by Thomas Hardy
Something broke the stillness. The front door of the house she was gazing at opened softly, and there came out into the porch a female figure, wrapped in a large shawl, beneath which was visible the white skirt of a long loose garment. A gray arm, stretching from within the porch, adjusted the shawl over the woman’s shoulders; it was withdrawn and disappeared, the door closing behind her.
The woman went quickly down the box-edged path between the raspberries and currants, and as she walked her well-developed form and gait betrayed her individuality. It was Suke Damson, the affianced one of simple young Tim Tangs. At the bottom of the garden she entered the shelter of the tall hedge, and only the top of her head could be seen hastening in the direction of her own dwelling.
Grace had recognized, or thought she recognized, in the gray arm stretching from the porch, the sleeve of a dressing-gown which Mr. Fitzpiers had been wearing on her own memorable visit to him. Her face fired red. She had just before thought of dressing herself and taking a lonely walk under the trees, so coolly green this early morning; but she now sat down on her bed and fell into reverie. It seemed as if hardly any time had passed when she heard the household moving briskly about, and breakfast preparing down-stairs; though, on rousing herself to robe and descend, she found that the sun was throwing his rays completely over the tree-tops, a progress of natural phenomena denoting that at least three hours had elapsed since she last looked out of the window.
When attired she searched about the house for her father; she found him at last in the garden, stooping to examine the potatoes for signs of disease. Hearing her rustle, he stood up and stretched his back and arms, saying, “Morning t’ye, Gracie. I congratulate ye. It is only a month to-day to the time!”
She did not answer, but, without lifting her dress, waded between the dewy rows of tall potato-green into the middle of the plot where he was.
“I have been thinking very much about my position this morning — ever since it was light,” she began, excitedly, and trembling so that she could hardly stand. “And I feel it is a false one. I wish not to marry Mr. Fitzpiers. I wish not to marry anybody; but I’ll marry Giles Winterborne if you say I must as an alternative.”
Her father’s face settled into rigidity, he turned pale, and came deliberately out of the plot before he answered her. She had never seen him look so incensed before.
“Now, hearken to me,” he said. “There’s a time for a woman to alter her mind; and there’s a time when she can no longer alter it, if she has any right eye to her parents’ honour and the seemliness of things. That time has come. I won’t say to ye, you SHALL marry him. But I will say that if you refuse, I shall forever be ashamed and a-weary of ye as a daughter, and shall look upon you as the hope of my life no more. What do you know about life and what it can bring forth, and how you ought to act to lead up to best ends? Oh, you are an ungrateful maid, Grace; you’ve seen that fellow Giles, and he has got over ye; that’s where the secret lies, I’ll warrant me!”
“No, father, no! It is not Giles — it is something I cannot tell you of — ”
“Well, make fools of us all; make us laughing-stocks; break it off; have your own way.”
“But who knows of the engagement as yet? how can breaking it disgrace you?”
Melbury then by degrees admitted that he had mentioned the engagement to this acquaintance and to that, till she perceived that in his restlessness and pride he had published it everywhere. She went dismally away to a bower of laurel at the top of the garden. Her father followed her.
“It is that Giles Winterborne!” he said, with an upbraiding gaze at her.
“No, it is not; though for that matter you encouraged him once,” she said, troubled to the verge of despair. “It is not Giles, it is Mr. Fitzpiers.”
“You’ve had a tiff — a lovers’ tiff — that’s all, I suppose
“It is some woman — ”
“Ay, ay; you are jealous. The old story. Don’t tell me. Now do you bide here. I’ll send Fitzpiers to you. I saw him smoking in front of his house but a minute by-gone.”
He went off hastily out of the garden-gate and down the lane. But she would not stay where she was; and edging through a slit in the garden-fence, walked away into the wood. Just about here the trees were large and wide apart, and there was no undergrowth, so that she could be seen to some distance; a sylph-like, greenish-white creature, as toned by the sunlight and leafage. She heard a foot-fall crushing dead leaves behind her, and found herself reconnoitered by Fitzpiers himself, approaching gay and fresh as the morning around them.
His remote gaze at her had been one of mild interest rather than of rapture. But she looked so lovely in the green world about her, her pink cheeks, her simple light dress, and the delicate flexibility of her movement acquired such rarity from their wild-wood setting, that his eyes kindled as he drew near.
“My darling, what is it? Your father says you are in the pouts, and jealous, and I don’t know what. Ha! ha! ha! as if there were any rival to you, except vegetable nature, in this home of recluses! We know better.”
“Jealous; oh no, it is not so,” said she, gravely. “That’s a mistake of his and yours, sir. I spoke to him so closely about the question of marriage with you that he did not apprehend my state of mind.”
“But there’s something wrong — eh?” he asked, eying her narrowly, and bending to kiss her. She shrank away, and his purposed kiss miscarried.
“What is it?” he said, more seriously for this little defeat.
She made no answer beyond, “Mr. Fitzpiers, I have had no breakfast, I must go in.”
“Come,” he insisted, fixing his eyes upon her. “Tell me at once, I say.”
