CHAPTER XVI.
Dr. Fitzpiers lived on the slope of the hill, in a house of much lesspretension, both as to architecture and as to magnitude, than thetimber-merchant's. The latter had, without doubt, been once themanorial residence appertaining to the snug and modest domain of LittleHintock, of which the boundaries were now lost by its absorption withothers of its kind into the adjoining estate of Mrs. Charmond. Thoughthe Melburys themselves were unaware of the fact, there was everyreason to believe--at least so the parson said--that the owners of thatlittle manor had been Melbury's own ancestors, the family nameoccurring in numerous documents relating to transfers of land about thetime of the civil wars.
Mr. Fitzpiers's dwelling, on the contrary, was small, cottage-like, andcomparatively modern. It had been occupied, and was in part occupiedstill, by a retired farmer and his wife, who, on the surgeon's arrivalin quest of a home, had accommodated him by receding from their frontrooms into the kitchen quarter, whence they administered to his wants,and emerged at regular intervals to receive from him a not unwelcomeaddition to their income.
The cottage and its garden were so regular in their arrangement thatthey might have been laid out by a Dutch designer of the time ofWilliam and Mary. In a low, dense hedge, cut to wedge-shape, was adoor over which the hedge formed an arch, and from the inside of thedoor a straight path, bordered with clipped box, ran up the slope ofthe garden to the porch, which was exactly in the middle of the housefront, with two windows on each side. Right and left of the path werefirst a bed of gooseberry bushes; next of currant; next of raspberry;next of strawberry; next of old-fashioned flowers; at the cornersopposite the porch being spheres of box resembling a pair of schoolglobes. Over the roof of the house could be seen the orchard, on yethigher ground, and behind the orchard the forest-trees, reaching up tothe crest of the hill.
Opposite the garden door and visible from the parlor window was aswing-gate leading into a field, across which there ran a footpath.The swing-gate had just been repainted, and on one fine afternoon,before the paint was dry, and while gnats were still dying thereon, thesurgeon was standing in his sitting-room abstractedly looking out atthe different pedestrians who passed and repassed along that route.Being of a philosophical stamp, he perceived that the character of eachof these travellers exhibited itself in a somewhat amusing manner byhis or her method of handling the gate.
As regarded the men, there was not much variety: they gave the gate akick and passed through. The women were more contrasting. To them thesticky wood-work was a barricade, a disgust, a menace, a treachery, asthe case might be.
The first that he noticed was a bouncing woman with her skirts tuckedup and her hair uncombed. She grasped the gate without looking, givingit a supplementary push with her shoulder, when the white imprint drewfrom her an exclamation in language not too refined. She went to thegreen bank, sat down and rubbed herself in the grass, cursing the while.
"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed the doctor.
The next was a girl, with her hair cropped short, in whom the surgeonrecognized the daughter of his late patient, the woodman South.Moreover, a black bonnet that she wore by way of mourning unpleasantlyreminded him that he had ordered the felling of a tree which had causedher parent's death and Winterborne's losses. She walked and thought,and not recklessly; but her preoccupation led her to graspunsuspectingly the bar of the gate, and touch it with her arm.Fitzpiers felt sorry that she should have soiled that new black frock,poor as it was, for it was probably her only one. She looked at herhand and arm, seemed but little surprised, wiped off the disfigurementwith an almost unmoved face, and as if without abandoning her originalthoughts. Thus she went on her way.
Then there came over the green quite a different sort of personage.She walked as delicately as if she had been bred in town, and as firmlyas if she had been bred in the country; she seemed one who dimly knewher appearance to be attractive, but who retained some of the charm ofbeing ignorant of that fact by forgetting it in a general pensiveness.She approached the gate. To let such a creature touch it even with atip of her glove was to Fitzpiers almost like letting her proceed totragical self-destruction. He jumped up and looked for his hat, butwas unable to find the right one; glancing again out of the window hesaw that he was too late. Having come up, she stopped, looked at thegate, picked up a little stick, and using it as a bayonet, pushed openthe obstacle without touching it at all.
He steadily watched her till she had passed out of sight, recognizingher as the very young lady whom he had seen once before and been unableto identify. Whose could that emotional face be? All the others he hadseen in Hintock as yet oppressed him with their crude rusticity; thecontrast offered by this suggested that she hailed from elsewhere.
Precisely these thoughts had occurred to him at the first time ofseeing her; but he now went a little further with them, and consideredthat as there had been no carriage seen or heard lately in that spotshe could not have come a very long distance. She must be somebodystaying at Hintock House? Possibly Mrs. Charmond, of whom he had heardso much--at any rate an inmate, and this probability was sufficient toset a mild radiance in the surgeon's somewhat dull sky.
