CHAPTER XXVIII.

A week had passed, and Mrs. Charmond had left Hintock House. Middleton

Abbey, the place of her sojourn, was about twenty miles distant by

road, eighteen by bridle-paths and footways.

Grace observed, for the first time, that her husband was restless, that

at moments he even was disposed to avoid her. The scrupulous civility

of mere acquaintanceship crept into his manner; yet, when sitting at

meals, he seemed hardly to hear her remarks. Her little doings

interested him no longer, while towards her father his bearing was not

far from supercilious. It was plain that his mind was entirely outside

her life, whereabouts outside it she could not tell; in some region of

science, possibly, or of psychological literature. But her hope that he

was again immersing himself in those lucubrations which before her

marriage had made his light a landmark in Hintock, was founded simply

on the slender fact that he often sat up late.

One evening she discovered him leaning over a gate on Rub-Down Hill,

the gate at which Winterborne had once been standing, and which opened

on the brink of a steep, slanting down directly into Blackmoor Vale, or

the Vale of the White Hart, extending beneath the eye at this point to

a distance of many miles. His attention was fixed on the landscape far

away, and Grace’s approach was so noiseless that he did not hear her.

When she came close she could see his lips moving unconsciously, as to

some impassioned visionary theme.

She spoke, and Fitzpiers started. “What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Oh! I was contemplating our old place of Buckbury, in my idle way,” he

said.

It had seemed to her that he was looking much to the right of that

cradle and tomb of his ancestral dignity; but she made no further

observation, and taking his arm walked home beside him almost in

silence. She did not know that Middleton Abbey lay in the direction of

his gaze. “Are you going to have out Darling this afternoon?” she

asked, presently. Darling being the light-gray mare which Winterborne

had bought for Grace, and which Fitzpiers now constantly used, the

animal having turned out a wonderful bargain, in combining a perfect

docility with an almost human intelligence; moreover, she was not too

young. Fitzpiers was unfamiliar with horses, and he valued these

qualities.

“Yes,” he replied, “but not to drive. I am riding her. I practise

crossing a horse as often as I can now, for I find that I can take much

shorter cuts on horseback.”

He had, in fact, taken these riding exercises for about a week, only

since Mrs. Charmond’s absence, his universal practice hitherto having

been to drive.

Some few days later, Fitzpiers started on the back of this horse to see

a patient in the aforesaid Vale. It was about five o’clock in the

evening when he went away, and at bedtime he had not reached home.

There was nothing very singular in this, though she was not aware that

he had any patient more than five or six miles distant in that

direction. The clock had struck one before Fitzpiers entered the house,

and he came to his room softly, as if anxious not to disturb her.

The next morning she was stirring considerably earlier than he.

In the yard there was a conversation going on about the mare; the man

who attended to the horses, Darling included, insisted that the latter

was “hag-rid;” for when he had arrived at the stable that morning she

was in such a state as no horse could be in by honest riding. It was

true that the doctor had stabled her himself when he got home, so that

she was not looked after as she would have been if he had groomed and

fed her; but that did not account for the appearance she presented, if

Mr. Fitzpiers’s journey had been only where he had stated. The

phenomenal exhaustion of Darling, as thus related, was sufficient to

develop a whole series of tales about riding witches and demons, the

narration of which occupied a considerable time.

Grace returned in-doors. In passing through the outer room she picked

up her husband’s overcoat which he had carelessly flung down across a

chair. A turnpike ticket fell out of the breast-pocket, and she saw

that it had been issued at Middleton Gate. He had therefore visited

Middleton the previous night, a distance of at least five-and-thirty

miles on horseback, there and back.

During the day she made some inquiries, and learned for the first time

that Mrs. Charmond was staying at Middleton Abbey. She could not resist

an inference—strange as that inference was.

A few days later he prepared to start again, at the same time and in

the same direction. She knew that the state of the cottager who lived

that way was a mere pretext; she was quite sure he was going to Mrs.

