Book: The Woodlanders

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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.



CHAPTER XXVIII.


A week had passed, and Mrs. Charmond had left Hintock House.
Middleton Abbey, the place of her sojourn, was about twenty miles
distant by road, eighteen by bridle-paths and footways.

Grace observed, for the first time, that her husband was restless,
that at moments he even was disposed to avoid her. The scrupulous
civility of mere acquaintanceship crept into his manner; yet, when
sitting at meals, he seemed hardly to hear her remarks. Her
little doings interested him no longer, while towards her father
his bearing was not far from supercilious. It was plain that his
mind was entirely outside her life, whereabouts outside it she
could not tell; in some region of science, possibly, or of
psychological literature. But her hope that he was again
immersing himself in those lucubrations which before her marriage
had made his light a landmark in Hintock, was founded simply on
the slender fact that he often sat up late.

One evening she discovered him leaning over a gate on Rub-Down
Hill, the gate at which Winterborne had once been standing, and
which opened on the brink of a steep, slanting down directly into
Blackmoor Vale, or the Vale of the White Hart, extending beneath
the eye at this point to a distance of many miles. His attention
was fixed on the landscape far away, and Grace's approach was so
noiseless that he did not hear her. When she came close she could
see his lips moving unconsciously, as to some impassioned
visionary theme.

She spoke, and Fitzpiers started. "What are you looking at?" she
asked.

"Oh! I was contemplating our old place of Buckbury, in my idle
way," he said.

It had seemed to her that he was looking much to the right of that
cradle and tomb of his ancestral dignity; but she made no further
observation, and taking his arm walked home beside him almost in
silence. She did not know that Middleton Abbey lay in the
direction of his gaze. "Are you going to have out Darling this
afternoon?" she asked, presently. Darling being the light-gray
mare which Winterborne had bought for Grace, and which Fitzpiers
now constantly used, the animal having turned out a wonderful
bargain, in combining a perfect docility with an almost human
intelligence; moreover, she was not too young. Fitzpiers was
unfamiliar with horses, and he valued these qualities.

"Yes," he replied, "but not to drive. I am riding her. I
practise crossing a horse as often as I can now, for I find that I
can take much shorter cuts on horseback."

He had, in fact, taken these riding exercises for about a week,
only since Mrs. Charmond's absence, his universal practice
hitherto having been to drive.

Some few days later, Fitzpiers started on the back of this horse
to see a patient in the aforesaid Vale. It was about five o'clock
in the evening when he went away, and at bedtime he had not
reached home. There was nothing very singular in this, though she
was not aware that he had any patient more than five or six miles
distant in that direction. The clock had struck one before
Fitzpiers entered the house, and he came to his room softly, as if
anxious not to disturb her.

The next morning she was stirring considerably earlier than he.

In the yard there was a conversation going on about the mare; the
man who attended to the horses, Darling included, insisted that
the latter was "hag-rid;" for when he had arrived at the stable
that morning she was in such a state as no horse could be in by
honest riding. It was true that the doctor had stabled her
himself when he got home, so that she was not looked after as she
would have been if he had groomed and fed her; but that did not
account for the appearance she presented, if Mr. Fitzpiers's
journey had been only where he had stated. The phenomenal
exhaustion of Darling, as thus related, was sufficient to develop
a whole series of tales about riding witches and demons, the
narration of which occupied a considerable time.

Grace returned in-doors. In passing through the outer room she
picked up her husband's overcoat which he had carelessly flung
down across a chair. A turnpike ticket fell out of the breast-
pocket, and she saw that it had been issued at Middleton Gate. He
had therefore visited Middleton the previous night, a distance of
at least five-and-thirty miles on horseback, there and back.

During the day she made some inquiries, and learned for the first
time that Mrs. Charmond was staying at Middleton Abbey. She could
not resist an inference--strange as that inference was.

A few days later he prepared to start again, at the same time and
in the same direction. She knew that the state of the cottager
who lived that way was a mere pretext; she was quite sure he was
going to Mrs. Charmond. Grace was amazed at the mildness of the
passion which the suspicion engendered in her. She was but little
excited, and her jealousy was languid even to death. It told
tales of the nature of her affection for him. In truth, her
antenuptial regard for Fitzpiers had been rather of the quality of
awe towards a superior being than of tender solicitude for a
lover. It had been based upon mystery and strangeness--the
mystery of his past, of his knowledge, of his professional skill,
of his beliefs. When this structure of ideals was demolished by
the intimacy of common life, and she found him as merely human as
the Hintock people themselves, a new foundation was in demand for
an enduring and stanch affection--a sympathetic interdependence,
wherein mutual weaknesses were made the grounds of a defensive
alliance. Fitzpiers had furnished none of that single-minded
confidence and truth out of which alone such a second union could
spring; hence it was with a controllable emotion that she now
watched the mare brought round.

"I'll walk with you to the hill if you are not in a great hurry,"
she said, rather loath, after all, to let him go.

"Do; there's plenty of time," replied her husband. Accordingly he
led along the horse, and walked beside her, impatient enough
nevertheless. Thus they proceeded to the turnpike road, and
ascended Rub-Down Hill to the gate he had been leaning over when
she surprised him ten days before. This was the end of her
excursion. Fitzpiers bade her adieu with affection, even with
tenderness, and she observed that he looked weary-eyed.

"Why do you go to-night?" she said. "You have been called up two
nights in succession already."

"I must go," he answered, almost gloomily. "Don't wait up for
me." With these words he mounted his horse, passed through the
gate which Grace held open for him, and ambled down the steep
bridle-track to the valley.

