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!”
She drew a catching breath, and turned pale. The dialogue had been
affectionate comedy up to this point. The gloomy atmosphere of the
past, and the still gloomy horizon of the present, had been for the
interval forgotten. Now the whole environment came back, the due
balance of shade among the light was restored.
“It is sure to be all right, I trust?” she resumed, in uneasy accents.
“What did my father say the solicitor had told him?”
“Oh—that all is sure enough. The case is so clear—nothing could be
clearer. But the legal part is not yet quite done and finished, as is
natural.”
“Oh no—of course not,” she said, sunk in meek thought. “But father said
it was _almost_—did he not? Do you know anything about the new law that
makes these things so easy?”
“Nothing—except the general fact that it enables ill-assorted husbands
and wives to part in a way they could not formerly do without an Act of
Parliament.”
“Have you to sign a paper, or swear anything? Is it something like
that?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“How long has it been introduced?”
“About six months or a year, the lawyer said, I think.”
To hear these two poor Arcadian innocents talk of imperial law would
have made a humane person weep who should have known what a dangerous
structure they were building up on their supposed knowledge. They
remained in thought, like children in the presence of the
incomprehensible.
“Giles,” she said, at last, “it makes me quite weary when I think how
serious my situation is, or has been. Shall we not go out from here
now, as it may seem rather fast of me—our being so long together, I
mean—if anybody were to see us? I am almost sure,” she added,
uncertainly, “that I ought not to let you hold my hand yet, knowing
that the documents—or whatever it may be—have not been signed; so that
I—am still as married as ever—or almost. My dear father has forgotten
himself. Not that I feel morally bound to any one else, after what has
taken place—no woman of spirit could—now, too, that several months have
passed. But I wish to keep the proprieties as well as I can.”
“Yes, yes. Still, your father reminds us that life is short. I myself
feel that it is; that is why I wished to understand you in this that we
have begun. At times, dear Grace, since receiving your father’s letter,
I am as uneasy and fearful as a child at what he said. If one of us
were to die before the formal signing and sealing that is to release
you have been done—if we should drop out of the world and never have
made the most of this little, short, but real opportunity, I should
think to myself as I sunk down dying, ‘Would to my God that I had
spoken out my whole heart—given her one poor little kiss when I had the
chance to give it! But I never did, although she had promised to be
mine some day; and now I never can.’ That’s what I should think.”
She had begun by watching the words from his lips with a mournful
regard, as though their passage were visible; but as he went on she
dropped her glance. “Yes,” she said, “I have thought that, too. And,
because I have thought it, I by no means meant, in speaking of the
proprieties, to be reserved and cold to you who loved me so long ago,
or to hurt your heart as I used to do at that thoughtless time. Oh, not
at all, indeed! But—ought I to allow you?—oh, it is too quick—surely!”
Her eyes filled with tears of bewildered, alarmed emotion.
Winterborne was too straightforward to influence her further against
her better judgment. “Yes—I suppose it is,” he said, repentantly. “I’ll
wait till all is settled. What did your father say in that last
letter?”
He meant about his progress with the petition; but she, mistaking him,
frankly spoke of the personal part. “He said—what I have implied.
Should I tell more plainly?”
“Oh no—don’t, if it is a secret.”
“Not at all. I will tell every word, straight out, Giles, if you wish.
He said I was to encourage you. There. But I cannot obey him further
to-day. Come, let us go now.” She gently slid her hand from his, and
went in front of him out of the Abbey.
“I was thinking of getting some dinner,” said Winterborne, changing to
the prosaic, as they walked. “And you, too, must require something. Do
let me take you to a place I know.”
Grace was almost without a friend in the world outside her father’s
house; her life with Fitzpiers had brought her no society; had
sometimes, indeed, brought her deeper solitude and inconsideration than
any she had ever known before. Hence it was a treat to her to find
herself again the object of thoughtful care. But she questioned if to
go publicly to dine with Giles Winterborne were not a proposal, due
rather to his unsophistication than to his discretion. She said gently
that she would much prefer his ordering her lunch at some place and
then coming to tell her it was ready, while she remained in the Abbey
porch. Giles saw her secret reasoning, thought how hopelessly blind to
propriety he was beside her, and went to do as she wished.
