Fitzpiers was generous in his turn. "It shall be so," he rejoined,
gracefully. "To holy church we'll go, and much good may it do us."
They returned through the bushes indoors, Grace walking, full of
thought between the other two, somewhat comforted, both by Fitzpiers's
ingenious explanation and by the sense that she was not to be deprived
of a religious ceremony. "So let it be," she said to herself. "Pray
God it is for the best."
From this hour there was no serious attempt at recalcitration on her
part. Fitzpiers kept himself continually near her, dominating any
rebellious impulse, and shaping her will into passive concurrence with
all his desires. Apart from his lover-like anxiety to possess her, the
few golden hundreds of the timber-dealer, ready to hand, formed a warm
background to Grace's lovely face, and went some way to remove his
uneasiness at the prospect of endangering his professional and social
chances by an alliance with the family of a simple countryman.
The interim closed up its perspective surely and silently. Whenever
Grace had any doubts of her position, the sense of contracting time was
like a shortening chamber: at other moments she was comparatively
blithe. Day after day waxed and waned; the one or two woodmen who
sawed, shaped, spokeshaved on her father's premises at this inactive
season of the year, regularly came and unlocked the doors in the
morning, locked them in the evening, supped, leaned over their
garden-gates for a whiff of evening air, and to catch any last and
farthest throb of news from the outer world, which entered and expired
at Little Hintock like the exhausted swell of a wave in some innermost
cavern of some innermost creek of an embayed sea; yet no news
interfered with the nuptial purpose at their neighbor's house. The
sappy green twig-tips of the season's growth would not, she thought,
be appreciably woodier on the day she became a wife, so near was the
time; the tints of the foliage would hardly have changed. Everything
was so much as usual that no itinerant stranger would have supposed a
woman's fate to be hanging in the balance at that summer's decline.
But there were preparations, imaginable readily enough by those who had
special knowledge. In the remote and fashionable town of Sandbourne
something was growing up under the hands of several persons who had
never seen Grace Melbury, never would see her, or care anything about
her at all, though their creation had such interesting relation to her
life that it would enclose her very heart at a moment when that heart
would beat, if not with more emotional ardor, at least with more
emotional turbulence than at any previous time.