Charmond. Grace was amazed at the mildness of the passion which the

suspicion engendered in her. She was but little excited, and her

jealousy was languid even to death. It told tales of the nature of her

affection for him. In truth, her antenuptial regard for Fitzpiers had

been rather of the quality of awe towards a superior being than of

tender solicitude for a lover. It had been based upon mystery and

strangeness—the mystery of his past, of his knowledge, of his

professional skill, of his beliefs. When this structure of ideals was

demolished by the intimacy of common life, and she found him as merely

human as the Hintock people themselves, a new foundation was in demand

for an enduring and stanch affection—a sympathetic interdependence,

wherein mutual weaknesses were made the grounds of a defensive

alliance. Fitzpiers had furnished none of that single-minded confidence

and truth out of which alone such a second union could spring; hence it

was with a controllable emotion that she now watched the mare brought

round.

“I’ll walk with you to the hill if you are not in a great hurry,” she

said, rather loath, after all, to let him go.

“Do; there’s plenty of time,” replied her husband. Accordingly he led

along the horse, and walked beside her, impatient enough nevertheless.

Thus they proceeded to the turnpike road, and ascended Rub-Down Hill to

the gate he had been leaning over when she surprised him ten days

before. This was the end of her excursion. Fitzpiers bade her adieu

with affection, even with tenderness, and she observed that he looked

weary-eyed.

“Why do you go to-night?” she said. “You have been called up two nights

in succession already.”

“I must go,” he answered, almost gloomily. “Don’t wait up for me.” With

these words he mounted his horse, passed through the gate which Grace

held open for him, and ambled down the steep bridle-track to the

valley.

She closed the gate and watched his descent, and then his journey

onward. His way was east, the evening sun which stood behind her back

beaming full upon him as soon as he got out from the shade of the hill.

Notwithstanding this untoward proceeding she was determined to be loyal

if he proved true; and the determination to love one’s best will carry

a heart a long way towards making that best an ever-growing thing. The

conspicuous coat of the active though blanching mare made horse and

rider easy objects for the vision. Though Darling had been chosen with

such pains by Winterborne for Grace, she had never ridden the sleek

creature; but her husband had found the animal exceedingly convenient,

particularly now that he had taken to the saddle, plenty of staying

power being left in Darling yet. Fitzpiers, like others of his

character, while despising Melbury and his station, did not at all

disdain to spend Melbury’s money, or appropriate to his own use the

horse which belonged to Melbury’s daughter.

And so the infatuated young surgeon went along through the gorgeous

autumn landscape of White Hart Vale, surrounded by orchards lustrous

with the reds of apple-crops, berries, and foliage, the whole

intensified by the gilding of the declining sun. The earth this year

had been prodigally bountiful, and now was the supreme moment of her

bounty. In the poorest spots the hedges were bowed with haws and

blackberries; acorns cracked underfoot, and the burst husks of

chestnuts lay exposing their auburn contents as if arranged by anxious

sellers in a fruit-market. In all this proud show some kernels were

unsound as her own situation, and she wondered if there were one world

in the universe where the fruit had no worm, and marriage no sorrow.

Herr Tannhäuser still moved on, his plodding steed rendering him

distinctly visible yet. Could she have heard Fitzpiers’s voice at that

moment she would have found him murmuring—

“...Towards the loadstar of my one desire

I flitted, even as a dizzy moth in the owlet light.”

But he was a silent spectacle to her now. Soon he rose out of the

valley, and skirted a high plateau of the chalk formation on his right,

which rested abruptly upon the fruity district of loamy clay, the

character and herbage of the two formations being so distinct that the

calcareous upland appeared but as a deposit of a few years’ antiquity

upon the level vale. He kept along the edge of this high, unenclosed

country, and the sky behind him being deep violet, she could still see

white Darling in relief upon it—a mere speck now—a Wouvermans

eccentricity reduced to microscopic dimensions. Upon this high ground

he gradually disappeared.

