The mare paced along with firm and cautious tread through the copse where Winterborne had worked, and into the heavier soil where the oaks grew; past Great Willy, the largest oak in the wood, and thence towards Nellcombe Bottom, intensely dark now with overgrowth, and popularly supposed to be haunted by the spirits of the fratricides exorcised from Hintock House.
By this time Fitzpiers was quite recovered as to physical strength. But he had eaten nothing since making a hasty breakfast in London that morning, his anxiety about Felice having hurried him away from home before dining; as a consequence, the old rum administered by his father-inlaw flew to the young man’s head and loosened his tongue, without his ever having recognized who it was that had lent him a kindly hand. He began to speak in desultory sentences, Melbury still supporting him.
“I’ve come all the way from London today,” said Fitzpiers. “Ah, that’s the place to meet your equals. I live at Hintock — worse, at Little Hintock — and I am quite lost there. There’s not a man within ten miles of Hintock who can comprehend me. I tell you, Farmer What’s-your-name, that I’m a man of education. I know several languages; the poets and I are familiar friends; I used to read more in metaphysics than anybody within fifty miles; and since I gave that up there’s nobody can match me in the whole county of Wessex as a scientist. Yet I an doomed to live with tradespeople in a miserable little hole like Hintock!”
“Indeed!” muttered Melbury.
Fitzpiers, increasingly energized by the alcohol, here reared himself up suddenly from the bowed posture he had hitherto held, thrusting his shoulders so violently against Melbury’s breast as to make it difficult for the old man to keep a hold on the reins. “People don’t appreciate me here!” the surgeon exclaimed; lowering his voice, he added, softly and slowly, “except one — except one! . . . A passionate soul, as warm as she is clever, as beautiful as she is warm, and as rich as she is beautiful. I say, old fellow, those claws of yours clutch me rather tight — rather like the eagle’s, you know, that ate out the liver of Pro — Pre — the man on Mount Caucasus. People don’t appreciate me, I say, except HER. Ah, gods, I am an unlucky man! She would have been mine, she would have taken my name; but unfortunately it cannot be so. I stooped to mate beneath me, and now I rue it.”
The position was becoming a very trying one for Melbury, corporeally and mentally. He was obliged to steady Fitzpiers with his left arm, and he began to hate the contact. He hardly knew what to do. It was useless to remonstrate with Fitzpiers, in his intellectual confusion from the rum and from the fall. He remained silent, his hold upon his companion, however, being stern rather than compassionate.
“You hurt me a little, farmer — though I am much obliged to you for your kindness. People don’t appreciate me, I say. Between ourselves, I am losing my practice here; and why? Because I see matchless attraction where matchless attraction is, both in person and position. I mention no names, so nobody will be the wiser. But I have lost her, in a legitimate sense, that is. If I were a free man now, things have come to such a pass that she could not refuse me; while with her fortune (which I don’t covet for itself) I should have a chance of satisfying an honorable ambition — a chance I have never had yet, and now never, never shall have, probably!”
Melbury, his heart throbbing against the other’s backbone, and his brain on fire with indignation, ventured to mutter huskily, “Why?”
The horse ambled on some steps before Fitzpiers replied, “Because I am tied and bound to another by law, as tightly as I am to you by your arm — not that I complain of your arm — I thank you for helping me. Well, where are we? Not nearly home yet? . . . Home, say I. It is a home! When I might have been at the other house over there.” In a stupefied way he flung his hand in the direction of the park. “I was just two months too early in committing myself. Had I only seen the other first —”
Here the old man’s arm gave Fitzpiers a convulsive shake. “What are you doing?” continued the latter. “Keep still, please, or put me down. I was saying that I lost her by a mere little two months! There is no chance for me now in this world, and it makes me reckless — reckless! Unless, indeed, anything should happen to the other one. She is amiable enough; but if anything should happen to her — and I hear she is ill — well, if it should, I should be free — and my fame, my happiness, would be insured.”
These were the last words that Fitzpiers uttered in his seat in front of the timber-merchant. Unable longer to master himself, Melbury, the skin of his face compressed, whipped away his spare arm from Fitzpiers’s waist, and seized him by the collar.
“You heartless villain — after all that we have done for ye!” he cried, with a quivering lip. “And the money of hers that you’ve had, and the roof we’ve provided to shelter ye! It is to me, George Melbury, that you dare to talk like that!” The exclamation was accompanied by a powerful swing from the shoulder, which flung the young man head-long into the road, Fitzpiers fell with a heavy thud upon the stumps of some undergrowth which had been cut during the winter preceding. Darling continued her walk for a few paces farther and stopped.
