Book: The Woodlanders

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He fell, and did not move, lying as Melbury afterwards found him.
The boy ran away, salving his conscience for the desertion by
thinking how vigorously he would spread the alarm of the accident
when he got to Hintock--which he uncompromisingly did, incrusting
the skeleton event with a load of dramatic horrors.

Grace had returned, and the fly hired on her account, though not
by her husband, at the Crown Hotel, Shottsford-Forum, had been
paid for and dismissed. The long drive had somewhat revived her,
her illness being a feverish intermittent nervousness which had
more to do with mind than body, and she walked about her sitting-
room in something of a hopeful mood. Mrs. Melbury had told her as
soon as she arrived that her husband had returned from London. He
had gone out, she said, to see a patient, as she supposed, and he
must soon be back, since he had had no dinner or tea. Grace would
not allow her mind to harbor any suspicion of his whereabouts, and
her step-mother said nothing of Mrs. Charmond's rumored sorrows
and plans of departure.

So the young wife sat by the fire, waiting silently. She had left
Hintock in a turmoil of feeling after the revelation of Mrs.
Charmond, and had intended not to be at home when her husband
returned. But she had thought the matter over, and had allowed
her father's influence to prevail and bring her back; and now
somewhat regretted that Edgar's arrival had preceded hers.

By-and-by Mrs. Melbury came up-stairs with a slight air of flurry
and abruptness.

"I have something to tell--some bad news," she said. "But you
must not be alarmed, as it is not so bad as it might have been.
Edgar has been thrown off his horse. We don't think he is hurt
much. It happened in the wood the other side of Nellcombe Bottom,
where 'tis said the ghosts of the brothers walk."

She went on to give a few of the particulars, but none of the
invented horrors that had been communicated by the boy. "I
thought it better to tell you at once," she added, "in case he
should not be very well able to walk home, and somebody should
bring him."

Mrs. Melbury really thought matters much worse than she
represented, and Grace knew that she thought so. She sat down
dazed for a few minutes, returning a negative to her step-mother's
inquiry if she could do anything for her. "But please go into the
bedroom," Grace said, on second thoughts, "and see if all is ready
there--in case it is serious." Mrs. Melbury thereupon called
Grammer, and they did as directed, supplying the room with
everything they could think of for the accommodation of an injured
man.

Nobody was left in the lower part of the house. Not many minutes
passed when Grace heard a knock at the door--a single knock, not
loud enough to reach the ears of those in the bedroom. She went
to the top of the stairs and said, faintly, "Come up," knowing
that the door stood, as usual in such houses, wide open.

Retreating into the gloom of the broad landing she saw rise up the
stairs a woman whom at first she did not recognize, till her voice
revealed her to be Suke Damson, in great fright and sorrow. A
streak of light from the partially closed door of Grace's room
fell upon her face as she came forward, and it was drawn and pale.

"Oh, Miss Melbury--I would say Mrs. Fitzpiers," she said, wringing
her hands. "This terrible news. Is he dead? Is he hurted very
bad? Tell me; I couldn't help coming; please forgive me, Miss
Melbury--Mrs. Fitzpiers I would say!"

Grace sank down on the oak chest which stood on the landing, and
put her hands to her now flushed face and head. Could she order
Suke Damson down-stairs and out of the house? Her husband might be
brought in at any moment, and what would happen? But could she
order this genuinely grieved woman away?

There was a dead silence of half a minute or so, till Suke said,
"Why don't ye speak? Is he here? Is he dead? If so, why can't I
see him--would it be so very wrong?"

Before Grace had answered somebody else came to the door below--a
foot-fall light as a roe's. There was a hurried tapping upon the
panel, as if with the impatient tips of fingers whose owner
thought not whether a knocker were there or no. Without a pause,
and possibly guided by the stray beam of light on the landing, the
newcomer ascended the staircase as the first had done. Grace was
sufficiently visible, and the lady, for a lady it was, came to her
side.

"I could make nobody hear down-stairs," said Felice Charmond, with
lips whose dryness could almost be heard, and panting, as she
stood like one ready to sink on the floor with distress. "What
is--the matter--tell me the worst! Can he live?" She looked at
Grace imploringly, without perceiving poor Suke, who, dismayed at
such a presence, had shrunk away into the shade.

