldn’t renew them, though it is said that Mr. Winterborne had a very
good claim. That’s as I’ve heard it, ma’am, and it was through it that
the match was broke off.”

Being just then distracted by a dozen emotions, Mrs. Charmond sunk into
a mood of dismal self-reproach. “In refusing that poor man his
reasonable request,” she said to herself, “I foredoomed my rejuvenated
girlhood’s romance. Who would have thought such a business matter could
have nettled my own heart like this? Now for a winter of regrets and
agonies and useless wishes, till I forget him in the spring. Oh! I am
glad I am going away.”

She left her chamber and went down to dine with a sigh. On the stairs
she stood opposite the large window for a moment, and looked out upon
the lawn. It was not yet quite dark. Half-way up the steep green slope
confronting her stood old Timothy Tangs, who was shortening his way
homeward by clambering here where there was no road, and in opposition
to express orders that no path was to be made there. Tangs had
momentarily stopped to take a pinch of snuff; but observing Mrs.
Charmond gazing at him, he hastened to get over the top out of hail.
His precipitancy made him miss his footing, and he rolled like a barrel
to the bottom, his snuffbox rolling in front of him.

Her indefinite, idle, impossible passion for Fitzpiers; her
constitutional cloud of misery; the sorrowful drops that still hung
upon her eyelashes, all made way for the incursive mood started by the
spectacle. She burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, her very gloom
of the previous hour seeming to render it the more uncontrollable. It
had not died out of her when she reached the dining-room; and even
here, before the servants, her shoulders suddenly shook as the scene
returned upon her; and the tears of her hilarity mingled with the
remnants of those engendered by her grief.

She resolved to be sad no more. She drank two glasses of champagne, and
a little more still after those, and amused herself in the evening with
singing little amatory songs.

“I must do something for that poor man Winterborne, however,” she said.




CHAPTER XXVIII.


A week had passed, and Mrs. Charmond had left Hintock House. Middleton
Abbey, the place of her sojourn, was about twenty miles distant by
road, eighteen by bridle-paths and footways.

Grace observed, for the first time, that her husband was restless, that
at moments he even was disposed to avoid her. The scrupulous civility
of mere acquaintanceship crept into his manner; yet, when sitting at
meals, he seemed hardly to hear her remarks. Her little doings
interested him no longer, while towards her father his bearing was not
far from supercilious. It was plain that his mind was entirely outside
her life, whereabouts outside it she could not tell; in some region of
science, possibly, or of psychological literature. But her hope that he
was again immersing himself in those lucubrations which before her
marriage had made his light a landmark in Hintock, was founded simply
on the slender fact that he often sat up late.

One evening she discovered him leaning over a gate on Rub-Down Hill,
the gate at which Winterborne had once been standing, and which opened
on the brink of a steep, slanting down directly into Blackmoor Vale, or
the Vale of the White Hart, extending beneath the eye at this point to
a distance of many miles. His attention was fixed on the landscape far
away, and Grace’s approach was so noiseless that he did not hear her.
When she came close she could see his lips moving unconsciously, as to
some impassioned visionary theme.

She spoke, and Fitzpiers started. “What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Oh! I was contemplating our old place of Buckbury, in my idle way,” he
said.

It had seemed to her that he was looking much to the right of that
cradle and tomb of his ancestral dignity; but she made no further
observation, and taking his arm walked home beside him almost in
silence. She did not know that Middleton Abbey lay in the direction of
his gaze. “Are you going to have out Darling this afternoon?” she
asked, presently. Darling being the light-gray mare which Winterborne
had bought for Grace, and which Fitzpiers now constantly used, the
animal having turned out a wonderful bargain, in combining a perfect
docility with an almost human intelligence; moreover, she was not too
young. Fitzpiers was unfamiliar with horses, and he valued these
qualities.

“Yes,” he replied, “but not to drive. I am riding her. I practise
crossing a horse as often as I can now, for I find that I can take much
shorter cuts on horseback.”

He had, in fact, taken these riding exercises for about a week, only
since Mrs. Charmond’s absence, his universal practice hitherto having
been to drive.

Some few days later, Fitzpiers started on the back of this horse to see
a patient in the aforesaid Vale. It was about five o’clock in the
evening when he went away, and at bedtime he had not reached home.
There was nothing very singular in this, though she was not aware that
he had any patient more than five or six miles distant in that
direction. The clock had struck one before Fitzpiers entered the house,
and he came to his room softly, as if anxious not to disturb her.

The next morning she was stirring considerably earlier than he.

In the yard there was a conversation going on about the mare; the man
who attended to the horses, Darling included, insisted that the latter
was “hag-rid;” for when he had arrived at the stable that morning she
was in such a state as no horse could be in by honest riding. It was
true that the doctor had stabled her himself when he got home, so that
she was not looked after as she would have been if he had groomed and
fed her; but that did not account for the appearance she presented, if
Mr. Fitzpiers’s journey had been only where he had stated. The
phenomenal exhaustion of Darling, as thus related, was sufficient to
develop a whole series of tales about riding witches and demons, the
narration of which occupied a considerable time.

Grace returned in-doors. In passing through the outer room she picked
up her husband’s overcoat which he had carelessly flung down across a
chair. A turnpike ticket fell out of the breast-pocket, and she saw
that it had been issued at Middleton Gate. He had therefore visited
Middleton the previous night, a distance of at least five-and-thirty
miles on horseback, there and back.

During the day she made some inquiries, and learned for the first time
that Mrs. Charmond was staying at Middleton Abbey. She could not resist
an inference—strange as that inference was.

A few days later he prepared to start again, at the same time and in
the same direction. She knew that the state of the cottager who lived
that way was a mere pretext; she was quite sure he was going to Mrs.
Charmond. Grace was amazed at the mildness of the passion which the
suspicion engendered in her. She was but little excited, and her
jealousy was languid even to death. It told tales of the nature of her
affection for him. In truth, her antenuptial regard for Fitzpiers had
been rather of the quality of awe towards a superior being than of
tender solicitude for a lover. It had been based upon mystery and
strangeness—the mystery of his past, of his knowledge, of his
professional skill, of his beliefs. When this structure of ideals was
demolished by the intimacy of common life, and she found him as merely
human as the Hintock people themselves, a new foundation was in demand
for an enduring and stanch affection—a sympathetic interdependence,
wherein mutual weaknesses were made the grounds of a defensive
alliance. Fitzpiers had furnished none of that single-minded confidence
and truth out of which alone such a second union could spring; hence it
was with a controllable emotion that she now watched the mare brought
round.

“I’ll walk with you to the hill if you are not in a great hurry,” she
said, rather loath, after all, to let him go.

“Do; there’s plenty of time,” replied her husband. Accordingly he led
along the horse, and walked beside her, impatient enough nevertheless.
Thus they proceeded to the turnpike road, and ascended Rub-Down Hill to
the gate he had been leaning over when she surprised him ten days
before. This was the end of her excursion. Fitzpiers bade her adieu
with affection, even with tenderness, and she observed that he looked
weary-eyed.

“Why do you go to-night?” she said. “You have been called up two nights
in succession already.”

“I must go,” he answered, almost gloomily. “Don’t wait up for me.” With
these words he mounted his horse, passed through the gate which Grace
held open for him, and ambled down the steep bridle-track to the
valley.

She closed the gate and watched his descent, and then his journey
onward. His way was east, the evening sun which stood behind her back
beaming full upon him as soon as he got out from the shade of the hill.
Notwithstanding this untoward proceeding she was determined to be loyal
if he proved true; and the determination to love one’s best will carry
a heart a long way towards making that best an ever-growing thing. The
conspicuous coat of the active though blanching mare made horse and
rider easy objects for the vision. Though Darling had been chosen with
such pains by Winterborne for Grace, she had never ridden the sleek
creature; but her husband had found the animal exceedingly convenient,
particularly now that he had taken to the saddle, plenty of staying
power being left in Darling yet. Fitzpiers, like others of his
character, while despising Melbury and his station, did not at all
disdain to spend Melbury’s money, or appropriate to his own use the
horse which belonged to Melbury’s daughter.

And so the infatuated young surgeon went along through the gorgeous
autumn landscape of White Hart Vale, surrounded by orchards lustrous
with the reds of apple-crops, berries, and foliage, the whole
intensified by the gilding of the declining sun. The earth this year
had been prodigally bountiful, and now was the supreme moment of her
bounty. In the poorest spots the hedges were bowed with haws and
blackberries; acorns cracked underfoot, and the burst husks of
chestnuts lay exposing their auburn contents as if arranged by anxious
sellers in a fruit-market. In all this proud show some kernels were
unsound as her own situation, and she wondered if there were one world
in the universe where the fruit had no worm, and marriage no sorrow.

Herr Tannhäuser still moved on, his plodding steed rendering him
distinctly visible yet. Could she have heard Fitzpiers’s voice at that
moment she would have found him murmuring—

“...Towards the loadstar of my one desire
I flitted, even as a dizzy moth in the owlet light.”


But he was a silent spectacle to her now. Soon he rose out of the
valley, and skirted a high plateau of the chalk formation on his right,
which rested abruptly upon the fruity district of loamy clay, the
character and herbage of the two formations being so distinct that the
calcareous upland appeared but as a deposit of a few years’ antiquity
upon the level vale. He kept along the edge of this high, unenclosed
country, and the sky behind him being deep violet, she could still see
white Darling in relief upon it—a mere speck now—a Wouvermans
eccentricity reduced to microscopic dimensions. Upon this high ground
he gradually disappeared.

Thus she had beheld the pet animal purchased for her own use, in pure
love of her, by one who had always been true, impressed to convey her
husband away from her to the side of a new-found idol. While she was
musing on the vicissitudes of horses and wives, she discerned shapes
moving up the valley towards her, quite near at hand, though till now
hidden by the hedges. Surely they were Giles Winterborne, with his two
horses and cider-apparatus, conducted by Robert Creedle. Up, upward
they crept, a stray beam of the sun alighting every now and then like a
star on the blades of the pomace-shovels, which had been converted to
steel mirrors by the action of the malic acid. She opened the gate when
he came close, and the panting horses rested as they achieved the
ascent.

“How do you do, Giles?” said she, under a sudden impulse to be familiar
with him.

He replied with much more reserve. “You are going for a walk, Mrs.
Fitzpiers?” he added. “It is pleasant just now.”

“No, I am returning,” said she.

The vehicles passed through, the gate slammed, and Winterborne walked
by her side in the rear of the apple-mill.

He looked and smelt like Autumn’s very brother, his face being sunburnt
to wheat-color, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his boots and leggings
dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of
apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him that
atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an
indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among
the orchards. Her heart rose from its late sadness like a released
spring; her senses revelled in the sudden lapse back to nature
unadorned. The consciousness of having to be genteel because of her
husband’s profession, the veneer of artificiality which she had
acquired at the fashionable schools, were thrown off, and she became
the crude, country girl of her latent, earliest instincts.

Nature was bountiful, she thought. No sooner had she been starved off
by Edgar Fitzpiers than another being, impersonating bare and undiluted
manliness, had arisen out of the earth, ready to hand. This was an
excursion of the imagination which she did not encourage, and she said
suddenly, to disguise the confused regard which had followed her
thoughts, “Did you meet my husband?”

Winterborne, with some hesitation, “Yes.”

“Where did you meet him?”

“At Calfhay Cross. I come from Middleton Abbey; I have been making
there for the last week.”

“Haven’t they a mill of their own?”

“Yes, but it’s out of repair.”

“I think—I heard that Mrs. Charmond had gone there to stay?”

“Yes. I have seen her at the windows once or twice.”

Grace waited an interval before she went on: “Did Mr. Fitzpiers take
the way to Middleton?”

“Yes...I met him on Darling.” As she did not reply, he added, with a
gentler inflection, “You know why the mare was called that?”

“Oh yes—of course,” she answered, quickly.

They had risen so far over the crest of the hill that the whole west
sky was revealed. Between the broken clouds they could see far into the
recesses of heaven, the eye journeying on under a species of golden
arcades, and past fiery obstructions, fancied cairns, logan-stones,
stalactites and stalagmite of topaz. Deeper than this their gaze passed
thin flakes of incandescence, till it plunged into a bottomless medium
of soft green fire.

Her abandonment to the luscious time after her sense of ill-usage, her
revolt for the nonce against social law, her passionate desire for
primitive life, may have showed in her face. Winterborne was looking at
her, his eyes lingering on a flower that she wore in her bosom. Almost
with the abstraction of a somnambulist he stretched out his hand and
gently caressed the flower.

She drew back. “What are you doing, Giles Winterborne!” she exclaimed,
with a look of severe surprise. The evident absence of all
premeditation from the act, however, speedily led her to think that it
was not necessary to stand upon her dignity here and now. “You must
bear in mind, Giles,” she said, kindly, “that we are not as we were;
and some people might have said that what you did was taking a
liberty.”

It was more than she need have told him; his action of forgetfulness
had made him so angry with himself that he flushed through his tan. “I
don’t know what I am coming to!” he exclaimed, savagely. “Ah—I was not
once like this!” Tears of vexation were in his eyes.

“No, now—it was nothing. I was too reproachful.”

“It would not have occurred to me if I had not seen something like it
done elsewhere—at Middleton lately,” he said, thoughtfully, after a
while.

“By whom?”

“Don’t ask it.”

She scanned him narrowly. “I know quite well enough,” she returned,
indifferently. “It was by my husband, and the woman was Mrs. Charmond.
Association of ideas reminded you when you saw me....Giles—tell me all
you know about that—please do, Giles! But no—I won’t hear it. Let the
subject cease. And as you are my friend, say nothing to my father.”

They reached a place where their ways divided. Winterborne continued
along the highway which kept outside the copse, and Grace opened a gate
that entered it.




CHAPTER XXIX.


She walked up the soft grassy ride, screened on either hand by
nut-bushes, just now heavy with clusters of twos and threes and fours.
A little way on, the track she pursued was crossed by a similar one at
right angles. Here Grace stopped; some few yards up the transverse ride
the buxom Suke Damson was visible—her gown tucked up high through her
pocket-hole, and no bonnet on her head—in the act of pulling down
boughs from which she was gathering and eating nuts with great
rapidity, her lover Tim Tangs standing near her engaged in the same
pleasant meal.

Crack, crack went Suke’s jaws every second or two. By an automatic
chain of thought Grace’s mind reverted to the tooth-drawing scene
described by her husband; and for the first time she wondered if that
narrative were really true, Susan’s jaws being so obviously sound and
strong. Grace turned up towards the nut-gatherers, and conquered her
reluctance to speak to the girl who was a little in advance of Tim.
“Good-evening, Susan,” she said.

“Good-evening, Miss Melbury” (crack).

“Mrs. Fitzpiers.”

“Oh yes, ma’am—Mrs. Fitzpiers,” said Suke, with a peculiar smile.

Grace, not to be daunted, continued: “Take care of your teeth, Suke.
That accounts for the toothache.”

“I don’t know what an ache is, either in tooth, ear, or head, thank the
Lord” (crack).

“Nor the loss of one, either?”

“See for yourself, ma’am.” She parted her red lips, and exhibited the
whole double row, full up and unimpaired.

“You have never had one drawn?”

“Never.”

“So much the better for your stomach,” said Mrs. Fitzpiers, in an
altered voice. And turning away quickly, she went on.

As her husband’s character thus shaped itself under the touch of time,
Grace was almost startled to find how little she suffered from that
jealous excitement which is conventionally attributed to all wives in
such circumstances. But though possessed by none of that feline
wildness which it was her moral duty to experience, she did not fail to
know that she had made a frightful mistake in her marriage.
Acquiescence in her father’s wishes had been degradation to herself.
People are not given premonitions for nothing; she should have obeyed
her impulse on that early morning, and steadfastly refused her hand.

Oh, that plausible tale which her then betrothed had told her about
Suke—the dramatic account of her entreaties to him to draw the aching
enemy, and the fine artistic touch he had given to the story by
explaining that it was a lovely molar without a flaw!

She traced the remainder of the woodland track dazed by the
complications of her position. If his protestations to her before their
marriage could be believed, her husband had felt affection of some sort
for herself and this woman simultaneously; and was now again spreading
the same emotion over Mrs. Charmond and herself conjointly, his manner
being still kind and fond at times. But surely, rather than that, he
must have played the hypocrite towards her in each case with elaborate
completeness; and the thought of this sickened her, for it involved the
conjecture that if he had not loved her, his only motive for making her
his wife must have been her little fortune. Yet here Grace made a
mistake, for the love of men like Fitzpiers is unquestionably of such
quality as to bear division and transference. He had indeed, once
declared, though not to her, that on one occasion he had noticed
himself to be possessed by five distinct infatuations at the same time.
Therein it differed from the highest affection as the lower orders of
the animal world differ from advanced organisms, partition causing, not
death, but a multiplied existence. He had loved her sincerely, and had
by no means ceased to love her now. But such double and treble
barrelled hearts were naturally beyond her conception.

Of poor Suke Damson, Grace thought no more. She had had her day.

“If he does not love me I will not love him!” said Grace, proudly. And
though these were mere words, it was a somewhat formidable thing for
Fitzpiers that her heart was approximating to a state in which it might
be possible to carry them out. That very absence of hot jealousy which
made his courses so easy, and on which, indeed, he congratulated
himself, meant, unknown to either wife or husband, more mischief than
the inconvenient watchfulness of a jaundiced eye.

Her sleep that night was nervous. The wing allotted to her and her
husband had never seemed so lonely. At last she got up, put on her
dressing-gown, and went down-stairs. Her father, who slept lightly,
heard her descend, and came to the stair-head.

“Is that you, Grace? What’s the matter?” he said.

“Nothing more than that I am restless. Edgar is detained by a case at
Owlscombe in White Hart Vale.”

“But how’s that? I saw the woman’s husband at Great Hintock just afore
bedtime; and she was going on well, and the doctor gone then.”

“Then he’s detained somewhere else,” said Grace. “Never mind me; he
will soon be home. I expect him about one.”

She went back to her room, and dozed and woke several times. One
o’clock had been the hour of his return on the last occasion; but it
passed now by a long way, and Fitzpiers did not come. Just before dawn
she heard the men stirring in the yard; and the flashes of their
lanterns spread every now and then through her window-blind. She
remembered that her father had told her not to be disturbed if she
noticed them, as they would be rising early to send off four loads of
hurdles to a distant sheep-fair. Peeping out, she saw them bustling
about, the hollow-turner among the rest; he was loading his
wares—wooden-bowls, dishes, spigots, spoons, cheese-vats, funnels, and
so on—upon one of her father’s wagons, who carried them to the fair for
him every year out of neighborly kindness.

The scene and the occasion would have enlivened her but that her
husband was still absent; though it was now five o’clock. She could
hardly suppose him, whatever his infatuation, to have prolonged to a
later hour than ten an ostensibly professional call on Mrs. Charmond at
Middleton; and he could have ridden home in two hours and a half. What,
then, had become of him? That he had been out the greater part of the
two preceding nights added to her uneasiness.

She dressed herself, descended, and went out, the weird twilight of
advancing day chilling the rays from the lanterns, and making the men’s
faces wan. As soon as Melbury saw her he came round, showing his alarm.

“Edgar is not come,” she said. “And I have reason to know that he’s not
attending anybody. He has had no rest for two nights before this. I was
going to the top of the hill to look for him.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Melbury.

She begged him not to hinder himself; but he insisted, for he saw a
peculiar and rigid gloom in her face over and above her uneasiness, and
did not like the look of it. Telling the men he would be with them
again soon, he walked beside her into the turnpike-road, and partly up
the hill whence she had watched Fitzpiers the night before across the
Great White Hart or Blackmoor Valley. They halted beneath a half-dead
oak, hollow, and disfigured with white tumors, its roots spreading out
like accipitrine claws grasping the ground. A chilly wind circled round
them, upon whose currents the seeds of a neighboring lime-tree,
supported parachute-wise by the wing attached, flew out of the boughs
downward like fledglings from their nest. The vale was wrapped in a dim
atmosphere of unnaturalness, and the east was like a livid curtain
edged with pink. There was no sign nor sound of Fitzpiers.

“It is no use standing here,” said her father. “He may come home fifty
ways...why, look here!—here be Darling’s tracks—turned homeward and
nearly blown dry and hard! He must have come in hours ago without your
seeing him.”

“He has not done that,” said she.

They went back hastily. On entering their own gates they perceived that
the men had left the wagons, and were standing round the door of the
stable which had been appropriated to the doctor’s use. “Is there
anything the matter?” cried Grace.

“Oh no, ma’am. All’s well that ends well,” said old Timothy Tangs.
“I’ve heard of such things before—among workfolk, though not among your
gentle people—that’s true.”

They entered the stable, and saw the pale shape of Darling standing in
the middle of her stall, with Fitzpiers on her back, sound asleep.
Darling was munching hay as well as she could with the bit in her
month, and the reins, which had fallen from Fitzpiers’s hand, hung upon
her neck.

Grace went and touched his hand; shook it before she could arouse him.
He moved, started, opened his eyes, and exclaimed, “Ah, Felice!...Oh,
it’s Grace. I could not see in the gloom. What—am I in the saddle?”

“Yes,” said she. “How do you come here?”

He collected his thoughts, and in a few minutes stammered, “I was
riding along homeward through the vale, very, very sleepy, having been
up so much of late. When I came opposite Holywell spring the mare
turned her head that way, as if she wanted to drink. I let her go in,
and she drank; I thought she would never finish. While she was
drinking, the clock of Owlscombe Church struck twelve. I distinctly
remember counting the strokes. From that moment I positively recollect
nothing till I saw you here by my side.”

“The name! If it had been any other horse he’d have had a broken neck!”
murmured Melbury.

“’Tis wonderful, sure, how a quiet hoss will bring a man home at such
times!” said John Upjohn. “And what’s more wonderful than keeping your
seat in a deep, slumbering sleep? I’ve knowed men drowze off walking
home from randies where the mead and other liquors have gone round
well, and keep walking for more than a mile on end without waking.
Well, doctor, I don’t care who the man is, ’tis a mercy you wasn’t a
drownded, or a splintered, or a hanged up to a tree like Absalom—also a
handsome gentleman like yerself, as the prophets say.”

“True,” murmured old Timothy. “From the soul of his foot to the crown
of his head there was no blemish in him.”

“Or leastwise you might ha’ been a-wownded into tatters a’most, and no
doctor to jine your few limbs together within seven mile!”

While this grim address was proceeding, Fitzpiers had dismounted, and
taking Grace’s arm walked stiffly in-doors with her. Melbury stood
staring at the horse, which, in addition to being very weary, was
spattered with mud. There was no mud to speak of about the Hintocks
just now—only in the clammy hollows of the vale beyond Owlscombe, the
stiff soil of which retained moisture for weeks after the uplands were
dry. While they were rubbing down the mare, Melbury’s mind coupled with
the foreign quality of the mud the name he had heard unconsciously
muttered by the surgeon when Grace took his hand—“Felice.” Who was
Felice? Why, Mrs. Charmond; and she, as he knew, was staying at
Middleton.

Melbury had indeed pounced upon the image that filled Fitzpiers’s
half-awakened soul—wherein there had been a picture of a recent
interview on a lawn with a capriciously passionate woman who had begged
him not to come again in tones whose vibration incited him to disobey.
“What are you doing here? Why do you pursue me? Another belongs to you.
If they were to see you they would seize you as a thief!” And she had
turbulently admitted to his wringing questions that her visit to
Middleton had been undertaken less because of the invalid relative than
in shamefaced fear of her own weakness if she remained near his home. A
triumph then it was to Fitzpiers, poor and hampered as he had become,
to recognize his real conquest of this beauty, delayed so many years.
His was the selfish passion of Congreve’s Millamont, to whom love’s
supreme delight lay in “that heart which others bleed for, bleed for
me.”

When the horse had been attended to Melbury stood uneasily here and
there about his premises; he was rudely disturbed in the comfortable
views which had lately possessed him on his domestic concerns. It is
true that he had for some days discerned that Grace more and more
sought his company, preferred supervising his kitchen and bakehouse
with her step-mother to occupying herself with the lighter details of
her own apartments. She seemed no longer able to find in her own hearth
an adequate focus for her life, and hence, like a weak queen-bee after
leading off to an independent home, had hovered again into the parent
hive. But he had not construed these and other incidents of the kind
till now.

Something was wrong in the dove-cot. A ghastly sense that he alone
would be responsible for whatever unhappiness should be brought upon
her for whom he almost solely lived, whom to retain under his roof he
had faced the numerous inconveniences involved in giving up the best
part of his house to Fitzpiers. There was no room for doubt that, had
he allowed events to take their natural course, she would have accepted
Winterborne, and realized his old dream of restitution to that young
man’s family.

That Fitzpiers could allow himself to look on any other creature for a
moment than Grace filled Melbury with grief and astonishment. In the
pure and simple life he had led it had scarcely occurred to him that
after marriage a man might be faithless. That he could sweep to the
heights of Mrs. Charmond’s position, lift the veil of Isis, so to
speak, would have amazed Melbury by its audacity if he had not
suspected encouragement from that quarter. What could he and his simple
Grace do to countervail the passions of such as those two sophisticated
beings—versed in the world’s ways, armed with every apparatus for
victory? In such an encounter the homely timber-dealer felt as inferior
as a bow-and-arrow savage before the precise weapons of modern warfare.

Grace came out of the house as the morning drew on. The village was
silent, most of the folk having gone to the fair. Fitzpiers had retired
to bed, and was sleeping off his fatigue. She went to the stable and
looked at poor Darling: in all probability Giles Winterborne, by
obtaining for her a horse of such intelligence and docility, had been
the means of saving her husband’s life. She paused over the strange
thought; and then there appeared her father behind her. She saw that he
knew things were not as they ought to be, from the troubled dulness of
his eye, and from his face, different points of which had independent
motions, twitchings, and tremblings, unknown to himself, and
involuntary.

“He was detained, I suppose, last night?” said Melbury.

“Oh yes; a bad case in the vale,” she replied, calmly.

“Nevertheless, he should have stayed at home.”

“But he couldn’t, father.”

Her father turned away. He could hardly bear to see his whilom truthful
girl brought to the humiliation of having to talk like that.

That night carking care sat beside Melbury’s pillow, and his stiff
limbs tossed at its presence. “I can’t lie here any longer,” he
muttered. Striking a light, he wandered about the room. “What have I
done—what have I done for her?” he said to his wife, who had anxiously
awakened. “I had long planned that she should marry the son of the man
I wanted to make amends to; do ye mind how I told you all about it,
Lucy, the night before she came home? Ah! but I was not content with
doing right, I wanted to do more!”

“Don’t raft yourself without good need, George,” she replied. “I won’t
quite believe that things are so much amiss. I won’t believe that Mrs.
Charmond has encouraged him. Even supposing she has encouraged a great
many, she can have no motive to do it now. What so likely as that she
is not yet quite well, and doesn’t care to let another doctor come near
her?”

He did not heed. “Grace used to be so busy every day, with fixing a
curtain here and driving a tin-tack there; but she cares for no
employment now!”

“Do you know anything of Mrs. Charmond’s past history? Perhaps that
would throw some light upon things. Before she came here as the wife of
old Charmond four or five years ago, not a soul seems to have heard
aught of her. Why not make inquiries? And then do ye wait and see more;
there’ll be plenty of opportunity. Time enough to cry when you know
’tis a crying matter; and ’tis bad to meet troubles half-way.”

There was some good-sense in the notion of seeing further. Melbury
resolved to inquire and wait, hoping still, but oppressed
between-whiles with much fear.




CHAPTER XXX.


Examine Grace as her father might, she would admit nothing. For the
present, therefore, he simply watched.

The suspicion that his darling child was being slighted wrought almost
a miraculous change in Melbury’s nature. No man so furtive for the time
as the ingenuous countryman who finds that his ingenuousness has been
abused. Melbury’s heretofore confidential candor towards his
gentlemanly son-in-law was displaced by a feline stealth that did
injury to his every action, thought, and mood. He knew that a woman
once given to a man for life took, as a rule, her lot as it came and
made the best of it, without external interference; but for the first
time he asked himself why this so generally should be so. Moreover,
this case was not, he argued, like ordinary cases. Leaving out the
question of Grace being anything but an ordinary woman, her peculiar
situation, as it were in mid-air between two planes of society,
together with the loneliness of Hintock, made a husband’s neglect a far
more tragical matter to her than it would be to one who had a large
circle of friends to fall back upon. Wisely or unwisely, and whatever
other fathers did, he resolved to fight his daughter’s battle still.

Mrs. Charmond had returned. But Hintock House scarcely gave forth signs
of life, so quietly had she reentered it. He went to church at Great
Hintock one afternoon as usual, there being no service at the smaller
village. A few minutes before his departure, he had casually heard
Fitzpiers, who was no church-goer, tell his wife that he was going to
walk in the wood. Melbury entered the building and sat down in his pew;
the parson came in, then Mrs. Charmond, then Mr. Fitzpiers.

The service proceeded, and the jealous father was quite sure that a
mutual consciousness was uninterruptedly maintained between those two;
he fancied that more than once their eyes met. At the end, Fitzpiers so
timed his movement into the aisle that it exactly coincided with Felice
Charmond’s from the opposite side, and they walked out with their
garments in contact, the surgeon being just that two or three inches in
her rear which made it convenient for his eyes to rest upon her cheek.
The cheek warmed up to a richer tone.

This was a worse feature in the flirtation than he had expected. If she
had been playing with him in an idle freak the game might soon have
wearied her; but the smallest germ of passion—and women of the world do
not change color for nothing—was a threatening development. The mere
presence of Fitzpiers in the building, after his statement, was
wellnigh conclusive as far as he was concerned; but Melbury resolved
yet to watch.

He had to wait long. Autumn drew shiveringly to its end. One day
something seemed to be gone from the gardens; the tenderer leaves of
vegetables had shrunk under the first smart frost, and hung like faded
linen rags; then the forest leaves, which had been descending at
leisure, descended in haste and in multitudes, and all the golden
colors that had hung overhead were now crowded together in a degraded
mass underfoot, where the fallen myriads got redder and hornier, and
curled themselves up to rot. The only suspicious features in Mrs.
Charmond’s existence at this season were two: the first, that she lived
with no companion or relative about her, which, considering her age and
attractions, was somewhat unusual conduct for a young widow in a lonely
country-house; the other, that she did not, as in previous years, start
from Hintock to winter abroad. In Fitzpiers, the only change from his
last autumn’s habits lay in his abandonment of night study—his lamp
never shone from his new dwelling as from his old.

If the suspected ones met, it was by such adroit contrivances that even
Melbury’s vigilance could not encounter them together. A simple call at
her house by the doctor had nothing irregular about it, and that he had
paid two or three such calls was certain. What had passed at those
interviews was known only to the parties themselves; but that Felice
Charmond was under some one’s influence Melbury soon had opportunity of
perceiving.

Winter had come on. Owls began to be noisy in the mornings and
evenings, and flocks of wood-pigeons made themselves prominent again.
One day in February, about six months after the marriage of Fitzpiers,
Melbury was returning from Great Hintock on foot through the lane, when
he saw before him the surgeon also walking. Melbury would have
overtaken him, but at that moment Fitzpiers turned in through a gate to
one of the rambling drives among the trees at this side of the wood,
which led to nowhere in particular, and the beauty of whose serpentine
curves was the only justification of their existence. Felice almost
simultaneously trotted down the lane towards the timber-dealer, in a
little basket-carriage which she sometimes drove about the estate,
unaccompanied by a servant. She turned in at the same place without
having seen either Melbury or apparently Fitzpiers. Melbury was soon at
the spot, despite his aches and his sixty years. Mrs. Charmond had come
up with the doctor, who was standing immediately behind the carriage.
She had turned to him, her arm being thrown carelessly over the back of
the seat. They looked in each other’s faces without uttering a word, an
arch yet gloomy smile wreathing her lips. Fitzpiers clasped her hanging
hand, and, while she still remained in the same listless attitude,
looking volumes into his eyes, he stealthily unbuttoned her glove, and
stripped her hand of it by rolling back the gauntlet over the fingers,
so that it came off inside out. He then raised her hand to his month,
she still reclining passively, watching him as she might have watched a
fly upon her dress. At last she said, “Well, sir, what excuse for this
disobedience?”

“I make none.”

“Then go your way, and let me go mine.” She snatched away her hand,
touched the pony with the whip, and left him standing there, holding
the reversed glove.

Melbury’s first impulse was to reveal his presence to Fitzpiers, and
upbraid him bitterly. But a moment’s thought was sufficient to show him
the futility of any such simple proceeding. There was not, after all,
so much in what he had witnessed as in what that scene might be the
surface and froth of—probably a state of mind on which censure operates
as an aggravation rather than as a cure. Moreover, he said to himself
that the point of attack should be the woman, if either. He therefore
kept out of sight, and musing sadly, even tearfully—for he was meek as
a child in matters concerning his daughter—continued his way towards
Hintock.

The insight which is bred of deep sympathy was never more finely
exemplified than in this instance. Through her guarded manner, her
dignified speech, her placid countenance, he discerned the interior of
Grace’s life only too truly, hidden as were its incidents from every
outer eye.

These incidents had become painful enough. Fitzpiers had latterly
developed an irritable discontent which vented itself in monologues
when Grace was present to hear them. The early morning of this day had
been dull, after a night of wind, and on looking out of the window
Fitzpiers had observed some of Melbury’s men dragging away a large limb
which had been snapped off a beech-tree. Everything was cold and
colorless.

“My good Heaven!” he said, as he stood in his dressing-gown. “This is
life!” He did not know whether Grace was awake or not, and he would not
turn his head to ascertain. “Ah, fool,” he went on to himself, “to clip
your own wings when you were free to soar!...But I could not rest till
I had done it. Why do I never recognize an opportunity till I have
missed it, nor the good or ill of a step till it is irrevocable!...I
fell in love....Love, indeed!—

“‘Love’s but the frailty of the mind
When ’tis not with ambition joined;
A sickly flame which if not fed, expires,
And feeding, wastes in self-consuming fires!’


Ah, old author of ‘The Way of the World,’ you knew—you knew!” Grace
moved. He thought she had heard some part of his soliloquy. He was
sorry—though he had not taken any precaution to prevent her.

He expected a scene at breakfast, but she only exhibited an extreme
reserve. It was enough, however, to make him repent that he should have
done anything to produce discomfort; for he attributed her manner
entirely to what he had said. But Grace’s manner had not its cause
either in his sayings or in his doings. She had not heard a single word
of his regrets. Something even nearer home than her husband’s blighted
prospects—if blighted they were—was the origin of her mood, a mood that
was the mere continuation of what her father had noticed when he would
have preferred a passionate jealousy in her, as the more natural.

She had made a discovery—one which to a girl of honest nature was
almost appalling. She had looked into her heart, and found that her
early interest in Giles Winterborne had become revitalized into
luxuriant growth by her widening perceptions of what was great and
little in life. His homeliness no longer offended her acquired tastes;
his comparative want of so-called culture did not now jar on her
intellect; his country dress even pleased her eye; his exterior
roughness fascinated her. Having discovered by marriage how much that
was humanly not great could co-exist with attainments of an exceptional
order, there was a revulsion in her sentiments from all that she had
formerly clung to in this kind: honesty, goodness, manliness,
tenderness, devotion, for her only existed in their purity now in the
breasts of unvarnished men; and here was one who had manifested them
towards her from his youth up.

There was, further, that never-ceasing pity in her soul for Giles as a
man whom she had wronged—a man who had been unfortunate in his worldly
transactions; while, not without a touch of sublimity, he had, like
Horatio, borne himself throughout his scathing

“As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing.”


It was these perceptions, and no subtle catching of her husband’s
murmurs, that had bred the abstraction visible in her.

