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

are dead already.” His eyes still remained fixed on her; the conclusion to which he had come seeming to end his interest, professional and otherwise, in Winterborne forever.

“But it cannot be! He was well three days ago.”

“Not well, I suspect. This seems like a secondary attack, which has followed some previous illness⁠—possibly typhoid⁠—it may have been months ago, or recently.”

“Ah⁠—he was not well⁠—you are right. He was ill⁠—he was ill when I came.”

There was nothing more to do or say. She crouched down at the side of the bed, and Fitzpiers took a seat. Thus they remained in silence, and long as it lasted she never turned her eyes, or apparently her thoughts, at all to her husband. He occasionally murmured, with automatic authority, some slight directions for alleviating the pain of the dying man, which she mechanically obeyed, bending over him during the intervals in silent tears.

Winterborne never recovered consciousness of what was passing; and that he was going became soon perceptible also to her. In less than an hour the delirium ceased; then there was an interval of somnolent painlessness and soft breathing, at the end of which Winterborne passed quietly away.

Then Fitzpiers broke the silence. “Have you lived here long?” said he.

Grace was wild with sorrow⁠—with all that had befallen her⁠—with the cruelties that had attacked her⁠—with life⁠—with Heaven. She answered at random. “Yes. By what right do you ask?”

“Don’t think I claim any right,” said Fitzpiers, sadly. “It is for you to do and say what you choose. I admit, quite as much as you feel, that I am a vagabond⁠—a brute⁠—not worthy to possess the smallest fragment of you. But here I am, and I have happened to take sufficient interest in you to make that inquiry.”

“He is everything to me!” said Grace, hardly heeding her husband, and laying her hand reverently on the dead man’s eyelids, where she kept it a long time, pressing down their lashes with gentle touches, as if she were stroking a little bird.

He watched her a while, and then glanced round the chamber where his eyes fell upon a few dressing necessaries that she had brought.

“Grace⁠—if I may call you so,” he said, “I have been already humiliated almost to the depths. I have come back since you refused to join me elsewhere⁠—I have entered your father’s house, and borne all that that cost me without flinching, because I have felt that I deserved humiliation. But is there a yet greater humiliation in store for me? You say you have been living here⁠—that he is everything to you. Am I to draw from that the obvious, the extremest inference?”

Triumph at any price is sweet to men and women⁠—especially the latter. It was her first and last opportunity of repaying him for the cruel contumely which she had borne at his hands so docilely.

“Yes,” she answered; and there was that in her subtly compounded nature which made her feel a thrill of pride as she did so.

Yet the moment after she had so mightily belied her character she half repented. Her husband had turned as white as the wall behind him. It seemed as if all that remained to him of life and spirit had been abstracted at a stroke. Yet he did not move, and in his efforts at self-control closed his mouth together as a vice. His determination was fairly successful, though she saw how very much greater than she had expected her triumph had been. Presently he looked across at Winterborne.

“Would it startle you to hear,” he said, as if he hardly had breath to utter the words, “that she who was to me what he was to you is dead also?”

“Dead⁠—she dead?” exclaimed Grace.

“Yes. Felice Charmond is where this young man is.”

“Never!” said Grace, vehemently.

He went on without heeding the insinuation: “And I came back to try to make it up with you⁠—but⁠—”

Fitzpiers rose, and moved across the room to go away, looking downward with the droop of a man whose hope was turned to apathy, if not despair. In going round the door his eye fell upon her once more. She was still bending over the body of Winterborne, her face close to the young man’s.

“Have you been kissing him during his illness?” asked her husband.

“Yes.”

“Since his fevered state set in?”

“Yes.”

“On his lips?”

“Yes.”

“Then you will do well to take a few drops of this in water as soon as possible.” He drew a small phial from his pocket and returned to offer it to her.

Grace shook her head.

“If you don’t do as I tell you you may soon be like him.”

“I don’t care. I wish to die.”

“I’ll put it here,” said Fitzpiers, placing the bottle on a ledge beside him. “The sin of not having warned you will not be upon my head at any rate, among my other sins. I am now going, and I will send somebody to you. Your father does not know that you are here, so I suppose I shall be bound to tell him?”

“Certainly.”

Fitzpiers left the cot, and the stroke of his feet was soon immersed in the silence that pervaded the spot. Grace remained kneeling and weeping, she hardly knew how long, and then she sat up, covered poor Giles’s features, and went towards the door where her husband had stood. No sign of any other comer greeted her ear, the only perceptible sounds being the tiny cracklings of the dead leaves, which, like a featherbed, had not yet done rising to their normal level where indented by the pressure of her husband’s receding footsteps. It reminded her that she had been struck with the change in his aspect; the extremely intellectual look that had always been in his face was wrought to a finer phase by thinness, and a careworn dignity had been superadded. She returned to Winterborne’s side, and during her meditations another tread drew near the door, entered the outer room, and halted at the entrance of the chamber where Grace was.

“What⁠—Marty!” said Grace.

“Yes. I