CHAPTER XXVII.

The doctor’s professional visit to Hintock House was promptly repeated

the next day and the next. He always found Mrs. Charmond reclining on a

sofa, and behaving generally as became a patient who was in no great

hurry to lose that title. On each occasion he looked gravely at the

little scratch on her arm, as if it had been a serious wound.

He had also, to his further satisfaction, found a slight scar on her

temple, and it was very convenient to put a piece of black plaster on

this conspicuous part of her person in preference to gold-beater’s

skin, so that it might catch the eyes of the servants, and make his

presence appear decidedly necessary, in case there should be any doubt

of the fact.

“Oh—you hurt me!” she exclaimed one day.

He was peeling off the bit of plaster on her arm, under which the

scrape had turned the color of an unripe blackberry previous to

vanishing altogether. “Wait a moment, then—I’ll damp it,” said

Fitzpiers. He put his lips to the place and kept them there till the

plaster came off easily. “It was at your request I put it on,” said he.

“I know it,” she replied. “Is that blue vein still in my temple that

used to show there? The scar must be just upon it. If the cut had been

a little deeper it would have spilt my hot blood indeed!” Fitzpiers

examined so closely that his breath touched her tenderly, at which

their eyes rose to an encounter—hers showing themselves as deep and

mysterious as interstellar space. She turned her face away suddenly.

“Ah! none of that! none of that—I cannot coquet with you!” she cried.

“Don’t suppose I consent to for one moment. Our poor, brief, youthful

hour of love-making was too long ago to bear continuing now. It is as

well that we should understand each other on that point before we go

further.”

“Coquet! Nor I with you. As it was when I found the historic gloves, so

it is now. I might have been and may be foolish; but I am no trifler. I

naturally cannot forget that little space in which I flitted across the

field of your vision in those days of the past, and the recollection

opens up all sorts of imaginings.”

“Suppose my mother had not taken me away?” she murmured, her dreamy

eyes resting on the swaying tip of a distant tree.

“I should have seen you again.”

“And then?”

“Then the fire would have burned higher and higher. What would have

immediately followed I know not; but sorrow and sickness of heart at

last.”

“Why?”

“Well—that’s the end of all love, according to Nature’s law. I can give

no other reason.”

“Oh, don’t speak like that,” she exclaimed. “Since we are only

picturing the possibilities of that time, don’t, for pity’s sake, spoil

the picture.” Her voice sank almost to a whisper as she added, with an

incipient pout upon her full lips, “Let me think at least that if you

had really loved me at all seriously, you would have loved me for ever

and ever!”

“You are right—think it with all your heart,” said he. “It is a

pleasant thought, and costs nothing.”

She weighed that remark in silence a while. “Did you ever hear anything

of me from then till now?” she inquired.

“Not a word.”

“So much the better. I had to fight the battle of life as well as you.

I may tell you about it some day. But don’t ever ask me to do it, and

particularly do not press me to tell you now.”

Thus the two or three days that they had spent in tender acquaintance

on the romantic slopes above the Neckar were stretched out in

retrospect to the length and importance of years; made to form a canvas

for infinite fancies, idle dreams, luxurious melancholies, and sweet,

alluring assertions which could neither be proved nor disproved. Grace

was never mentioned between them, but a rumor of his proposed domestic

changes somehow reached her ears.

“Doctor, you are going away,” she exclaimed, confronting him with

accusatory reproach in her large dark eyes no less than in her rich

cooing voice. “Oh yes, you are,” she went on, springing to her feet

with an air which might almost have been called passionate. “It is no

use denying it. You have bought a practice at Budmouth. I don’t blame

you. Nobody can live at Hintock—least of all a professional man who

wants to keep abreast of recent discovery. And there is nobody here to

induce such a one to stay for other reasons. That’s right, that’s

right—go away!”

“But no, I have not actually bought the practice as yet, though I am

indeed in treaty for it. And, my dear friend, if I continue to feel

about the business as I feel at this moment—perhaps I may conclude

never to go at all.”

“But you hate Hintock, and everybody and everything in it that you

don’t mean to take away with you?”

Fitzpiers contradicted this idea in his most vibratory tones, and she

lapsed into the frivolous archness under which she hid passions of no

mean strength—strange, smouldering, erratic passions, kept down like a

stifled conflagration, but bursting out now here, now there—the only

certain element in their direction being its unexpectedness. If one

word could have expressed her it would have been Inconsequence. She was

a woman of perversities, delighting in frequent contrasts. She liked

mystery, in her life, in her love, in her history. To be fair to her,

there was nothing in the latter which she had any great reason to be

ashamed of, and many things of which she might have been proud; but it

had never been fathomed by the honest minds of Hintock, and she rarely

volunteered her experiences. As for her capricious nature, the people

on her estates grew accustomed to it, and with that marvellous subtlety

of contrivance in steering round odd tempers, that is found in sons of

the soil and dependants generally, they managed to get along under her

government rather better than they would have done beneath a more

equable rule.

