The Woodlanders

When her husband's letter reached Grace's hands, bearing upon it the

postmark of a distant town, it never once crossed her mind that

Fitzpiers was within a mile of her still. She felt relieved that he

did not write more bitterly of the quarrel with her father, whatever

its nature might have been; but the general frigidity of his

communication quenched in her the incipient spark that events had

kindled so shortly before.

From this centre of information it was made known in Hintock that the

doctor had gone away, and as none but the Melbury household was aware

that he did not return on the night of his accident, no excitement

manifested itself in the village.

Thus the early days of May passed by. None but the nocturnal birds and

animals observed that late one evening, towards the middle of the

month, a closely wrapped figure, with a crutch under one arm and a

stick in his hand, crept out from Hintock House across the lawn to the

shelter of the trees, taking thence a slow and laborious walk to the

nearest point of the turnpike-road. The mysterious personage was so

disguised that his own wife would hardly have known him. Felice

Charmond was a practised hand at make-ups, as well she might be; and

she had done her utmost in padding and painting Fitzpiers with the old

materials of her art in the recesses of the lumber-room.

In the highway he was met by a covered carriage, which conveyed him to

Sherton-Abbas, whence he proceeded to the nearest port on the south

coast, and immediately crossed the Channel.

But it was known to everybody that three days after this time Mrs.

Charmond executed her long-deferred plan of setting out for a long term

of travel and residence on the Continent. She went off one morning as

unostentatiously as could be, and took no maid with her, having, she

said, engaged one to meet her at a point farther on in her route.

After that, Hintock House, so frequently deserted, was again to be let.

Spring had not merged in summer when a clinching rumor, founded on the

best of evidence, reached the parish and neighborhood. Mrs. Charmond

and Fitzpiers had been seen together in Baden, in relations which set

at rest the question that had agitated the little community ever since

the winter.

Melbury had entered the Valley of Humiliation even farther than Grace.

His spirit seemed broken.

But once a week he mechanically went to market as usual, and here, as

he was passing by the conduit one day, his mental condition expressed

largely by his gait, he heard his name spoken by a voice formerly

familiar. He turned and saw a certain Fred Beaucock--once a promising

lawyer's clerk and local dandy, who had been called the cleverest

fellow in Sherton, without whose brains the firm of solicitors

employing him would be nowhere. But later on Beaucock had fallen into

the mire. He was invited out a good deal, sang songs at agricultural

meetings and burgesses' dinners; in sum, victualled himself with

spirits more frequently than was good for the clever brains or body

either. He lost his situation, and after an absence spent in trying

his powers elsewhere, came back to his native town, where, at the time

of the foregoing events in Hintock, he gave legal advice for

astonishingly small fees--mostly carrying on his profession on

public-house settles, in whose recesses he might often have been

overheard making country-people's wills for half a crown; calling with

a learned voice for pen-and-ink and a halfpenny sheet of paper, on

which he drew up the testament while resting it in a little space wiped

with his hand on the table amid the liquid circles formed by the cups

and glasses. An idea implanted early in life is difficult to uproot,

and many elderly tradespeople still clung to the notion that Fred

Beaucock knew a great deal of law.