Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (523 page)

“I can scarcely move, and I am scratched dreadfully about the ankles.”

Grace reflected. “Perhaps, as it is dry under foot, the best thing for us to do would be to sit down for half an hour, and then start again when we have thoroughly rested. By walking straight we must come to a track leading somewhere before the morning.”

They found a clump of bushy hollies which afforded a shelter from the wind, and sat down under it, some tufts of dead fern, crisp and dry, that remained from the previous season forming a sort of nest for them. But it was cold, nevertheless, on this March night, particularly for Grace, who with the sanguine prematureness of youth in matters of dress, had considered it spring-time, and hence was not so warmly clad as Mrs. Charmond, who still wore her winter fur. But after sitting a while the latter lady shivered no less than Grace as the warmth imparted by her hasty walking began to go off, and they felt the cold air drawing through the holly leaves which scratched their backs and shoulders. Moreover, they could hear some drops of rain falling on the trees, though none reached the nook in which they had ensconced themselves.

“If we were to cling close together,” said Mrs. Charmond, “we should keep each other warm. But,” she added, in an uneven voice, “I suppose you won’t come near me for the world!”

“Why not?”

“Because — well, you know.”

“Yes. I will — I don’t hate you at all.”

They consequently crept up to one another, and being in the dark, lonely and weary, did what neither had dreamed of doing beforehand, clasped each other closely, Mrs. Charmond’s furs consoling Grace’s cold face, and each one’s body as she breathed alternately heaving against that of her companion.

When a few minutes had been spent thus, Mrs. Charmond said, “I am so wretched!” in a heavy, emotional whisper.

“You are frightened,” said Grace, kindly. “But there is nothing to fear; I know these woods well.”

“I am not at all frightened at the wood, but I am at other things.”

Mrs. Charmond embraced Grace more and more tightly, and the younger woman could feel her neighbour’s breathings grow deeper and more spasmodic, as though uncontrollable feelings were germinating.

“After I had left you,” she went on, “I regretted something I had said. I have to make a confession — I must make it!” she whispered, brokenly, the instinct to indulge in warmth of sentiment which had led this woman of passions to respond to Fitzpiers in the first place leading her now to find luxurious comfort in opening her heart to his wife. “I said to you I could give him up without pain or deprivation — that he had only been my pastime. That was untrue — it was said to deceive you. I could not do it without much pain; and, what is more dreadful, I cannot give him up — even if I would — of myself alone.”

“Why? Because you love him, you mean.”

Felice Charmond denoted assent by a movement.

“I knew I was right!” said Grace, exaltedly. “But that should not deter you,” she presently added, in a moral tone. “Oh, do struggle against it, and you will conquer!”

“You are so simple, so simple!” cried Felice. “You think, because you guessed my assumed indifference to him to be a sham, that you know the extremes that people are capable of going to! But a good deal more may have been going on than you have fathomed with all your insight. I CANNOT give him up until he chooses to give up me.”

“But surely you are the superior in station and in every way, and the cut must come from you.”

“Tchut! Must I tell verbatim, you simple child? Oh, I suppose I must! I shall eat away my heart if I do not let out all, after meeting you like this and finding how guileless you are.” She thereupon whispered a few words in the girl’s ear, and burst into a violent fit of sobbing.

Grace started roughly away from the shelter of the fur, and sprang to her feet.

“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed, thunderstruck at a revelation transcending her utmost suspicion. “Can it be — can it be!”

She turned as if to hasten away. But Felice Charmond’s sobs came to her ear: deep darkness circled her about, the funereal trees rocked and chanted their diriges and placebos around her, and she did not know which way to go. After a moment of energy she felt mild again, and turned to the motionless woman at her feet.

“Are you rested?” she asked, in what seemed something like her own voice grown ten years older.

Without an answer Mrs. Charmond slowly rose.

“You mean to betray me!” she said from the bitterest depths of her soul. “Oh fool, fool I!”

“No,” said Grace, shortly. “I mean no such thing. But let us be quick now. We have a serious undertaking before us. Think of nothing but going straight on.”

