CHAPTER XXX.
Examine Grace as her father might, she would admit nothing. For thepresent, therefore, he simply watched.
The suspicion that his darling child was being slighted wrought almosta miraculous change in Melbury's nature. No man so furtive for thetime as the ingenuous countryman who finds that his ingenuousness hasbeen abused. Melbury's heretofore confidential candor towards hisgentlemanly son-in-law was displaced by a feline stealth that didinjury to his every action, thought, and mood. He knew that a womanonce given to a man for life took, as a rule, her lot as it came andmade the best of it, without external interference; but for the firsttime he asked himself why this so generally should be so. Moreover,this case was not, he argued, like ordinary cases. Leaving out thequestion of Grace being anything but an ordinary woman, her peculiarsituation, as it were in mid-air between two planes of society,together with the loneliness of Hintock, made a husband's neglect a farmore tragical matter to her than it would be to one who had a largecircle of friends to fall back upon. Wisely or unwisely, and whateverother fathers did, he resolved to fight his daughter's battle still.
Mrs. Charmond had returned. But Hintock House scarcely gave forthsigns of life, so quietly had she reentered it. He went to church atGreat Hintock one afternoon as usual, there being no service at thesmaller village. A few minutes before his departure, he had casuallyheard Fitzpiers, who was no church-goer, tell his wife that he wasgoing to walk in the wood. Melbury entered the building and sat downin his pew; the parson came in, then Mrs. Charmond, then Mr. Fitzpiers.
The service proceeded, and the jealous father was quite sure that amutual consciousness was uninterruptedly maintained between those two;he fancied that more than once their eyes met. At the end, Fitzpiersso timed his movement into the aisle that it exactly coincided withFelice Charmond's from the opposite side, and they walked out withtheir garments in contact, the surgeon being just that two or threeinches in her rear which made it convenient for his eyes to rest uponher cheek. The cheek warmed up to a richer tone.
This was a worse feature in the flirtation than he had expected. If shehad been playing with him in an idle freak the game might soon havewearied her; but the smallest germ of passion--and women of the worlddo not change color for nothing--was a threatening development. Themere presence of Fitzpiers in the building, after his statement, waswellnigh conclusive as far as he was concerned; but Melbury resolvedyet to watch.
He had to wait long. Autumn drew shiveringly to its end. One daysomething seemed to be gone from the gardens; the tenderer leaves ofvegetables had shrunk under the first smart frost, and hung like fadedlinen rags; then the forest leaves, which had been descending atleisure, descended in haste and in multitudes, and all the goldencolors that had hung overhead were now crowded together in a degradedmass underfoot, where the fallen myriads got redder and hornier, andcurled themselves up to rot. The only suspicious features in Mrs.Charmond's existence at this season were two: the first, that she livedwith no companion or relative about her, which, considering her age andattractions, was somewhat unusual conduct for a young widow in a lonelycountry-house; the other, that she did not, as in previous years,start from Hintock to winter abroad. In Fitzpiers, the only changefrom his last autumn's habits lay in his abandonment of nightstudy--his lamp never shone from his new dwelling as from his old.
If the suspected ones met, it was by such adroit contrivances that evenMelbury's vigilance could not encounter them together. A simple callat her house by the doctor had nothing irregular about it, and that hehad paid two or three such calls was certain. What had passed at thoseinterviews was known only to the parties themselves; but that FeliceCharmond was under some one's influence Melbury soon had opportunity ofperceiving.
Winter had come on. Owls began to be noisy in the mornings andevenings, and flocks of wood-pigeons made themselves prominent again.One day in February, about six months after the marriage of Fitzpiers,Melbury was returning from Great Hintock on foot through the lane, whenhe saw before him the surgeon also walking. Melbury would haveovertaken him, but at that moment Fitzpiers turned in through a gate toone of the rambling drives among the trees at this side of the wood,which led to nowhere in particular, and the beauty of whose serpentinecurves was the only justification of their existence. Felice almostsimultaneously trotted down the lane towards the timber-dealer, in alittle basket-carriage which she sometimes drove about the estate,unaccompanied by a servant. She turned in at the same place withouthaving seen either Melbury or apparently Fitzpiers. Melbury was soon atthe spot, despite his aches and his sixty years. Mrs. Charmond hadcome up with the doctor, who was standing immediately behind thecarriage. She had turned to him, her arm being thrown carelessly overthe back of the seat. They looked in each other's faces withoututtering a word, an arch yet gloomy smile wreathing her lips.Fitzpiers clasped her hanging hand, and, while she still remained inthe same listless attitude, looking volumes into his eyes, hestealthily unbuttoned her glove, and stripped her hand of it by rollingback the gauntlet over the fingers, so that it came off inside out. Hethen raised her hand to his month, she still reclining passively,watching him as she might have watched a fly upon her dress. At lastshe said, "Well, sir, what excuse for this disobedience?"
