The Woodlanders

"But I don't wish to escape it."

"If you don't on your own account, cannot you wish to on mine and hers?

Nobody except our household knows that you have left home. Then why

should you, by a piece of perverseness, bring down my gray hairs with

sorrow to the grave?"

"If it were not for my husband--" she began, moved by his words. "But

how can I meet him there? How can any woman who is not a mere man's

creature join him after what has taken place?"

"He would go away again rather than keep you out of my house."

"How do you know that, father?"

"We met him on our way here, and he told us so," said Mrs. Melbury.

"He had said something like it before. He seems very much upset

altogether."

"He declared to her when he came to our house that he would wait for

time and devotion to bring about his forgiveness," said her husband.

"That was it, wasn't it, Lucy?"

"Yes. That he would not intrude upon you, Grace, till you gave him

absolute permission," Mrs. Melbury added.

This antecedent considerateness in Fitzpiers was as welcome to Grace as

it was unexpected; and though she did not desire his presence, she was

sorry that by her retaliatory fiction she had given him a different

reason for avoiding her. She made no further objections to

accompanying her parents, taking them into the inner room to give

Winterborne a last look, and gathering up the two or three things that

belonged to her. While she was doing this the two women came who had

been called by Melbury, and at their heels poor Creedle.

"Forgive me, but I can't rule my mourning nohow as a man should, Mr.

Melbury," he said. "I ha'n't seen him since Thursday se'night, and

have wondered for days and days where he's been keeping. There was I

expecting him to come and tell me to wash out the cider-barrels against

the making, and here was he-- Well, I've knowed him from table-high; I

knowed his father--used to bide about upon two sticks in the sun afore

he died!--and now I've seen the end of the family, which we can ill

afford to lose, wi' such a scanty lot of good folk in Hintock as we've

got. And now Robert Creedle will be nailed up in parish boards 'a

b'lieve; and noboby will glutch down a sigh for he!"

They started for home, Marty and Creedle remaining behind. For a time

Grace and her father walked side by side without speaking. It was just

in the blue of the dawn, and the chilling tone of the sky was reflected

in her cold, wet face. The whole wood seemed to be a house of death,

pervaded by loss to its uttermost length and breadth. Winterborne was

gone, and the copses seemed to show the want of him; those young trees,

so many of which he had planted, and of which he had spoken so truly

when he said that he should fall before they fell, were at that very

moment sending out their roots in the direction that he had given them

with his subtle hand.