Book: The Woodlanders

T >> Thomas Hardy >> The Woodlanders




Melbury had entered the Valley of Humiliation even farther than
Grace. His spirit seemed broken.

But once a week he mechanically went to market as usual, and here,
as he was passing by the conduit one day, his mental condition
expressed largely by his gait, he heard his name spoken by a voice
formerly familiar. He turned and saw a certain Fred Beaucock--
once a promising lawyer's clerk and local dandy, who had been
called the cleverest fellow in Sherton, without whose brains the
firm of solicitors employing him would be nowhere. But later on
Beaucock had fallen into the mire. He was invited out a good
deal, sang songs at agricultural meetings and burgesses' dinners;
in sum, victualled himself with spirits more frequently than was
good for the clever brains or body either. He lost his situation,
and after an absence spent in trying his powers elsewhere, came
back to his native town, where, at the time of the foregoing
events in Hintock, he gave legal advice for astonishingly small
fees--mostly carrying on his profession on public-house settles,
in whose recesses he might often have been overheard making
country-people's wills for half a crown; calling with a learned
voice for pen-and-ink and a halfpenny sheet of paper, on which he
drew up the testament while resting it in a little space wiped
with his hand on the table amid the liquid circles formed by the
cups and glasses. An idea implanted early in life is difficult to
uproot, and many elderly tradespeople still clung to the notion
that Fred Beaucock knew a great deal of law.

It was he who had called Melbury by name. "You look very down,
Mr. Melbury--very, if I may say as much," he observed, when the
timber-merchant turned. "But I know--I know. A very sad case--
very. I was bred to the law, as you know, and am professionally
no stranger to such matters. Well, Mrs. Fitzpiers has her
remedy."

"How--what--a remedy?" said Melbury.

"Under the new law, sir. A new court was established last year,
and under the new statute, twenty and twenty-one Vic., cap.
eighty-five, unmarrying is as easy as marrying. No more Acts of
Parliament necessary; no longer one law for the rich and another
for the poor. But come inside--I was just going to have a
nibleykin of rum hot--I'll explain it all to you."

The intelligence amazed Melbury, who saw little of newspapers.
And though he was a severely correct man in his habits, and had no
taste for entering a tavern with Fred Beaucock--nay, would have
been quite uninfluenced by such a character on any other matter in
the world--such fascination lay in the idea of delivering his poor
girl from bondage, that it deprived him of the critical faculty.
He could not resist the ex-lawyer's clerk, and entered the inn.

Here they sat down to the rum, which Melbury paid for as a matter
of course, Beaucock leaning back in the settle with a legal
gravity which would hardly allow him to be conscious of the
spirits before him, though they nevertheless disappeared with
mysterious quickness.

How much of the exaggerated information on the then new divorce
laws which Beaucock imparted to his listener was the result of
ignorance, and how much of dupery, was never ascertained. But he
related such a plausible story of the ease with which Grace could
become a free woman that her father was irradiated with the
project; and though he scarcely wetted his lips, Melbury never
knew how he came out of the inn, or when or where he mounted his
gig to pursue his way homeward. But home he found himself, his
brain having all the way seemed to ring sonorously as a gong in
the intensity of its stir. Before he had seen Grace, he was
accidentally met by Winterborne, who found his face shining as if
he had, like the Law-giver, conversed with an angel.

He relinquished his horse, and took Winterborne by the arm to a
heap of rendlewood--as barked oak was here called--which lay under
a privet-hedge.

"Giles," he said, when they had sat down upon the logs, "there's a
new law in the land! Grace can be free quite easily. I only knew
it by the merest accident. I might not have found it out for the
next ten years. She can get rid of him--d'ye hear?--get rid of
him. Think of that, my friend Giles!"

He related what he had learned of the new legal remedy. A subdued
tremulousness about the mouth was all the response that
Winterborne made; and Melbury added, "My boy, you shall have her
yet--if you want her." His feelings had gathered volume as he said
this, and the articulate sound of the old idea drowned his sight
in mist.

"Are you sure--about this new law?" asked Winterborne, so
disquieted by a gigantic exultation which loomed alternately with
fearful doubt that he evaded the full acceptance of Melbury's last
statement.

