The Woodlanders: Chapter 18
Chapter 18
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.
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