Book: The Woodlanders

T >> Thomas Hardy >> The Woodlanders




"How clever he is!" she said, regretfully. "Why could he not have
had more principle, so as to turn his great talents to good
account? Perhaps he has saved my useless life. But he doesn't
know it, and doesn't care whether he has saved it or not; and on
that account will never be told by me! Probably he only gave it to
me in the arrogance of his skill, to show the greatness of his
resources beside mine, as Elijah drew down fire from heaven."

As soon as she had quite recovered from this foiled attack upon
her life, Grace went to Marty South's cottage. The current of her
being had again set towards the lost Giles Winterborne.

"Marty," she said, "we both loved him. We will go to his grave
together."

Great Hintock church stood at the upper part of the village, and
could be reached without passing through the street. In the dusk
of the late September day they went thither by secret ways,
walking mostly in silence side by side, each busied with her own
thoughts. Grace had a trouble exceeding Marty's--that haunting
sense of having put out the light of his life by her own hasty
doings. She had tried to persuade herself that he might have died
of his illness, even if she had not taken possession of his house.
Sometimes she succeeded in her attempt; sometimes she did not.

They stood by the grave together, and though the sun had gone
down, they could see over the woodland for miles, and down to the
vale in which he had been accustomed to descend every year, with
his portable mill and press, to make cider about this time.

Perhaps Grace's first grief, the discovery that if he had lived he
could never have claimed her, had some power in softening this,
the second. On Marty's part there was the same consideration;
never would she have been his. As no anticipation of gratified
affection had been in existence while he was with them, there was
none to be disappointed now that he had gone.

Grace was abased when, by degrees, she found that she had never
understood Giles as Marty had done. Marty South alone, of all the
women in Hintock and the world, had approximated to Winterborne's
level of intelligent intercourse with nature. In that respect she
had formed the complement to him in the other sex, had lived as
his counterpart, had subjoined her thought to his as a corollary.

The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon
that wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had
been with these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze. They had been
possessed of its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had
been able to read its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the
sights and sounds of night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense
boughs, which had to Grace a touch of the uncanny, and even the
supernatural, were simple occurrences whose origin, continuance,
and laws they foreknew. They had planted together, and together
they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years,
mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in
few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet.
From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces, when
brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the
species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the
wind's murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its
sort afar off. They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were
sound, or tainted with incipient decay, and by the state of its
upper twigs, the stratum that had been reached by its roots. The
artifices of the seasons were seen by them from the conjuror's own
point of view, and not from that of the spectator's.

"He ought to have married YOU, Marty, and nobody else in the
world!" said Grace, with conviction, after thinking somewhat in
the above strain.

Marty shook her head. "In all our out-door days and years
together, ma'am," she replied, "the one thing he never spoke of to
me was love; nor I to him."

"Yet you and he could speak in a tongue that nobody else knew--not
even my father, though he came nearest knowing--the tongue of the
trees and fruits and flowers themselves."

She could indulge in mournful fancies like this to Marty; but the
hard core to her grief--which Marty's had not--remained. Had she
been sure that Giles's death resulted entirely from his exposure,
it would have driven her well-nigh to insanity; but there was
always that bare possibility that his exposure had only
precipitated what was inevitable. She longed to believe that it
had not done even this.

There was only one man whose opinion on the circumstances she
would be at all disposed to trust. Her husband was that man. Yet
to ask him it would be necessary to detail the true conditions in
which she and Winterborne had lived during these three or four
critical days that followed her flight; and in withdrawing her
original defiant announcement on that point, there seemed a
weakness she did not care to show. She never doubted that
Fitzpiers would believe her if she made a clean confession of the
actual situation; but to volunteer the correction would seem like
signalling for a truce, and that, in her present frame of mind,
was what she did not feel the need of.



It will probably not appear a surprising statement, after what has
been already declared of Fitzpiers, that the man whom Grace's
fidelity could not keep faithful was stung into passionate throbs
of interest concerning her by her avowal of the contrary.

He declared to himself that he had never known her dangerously
full compass if she were capable of such a reprisal; and,
melancholy as it may be to admit the fact, his own humiliation and
regret engendered a smouldering admiration of her.

