The Woodlanders: Chapter 42

Chapter 42

CHAPTER XLII.


The next morning Grace was at the window early.  She felt
determined to see him somehow that day, and prepared his breakfast
eagerly.  Eight o'clock struck, and she had remembered that he had
not come to arouse her by a knocking, as usual, her own anxiety
having caused her to stir.

The breakfast was set in its place without.  But he did not arrive
to take it; and she waited on.  Nine o'clock arrived, and the
breakfast was cold; and still there was no Giles.  A thrush, that
had been repeating itself a good deal on an opposite bush for some
time, came and took a morsel from the plate and bolted it, waited,
looked around, and took another.  At ten o'clock she drew in the
tray, and sat down to her own solitary meal.  He must have been
called away on business early, the rain having cleared off.

Yet she would have liked to assure herself, by thoroughly
exploring the precincts of the hut, that he was nowhere in its
vicinity; but as the day was comparatively fine, the dread lest
some stray passenger or woodman should encounter her in such a
reconnoitre paralyzed her wish.  The solitude was further
accentuated to-day by the stopping of the clock for want of
winding, and the fall into the chimney-corner of flakes of soot
loosened by the rains.  At noon she heard a slight rustling
outside the window, and found that it was caused by an eft which
had crept out of the leaves to bask in the last sun-rays that
would be worth having till the following May.

She continually peeped out through the lattice, but could see
little.  In front lay the brown leaves of last year, and upon them
some yellowish-green ones of this season that had been prematurely
blown down by the gale.  Above stretched an old beech, with vast
armpits, and great pocket-holes in its sides where branches had
been amputated in past times; a black slug was trying to climb it.
Dead boughs were scattered about like ichthyosauri in a museum,
and beyond them were perishing woodbine stems resembling old
ropes.

From the other window all she could see were more trees, jacketed
with lichen and stockinged with moss.  At their roots were
stemless yellow fungi like lemons and apricots, and tall fungi
with more stem than stool.  Next were more trees close together,
wrestling for existence, their branches disfigured with wounds
resulting from their mutual rubbings and blows.  It was the
struggle between these neighbors that she had heard in the night.
Beneath them were the rotting stumps of those of the group that
had been vanquished long ago, rising from their mossy setting like
decayed teeth from green gums.  Farther on were other tufts of
moss in islands divided by the shed leaves--variety upon variety,
dark green and pale green; moss-like little fir-trees, like plush,
like malachite stars, like nothing on earth except moss.

The strain upon Grace's mind in various ways was so great on this
the most desolate day she had passed there that she felt it would
be well-nigh impossible to spend another in such circumstances.
The evening came at last; the sun, when its chin was on the earth,
found an opening through which to pierce the shade, and stretched
irradiated gauzes across the damp atmosphere, making the wet
trunks shine, and throwing splotches of such ruddiness on the
leaves beneath the beech that they were turned to gory hues.  When
night at last arrived, and with it the time for his return, she
was nearly broken down with suspense.

The simple evening meal, partly tea, partly supper, which Grace
had prepared, stood waiting upon the hearth; and yet Giles did not
come.  It was now nearly twenty-four hours since she had seen him.
As the room grew darker, and only the firelight broke against the
gloom of the walls, she was convinced that it would be beyond her
staying power to pass the night without hearing from him or from
somebody.  Yet eight o'clock drew on, and his form at the window
did not appear.

The meal remained untasted.  Suddenly rising from before the
hearth of smouldering embers, where she had been crouching with
her hands clasped over her knees, she crossed the room, unlocked
the door, and listened.  Every breath of wind had ceased with the
decline of day, but the rain had resumed the steady dripping of
the night before.  Grace might have stood there five minutes when
she fancied she heard that old sound, a cough, at no great
distance; and it was presently repeated.  If it were
Winterborne's, he must be near her; why, then, had he not visited
her?

A horrid misgiving that he could not visit her took possession of
Grace, and she looked up anxiously for the lantern, which was
hanging above her head.  To light it and go in the direction of
the sound would be the obvious way to solve the dread problem; but
the conditions made her hesitate, and in a moment a cold sweat
pervaded her at further sounds from the same quarter.

They were low mutterings; at first like persons in conversation,
but gradually resolving themselves into varieties of one voice.
It was an endless monologue, like that we sometimes hear from
inanimate nature in deep secret places where water flows, or where
ivy leaves flap against stones; but by degrees she was convinced
that the voice was Winterborne's.  Yet who could be his listener,
so mute and patient; for though he argued so rapidly and
persistently, nobody replied.

A dreadful enlightenment spread through the mind of Grace.  "Oh,"
she cried, in her anguish, as she hastily prepared herself to go
out, "how selfishly correct I am always--too, too correct! Cruel
propriety is killing the dearest heart that ever woman clasped to
her own."

