The Woodlanders: Chapter 16
Chapter 16
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 foot-
path. 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 chararter 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
accessaries. 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 farm-
houses?"
"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
{Greek word: irony} 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.
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