Grace's eyes had tears in them. "I don't like to go to him on such an
errand, Grammer," she said, brokenly. "But I will, to ease your mind."
It was with extreme reluctance that Grace cloaked herself next morning
for the undertaking. She was all the more indisposed to the journey by
reason of Grammer's allusion to the effect of a pretty face upon Dr.
Fitzpiers; and hence she most illogically did that which, had the
doctor never seen her, would have operated to stultify the sole motive
of her journey; that is to say, she put on a woollen veil, which hid
all her face except an occasional spark of her eyes.
Her own wish that nothing should be known of this strange and grewsome
proceeding, no less than Grammer Oliver's own desire, led Grace to take
every precaution against being discovered. She went out by the garden
door as the safest way, all the household having occupations at the
other side. The morning looked forbidding enough when she stealthily
opened it. The battle between frost and thaw was continuing in
mid-air: the trees dripped on the garden-plots, where no vegetables
would grow for the dripping, though they were planted year after year
with that curious mechanical regularity of country people in the face
of hopelessness; the moss which covered the once broad gravel terrace
was swamped; and Grace stood irresolute. Then she thought of poor
Grammer, and her dreams of the doctor running after her, scalpel in
hand, and the possibility of a case so curiously similar to South's
ending in the same way; thereupon she stepped out into the drizzle.
The nature of her errand, and Grammer Oliver's account of the compact
she had made, lent a fascinating horror to Grace's conception of
Fitzpiers. She knew that he was a young man; but her single object in
seeking an interview with him put all considerations of his age and
social aspect from her mind. Standing as she stood, in Grammer Oliver's
shoes, he was simply a remorseless Jove of the sciences, who would not
have mercy, and would have sacrifice; a man whom, save for this, she
would have preferred to avoid knowing. But since, in such a small
village, it was improbable that any long time could pass without their
meeting, there was not much to deplore in her having to meet him now.
But, as need hardly be said, Miss Melbury's view of the doctor as a
merciless, unwavering, irresistible scientist was not quite in
accordance with fact. The real Dr. Fitzpiers w as a man of too many
hobbies to show likelihood of rising to any great eminence in the
profession he had chosen, or even to acquire any wide practice in the
rural district he had marked out as his field of survey for the
present. In the course of a year his mind was accustomed to pass in a
grand solar sweep through all the zodiacal signs of the intellectual
heaven. Sometimes it was in the Ram, sometimes in the Bull; one month
he would be immersed in alchemy, another in poesy; one month in the
Twins of astrology and astronomy; then in the Crab of German literature
and metaphysics. In justice to him it must be stated that he took such
studies as were immediately related to his own profession in turn with
the rest, and it had been in a month of anatomical ardor without the
possibility of a subject that he had proposed to Grammer Oliver the
terms she had mentioned to her mistress.