The Woodlanders

by Thomas Hardy

  CHAPTER XLIII.

  She re-entered the hut, flung off her bonnet and cloak, and approachedthe sufferer. He had begun anew those terrible mutterings, and hishands were cold. As soon as she saw him there returned to her thatagony of mind which the stimulus of her journey had thrown off for atime.

  Could he really be dying? She bathed him, kissed him, forgot all thingsbut the fact that lying there before her was he who had loved her morethan the mere lover would have loved; had martyred himself for hercomfort, cared more for her self-respect than she had thought ofcaring. This mood continued till she heard quick, smart footstepswithout; she knew whose footsteps they were.

  Grace sat on the inside of the bed against the wall, holding Giles'shand, so that when her husband entered the patient lay between herselfand him. He stood transfixed at first, noticing Grace only. Slowly hedropped his glance and discerned who the prostrate man was. Strangelyenough, though Grace's distaste for her husband's company had amountedalmost to dread, and culminated in actual flight, at this moment herlast and least feeling was personal. Sensitive femininity was eclipsedby self-effacing purpose, and that it was a husband who stood there wasforgotten. The first look that possessed her face was relief;satisfaction at the presence of the physician obliterated thought ofthe man, which only returned in the form of a sub-consciousness thatdid not interfere with her words.

  "Is he dying--is there any hope?" she cried.

  "Grace!" said Fitzpiers, in an indescribable whisper--more thaninvocating, if not quite deprecatory.

  He was arrested by the spectacle, not so much in its intrinsiccharacter--though that was striking enough to a man who called himselfthe husband of the sufferer's friend and nurse--but in its character asthe counterpart of one that had its hour many months before, in whichhe 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 examinedWinterborne as he stood. His inspection was concluded in a mereglance. Before he spoke he looked at her contemplatively as to theeffect 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 allover. The extremities are dead already." His eyes still remainedfixed on her; the conclusion to which he had come seeming to end hisinterest, 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 hasfollowed some previous illness--possibly typhoid--it may have beenmonths ago, or recently."

  "Ah--he was not well--you are right. He was ill--he was ill when Icame."

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

  Winterborne never recovered consciousness of what was passing; and thathe was going became soon perceptible also to her. In less than an hourthe delirium ceased; then there was an interval of somnolentpainlessness and soft breathing, at the end of which Winterborne passedquietly 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 thecruelties that had attacked her--with life--with Heaven. She answeredat random. "Yes. By what right do you ask?"

  "Don't think I claim any right," said Fitzpiers, sadly. "It is for youto 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 smallestfragment of you. But here I am, and I have happened to take sufficientinterest in you to make that inquiry."

  "He is everything to me!" said Grace, hardly heeding her husband, andlaying her hand reverently on the dead man's eyelids, where she kept ita long time, pressing down their lashes with gentle touches, as if shewere stroking a little bird.

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

  "Grace--if I may call you so," he said, "I have been already humiliatedalmost to the depths. I have come back since you refused to join meelsewhere--I have entered your father's house, and borne all that thatcost me without flinching, because I have felt that I deservedhumiliation. 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 Ito 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 cruelcontumely which she had borne at his hands so docilely.

  "Yes," she answered; and there was that in her subtly compounded naturewhich made her feel a thrill of pride as she did so.

  Yet the moment after she had so mightily belied her character she halfrepented. Her husband had turned as white as the wall behind him. Itseemed as if all that remained to him of life and spirit had beenabstracted at a stroke. Yet he did not move, and in his efforts atself-control closed his mouth together as a vice. His determinationwas fairly successful, though she saw how very much greater than shehad expected her triumph had been. Presently he looked across atWinterborne.

  "Would it startle you to hear," he said, as if he hardly had breath toutter the words, "that she who was to me what he was to you is deadalso?"

  "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 tomake it up with you--but--"

  Fitzpiers rose, and moved across the room to go away, looking downwardwith the droop of a man whose hope was turned to apathy, if notdespair. In going round the door his eye fell upon her once more. Shewas still bending over the body of Winterborne, her face close to theyoung 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 aspossible." He drew a small phial from his pocket and returned to offerit 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 ledgebeside him. "The sin of not having warned you will not be upon my headat any rate, among my other sins. I am now going, and I will sendsomebody to you. Your father does not know that you are here, so Isuppose I shall be bound to tell him?"

