He left her at the door of her father’s house. As he receded, and was
clasped out of sight by the filmy shades, he impressed Grace as a man
who hardly appertained to her existence at all. Cleverer, greater than
herself, one outside her mental orbit, as she considered him, he seemed
to be her ruler rather than her equal, protector, and dear familiar
friend.
The disappointment she had experienced at his wish, the shock given to
her girlish sensibilities by his irreverent views of marriage, together
with the sure and near approach of the day fixed for committing her
future to his keeping, made her so restless that she could scarcely
sleep at all that night. She rose when the sparrows began to walk out
of the roof-holes, sat on the floor of her room in the dim light, and
by-and-by peeped out behind the window-curtains. It was even now day
out-of-doors, though the tones of morning were feeble and wan, and it
was long before the sun would be perceptible in this overshadowed vale.
Not a sound came from any of the out-houses as yet. The tree-trunks,
the road, the out-buildings, the garden, every object wore that aspect
of mesmeric fixity which the suspensive quietude of daybreak lends to
such scenes. Outside her window helpless immobility seemed to be
combined with intense consciousness; a meditative inertness possessed
all things, oppressively contrasting with her own active emotions.
Beyond the road were some cottage roofs and orchards; over these roofs
and over the apple-trees behind, high up the slope, and backed by the
plantation on the crest, was the house yet occupied by her future
husband, the rough-cast front showing whitely through its creepers. The
window-shutters were closed, the bedroom curtains closely drawn, and
not the thinnest coil of smoke rose from the rugged chimneys.
Something broke the stillness. The front door of the house she was
gazing at opened softly, and there came out into the porch a female
figure, wrapped in a large shawl, beneath which was visible the white
skirt of a long loose garment. A gray arm, stretching from within the
porch, adjusted the shawl over the woman’s shoulders; it was withdrawn
and disappeared, the door closing behind her.
The woman went quickly down the box-edged path between the raspberries
and currants, and as she walked her well-developed form and gait
betrayed her individuality. It was Suke Damson, the affianced one of
simple young Tim Tangs. At the bottom of the garden she entered the
shelter of the tall hedge, and only the top of her head could be seen
hastening in the direction of her own dwelling.
Grace had recognized, or thought she recognized, in the gray arm
stretching from the porch, the sleeve of a dressing-gown which Mr.
Fitzpiers had been wearing on her own memorable visit to him. Her face
fired red. She had just before thought of dressing herself and taking a
lonely walk under the trees, so coolly green this early morning; but
she now sat down on her bed and fell into reverie. It seemed as if
hardly any time had passed when she heard the household moving briskly
about, and breakfast preparing down-stairs; though, on rousing herself
to robe and descend, she found that the sun was throwing his rays
completely over the tree-tops, a progress of natural phenomena denoting
that at least three hours had elapsed since she last looked out of the
window.
When attired she searched about the house for her father; she found him
at last in the garden, stooping to examine the potatoes for signs of
disease. Hearing her rustle, he stood up and stretched his back and
arms, saying, “Morning t’ye, Gracie. I congratulate ye. It is only a
month to-day to the time!”
She did not answer, but, without lifting her dress, waded between the
dewy rows of tall potato-green into the middle of the plot where he
was.
“I have been thinking very much about my position this morning—ever
since it was light,” she began, excitedly, and trembling so that she
could hardly stand. “And I feel it is a false one. I wish not to marry
Mr. Fitzpiers. I wish not to marry anybody; but I’ll marry Giles
Winterborne if you say I must as an alternative.”
Her father’s face settled into rigidity, he turned pale, and came
deliberately out of the plot before he answered her. She had never seen
him look so incensed before.
“Now, hearken to me,” he said. “There’s a time for a woman to alter her
mind; and there’s a time when she can no longer alter it, if she has
any right eye to her parents’ honor and the seemliness of things. That
time has come. I won’t say to ye, you _shall_ marry him. But I will say
that if you refuse, I shall forever be ashamed and a-weary of ye as a
daughter, and shall look upon you as the hope of my life no more. What
do you know about life and what it can bring forth, and how you ought
to act to lead up to best ends? Oh, you are an ungrateful maid, Grace;
you’ve seen that fellow Giles, and he has got over ye; that’s where the
secret lies, I’ll warrant me!”
“No, father, no! It is not Giles—it is something I cannot tell you of—”
“Well, make fools of us all; make us laughing-stocks; break it off;
have your own way.”
“But who knows of the engagement as yet? how can breaking it disgrace
you?”
Melbury then by degrees admitted that he had mentioned the engagement
to this acquaintance and to that, till she perceived that in his
restlessness and pride he had published it everywhere. She went
dismally away to a bower of laurel at the top of the garden. Her father
followed her.
