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?”

“No!”

“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!”

They started for home, Marty and Creedle remaining behind. For a time

Grace and her father walked side by side without speaking. It was just

in the blue of the dawn, and the chilling tone of the sky was reflected

in her cold, wet face. The whole wood seemed to be a house of death,

pervaded by loss to its uttermost length and breadth. Winterborne was

gone, and the copses seemed to show the want of him; those young trees,

so many of which he had planted, and of which he had spoken so truly

when he said that he should fall before they fell, were at that very

moment sending out their roots in the direction that he had given them

with his subtle hand.

“One thing made it tolerable to us that your husband should come back

to the house,” said Melbury at last—“the death of Mrs. Charmond.”

“Ah, yes,” said Grace, arousing slightly to the recollection, “he told

me so.”

“Did he tell you how she died? It was no such death as Giles’s. She was

shot—by a disappointed lover. It occurred in Germany. The unfortunate

man shot himself afterwards. He was that South Carolina gentleman of

very passionate nature who used to haunt this place to force her to an

interview, and followed her about everywhere. So ends the brilliant

Felice Charmond—once a good friend to me—but no friend to you.”

“I can forgive her,” said Grace, absently. “Did Edgar tell you of

this?”

“No; but he put a London newspaper, giving an account of it, on the

hall table, folded in such a way that we should see it. It will be in

the Sherton paper this week, no doubt. To make the event more solemn

still to him, he had just before had sharp words with her, and left

her. He told Lucy this, as nothing about him appears in the newspaper.

And the cause of the quarrel was, of all people, she we’ve left behind

us.”

“Do you mean Marty?” Grace spoke the words but perfunctorily. For,

pertinent and pointed as Melbury’s story was, she had no heart for it

now.

“Yes. Marty South.” Melbury persisted in his narrative, to divert her

from her present grief, if possible. “Before he went away she wrote him

a letter, which he kept in his pocket a long while before reading. He

chanced to pull it out in Mrs. Charmond’s, presence, and read it out

loud. It contained something which teased her very much, and that led

to the rupture. She was following him to make it up when she met with

her terrible death.”

Melbury did not know enough to give the gist of the incident, which was

that Marty South’s letter had been concerning a certain personal

adornment common to herself and Mrs. Charmond. Her bullet reached its

billet at last. The scene between Fitzpiers and Felice had been sharp,

as only a scene can be which arises out of the mortification of one

woman by another in the presence of a lover. True, Marty had not

effected it by word of mouth; the charge about the locks of hair was

made simply by Fitzpiers reading her letter to him aloud to Felice in

the playfully ironical tones of one who had become a little weary of

his situation, and was finding his friend, in the phrase of George

Herbert, a “flat delight.” He had stroked those false tresses with his

hand many a time without knowing them to be transplanted, and it was

impossible when the discovery was so abruptly made to avoid being

finely satirical, despite her generous disposition.

That was how it had begun, and tragedy had been its end. On his abrupt

departure she had followed him to the station but the train was gone;

and in travelling to Baden in search of him she had met his rival,

whose reproaches led to an altercation, and the death of both. Of that

precipitate scene of passion and crime Fitzpiers had known nothing till

he saw an account of it in the papers, where, fortunately for himself,

no mention was made of his prior acquaintance with the unhappy lady;

nor was there any allusion to him in the subsequent inquiry, the double

death being attributed to some gambling losses, though, in point of

fact, neither one of them had visited the tables.

Melbury and his daughter drew near their house, having seen but one

living thing on their way, a squirrel, which did not run up its tree,

but, dropping the sweet chestnut which it carried, cried

chut-chut-chut, and stamped with its hind legs on the ground. When the

roofs and chimneys of the homestead began to emerge from the screen of

boughs, Grace started, and checked herself in her abstracted advance.

“You clearly understand,” she said to her step-mother some of her old

misgiving returning, “that I am coming back only on condition of his

leaving as he promised? Will you let him know this, that there may be

no mistake?”

Mrs. Melbury, who had some long private talks with Fitzpiers, assured

Grace that she need have no doubts on that point, and that he would

probably be gone by the evening. Grace then entered with them into

Melbury’s wing of the house, and sat down listlessly in the parlor,

while her step-mother went to Fitzpiers.

The prompt obedience to her wishes which the surgeon showed did honor

to him, if anything could. Before Mrs. Melbury had returned to the room

Grace, who was sitting on the parlor window-bench, saw her husband go

from the door under the increasing light of morning, with a bag in his

hand. While passing through the gate he turned his head. The firelight

of the room she sat in threw her figure into dark relief against the

window as she looked through the panes, and he must have seen her

distinctly. In a moment he went on, the gate fell to, and he

disappeared. At the hut she had declared that another had displaced

him; and now she had banished him.