  "Certainly."

  Fitzpiers left the cot, and the stroke of his feet was soon immersed inthe silence that pervaded the spot. Grace remained kneeling andweeping, she hardly knew how long, and then she sat up, covered poorGiles's features, and went towards the door where her husband hadstood. No sign of any other comer greeted her ear, the onlyperceptible sounds being the tiny cracklings of the dead leaves, which,like a feather-bed, had not yet done rising to their normal level whereindented by the pressure of her husband's receding footsteps. Itreminded her that she had been struck with the change in his aspect;the extremely intellectual look that had always been in his face waswrought to a finer phase by thinness, and a care-worn dignity had beensuperadded. She returned to Winterborne's side, and during hermeditations 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.

  "Y
es. I have heard," said Marty, whose demeanor had lost all itsgirlishness under the stroke that seemed almost literally to havebruised her.

  "He died for me!" murmured Grace, heavily.

  Marty did not fully comprehend; and she answered, "He belongs toneither of us now, and your beauty is no more powerful with him than myplainness. I have come to help you, ma'am. He never cared for me, andhe 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 ofthe wood this time of the year, and am obliged to get there before fouro'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, andlodged 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 havesaved--saved--" To check her tears she turned, and seeing a book on thewindow-bench, took it up. "Look, Marty, this is a Psalter. He was notan 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 handmainly for the convenience of whetting his pen-knife upon its leathercovers. She began to read in that rich, devotional voice peculiar towomen only on such occasions. When it was over, Marty said, "I shouldlike 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 senseof making amends for having neglected him in the body; and their tendervoices united and filled the narrow room with supplicatory murmurs thata Calvinist might have envied. They had hardly ended when now and morenumerous foot-falls were audible, also persons in conversation, one ofwhom Grace recognized as her father.

  She rose, and went to the outer apartment, in which there was only suchlight as beamed from the inner one. Melbury and Mrs. Melbury werestanding there.

  "I don't reproach you, Grace," said her father, with an estrangedmanner, and in a voice not at all like his old voice. "What has comeupon 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 amastonished. 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 untilhe knows the true circumstances of my life here. Go and tell him--whatyou 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 ashort absence returned. Then Grace rose, and going out asked herfather 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--Iought to know ye better. Are you coming with me to what was once yourhome?"

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

  The unwonted, perplexing, agitating relations in which she had stood toWinterborne quite lately--brought about by Melbury's owncontrivance--could not fail to soften the natural anger of a parent ather more recent doings. "My daughter, things are bad," he rejoined."But why do you persevere to make 'em worse? What good can you do toGiles by staying here with him? Mind, I ask no questions. I don'tinquire why you decided to come here, or anything as to what yourcourse would have been if he had not died, though I know there's nodeliberate harm in ye. As for me, I have lost all claim upon you, andI make no complaint. But I do say that by coming back with me now youwill 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 whyshould you, by a piece of perverseness, bring down my gray hairs withsorrow to the grave?"

  "If it were not for my husband--" she began, moved by his words. "Buthow can I meet him there? How can any woman who is not a mere man'screature 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 upsetaltogether."

  "He declared to her when he came to our house that he would wait fortime 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 himabsolute permission," Mrs. Melbury added.

  This antecedent considerateness in Fitzpiers was as welcome to Grace asit was unexpected; and though she did not desire his presence, she wassorry that by her retaliatory fiction she had given him a differentreason for avoiding her. She made no further objections toaccompanying her parents, taking them into the inner room to giveWinterborne a last look, and gathering up the two or three things thatbelonged to her. While she was doing this the two women came who hadbeen 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, andhave wondered for days and days where he's been keeping. There was Iexpecting him to come and tell me to wash out the cider-barrels againstthe making, and here was he-- Well, I've knowed him from table-high; Iknowed his father--used to bide about upon two sticks in the sun aforehe died!--and now I've seen the end of the family, which we can illafford to lose, wi' such a scanty lot of good folk in Hintock as we'vegot. And now Robert Creedle will be nailed up in parish boards 'ab'lieve; and noboby will glutch down a sigh for he!"

