The Woodlanders: Chapter 40

Chapter 40

CHAPTER XL.


Life among the people involved in these events seemed to be
suppressed and hide-bound for a while.  Grace seldom showed
herself outside the house, never outside the garden; for she
feared she might encounter Giles Winterborne; and that she could
not bear.

This pensive intramural existence of the self-constituted nun
appeared likely to continue for an indefinite time.  She had
learned that there was one possibility in which her formerly
imagined position might become real, and only one; that her
husband's absence should continue long enough to amount to
positive desertion.  But she never allowed her mind to dwell much
upon the thought; still less did she deliberately hope for such a
result.  Her regard for Winterborne had been rarefied by the shock
which followed its avowal into an ethereal emotion that had little
to do with living and doing.

As for Giles, he was lying--or rather sitting--ill at his hut.  A
feverish indisposition which had been hanging about him for some
time, the result of a chill caught the previous winter, seemed to
acquire virulence with the prostration of his hopes.  But not a
soul knew of his languor, and he did not think the case serious
enough to send for a medical man.  After a few days he was better
again, and crept about his home in a great coat, attending to his
simple wants as usual with his own hands.  So matters stood when
the limpid inertion of Grace's pool-like existence was disturbed
as by a geyser.  She received a letter from Fitzpiers.

Such a terrible letter it was in its import, though couched in the
gentlest language.  In his absence Grace had grown to regard him
with toleration, and her relation to him with equanimity, till she
had almost forgotten how trying his presence would be.  He wrote
briefly and unaffectedly; he made no excuses, but informed her
that he was living quite alone, and had been led to think that
they ought to be together, if she would make up her mind to
forgive him.  He therefore purported to cross the Channel to
Budmouth by the steamer on a day he named, which she found to be
three days after the time of her present reading.

He said that he could not come to Hintock for obvious reasons,
which her father would understand even better than herself.  As
the only alternative she was to be on the quay to meet the steamer
when it arrived from the opposite coast, probably about half an
hour before midnight, bringing with her any luggage she might
require; join him there, and pass with him into the twin vessel,
which left immediately the other entered the harbor; returning
thus with him to his continental dwelling-place, which he did not
name.  He had no intention of showing himself on land at all.

The troubled Grace took the letter to her father, who now
continued for long hours by the fireless summer chimney-corner, as
if he thought it were winter, the pitcher of cider standing beside
him, mostly untasted, and coated with a film of dust.  After
reading it he looked up.

"You sha'n't go," said he.

"I had felt I would not," she answered.  "But I did not know what
you would say."

"If he comes and lives in England, not too near here and in a
respectable way, and wants you to come to him, I am not sure that
I'll oppose him in wishing it," muttered Melbury.  "I'd stint
myself to keep you both in a genteel and seemly style.  But go
abroad you never shall with my consent."

There the question rested that day.  Grace was unable to reply to
her husband in the absence of an address, and the morrow came, and
the next day, and the evening on which he had requested her to
meet him.  Throughout the whole of it she remained within the four
walls of her room.

The sense of her harassment, carking doubt of what might be
impending, hung like a cowl of blackness over the Melbury
household.  They spoke almost in whispers, and wondered what
Fitzpiers would do next.  It was the hope of every one that,
finding she did not arrive, he would return again to France; and
as for Grace, she was willing to write to him on the most kindly
terms if he would only keep away.

The night passed, Grace lying tense and wide awake, and her
relatives, in great part, likewise.  When they met the next
morning they were pale and anxious, though neither speaking of the
subject which occupied all their thoughts.  The day passed as
quietly as the previous ones, and she began to think that in the
rank caprice of his moods he had abandoned the idea of getting her
to join him as quickly as it was formed.  All on a sudden, some
person who had just come from Sherton entered the house with the
news that Mr. Fitzpiers was on his way home to Hintock.  He had
been seen hiring a carriage at the Earl of Wessex Hotel.

Her father and Grace were both present when the intelligence was
announced.

"Now," said Melbury, "we must make the best of what has been a
very bad matter.  The man is repenting; the partner of his shame,
I hear, is gone away from him to Switzerland, so that chapter of
his life is probably over.  If he chooses to make a home for ye I
think you should not say him nay, Grace.  Certainly he cannot very
well live at Hintock without a blow to his pride; but if he can
bear that, and likes Hintock best, why, there's the empty wing of
the house as it was before."