Now, with regard to the doctor’s notion of leaving Hintock, he had

advanced further towards completing the purchase of the Budmouth

surgeon’s good-will than he had admitted to Mrs. Charmond. The whole

matter hung upon what he might do in the ensuing twenty-four hours. The

evening after leaving her he went out into the lane, and walked and

pondered between the high hedges, now greenish-white with wild

clematis—here called “old-man’s beard,” from its aspect later in the

year.

The letter of acceptance was to be written that night, after which his

departure from Hintock would be irrevocable. But could he go away,

remembering what had just passed? The trees, the hills, the leaves, the

grass—each had been endowed and quickened with a subtle charm since he

had discovered the person and history, and, above all, mood of their

owner. There was every temporal reason for leaving; it would be

entering again into a world which he had only quitted in a passion for

isolation, induced by a fit of Achillean moodiness after an imagined

slight. His wife herself saw the awkwardness of their position here,

and cheerfully welcomed the purposed change, towards which every step

had been taken but the last. But could he find it in his heart—as he

found it clearly enough in his conscience—to go away?

He drew a troubled breath, and went in-doors. Here he rapidly penned a

letter, wherein he withdrew once for all from the treaty for the

Budmouth practice. As the postman had already left Little Hintock for

that night, he sent one of Melbury’s men to intercept a mail-cart on

another turnpike-road, and so got the letter off.

The man returned, met Fitzpiers in the lane, and told him the thing was

done. Fitzpiers went back to his house musing. Why had he carried out

this impulse—taken such wild trouble to effect a probable injury to his

own and his young wife’s prospects? His motive was fantastic, glowing,

shapeless as the fiery scenery about the western sky. Mrs. Charmond

could overtly be nothing more to him than a patient now, and to his

wife, at the outside, a patron. In the unattached bachelor days of his

first sojourning here how highly proper an emotional reason for

lingering on would have appeared to troublesome dubiousness.

Matrimonial ambition is such an honorable thing.

“My father has told me that you have sent off one of the men with a

late letter to Budmouth,” cried Grace, coming out vivaciously to meet

him under the declining light of the sky, wherein hung, solitary, the

folding star. “I said at once that you had finally agreed to pay the

premium they ask, and that the tedious question had been settled. When

do we go, Edgar?”

“I have altered my mind,” said he. “They want too much—seven hundred

and fifty is too large a sum—and in short, I have declined to go

further. We must wait for another opportunity. I fear I am not a good

business-man.” He spoke the last words with a momentary faltering at

the great foolishness of his act; for, as he looked in her fair and

honorable face, his heart reproached him for what he had done.

Her manner that evening showed her disappointment. Personally she liked

the home of her childhood much, and she was not ambitious. But her

husband had seemed so dissatisfied with the circumstances hereabout

since their marriage that she had sincerely hoped to go for his sake.

It was two or three days before he visited Mrs. Charmond again. The

morning had been windy, and little showers had sowed themselves like

grain against the walls and window-panes of the Hintock cottages. He

went on foot across the wilder recesses of the park, where slimy

streams of green moisture, exuding from decayed holes caused by old

amputations, ran down the bark of the oaks and elms, the rind below

being coated with a lichenous wash as green as emerald. They were

stout-trunked trees, that never rocked their stems in the fiercest

gale, responding to it entirely by crooking their limbs. Wrinkled like

an old crone’s face, and antlered with dead branches that rose above

the foliage of their summits, they were nevertheless still green—though

yellow had invaded the leaves of other trees.

She was in a little boudoir or writing-room on the first floor, and

Fitzpiers was much surprised to find that the window-curtains were

closed and a red-shaded lamp and candles burning, though out-of-doors

it was broad daylight. Moreover, a large fire was burning in the grate,

though it was not cold.

“What does it all mean?” he asked.

She sat in an easy-chair, her face being turned away. “Oh,” she

murmured, “it is because the world is so dreary outside. Sorrow and

bitterness in the sky, and floods of agonized tears beating against the

panes. I lay awake last night, and I could hear the scrape of snails

creeping up the window-glass; it was so sad! My eyes were so heavy this

morning that I could have wept my life away. I cannot bear you to see

my face; I keep it away from you purposely. Oh! why were we given

hungry hearts and wild desires if we have to live in a world like this?

Why should Death only lend what Life is compelled to borrow—rest?

Answer that, Dr. Fitzpiers.”

“You must eat of a second tree of knowledge before _you_ can do it,

Felice Charmond.”

“Then, when my emotions have exhausted themselves, I become full of

fears, till I think I shall die for very fear. The terrible

insistencies of society—how severe they are, and cold and

inexorable—ghastly towards those who are made of wax and not of stone.

Oh, I am afraid of them; a stab for this error, and a stab for

that—correctives and regulations framed that society may tend to

perfection—an end which I don’t care for in the least. Yet for this,

all I do care for has to be stunted and starved.”

Fitzpiers had seated himself near her. “What sets you in this mournful

mood?” he asked, gently. (In reality he knew that it was the result of

a loss of tone from staying in-doors so much, but he did not say so.)

