The Woodlanders: Chapter 27

Chapter 27

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 furthur 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.

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