Book: The Woodlanders

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"Certainly not--certainly not," said Fitzpiers; and he entered the
room with the heroic smile of a martyr.

As soon as they sat down to table Melbury came in, and seemed to
see at once that Fitzpiers would much rather have received no such
demonstrative reception. He thereupon privately chid his wife for
her forwardness in the matter. Mrs. Melbury declared that it was
as much Grace's doing as hers, after which there was no more to be
said by that young woman's tender father. By this time Fitzpiers
was making the best of his position among the wide-elbowed and
genial company who sat eating and drinking and laughing and joking
around him; and getting warmed himself by the good cheer, was
obliged to admit that, after all, the supper was not the least
enjoyable he had ever known.

At times, however, the words about his having spoiled his
opportunities, repeated to him as those of Mrs. Charmond, haunted
him like a handwriting on the wall. Then his manner would become
suddenly abstracted. At one moment he would mentally put an
indignant query why Mrs. Charmond or any other woman should make
it her business to have opinions about his opportunities; at
another he thought that he could hardly be angry with her for
taking an interest in the doctor of her own parish. Then he would
drink a glass of grog and so get rid of the misgiving. These
hitches and quaffings were soon perceived by Grace as well as by
her father; and hence both of them were much relieved when the
first of the guests to discover that the hour was growing late
rose and declared that he must think of moving homeward. At the
words Melbury rose as alertly as if lifted by a spring, and in ten
minutes they were gone.

"Now, Grace," said her husband as soon as he found himself alone
with her in their private apartments, "we've had a very pleasant
evening, and everybody has been very kind. But we must come to an
understanding about our way of living here. If we continue in
these rooms there must be no mixing in with your people below. I
can't stand it, and that's the truth."

She had been sadly surprised at the suddenness of his distaste for
those old-fashioned woodland forms of life which in his courtship
he had professed to regard with so much interest. But she
assented in a moment.

"We must be simply your father's tenants," he continued, "and our
goings and comings must be as independent as if we lived
elsewhere."

"Certainly, Edgar--I quite see that it must be so."

"But you joined in with all those people in my absence, without
knowing whether I should approve or disapprove. When I came I
couldn't help myself at all."

She, sighing: "Yes--I see I ought to have waited; though they came
unexpectedly, and I thought I had acted for the best."

Thus the discussion ended, and the next day Fitzpiers went on his
old rounds as usual. But it was easy for so super-subtle an eye
as his to discern, or to think he discerned, that he was no longer
regarded as an extrinsic, unfathomed gentleman of limitless
potentiality, scientific and social; but as Mr. Melbury's compeer,
and therefore in a degree only one of themselves. The Hintock
woodlandlers held with all the strength of inherited conviction to
the aristocratic principle, and as soon as they had discovered
that Fitzpiers was one of the old Buckbury Fitzpierses they had
accorded to him for nothing a touching of hat-brims, promptness of
service, and deference of approach, which Melbury had to do
without, though he paid for it over and over. But now, having
proved a traitor to his own cause by this marriage, Fitzpiers was
believed in no more as a superior hedged by his own divinity;
while as doctor he began to be rated no higher than old Jones,
whom they had so long despised.

His few patients seemed in his two months' absence to have
dwindled considerably in number, and no sooner had he returned
than there came to him from the Board of Guardians a complaint
that a pauper had been neglected by his substitute. In a fit of
pride Fitzpiers resigned his appointment as one of the surgeons to
the union, which had been the nucleus of his practice here.

At the end of a fortnight he came in-doors one evening to Grace
more briskly than usual. "They have written to me again about
that practice in Budmouth that I once negotiated for," he said to
her. "The premium asked is eight hundred pounds, and I think that
between your father and myself it ought to be raised. Then we can
get away from this place forever."

The question had been mooted between them before, and she was not
unprepared to consider it. They had not proceeded far with the
discussion when a knock came to the door, and in a minute Grammer
ran up to say that a message had arrived from Hintock House
requesting Dr. Fitzpiers to attend there at once. Mrs. Charmond
had met with a slight accident through the overturning of her
carriage.

"This is something, anyhow," said Fitzpiers, rising with an
interest which he could not have defined. "I have had a
presentiment that this mysterious woman and I were to be better
acquainted."