Thus she had beheld the pet animal purchased for her own use, in pure

love of her, by one who had always been true, impressed to convey her

husband away from her to the side of a new-found idol. While she was

musing on the vicissitudes of horses and wives, she discerned shapes

moving up the valley towards her, quite near at hand, though till now

hidden by the hedges. Surely they were Giles Winterborne, with his two

horses and cider-apparatus, conducted by Robert Creedle. Up, upward

they crept, a stray beam of the sun alighting every now and then like a

star on the blades of the pomace-shovels, which had been converted to

steel mirrors by the action of the malic acid. She opened the gate when

he came close, and the panting horses rested as they achieved the

ascent.

“How do you do, Giles?” said she, under a sudden impulse to be familiar

with him.

He replied with much more reserve. “You are going for a walk, Mrs.

Fitzpiers?” he added. “It is pleasant just now.”

“No, I am returning,” said she.

The vehicles passed through, the gate slammed, and Winterborne walked

by her side in the rear of the apple-mill.

He looked and smelt like Autumn’s very brother, his face being sunburnt

to wheat-color, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his boots and leggings

dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of

apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him that

atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an

indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among

the orchards. Her heart rose from its late sadness like a released

spring; her senses revelled in the sudden lapse back to nature

unadorned. The consciousness of having to be genteel because of her

husband’s profession, the veneer of artificiality which she had

acquired at the fashionable schools, were thrown off, and she became

the crude, country girl of her latent, earliest instincts.

Nature was bountiful, she thought. No sooner had she been starved off

by Edgar Fitzpiers than another being, impersonating bare and undiluted

manliness, had arisen out of the earth, ready to hand. This was an

excursion of the imagination which she did not encourage, and she said

suddenly, to disguise the confused regard which had followed her

thoughts, “Did you meet my husband?”

Winterborne, with some hesitation, “Yes.”

“Where did you meet him?”

“At Calfhay Cross. I come from Middleton Abbey; I have been making

there for the last week.”

“Haven’t they a mill of their own?”

“Yes, but it’s out of repair.”

“I think—I heard that Mrs. Charmond had gone there to stay?”

“Yes. I have seen her at the windows once or twice.”

Grace waited an interval before she went on: “Did Mr. Fitzpiers take

the way to Middleton?”

“Yes...I met him on Darling.” As she did not reply, he added, with a

gentler inflection, “You know why the mare was called that?”

“Oh yes—of course,” she answered, quickly.

They had risen so far over the crest of the hill that the whole west

sky was revealed. Between the broken clouds they could see far into the

recesses of heaven, the eye journeying on under a species of golden

arcades, and past fiery obstructions, fancied cairns, logan-stones,

stalactites and stalagmite of topaz. Deeper than this their gaze passed

thin flakes of incandescence, till it plunged into a bottomless medium

of soft green fire.

Her abandonment to the luscious time after her sense of ill-usage, her

revolt for the nonce against social law, her passionate desire for

primitive life, may have showed in her face. Winterborne was looking at

her, his eyes lingering on a flower that she wore in her bosom. Almost

with the abstraction of a somnambulist he stretched out his hand and

gently caressed the flower.

She drew back. “What are you doing, Giles Winterborne!” she exclaimed,

with a look of severe surprise. The evident absence of all

premeditation from the act, however, speedily led her to think that it

was not necessary to stand upon her dignity here and now. “You must

bear in mind, Giles,” she said, kindly, “that we are not as we were;

and some people might have said that what you did was taking a

liberty.”

It was more than she need have told him; his action of forgetfulness

had made him so angry with himself that he flushed through his tan. “I

don’t know what I am coming to!” he exclaimed, savagely. “Ah—I was not

once like this!” Tears of vexation were in his eyes.

“No, now—it was nothing. I was too reproachful.”

“It would not have occurred to me if I had not seen something like it

done elsewhere—at Middleton lately,” he said, thoughtfully, after a

while.

“By whom?”

“Don’t ask it.”

She scanned him narrowly. “I know quite well enough,” she returned,

indifferently. “It was by my husband, and the woman was Mrs. Charmond.

Association of ideas reminded you when you saw me....Giles—tell me all

you know about that—please do, Giles! But no—I won’t hear it. Let the

subject cease. And as you are my friend, say nothing to my father.”

They reached a place where their ways divided. Winterborne continued

along the highway which kept outside the copse, and Grace opened a gate

that entered it.