Fitzpiers sat down to the book he had been perusing. It happened to bethat of a German metaphysician, for the doctor was not a practical man,except by fits, and much preferred the ideal world to the real, and thediscovery of principles to their application. The young lady remainedin his thoughts. He might have followed her; but he was notconstitutionally active, and preferred a conjectural pursuit. However,when he went out for a ramble just before dusk he insensibly took thedirection of Hintock House, which was the way that Grace had beenwalking, it having happened that her mind had run on Mrs. Charmond thatday, and she had walked to the brow of a hill whence the house could beseen, returning by another route.
Fitzpiers in his turn reached the edge of the glen, overlooking themanor-house. The shutters were shut, and only one chimney smoked. Themere aspect of the place was enough to inform him that Mrs. Charmondhad gone away and that nobody else was staying there. Fitzpiers felt avague disappointment that the young lady was not Mrs. Charmond, of whomhe had heard so much; and without pausing longer to gaze at a carcassfrom which the spirit had flown, he bent his steps homeward.
Later in the evening Fitzpiers was summoned to visit a cottage patientabout two miles distant. Like the majority of young practitioners inhis position he was far from having assumed the dignity of being drivenhis rounds by a servant in a brougham that flashed the sunlight like amirror; his way of getting about was by means of a gig which he drovehimself, hitching the rein of the horse to the gate post, shutter hook,or garden paling of the domicile under visitation, or giving pennies tolittle boys to hold the animal during his stay--pennies which were wellearned when the cases to be attended were of a certain cheerful kindthat wore out the patience of the little boys.
On this account of travelling alone, the night journeys which Fitzpiershad frequently to take were dismal enough, a serious apparentperversity in nature ruling that whenever there was to be a birth in aparticularly inaccessible and lonely place, that event should occur inthe night. The surgeon, having been of late years a town man, hatedthe solitary midnight woodland. He was not altogether skilful with thereins, and it often occurred to his mind that if in some remote depthsof the trees an accident were to happen, the fact of his being alonemight be the death of him. Hence he made a practice of picking up anycountryman or lad whom he chanced to pass by, and under the disguise oftreating him to a nice drive, obtained his companionship on thejourney, and his convenient assistance in opening gates.
The doctor had started on his way out of the village on the night inquestion when the light of his lamps fell upon the musing form ofWinterborne, walking leisurely along, as if he had no object in life.Winterborne was a better class of companion than the doctor usuallycould get, and he at once pulled up and asked him if he would like adrive through the wood that fine night.
Giles seemed
rather surprised at the doctor's friendliness, but saidthat he had no objection, and accordingly mounted beside Mr. Fitzpiers.
They drove along under the black boughs which formed a network upon thestars, all the trees of a species alike in one respect, and no two ofthem alike in another. Looking up as they passed under a horizontalbough they sometimes saw objects like large tadpoles lodgeddiametrically across it, which Giles explained to be pheasants there atroost; and they sometimes heard the report of a gun, which reminded himthat others knew what those tadpole shapes represented as well as he.
Presently the doctor said what he had been going to say for some time:
"Is there a young lady staying in this neighborhood--a very attractivegirl--with a little white boa round her neck, and white fur round hergloves?"
Winterborne of course knew in a moment that Grace, whom he had caughtthe doctor peering at, was represented by these accessaries. With awary grimness, partly in his character, partly induced by thecircumstances, he evaded an answer by saying, "I saw a young ladytalking to Mrs. Charmond the other day; perhaps it was she."
Fitzpiers concluded from this that Winterborne had not seen him lookingover the hedge. "It might have been," he said. "She is quite agentlewoman--the one I mean. She cannot be a permanent resident inHintock or I should have seen her before. Nor does she look like one."
"She is not staying at Hintock House?"
"No; it is closed."
"Then perhaps she is staying at one of the cottages, or farmhouses?"
"Oh no--you mistake. She was a different sort of girl altogether." AsGiles was nobody, Fitzpiers treated him accordingly, and apostrophizedthe night in continuation:
"'She moved upon this earth a shape of brightness, A power, that from its objects scarcely drew One impulse of her being--in her lightness Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew, Which wanders through the waste air's pathless blue, To nourish some far desert: she did seem Beside me, gathering beauty as she grew, Like the bright shade of some immortal dream Which walks, when tempests sleep, the wave of life's dark stream.'"