"I make none."
"Then go your way, and let me go mine." She snatched away her hand,touched the pony with the whip, and left him standing there, holdingthe reversed glove.
Melbury's first impulse was to reveal his presence to Fitzpiers, andupbraid him bitterly. But a moment's thought was sufficient to showhim the futility of any such simple proceeding. There was not, afterall, so much in what he had witnessed as in what that scene might bethe surface and froth of--probably a state of mind on which censureoperates as an aggravation rather than as a cure. Moreover, he said tohimself that the point of attack should be the woman, if either. Hetherefore kept out of sight, and musing sadly, even tearfully--for hewas meek as a child in matters concerning his daughter--continued hisway towards Hintock.
The insight which is bred of deep sympathy was never more finelyexemplified than in this instance. Through her guarded manner, herdignified speech, her placid countenance, he discerned the interior ofGrace's life only too truly, hidden as were its incidents from everyouter eye.
These incidents had become painful enough. Fitzpiers had latterlydeveloped an irritable discontent which vented itself in monologueswhen Grace was present to hear them. The early morning of this day hadbeen dull, after a night of wind, and on looking out of the windowFitzpiers had observed some of Melbury's men dragging away a large limbwhich had been snapped off a beech-tree. Everything was cold andcolorless.
"My good Heaven!" he said, as he stood in his dressing-gown. "This islife!" He did not know whether Grace was awake or not, and he would notturn his head to ascertain. "Ah, fool," he went on to himself, "toclip your own wings when you were free to soar!...But I could not resttill I had done it. Why do I never recognize an opportunity till Ihave missed it, nor the good or ill of a step till it isirrevocable!...I fell in love....Love, indeed!--
"'Love's but the frailty of the mind When 'tis not with ambition joined; A sickly flame which if not fed, expires, And feeding, wastes in self-consuming fires!'
Ah, old author of 'The Way of the World,' you knew--you knew!" Gracemoved. He thought she had heard some part of his soliloquy. He wassorry--though he had not taken any precaution to prevent her.
He expected a scene at breakfast, but she only exhibited an extremereserve. It was enough, however, to make him repent that he shouldhave done anything to produce discomfort; for he attributed her mannerentirely to what he had said. But Grace's manner had not its causeeither in his sayings or in his doings. She had not heard a single wordof his regrets. Something even nearer home than her husband's blightedprospects--if blighted they were--was the origin of her mood, a moodthat was the mere continuation of what her father had noticed when hewould have preferred a passion
ate jealousy in her, as the more natural.
She had made a discovery--one which to a girl of honest nature wasalmost appalling. She had looked into her heart, and found that herearly interest in Giles Winterborne had become revitalized intoluxuriant growth by her widening perceptions of what was great andlittle in life. His homeliness no longer offended her acquired tastes;his comparative want of so-called culture did not now jar on herintellect; his country dress even pleased her eye; his exteriorroughness fascinated her. Having discovered by marriage how much thatwas humanly not great could co-exist with attainments of an exceptionalorder, there was a revulsion in her sentiments from all that she hadformerly clung to in this kind: honesty, goodness, manliness,tenderness, devotion, for her only existed in their purity now in thebreasts of unvarnished men; and here was one who had manifested themtowards her from his youth up.
There was, further, that never-ceasing pity in her soul for Giles as aman whom she had wronged--a man who had been unfortunate in his worldlytransactions; while, not without a touch of sublimity, he had, likeHoratio, borne himself throughout his scathing
"As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing."
It was these perceptions, and no subtle catching of her husband'smurmurs, that had bred the abstraction visible in her.
When her father approached the house after witnessing the interviewbetween Fitzpiers and Mrs. Charmond, Grace was looking out of hersitting-room window, as if she had nothing to do, or think of, or carefor. He stood still.
"Ah, Grace," he said, regarding her fixedly.
"Yes, father," she murmured.
"Waiting for your dear husband?" he inquired, speaking with the sarcasmof pitiful affection.
"Oh no--not especially. He has a great many patients to see thisafternoon."
Melbury came quite close. "Grace, what's the use of talking like that,when you know--Here, come down and walk with me out in the garden,child."