He passed a month or two of great misery at Exbury, the place to
which he had retired--quite as much misery indeed as Grace, could
she have known of it, would have been inclined to inflict upon any
living creature, how much soever he might have wronged her. Then
a sudden hope dawned upon him; he wondered if her affirmation were
true. He asked himself whether it were not the act of a woman
whose natural purity and innocence had blinded her to the
contingencies of such an announcement. His wide experience of the
sex had taught him that, in many cases, women who ventured on
hazardous matters did so because they lacked an imagination
sensuous enough to feel their full force. In this light Grace's
bold avowal might merely have denoted the desperation of one who
was a child to the realities of obliquity.

Fitzpiers's mental sufferings and suspense led him at last to take
a melancholy journey to the neighborhood of Little Hintock; and
here he hovered for hours around the scene of the purest emotional
experiences that he had ever known in his life. He walked about
the woods that surrounded Melbury's house, keeping out of sight
like a criminal. It was a fine evening, and on his way homeward
he passed near Marty South's cottage. As usual she had lighted
her candle without closing her shutters; he saw her within as he
had seen her many times before.

She was polishing tools, and though he had not wished to show
himself, he could not resist speaking in to her through the half-
open door. "What are you doing that for, Marty?"

"Because I want to clean them. They are not mine." He could see,
indeed, that they were not hers, for one was a spade, large and
heavy, and another was a bill-hook which she could only have used
with both hands. The spade, though not a new one, had been so
completely burnished that it was bright as silver.

Fitzpiers somehow divined that they were Giles Winterborne's, and
he put the question to her.

She replied in the affirmative. "I am going to keep 'em," she
said, "but I can't get his apple-mill and press. I wish could; it
is going to be sold, they say."

"Then I will buy it for you," said Fitzpiers. "That will be
making you a return for a kindness you did me." His glance fell
upon the girl's rare-colored hair, which had grown again. "Oh,
Marty, those locks of yours--and that letter! But it was a
kindness to send it, nevertheless," he added, musingly.

After this there was confidence between them--such confidence as
there had never been before. Marty was shy, indeed, of speaking
about the letter, and her motives in writing it; but she thanked
him warmly for his promise of the cider-press. She would travel
with it in the autumn season, as he had done, she said. She would
be quite strong enough, with old Creedle as an assistant.

"Ah! there was one nearer to him than you," said Fitzpiers,
referring to Winterborne. "One who lived where he lived, and was
with him when he died."

Then Marty, suspecting that he did not know the true
circumstances, from the fact that Mrs. Fitzpiers and himself were
living apart, told him of Giles's generosity to Grace in giving up
his house to her at the risk, and possibly the sacrifice, of his
own life. When the surgeon heard it he almost envied Giles his
chivalrous character. He expressed a wish to Marty that his visit
to her should be kept secret, and went home thoughtful, feeling
that in more that one sense his journey to Hintock had not been in
vain.

He would have given much to win Grace's forgiveness then. But
whatever he dared hope for in that kind from the future, there was
nothing to be done yet, while Giles Winterborne's memory was
green. To wait was imperative. A little time might melt her
frozen thoughts, and lead her to look on him with toleration, if
not with love.



CHAPTER XLV.


Weeks and months of mourning for Winterborne had been passed by
Grace in the soothing monotony of the memorial act to which she
and Marty had devoted themselves. Twice a week the pair went in
the dusk to Great Hintock, and, like the two mourners in
Cymbeline, sweetened his sad grave with their flowers and their
tears. Sometimes Grace thought that it was a pity neither one of
them had been his wife for a little while, and given the world a
copy of him who was so valuable in their eyes. Nothing ever had
brought home to her with such force as this death how little
acquirements and culture weigh beside sterling personal character.
While her simple sorrow for his loss took a softer edge with the
lapse of the autumn and winter seasons, her self-reproach at
having had a possible hand in causing it knew little abatement.