Melbury said that he had no manner of doubt, for since his talk
with Beaucock it had come into his mind that he had seen some time
ago in the weekly paper an allusion to such a legal change; but,
having no interest in those desperate remedies at the moment, he
had passed it over. "But I'm not going to let the matter rest
doubtful for a single day," he continued. "I am going to London.
Beaucock will go with me, and we shall get the best advice as soon
as we possibly can. Beaucock is a thorough lawyer--nothing the
matter with him but a fiery palate. I knew him as the stay and
refuge of Sherton in knots of law at one time."

Winterborne's replies were of the vaguest. The new possibility
was almost unthinkable by him at the moment. He was what was
called at Hintock "a solid-going fellow;" he maintained his
abeyant mood, not from want of reciprocity, but from a taciturn
hesitancy, taught by life as he knew it.

"But," continued the timber-merchant, a temporary crease or two of
anxiety supplementing those already established in his forehead by
time and care, "Grace is not at all well. Nothing constitutional,
you know; but she has been in a low, nervous state ever since that
night of fright. I don't doubt but that she will be all right
soon....I wonder how she is this evening?" He rose with the words,
as if he had too long forgotten her personality in the excitement
of her previsioned career.

They had sat till the evening was beginning to dye the garden
brown, and now went towards Melbury's house, Giles a few steps in
the rear of his old friend, who was stimulated by the enthusiasm
of the moment to outstep the ordinary walking of Winterborne. He
felt shy of entering Grace's presence as her reconstituted lover--
which was how her father's manner would be sure to present him--
before definite information as to her future state was
forthcoming; it seemed too nearly like the act of those who rush
in where angels fear to tread.

A chill to counterbalance all the glowing promise of the day was
prompt enough in coming. No sooner had he followed the timber-
merchant in at the door than he heard Grammer inform him that Mrs.
Fitzpiers was still more unwell than she had been in the morning.
Old Dr. Jones being in the neighborhood they had called him in,
and he had instantly directed them to get her to bed. They were
not, however, to consider her illness serious--a feverish, nervous
attack the result of recent events, was what she was suffering
from, and she would doubtless be well in a few days.

Winterborne, therefore, did not remain, and his hope of seeing her
that evening was disappointed. Even this aggravation of her
morning condition did not greatly depress Melbury. He knew, he
said, that his daughter's constitution was sound enough. It was
only these domestic troubles that were pulling her down. Once
free she would be blooming again. Melbury diagnosed rightly, as
parents usually do.

He set out for London the next morning, Jones having paid another
visit and assured him that he might leave home without uneasiness,
especially on an errand of that sort, which would the sooner put
an end to her suspense.

The timber-merchant had been away only a day or two when it was
told in Hintock that Mr. Fitzpiers's hat had been found in the
wood. Later on in the afternoon the hat was brought to Melbury,
and, by a piece of ill-fortune, into Grace's presence. It had
doubtless lain in the wood ever since his fall from the horse, but
it looked so clean and uninjured--the summer weather and leafy
shelter having much favored its preservation--that Grace could not
believe it had remained so long concealed. A very little of fact
was enough to set her fevered fancy at work at this juncture; she
thought him still in the neighborhood; she feared his sudden
appearance; and her nervous malady developed consequences so grave
that Dr. Jones began to look serious, and the household was
alarmed.

It was the beginning of June, and the cuckoo at this time of the
summer scarcely ceased his cry for more than two or three hours
during the night. The bird's note, so familiar to her ears from
infancy, was now absolute torture to the poor girl. On the Friday
following the Wednesday of Melbury's departure, and the day after
the discovery of Fitzpiers's hat, the cuckoo began at two o'clock
in the morning with a sudden cry from one of Melbury's apple-
trees, not three yards from the window of Grace's room.

"Oh, he is coming!" she cried, and in her terror sprang clean from
the bed out upon the floor.

These starts and frights continued till noon; and when the doctor
had arrived and had seen her, and had talked with Mrs. Melbury, he
sat down and meditated. That ever-present terror it was
indispensable to remove from her mind at all hazards; and he
thought how this might be done.