The latter words were murmured to himself alone.

"Good-night," said Grace, as soon as he was ready. "I shall be
asleep, probably, when you return."

"Good-night, "he replied, inattentively, and went down-stairs. It
was the first time since their marriage that he had left her
without a kiss.



CHAPTER XXVI.


Winterborne's house had been pulled down. On this account his
face had been seen but fitfully in Hintock; and he would probably
have disappeared from the place altogether but for his slight
business connection with Melbury, on whose premises Giles kept his
cider-making apparatus, now that he had no place of his own to
stow it in. Coming here one evening on his way to a hut beyond
the wood where he now slept, he noticed that the familiar brown-
thatched pinion of his paternal roof had vanished from its site,
and that the walls were levelled. In present circumstances he had
a feeling for the spot that might have been called morbid, and
when he had supped in the hut aforesaid he made use of the spare
hour before bedtime to return to Little Hintock in the twilight
and ramble over the patch of ground on which he had first seen the
day.

He repeated this evening visit on several like occasions. Even in
the gloom he could trace where the different rooms had stood;
could mark the shape of the kitchen chimney-corner, in which he
had roasted apples and potatoes in his boyhood, cast his bullets,
and burned his initials on articles that did and did not belong to
him. The apple-trees still remained to show where the garden had
been, the oldest of them even now retaining the crippled slant to
north-east given them by the great November gale of 1824, which
carried a brig bodily over the Chesil Bank. They were at present
bent to still greater obliquity by the heaviness of their produce.
Apples bobbed against his head, and in the grass beneath he
crunched scores of them as he walked. There was nobody to gather
them now.

It was on the evening under notice that, half sitting, half
leaning against one of these inclined trunks, Winterborne had
become lost in his thoughts, as usual, till one little star after
another had taken up a position in the piece of sky which now
confronted him where his walls and chimneys had formerly raised
their outlines. The house had jutted awkwardly into the road, and
the opening caused by its absence was very distinct.

In the silence the trot of horses and the spin of carriage-wheels
became audible; and the vehicle soon shaped itself against the
blank sky, bearing down upon him with the bend in the lane which
here occurred, and of which the house had been the cause. He
could discern the figure of a woman high up on the driving-seat of
a phaeton, a groom being just visible behind. Presently there was
a slight scrape, then a scream. Winterborne went across to the
spot, and found the phaeton half overturned, its driver sitting on
the heap of rubbish which had once been his dwelling, and the man
seizing the horses' heads. The equipage was Mrs. Charmond's, and
the unseated charioteer that lady herself.

To his inquiry if she were hurt she made some incoherent reply to
the effect that she did not know. The damage in other respects
was little or none: the phaeton was righted, Mrs. Charmond placed
in it, and the reins given to the servant. It appeared that she
had been deceived by the removal of the house, imagining the gap
caused by the demolition to be the opening of the road, so that
she turned in upon the ruins instead of at the bend a few yards
farther on.

"Drive home--drive home!" cried the lady, impatiently; and they
started on their way. They had not, however, gone many paces
when, the air being still, Winterborne heard her say "Stop; tell
that man to call the doctor--Mr. Fitzpiers--and send him on to the
House. I find I am hurt more seriously than I thought."

Winterborne took the message from the groom and proceeded to the
doctor's at once. Having delivered it, he stepped back into the
darkness, and waited till he had seen Fitzpiers leave the door.
He stood for a few minutes looking at the window which by its
light revealed the room where Grace was sitting, and went away
under the gloomy trees.



Fitzpiers duly arrived at Hintock House, whose doors he now saw
open for the first time. Contrary to his expectation there was
visible no sign of that confusion or alarm which a serious
accident to the mistress of the abode would have occasioned. He
was shown into a room at the top of the staircase, cosily and
femininely draped, where, by the light of the shaded lamp, he saw
a woman of full round figure reclining upon a couch in such a
position as not to disturb a pile of magnificent hair on the crown
of her head. A deep purple dressing-gown formed an admirable foil
to the peculiarly rich brown of her hair-plaits; her left arm,
which was naked nearly up to the shoulder, was thrown upward, and
between the fingers of her right hand she held a cigarette, while
she idly breathed from her plump lips a thin stream of smoke
towards the ceiling.