When her father approached the house after witnessing the interview
between Fitzpiers and Mrs. Charmond, Grace was looking out of her
sitting-room window, as if she had nothing to do, or think of, or care
for. He stood still.

“Ah, Grace,” he said, regarding her fixedly.

“Yes, father,” she murmured.

“Waiting for your dear husband?” he inquired, speaking with the sarcasm
of pitiful affection.

“Oh no—not especially. He has a great many patients to see this
afternoon.”

Melbury came quite close. “Grace, what’s the use of talking like that,
when you know—Here, come down and walk with me out in the garden,
child.”

He unfastened the door in the ivy-laced wall, and waited. This apparent
indifference alarmed him. He would far rather that she had rushed in
all the fire of jealousy to Hintock House, regardless of
conventionality, confronted and attacked Felice Charmond _unguibus et
rostro_, and accused her even in exaggerated shape of stealing away her
husband. Such a storm might have cleared the air.

She emerged in a minute or two, and they went inside together. “You
know as well as I do,” he resumed, “that there is something threatening
mischief to your life; and yet you pretend you do not. Do you suppose I
don’t see the trouble in your face every day? I am very sure that this
quietude is wrong conduct in you. You should look more into matters.”

“I am quiet because my sadness is not of a nature to stir me to
action.”

Melbury wanted to ask her a dozen questions—did she not feel jealous?
was she not indignant? but a natural delicacy restrained him. “You are
very tame and let-alone, I am bound to say,” he remarked, pointedly.

“I am what I feel, father,” she repeated.

He glanced at her, and there returned upon his mind the scene of her
offering to wed Winterborne instead of Fitzpiers in the last days
before her marriage; and he asked himself if it could be the fact that
she loved Winterborne, now that she had lost him, more than she had
ever done when she was comparatively free to choose him.

“What would you have me do?” she asked, in a low voice.

He recalled his mind from the retrospective pain to the practical
matter before them. “I would have you go to Mrs. Charmond,” he said.

“Go to Mrs. Charmond—what for?” said she.

“Well—if I must speak plain, dear Grace—to ask her, appeal to her in
the name of your common womanhood, and your many like sentiments on
things, not to make unhappiness between you and your husband. It lies
with her entirely to do one or the other—that I can see.”

Grace’s face had heated at her father’s words, and the very rustle of
her skirts upon the box-edging bespoke hauteur. “I shall not think of
going to her, father—of course I could not!” she answered.

“Why—don’t ’ee want to be happier than you be at present?” said
Melbury, more moved on her account than she was herself.

“I don’t wish to be more humiliated. If I have anything to bear I can
bear it in silence.”

“But, my dear maid, you are too young—you don’t know what the present
state of things may lead to. Just see the harm done a’ready! Your
husband would have gone away to Budmouth to a bigger practice if it had
not been for this. Although it has gone such a little way, it is
poisoning your future even now. Mrs. Charmond is thoughtlessly bad, not
bad by calculation; and just a word to her now might save ’ee a peck of
woes.”

“Ah, I loved her once,” said Grace, with a broken articulation, “and
she would not care for me then! Now I no longer love her. Let her do
her worst: I don’t care.”

“You ought to care. You have got into a very good position to start
with. You have been well educated, well tended, and you have become the
wife of a professional man of unusually good family. Surely you ought
to make the best of your position.”

“I don’t see that I ought. I wish I had never got into it. I wish you
had never, never thought of educating me. I wish I worked in the woods
like Marty South. I hate genteel life, and I want to be no better than
she.”

“Why?” said her amazed father.

“Because cultivation has only brought me inconveniences and troubles. I
say again, I wish you had never sent me to those fashionable schools
you set your mind on. It all arose out of that, father. If I had stayed
at home I should have married—” She closed up her mouth suddenly and
was silent; and he saw that she was not far from crying.

Melbury was much grieved. “What, and would you like to have grown up as
we be here in Hintock—knowing no more, and with no more chance of
seeing good life than we have here?”

“Yes. I have never got any happiness outside Hintock that I know of,
and I have suffered many a heartache at being sent away. Oh, the misery
of those January days when I had got back to school, and left you all
here in the wood so happy. I used to wonder why I had to bear it. And I
was always a little despised by the other girls at school, because they
knew where I came from, and that my parents were not in so good a
station as theirs.”

Her poor father was much hurt at what he thought her ingratitude and
intractability. He had admitted to himself bitterly enough that he
should have let young hearts have their way, or rather should have
helped on her affection for Winterborne, and given her to him according
to his original plan; but he was not prepared for her deprecation of
those attainments whose completion had been a labor of years, and a
severe tax upon his purse.

“Very well,” he said, with much heaviness of spirit. “If you don’t like
to go to her I don’t wish to force you.”

And so the question remained for him still: how should he remedy this
perilous state of things? For days he sat in a moody attitude over the
fire, a pitcher of cider standing on the hearth beside him, and his
drinking-horn inverted upon the top of it. He spent a week and more
thus composing a letter to the chief offender, which he would every now
and then attempt to complete, and suddenly crumple up in his hand.




CHAPTER XXXI.


As February merged in March, and lighter evenings broke the gloom of
the woodmen’s homeward journey, the Hintocks Great and Little began to
have ears for a rumor of the events out of which had grown the
timber-dealer’s troubles. It took the form of a wide sprinkling of
conjecture, wherein no man knew the exact truth. Tantalizing phenomena,
at once showing and concealing the real relationship of the persons
concerned, caused a diffusion of excited surprise. Honest people as the
woodlanders were, it was hardly to be expected that they could remain
immersed in the study of their trees and gardens amid such
circumstances, or sit with their backs turned like the good burghers of
Coventry at the passage of the beautiful lady.

Rumor, for a wonder, exaggerated little. There were, in fact, in this
case as in thousands, the well-worn incidents, old as the hills, which,
with individual variations, made a mourner of Ariadne, a by-word of
Vashti, and a corpse of the Countess Amy. There were rencounters
accidental and contrived, stealthy correspondence, sudden misgivings on
one side, sudden self-reproaches on the other. The inner state of the
twain was one as of confused noise that would not allow the accents of
calmer reason to be heard. Determinations to go in this direction, and
headlong plunges in that; dignified safeguards, undignified collapses;
not a single rash step by deliberate intention, and all against
judgment.

It was all that Melbury had expected and feared. It was more, for he
had overlooked the publicity that would be likely to result, as it now
had done. What should he do—appeal to Mrs. Charmond himself, since
Grace would not? He bethought himself of Winterborne, and resolved to
consult him, feeling the strong need of some friend of his own sex to
whom he might unburden his mind.

He had entirely lost faith in his own judgment. That judgment on which
he had relied for so many years seemed recently, like a false companion
unmasked, to have disclosed unexpected depths of hypocrisy and
speciousness where all had seemed solidity. He felt almost afraid to
form a conjecture on the weather, or the time, or the fruit-promise, so
great was his self-abasement.

It was a rimy evening when he set out to look for Giles. The woods
seemed to be in a cold sweat; beads of perspiration hung from every
bare twig; the sky had no color, and the trees rose before him as
haggard, gray phantoms, whose days of substantiality were passed.
Melbury seldom saw Winterborne now, but he believed him to be occupying
a lonely hut just beyond the boundary of Mrs. Charmond’s estate, though
still within the circuit of the woodland. The timber-merchant’s thin
legs stalked on through the pale, damp scenery, his eyes on the dead
leaves of last year; while every now and then a hasty “Ay?” escaped his
lips in reply to some bitter proposition.

His notice was attracted by a thin blue haze of smoke, behind which
arose sounds of voices and chopping: bending his steps that way, he saw
Winterborne just in front of him. It just now happened that Giles,
after being for a long time apathetic and unemployed, had become one of
the busiest men in the neighborhood. It is often thus; fallen friends,
lost sight of, we expect to find starving; we discover them going on
fairly well. Without any solicitation, or desire for profit on his
part, he had been asked to execute during that winter a very large
order for hurdles and other copse-ware, for which purpose he had been
obliged to buy several acres of brushwood standing. He was now engaged
in the cutting and manufacture of the same, proceeding with the work
daily like an automaton.

The hazel-tree did not belie its name to-day. The whole of the
copse-wood where the mist had cleared returned purest tints of that
hue, amid which Winterborne himself was in the act of making a hurdle,
the stakes being driven firmly into the ground in a row, over which he
bent and wove the twigs. Beside him was a square, compact pile like the
altar of Cain, formed of hurdles already finished, which bristled on
all sides with the sharp points of their stakes. At a little distance
the men in his employ were assisting him to carry out his contract.
Rows of copse-wood lay on the ground as it had fallen under the axe;
and a shelter had been constructed near at hand, in front of which
burned the fire whose smoke had attracted him. The air was so dank that
the smoke hung heavy, and crept away amid the bushes without rising
from the ground.

After wistfully regarding Winterborne a while, Melbury drew nearer, and
briefly inquired of Giles how he came to be so busily engaged, with an
undertone of slight surprise that Winterborne could seem so thriving
after being deprived of Grace. Melbury was not without emotion at the
meeting; for Grace’s affairs had divided them, and ended their intimacy
of old times.

Winterborne explained just as briefly, without raising his eyes from
his occupation of chopping a bough that he held in front of him.

“’Twill be up in April before you get it all cleared,” said Melbury.

“Yes, there or thereabouts,” said Winterborne, a chop of the billhook
jerking the last word into two pieces.

There was another interval; Melbury still looked on, a chip from
Winterborne’s hook occasionally flying against the waistcoat and legs
of his visitor, who took no heed.

“Ah, Giles—you should have been my partner. You should have been my
son-in-law,” the old man said at last. “It would have been far better
for her and for me.”

Winterborne saw that something had gone wrong with his former friend,
and throwing down the switch he was about to interweave, he responded
only too readily to the mood of the timber-dealer. “Is she ill?” he
said, hurriedly.

“No, no.” Melbury stood without speaking for some minutes, and then, as
though he could not bring himself to proceed, turned to go away.

Winterborne told one of his men to pack up the tools for the night and
walked after Melbury.

“Heaven forbid that I should seem too inquisitive, sir,” he said,
“especially since we don’t stand as we used to stand to one another;
but I hope it is well with them all over your way?”

“No,” said Melbury—“no.” He stopped, and struck the smooth trunk of a
young ash-tree with the flat of his hand. “I would that his ear had
been where that rind is!” he exclaimed; “I should have treated him to
little compared wi what he deserves.”

“Now,” said Winterborne, “don’t be in a hurry to go home. I’ve put some
cider down to warm in my shelter here, and we’ll sit and drink it and
talk this over.”

Melbury turned unresistingly as Giles took his arm, and they went back
to where the fire was, and sat down under the screen, the other woodmen
having gone. He drew out the cider-mug from the ashes and they drank
together.

“Giles, you ought to have had her, as I said just now,” repeated
Melbury. “I’ll tell you why for the first time.”

He thereupon told Winterborne, as with great relief, the story of how
he won away Giles’s father’s chosen one—by nothing worse than a lover’s
cajoleries, it is true, but by means which, except in love, would
certainly have been pronounced cruel and unfair. He explained how he
had always intended to make reparation to Winterborne the father by
giving Grace to Winterborne the son, till the devil tempted him in the
person of Fitzpiers, and he broke his virtuous vow.

“How highly I thought of that man, to be sure! Who’d have supposed he’d
have been so weak and wrong-headed as this! You ought to have had her,
Giles, and there’s an end on’t.”

Winterborne knew how to preserve his calm under this unconsciously
cruel tearing of a healing wound to which Melbury’s concentration on
the more vital subject had blinded him. The young man endeavored to
make the best of the case for Grace’s sake.

“She would hardly have been happy with me,” he said, in the dry,
unimpassioned voice under which he hid his feelings. “I was not well
enough educated: too rough, in short. I couldn’t have surrounded her
with the refinements she looked for, anyhow, at all.”

“Nonsense—you are quite wrong there,” said the unwise old man,
doggedly. “She told me only this day that she hates refinements and
such like. All that my trouble and money bought for her in that way is
thrown away upon her quite. She’d fain be like Marty South—think o’
that! That’s the top of her ambition! Perhaps she’s right. Giles, she
loved you—under the rind; and, what’s more, she loves ye still—worse
luck for the poor maid!”

If Melbury only had known what fires he was recklessly stirring up he
might have held his peace. Winterborne was silent a long time. The
darkness had closed in round them, and the monotonous drip of the fog
from the branches quickened as it turned to fine rain.

“Oh, she never cared much for me,” Giles managed to say, as he stirred
the embers with a brand.

“She did, and does, I tell ye,” said the other, obstinately. “However,
all that’s vain talking now. What I come to ask you about is a more
practical matter—how to make the best of things as they are. I am
thinking of a desperate step—of calling on the woman Charmond. I am
going to appeal to her, since Grace will not. ’Tis she who holds the
balance in her hands—not he. While she’s got the will to lead him
astray he will follow—poor, unpractical, lofty-notioned dreamer—and how
long she’ll do it depends upon her whim. Did ye ever hear anything
about her character before she came to Hintock?”

“She’s been a bit of a charmer in her time, I believe,” replied Giles,
with the same level quietude, as he regarded the red coals. “One who
has smiled where she has not loved and loved where she has not married.
Before Mr. Charmond made her his wife she was a play-actress.”

“Hey? But how close you have kept all this, Giles! What besides?”

“Mr. Charmond was a rich man, engaged in the iron trade in the north,
twenty or thirty years older than she. He married her and retired, and
came down here and bought this property, as they do nowadays.”

“Yes, yes—I know all about that; but the other I did not know. I fear
it bodes no good. For how can I go and appeal to the forbearance of a
woman in this matter who has made cross-loves and crooked entanglements
her trade for years? I thank ye, Giles, for finding it out; but it
makes my plan the harder that she should have belonged to that unstable
tribe.”

Another pause ensued, and they looked gloomily at the smoke that beat
about the hurdles which sheltered them, through whose weavings a large
drop of rain fell at intervals and spat smartly into the fire. Mrs.
Charmond had been no friend to Winterborne, but he was manly, and it
was not in his heart to let her be condemned without a trial.

“She is said to be generous,” he answered. “You might not appeal to her
in vain.”

“It shall be done,” said Melbury, rising. “For good or for evil, to
Mrs. Charmond I’ll go.”




CHAPTER XXXII.


At nine o’clock the next morning Melbury dressed himself up in shining
broadcloth, creased with folding and smelling of camphor, and started
for Hintock House. He was the more impelled to go at once by the
absence of his son-in-law in London for a few days, to attend, really
or ostensibly, some professional meetings. He said nothing of his
destination either to his wife or to Grace, fearing that they might
entreat him to abandon so risky a project, and went out unobserved. He
had chosen his time with a view, as he supposed, of conveniently
catching Mrs. Charmond when she had just finished her breakfast, before
any other business people should be about, if any came. Plodding
thoughtfully onward, he crossed a glade lying between Little Hintock
Woods and the plantation which abutted on the park; and the spot being
open, he was discerned there by Winterborne from the copse on the next
hill, where he and his men were working. Knowing his mission, the
younger man hastened down from the copse and managed to intercept the
timber-merchant.

“I have been thinking of this, sir,” he said, “and I am of opinion that
it would be best to put off your visit for the present.”

But Melbury would not even stop to hear him. His mind was made up, the
appeal was to be made; and Winterborne stood and watched him sadly till
he entered the second plantation and disappeared.

Melbury rang at the tradesmen’s door of the manor-house, and was at
once informed that the lady was not yet visible, as indeed he might
have guessed had he been anybody but the man he was. Melbury said he
would wait, whereupon the young man informed him in a neighborly way
that, between themselves, she was in bed and asleep.

“Never mind,” said Melbury, retreating into the court, “I’ll stand
about here.” Charged so fully with his mission, he shrank from contact
with anybody.

But he walked about the paved court till he was tired, and still nobody
came to him. At last he entered the house and sat down in a small
waiting-room, from which he got glimpses of the kitchen corridor, and
of the white-capped maids flitting jauntily hither and thither. They
had heard of his arrival, but had not seen him enter, and, imagining
him still in the court, discussed freely the possible reason of his
calling. They marvelled at his temerity; for though most of the tongues
which had been let loose attributed the chief blame-worthiness to
Fitzpiers, these of her household preferred to regard their mistress as
the deeper sinner.

Melbury sat with his hands resting on the familiar knobbed thorn
walking-stick, whose growing he had seen before he enjoyed its use. The
scene to him was not the material environment of his person, but a
tragic vision that travelled with him like an envelope. Through this
vision the incidents of the moment but gleamed confusedly here and
there, as an outer landscape through the high-colored scenes of a
stained window. He waited thus an hour, an hour and a half, two hours.
He began to look pale and ill, whereupon the butler, who came in, asked
him to have a glass of wine. Melbury roused himself and said, “No, no.
Is she almost ready?”

“She is just finishing breakfast,” said the butler. “She will soon see
you now. I am just going up to tell her you are here.”

“What! haven’t you told her before?” said Melbury.

“Oh no,” said the other. “You see you came so very early.”

At last the bell rang: Mrs. Charmond could see him. She was not in her
private sitting-room when he reached it, but in a minute he heard her
coming from the front staircase, and she entered where he stood.

At this time of the morning Mrs. Charmond looked her full age and more.
She might almost have been taken for the typical _femme de trente ans_,
though she was really not more than seven or eight and twenty. There
being no fire in the room, she came in with a shawl thrown loosely
round her shoulders, and obviously without the least suspicion that
Melbury had called upon any other errand than timber. Felice was,
indeed, the only woman in the parish who had not heard the rumor of her
own weaknesses; she was at this moment living in a fool’s paradise in
respect of that rumor, though not in respect of the weaknesses
themselves, which, if the truth be told, caused her grave misgivings.

“Do sit down, Mr. Melbury. You have felled all the trees that were to
be purchased by you this season, except the oaks, I believe.”

“Yes,” said Melbury.

“How very nice! It must be so charming to work in the woods just now!”

She was too careless to affect an interest in an extraneous person’s
affairs so consummately as to deceive in the manner of the perfect
social machine. Hence her words “very nice,” “so charming,” were
uttered with a perfunctoriness that made them sound absurdly unreal.

“Yes, yes,” said Melbury, in a reverie. He did not take a chair, and
she also remained standing. Resting upon his stick, he began: “Mrs.
Charmond, I have called upon a more serious matter—at least to me—than
tree-throwing. And whatever mistakes I make in my manner of speaking
upon it to you, madam, do me the justice to set ’em down to my want of
practice, and not to my want of care.”

Mrs. Charmond looked ill at ease. She might have begun to guess his
meaning; but apart from that, she had such dread of contact with
anything painful, harsh, or even earnest, that his preliminaries alone
were enough to distress her. “Yes, what is it?” she said.

“I am an old man,” said Melbury, “whom, somewhat late in life, God
thought fit to bless with one child, and she a daughter. Her mother was
a very dear wife to me, but she was taken away from us when the child
was young, and the child became precious as the apple of my eye to me,
for she was all I had left to love. For her sake entirely I married as
second wife a homespun woman who had been kind as a mother to her. In
due time the question of her education came on, and I said, ‘I will
educate the maid well, if I live upon bread to do it.’ Of her possible
marriage I could not bear to think, for it seemed like a death that she
should cleave to another man, and grow to think his house her home
rather than mine. But I saw it was the law of nature that this should
be, and that it was for the maid’s happiness that she should have a
home when I was gone; and I made up my mind without a murmur to help it
on for her sake. In my youth I had wronged my dead friend, and to make
amends I determined to give her, my most precious possession, to my
friend’s son, seeing that they liked each other well. Things came about
which made me doubt if it would be for my daughter’s happiness to do
this, inasmuch as the young man was poor, and she was delicately
reared. Another man came and paid court to her—one her equal in
breeding and accomplishments; in every way it seemed to me that he only
could give her the home which her training had made a necessity almost.
I urged her on, and she married him. But, ma’am, a fatal mistake was at
the root of my reckoning. I found that this well-born gentleman I had
calculated on so surely was not stanch of heart, and that therein lay a
danger of great sorrow for my daughter. Madam, he saw you, and you know
the rest....I have come to make no demands—to utter no threats; I have
come simply as a father in great grief about this only child, and I
beseech you to deal kindly with my daughter, and to do nothing which
can turn her husband’s heart away from her forever. Forbid him your
presence, ma’am, and speak to him on his duty as one with your power
over him well can do, and I am hopeful that the rent between them may
be patched up. For it is not as if you would lose by so doing; your
course is far higher than the courses of a simple professional man, and
the gratitude you would win from me and mine by your kindness is more
than I can say.”

Mrs. Charmond had first rushed into a mood of indignation on
comprehending Melbury’s story; hot and cold by turns, she had murmured,
“Leave me, leave me!” But as he seemed to take no notice of this, his
words began to influence her, and when he ceased speaking she said,
with hurried, hot breath, “What has led you to think this of me? Who
says I have won your daughter’s husband away from her? Some monstrous
calumnies are afloat—of which I have known nothing until now!”

Melbury started, and looked at her simply. “But surely, ma’am, you know
the truth better than I?”

Her features became a little pinched, and the touches of powder on her
handsome face for the first time showed themselves as an extrinsic
film. “Will you leave me to myself?” she said, with a faintness which
suggested a guilty conscience. “This is so utterly unexpected—you
obtain admission to my presence by misrepresentation—”

“As God’s in heaven, ma’am, that’s not true. I made no pretence; and I
thought in reason you would know why I had come. This gossip—”

“I have heard nothing of it. Tell me of it, I say.”

“Tell you, ma’am—not I. What the gossip is, no matter. What really is,
you know. Set facts right, and the scandal will right of itself. But
pardon me—I speak roughly; and I came to speak gently, to coax you, beg
you to be my daughter’s friend. She loved you once, ma’am; you began by
liking her. Then you dropped her without a reason, and it hurt her warm
heart more than I can tell ye. But you were within your right as the
superior, no doubt. But if you would consider her position now—surely,
surely, you would do her no harm!”

“Certainly I would do her no harm—I—” Melbury’s eye met hers. It was
curious, but the allusion to Grace’s former love for her seemed to
touch her more than all Melbury’s other arguments. “Oh, Melbury,” she
burst out, “you have made me so unhappy! How could you come to me like
this! It is too dreadful! Now go away—go, go!”

“I will,” he said, in a husky tone.

As soon as he was out of the room she went to a corner and there sat
and writhed under an emotion in which hurt pride and vexation mingled
with better sentiments.

Mrs. Charmond’s mobile spirit was subject to these fierce periods of
stress and storm. She had never so clearly perceived till now that her
soul was being slowly invaded by a delirium which had brought about all
this; that she was losing judgment and dignity under it, becoming an
animated impulse only, a passion incarnate. A fascination had led her
on; it was as if she had been seized by a hand of velvet; and this was
where she found herself—overshadowed with sudden night, as if a tornado
had passed by.

While she sat, or rather crouched, unhinged by the interview,
lunch-time came, and then the early afternoon, almost without her
consciousness. Then “a strange gentleman who says it is not necessary
to give his name,” was suddenly announced.

“I cannot see him, whoever he may be. I am not at home to anybody.”

She heard no more of her visitor; and shortly after, in an attempt to
recover some mental serenity by violent physical exercise, she put on
her hat and cloak and went out-of-doors, taking a path which led her up
the slopes to the nearest spur of the wood. She disliked the woods, but
they had the advantage of being a place in which she could walk
comparatively unobserved.




CHAPTER XXXIII.


There was agitation to-day in the lives of all whom these matters
concerned. It was not till the Hintock dinner-time—one o’clock—that
Grace discovered her father’s absence from the house after a departure
in the morning under somewhat unusual conditions. By a little reasoning
and inquiry she was able to come to a conclusion on his destination,
and to divine his errand.

Her husband was absent, and her father did not return. He had, in
truth, gone on to Sherton after the interview, but this Grace did not
know. In an indefinite dread that something serious would arise out of
Melbury’s visit by reason of the inequalities of temper and nervous
irritation to which he was subject, something possibly that would bring
her much more misery than accompanied her present negative state of
mind, she left the house about three o’clock, and took a loitering walk
in the woodland track by which she imagined he would come home. This
track under the bare trees and over the cracking sticks, screened and
roofed in from the outer world of wind and cloud by a net-work of
boughs, led her slowly on till in time she had left the larger trees
behind her and swept round into the coppice where Winterborne and his
men were clearing the undergrowth.

Had Giles’s attention been concentrated on his hurdles he would not
have seen her; but ever since Melbury’s passage across the opposite
glade in the morning he had been as uneasy and unsettled as Grace
herself; and her advent now was the one appearance which, since her
father’s avowal, could arrest him more than Melbury’s return with his
tidings. Fearing that something might be the matter, he hastened up to
her.

She had not seen her old lover for a long time, and, too conscious of
the late pranks of her heart, she could not behold him calmly. “I am
only looking for my father,” she said, in an unnecessarily apologetic
intonation.

“I was looking for him too,” said Giles. “I think he may perhaps have
gone on farther.”

“Then you knew he was going to the House, Giles?” she said, turning her
large tender eyes anxiously upon him. “Did he tell you what for?”

Winterborne glanced doubtingly at her, and then softly hinted that her
father had visited him the evening before, and that their old
friendship was quite restored, on which she guessed the rest.

“Oh, I am glad, indeed, that you two are friends again!” she cried. And
then they stood facing each other, fearing each other, troubling each
other’s souls. Grace experienced acute misery at the sight of these
wood-cutting scenes, because she had estranged herself from them,
craving, even to its defects and inconveniences, that homely sylvan
life of her father which in the best probable succession of events
would shortly be denied her.

At a little distance, on the edge of the clearing, Marty South was
shaping spar-gads to take home for manufacture during the evenings.
While Winterborne and Mrs. Fitzpiers stood looking at her in their
mutual embarrassment at each other’s presence, they beheld approaching
the girl a lady in a dark fur mantle and a black hat, having a white
veil tied picturesquely round it. She spoke to Marty, who turned and
courtesied, and the lady fell into conversation with her. It was Mrs.
Charmond.

On leaving her house, Mrs. Charmond had walked on and onward under the
fret and fever of her mind with more vigor than she was accustomed to
show in her normal moods—a fever which the solace of a cigarette did
not entirely allay. Reaching the coppice, she listlessly observed Marty
at work, threw away her cigarette, and came near. Chop, chop, chop,
went Marty’s little billhook with never more assiduity, till Mrs.
Charmond spoke.

“Who is that young lady I see talking to the woodman yonder?” she
asked.

“Mrs. Fitzpiers, ma’am,” said Marty.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Charmond, with something like a start; for she had not
recognized Grace at that distance. “And the man she is talking to?”

“That’s Mr. Winterborne.”

A redness stole into Marty’s face as she mentioned Giles’s name, which
Mrs. Charmond did not fail to notice informed her of the state of the
girl’s heart. “Are you engaged to him?” she asked, softly.

“No, ma’am,” said Marty. “_She_ was once; and I think—”

But Marty could not possibly explain the complications of her thoughts
on this matter—which were nothing less than one of extraordinary
acuteness for a girl so young and inexperienced—namely, that she saw
danger to two hearts naturally honest in Grace being thrown back into
Winterborne’s society by the neglect of her husband. Mrs. Charmond,
however, with the almost supersensory means to knowledge which women
have on such occasions, quite understood what Marty had intended to
convey, and the picture thus exhibited to her of lives drifting away,
involving the wreck of poor Marty’s hopes, prompted her to more
generous resolves than all Melbury’s remonstrances had been able to
stimulate.

Full of the new feeling, she bade the girl good-afternoon, and went on
over the stumps of hazel to where Grace and Winterborne were standing.
They saw her approach, and Winterborne said, “She is coming to you; it
is a good omen. She dislikes me, so I’ll go away.” He accordingly
retreated to where he had been working before Grace came, and Grace’s
formidable rival approached her, each woman taking the other’s measure
as she came near.

“Dear—Mrs. Fitzpiers,” said Felice Charmond, with some inward turmoil
which stopped her speech. “I have not seen you for a long time.”

She held out her hand tentatively, while Grace stood like a wild animal
on first confronting a mirror or other puzzling product of
civilization. Was it really Mrs. Charmond speaking to her thus? If it
was, she could no longer form any guess as to what it signified.

“I want to talk with you,” said Mrs. Charmond, imploringly, for the
gaze of the young woman had chilled her through. “Can you walk on with
me till we are quite alone?”

Sick with distaste, Grace nevertheless complied, as by clockwork and
they moved evenly side by side into the deeper recesses of the woods.
They went farther, much farther than Mrs. Charmond had meant to go; but
she could not begin her conversation, and in default of it kept
walking.

“I have seen your father,” she at length resumed. “And—I am much
troubled by what he told me.”

“What did he tell you? I have not been admitted to his confidence on
anything he may have said to you.”

“Nevertheless, why should I repeat to you what you can easily divine?”

“True—true,” returned Grace, mournfully. “Why should you repeat what we
both know to be in our minds already?”

“Mrs. Fitzpiers, your husband—” The moment that the speaker’s tongue
touched the dangerous subject a vivid look of self-consciousness
flashed over her, in which her heart revealed, as by a lightning gleam,
what filled it to overflowing. So transitory was the expression that
none but a sensitive woman, and she in Grace’s position, would have had
the power to catch its meaning. Upon her the phase was not lost.

“Then you _do_ love him!” she exclaimed, in a tone of much surprise.

“What do you mean, my young friend?”

“Why,” cried Grace, “I thought till now that you had only been cruelly
flirting with my husband, to amuse your idle moments—a rich lady with a
poor professional gentleman whom in her heart she despised not much
less than her who belongs to him. But I guess from your manner that you
love him desperately, and I don’t hate you as I did before.”

“Yes, indeed,” continued Mrs. Fitzpiers, with a trembling tongue,
“since it is not playing in your case at all, but _real_. Oh, I do pity
you, more than I despise you, for _you_ will s-s-suffer most!”

Mrs. Charmond was now as much agitated as Grace. “I ought not to allow
myself to argue with you,” she exclaimed. “I demean myself by doing it.
But I liked you once, and for the sake of that time I try to tell you
how mistaken you are!” Much of her confusion resulted from her wonder
and alarm at finding herself in a sense dominated mentally and
emotionally by this simple school-girl. “I do not love him,” she went
on, with desperate untruth. “It was a kindness—my making somewhat more
of him than one usually does of one’s doctor. I was lonely; I
talked—well, I trifled with him. I am very sorry if such child’s
playing out of pure friendship has been a serious matter to you. Who
could have expected it? But the world is so simple here.”

“Oh, that’s affectation,” said Grace, shaking her head. “It is no
use—you _love_ him. I can see in your face that in this matter of my
husband you have not let your acts belie your feelings. During these
last four or six months you have been terribly indiscreet; but you have
not been insincere, and that almost disarms me.”

“I _have_ been insincere—if you will have the word—I mean I _have_
coquetted, and do _not_ love him!”

But Grace clung to her position like a limpet. “You may have trifled
with others, but him you love as you never loved another man.”

“Oh, well—I won’t argue,” said Mrs. Charmond, laughing faintly. “And
you come to reproach me for it, child.”

“No,” said Grace, magnanimously. “You may go on loving him if you
like—I don’t mind at all. You’ll find it, let me tell you, a bitterer
business for yourself than for me in the end. He’ll get tired of you
soon, as tired as can be—you don’t know him so well as I—and then you
may wish you had never seen him!”

Mrs. Charmond had grown quite pale and weak under this prophecy. It was
extraordinary that Grace, whom almost every one would have
characterized as a gentle girl, should be of stronger fibre than her
interlocutor. “You exaggerate—cruel, silly young woman,” she
reiterated, writhing with little agonies. “It is nothing but playful
friendship—nothing! It will be proved by my future conduct. I shall at
once refuse to see him more—since it will make no difference to my
heart, and much to my name.”

“I question if you will refuse to see him again,” said Grace, dryly, as
with eyes askance she bent a sapling down. “But I am not incensed
against you as you are against me,” she added, abandoning the tree to
its natural perpendicular. “Before I came I had been despising you for
wanton cruelty; now I only pity you for misplaced affection. When Edgar
has gone out of the house in hope of seeing you, at seasonable hours
and unseasonable; when I have found him riding miles and miles across
the country at midnight, and risking his life, and getting covered with
mud, to get a glimpse of you, I have called him a foolish man—the
plaything of a finished coquette. I thought that what was getting to be
a tragedy to me was a comedy to you. But now I see that tragedy lies on
YOUR side of the situation no less than on mine, and more; that if I
have felt trouble at my position, you have felt anguish at yours; that
if I have had disappointments, you have had despairs. Heaven may
fortify _me_—God help _you!_”

“I cannot attempt to reply to your raving eloquence,” returned the
other, struggling to restore a dignity which had completely collapsed.
“My acts will be my proofs. In the world which you have seen nothing
of, friendships between men and women are not unknown, and it would
have been better both for you and your father if you had each judged me
more respectfully, and left me alone. As it is I wish never to see or
speak to you, madam, any more.”

Grace bowed, and Mrs. Charmond turned away. The two went apart in
directly opposite courses, and were soon hidden from each other by
their umbrageous surroundings and by the shadows of eve.

In the excitement of their long argument they had walked onward and
zigzagged about without regarding direction or distance. All sound of
the woodcutters had long since faded into remoteness, and even had not
the interval been too great for hearing them they would have been
silent and homeward bound at this twilight hour. But Grace went on her
course without any misgiving, though there was much underwood here,
with only the narrowest passages for walking, across which brambles
hung. She had not, however, traversed this the wildest part of the wood
since her childhood, and the transformation of outlines had been great;
old trees which once were landmarks had been felled or blown down, and
the bushes which then had been small and scrubby were now large and
overhanging. She soon found that her ideas as to direction were
vague—that she had indeed no ideas as to direction at all. If the
evening had not been growing so dark, and the wind had not put on its
night moan so distinctly, Grace would not have minded; but she was
rather frightened now, and began to strike across hither and thither in
random courses.

Denser grew the darkness, more developed the wind-voices, and still no
recognizable spot or outlet of any kind appeared, nor any sound of the
Hintocks floated near, though she had wandered probably between one and
two hours, and began to be weary. She was vexed at her foolishness,
since the ground she had covered, if in a straight line, must
inevitably have taken her out of the wood to some remote village or
other; but she had wasted her forces in countermarches; and now, in
much alarm, wondered if she would have to pass the night here. She
stood still to meditate, and fancied that between the soughing of the
wind she heard shuffling footsteps on the leaves heavier than those of
rabbits or hares. Though fearing at first to meet anybody on the chance
of his being a friend, she decided that the fellow night-rambler, even
if a poacher, would not injure her, and that he might possibly be some
one sent to search for her. She accordingly shouted a rather timid
“Hoi!”

The cry was immediately returned by the other person; and Grace running
at once in the direction whence it came beheld an indistinct figure
hastening up to her as rapidly. They were almost in each other’s arms
when she recognized in her vis-a-vis the outline and white veil of her
whom she had parted from an hour and a half before—Mrs. Charmond.

“I have lost my way, I have lost my way,” cried that lady. “Oh—is it
indeed you? I am so glad to meet you or anybody. I have been wandering
up and down ever since we parted, and am nearly dead with terror and
misery and fatigue!”

“So am I,” said Grace. “What _shall_ we, _shall_ we do?”

“You won’t go away from me?” asked her companion, anxiously.

“No, indeed. Are you very tired?”

“I can scarcely move, and I am scratched dreadfully about the ankles.”

Grace reflected. “Perhaps, as it is dry under foot, the best thing for
us to do would be to sit down for half an hour, and then start again
when we have thoroughly rested. By walking straight we must come to a
track leading somewhere before the morning.”