They walked on in profound silence, pulling back boughs now growing wet, and treading down woodbine, but still keeping a pretty straight course. Grace began to be thoroughly worn out, and her companion too, when, on a sudden, they broke into the deserted highway at the hill-top on which the Sherton man had waited for Mrs. Dollery’s van. Grace recognized the spot as soon as she looked around her.

“How we have got here I cannot tell,” she said, with cold civility. “We have made a complete circuit of Little Hintock. The hazel copse is quite on the other side. Now we have only to follow the road.”

They dragged themselves onward, turned into the lane, passed the track to Little Hintock, and so reached the park.

“Here I turn back,” said Grace, in the same passionless voice. “You are quite near home.”

Mrs. Charmond stood inert, seeming appalled by her late admission.

“I have told you something in a moment of irresistible desire to unburden my soul which all but a fool would have kept silent as the grave,” she said. “I cannot help it now. Is it to be a secret — or do you mean war?”

“A secret, certainly,” said Grace, mournfully. “How can you expect war from such a helpless, wretched being as I!”

“And I’ll do my best not to see him. I am his slave; but I’ll try.”

Grace was naturally kind; but she could not help using a small dagger now.

“Pray don’t distress yourself,” she said, with exquisitely fine scorn. “You may keep him — for me.” Had she been wounded instead of mortified she could not have used the words; but Fitzpiers’s hold upon her heart was slight.

They parted thus and there, and Grace went moodily homeward. Passing Marty’s cottage she observed through the window that the girl was writing instead of chopping as usual, and wondered what her correspondence could be. Directly afterwards she met people in search of her, and reached the house to find all in serious alarm. She soon explained that she had lost her way, and her general depression was attributed to exhaustion on that account.

Could she have known what Marty was writing she would have been surprised.

The rumor which agitated the other folk of Hintock had reached the young girl, and she was penning a letter to Fitzpiers, to tell him that Mrs. Charmond wore her hair. It was poor Marty’s only card, and she played it, knowing nothing of fashion, and thinking her revelation a fatal one for a lover.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

It was at the beginning of April, a few days after the meeting between Grace and Mrs. Charmond in the wood, that Fitzpiers, just returned from London, was travelling from Sherton-Abbas to Hintock in a hired carriage. In his eye there was a doubtful light, and the lines of his refined face showed a vague disquietude. He appeared now like one of those who impress the beholder as having suffered wrong in being born.

His position was in truth gloomy, and to his appreciative mind it seemed even gloomier than it was. His practice had been slowly dwindling of late, and now threatened to die out altogether, the irrepressible old Dr. Jones capturing patients up to Fitzpiers’s very door. Fitzpiers knew only too well the latest and greatest cause of his unpopularity; and yet, so illogical is man, the second branch of his sadness grew out of a remedial measure proposed for the first — a letter from Felice Charmond imploring him not to see her again. To bring about their severance still more effectually, she added, she had decided during his absence upon almost immediate departure for the Continent.

The time was that dull interval in a woodlander’s life which coincides with great activity in the life of the woodland itself — a period following the close of the winter tree-cutting, and preceding the barking season, when the saps are just beginning to heave with the force of hydraulic lifts inside all the trunks of the forest.

Winterborne’s contract was completed, and the plantations were deserted. It was dusk; there were no leaves as yet; the nightingales would not begin to sing for a fortnight; and “the Mother of the Months” was in her most attenuated phase — starved and bent to a mere bowed skeleton, which glided along behind the bare twigs in Fitzpiers’s company.

When he reached home he went straight up to his wife’s sitting-room. He found it deserted, and without a fire. He had mentioned no day for his return; nevertheless, he wondered why she was not there waiting to receive him. On descending to the other wing of the house and inquiring of Mrs. Melbury, he learned with much surprise that Grace had gone on a visit to an acquaintance at Shottsford-Forum three days earlier; that tidings had on this morning reached her father of her being very unwell there, in consequence of which he had ridden over to see her.

