Herr Tannhauser still moved on, his plodding steed rendering him
distinctly visible yet. Could she have heard Fitzpiers's voice at that
moment she would have found him murmuring-"...Towards the loadstar of my one desire
I flitted, even as a dizzy moth in the owlet light."
But he was a silent spectacle to her now. Soon he rose out of the
valley, and skirted a high plateau of the chalk formation on his right,
which rested abruptly upon the fruity district of loamy clay, the
character and herbage of the two formations being so distinct that the
calcareous upland appeared but as a deposit of a few years' antiquity
upon the level vale. He kept along the edge of this high, unenclosed
country, and the sky behind him being deep violet, she could still see
white Darling in relief upon it--a mere speck now--a Wouvermans
eccentricity reduced to microscopic dimensions. Upon this high ground
he gradually disappeared.
Thus she had beheld the pet animal purchased for her own use, in pure
love of her, by one who had always been true, impressed to convey her
husband away from her to the side of a new-found idol. While she was
musing on the vicissitudes of horses and wives, she discerned shapes
moving up the valley towards her, quite near at hand, though till now
hidden by the hedges. Surely they were Giles Winterborne, with his two
horses and cider-apparatus, conducted by Robert Creedle. Up, upward
they crept, a stray beam of the sun alighting every now and then like a
star on the blades of the pomace-shovels, which had been converted to
steel mirrors by the action of the malic acid. She opened the gate
when he came close, and the panting horses rested as they achieved the
ascent.
"How do you do, Giles?" said she, under a sudden impulse to be familiar
with him.
He replied with much more reserve. "You are going for a walk, Mrs.
Fitzpiers?" he added. "It is pleasant just now."
"No, I am returning," said she.
The vehicles passed through, the gate slammed, and Winterborne walked
by her side in the rear of the apple-mill.
He looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt
to wheat-color, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his boots and leggings
dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of
apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him that
atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an
indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among
the orchards. Her heart rose from its late sadness like a released
spring; her senses revelled in the sudden lapse back to nature
unadorned. The consciousness of having to be genteel because of her
husband's profession, the veneer of artificiality which she had
acquired at the fashionable schools, were thrown off, and she became
the crude, country girl of her latent, earliest instincts.