They found a clump of bushy hollies which afforded a shelter from the
wind, and sat down under it, some tufts of dead fern, crisp and dry,
that remained from the previous season forming a sort of nest for them.
But it was cold, nevertheless, on this March night, particularly for
Grace, who with the sanguine prematureness of youth in matters of
dress, had considered it spring-time, and hence was not so warmly clad
as Mrs. Charmond, who still wore her winter fur. But after sitting a
while the latter lady shivered no less than Grace as the warmth
imparted by her hasty walking began to go off, and they felt the cold
air drawing through the holly leaves which scratched their backs and
shoulders. Moreover, they could hear some drops of rain falling on the
trees, though none reached the nook in which they had ensconced
themselves.

“If we were to cling close together,” said Mrs. Charmond, “we should
keep each other warm. But,” she added, in an uneven voice, “I suppose
you won’t come near me for the world!”

“Why not?”

“Because—well, you know.”

“Yes. I will—I don’t hate you at all.”

They consequently crept up to one another, and being in the dark,
lonely and weary, did what neither had dreamed of doing beforehand,
clasped each other closely, Mrs. Charmond’s furs consoling Grace’s cold
face, and each one’s body as she breathed alternately heaving against
that of her companion.

When a few minutes had been spent thus, Mrs. Charmond said, “I am so
wretched!” in a heavy, emotional whisper.

“You are frightened,” said Grace, kindly. “But there is nothing to
fear; I know these woods well.”

“I am not at all frightened at the wood, but I am at other things.”

Mrs. Charmond embraced Grace more and more tightly, and the younger
woman could feel her neighbor’s breathings grow deeper and more
spasmodic, as though uncontrollable feelings were germinating.

“After I had left you,” she went on, “I regretted something I had said.
I have to make a confession—I must make it!” she whispered, brokenly,
the instinct to indulge in warmth of sentiment which had led this woman
of passions to respond to Fitzpiers in the first place leading her now
to find luxurious comfort in opening her heart to his wife. “I said to
you I could give him up without pain or deprivation—that he had only
been my pastime. That was untrue—it was said to deceive you. I could
not do it without much pain; and, what is more dreadful, I _cannot_
give him up—even if I would—of myself alone.”

“Why? Because you love him, you mean.”

Felice Charmond denoted assent by a movement.

“I knew I was right!” said Grace, exaltedly. “But that should not deter
you,” she presently added, in a moral tone. “Oh, do struggle against
it, and you will conquer!”

“You are so simple, so simple!” cried Felice. “You think, because you
guessed my assumed indifference to him to be a sham, that you know the
extremes that people are capable of going to! But a good deal more may
have been going on than you have fathomed with all your insight. I
_cannot_ give him up until he chooses to give up me.”

“But surely you are the superior in station and in every way, and the
cut must come from you.”

“Tchut! Must I tell verbatim, you simple child? Oh, I suppose I must! I
shall eat away my heart if I do not let out all, after meeting you like
this and finding how guileless you are.” She thereupon whispered a few
words in the girl’s ear, and burst into a violent fit of sobbing.

Grace started roughly away from the shelter of the fur, and sprang to
her feet.

“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed, thunderstruck at a revelation transcending
her utmost suspicion. “Can it be—can it be!”

She turned as if to hasten away. But Felice Charmond’s sobs came to her
ear: deep darkness circled her about, the funereal trees rocked and
chanted their diriges and placebos around her, and she did not know
which way to go. After a moment of energy she felt mild again, and
turned to the motionless woman at her feet.

“Are you rested?” she asked, in what seemed something like her own
voice grown ten years older.

Without an answer Mrs. Charmond slowly rose.

“You mean to betray me!” she said from the bitterest depths of her
soul. “Oh fool, fool I!”

“No,” said Grace, shortly. “I mean no such thing. But let us be quick
now. We have a serious undertaking before us. Think of nothing but
going straight on.”

They walked on in profound silence, pulling back boughs now growing
wet, and treading down woodbine, but still keeping a pretty straight
course. Grace began to be thoroughly worn out, and her companion too,
when, on a sudden, they broke into the deserted highway at the hill-top
on which the Sherton man had waited for Mrs. Dollery’s van. Grace
recognized the spot as soon as she looked around her.

“How we have got here I cannot tell,” she said, with cold civility. “We
have made a complete circuit of Little Hintock. The hazel copse is
quite on the other side. Now we have only to follow the road.”

They dragged themselves onward, turned into the lane, passed the track
to Little Hintock, and so reached the park.

“Here I turn back,” said Grace, in the same passionless voice. “You are
quite near home.”

Mrs. Charmond stood inert, seeming appalled by her late admission.

“I have told you something in a moment of irresistible desire to
unburden my soul which all but a fool would have kept silent as the
grave,” she said. “I cannot help it now. Is it to be a secret—or do you
mean war?”

“A secret, certainly,” said Grace, mournfully. “How can you expect war
from such a helpless, wretched being as I!”

“And I’ll do my best not to see him. I am his slave; but I’ll try.”

Grace was naturally kind; but she could not help using a small dagger
now.

“Pray don’t distress yourself,” she said, with exquisitely fine scorn.
“You may keep him—for me.” Had she been wounded instead of mortified
she could not have used the words; but Fitzpiers’s hold upon her heart
was slight.

They parted thus and there, and Grace went moodily homeward. Passing
Marty’s cottage she observed through the window that the girl was
writing instead of chopping as usual, and wondered what her
correspondence could be. Directly afterwards she met people in search
of her, and reached the house to find all in serious alarm. She soon
explained that she had lost her way, and her general depression was
attributed to exhaustion on that account.

Could she have known what Marty was writing she would have been
surprised.

The rumor which agitated the other folk of Hintock had reached the
young girl, and she was penning a letter to Fitzpiers, to tell him that
Mrs. Charmond wore her hair. It was poor Marty’s only card, and she
played it, knowing nothing of fashion, and thinking her revelation a
fatal one for a lover.




CHAPTER XXXIV.


It was at the beginning of April, a few days after the meeting between
Grace and Mrs. Charmond in the wood, that Fitzpiers, just returned from
London, was travelling from Sherton-Abbas to Hintock in a hired
carriage. In his eye there was a doubtful light, and the lines of his
refined face showed a vague disquietude. He appeared now like one of
those who impress the beholder as having suffered wrong in being born.

His position was in truth gloomy, and to his appreciative mind it
seemed even gloomier than it was. His practice had been slowly
dwindling of late, and now threatened to die out altogether, the
irrepressible old Dr. Jones capturing patients up to Fitzpiers’s very
door. Fitzpiers knew only too well the latest and greatest cause of his
unpopularity; and yet, so illogical is man, the second branch of his
sadness grew out of a remedial measure proposed for the first—a letter
from Felice Charmond imploring him not to see her again. To bring about
their severance still more effectually, she added, she had decided
during his absence upon almost immediate departure for the Continent.

The time was that dull interval in a woodlander’s life which coincides
with great activity in the life of the woodland itself—a period
following the close of the winter tree-cutting, and preceding the
barking season, when the saps are just beginning to heave with the
force of hydraulic lifts inside all the trunks of the forest.

Winterborne’s contract was completed, and the plantations were
deserted. It was dusk; there were no leaves as yet; the nightingales
would not begin to sing for a fortnight; and “the Mother of the Months”
was in her most attenuated phase—starved and bent to a mere bowed
skeleton, which glided along behind the bare twigs in Fitzpiers’s
company.

When he reached home he went straight up to his wife’s sitting-room. He
found it deserted, and without a fire. He had mentioned no day for his
return; nevertheless, he wondered why she was not there waiting to
receive him. On descending to the other wing of the house and inquiring
of Mrs. Melbury, he learned with much surprise that Grace had gone on a
visit to an acquaintance at Shottsford-Forum three days earlier; that
tidings had on this morning reached her father of her being very unwell
there, in consequence of which he had ridden over to see her.

Fitzpiers went up-stairs again, and the little drawing-room, now
lighted by a solitary candle, was not rendered more cheerful by the
entrance of Grammer Oliver with an apronful of wood, which she threw on
the hearth while she raked out the grate and rattled about the
fire-irons, with a view to making things comfortable. Fitzpiers
considered that Grace ought to have let him know her plans more
accurately before leaving home in a freak like this. He went
desultorily to the window, the blind of which had not been pulled down,
and looked out at the thin, fast-sinking moon, and at the tall stalk of
smoke rising from the top of Suke Damson’s chimney, signifying that the
young woman had just lit her fire to prepare supper.

He became conscious of a discussion in progress on the opposite side of
the court. Somebody had looked over the wall to talk to the sawyers,
and was telling them in a loud voice news in which the name of Mrs.
Charmond soon arrested his ears.

“Grammer, don’t make so much noise with that grate,” said the surgeon;
at which Grammer reared herself upon her knees and held the fuel
suspended in her hand, while Fitzpiers half opened the casement.

“She is off to foreign lands again at last—hev made up her mind quite
sudden-like—and it is thoughted she’ll leave in a day or two. She’s
been all as if her mind were low for some days past—with a sort of
sorrow in her face, as if she reproached her own soul. She’s the wrong
sort of woman for Hintock—hardly knowing a beech from a woak—that I
own. But I don’t care who the man is, she’s been a very kind friend to
me.

“Well, the day after to-morrow is the Sabbath day, and without charity
we are but tinkling simples; but this I do say, that her going will be
a blessed thing for a certain married couple who remain.”

The fire was lighted, and Fitzpiers sat down in front of it, restless
as the last leaf upon a tree. “A sort of sorrow in her face, as if she
reproached her own soul.” Poor Felice. How Felice’s frame must be
pulsing under the conditions of which he had just heard the caricature;
how her fair temples must ache; what a mood of wretchedness she must be
in! But for the mixing up of his name with hers, and her determination
to sunder their too close acquaintance on that account, she would
probably have sent for him professionally. She was now sitting alone,
suffering, perhaps wishing that she had not forbidden him to come
again.

Unable to remain in this lonely room any longer, or to wait for the
meal which was in course of preparation, he made himself ready for
riding, descended to the yard, stood by the stable-door while Darling
was being saddled, and rode off down the lane. He would have preferred
walking, but was weary with his day’s travel.

As he approached the door of Marty South’s cottage, which it was
necessary to pass on his way, she came from the porch as if she had
been awaiting him, and met him in the middle of the road, holding up a
letter. Fitzpiers took it without stopping, and asked over his shoulder
from whom it came.

Marty hesitated. “From me,” she said, shyly, though with noticeable
firmness.

This letter contained, in fact, Marty’s declaration that she was the
original owner of Mrs. Charmond’s supplementary locks, and enclosed a
sample from the native stock, which had grown considerably by this
time. It was her long contemplated apple of discord, and much her hand
trembled as she handed the document up to him.

But it was impossible on account of the gloom for Fitzpiers to read it
then, while he had the curiosity to do so, and he put it in his pocket.
His imagination having already centred itself on Hintock House, in his
pocket the letter remained unopened and forgotten, all the while that
Marty was hopefully picturing its excellent weaning effect upon him.

He was not long in reaching the precincts of the Manor House. He drew
rein under a group of dark oaks commanding a view of the front, and
reflected a while. His entry would not be altogether unnatural in the
circumstances of her possible indisposition; but upon the whole he
thought it best to avoid riding up to the door. By silently approaching
he could retreat unobserved in the event of her not being alone.
Thereupon he dismounted, hitched Darling to a stray bough hanging a
little below the general browsing line of the trees, and proceeded to
the door on foot.

In the mean time Melbury had returned from Shottsford-Forum. The great
court or quadrangle of the timber-merchant’s house, divided from the
shady lane by an ivy-covered wall, was entered by two white gates, one
standing near each extremity of the wall. It so happened that at the
moment when Fitzpiers was riding out at the lower gate on his way to
the Manor House, Melbury was approaching the upper gate to enter it.
Fitzpiers being in front of Melbury was seen by the latter, but the
surgeon, never turning his head, did not observe his father-in-law,
ambling slowly and silently along under the trees, though his horse too
was a gray one.

“How is Grace?” said his wife, as soon as he entered.

Melbury looked gloomy. “She is not at all well,” he said. “I don’t like
the looks of her at all. I couldn’t bear the notion of her biding away
in a strange place any longer, and I begged her to let me get her home.
At last she agreed to it, but not till after much persuading. I was
then sorry that I rode over instead of driving; but I have hired a nice
comfortable carriage—the easiest-going I could get—and she’ll be here
in a couple of hours or less. I rode on ahead to tell you to get her
room ready; but I see her husband has come back.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Melbury. She expressed her concern that her husband
had hired a carriage all the way from Shottsford. “What it will cost!”
she said.

“I don’t care what it costs!” he exclaimed, testily. “I was determined
to get her home. Why she went away I can’t think! She acts in a way
that is not at all likely to mend matters as far as I can see.” (Grace
had not told her father of her interview with Mrs. Charmond, and the
disclosure that had been whispered in her startled ear.) “Since Edgar
is come,” he continued, “he might have waited in till I got home, to
ask me how she was, if only for a compliment. I saw him go out; where
is he gone?”

Mrs. Melbury did not know positively; but she told her husband that
there was not much doubt about the place of his first visit after an
absence. She had, in fact, seen Fitzpiers take the direction of the
Manor House.

Melbury said no more. It was exasperating to him that just at this
moment, when there was every reason for Fitzpiers to stay indoors, or
at any rate to ride along the Shottsford road to meet his ailing wife,
he should be doing despite to her by going elsewhere. The old man went
out-of-doors again; and his horse being hardly unsaddled as yet, he
told Upjohn to retighten the girths, when he again mounted, and rode
off at the heels of the surgeon.

By the time that Melbury reached the park, he was prepared to go any
lengths in combating this rank and reckless errantry of his daughter’s
husband. He would fetch home Edgar Fitzpiers to-night by some means,
rough or fair: in his view there could come of his interference nothing
worse than what existed at present. And yet to every bad there is a
worse.

He had entered by the bridle-gate which admitted to the park on this
side, and cantered over the soft turf almost in the tracks of
Fitzpiers’s horse, till he reached the clump of trees under which his
precursor had halted. The whitish object that was indistinctly visible
here in the gloom of the boughs he found to be Darling, as left by
Fitzpiers.

“D—n him! why did he not ride up to the house in an honest way?” said
Melbury.

He profited by Fitzpiers’s example; dismounting, he tied his horse
under an adjoining tree, and went on to the house on foot, as the other
had done. He was no longer disposed to stick at trifles in his
investigation, and did not hesitate to gently open the front door
without ringing.

The large square hall, with its oak floor, staircase, and wainscot, was
lighted by a dim lamp hanging from a beam. Not a soul was visible. He
went into the corridor and listened at a door which he knew to be that
of the drawing-room; there was no sound, and on turning the handle he
found the room empty. A fire burning low in the grate was the sole
light of the apartment; its beams flashed mockingly on the somewhat
showy Versaillese furniture and gilding here, in style as unlike that
of the structural parts of the building as it was possible to be, and
probably introduced by Felice to counteract the fine old-English gloom
of the place. Disappointed in his hope of confronting his son-in-law
here, he went on to the dining-room; this was without light or fire,
and pervaded by a cold atmosphere, which signified that she had not
dined there that day.

By this time Melbury’s mood had a little mollified. Everything here was
so pacific, so unaggressive in its repose, that he was no longer
incited to provoke a collision with Fitzpiers or with anybody. The
comparative stateliness of the apartments influenced him to an emotion,
rather than to a belief, that where all was outwardly so good and
proper there could not be quite that delinquency within which he had
suspected. It occurred to him, too, that even if his suspicion were
justified, his abrupt, if not unwarrantable, entry into the house might
end in confounding its inhabitant at the expense of his daughter’s
dignity and his own. Any ill result would be pretty sure to hit Grace
hardest in the long-run. He would, after all, adopt the more rational
course, and plead with Fitzpiers privately, as he had pleaded with Mrs.
Charmond.

He accordingly retreated as silently as he had come. Passing the door
of the drawing-room anew, he fancied that he heard a noise within which
was not the crackling of the fire. Melbury gently reopened the door to
a distance of a few inches, and saw at the opposite window two figures
in the act of stepping out—a man and a woman—in whom he recognized the
lady of the house and his son-in-law. In a moment they had disappeared
amid the gloom of the lawn.

He returned into the hall, and let himself out by the carriage-entrance
door, coming round to the lawn front in time to see the two figures
parting at the railing which divided the precincts of the house from
the open park. Mrs. Charmond turned to hasten back immediately that
Fitzpiers had left her side, and he was speedily absorbed into the
duskiness of the trees.

Melbury waited till Mrs. Charmond had re-entered the drawing-room, and
then followed after Fitzpiers, thinking that he would allow the latter
to mount and ride ahead a little way before overtaking him and giving
him a piece of his mind. His son-in-law might possibly see the second
horse near his own; but that would do him no harm, and might prepare
him for what he was to expect.

The event, however, was different from the plan. On plunging into the
thick shade of the clump of oaks, he could not perceive his horse
Blossom anywhere; but feeling his way carefully along, he by-and-by
discerned Fitzpiers’s mare Darling still standing as before under the
adjoining tree. For a moment Melbury thought that his own horse, being
young and strong, had broken away from her fastening; but on listening
intently he could hear her ambling comfortably along a little way
ahead, and a creaking of the saddle which showed that she had a rider.
Walking on as far as the small gate in the corner of the park, he met a
laborer, who, in reply to Melbury’s inquiry if he had seen any person
on a gray horse, said that he had only met Dr. Fitzpiers.

It was just what Melbury had begun to suspect: Fitzpiers had mounted
the mare which did not belong to him in mistake for his own—an
oversight easily explicable, in a man ever unwitting in horse-flesh, by
the darkness of the spot and the near similarity of the animals in
appearance, though Melbury’s was readily enough seen to be the grayer
horse by day. He hastened back, and did what seemed best in the
circumstances—got upon old Darling, and rode rapidly after Fitzpiers.

Melbury had just entered the wood, and was winding along the cart-way
which led through it, channelled deep in the leaf-mould with large ruts
that were formed by the timber-wagons in fetching the spoil of the
plantations, when all at once he descried in front, at a point where
the road took a turning round a large chestnut-tree, the form of his
own horse Blossom, at which Melbury quickened Darling’s pace, thinking
to come up with Fitzpiers.

Nearer view revealed that the horse had no rider. At Melbury’s approach
it galloped friskily away under the trees in a homeward direction.
Thinking something was wrong, the timber-merchant dismounted as soon as
he reached the chestnut, and after feeling about for a minute or two
discovered Fitzpiers lying on the ground.

“Here—help!” cried the latter as soon as he felt Melbury’s touch; “I
have been thrown off, but there’s not much harm done, I think.”

Since Melbury could not now very well read the younger man the lecture
he had intended, and as friendliness would be hypocrisy, his instinct
was to speak not a single word to his son-in-law. He raised Fitzpiers
into a sitting posture, and found that he was a little stunned and
stupefied, but, as he had said, not otherwise hurt. How this fall had
come about was readily conjecturable: Fitzpiers, imagining there was
only old Darling under him, had been taken unawares by the younger
horse’s sprightliness.

Melbury was a traveller of the old-fashioned sort; having just come
from Shottsford-Forum, he still had in his pocket the pilgrim’s flask
of rum which he always carried on journeys exceeding a dozen miles,
though he seldom drank much of it. He poured it down the surgeon’s
throat, with such effect that he quickly revived. Melbury got him on
his legs; but the question was what to do with him. He could not walk
more than a few steps, and the other horse had gone away.

With great exertion Melbury contrived to get him astride Darling,
mounting himself behind, and holding Fitzpiers round his waist with one
arm. Darling being broad, straight-backed, and high in the withers, was
well able to carry double, at any rate as far as Hintock, and at a
gentle pace.




CHAPTER XXXV.


The mare paced along with firm and cautious tread through the copse
where Winterborne had worked, and into the heavier soil where the oaks
grew; past Great Willy, the largest oak in the wood, and thence towards
Nellcombe Bottom, intensely dark now with overgrowth, and popularly
supposed to be haunted by the spirits of the fratricides exorcised from
Hintock House.

By this time Fitzpiers was quite recovered as to physical strength. But
he had eaten nothing since making a hasty breakfast in London that
morning, his anxiety about Felice having hurried him away from home
before dining; as a consequence, the old rum administered by his
father-in-law flew to the young man’s head and loosened his tongue,
without his ever having recognized who it was that had lent him a
kindly hand. He began to speak in desultory sentences, Melbury still
supporting him.

“I’ve come all the way from London to-day,” said Fitzpiers. “Ah, that’s
the place to meet your equals. I live at Hintock—worse, at Little
Hintock—and I am quite lost there. There’s not a man within ten miles
of Hintock who can comprehend me. I tell you, Farmer What’s-your-name,
that I’m a man of education. I know several languages; the poets and I
are familiar friends; I used to read more in metaphysics than anybody
within fifty miles; and since I gave that up there’s nobody can match
me in the whole county of Wessex as a scientist. Yet I an doomed to
live with tradespeople in a miserable little hole like Hintock!”

“Indeed!” muttered Melbury.

Fitzpiers, increasingly energized by the alcohol, here reared himself
up suddenly from the bowed posture he had hitherto held, thrusting his
shoulders so violently against Melbury’s breast as to make it difficult
for the old man to keep a hold on the reins. “People don’t appreciate
me here!” the surgeon exclaimed; lowering his voice, he added, softly
and slowly, “except one—except one!...A passionate soul, as warm as she
is clever, as beautiful as she is warm, and as rich as she is
beautiful. I say, old fellow, those claws of yours clutch me rather
tight—rather like the eagle’s, you know, that ate out the liver of
Pro—Pre—the man on Mount Caucasus. People don’t appreciate me, I say,
except _her!_ Ah, gods, I am an unlucky man! She would have been mine,
she would have taken my name; but unfortunately it cannot be so. I
stooped to mate beneath me, and now I rue it.”

The position was becoming a very trying one for Melbury, corporeally
and mentally. He was obliged to steady Fitzpiers with his left arm, and
he began to hate the contact. He hardly knew what to do. It was useless
to remonstrate with Fitzpiers, in his intellectual confusion from the
rum and from the fall. He remained silent, his hold upon his companion,
however, being stern rather than compassionate.

“You hurt me a little, farmer—though I am much obliged to you for your
kindness. People don’t appreciate me, I say. Between ourselves, I am
losing my practice here; and why? Because I see matchless attraction
where matchless attraction is, both in person and position. I mention
no names, so nobody will be the wiser. But I have lost her, in a
legitimate sense, that is. If I were a free man now, things have come
to such a pass that she could not refuse me; while with her fortune
(which I don’t covet for itself) I should have a chance of satisfying
an honorable ambition—a chance I have never had yet, and now never,
never shall have, probably!”

Melbury, his heart throbbing against the other’s backbone, and his
brain on fire with indignation, ventured to mutter huskily, “Why?”

The horse ambled on some steps before Fitzpiers replied, “Because I am
tied and bound to another by law, as tightly as I am to you by your
arm—not that I complain of your arm—I thank you for helping me. Well,
where are we? Not nearly home yet?...Home, say I. It _is_ a home! When
I might have been at the other house over there.” In a stupefied way he
flung his hand in the direction of the park. “I was just two months too
early in committing myself. Had I only seen the other first—”

Here the old man’s arm gave Fitzpiers a convulsive shake. “What are you
doing?” continued the latter. “Keep still, please, or put me down. I
was saying that I lost her by a mere little two months! There is no
chance for me now in this world, and it makes me reckless—reckless!
Unless, indeed, anything should happen to the other one. She is amiable
enough; but if anything should happen to her—and I hear she is
ill—well, if it _should_, I should be free—and my fame, my happiness,
would be insured.”

These were the last words that Fitzpiers uttered in his seat in front
of the timber-merchant. Unable longer to master himself, Melbury, the
skin of his face compressed, whipped away his spare arm from
Fitzpiers’s waist, and seized him by the collar.

“You heartless villain—after all that we have done for ye!” he cried,
with a quivering lip. “And the money of hers that you’ve had, and the
roof we’ve provided to shelter ye! It is to me, George Melbury, that
you dare to talk like that!” The exclamation was accompanied by a
powerful swing from the shoulder, which flung the young man head-long
into the road, Fitzpiers fell with a heavy thud upon the stumps of some
undergrowth which had been cut during the winter preceding. Darling
continued her walk for a few paces farther and stopped.

“God forgive me!” Melbury murmured, repenting of what he had done. “He
tried me too sorely; and now perhaps I’ve murdered him!”

He turned round in the saddle and looked towards the spot on which
Fitzpiers had fallen. To his great surprise he beheld the surgeon rise
to his feet with a bound, as if unhurt, and walk away rapidly under the
trees.

Melbury listened till the rustle of Fitzpiers’s footsteps died away.
“It might have been a crime, but for the mercy of Providence in
providing leaves for his fall,” he said to himself. And then his mind
reverted to the words of Fitzpiers, and his indignation so mounted
within him that he almost wished the fall had put an end to the young
man there and then.

He had not ridden far when he discerned his own gray mare standing
under some bushes. Leaving Darling for a moment, Melbury went forward
and easily caught the younger animal, now disheartened at its freak. He
then made the pair of them fast to a tree, and turning back, endeavored
to find some trace of Fitzpiers, feeling pitifully that, after all, he
had gone further than he intended with the offender.

But though he threaded the wood hither and thither, his toes ploughing
layer after layer of the little horny scrolls that had once been
leaves, he could not find him. He stood still listening and looking
round. The breeze was oozing through the network of boughs as through a
strainer; the trunks and larger branches stood against the light of the
sky in the forms of writhing men, gigantic candelabra, pikes, halberds,
lances, and whatever besides the fancy chose to make of them. Giving up
the search, Melbury came back to the horses, and walked slowly
homeward, leading one in each hand.

It happened that on this self-same evening a boy had been returning
from Great to Little Hintock about the time of Fitzpiers’s and
Melbury’s passage home along that route. A horse-collar that had been
left at the harness-mender’s to be repaired was required for use at
five o’clock next morning, and in consequence the boy had to fetch it
overnight. He put his head through the collar, and accompanied his walk
by whistling the one tune he knew, as an antidote to fear.

The boy suddenly became aware of a horse trotting rather friskily along
the track behind him, and not knowing whether to expect friend or foe,
prudence suggested that he should cease his whistling and retreat among
the trees till the horse and his rider had gone by; a course to which
he was still more inclined when he found how noiselessly they
approached, and saw that the horse looked pale, and remembered what he
had read about Death in the Revelation. He therefore deposited the
collar by a tree, and hid himself behind it. The horseman came on, and
the youth, whose eyes were as keen as telescopes, to his great relief
recognized the doctor.

As Melbury surmised, Fitzpiers had in the darkness taken Blossom for
Darling, and he had not discovered his mistake when he came up opposite
the boy, though he was somewhat surprised at the liveliness of his
usually placid mare. The only other pair of eyes on the spot whose
vision was keen as the young carter’s were those of the horse; and,
with that strongly conservative objection to the unusual which animals
show, Blossom, on eying the collar under the tree—quite invisible to
Fitzpiers—exercised none of the patience of the older horse, but shied
sufficiently to unseat so second-rate an equestrian as the surgeon.

He fell, and did not move, lying as Melbury afterwards found him. The
boy ran away, salving his conscience for the desertion by thinking how
vigorously he would spread the alarm of the accident when he got to
Hintock—which he uncompromisingly did, incrusting the skeleton event
with a load of dramatic horrors.

Grace had returned, and the fly hired on her account, though not by her
husband, at the Crown Hotel, Shottsford-Forum, had been paid for and
dismissed. The long drive had somewhat revived her, her illness being a
feverish intermittent nervousness which had more to do with mind than
body, and she walked about her sitting-room in something of a hopeful
mood. Mrs. Melbury had told her as soon as she arrived that her husband
had returned from London. He had gone out, she said, to see a patient,
as she supposed, and he must soon be back, since he had had no dinner
or tea. Grace would not allow her mind to harbor any suspicion of his
whereabouts, and her step-mother said nothing of Mrs. Charmond’s
rumored sorrows and plans of departure.

So the young wife sat by the fire, waiting silently. She had left
Hintock in a turmoil of feeling after the revelation of Mrs. Charmond,
and had intended not to be at home when her husband returned. But she
had thought the matter over, and had allowed her father’s influence to
prevail and bring her back; and now somewhat regretted that Edgar’s
arrival had preceded hers.

By-and-by Mrs. Melbury came up-stairs with a slight air of flurry and
abruptness.

“I have something to tell—some bad news,” she said. “But you must not
be alarmed, as it is not so bad as it might have been. Edgar has been
thrown off his horse. We don’t think he is hurt much. It happened in
the wood the other side of Nellcombe Bottom, where ’tis said the ghosts
of the brothers walk.”

She went on to give a few of the particulars, but none of the invented
horrors that had been communicated by the boy. “I thought it better to
tell you at once,” she added, “in case he should not be very well able
to walk home, and somebody should bring him.”

Mrs. Melbury really thought matters much worse than she represented,
and Grace knew that she thought so. She sat down dazed for a few
minutes, returning a negative to her step-mother’s inquiry if she could
do anything for her. “But please go into the bedroom,” Grace said, on
second thoughts, “and see if all is ready there—in case it is serious.”
Mrs. Melbury thereupon called Grammer, and they did as directed,
supplying the room with everything they could think of for the
accommodation of an injured man.

Nobody was left in the lower part of the house. Not many minutes passed
when Grace heard a knock at the door—a single knock, not loud enough to
reach the ears of those in the bedroom. She went to the top of the
stairs and said, faintly, “Come up,” knowing that the door stood, as
usual in such houses, wide open.

Retreating into the gloom of the broad landing she saw rise up the
stairs a woman whom at first she did not recognize, till her voice
revealed her to be Suke Damson, in great fright and sorrow. A streak of
light from the partially closed door of Grace’s room fell upon her face
as she came forward, and it was drawn and pale.

“Oh, Miss Melbury—I would say Mrs. Fitzpiers,” she said, wringing her
hands. “This terrible news. Is he dead? Is he hurted very bad? Tell me;
I couldn’t help coming; please forgive me, Miss Melbury—Mrs. Fitzpiers
I would say!”

Grace sank down on the oak chest which stood on the landing, and put
her hands to her now flushed face and head. Could she order Suke Damson
down-stairs and out of the house? Her husband might be brought in at
any moment, and what would happen? But could she order this genuinely
grieved woman away?

There was a dead silence of half a minute or so, till Suke said, “Why
don’t ye speak? Is he here? Is he dead? If so, why can’t I see
him—would it be so very wrong?”

Before Grace had answered somebody else came to the door below—a
foot-fall light as a roe’s. There was a hurried tapping upon the panel,
as if with the impatient tips of fingers whose owner thought not
whether a knocker were there or no. Without a pause, and possibly
guided by the stray beam of light on the landing, the newcomer ascended
the staircase as the first had done. Grace was sufficiently visible,
and the lady, for a lady it was, came to her side.

“I could make nobody hear down-stairs,” said Felice Charmond, with lips
whose dryness could almost be heard, and panting, as she stood like one
ready to sink on the floor with distress. “What is—the matter—tell me
the worst! Can he live?” She looked at Grace imploringly, without
perceiving poor Suke, who, dismayed at such a presence, had shrunk away
into the shade.

Mrs. Charmond’s little feet were covered with mud; she was quite
unconscious of her appearance now. “I have heard such a dreadful
report,” she went on; “I came to ascertain the truth of it. Is
he—killed?”

“She won’t tell us—he’s dying—he’s in that room!” burst out Suke,
regardless of consequences, as she heard the distant movements of Mrs.
Melbury and Grammer in the bedroom at the end of the passage.

“Where?” said Mrs. Charmond; and on Suke pointing out the direction,
she made as if to go thither.

Grace barred the way. “He is not there,” she said. “I have not seen him
any more than you. I have heard a report only—not so bad as you think.
It must have been exaggerated to you.”

“Please do not conceal anything—let me know all!” said Felice,
doubtingly.

“You shall know all I know—you have a perfect right to know—who can
have a better than either of you?” said Grace, with a delicate sting
which was lost upon Felice Charmond now. “I repeat, I have only heard a
less alarming account than you have heard; how much it means, and how
little, I cannot say. I pray God that it means not much—in common
humanity. You probably pray the same—_for other reasons_.”

She regarded them both there in the dim light a while.

They stood dumb in their trouble, not stinging back at her; not heeding
her mood. A tenderness spread over Grace like a dew. It was well, very
well, conventionally, to address either one of them in the wife’s
regulation terms of virtuous sarcasm, as woman, creature, or thing, for
losing their hearts to her husband. But life, what was it, and who was
she? She had, like the singer of the psalm of Asaph, been plagued and
chastened all the day long; but could she, by retributive words, in
order to please herself—the individual—“offend against the generation,”
as he would not?

“He is dying, perhaps,” blubbered Suke Damson, putting her apron to her
eyes.

In their gestures and faces there were anxieties, affection, agony of
heart, all for a man who had wronged them—had never really behaved
towards either of them anyhow but selfishly. Neither one but would have
wellnigh sacrificed half her life to him, even now. The tears which his
possibly critical situation could not bring to her eyes surged over at
the contemplation of these fellow-women. She turned to the balustrade,
bent herself upon it, and wept.

Thereupon Felice began to cry also, without using her handkerchief, and
letting the tears run down silently. While these three poor women stood
together thus, pitying another though most to be pitied themselves, the
pacing of a horse or horses became audible in the court, and in a
moment Melbury’s voice was heard calling to his stableman. Grace at
once started up, ran down the stairs and out into the quadrangle as her
father crossed it towards the door. “Father, what is the matter with
him?” she cried.

“Who—Edgar?” said Melbury, abruptly. “Matter? Nothing. What, my dear,
and have you got home safe? Why, you are better already! But you ought
not to be out in the air like this.”

“But he has been thrown off his horse!”

“I know; I know. I saw it. He got up again, and walked off as well as
ever. A fall on the leaves didn’t hurt a spry fellow like him. He did
not come this way,” he added, significantly. “I suppose he went to look
for his horse. I tried to find him, but could not. But after seeing him
go away under the trees I found the horse, and have led it home for
safety. So he must walk. Now, don’t you stay out here in this night
air.”

She returned to the house with her father. When she had again ascended
to the landing and to her own rooms beyond it was a great relief to her
to find that both Petticoat the First and Petticoat the Second of her
_Bien-aimé_ had silently disappeared. They had, in all probability,
heard the words of her father, and departed with their anxieties
relieved.

Presently her parents came up to Grace, and busied themselves to see
that she was comfortable. Perceiving soon that she would prefer to be
left alone they went away.

Grace waited on. The clock raised its voice now and then, but her
husband did not return. At her father’s usual hour for retiring he
again came in to see her. “Do not stay up,” she said, as soon as he
entered. “I am not at all tired. I will sit up for him.”

“I think it will be useless, Grace,” said Melbury, slowly.

“Why?”

“I have had a bitter quarrel with him; and on that account I hardly
think he will return to-night.”

“A quarrel? Was that after the fall seen by the boy?”

Melbury nodded an affirmative, without taking his eyes off the candle.

“Yes; it was as we were coming home together,” he said.

Something had been swelling up in Grace while her father was speaking.
“How could you want to quarrel with him?” she cried, suddenly. “Why
could you not let him come home quietly if he were inclined to? He is
my husband; and now you have married me to him surely you need not
provoke him unnecessarily. First you induce me to accept him, and then
you do things that divide us more than we should naturally be divided!”

“How can you speak so unjustly to me, Grace?” said Melbury, with
indignant sorrow. “_I_ divide you from your husband, indeed! You little
think—”

He was inclined to say more—to tell her the whole story of the
encounter, and that the provocation he had received had lain entirely
in hearing her despised. But it would have greatly distressed her, and
he forbore. “You had better lie down. You are tired,” he said,
soothingly. “Good-night.”

