The Woodlanders - Thomas Hardy (best books to read for women .txt) 📗

Her cheeks became slowly bloodless. “Oh, Giles,” she said, grasping his arm, “you have heard something! What⁠—cannot my father conclude it there and now? Surely he has done it? Oh, Giles, Giles, don’t deceive me. What terrible position am I in?”

He could not tell her, try as he would. The sense of her implicit trust in his honor absolutely disabled him. “I cannot inform you,” he murmured, his voice as husky as that of the leaves underfoot. “Your father will soon be here. Then we shall know. I will take you home.”

Inexpressibly dear as she was to him, he offered her his arm with the most reserved air, as he added, correctingly, “I will take you, at any rate, into the drive.”

Thus they walked on together. Grace vibrating between happiness and misgiving. It was only a few minutes’ walk to where the drive ran, and they had hardly descended into it when they heard a voice behind them cry, “Take out that arm!”

For a moment they did not heed, and the voice repeated, more loudly and hoarsely,

“Take out that arm!”

It was Melbury’s. He had returned sooner than they expected, and now came up to them. Grace’s hand had been withdrawn like lightning on her hearing the second command. “I don’t blame you⁠—I don’t blame you,” he said, in the weary cadence of one broken down with scourgings. “But you two must walk together no more⁠—I have been surprised⁠—I have been cruelly deceived⁠—Giles, don’t say anything to me; but go away!”

He was evidently not aware that Winterborne had known the truth before he brought it; and Giles would not stay to discuss it with him then. When the young man had gone Melbury took his daughter indoors to the room he used as his office. There he sat down, and bent over the slope of the bureau, her bewildered gaze fixed upon him.

When Melbury had recovered a little he said, “You are now, as ever, Fitzpiers’s wife. I was deluded. He has not done you enough harm. You are still subject to his beck and call.”

“Then let it be, and never mind, father,” she said, with dignified sorrow. “I can bear it. It is your trouble that grieves me most.” She stooped over him, and put her arm round his neck, which distressed Melbury still more. “I don’t mind at all what comes to me,” Grace continued; “whose wife I am, or whose I am not. I do love Giles; I cannot help that; and I have gone further with him than I should have done if I had known exactly how things were. But I do not reproach you.”

“Then Giles did not tell you?” said Melbury.

“No,” said she. “He could not have known it. His behavior to me proved that he did not know.”

Her father said nothing more, and Grace went away to the solitude of her chamber.

Her heavy disquietude had many shapes; and for a time she put aside the dominant fact to think of her too free conduct towards Giles. His lovemaking had been brief as it was sweet; but would he on reflection contemn her for forwardness? How could she have been so simple as to suppose she was in a position to behave as she had done! Thus she mentally blamed her ignorance; and yet in the centre of her heart she blessed it a little for what it had momentarily brought her.

Life among the people involved in these events seemed to be suppressed and hidebound for a while. Grace seldom showed herself outside the house, never outside the garden; for she feared she might encounter Giles Winterborne; and that she could not bear.

This pensive intramural existence of the self-constituted nun appeared likely to continue for an indefinite time. She had learned that there was one possibility in which her formerly imagined position might become real, and only one; that her husband’s absence should continue long enough to amount to positive desertion. But she never allowed her mind to dwell much upon the thought; still less did she deliberately hope for such a result. Her regard for Winterborne had been rarefied by the shock which followed its avowal into an ethereal emotion that had little to do with living and doing.

As for Giles, he was lying⁠—or rather sitting⁠—ill at his hut. A feverish indisposition which had been hanging about him for some time, the result of a chill caught the previous winter, seemed to acquire virulence with the prostration of his hopes. But not a soul knew of his languor, and he did not think the case serious enough to send for a medical man. After a few days he was better again, and crept about his home in a great coat, attending to his simple wants as usual with his own hands. So matters stood when the limpid inertion of Grace’s pool-like existence was disturbed as by a geyser. She received a letter from Fitzpiers.

Such a terrible letter it was in its import, though couched in the gentlest language. In his absence Grace had grown to regard him with toleration, and her relation to him with equanimity, till she had almost forgotten how trying his presence would be. He wrote briefly and unaffectedly; he made no excuses, but informed her that he was living quite alone, and had been led to think that they ought to be together, if she would make up her mind to forgive him. He therefore purported to cross the Channel to Budmouth by the steamer on a day he named, which she found to be three days after the time of her present reading.

He said that he could not come to Hintock for obvious reasons, which her father would understand even better than herself. As the only alternative she was to be on the quay to meet the steamer when it arrived from the opposite coast, probably about half an hour before midnight, bringing with