“God forgive me!” Melbury murmured, repenting of what he had done. “He tried me too sorely; and now perhaps I’ve murdered him!”
He turned round in the saddle and looked towards the spot on which Fitzpiers had fallen. To his great surprise he beheld the surgeon rise to his feet with a bound, as if unhurt, and walk away rapidly under the trees.
Melbury listened till the rustle of Fitzpiers’s footsteps died away. “It might have been a crime, but for the mercy of Providence in providing leaves for his fall,” he said to himself. And then his mind reverted to the words of Fitzpiers, and his indignation so mounted within him that he almost wished the fall had put an end to the young man there and then.
He had not ridden far when he discerned his own gray mare standing under some bushes. Leaving Darling for a moment, Melbury went forward and easily caught the younger animal, now disheartened at its freak. He then made the pair of them fast to a tree, and turning back, endeavored to find some trace of Fitzpiers, feeling pitifully that, after all, he had gone further than he intended with the offender.
But though he threaded the wood hither and thither, his toes ploughing layer after layer of the little horny scrolls that had once been leaves, he could not find him. He stood still listening and looking round. The breeze was oozing through the network of boughs as through a strainer; the trunks and larger branches stood against the light of the sky in the forms of writhing men, gigantic candelabra, pikes, halberds, lances, and whatever besides the fancy chose to make of them. Giving up the search, Melbury came back to the horses, and walked slowly homeward, leading one in each hand.
It happened that on this self-same evening a boy had been returning from Great to Little Hintock about the time of Fitzpiers’s and Melbury’s passage home along that route. A horse-collar that had been left at the harness-mender’s to be repaired was required for use at five o’clock next morning, and in consequence the boy had to fetch it overnight. He put his head through the collar, and accompanied his walk by whistling the one tune he knew, as an antidote to fear.
The boy suddenly became aware of a horse trotting rather friskily along the track behind him, and not knowing whether to expect friend or foe, prudence suggested that he should cease his whistling and retreat among the trees till the horse and his rider had gone by; a course to which he was still more inclined when he found how noiselessly they approached, and saw that the horse looked pale, and remembered what he had read about Death in the Revelation. He therefore deposited the collar by a tree, and hid himself behind it. The horseman came on, and the youth, whose eyes were as keen as telescopes, to his great relief recognized the doctor.
As Melbury surmised, Fitzpiers had in the darkness taken Blossom for Darling, and he had not discovered his mistake when he came up opposite the boy, though he was somewhat surprised at the liveliness of his usually placid mare. The only other pair of eyes on the spot whose vision was keen as the young carter’s were those of the horse; and, with that strongly conservative objection to the unusual which animals show, Blossom, on eying the collar under the tree — quite invisible to Fitzpiers — exercised none of the patience of the older horse, but shied sufficiently to unseat so second-rate an equestrian as the surgeon.
He fell, and did not move, lying as Melbury afterwards found him. The boy ran away, salving his conscience for the desertion by thinking how vigorously he would spread the alarm of the accident when he got to Hintock — which he uncompromisingly did, incrusting the skeleton event with a load of dramatic horrors.
Grace had returned, and the fly hired on her account, though not by her husband, at the Crown Hotel, Shottsford-Forum, had been paid for and dismissed. The long drive had somewhat revived her, her illness being a feverish intermittent nervousness which had more to do with mind than body, and she walked about her sitting-room in something of a hopeful mood. Mrs. Melbury had told her as soon as she arrived that her husband had returned from London. He had gone out, she said, to see a patient, as she supposed, and he must soon be back, since he had had no dinner or tea. Grace would not allow her mind to harbor any suspicion of his whereabouts, and her step-mother said nothing of Mrs. Charmond’s rumored sorrows and plans of departure.
So the young wife sat by the fire, waiting silently. She had left Hintock in a turmoil of feeling after the revelation of Mrs. Charmond, and had intended not to be at home when her husband returned. But she had thought the matter over, and had allowed her father’s influence to prevail and bring her back; and now somewhat regretted that Edgar’s arrival had preceded hers.
By-and-by Mrs. Melbury came up-stairs with a slight air of flurry and abruptness.
“I have something to tell — some bad news,” she said. “But yo............