Mrs. Charmond's little feet were covered with mud; she was quite
unconscious of her appearance now. "I have heard such a dreadful
report," she went on; "I came to ascertain the truth of it. Is
he--killed?"

"She won't tell us--he's dying--he's in that room!" burst out
Suke, regardless of consequences, as she heard the distant
movements of Mrs. Melbury and Grammer in the bedroom at the end of
the passage.

"Where?" said Mrs. Charmond; and on Suke pointing out the
direction, she made as if to go thither.

Grace barred the way. "He is not there," she said. "I have not
seen him any more than you. I have heard a report only--not so
bad as you think. It must have been exaggerated to you."

"Please do not conceal anything--let me know all!" said Felice,
doubtingly.

"You shall know all I know--you have a perfect right to know--who
can have a better than either of you?" said Grace, with a delicate
sting which was lost upon Felice Charmond now. "I repeat, I have
only heard a less alarming account than you have heard; how much
it means, and how little, I cannot say. I pray God that it means
not much--in common humanity. You probably pray the same--for
other reasons."

She regarded them both there in the dim light a while.

They stood dumb in their trouble, not stinging back at her; not
heeding her mood. A tenderness spread over Grace like a dew. It
was well, very well, conventionally, to address either one of them
in the wife's regulation terms of virtuous sarcasm, as woman,
creature, or thing, for losing their hearts to her husband. But
life, what was it, and who was she? She had, like the singer of
the psalm of Asaph, been plagued and chastened all the day long;
but could she, by retributive words, in order to please herself--
the individual--"offend against the generation," as he would not?

"He is dying, perhaps," blubbered Suke Damson, putting her apron
to her eyes.

In their gestures and faces there were anxieties, affection, agony
of heart, all for a man who had wronged them--had never really
behaved towards either of them anyhow but selfishly. Neither one
but would have wellnigh sacrificed half her life to him, even now.
The tears which his possibly critical situation could not bring to
her eyes surged over at the contemplation of these fellow-women.
She turned to the balustrade, bent herself upon it, and wept.

Thereupon Felice began to cry also, without using her
handkerchief, and letting the tears run down silently. While
these three poor women stood together thus, pitying another though
most to be pitied themselves, the pacing of a horse or horses
became audible in the court, and in a moment Melbury's voice was
heard calling to his stableman. Grace at once started up, ran
down the stairs and out into the quadrangle as her father crossed
it towards the door. "Father, what is the matter with him?" she
cried.

"Who--Edgar?" said Melbury, abruptly. "Matter? Nothing. What, my
dear, and have you got home safe? Why, you are better already! But
you ought not to be out in the air like this."

"But he has been thrown off his horse!"

"I know; I know. I saw it. He got up again, and walked off as
well as ever. A fall on the leaves didn't hurt a spry fellow like
him. He did not come this way," he added, significantly. "I
suppose he went to look for his horse. I tried to find him, but
could not. But after seeing him go away under the trees I found
the horse, and have led it home for safety. So he must walk.
Now, don't you stay out here in this night air.

She returned to the house with her father. when she had again
ascended to the landing and to her own rooms beyond it was a great
relief to her to find that both Petticoat the First and Petticoat
the Second of her Bien-aime had silently disappeared. They had,
in all probability, heard the words of her father, and departed
with their anxieties relieved.

Presently her parents came up to Grace, and busied themselves to
see that she was comfortable. Perceiving soon that she would
prefer to be left alone they went away.

Grace waited on. The clock raised its voice now and then, but her
husband did not return. At her father's usual hour for retiring
he again came in to see her. "Do not stay up," she said, as soon
as he entered. "I am not at all tired. I will sit up for him."

"I think it will be useless, Grace," said Melbury, slowly.

"Why?"

"I have had a bitter quarrel with him; and on that account I
hardly think he will return to-night."

"A quarrel? Was that after the fall seen by the boy?"

Melbury nodded an affirmative, without taking his eyes off the
candle.

"Yes; it was as we were coming home together," he said.

Something had been swelling up in Grace while her father was
speaking. "How could you want to quarrel with him?" she cried,
suddenly. "Why could you not let him come home quietly if he were
inclined to? He is my husband; and now you have married me to him
surely you need not provoke him unnecessarily. First you induce
me to accept him, and then you do things that divide us more than
we should naturally be divided!"