“It is that Giles Winterborne!” he said, with an upbraiding gaze at
her.
“No, it is not; though for that matter you encouraged him once,” she
said, troubled to the verge of despair. “It is not Giles, it is Mr.
Fitzpiers.”
“You’ve had a tiff—a lovers’ tiff—that’s all, I suppose!”
“It is some woman—”
“Ay, ay; you are jealous. The old story. Don’t tell me. Now do you bide
here. I’ll send Fitzpiers to you. I saw him smoking in front of his
house but a minute by-gone.”
He went off hastily out of the garden-gate and down the lane. But she
would not stay where she was; and edging through a slit in the
garden-fence, walked away into the wood. Just about here the trees were
large and wide apart, and there was no undergrowth, so that she could
be seen to some distance; a sylph-like, greenish-white creature, as
toned by the sunlight and leafage. She heard a foot-fall crushing dead
leaves behind her, and found herself reconnoitered by Fitzpiers
himself, approaching gay and fresh as the morning around them.
His remote gaze at her had been one of mild interest rather than of
rapture. But she looked so lovely in the green world about her, her
pink cheeks, her simple light dress, and the delicate flexibility of
her movement acquired such rarity from their wild-wood setting, that
his eyes kindled as he drew near.
“My darling, what is it? Your father says you are in the pouts, and
jealous, and I don’t know what. Ha! ha! ha! as if there were any rival
to you, except vegetable nature, in this home of recluses! We know
better.”
“Jealous; oh no, it is not so,” said she, gravely. “That’s a mistake of
his and yours, sir. I spoke to him so closely about the question of
marriage with you that he did not apprehend my state of mind.”
“But there’s something wrong—eh?” he asked, eying her narrowly, and
bending to kiss her. She shrank away, and his purposed kiss miscarried.
“What is it?” he said, more seriously for this little defeat.
She made no answer beyond, “Mr. Fitzpiers, I have had no breakfast, I
must go in.”
“Come,” he insisted, fixing his eyes upon her. “Tell me at once, I
say.”
It was the greater strength against the smaller; but she was mastered
less by his manner than by her own sense of the unfairness of silence.
“I looked out of the window,” she said, with hesitation. “I’ll tell you
by-and-by. I must go in-doors. I have had no breakfast.”
By a sort of divination his conjecture went straight to the fact. “Nor
I,” said he, lightly. “Indeed, I rose late to-day. I have had a broken
night, or rather morning. A girl of the village—I don’t know her
name—came and rang at my bell as soon as it was light—between four and
five, I should think it was—perfectly maddened with an aching tooth. As
no-body heard her ring, she threw some gravel at my window, till at
last I heard her and slipped on my dressing-gown and went down. The
poor thing begged me with tears in her eyes to take out her tormentor,
if I dragged her head off. Down she sat and out it came—a lovely molar,
not a speck upon it; and off she went with it in her handkerchief, much
contented, though it would have done good work for her for fifty years
to come.”
It was all so plausible—so completely explained. Knowing nothing of the
incident in the wood on old Midsummer-eve, Grace felt that her
suspicions were unworthy and absurd, and with the readiness of an
honest heart she jumped at the opportunity of honoring his word. At the
moment of her mental liberation the bushes about the garden had moved,
and her father emerged into the shady glade. “Well, I hope it is made
up?” he said, cheerily.
“Oh yes,” said Fitzpiers, with his eyes fixed on Grace, whose eyes were
shyly bent downward.
“Now,” said her father, “tell me, the pair of ye, that you still mean
to take one another for good and all; and on the strength o’t you shall
have another couple of hundred paid down. I swear it by the name.”
Fitzpiers took her hand. “We declare it, do we not, my dear Grace?”
said he.
Relieved of her doubt, somewhat overawed, and ever anxious to please,
she was disposed to settle the matter; yet, womanlike, she would not
relinquish her opportunity of asking a concession of some sort. “If our
wedding can be at church, I say yes,” she answered, in a measured
voice. “If not, I say no.”
Fitzpiers was generous in his turn. “It shall be so,” he rejoined,
gracefully. “To holy church we’ll go, and much good may it do us.”
They returned through the bushes indoors, Grace walking, full of
thought between the other two, somewhat comforted, both by Fitzpiers’s
ingenious explanation and by the sense that she was not to be deprived
of a religious ceremony. “So let it be,” she said to herself. “Pray God
it is for the best.”