Little occurred at Hintock during these months of the fall and
decay of the leaf. Discussion of the almost contemporaneous death
of Mrs. Charmond abroad had waxed and waned. Fitzpiers had had a
marvellous escape from being dragged into the inquiry which
followed it, through the accident of their having parted just
before under the influence of Marty South's letter--the tiny
instrument of a cause deep in nature.

Her body was not brought home. It seemed to accord well with the
fitful fever of that impassioned woman's life that she should not
have found a native grave. She had enjoyed but a life-interest in
the estate, which, after her death, passed to a relative of her
husband's--one who knew not Felice, one whose purpose seemed to be
to blot out every vestige of her.

On a certain day in February--the cheerful day of St. Valentine,
in fact--a letter reached Mrs. Fitzpiers, which had been mentally
promised her for that particular day a long time before.

It announced that Fitzpiers was living at some midland town, where
he had obtained a temporary practice as assistant to some local
medical man, whose curative principles were all wrong, though he
dared not set them right. He had thought fit to communicate with
her on that day of tender traditions to inquire if, in the event
of his obtaining a substantial practice that he had in view
elsewhere, she could forget the past and bring herself to join
him.

There the practical part ended; he then went on--


"My last year of experience has added ten years to my age, dear
Grace and dearest wife that ever erring man undervalued. You may
be absolutely indifferent to what I say, but let me say it: I have
never loved any woman alive or dead as I love, respect, and honor
you at this present moment. What you told me in the pride and
haughtiness of your heart I never believed [this, by the way, was
not strictly true]; but even if I had believed it, it could never
have estranged me from you. Is there any use in telling you--no,
there is not--that I dream of your ripe lips more frequently than
I say my prayers; that the old familiar rustle of your dress often
returns upon my mind till it distracts me? If you could condescend
even only to see me again you would be breathing life into a
corpse. My pure, pure Grace, modest as a turtledove, how came I
ever to possess you? For the sake of being present in your mind on
this lovers' day, I think I would almost rather have you hate me a
little than not think of me at all. You may call my fancies
whimsical; but remember, sweet, lost one, that 'nature is one in
love, and where 'tis fine it sends some instance of itself.' I
will not intrude upon you further now. Make me a little bit happy
by sending back one line to say that you will consent, at any
rate, to a short interview. I will meet you and leave you as a
mere acquaintance, if you will only afford me this slight means of
making a few explanations, and of putting my position before you.
Believe me, in spite of all you may do or feel, Your lover
always (once your husband),

"E."


It was, oddly enough, the first occasion, or nearly the first on
which Grace had ever received a love-letter from him, his
courtship having taken place under conditions which rendered
letter-writing unnecessary. Its perusal, therefore, had a certain
novelty for her. She thought that, upon the whole, he wrote love-
letters very well. But the chief rational interest of the letter
to the reflective Grace lay in the chance that such a meeting as
he proposed would afford her of setting her doubts at rest, one
way or the other, on her actual share in Winterborne's death. The
relief of consulting a skilled mind, the one professional man who
had seen Giles at that time, would be immense. As for that
statement that she had uttered in her disdainful grief, which at
the time she had regarded as her triumph, she was quite prepared
to admit to him that his belief was the true one; for in wronging
herself as she did when she made it, she had done what to her was
a far more serious thing, wronged Winterborne's memory.

Without consulting her father, or any one in the house or out of
it, Grace replied to the letter. She agreed to meet Fitzpiers on
two conditions, of which the first was that the place of meeting
should be the top of Rubdown Hill, the second that he would not
object to Marty South accompanying her.

Whatever part, much or little, there may have been in Fitzpiers's
so-called valentine to his wife, he felt a delight as of the
bursting of spring when her brief reply came. It was one of the
few pleasures that he had experienced of late years at all
resembling those of his early youth. He promptly replied that he
accepted the conditions, and named the day and hour at which he
would be on the spot she mentioned.

A few minutes before three on the appointed day found him climbing
the well-known hill, which had been the axis of so many critical
movements in their lives during his residence at Hintock.

The sight of each homely and well-remembered object swelled the
regret that seldom left him now. Whatever paths might lie open to
his future, the soothing shades of Hintock were forbidden him
forever as a permanent dwelling-place.