The household went to bed, and a silence fell upon the dwelling, broken
only by the occasional skirr of a halter in Melbury’s stables. Despite
her father’s advice Grace still waited up. But nobody came.

It was a critical time in Grace’s emotional life that night. She
thought of her husband a good deal, and for the nonce forgot
Winterborne.

“How these unhappy women must have admired Edgar!” she said to herself.
“How attractive he must be to everybody; and, indeed, he is
attractive.” The possibility is that, piqued by rivalry, these ideas
might have been transformed into their corresponding emotions by a show
of the least reciprocity in Fitzpiers. There was, in truth, a love-bird
yearning to fly from her heart; and it wanted a lodging badly.

But no husband came. The fact was that Melbury had been much mistaken
about the condition of Fitzpiers. People do not fall headlong on stumps
of underwood with impunity. Had the old man been able to watch
Fitzpiers narrowly enough, he would have observed that on rising and
walking into the thicket he dropped blood as he went; that he had not
proceeded fifty yards before he showed signs of being dizzy, and,
raising his hands to his head, reeled and fell down.




CHAPTER XXXVI.


Grace was not the only one who watched and meditated in Hintock that
night. Felice Charmond was in no mood to retire to rest at a customary
hour; and over her drawing-room fire at the Manor House she sat as
motionless and in as deep a reverie as Grace in her little apartment at
the homestead.

Having caught ear of Melbury’s intelligence while she stood on the
landing at his house, and been eased of much of her mental distress,
her sense of personal decorum returned upon her with a rush. She
descended the stairs and left the door like a ghost, keeping close to
the walls of the building till she got round to the gate of the
quadrangle, through which she noiselessly passed almost before Grace
and her father had finished their discourse. Suke Damson had thought it
well to imitate her superior in this respect, and, descending the back
stairs as Felice descended the front, went out at the side door and
home to her cottage.

Once outside Melbury’s gates Mrs. Charmond ran with all her speed to
the Manor House, without stopping or turning her head, and splitting
her thin boots in her haste. She entered her own dwelling, as she had
emerged from it, by the drawing-room window. In other circumstances she
would have felt some timidity at undertaking such an unpremeditated
excursion alone; but her anxiety for another had cast out her fear for
herself.

Everything in her drawing-room was just as she had left it—the candles
still burning, the casement closed, and the shutters gently pulled to,
so as to hide the state of the window from the cursory glance of a
servant entering the apartment. She had been gone about three-quarters
of an hour by the clock, and nobody seemed to have discovered her
absence. Tired in body but tense in mind, she sat down, palpitating,
round-eyed, bewildered at what she had done.

She had been betrayed by affrighted love into a visit which, now that
the emotion instigating it had calmed down under her belief that
Fitzpiers was in no danger, was the saddest surprise to her. This was
how she had set about doing her best to escape her passionate bondage
to him! Somehow, in declaring to Grace and to herself the unseemliness
of her infatuation, she had grown a convert to its irresistibility. If
Heaven would only give her strength; but Heaven never did! One thing
was indispensable; she must go away from Hintock if she meant to
withstand further temptation. The struggle was too wearying, too
hopeless, while she remained. It was but a continual capitulation of
conscience to what she dared not name.

By degrees, as she sat, Felice’s mind—helped perhaps by the anticlimax
of learning that her lover was unharmed after all her fright about
him—grew wondrously strong in wise resolve. For the moment she was in a
mood, in the words of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, “to run mad with
discretion;” and was so persuaded that discretion lay in departure that
she wished to set about going that very minute. Jumping up from her
seat, she began to gather together some small personal knick-knacks
scattered about the room, to feel that preparations were really in
train.

While moving here and there she fancied that she heard a slight noise
out-of-doors, and stood still. Surely it was a tapping at the window. A
thought entered her mind, and burned her cheek. He had come to that
window before; yet was it possible that he should dare to do so now!
All the servants were in bed, and in the ordinary course of affairs she
would have retired also. Then she remembered that on stepping in by the
casement and closing it, she had not fastened the window-shutter, so
that a streak of light from the interior of the room might have
revealed her vigil to an observer on the lawn. How all things conspired
against her keeping faith with Grace!

The tapping recommenced, light as from the bill of a little bird; her
illegitimate hope overcame her vow; she went and pulled back the
shutter, determining, however, to shake her head at him and keep the
casement securely closed.

What she saw outside might have struck terror into a heart stouter than
a helpless woman’s at midnight. In the centre of the lowest pane of the
window, close to the glass, was a human face, which she barely
recognized as the face of Fitzpiers. It was surrounded with the
darkness of the night without, corpse-like in its pallor, and covered
with blood. As disclosed in the square area of the pane it met her
frightened eyes like a replica of the Sudarium of St. Veronica.

He moved his lips, and looked at her imploringly. Her rapid mind pieced
together in an instant a possible concatenation of events which might
have led to this tragical issue. She unlatched the casement with a
terrified hand, and bending down to where he was crouching, pressed her
face to his with passionate solicitude. She assisted him into the room
without a word, to do which it was almost necessary to lift him bodily.
Quickly closing the window and fastening the shutters, she bent over
him breathlessly.

“Are you hurt much—much?” she cried, faintly. “Oh, oh, how is this!”

“Rather much—but don’t be frightened,” he answered in a difficult
whisper, and turning himself to obtain an easier position if possible.
“A little water, please.”

She ran across into the dining-room, and brought a bottle and glass,
from which he eagerly drank. He could then speak much better, and with
her help got upon the nearest couch.

“Are you dying, Edgar?” she said. “Do speak to me!”

“I am half dead,” said Fitzpiers. “But perhaps I shall get over
it....It is chiefly loss of blood.”

“But I thought your fall did not hurt you,” said she. “Who did this?”

“Felice—my father-in-law!...I have crawled to you more than a mile on
my hands and knees—God, I thought I should never have got here!...I
have come to you—be-cause you are the only friend—I have in the world
now....I can never go back to Hintock—never—to the roof of the
Melburys! Not poppy nor mandragora will ever medicine this bitter
feud!...If I were only well again—”

“Let me bind your head, now that you have rested.”

“Yes—but wait a moment—it has stopped bleeding, fortunately, or I
should be a dead man before now. While in the wood I managed to make a
tourniquet of some half-pence and my handkerchief, as well as I could
in the dark....But listen, dear Felice! Can you hide me till I am well?
Whatever comes, I can be seen in Hintock no more. My practice is nearly
gone, you know—and after this I would not care to recover it if I
could.”

By this time Felice’s tears began to blind her. Where were now her
discreet plans for sundering their lives forever? To administer to him
in his pain, and trouble, and poverty, was her single thought. The
first step was to hide him, and she asked herself where. A place
occurred to her mind.

She got him some wine from the dining-room, which strengthened him
much. Then she managed to remove his boots, and, as he could now keep
himself upright by leaning upon her on one side and a walking-stick on
the other, they went thus in slow march out of the room and up the
stairs. At the top she took him along a gallery, pausing whenever he
required rest, and thence up a smaller staircase to the least used part
of the house, where she unlocked a door. Within was a lumber-room,
containing abandoned furniture of all descriptions, built up in piles
which obscured the light of the windows, and formed between them nooks
and lairs in which a person would not be discerned even should an eye
gaze in at the door. The articles were mainly those that had belonged
to the previous owner of the house, and had been bought in by the late
Mr. Charmond at the auction; but changing fashion, and the tastes of a
young wife, had caused them to be relegated to this dungeon.

Here Fitzpiers sat on the floor against the wall till she had hauled
out materials for a bed, which she spread on the floor in one of the
aforesaid nooks. She obtained water and a basin, and washed the dried
blood from his face and hands; and when he was comfortably reclining,
fetched food from the larder. While he ate her eyes lingered anxiously
on his face, following its every movement with such loving-kindness as
only a fond woman can show.

He was now in better condition, and discussed his position with her.

“What I fancy I said to Melbury must have been enough to enrage any
man, if uttered in cold blood, and with knowledge of his presence. But
I did not know him, and I was stupefied by what he had given me, so
that I hardly was aware of what I said. Well—the veil of that temple is
rent in twain!...As I am not going to be seen again in Hintock, my
first efforts must be directed to allay any alarm that may be felt at
my absence, before I am able to get clear away. Nobody must suspect
that I have been hurt, or there will be a country talk about me.
Felice, I must at once concoct a letter to check all search for me. I
think if you can bring me a pen and paper I may be able to do it now. I
could rest better if it were done. Poor thing! how I tire her with
running up and down!”

She fetched writing materials, and held up the blotting-book as a
support to his hand, while he penned a brief note to his nominal wife.

“The animosity shown towards me by your father,” he wrote, in this
coldest of marital epistles, “is such that I cannot return again to a
roof which is his, even though it shelters you. A parting is
unavoidable, as you are sure to be on his side in this division. I am
starting on a journey which will take me a long way from Hintock, and
you must not expect to see me there again for some time.”

He then gave her a few directions bearing upon his professional
engagements and other practical matters, concluding without a hint of
his destination, or a notion of when she would see him again. He
offered to read the note to Felice before he closed it up, but she
would not hear or see it; that side of his obligations distressed her
beyond endurance. She turned away from Fitzpiers, and sobbed bitterly.

“If you can get this posted at a place some miles away,” he whispered,
exhausted by the effort of writing—“at Shottsford or Port-Bredy, or
still better, Budmouth—it will divert all suspicion from this house as
the place of my refuge.”

“I will drive to one or other of the places myself—anything to keep it
unknown,” she murmured, her voice weighted with vague foreboding, now
that the excitement of helping him had passed away.

Fitzpiers told her that there was yet one thing more to be done. “In
creeping over the fence on to the lawn,” he said, “I made the rail
bloody, and it shows rather much on the white paint—I could see it in
the dark. At all hazards it should be washed off. Could you do that
also, Felice?”

What will not women do on such devoted occasions? weary as she was she
went all the way down the rambling staircases to the ground-floor, then
to search for a lantern, which she lighted and hid under her cloak;
then for a wet sponge, and next went forth into the night. The white
railing stared out in the darkness at her approach, and a ray from the
enshrouded lantern fell upon the blood—just where he had told her it
would be found. She shuddered. It was almost too much to bear in one
day—but with a shaking hand she sponged the rail clean, and returned to
the house.

The time occupied by these several proceedings was not much less than
two hours. When all was done, and she had smoothed his extemporized
bed, and placed everything within his reach that she could think of,
she took her leave of him, and locked him in.




CHAPTER XXXVII.


When her husband’s letter reached Grace’s hands, bearing upon it the
postmark of a distant town, it never once crossed her mind that
Fitzpiers was within a mile of her still. She felt relieved that he did
not write more bitterly of the quarrel with her father, whatever its
nature might have been; but the general frigidity of his communication
quenched in her the incipient spark that events had kindled so shortly
before.

From this centre of information it was made known in Hintock that the
doctor had gone away, and as none but the Melbury household was aware
that he did not return on the night of his accident, no excitement
manifested itself in the village.

Thus the early days of May passed by. None but the nocturnal birds and
animals observed that late one evening, towards the middle of the
month, a closely wrapped figure, with a crutch under one arm and a
stick in his hand, crept out from Hintock House across the lawn to the
shelter of the trees, taking thence a slow and laborious walk to the
nearest point of the turnpike-road. The mysterious personage was so
disguised that his own wife would hardly have known him. Felice
Charmond was a practised hand at make-ups, as well she might be; and
she had done her utmost in padding and painting Fitzpiers with the old
materials of her art in the recesses of the lumber-room.

In the highway he was met by a covered carriage, which conveyed him to
Sherton-Abbas, whence he proceeded to the nearest port on the south
coast, and immediately crossed the Channel.

But it was known to everybody that three days after this time Mrs.
Charmond executed her long-deferred plan of setting out for a long term
of travel and residence on the Continent. She went off one morning as
unostentatiously as could be, and took no maid with her, having, she
said, engaged one to meet her at a point farther on in her route. After
that, Hintock House, so frequently deserted, was again to be let.
Spring had not merged in summer when a clinching rumor, founded on the
best of evidence, reached the parish and neighborhood. Mrs. Charmond
and Fitzpiers had been seen together in Baden, in relations which set
at rest the question that had agitated the little community ever since
the winter.

Melbury had entered the Valley of Humiliation even farther than Grace.
His spirit seemed broken.

But once a week he mechanically went to market as usual, and here, as
he was passing by the conduit one day, his mental condition expressed
largely by his gait, he heard his name spoken by a voice formerly
familiar. He turned and saw a certain Fred Beaucock—once a promising
lawyer’s clerk and local dandy, who had been called the cleverest
fellow in Sherton, without whose brains the firm of solicitors
employing him would be nowhere. But later on Beaucock had fallen into
the mire. He was invited out a good deal, sang songs at agricultural
meetings and burgesses’ dinners; in sum, victualled himself with
spirits more frequently than was good for the clever brains or body
either. He lost his situation, and after an absence spent in trying his
powers elsewhere, came back to his native town, where, at the time of
the foregoing events in Hintock, he gave legal advice for astonishingly
small fees—mostly carrying on his profession on public-house settles,
in whose recesses he might often have been overheard making
country-people’s wills for half a crown; calling with a learned voice
for pen-and-ink and a halfpenny sheet of paper, on which he drew up the
testament while resting it in a little space wiped with his hand on the
table amid the liquid circles formed by the cups and glasses. An idea
implanted early in life is difficult to uproot, and many elderly
tradespeople still clung to the notion that Fred Beaucock knew a great
deal of law.

It was he who had called Melbury by name. “You look very down, Mr.
Melbury—very, if I may say as much,” he observed, when the
timber-merchant turned. “But I know—I know. A very sad case—very. I was
bred to the law, as you know, and am professionally no stranger to such
matters. Well, Mrs. Fitzpiers has her remedy.”

“How—what—a remedy?” said Melbury.

“Under the new law, sir. A new court was established last year, and
under the new statute, twenty and twenty-one Vic., cap. eighty-five,
unmarrying is as easy as marrying. No more Acts of Parliament
necessary; no longer one law for the rich and another for the poor. But
come inside—I was just going to have a nibleykin of rum hot—I’ll
explain it all to you.”

The intelligence amazed Melbury, who saw little of newspapers. And
though he was a severely correct man in his habits, and had no taste
for entering a tavern with Fred Beaucock—nay, would have been quite
uninfluenced by such a character on any other matter in the world—such
fascination lay in the idea of delivering his poor girl from bondage,
that it deprived him of the critical faculty. He could not resist the
ex-lawyer’s clerk, and entered the inn.

Here they sat down to the rum, which Melbury paid for as a matter of
course, Beaucock leaning back in the settle with a legal gravity which
would hardly allow him to be conscious of the spirits before him,
though they nevertheless disappeared with mysterious quickness.

How much of the exaggerated information on the then new divorce laws
which Beaucock imparted to his listener was the result of ignorance,
and how much of dupery, was never ascertained. But he related such a
plausible story of the ease with which Grace could become a free woman
that her father was irradiated with the project; and though he scarcely
wetted his lips, Melbury never knew how he came out of the inn, or when
or where he mounted his gig to pursue his way homeward. But home he
found himself, his brain having all the way seemed to ring sonorously
as a gong in the intensity of its stir. Before he had seen Grace, he
was accidentally met by Winterborne, who found his face shining as if
he had, like the Law-giver, conversed with an angel.

He relinquished his horse, and took Winterborne by the arm to a heap of
rendlewood—as barked oak was here called—which lay under a
privet-hedge.

“Giles,” he said, when they had sat down upon the logs, “there’s a new
law in the land! Grace can be free quite easily. I only knew it by the
merest accident. I might not have found it out for the next ten years.
She can get rid of him—d’ye hear?—get rid of him. Think of that, my
friend Giles!”

He related what he had learned of the new legal remedy. A subdued
tremulousness about the mouth was all the response that Winterborne
made; and Melbury added, “My boy, you shall have her yet—if you want
her.” His feelings had gathered volume as he said this, and the
articulate sound of the old idea drowned his sight in mist.

“Are you sure—about this new law?” asked Winterborne, so disquieted by
a gigantic exultation which loomed alternately with fearful doubt that
he evaded the full acceptance of Melbury’s last statement.

Melbury said that he had no manner of doubt, for since his talk with
Beaucock it had come into his mind that he had seen some time ago in
the weekly paper an allusion to such a legal change; but, having no
interest in those desperate remedies at the moment, he had passed it
over. “But I’m not going to let the matter rest doubtful for a single
day,” he continued. “I am going to London. Beaucock will go with me,
and we shall get the best advice as soon as we possibly can. Beaucock
is a thorough lawyer—nothing the matter with him but a fiery palate. I
knew him as the stay and refuge of Sherton in knots of law at one
time.”

Winterborne’s replies were of the vaguest. The new possibility was
almost unthinkable by him at the moment. He was what was called at
Hintock “a solid-going fellow;” he maintained his abeyant mood, not
from want of reciprocity, but from a taciturn hesitancy, taught by life
as he knew it.

“But,” continued the timber-merchant, a temporary crease or two of
anxiety supplementing those already established in his forehead by time
and care, “Grace is not at all well. Nothing constitutional, you know;
but she has been in a low, nervous state ever since that night of
fright. I don’t doubt but that she will be all right soon....I wonder
how she is this evening?” He rose with the words, as if he had too long
forgotten her personality in the excitement of her previsioned career.

They had sat till the evening was beginning to dye the garden brown,
and now went towards Melbury’s house, Giles a few steps in the rear of
his old friend, who was stimulated by the enthusiasm of the moment to
outstep the ordinary walking of Winterborne. He felt shy of entering
Grace’s presence as her reconstituted lover—which was how her father’s
manner would be sure to present him—before definite information as to
her future state was forthcoming; it seemed too nearly like the act of
those who rush in where angels fear to tread.

A chill to counterbalance all the glowing promise of the day was prompt
enough in coming. No sooner had he followed the timber-merchant in at
the door than he heard Grammer inform him that Mrs. Fitzpiers was still
more unwell than she had been in the morning. Old Dr. Jones being in
the neighborhood they had called him in, and he had instantly directed
them to get her to bed. They were not, however, to consider her illness
serious—a feverish, nervous attack the result of recent events, was
what she was suffering from, and she would doubtless be well in a few
days.

Winterborne, therefore, did not remain, and his hope of seeing her that
evening was disappointed. Even this aggravation of her morning
condition did not greatly depress Melbury. He knew, he said, that his
daughter’s constitution was sound enough. It was only these domestic
troubles that were pulling her down. Once free she would be blooming
again. Melbury diagnosed rightly, as parents usually do.

He set out for London the next morning, Jones having paid another visit
and assured him that he might leave home without uneasiness, especially
on an errand of that sort, which would the sooner put an end to her
suspense.

The timber-merchant had been away only a day or two when it was told in
Hintock that Mr. Fitzpiers’s hat had been found in the wood. Later on
in the afternoon the hat was brought to Melbury, and, by a piece of
ill-fortune, into Grace’s presence. It had doubtless lain in the wood
ever since his fall from the horse, but it looked so clean and
uninjured—the summer weather and leafy shelter having much favored its
preservation—that Grace could not believe it had remained so long
concealed. A very little of fact was enough to set her fevered fancy at
work at this juncture; she thought him still in the neighborhood; she
feared his sudden appearance; and her nervous malady developed
consequences so grave that Dr. Jones began to look serious, and the
household was alarmed.

It was the beginning of June, and the cuckoo at this time of the summer
scarcely ceased his cry for more than two or three hours during the
night. The bird’s note, so familiar to her ears from infancy, was now
absolute torture to the poor girl. On the Friday following the
Wednesday of Melbury’s departure, and the day after the discovery of
Fitzpiers’s hat, the cuckoo began at two o’clock in the morning with a
sudden cry from one of Melbury’s apple-trees, not three yards from the
window of Grace’s room.

“Oh, he is coming!” she cried, and in her terror sprang clean from the
bed out upon the floor.

These starts and frights continued till noon; and when the doctor had
arrived and had seen her, and had talked with Mrs. Melbury, he sat down
and meditated. That ever-present terror it was indispensable to remove
from her mind at all hazards; and he thought how this might be done.

Without saying a word to anybody in the house, or to the disquieted
Winterborne waiting in the lane below, Dr. Jones went home and wrote to
Mr. Melbury at the London address he had obtained from his wife. The
gist of his communication was that Mrs. Fitzpiers should be assured as
soon as possible that steps were being taken to sever the bond which
was becoming a torture to her; that she would soon be free, and was
even then virtually so. “If you can say it _at once_ it may be the
means of averting much harm,” he said. “Write to herself; not to me.”

On Saturday he drove over to Hintock, and assured her with mysterious
pacifications that in a day or two she might expect to receive some
assuring news. So it turned out. When Sunday morning came there was a
letter for Grace from her father. It arrived at seven o’clock, the
usual time at which the toddling postman passed by Hintock; at eight
Grace awoke, having slept an hour or two for a wonder, and Mrs. Melbury
brought up the letter.

“Can you open it yourself?” said she.

“Oh yes, yes!” said Grace, with feeble impatience. She tore the
envelope, unfolded the sheet, and read; when a creeping blush tinctured
her white neck and cheek.

Her father had exercised a bold discretion. He informed her that she
need have no further concern about Fitzpiers’s return; that she would
shortly be a free woman; and therefore, if she should desire to wed her
old lover—which he trusted was the case, since it was his own deep
wish—she would be in a position to do so. In this Melbury had not
written beyond his belief. But he very much stretched the facts in
adding that the legal formalities for dissolving her union were
practically settled. The truth was that on the arrival of the doctor’s
letter poor Melbury had been much agitated, and could with difficulty
be prevented by Beaucock from returning to her bedside. What was the
use of his rushing back to Hintock? Beaucock had asked him. The only
thing that could do her any good was a breaking of the bond. Though he
had not as yet had an interview with the eminent solicitor they were
about to consult, he was on the point of seeing him; and the case was
clear enough. Thus the simple Melbury, urged by his parental alarm at
her danger by the representations of his companion, and by the doctor’s
letter, had yielded, and sat down to tell her roundly that she was
virtually free.

“And you’d better write also to the gentleman,” suggested Beaucock,
who, scenting notoriety and the germ of a large practice in the case,
wished to commit Melbury to it irretrievably; to effect which he knew
that nothing would be so potent as awakening the passion of Grace for
Winterborne, so that her father might not have the heart to withdraw
from his attempt to make her love legitimate when he discovered that
there were difficulties in the way.

The nervous, impatient Melbury was much pleased with the idea of
“starting them at once,” as he called it. To put his long-delayed
reparative scheme in train had become a passion with him now. He added
to the letter addressed to his daughter a passage hinting that she
ought to begin to encourage Winterborne, lest she should lose him
altogether; and he wrote to Giles that the path was virtually open for
him at last. Life was short, he declared; there were slips betwixt the
cup and the lip; her interest in him should be reawakened at once, that
all might be ready when the good time came for uniting them.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.


At these warm words Winterborne was not less dazed than he was moved in
heart. The novelty of the avowal rendered what it carried with it
inapprehensible by him in its entirety.

Only a few short months ago completely estranged from this
family—beholding Grace going to and fro in the distance, clothed with
the alienating radiance of obvious superiority, the wife of the then
popular and fashionable Fitzpiers, hopelessly outside his social
boundary down to so recent a time that flowers then folded were hardly
faded yet—he was now asked by that jealously guarding father of hers to
take courage—to get himself ready for the day when he should be able to
claim her.

The old times came back to him in dim procession. How he had been
snubbed; how Melbury had despised his Christmas party; how that sweet,
coy Grace herself had looked down upon him and his household
arrangements, and poor Creedle’s contrivances!

Well, he could not believe it. Surely the adamantine barrier of
marriage with another could not be pierced like this! It did violence
to custom. Yet a new law might do anything. But was it at all within
the bounds of probability that a woman who, over and above her own
attainments, had been accustomed to those of a cultivated professional
man, could ever be the wife of such as he?

Since the date of his rejection he had almost grown to see the
reasonableness of that treatment. He had said to himself again and
again that her father was right; that the poor ceorl, Giles
Winterborne, would never have been able to make such a dainty girl
happy. Yet, now that she had stood in a position farther removed from
his own than at first, he was asked to prepare to woo her. He was full
of doubt.

Nevertheless, it was not in him to show backwardness. To act so
promptly as Melbury desired him to act seemed, indeed, scarcely wise,
because of the uncertainty of events. Giles knew nothing of legal
procedure, but he did know that for him to step up to Grace as a lover
before the bond which bound her was actually dissolved was simply an
extravagant dream of her father’s overstrained mind. He pitied Melbury
for his almost childish enthusiasm, and saw that the aging man must
have suffered acutely to be weakened to this unreasoning desire.

Winterborne was far too magnanimous to harbor any cynical conjecture
that the timber-merchant, in his intense affection for Grace, was
courting him now because that young lady, when disunited, would be left
in an anomalous position, to escape which a bad husband was better than
none. He felt quite sure that his old friend was simply on tenterhooks
of anxiety to repair the almost irreparable error of dividing two whom
Nature had striven to join together in earlier days, and that in his
ardor to do this he was oblivious of formalities. The cautious
supervision of his past years had overleaped itself at last. Hence,
Winterborne perceived that, in this new beginning, the necessary care
not to compromise Grace by too early advances must be exercised by
himself.

Perhaps Winterborne was not quite so ardent as heretofore. There is no
such thing as a stationary love: men are either loving more or loving
less. But Giles himself recognized no decline in his sense of her
dearness. If the flame did indeed burn lower now than when he had
fetched her from Sherton at her last return from school, the marvel was
small. He had been laboring ever since his rejection and her marriage
to reduce his former passion to a docile friendship, out of pure regard
to its expediency; and their separation may have helped him to a
partial success.

A week and more passed, and there was no further news of Melbury. But
the effect of the intelligence he had already transmitted upon the
elastic-nerved daughter of the woods had been much what the old surgeon
Jones had surmised. It had soothed her perturbed spirit better than all
the opiates in the pharmacopoeia. She had slept unbrokenly a whole
night and a day. The “new law” was to her a mysterious, beneficent,
godlike entity, lately descended upon earth, that would make her as she
once had been without trouble or annoyance. Her position fretted her,
its abstract features rousing an aversion which was even greater than
her aversion to the personality of him who had caused it. It was
mortifying, productive of slights, undignified. Him she could forget;
her circumstances she had always with her.

She saw nothing of Winterborne during the days of her recovery; and
perhaps on that account her fancy wove about him a more romantic tissue
than it could have done if he had stood before her with all the specks
and flaws inseparable from corporeity. He rose upon her memory as the
fruit-god and the wood-god in alternation; sometimes leafy, and smeared
with green lichen, as she had seen him among the sappy boughs of the
plantations; sometimes cider-stained, and with apple-pips in the hair
of his arms, as she had met him on his return from cider-making in
White Hart Vale, with his vats and presses beside him. In her secret
heart she almost approximated to her father’s enthusiasm in wishing to
show Giles once for all how she still regarded him. The question
whether the future would indeed bring them together for life was a
standing wonder with her. She knew that it could not with any propriety
do so just yet. But reverently believing in her father’s sound judgment
and knowledge, as good girls are wont to do, she remembered what he had
written about her giving a hint to Winterborne lest there should be
risk in delay, and her feelings were not averse to such a step, so far
as it could be done without danger at this early stage of the
proceedings.

From being a frail phantom of her former equable self she returned in
bounds to a condition of passable philosophy. She bloomed again in the
face in the course of a few days, and was well enough to go about as
usual. One day Mrs. Melbury proposed that for a change she should be
driven in the gig to Sherton market, whither Melbury’s man was going on
other errands. Grace had no business whatever in Sherton; but it
crossed her mind that Winterborne would probably be there, and this
made the thought of such a drive interesting.

On the way she saw nothing of him; but when the horse was walking
slowly through the obstructions of Sheep Street, she discerned the
young man on the pavement. She thought of that time when he had been
standing under his apple-tree on her return from school, and of the
tender opportunity then missed through her fastidiousness. Her heart
rose in her throat. She abjured all such fastidiousness now. Nor did
she forget the last occasion on which she had beheld him in that town,
making cider in the court-yard of the Earl of Wessex Hotel, while she
was figuring as a fine lady in the balcony above.

Grace directed the man to set her down there in the midst, and
immediately went up to her lover. Giles had not before observed her,
and his eyes now suppressedly looked his pleasure, without the
embarrassment that had formerly marked him at such meetings.

When a few words had been spoken, she said, archly, “I have nothing to
do. Perhaps you are deeply engaged?”

“I? Not a bit. My business now at the best of times is small, I am
sorry to say.”

“Well, then, I am going into the Abbey. Come along with me.”

The proposition had suggested itself as a quick escape from publicity,
for many eyes were regarding her. She had hoped that sufficient time
had elapsed for the extinction of curiosity; but it was quite
otherwise. The people looked at her with tender interest as the
deserted girl-wife—without obtrusiveness, and without vulgarity; but
she was ill prepared for scrutiny in any shape.

They walked about the Abbey aisles, and presently sat down. Not a soul
was in the building save themselves. She regarded a stained window,
with her head sideways, and tentatively asked him if he remembered the
last time they were in that town alone.

He remembered it perfectly, and remarked, “You were a proud miss then,
and as dainty as you were high. Perhaps you are now?”

Grace slowly shook her head. “Affliction has taken all that out of me,”
she answered, impressively. “Perhaps I am too far the other way now.”
As there was something lurking in this that she could not explain, she
added, so quickly as not to allow him time to think of it, “Has my
father written to you at all?”

“Yes,” said Winterborne.

She glanced ponderingly up at him. “Not about me?”

“Yes.”

His mouth was lined with charactery which told her that he had been
bidden to take the hint as to the future which she had been bidden to
give. The unexpected discovery sent a scarlet pulsation through Grace
for the moment. However, it was only Giles who stood there, of whom she
had no fear; and her self-possession returned.

“He said I was to sound you with a view to—what you will understand, if
you care to,” continued Winterborne, in a low voice. Having been put on
this track by herself, he was not disposed to abandon it in a hurry.

They had been children together, and there was between them that
familiarity as to personal affairs which only such acquaintanceship can
give. “You know, Giles,” she answered, speaking in a very practical
tone, “that that is all very well; but I am in a very anomalous
position at present, and I cannot say anything to the point about such
things as those.”

“No?” he said, with a stray air as regarded the subject. He was looking
at her with a curious consciousness of discovery. He had not been
imagining that their renewed intercourse would show her to him thus.
For the first time he realized an unexpectedness in her, which, after
all, should not have been unexpected. She before him was not the girl
Grace Melbury whom he used to know. Of course, he might easily have
prefigured as much; but it had never occurred to him. She was a woman
who had been married; she had moved on; and without having lost her
girlish modesty, she had lost her girlish shyness. The inevitable
change, though known to him, had not been heeded; and it struck him
into a momentary fixity. The truth was that he had never come into
close comradeship with her since her engagement to Fitzpiers, with the
brief exception of the evening encounter on Rubdown Hill, when she met
him with his cider apparatus; and that interview had been of too
cursory a kind for insight.

Winterborne had advanced, too. He could criticise her. Times had been
when to criticise a single trait in Grace Melbury would have lain as
far beyond his powers as to criticise a deity. This thing was sure: it
was a new woman in many ways whom he had come out to see; a creature of
more ideas, more dignity, and, above all, more assurance, than the
original Grace had been capable of. He could not at first decide
whether he were pleased or displeased at this. But upon the whole the
novelty attracted him.

She was so sweet and sensitive that she feared his silence betokened
something in his brain of the nature of an enemy to her. “What are you
thinking of that makes those lines come in your forehead?” she asked.
“I did not mean to offend you by speaking of the time being premature
as yet.”

Touched by the genuine loving-kindness which had lain at the foundation
of these words, and much moved, Winterborne turned his face aside, as
he took her by the hand. He was grieved that he had criticised her.

“You are very good, dear Grace,” he said, in a low voice. “You are
better, much better, than you used to be.”

“How?”

He could not very well tell her how, and said, with an evasive smile,
“You are prettier;” which was not what he really had meant. He then
remained still holding her right hand in his own right, so that they
faced in opposite ways; and as he did not let go, she ventured upon a
tender remonstrance.

“I think we have gone as far as we ought to go at present—and far
enough to satisfy my poor father that we are the same as ever. You see,
Giles, my case is not settled yet, and if—Oh, suppose I _never_ get
free!—there should be any hitch or informality!”

She drew a catching breath, and turned pale. The dialogue had been
affectionate comedy up to this point. The gloomy atmosphere of the
past, and the still gloomy horizon of the present, had been for the
interval forgotten. Now the whole environment came back, the due
balance of shade among the light was restored.

“It is sure to be all right, I trust?” she resumed, in uneasy accents.
“What did my father say the solicitor had told him?”

“Oh—that all is sure enough. The case is so clear—nothing could be
clearer. But the legal part is not yet quite done and finished, as is
natural.”

“Oh no—of course not,” she said, sunk in meek thought. “But father said
it was _almost_—did he not? Do you know anything about the new law that
makes these things so easy?”

“Nothing—except the general fact that it enables ill-assorted husbands
and wives to part in a way they could not formerly do without an Act of
Parliament.”

“Have you to sign a paper, or swear anything? Is it something like
that?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“How long has it been introduced?”

“About six months or a year, the lawyer said, I think.”

To hear these two poor Arcadian innocents talk of imperial law would
have made a humane person weep who should have known what a dangerous
structure they were building up on their supposed knowledge. They
remained in thought, like children in the presence of the
incomprehensible.

“Giles,” she said, at last, “it makes me quite weary when I think how
serious my situation is, or has been. Shall we not go out from here
now, as it may seem rather fast of me—our being so long together, I
mean—if anybody were to see us? I am almost sure,” she added,
uncertainly, “that I ought not to let you hold my hand yet, knowing
that the documents—or whatever it may be—have not been signed; so that
I—am still as married as ever—or almost. My dear father has forgotten
himself. Not that I feel morally bound to any one else, after what has
taken place—no woman of spirit could—now, too, that several months have
passed. But I wish to keep the proprieties as well as I can.”

“Yes, yes. Still, your father reminds us that life is short. I myself
feel that it is; that is why I wished to understand you in this that we
have begun. At times, dear Grace, since receiving your father’s letter,
I am as uneasy and fearful as a child at what he said. If one of us
were to die before the formal signing and sealing that is to release
you have been done—if we should drop out of the world and never have
made the most of this little, short, but real opportunity, I should
think to myself as I sunk down dying, ‘Would to my God that I had
spoken out my whole heart—given her one poor little kiss when I had the
chance to give it! But I never did, although she had promised to be
mine some day; and now I never can.’ That’s what I should think.”

She had begun by watching the words from his lips with a mournful
regard, as though their passage were visible; but as he went on she
dropped her glance. “Yes,” she said, “I have thought that, too. And,
because I have thought it, I by no means meant, in speaking of the
proprieties, to be reserved and cold to you who loved me so long ago,
or to hurt your heart as I used to do at that thoughtless time. Oh, not
at all, indeed! But—ought I to allow you?—oh, it is too quick—surely!”
Her eyes filled with tears of bewildered, alarmed emotion.

Winterborne was too straightforward to influence her further against
her better judgment. “Yes—I suppose it is,” he said, repentantly. “I’ll
wait till all is settled. What did your father say in that last
letter?”

He meant about his progress with the petition; but she, mistaking him,
frankly spoke of the personal part. “He said—what I have implied.
Should I tell more plainly?”

“Oh no—don’t, if it is a secret.”

“Not at all. I will tell every word, straight out, Giles, if you wish.
He said I was to encourage you. There. But I cannot obey him further
to-day. Come, let us go now.” She gently slid her hand from his, and
went in front of him out of the Abbey.

