The Woodlanders: Chapter 29
Chapter 29
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. Pefore 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 opportnnity. 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, hut oppressed
between-whiles with much fear.
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