"Oh, father!" said Grace, turning white with dismay.

"Why not?" said he, a little of his former doggedness returning.
He was, in truth, disposed to somewhat more leniency towards her
husband just now than he had shown formerly, from a conviction
that he had treated him over-roughly in his anger.  "Surely it is
the most respectable thing to do?" he continued.  "I don't like
this state that you are in--neither married nor single.  It hurts
me, and it hurts you, and it will always be remembered against us
in Hintock.  There has never been any scandal like it in the
family before."

"He will be here in less than an hour," murmured Grace.  The
twilight of the room prevented her father seeing the despondent
misery of her face.  The one intolerable condition, the condition
she had deprecated above all others, was that of Fitzpiers's
reinstatement there.  "Oh, I won't, I won't see him," she said,
sinking down.  She was almost hysterical.

"Try if you cannot," he returned, moodily.

"Oh yes, I will, I will," she went on, inconsequently.  "I'll
try;" and jumping up suddenly, she left the room.

In the darkness of the apartment to which she flew nothing could
have been seen during the next half-hour; but from a corner a
quick breathing was audible from this impressible creature, who
combined modern nerves with primitive emotions, and was doomed by
such coexistence to be numbered among the distressed, and to take
her scourgings to their exquisite extremity.

The window was open.  On this quiet, late summer evening, whatever
sound arose in so secluded a district--the chirp of a bird, a call
from a voice, the turning of a wheel--extended over bush and tree
to unwonted distances.  Very few sounds did arise.  But as Grace
invisibly breathed in the brown glooms of the chamber, the small
remote noise of light wheels came in to her, accompanied by the
trot of a horse on the turnpike-road.  There seemed to be a sudden
hitch or pause in the progress of the vehicle, which was what
first drew her attention to it.  She knew the point whence the
sound proceeded--the hill-top over which travellers passed on
their way hitherward from Sherton Abbas--the place at which she
had emerged from the wood with Mrs. Charmond.  Grace slid along
the floor, and bent her head over the window-sill, listening with
open lips.  The carriage had stopped, and she heard a man use
exclamatory words.  Then another said, "What the devil is the
matter with the horse?" She recognized the voice as her husband's.

The accident, such as it had been, was soon remedied, and the
carriage could be heard descending the hill on the Hintock side,
soon to turn into the lane leading out of the highway, and then
into the "drong" which led out of the lane to the house where she
was.

A spasm passed through Grace.  The Daphnean instinct,
exceptionally strong in her as a girl, had been revived by her
widowed seclusion; and it was not lessened by her affronted
sentiments towards the comer, and her regard for another man.  She
opened some little ivory tablets that lay on the dressing-table,
scribbled in pencil on one of them, "I am gone to visit one of my
school-friends," gathered a few toilet necessaries into a hand-
bag, and not three minutes after that voice had been heard, her
slim form, hastily wrapped up from observation, might have been
seen passing out of the back door of Melbury's house.  Thence she
skimmed up the garden-path, through the gap in the hedge, and into
the mossy cart-track under the trees which led into the depth of
the woods.

The leaves overhead were now in their latter green--so opaque,
that it was darker at some of the densest spots than in winter-
time, scarce a crevice existing by which a ray could get down to
the ground.  But in open places she could see well enough.  Summer
was ending: in the daytime singing insects hung in every sunbeam;
vegetation was heavy nightly with globes of dew; and after showers
creeping damps and twilight chills came up from the hollows.  The
plantations were always weird at this hour of eve--more spectral
far than in the leafless season, when there were fewer masses and
more minute lineality.  The smooth surfaces of glossy plants came
out like weak, lidless eyes; there were strange faces and figures
from expiring lights that had somehow wandered into the canopied
obscurity; while now and then low peeps of the sky between the
trunks were like sheeted shapes, and on the tips of boughs sat
faint cloven tongues.

But Grace's fear just now was not imaginative or spiritual, and
she heeded these impressions but little.  She went on as silently
as she could, avoiding the hollows wherein leaves had accumulated,
and stepping upon soundless moss and grass-tufts.  She paused
breathlessly once or twice, and fancied that she could hear, above
the beat of her strumming pulse, the vehicle containing Fitzpiers
turning in at the gate of her father's premises.  She hastened on
again.