“I was thinking of getting some dinner,” said Winterborne, changing to
the prosaic, as they walked. “And you, too, must require something. Do
let me take you to a place I know.”

Grace was almost without a friend in the world outside her father’s
house; her life with Fitzpiers had brought her no society; had
sometimes, indeed, brought her deeper solitude and inconsideration than
any she had ever known before. Hence it was a treat to her to find
herself again the object of thoughtful care. But she questioned if to
go publicly to dine with Giles Winterborne were not a proposal, due
rather to his unsophistication than to his discretion. She said gently
that she would much prefer his ordering her lunch at some place and
then coming to tell her it was ready, while she remained in the Abbey
porch. Giles saw her secret reasoning, thought how hopelessly blind to
propriety he was beside her, and went to do as she wished.

He was not absent more than ten minutes, and found Grace where he had
left her. “It will be quite ready by the time you get there,” he said,
and told her the name of the inn at which the meal had been ordered,
which was one that she had never heard of.

“I’ll find it by inquiry,” said Grace, setting out.

“And shall I see you again?”

“Oh yes—come to me there. It will not be like going together. I shall
want you to find my father’s man and the gig for me.”

He waited on some ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, till he thought
her lunch ended, and that he might fairly take advantage of her
invitation to start her on her way home. He went straight to The Three
Tuns—a little tavern in a side street, scrupulously clean, but humble
and inexpensive. On his way he had an occasional misgiving as to
whether the place had been elegant enough for her; and as soon as he
entered it, and saw her ensconced there, he perceived that he had
blundered.

Grace was seated in the only dining-room that the simple old hostelry
could boast of, which was also a general parlor on market-days; a long,
low apartment, with a sanded floor herring-boned with a broom; a wide,
red-curtained window to the street, and another to the garden. Grace
had retreated to the end of the room looking out upon the latter, the
front part being full of a mixed company which had dropped in since he
was there.

She was in a mood of the greatest depression. On arriving, and seeing
what the tavern was like, she had been taken by surprise; but having
gone too far to retreat, she had heroically entered and sat down on the
well-scrubbed settle, opposite the narrow table with its knives and
steel forks, tin pepper-boxes, blue salt-cellars, and posters
advertising the sale of bullocks against the wall. The last time that
she had taken any meal in a public place it had been with Fitzpiers at
the grand new Earl of Wessex Hotel in that town, after a two months’
roaming and sojourning at the gigantic hotels of the Continent. How
could she have expected any other kind of accommodation in present
circumstances than such as Giles had provided? And yet how unprepared
she was for this change! The tastes that she had acquired from
Fitzpiers had been imbibed so subtly that she hardly knew she possessed
them till confronted by this contrast. The elegant Fitzpiers, in fact,
at that very moment owed a long bill at the above-mentioned hotel for
the luxurious style in which he used to put her up there whenever they
drove to Sherton. But such is social sentiment, that she had been quite
comfortable under those debt-impending conditions, while she felt
humiliated by her present situation, which Winterborne had paid for
honestly on the nail.

He had noticed in a moment that she shrunk from her position, and all
his pleasure was gone. It was the same susceptibility over again which
had spoiled his Christmas party long ago.

But he did not know that this recrudescence was only the casual result
of Grace’s apprenticeship to what she was determined to learn in spite
of it—a consequence of one of those sudden surprises which confront
everybody bent upon turning over a new leaf. She had finished her
lunch, which he saw had been a very mincing performance; and he brought
her out of the house as soon as he could.

“Now,” he said, with great sad eyes, “you have not finished at all
well, I know. Come round to the Earl of Wessex. I’ll order a tea there.
I did not remember that what was good enough for me was not good enough
for you.”

Her face faded into an aspect of deep distress when she saw what had
happened. “Oh no, Giles,” she said, with extreme pathos; “certainly
not. Why do you—say that when you know better? You _ever_ will
misunderstand me.”

“Indeed, that’s not so, Mrs. Fitzpiers. Can you deny that you felt out
of place at The Three Tuns?”

“I don’t know. Well, since you make me speak, I do not deny it.”

“And yet I have felt at home there these twenty years. Your husband
used always to take you to the Earl of Wessex, did he not?”

“Yes,” she reluctantly admitted. How could she explain in the street of
a market-town that it was her superficial and transitory taste which
had been offended, and not her nature or her affection? Fortunately, or
unfortunately, at that moment they saw Melbury’s man driving vacantly
along the street in search of her, the hour having passed at which he
had been told to take her up. Winterborne hailed him, and she was
powerless then to prolong the discourse. She entered the vehicle sadly,
and the horse trotted away.




CHAPTER XXXIX.


All night did Winterborne think over that unsatisfactory ending of a
pleasant time, forgetting the pleasant time itself. He feared anew that
they could never be happy together, even should she be free to choose
him. She was accomplished; he was unrefined. It was the original
difficulty, which he was too sensitive to recklessly ignore, as some
men would have done in his place.

He was one of those silent, unobtrusive beings who want little from
others in the way of favor or condescension, and perhaps on that very
account scrutinize those others’ behavior too closely. He was not
versatile, but one in whom a hope or belief which had once had its
rise, meridian, and decline seldom again exactly recurred, as in the
breasts of more sanguine mortals. He had once worshipped her, laid out
his life to suit her, wooed her, and lost her. Though it was with
almost the same zest, it was with not quite the same hope, that he had
begun to tread the old tracks again, and allowed himself to be so
charmed with her that day.

Move another step towards her he would not. He would even repulse
her—as a tribute to conscience. It would be sheer sin to let her
prepare a pitfall for her happiness not much smaller than the first by
inveigling her into a union with such as he. Her poor father was now
blind to these subtleties, which he had formerly beheld as in noontide
light. It was his own duty to declare them—for her dear sake.

Grace, too, had a very uncomfortable night, and her solicitous
embarrassment was not lessened the next morning when another letter
from her father was put into her hands. Its tenor was an intenser
strain of the one that had preceded it. After stating how extremely
glad he was to hear that she was better, and able to get out-of-doors,
he went on:

“This is a wearisome business, the solicitor we have come to see being
out of town. I do not know when I shall get home. My great anxiety in
this delay is still lest you should lose Giles Winterborne. I cannot
rest at night for thinking that while our business is hanging fire he
may become estranged, or go away from the neighborhood. I have set my
heart upon seeing him your husband, if you ever have another. Do, then,
Grace, give him some temporary encouragement, even though it is
over-early. For when I consider the past I do think God will forgive me
and you for being a little forward. I have another reason for this, my
dear. I feel myself going rapidly downhill, and late affairs have still
further helped me that way. And until this thing is done I cannot rest
in peace.”


He added a postscript:

“I have just heard that the solicitor is to be seen to-morrow.
Possibly, therefore, I shall return in the evening after you get this.”


The paternal longing ran on all fours with her own desire; and yet in
forwarding it yesterday she had been on the brink of giving offence.
While craving to be a country girl again just as her father requested;
to put off the old Eve, the fastidious miss—or rather madam—completely,
her first attempt had been beaten by the unexpected vitality of that
fastidiousness. Her father on returning and seeing the trifling
coolness of Giles would be sure to say that the same perversity which
had led her to make difficulties about marrying Fitzpiers was now
prompting her to blow hot and cold with poor Winterborne.

If the latter had been the most subtle hand at touching the stops of
her delicate soul instead of one who had just bound himself to let her
drift away from him again (if she would) on the wind of her estranging
education, he could not have acted more seductively than he did that
day. He chanced to be superintending some temporary work in a field
opposite her windows. She could not discover what he was doing, but she
read his mood keenly and truly: she could see in his coming and going
an air of determined abandonment of the whole landscape that lay in her
direction.

Oh, how she longed to make it up with him! Her father coming in the
evening—which meant, she supposed, that all formalities would be in
train, her marriage virtually annulled, and she be free to be won
again—how could she look him in the face if he should see them
estranged thus?

It was a fair green evening in June. She was seated in the garden, in
the rustic chair which stood under the laurel-bushes—made of peeled
oak-branches that came to Melbury’s premises as refuse after
barking-time. The mass of full-juiced leafage on the heights around her
was just swayed into faint gestures by a nearly spent wind which, even
in its enfeebled state, did not reach her shelter. All day she had
expected Giles to call—to inquire how she had got home, or something or
other; but he had not come. And he still tantalized her by going
athwart and across that orchard opposite. She could see him as she sat.

A slight diversion was presently created by Creedle bringing him a
letter. She knew from this that Creedle had just come from Sherton, and
had called as usual at the post-office for anything that had arrived by
the afternoon post, of which there was no delivery at Hintock. She
pondered on what the letter might contain—particularly whether it were
a second refresher for Winterborne from her father, like her own of the
morning.

But it appeared to have no bearing upon herself whatever. Giles read
its contents; and almost immediately turned away to a gap in the hedge
of the orchard—if that could be called a hedge which, owing to the
drippings of the trees, was little more than a bank with a bush upon it
here and there. He entered the plantation, and was no doubt going that
way homeward to the mysterious hut he occupied on the other side of the
woodland.

The sad sands were running swiftly through Time’s glass; she had often
felt it in these latter days; and, like Giles, she felt it doubly now
after the solemn and pathetic reminder in her father’s communication.
Her freshness would pass, the long-suffering devotion of Giles might
suddenly end—might end that very hour. Men were so strange. The thought
took away from her all her former reticence, and made her action bold.
She started from her seat. If the little breach, quarrel, or whatever
it might be called, of yesterday, was to be healed up it must be done
by her on the instant. She crossed into the orchard, and clambered
through the gap after Giles, just as he was diminishing to a faun-like
figure under the green canopy and over the brown floor.

Grace had been wrong—very far wrong—in assuming that the letter had no
reference to herself because Giles had turned away into the wood after
its perusal. It was, sad to say, because the missive had so much
reference to herself that he had thus turned away. He feared that his
grieved discomfiture might be observed. The letter was from Beaucock,
written a few hours later than Melbury’s to his daughter. It announced
failure.

Giles had once done that thriftless man a good turn, and now was the
moment when Beaucock had chosen to remember it in his own way. During
his absence in town with Melbury, the lawyer’s clerk had naturally
heard a great deal of the timber-merchant’s family scheme of justice to
Giles, and his communication was to inform Winterborne at the earliest
possible moment that their attempt had failed, in order that the young
man should not place himself in a false position towards Grace in the
belief of its coming success. The news was, in sum, that Fitzpiers’s
conduct had not been sufficiently cruel to Grace to enable her to snap
the bond. She was apparently doomed to be his wife till the end of the
chapter.

Winterborne quite forgot his superficial differences with the poor girl
under the warm rush of deep and distracting love for her which the
almost tragical information engendered.

To renounce her forever—that was then the end of it for him, after all.
There was no longer any question about suitability, or room for tiffs
on petty tastes. The curtain had fallen again between them. She could
not be his. The cruelty of their late revived hope was now terrible.
How could they all have been so simple as to suppose this thing could
be done?

It was at this moment that, hearing some one coming behind him, he
turned and saw her hastening on between the thickets. He perceived in
an instant that she did not know the blighting news.

“Giles, why didn’t you come across to me?” she asked, with arch
reproach. “Didn’t you see me sitting there ever so long?”

“Oh yes,” he said, in unprepared, extemporized tones, for her
unexpected presence caught him without the slightest plan of behavior
in the conjuncture. His manner made her think that she had been too
chiding in her speech; and a mild scarlet wave passed over her as she
resolved to soften it.

“I have had another letter from my father,” she hastened to continue.
“He thinks he may come home this evening. And—in view of his hopes—it
will grieve him if there is any little difference between us, Giles.”

“There is none,” he said, sadly regarding her from the face downward as
he pondered how to lay the cruel truth bare.

“Still—I fear you have not quite forgiven me about my being
uncomfortable at the inn.”

“I have, Grace, I’m sure.”

“But you speak in quite an unhappy way,” she returned, coming up close
to him with the most winning of the many pretty airs that appertained
to her. “Don’t you think you will ever be happy, Giles?”

He did not reply for some instants. “When the sun shines on the north
front of Sherton Abbey—that’s when my happiness will come to me!” said
he, staring as it were into the earth.

“But—then that means that there is something more than my offending you
in not liking The Three Tuns. If it is because I—did not like to let
you kiss me in the Abbey—well, you know, Giles, that it was not on
account of my cold feelings, but because I did certainly, just then,
think it was rather premature, in spite of my poor father. That was the
true reason—the sole one. But I do not want to be hard—God knows I do
not,” she said, her voice fluctuating. “And perhaps—as I am on the
verge of freedom—I am not right, after all, in thinking there is any
harm in your kissing me.”

“Oh God!” said Winterborne within himself. His head was turned askance
as he still resolutely regarded the ground. For the last several
minutes he had seen this great temptation approaching him in regular
siege; and now it had come. The wrong, the social sin, of now taking
advantage of the offer of her lips had a magnitude, in the eyes of one
whose life had been so primitive, so ruled by purest household laws, as
Giles’s, which can hardly be explained.

“Did you say anything?” she asked, timidly.

“Oh no—only that—”

“You mean that it must _be already_ settled, since my father is coming
home?” she said, gladly.

Winterborne, though fighting valiantly against himself all this
while—though he would have protected Grace’s good repute as the apple
of his eye—was a man; and, as Desdemona said, men are not gods. In face
of the agonizing seductiveness shown by her, in her unenlightened
school-girl simplicity about the laws and ordinances, he betrayed a
man’s weakness. Since it was so—since it had come to this, that Grace,
deeming herself free to do it, was virtually asking him to demonstrate
that he loved her—since he could demonstrate it only too truly—since
life was short and love was strong—he gave way to the temptation,
notwithstanding that he perfectly well knew her to be wedded
irrevocably to Fitzpiers. Indeed, he cared for nothing past or future,
simply accepting the present and what it brought, desiring once in his
life to clasp in his arms her he had watched over and loved so long.

She started back suddenly from his embrace, influenced by a sort of
inspiration. “Oh, I suppose,” she stammered, “that I am really
free?—that this is right? Is there _really_ a new law? Father cannot
have been too sanguine in saying—”

He did not answer, and a moment afterwards Grace burst into tears in
spite of herself. “Oh, why does not my father come home and explain,”
she sobbed, “and let me know clearly what I am? It is too trying, this,
to ask me to—and then to leave me so long in so vague a state that I do
not know what to do, and perhaps do wrong!”

Winterborne felt like a very Cain, over and above his previous sorrow.
How he had sinned against her in not telling her what he knew. He
turned aside; the feeling of his cruelty mounted higher and higher. How
could he have dreamed of kissing her? He could hardly refrain from
tears. Surely nothing more pitiable had ever been known than the
condition of this poor young thing, now as heretofore the victim of her
father’s well-meant but blundering policy.

Even in the hour of Melbury’s greatest assurance Winterborne had
harbored a suspicion that no law, new or old, could undo Grace’s
marriage without her appearance in public; though he was not
sufficiently sure of what might have been enacted to destroy by his own
words her pleasing idea that a mere dash of the pen, on her father’s
testimony, was going to be sufficient. But he had never suspected the
sad fact that the position was irremediable.

Poor Grace, perhaps feeling that she had indulged in too much fluster
for a mere kiss, calmed herself at finding how grave he was.

“I am glad we are friends again anyhow,” she said, smiling through her
tears. “Giles, if you had only shown half the boldness before I married
that you show now, you would have carried me off for your own first
instead of second. If we do marry, I hope you will never think badly of
me for encouraging you a little, but my father is _so_ impatient, you
know, as his years and infirmities increase, that he will wish to see
us a little advanced when he comes. That is my only excuse.”

To Winterborne all this was sadder than it was sweet. How could she so
trust her father’s conjectures? He did not know how to tell her the
truth and shame himself. And yet he felt that it must be done. “We may
have been wrong,” he began, almost fearfully, “in supposing that it can
all be carried out while we stay here at Hintock. I am not sure but
that people may have to appear in a public court even under the new
Act; and if there should be any difficulty, and we cannot marry after
all—”

Her cheeks became slowly bloodless. “Oh, Giles,” she said, grasping his
arm, “you have heard something! What—cannot my father conclude it there
and now? Surely he has done it? Oh, Giles, Giles, don’t deceive me.
What terrible position am I in?”

He could not tell her, try as he would. The sense of her implicit trust
in his honor absolutely disabled him. “I cannot inform you,” he
murmured, his voice as husky as that of the leaves underfoot. “Your
father will soon be here. Then we shall know. I will take you home.”

Inexpressibly dear as she was to him, he offered her his arm with the
most reserved air, as he added, correctingly, “I will take you, at any
rate, into the drive.”

Thus they walked on together. Grace vibrating between happiness and
misgiving. It was only a few minutes’ walk to where the drive ran, and
they had hardly descended into it when they heard a voice behind them
cry, “Take out that arm!”

For a moment they did not heed, and the voice repeated, more loudly and
hoarsely,

“Take out that arm!”

It was Melbury’s. He had returned sooner than they expected, and now
came up to them. Grace’s hand had been withdrawn like lightning on her
hearing the second command. “I don’t blame you—I don’t blame you,” he
said, in the weary cadence of one broken down with scourgings. “But you
two must walk together no more—I have been surprised—I have been
cruelly deceived—Giles, don’t say anything to me; but go away!”

He was evidently not aware that Winterborne had known the truth before
he brought it; and Giles would not stay to discuss it with him then.
When the young man had gone Melbury took his daughter in-doors to the
room he used as his office. There he sat down, and bent over the slope
of the bureau, her bewildered gaze fixed upon him.

When Melbury had recovered a little he said, “You are now, as ever,
Fitzpiers’s wife. I was deluded. He has not done you _enough_ harm. You
are still subject to his beck and call.”

“Then let it be, and never mind, father,” she said, with dignified
sorrow. “I can bear it. It is your trouble that grieves me most.” She
stooped over him, and put her arm round his neck, which distressed
Melbury still more. “I don’t mind at all what comes to me,” Grace
continued; “whose wife I am, or whose I am not. I do love Giles; I
cannot help that; and I have gone further with him than I should have
done if I had known exactly how things were. But I do not reproach
you.”

“Then Giles did not tell you?” said Melbury.

“No,” said she. “He could not have known it. His behavior to me proved
that he did not know.”

Her father said nothing more, and Grace went away to the solitude of
her chamber.

Her heavy disquietude had many shapes; and for a time she put aside the
dominant fact to think of her too free conduct towards Giles. His
love-making had been brief as it was sweet; but would he on reflection
contemn her for forwardness? How could she have been so simple as to
suppose she was in a position to behave as she had done! Thus she
mentally blamed her ignorance; and yet in the centre of her heart she
blessed it a little for what it had momentarily brought her.




CHAPTER XL.


Life among the people involved in these events seemed to be suppressed
and hide-bound for a while. Grace seldom showed herself outside the
house, never outside the garden; for she feared she might encounter
Giles Winterborne; and that she could not bear.

This pensive intramural existence of the self-constituted nun appeared
likely to continue for an indefinite time. She had learned that there
was one possibility in which her formerly imagined position might
become real, and only one; that her husband’s absence should continue
long enough to amount to positive desertion. But she never allowed her
mind to dwell much upon the thought; still less did she deliberately
hope for such a result. Her regard for Winterborne had been rarefied by
the shock which followed its avowal into an ethereal emotion that had
little to do with living and doing.

As for Giles, he was lying—or rather sitting—ill at his hut. A feverish
indisposition which had been hanging about him for some time, the
result of a chill caught the previous winter, seemed to acquire
virulence with the prostration of his hopes. But not a soul knew of his
languor, and he did not think the case serious enough to send for a
medical man. After a few days he was better again, and crept about his
home in a great coat, attending to his simple wants as usual with his
own hands. So matters stood when the limpid inertion of Grace’s
pool-like existence was disturbed as by a geyser. She received a letter
from Fitzpiers.

Such a terrible letter it was in its import, though couched in the
gentlest language. In his absence Grace had grown to regard him with
toleration, and her relation to him with equanimity, till she had
almost forgotten how trying his presence would be. He wrote briefly and
unaffectedly; he made no excuses, but informed her that he was living
quite alone, and had been led to think that they ought to be together,
if she would make up her mind to forgive him. He therefore purported to
cross the Channel to Budmouth by the steamer on a day he named, which
she found to be three days after the time of her present reading.

He said that he could not come to Hintock for obvious reasons, which
her father would understand even better than herself. As the only
alternative she was to be on the quay to meet the steamer when it
arrived from the opposite coast, probably about half an hour before
midnight, bringing with her any luggage she might require; join him
there, and pass with him into the twin vessel, which left immediately
the other entered the harbor; returning thus with him to his
continental dwelling-place, which he did not name. He had no intention
of showing himself on land at all.

The troubled Grace took the letter to her father, who now continued for
long hours by the fireless summer chimney-corner, as if he thought it
were winter, the pitcher of cider standing beside him, mostly untasted,
and coated with a film of dust. After reading it he looked up.

“You sha’n’t go,” said he.

“I had felt I would not,” she answered. “But I did not know what you
would say.”

“If he comes and lives in England, not too near here and in a
respectable way, and wants you to come to him, I am not sure that I’ll
oppose him in wishing it,” muttered Melbury. “I’d stint myself to keep
you both in a genteel and seemly style. But go abroad you never shall
with my consent.”

There the question rested that day. Grace was unable to reply to her
husband in the absence of an address, and the morrow came, and the next
day, and the evening on which he had requested her to meet him.
Throughout the whole of it she remained within the four walls of her
room.

The sense of her harassment, carking doubt of what might be impending,
hung like a cowl of blackness over the Melbury household. They spoke
almost in whispers, and wondered what Fitzpiers would do next. It was
the hope of every one that, finding she did not arrive, he would return
again to France; and as for Grace, she was willing to write to him on
the most kindly terms if he would only keep away.

The night passed, Grace lying tense and wide awake, and her relatives,
in great part, likewise. When they met the next morning they were pale
and anxious, though neither speaking of the subject which occupied all
their thoughts. The day passed as quietly as the previous ones, and she
began to think that in the rank caprice of his moods he had abandoned
the idea of getting her to join him as quickly as it was formed. All on
a sudden, some person who had just come from Sherton entered the house
with the news that Mr. Fitzpiers was on his way home to Hintock. He had
been seen hiring a carriage at the Earl of Wessex Hotel.

Her father and Grace were both present when the intelligence was
announced.

“Now,” said Melbury, “we must make the best of what has been a very bad
matter. The man is repenting; the partner of his shame, I hear, is gone
away from him to Switzerland, so that chapter of his life is probably
over. If he chooses to make a home for ye I think you should not say
him nay, Grace. Certainly he cannot very well live at Hintock without a
blow to his pride; but if he can bear that, and likes Hintock best,
why, there’s the empty wing of the house as it was before.”

“Oh, father!” said Grace, turning white with dismay.

“Why not?” said he, a little of his former doggedness returning. He
was, in truth, disposed to somewhat more leniency towards her husband
just now than he had shown formerly, from a conviction that he had
treated him over-roughly in his anger. “Surely it is the most
respectable thing to do?” he continued. “I don’t like this state that
you are in—neither married nor single. It hurts me, and it hurts you,
and it will always be remembered against us in Hintock. There has never
been any scandal like it in the family before.”

“He will be here in less than an hour,” murmured Grace. The twilight of
the room prevented her father seeing the despondent misery of her face.
The one intolerable condition, the condition she had deprecated above
all others, was that of Fitzpiers’s reinstatement there. “Oh, I won’t,
I won’t see him,” she said, sinking down. She was almost hysterical.

“Try if you cannot,” he returned, moodily.

“Oh yes, I will, I will,” she went on, inconsequently. “I’ll try;” and
jumping up suddenly, she left the room.

In the darkness of the apartment to which she flew nothing could have
been seen during the next half-hour; but from a corner a quick
breathing was audible from this impressible creature, who combined
modern nerves with primitive emotions, and was doomed by such
coexistence to be numbered among the distressed, and to take her
scourgings to their exquisite extremity.

The window was open. On this quiet, late summer evening, whatever sound
arose in so secluded a district—the chirp of a bird, a call from a
voice, the turning of a wheel—extended over bush and tree to unwonted
distances. Very few sounds did arise. But as Grace invisibly breathed
in the brown glooms of the chamber, the small remote noise of light
wheels came in to her, accompanied by the trot of a horse on the
turnpike-road. There seemed to be a sudden hitch or pause in the
progress of the vehicle, which was what first drew her attention to it.
She knew the point whence the sound proceeded—the hill-top over which
travellers passed on their way hitherward from Sherton Abbas—the place
at which she had emerged from the wood with Mrs. Charmond. Grace slid
along the floor, and bent her head over the window-sill, listening with
open lips. The carriage had stopped, and she heard a man use
exclamatory words. Then another said, “What the devil is the matter
with the horse?” She recognized the voice as her husband’s.

The accident, such as it had been, was soon remedied, and the carriage
could be heard descending the hill on the Hintock side, soon to turn
into the lane leading out of the highway, and then into the “drong”
which led out of the lane to the house where she was.

A spasm passed through Grace. The Daphnean instinct, exceptionally
strong in her as a girl, had been revived by her widowed seclusion; and
it was not lessened by her affronted sentiments towards the comer, and
her regard for another man. She opened some little ivory tablets that
lay on the dressing-table, scribbled in pencil on one of them, “I am
gone to visit one of my school-friends,” gathered a few toilet
necessaries into a hand-bag, and not three minutes after that voice had
been heard, her slim form, hastily wrapped up from observation, might
have been seen passing out of the back door of Melbury’s house. Thence
she skimmed up the garden-path, through the gap in the hedge, and into
the mossy cart-track under the trees which led into the depth of the
woods.

The leaves overhead were now in their latter green—so opaque, that it
was darker at some of the densest spots than in winter-time, scarce a
crevice existing by which a ray could get down to the ground. But in
open places she could see well enough. Summer was ending: in the
daytime singing insects hung in every sunbeam; vegetation was heavy
nightly with globes of dew; and after showers creeping damps and
twilight chills came up from the hollows. The plantations were always
weird at this hour of eve—more spectral far than in the leafless
season, when there were fewer masses and more minute lineality. The
smooth surfaces of glossy plants came out like weak, lidless eyes;
there were strange faces and figures from expiring lights that had
somehow wandered into the canopied obscurity; while now and then low
peeps of the sky between the trunks were like sheeted shapes, and on
the tips of boughs sat faint cloven tongues.

But Grace’s fear just now was not imaginative or spiritual, and she
heeded these impressions but little. She went on as silently as she
could, avoiding the hollows wherein leaves had accumulated, and
stepping upon soundless moss and grass-tufts. She paused breathlessly
once or twice, and fancied that she could hear, above the beat of her
strumming pulse, the vehicle containing Fitzpiers turning in at the
gate of her father’s premises. She hastened on again.

The Hintock woods owned by Mrs. Charmond were presently left behind,
and those into which she next plunged were divided from the latter by a
bank, from whose top the hedge had long ago perished—starved for want
of sun. It was with some caution that Grace now walked, though she was
quite free from any of the commonplace timidities of her ordinary
pilgrimages to such spots. She feared no lurking harms, but that her
effort would be all in vain, and her return to the house rendered
imperative.

She had walked between three and four miles when that prescriptive
comfort and relief to wanderers in woods—a distant light—broke at last
upon her searching eyes. It was so very small as to be almost sinister
to a stranger, but to her it was what she sought. She pushed forward,
and the dim outline of a dwelling was disclosed.

The house was a square cot of one story only, sloping up on all sides
to a chimney in the midst. It had formerly been the home of a
charcoal-burner, in times when that fuel was still used in the county
houses. Its only appurtenance was a paled enclosure, there being no
garden, the shade of the trees preventing the growth of vegetables. She
advanced to the window whence the rays of light proceeded, and the
shutters being as yet unclosed, she could survey the whole interior
through the panes.

The room within was kitchen, parlor, and scullery all in one; the
natural sandstone floor was worn into hills and dales by long treading,
so that none of the furniture stood level, and the table slanted like a
desk. A fire burned on the hearth, in front of which revolved the
skinned carcass of a rabbit, suspended by a string from a nail. Leaning
with one arm on the mantle-shelf stood Winterborne, his eyes on the
roasting animal, his face so rapt that speculation could build nothing
on it concerning his thoughts, more than that they were not with the
scene before him. She thought his features had changed a little since
she saw them last. The fire-light did not enable her to perceive that
they were positively haggard.

Grace’s throat emitted a gasp of relief at finding the result so nearly
as she had hoped. She went to the door and tapped lightly.

He seemed to be accustomed to the noises of woodpeckers, squirrels, and
such small creatures, for he took no notice of her tiny signal, and she
knocked again. This time he came and opened the door. When the light of
the room fell upon her face he started, and, hardly knowing what he
did, crossed the threshold to her, placing his hands upon her two arms,
while surprise, joy, alarm, sadness, chased through him by turns. With
Grace it was the same: even in this stress there was the fond fact that
they had met again. Thus they stood,

“Long tears upon their faces, waxen white
With extreme sad delight.”


He broke the silence by saying in a whisper, “Come in.”

“No, no, Giles!” she answered, hurriedly, stepping yet farther back
from the door. “I am passing by—and I have called on you—I won’t enter.
Will you help me? I am afraid. I want to get by a roundabout way to
Sherton, and so to Exbury. I have a school-fellow there—but I cannot
get to Sherton alone. Oh, if you will only accompany me a little way!
Don’t condemn me, Giles, and be offended! I was obliged to come to you
because—I have no other help here. Three months ago you were my lover;
now you are only my friend. The law has stepped in, and forbidden what
we thought of. It must not be. But we can act honestly, and yet you can
be my friend for one little hour? I have no other—”

She could get no further. Covering her eyes with one hand, by an effort
of repression she wept a silent trickle, without a sigh or sob.
Winterborne took her other hand. “What has happened?” he said.

“He has come.”

There was a stillness as of death, till Winterborne asked, “You mean
this, Grace—that I am to help you to get away?”

“Yes,” said she. “Appearance is no matter, when the reality is right. I
have said to myself I can trust you.”

Giles knew from this that she did not suspect his treachery—if it could
be called such—earlier in the summer, when they met for the last time
as lovers; and in the intensity of his contrition for that tender
wrong, he determined to deserve her faith now at least, and so wipe out
that reproach from his conscience. “I’ll come at once,” he said. “I’ll
light a lantern.”

He unhooked a dark-lantern from a nail under the eaves and she did not
notice how his hand shook with the slight strain, or dream that in
making this offer he was taxing a convalescence which could ill afford
such self-sacrifice. The lantern was lit, and they started.




CHAPTER XLI.


The first hundred yards of their course lay under motionless trees,
whose upper foliage began to hiss with falling drops of rain. By the
time that they emerged upon a glade it rained heavily.

“This is awkward,” said Grace, with an effort to hide her concern.

Winterborne stopped. “Grace,” he said, preserving a strictly business
manner which belied him, “you cannot go to Sherton to-night.”

“But I must!”

“Why? It is nine miles from here. It is almost an impossibility in this
rain.”

“True—_why?_” she replied, mournfully, at the end of a silence. “What
is reputation to me?”

“Now hearken,” said Giles. “You won’t—go back to your—”

“No, no, no! Don’t make me!” she cried, piteously.

“Then let us turn.” They slowly retraced their steps, and again stood
before his door. “Now, this house from this moment is yours, and not
mine,” he said, deliberately. “I have a place near by where I can stay
very well.”

Her face had drooped. “Oh!” she murmured, as she saw the dilemma. “What
have I done!”

There was a smell of something burning within, and he looked through
the window. The rabbit that he had been cooking to coax a weak appetite
was beginning to char. “Please go in and attend to it,” he said. “Do
what you like. Now I leave. You will find everything about the hut that
is necessary.”

“But, Giles—your supper,” she exclaimed. “An out-house would do for
me—anything—till to-morrow at day-break!”

He signified a negative. “I tell you to go in—you may catch agues out
here in your delicate state. You can give me my supper through the
window, if you feel well enough. I’ll wait a while.”

He gently urged her to pass the door-way, and was relieved when he saw
her within the room sitting down. Without so much as crossing the
threshold himself, he closed the door upon her, and turned the key in
the lock. Tapping at the window, he signified that she should open the
casement, and when she had done this he handed in the key to her.

“You are locked in,” he said; “and your own mistress.”

Even in her trouble she could not refrain from a faint smile at his
scrupulousness, as she took the door-key.

“Do you feel better?” he went on. “If so, and you wish to give me some
of your supper, please do. If not, it is of no importance. I can get
some elsewhere.”

The grateful sense of his kindness stirred her to action, though she
only knew half what that kindness really was. At the end of some ten
minutes she again came to the window, pushed it open, and said in a
whisper, “Giles!” He at once emerged from the shade, and saw that she
was preparing to hand him his share of the meal upon a plate.

“I don’t like to treat you so hardly,” she murmured, with deep regret
in her words as she heard the rain pattering on the leaves. “But—I
suppose it is best to arrange like this?”

“Oh yes,” he said, quickly.

“I feel that I could never have reached Sherton.”

“It was impossible.”

“Are you sure you have a snug place out there?” (With renewed
misgiving.)

“Quite. Have you found everything you want? I am afraid it is rather
rough accommodation.”

“Can I notice defects? I have long passed that stage, and you know it,
Giles, or you ought to.”

His eyes sadly contemplated her face as its pale responsiveness
modulated through a crowd of expressions that showed only too clearly
to what a pitch she was strung. If ever Winterborne’s heart fretted his
bosom it was at this sight of a perfectly defenceless creature
conditioned by such circumstances. He forgot his own agony in the
satisfaction of having at least found her a shelter. He took his plate
and cup from her hands, saying, “Now I’ll push the shutter to, and you
will find an iron pin on the inside, which you must fix into the bolt.
Do not stir in the morning till I come and call you.”

She expressed an alarmed hope that he would not go very far away.

“Oh no—I shall be quite within hail,” said Winterborne.

She bolted the window as directed, and he retreated. His snug place
proved to be a wretched little shelter of the roughest kind, formed of
four hurdles thatched with brake-fern. Underneath were dry sticks, hay,
and other litter of the sort, upon which he sat down; and there in the
dark tried to eat his meal. But his appetite was quite gone. He pushed
the plate aside, and shook up the hay and sacks, so as to form a rude
couch, on which he flung himself down to sleep, for it was getting
late.

But sleep he could not, for many reasons, of which not the least was
thought of his charge. He sat up, and looked towards the cot through
the damp obscurity. With all its external features the same as usual,
he could scarcely believe that it contained the dear friend—he would
not use a warmer name—who had come to him so unexpectedly, and, he
could not help admitting, so rashly.

He had not ventured to ask her any particulars; but the position was
pretty clear without them. Though social law had negatived forever
their opening paradise of the previous June, it was not without stoical
pride that he accepted the present trying conjuncture. There was one
man on earth in whom she believed absolutely, and he was that man. That
this crisis could end in nothing but sorrow was a view for a moment
effaced by this triumphant thought of her trust in him; and the purity
of the affection with which he responded to that trust rendered him
more than proof against any frailty that besieged him in relation to
her.

The rain, which had never ceased, now drew his attention by beginning
to drop through the meagre screen that covered him. He rose to attempt
some remedy for this discomfort, but the trembling of his knees and the
throbbing of his pulse told him that in his weakness he was unable to
fence against the storm, and he lay down to bear it as best he might.
He was angry with himself for his feebleness—he who had been so strong.
It was imperative that she should know nothing of his present state,
and to do that she must not see his face by daylight, for its color
would inevitably betray him.

The next morning, accordingly, when it was hardly light, he rose and
dragged his stiff limbs about the precincts, preparing for her
everything she could require for getting breakfast within. On the bench
outside the window-sill he placed water, wood, and other necessaries,
writing with a piece of chalk beside them, “It is best that I should
not see you. Put my breakfast on the bench.”