He unfastened the door in the ivy-laced wall, and waited. Thisapparent indifference alarmed him. He would far rather that she hadrushed in all the fire of jealousy to Hintock House, regardless ofconventionality, confronted and attacked Felice Charmond _unguibus etrostro_, and accused her even in exaggerated shape of stealing away herhusband. Such a storm might have cleared the air.
She emerged in a minute or two, and they went inside together. "Youknow as well as I do," he resumed, "that there is something threateningmischief to your life; and yet you pretend you do not. Do you suppose Idon't see the trouble in your face every day? I am very sure that thisquietude is wrong conduct in you. You should look more into matters."
"I am quiet because my sadness is not of a nature to stir me to action."
Melbury wanted to ask her a dozen questions--did she not feel jealous?was she not indignant? but a natural delicacy restrained him. "You arevery tame and let-alone, I am bound to say," he remarked, pointedly.
"I am what I feel, father," she repeated.
He glanced at her, and there returned upon his mind the scene of heroffering to wed Winterborne instead of Fitzpiers in the last daysbefore her marriage; and he asked himself if it could be the fact thatshe loved Winterborne, now that she had lost him, more than she hadever done when she was comparatively free to choose him.
"What would you have me do?" she asked, in a low voice.
He recalled his mind from the retrospective pain to the practicalmatter before them. "I would have you go to Mrs. Charmond," he said.
"Go to Mrs. Charmond--what for?" said she.
"Well--if I must speak plain, dear Grace--to ask her, appeal to her inthe name of your common womanhood, and your many like sentiments onthings, not to make unhappiness between you and your husband. It lieswith her entirely to do one or the other--that I can see."
Grace's face had heated at her father's words, and the very rustle ofher skirts upon the box-edging bespoke hauteur. "I shall not think ofgoing to her, father--of course I could not!" she answered.
"Why--don't 'ee want to be happier than you be at present?" saidMelbury, more moved on her account than she was herself.
"I don't wish to be more humiliated. If I have anything to bear I canbear it in silence."
"But, my dear maid, you are too young--you don't know what the presentstate of things may lead to. Just see the harm done a'ready! Yourhusband would have gone away to Budmouth to a bigger practice if it hadnot been for this. Although it has gone such a little way, it ispoisoning your future even now. Mrs. Charmond is thoughtlessly bad,not bad by calculation and just a word to her now might save 'ee apeck of woes."
"Ah, I loved her once," said Grace, with a broken articulation, "andshe would not care for me then! Now I no longer love her. Let her doher worst: I don't care."
"You ought to care. You have got into a very good position to startwith. You have been well educated, well tended, and you have becomethe wife of a professional man of unusually good family. Surely youought to make the best of your position."
"I don't see that I ought. I wish I had never got into it. I wish youhad never, never thought of educating me. I wish I worked in the woodslike Marty South. I hate genteel life, and I want to be no better thanshe."
"Why?" said her amazed father.
"Because cultivation has only brought me inconveniences and troubles.I say again, I wish you had never sent me to those fashionable schoolsyou set your mind on. It all arose out of that, father. If I hadstayed at home I should have married--" She closed up her mouthsuddenly and was silent; and he saw that she was not far from crying.
Melbury was much grieved. "What, and would you like to have grown upas we be here in Hintock--knowing no more, and with no more chance ofseeing good life than we have here?"
"Yes. I have never got any happiness outside Hintock that I know of,and I have suffered many a heartache at being sent away. Oh, themisery of those January days when I had got back to school, and leftyou all here in the wood so happy. I used to wonder why I had to bearit. And I was always a little despised by the other girls at school,because they knew where I came from, and that my parents were not in sogood a station as theirs."
Her poor father was much hurt at what he thought her ingratitude andintractability. He had admitted to himself bitterly enough that heshould have let young hearts have their way, or rather should havehelped on her affection for Winterborne, and given her to him accordingto his original plan; but he was not prepared for her deprecation ofthose attainments whose completion had been a labor of years, and asevere tax upon his purse.
"Very well," he said, with much heaviness of spirit. "If you don'tlike to go to her I don't wish to force you."
And so the question remained for him still: how should he remedy thisperilous state of things? For days he sat in a moody attitude over thefire, a pitcher of cider standing on the hearth beside him, and hisdrinking-horn inverted upon the top of it. He spent a week and morethus composing a letter to the chief offender, which he would every nowand then attempt to complete, and suddenly crumple up in his hand.