Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (534 page)

CHAPTER XLIII.

She re-entered the hut, flung off her bonnet and cloak, and approached the sufferer. He had begun anew those terrible mutterings, and his hands were cold. As soon as she saw him there returned to her that agony of mind which the stimulus of her journey had thrown off for a time.

Could he really be dying? She bathed him, kissed him, forgot all things but the fact that lying there before her was he who had loved her more than the mere lover would have loved; had martyred himself for her comfort, cared more for her self-respect than she had thought of caring. This mood continued till she heard quick, smart footsteps without; she knew whose footsteps they were.

Grace sat on the inside of the bed against the wall, holding Giles’s hand, so that when her husband entered the patient lay between herself and him. He stood transfixed at first, noticing Grace only. Slowly he dropped his glance and discerned who the prostrate man was. Strangely enough, though Grace’s distaste for her husband’s company had amounted almost to dread, and culminated in actual flight, at this moment her last and least feeling was personal. Sensitive femininity was eclipsed by self-effacing purpose, and that it was a husband who stood there was forgotten. The first look that possessed her face was relief; satisfaction at the presence of the physician obliterated thought of the man, which only returned in the form of a sub-consciousness that did not interfere with her words.

“Is he dying — is there any hope?” she cried.

“Grace!” said Fitzpiers, in an indescribable whisper — more than invocating, if not quite deprecatory.

He was arrested by the spectacle, not so much in its intrinsic character — though that was striking enough to a man who called himself the husband of the sufferer’s friend and nurse — but in its character as the counterpart of one that had its hour many months before, in which he had figured as the patient, and the woman had been Felice Charmond.

“Is he in great danger — can you save him?” she cried again.

Fitzpiers aroused himself, came a little nearer, and examined Winterborne as he stood. His inspection was concluded in a mere glance. Before he spoke he looked at her contemplatively as to the effect of his coming words.

“He is dying,” he said, with dry precision.

“What?” said she.

“Nothing can be done, by me or any other man. It will soon be all over. The extremities are dead already.” His eyes still remained fixed on her; the conclusion to which he had come seeming to end his interest, professional and otherwise, in Winterborne forever.

“But it cannot be! He was well three days ago.”

“Not well, I suspect. This seems like a secondary attack, which has followed some previous illness — possibly typhoid — it may have been months ago, or recently.”

“Ah — he was not well — you are right. He was ill — he was ill when I came.”

There was nothing more to do or say. She crouched down at the side of the bed, and Fitzpiers took a seat. Thus they remained in silence, and long as it lasted she never turned her eyes, or apparently her thoughts, at all to her husband. He occasionally murmured, with automatic authority, some slight directions for alleviating the pain of the dying man, which she mechanically obeyed, bending over him during the intervals in silent tears.

Winterborne never recovered consciousness of what was passing; and that he was going became soon perceptible also to her. In less than an hour the delirium ceased; then there was an interval of somnolent painlessness and soft breathing, at the end of which Winterborne passed quietly away.

Then Fitzpiers broke the silence. “Have you lived here long?” said he.

Grace was wild with sorrow — with all that had befallen her — with the cruelties that had attacked her — with life — with Heaven. She answered at random. “Yes. By what right do you ask?”

“Don’t think I claim any right,” said Fitzpiers, sadly. “It is for you to do and say what you choose. I admit, quite as much as you feel, that I am a vagabond — a brute — not worthy to possess the smallest fragment of you. But here I am, and I have happened to take sufficient interest in you to make that inquiry.”

“He is everything to me!” said Grace, hardly heeding her husband, and laying her hand reverently on the dead man’s eyelids, where she kept it a long time, pressing down their lashes with gentle touches, as if she were stroking a little bird.

He watched her a while, and then glanced round the chamber where his eyes fell upon a few dressing necessaries that she had brought.

“Grace — if I may call you so,” he said, “I have been already humiliated almost to the depths. I have come back since you refused to join me elsewhere — I have entered your father’s house, and borne all that that cost me without flinching, because I have felt that I deserved humiliation. But is there a yet greater humiliation in store for me? You say you have been living here — that he is everything to you. Am I to draw from that the obvious, the extremest inference?”

