Part 51 (1/2)
”So should I,” said her companion. ”But we must not.”
”Why? n.o.body would know.”
Grace could not resist the argument, influenced as she was by the sense of making amends for having neglected him in the body; and their tender voices united and filled the narrow room with supplicatory murmurs that a Calvinist might have envied. They had hardly ended when now and more numerous foot-falls were audible, also persons in conversation, one of whom Grace recognized as her father.
She rose, and went to the outer apartment, in which there was only such light as beamed from the inner one. Melbury and Mrs. Melbury were standing there.
”I don't reproach you, Grace,” said her father, with an estranged manner, and in a voice not at all like his old voice. ”What has come upon 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 am astonished. 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 until he knows the true circ.u.mstances of my life here. Go and tell him--what you 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 a short absence returned. Then Grace rose, and going out asked her father 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--I ought to know ye better. Are you coming with me to what was once your home?”
”No. I stay here with HIM. Take no account of me any more.”
The unwonted, perplexing, agitating relations in which she had stood to Winterborne quite lately--brought about by Melbury's own contrivance--could not fail to soften the natural anger of a parent at her more recent doings. ”My daughter, things are bad,” he rejoined.
”But why do you persevere to make 'em worse? What good can you do to Giles by staying here with him? Mind, I ask no questions. I don't inquire why you decided to come here, or anything as to what your course would have been if he had not died, though I know there's no deliberate harm in ye. As for me, I have lost all claim upon you, and I make no complaint. But I do say that by coming back with me now you will 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?
n.o.body except our household knows that you have left home. Then why should you, by a piece of perverseness, bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave?”
”If it were not for my husband--” she began, moved by his words. ”But how can I meet him there? How can any woman who is not a mere man's creature 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 upset altogether.”
”He declared to her when he came to our house that he would wait for time 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 him absolute permission,” Mrs. Melbury added.
This antecedent considerateness in Fitzpiers was as welcome to Grace as it was unexpected; and though she did not desire his presence, she was sorry that by her retaliatory fiction she had given him a different reason for avoiding her. She made no further objections to accompanying her parents, taking them into the inner room to give Winterborne a last look, and gathering up the two or three things that belonged to her. While she was doing this the two women came who had been called by Melbury, and at their heels poor Creedle.
”Forgive me, but I can't rule my mourning nohow as a man should, Mr.