It was the greater strength against the smaller; but she was mastered less by his manner than by her own sense of the unfairness of silence. “I looked out of the window,” she said, with hesitation. “I’ll tell you by-and-by. I must go in-doors. I have had no breakfast.”
By a sort of divination his conjecture went straight to the fact. “Nor I,” said he, lightly. “Indeed, I rose late to-day. I have had a broken night, or rather morning. A girl of the village — I don’t know her name — came and rang at my bell as soon as it was light — between four and five, I should think it was — perfectly maddened with an aching tooth. As no-body heard her ring, she threw some gravel at my window, till at last I heard her and slipped on my dressing-gown and went down. The poor thing begged me with tears in her eyes to take out her tormentor, if I dragged her head off. Down she sat and out it came — a lovely molar, not a speck upon it; and off she went with it in her handkerchief, much contented, though it would have done good work for her for fifty years to come.”
It was all so plausible — so completely explained. Knowing nothing of the incident in the wood on old Midsummer-eve, Grace felt that her suspicions were unworthy and absurd, and with the readiness of an honest heart she jumped at the opportunity of honouring his word. At the moment of her mental liberation the bushes about the garden had moved, and her father emerged into the shady glade. “Well, I hope it is made up?” he said, cheerily.
“Oh yes,” said Fitzpiers, with his eyes fixed on Grace, whose eyes were shyly bent downward.
“Now,” said her father, “tell me, the pair of ye, that you still mean to take one another for good and all; and on the strength o’t you shall have another couple of hundred paid down. I swear it by the name.”
Fitzpiers took her hand. “We declare it, do we not, my dear Grace?” said he.
Relieved of her doubt, somewhat overawed, and ever anxious to please, she was disposed to settle the matter; yet, womanlike, she would not relinquish her opportunity of asking a concession of some sort. “If our wedding can be at church, I say yes,” she answered, in a measured voice. “If not, I say no.”
Fitzpiers was generous in his turn. “It shall be so,” he rejoined, gracefully. “To holy church we’ll go, and much good may it do us.”
They returned through the bushes indo
ors, Grace walking, full of thought between the other two, somewhat comforted, both by Fitzpiers’s ingenious explanation and by the sense that she was not to be deprived of a religious ceremony. “So let it be,” she said to herself. “Pray God it is for the best.”
From this hour there was no serious attempt at recalcitration on her part. Fitzpiers kept himself continually near her, dominating any rebellious impulse, and shaping her will into passive concurrence with all his desires. Apart from his lover-like anxiety to possess her, the few golden hundreds of the timber-dealer, ready to hand, formed a warm background to Grace’s lovely face, and went some way to remove his uneasiness at the prospect of endangering his professional and social chances by an alliance with the family of a simple countryman.
The interim closed up its perspective surely and silently. Whenever Grace had any doubts of her position, the sense of contracting time was like a shortening chamber: at other moments she was comparatively blithe. Day after day waxed and waned; the one or two woodmen who sawed, shaped, spokeshaved on her father’s premises at this inactive season of the year, regularly came and unlocked the doors in the morning, locked them in the evening, supped, leaned over their garden-gates for a whiff of evening air, and to catch any last and farthest throb of news from the outer world, which entered and expired at Little Hintock like the exhausted swell of a wave in some innermost cavern of some innermost creek of an embayed sea; yet no news interfered with the nuptial purpose at their neighbour’s house. The sappy green twig-tips of the season’s growth would not, she thought, be appreciably woodier on the day she became a wife, so near was the time; the tints of the foliage would hardly have changed. Everything was so much as usual that no itinerant stranger would have supposed a woman’s fate to be hanging in the balance at that summer’s decline.
But there were preparations, imaginable readily enough by those who had special knowledge. In the remote and fashionable town of Sandbourne something was growing up under the hands of several persons who had never seen Grace Melbury, never would see her, or care anything about her at all, though their creation had such interesting relation to her life that it would enclose her very heart at a moment when that heart would beat, if not with more emotional ardor, at least with more emotional turbulence than at any previous time.
Why did Mrs. Dollery’s van, instead of passing along at the end of the smaller village to Great Hintock direct, turn one Saturday night into Little Hintock Lane, and never pull up till it reached Mr. Melbury’s gates? The gilding shine of evening fell upon a large, flat box not less than a yard square, and safely tied with cord, as it was handed out from under the tilt with a great deal of care. But it was not heavy for its size; Mrs. Dollery herself carried it into the house. Tim Tangs, the hollow-turner, Bawtree, Suke Damson, and others, looked knowing, and made remarks to each other as they watched its entrance. Melbury stood at the door of the timber-shed in the attitude of a man to whom such an arrival was a trifling domestic detail with which he did not condescend to be concerned. Yet he well divined the contents of that box, and was in truth all the while in a pleasant exaltation at the proof that thus far, at any rate, no disappointment had supervened. While Mrs. Dollery remained — which was rather long, from her sense of the importance of her errand — he went into the out-house; but as soon as she had had her say, been paid, and had rumbled away, he entered the dwelling, to find there what he knew he should find — his wife and daughter in a flutter of excitement over the wedding-gown, just arrived from the leading dress-maker of Sandbourne watering-place aforesaid.
