CHAPTER XVII.

Grace’s exhibition of herself, in the act of pulling-to the

window-curtains, had been the result of an unfortunate incident in the

house that day—nothing less than the illness of Grammer Oliver, a woman

who had never till now lain down for such a reason in her life. Like

others to whom unbroken years of health has made the idea of keeping

their bed almost as repugnant as death itself, she had continued on

foot till she literally fell on the floor; and though she had, as yet,

been scarcely a day off duty, she had sickened into quite a different

personage from the independent Grammer of the yard and spar-house. Ill

as she was, on one point she was firm. On no account would she see a

doctor; in other words, Fitzpiers.

The room in which Grace had been discerned was not her own, but the old

woman’s. On the girl’s way to bed she had received a message from

Grammer, to the effect that she would much like to speak to her that

night.

Grace entered, and set the candle on a low chair beside the bed, so

that the profile of Grammer as she lay cast itself in a keen shadow

upon the whitened wall, her large head being still further magnified by

an enormous turban, which was, really, her petticoat wound in a wreath

round her temples. Grace put the room a little in order, and

approaching the sick woman, said, “I am come, Grammer, as you wish. Do

let us send for the doctor before it gets later.”

“I will not have him,” said Grammer Oliver, decisively.

“Then somebody to sit up with you.”

“Can’t abear it! No; I wanted to see you, Miss Grace, because ’ch have

something on my mind. Dear Miss Grace, _I took that money of the

doctor, after all!_”

“What money?”

“The ten pounds.”

Grace did not quite understand.

“The ten pounds he offered me for my head, because I’ve a large brain.

I signed a paper when I took the money, not feeling concerned about it

at all. I have not liked to tell ye that it was really settled with

him, because you showed such horror at the notion. Well, having thought

it over more at length, I wish I hadn’t done it; and it weighs upon my

mind. John South’s death of fear about the tree makes me think that I

shall die of this....’Ch have been going to ask him again to let me

off, but I hadn’t the face.”

“Why?”

“I’ve spent some of the money—more’n two pounds o’t. It do wherrit me

terribly; and I shall die o’ the thought of that paper I signed with my

holy cross, as South died of his trouble.”

“If you ask him to burn the paper he will, I’m sure, and think no more

of it.”

“‘Ch have done it once already, miss. But he laughed cruel like. ‘Yours

is such a fine brain, Grammer,’ ’er said, ‘that science couldn’t afford

to lose you. Besides, you’ve taken my money.’...Don’t let your father

know of this, please, on no account whatever!”

“No, no. I will let you have the money to return to him.”

Grammer rolled her head negatively upon the pillow. “Even if I should

be well enough to take it to him, he won’t like it. Though why he

should so particular want to look into the works of a poor old woman’s

head-piece like mine when there’s so many other folks about, I don’t

know. I know how he’ll answer me: ‘A lonely person like you, Grammer,’

er woll say. ‘What difference is it to you what becomes of ye when the

breath’s out of your body?’ Oh, it do trouble me! If you only knew how

he do chevy me round the chimmer in my dreams, you’d pity me. How I

could do it I can’t think! But ’ch was always so rackless!...If I only

had anybody to plead for me!”

“Mrs. Melbury would, I am sure.”

“Ay; but he wouldn’t hearken to she! It wants a younger face than hers

to work upon such as he.”

Grace started with comprehension. “You don’t think he would do it for

me?” she said.

“Oh, wouldn’t he!”

“I couldn’t go to him, Grammer, on any account. I don’t know him at

all.”

“Ah, if I were a young lady,” said the artful Grammer, “and could save

a poor old woman’s skellington from a heathen doctor instead of a

Christian grave, I would do it, and be glad to. But nobody will do

anything for a poor old familiar friend but push her out of the way.”

“You are very ungrateful, Grammer, to say that. But you are ill, I

know, and that’s why you speak so. Now believe me, you are not going to

die yet. Remember you told me yourself that you meant to keep him

waiting many a year.”