At seven o’clock he tapped at her window, as he had promised,
retreating at once, that she might not catch sight of him. But from his
shelter under the boughs he could see her very well, when, in response
to his signal, she opened the window and the light fell upon her face.
The languid largeness of her eyes showed that her sleep had been little
more than his own, and the pinkness of their lids, that her waking
hours had not been free from tears.

She read the writing, seemed, he thought, disappointed, but took up the
materials he had provided, evidently thinking him some way off. Giles
waited on, assured that a girl who, in spite of her culture, knew what
country life was, would find no difficulty in the simple preparation of
their food.

Within the cot it was all very much as he conjectured, though Grace had
slept much longer than he. After the loneliness of the night, she would
have been glad to see him; but appreciating his feeling when she read
the writing, she made no attempt to recall him. She found abundance of
provisions laid in, his plan being to replenish his buttery weekly, and
this being the day after the victualling van had called from Sherton.
When the meal was ready, she put what he required outside, as she had
done with the supper; and, notwithstanding her longing to see him,
withdrew from the window promptly, and left him to himself.

It had been a leaden dawn, and the rain now steadily renewed its fall.
As she heard no more of Winterborne, she concluded that he had gone
away to his daily work, and forgotten that he had promised to accompany
her to Sherton; an erroneous conclusion, for he remained all day, by
force of his condition, within fifty yards of where she was. The
morning wore on; and in her doubt when to start, and how to travel, she
lingered yet, keeping the door carefully bolted, lest an intruder
should discover her. Locked in this place, she was comparatively safe,
at any rate, and doubted if she would be safe elsewhere.

The humid gloom of an ordinary wet day was doubled by the shade and
drip of the leafage. Autumn, this year, was coming in with rains.
Gazing, in her enforced idleness, from the one window of the
living-room, she could see various small members of the animal
community that lived unmolested there—creatures of hair, fluff, and
scale, the toothed kind and the billed kind; underground creatures,
jointed and ringed—circumambulating the hut, under the impression that,
Giles having gone away, nobody was there; and eying it inquisitively
with a view to winter-quarters. Watching these neighbors, who knew
neither law nor sin, distracted her a little from her trouble; and she
managed to while away some portion of the afternoon by putting Giles’s
home in order and making little improvements which she deemed that he
would value when she was gone.

Once or twice she fancied that she heard a faint noise amid the trees,
resembling a cough; but as it never came any nearer she concluded that
it was a squirrel or a bird.

At last the daylight lessened, and she made up a larger fire for the
evenings were chilly. As soon as it was too dark—which was
comparatively early—to discern the human countenance in this place of
shadows, there came to the window to her great delight, a tapping which
she knew from its method to be Giles’s.

She opened the casement instantly, and put out her hand to him, though
she could only just perceive his outline. He clasped her fingers, and
she noticed the heat of his palm and its shakiness.

“He has been walking fast, in order to get here quickly,” she thought.
How could she know that he had just crawled out from the straw of the
shelter hard by; and that the heat of his hand was feverishness?

“My dear, good Giles!” she burst out, impulsively.

“Anybody would have done it for you,” replied Winterborne, with as much
matter-of-fact as he could summon.

“About my getting to Exbury?” she said.

“I have been thinking,” responded Giles, with tender deference, “that
you had better stay where you are for the present, if you wish not to
be caught. I need not tell you that the place is yours as long as you
like; and perhaps in a day or two, finding you absent, he will go away.
At any rate, in two or three days I could do anything to assist—such as
make inquiries, or go a great way towards Sherton-Abbas with you; for
the cider season will soon be coming on, and I want to run down to the
Vale to see how the crops are, and I shall go by the Sherton road. But
for a day or two I am busy here.” He was hoping that by the time
mentioned he would be strong enough to engage himself actively on her
behalf. “I hope you do not feel over-much melancholy in being a
prisoner?”

She declared that she did not mind it; but she sighed.

From long acquaintance they could read each other’s heart-symptoms like
books of large type. “I fear you are sorry you came,” said Giles, “and
that you think I should have advised you more firmly than I did not to
stay.”

“Oh no, dear, dear friend,” answered Grace, with a heaving bosom.
“Don’t think that that is what I regret. What I regret is my enforced
treatment of you—dislodging you, excluding you from your own house. Why
should I not speak out? You know what I feel for you—what I have felt
for no other living man, what I shall never feel for a man again! But
as I have vowed myself to somebody else than you, and cannot be
released, I must behave as I do behave, and keep that vow. I am not
bound to him by any divine law, after what he has done; but I have
promised, and I will pay.”

The rest of the evening was passed in his handing her such things as
she would require the next day, and casual remarks thereupon, an
occupation which diverted her mind to some degree from pathetic views
of her attitude towards him, and of her life in general. The only
infringement—if infringement it could be called—of his predetermined
bearing towards her was an involuntary pressing of her hand to his lips
when she put it through the casement to bid him good-night. He knew she
was weeping, though he could not see her tears.

She again entreated his forgiveness for so selfishly appropriating the
cottage. But it would only be for a day or two more, she thought, since
go she must.

He replied, yearningly, “I—I don’t like you to go away.”

“Oh, Giles,” said she, “I know—I know! But—I am a woman, and you are a
man. I cannot speak more plainly. ‘Whatsoever things are pure,
whatsoever things are of good report’—you know what is in my mind,
because you know me so well.”

“Yes, Grace, yes. I do not at all mean that the question between us has
not been settled by the fact of your marriage turning out hopelessly
unalterable. I merely meant—well, a feeling no more.”

“In a week, at the outside, I should be discovered if I stayed here:
and I think that by law he could compel me to return to him.”

“Yes; perhaps you are right. Go when you wish, dear Grace.”

His last words that evening were a hopeful remark that all might be
well with her yet; that Mr. Fitzpiers would not intrude upon her life,
if he found that his presence cost her so much pain. Then the window
was closed, the shutters folded, and the rustle of his footsteps died
away.

No sooner had she retired to rest that night than the wind began to
rise, and, after a few prefatory blasts, to be accompanied by rain. The
wind grew more violent, and as the storm went on, it was difficult to
believe that no opaque body, but only an invisible colorless thing, was
trampling and climbing over the roof, making branches creak, springing
out of the trees upon the chimney, popping its head into the flue, and
shrieking and blaspheming at every corner of the walls. As in the old
story, the assailant was a spectre which could be felt but not seen.
She had never before been so struck with the devilry of a gusty night
in a wood, because she had never been so entirely alone in spirit as
she was now. She seemed almost to be apart from herself—a vacuous
duplicate only. The recent self of physical animation and clear
intentions was not there.

Sometimes a bough from an adjoining tree was swayed so low as to smite
the roof in the manner of a gigantic hand smiting the mouth of an
adversary, to be followed by a trickle of rain, as blood from the
wound. To all this weather Giles must be more or less exposed; how
much, she did not know.

At last Grace could hardly endure the idea of such a hardship in
relation to him. Whatever he was suffering, it was she who had caused
it; he vacated his house on account of her. She was not worth such
self-sacrifice; she should not have accepted it of him. And then, as
her anxiety increased with increasing thought, there returned upon her
mind some incidents of her late intercourse with him, which she had
heeded but little at the time. The look of his face—what had there been
about his face which seemed different from its appearance as of yore?
Was it not thinner, less rich in hue, less like that of ripe autumn’s
brother to whom she had formerly compared him? And his voice; she had
distinctly noticed a change in tone. And his gait; surely it had been
feebler, stiffer, more like the gait of a weary man. That slight
occasional noise she had heard in the day, and attributed to squirrels,
it might have been his cough after all.

Thus conviction took root in her perturbed mind that Winterborne was
ill, or had been so, and that he had carefully concealed his condition
from her that she might have no scruples about accepting a hospitality
which by the nature of the case expelled her entertainer.

“My own, own, true l——, my dear kind friend!” she cried to herself.
“Oh, it shall not be—it shall not be!”

She hastily wrapped herself up, and obtained a light, with which she
entered the adjoining room, the cot possessing only one floor. Setting
down the candle on the table here, she went to the door with the key in
her hand, and placed it in the lock. Before turning it she paused, her
fingers still clutching it; and pressing her other hand to her
forehead, she fell into agitating thought.

A tattoo on the window, caused by the tree-droppings blowing against
it, brought her indecision to a close. She turned the key and opened
the door.

The darkness was intense, seeming to touch her pupils like a substance.
She only now became aware how heavy the rainfall had been and was; the
dripping of the eaves splashed like a fountain. She stood listening
with parted lips, and holding the door in one hand, till her eyes,
growing accustomed to the obscurity, discerned the wild brandishing of
their boughs by the adjoining trees. At last she cried loudly with an
effort, “Giles! you may come in!”

There was no immediate answer to her cry, and overpowered by her own
temerity, Grace retreated quickly, shut the door, and stood looking on
the floor. But it was not for long. She again lifted the latch, and
with far more determination than at first.

“Giles, Giles!” she cried, with the full strength of her voice, and
without any of the shamefacedness that had characterized her first cry.
“Oh, come in—come in! Where are you? I have been wicked. I have thought
too much of myself! Do you hear? I don’t want to keep you out any
longer. I cannot bear that you should suffer so. Gi-i-iles!”

A reply! It was a reply! Through the darkness and wind a voice reached
her, floating upon the weather as though a part of it.

“Here I am—all right. Don’t trouble about me.”

“Don’t you want to come in? Are you not wet? _Come to me! I don’t mind
what they say, or what they think any more._”

“I am all right,” he repeated. “It is not necessary for me to come.
Good-night! good-night!”

Grace sighed, turned and shut the door slowly. Could she have been
mistaken about his health? Perhaps, after all, she had perceived a
change in him because she had not seen him for so long. Time sometimes
did his ageing work in jerks, as she knew. Well, she had done all she
could. He would not come in. She retired to rest again.




CHAPTER XLII.


The next morning Grace was at the window early. She felt determined to
see him somehow that day, and prepared his breakfast eagerly. Eight
o’clock struck, and she had remembered that he had not come to arouse
her by a knocking, as usual, her own anxiety having caused her to stir.

The breakfast was set in its place without. But he did not arrive to
take it; and she waited on. Nine o’clock arrived, and the breakfast was
cold; and still there was no Giles. A thrush, that had been repeating
itself a good deal on an opposite bush for some time, came and took a
morsel from the plate and bolted it, waited, looked around, and took
another. At ten o’clock she drew in the tray, and sat down to her own
solitary meal. He must have been called away on business early, the
rain having cleared off.

Yet she would have liked to assure herself, by thoroughly exploring the
precincts of the hut, that he was nowhere in its vicinity; but as the
day was comparatively fine, the dread lest some stray passenger or
woodman should encounter her in such a reconnoitre paralyzed her wish.
The solitude was further accentuated to-day by the stopping of the
clock for want of winding, and the fall into the chimney-corner of
flakes of soot loosened by the rains. At noon she heard a slight
rustling outside the window, and found that it was caused by an eft
which had crept out of the leaves to bask in the last sun-rays that
would be worth having till the following May.

She continually peeped out through the lattice, but could see little.
In front lay the brown leaves of last year, and upon them some
yellowish-green ones of this season that had been prematurely blown
down by the gale. Above stretched an old beech, with vast armpits, and
great pocket-holes in its sides where branches had been amputated in
past times; a black slug was trying to climb it. Dead boughs were
scattered about like ichthyosauri in a museum, and beyond them were
perishing woodbine stems resembling old ropes.

From the other window all she could see were more trees, jacketed with
lichen and stockinged with moss. At their roots were stemless yellow
fungi like lemons and apricots, and tall fungi with more stem than
stool. Next were more trees close together, wrestling for existence,
their branches disfigured with wounds resulting from their mutual
rubbings and blows. It was the struggle between these neighbors that
she had heard in the night. Beneath them were the rotting stumps of
those of the group that had been vanquished long ago, rising from their
mossy setting like decayed teeth from green gums. Farther on were other
tufts of moss in islands divided by the shed leaves—variety upon
variety, dark green and pale green; moss-like little fir-trees, like
plush, like malachite stars, like nothing on earth except moss.

The strain upon Grace’s mind in various ways was so great on this the
most desolate day she had passed there that she felt it would be
well-nigh impossible to spend another in such circumstances. The
evening came at last; the sun, when its chin was on the earth, found an
opening through which to pierce the shade, and stretched irradiated
gauzes across the damp atmosphere, making the wet trunks shine, and
throwing splotches of such ruddiness on the leaves beneath the beech
that they were turned to gory hues. When night at last arrived, and
with it the time for his return, she was nearly broken down with
suspense.

The simple evening meal, partly tea, partly supper, which Grace had
prepared, stood waiting upon the hearth; and yet Giles did not come. It
was now nearly twenty-four hours since she had seen him. As the room
grew darker, and only the firelight broke against the gloom of the
walls, she was convinced that it would be beyond her staying power to
pass the night without hearing from him or from somebody. Yet eight
o’clock drew on, and his form at the window did not appear.

The meal remained untasted. Suddenly rising from before the hearth of
smouldering embers, where she had been crouching with her hands clasped
over her knees, she crossed the room, unlocked the door, and listened.
Every breath of wind had ceased with the decline of day, but the rain
had resumed the steady dripping of the night before. Grace might have
stood there five minutes when she fancied she heard that old sound, a
cough, at no great distance; and it was presently repeated. If it were
Winterborne’s, he must be near her; why, then, had he not visited her?

A horrid misgiving that he could not visit her took possession of
Grace, and she looked up anxiously for the lantern, which was hanging
above her head. To light it and go in the direction of the sound would
be the obvious way to solve the dread problem; but the conditions made
her hesitate, and in a moment a cold sweat pervaded her at further
sounds from the same quarter.

They were low mutterings; at first like persons in conversation, but
gradually resolving themselves into varieties of one voice. It was an
endless monologue, like that we sometimes hear from inanimate nature in
deep secret places where water flows, or where ivy leaves flap against
stones; but by degrees she was convinced that the voice was
Winterborne’s. Yet who could be his listener, so mute and patient; for
though he argued so rapidly and persistently, nobody replied.

A dreadful enlightenment spread through the mind of Grace. “Oh,” she
cried, in her anguish, as she hastily prepared herself to go out, “how
selfishly correct I am always—too, too correct! Cruel propriety is
killing the dearest heart that ever woman clasped to her own.”

While speaking thus to herself she had lit the lantern, and hastening
out without further thought, took the direction whence the mutterings
had proceeded. The course was marked by a little path, which ended at a
distance of about forty yards in a small erection of hurdles, not much
larger than a shock of corn, such as were frequent in the woods and
copses when the cutting season was going on. It was too slight even to
be called a hovel, and was not high enough to stand upright in;
appearing, in short, to be erected for the temporary shelter of fuel.
The side towards Grace was open, and turning the light upon the
interior, she beheld what her prescient fear had pictured in snatches
all the way thither.

Upon the straw within, Winterborne lay in his clothes, just as she had
seen him during the whole of her stay here, except that his hat was
off, and his hair matted and wild.

Both his clothes and the straw were saturated with rain. His arms were
flung over his head; his face was flushed to an unnatural crimson. His
eyes had a burning brightness, and though they met her own, she
perceived that he did not recognize her.

“Oh, my Giles,” she cried, “what have I done to you!”

But she stopped no longer even to reproach herself. She saw that the
first thing to be thought of was to get him indoors.

How Grace performed that labor she never could have exactly explained.
But by dint of clasping her arms round him, rearing him into a sitting
posture, and straining her strength to the uttermost, she put him on
one of the hurdles that was loose alongside, and taking the end of it
in both her hands, dragged him along the path to the entrance of the
hut, and, after a pause for breath, in at the door-way.

It was somewhat singular that Giles in his semi-conscious state
acquiesced unresistingly in all that she did. But he never for a moment
recognized her—continuing his rapid conversation to himself, and
seeming to look upon her as some angel, or other supernatural creature
of the visionary world in which he was mentally living. The undertaking
occupied her more than ten minutes; but by that time, to her great
thankfulness, he was in the inner room, lying on the bed, his damp
outer clothing removed.

Then the unhappy Grace regarded him by the light of the candle. There
was something in his look which agonized her, in the rush of his
thoughts, accelerating their speed from minute to minute. He seemed to
be passing through the universe of ideas like a comet—erratic,
inapprehensible, untraceable.

Grace’s distraction was almost as great as his. In a few moments she
firmly believed he was dying. Unable to withstand her impulse, she
knelt down beside him, kissed his hands and his face and his hair,
exclaiming, in a low voice, “How could I? How could I?”

Her timid morality had, indeed, underrated his chivalry till now,
though she knew him so well. The purity of his nature, his freedom from
the grosser passions, his scrupulous delicacy, had never been fully
understood by Grace till this strange self-sacrifice in lonely
juxtaposition to her own person was revealed. The perception of it
added something that was little short of reverence to the deep
affection for him of a woman who, herself, had more of Artemis than of
Aphrodite in her constitution.

All that a tender nurse could do, Grace did; and the power to express
her solicitude in action, unconscious though the sufferer was, brought
her mournful satisfaction. She bathed his hot head, wiped his
perspiring hands, moistened his lips, cooled his fiery eyelids, sponged
his heated skin, and administered whatever she could find in the house
that the imagination could conceive as likely to be in any way
alleviating. That she might have been the cause, or partially the
cause, of all this, interfused misery with her sorrow.

Six months before this date a scene, almost similar in its mechanical
parts, had been enacted at Hintock House. It was between a pair of
persons most intimately connected in their lives with these. Outwardly
like as it had been, it was yet infinite in spiritual difference,
though a woman’s devotion had been common to both.

Grace rose from her attitude of affection, and, bracing her energies,
saw that something practical must immediately be done. Much as she
would have liked, in the emotion of the moment, to keep him entirely to
herself, medical assistance was necessary while there remained a
possibility of preserving him alive. Such assistance was fatal to her
own concealment; but even had the chance of benefiting him been less
than it was, she would have run the hazard for his sake. The question
was, where should she get a medical man, competent and near?

There was one such man, and only one, within accessible distance; a man
who, if it were possible to save Winterborne’s life, had the brain most
likely to do it. If human pressure could bring him, that man ought to
be brought to the sick Giles’s side. The attempt should be made.

Yet she dreaded to leave her patient, and the minutes raced past, and
yet she postponed her departure. At last, when it was after eleven
o’clock, Winterborne fell into a fitful sleep, and it seemed to afford
her an opportunity.

She hastily made him as comfortable as she could, put on her things,
cut a new candle from the bunch hanging in the cupboard, and having set
it up, and placed it so that the light did not fall upon his eyes, she
closed the door and started.

The spirit of Winterborne seemed to keep her company and banish all
sense of darkness from her mind. The rains had imparted a
phosphorescence to the pieces of touchwood and rotting leaves that lay
about her path, which, as scattered by her feet, spread abroad like
spilt milk. She would not run the hazard of losing her way by plunging
into any short, unfrequented track through the denser parts of the
woodland, but followed a more open course, which eventually brought her
to the highway. Once here, she ran along with great speed, animated by
a devoted purpose which had much about it that was stoical; and it was
with scarcely any faltering of spirit that, after an hour’s progress,
she passed over Rubdown Hill, and onward towards that same Hintock, and
that same house, out of which she had fled a few days before in
irresistible alarm. But that had happened which, above all other things
of chance and change, could make her deliberately frustrate her plan of
flight and sink all regard of personal consequences.

One speciality of Fitzpiers’s was respected by Grace as much as
ever—his professional skill. In this she was right. Had his persistence
equalled his insight, instead of being the spasmodic and fitful thing
it was, fame and fortune need never have remained a wish with him. His
freedom from conventional errors and crusted prejudices had, indeed,
been such as to retard rather than accelerate his advance in Hintock
and its neighborhood, where people could not believe that nature
herself effected cures, and that the doctor’s business was only to
smooth the way.

It was past midnight when Grace arrived opposite her father’s house,
now again temporarily occupied by her husband, unless he had already
gone away. Ever since her emergence from the denser plantations about
Winterborne’s residence a pervasive lightness had hung in the damp
autumn sky, in spite of the vault of cloud, signifying that a moon of
some age was shining above its arch. The two white gates were distinct,
and the white balls on the pillars, and the puddles and damp ruts left
by the recent rain, had a cold, corpse-eyed luminousness. She entered
by the lower gate, and crossed the quadrangle to the wing wherein the
apartments that had been hers since her marriage were situate, till she
stood under a window which, if her husband were in the house, gave
light to his bedchamber.

She faltered, and paused with her hand on her heart, in spite of
herself. Could she call to her presence the very cause of all her
foregoing troubles? Alas!—old Jones was seven miles off; Giles was
possibly dying—what else could she do?

It was in a perspiration, wrought even more by consciousness than by
exercise, that she picked up some gravel, threw it at the panes, and
waited to see the result. The night-bell which had been fixed when
Fitzpiers first took up his residence there still remained; but as it
had fallen into disuse with the collapse of his practice, and his
elopement, she did not venture to pull it now.

Whoever slept in the room had heard her signal, slight as it was. In
half a minute the window was opened, and a voice said “Yes?”
inquiringly. Grace recognized her husband in the speaker at once. Her
effort was now to disguise her own accents.

“Doctor,” she said, in as unusual a tone as she could command, “a man
is dangerously ill in One-chimney Hut, out towards Delborough, and you
must go to him at once—in all mercy!”

“I will, readily.”

The alacrity, surprise, and pleasure expressed in his reply amazed her
for a moment. But, in truth, they denoted the sudden relief of a man
who, having got back in a mood of contrition, from erratic abandonment
to fearful joys, found the soothing routine of professional practice
unexpectedly opening anew to him. The highest desire of his soul just
now was for a respectable life of painstaking. If this, his first
summons since his return, had been to attend upon a cat or dog, he
would scarcely have refused it in the circumstances.

“Do you know the way?” she asked.

“Yes,” said he.

“One-chimney Hut,” she repeated. “And—immediately!”

“Yes, yes,” said Fitzpiers.

Grace remained no longer. She passed out of the white gate without
slamming it, and hastened on her way back. Her husband, then, had
re-entered her father’s house. How he had been able to effect a
reconciliation with the old man, what were the terms of the treaty
between them, she could not so much as conjecture. Some sort of truce
must have been entered into, that was all she could say. But close as
the question lay to her own life, there was a more urgent one which
banished it; and she traced her steps quickly along the meandering
track-ways.

Meanwhile, Fitzpiers was preparing to leave the house. The state of his
mind, over and above his professional zeal, was peculiar. At Grace’s
first remark he had not recognized or suspected her presence; but as
she went on, he was awakened to the great resemblance of the speaker’s
voice to his wife’s. He had taken in such good faith the statement of
the household on his arrival, that she had gone on a visit for a time
because she could not at once bring her mind to be reconciled to him,
that he could not quite actually believe this comer to be she. It was
one of the features of Fitzpiers’s repentant humor at this date that,
on receiving the explanation of her absence, he had made no attempt to
outrage her feelings by following her; though nobody had informed him
how very shortly her departure had preceded his entry, and of all that
might have been inferred from her precipitancy.

Melbury, after much alarm and consideration, had decided not to follow
her either. He sympathized with her flight, much as he deplored it;
moreover, the tragic color of the antecedent events that he had been a
great means of creating checked his instinct to interfere. He prayed
and trusted that she had got into no danger on her way (as he supposed)
to Sherton, and thence to Exbury, if that were the place she had gone
to, forbearing all inquiry which the strangeness of her departure would
have made natural. A few months before this time a performance by Grace
of one-tenth the magnitude of this would have aroused him to unwonted
investigation.

It was in the same spirit that he had tacitly assented to Fitzpiers’s
domicilation there. The two men had not met face to face, but Mrs.
Melbury had proposed herself as an intermediary, who made the surgeon’s
re-entrance comparatively easy to him. Everything was provisional, and
nobody asked questions. Fitzpiers had come in the performance of a plan
of penitence, which had originated in circumstances hereafter to be
explained; his self-humiliation to the very bass-string was deliberate;
and as soon as a call reached him from the bedside of a dying man his
desire was to set to work and do as much good as he could with the
least possible fuss or show. He therefore refrained from calling up a
stableman to get ready any horse or gig, and set out for One-chimney
Hut on foot, as Grace had done.




CHAPTER XLIII.


She re-entered the hut, flung off her bonnet and cloak, and approached
the sufferer. He had begun anew those terrible mutterings, and his
hands were cold. As soon as she saw him there returned to her that
agony of mind which the stimulus of her journey had thrown off for a
time.

Could he really be dying? She bathed him, kissed him, forgot all things
but the fact that lying there before her was he who had loved her more
than the mere lover would have loved; had martyred himself for her
comfort, cared more for her self-respect than she had thought of
caring. This mood continued till she heard quick, smart footsteps
without; she knew whose footsteps they were.

Grace sat on the inside of the bed against the wall, holding Giles’s
hand, so that when her husband entered the patient lay between herself
and him. He stood transfixed at first, noticing Grace only. Slowly he
dropped his glance and discerned who the prostrate man was. Strangely
enough, though Grace’s distaste for her husband’s company had amounted
almost to dread, and culminated in actual flight, at this moment her
last and least feeling was personal. Sensitive femininity was eclipsed
by self-effacing purpose, and that it was a husband who stood there was
forgotten. The first look that possessed her face was relief;
satisfaction at the presence of the physician obliterated thought of
the man, which only returned in the form of a sub-consciousness that
did not interfere with her words.

“Is he dying—is there any hope?” she cried.

“Grace!” said Fitzpiers, in an indescribable whisper—more than
invocating, if not quite deprecatory.

He was arrested by the spectacle, not so much in its intrinsic
character—though that was striking enough to a man who called himself
the husband of the sufferer’s friend and nurse—but in its character as
the counterpart of one that had its hour many months before, in which
he had figured as the patient, and the woman had been Felice Charmond.

“Is he in great danger—can you save him?” she cried again.

Fitzpiers aroused himself, came a little nearer, and examined
Winterborne as he stood. His inspection was concluded in a mere glance.
Before he spoke he looked at her contemplatively as to the effect of
his coming words.

“He is dying,” he said, with dry precision.

“What?” said she.

“Nothing can be done, by me or any other man. It will soon be all over.
The extremities are dead already.” His eyes still remained fixed on
her; the conclusion to which he had come seeming to end his interest,
professional and otherwise, in Winterborne forever.

“But it cannot be! He was well three days ago.”

“Not well, I suspect. This seems like a secondary attack, which has
followed some previous illness—possibly typhoid—it may have been months
ago, or recently.”

“Ah—he was not well—you are right. He was ill—he was ill when I came.”

There was nothing more to do or say. She crouched down at the side of
the bed, and Fitzpiers took a seat. Thus they remained in silence, and
long as it lasted she never turned her eyes, or apparently her
thoughts, at all to her husband. He occasionally murmured, with
automatic authority, some slight directions for alleviating the pain of
the dying man, which she mechanically obeyed, bending over him during
the intervals in silent tears.

Winterborne never recovered consciousness of what was passing; and that
he was going became soon perceptible also to her. In less than an hour
the delirium ceased; then there was an interval of somnolent
painlessness and soft breathing, at the end of which Winterborne passed
quietly away.

Then Fitzpiers broke the silence. “Have you lived here long?” said he.

Grace was wild with sorrow—with all that had befallen her—with the
cruelties that had attacked her—with life—with Heaven. She answered at
random. “Yes. By what right do you ask?”

“Don’t think I claim any right,” said Fitzpiers, sadly. “It is for you
to do and say what you choose. I admit, quite as much as you feel, that
I am a vagabond—a brute—not worthy to possess the smallest fragment of
you. But here I am, and I have happened to take sufficient interest in
you to make that inquiry.”

“He is everything to me!” said Grace, hardly heeding her husband, and
laying her hand reverently on the dead man’s eyelids, where she kept it
a long time, pressing down their lashes with gentle touches, as if she
were stroking a little bird.

He watched her a while, and then glanced round the chamber where his
eyes fell upon a few dressing necessaries that she had brought.

“Grace—if I may call you so,” he said, “I have been already humiliated
almost to the depths. I have come back since you refused to join me
elsewhere—I have entered your father’s house, and borne all that that
cost me without flinching, because I have felt that I deserved
humiliation. But is there a yet greater humiliation in store for me?
You say you have been living here—that he is everything to you. Am I to
draw from that the obvious, the extremest inference?”

Triumph at any price is sweet to men and women—especially the latter.
It was her first and last opportunity of repaying him for the cruel
contumely which she had borne at his hands so docilely.

“Yes,” she answered; and there was that in her subtly compounded nature
which made her feel a thrill of pride as she did so.

Yet the moment after she had so mightily belied her character she half
repented. Her husband had turned as white as the wall behind him. It
seemed as if all that remained to him of life and spirit had been
abstracted at a stroke. Yet he did not move, and in his efforts at
self-control closed his mouth together as a vice. His determination was
fairly successful, though she saw how very much greater than she had
expected her triumph had been. Presently he looked across at
Winterborne.

“Would it startle you to hear,” he said, as if he hardly had breath to
utter the words, “that she who was to me what he was to you is dead
also?”

“Dead—_she_ dead?” exclaimed Grace.

“Yes. Felice Charmond is where this young man is.”

“Never!” said Grace, vehemently.

He went on without heeding the insinuation: “And I came back to try to
make it up with you—but—”

Fitzpiers rose, and moved across the room to go away, looking downward
with the droop of a man whose hope was turned to apathy, if not
despair. In going round the door his eye fell upon her once more. She
was still bending over the body of Winterborne, her face close to the
young man’s.

“Have you been kissing him during his illness?” asked her husband.

“Yes.”

“Since his fevered state set in?”

“Yes.”

“On his lips?”

“Yes.”

“Then you will do well to take a few drops of this in water as soon as
possible.” He drew a small phial from his pocket and returned to offer
it to her.

Grace shook her head.

“If you don’t do as I tell you you may soon be like him.”

“I don’t care. I wish to die.”

“I’ll put it here,” said Fitzpiers, placing the bottle on a ledge
beside him. “The sin of not having warned you will not be upon my head
at any rate, among my other sins. I am now going, and I will send
somebody to you. Your father does not know that you are here, so I
suppose I shall be bound to tell him?”

“Certainly.”

Fitzpiers left the cot, and the stroke of his feet was soon immersed in
the silence that pervaded the spot. Grace remained kneeling and
weeping, she hardly knew how long, and then she sat up, covered poor
Giles’s features, and went towards the door where her husband had
stood. No sign of any other comer greeted her ear, the only perceptible
sounds being the tiny cracklings of the dead leaves, which, like a
feather-bed, had not yet done rising to their normal level where
indented by the pressure of her husband’s receding footsteps. It
reminded her that she had been struck with the change in his aspect;
the extremely intellectual look that had always been in his face was
wrought to a finer phase by thinness, and a care-worn dignity had been
superadded. She returned to Winterborne’s side, and during her
meditations another tread drew near the door, entered the outer room,
and halted at the entrance of the chamber where Grace was.

“What—Marty!” said Grace.

“Yes. I have heard,” said Marty, whose demeanor had lost all its
girlishness under the stroke that seemed almost literally to have
bruised her.

“He died for me!” murmured Grace, heavily.

Marty did not fully comprehend; and she answered, “He belongs to
neither of us now, and your beauty is no more powerful with him than my
plainness. I have come to help you, ma’am. He never cared for me, and
he cared much for you; but he cares for us both alike now.”

“Oh don’t, don’t, Marty!”

Marty said no more, but knelt over Winterborne from the other side.

“Did you meet my hus—Mr. Fitzpiers?”

“No!”

“Then what brought you here?”

“I come this way sometimes. I have got to go to the farther side of the
wood this time of the year, and am obliged to get there before four
o’clock in the morning, to begin heating the oven for the early baking.
I have passed by here often at this time.”

Grace looked at her quickly. “Then did you know I was here?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you tell anybody?”

“No. I knew you lived in the hut, that he had gied it up to ye, and
lodged out himself.”

“Did you know where he lodged?”

“No. That I couldn’t find out. Was it at Delborough?”

“No. It was not there, Marty. Would it had been! It would have
saved—saved—” To check her tears she turned, and seeing a book on the
window-bench, took it up. “Look, Marty, this is a Psalter. He was not
an outwardly religious man, but he was pure and perfect in his heart.
Shall we read a psalm over him?”

“Oh yes—we will—with all my heart!”

Grace opened the thin brown book, which poor Giles had kept at hand
mainly for the convenience of whetting his pen-knife upon its leather
covers. She began to read in that rich, devotional voice peculiar to
women only on such occasions. When it was over, Marty said, “I should
like to pray for his soul.”

“So should I,” said her companion. “But we must not.”

“Why? Nobody would know.”

Grace could not resist the argument, influenced as she was by the sense
of making amends for having neglected him in the body; and their tender
voices united and filled the narrow room with supplicatory murmurs that
a Calvinist might have envied. They had hardly ended when now and more
numerous foot-falls were audible, also persons in conversation, one of
whom Grace recognized as her father.

She rose, and went to the outer apartment, in which there was only such
light as beamed from the inner one. Melbury and Mrs. Melbury were
standing there.

“I don’t reproach you, Grace,” said her father, with an estranged
manner, and in a voice not at all like his old voice. “What has come
upon you and us is beyond reproach, beyond weeping, and beyond wailing.
Perhaps I drove you to it. But I am hurt; I am scourged; I am
astonished. In the face of this there is nothing to be said.”

Without replying, Grace turned and glided back to the inner chamber.
“Marty,” she said, quickly, “I cannot look my father in the face until
he knows the true circumstances of my life here. Go and tell him—what
you have told me—what you saw—that he gave up his house to me.”

She sat down, her face buried in her hands, and Marty went, and after a
short absence returned. Then Grace rose, and going out asked her father
if he had met her husband.

“Yes,” said Melbury.

“And you know all that has happened?”

“I do. Forgive me, Grace, for suspecting ye of worse than rashness—I
ought to know ye better. Are you coming with me to what was once your
home?”

“No. I stay here with HIM. Take no account of me any more.”

The unwonted, perplexing, agitating relations in which she had stood to
Winterborne quite lately—brought about by Melbury’s own
contrivance—could not fail to soften the natural anger of a parent at
her more recent doings. “My daughter, things are bad,” he rejoined.
“But why do you persevere to make ’em worse? What good can you do to
Giles by staying here with him? Mind, I ask no questions. I don’t
inquire why you decided to come here, or anything as to what your
course would have been if he had not died, though I know there’s no
deliberate harm in ye. As for me, I have lost all claim upon you, and I
make no complaint. But I do say that by coming back with me now you
will show no less kindness to him, and escape any sound of shame.

“But I don’t wish to escape it.”

“If you don’t on your own account, cannot you wish to on mine and hers?
Nobody except our household knows that you have left home. Then why
should you, by a piece of perverseness, bring down my gray hairs with
sorrow to the grave?”

“If it were not for my husband—” she began, moved by his words. “But
how can I meet him there? How can any woman who is not a mere man’s
creature join him after what has taken place?”

“He would go away again rather than keep you out of my house.”

“How do you know that, father?”

“We met him on our way here, and he told us so,” said Mrs. Melbury. “He
had said something like it before. He seems very much upset
altogether.”

“He declared to her when he came to our house that he would wait for
time and devotion to bring about his forgiveness,” said her husband.
“That was it, wasn’t it, Lucy?”

“Yes. That he would not intrude upon you, Grace, till you gave him
absolute permission,” Mrs. Melbury added.

This antecedent considerateness in Fitzpiers was as welcome to Grace as
it was unexpected; and though she did not desire his presence, she was
sorry that by her retaliatory fiction she had given him a different
reason for avoiding her. She made no further objections to accompanying
her parents, taking them into the inner room to give Winterborne a last
look, and gathering up the two or three things that belonged to her.
While she was doing this the two women came who had been called by
Melbury, and at their heels poor Creedle.