He longed for the society of Grace. But to lay offerings on her
slighted altar was his first aim, and until her propitiation was
complete he would constrain her in no way to return to him. The
least reparation that he could make, in a case where he would
gladly have made much, would be to let her feel herself absolutely
free to choose between living with him and without him.

Moreover, a subtlist in emotions, he cultivated as under glasses
strange and mournful pleasures that he would not willingly let die
just at present. To show any forwardness in suggesting a modus
vivendi to Grace would be to put an end to these exotics. To be
the vassal of her sweet will for a time, he demanded no more, and
found solace in the contemplation of the soft miseries she caused
him.

Approaching the hill-top with a mind strung to these notions,
Fitzpiers discerned a gay procession of people coming over the
crest, and was not long in perceiving it to be a wedding-party.

Though the wind was keen the women were in light attire, and the
flowered waistcoats of the men had a pleasing vividness of
pattern. Each of the gentler ones clung to the arm of her partner
so tightly as to have with him one step, rise, swing, gait, almost
one centre of gravity. In the buxom bride Fitzpiers recognized no
other than Suke Damson, who in her light gown looked a giantess;
the small husband beside her he saw to be Tim Tangs.

Fitzpiers could not escape, for they had seen him; though of all
the beauties of the world whom he did not wish to meet Suke was
the chief. But he put the best face on the matter that he could
and came on, the approaching company evidently discussing him and
his separation from Mrs. Fitzpiers. As the couples closed upon
him he expressed his congratulations.

"We be just walking round the parishes to show ourselves a bit,"
said Tim. "First we het across to Delborough, then athwart to
here, and from here we go to Rubdown and Millshot, and then round
by the cross-roads home. Home says I, but it won't be that long!
We be off next month."

"Indeed. Where to?"

Tim informed him that they were going to New Zealand. Not but
that he would have been contented with Hintock, but his wife was
ambitious and wanted to leave, so he had given way.

"Then good-by," said Fitzpiers; "I may not see you again." He
shook hands with Tim and turned to the bride. "Good-by, Suke," he
said, taking her hand also. "I wish you and your husband
prosperity in the country you have chosen." With this he left
them, and hastened on to his appointment.

The wedding-party re-formed and resumed march likewise. But in
restoring his arm to Suke, Tim noticed that her full and blooming
countenance had undergone a change. "Holloa! me dear--what's the
matter?" said Tim.

"Nothing to speak o'," said she. But to give the lie to her
assertion she was seized with lachrymose twitches, that soon
produced a dribbling face.

"How--what the devil's this about!" exclaimed the bridegroom.

"She's a little wee bit overcome, poor dear!" said the first
bridesmaid, unfolding her handkerchief and wiping Suke's eyes.

"I never did like parting from people!" said Suke, as soon as she
could speak.

"Why him in particular?"

"Well--he's such a clever doctor, that 'tis a thousand pities we
sha'n't see him any more! There'll be no such clever doctor as he
in New Zealand, if I should require one; and the thought o't got
the better of my feelings!"

They walked on, but Tim's face had grown rigid and pale, for he
recalled slight circumstances, disregarded at the time of their
occurrence. The former boisterous laughter of the wedding-party
at the groomsman's jokes was heard ringing through the woods no
more.

By this time Fitzpiers had advanced on his way to the top of the
hill, where he saw two figures emerging from the bank on the right
hand. These were the expected ones, Grace and Marty South, who
had evidently come there by a short and secret path through the
wood. Grace was muffled up in her winter dress, and he thought
that she had never looked so seductive as at this moment, in the
noontide bright but heatless sun, and the keen wind, and the
purplish-gray masses of brushwood around.

Fitzpiers continued to regard the nearing picture, till at length
their glances met for a moment, when she demurely sent off hers at
a tangent and gave him the benefit of her three-quarter face,
while with courteous completeness of conduct he lifted his hat in
a large arc. Marty dropped behind; and when Fitzpiers held out
his hand, Grace touched it with her fingers.

"I have agreed to be here mostly because I wanted to ask you
something important," said Mrs. Fitzpiers, her intonation
modulating in a direction that she had not quite wished it to
take.