“Ay, one can joke when one is well, even in old age; but in sickness

one’s gayety falters to grief; and that which seemed small looks large;

and the grim far-off seems near.”

Grace’s eyes had tears in them. “I don’t like to go to him on such an

errand, Grammer,” she said, brokenly. “But I will, to ease your mind.”

It was with extreme reluctance that Grace cloaked herself next morning

for the undertaking. She was all the more indisposed to the journey by

reason of Grammer’s allusion to the effect of a pretty face upon Dr.

Fitzpiers; and hence she most illogically did that which, had the

doctor never seen her, would have operated to stultify the sole motive

of her journey; that is to say, she put on a woollen veil, which hid

all her face except an occasional spark of her eyes.

Her own wish that nothing should be known of this strange and grewsome

proceeding, no less than Grammer Oliver’s own desire, led Grace to take

every precaution against being discovered. She went out by the garden

door as the safest way, all the household having occupations at the

other side. The morning looked forbidding enough when she stealthily

opened it. The battle between frost and thaw was continuing in mid-air:

the trees dripped on the garden-plots, where no vegetables would grow

for the dripping, though they were planted year after year with that

curious mechanical regularity of country people in the face of

hopelessness; the moss which covered the once broad gravel terrace was

swamped; and Grace stood irresolute. Then she thought of poor Grammer,

and her dreams of the doctor running after her, scalpel in hand, and

the possibility of a case so curiously similar to South’s ending in the

same way; thereupon she stepped out into the drizzle.

The nature of her errand, and Grammer Oliver’s account of the compact

she had made, lent a fascinating horror to Grace’s conception of

Fitzpiers. She knew that he was a young man; but her single object in

seeking an interview with him put all considerations of his age and

social aspect from her mind. Standing as she stood, in Grammer Oliver’s

shoes, he was simply a remorseless Jove of the sciences, who would not

have mercy, and would have sacrifice; a man whom, save for this, she

would have preferred to avoid knowing. But since, in such a small

village, it was improbable that any long time could pass without their

meeting, there was not much to deplore in her having to meet him now.

But, as need hardly be said, Miss Melbury’s view of the doctor as a

merciless, unwavering, irresistible scientist was not quite in

accordance with fact. The real Dr. Fitzpiers was a man of too many

hobbies to show likelihood of rising to any great eminence in the

profession he had chosen, or even to acquire any wide practice in the

rural district he had marked out as his field of survey for the

present. In the course of a year his mind was accustomed to pass in a

grand solar sweep through all the zodiacal signs of the intellectual

heaven. Sometimes it was in the Ram, sometimes in the Bull; one month

he would be immersed in alchemy, another in poesy; one month in the

Twins of astrology and astronomy; then in the Crab of German literature

and metaphysics. In justice to him it must be stated that he took such

studies as were immediately related to his own profession in turn with

the rest, and it had been in a month of anatomical ardor without the

possibility of a subject that he had proposed to Grammer Oliver the

terms she had mentioned to her mistress.

As may be inferred from the tone of his conversation with Winterborne,

he had lately plunged into abstract philosophy with much zest; perhaps

his keenly appreciative, modern, unpractical mind found this a realm

more to his taste than any other. Though his aims were desultory,

Fitzpiers’s mental constitution was not without its admirable side; a

keen inquirer he honestly was, even if the midnight rays of his lamp,

visible so far through the trees of Hintock, lighted rank literatures

of emotion and passion as often as, or oftener than, the books and

_matériel_ of science.

But whether he meditated the Muses or the philosophers, the loneliness

of Hintock life was beginning to tell upon his impressionable nature.

Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is

tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful, given certain

conditions, but these are not the conditions which attach to the life

of a professional man who drops down into such a place by mere

accident. They were present to the lives of Winterborne, Melbury, and

Grace; but not to the doctor’s. They are old association—an almost

exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object,

animate and inanimate, within the observer’s horizon. He must know all

about those invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have

traversed the fields which look so gray from his windows; recall whose

creaking plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands

planted the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses

and hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds affect that

particular brake; what domestic dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, or

disappointment have been enacted in the cottages, the mansion, the

street, or on the green. The spot may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity,

convenience; but if it lack memories it will ultimately pall upon him

who settles there without opportunity of intercourse with his kind.

In such circumstances, maybe, an old man dreams of an ideal friend,

till he throws himself into the arms of any impostor who chooses to

wear that title on his face. A young man may dream of an ideal friend

likewise, but some humor of the blood will probably lead him to think

rather of an ideal mistress, and at length the rustle of a woman’s

dress, the sound of her voice, or the transit of her form across the

field of his vision, will enkindle his soul with a flame that blinds

his eyes.

The discovery of the attractive Grace’s name and family would have been

enough in other circumstances to lead the doctor, if not to put her

personality out of his head, to change the character of his interest in

her. Instead of treasuring her image as a rarity, he would at most have

played with it as a toy. He was that kind of a man. But situated here

he could not go so far as amative cruelty. He dismissed all reverential

thought about her, but he could not help taking her seriously.

He went on to imagine the impossible. So far, indeed, did he go in this

futile direction that, as others are wont to do, he constructed

dialogues and scenes in which Grace had turned out to be the mistress

of Hintock Manor-house, the mysterious Mrs. Charmond, particularly

ready and willing to be wooed by himself and nobody else. “Well, she

isn’t that,” he said, finally. “But she’s a very sweet, nice,

exceptional girl.”

The next morning he breakfasted alone, as usual. It was snowing with a

fine-flaked desultoriness just sufficient to make the woodland gray,

without ever achieving whiteness. There was not a single letter for

Fitzpiers, only a medical circular and a weekly newspaper.

To sit before a large fire on such mornings, and read, and gradually

acquire energy till the evening came, and then, with lamp alight, and

feeling full of vigor, to pursue some engrossing subject or other till

the small hours, had hitherto been his practice. But to-day he could

not settle into his chair. That self-contained position he had lately

occupied, in which the only attention demanded was the concentration of

the inner eye, all outer regard being quite gratuitous, seemed to have

been taken by insidious stratagem, and for the first time he had an

interest outside the house. He walked from one window to another, and

became aware that the most irksome of solitudes is not the solitude of

remoteness, but that which is just outside desirable company.

The breakfast hour went by heavily enough, and the next followed, in

the same half-snowy, half-rainy style, the weather now being the

inevitable relapse which sooner or later succeeds a time too radiant

for the season, such as they had enjoyed in the late midwinter at

Hintock. To people at home there these changeful tricks had their

interests; the strange mistakes that some of the more sanguine trees

had made in budding before their month, to be incontinently glued up by

frozen thawings now; the similar sanguine errors of impulsive birds in

framing nests that were now swamped by snow-water, and other such

incidents, prevented any sense of wearisomeness in the minds of the

natives. But these were features of a world not familiar to Fitzpiers,

and the inner visions to which he had almost exclusively attended

having suddenly failed in their power to absorb him, he felt

unutterably dreary.

He wondered how long Miss Melbury was going to stay in Hintock. The

season was unpropitious for accidental encounters with her

out-of-doors, and except by accident he saw not how they were to become

acquainted. One thing was clear—any acquaintance with her could only,

with a due regard to his future, be casual, at most of the nature of a

flirtation; for he had high aims, and they would some day lead him into

other spheres than this.

Thus desultorily thinking he flung himself down upon the couch, which,

as in many draughty old country houses, was constructed with a hood,

being in fact a legitimate development from the settle. He tried to

read as he reclined, but having sat up till three o’clock that morning,

the book slipped from his hand and he fell asleep.