At these warm words Winterborne was not less dazed than he was moved in
heart. The novelty of the avowal rendered what it carried with it
inapprehensible by him in its entirety.
Only a few short months ago completely estranged from this
family--beholding Grace going to and fro in the distance, clothed with
the alienating radiance of obvious superiority, the wife of the then
popular and fashionable Fitzpiers, hopelessly outside his social
boundary down to so recent a time that flowers then folded were hardly
faded yet--he was now asked by that jealously guarding father of hers
to take courage--to get himself ready for the day when he should be
able to claim her.
The old times came back to him in dim procession. How he had been
snubbed; how Melbury had despised his Christmas party; how that sweet,
coy Grace herself had looked down upon him and his household
arrangements, and poor Creedle's contrivances!
Well, he could not believe it. Surely the adamantine barrier of
marriage with another could not be pierced like this! It did violence
to custom. Yet a new law might do anything. But was it at all within
the bounds of probability that a woman who, over and above her own
attainments, had been accustomed to those of a cultivated professional
man, could ever be the wife of such as he?
Since the date of his rejection he had almost grown to see the
reasonableness of that treatment. He had said to himself again and
again that her father was right; that the poor ceorl, Giles
Winterborne, would never have been able to make such a dainty girl
happy. Yet, now that she had stood in a position farther removed from
his own than at first, he was asked to prepare to woo her. He was full
of doubt.
Nevertheless, it was not in him to show backwardness. To act so
promptly as Melbury desired him to act seemed, indeed, scarcely wise,
because of the uncertainty of events. Giles knew nothing of legal
procedure, but he did know that for him to step up to Grace as a lover
before the bond which bound her was actually dissolved was simply an
extravagant dream of her father's overstrained mind. He pitied Melbury
for his almost childish enthusiasm, and saw that the aging man must
have suffered acutely to be weakened to this unreasoning desire.
Winterborne was far too magnanimous to harbor any cynical conjecture
that the timber-merchant, in his intense affection for Grace, was
courting him now because that young lady, when disunited, would be left
in an anomalous position, to escape which a bad husband was better than
none. He felt quite sure that his old friend was simply on tenterhooks
of anxiety to repair the almost irreparable error of dividing two whom
Nature had striven to join together in earlier days, and that in his
ardor to do this he was oblivious of formalities. The cautious
supervision of his past years had overleaped itself at last. Hence,
Winterborne perceived that, in this new beginning, the necessary care
not to compromise Grace by too early advances must be exercised by
himself.