While speaking thus to herself she had lit the lantern, and
hastening out without further thought, took the direction whence
the mutterings had proceeded.  The course was marked by a little
path, which ended at a distance of about forty yards in a small
erection of hurdles, not much larger than a shock of corn, such as
were frequent in the woods and copses when the cutting season was
going on.  It was too slight even to be called a hovel, and was
not high enough to stand upright in; appearing, in short, to be
erected for the temporary shelter of fuel.  The side towards Grace
was open, and turning the light upon the interior, she beheld what
her prescient fear had pictured in snatches all the way thither.

Upon the straw within, Winterborne lay in his clothes, just as she
had seen him during the whole of her stay here, except that his
hat was off, and his hair matted and wild.

Both his clothes and the straw were saturated with rain.  His arms
were flung over his head; his face was flushed to an unnatural
crimson.  His eyes had a burning brightness, and though they met
her own, she perceived that he did not recognize her.

"Oh, my Giles," she cried, "what have I done to you!"

But she stopped no longer even to reproach herself.  She saw that
the first thing to be thought of was to get him indoors.

How Grace performed that labor she never could have exactly
explained.  But by dint of clasping her arms round him, rearing
him into a sitting posture, and straining her strength to the
uttermost, she put him on one of the hurdles that was loose
alongside, and taking the end of it in both her hands, dragged him
along the path to the entrance of the hut, and, after a pause for
breath, in at the door-way.

It was somewhat singular that Giles in his semi-conscious state
acquiesced unresistingly in all that she did.  But he never for a
moment recognized her--continuing his rapid conversation to
himself, and seeming to look upon her as some angel, or other
supernatural creature of the visionary world in which he was
mentally living.  The undertaking occupied her more than ten
minutes; but by that time, to her great thankfulness, he was in
the inner room, lying on the bed, his damp outer clothing removed.

Then the unhappy Grace regarded him by the light of the candle.
There was something in his look which agonized her, in the rush of
his thoughts, accelerating their speed from minute to minute.  He
seemed to be passing through the universe of ideas like a comet--
erratic, inapprehensible, untraceable.

Grace's distraction was almost as great as his.  In a few moments
she firmly believed he was dying.  Unable to withstand her
impulse, she knelt down beside him, kissed his hands and his face
and his hair, exclaiming, in a low voice, "How could I? How could
I?"

Her timid morality had, indeed, underrated his chivalry till now,
though she knew him so well.  The purity of his nature, his
freedom from the grosser passions, his scrupulous delicacy, had
never been fully understood by Grace till this strange self-
sacrifice in lonely juxtaposition to her own person was revealed.
The perception of it added something that was little short of
reverence to the deep affection for him of a woman who, herself,
had more of Artemis than of Aphrodite in her constitution.

All that a tender nurse could do, Grace did; and the power to
express her solicitude in action, unconscious though the sufferer
was, brought her mournful satisfaction.  She bathed his hot head,
wiped his perspiring hands, moistened his lips, cooled his fiery
eyelids, sponged his heated skin, and administered whatever she
could find in the house that the imagination could conceive as
likely to be in any way alleviating.  That she might have been the
cause, or partially the cause, of all this, interfused misery with
her sorrow.

Six months before this date a scene, almost similar in its
mechanical parts, had been enacted at Hintock House.  It was
between a pair of persons most intimately connected in their lives
with these.  Outwardly like as it had been, it was yet infinite in
spiritual difference, though a woman's devotion had been common to
both.

Grace rose from her attitude of affection, and, bracing her
energies, saw that something practical must immediately be done.
Much as she would have liked, in the emotion of the moment, to
keep him entirely to herself, medical assistance was necessary
while there remained a possibility of preserving him alive.  Such
assistance was fatal to her own concealment; but even had the
chance of benefiting him been less than it was, she would have run
the hazard for his sake.  The question was, where should she get a
medical man, competent and near?

There was one such man, and only one, within accessible distance;
a man who, if it were possible to save Winterborne's life, had the
brain most likely to do it.  If human pressure could bring him,
that man ought to be brought to the sick Giles's side.  The
attempt should be made.

Yet she dreaded to leave her patient, and the minutes raced past,
and yet she postponed her departure.  At last, when it was after
eleven o'clock, Winterborne fell into a fitful sleep, and it
seemed to afford her an opportunity.

She hastily made him as comfortable as she could, put on her
things, cut a new candle from the bunch hanging in the cupboard,
and having set it up, and placed it so that the light did not fall
upon his eyes, she closed the door and started.

The spirit of Winterborne seemed to keep her company and banish
all sense of darkness from her mind.  The rains had imparted a
phosphorescence to the pieces of touchwood and rotting leaves that
lay about her path, which, as scattered by her feet, spread abroad
like spilt milk.  She would not run the hazard of losing her way
by plunging into any short, unfrequented track through the denser
parts of the woodland, but followed a more open course, which
eventually brought her to the highway.  Once here, she ran along
with great speed, animated by a devoted purpose which had much
about it that was stoical; and it was with scarcely any faltering
of spirit that, after an hour's progress, she passed over Rubdown
Hill, and onward towards that same Hintock, and that same house,
out of which she had fled a few days before in irresistible alarm.
But that had happened which, above all other things of chance and
change, could make her deliberately frustrate her plan of flight
and sink all regard of personal consequences.