Without saying a word to anybody in the house, or to the
disquieted Winterborne waiting in the lane below, Dr. Jones went
home and wrote to Mr. Melbury at the London address he had
obtained from his wife. The gist of his communication was that
Mrs. Fitzpiers should be assured as soon as possible that steps
were being taken to sever the bond which was becoming a torture to
her; that she would soon be free, and was even then virtually so.
"If you can say it AT ONCE it may be the means of averting much
harm," he said. "Write to herself; not to me."

On Saturday he drove over to Hintock, and assured her with
mysterious pacifications that in a day or two she might expect to
receive some assuring news. So it turned out. When Sunday
morning came there was a letter for Grace from her father. It
arrived at seven o'clock, the usual time at which the toddling
postman passed by Hintock; at eight Grace awoke, having slept an
hour or two for a wonder, and Mrs. Melbury brought up the letter.

"Can you open it yourself?" said she.

"Oh yes, yes!" said Grace, with feeble impatience. She tore the
envelope, unfolded the sheet, and read; when a creeping blush
tinctured her white neck and cheek.

Her father had exercised a bold discretion. He informed her that
she need have no further concern about Fitzpiers's return; that
she would shortly be a free woman; and therefore, if she should
desire to wed her old lover--which he trusted was the case, since
it was his own deep wish--she would be in a position to do so. In
this Melbury had not written beyond his belief. But he very much
stretched the facts in adding that the legal formalities for
dissolving her union were practically settled. The truth was that
on the arrival of the doctor's letter poor Melbury had been much
agitated, and could with difficulty be prevented by Beaucock from
returning to her bedside. What was the use of his rushing back to
Hintock? Beaucock had asked him. The only thing that could do her
any good was a breaking of the bond. Though he had not as yet had
an interview with the eminent solicitor they were about to
consult, he was on the point of seeing him; and the case was clear
enough. Thus the simple Melbury, urged by his parental alarm at
her danger by the representations of his companion, and by the
doctor's letter, had yielded, and sat down to tell her roundly
that she was virtually free.

"And you'd better write also to the gentleman," suggested
Beaucock, who, scenting notoriety and the germ of a large practice
in the case, wished to commit Melbury to it irretrievably; to
effect which he knew that nothing would be so potent as awakening
the passion of Grace for Winterborne, so that her father might not
have the heart to withdraw from his attempt to make her love
legitimate when he discovered that there were difficulties in the
way.

The nervous, impatient Melbury was much pleased with the idea of
"starting them at once," as he called it. To put his long-delayed
reparative scheme in train had become a passion with him now. He
added to the letter addressed to his daughter a passage hinting
that she ought to begin to encourage Winterborne, lest she should
lose him altogether; and he wrote to Giles that the path was
virtually open for him at last. Life was short, he declared;
there were slips betwixt the cup and the lip; her interest in him
should be reawakened at once, that all might be ready when the
good time came for uniting them.



CHAPTER XXXVIII.


At these warm words Winterborne was not less dazed than he was
moved in heart. The novelty of the avowal rendered what it
carried with it inapprehensible by him in its entirety.

Only a few short months ago completely estranged from this family--
beholding Grace going to and fro in the distance, clothed with
the alienating radiance of obvious superiority, the wife of the
then popular and fashionable Fitzpiers, hopelessly outside his
social boundary down to so recent a time that flowers then folded
were hardly faded yet--he was now asked by that jealously guarding
father of hers to take courage--to get himself ready for the day
when he should be able to claim her.

The old times came back to him in dim procession. How he had been
snubbed; how Melbury had despised his Christmas party; how that
sweet, coy Grace herself had looked down upon him and his
household arrangements, and poor Creedle's contrivances!

Well, he could not believe it. Surely the adamantine barrier of
marriage with another could not be pierced like this! It did
violence to custom. Yet a new law might do anything. But was it
at all within the bounds of probability that a woman who, over and
above her own attainments, had been accustomed to those of a
cultivated professional man, could ever be the wife of such as he?

Since the date of his rejection he had almost grown to see the
reasonableness of that treatment. He had said to himself again
and again that her father was right; that the poor ceorl, Giles
Winterborne, would never have been able to make such a dainty girl
happy. Yet, now that she had stood in a position farther removed
from his own than at first, he was asked to prepare to woo her.
He was full of doubt.