During these weeks Giles Winterborne was nowhere to be seen or heard of. At the close of his tenure in Hintock he had sold some of his furniture, packed up the rest — a few pieces endeared by associations, or necessary to his occupation — in the house of a friendly neighbour, and gone away. People said that a certain laxity had crept into his life; that he had never gone near a church latterly, and had been sometimes seen on Sundays with unblacked boots, lying on his elbow under a tree, with a cynical gaze at surrounding objects. He was likely to return to Hintock when the cider-making season came round, his apparatus being stored there, and travel with his mill and press from village to village.
The narrow interval that stood before the day diminished yet. There was in Grace’s mind sometimes a certain anticipative satisfaction, the satisfaction of feeling that she would be the heroine of an hour; moreover, she was proud, as a cultivated woman, to be the wife of a cultivated man. It was an opportunity denied very frequently to young women in her position, nowadays not a few; those in whom parental discovery of the value of education has implanted tastes which parental circles fail to gratify. But what an attenuation was this cold pride of the dream of her youth, in which she had pictured herself walking in state towards the altar, flushed by the purple light and bloom of her own passion, without a single misgiving as to the sealing of the bond, and fervently receiving as her due
“The homage of a thousand hearts; the fond, deep love of one.”
Everything had been clear then, in imagination; now something was undefined. She had little carking anxieties; a curious fatefulness seemed to rule her, and she experienced a mournful want of some one to confide in.
The day loomed so big and nigh that her prophetic ear could, in fancy, catch the noise of it, hear the murmur of the villagers as she came out of church, imagine the jangle of the three thin-toned Hintock bells. The dialogues seemed to grow louder, and the ding-ding-dong of those three crazed bells more persistent. She awoke: the morning had come.
Five hours later she was the wife of Fitzpiers.
CHAPTER XXV.
The chief hotel at Sherton-Abbas was an old stone-fronted inn with a yawning arch, under which vehicles were driven by stooping coachmen to back premises of wonderful commodiousness. The windows to the street were mullioned into narrow lights, and only commanded a view of the opposite houses; hence, perhaps, it arose that the best and most luxurious private sitting-room that the inn could afford over-looked the nether parts of the establishment, where beyond the yard were to be seen gardens and orchards, now bossed, nay incrusted, with scarlet and gold fruit, stretching to infinite distance under a luminous lavender mist. The time was early autumn,
“When the fair apples, red as evening sky,
Do bend the tree unto the fruitful ground,
When juicy pears, and berries of black dye,
Do dance in air, and call the eyes around.”
The landscape confronting the window might, indeed, have been part of the identical stretch of country which the youthful Chatterton had in his mind.
In this room sat she who had been the maiden Grace Melbury till the finger of fate touched her and turned her to a wife. It was two months after the wedding, and she was alone. Fitzpiers had walked out to see the abbey by the light of sunset, but she had been too fatigued to accompany him. They had reached the last stage of a long eight-weeks’ tour, and were going on to Hintock that night.
In the yard, between Grace and the orchards, there progressed a scene natural to the locality at this time of the year. An apple-mill and press had been erected on the spot, to which some men were bringing fruit from divers points in mawn-baskets, while others were grinding them, and others wringing down the pomace, whose sweet juice gushed forth into tubs and pails. The superintendent of these proceedings, to whom the others spoke as master, was a young yeoman of prepossessing manner and aspect, whose form she recognized in a moment. He had hung his coat to a nail of the out-house wall, and wore his shirt-sleeves rolled up beyond his elbows, to keep them unstained while he rammed the pomace into the bags of horse-hair. Fragments of apple-rind had alighted upon the brim of his hat — probably from the bursting of a bag — while brown pips of the same fruit were sticking among the down upon his fine, round arms.
She realised in a moment how he had come there. Down in the heart of the apple country nearly every farmer kept up a cider-making apparatus and wring-house for his own use, building up
the pomace in great straw “cheeses,” as they were called; but here, on the margin of Pomona’s plain, was a debatable land neither orchard nor sylvan exclusively, where the apple produce was hardly sufficient to warrant each proprietor in keeping a mill of his own. This was the field of the travelling cider-maker. His press and mill were fixed to wheels instead of being set up in a cider-house; and with a couple of horses, buckets, tubs, strainers, and an assistant or two, he wandered from place to place, deriving very satisfactory returns for his trouble in such a prolific season as the present.
The back parts of the town were just now abounding with apple-gatherings. They stood in the yards in carts, baskets, and loose heaps; and the blue, stagnant air of autumn which hung over everything was heavy with a sweet cidery smell. Cakes of pomace lay against the walls in the yellow sun, where they were drying to be used as fuel. Yet it was not the great make of the year as yet; before the standard crop came in there accumulated, in abundant times like this, a large superfluity of early apples, and windfalls from the trees of later harvest, which would not keep long. Thus, in the baskets, and quivering in the hopper of the mill, she saw specimens of mixed dates, including the mellow countenances of streaked-jacks, codlins, costards, stubbards, ratheripes, and other well-known friends of her ravenous youth.