"How can you speak so unjustly to me, Grace?" said Melbury, with
indignant sorrow. "I divide you from your husband, indeed! You
little think--"

He was inclined to say more--to tell her the whole story of the
encounter, and that the provocation he had received had lain
entirely in hearing her despised. But it would have greatly
distressed her, and he forbore. "You had better lie down. You
are tired," he said, soothingly. "Good-night."

The household went to bed, and a silence fell upon the dwelling,
broken only by the occasional skirr of a halter in Melbury's
stables. Despite her father's advice Grace still waited up. But
nobody came.

It was a critical time in Grace's emotional life that night. She
thought of her husband a good deal, and for the nonce forgot
Winterborne.

"How these unhappy women must have admired Edgar!" she said to
herself. "How attractive he must be to everybody; and, indeed, he
is attractive." The possibility is that, piqued by rivalry, these
ideas might have been transformed into their corresponding
emotions by a show of the least reciprocity in Fitzpiers. There
was, in truth, a love-bird yearning to fly from her heart; and it
wanted a lodging badly.

But no husband came. The fact was that Melbury had been much
mistaken about the condition of Fitzpiers. People do not fall
headlong on stumps of underwood with impunity. Had the old man
been able to watch Fitzpiers narrowly enough, he would have
observed that on rising and walking into the thicket he dropped
blood as he went; that he had not proceeded fifty yards before he
showed signs of being dizzy, and, raising his hands to his head,
reeled and fell down.



CHAPTER XXXVI.


Grace was not the only one who watched and meditated in Hintock
that night. Felice Charmond was in no mood to retire to rest at a
customary hour; and over her drawing-room fire at the Manor House
she sat as motionless and in as deep a reverie as Grace in her
little apartment at the homestead.

Having caught ear of Melbury's intelligence while she stood on the
landing at his house, and been eased of much of her mental
distress, her sense of personal decorum returned upon her with a
rush. She descended the stairs and left the door like a ghost,
keeping close to the walls of the building till she got round to
the gate of the quadrangle, through which she noiselessly passed
almost before Grace and her father had finished their discourse.
Suke Damson had thought it well to imitate her superior in this
respect, and, descending the back stairs as Felice descended the
front, went out at the side door and home to her cottage.

Once outside Melbury's gates Mrs. Charmond ran with all her speed
to the Manor House, without stopping or turning her head, and
splitting her thin boots in her haste. She entered her own
dwelling, as she had emerged from it, by the drawing-room window.
In other circumstances she would have felt some timidity at
undertaking such an unpremeditated excursion alone; but her
anxiety for another had cast out her fear for herself.

Everything in her drawing-room was just as she had left it--the
candles still burning, the casement closed, and the shutters
gently pulled to, so as to hide the state of the window from the
cursory glance of a servant entering the apartment. She had been
gone about three-quarters of an hour by the clock, and nobody
seemed to have discovered her absence. Tired in body but tense in
mind, she sat down, palpitating, round-eyed, bewildered at what
she had done.

She had been betrayed by affrighted love into a visit which, now
that the emotion instigating it had calmed down under her belief
that Fitzpiers was in no danger, was the saddest surprise to her.
This was how she had set about doing her best to escape her
passionate bondage to him! Somehow, in declaring to Grace and to
herself the unseemliness of her infatuation, she had grown a
convert to its irresistibility. If Heaven would only give her
strength; but Heaven never did! One thing was indispensable; she
must go away from Hintock if she meant to withstand further
temptation. The struggle was too wearying, too hopeless, while
she remained. It was but a continual capitulation of conscience
to what she dared not name.

By degrees, as she sat, Felice's mind--helped perhaps by the
anticlimax of learning that her lover was unharmed after all her
fright about him--grew wondrously strong in wise resolve. For the
moment she was in a mood, in the words of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu,
"to run mad with discretion;" and was so persuaded that discretion
lay in departure that she wished to set about going that very
minute. Jumping up from her seat, she began to gather together
some small personal knick-knacks scattered about the room, to feel
that preparations were really in train.

While moving here and there she fancied that she heard a slight
noise out-of-doors, and stood still. Surely it was a tapping at
the window. A thought entered her mind, and burned her cheek. He
had come to that window before; yet was it possible that he should
dare to do so now! All the servants were in bed, and in the
ordinary course of affairs she would have retired also. Then she
remembered that on stepping in by the casement and closing it, she
had not fastened the window-shutter, so that a streak of light
from the interior of the room might have revealed her vigil to an
observer on the lawn. How all things conspired against her
keeping faith with Grace!