The doctor's first feeling was a sense of his exaggerated
prevision in having brought appliances for a serious case; the
next, something more curious. While the scene and the moment were
new to him and unanticipated, the sentiment and essence of the
moment were indescribably familiar. What could be the cause of
it? Probably a dream.

Mrs. Charmond did not move more than to raise her eyes to him, and
he came and stood by her. She glanced up at his face across her
brows and forehead, and then he observed a blush creep slowly over
her decidedly handsome cheeks. Her eyes, which had lingered upon
him with an inquiring, conscious expression, were hastily
withdrawn, and she mechanically applied the cigarette again to her
lips.

For a moment he forgot his errand, till suddenly arousing himself
he addressed her, formally condoled with her, and made the usual
professional inquiries about what had happened to her, and where
she was hurt.

"That's what I want you to tell me," she murmured, in tones of
indefinable reserve. "I quite believe in you, for I know you are
very accomplished, because you study so hard."

"I'll do my best to justify your good opinion," said the young
man, bowing. "And none the less that I am happy to find the
accident has not been serious."

"I am very much shaken," she said.

"Oh yes," he replied; and completed his examination, which
convinced him that there was really nothing the matter with her,
and more than ever puzzled him as to why he had been fetched,
since she did not appear to be a timid woman. "You must rest a
while, and I'll send something," he said.

"Oh, I forgot," she returned. "Look here." And she showed him a
little scrape on her arm--the full round arm that was exposed.
"Put some court-plaster on that, please."

He obeyed. "And now," she said, "before you go I want to put a
question to you. Sit round there in front of me, on that low
chair, and bring the candles, or one, to the little table. Do you
smoke? Yes? That's right--I am learning. Take one of these; and
here's a light." She threw a matchbox across.

Fitzpiers caught it, and having lit up, regarded her from his new
position, which, with the shifting of the candles, for the first
time afforded him a full view of her face. "How many years have
passed since first we met!" she resumed, in a voice which she
mainly endeavored to maintain at its former pitch of composure,
and eying him with daring bashfulness.

"WE met, do you say?"

She nodded. "I saw you recently at an hotel in London, when you
were passing through, I suppose, with your bride, and I recognized
you as one I had met in my girlhood. Do you remember, when you
were studying at Heidelberg, an English family that was staying
there, who used to walk--"

"And the young lady who wore a long tail of rare-colored hair--ah,
I see it before my eyes!--who lost her gloves on the Great
Terrace--who was going back in the dusk to find them--to whom I
said, 'I'll go for them,' and you said, 'Oh, they are not worth
coming all the way up again for.' I DO remember, and how very long
we stayed talking there! I went next morning while the dew was on
the grass: there they lay--the little fingers sticking out damp
and thin. I see them now! I picked them up, and then--"

"Well?"

"I kissed them," he rejoined, rather shamefacedly.

"But you had hardly ever seen me except in the dusk?"

"Never mind. I was young then, and I kissed them. I wondered how
I could make the most of my trouvaille, and decided that I would
call at your hotel with them that afternoon. It rained, and I
waited till next day. I called, and you were gone."

"Yes," answered she, with dry melancholy. "My mother, knowing my
disposition, said she had no wish for such a chit as me to go
falling in love with an impecunious student, and spirited me away
to Baden. As it is all over and past I'll tell you one thing: I
should have sent you a line passing warm had I known your name.
That name I never knew till my maid said, as you passed up the
hotel stairs a month ago, 'There's Dr. Fitzpiers.'"

"Good Heaven!" said Fitzpiers, musingly. "How the time comes back
to me! The evening, the morning, the dew, the spot. When I found
that you really were gone it was as if a cold iron had been passed
down my back. I went up to where you had stood when I last saw
you---I flung myself on the grass, and--being not much more than a
boy--my eyes were literally blinded with tears. Nameless, unknown
to me as you were, I couldn't forget your voice."

"For how long?"

"Oh--ever so long. Days and days."

"Days and days! ONLY days and days? Oh, the heart of a man! Days
and days!"

"But, my dear madam, I had not known you more than a day or two.
It was not a full-blown love--it was the merest bud--red, fresh,
vivid, but small. It was a colossal passion in posse, a giant in
embryo. It never matured."

"So much the better, perhaps."