“Forgive me, but I can’t rule my mourning nohow as a man should, Mr.
Melbury,” he said. “I ha’n’t seen him since Thursday se’night, and have
wondered for days and days where he’s been keeping. There was I
expecting him to come and tell me to wash out the cider-barrels against
the making, and here was he— Well, I’ve knowed him from table-high; I
knowed his father—used to bide about upon two sticks in the sun afore
he died!—and now I’ve seen the end of the family, which we can ill
afford to lose, wi’ such a scanty lot of good folk in Hintock as we’ve
got. And now Robert Creedle will be nailed up in parish boards ’a
b’lieve; and noboby will glutch down a sigh for he!”

They started for home, Marty and Creedle remaining behind. For a time
Grace and her father walked side by side without speaking. It was just
in the blue of the dawn, and the chilling tone of the sky was reflected
in her cold, wet face. The whole wood seemed to be a house of death,
pervaded by loss to its uttermost length and breadth. Winterborne was
gone, and the copses seemed to show the want of him; those young trees,
so many of which he had planted, and of which he had spoken so truly
when he said that he should fall before they fell, were at that very
moment sending out their roots in the direction that he had given them
with his subtle hand.

“One thing made it tolerable to us that your husband should come back
to the house,” said Melbury at last—“the death of Mrs. Charmond.”

“Ah, yes,” said Grace, arousing slightly to the recollection, “he told
me so.”

“Did he tell you how she died? It was no such death as Giles’s. She was
shot—by a disappointed lover. It occurred in Germany. The unfortunate
man shot himself afterwards. He was that South Carolina gentleman of
very passionate nature who used to haunt this place to force her to an
interview, and followed her about everywhere. So ends the brilliant
Felice Charmond—once a good friend to me—but no friend to you.”

“I can forgive her,” said Grace, absently. “Did Edgar tell you of
this?”

“No; but he put a London newspaper, giving an account of it, on the
hall table, folded in such a way that we should see it. It will be in
the Sherton paper this week, no doubt. To make the event more solemn
still to him, he had just before had sharp words with her, and left
her. He told Lucy this, as nothing about him appears in the newspaper.
And the cause of the quarrel was, of all people, she we’ve left behind
us.”

“Do you mean Marty?” Grace spoke the words but perfunctorily. For,
pertinent and pointed as Melbury’s story was, she had no heart for it
now.

“Yes. Marty South.” Melbury persisted in his narrative, to divert her
from her present grief, if possible. “Before he went away she wrote him
a letter, which he kept in his, pocket a long while before reading. He
chanced to pull it out in Mrs. Charmond’s, presence, and read it out
loud. It contained something which teased her very much, and that led
to the rupture. She was following him to make it up when she met with
her terrible death.”

Melbury did not know enough to give the gist of the incident, which was
that Marty South’s letter had been concerning a certain personal
adornment common to herself and Mrs. Charmond. Her bullet reached its
billet at last. The scene between Fitzpiers and Felice had been sharp,
as only a scene can be which arises out of the mortification of one
woman by another in the presence of a lover. True, Marty had not
effected it by word of mouth; the charge about the locks of hair was
made simply by Fitzpiers reading her letter to him aloud to Felice in
the playfully ironical tones of one who had become a little weary of
his situation, and was finding his friend, in the phrase of George
Herbert, a “flat delight.” He had stroked those false tresses with his
hand many a time without knowing them to be transplanted, and it was
impossible when the discovery was so abruptly made to avoid being
finely satirical, despite her generous disposition.

That was how it had begun, and tragedy had been its end. On his abrupt
departure she had followed him to the station but the train was gone;
and in travelling to Baden in search of him she had met his rival,
whose reproaches led to an altercation, and the death of both. Of that
precipitate scene of passion and crime Fitzpiers had known nothing till
he saw an account of it in the papers, where, fortunately for himself,
no mention was made of his prior acquaintance with the unhappy lady;
nor was there any allusion to him in the subsequent inquiry, the double
death being attributed to some gambling losses, though, in point of
fact, neither one of them had visited the tables.

Melbury and his daughter drew near their house, having seen but one
living thing on their way, a squirrel, which did not run up its tree,
but, dropping the sweet chestnut which it carried, cried
chut-chut-chut, and stamped with its hind legs on the ground. When the
roofs and chimneys of the homestead began to emerge from the screen of
boughs, Grace started, and checked herself in her abstracted advance.

“You clearly understand,” she said to her step-mother some of her old
misgiving returning, “that I am coming back only on condition of his
leaving as he promised? Will you let him know this, that there may be
no mistake?”

Mrs. Melbury, who had some long private talks with Fitzpiers, assured
Grace that she need have no doubts on that point, and that he would
probably be gone by the evening. Grace then entered with them into
Melbury’s wing of the house, and sat down listlessly in the parlor,
while her step-mother went to Fitzpiers.

The prompt obedience to her wishes which the surgeon showed did honor
to him, if anything could. Before Mrs. Melbury had returned to the room
Grace, who was sitting on the parlor window-bench, saw her husband go
from the door under the increasing light of morning, with a bag in his
hand. While passing through the gate he turned his head. The firelight
of the room she sat in threw her figure into dark relief against the
window as she looked through the panes, and he must have seen her
distinctly. In a moment he went on, the gate fell to, and he
disappeared. At the hut she had declared that another had displaced
him; and now she had banished him.




CHAPTER XLIV.


Fitzpiers had hardly been gone an hour when Grace began to sicken. The
next day she kept her room. Old Jones was called in; he murmured some
statements in which the words “feverish symptoms” occurred. Grace heard
them, and guessed the means by which she had brought this visitation
upon herself.

One day, while she still lay there with her head throbbing, wondering
if she were really going to join him who had gone before, Grammer
Oliver came to her bedside. “I don’t know whe’r this is meant for you
to take, ma’am,” she said, “but I have found it on the table. It was
left by Marty, I think, when she came this morning.”

Grace turned her hot eyes upon what Grammer held up. It was the phial
left at the hut by her husband when he had begged her to take some
drops of its contents if she wished to preserve herself from falling a
victim to the malady which had pulled down Winterborne. She examined it
as well as she could. The liquid was of an opaline hue, and bore a
label with an inscription in Italian. He had probably got it in his
wanderings abroad. She knew but little Italian, but could understand
that the cordial was a febrifuge of some sort. Her father, her mother,
and all the household were anxious for her recovery, and she resolved
to obey her husband’s directions. Whatever the risk, if any, she was
prepared to run it. A glass of water was brought, and the drops dropped
in.

The effect, though not miraculous, was remarkable. In less than an hour
she felt calmer, cooler, better able to reflect—less inclined to fret
and chafe and wear herself away. She took a few drops more. From that
time the fever retreated, and went out like a damped conflagration.

“How clever he is!” she said, regretfully. “Why could he not have had
more principle, so as to turn his great talents to good account?
Perhaps he has saved my useless life. But he doesn’t know it, and
doesn’t care whether he has saved it or not; and on that account will
never be told by me! Probably he only gave it to me in the arrogance of
his skill, to show the greatness of his resources beside mine, as
Elijah drew down fire from heaven.”

As soon as she had quite recovered from this foiled attack upon her
life, Grace went to Marty South’s cottage. The current of her being had
again set towards the lost Giles Winterborne.

“Marty,” she said, “we both loved him. We will go to his grave
together.”

Great Hintock church stood at the upper part of the village, and could
be reached without passing through the street. In the dusk of the late
September day they went thither by secret ways, walking mostly in
silence side by side, each busied with her own thoughts. Grace had a
trouble exceeding Marty’s—that haunting sense of having put out the
light of his life by her own hasty doings. She had tried to persuade
herself that he might have died of his illness, even if she had not
taken possession of his house. Sometimes she succeeded in her attempt;
sometimes she did not.

They stood by the grave together, and though the sun had gone down,
they could see over the woodland for miles, and down to the vale in
which he had been accustomed to descend every year, with his portable
mill and press, to make cider about this time.

Perhaps Grace’s first grief, the discovery that if he had lived he
could never have claimed her, had some power in softening this, the
second. On Marty’s part there was the same consideration; never would
she have been his. As no anticipation of gratified affection had been
in existence while he was with them, there was none to be disappointed
now that he had gone.

Grace was abased when, by degrees, she found that she had never
understood Giles as Marty had done. Marty South alone, of all the women
in Hintock and the world, had approximated to Winterborne’s level of
intelligent intercourse with nature. In that respect she had formed the
complement to him in the other sex, had lived as his counterpart, had
subjoined her thought to his as a corollary.

The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that
wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been with
these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze. They had been possessed of
its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to read
its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds of
night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, which had to Grace
a touch of the uncanny, and even the supernatural, were simple
occurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew. They had
planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with
the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and
symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together
made an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces,
when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the
species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the
wind’s murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sort
afar off. They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or
tainted with incipient decay, and by the state of its upper twigs, the
stratum that had been reached by its roots. The artifices of the
seasons were seen by them from the conjuror’s own point of view, and
not from that of the spectator’s.

“He ought to have married _you_, Marty, and nobody else in the world!”
said Grace, with conviction, after thinking somewhat in the above
strain.

Marty shook her head. “In all our out-door days and years together,
ma’am,” she replied, “the one thing he never spoke of to me was love;
nor I to him.”

“Yet you and he could speak in a tongue that nobody else knew—not even
my father, though he came nearest knowing—the tongue of the trees and
fruits and flowers themselves.”

She could indulge in mournful fancies like this to Marty; but the hard
core to her grief—which Marty’s had not—remained. Had she been sure
that Giles’s death resulted entirely from his exposure, it would have
driven her well-nigh to insanity; but there was always that bare
possibility that his exposure had only precipitated what was
inevitable. She longed to believe that it had not done even this.

There was only one man whose opinion on the circumstances she would be
at all disposed to trust. Her husband was that man. Yet to ask him it
would be necessary to detail the true conditions in which she and
Winterborne had lived during these three or four critical days that
followed her flight; and in withdrawing her original defiant
announcement on that point, there seemed a weakness she did not care to
show. She never doubted that Fitzpiers would believe her if she made a
clean confession of the actual situation; but to volunteer the
correction would seem like signalling for a truce, and that, in her
present frame of mind, was what she did not feel the need of.

It will probably not appear a surprising statement, after what has been
already declared of Fitzpiers, that the man whom Grace’s fidelity could
not keep faithful was stung into passionate throbs of interest
concerning her by her avowal of the contrary.

He declared to himself that he had never known her dangerously full
compass if she were capable of such a reprisal; and, melancholy as it
may be to admit the fact, his own humiliation and regret engendered a
smouldering admiration of her.

He passed a month or two of great misery at Exbury, the place to which
he had retired—quite as much misery indeed as Grace, could she have
known of it, would have been inclined to inflict upon any living
creature, how much soever he might have wronged her. Then a sudden hope
dawned upon him; he wondered if her affirmation were true. He asked
himself whether it were not the act of a woman whose natural purity and
innocence had blinded her to the contingencies of such an announcement.
His wide experience of the sex had taught him that, in many cases,
women who ventured on hazardous matters did so because they lacked an
imagination sensuous enough to feel their full force. In this light
Grace’s bold avowal might merely have denoted the desperation of one
who was a child to the realities of obliquity.

Fitzpiers’s mental sufferings and suspense led him at last to take a
melancholy journey to the neighborhood of Little Hintock; and here he
hovered for hours around the scene of the purest emotional experiences
that he had ever known in his life. He walked about the woods that
surrounded Melbury’s house, keeping out of sight like a criminal. It
was a fine evening, and on his way homeward he passed near Marty
South’s cottage. As usual she had lighted her candle without closing
her shutters; he saw her within as he had seen her many times before.

She was polishing tools, and though he had not wished to show himself,
he could not resist speaking in to her through the half-open door.
“What are you doing that for, Marty?”

“Because I want to clean them. They are not mine.” He could see,
indeed, that they were not hers, for one was a spade, large and heavy,
and another was a bill-hook which she could only have used with both
hands. The spade, though not a new one, had been so completely
burnished that it was bright as silver.

Fitzpiers somehow divined that they were Giles Winterborne’s, and he
put the question to her.

She replied in the affirmative. “I am going to keep ’em,” she said,
“but I can’t get his apple-mill and press. I wish could; it is going to
be sold, they say.”

“Then I will buy it for you,” said Fitzpiers. “That will be making you
a return for a kindness you did me.” His glance fell upon the girl’s
rare-colored hair, which had grown again. “Oh, Marty, those locks of
yours—and that letter! But it was a kindness to send it, nevertheless,”
he added, musingly.

After this there was confidence between them—such confidence as there
had never been before. Marty was shy, indeed, of speaking about the
letter, and her motives in writing it; but she thanked him warmly for
his promise of the cider-press. She would travel with it in the autumn
season, as he had done, she said. She would be quite strong enough,
with old Creedle as an assistant.

“Ah! there was one nearer to him than you,” said Fitzpiers, referring
to Winterborne. “One who lived where he lived, and was with him when he
died.”

Then Marty, suspecting that he did not know the true circumstances,
from the fact that Mrs. Fitzpiers and himself were living apart, told
him of Giles’s generosity to Grace in giving up his house to her at the
risk, and possibly the sacrifice, of his own life. When the surgeon
heard it he almost envied Giles his chivalrous character. He expressed
a wish to Marty that his visit to her should be kept secret, and went
home thoughtful, feeling that in more that one sense his journey to
Hintock had not been in vain.

He would have given much to win Grace’s forgiveness then. But whatever
he dared hope for in that kind from the future, there was nothing to be
done yet, while Giles Winterborne’s memory was green. To wait was
imperative. A little time might melt her frozen thoughts, and lead her
to look on him with toleration, if not with love.




CHAPTER XLV.


Weeks and months of mourning for Winterborne had been passed by Grace
in the soothing monotony of the memorial act to which she and Marty had
devoted themselves. Twice a week the pair went in the dusk to Great
Hintock, and, like the two mourners in _Cymbeline_, sweetened his sad
grave with their flowers and their tears. Sometimes Grace thought that
it was a pity neither one of them had been his wife for a little while,
and given the world a copy of him who was so valuable in their eyes.
Nothing ever had brought home to her with such force as this death how
little acquirements and culture weigh beside sterling personal
character. While her simple sorrow for his loss took a softer edge with
the lapse of the autumn and winter seasons, her self-reproach at having
had a possible hand in causing it knew little abatement.

Little occurred at Hintock during these months of the fall and decay of
the leaf. Discussion of the almost contemporaneous death of Mrs.
Charmond abroad had waxed and waned. Fitzpiers had had a marvellous
escape from being dragged into the inquiry which followed it, through
the accident of their having parted just before under the influence of
Marty South’s letter—the tiny instrument of a cause deep in nature.

Her body was not brought home. It seemed to accord well with the fitful
fever of that impassioned woman’s life that she should not have found a
native grave. She had enjoyed but a life-interest in the estate, which,
after her death, passed to a relative of her husband’s—one who knew not
Felice, one whose purpose seemed to be to blot out every vestige of
her.

On a certain day in February—the cheerful day of St. Valentine, in
fact—a letter reached Mrs. Fitzpiers, which had been mentally promised
her for that particular day a long time before.

It announced that Fitzpiers was living at some midland town, where he
had obtained a temporary practice as assistant to some local medical
man, whose curative principles were all wrong, though he dared not set
them right. He had thought fit to communicate with her on that day of
tender traditions to inquire if, in the event of his obtaining a
substantial practice that he had in view elsewhere, she could forget
the past and bring herself to join him.

There the practical part ended; he then went on—

“My last year of experience has added ten years to my age, dear Grace
and dearest wife that ever erring man undervalued. You may be
absolutely indifferent to what I say, but let me say it: I have never
loved any woman alive or dead as I love, respect, and honor you at this
present moment. What you told me in the pride and haughtiness of your
heart I never believed [this, by the way, was not strictly true]; but
even if I had believed it, it could never have estranged me from you.
Is there any use in telling you—no, there is not—that I dream of your
ripe lips more frequently than I say my prayers; that the old familiar
rustle of your dress often returns upon my mind till it distracts me?
If you could condescend even only to see me again you would be
breathing life into a corpse. My pure, pure Grace, modest as a
turtledove, how came I ever to possess you? For the sake of being
present in your mind on this lovers’ day, I think I would almost rather
have you hate me a little than not think of me at all. You may call my
fancies whimsical; but remember, sweet, lost one, that ‘nature is one
in love, and where ’tis fine it sends some instance of itself.’ I will
not intrude upon you further now. Make me a little bit happy by sending
back one line to say that you will consent, at any rate, to a short
interview. I will meet you and leave you as a mere acquaintance, if you
will only afford me this slight means of making a few explanations, and
of putting my position before you. Believe me, in spite of all you may
do or feel,


Your lover always (once your husband),

“E.F.”


It was, oddly enough, the first occasion, or nearly the first on which
Grace had ever received a love-letter from him, his courtship having
taken place under conditions which rendered letter-writing unnecessary.
Its perusal, therefore, had a certain novelty for her. She thought
that, upon the whole, he wrote love-letters very well. But the chief
rational interest of the letter to the reflective Grace lay in the
chance that such a meeting as he proposed would afford her of setting
her doubts at rest, one way or the other, on her actual share in
Winterborne’s death. The relief of consulting a skilled mind, the one
professional man who had seen Giles at that time, would be immense. As
for that statement that she had uttered in her disdainful grief, which
at the time she had regarded as her triumph, she was quite prepared to
admit to him that his belief was the true one; for in wronging herself
as she did when she made it, she had done what to her was a far more
serious thing, wronged Winterborne’s memory.

Without consulting her father, or any one in the house or out of it,
Grace replied to the letter. She agreed to meet Fitzpiers on two
conditions, of which the first was that the place of meeting should be
the top of Rubdown Hill, the second that he would not object to Marty
South accompanying her.

Whatever part, much or little, there may have been in Fitzpiers’s
so-called valentine to his wife, he felt a delight as of the bursting
of spring when her brief reply came. It was one of the few pleasures
that he had experienced of late years at all resembling those of his
early youth. He promptly replied that he accepted the conditions, and
named the day and hour at which he would be on the spot she mentioned.

A few minutes before three on the appointed day found him climbing the
well-known hill, which had been the axis of so many critical movements
in their lives during his residence at Hintock.

The sight of each homely and well-remembered object swelled the regret
that seldom left him now. Whatever paths might lie open to his future,
the soothing shades of Hintock were forbidden him forever as a
permanent dwelling-place.

He longed for the society of Grace. But to lay offerings on her
slighted altar was his first aim, and until her propitiation was
complete he would constrain her in no way to return to him. The least
reparation that he could make, in a case where he would gladly have
made much, would be to let her feel herself absolutely free to choose
between living with him and without him.

Moreover, a subtlist in emotions, he cultivated as under glasses
strange and mournful pleasures that he would not willingly let die just
at present. To show any forwardness in suggesting a _modus vivendi_ to
Grace would be to put an end to these exotics. To be the vassal of her
sweet will for a time, he demanded no more, and found solace in the
contemplation of the soft miseries she caused him.

Approaching the hill-top with a mind strung to these notions, Fitzpiers
discerned a gay procession of people coming over the crest, and was not
long in perceiving it to be a wedding-party.

Though the wind was keen the women were in light attire, and the
flowered waistcoats of the men had a pleasing vividness of pattern.
Each of the gentler ones clung to the arm of her partner so tightly as
to have with him one step, rise, swing, gait, almost one centre of
gravity. In the buxom bride Fitzpiers recognized no other than Suke
Damson, who in her light gown looked a giantess; the small husband
beside her he saw to be Tim Tangs.

Fitzpiers could not escape, for they had seen him; though of all the
beauties of the world whom he did not wish to meet Suke was the chief.
But he put the best face on the matter that he could and came on, the
approaching company evidently discussing him and his separation from
Mrs. Fitzpiers. As the couples closed upon him he expressed his
congratulations.

“We be just walking round the parishes to show ourselves a bit,” said
Tim. “First we het across to Delborough, then athwart to here, and from
here we go to Rubdown and Millshot, and then round by the cross-roads
home. Home says I, but it won’t be that long! We be off next month.”

“Indeed. Where to?”

Tim informed him that they were going to New Zealand. Not but that he
would have been contented with Hintock, but his wife was ambitious and
wanted to leave, so he had given way.

“Then good-by,” said Fitzpiers; “I may not see you again.” He shook
hands with Tim and turned to the bride. “Good-by, Suke,” he said,
taking her hand also. “I wish you and your husband prosperity in the
country you have chosen.” With this he left them, and hastened on to
his appointment.

The wedding-party re-formed and resumed march likewise. But in
restoring his arm to Suke, Tim noticed that her full and blooming
countenance had undergone a change. “Holloa! me dear—what’s the
matter?” said Tim.

“Nothing to speak o’,” said she. But to give the lie to her assertion
she was seized with lachrymose twitches, that soon produced a dribbling
face.

“How—what the devil’s this about!” exclaimed the bridegroom.

“She’s a little wee bit overcome, poor dear!” said the first
bridesmaid, unfolding her handkerchief and wiping Suke’s eyes.

“I never did like parting from people!” said Suke, as soon as she could
speak.

“Why him in particular?”

“Well—he’s such a clever doctor, that ’tis a thousand pities we sha’n’t
see him any more! There’ll be no such clever doctor as he in New
Zealand, if I should require one; and the thought o’t got the better of
my feelings!”

They walked on, but Tim’s face had grown rigid and pale, for he
recalled slight circumstances, disregarded at the time of their
occurrence. The former boisterous laughter of the wedding-party at the
groomsman’s jokes was heard ringing through the woods no more.

By this time Fitzpiers had advanced on his way to the top of the hill,
where he saw two figures emerging from the bank on the right hand.
These were the expected ones, Grace and Marty South, who had evidently
come there by a short and secret path through the wood. Grace was
muffled up in her winter dress, and he thought that she had never
looked so seductive as at this moment, in the noontide bright but
heatless sun, and the keen wind, and the purplish-gray masses of
brushwood around.

Fitzpiers continued to regard the nearing picture, till at length their
glances met for a moment, when she demurely sent off hers at a tangent
and gave him the benefit of her three-quarter face, while with
courteous completeness of conduct he lifted his hat in a large arc.
Marty dropped behind; and when Fitzpiers held out his hand, Grace
touched it with her fingers.

“I have agreed to be here mostly because I wanted to ask you something
important,” said Mrs. Fitzpiers, her intonation modulating in a
direction that she had not quite wished it to take.

“I am most attentive,” said her husband. “Shall we take to the wood for
privacy?”

Grace demurred, and Fitzpiers gave in, and they kept the public road.

At any rate she would take his arm? This also was gravely negatived,
the refusal being audible to Marty.

“Why not?” he inquired.

“Oh, Mr. Fitzpiers—how can you ask?”

“Right, right,” said he, his effusiveness shrivelled up.

As they walked on she returned to her inquiry. “It is about a matter
that may perhaps be unpleasant to you. But I think I need not consider
that too carefully.”

“Not at all,” said Fitzpiers, heroically.

She then took him back to the time of poor Winterborne’s death, and
related the precise circumstances amid which his fatal illness had come
upon him, particularizing the dampness of the shelter to which he had
betaken himself, his concealment from her of the hardships that he was
undergoing, all that he had put up with, all that he had done for her
in his scrupulous considerateness. The retrospect brought her to tears
as she asked him if he thought that the sin of having driven him to his
death was upon her.

Fitzpiers could hardly help showing his satisfaction at what her
narrative indirectly revealed, the actual harmlessness of an escapade
with her lover, which had at first, by her own showing, looked so
grave, and he did not care to inquire whether that harmlessness had
been the result of aim or of accident. With regard to her question, he
declared that in his judgment no human being could answer it. He
thought that upon the whole the balance of probabilities turned in her
favor. Winterborne’s apparent strength, during the last months of his
life, must have been delusive. It had often occurred that after a first
attack of that insidious disease a person’s apparent recovery was a
physiological mendacity.

The relief which came to Grace lay almost as much in sharing her
knowledge of the particulars with an intelligent mind as in the
assurances Fitzpiers gave her. “Well, then, to put this case before
you, and obtain your professional opinion, was chiefly why I consented
to come here to-day,” said she, when he had reached the aforesaid
conclusion.

“For no other reason at all?” he asked, ruefully.

“It was nearly the whole.”

They stood and looked over a gate at twenty or thirty starlings feeding
in the grass, and he started the talk again by saying, in a low voice,
“And yet I love you more than ever I loved you in my life.”

Grace did not move her eyes from the birds, and folded her delicate
lips as if to keep them in subjection.

“It is a different kind of love altogether,” said he. “Less passionate;
more profound. It has nothing to do with the material conditions of the
object at all; much to do with her character and goodness, as revealed
by closer observation. ‘Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge
with dearer love.’”

“That’s out of _Measure for Measure_,” said she, slyly.

“Oh yes—I meant it as a citation,” blandly replied Fitzpiers. “Well,
then, why not give me a very little bit of your heart again?”

The crash of a felled tree in the remote depths of the wood recalled
the past at that moment, and all the homely faithfulness of
Winterborne. “Don’t ask it! My heart is in the grave with Giles,” she
replied, stanchly.

“Mine is with you—in no less deep a grave, I fear, according to that.”

“I am very sorry; but it cannot be helped.”

“How can you be sorry for me, when you wilfully keep open the grave?”

“Oh no—that’s not so,” returned Grace, quickly, and moved to go away
from him.

“But, dearest Grace,” said he, “you have condescended to come; and I
thought from it that perhaps when I had passed through a long state of
probation you would be generous. But if there can be no hope of our
getting completely reconciled, treat me gently—wretch though I am.”

“I did not say you were a wretch, nor have I ever said so.”

“But you have such a contemptuous way of looking at me that I fear you
think so.”

Grace’s heart struggled between the wish not to be harsh and the fear
that she might mislead him. “I cannot look contemptuous unless I feel
contempt,” she said, evasively. “And all I feel is lovelessness.”

“I have been very bad, I know,” he returned. “But unless you can really
love me again, Grace, I would rather go away from you forever. I don’t
want you to receive me again for duty’s sake, or anything of that sort.
If I had not cared more for your affection and forgiveness than my own
personal comfort, I should never have come back here. I could have
obtained a practice at a distance, and have lived my own life without
coldness or reproach. But I have chosen to return to the one spot on
earth where my name is tarnished—to enter the house of a man from whom
I have had worse treatment than from any other man alive—all for you!”

This was undeniably true, and it had its weight with Grace, who began
to look as if she thought she had been shockingly severe.

“Before you go,” he continued, “I want to know your pleasure about
me—what you wish me to do, or not to do.”

“You are independent of me, and it seems a mockery to ask that. Far be
it from me to advise. But I will think it over. I rather need advice
myself than stand in a position to give it.”

“_You_ don’t need advice, wisest, dearest woman that ever lived. If you
did—”

“Would you give it to me?”

“Would you act upon what I gave?”

“That’s not a fair inquiry,” said she, smiling despite her gravity. “I
don’t mind hearing it—what you do really think the most correct and
proper course for me.”

“It is so easy for me to say, and yet I dare not, for it would be
provoking you to remonstrances.”

Knowing, of course, what the advice would be, she did not press him
further, and was about to beckon Marty forward and leave him, when he
interrupted her with, “Oh, one moment, dear Grace—you will meet me
again?”

She eventually agreed to see him that day fortnight. Fitzpiers
expostulated at the interval, but the half-alarmed earnestness with
which she entreated him not to come sooner made him say hastily that he
submitted to her will—that he would regard her as a friend only,
anxious for his reform and well-being, till such time as she might
allow him to exceed that privilege.

All this was to assure her; it was only too clear that he had not won
her confidence yet. It amazed Fitzpiers, and overthrew all his
deductions from previous experience, to find that this girl, though she
had been married to him, could yet be so coy. Notwithstanding a certain
fascination that it carried with it, his reflections were sombre as he
went homeward; he saw how deep had been his offence to produce so great
a wariness in a gentle and once unsuspicious soul.

He was himself too fastidious to care to coerce her. To be an object of
misgiving or dislike to a woman who shared his home was what he could
not endure the thought of. Life as it stood was more tolerable.

When he was gone, Marty joined Mrs. Fitzpiers. She would fain have
consulted Marty on the question of Platonic relations with her former
husband, as she preferred to regard him. But Marty showed no great
interest in their affairs, so Grace said nothing. They came onward, and
saw Melbury standing at the scene of the felling which had been audible
to them, when, telling Marty that she wished her meeting with Mr.
Fitzpiers to be kept private, she left the girl to join her father. At
any rate, she would consult him on the expediency of occasionally
seeing her husband.

Her father was cheerful, and walked by her side as he had done in
earlier days. “I was thinking of you when you came up,” he said. “I
have considered that what has happened is for the best. Since your
husband is gone away, and seems not to wish to trouble you, why, let
him go, and drop out of your life. Many women are worse off. You can
live here comfortably enough, and he can emigrate, or do what he likes
for his good. I wouldn’t mind sending him the further sum of money he
might naturally expect to come to him, so that you may not be bothered
with him any more. He could hardly have gone on living here without
speaking to me, or meeting me; and that would have been very unpleasant
on both sides.”

These remarks checked her intention. There was a sense of weakness in
following them by saying that she had just met her husband by
appointment. “Then you would advise me not to communicate with him?”
she observed.

“I shall never advise ye again. You are your own mistress—do as you
like. But my opinion is that if you don’t live with him, you had better
live without him, and not go shilly-shallying and playing bopeep. You
sent him away; and now he’s gone. Very well; trouble him no more.”

Grace felt a guiltiness—she hardly knew why—and made no confession.




CHAPTER XLVI.


The woods were uninteresting, and Grace stayed in-doors a great deal.
She became quite a student, reading more than she had done since her
marriage But her seclusion was always broken for the periodical visit
to Winterborne’s grave with Marty, which was kept up with pious
strictness, for the purpose of putting snow-drops, primroses, and other
vernal flowers thereon as they came.

One afternoon at sunset she was standing just outside her father’s
garden, which, like the rest of the Hintock enclosures, abutted into
the wood. A slight foot-path led along here, forming a secret way to
either of the houses by getting through its boundary hedge. Grace was
just about to adopt this mode of entry when a figure approached along
the path, and held up his hand to detain her. It was her husband.

“I am delighted,” he said, coming up out of breath; and there seemed no
reason to doubt his words. “I saw you some way off—I was afraid you
would go in before I could reach you.”

“It is a week before the time,” said she, reproachfully. “I said a
fortnight from the last meeting.”

“My dear, you don’t suppose I could wait a fortnight without trying to
get a glimpse of you, even though you had declined to meet me! Would it
make you angry to know that I have been along this path at dusk three
or four times since our last meeting? Well, how are you?”

She did not refuse her hand, but when he showed a wish to retain it a
moment longer than mere formality required, she made it smaller, so
that it slipped away from him, with again that same alarmed look which
always followed his attempts in this direction. He saw that she was not
yet out of the elusive mood; not yet to be treated presumingly; and he
was correspondingly careful to tranquillize her.

His assertion had seemed to impress her somewhat. “I had no idea you
came so often,” she said. “How far do you come from?”

“From Exbury. I always walk from Sherton-Abbas, for if I hire, people
will know that I come; and my success with you so far has not been
great enough to justify such overtness. Now, my dear one—as I _must_
call you—I put it to you: will you see me a little oftener as the
spring advances?”

Grace lapsed into unwonted sedateness, and avoiding the question, said,
“I wish you would concentrate on your profession, and give up those
strange studies that used to distract you so much. I am sure you would
get on.”

“It is the very thing I am doing. I was going to ask you to burn—or, at
least, get rid of—all my philosophical literature. It is in the
bookcases in your rooms. The fact is, I never cared much for abstruse
studies.”

“I am so glad to hear you say that. And those other books—those piles
of old plays—what good are they to a medical man?”

“None whatever!” he replied, cheerfully. “Sell them at Sherton for what
they will fetch.”

“And those dreadful old French romances, with their horrid spellings of
‘filz’ and ‘ung’ and ‘ilz’ and ‘mary’ and ‘ma foy?’”

“You haven’t been reading them, Grace?”

“Oh no—I just looked into them, that was all.”

“Make a bonfire of ’em directly you get home. I meant to do it myself.
I can’t think what possessed me ever to collect them. I have only a few
professional hand-books now, and am quite a practical man. I am in
hopes of having some good news to tell you soon, and then do you think
you could—come to me again?”

“I would rather you did not press me on that just now,” she replied,
with some feeling. “You have said you mean to lead a new, useful,
effectual life; but I should like to see you put it in practice for a
little while before you address that query to me. Besides—I could not
live with you.”

“Why not?”

Grace was silent a few instants. “I go with Marty to Giles’s grave. We
swore we would show him that devotion. And I mean to keep it up.”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind that at all. I have no right to expect anything
else, and I will not wish you to keep away. I liked the man as well as
any I ever knew. In short, I would accompany you a part of the way to
the place, and smoke a cigar on the stile while I waited till you came
back.”

“Then you haven’t given up smoking?”

“Well—ahem—no. I have thought of doing so, but—”

His extreme complacence had rather disconcerted Grace, and the question
about smoking had been to effect a diversion. Presently she said,
firmly, and with a moisture in her eye that he could not see, as her
mind returned to poor Giles’s “frustrate ghost,” “I don’t like you—to
speak lightly on that subject, if you did speak lightly. To be frank
with you—quite frank—I think of him as my betrothed lover still. I
cannot help it. So that it would be wrong for me to join you.”

Fitzpiers was now uneasy. “You say your betrothed lover still,” he
rejoined. “When, then, were you betrothed to him, or engaged, as we
common people say?”

“When you were away.”

“How could that be?”

Grace would have avoided this; but her natural candor led her on. “It
was when I was under the impression that my marriage with you was about
to be annulled, and that he could then marry me. So I encouraged him to
love me.”

Fitzpiers winced visibly; and yet, upon the whole, she was right in
telling it. Indeed, his perception that she was right in her absolute
sincerity kept up his affectionate admiration for her under the pain of
the rebuff. Time had been when the avowal that Grace had deliberately
taken steps to replace him would have brought him no sorrow. But she so
far dominated him now that he could not bear to hear her words,
although the object of her high regard was no more.

“It is rough upon me—that!” he said, bitterly. “Oh, Grace—I did not
know you—tried to get rid of me! I suppose it is of no use, but I ask,
cannot you hope to—find a little love in your heart for me again?”

“If I could I would oblige you; but I fear I cannot!” she replied, with
illogical ruefulness. “And I don’t see why you should mind my having
had one lover besides yourself in my life, when you have had so many.”

“But I can tell you honestly that I love you better than all of them
put together, and that’s what you will not tell me!”

“I am sorry; but I fear I cannot,” she said, sighing again.

“I wonder if you ever will?” He looked musingly into her indistinct
face, as if he would read the future there. “Now have pity, and tell
me: will you try?”

“To love you again?”

“Yes; if you can.”

“I don’t know how to reply,” she answered, her embarrassment proving
her truth. “Will you promise to leave me quite free as to seeing you or
not seeing you?”

“Certainly. Have I given any ground for you to doubt my first promise
in that respect?”

She was obliged to admit that he had not.

“Then I think that you might get your heart out of that grave,” said
he, with playful sadness. “It has been there a long time.”

She faintly shook her head, but said, “I’ll try to think of you more—if
I can.”

With this Fitzpiers was compelled to be satisfied, and he asked her
when she would meet him again.

“As we arranged—in a fortnight.”

“If it must be a fortnight it must!”

“This time at least. I’ll consider by the day I see you again if I can
shorten the interval.”

“Well, be that as it may, I shall come at least twice a week to look at
your window.”

