Melbury now returned to the room, and the men having declared
themselves refreshed, they all started on the homeward journey, which
was by no means cheerless under the rays of the high moon. Having to
walk the whole distance they came by a foot-path rather shorter than
the highway, though difficult except to those who knew the country
well. This brought them by way of Great Hintock; and passing the
church-yard they observed, as they talked, a motionless figure standing
by the gate.
"I think it was Marty South," said the hollow-turner, parenthetically.
"I think 'twas; 'a was always a lonely maid," said Upjohn. And they
passed on homeward, and thought of the matter no more.
It was Marty, as they had supposed. That evening had been the
particular one of the week upon which Grace and herself had been
accustomed to privately deposit flowers on Giles's grave, and this was
the first occasion since his death, eight months earlier, on which
Grace had failed to keep her appointment. Marty had waited in the road
just outside Little Hintock, where her fellow-pilgrim had been wont to
join her, till she was weary; and at last, thinking that Grace had
missed her and gone on alone, she followed the way to Great Hintock,
but saw no Grace in front of her. It got later, and Marty continued
her walk till she reached the church-yard gate; but still no Grace.
Yet her sense of comradeship would not allow her to go on to the grave
alone, and still thinking the delay had been unavoidable, she stood
there with her little basket of flowers in her clasped hands, and her
feet chilled by the damp ground, till more than two hours had passed.
She then heard the footsteps of Melbury's men, who presently passed on
their return from the search. In the silence of the night Marty could
not help hearing fragments of their conversation, from which she
acquired a general idea of what had occurred, and where Mrs. Fitzpiers
then was.
Immediately they had dropped down the hill she entered the church-yard,
going to a secluded corner behind the bushes, where rose the
unadorned stone that marked the last bed of Giles Winterborne. As this
solitary and silent girl stood there in the moonlight, a straight slim
figure, clothed in a plaitless gown, the contours of womanhood so
undeveloped as to be scarcely perceptible, the marks of poverty and
toil effaced by the misty hour, she touched sublimity at points, and
looked almost like a being who had rejected with indifference the
attribute of sex for the loftier quality of abstract humanism. She
stooped down and cleared away the withered flowers that Grace and
herself had laid there the previous week, and put her fresh ones in
their place.