The tapping recommenced, light as from the bill of a little bird;
her illegitimate hope overcame her vow; she went and pulled back
the shutter, determining, however, to shake her head at him and
keep the casement securely closed.

What she saw outside might have struck terror into a heart stouter
than a helpless woman's at midnight. In the centre of the lowest
pane of the window, close to the glass, was a human face, which
she barely recognized as the face of Fitzpiers. It was surrounded
with the darkness of the night without, corpse-like in its pallor,
and covered with blood. As disclosed in the square area of the
pane it met her frightened eyes like a replica of the Sudarium of
St. Veronica.

He moved his lips, and looked at her imploringly. Her rapid mind
pieced together in an instant a possible concatenation of events
which might have led to this tragical issue. She unlatched the
casement with a terrified hand, and bending down to where he was
crouching, pressed her face to his with passionate solicitude.
She assisted him into the room without a word, to do which it was
almost necessary to lift him bodily. Quickly closing the window
and fastening the shutters, she bent over him breathlessly.

"Are you hurt much--much?" she cried, faintly. "Oh, oh, how is
this!"

"Rather much--but don't be frightened," he answered in a difficult
whisper, and turning himself to obtain an easier position if
possible. "A little water, please."

She ran across into the dining-room, and brought a bottle and
glass, from which he eagerly drank. He could then speak much
better, and with her help got upon the nearest couch.

"Are you dying, Edgar?" she said. "Do speak to me!"

"I am half dead," said Fitzpiers. "But perhaps I shall get over
it....It is chiefly loss of blood."

"But I thought your fall did not hurt you," said she. "Who did
this?"

"Felice--my father-in-law!...I have crawled to you more than a
mile on my hands and knees--God, I thought I should never have got
here!...I have come to you--be-cause you are the only friend--I
have in the world now....I can never go back to Hintock--never--to
the roof of the Melburys! Not poppy nor mandragora will ever
medicine this bitter feud!...If I were only well again--"

"Let me bind your head, now that you have rested."

"Yes--but wait a moment--it has stopped bleeding, fortunately, or
I should be a dead man before now. While in the wood I managed to
make a tourniquet of some half-pence and my handkerchief, as well
as I could in the dark....But listen, dear Felice! Can you hide me
till I am well? Whatever comes, I can be seen in Hintock no more.
My practice is nearly gone, you know--and after this I would not
care to recover it if I could."

By this time Felice's tears began to blind her. Where were now
her discreet plans for sundering their lives forever? To
administer to him in his pain, and trouble, and poverty, was her
single thought. The first step was to hide him, and she asked
herself where. A place occurred to her mind.

She got him some wine from the dining-room, which strengthened him
much. Then she managed to remove his boots, and, as he could now
keep himself upright by leaning upon her on one side and a
walking-stick on the other, they went thus in slow march out of
the room and up the stairs. At the top she took him along a
gallery, pausing whenever he required rest, and thence up a
smaller staircase to the least used part of the house, where she
unlocked a door. Within was a lumber-room, containing abandoned
furniture of all descriptions, built up in piles which obscured
the light of the windows, and formed between them nooks and lairs
in which a person would not be discerned even should an eye gaze
in at the door. The articles were mainly those that had belonged
to the previous owner of the house, and had been bought in by the
late Mr. Charmond at the auction; but changing fashion, and the
tastes of a young wife, had caused them to be relegated to this
dungeon.

Here Fitzpiers sat on the floor against the wall till she had
hauled out materials for a bed, which she spread on the floor in
one of the aforesaid nooks. She obtained water and a basin, and
washed the dried blood from his face and hands; and when he was
comfortably reclining, fetched food from the larder. While he ate
her eyes lingered anxiously on his face, following its every
movement with such loving-kindness as only a fond woman can show.

He was now in better condition, and discussed his position with
her.