“You must do as you like about that. Good-night.”

“Say ‘husband.’”

She seemed almost inclined to give him the word; but exclaiming, “No,
no; I cannot,” slipped through the garden-hedge and disappeared.

Fitzpiers did not exaggerate when he told her that he should haunt the
precincts of the dwelling. But his persistence in this course did not
result in his seeing her much oftener than at the fortnightly interval
which she had herself marked out as proper. At these times, however,
she punctually appeared, and as the spring wore on the meetings were
kept up, though their character changed but little with the increase in
their number.

The small garden of the cottage occupied by the Tangs family—father,
son, and now son’s wife—aligned with the larger one of the
timber-dealer at its upper end; and when young Tim, after leaving work
at Melbury’s, stood at dusk in the little bower at the corner of his
enclosure to smoke a pipe, he frequently observed the surgeon pass
along the outside track before-mentioned. Fitzpiers always walked
loiteringly, pensively, looking with a sharp eye into the gardens one
after another as he proceeded; for Fitzpiers did not wish to leave the
now absorbing spot too quickly, after travelling so far to reach it;
hoping always for a glimpse of her whom he passionately desired to take
to his arms anew.

Now Tim began to be struck with these loitering progresses along the
garden boundaries in the gloaming, and wondered what they boded. It
was, naturally, quite out of his power to divine the singular,
sentimental revival in Fitzpiers’s heart; the fineness of tissue which
could take a deep, emotional—almost also an artistic—pleasure in being
the yearning _innamorato_ of a woman he once had deserted, would have
seemed an absurdity to the young sawyer. Mr. and Mrs. Fitzpiers were
separated; therefore the question of affection as between them was
settled. But his Suke had, since that meeting on their marriage-day,
repentantly admitted, to the urgency of his questioning, a good deal
concerning her past levities. Putting all things together, he could
hardly avoid connecting Fitzpiers’s mysterious visits to this spot with
Suke’s residence under his roof. But he made himself fairly easy: the
vessel in which they were about to emigrate sailed that month; and then
Suke would be out of Fitzpiers’s way forever.

The interval at last expired, and the eve of their departure arrived.
They were pausing in the room of the cottage allotted to them by Tim’s
father, after a busy day of preparation, which left them weary. In a
corner stood their boxes, crammed and corded, their large case for the
hold having already been sent away. The firelight shone upon Suke’s
fine face and form as she stood looking into it, and upon the face of
Tim seated in a corner, and upon the walls of his father’s house, which
he was beholding that night almost for the last time.

Tim Tangs was not happy. This scheme of emigration was dividing him
from his father—for old Tangs would on no account leave Hintock—and had
it not been for Suke’s reputation and his own dignity, Tim would at the
last moment have abandoned the project. As he sat in the back part of
the room he regarded her moodily, and the fire and the boxes. One thing
he had particularly noticed this evening—she was very restless; fitful
in her actions, unable to remain seated, and in a marked degree
depressed.

“Sorry that you be going, after all, Suke?” he said.

She sighed involuntarily. “I don’t know but that I be,” she answered.
“’Tis natural, isn’t it, when one is going away?”

“But you wasn’t born here as I was.”

“No.”

“There’s folk left behind that you’d fain have with ’ee, I reckon?”

“Why do you think that?”

“I’ve seen things and I’ve heard things; and, Suke, I say ’twill be a
good move for me to get ’ee away. I don’t mind his leavings abroad, but
I do mind ’em at home.”

Suke’s face was not changed from its aspect of listless indifference by
the words. She answered nothing; and shortly after he went out for his
customary pipe of tobacco at the top of the garden.

The restlessness of Suke had indeed owed its presence to the gentleman
of Tim’s suspicions, but in a different—and it must be added in justice
to her—more innocent sense than he supposed, judging from former
doings. She had accidentally discovered that Fitzpiers was in the habit
of coming secretly once or twice a week to Hintock, and knew that this
evening was a favorite one of the seven for his journey. As she was
going next day to leave the country, Suke thought there could be no
great harm in giving way to a little sentimentality by obtaining a
glimpse of him quite unknown to himself or to anybody, and thus taking
a silent last farewell. Aware that Fitzpiers’s time for passing was at
hand she thus betrayed her feeling. No sooner, therefore, had Tim left
the room than she let herself noiselessly out of the house, and
hastened to the corner of the garden, whence she could witness the
surgeon’s transit across the scene—if he had not already gone by.

Her light cotton dress was visible to Tim lounging in the arbor of the
opposite corner, though he was hidden from her. He saw her stealthily
climb into the hedge, and so ensconce herself there that nobody could
have the least doubt her purpose was to watch unseen for a passer-by.

He went across to the spot and stood behind her. Suke started, having
in her blundering way forgotten that he might be near. She at once
descended from the hedge.

“So he’s coming to-night,” said Tim, laconically. “And we be always
anxious to see our dears.”

“He _is_ coming to-night,” she replied, with defiance. “And we _be_
anxious for our dears.”

“Then will you step in-doors, where your dear will soon jine ’ee? We’ve
to mouster by half-past three to-morrow, and if we don’t get to bed by
eight at latest our faces will be as long as clock-cases all day.”

She hesitated for a minute, but ultimately obeyed, going slowly down
the garden to the house, where he heard the door-latch click behind
her.

Tim was incensed beyond measure. His marriage had so far been a total
failure, a source of bitter regret; and the only course for improving
his case, that of leaving the country, was a sorry, and possibly might
not be a very effectual one. Do what he would, his domestic sky was
likely to be overcast to the end of the day. Thus he brooded, and his
resentment gathered force. He craved a means of striking one blow back
at the cause of his cheerless plight, while he was still on the scene
of his discomfiture. For some minutes no method suggested itself, and
then he had an idea.

Coming to a sudden resolution, he hastened along the garden, and
entered the one attached to the next cottage, which had formerly been
the dwelling of a game-keeper. Tim descended the path to the back of
the house, where only an old woman lived at present, and reaching the
wall he stopped. Owing to the slope of the ground the roof-eaves of the
linhay were here within touch, and he thrust his arm up under them,
feeling about in the space on the top of the wall-plate.

“Ah, I thought my memory didn’t deceive me!” he lipped silently.

With some exertion he drew down a cobwebbed object curiously framed in
iron, which clanked as he moved it. It was about three feet in length
and half as wide. Tim contemplated it as well as he could in the dying
light of day, and raked off the cobwebs with his hand.

“That will spoil his pretty shins for’n, I reckon!” he said.

It was a man-trap.




CHAPTER XLVII.


Were the inventors of automatic machines to be ranged according to the
excellence of their devices for producing sound artistic torture, the
creator of the man-trap would occupy a very respectable if not a very
high place.

It should rather, however, be said, the inventor of the particular form
of man-trap of which this found in the keeper’s out-house was a
specimen. For there were other shapes and other sizes, instruments
which, if placed in a row beside one of the type disinterred by Tim,
would have worn the subordinate aspect of the bears, wild boars, or
wolves in a travelling menagerie, as compared with the leading lion or
tiger. In short, though many varieties had been in use during those
centuries which we are accustomed to look back upon as the true and
only period of merry England—in the rural districts more especially—and
onward down to the third decade of the nineteenth century, this model
had borne the palm, and had been most usually followed when the
orchards and estates required new ones.

There had been the toothless variety used by the softer-hearted
landlords—quite contemptible in their clemency. The jaws of these
resembled the jaws of an old woman to whom time has left nothing but
gums. There were also the intermediate or half-toothed sorts, probably
devised by the middle-natured squires, or those under the influence of
their wives: two inches of mercy, two inches of cruelty, two inches of
mere nip, two inches of probe, and so on, through the whole extent of
the jaws. There were also, as a class apart, the bruisers, which did
not lacerate the flesh, but only crushed the bone.

The sight of one of these gins when set produced a vivid impression
that it was endowed with life. It exhibited the combined aspects of a
shark, a crocodile, and a scorpion. Each tooth was in the form of a
tapering spine, two and a quarter inches long, which, when the jaws
were closed, stood in alternation from this side and from that. When
they were open, the two halves formed a complete circle between two and
three feet in diameter, the plate or treading-place in the midst being
about a foot square, while from beneath extended in opposite directions
the soul of the apparatus, the pair of springs, each one being of a
stiffness to render necessary a lever or the whole weight of the body
when forcing it down.

There were men at this time still living at Hintock who remembered when
the gin and others like it were in use. Tim Tangs’s great-uncle had
endured a night of six hours in this very trap, which lamed him for
life. Once a keeper of Hintock woods set it on the track of a poacher,
and afterwards, coming back that way, forgetful of what he had done,
walked into it himself. The wound brought on lockjaw, of which he died.
This event occurred during the thirties, and by the year 1840 the use
of such implements was well-nigh discontinued in the neighborhood. But
being made entirely of iron, they by no means disappeared, and in
almost every village one could be found in some nook or corner as
readily as this was found by Tim. It had, indeed, been a fearful
amusement of Tim and other Hintock lads—especially those who had a dim
sense of becoming renowned poachers when they reached their prime—to
drag out this trap from its hiding, set it, and throw it with billets
of wood, which were penetrated by the teeth to the depth of near an
inch.

As soon as he had examined the trap, and found that the hinges and
springs were still perfect, he shouldered it without more ado, and
returned with his burden to his own garden, passing on through the
hedge to the path immediately outside the boundary. Here, by the help
of a stout stake, he set the trap, and laid it carefully behind a bush
while he went forward to reconnoitre. As has been stated, nobody passed
this way for days together sometimes; but there was just a possibility
that some other pedestrian than the one in request might arrive, and it
behooved Tim to be careful as to the identity of his victim.

Going about a hundred yards along the rising ground to the right, he
reached a ridge whereon a large and thick holly grew. Beyond this for
some distance the wood was more open, and the course which Fitzpiers
must pursue to reach the point, if he came to-night, was visible a long
way forward.

For some time there was no sign of him or of anybody. Then there shaped
itself a spot out of the dim mid-distance, between the masses of
brushwood on either hand. And it enlarged, and Tim could hear the
brushing of feet over the tufts of sour-grass. The airy gait revealed
Fitzpiers even before his exact outline could be seen.

Tim Tangs turned about, and ran down the opposite side of the hill,
till he was again at the head of his own garden. It was the work of a
few moments to drag out the man-trap, very gently—that the plate might
not be disturbed sufficiently to throw it—to a space between a pair of
young oaks which, rooted in contiguity, grew apart upward, forming a
V-shaped opening between; and, being backed up by bushes, left this as
the only course for a foot-passenger. In it he laid the trap with the
same gentleness of handling, locked the chain round one of the trees,
and finally slid back the guard which was placed to keep the gin from
accidentally catching the arms of him who set it, or, to use the local
and better word, “toiled” it.

Having completed these arrangements, Tim sprang through the adjoining
hedge of his father’s garden, ran down the path, and softly entered the
house.

Obedient to his order, Suke had gone to bed; and as soon as he had
bolted the door, Tim unlaced and kicked off his boots at the foot of
the stairs, and retired likewise, without lighting a candle. His object
seemed to be to undress as soon as possible. Before, however, he had
completed the operation, a long cry resounded without—penetrating, but
indescribable.

“What’s that?” said Suke, starting up in bed.

“Sounds as if somebody had caught a hare in his gin.”

“Oh no,” said she. “It was not a hare, ’twas louder. Hark!”

“Do ’ee get to sleep,” said Tim. “How be you going to wake at half-past
three else?”

She lay down and was silent. Tim stealthily opened the window and
listened. Above the low harmonies produced by the instrumentation of
the various species of trees around the premises he could hear the
twitching of a chain from the spot whereon he had set the man-trap. But
further human sound there was none.

Tim was puzzled. In the haste of his project he had not calculated upon
a cry; but if one, why not more? He soon ceased to essay an answer, for
Hintock was dead to him already. In half a dozen hours he would be out
of its precincts for life, on his way to the antipodes. He closed the
window and lay down.

The hour which had brought these movements of Tim to birth had been
operating actively elsewhere. Awaiting in her father’s house the minute
of her appointment with her husband, Grace Fitzpiers deliberated on
many things. Should she inform her father before going out that the
estrangement of herself and Edgar was not so complete as he had
imagined, and deemed desirable for her happiness? If she did so she
must in some measure become the apologist of her husband, and she was
not prepared to go so far.

As for him, he kept her in a mood of considerate gravity. He certainly
had changed. He had at his worst times always been gentle in his manner
towards her. Could it be that she might make of him a true and worthy
husband yet? She had married him; there was no getting over that; and
ought she any longer to keep him at a distance? His suave deference to
her lightest whim on the question of his comings and goings, when as
her lawful husband he might show a little independence, was a trait in
his character as unexpected as it was engaging. If she had been his
empress, and he her thrall, he could not have exhibited a more
sensitive care to avoid intruding upon her against her will.

Impelled by a remembrance she took down a prayer-book and turned to the
marriage-service. Reading it slowly through, she became quite appalled
at her recent off-handedness, when she rediscovered what awfully solemn
promises she had made him at those chancel steps not so very long ago.

She became lost in long ponderings on how far a person’s conscience
might be bound by vows made without at the time a full recognition of
their force. That particular sentence, beginning “Whom God hath joined
together,” was a staggerer for a gentlewoman of strong devotional
sentiment. She wondered whether God really did join them together.
Before she had done deliberating the time of her engagement drew near,
and she went out of the house almost at the moment that Tim Tangs
retired to his own.

The position of things at that critical juncture was briefly as
follows.

Two hundred yards to the right of the upper end of Tangs’s garden
Fitzpiers was still advancing, having now nearly reached the summit of
the wood-clothed ridge, the path being the actual one which further on
passed between the two young oaks. Thus far it was according to Tim’s
conjecture. But about two hundred yards to the left, or rather less,
was arising a condition which he had not divined, the emergence of
Grace as aforesaid from the upper corner of her father’s garden, with
the view of meeting Tim’s intended victim. Midway between husband and
wife was the diabolical trap, silent, open, ready.

Fitzpiers’s walk that night had been cheerful, for he was convinced
that the slow and gentle method he had adopted was promising success.
The very restraint that he was obliged to exercise upon himself, so as
not to kill the delicate bud of returning confidence, fed his flame. He
walked so much more rapidly than Grace that, if they continued
advancing as they had begun, he would reach the trap a good half-minute
before she could reach the same spot.

But here a new circumstance came in; to escape the unpleasantness of
being watched or listened to by lurkers—naturally curious by reason of
their strained relations—they had arranged that their meeting for
to-night should be at the holm-tree on the ridge above named. So soon,
accordingly, as Fitzpiers reached the tree he stood still to await her.

He had not paused under the prickly foliage more than two minutes when
he thought he heard a scream from the other side of the ridge.
Fitzpiers wondered what it could mean; but such wind as there was just
now blew in an adverse direction, and his mood was light. He set down
the origin of the sound to one of the superstitious freaks or
frolicsome scrimmages between sweethearts that still survived in
Hintock from old-English times; and waited on where he stood till ten
minutes had passed. Feeling then a little uneasy, his mind reverted to
the scream; and he went forward over the summit and down the embowered
incline, till he reached the pair of sister oaks with the narrow
opening between them.

Fitzpiers stumbled and all but fell. Stretching down his hand to
ascertain the obstruction, it came in contact with a confused mass of
silken drapery and iron-work that conveyed absolutely no explanatory
idea to his mind at all. It was but the work of a moment to strike a
match; and then he saw a sight which congealed his blood.

The man-trap was thrown; and between its jaws was part of a woman’s
clothing—a patterned silk skirt—gripped with such violence that the
iron teeth had passed through it, skewering its tissue in a score of
places. He immediately recognized the skirt as that of one of his
wife’s gowns—the gown that she had worn when she met him on the very
last occasion.

Fitzpiers had often studied the effect of these instruments when
examining the collection at Hintock House, and the conception instantly
flashed through him that Grace had been caught, taken out mangled by
some chance passer, and carried home, some of her clothes being left
behind in the difficulty of getting her free. The shock of this
conviction, striking into the very current of high hope, was so great
that he cried out like one in corporal agony, and in his misery bowed
himself down to the ground.

Of all the degrees and qualities of punishment that Fitzpiers had
undergone since his sins against Grace first began, not any even
approximated in intensity to this.

“Oh, my own—my darling! Oh, cruel Heaven—it is too much, this!” he
cried, writhing and rocking himself over the sorry accessories of her
he deplored.

The voice of his distress was sufficiently loud to be audible to any
one who might have been there to hear it; and one there was. Right and
left of the narrow pass between the oaks were dense bushes; and now
from behind these a female figure glided, whose appearance even in the
gloom was, though graceful in outline, noticeably strange.

She was in white up to the waist, and figured above. She was, in short,
Grace, his wife, lacking the portion of her dress which the gin
retained.

“Don’t be grieved about me—don’t, dear Edgar!” she exclaimed, rushing
up and bending over him. “I am not hurt a bit! I was coming on to find
you after I had released myself, but I heard footsteps; and I hid away,
because I was without some of my clothing, and I did not know who the
person might be.”

Fitzpiers had sprung to his feet, and his next act was no less
unpremeditated by him than it was irresistible by her, and would have
been so by any woman not of Amazonian strength. He clasped his arms
completely round, pressed her to his breast, and kissed her
passionately.

“You are not dead!—you are not hurt! Thank God—thank God!” he said,
almost sobbing in his delight and relief from the horror of his
apprehension. “Grace, my wife, my love, how is this—what has happened?”

“I was coming on to you,” she said as distinctly as she could in the
half-smothered state of her face against his. “I was trying to be as
punctual as possible, and as I had started a minute late I ran along
the path very swiftly—fortunately for myself. Just when I had passed
between these trees I felt something clutch at my dress from behind
with a noise, and the next moment I was pulled backward by it, and fell
to the ground. I screamed with terror, thinking it was a man lying down
there to murder me, but the next moment I discovered it was iron, and
that my clothes were caught in a trap. I pulled this way and that, but
the thing would not let go, drag it as I would, and I did not know what
to do. I did not want to alarm my father or anybody, as I wished nobody
to know of these meetings with you; so I could think of no other plan
than slipping off my skirt, meaning to run on and tell you what a
strange accident had happened to me. But when I had just freed myself
by leaving the dress behind, I heard steps, and not being sure it was
you, I did not like to be seen in such a pickle, so I hid away.”

“It was only your speed that saved you! One or both of your legs would
have been broken if you had come at ordinary walking pace.”

“Or yours, if you had got here first,” said she, beginning to realize
the whole ghastliness of the possibility. “Oh, Edgar, there has been an
Eye watching over us to-night, and we should be thankful indeed!”

He continued to press his face to hers. “You are mine—mine again now.”

She gently owned that she supposed she was. “I heard what you said when
you thought I was injured,” she went on, shyly, “and I know that a man
who could suffer as you were suffering must have a tender regard for
me. But how does this awful thing come here?”

“I suppose it has something to do with poachers.” Fitzpiers was still
so shaken by the sense of her danger that he was obliged to sit awhile,
and it was not until Grace said, “If I could only get my skirt out
nobody would know anything about it,” that he bestirred himself.

By their united efforts, each standing on one of the springs of the
trap, they pressed them down sufficiently to insert across the jaws a
billet which they dragged from a faggot near at hand; and it was then
possible to extract the silk mouthful from the monster’s bite, creased
and pierced with many holes, but not torn. Fitzpiers assisted her to
put it on again; and when her customary contours were thus restored
they walked on together, Grace taking his arm, till he effected an
improvement by clasping it round her waist.

The ice having been broken in this unexpected manner, she made no
further attempt at reserve. “I would ask you to come into the house,”
she said, “but my meetings with you have been kept secret from my
father, and I should like to prepare him.”

“Never mind, dearest. I could not very well have accepted the
invitation. I shall never live here again—as much for your sake as for
mine. I have news to tell you on this very point, but my alarm had put
it out of my head. I have bought a practice, or rather a partnership,
in the Midlands, and I must go there in a week to take up permanent
residence. My poor old great-aunt died about eight months ago, and left
me enough to do this. I have taken a little furnished house for a time,
till we can get one of our own.”

He described the place, and the surroundings, and the view from the
windows, and Grace became much interested. “But why are you not there
now?” she said.

“Because I cannot tear myself away from here till I have your promise.
Now, darling, you will accompany me there—will you not? To-night has
settled that.”

Grace’s tremblings had gone off, and she did not say nay. They went on
together.

The adventure, and the emotions consequent upon the reunion which that
event had forced on, combined to render Grace oblivious of the
direction of their desultory ramble, till she noticed they were in an
encircled glade in the densest part of the wood, whereon the moon, that
had imperceptibly added its rays to the scene, shone almost vertically.
It was an exceptionally soft, balmy evening for the time of year, which
was just that transient period in the May month when beech-trees have
suddenly unfolded large limp young leaves of the softness of
butterflies’ wings. Boughs bearing such leaves hung low around, and
completely enclosed them, so that it was as if they were in a great
green vase, which had moss for its bottom and leaf sides.

The clouds having been packed in the west that evening so as to retain
the departing glare a long while, the hour had seemed much earlier than
it was. But suddenly the question of time occurred to her.

“I must go back,” she said; and without further delay they set their
faces towards Hintock. As they walked he examined his watch by the aid
of the now strong moonlight.

“By the gods, I think I have lost my train!” said Fitzpiers.

“Dear me—whereabouts are we?” said she.

“Two miles in the direction of Sherton.”

“Then do you hasten on, Edgar. I am not in the least afraid. I
recognize now the part of the wood we are in and I can find my way back
quite easily. I’ll tell my father that we have made it up. I wish I had
not kept our meetings so private, for it may vex him a little to know I
have been seeing you. He is getting old and irritable, that was why I
did not. Good-by.”

“But, as I must stay at the Earl of Wessex to-night, for I cannot
possibly catch the train, I think it would be safer for you to let me
take care of you.”

“But what will my father think has become of me? He does not know in
the least where I am—he thinks I only went into the garden for a few
minutes.”

“He will surely guess—somebody has seen me for certain. I’ll go all the
way back with you to-morrow.”

“But that newly done-up place—the Earl of Wessex!”

“If you are so very particular about the publicity I will stay at the
Three Tuns.”

“Oh no—it is not that I am particular—but I haven’t a brush or comb or
anything!”




CHAPTER XLVIII.


All the evening Melbury had been coming to his door, saying, “I wonder
where in the world that girl is! Never in all my born days did I know
her bide out like this! She surely said she was going into the garden
to get some parsley.”

Melbury searched the garden, the parsley-bed, and the orchard, but
could find no trace of her, and then he made inquiries at the cottages
of such of his workmen as had not gone to bed, avoiding Tangs’s because
he knew the young people were to rise early to leave. In these
inquiries one of the men’s wives somewhat incautiously let out the fact
that she had heard a scream in the wood, though from which direction
she could not say.

This set Melbury’s fears on end. He told the men to light lanterns, and
headed by himself they started, Creedle following at the last moment
with quite a burden of grapnels and ropes, which he could not be
persuaded to leave behind, and the company being joined by the
hollow-turner and the man who kept the cider-house as they went along.

They explored the precincts of the village, and in a short time lighted
upon the man-trap. Its discovery simply added an item of fact without
helping their conjectures; but Melbury’s indefinite alarm was greatly
increased when, holding a candle to the ground, he saw in the teeth of
the instrument some frayings from Grace’s clothing. No intelligence of
any kind was gained till they met a woodman of Delborough, who said
that he had seen a lady answering to the description her father gave of
Grace, walking through the wood on a gentleman’s arm in the direction
of Sherton.

“Was he clutching her tight?” said Melbury.

“Well—rather,” said the man.

“Did she walk lame?”

“Well, ’tis true her head hung over towards him a bit.”

Creedle groaned tragically.

Melbury, not suspecting the presence of Fitzpiers, coupled this account
with the man-trap and the scream; he could not understand what it all
meant; but the sinister event of the trap made him follow on.
Accordingly, they bore away towards the town, shouting as they went,
and in due course emerged upon the highway.

Nearing Sherton-Abbas, the previous information was confirmed by other
strollers, though the gentleman’s supporting arm had disappeared from
these later accounts. At last they were so near Sherton that Melbury
informed his faithful followers that he did not wish to drag them
farther at so late an hour, since he could go on alone and inquire if
the woman who had been seen were really Grace. But they would not leave
him alone in his anxiety, and trudged onward till the lamplight from
the town began to illuminate their fronts. At the entrance to the High
Street they got fresh scent of the pursued, but coupled with the new
condition that the lady in the costume described had been going up the
street alone.

“Faith!—I believe she’s mesmerized, or walking in her sleep,” said
Melbury.

However, the identity of this woman with Grace was by no means certain;
but they plodded along the street. Percombe, the hair-dresser, who had
despoiled Marty of her tresses, was standing at his door, and they duly
put inquiries to him.

“Ah—how’s Little Hintock folk by now?” he said, before replying. “Never
have I been over there since one winter night some three year ago—and
then I lost myself finding it. How can ye live in such a one-eyed
place? Great Hintock is bad enough—hut Little Hintock—the bats and owls
would drive me melancholy-mad! It took two days to raise my sperrits to
their true pitch again after that night I went there. Mr. Melbury, sir,
as a man’s that put by money, why not retire and live here, and see
something of the world?”

The responses at last given by him to their queries guided them to the
building that offered the best accommodation in Sherton—having been
enlarged contemporaneously with the construction of the railway—namely,
the Earl of Wessex Hotel.

Leaving the others without, Melbury made prompt inquiry here. His alarm
was lessened, though his perplexity was increased, when he received a
brief reply that such a lady was in the house.

“Do you know if it is my daughter?” asked Melbury.

The waiter did not.

“Do you know the lady’s name?”

Of this, too, the household was ignorant, the hotel having been taken
by brand-new people from a distance. They knew the gentleman very well
by sight, and had not thought it necessary to ask him to enter his
name.

“Oh, the gentleman appears again now,” said Melbury to himself. “Well,
I want to see the lady,” he declared.

A message was taken up, and after some delay the shape of Grace
appeared descending round the bend of the stair-case, looking as if she
lived there, but in other respects rather guilty and frightened.

“Why—what the name—” began her father. “I thought you went out to get
parsley!”

“Oh, yes—I did—but it is all right,” said Grace, in a flurried whisper.
“I am not alone here. I am here with Edgar. It is entirely owing to an
accident, father.”

“Edgar! An accident! How does he come here? I thought he was two
hundred mile off.”

“Yes, so he is—I mean he has got a beautiful practice two hundred miles
off; he has bought it with his own money, some that came to him. But he
travelled here, and I was nearly caught in a man-trap, and that’s how
it is I am here. We were just thinking of sending a messenger to let
you know.”

Melbury did not seem to be particularly enlightened by this
explanation.

“You were caught in a man-trap?”

“Yes; my dress was. That’s how it arose. Edgar is up-stairs in his own
sitting-room,” she went on. “He would not mind seeing you, I am sure.”

“Oh, faith, I don’t want to see him! I have seen him too often a’ready.
I’ll see him another time, perhaps, if ’tis to oblige ’ee.”

“He came to see me; he wanted to consult me about this large
partnership I speak of, as it is very promising.”

“Oh, I am glad to hear it,” said Melbury, dryly.

A pause ensued, during which the inquiring faces and whity-brown
clothes of Melbury’s companions appeared in the door-way.

“Then bain’t you coming home with us?” he asked.

“I—I think not,” said Grace, blushing.

“H’m—very well—you are your own mistress,” he returned, in tones which
seemed to assert otherwise. “Good-night;” and Melbury retreated towards
the door.

“Don’t be angry, father,” she said, following him a few steps. “I have
done it for the best.”

“I am not angry, though it is true I have been a little misled in this.
However, good-night. I must get home along.”

He left the hotel, not without relief, for to be under the eyes of
strangers while he conversed with his lost child had embarrassed him
much. His search-party, too, had looked awkward there, having rushed to
the task of investigation—some in their shirt sleeves, others in their
leather aprons, and all much stained—just as they had come from their
work of barking, and not in their Sherton marketing attire; while
Creedle, with his ropes and grapnels and air of impending tragedy, had
added melancholy to gawkiness.

“Now, neighbors,” said Melbury, on joining them, “as it is getting
late, we’ll leg it home again as fast as we can. I ought to tell you
that there has been some mistake—some arrangement entered into between
Mr. and Mrs. Fitzpiers which I didn’t quite understand—an important
practice in the Midland counties has come to him, which made it
necessary for her to join him to-night—so she says. That’s all it
was—and I’m sorry I dragged you out.”

“Well,” said the hollow-turner, “here be we six mile from home, and
night-time, and not a hoss or four-footed creeping thing to our name. I
say, we’ll have a mossel and a drop o’ summat to strengthen our nerves
afore we vamp all the way back again? My throat’s as dry as a kex. What
d’ye say so’s?”

They all concurred in the need for this course, and proceeded to the
antique and lampless back street, in which the red curtain of the Three
Tuns was the only radiant object. As soon as they had stumbled down
into the room Melbury ordered them to be served, when they made
themselves comfortable by the long table, and stretched out their legs
upon the herring-boned sand of the floor. Melbury himself, restless as
usual, walked to the door while he waited for them, and looked up and
down the street.

“I’d gie her a good shaking if she were my maid; pretending to go out
in the garden, and leading folk a twelve-mile traipse that have got to
get up at five o’clock to morrow,” said a bark-ripper; who, not working
regularly for Melbury, could afford to indulge in strong opinions.

“I don’t speak so warm as that,” said the hollow-turner, “but if ’tis
right for couples to make a country talk about their separating, and
excite the neighbors, and then make fools of ’em like this, why, I
haven’t stood upon one leg for five-and-twenty year.”

All his listeners knew that when he alluded to his foot-lathe in these
enigmatic terms, the speaker meant to be impressive; and Creedle chimed
in with, “Ah, young women do wax wanton in these days! Why couldn’t she
ha’ bode with her father, and been faithful?” Poor Creedle was thinking
of his old employer.

“But this deceiving of folks is nothing unusual in matrimony,” said
Farmer Bawtree. “I knowed a man and wife—faith, I don’t mind owning, as
there’s no strangers here, that the pair were my own relations—they’d
be at it that hot one hour that you’d hear the poker and the tongs and
the bellows and the warming-pan flee across the house with the
movements of their vengeance; and the next hour you’d hear ’em singing
‘The Spotted Cow’ together as peaceable as two holy twins; yes—and very
good voices they had, and would strike in like professional
ballet-singers to one another’s support in the high notes.”

“And I knowed a woman, and the husband o’ her went away for
four-and-twenty year,” said the bark-ripper. “And one night he came
home when she was sitting by the fire, and thereupon he sat down
himself on the other side of the chimney-corner. ‘Well,’ says she,
‘have ye got any news?’ ‘Don’t know as I have,’ says he; ‘have you?’
‘No,’ says she, ‘except that my daughter by my second husband was
married last month, which was a year after I was made a widow by him.’
‘Oh! Anything else?’ he says. ‘No,’ says she. And there they sat, one
on each side of that chimney-corner, and were found by their neighbors
sound asleep in their chairs, not having known what to talk about at
all.”

“Well, I don’t care who the man is,” said Creedle, “they required a
good deal to talk about, and that’s true. It won’t be the same with
these.”

“No. He is such a projick, you see. And she is a wonderful scholar
too!”

“What women do know nowadays!” observed the hollow-turner. “You can’t
deceive ’em as you could in my time.”

“What they knowed then was not small,” said John Upjohn. “Always a good
deal more than the men! Why, when I went courting my wife that is now,
the skilfulness that she would show in keeping me on her pretty side as
she walked was beyond all belief. Perhaps you’ve noticed that she’s got
a pretty side to her face as well as a plain one?”

“I can’t say I’ve noticed it particular much,” said the hollow-turner,
blandly.

“Well,” continued Upjohn, not disconcerted, “she has. All women under
the sun be prettier one side than t’other. And, as I was saying, the
pains she would take to make me walk on the pretty side were unending!
I warrant that whether we were going with the sun or against the sun,
uphill or downhill, in wind or in lewth, that wart of hers was always
towards the hedge, and that dimple towards me. There was I, too simple
to see her wheelings and turnings; and she so artful, though two years
younger, that she could lead me with a cotton thread, like a blind ram;
for that was in the third climate of our courtship. No; I don’t think
the women have got cleverer, for they was never otherwise.”

“How many climates may there be in courtship, Mr. Upjohn?” inquired a
youth—the same who had assisted at Winterborne’s Christmas party.

“Five—from the coolest to the hottest—leastwise there was five in
mine.”

“Can ye give us the chronicle of ’em, Mr. Upjohn?”

“Yes—I could. I could certainly. But ’tis quite unnecessary. They’ll
come to ye by nater, young man, too soon for your good.”

“At present Mrs. Fitzpiers can lead the doctor as your mis’ess could
lead you,” the hollow-turner remarked. “She’s got him quite tame. But
how long ’twill last I can’t say. I happened to be setting a wire on
the top of my garden one night when he met her on the other side of the
hedge; and the way she queened it, and fenced, and kept that poor
feller at a distance, was enough to freeze yer blood. I should never
have supposed it of such a girl.”

Melbury now returned to the room, and the men having declared
themselves refreshed, they all started on the homeward journey, which
was by no means cheerless under the rays of the high moon. Having to
walk the whole distance they came by a foot-path rather shorter than
the highway, though difficult except to those who knew the country
well. This brought them by way of Great Hintock; and passing the
church-yard they observed, as they talked, a motionless figure standing
by the gate.

“I think it was Marty South,” said the hollow-turner, parenthetically.

“I think ’twas; ’a was always a lonely maid,” said Upjohn. And they
passed on homeward, and thought of the matter no more.

It was Marty, as they had supposed. That evening had been the
particular one of the week upon which Grace and herself had been
accustomed to privately deposit flowers on Giles’s grave, and this was
the first occasion since his death, eight months earlier, on which
Grace had failed to keep her appointment. Marty had waited in the road
just outside Little Hintock, where her fellow-pilgrim had been wont to
join her, till she was weary; and at last, thinking that Grace had
missed her and gone on alone, she followed the way to Great Hintock,
but saw no Grace in front of her. It got later, and Marty continued her
walk till she reached the church-yard gate; but still no Grace. Yet her
sense of comradeship would not allow her to go on to the grave alone,
and still thinking the delay had been unavoidable, she stood there with
her little basket of flowers in her clasped hands, and her feet chilled
by the damp ground, till more than two hours had passed.

She then heard the footsteps of Melbury’s men, who presently passed on
their return from the search. In the silence of the night Marty could
not help hearing fragments of their conversation, from which she
acquired a general idea of what had occurred, and where Mrs. Fitzpiers
then was.

Immediately they had dropped down the hill she entered the church-yard,
going to a secluded corner behind the bushes, where rose the unadorned
stone that marked the last bed of Giles Winterborne. As this solitary
and silent girl stood there in the moonlight, a straight slim figure,
clothed in a plaitless gown, the contours of womanhood so undeveloped
as to be scarcely perceptible, the marks of poverty and toil effaced by
the misty hour, she touched sublimity at points, and looked almost like
a being who had rejected with indifference the attribute of sex for the
loftier quality of abstract humanism. She stooped down and cleared away
the withered flowers that Grace and herself had laid there the previous
week, and put her fresh ones in their place.

“Now, my own, own love,” she whispered, “you are mine, and on’y mine;
for she has forgot ’ee at last, although for her you died. But
I—whenever I get up I’ll think of ’ee, and whenever I lie down I’ll
think of ’ee. Whenever I plant the young larches I’ll think that none
can plant as you planted; and whenever I split a gad, and whenever I
turn the cider-wring, I’ll say none could do it like you. If ever I
forget your name, let me forget home and Heaven!—But no, no, my love, I
never can forget ’ee; for you was a _good_ man, and did good things!”






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