The consummate charm of the lines seemed to Winterborne, though hedivined that they were a quotation, to be somehow the result of hislost love's charms upon Fitzpiers.
"You seem to be mightily in love with her, sir," he said, with asensation of heart-sickness, and more than ever resolved not to mentionGrace by name.
"Oh no--I am not that, Winterborne; people living insulated, as I do bythe solitude of this place, get charged with emotive fluid like aLeyden-jar with electric, for want of some conductor at hand todisperse it. Human love is a subjective thing--the essence itself ofman, as that great thinker Spinoza the philosopher says--ipsa hominisessentia--it is joy accompanied by an idea which we project against anysuitable object in the line of our vision, just as the rainbow iris isprojected against an oak, ash, or elm tree indifferently. So that ifany other young lady had appeared instead of the one who did appear, Ishould have felt just the same interest in her, and have quotedprecisely the same lines from Shelley about her, as about this one Isaw. Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all!"
"Well, it is what we call being in love down in these parts, whether orno," said Winterborne.
"You are right enough if you admit that I am in love with something inmy own head, and no thing in itself outside it at all."
"Is it part of a country doctor's duties to learn that view of things,may I ask, sir?" said Winterborne, adopting the Socratic {Greek word:irony} with such well-assumed simplicity that Fitzpiers answered,readily,
"Oh no. The real truth is, Winterborne, that medical practice inplaces like this is a very rule-of-thumb matter; a bottle of bitterstuff for this and that old woman--the bitterer the better--compoundedfrom a few simple stereotyped prescriptions; occasional attendance atbirths, where mere presence is almost sufficient, so healthy and strongare the people; and a lance for an abscess now and then. Investigationand experiment cannot be carried on without more appliances than onehas here--though I have attempted it a little."
Giles did not enter into this view of the case; what he had been struckwith was the curious parallelism between Mr. Fitzpiers's manner andGrace's, as shown by the fact of both of them straying into a subjectof discourse so engrossing to themselves that it made them forget itwas foreign to him.
Nothing further passed between himself and the doctor in relation toGrace till they were on their way back. They had stopped at a way-sideinn for a glass of brandy and cider hot, and when they were again inmotion, Fitzpiers, possibly a little warmed by the liquor, resumed thesubject by saying, "I should like very much to know who that young ladywas."
"What difference can it make, if she's only the tree your rainbow fallson?"
"Ha! ha! True."
"You have no wife, sir?"
"I have no wife, and no idea of one. I hope to do better things thanmarry and settle in Hintock. Not but that it is well for a medical manto be married, and sometimes, begad, 'twould be pleasant enough in thisplace, with the wind roaring round the house, and the rain and theboughs beating against it. I hear that you lost your life-holds by thedeath of South?"
"I did. I lost in more ways than one."
They had reached the top of Hintock Lane or Street, if it could becalled such where three-quarters of the road-side consisted of copseand orchard. One of the first houses to be passed was Melbury's. Alight was shining from a bedroom window facing lengthwise of the lane.Winterborne glanced at it, and saw what was coming. He had withheld ananswer to the doctor's inquiry to hinder his knowledge of Grace; but,as he thought to himself, "who hath gathered the wind in his fists? whohath bound the waters in a garment?" he could not hinder what wasdoomed to arrive, and might just as well have been outspoken. As theycame up to the house, Grace's figure was distinctly visible, drawingthe two white curtains together which were used here instead of blinds.
"Why, there she is!" said Fitzpiers. "How does she come there?"
"In the most natural way in the world. It is her home. Mr. Melbury isher father."
"Oh, indeed--indeed--indeed! How comes he to have a daughter of thatstamp?"
Winterborne laughed coldly. "Won't money do anything," he said, "ifyou've promising material to work upon? Why shouldn't a Hintock girl,taken early from home, and put under proper instruction, become asfinished as any other young lady, if she's got brains and good looks tobegin with?"
"No reason at all why she shouldn't," murmured the surgeon, withreflective disappointment. "Only I didn't anticipate quite that kindof origin for her."
"And you think an inch or two less of her now." There was a littletremor in Winterborne's voice as he spoke.
"Well," said the doctor, with recovered warmth, "I am not so sure thatI think less of her. At first it was a sort of blow; but, dammy! I'llstick up for her. She's charming, every inch of her!"
"So she is," said Winterborne, "but not to me."
From this ambiguous expression of the reticent woodlander's, Dr.Fitzpiers inferred that Giles disliked Miss Melbury because of somehaughtiness in her bearing towards him, and had, on that account,withheld her name. The supposition did not tend to diminish hisadmiration for her.