Triumph at any price is sweet to men and women — especially the latter. It was her first and last opportunity of repaying him for the cruel contumely which she had borne at his hands so docilely.

“Yes,” she answered; and there was that in her subtly compounded nature which made her feel a thrill of pride as she did so.

Yet the moment after she had so mightily belied her character she half repented. Her husband had turned as white as the wall behind him. It seemed as if all that remained to him of life and spirit had been abstracted at a stroke. Yet he did not move, and in his efforts at self-control closed his mouth together as a vice. His determination was fairly successful, though she saw how very much greater than she had expected her triumph had been. Presently he looked across at Winterborne.

“Would it startle you to hear,” he said, as if he hardly had breath to utter the words, “that she who was to me what he was to you is dead also?”

“Dead — SHE dead?” exclaimed Grace.

“Yes. Felice Charmond is where this young man is.”

“Never!” said Grace, vehemently.

He went on without heeding the insinuation: “And I came back to try to make it up with you — but — ”

Fitzpiers rose, and moved across the room to go away, looking downward with the droop of a man whose hope was turned to apathy, if not despair. In going round the door his eye fell upon her once more. She was still bending over the body of Winterborne, her face close to the young man’s.

“Have you been kissing him during his illness?” asked her husband.

“Yes.”

“Since his fevered state set in?”

“Yes.”

“On his lips?”

“Yes.”

“Then you will do well to take a few drops of this in water as soon as possible.” He drew a small phial from his pocket and returned to offer it to her.

Grace shook her head.

“If you don’t do as I tell you you may soon be like him.”

“I don’t care. I wish to die.”

“I’ll put it here,” said Fitzpiers, placing the bottle on a ledge beside him. “The sin of not having warned you will not be upon my head at any rate, among my other sins. I am now going, and I will send somebody to you. Your father does not know that you are here, so I suppose I shall be bound to tell him?”

“Certainly.”

Fitzpiers left the cot, and the stroke of his feet was soon immersed in the silence that pervaded the spot. Grace remained kneeling and weeping, she hardly knew how long, and then she sat up, covered poor Giles’s features, and went towards the door where her husband had stood. No sign of any other comer greeted her ear, the only perceptible sounds being the tiny cracklings of the dead leaves, which, like a feather-bed, had not yet done rising to their normal level where indented by the pressure of her husband’s receding footsteps. It reminded her that she had been struck with the change in his aspect; the extremely intellectual look that had always been in his face was wrought to a finer phase by thinness, and a care-worn dignity had been superadded. She returned to Winterborne’s side, and during her meditations another tread drew near the door, entered the outer room, and halted at the entrance of the chamber where Grace was.

“What — Marty!” said Grace.

“Yes. I have heard,” said Marty, whose demeanor had lost all its girlishness under the stroke that seemed almost literally to have bruised her.

“He died for me!” murmured Grace, heavily.

Marty did not fully comprehend; and she answered, “He belongs to neither of us now, and your beauty is no more powerful with him than my plainness. I have come to help you, ma’am. He never cared for me, and he cared much for you; but he cares for us both alike now.”

“Oh don’t, don’t, Marty!”

Marty said no more, but knelt over Winterborne from the other side.

“Did you meet my hus — Mr. Fitzpiers?”

“Then what brought you here?”

“I come this way sometimes. I have got to go to the farther side of the wood this time of the year, and am obliged to get there before four o’clock in the morning, to begin heating the oven for the early baking. I have passed by here often at this time.”

Grace looked at her quickly. “Then did you know I was here?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you tell anybody?”

“No. I knew you lived in the hut, that he had gied it up to ye, and lodged out himself.”

“Did you know where he lodged?”

“No. That I couldn’t find out. Was it at Delborough?”

“No. It was not there, Marty. Would it had been! It would have saved — saved — ” To check her tears she turned, and seeing a book on the window-bench, took it up. “Look, Marty, this is a Psalter. He was not an outwardly religious man, but he was pure and perfect in his heart. Shall we read a psalm over him?”

“Oh yes — we will — with all my heart!”

