Part 32 (1/2)
”Then I am going,” he said.
”Very well,” she answered, stretching one hand round to him, and patting her eyes with a handkerchief held in the other.
”Shall I write a line to you at--”
”No, no.” A gentle reasonableness came into her tone as she added, ”It must not be, you know. It won't do.”
”Very well. Good-by.” The next moment he was gone.
In the evening, with listless adroitness, she encouraged the maid who dressed her for dinner to speak of Dr. Fitzpiers's marriage.
”Mrs. Fitzpiers was once supposed to favor Mr. Winterborne,” said the young woman.
”And why didn't she marry him?” said Mrs. Charmond.
”Because, you see, ma'am, he lost his houses.”
”Lost his houses? How came he to do that?”
”The houses were held on lives, and the lives dropped, and your agent wouldn't renew them, though it is said that Mr. Winterborne had a very good claim. That's as I've heard it, ma'am, and it was through it that the match was broke off.”
Being just then distracted by a dozen emotions, Mrs. Charmond sunk into a mood of dismal self-reproach. ”In refusing that poor man his reasonable request,” she said to herself, ”I foredoomed my rejuvenated girlhood's romance. Who would have thought such a business matter could have nettled my own heart like this? Now for a winter of regrets and agonies and useless wishes, till I forget him in the spring. Oh! I am glad I am going away.”
She left her chamber and went down to dine with a sigh. On the stairs she stood opposite the large window for a moment, and looked out upon the lawn. It was not yet quite dark. Half-way up the steep green slope confronting her stood old Timothy Tangs, who was shortening his way homeward by clambering here where there was no road, and in opposition to express orders that no path was to be made there. Tangs had momentarily stopped to take a pinch of snuff; but observing Mrs.
Charmond gazing at him, he hastened to get over the top out of hail.
His precipitancy made him miss his footing, and he rolled like a barrel to the bottom, his snuffbox rolling in front of him.
Her indefinite, idle, impossible pa.s.sion for Fitzpiers; her const.i.tutional cloud of misery; the sorrowful drops that still hung upon her eyelashes, all made way for the incursive mood started by the spectacle. She burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, her very gloom of the previous hour seeming to render it the more uncontrollable. It had not died out of her when she reached the dining-room; and even here, before the servants, her shoulders suddenly shook as the scene returned upon her; and the tears of her hilarity mingled with the remnants of those engendered by her grief.
She resolved to be sad no more. She drank two gla.s.ses of champagne, and a little more still after those, and amused herself in the evening with singing little amatory songs.
”I must do something for that poor man Winterborne, however,” she said.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A week had pa.s.sed, and Mrs. Charmond had left Hintock House. Middleton Abbey, the place of her sojourn, was about twenty miles distant by road, eighteen by bridle-paths and footways.
Grace observed, for the first time, that her husband was restless, that at moments he even was disposed to avoid her. The scrupulous civility of mere acquaintances.h.i.+p crept into his manner; yet, when sitting at meals, he seemed hardly to hear her remarks. Her little doings interested him no longer, while towards her father his bearing was not far from supercilious. It was plain that his mind was entirely outside her life, whereabouts outside it she could not tell; in some region of science, possibly, or of psychological literature. But her hope that he was again immersing himself in those lucubrations which before her marriage had made his light a landmark in Hintock, was founded simply on the slender fact that he often sat up late.
One evening she discovered him leaning over a gate on Rub-Down Hill, the gate at which Winterborne had once been standing, and which opened on the brink of a steep, slanting down directly into Blackmoor Vale, or the Vale of the White Hart, extending beneath the eye at this point to a distance of many miles. His attention was fixed on the landscape far away, and Grace's approach was so noiseless that he did not hear her.
When she came close she could see his lips moving unconsciously, as to some impa.s.sioned visionary theme.
She spoke, and Fitzpiers started. ”What are you looking at?” she asked.
”Oh! I was contemplating our old place of Buckbury, in my idle way,” he said.
It had seemed to her that he was looking much to the right of that cradle and tomb of his ancestral dignity; but she made no further observation, and taking his arm walked home beside him almost in silence. She did not know that Middleton Abbey lay in the direction of his gaze. ”Are you going to have out Darling this afternoon?” she asked, presently. Darling being the light-gray mare which Winterborne had bought for Grace, and which Fitzpiers now constantly used, the animal having turned out a wonderful bargain, in combining a perfect docility with an almost human intelligence; moreover, she was not too young. Fitzpiers was unfamiliar with horses, and he valued these qualities.
”Yes,” he replied, ”but not to drive. I am riding her. I practise crossing a horse as often as I can now, for I find that I can take much shorter cuts on horseback.”