Nevertheless, it was not in him to show backwardness. To act so
promptly as Melbury desired him to act seemed, indeed, scarcely
wise, because of the uncertainty of events. Giles knew nothing of
legal procedure, but he did know that for him to step up to Grace
as a lover before the bond which bound her was actually dissolved
was simply an extravagant dream of her father's overstrained mind.
He pitied Melbury for his almost childish enthusiasm, and saw that
the aging man must have suffered acutely to be weakened to this
unreasoning desire.

Winterborne was far too magnanimous to harbor any cynical
conjecture that the timber-merchant, in his intense affection for
Grace, was courting him now because that young lady, when
disunited, would be left in an anomalous position, to escape which
a bad husband was better than none. He felt quite sure that his
old friend was simply on tenterhooks of anxiety to repair the
almost irreparable error of dividing two whom Nature had striven
to join together in earlier days, and that in his ardor to do this
he was oblivious of formalities. The cautious supervision of his
past years had overleaped itself at last. hence, Winterborne
perceived that, in this new beginning, the necessary care not to
compromise Grace by too early advances must be exercised by
himself.

Perhaps Winterborne was not quite so ardent as heretofore. There
is no such thing as a stationary love: men are either loving more
or loving less. But Giles himself recognized no decline in his
sense of her dearness. If the flame did indeed burn lower now
than when he had fetched her from Sherton at her last return from
school, the marvel was small. He had been laboring ever since his
rejection and her marriage to reduce his former passion to a
docile friendship, out of pure regard to its expediency; and their
separation may have helped him to a partial success.

A week and more passed, and there was no further news of Melbury.
But the effect of the intelligence he had already transmitted upon
the elastic-nerved daughter of the woods had been much what the
old surgeon Jones had surmised. It had soothed her perturbed
spirit better than all the opiates in the pharmacopoeia. She had
slept unbrokenly a whole night and a day. The "new law" was to
her a mysterious, beneficent, godlike entity, lately descended
upon earth, that would make her as she once had been without
trouble or annoyance. Her position fretted her, its abstract
features rousing an aversion which was even greater than her
aversion to the personality of him who had caused it. It was
mortifying, productive of slights, undignified. Him she could
forget; her circumstances she had always with her.

She saw nothing of Winterborne during the days of her recovery;
and perhaps on that account her fancy wove about him a more
romantic tissue than it could have done if he had stood before her
with all the specks and flaws inseparable from corporeity. He
rose upon her memory as the fruit-god and the wood-god in
alternation; sometimes leafy, and smeared with green lichen, as
she had seen him among the sappy boughs of the plantations;
sometimes cider-stained, and with apple-pips in the hair of his
arms, as she had met him on his return from cider-making in White
Hart Vale, with his vats and presses beside him. In her secret
heart she almost approximated to her father's enthusiasm in
wishing to show Giles once for all how she still regarded him.
The question whether the future would indeed bring them together
for life was a standing wonder with her. She knew that it could
not with any propriety do so just yet. But reverently believing
in her father's sound judgment and knowledge, as good girls are
wont to do, she remembered what he had written about her giving a
hint to Winterborne lest there should be risk in delay, and her
feelings were not averse to such a step, so far as it could be
done without danger at this early stage of the proceedings.

From being a frail phantom of her former equable self she returned
in bounds to a condition of passable philosophy. She bloomed
again in the face in the course of a few days, and was well enough
to go about as usual. One day Mrs. Melbury proposed that for a
change she should be driven in the gig to Sherton market, whither
Melbury's man was going on other errands. Grace had no business
whatever in Sherton; but it crossed her mind that Winterborne
would probably be there, and this made the thought of such a drive
interesting.

On the way she saw nothing of him; but when the horse was walking
slowly through the obstructions of Sheep Street, she discerned the
young man on the pavement. She thought of that time when he had
been standing under his apple-tree on her return from school, and
of the tender opportunity then missed through her fastidiousness.
Her heart rose in her throat. She abjured all such fastidiousness
now. Nor did she forget the last occasion on which she had beheld
him in that town, making cider in the court-yard of the Earl of
Wessex Hotel, while she was figuring as a fine lady in the balcony
above.

Grace directed the man to set her down there in the midst, and
immediately went up to her lover. Giles had not before observed
her, and his eyes now suppressedly looked his pleasure, without
the embarrassment that had formerly marked him at such meetings.