"What I fancy I said to Melbury must have been enough to enrage
any man, if uttered in cold blood, and with knowledge of his
presence. But I did not know him, and I was stupefied by what he
had given me, so that I hardly was aware of what I said. Well--
the veil of that temple is rent in twain!...As I am not going to
be seen again in Hintock, my first efforts must be directed to
allay any alarm that may be felt at my absence, before I am able
to get clear away. Nobody must suspect that I have been hurt, or
there will be a country talk about me. Felice, I must at once
concoct a letter to check all search for me. I think if you can
bring me a pen and paper I may be able to do it now. I could rest
better if it were done. Poor thing! how I tire her with running
up and down!"

She fetched writing materials, and held up the blotting-book as a
support to his hand, while he penned a brief note to his nominal
wife.

"The animosity shown towards me by your father," he wrote, in this
coldest of marital epistles, "is such that I cannot return again
to a roof which is his, even though it shelters you. A parting is
unavoidable, as you are sure to be on his side in this division.
I am starting on a journey which will take me a long way from
Hintock, and you must not expect to see me there again for some
time."

He then gave her a few directions bearing upon his professional
engagements and other practical matters, concluding without a hint
of his destination, or a notion of when she would see him again.
He offered to read the note to Felice before he closed it up, but
she would not hear or see it; that side of his obligations
distressed her beyond endurance. She turned away from Fitzpiers,
and sobbed bitterly.

"If you can get this posted at a place some miles away," he
whispered, exhausted by the effort of writing--"at Shottsford or
Port-Bredy, or still better, Budmouth--it will divert all
suspicion from this house as the place of my refuge."

"I will drive to one or other of the places myself--anything to
keep it unknown," she murmured, her voice weighted with vague
foreboding, now that the excitement of helping him had passed
away.

Fitzpiers told her that there was yet one thing more to he done.
"In creeping over the fence on to the lawn," he said, "I made the
rail bloody, and it shows rather much on the white paint--I could
see it in the dark. At all hazards it should be washed off.
Could you do that also, Felice?"

What will not women do on such devoted occasions? weary as she was
she went all the way down the rambling staircases to the ground-
floor, then to search for a lantern, which she lighted and hid
under her cloak; then for a wet sponge, and next went forth into
the night. The white railing stared out in the darkness at her
approach, and a ray from the enshrouded lantern fell upon the
blood--just where he had told her it would be found. she
shuddered. It was almost too much to bear in one day--but with a
shaking hand she sponged the rail clean, and returned to the
house.

The time occupied by these several proceedings was not much less
than two hours. When all was done, and she had smoothed his
extemporized bed, and placed everything within his reach that she
could think of, she took her leave of him, and locked him in.



CHAPTER XXXVII.


When her husband's letter reached Grace's hands, bearing upon it
the postmark of a distant town, it never once crossed her mind
that Fitzpiers was within a mile of her still. she felt relieved
that he did not write more bitterly of the quarrel with her
father, whatever its nature might have been; but the general
frigidity of his communication quenched in her the incipient spark
that events had kindled so shortly before.

From this centre of information it was made known in Hintock that
the doctor had gone away, and as none but the Melbury household
was aware that he did not return on the night of his accident, no
excitement manifested itself in the village.

Thus the early days of May passed by. None but the nocturnal
birds and animals observed that late one evening, towards the
middle of the month, a closely wrapped figure, with a crutch under
one arm and a stick in his hand, crept out from Hintock House
across the lawn to the shelter of the trees, taking thence a slow
and laborious walk to the nearest point of the turnpike-road. The
mysterious personage was so disguised that his own wife would
hardly have known him. Felice Charmond was a practised hand at
make-ups, as well she might be; and she had done her utmost in
padding and painting Fitzpiers with the old materials of her art
in the recesses of the lumber-room.

In the highway he was met by a covered carriage, which conveyed
him to Sherton-Abbas, whence he proceeded to the nearest port on
the south coast, and immediately crossed the Channel.

But it was known to everybody that three days after this time Mrs.
Charmond executed her long-deferred plan of setting out for a long
term of travel and residence on the Continent. She went off one
morning as unostentatiously as could be, and took no maid with
her, having, she said, engaged one to meet her at a point farther
on in her route. After that, Hintock House, so frequently
deserted, was again to be let. Spring had not merged in summer
when a clinching rumor, founded on the best of evidence, reached
the parish and neighborhood. Mrs. Charmond and Fitzpiers had been
seen together in Baden, in relations which set at rest the
question that had agitated the little community ever since the
winter.

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