She closed the gate and watched his descent, and then his journey
onward. His way was east, the evening sun which stood behind her
back beaming full upon him as soon as he got out from the shade of
the hill. Notwithstanding this untoward proceeding she was
determined to be loyal if he proved true; and the determination to
love one's best will carry a heart a long way towards making that
best an ever-growing thing. The conspicuous coat of the active
though blanching mare made horse and rider easy objects for the
vision. Though Darling had been chosen with such pains by
Winterborne for Grace, she had never ridden the sleek creature;
but her husband had found the animal exceedingly convenient,
particularly now that he had taken to the saddle, plenty of
staying power being left in Darling yet. Fitzpiers, like others
of his character, while despising Melbury and his station, did not
at all disdain to spend Melbury's money, or appropriate to his own
use the horse which belonged to Melbury's daughter.

And so the infatuated young surgeon went along through the
gorgeous autumn landscape of White Hart Vale, surrounded by
orchards lustrous with the reds of apple-crops, berries, and
foliage, the whole intensified by the gilding of the declining
sun. The earth this year had been prodigally bountiful, and now
was the supreme moment of her bounty. In the poorest spots the
hedges were bowed with haws and blackberries; acorns cracked
underfoot, and the burst husks of chestnuts lay exposing their
auburn contents as if arranged by anxious sellers in a fruit-
market. In all this proud show some kernels were unsound as her
own situation, and she wondered if there were one world in the
universe where the fruit had no worm, and marriage no sorrow.

Herr Tannhauser still moved on, his plodding steed rendering him
distinctly visible yet. Could she have heard Fitzpiers's voice at
that moment she would have found him murmuring--


"...Towards the loadstar of my one desire
I flitted, even as a dizzy moth in the owlet light."


But he was a silent spectacle to her now. Soon he rose out of the
valley, and skirted a high plateau of the chalk formation on his
right, which rested abruptly upon the fruity district of loamy
clay, the character and herbage of the two formations being so
distinct that the calcareous upland appeared but as a deposit of a
few years' antiquity upon the level vale. He kept along the edge
of this high, unenclosed country, and the sky behind him being
deep violet, she could still see white Darling in relief upon it--
a mere speck now--a Wouvermans eccentricity reduced to microscopic
dimensions. Upon this high ground he gradually disappeared.

Thus she had beheld the pet animal purchased for her own use, in
pure love of her, by one who had always been true, impressed to
convey her husband away from her to the side of a new-found idol.
While she was musing on the vicissitudes of horses and wives, she
discerned shapes moving up the valley towards her, quite near at
hand, though till now hidden by the hedges. Surely they were
Giles Winterborne, with his two horses and cider-apparatus,
conducted by Robert Creedle. Up, upward they crept, a stray beam
of the sun alighting every now and then like a star on the blades
of the pomace-shovels, which had been converted to steel mirrors
by the action of the malic acid. She opened the gate when he came
close, and the panting horses rested as they achieved the ascent.

"How do you do, Giles?" said she, under a sudden impulse to be
familiar with him.

He replied with much more reserve. "You are going for a walk,
Mrs. Fitzpiers?" he added. "It is pleasant just now."

"No, I am returning," said she.

The vehicles passed through, the gate slammed, and Winterborne
walked by her side in the rear of the apple-mill.

He looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being
sunburnt to wheat-color, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his boots
and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the
sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere
about him that atmosphere of cider which at its first return each
season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have
been born and bred among the orchards. Her heart rose from its
late sadness like a released spring; her senses revelled in the
sudden lapse back to nature unadorned. The consciousness of
having to be genteel because of her husband's profession, the
veneer of artificiality which she had acquired at the fashionable
schools, were thrown off, and she became the crude, country girl
of her latent, earliest instincts.

Nature was bountiful, she thought. No sooner had she been starved
off by Edgar Fitzpiers than another being, impersonating bare and
undiluted manliness, had arisen out of the earth, ready to hand.
This was an excursion of the imagination which she did not
encourage, and she said suddenly, to disguise the confused regard
which had followed her thoughts, "Did you meet my husband?"

Winterborne, with some hesitation, "Yes."

"Where did you meet him?"

"At Calfhay Cross. I come from Middleton Abbey; I have been
making there for the last week."

"Haven't they a mill of their own?"

"Yes, but it's out of repair."

"I think--I heard that Mrs. Charmond had gone there to stay?"

"Yes. I have seen her at the windows once or twice."

Grace waited an interval before she went on: "Did Mr. Fitzpiers
take the way to Middleton?"

"Yes...I met him on Darling." As she did not reply, he added, with
a gentler inflection, "You know why the mare was called that?"

"Oh yes--of course," she answered, quickly.

They had risen so far over the crest of the hill that the whole
west sky was revealed. Between the broken clouds they could see
far into the recesses of heaven, the eye journeying on under a
species of golden arcades, and past fiery obstructions, fancied
cairns, logan-stones, stalactites and stalagmite of topaz. Deeper
than this their gaze passed thin flakes of incandescence, till it
plunged into a bottomless medium of soft green fire.

Her abandonment to the luscious time after her sense of ill-usage,
her revolt for the nonce against social law, her passionate desire
for primitive life, may have showed in her face. Winterborne was
looking at her, his eyes lingering on a flower that she wore in
her bosom. Almost with the abstraction of a somnambulist he
stretched out his hand and gently caressed the flower.

She drew back. "What are you doing, Giles Winterborne!" she
exclaimed, with a look of severe surprise. The evident absence of
all premeditation from the act, however, speedily led her to think
that it was not necessary to stand upon her dignity here and now.
"You must bear in mind, Giles," she said, kindly, "that we are not
as we were; and some people might have said that what you did was
taking a liberty."

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