One speciality of Fitzpiers's was respected by Grace as much as
ever--his professional skill.  In this she was right.  Had his
persistence equalled his insight, instead of being the spasmodic
and fitful thing it was, fame and fortune need never have remained
a wish with him.  His freedom from conventional errors and crusted
prejudices had, indeed, been such as to retard rather than
accelerate his advance in Hintock and its neighborhood, where
people could not believe that nature herself effected cures, and
that the doctor's business was only to smooth the way.

It was past midnight when Grace arrived opposite her father's
house, now again temporarily occupied by her husband, unless he
had already gone away.  Ever since her emergence from the denser
plantations about Winterborne's residence a pervasive lightness
had hung in the damp autumn sky, in spite of the vault of cloud,
signifying that a moon of some age was shining above its arch.
The two white gates were distinct, and the white balls on the
pillars, and the puddles and damp ruts left by the recent rain,
had a cold, corpse-eyed luminousness.  She entered by the lower
gate, and crossed the quadrangle to the wing wherein the
apartments that had been hers since her marriage were situate,
till she stood under a window which, if her husband were in the
house, gave light to his bedchamber.

She faltered, and paused with her hand on her heart, in spite of
herself.  Could she call to her presence the very cause of all her
foregoing troubles? Alas!--old Jones was seven miles off; Giles
was possibly dying--what else could she do?

It was in a perspiration, wrought even more by consciousness than
by exercise, that she picked up some gravel, threw it at the
panes, and waited to see the result.  The night-bell which had
been fixed when Fitzpiers first took up his residence there still
remained; but as it had fallen into disuse with the collapse of
his practice, and his elopement, she did not venture to pull it
now.

Whoever slept in the room had heard her signal, slight as it was.
In half a minute the window was opened, and a voice said "Yes?"
inquiringly.  Grace recognized her husband in the speaker at once.
Her effort was now to disguise her own accents.

"Doctor," she said, in as unusual a tone as she could command, "a
man is dangerously ill in One-chimney Hut, out towards Delborough,
and you must go to him at once--in all mercy!"

"I will, readily."

The alacrity, surprise, and pleasure expressed in his reply amazed
her for a moment.  But, in truth, they denoted the sudden relief
of a man who, having got back in a mood of contrition, from
erratic abandonment to fearful joys, found the soothing routine of
professional practice unexpectedly opening anew to him.  The
highest desire of his soul just now was for a respectable life of
painstaking.  If this, his first summons since his return, had
been to attend upon a cat or dog, he would scarcely have refused
it in the circumstances.

"Do you know the way?" she asked.

"Yes," said he.

"One-chimney Hut," she repeated.  "And--immediately!"

"Yes, yes," said Fitzpiers.

Grace remained no longer.  She passed out of the white gate
without slamming it, and hastened on her way back.  Her husband,
then, had re-entered her father's house.  How he had been able to
effect a reconciliation with the old man, what were the terms of
the treaty between them, she could not so much as conjecture.
Some sort of truce must have been entered into, that was all she
could say.  But close as the question lay to her own life, there
was a more urgent one which banished it; and she traced her steps
quickly along the meandering track-ways.

Meanwhile, Fitzpiers was preparing to leave the house.  The state
of his mind, over and above his professional zeal, was peculiar.
At Grace's first remark he had not recognized or suspected her
presence; but as she went on, he was awakened to the great
resemblance of the speaker's voice to his wife's.  He had taken in
such good faith the statement of the household on his arrival,
that she had gone on a visit for a time because she could not at
once bring her mind to be reconciled to him, that he could not
quite actually believe this comer to be she.  It was one of the
features of Fitzpiers's repentant humor at this date that, on
receiving the explanation of her absence, he had made no attempt
to outrage her feelings by following her; though nobody had
informed him how very shortly her departure had preceded his
entry, and of all that might have been inferred from her
precipitancy.

Melbury, after much alarm and consideration, had decided not to
follow her either.  He sympathized with her flight, much as he
deplored it; moreover, the tragic color of the antecedent events
that he had been a great means of creating checked his instinct to
interfere.  He prayed and trusted that she had got into no danger
on her way (as he supposed) to Sherton, and thence to Exbury, if
that were the place she had gone to, forbearing all inquiry which
the strangeness of her departure would have made natural.  A few
months before this time a performance by Grace of one-tenth the
magnitude of this would have aroused him to unwonted
investigation.

It was in the same spirit that he had tacitly assented to
Fitzpiers's domicilation there.  The two men had not met face to
face, but Mrs. Melbury had proposed herself as an intermediary,
who made the surgeon's re-entrance comparatively easy to him.
Everything was provisional, and nobody asked questions.  Fitzpiers
had come in the performance of a plan of penitence, which had
originated in circumstances hereafter to be explained; his self-
humiliation to the very bass-string was deliberate; and as soon as
a call reached him from the bedside of a dying man his desire was
to set to work and do as much good as he could with the least
possible fuss or show.  He therefore refrained from calling up a
stableman to get ready any horse or gig, and set out for One-
chimney Hut on foot, as Grace had done.

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