"I am most attentive," said her husband. "Shall we take to the
wood for privacy?"

Grace demurred, and Fitzpiers gave in, and they kept the public
road.

At any rate she would take his arm? This also was gravely
negatived, the refusal being audible to Marty.

"Why not?" he inquired.

"Oh, Mr. Fitzpiers--how can you ask?"

"Right, right," said he, his effusiveness shrivelled up.

As they walked on she returned to her inquiry. "It is about a
matter that may perhaps be unpleasant to you. But I think I need
not consider that too carefully."

"Not at all," said Fitzpiers, heroically.

She then took him back to the time of poor Winterborne's death,
and related the precise circumstances amid which his fatal illness
had come upon him, particularizing the dampness of the shelter to
which he had betaken himself, his concealment from her of the
hardships that he was undergoing, all that he had put up with, all
that he had done for her in his scrupulous considerateness. The
retrospect brought her to tears as she asked him if he thought
that the sin of having driven him to his death was upon her.

Fitzpiers could hardly help showing his satisfaction at what her
narrative indirectly revealed, the actual harmlessness of an
escapade with her lover, which had at first, by her own showing,
looked so grave, and he did not care to inquire whether that
harmlessness had been the result of aim or of accident. With
regard to her question, he declared that in his judgment no human
being could answer it. He thought that upon the whole the balance
of probabilities turned in her favor. Winterborne's apparent
strength, during the last months of his life, must have been
delusive. It had often occurred that after a first attack of that
insidious disease a person's apparent recovery was a physiological
mendacity.

The relief which came to Grace lay almost as much in sharing her
knowledge of the particulars with an intelligent mind as in the
assurances Fitzpiers gave her. "Well, then, to put this case
before you, and obtain your professional opinion, was chiefly why
I consented to come here to-day," said she, when he had reached
the aforesaid conclusion.

"For no other reason at all?" he asked, ruefully.

"It was nearly the whole."

They stood and looked over a gate at twenty or thirty starlings
feeding in the grass, and he started the talk again by saying, in
a low voice, "And yet I love you more than ever I loved you in my
life."

Grace did not move her eyes from the birds, and folded her
delicate lips as if to keep them in subjection.

"It is a different kind of love altogether," said he. "Less
passionate; more profound. It has nothing to do with the material
conditions of the object at all; much to do with her character and
goodness, as revealed by closer observation. 'Love talks with
better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love.'"

"That's out of 'Measure for Measure,'" said she, slyly.

"Oh yes--I meant it as a citation," blandly replied Fitzpiers.
"Well, then, why not give me a very little bit of your heart
again?"

The crash of a felled tree in the remote depths of the wood
recalled the past at that moment, and all the homely faithfulness
of Winterborne. "Don't ask it! My heart is in the grave with
Giles," she replied, stanchly.

"Mine is with you--in no less deep a grave, I fear, according to
that."

"I am very sorry; but it cannot be helped."

"How can you be sorry for me, when you wilfully keep open the
grave?"

"Oh no--that's not so," returned Grace, quickly, and moved to go
away from him.

"But, dearest Grace," said he, "you have condescended to come; and
I thought from it that perhaps when I had passed through a long
state of probation you would be generous. But if there can be no
hope of our getting completely reconciled, treat me gently--wretch
though I am."

"I did not say you were a wretch, nor have I ever said so."

"But you have such a contemptuous way of looking at me that I fear
you think so."

Grace's heart struggled between the wish not to be harsh and the
fear that she might mislead him. "I cannot look contemptuous
unless I feel contempt," she said, evasively. "And all I feel is
lovelessness."

"I have been very bad, I know," he returned. "But unless you can
really love me again, Grace, I would rather go away from you
forever. I don't want you to receive me again for duty's sake, or
anything of that sort. If I had not cared more for your affection
and forgiveness than my own personal comfort, I should never have
come back here. I could have obtained a practice at a distance,
and have lived my own life without coldness or reproach. But I
have chosen to return to the one spot on earth where my name is
tarnished--to enter the house of a man from whom I have had worse
treatment than from any other man alive--all for you!"

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.