Fitzpiers went up-stairs again, and the little drawing-room, now lighted by a solitary candle, was not rendered more cheerful by the entrance of Grammer Oliver with an apronful of wood, which she threw on the hearth while she raked out the grate and rattled about the fire-irons, with a view to making things comfortable. Fitzpiers considered that Grace ought to have let him know her plans more accurately before leaving home in a freak like this. He went desultorily to the window, the blind of which had not been pulled down, and looked out at the thin, fast-sinking moon, and at the tall stalk of smoke rising from the top of Suke Damson’s chimney, signifying that the young woman had just lit her fire to prepare supper.

He became conscious of a discussion in progress on the opposite side of the court. Somebody had looked over the wall to talk to the sawyers, and was telling them in a loud voice news in which the name of Mrs. Charmond soon arrested his ears.

“Grammer, don’t make so much noise with that grate,” said the surgeon; at which Grammer reared herself upon her knees and held the fuel suspended in her hand, while Fitzpiers half opened the casement.

“She is off to foreign lands again at last — hev made up her mind quite sudden-like — and it is thoughted she’ll leave in a day or two. She’s been all as if her mind were low for some days past — with a sort of sorrow in her face, as if she reproached her own soul. She’s the wrong sort of woman for Hintock — hardly knowing a beech from a woak — that I own. But I don’t care who the man is, she’s been a very kind friend to me.

“Well, the day after to-morrow is the Sabbath day, and without charity we are but tinkling simples; but this I do say, that her going will be a blessed thing for a certain married couple who remain.”

The fire was lighted, and Fitzpiers sat down in front of it, restless as the last leaf upon a tree. “A sort of sorrow in her face, as if she reproached her own soul.” Poor Felice. How Felice’s frame must be pulsing under the conditions of which he had just heard the caricature; how her fair temples must ache; what a mood of wretchedness she must be in! But for the mixing up of his name with hers, and her determination to sunder their too close acquaintance on that account, she would probably have sent for him professionally. She was now sitting alone, suffering, perhaps wishing that she had not forbidden him to come again.

Unable to remain in this lonely room any longer, or to wait for the meal which was in course of preparation, he made himself ready for riding, descended to the yard, stood by the stable-door while Darling was being saddled, and rode off down the lane. He would have preferred walking, but was weary with his day’s travel.

As he approached the door of Marty South’s cottage, which it was necessary to pass on his way, she came from the porch as if she had been awaiting him, and met him in the middle of the road, holding up a letter. Fitzpiers took it without stopping, and asked over his shoulder from whom it came.

Marty hesitated. “From me,” she said, shyly, though with noticeable firmness.

This letter contained, in fact, Marty’s declaration that she was the original owner of Mrs. Charmond’s supplementary locks, and enclosed a sample from the native stock, which had grown considerably by this time. It was her long contemplated apple of discord, and much her hand trembled as she handed the document up to him.

But it was impossible on account of the gloom for Fitzpiers to read it then, while he had the curiosity to do so, and he put it in his pocket. His imagination having already centred itself on Hintock House, in his pocket the letter remained unopened and forgotten, all the while that Marty was hopefully picturing its excellent weaning effect upon him.

He was not long in reaching the precincts of the Manor House. He drew rein under a group of dark oaks commanding a view of the front, and reflected a while. His entry would not be altogether unnatural in the circumstances of her possible indisposition; but upon the whole he thought it best to avoid riding up to the door. By silently approaching he could retreat unobserved in the event of her not being alone. Thereupon he dismounted, hitched Darling to a stray bough hanging a little below the general browsing line of the trees, and proceeded to the door on foot.

In the mean time Melbury had returned from Shottsford-Forum. The great court or quadrangle of the timber-merchant’s house, divided from the shady lane by an ivy-covered wall, was entered by two white gates, one standing near each extremity of the wall. It so happened that at the moment when Fitzpiers was riding out at the lower gate on his way to the Manor House, Melbury was approaching the upper gate to enter it. Fitzpiers being in front of Melbury was seen by the latter, but the surgeon, never turning his head, did not observe his father-in-law, ambling slowly and silently along under the trees, though his horse too was a gray one.