Grace opened the thin brown book, which poor Giles had kept at hand mainly for the convenience of whetting his pen-knife upon its leather covers. She began to read in that rich, devotional voice peculiar to women only on such occasions. When it was over, Marty said, “I should like to pray for his soul.”

“So should I,” said her companion. “But we must not.”

“Why? Nobody would know.”

Grace could not resist the argument, influenced as she was by the sense of making amends for having neglected him in the body; and their tender voices united and filled the narrow room with supplicatory murmurs that a Calvinist might have envied. They had hardly ended when now and more numerous foot-falls were audible, also persons in conversation, one of whom Grace recognized as her father.

She rose, and went to the outer apartment, in which there was only such light as beamed from the inner one. Melbury and Mrs. Melbury were standing there.

“I don’t reproach you, Grace,” said her father, with an estranged manner, and in a voice not at all like his old voice. “What has come upon you and us is beyond reproach, beyond weeping, and beyond wailing. Perhaps I drove you to it. But I am hurt; I am scourged; I am astonished. In the face of this there is nothing to be said.”

Without replying, Grace turned and glided back to the inner chamber. “Marty,” she said, quickly, “I cannot look my father in the face until he knows the true circumstances of my life here. Go and tell him — what you have told me — what you saw — that he gave up his house to me.”

She sat down, her face buried in her hands, and Marty went, and after a short absence returned. Then Grace rose, and going out asked her father if he had met her husband.

“Yes,” said Melbury.

“And you know all that has happened?”

“I do. Forgive me, Grace, for suspecting ye of worse than rashness — I ought to know ye better. Are you coming with me to what was once your home?”

“No. I stay here with HIM. Take no account of me any more.”

The unwonted, perplexing, agitating relations in which she had stood to Winterborne quite lately — brought about by Melbury’s own contrivance — could not fail to soften the natural anger of a parent at her more recent doings. “My daughter, things are bad,” he rejoined. “But why do you persevere to make ‘em worse? What good can you do to Giles by staying here with him? Mind, I ask no questions. I don’t inquire why you decided to come here, or anything as to what your course would have been if he had not died, though I know there’s no deliberate harm in ye. As for me, I have lost all claim upon you, and I make no complaint. But I do say that by coming back with me now you will show no less kindness to him, and escape any sound of shame.

“But I don’t wish to escape it.”

“If you don’t on your own account, cannot you wish to on mine and hers? Nobody except our household knows that you have left home. Then why should you, by a piece of perverseness, bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave?”

“If it were not for my husband — ” she began, moved by his words. “But how can I meet him there? How can any woman who is not a mere man’s creature join him after what has taken place?”

“He would go away again rather than keep you out of my house.”

“How do you know that, father?”

“We met him on our way here, and he told us so,” said Mrs. Melbury. “He had said something like it before. He seems very much upset altogether.”

“He declared to her when he came to our house that he would wait for time and devotion to bring about his forgiveness,” said her husband. “That was it, wasn’t it, Lucy?”

“Yes. That he would not intrude upon you, Grace, till you gave him absolute permission,” Mrs. Melbury added.

This antecedent considerateness in Fitzpiers was as welcome to Grace as it was unexpected; and though she did not desire his presence, she was sorry that by her retaliatory fiction she had given him a different reason for avoiding her. She made no further objections to accompanying her parents, taking them into the inner room to give Winterborne a last look, and gathering up the two or three things that belonged to her. While she was doing this the two women came who had been called by Melbury, and at their heels poor Creedle.

“Forgive me, but I can’t rule my mourning nohow as a man should, Mr. Melbury,” he said. “I ha’n’t seen him since Thursday se’night, and have wondered for days and days where he’s been keeping. There was I expecting him to come and tell me to wash out the cider-barrels against the making, and here was he — Well, I’ve knowed him from table-high; I knowed his father — used to bide about upon two sticks in the sun afore he died! — and now I’ve seen the end of the family, which we can ill afford to lose, wi’ such a scanty lot of good folk in Hintock as we’ve got. And now Robert Creedle will be nailed up in parish boards ‘a b’lieve; and noboby will glutch down a sigh for he!”