A week had passed, and Mrs. Charmond had left Hintock House. Middleton
Abbey, the place of her sojourn, was about twenty miles distant by
road, eighteen by bridle-paths and footways.
Grace observed, for the first time, that her husband was restless, that
at moments he even was disposed to avoid her. The scrupulous civility
of mere acquaintanceship crept into his manner; yet, when sitting at
meals, he seemed hardly to hear her remarks. Her little doings
interested him no longer, while towards her father his bearing was not
far from supercilious. It was plain that his mind was entirely outside
her life, whereabouts outside it she could not tell; in some region of
science, possibly, or of psychological literature. But her hope that
he was again immersing himself in those lucubrations which before her
marriage had made his light a landmark in Hintock, was founded simply
on the slender fact that he often sat up late.
One evening she discovered him leaning over a gate on Rub-Down Hill,
the gate at which Winterborne had once been standing, and which opened
on the brink of a steep, slanting down directly into Blackmoor Vale, or
the Vale of the White Hart, extending beneath the eye at this point to
a distance of many miles. His attention was fixed on the landscape far
away, and Grace's approach was so noiseless that he did not hear her.
When she came close she could see his lips moving unconsciously, as to
some impassioned visionary theme.
She spoke, and Fitzpiers started. "What are you looking at?" she asked.
"Oh! I was contemplating our old place of Buckbury, in my idle way," he
said.
It had seemed to her that he was looking much to the right of that
cradle and tomb of his ancestral dignity; but she made no further
observation, and taking his arm walked home beside him almost in
silence. She did not know that Middleton Abbey lay in the direction of
his gaze. "Are you going to have out Darling this afternoon?" she
asked, presently. Darling being the light-gray mare which Winterborne
had bought for Grace, and which Fitzpiers now constantly used, the
animal having turned out a wonderful bargain, in combining a perfect
docility with an almost human intelligence; moreover, she was not too
young. Fitzpiers was unfamiliar with horses, and he valued these
qualities.
"Yes," he replied, "but not to drive. I am riding her. I practise
crossing a horse as often as I can now, for I find that I can take much
shorter cuts on horseback."
He had, in fact, taken these riding exercises for about a week, only
since Mrs. Charmond's absence, his universal practice hitherto having
been to drive.