The Hintock woods owned by Mrs. Charmond were presently left
behind, and those into which she next plunged were divided from
the latter by a bank, from whose top the hedge had long ago
perished--starved for want of sun.  It was with some caution that
Grace now walked, though she was quite free from any of the
commonplace timidities of her ordinary pilgrimages to such spots.
She feared no lurking harms, but that her effort would be all in
vain, and her return to the house rendered imperative.

She had walked between three and four miles when that prescriptive
comfort and relief to wanderers in woods--a distant light--broke
at last upon her searching eyes.  It was so very small as to be
almost sinister to a stranger, but to her it was what she sought.
She pushed forward, and the dim outline of a dwelling was
disclosed.

The house was a square cot of one story only, sloping up on all
sides to a chimney in the midst.  It had formerly been the home of
a charcoal-burner, in times when that fuel was still used in the
county houses.  Its only appurtenance was a paled enclosure, there
being no garden, the shade of the trees preventing the growth of
vegetables.  She advanced to the window whence the rays of light
proceeded, and the shutters being as yet unclosed, she could
survey the whole interior through the panes.

The room within was kitchen, parlor, and scullery all in one; the
natural sandstone floor was worn into hills and dales by long
treading, so that none of the furniture stood level, and the table
slanted like a desk.  A fire burned on the hearth, in front of
which revolved the skinned carcass of a rabbit, suspended by a
string from a nail.  Leaning with one arm on the mantle-shelf
stood Winterborne, his eyes on the roasting animal, his face so
rapt that speculation could build nothing on it concerning his
thoughts, more than that they were not with the scene before him.
She thought his features had changed a little since she saw them
last.  The fire-light did not enable her to perceive that they
were positively haggard.

Grace's throat emitted a gasp of relief at finding the result so
nearly as she had hoped.  She went to the door and tapped lightly.

He seemed to be accustomed to the noises of woodpeckers,
squirrels, and such small creatures, for he took no notice of her
tiny signal, and she knocked again.  This time he came and opened
the door.  When the light of the room fell upon her face he
started, and, hardly knowing what he did, crossed the threshold to
her, placing his hands upon her two arms, while surprise, joy,
alarm, sadness, chased through him by turns.  With Grace it was
the same: even in this stress there was the fond fact that they
had met again.  Thus they stood,


    "Long tears upon their faces, waxen white
         With extreme sad delight."


He broke the silence by saying in a whisper, "Come in."

"No, no, Giles!" she answered, hurriedly, stepping yet farther
back from the door.  "I am passing by--and I have called on you--I
won't enter.  Will you help me?  I am afraid.  I want to get by a
roundabout way to Sherton, and so to Exbury.  I have a school-
fellow there--but I cannot get to Sherton alone.  Oh, if you will
only accompany me a little way! Don't condemn me, Giles, and be
offended! I was obliged to come to you because--I have no other
help here.  Three months ago you were my lover; now you are only
my friend.  The law has stepped in, and forbidden what we thought
of.  It must not be.  But we can act honestly, and yet you can be
my friend for one little hour?  I have no other--"

She could get no further.  Covering her eyes with one hand, by an
effort of repression she wept a silent trickle, without a sigh or
sob.  Winterborne took her other hand.  "What has happened?" he
said.

"He has come."

There was a stillness as of death, till Winterborne asked, "You
mean this, Grace--that I am to help you to get away?"

"Yes," said she.  "Appearance is no matter, when the reality is
right.  I have said to myself I can trust you."

Giles knew from this that she did not suspect his treachery--if it
could be called such--earlier in the summer, when they met for the
last time as lovers; and in the intensity of his contrition for
that tender wrong, he determined to deserve her faith now at
least, and so wipe out that reproach from his conscience.  "I'll
come at once," he said.  "I'll light a lantern."

He unhooked a dark-lantern from a nail under the eaves and she did
not notice how his hand shook with the slight strain, or dream
that in making this offer he was taxing a convalescence which
could ill afford such self-sacrifice.  The lantern was lit, and
they started.

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