“My reflections. Doctor, you must not come here any more. They begin to

think it a farce already. I say you must come no more. There—don’t be

angry with me;” and she jumped up, pressed his hand, and looked

anxiously at him. “It is necessary. It is best for both you and me.”

“But,” said Fitzpiers, gloomily, “what have we done?”

“Done—we have done nothing. Perhaps we have thought the more. However,

it is all vexation. I am going away to Middleton Abbey, near

Shottsford, where a relative of my late husband lives, who is confined

to her bed. The engagement was made in London, and I can’t get out of

it. Perhaps it is for the best that I go there till all this is past.

When are you going to enter on your new practice, and leave Hintock

behind forever, with your pretty wife on your arm?”

“I have refused the opportunity. I love this place too well to depart.”

“You _have?_” she said, regarding him with wild uncertainty. “Why do

you ruin yourself in that way? Great Heaven, what have I done!”

“Nothing. Besides, you are going away.”

“Oh yes; but only to Middleton Abbey for a month or two. Yet perhaps I

shall gain strength there—particularly strength of mind—I require it.

And when I come back I shall be a new woman; and you can come and see

me safely then, and bring your wife with you, and we’ll be friends—she

and I. Oh, how this shutting up of one’s self does lead to indulgence

in idle sentiments. I shall not wish you to give your attendance to me

after to-day. But I am glad that you are not going away—if your

remaining does not injure your prospects at all.”

As soon as he had left the room the mild friendliness she had preserved

in her tone at parting, the playful sadness with which she had

conversed with him, equally departed from her. She became as heavy as

lead—just as she had been before he arrived. Her whole being seemed to

dissolve in a sad powerlessness to do anything, and the sense of it

made her lips tremulous and her closed eyes wet. His footsteps again

startled her, and she turned round.

“I returned for a moment to tell you that the evening is going to be

fine. The sun is shining; so do open your curtains and put out those

lights. Shall I do it for you?”

“Please—if you don’t mind.”

He drew back the window-curtains, whereupon the red glow of the lamp

and the two candle-flames became almost invisible with the flood of

late autumn sunlight that poured in. “Shall I come round to you?” he

asked, her back being towards him.

“No,” she replied.

“Why not?”

“Because I am crying, and I don’t want to see you.”

He stood a moment irresolute, and regretted that he had killed the

rosy, passionate lamplight by opening the curtains and letting in

garish day.

“Then I am going,” he said.

“Very well,” she answered, stretching one hand round to him, and

patting her eyes with a handkerchief held in the other.

“Shall I write a line to you at—”

“No, no.” A gentle reasonableness came into her tone as she added, “It

must not be, you know. It won’t do.”

“Very well. Good-by.” The next moment he was gone.

In the evening, with listless adroitness, she encouraged the maid who

dressed her for dinner to speak of Dr. Fitzpiers’s marriage.

“Mrs. Fitzpiers was once supposed to favor Mr. Winterborne,” said the

young woman.

“And why didn’t she marry him?” said Mrs. Charmond.

“Because, you see, ma’am, he lost his houses.”

“Lost his houses? How came he to do that?”

“The houses were held on lives, and the lives dropped, and your agent

wouldn’t renew them, though it is said that Mr. Winterborne had a very

good claim. That’s as I’ve heard it, ma’am, and it was through it that

the match was broke off.”

Being just then distracted by a dozen emotions, Mrs. Charmond sunk into

a mood of dismal self-reproach. “In refusing that poor man his

reasonable request,” she said to herself, “I foredoomed my rejuvenated

girlhood’s romance. Who would have thought such a business matter could

have nettled my own heart like this? Now for a winter of regrets and

agonies and useless wishes, till I forget him in the spring. Oh! I am

glad I am going away.”

She left her chamber and went down to dine with a sigh. On the stairs

she stood opposite the large window for a moment, and looked out upon

the lawn. It was not yet quite dark. Half-way up the steep green slope

confronting her stood old Timothy Tangs, who was shortening his way

homeward by clambering here where there was no road, and in opposition

to express orders that no path was to be made there. Tangs had

momentarily stopped to take a pinch of snuff; but observing Mrs.

Charmond gazing at him, he hastened to get over the top out of hail.

His precipitancy made him miss his footing, and he rolled like a barrel

to the bottom, his snuffbox rolling in front of him.

Her indefinite, idle, impossible passion for Fitzpiers; her

constitutional cloud of misery; the sorrowful drops that still hung

upon her eyelashes, all made way for the incursive mood started by the

spectacle. She burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, her very gloom

of the previous hour seeming to render it the more uncontrollable. It

had not died out of her when she reached the dining-room; and even

here, before the servants, her shoulders suddenly shook as the scene

returned upon her; and the tears of her hilarity mingled with the

remnants of those engendered by her grief.

She resolved to be sad no more. She drank two glasses of champagne, and

a little more still after those, and amused herself in the evening with

singing little amatory songs.

“I must do something for that poor man Winterborne, however,” she said.