When a few words had been spoken, she said, archly, "I have
nothing to do. Perhaps you are deeply engaged?"

"I? Not a bit. My business now at the best of times is small, I
am sorry to say."

"Well, then, I am going into the Abbey. Come along with me."

The proposition had suggested itself as a quick escape from
publicity, for many eyes were regarding her. She had hoped that
sufficient time had elapsed for the extinction of curiosity; but
it was quite otherwise. The people looked at her with tender
interest as the deserted girl-wife--without obtrusiveness, and
without vulgarity; but she was ill prepared for scrutiny in any
shape.

They walked about the Abbey aisles, and presently sat down. Not a
soul was in the building save themselves. She regarded a stained
window, with her head sideways, and tentatively asked him if he
remembered the last time they were in that town alone.

He remembered it perfectly, and remarked, "You were a proud miss
then, and as dainty as you were high. Perhaps you are now?"

Grace slowly shook her head. "Affliction has taken all that out
of me," she answered, impressively. "Perhaps I am too far the
other way now." As there was something lurking in this that she
could not explain, she added, so quickly as not to allow him time
to think of it, "Has my father written to you at all?"

"Yes," said Winterborne.

She glanced ponderingly up at him. "Not about me?"

"Yes."

His mouth was lined with charactery which told her that he had
been bidden to take the hint as to the future which she had been
bidden to give. The unexpected discovery sent a scarlet pulsation
through Grace for the moment. However, it was only Giles who
stood there, of whom she had no fear; and her self-possession
returned.

"He said I was to sound you with a view to--what you will
understand, if you care to," continued Winterborne, in a low
voice. Having been put on this track by herself, he was not
disposed to abandon it in a hurry.

They had been children together, and there was between them that
familiarity as to personal affairs which only such
acquaintanceship can give. "You know, Giles," she answered,
speaking in a very practical tone, "that that is all very well;
but I am in a very anomalous position at present, and I cannot say
anything to the point about such things as those."

"No?" he said, with a stray air as regarded the subject. He was
looking at her with a curious consciousness of discovery. He had
not been imagining that their renewed intercourse would show her
to him thus. For the first time he realized an unexpectedness in
her, which, after all, should not have been unexpected. She
before him was not the girl Grace Melbury whom he used to know.
Of course, he might easily have prefigured as much; but it had
never occurred to him. She was a woman who had been married; she
had moved on; and without having lost her girlish modesty, she had
lost her girlish shyness. The inevitable change, though known to
him, had not been heeded; and it struck him into a momentary
fixity. The truth was that he had never come into close
comradeship with her since her engagement to Fitzpiers, with the
brief exception of the evening encounter on Rubdown Hill, when she
met him with his cider apparatus; and that interview had been of
too cursory a kind for insight.

Winterborne had advanced, too. He could criticise her. Times had
been when to criticise a single trait in Grace Melbury would have
lain as far beyond his powers as to criticise a deity. This thing
was sure: it was a new woman in many ways whom he had come out to
see; a creature of more ideas, more dignity, and, above all, more
assurance, than the original Grace had been capable of. He could
not at first decide whether he were pleased or displeased at this.
But upon the whole the novelty attracted him.

She was so sweet and sensitive that she feared his silence
betokened something in his brain of the nature of an enemy to her.
"What are you thinking of that makes those lines come in your
forehead?" she asked. "I did not mean to offend you by speaking
of the time being premature as yet."

Touched by the genuine loving-kindness which had lain at the
foundation of these words, and much moved, Winterborne turned his
face aside, as he took her by the hand. He was grieved that he
had criticised her.

"You are very good, dear Grace," he said, in a low voice. "You
are better, much better, than you used to be."

"How?"

He could not very well tell her how, and said, with an evasive
smile, "You are prettier;" which was not what he really had meant.
He then remained still holding her right hand in his own right, so
that they faced in opposite ways; and as he did not let go, she
ventured upon a tender remonstrance.

"I think we have gone as far as we ought to go at present--and far
enough to satisfy my poor father that we are the same as ever.
You see, Giles, my case is not settled yet, and if--Oh, suppose I
NEVER get free!--there should be any hitch or informality!"

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