He was not absent more than ten minutes, and found Grace where he had
left her. “It will be quite ready by the time you get there,” he said,
and told her the name of the inn at which the meal had been ordered,
which was one that she had never heard of.
“I’ll find it by inquiry,” said Grace, setting out.
“And shall I see you again?”
“Oh yes—come to me there. It will not be like going together. I shall
want you to find my father’s man and the gig for me.”
He waited on some ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, till he thought
her lunch ended, and that he might fairly take advantage of her
invitation to start her on her way home. He went straight to The Three
Tuns—a little tavern in a side street, scrupulously clean, but humble
and inexpensive. On his way he had an occasional misgiving as to
whether the place had been elegant enough for her; and as soon as he
entered it, and saw her ensconced there, he perceived that he had
blundered.
Grace was seated in the only dining-room that the simple old hostelry
could boast of, which was also a general parlor on market-days; a long,
low apartment, with a sanded floor herring-boned with a broom; a wide,
red-curtained window to the street, and another to the garden. Grace
had retreated to the end of the room looking out upon the latter, the
front part being full of a mixed company which had dropped in since he
was there.
She was in a mood of the greatest depression. On arriving, and seeing
what the tavern was like, she had been taken by surprise; but having
gone too far to retreat, she had heroically entered and sat down on the
well-scrubbed settle, opposite the narrow table with its knives and
steel forks, tin pepper-boxes, blue salt-cellars, and posters
advertising the sale of bullocks against the wall. The last time that
she had taken any meal in a public place it had been with Fitzpiers at
the grand new Earl of Wessex Hotel in that town, after a two months’
roaming and sojourning at the gigantic hotels of the Continent. How
could she have expected any other kind of accommodation in present
circumstances than such as Giles had provided? And yet how unprepared
she was for this change! The tastes that she had acquired from
Fitzpiers had been imbibed so subtly that she hardly knew she possessed
them till confronted by this contrast. The elegant Fitzpiers, in fact,
at that very moment owed a long bill at the above-mentioned hotel for
the luxurious style in which he used to put her up there whenever they
drove to Sherton. But such is social sentiment, that she had been quite
comfortable under those debt-impending conditions, while she felt
humiliated by her present situation, which Winterborne had paid for
honestly on the nail.
He had noticed in a moment that she shrunk from her position, and all
his pleasure was gone. It was the same susceptibility over again which
had spoiled his Christmas party long ago.
But he did not know that this recrudescence was only the casual result
of Grace’s apprenticeship to what she was determined to learn in spite
of it—a consequence of one of those sudden surprises which confront
everybody bent upon turning over a new leaf. She had finished her
lunch, which he saw had been a very mincing performance; and he brought
her out of the house as soon as he could.
“Now,” he said, with great sad eyes, “you have not finished at all
well, I know. Come round to the Earl of Wessex. I’ll order a tea there.
I did not remember that what was good enough for me was not good enough
for you.”
Her face faded into an aspect of deep distress when she saw what had
happened. “Oh no, Giles,” she said, with extreme pathos; “certainly
not. Why do you—say that when you know better? You _ever_ will
misunderstand me.”
“Indeed, that’s not so, Mrs. Fitzpiers. Can you deny that you felt out
of place at The Three Tuns?”
“I don’t know. Well, since you make me speak, I do not deny it.”
“And yet I have felt at home there these twenty years. Your husband
used always to take you to the Earl of Wessex, did he not?”
“Yes,” she reluctantly admitted. How could she explain in the street of
a market-town that it was her superficial and transitory taste which
had been offended, and not her nature or her affection? Fortunately, or
unfortunately, at that moment they saw Melbury’s man driving vacantly
along the street in search of her, the hour having passed at which he
had been told to take her up. Winterborne hailed him, and she was
powerless then to prolong the discourse. She entered the vehicle sadly,
and the horse trotted away.