The Woodlanders: Chapter 17
Chapter 17
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 w as 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 materiel 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.
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