The scene and the occasion would have enlivened her but that her husband was still absent; though it was now five o'clock. She could hardly suppose him, whatever his infatuation, to have prolonged to a later hour than ten an ostensibly professional call on Mrs. Charmond at Middleton; and he could have ridden home in two hours and a half. What, then, had become of him? That he had been out the greater part of the two preceding nights added to her uneasiness.
She dressed herself, descended, and went out, the weird twilight of advancing day chilling the rays from the lanterns, and ****** the men's faces wan. As soon as Melbury saw her he came round, showing his alarm.
"Edgar is not come," she said. "And I have reason to know that he's not attending anybody. He has had no rest for two nights before this. I was going to the top of the hill to look for him."
"I'll come with you," said Melbury.
She begged him not to hinder himself; but he insisted, for he saw a peculiar and rigid gloom in her face over and above her uneasiness, and did not like the look of it. Telling the men he would be with them again soon, he walked beside her into the turnpike-road, and partly up the hill whence she had watched Fitzpiers the night before across the Great White Hart or Blackmoor Valley. They halted beneath a half-dead oak, hollow, and disfigured with white tumors, its roots spreading out like accipitrine claws grasping the ground. A chilly wind circled round them, upon whose currents the seeds of a neighboring lime- tree, supported parachute-wise by the wing attached, flew out of the boughs downward like fledglings from their nest. The vale was wrapped in a dim atmosphere of unnaturalness, and the east was like a livid curtain edged with pink. There was no sign nor sound of Fitzpiers.
"It is no use standing here," said her father. "He may come home fifty ways...why, look here!--here be Darling's tracks--turned homeward and nearly blown dry and hard! He must have come in hours ago without your seeing him."
"He has not done that," said she.
They went back hastily. On entering their own gates they perceived that the men had left the wagons, and were standing round the door of the stable which had been appropriated to the doctor's use. "Is there anything the matter?" cried Grace.
"Oh no, ma'am. All's well that ends well," said old Timothy Tangs. "I've heard of such things before--among workfolk, though not among your gentle people--that's true."
They entered the stable, and saw the pale shape of Darling standing in the middle of her stall, with Fitzpiers on her back, sound asleep. Darling was munching hay as well as she could with the bit in her month, and the reins, which had fallen from Fitzpiers's hand, hung upon her neck.
Grace went and touched his hand; shook it before she could arouse him. He moved, started, opened his eyes, and exclaimed, "Ah, Felice!...Oh, it's Grace. I could not see in the gloom. What--am I in the saddle?"
"Yes," said she. "How do you come here?"
He collected his thoughts, and in a few minutes stammered, "I was riding along homeward through the vale, very, very sleepy, having been up so much of late. When I came opposite Holywell spring the mare turned her head that way, as if she wanted to drink. I let her go in, and she drank; I thought she would never finish. While she was drinking, the clock of Owlscombe Church struck twelve. I distinctly remember counting the strokes. From that moment I positively recollect nothing till I saw you here by my side."
"The name! If it had been any other horse he'd have had a broken neck!" murmured Melbury.
"'Tis wonderful, sure, how a quiet hoss will bring a man home at such times!" said John Upjohn. "And what's more wonderful than keeping your seat in a deep, slumbering sleep? I've knowed men drowze off walking home from randies where the mead and other liquors have gone round well, and keep walking for more than a mile on end without waking. Well, doctor, I don't care who the man is, 'tis a mercy you wasn't a drownded, or a splintered, or a hanged up to a tree like Absalom--also a handsome gentleman like yerself, as the prophets say."
"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.