Part 17 (2/2)
”Nonsense,” he said, sharply. ”You don't know what you are talking about. Look here.”
He handed across to her the letter received from Giles.
She read it, and said no more. Could he have seen her write on the wall? She did not know. Fate, it seemed, would have it this way, and there was nothing to do but to acquiesce.
It was a few hours after this that Winterborne, who, curiously enough, had NOT perceived Grace writing, was clearing away the tree from the front of South's late dwelling. He saw Marty standing in her door-way, a slim figure in meagre black, almost without womanly contours as yet.
He went up to her and said, ”Marty, why did you write that on my wall last night? It WAS you, you know.”
”Because it was the truth. I didn't mean to let it stay, Mr.
Winterborne; but when I was going to rub it out you came, and I was obliged to run off.”
”Having prophesied one thing, why did you alter it to another? Your predictions can't be worth much.”
”I have not altered it.”
”But you have.”
”No.”
”It is altered. Go and see.”
She went, and read that, in spite of losing his dwelling-place, he would KEEP his Grace. Marty came back surprised.
”Well, I never,” she said. ”Who can have made such nonsense of it?”
”Who, indeed?” said he.
”I have rubbed it all out, as the point of it is quite gone.”
”You'd no business to rub it out. I didn't tell you to. I meant to let it stay a little longer.”
”Some idle boy did it, no doubt,” she murmured.
As this seemed very probable, and the actual perpetrator was unsuspected, Winterborne said no more, and dismissed the matter from his mind.
From this day of his life onward for a considerable time, Winterborne, though not absolutely out of his house as yet, retired into the background of human life and action thereabout--a feat not particularly difficult of performance anywhere when the doer has the a.s.sistance of a lost prestige. Grace, thinking that Winterborne saw her write, made no further sign, and the frail bark of fidelity that she had thus timidly launched was stranded and lost.
CHAPTER XVI.
Dr. Fitzpiers lived on the slope of the hill, in a house of much less pretension, both as to architecture and as to magnitude, than the timber-merchant's. The latter had, without doubt, been once the manorial residence appertaining to the snug and modest domain of Little Hintock, of which the boundaries were now lost by its absorption with others of its kind into the adjoining estate of Mrs. Charmond. Though the Melburys themselves were unaware of the fact, there was every reason to believe--at least so the parson said that the owners of that little manor had been Melbury's own ancestors, the family name occurring in numerous doc.u.ments relating to transfers of land about the time of the civil wars.
Mr. Fitzpiers's dwelling, on the contrary, was small, cottage-like, and comparatively modern. It had been occupied, and was in part occupied still, by a retired farmer and his wife, who, on the surgeon's arrival in quest of a home, had accommodated him by receding from their front rooms into the kitchen quarter, whence they administered to his wants, and emerged at regular intervals to receive from him a not unwelcome addition to their income.
The cottage and its garden were so regular in their arrangement that they might have been laid out by a Dutch designer of the time of William and Mary. In a low, dense hedge, cut to wedge-shape, was a door over which the hedge formed an arch, and from the inside of the door a straight path, bordered with clipped box, ran up the slope of the garden to the porch, which was exactly in the middle of the house front, with two windows on each side. Right and left of the path were first a bed of gooseberry bushes; next of currant; next of raspberry; next of strawberry; next of old-fas.h.i.+oned flowers; at the corners opposite the porch being spheres of box resembling a pair of school globes. Over the roof of the house could be seen the orchard, on yet higher ground, and behind the orchard the forest-trees, reaching up to the crest of the hill.
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