"Perhaps. But see how powerless is the human will against
predestination. We were prevented meeting; we have met. One
feature of the case remains the same amid many changes. You are
still rich, and I am still poor. Better than that, you have
(judging by your last remark) outgrown the foolish, impulsive
passions of your early girl-hood. I have not outgrown mine."

"I beg your pardon," said she, with vibrations of strong feeling
in her words. "I have been placed in a position which hinders
such outgrowings. Besides, I don't believe that the genuine
subjects of emotion do outgrow them; I believe that the older such
people get the worse they are. Possibly at ninety or a hundred
they may feel they are cured; but a mere threescore and ten won't
do it--at least for me."

He gazed at her in undisguised admiration. Here was a soul of
souls!

"Mrs. Charmond, you speak truly," he exclaimed. "But you speak
sadly as well. Why is that?"

"I always am sad when I come here," she said, dropping to a low
tone with a sense of having been too demonstrative.

"Then may I inquire why you came?"

"A man brought me. Women are always carried about like corks upon
the waves of masculine desires....I hope I have not alarmed you;
but Hintock has the curious effect of bottling up the emotions
till one can no longer hold them; I am often obliged to fly away
and discharge my sentiments somewhere, or I should die outright."

"There is very good society in the county for those who have the
privilege of entering it."

"Perhaps so. But the misery of remote country life is that your
neighbors have no toleration for difference of opinion and habit.
My neighbors think I am an atheist, except those who think I am a
Roman Catholic; and when I speak disrespectfully of the weather or
the crops they think I am a blasphemer."

She broke into a low musical laugh at the idea.

"You don't wish me to stay any longer?" he inquired, when he found
that she remained musing.

"No--I think not."

"Then tell me that I am to be gone."

"Why? Cannot you go without?"

"I may consult my own feelings only, if left to myself."

"Well, if you do, what then? Do you suppose you'll be in my way?"

"I feared it might be so."

"Then fear no more. But good-night. Come to-morrow and see if I
am going on right. This renewal of acquaintance touches me. I
have already a friendship for you."

"If it depends upon myself it shall last forever."

"My best hopes that it may. Good-by."

Fitzpiers went down the stairs absolutely unable to decide whether
she had sent for him in the natural alarm which might have
followed her mishap, or with the single view of making herself
known to him as she had done, for which the capsize had afforded
excellent opportunity. Outside the house he mused over the spot
under the light of the stars. It seemed very strange that he
should have come there more than once when its inhabitant was
absent, and observed the house with a nameless interest; that he
should have assumed off-hand before he knew Grace that it was here
she lived; that, in short, at sundry times and seasons the
individuality of Hintock House should have forced itself upon him
as appertaining to some existence with which he was concerned.

The intersection of his temporal orbit with Mrs. Charmond's for a
day or two in the past had created a sentimental interest in her
at the time, but it had been so evanescent that in the ordinary
onward roll of affairs he would scarce ever have recalled it
again. To find her here, however, in these somewhat romantic
circumstances, magnified that by-gone and transitory tenderness to
indescribable proportions.

On entering Little Hintock he found himself regarding it in a new
way--from the Hintock House point of view rather than from his own
and the Melburys'. The household had all gone to bed, and as he
went up-stairs he heard the snore of the timber-merchant from his
quarter of the building, and turned into the passage communicating
with his own rooms in a strange access of sadness. A light was
burning for him in the chamber; but Grace, though in bed, was not
asleep. In a moment her sympathetic voice came from behind the
curtains.

"Edgar, is she very seriously hurt?"

Fitzpiers had so entirely lost sight of Mrs. Charmond as a patient
that he was not on the instant ready with a reply.

"Oh no," he said. "There are no bones broken, but she is shaken.
I am going again to-morrow."

Another inquiry or two, and Grace said,

"Did she ask for me?"

"Well--I think she did--I don't quite remember; but I am under the
impression that she spoke of you."

"Cannot you recollect at all what she said?"

"I cannot, just this minute."

"At any rate she did not talk much about me?" said Grace with
disappointment.

"Oh no."

"But you did, perhaps," she added, innocently fishing for a
compliment.

"Oh yes--you may depend upon that!" replied he, warmly, though
scarcely thinking of what he was saving, so vividly was there
present to his mind the personality of Mrs. Charmond.



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.

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