The inspiriting appointment which had led Grace Melbury to indulge in a six-candle illumination for the arrangement of her attire, carried her over the ground the next morning with a springy tread. Her sense of being properly appreciated on her own native soil seemed to brighten the atmosphere and herbage around her, as the glowworm’s lamp irradiates the grass. Thus she moved along, a vessel of emotion going to empty itself on she knew not what.
Twenty minutes’ walking through copses, over a stile, and along an upland lawn brought her to the verge of a deep glen, at the bottom of which Hintock House appeared immediately beneath her eye. To describe it as standing in a hollow would not express the situation of the manor-house; it stood in a hole, notwithstanding that the hole was full of beauty. From the spot which Grace had reached a stone could easily have been thrown over or into, the birds’-nested chimneys of the mansion. Its walls were surmounted by a battlemented parapet; but the gray lead roofs were quite visible behind it, with their gutters, laps, rolls, and skylights, together with incised letterings and shoe-patterns cut by idlers thereon.
The front of the house exhibited an ordinary manorial presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-colored freestone from local quarries. The ashlar of the walls, where not overgrown with ivy and other creepers, was coated with lichen of every shade, intensifying its luxuriance with its nearness to the ground, till, below the plinth, it merged in moss.
Above the house to the back was a dense plantation, the roots of whose trees were above the level of the chimneys. The corresponding high ground on which Grace stood was richly grassed, with only an old tree here and there. A few sheep lay about, which, as they ruminated, looked quietly into the bedroom windows. The situation of the house, prejudicial to humanity, was a stimulus to vegetation, on which account an endless shearing of the heavy-armed ivy was necessary, and a continual lopping of trees and shrubs. It was an edifice built in times when human constitutions were damp-proof, when shelter from the boisterous was all that men thought of in choosing a dwelling-place, the insidious being beneath their notice; and its hollow site was an ocular reminder, by its unfitness for modern lives, of the fragility to which these have declined. The highest architectural cunning could have done nothing to make Hintock House dry and salubrious; and ruthless ignorance could have done little to make it unpicturesque. It was vegetable nature’s own home; a spot to inspire the painter and poet of still life — if they did not suffer too much from the relaxing atmosphere — and to draw groans from the gregariously disposed. Grace descended the green escarpment by a zigzag path into the drive, which swept round beneath the slope. The exterior of the house had been familiar to her from her childhood, but she had never been inside, and the approach to knowing an old thing in a new way was a lively experience. It was with a little flutter that she was shown in; but she recollected that Mrs. Charmond would probably be alone. Up to a few days before this time that lady had been accompanied in her comings, stayings, and goings by a relative believed to be her aunt; latterly, however, these two ladies had separated, owing, it was supposed, to a quarrel, and Mrs. Charmond had been left desolate. Being presumably a woman who did not care for solitude, this deprivation might possibly account for her sudden interest in Grace.
Mrs. Charmond was at the end of a gallery opening from the hall when Miss Melbury was announced, and saw her through the glass doors between them. She came forward with a smile on her face, and told the young girl it was good of her to come.
“Ah! you have noticed those,” she said, seeing that Grace’s eyes were attracted by some curious objects against the walls. “They are man-traps. My husband was a connoisseur in man-traps and spring-guns and such articles, collecting them from all his neighbors. He knew the histories of all these — which gin had broken a man’s leg, which gun had killed a man. That one, I remember his saying, had been set by a game-keeper in the track of a notorious poacher; but the keeper, forgetting what he had done, went that way himself, received the charge in the lower part of his body, and died of the wound. I don’t like them here, but I’ve never yet given directions for them to be taken away.” She added, playfully, “Man-traps are of rather ominous significance where a person of our sex lives, are they not?”
Grace was bound to smile; but that side of womanliness was one which her inexperience had no great zest in contemplating.
“They are interesting, no doubt, as relics of a barbarous time happily past,” she said, looking thoughtfully at the varied designs of these instruments of torture — some with semi-circular jaws, some with rectangular; most of them with long, sharp teeth, but a few with none, so that their jaws looked like the blank gums of old age.
“Well, we must not take them too seriously,” said Mrs. Charmond, with an indolent turn of her head, and they moved on inward. When she had shown her visitor different articles in cabinets that she deemed likely to interest her, some tapestries, wood-carvings, ivories, miniatures, and so on — always with a mien of listlessness which might either have been constitutional, or partly owing to the situation of the place — they sat down to an early cup of tea.
“Will you pour it out, please? Do,” she said, leaning back in her chair, and placing her hand above her forehead, while her almond eyes — those long eyes so common to the angelic legions of early Italian art — became longer, and her voice more languishing. She showed that oblique-mannered softness which is perhaps most frequent in women of darker complexion and more lymphatic temperament than Mrs. Charmond’s was; who lingeringly smile their meanings to men rather than speak them, who inveigle rather than prompt, and take advantage of currents rather than steer.
“I am the most inactive woman when I am here,” she said. “I think sometimes I was born to live and do nothing, nothing, nothing but float about, as we fancy we do sometimes in dreams. But that cannot be really my destiny, and I must struggle against such fancies.”
“I am so sorry you do not enjoy exertion — it is quite sad! I wish I could tend you and make you very happy.”
There was something so sympathetic, so appreciative, in the sound of Grace’s voice, that it impelled people to play havoc with their customary reservations in talking to her. “It is tender and kind of you to feel that,” said Mrs. Charmond. “Perhaps I have given you the notion that my languor is more than it really is. But this place oppresses me, and I have a plan of going abroad a good deal. I used to go with a relative, but that arrangement has dropped through.” Regarding Grace with a final glance of criticism, she seemed to make up her mind to consider the young girl satisfactory, and continued: “Now I am often impelled to record my impressions of times and places. I have often thought of writing a ‘New Sentimental Journey.’ But I cannot find energy enough to do it alone. When I am at different places in the south of Europe I feel a crowd of ideas and fancies thronging upon me continually, but to unfold writing-materials, take up a cold steel pen, and put these impressions down systematically on cold, smooth paper — that I cannot do. So I have thought that if I always could have somebody at my elbow with whom I am in sympathy, I might dictate any ideas that come into my head. And directly I had made your acquaintance the other day it struck me that you would suit me so well. Would you like to undertake it? You might read to me, too, if desirable. Will you think it over, and ask your parents if they are willing?”
“Oh yes,” said Grace. “I am almost sure they would be very glad.”
“You are so accomplished, I hear; I should be quite honored by such intellectual company.”
Grace, modestly blushing, deprecated any such idea.
“Do you keep up your lucubrations at Little Hintock?”
“Oh no. Lucubrations are not unknown at Little Hintock; but they are not carried on by me.”
“What — another student in that retreat?”
“There is a surgeon lately come, and I have heard that he reads a great deal — I see his light sometimes through the trees late at night.”
“Oh yes — a doctor — I believe I was told of him. It is a strange place for him to settle in.”
“It is a convenient centre for a practice, they say. But he does not confine his studies to medicine, it seems. He investigates theology and metaphysics and all sorts of subjects.”
“What is his name?”
“Fitzpiers. He represents a very old family, I believe, the Fitzpierses of Buckbury-Fitzpiers — not a great many miles from here.”
“I am not sufficiently local to know the history of the family. I was never in the county till my husband brought me here.” Mrs. Charmond did not care to pursue this line of investigation. Whatever mysterious merit might attach to family antiquity, it was one which, though she herself could claim it, her adaptable, wandering weltburgerliche nature had grown tired of caring about — a peculiarity that made her a contrast to her neighbors. “It is of rather more importance to know what the man is himself than what his ............