CHAPTER XLIV.
Fitzpiers had hardly been gone an hour when Grace began to sicken. Thenext day she kept her room. Old Jones was called in; he murmured somestatements in which the words "feverish symptoms" occurred. Graceheard them, and guessed the means by which she had brought thisvisitation upon herself.
One day, while she still lay there with her head throbbing, wonderingif she were really going to join him who had gone before, GrammerOliver came to her bedside. "I don't know whe'r this is meant for youto take, ma'am," she said, "but I have found it on the table. It wasleft by Marty, I think, when she came this morning."
Grace turned her hot eyes upon what Grammer held up. It was the phialleft at the hut by her husband when he had begged her to take somedrops of its contents if she wished to preserve herself from falling avictim to the malady which had pulled down Winterborne. She examinedit as well as she could. The liquid was of an opaline hue, and bore alabel with an inscription in Italian. He had probably got it in hiswanderings abroad. She knew but little Italian, but could understandthat the cordial was a febrifuge of some sort. Her father, her mother,and all the household were anxious for her recovery, and she resolvedto obey her husband's directions. Whatever the risk, if any, she wasprepared to run it. A glass of water was brought, and the dropsdropped in.
The effect, though not miraculous, was remarkable. In less than anhour she felt calmer, cooler, better able to reflect--less inclined tofret and chafe and wear herself away. She took a few drops more. Fromthat time the fever retreated, and went out like a damped conflagration.
"How clever he is!" she said, regretfully. "Why could he not have hadmore principle, so as to turn his great talents to good account?Perhaps he has saved my useless life. But he doesn't know it, anddoesn't care whether he has saved it or not; and on that account willnever be told by me! Probably he only gave it to me in the arrogance ofhis skill, to show the greatness of his resources beside mine, asElijah drew down fire from heaven."
As soon as she had quite recovered from this foiled attack upon herlife, Grace went to Marty South's cottage. The current of her beinghad again set towards the lost Giles Winterborne.
"Marty," she said, "we both loved him. We will go to his gravetogether."
Great Hintock church stood at the upper part of the village, and couldbe reached without passing through the street. In the dusk of the lateSeptember day they went thither by secret ways, walking mostly insilence side by side, each busied with her own thoughts. Grace had atrouble exceeding Marty's--that haunting sense of having put out thelight of his life by her own hasty doings. She had tried to persuadeherself that he might have died of his illness, even if she had nottaken 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 inwhich he had been accustomed to descend every year, with his portablemill and press, to make cider about this time.
Perhaps Grace's first grief, the discovery that if he had lived hecould never have claimed her, had some power in softening this, thesecond. On Marty's part there was the same consideration never wouldshe have been his. As no anticipation of gratified affection had beenin existence while he was with them, there was none to be disappointednow that he had gone.
Grace was abased when, by degrees, she found that she had neverunderstood Giles as Marty had done. Marty South alone, of all thewomen in Hintock and the world, had approximated to Winterborne's levelof intelligent intercourse with nature. In that respect she had formedthe 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 thatwondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been withthese two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze. They had been possessed ofits finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to readits hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds ofnight, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, which had to Gracea touch of the uncanny, and even the supernatural, were simpleoccurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew. Theyhad planted together, and together they had felled; together they had,with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs andsymbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all togethermade an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces,when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon thespecies of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of thewind's murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sortafar off. They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, ortainted with incipient decay, and by the state of its upper twigs, thestratum that had been reached by its roots. The artifices of theseasons were seen by them from the conjuror's own point of view, andnot 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 abovestrain.
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 evenmy father, though he came nearest knowing--the tongue of the trees andfruits and flowers themselves."
She could indulge in mournful fancies like this to Marty; but the hardcore to her grief--which Marty's had not--remained. Had she been surethat Giles's death resulted entirely from his exposure, it would havedriven her well-nigh to insanity; but there was always that barepossibility that his exposure had only precipitated what wasinevitable. She longed to believe that it had not done even this.
There was only one man whose opinion on the circumstances she would beat all disposed to trust. Her husband was that man. Yet to ask him itwould be necessary to detail the true conditions in which she andWinterborne had lived during these three or four critical days thatfollowed her flight; and in withdrawing her original defiantannouncement on that point, there seemed a weakness she did not care toshow. She never doubted that Fitzpiers would believe her if she made aclean confession of the actual situation but to volunteer thecorrection would seem like signalling for a truce, and that, in herpresent frame of mind, was what she did not feel the need of.
It will probably not appear a surprising statement, after what has beenalready declared of Fitzpiers, that the man whom Grace's fidelity couldnot keep faithful was stung into passionate throbs of interestconcerning her by her avowal of the contrary.
He declared to himself that he had never known her dangerously fullcompass if she were capable of such a reprisal; and, melancholy as itmay be to admit the fact, his own humiliation and regret engendered asmouldering admiration of her.
He passed a month or two of great misery at Exbury, the place to whichhe had retired--quite as much misery indeed as Grace, could she haveknown of it, would have been inclined to inflict upon any livingcreature, how much soever he might have wronged her. Then a suddenhope dawned upon him; he wondered if her affirmation were true. Heasked himself whether it were not the act of a woman whose naturalpurity and innocence had blinded her to the contingencies of such anannouncement. His wide experience of the sex had taught him that, inmany cases, women who ventured on hazardous matters did so because theylacked an imagination sensuous enough to feel their full force. Inthis light Grace's bold avowal might merely have denoted thedesperation of one who was a child to the realities of obliquity.
Fitzpiers's mental sufferings and suspense led him at last to take amelancholy journey to the neighborhood of Little Hintock; and here hehovered for hours around the scene of the purest emotional experiencesthat he had ever known in his life. He walked about the woods thatsurrounded Melbury's house, keeping out of sight like a criminal. Itwas a fine evening, and on his way homeward he passed near MartySouth's cottage. As usual she had lighted her candle with
out closingher 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 bothhands. The spade, though not a new one, had been so completelyburnished that it was bright as silver.
Fitzpiers somehow divined that they were Giles Winterborne's, and heput 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 goingto be sold, they say."
"Then I will buy it for you," said Fitzpiers. "That will be making youa return for a kindness you did me." His glance fell upon the girl'srare-colored hair, which had grown again. "Oh, Marty, those locks ofyours--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 therehad never been before. Marty was shy, indeed, of speaking about theletter, and her motives in writing it; but she thanked him warmly forhis promise of the cider-press. She would travel with it in the autumnseason, 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, referringto Winterborne. "One who lived where he lived, and was with him whenhe died."
Then Marty, suspecting that he did not know the true circumstances,from the fact that Mrs. Fitzpiers and himself were living apart, toldhim of Giles's generosity to Grace in giving up his house to her at therisk, and possibly the sacrifice, of his own life. When the surgeonheard it he almost envied Giles his chivalrous character. He expresseda wish to Marty that his visit to her should be kept secret, and wenthome thoughtful, feeling that in more that one sense his journey toHintock had not been in vain.
He would have given much to win Grace's forgiveness then. But whateverhe dared hope for in that kind from the future, there was nothing to bedone yet, while Giles Winterborne's memory was green. To wait wasimperative. A little time might melt her frozen thoughts, and lead herto look on him with toleration, if not with love.