From this hour there was no serious attempt at recalcitration on her
part. Fitzpiers kept himself continually near her, dominating any
rebellious impulse, and shaping her will into passive concurrence with
all his desires. Apart from his lover-like anxiety to possess her, the
few golden hundreds of the timber-dealer, ready to hand, formed a warm
background to Grace’s lovely face, and went some way to remove his
uneasiness at the prospect of endangering his professional and social
chances by an alliance with the family of a simple countryman.
The interim closed up its perspective surely and silently. Whenever
Grace had any doubts of her position, the sense of contracting time was
like a shortening chamber: at other moments she was comparatively
blithe. Day after day waxed and waned; the one or two woodmen who
sawed, shaped, spokeshaved on her father’s premises at this inactive
season of the year, regularly came and unlocked the doors in the
morning, locked them in the evening, supped, leaned over their
garden-gates for a whiff of evening air, and to catch any last and
farthest throb of news from the outer world, which entered and expired
at Little Hintock like the exhausted swell of a wave in some innermost
cavern of some innermost creek of an embayed sea; yet no news
interfered with the nuptial purpose at their neighbor’s house. The
sappy green twig-tips of the season’s growth would not, she thought, be
appreciably woodier on the day she became a wife, so near was the time;
the tints of the foliage would hardly have changed. Everything was so
much as usual that no itinerant stranger would have supposed a woman’s
fate to be hanging in the balance at that summer’s decline.
But there were preparations, imaginable readily enough by those who had
special knowledge. In the remote and fashionable town of Sandbourne
something was growing up under the hands of several persons who had
never seen Grace Melbury, never would see her, or care anything about
her at all, though their creation had such interesting relation to her
life that it would enclose her very heart at a moment when that heart
would beat, if not with more emotional ardor, at least with more
emotional turbulence than at any previous time.
Why did Mrs. Dollery’s van, instead of passing along at the end of the
smaller village to Great Hintock direct, turn one Saturday night into
Little Hintock Lane, and never pull up till it reached Mr. Melbury’s
gates? The gilding shine of evening fell upon a large, flat box not
less than a yard square, and safely tied with cord, as it was handed
out from under the tilt with a great deal of care. But it was not heavy
for its size; Mrs. Dollery herself carried it into the house. Tim
Tangs, the hollow-turner, Bawtree, Suke Damson, and others, looked
knowing, and made remarks to each other as they watched its entrance.
Melbury stood at the door of the timber-shed in the attitude of a man
to whom such an arrival was a trifling domestic detail with which he
did not condescend to be concerned. Yet he well divined the contents of
that box, and was in truth all the while in a pleasant exaltation at
the proof that thus far, at any rate, no disappointment had supervened.
While Mrs. Dollery remained—which was rather long, from her sense of
the importance of her errand—he went into the out-house; but as soon as
she had had her say, been paid, and had rumbled away, he entered the
dwelling, to find there what he knew he should find—his wife and
daughter in a flutter of excitement over the wedding-gown, just arrived
from the leading dress-maker of Sandbourne watering-place aforesaid.
During these weeks Giles Winterborne was nowhere to be seen or heard
of. At the close of his tenure in Hintock he had sold some of his
furniture, packed up the rest—a few pieces endeared by associations, or
necessary to his occupation—in the house of a friendly neighbor, and
gone away. People said that a certain laxity had crept into his life;
that he had never gone near a church latterly, and had been sometimes
seen on Sundays with unblacked boots, lying on his elbow under a tree,
with a cynical gaze at surrounding objects. He was likely to return to
Hintock when the cider-making season came round, his apparatus being
stored there, and travel with his mill and press from village to
village.
The narrow interval that stood before the day diminished yet. There was
in Grace’s mind sometimes a certain anticipative satisfaction, the
satisfaction of feeling that she would be the heroine of an hour;
moreover, she was proud, as a cultivated woman, to be the wife of a
cultivated man. It was an opportunity denied very frequently to young
women in her position, nowadays not a few; those in whom parental
discovery of the value of education has implanted tastes which parental
circles fail to gratify. But what an attenuation was this cold pride of
the dream of her youth, in which she had pictured herself walking in
state towards the altar, flushed by the purple light and bloom of her
own passion, without a single misgiving as to the sealing of the bond,
and fervently receiving as her due
“The homage of a thousand hearts; the fond, deep love of one.”
Everything had been clear then, in imagination; now something was
undefined. She had little carking anxieties; a curious fatefulness
seemed to rule her, and she experienced a mournful want of some one to
confide in.
The day loomed so big and nigh that her prophetic ear could, in fancy,
catch the noise of it, hear the murmur of the villagers as she came out
of church, imagine the jangle of the three thin-toned Hintock bells.
The dialogues seemed to grow louder, and the ding-ding-dong of those
three crazed bells more persistent. She awoke: the morning had come.
Five hours later she was the wife of Fitzpiers.