The sunny, leafy week which followed the tender doings of Midsummer Eve
brought a visitor to Fitzpiers's door; a voice that he knew sounded in
the passage. Mr. Melbury had called. At first he had a particular
objection to enter the parlor, because his boots were dusty, but as the
surgeon insisted he waived the point and came in.
Looking neither to the right nor to the left, hardly at Fitzpiers
himself, he put his hat under his chair, and with a preoccupied gaze at
the floor, he said, "I've called to ask you, doctor, quite privately, a
question that troubles me. I've a daughter, Grace, an only daughter,
as you may have heard. Well, she's been out in the dew--on Midsummer
Eve in particular she went out in thin slippers to watch some vagary of
the Hintock maids--and she's got a cough, a distinct hemming and
hacking, that makes me uneasy. Now, I have decided to send her away to
some seaside place for a change--"
"Send her away!" Fitzpiers's countenance had fallen.
"Yes. And the question is, where would you advise me to send her?"
The timber-merchant had happened to call at a moment when Fitzpiers was
at the spring-tide of a sentiment that Grace was a necessity of his
existence. The sudden pressure of her form upon his breast as she came
headlong round the bush had never ceased to linger with him, ever since
he adopted the manoeuvre for which the hour and the moonlight and the
occasion had been the only excuse. Now she was to be sent away.
Ambition? it could be postponed. Family? culture and reciprocity of
tastes had taken the place of family nowadays. He allowed himself to
be carried forward on the wave of his desire.
"How strange, how very strange it is," he said, "that you should have
come to me about her just now. I have been thinking every day of
coming to you on the very same errand."
"Ah!--you have noticed, too, that her health----"
"I have noticed nothing the matter with her health, because there is
nothing. But, Mr. Melbury, I have seen your daughter several times by
accident. I have admired her infinitely, and I was coming to ask you
if I may become better acquainted with her--pay my addresses to her?"
Melbury was looking down as he listened, and did not see the air of
half-misgiving at his own rashness that spread over Fitzpiers's face as
he made this declaration.
"You have--got to know her?" said Melbury, a spell of dead silence
having preceded his utterance, during which his emotion rose with
almost visible effect.