"True," murmured old Timothy. "From the soul of his foot to the crown
of his head there was no blemish in him."
"Or leastwise you might ha' been a-wownded into tatters a'most, and no
doctor to jine your few limbs together within seven mile!"
While this grim address was proceeding, Fitzpiers had dismounted, and
taking Grace's arm walked stiffly in-doors with her. Melbury stood
staring at the horse, which, in addition to being very weary, was
spattered with mud. There was no mud to speak of about the Hintocks
just now--only in the clammy hollows of the vale beyond Owlscombe, the
stiff soil of which retained moisture for weeks after the uplands were
dry. While they were rubbing down the mare, Melbury's mind coupled
with the foreign quality of the mud the name he had heard unconsciously
muttered by the surgeon when Grace took his hand--"Felice." Who was
Felice? Why, Mrs. Charmond; and she, as he knew, was staying at
Middleton.
Melbury had indeed pounced upon the image that filled Fitzpiers's
half-awakened soul--wherein there had been a picture of a recent
interview on a lawn with a capriciously passionate woman who had begged
him not to come again in tones whose vibration incited him to disobey.
"What are you doing here? Why do you pursue me? Another belongs to you.
If they were to see you they would seize you as a thief!" And she had
turbulently admitted to his wringing questions that her visit to
Middleton had been undertaken less because of the invalid relative than
in shamefaced fear of her own weakness if she remained near his home.
A triumph then it was to Fitzpiers, poor and hampered as he had become,
to recognize his real conquest of this beauty, delayed so many years.
His was the selfish passion of Congreve's Millamont, to whom love's
supreme delight lay in "that heart which others bleed for, bleed for
me."
When the horse had been attended to Melbury stood uneasily here and
there about his premises; he was rudely disturbed in the comfortable
views which had lately possessed him on his domestic concerns. It is
true that he had for some days discerned that Grace more and more
sought his company, preferred supervising his kitchen and bakehouse
with her step-mother to occupying herself with the lighter details of
her own apartments. She seemed no longer able to find in her own
hearth an adequate focus for her life, and hence, like a weak queen-bee
after leading off to an independent home, had hovered again into the
parent hive. But he had not construed these and other incidents of the
kind till now.