  They started for home, Marty and Creedle remaining behind. For a timeGrace and her father walked side by side without speaking. It was justin the blue of the dawn, and the chilling tone of the sky was reflectedin her cold, wet face. The whole wood seemed to be a house of death,pervaded by loss to its uttermost length and breadth. Winterborne wasgone, 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 trulywhen he said that he should fall before they fell, were at that verymoment sending out their roots in the direction that he had given themwith his subtle hand.

  "One thing made it tolerable to us that your husband should come backto the house," said Melbury at last--"the death of Mrs. Charmond."

  "Ah, yes," said Grace, arousing slightly to the recollection, "he toldme so."

  "Did he tell you how she died? It was no such death as Giles's. Shewas shot--by a disappointed lover. It occurred in Germany. Theunfortunate man shot himself afterwards. He was that South Carolinagentleman of very passionate nature who used to haunt this place toforce her to an interview, and followed her about everywhere. So endsthe brilliant Felice Charmond--once a good friend to me--but no friendto you."

  "I can forgive her," said Grace, absently. "Did Edgar tell you ofthis?"

  "No; but he put a London newspaper, giving an account of it, on thehall table, folded in such a way that we should see it. It will be inthe Sherton paper this week, no doubt. To make the event more solemnstill to him, he had just before had sharp words with her, and lefther. 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 behindus."

&nb
sp; "Do you mean Marty?" Grace spoke the words but perfunctorily. For,pertinent and pointed as Melbury's story was, she had no heart for itnow.

  "Yes. Marty South." Melbury persisted in his narrative, to divert herfrom her present grief, if possible. "Before he went away she wrotehim 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 outloud. It contained something which teased her very much, and that ledto the rupture. She was following him to make it up when she met withher terrible death."

  Melbury did not know enough to give the gist of the incident, which wasthat Marty South's letter had been concerning a certain personaladornment common to herself and Mrs. Charmond. Her bullet reached itsbillet at last. The scene between Fitzpiers and Felice had been sharp,as only a scene can be which arises out of the mortification of onewoman by another in the presence of a lover. True, Marty had noteffected it by word of mouth; the charge about the locks of hair wasmade simply by Fitzpiers reading her letter to him aloud to Felice inthe playfully ironical tones of one who had become a little weary ofhis situation, and was finding his friend, in the phrase of GeorgeHerbert, a "flat delight." He had stroked those false tresses with hishand many a time without knowing them to be transplanted, and it wasimpossible when the discovery was so abruptly made to avoid beingfinely satirical, despite her generous disposition.

  That was how it had begun, and tragedy had been its end. On his abruptdeparture 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 thatprecipitate scene of passion and crime Fitzpiers had known nothing tillhe 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 doubledeath being attributed to some gambling losses, though, in point offact, neither one of them had visited the tables.

  Melbury and his daughter drew near their house, having seen but oneliving thing on their way, a squirrel, which did not run up its tree,but, dropping the sweet chestnut which it carried, criedchut-chut-chut, and stamped with its hind legs on the ground. When theroofs and chimneys of the homestead began to emerge from the screen ofboughs, Grace started, and checked herself in her abstracted advance.

  "You clearly understand," she said to her step-mother some of her oldmisgiving returning, "that I am coming back only on condition of hisleaving as he promised? Will you let him know this, that there may beno mistake?"

  Mrs. Melbury, who had some long private talks with Fitzpiers, assuredGrace that she need have no doubts on that point, and that he wouldprobably be gone by the evening. Grace then entered with them intoMelbury'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 honorto him, if anything could. Before Mrs. Melbury had returned to theroom Grace, who was sitting on the parlor window-bench, saw her husbandgo from the door under the increasing light of morning, with a bag inhis hand. While passing through the gate he turned his head. Thefirelight of the room she sat in threw her figure into dark reliefagainst the window as she looked through the panes, and he must haveseen her distinctly. In a moment he went on, the gate fell to, and hedisappeared. At the hut she had declared that another had displacedhim; and now she had banished him.